Mark Flood’s Art Star show in Chelsea

I attended an art event in Chelsea at the Zach Feuer Gallery today put on by artist Mark Flood as a part of his new exhibition at the gallery called Art Star.

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The show consists of a series of word paintings with sayings like “Museum Whores” and “Alleged Artists” and a video showing the judges from the Bravo TV show The Next Great Artist, but what the judges are saying is over-dubbed. Instead of giving real critiques, they are dubbed with computer generated voices and completely trashing the hypothetical artist they are discussing… then on the walls of the gallery are large canvases painted black in the center with borders of painted lace. (Lace paintings are works Flood has been known for in his career and how became known.)

The video tape of the judges was, for me, the most amusing part of the exhibition because of the cynicism Flood is showing about the whole way art is promoted by galleries and museums and how artists are commodified and sold.

Today’s event consisted of a panel of 10 men who all claimed to be Mark Flood, and 2 moderators who were there to ask the Mark Floods questions. One of the panel participants was actually Mark Flood, but he never identified himself as the “real artist” and similarly none of the questions that were asked of any of the Mark Floods sitting on the panel were answered seriously. All of the questions and answers were amusing and ironic, with one of the Mark Flood’s pretending to be a tree, another was a cat in a cage, and still others who pretended to represent some part of Mark Flood’s personality (narcissist, sell out, business person, musician, etc.).

Not too many years ago I would have found this kind of art exhibition completely ridiculous, but these days I think I can appreciate the humor and cynicism Flood is depicting in the show. The world of “high art” has become (has always been?) controlled by powerful forces and heavily driven by money. Who becomes the next “art star” has probably very little to do with actual talent and more to do with the proximity of an artist’s relationships to art power structures and influence.

Unfortunately though, I didn’t find the paintings in the exhibition to be “art star” worthy – but I could not figure out if that was purposeful by the artist. Perhaps Mark Flood wanted to create a set of paintings that would be seen as mediocre to underscore his point about how actual talent is irrelevant in the face of all these power structures at play. Or maybe the idea was that mediocre paintings are what galleries are selling today, along with the hype selected artists get by being represented by those galleries.

Regardless, I can appreciate the narrative commentary Flood provides in the word paintings and the video installation to underscore his points, plus the pointed humor he uses to get his message across. The art event today was a lot of fun, although I learned nothing more about Mark Flood as an artist by going, the 45 minutes I spent laughing at myself as an audience participant and laughing at the 10 Mark Floods give silly answers to silly questions makes light of what can normally be a serious endeavor to try and understand what an artist is trying to say with their work.

If you’re in the Chelsea area, I’d recommend checking out the exhibition… the gallery is located on 22nd near 11th Ave. and Art Star will be in residence there until October 15th.

NoLa Diary #4 – Ogden Museum & Contemporary Art Center

Originally I thought the Ogden Museum of Southern Art , located on Camp Street, was free to visitors on Thursdays but I was mistaken. The Ogden is free to any resident of the state of Louisiana on Thursdays, but not a Yankee like me. I was also informed by the helpful desk clerk that the Ogden After Hours program (Thursday evenings between 6-8pm) requires a second admission fee 0f $10.

Travel Tip: However, despite the rain today, there was a silver lining. The Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans  - which is directly across the street from the Ogden was offering a one day $10 “Prospect Pass” which included admission to both the CAC and the Ogden, as well as numerous galleries across the city as part of a group “Prospect” show.

I wish the CAC allowed photography inside their NOLA Today show on the 3rd floor, but alas they did not. The show was well curated and there was a lot of narrative work about New Orleans and artist’s interpretations of life in NoLa now. Of course, references to the flood were plentiful, and the art it inspired was moving. I recommend it highly, and NOLA Today will be on display until the end of January 2012.

Lovely mural on the side of the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, Camp St

Once I took in everything the CAC had to offer today, I went back across the street to the Ogden and I’m so glad I did.

The red and white building on the right is the Ogden and the really old building on the left is a Civil War Museum which I didn’t visit

The one reason I wanted to go to the Ogden was to see native New Orleans artists work and I’m happy to report the work of George Dureau, a well known NoLa French Quarter artist, was worth the visit alone.

Entrance piece (a self portrait by the artist) to the George Dureau exhibition at Ogden

I loved Dureau’s use of color and abstract figuration and I enjoyed the fact that he appears in nearly all of his own work as a model, which is intriguing and I think unusual.

Dureau self portrait red background

Other than the amazing Dureau exhibit, I was really astounded by the work of New Orleans photographer Josephine Sacabo. Her surrealistic negative images of women’s faces are hauntingly beautiful and inspiring. Her work (according to the biography on her website) is in MoMA in NY, the New Orleans Museum of Art – NOMA, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress collections, just to name a few.

Sacabo piece on display at Ogden

To say the work I saw today was “crazy good” is not an understatement. I was excited by these more contemporary works, even though I thoroughly enjoyed NOMA and the sculpture gardens yesterday. Today I felt like I was putting fuel in my creative furnace as I continue to soak in what the city has to offer.

Another strong Sacabo piece at Ogden – woman with smoke

Although I’ve focused most of my diary entries on museums and art galleries almost exclusively for the first few days of my visit here, I think anyone can easily see why it’s so easy to get pulled in by the artistic heartbeat of New Orleans. The city is so old and has such a strong character, it makes sense to me that so many artists would call this place home.

NoLa Diary #3 – NOMA and adjoining Sculpture Garden

The New Orleans Museum of Art is celebrating a big birthday this week. NOMA turns 100 years old, and this Friday and Saturday (12/16 & 12/17/2011) the museum is planning a bash and is allowing all visitors in for free on both days.

New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA)

Travel Tip: To visit NOMA, just hop on the City Park streetcar on Canal Street (the edge of the French Quarter) and take it to the end. The streetcar trip can take 20-25 minutes so allow plenty of time to get there and back. Cross the street and enter City Park, NOMA is the first building you’ll see.

NOMA celebrates 100 years

Being from New York City, I’m incredibly spoiled when it comes to museums. MoMA, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Natural History are all towering examples of insanely well curated collections so when I travel I love to see what local curators do with their (usually) smaller spaces and budgets.

NOMA does not disappoint, and frankly, they have a wonderfully eclectic mix of art from different time periods and different cultures. The museum is 3 floors and with the exception of a traveling Fabrege exhibition, all of the galleries permitted the use of photography (without flash, of course.) Boy am I glad they allowed photography, I was snap happy today and took over 100 shots of the artworks and sculpture gardens. Some of my shots, sadly, are blurry or show reflections from glass but they give you a flavor of the incredible artworks.

John Biggers – Blessing the People – Detail

Their Contemporary gallery entrance was graced by this wonderful Frank Stella painting. In addition to Stella, they have pieces by Lee Krasner, Richard Serra, Miro, Jean DuBuffet, Dale Chihuly and many others. In an adjoining gallery, they have one piece by Picasso as well.

Work by Frank Stella

Of course, if you are into Native American pottery you would absolutely go crazy over this Hopi pot made by Nampeyo (they had several unbelievable examples of Nampeyo pots in perfect condition displayed as part of their collection, I could hardly believe they had so many).

Nampeyo Hopi pot – NOMA (This is the real deal – a Nampeyo pot is incredibly rare, NOMA has a whole collection of them!)

And of course, if you are going to NOMA you would be crazy to leave city park before taking a stroll through the particularly lovely sculpture garden behind the museum building. The sculpture garden is always free, while NOMA offers free admissions only on Wednesday (this week’s 100 year birthday celebration is the exception.)

This beautiful sculpture of a head by the (very well known French sculptor) Rodin is one of the newest pieces to be added to the garden, but the sculpture garden has over 70 truly fantastic examples of work spanning the classical, modern and post-modern genres.

NOMA’s new sculpture “bauble” – a bust by Rodin

If you get overwhelmed by all that art, you may need to just relax and look at the scenery. The grounds are immaculately kept and graced by beautiful bridges and artful landscaping, like what you see below.

The Artist’s Tuning Fork

Today was a gorgeous day in New York City, and I spent a few hours this afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art to see the William De Kooning exhibition. Now don’t get the wrong idea, I’m actually not a big fan of the artist, but I am very interested in Abstract Expressionism and I wanted the opportunity to re-think some of my ideas about this painter.

As per the MoMA website:

The exhibition, which will only be seen at MoMA, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 200 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000 square feet.

Despite my internal resistance to the way De Kooning merges traditional body forms with abstraction in his most famous paintings like Woman I,

De Kooning's Woman I - part of the permanent MoMA collection

I really did like his later works in the last two decades of his life, none of which I’ve seen before. These works were much more graphic in nature, brightly colored, with lots of white background to provide space to the drawn forms and lines that marked these canvases.

Regardless, the De Kooning work I have the strongest resistance made me think about my favorite Frank O’Hara poem Why I am Not a Painter. It goes like this:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

This led me to think about De Kooning’s “positive” and “negative” series including paintings like Zurich, which are all black and white and have words or letters embedded in the paintings. Or his piece called Attic, which De Kooning said had “everything in it.”

I’m not sure why, but all of this led me back around to thinking about the end of De Kooning’s life again, and the last two decades that he painted even though he was in ill health. I thought about how he was unable to paint for at least the last seven years of his life, as his health continued to decline in his late eighty’s and early nineties. It made me wonder if he felt trapped inside his body, with ideas still coming about how he wanted to paint, but his body would have been unable to comply with the demands of the work.

There’s a story in that idea somewhere. I feel that instinctively. And if you’re wondering where all this rambling is leading, I do have a point so bear with me just a bit more.

Yesterday I went to an open air art show where painters, sculptors, potters, and photographers gathered to show the best of what they had to offer. I met a sculptor there, named Brianna Martray of Denver, Colorado. She was displaying a piece called Lighthouse Keeping which really intrigued me. I sensed a feminine energy to her work, and this piece in particular strongly reminded me – not in form but in feeling – of a Dale Chihuly’s installation at the New York Botanical Garden which I saw in 2006.

             Image above courtesy of Brianna Martray

 

                   Chihuly installation of small glass works at the New York Botanical Garden

This weekend was, for me, an opportunity to become inundated – even over-stimulated if you like – with the ideas of other artists. All of these things keep me “in tune” as a writer, with other aspects of art that lead towards a highly diverse set of expressions.

In my short story, Lancaster, the main character comes into close contact with an artist and that experience changes him in some way; it makes him want to strive to be the self the artist has depicted of him, a self that he sees as “other” and yet some possible alternate self to his current way of living.

So, as you sit down to do some reading, whether it be a collection of short stories or a novel, you should also consider using the artist’s tuning fork and get out to see an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, installation art, arthouse films or anything else that intrigues you. While writers are notorious observers of other people, sitting next to them in restaurants, in trains, or elsewhere, we shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to tap directly into the veins of artistic expression and mainline directly from other masters of expression – words are optional.

There are so many possibilities to be inspired by other artists… who do you find yourself most in tune with, and why?