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Jaro Gielens' collection of over 400 handheld and tabletop computer games from the late '70s to the early '80s is documented in a book titled Electronic Plastic, published by Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin (available through amazon). The breathtaking design of the book is by Lopetz, a member of the Swiss graphics collective Büro Destruct, who is a game fanatic and Japanophile. Just as the design of the plastic shells and accessories of the games cleverly mimicked their subject matter ("Safari," "Airport Panic"), Lopetz riffs on the colors, logos, and typography of the games, yielding a hybrid experience that is more "now" than nostalgic. To view thumbnails of the entire book, click here.
An online column by Scott Speh called "Hot Commodities" deserves a look. Unusual for an art scene where everyone has an opinions about shows they don't see, Speh actually gets off his ass, goes to exhibits, and then writes frank, funny reports about them. Unlike the art mags, there's no commercial agenda or behind-the-scenes string-pulling, just honest, off-the-cuff opinionmongering. His review of Dennis Hollingsworth's show at Nicole Klagsbrun excellently captures the nuances of this abstract painter's hard-to-nail work:
The Voice said [it] looked like cheesy hotel art at first - this is part of the appeal. Like [Laura] Owens he toes that bad/good line. Plus he can paint in the old romantic sense of pushing colored mud around a canvas. But it's not all intuition and action painting - he does have a strategy, a formula if you will, that gives the work a sort of steely logic keeps me from yawning. In addition to the historical technique, alla prima, a wet into wet impasto type application, he uses a number of signature techniques - he calls some of them monads, bulldozers, flings and pillows - that sees him pulling starburst-like strings from globs of paint, squeezing pigment straight from the tube - then carving a flat edge off the top of these ribbons, and trowelling and excising geometric shapes. I'm a sucker for straight from the tube pure color and juxtaposing high key and putrid, ugly color.Here's another tidbit, from his review of Wolfgang Tillmans' last show at Andrea Rosen:
Artforum describes [Tillmans'] installation techniques as similar to the way teenagers decorate their bedrooms, "scattering unframed photos across the wall, mixing huge and tiny" etc. Oh, I don't think so. Has this writer ever seen a teenager's room? Perhaps he'd like to go home to Ohio with me and check out my 16-year-old sister's floor to ceiling collage - not an inch of free wall space.and last, this quip about Rita McBride at Alexander & Bonin:
Shiny greenish-grey minimalist sculptures cast from video games or ATMs. I told the desk jockey "that one ATM isn't working." She didn't think I was funny.
Several recommended exhibitions on view in Manhattan: "Superimposition" at Caren Golden (especially Matthew Bakkom's vase* made of what looks like miles of tightly-wound, 35mm motion-picture film), "Being There" at Derek Eller (check out Carl D'Alvia's cyborg monkeys!), "Perfunctory" at Team (Carol Bove's room of girl-drawings and bookshelves with '70s feminist texts is understated but superb), and Rebecca Quaytman's solo show at Spencer Brownstone (a tight array of abstractions and photo-paintings obliquely charting the death of an ancestor).
The "Superimposition" show is a grab bag of mostly young or "under-known" artists, assembled by hard-working curator David Hunt (pace yourself, man, you'll get an aneurysm!). Adobe Illustrator obsessive Marsha Cottrell has a couple of elaborate line drawings (Oce prints on Mylar) in the show; to see a detail of UNT, WT5.1, click here.
*Addendum: I've just learned that, per Holland Cotter in the Times, Bakkom's vase is a "funeral urn made of the entire movie The Insider, in the form of tightly wound 35 mm film." That takes it down a couple of notches in my estimation. First of all, because The Insider is lousy. The movie features a hero we can't root for (a big media type) against a villain we already know is bad (big tobacco). The point of the movie? Big media is corrupt. Well, duh.
But I also dislike art with obligatory, "deconstructive" back story. I would have enjoyed the piece just fine as a kind of sleek, Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not craft project: winding and shaping film so it looks like something cut with a laser on a high-tech lathe. Obviously the pearlescent, gem-like surface is film, you can see what look like figures reflected in the emulsion. But do we really need to know exactly what film it is? All that does is provide a helpful soundbite for an overworked journalist, and a one-liner for grant panels. It's so grad-school!
Below is an new piece done with MSPaint, Paintbrush, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, scissors, and linen tape. The title is Compound JA, the dimensions are 22 1/2 X 18 inches, and it's ink on matte paper (the polaroid I scanned makes it look greyer than it is). Since taking this photo, I've added a few more polka dots, but the polaroid changes it so radically the details don't matter much. A close-up can be found in the comments to this post, or in a slide show (in progress) of some other recent pieces I've done.
Days 6-7 Paris
I got back to New York yesterday. My last two days in France consisted of pleasant but fairly conventional tourism. Saturday Dave and I wandered around Montmartre, which is the "artist's district" one sees recreated on sound stages in An American in Paris, now largely a souvenir dispensary. It's still a gorgeous neighborhood of narrow angular streets, built on a hillside topped by the striking, mosque-like Sacre Couer church; historical markers tell you where famous artists and writers once lived. We strolled (actually elbowed our way) around the "artist's plaza," watching tourists shelling out money for street portraits and bad Impressionist knockoffs. The waiter at a cafe there advised me to keep my backpack under my seat. On the steps of Sacre Couer, street vendors with plastic buckets full of soft drinks and bottled water scatter like cockroaches every hour or so to avoid the gendarmes, who make perfunctory confiscations.
Sunday Dave, Trish, and I went to the Louvre, which has been much remodeled since I visited ten years ago. The highlight of my last trip, the collection of outrageous chimerical statues looted--sorry, taken for safekeeping--from Mesopotamia, was unfortunately closed, but the Sackler galleries of ancient Iranian reliefs and palace architecture, refurbished in 1997, are breathtaking. A group of half-men/half-lions, carved in profile into beige and turquoise relief tiles, is as sparingly and tastefully installed as a Donald Judd show, blending ancient and modern sensibilities. In the German painting section, I spent some time pondering Cranach the Elder's weird painting The Age of Silver. In this Edenic scene, all the figures are nude; on the left hand side of the panel, lovely women (for Cranach) cuddle with exquisite, happy looking children, while in the center and right a group of men beat the crap out of each other with wooden staffs. Is the message really as simple as "women good, men bad"? Was Cranach the Andrea Dworkin of his day?
After two weeks abroad, I was surprisingly happy to come back to New York. On the airport bus, everyone was bickering, but at least in wasn't in mandatory French! (I know, my US-centrism is showing.) Also, dirty as our subway cars are, they're so much better designed than Parisian ones. In Paris, half the car space is taken up with a few rows of fore-and-aft-facing seats, allowing exactly 16 people to enjoy a quaint, 19th Century style ride in the car's center while the rabble stands cheek to jowl at either end. Quel merde!