Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

On Sunday I went to MoMa to see "The Artist is Present," a retrospective of Marina Abramovic's work. And Marina was present, sitting on the second floor of the museum in a brilliant, flowing red dress. At 62, Abramovic doesn't look at day over 38. I jumped to the conclusion that she must look healthy and young because she gets to live her passion every day. Even if that passion is sitting in MoMa, staring at strangers.

Or carving a pentagram onto her stomach using a razor blade.


Or cleaning hundreds of cow bones for the Venice Biennale.


Or handing 72 objects of pain and torture to an audience and telling them "do to me what you will."

Or screaming at the top of her lungs until she lost her voice.

Or standing in the center of a blazing star until she lost consciousness from the fumes.

Or breaking up with her partner and collaborator by each of them walking the Great Wall of China from opposite ends, only to say goodbye once they reach the center.

The list goes on.

Obviously Abramovic can't been in twenty places at one time, and I don't think the Great Wall will fit in MoMa, so most of these pieces are exhibited through video. A few of them, however, are performed by actual human beings. (No, sadly not the pentagram piece). As a patron you do have the option of entering the exhibit by walking in between two naked people (Marina and Ulay in the original below).

I walked in between two naked guys. At first I was nonchalant about it, but after squeezing through I felt a surge of euphoria closely followed by panic and shame. Both of them looked wildly uncomfortable, and hot. MoMa had the heat on, and everyone was sweating - even the naked performers. Squeezing past them with a bag, a purse, a heavy coat and my big military boots wasn't easy. After, I felt bad. It's strange to look at art and have it look back at you. One performer, naked, laying on a slab that came up about waist-high in another room was covered in a skeleton. He looked at me, I looked at him. I tried to focus on looking at his body as a whole, avoiding eye contact, but I couldn't. He seemed sad, in pain. I wanted to bring him some water.

After the exhibit I was so exhausted (mentally, physically, emotionally) that I collapsed on my living room couch and didn't move for nearly two hours. I was overwhelmed by Abramovic's body of work, both in its scope and its nature. There's no distinction between Abramovic and her canvas. She is her canvas. I can't think of any kind of living that's more alive and real. Surely there will be haters who think the exhibit useless, but to hell with them. This exhibit is an inspiration. I walked out of MoMa feeling violated in the best way possible, thinking to myself: how can I live and feel and work on this level? I want it. No matter how uncomfortable. I want that kind of work. Every day. So now: how to do it?

Louise Bourgeois

Once again, the editors at More Intelligent Life have honored me by publishing my piece on the recent retrospective at Centre Pompidou of the brilliant artist and living legend Louise Bourgeois. The piece also concerns the Gustave Courbet exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum until May 18th.

If interested, you'll find it here.

Cheers, and thanks for reading,
Jessica

© MURAKAMI

The award for most disappointing, revoltingly consumerist exhibit of the year goes to Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum for "© MURAKAMI."

Now, now, before you get your panties in a twist, let me explain myself. I know pop art is supposed to be consumerist. I know it's supposed to stroke the monolith of capitalism. I know Warhol, I know, I know, I know. But Murakami has taken it another step by designing handbags for Louis Vuitton and then SELLING THEM INSIDE THE EXHIBIT. I repeat: One can go to view ninety works by Murakami and then walk out of the exhibit with a handbag that costs about a grand.



You know I love fashion. I love Marc! And hey, I could maybe even love Murakami. But, and correct me if I'm wrong here, isn't the point of pop art to use elements of popular culture against themselves to make a comment about said pop culture? No? Yes? I thought so. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore. But I'll tell you what the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum is for. It's not about art, it's about making a buck.

As if the Louis Vuitton handbags weren't enough, the gift shop embedded at the end of the exhibit was enough to make me (and my poor mom who I subjected to this bullshit) hurl. My younger brother studies Japanese, and my mom and I thought he might like something from the gift shop. A shirt. A key-chain. A postcard. Something. Well, the postcards cost $2.75 EACH. A t-shirt on starched white cotton was FORTY TWO BUCKS, and one of these little plush toys (that every single Park Slope mother was purchasing in volumes from her droves of offspring) costs a clean FORTY-NINE SMACKERS.



What makes me the angriest about all this is the fact that this exhibit was SWARMED. Mom and I had to wait thirty minutes to get into the museum. The gift shop was cleaned out, and yes, I even saw a woman buy a purse. In the exhibit. I want to emphasize that the Vuitton shop (complete with shop boys in crisp white linens--at one point I said, "what the hell, does that white boy practice Santaria?" And my mom replied, "no, I think he works in the Louis Vuitton shop.") was inside the exhibit. Not at the end, or in another part of the museum, but IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ART EXHIBIT. Why?! So one can buy the fucking purse and then walk through the exhibit and look at the paintings and say, "hey! my purse kind of looks like that painting!" ?!?

Granted, I'm not a big fan of Murakami's work to begin with. I think it's repetitive, derivative, and stupid. There were highlights, like this piece:



Or this one:


But, really?


Thankfully, Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party," is part of the Brooklyn Museum's permanent, fantastic wing of Feminist Art, so the visit was redeemed. But I couldn't get the taste of Murakami out of my mouth. I still can't. I think there's something very evil about all this. I'd like to hear a compelling argument about his work, if there is one.



Sorry, Murakami, but you're just not my bag!


*

If you want to vom, or you're way into the cultural implications of bullshit and derivative pop art, © MURAKAMI runs until July 13th, at the Brooklyn Museum.

I Want to Believe

Cai Guo-Qiang is a pyromaniac.
The man goes around the world and blows shit up for a living.

This is one of my favorites. I wish the video quality were better, but basically it looks like Cai is shooting holes into the sky in Valencia.



And then there's this little ditty, "Transient Rainbow."



Bare with me here, folks, I'm so jacked up on decongestants and anti-inflammatories right now that I can barely spell my first name, but Cai Guo-Qaing's show, "I Want to Believe," is the best exhibit I've seen at the Guggenheim so far. I was skeptical at first. Cars hanging from the ceiling? Pretty impressive, but what's the point? Not until the end of the show, after I had been inundated with explosions of every kind did I realize those cars aren't just hanging from the ceiling. They are falling from the ceiling: they are firework cars.



Cai is Chinese but lived in Japan briefly and has been a resident of New York since 1995. I imagine the Cultural Revolution, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 9/11 is a triumvirate devastating enough to leave a lasting impression on any artist's work, but here Cai has taken the phrase "lasting impression" literally. Many of this later "paintings" were created with fire—the lines and shapes the imprints made by gunpowder set aflame on canvas. Cai's paintings are not paintings. They are the charred remains of paintings.



And as if explosions, gunpowder paintings, and nine cars ready to crash on top of your head at any moment weren't enough, Cai is also a master of sculpture and replica. This piece, "Head On," includes 99 life-sized wolf replicas, crashing, reindeer-like into a piece of glass. In the Guggenheim, with its winding walkway, the piece is breathtaking, especially since you begin walking the curve of the walkway embedded in the pack of wolves: then one by one, they take flight, until all of them are above your head.



Other than a general sense of violence and destruction, Cai's work felt like a literal collision course. Like the wolves, we're bound to hit to the end somewhere. Or as my museum partner so eloquently put it, "I think this symbolizes mortality. The end is coming--" "but we just can't see it . . . death," I replied. Aside from one brief meditative piece, which features a bamboo raft which you can actually ride through water (complete with a cage of live birds) Cai finds solace in the explosive, the raging, and the rabid. Nature in its most organic form. The tipping point, for him, is all.




"I Want to Believe" runs until May 28th at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Kara Walker at The Whitney

"I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen-knife and some people she'd like to kill."



I first came across the work of Kara Walker on the cover of The New Yorker about two years ago. Last summer (of '06) I ran into her installations face to face at The Metropolitan Museum, in their very small space for contemporary art exhibits in the Modern art wing. While I was blown away by what I saw that day, Walker's retrospective at The Whitney is a far superior exhibit. The Whitney has finally given her work the attention and the space that it deserves.

Perhaps you've heard of Kara Walker. There was a piece about her in The New Yorker several weeks ago, by Hilton Als. Kara Walker was raised mostly in Atlanta and went to school there. She completed an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant at the age of 28 (she was, at the time, one of the youngest people to receive the grant). Her art, in the simplest terms, deals with racism mostly through depictions of antebellum slave scenes in silhouette cuts. Her work has a demonic violence and sexuality to it. The images, while black and white, are anything but.

The show at the Whitney is called "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," and it incorporates Walker's larger works, which are full scale (by full scale I mean full wall) slavery scenes and pages of what appear to be Walker's sketchbook/diary, and drawings and collage. The exhibit also features video art, with smaller silhouette cuts functioning as marionettes. All of these videos are set to music; some feature silent film plates.

I find Walker's art fascinating not only because of its commentary on racism and southern history in general, but because of its violent sexuality and its depiction of women. The slave girls are seen morphing into lizards. Women give birth to monsters, men have dangerously overgrown phalluses, boys are raped, people are missing limbs and a man who looks very similar to George Washington, the father of this country, is being fellated by a young female slave. There is a lot going on in the work of Kara Walker. Maybe even too much to talk about here.

As I watched a video installation of a young slave boy being raped presumably by his master or some other white man, the person who was standing next to me (who was a young black man) started to laugh. Standing in the exhibit was a difficult experience in itself. It was Friday night (pay what you will from 6-9 at the Whitney) and almost everyone in the exhibit was under fifty and white. I felt a strange pull between feelings of guilt (for being Southern and white) and other feelings of vindication (for being female, for being "wronged" by men)---Walker opens the exhibit with a virulent letter to an ex-lover, one who treated her like a "slave," when she gave him everything. My favorite line of the letter:

"Before, when there was a before, an upon a time I was a blank space defined in contrast to your POSITIVE, concrete avowal. now, a blank space in the void and I have to thank you for forgetting to stick your neck out for me after I craned my neck so often in your arms."

In the The New Yorker piece (I would link you to it but it's too new to be included on their website) Hilton Als discusses the fact that many black artists and critics have called Walker's art "racist." Many critics and writers make a similar comment about Sylvia Plath's work by calling it "misogynist." All I have to say to them is: just by using the methods and means of the system to create art does not mean that the artist herself gives credence to these systems as truth. Plath's (and Walker's) language is indeed violent, but it is a very specifically feminized violence. Plath takes her cues from the Greeks, featuring Medea and Clytemnestra as characters in her poems. For Walker it is the Slave Girl: the bottom of the totem pole: female and black. It is about rape. And, often, it is about revenge: in some of the murals, one girl is being tortured, while another wields an axe. The installations become works of beauty because they are rewriting history even as they recount it.

Walking down Madison Avenue, I concluded that, for Walker, history, whether it be that of this country, or the history of a relationship, reinforces the fact that intense connections are made through and by abuse. The aforementioned letter, whether it be "personal" or not, says to me, as the opener to the exhibit, that none of this work would be possible, none of this violent, disgusting, but true work would be possible without pain and rejection and despair. And that even if at the end we are alone, we are alone to create and make a criticism that can scream in its clearly cut and colored intentions. The South, and this country in general, can't be confronted enough with these images. In fact, instead of celebrating Lincoln's birthday with a beer, I think perhaps everyone should make a point to go see some Kara Walker.


The Whitney exhibit runs through February 3rd, New Yorkers.
I whole-heartedly encourage you to take a look.