Nine Inch Bohemian James Stanfield

I found myself at the Zak Smith opening last Wednesday in Chelsea. The art was really boring. I mean put you to sleep boring. The paintings reminded me of high school work – or maybe my first year in art school when all I wanted was to draw my new girlfriend naked.

The opening was packed and many of the guests had really cool died hair-jobs. Part of the crowd was pure Chelsea, but the other part seemed like they had just walked out of a NIN video (circa 89 or 90). I never really liked NIN. 1990-93 was always more about Nirvana or old Minor Threat and Crass records to me. Anyway, the hair-jobs were fun and the crowd made up for the sad pictures.

Ian Pedigo once said that he did not know why the arts are associated with the idea of bohemianism. I've thought about this, and I’m uncertain myself. When one bohemian group becomes a little tired a new set of cool kids appears. I guess that psychedelic kid art – the stuff in that new Deitch book – is on its way out, and here comes an awkward reworking of a strange phase, associated with the music industry, when synthesizers, punk, and goth all met to send industrial music into a perilous downward spiral. Hair-Job.

-----12345678910 James Stanfield

The following is quoted from an article called Born Into Bondage, written by Paul Raffaele and published in the September 2005 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

“Lightning and Thunder split the Saharan night. In northern Niger, heavy rain and wind smashed into the commodious goatskin tent of a Tuareg tribesman named Tafan and his family, snapping a tent pole and tumbling the tent to the ground.

Huddling in a small, tattered tent nearby was a second family, a man, a woman and their four children. Tafan ordered the woman, Asibit, to go outside and stand in the full face of the storm while holding the pole steady, keeping his tent upright until the rain and wind ceased.

Asibit obeyed because, like tens of thousands of other Nigerians, she was born into a slave caste that goes back hundreds of years. As she tells it, Tafan’s family treated her not as a human, but as chattel, a beast of burden like their goats, sheep and camels. Her eldest daughter, Asibit says, was born after Tafan raped her, and when the child turned 6, he gave her as a present to his brother – a common practice among Niger’s slave owners. Asibit, fearful of a whipping, watched in silence as her daughter was taken away.

…

Asibit bore these indignities without complaint. On that storm-tossed night in the desert, she says, she struggled for hours to keep the tent upright, knowing she’d be beaten if she failed. But then, like the tent pole, something inside her snapped: she threw the pole aside and ran into the night, making a dash for freedom to the nearest town, 20 miles across the desert.

History resonates with countless verified accounts of human bondage, but Asibit escaped only in June of last year.

Disturbing as it may seem in the 21st century, there may be more forced labor in the world now than ever…”

Americans Mary Jeys

I really really love the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is just so ginormous that I can literally go there every weekend and see not just something different, but an entirely new wing that has never made itself apparent to me. I regularly spend hours at the Met. It's like a second home- apart from work.

For the past year, I have been visiting the American Wing- always giving it enough time that I end up being kicked out by the guards, but not enough to cover all its ground. The American Wing is my own personal favorite because I'm often spending time with the paintings and the guards alone. The location is tucked away in an upstairs area that is hard to imagine in architecture. Even though I have been visiting for a year, I still have a hard time picturing how it fits into the huge space.

It's funny that the Met hides this section within its architecture. I mean, when you walk in, there are those huge steps, and the first thing you are walking into is European Painting. The architecture just guides you there. But for the American stuff, you have to find your way to the back, and enter some strange indoor/outdoor/indoor spaces that really make you appreciate the monstrosity of the place. Even once you're in the American Wing, you're hard pressed to find those John Singer Sargents they all talk about, like Madame X... . They're all so tucked way way back in a section of the museum that likely gets a decimal of a percentage of the traffic that the European Paintings get. This isn't very nationalistic of the Met, and I personally think it's a shame. Why give all the credit to the tradition of European painting, when we can hand ourselves and our forefathers the credit for reconstructing painting in a new land.

Yesterday I hung out with the American old historical paintings. They seem so funny, these painters, painting historical battle or tactical events, characterizing their figures in "noble" light like a drama playing out on the battle field. There's something really interesting about this notion of painting real events that really intrigues me. Like a notion of "reality" painting that could work. Like, what if we painted as television has done "real" events but ratcheted up the drama? And not just grand scale "reality" like as in historical paintings of political events... but just the banal stuff that would get edited into a 30 minute piece on how I flipped out at some woman on the subway putting her bag all up in my face.

I think this American tradition of painting has something to say about how Americans paint today. It's like it's all a farce we're all trying to pose and act like we belong, knowing full well that the the tradition of painting will always hang over our heads either in the form of placed prominence in architecture or in terms of credibility in the larger art world.

I'll try to hedge off what I see coming in form of comments, and say that recent history has proved to be the coming of age of American art and has placed Americans at the center stage of the art world. But still. Americans are isolated, pugnacious, and bratty. This shows in our paintings especially. We pose and wring our hands trying to think of more neurotic more self-deprecating ways to present our ideas, and it all comes off false. We're likable, just not terribly sure of ourselves, and not certain that we fit the way we want to fit. I'd expand this cultural identity all the way up to our President, GWB. Bragadoccio and humility mix in an awful display of ineptitude that I think we all have to face. I think one way to start to retrain our perspective is to suit our largest national museum to the American prominence that it wants to take, but doesn't want to display. Or is it the other way around?

Old News As New Keith Gladysz

It was September 10th when I finally saw the Greater New York Show at PS1. A bit behind the curve as usual, I’m afraid. Still it was new news to me, even if the shows been up since last March. I think the threat of its imminent closing finally got me to see the follow up to 2000’s original Greater New York (which I saw, quite early on, thank you).

Yes, hit and miss, though when it hit, it hit hard and with resonance. I had an exhaustedly good time. My regrets to the work on the third floor, I breezed by you in a fog. The first floor gets fresh eyes.

I loved the first gallery with works by Amy Cutler and Kent Henricksen. Show’s off to a great start, I thought. Amy’s drawings are equal parts craft and dream. I stared and stared, altering between analysis and hypnosis. And Kent’s work was the perfect compliment on the adjacent wall, cranking the uncanny creep knob a bit more. His embroidered images of hooded and masked s&m/ Klan figures on pillows depicting 17th century folk scenes, strangely connected the dots between faux idyllic imagery and the later work of Philip Guston. Who would have thought that would work? Kent did.

In the next room, I enjoyed looking at Yuken Teruya’s tree bags. The Notice Forest series transforms paper bags from well-known chains like McDonalds and Tiffany’s back into trees (at least metaphorically, and wielding tattooed corporate logos).

Hope Atherton’s Brown unicorn was like Beuy’s with a sad, pouty lip.

While Will Ryman’s The Pit made me climb, peer and smile.

Adam Helm’s NFA-NorthEastCompany scared me silly, in content and quality.

There was a lot more work that I loved but failed to mention. That’s my fault for keeping poor records and leaving my judgments to first impressions only. Had I seen the show months ago and then revisited, I might have more to say. Oh, I feel sheepish. But I still have ten days to go back. The show closes September 26th.