Titus O.

 

I thought I’d list some of the things I actually really liked in Miami. There were plenty actually. How could there not be with so much to see? Here’s a somewhat random list of things I made note of:

1) Program Gallery, from Warsaw, at Scope. It features young Polish artists (under 30); I especially liked the work of 24 year old Mariusz Tarkawian, who makes perfect, humble little drawings on 3 x 5 cards of art seen in magazines, museums, galleries, art fairs, wherever. He produces thousands of them, and they can be purchased in file folder box sets. Another nice piece he did was to make life size drawings, superimposed over each other, of every work of art that had ever hung on a particular museum wall. Genius little bugger.

2) I ran across a booth at Aqua Wynwood that I liked: Tracey Lawrence Gallery. I liked the whole program pretty well, but I really liked Jeremy Shaw’s installation of 30 or so posters of photos and text. There were lots of recognizable personal cornerstones, like Rimbaud, Albert Hoffman, and the original City Lights cover of Howl, with bright green text over them. It had something to do with how drugs had decimated the artist’s peer group in Vancouver or something.

Their current show of painter Matthew Brown looks really strong too.

3) The rare appearances of artists of color had impact, maybe because they were few and far between. Notable were some videos by Jefferson Pinder, of G Fine art in DC.

4) It may have been a reactionary response to the environment, but I absolutely loved the crazed paintings, and a sculpture, by Sebastian Gogel at Emmanuel Post. I said as much, and the gallerist wryly responded, “You are the only one.” He probably didn’t know what he was in for (I’m assuming he’s a first timer.) I don’t think the Miami crowd was ready for an angst-y uber-Deutsch neo-neo-neo Expressionist kick to their aesthetic gonads. How many artists are out there conversing with Otto Dix, or so knowingly with Picabia and early Max Ernst? The work is tough, visceral, and informed. I’m a sucker for good German painting.

 

5) Wayne White’s paintings and bronzes at Western Project.

6) Photo Miami: thought I wouldn’t care, but overall, it was one of the more pleasant experiences I had. It was very polished and civilized; all those large cibachromes, digital prints, lightboxes ‘n shit. Not a crap painting for blocks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7) Thorsten Brinkman, Kunstagenten at Scope. Mysterious yet frank photographs of Dada-esque sculpture/costumes. Totally cool.

 8- photographs of Birthe Piontek. Poignant, poetic, sexy, earthy.

9) Fernand Leger. His work is everywhere lately, it’s odd. You can even see his influence in a lot of recent art. I’m loving it. Leger has always been something of an enigma; his mature style and his politics (inseperable in many ways) both seeming so unfashionable for so long – up to this point, maybe.

10) Tomotaka Yasui at Megumi Ogita; beautiful contemporary sculpture using traditional approaches and materials.

Well, that’s an even ten. There were other things of course, but not too many. When all is said and done, I do recommend the Miami experience. But only as pure business. Get down to it and see the art, systematically and with purpose. It doesn’t make for, say, a lighthearted, enlightening trip to some museums. Maybe because of the chaotic, crass commercialism of it all, I found it an effective way to feel the pulse of the moment; seeing what sinks and swims, meanwhile finding encouragement for my own work and that of the community here in Texas.

Well, I’m back from Miami, visiting its (by last count) 452 art fairs. Over three days I attended about 10 of them, which by the end felt like maybe 8 too many. A few observations:

First, Miami is gross. I had up to last week been somewhat proud of having never set foot in Florida. I’ve now still only seen some very discreet parts, and I’m sure there are some other, downright lovable places. I’m told Captiva is nice. I stayed in Miami Beach, in a pleasant hotel in the heart of the Art Deco district.

I ate some good food , I went to the beach, even saw some good art, and still couldn’t wait to get out. Miami Beach is like going on a landlocked cruise, only with puddles of urine everywhere. It’s a humid, filthy, overcrowded, tacky place, and I do not anticipate a return anytime soon. At least I can hope not.

But I was there with a mission: namely, to see some art, and boy did I ever. It’s estimated I was joined by about 30,000 other folks doing the same – many of them from Texas (we ran into familiar folks everywhere.) I was told that this turnout still doesn’t hold a candle to the big boat show in February, when 10 times that many crowd the beaches and hotels and crap Italian bistros that populate every block. It’s good to have art kept in perspective to what really matters to Americans.

Speaking of hotels, a slew of them had fairs themselves, with the rooms transformed into mini galleries. Dallas’ own Road Agent was in Aqua, looking a little crowded but good overall and appearing to do better than many of their neighbors. The buzz is that while the big fairs (Basel and Art Miami) did better than ever (with billionaires sprinting to booths at the preview to be the first to buy; seriously), the economic downturn was already being felt in the smaller fairs. How could it not be, with such a glut of stuff, most of it necessarily terrible. Art is hard, people! Aqua was the best of the hotel fairs, with the Bridge being the worst I saw; worst of the weekend, hands down. Bad enough to keep me from seeing anything else. The coffin’s last nail.

I was generally impressed with the “mid-level” fairs in the Wynwood district – NADA, Scope, Pulse, and Aqua Wynwood (the new, non-hotel branch across town.) I saw things I liked in each, many things I didn’t. At NADA, I ran into an old school chum, who owns a gallery with a booth I was (happily) admiring when he recognized me – New York’s ATM. Japanese painter Tomoo Gokita was a stand out. Shades of Picabia, Leger, Magritte, and 80′s neo expressionism – all tendencies that were to be seen elsewhere, too.

Tendencies – what else can you look for when you’re digesting thousands of art works by the hour? It’s easy to just knee-jerk into some reactionary disdain – like Matthew Collings’ rants of late in Modern Painters, which have become standard, rote, “things were better in the Renaissance” diatribes. I admire him, and agree with much of what he says, but I’m wary of ever giving wholly in to some notion that things were ever better, purer, nicer, or cooler. I assume things sucked equally at every age, just for different reasons.

For now, skulls are still in abundance, as are deer, flowers, trash, birds, and fey works on paper. With some more deer. And some more skulls. But the vast areas of tasteful negative space punctuated with pastel doodles are being supplanted by some bolder gestures and more central compositions. I only saw a few mushrooms. I saw at least 10,000 pieces incorporating, or entirely built of, fluorescent light bulbs. That Flavin retrospective made the rounds apparently. And there were lots and lots of glossy large photographs of wistful, model-y young women in trouble, splayed on leafy forest floors or fleeing hidden menaces.

Chinese artists were everywhere of course. They like to paint really big heads I notice. I’ve come back thinking, well, maybe I’ll just paint me some big heads. Everyone likes a big, attractively painted head – me too. They are all working out the Social Realism training, and people still mostly like to recognize stuff in their art, ooh and ahh over the technique. “Ooooh, look, that’s so well painted!” Abstraction is still pretty challenging. Hence, I often stepped in booths full of minimalism for a breather, because they were invariably empty. Sold out, no doubt, but empty. These are not events for deep contemplation of the Void – at least that Void. More like the void of style, or technique, or an existential void in the midst of the maelstrom of art consumerism.

In upcoming posts I’ll share some of the better and worse things I witnessed, as my brain sifts through the wreckage, and I sort through my senseless notes. I’m writing a piece for SPOT on photography at the fairs, which was an interesting lens through which to view things (photo is dominant), so I’ll pass some of those observations along too.

“Who the #@$% is Jackson Pollock?” That’s the title and essential query at the heart of a documentary I just watched for the first time with one of my classes at UTA. Like many, from stories in the NYT and on 60 Minutes, I was aware of the hard-drinking, trash-talkin’ lady trucker who bought what she thought was an incredibly ugly painting in a thriftstore as a gag gift for a sick friend. The asking price was $8 – she negotiated it down to $5. It wouldn’t fit into her friend’s trailer home, so she put it in a yard sale. A local art teacher suggested that she might have a Jackson Pollock on her hands. And so began her plummet down the rabbit hole, into the Bizarro world of fine art. Oh, cursed, cursed day. You can’t help but sympathize.

Who was Pollock; more to the point, what constitutes authenticity in one of his works? To make a long story short (and the movie, at only an hour and change, starts to drag as it flogs already belabored points), Teri Horton spends a decade knocking on art world doors, trying to get a single foot in to answer that question. Instead, the gate keepers pull back their peephole shutters, see a chain-smoking plebe on the step, sniff, and bolt another lock.

Granted, it’s quite a tale. But you just want to slap some sense in the parade of “experts” who keep saying that there is simply no way a Pollock could appear today, without clear provenance. Have these people never seen Antiques Roadshow? There’s sharp irony that when she stopped telling the truth, and made up a story about a bar owner giving the painting to her, art world denizens started to listen. Fictional publican “Pops” had known alch-y Pollock well, she said, and in a snowed-in drunken celebrity-laden weekend orgy in Reno, Pollock had painted the thing, signing it (while standing on the bar) with his pecker. You know that had the ring of mythic truth to the art priests, whose livelihoods are woven with gossamer threads of mystery and anecdote. Cagney and Bogart and John Wayne were there, and that bitch Joan Crawford nagged Jackson all weekend, telling him how to paint, and he didn’t like it. You can just hear him (or better looking Ed Harris playing him) angrily slurring “F___ off, you c___!” Genius – it would make a great Jorg Immendorf or Red Grooms painting. Horton randomly ended up with the art world’s number, and she’s been crank-calling it for years.

The movie parades out a host of self-declared connoisseurs who proclaim that this in no way can be a real Pollock. The most egregious bastard among them by far is Thomas Hoving, former director of the Met, who I would pay real Pollock price for a chance to spit in the eye. He’s like a New Yorker cartoon, this guy. Do people actually talk like this, you wonder? Who put this guy in charge of the Met, for chrissakes? He’s unbelievable – an overblown caricature of a snob. Horton’s defenders basically have piles of irrefutable forensic proof that Pollock made the thing, including fingerprints, chemical analysis, microscopy, and side by side detail photos of nearly identical works that are indeed authenticated – famous even. I particularly liked the expert forger (who seemingly can copy almost any style, save Pollock he says) who upon seeing Horton’s piece seems really moved, saying that the painting is lovely and inimitable. Horton’s camp is a bit of a motley crew of frauds, forgers, swindlers, and raspy bar flies. Contrasted with their class-ier foes, you love them for their admittedly messy, nicotine-stained hands, as you’re supposed to. The film isn’t unbiased. But then, who’s rooting for the righteous stuffed shirts who, from their own testimony, come off so badly? What castle are they defending? Can’t they just say, “well, maybe. It’s worth considering”?

Instead, in the face of all the flak, Hoving and others act unperturbed, stating unequivocally that none of it matters, and their “expert taste” is the one and only rule. Science is cute, they say, a darling novelty, but unimportant in these matters. Gak. Pass the pepto. Hoving does a ridiculous song and dance about his “blink” moment (said with peculiar emphasis, indicating blather picked up from the Oprah-driven bestseller that came out about the time of filming,) where he can sense instantly if a work is real or not.

Look, I’m nobody, but I’ve seen a lot of Pollocks too, and this one looks as good as many, and better than some. Pound for pound, million dollar for 100 million dollar, the guy is one of the most uneven artists ever (our local DMA has proof, as do many other museums worldwide), and all the experts/cronies claiming that this color or that area makes it impossible for him to have made this one thing, or worse that it just gives off the wrong vibe, is literally laughable. It made a bunch of 20 year olds chuckle at 8 in the morning, and that’s a stiff litmus test – at least it speaks to the entertainment value of the movie.

To date, Horton’s passed on offers up to $9 million, which is kind of crazy. She admits she just wants to get rid of the thing, so why’s she holding out? The film gives compelling clues for her attachment to it, beyond the financial. Her friends say the fight has given her as much reason to live as anything. Apparently it still does – I can’t find any recent information about the possible sale of the work, though I did find a snarky email from yet another art world organization to her. I have a feeling that the DNA wagon will get rolled out soon, and we might have definitive proof. Maybe then Thomas Hoving can be made to restoratively lick the surface clean or something. Ah, only in dreams…