Lists for the Listless

by Paul Edmunds

I knew the 'plane was headed home when I caught sight of a Sunday Times headline in the galley. It could have been from 2 months ago: threat of strike action during the World Cup. After a mad dash through OR Thambo and a little hitch at customs, we boarded our connecting flight to Cape Town to find in front of us Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and behind us Badhi Chaabaaan, reminding us of the tightrope we walk, tautly strung and twitching side to side from hope to cynicism.

All of this gave me pause to reflect, and what I came up with is this, which I've named after a piece by Paul Krassner (thanks), but which, after 20 hours on an aircraft, may well have been called 'Lists for the Listing'.

Fauna (various):
- Red-tailed hawk
- Bluejays
- Northern Cardinals
- Two raccoons dozing in Central Park
- Debbie Harry
- Lenny Kaye
- Chipmonks (much smaller than I thought, more mouse than squirrel)
- Pinellated woodpecker

You can't see Lenny Kaye, but he's there, just behind Debbie Harry

Music we wigged out to:
- Apples in Stereo
- Generationals
- Jim Campilongo
- Andy Friedman
- Natalia Zukerman
- Holopaw

Weird but good weird:
- A ferret on a leash in a bicycle basket
- A symposium on the Grateful Dead and New York at the New York Society for Ethical Culture
- If you watch the Tony Awards you'll see me atop a rock in Central Park claiming to be 'King of the hill'. This should really be 'Other weird' but it's everyone's dream to be on TV in America, no?

Other weird:
- Artisanal pencil sharpening
- A bog roll ad compelling me to 'Enjoy the Go'. (OK. Thanks)
- Bathrooms in every restaurant have a sign that says: 'All employees must wash their hands before returning to work'. (If you look closely you'll see there's an asterix at the end, and then if you hunt around the bathroom you'll find its friend on a sign which states: 'All employers must have a sign which says "All employees must wash their hands before returning to work".') Honest.

This is a rip off! They do it for $11.50 down the road

Things I don't want to know:
- What exactly a 'Philly cheeseteak' is

Wild:
- Being rear-ended by a hipster on a brakeless fixed gear bike because I stopped at a red light
- Using the Dyson hand dryer at MoMA

A Dyson hand dryer on Monday

Museums of extraordinary interest (but you knew that):
Dia: Beacon
MoMA
The New York Historical Society

Artists I had previously not known or to whom I had paid less attention:
Meredith James
Hilary Berseth
Wes Lang
Marina Abramovic
The Romans
Sol LeWitt (doh!)

With that I leave you and extend, once more, my thanks to Jack Ginsberg and the Ampersand Foundation for the invaluable opportunity afforded to us. So long...

From the Left Bank to the Right Brain

by Paul Edmunds

It was completely coincidental that I visited the Gagosian's 'Claude Monet: Late Work' and Pace Gallery's 'Carsten Nicolai: Moiré' on the same morning. Both artists ostensibly explore the optical experience, and, in retrospect, both have engaged with the nature of artmaking in their practice.

On paper, Carsten's was the show which should have really appealed to me. He has a bit of that left-brained, rational approach to making art that I like to think my practice shares. Nicolai is ostensibly very hip, involved with nightclubs, music, and makes whacky works with jellyfish and an architectural proposal so bold as to alter one of the city's sacred cows: Frank Lloyd Wright's untouchable Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim tomorrow (possibly)

With Monet, I guess, it depends who's asking.

I've never doubted that he was the father of modern painting, and all the work in that lineage, from Jackson Pollock to pure Greenbergian abstraction, has always appealed to me. That might have to do with how it was taught to me in art school, and that it seemed a lot more exciting than early Renaissance painting (in light of an earlier experience I may have to revise this too). On the other hand, his work is so darned pretty and we're taught to mistrust that. Also, it's not that far a leap from Monet to this:

Claude Monet: 'It wasn't me'

Or is it? Perhaps too much is made of the relationship between early experiments in photography and the gestural colour mélange characteristic of much Impressionism; and maybe this detracts from the likes of Monet whose painting appears so uncalculated and so born of an instinctive response to what he saw.

Carsten's monochromatic exploration of the moiré effect is doubtlessly engaging and provides plenty of visual candy for the likes of me. In one work he creates interference by stretching black chords across a wall, shining a light on them to produce parallel shadows behind. This light moves up and down on a track, causing the shadows to move. In addition, the 'wall' is actually made of latex which inflates and deflates continually causing the shadows to warp, sending shifting patterns of interference across the chords. A lot of trouble, but a bit contrived, perhaps?

Nicolai's claim that his work does the groundwork for scientific and aesthetic exploration of the effect is a little tenuous, and I remain uncertain of where he thinks this can go, and how it goes further than what anyone has done before. I'm not sure that he reaches a conclusion, and I'm not sure that leaving that up to the viewer is likely to yield any results.

Perhaps the work's value lies in the fact that Nicolai undertakes these experiments and sets up conditions for these experiences in an artmaking context. And it is great to see ink drawings, LED's, inflatable PVC walls and brain-warping computer graphics, but ultimately, it's a little like a sculpture at a science fair, only here the scientists are wearing black coats.

I don't think Monet set out to explore colour, light and surface in a predetermined way, it was just that the way he saw things, and how he articulated his observations, disassembled painting's conventions and reconstructed the practice in such a way as to explore its very nature. But he did this without putting a full stop (or a period, as we say here) at the end of his sentence. Now there's progress!

So, while the way may be fraught with uncertainty, some things are unchanging. Like happens all too often these days, I was reminded of my age at the Monet show when I found myself wondering what it cost to insure.

My very own theme park

by Paul Edmunds

Went to the Museum of Art and Design on Columbus Circle where I saw a fantastic piece by Tim Hawkinson, and another by Alastair Mackie. Downstairs was an exhibition of bespoke handmade bicycles, including some beautiful machines by the inimitable Jeff Jones. Later I strolled up to the the New York Historical Society to pick up a button badge for the Dark Star Orchestra concert on Saturday night. Walked through Chelsea on my way back home and stopped in at a whole bunch of galleries. Made it home in time to listen to an interview with Joey Ramone on KEXP on the occasion of his would-be birthday. Went out to dinner at a vegan restaurant with a gallerist.

Did anyone say 'focus group'?

Tim Hawkinson, Point

Classic Rock

by Paul Edmunds

There are some things they won't tell you about New York. Firstly, you'll need a five-sided spanner if you want to open up a fire hydrant for a summer shower. Secondly, if you go near a park in the summer, you will hear a saxophone. Something they will tell you though, wherever you go, is that youth is wasted on the young.

In order not to waste what there is left of my youth (not much, actually), we headed to the Met, largely, I will tell you, to see 'Big Bambu', this season's installation by New Jersey-based Mike and Doug Starn. I mean, what's not to like? A large sprawling bamboo structure atop a stuffy old museum? Made by guys with tattoos and named after an album by Cheech and Chong?

Big Bambu

The thing is, that was the less attractive part of our visit. We kind of got hung up on the Classical antiquities. Honestly. Hell, I learned about this in high school, in Art History and Latin (yes, I know, but it's not that surprising is it?), in History of Art at art school as well as in 'Classical Civilisation' which was most often taken by Fine Art students because it overlapped with History of Art. I really didn't pay much attention, it was just something to be got through.

In a later part of my receding youth I wandered the halls of the Louvre several times, which is not short of such antiquities either. It was vaguely interesting, I guess.

A Roman sculpture yesterday

So it was with great surprise that I felt myself so drawn to 2000 year old marble busts, lapidry, wall painting, and work in glass and gold. It felt like a glimpse into a world where artisanship was raised to supreme artistry, where patronage of the arts was quite the norm. It's well accepted that this was a society at its peak, and what remains is an invaluable record of such a society's cultural production. Oh, and Western society pretty much based its philosophy and law on theirs too.

The Starn ploy is brilliant. Draw crowds of people up through the museum (where many of them are led blankly by an iPhone held aloft) into this edgy, fresh construction on the rooftop where they can all feel important. Or as a woman I would call a 'kugel' back home, said into her phone as she walked past me with a glass of something bubbly: 'I am in heaven!'. The thing is, after all the extraordinary craftsmanship downstairs, and that glimpse into a society where life revolved around cultural production, the arts and philosophy, the bamboo construction looked kind of messy.

On the other hand, a couple of weeks ago we went out to listen to some music with a guy who knows about these things. After a very long pizza we set off on foot for The Living Room, passing by the Bowery Ballroom. Our host started begging the doorman there to let us have a peak inside, in the hope of catching whoever may have been playing. The doorman was almost too eager to let us in, as if to say, 'You asked for it'.

Onstage were rock 'n roll histrionics of the most dramatic and cliched sort. We caught the band in the midst of their grand apopleptic finale. While the bass player windmilled like Pete Townsend, the drummer beat up a storm and the androgynous lead singer slunk off stage, the guitarist somehow managed to climb up onto the venue's gallery where he began humping his guitar against the railings. With dramatic flair the singer reappeared wrapped in a large banner covered in pictures of himself. His face emerged jawa-style and he introduced the band, leaving himself for last:'Justin Fuckin' Stanter'.

We left there speechless with laughter and excitement, but able to appreciate with the benefit of our advanced years the self-belief and serious intentions of everyone there, as well as the shallow, unchecked energy of youth. The Living Room was an entirely different story. The Jim Campilongo Electric Trio were talented, funny and quite literally mind-warping, playing all styles of music but playing none of it straight (thanks to TONY for that description). It's hard to explain.

I got a little sad there, lamenting the fact that it doesn't really pay enough for anyone to be that good at home, and it doesn't pay enough to have that kind of sound system in a venue a little larger than a lounge. It's nothing like Ancient Rome. But then I remembered, some things don't change anywhere, at any time. Just the other day in a chichi little basement Mexican restaurant, I heard the Gypsy Kings.

I know what The Artist is getting for Christmas: I have felt her presence

By Paul Edmunds

MoMA is currently recovering from a 'perfect storm', I'm told. My Inside Source tells me that such a storm is taking place for a number of reasons.

First and foremost amongst these was the Tim Burton show, which closed a week ago. So popular was this that visitors had to book entrance times once they had entered MoMA, and the show ran for 5 months, a very rare occurrence at the museum.

At the same time, the museum has been staging a major Marina Abramovic retrospective entitled 'The Artist is Present'. This includes a performance she has been staging since March 14, and some re-enactments of earlier pieces by ersatz Marina Abramovic's.

There is also a major Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective, and of most relevance to us, William Kentridge's 'Five Themes'.

And did I mention Picasso?

So, as my Inside Source states it, between the Tim Burton show, Picasso, one of the giants of 20th century photography, Kentridge, all the 'naked people upstairs' performing Abramovic's earlier works (including Imponderabilia where one is forced to squeeze between two naked strangers), and the artist's current performance which invites participation from visitors, the museum has seen upwards of 17 000 people passing through its doors daily. Of these, up to 6 000 have been visiting the Kentridge show.

The latter includes the wonderful model theatre playing Learning the Flute and the quite extraordinary, completely automated theatre and animated projection Black Box. I'm ashamed to say that I had previously seen neither of these works.

Getting back to Marina Abramovic, let me be upfront and say that I generally circle cautiously around performance work before approaching. I must be honest again and say that is largely due to my fear of 'audience participation' which is well founded. In one performance I found myself tied up by a topless woman (whom I knew, but not that well), and once I found myself with a Brazilian standing on my shoulder juggling burning torches.

Abramovic has completely changed me in that respect. However, I'm afraid she has taken the polish off any other performance I will ever see. The documentation of past works of hers, particularly the series she produced with Ulay, has been nothing short of illuminating. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that even such a hardened, non-romantic like myself was nearly reduced to a jibbering wreck when viewing the final work they produced together. It seemed, as I took it in, that the story of their collaboration was a love story wrought in a furnace the heat of which I have never encountered.

'The Artist is Present' (which you can view live here) is surprisingly powerful. This is in no small part due to Abramovic's presence, which is obviously an integral part of the work. A large portion of her performance hinges on her particular brand of presence, one which is both cerebrally and physically remarkable. She really does seem to occupy time and space in a particularly impressive and assertive fashion.

In this piece she sits on what seems to be a slightly over-sized chair facing, across a similarly scaled table, another such chair. It is here that visitors are invited to sit and engage her. She wore a long red dress on the day I visited, which dropped onto the floor and spread out, hiding her feet and contact with the ground completely.

It is in part a re-enactment of a work she did with Ulay, where the two sat opposite one another and looked into each other's eyes for some interminable period. Here, the interaction is something other than a staring match, but something more than a friendly engagement across a table. Abramovic has been there since March 14.

You can understand that a visitor, fears of audience participation aside, may want to engage with the artist whose presence is so tangible. You can probably understand too the desire that we each secretly harbour to be the one whose presence is such, the penetration of whose gaze is so powerful, that we break the artist's stride. This would really make us special.

Only one person has so far achieved this. Amir Baradaran engaged Abramovic in a work of his own entitled The Other Artist is Present. Even then, it was only when he proposed marriage that she reacted, and then it was with a smile.

My own visit to MoMA met with a little less success. My Inside Source offered us a ride in the Staff Elevator, which we accepted. The doors opened to reveal an elevator the size of a Gauteng garage. I stepped in to find only one other person there, and he was wearing the same shirt as me.

Mayday!

So it was the first of May on Saturday, and to that end my lovely wife and I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, known as Sakura Matsuri. Possibly due to the very wet winter, most of the trees had lost their blossoms already but there was no lack of action.

We caught the end of a wildly energetic Taiko drumming set and also saw some 'Japanese Gypsy Rock' music which was better than it sounds. There were loads of kids, both Japanese and not, dressed as Manga characters and Harajuku boys and girls. We strolled around the beautiful Hill and Pond Garden, ate a slice of cherry pie and exchanged niceties with all the other people who were out enjoying a beautiful spring day.

The day's beauty and innocence were slightly disturbed by an unusual event however. Shortly after we had settled down on a soft grassy bank, some commotion roused me from my would-be-slumber.

I had heard about New York's red-tailed hawks before but never expected to encounter so gruesome a sighting as this. On a branch, metres away from me, landed a hawk with a very much twitching and very 'nonplussed' rodent of a large variety, a squirrel perhaps. Said hawk dispatched his lunch without ceremony and tucked into some hors d'oeuvres before moving off to another spot where he was not the subject of 250 cameras wielded by a bunch of Harajuku and Russian tourists. My favourite NYC blogger captured a similar event recently:


New York's most famous Red-Tailed Hawk is known as Pale Male and he has been nesting on a very chichi 5th Avenue building adjacent to Central Park since 2002. Pale Male has apparently sired 26 chicks with several mates over the years. The building's owners were a little 'nonplussed' about this at some point, and removed the nest, before being seiged by a barrage of twitching New Yorkers (including Mary Tyler Moore), who demanded the return and preservation of Pale Male's abode.

Talk of blond birds brings me to the next item on my busy calendar last Saturday - Debbie Harry. After attending a Maypole dance, I followed the procession of dancers to Deitch Projects for the Shepard Fairey opening. He's the guy who produced this image when Courtney Love was sentenced to Anger Management classes:

And this, when the Obama kids were petitioning Pops for a Portugese water dog:

New Yorkers are not afraid to stand 'on line', as they say, and this they were doing in great numbers in order to get a glimpse of the work. The line snaked three deep all the way around the block and didn't appear to be moving. Deitch Projects closes after this show and director Jeffery Deitch is moving to LA to take up his post at MOCA there, so I guess this is part of the reason for the excitement. Besides, New York has always done pretty well at elevating artists from the street to the gallery; see Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat for example.

I had a Dim Sum date later and I'm not as good as standing 'on line' as New Yorkers, so I retired to the doorway of an abandoned building across the road to watch the parade (This doorway, incidentally, did not reek of piss, and I attribute this either to Giuliani or the fact that New Yorkers have bladders like airships.)

I was joined there by a girl from New York and her boyfriend from Milan. It was he who identified Lapo Elkann, 'playboy' and heir to the Fiat fortune, as the driver who pulled up in a Ferrari and parked badly in a spot just vacated by a black SUV that appeared to placemarking for him.

This was not nearly as exciting as Debbie Harry though. I would say she was tottering on vertiginous heels, but so broken up is the surface of Wooster Street, that you would even totter in a pair of Whoppers. I didn't really see what she was wearing to be honest, but it certainly wasn't this.

It was then that I realised I was ahead and should quit. I had hoped to meet Shepard and propose that we collaborate on a work. In his absence I've just gone ahead by myself, and here's what I came up with:


Paul Edmunds, New York 2010