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Went back in to look at Leif Ritchey's show today. The show is indeed overhung. Ritchey has one foot in the fashion world and his dresses are dresses, not sculptures. And beautiful, no? That's not to say they shouldn't be shown in a gallery, only that some effort should be made to establish a context. They lost oomph packed into a crowded room with the artist's paintings (not his strongest work) and assemblage sculptures. The sculptures, too, needed breathing room and context. These photos are my attempt to present the work in a more minimal way, at least as minimal as a blog page can be. The top two images are details, aiming the camera straight down at the horizontal surfaces of two different pieces. They are severely cropped, speaking of no context, but it was these areas that haunted me after the opening and this is my way of getting a good look at them. The image of the dresses is how I would present the dresses: Soho style, with a lot of white space around them so you can see them. I thought it was old or scavenged material but the gallery says no--it's just the way the artist handles and distresses the fabric(s).
A few quick movie notes. The Missouri Breaks ran on AMC last night. Marlon Brando in the granny dress yelling out "Smoked meat!" after he has torched the horse thieves' shack and burned a couple of them up is one of the stranger movie moments. His stalking and creative murder of the thieves (and his own eventual throat-slitting at the hands of good bad guy Jack Nicholson) looks back to the "weird late '60s/early '70s Western" tradition of Greaser's Palace and forward to the Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger school of meaningless '80s mayhem. Forgot that this was a Thomas McGuane script. God, he had good, short run in moviedom.
Watched The Aviator on the big screen yesterday looking for the tedg independent roving camera eye. You notice it in the scene where Howard Hughes and Katherine Hepburn first have sex. The camera precedes them into the study, has a look around, then turns back to find them already on the sofa langorously making out. The movie could be pitched as "The Carpetbaggers meets A Beautiful Mind." It's folded in the sense that we compare it to those other films and also complete it with our knowledge that Hughes will end as he does in James Ellroy's American Tabloid, an evil behind-the-scenes web spinner. (Webs literally begin appearing in the room in this movie.) Nauseating Hollywood mythmaking mingles with psycho soap opera throughout, but the flying scenes are bravura, especially the one where Hughes crashes the test plane into an upscale Hollywood neighborhood. Spoiler: the last lines--Hughes in a sweaty obsessive/compulsive fugue state, involuntarily mouthing the words "The Wave of the Future...The Wave of the Future..." do much to rescue the film from reassuring Ron Howard Land.
The previous post on the Arcangel + Paper Rad Super Mario Movie has been updated with some background info and technical detail. Above is the poster, compressed down to 66KB and stripped of the exhibit info and Deitch logo. This Flash-flavored image is more Paper Rad doing Beige, while the movie is more Beige doing Paper Rad. (Nerdy fan parsing.)
