DIARY OF HEROIC PROMISCUITY - Nate Lippens

I just adore nate Lippens ;)


New York is all legend all the time and it can't get enough of its heroic promiscuity. I love it, of course. And resent it too. The old money, boys' club, Ivy League bar-setting mentality makes me sleepy and heavy with disgust. It's a mindset that has shaped all of American life since such a thing came into consciousness.

Hollywood is the acknowledged and flogged exporter of American mythology, but the truth is that New York is the real factory of legends, myths, and heroes. They radiate westward, sometimes gloriously, sometimes with the toxicity of landfill. If Hollywood is the home of illegitimacy, then New York is the home of legitimacy. If you can make it there, you can condescend everywhere else.

In June, I headed there for a hero, to attend the Allen Ginsberg Memorial Reading with Eileen Myles. We met on that rainy Sunday afternoon to catch Gordon Matta-Clark's show at the Whitney. It was the final day of the show and everything seemed fraught: the throngs of people trying to get through the show, to take it all in before it vanished. The tours moved at a clip past us and we wandered off separately.

The show did little for me. Eileen came over and we both blurted out simultaneously, "Did you see the arrow drawings?" Of all the works in the show — the architectural cut-outs, the elaborate, heroic monster transformations — it was two small works on paper that transfixed us. Eileen took some of the papers that were stacked on the gallery floor as souvenirs. "Wallpaper," she said.

Matta-Clark died young of cancer. So did Eva Hesse, whose work I saw last summer at the Jewish Museum. In both cases the materials that the artists used are thought to have contributed to their deaths. Mythically, they play as artist Madame Curies, poisoned by their own hands. We can wonder at what they would have accomplished had they lived. We can admire their obsessiveness. We can feel the martyrdom of dedication.

We then made our way through the mostly embarrassing, Disney-ified Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. There were a few celebrity pics interspersed with ephemera, rock show posters, and optical illusions. Yes, Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Lindner, and Lynda Benglis all put in cameos, but they were mostly lost in the scrapbook explosion layout. It was more like Spencer Gifts than an exhibition and it was packed. The hard art of upstairs had given way to populism. Of course, the truth was that we were bowing at the Gods of the '60s and the '70s. And the Gods were men. The video in the Gordon Matta-Clark show was focused on the men and the women were literally in the kitchen and serving. In the psychedelic art show Marianne Faithfull and Grace Slick appear but mostly it's cock of the walk. Second verse same as the first. And there was Allen Ginsberg's face in the mix of celebrities, hippies, yippies, burnout, drop-outs, and headcases. We took that as our cue and left.

The Ginsberg event was a continuation of hero worship, much of it heartfelt and personal. Eileen blew a gust of now into the proceedings with some poems from her book Sorry Tree, published by Wave Books in Seattle. She was attaching herself to a tradition rather than a legacy. She read a few poems that she also delivered at the Henry Art Gallery back in April for her talk Everything Is Not Enough.

Following the reading everyone went their separate ways. Eileen and I got caught in a downpour and sought refuge at an empty-ish restaurant. She mentioned that the difference in the event was that "if Allen was still alive, we would have all gone out for dinner together."

★★★

The idea of the one-city critic is finished. This was what I heard in a discussion with another art critic. He insisted that like artists and curators, who travel, the critic must too. He had just returned from Venice and was regaling a table of us with tales of the Prosecco-drinking exploits of the art world. The more he talked the quieter it got. He was holding court. Afterward, a fiction writer who used to cover the East Village scene during the mid-80s boom and who was vilified for not being more "supportive" of the scene at the time told me, "That felt like déjà vu, all the talk is money and real estate and collectors." It was a pitch for critics to shill art as luxury fetish objects. Who wanted to remind the grandstanding critic of the stock market crash of '87 and the subsequent tumble and bust of the art world? Who wanted to suggest to him flipping through old issues of Artforum and asking where they are now, all of those hot commodities?

I actually like the idea of critical promiscuity. But I'd take it further: travel broadens the mind but multiple fields of investigation are even more important. It may seem inconceivable to artists but writers have practices too and it's important to stay fresh, to be restless, to never get too comfortable.

The next day I headed to the galleries. June in New York City felt like school was out. It was in a way because most of the art world cognoscenti were off to Europe for Basel and the Biennale. The merchants really were in Venice and with them some of the feverish trading floor mentality in Chelsea had lifted and I was free to wander through the summer shows.

Unsurprisingly, over-rehearsed uniformity and art-as-commodity permeated the blue-chip galleries. The smaller galleries weren't much better. Many artists seemed to be repurposing barely digested references. Built spaciness abounded. There were enough vapid art / architecture hybrids to fill every shelter magazine and several art quarterlies for good measure.

There were some surprises at smaller venues: Tom Meacham, at Oliver Kamm held promise if you believe painting is dead but canvas isn't. Liz Markus at ZeiherSmith encapsulated the Whitney, '60s / '70s mash-up well. Her works were Rorschach's of 60s painting references with 70s iconography. It beat the psychedelic show but a little went a long way.

I saved Trisha Donnally at Casey-Kaplan for last. I've loved her work especially the Canadian Rain piece, which is owned by Bill and Ruth True and has shown at Western Bridge and HAG. Somewhere on the Rhine the owners of Casey-Kaplan were partying on a pontoon, but in the gallery I didn't smell money or an idea. It was devastatingly bad. Pine branches on the floor, blown up photos, and a sound piece. Her elusiveness didn't even graze cleverness. The shaman vibe of her previous work had shrunken down to a few talismans.

I wandered through a dozen more galleries where plenty of knock-off Banks Violette gothica and junior varsity Matthew Barney pretenders were in evidence. Too much of it was Vice squad Brooklynese for the terminally cool. There was also much more of conceptual algebra: figure out what x equals, break the code, and feel smug. There has to be something more compelling than the mechanics of a clever parlor game to sustain the work. I couldn't wait to get back outside and take in the real visual pleasure on the streets.

★★★

I love flamboyance. Maybe that was why I was so smitten with Gego and Louise Nevelson's shows. Also after Chelsea and Matta-Clark it was a radically different everything. Of course, flamboyance is in the eye of the beholder or the definer. With her outlandish costumes and showgirl / drag queen false eyelashes most people would admit that Nevelson was flamboyant. Gego would be a harder sell. But I think her withholding, exacting yet organic wire sculptures are very flamboyant. They are so ephemeral that they demand attention.

Gego is undergoing the kind of re-discovery that the art world loves: an underappreciated or marginally known artist (usually dead) is finally given the respect and attention they deserve and everyone agrees they deserve it and so we all get to feel satisfied. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I love narrative; I like a story, especially a backstory. A bad childhood, alcoholism, horrible marriages, exile. In various combinations this one-downsmanship is the arc that draws me in. It is the counter-heroic. Or the heroic masked as loser lovely.

Gego does and doesn't fit the model and actually that's her appeal. Born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912, the daughter of a Jewish banker, she studied for a career in architecture and engineering. But in 1939, she left for Venezuela where she stayed until her death in 1994. Her work is simple and complicated, seemingly freehand semi-geometric drawings and sculptures which she called "drawing without paper." At the Drawing Center it was these twisted wire pieces that captivated. She wrote in a notebook: "Sculpture: three-dimensional forms of solid material. NEVER what I do!"

Gego ignored labels. She didn't really get going as an artist until she was already in her 40s and had raised a family, divorced, and settled with the émigré painter Gerd Leufert. No one knew how to package her work: Drawing? Sculpture? Abstract? Formal? Romantic? Organic? It was a tough sell and to some it probably still will be. Drifting through the small-scale exhibit I was thrilled at the pleasure of the work and the lack of heroics. The anti-heroic impulse in Chelsea is answered with abjection. But here it was something else, demanding yet quiet work.

The heroics came later in the day at the Jewish Museum where I saw Louise Nevelson's show. Nevelson mixes authority and impressionism. There is grandeur to the work, an outsize feel that is in keeping with the artist's persona. She is seemingly the flipside to Gego. Yet both are delicate in sensibility but roused by stoicism to be tough. And both of them remained elusive in Gego's transient perceptions barely registered outside of Venezuela and Nevelson was more familiar to many as a fashion gargoyle in a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph than as a sculptor to be reckoned with.

Her found object assemblages — abstract expressionist "boxes" grouped together to form new creations — have an almost holistic totemic quality. As she said,"When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you're really bringing them to life — a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

Nevelson was 42 before she had her first solo show. In 1959, at the age of 60 she was included in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was a launching pad for Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly — all younger than her son. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, a compact survey of 66 works organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport for the Jewish Museum, is her first New York museum show in 27 years.

Nevelson's installations made of street salvaged wooden remnants have AbEx scale, Cubist geometry, and a strong emotional undercurrent. "Self-Portrait, Silent Music," a grid of 24 black boxes is lined with cast-off fragments and a portrait of the artist and it leads to the stunning wall-scale environments including the haunting 225-foot memorial to the Holocaust, "Homage to 6,000,000 I."

They are mammoth in size and yet there is something small, personal, and mysterious to them, in a way that David Smith and Richard Serra never are. I appreciate and admire their work but I'm not moved. Nevelson's work has influenced many but she will always be the eccentric woman in her costumes and bravado, demanding attention. She has her legend because that's what becomes a legend most. In a photograph Gego stands in profile with her gnarled hands, cigarette dangling from her mouth, bending wire and will. Half of her back cock blocks the camera from the pleasure of her creation. She worked a different legend, one of work for work's sake, art as life.

"The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend" is on view through Sept. 16 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200.

Nate Lippens writes about books and art for various publications. He still lives in Seattle.

Elizabeth Murray - Death to Cancer at 66

Elizabeth Murray
(NY Times)

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 14, 2007
There are so many separations in every artist’s life — the projects that live only in the mind, the ones that go no further than a few sketches and, of course, the divorce that takes place when a work is really and truly finished and begins to live on its own. For those of us who celebrated the life and work of Elizabeth Murray, who died of cancer on Sunday at age 66, we mourn our separation from both.

Her paintings will be with us for years and years to come, teasing us, resisting us, giving life to something in her that could only find expression in an almost erotic sense of color and shape. People will come upon her work and wonder about the woman who made it, and she will take the place that every artist eventually takes — overshadowed by the constructs of her imagination.

But we — many of us New Yorkers — have been lucky to have known the woman herself. I have never met anyone in whom frankness and delicacy combined in the way they did in Elizabeth. Her eyes were very bold, and her face seemed constructed to make sure you couldn’t miss that boldness. There was a wildness blowing through her, and to talk to her was to feel that she was consciously effacing, for your benefit, something that would unhinge you if she let it out, which she did in her work. That was before cancer.

And if you happened to see her in the past year, frail and bald and as direct in the eye as ever, you knew that there was no effacing the knowledge of death, or the fresh understanding of life that that knowledge gives.

Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the tools she chose. It was central to her idea of herself, and yet the reference it makes to the living woman will now become more and more oblique. The work will live on in the durable world. But the memory of the artist lives on only in us, who are made of the same impermanent stuff that she was. VERLYN KLINKENBORG