Chang W. Lee for the New York Times

At risk of tritely introducing an artist by claiming that he or she needs no introduction, it so happens that Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector’s expository statement provides an excellent survey of his career, a worthy complement to her institution’s current Maurizio Cattelan retrospective.

In a sense, a major museum exhibition, even (or perhaps especially) at the Guggenheim, represents a kind of demise, Cattelan’s often-noted obsession, an expression of Heidegger’s Being-unto-Death in which the artist is ‘looking back,’ per the parlance, at an oeuvre that has ossified into something cohesive on the premise of comprehensiveness, a body of work that is consummate—immortalized—in a way that can be only defined in terms of mortality.

Nevertheless the work is not collectively bereft of the myriad meaning that it had in 1989, 1990, 1991, etc., though many of the specimens are indeed taxidermied. If there is an overall sensation that Cattelan has turned the museum into a mausoleum, it’s worth noting that it’s impossible (and futile) to determine whether the artist has done utmost respect or disrespect for the dead.

In any case, I was immediately struck by the sheer presence—i.e., the physicality—of the elaborately-suspended spectacle. The radically vertical arrangement attenuates the otherwise vertiginous nature of the atrium, allowing the viewer to see each piece from virtually every angle, a veritable infinity of perspectives and, likewise, juxtapositions that simply could never be achieved in a regular gallery space.

Indeed, the overarching sense of discovery is refreshingly more like a curio shop than the partitioned tabula rasa of, say, MoMA’s sixth floor: one encounters the smitten pope thrice over (La Nona Ora, 1999); a readymade bicycle; a particularly long-eared leporid; anti-authoritarian sentiments abound; sleeping dogs; banality revisited time and again; and, of course, the artist himself at varying levels.

The five-story spiral of Gehry’s sometimes-frustrating interior imparts an anthropomorphic scale to the mass of artwork to brilliant effect, the undeniable totality made manageable as it unravels in the viewer’s two-dimensional orbit. By presenting the work as a kind of anti-architecture, Cattelan transcends—or at least annuls—the antagonism between artist and architect to realize a near-perfect stasis between figure and ground, each fulfilling the destiny of the other.

It’s not so much that Cattelan has exploited the space as an ideal (as Matthew Barney did rather callously, or at least cartoonishly, in his magnum opus), but that he has masterfully harnessed its potential as a venue. Gravity and tension cancel out as pure inertia—physically, if not quite figuratively—to incorporate the disparate objects as a self-contained system that can be circumnavigated as a world. (As in Sartrean phenomenology, Cattelan’s world is subject only to ontological inquiry; one gets the sense that not even Spector herself could convincingly justify the existence of these artworks.)

Thus, the array invites countless stillborn analogies: the car-sized cat skeleton (Felix, 2001) evokes natural history, the museum a tar pit magically purged of its preservative pitch—a subtle indication that Cattelan might wish for his work to be preserved and, one day, exhumed as such. Or, alternately, the retrospective could be willfully circus-like if the lofty truss (from which all 128 works hang) slowly rotated; perhaps each work could also move up and down, as in a merry-go-round, pretty horses and all.

On one hand, the arrangement of the 128 works seems constellation-like if not altogether ad hoc, best symbolized by the pigeons—an order of magnitude fewer than his Biennale flock—which are inconspicuous for their ubiquity. Yet the relatively (or at least perceptually) uniform density of the space also suggests painstaking deliberation or some arcane rigor worthy of Fibonacci himself, a sense that there might be some hint of order to their articulation.

Moreover, taken as a single entity—in the context of the museum to complete the Gestalt—the Pillar of Cattelan(s) is an easy metaphor for a phallus, thrust into the mute Yin of the iconic atrium. Ever the contrarian, it’s not difficult to imagine Cattelan as an aggressor, the protagonist in a tale of conquest, erecting an inverted victory column to spite ivory tower-bound critics.

Volume, then, is the primary, if not sole, constraint: one gets the sense that the work could expand or contract relative to the space, the allusion more properly atmospheric as opposed to anatomical: “It’s a gas.”

Naturally, this is a gratuitously coarse approximation of the exhibition: there is something fundamentally fantastical—short of the sublime—about the levitating works of art, a visceral grasp of greatness despite (or perhaps because of) the patent artifice. It appears that Cattelan’s catalog is somehow frozen mid-Rapture—a pun on “meeting one’s maker,” perhaps—a moribund Dadaist riff on eschatology, the artist’s own final judgment notwithstanding.

All of which is to say that the collective effect of Maurizio Cattelan: All is that of an entirely new artwork, the Retrospective writ large. The viewer need not offer the proverbial penny for the artist’s thoughts: the plebeian dictum of e pluribus unum is in plain sight at the Guggenheim (…which, of course, charges $18.00 for admission).

Nevertheless, Maurizio Cattelan: All is not so much a critique as it is a rhetorical riddle or an ambiguously obscene gesture, in keeping with the artist’s distaste (if not outright disregard) for the trappings of the contemporary art world. Hence, my favorite oversimplified interpretation of the retrospective: a grotesque chandelier for arguably the museum as a shorthand for the contemporary art world. Taken as an attraction, the inverted monolith is a worthy answer to its seasonal, rightside-up counterpart at Rockefeller Center. Maurizio Cattelan: All is curiously illuminating for its opaqueness, the individual works ornament-like, parts of a whole, at once subject to scrutiny from nearly every angle and forever removed from the context of time and place, made accessible for both reasons.

Brooklyn’s own Interboro Partners just won MoMA / PS1’s annual Young Architects Program competition with “Holding Pattern.”

Many more (traditional) renderings at Interboro Partners (via Designboom, which actually has better pictures).

See also: Rob Walker on ‘Scalies’

NYC – Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

Not sure why there’s so much Williamsburg because he lives in Fort Greene…

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1. Nate Kensinger’s amazing photos of the Navy Yard (previously)

2. Brutalism in the UK

3. An experimental Plastic Dining Room in Vancouver by Goodweather Collective + Loki Ocean

4. Inside the Loew’s Pitkin Theater

5. Mount Fuji Architects Studio: Tree House

6. Though I’ve been to beach several times in the past couple weeks, I have yet to visit Rockaway Taco, which is now immortalized by photographer Todd Selby in his trademark interior / food porn-y style. “Gross” though it may be, Fort Tilden is the perfect place to spend a sweltering weekday, if you have one to spare.

7. Dalian oil spill on Boston Big Picture blog

8. Zhang Huan is easily one of my favorite contemporary conceptual artists—his clever treatment of Chinese culture is always on point—Designboom has some nice photos of his current exhibition at UCCA, Hope Tunnel.

Zhang Huan
Hope Tunnel
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
Big Hall
798 Art District
No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu [map]
Chaoyang District
Beijing, China 100015
+86 (0) 10 8459 9269 / 8459 9387
Through October 24, 2010

9. Who Is Afraid of Red, Amber and Green?

Li Hui
Who Is Afraid of Red, Amber and Green?
Centrum Kunstlicht in de Kunst
Emmasingel 31
5600 JM Eindhoven, Netherlands [map]
+31-(0)40-2755183

10. Phenomenal close-up photos of eyes (via Notcot)

11. Lego Tattoo Pilot Pen Ads

12. “…I have since learned you like tomato soup.”

I biked down the East River Greenway for the first (and possibly last) time a couple weeks ago, before this happened...

]]> http://idolizeyourkillers.com/2010/08/images-5/feed/ 0 http://idolizeyourkillers.com/2010/08/fort-tilden/ http://idolizeyourkillers.com/2010/08/fort-tilden/#comments Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:38:52 +0000 Ray http://idolizeyourkillers.com/?p=3398

• Nice interview with Raf Simons (WWD via HB)
• Lengthy inverview with David Andrew Sitek (BV)
• Awesome interview with Bill Murray (GQ)
• Telling interview with Penn & Teller (Telegraph)
• Decent interview with Ari Marcopoulos (Dossier)
• Hip interview with Pedro Winter (Busy P of Ed Banger) (OC)
• Strange interview with Spike Lee (Gothamist)
• Passable interview with Rafael de Cardenas (S×H)
• Brief interview with Tara McPherson (PSFK)

China:

• Urban China, ever the work in progress (NYT)
• China’s Banks: Great Wall Street (The Economist)
• Bad PR for the nouveau riche in the PRC (WSJ via Gawker)
• The other oil spill (NYT / Salon)
• A green movement grows in China (The Economist)
• The Economist also draws an ophidian metaphor for China’s growth / lack thereof.

Music:

• That’s Cool But Can You Make It More Shit?—short James Murphy interview (Nowness)
• The Antlers were amazing at Pier 54 last week (pics / video / new song @ BV)
• Why Music Is Good for You (via 3qd))
• Lil’ Wayne on a typical day in the clink.
• (More on) the Gaga Effect (NYT)
• Trent Reznor scores David Fincher’s The Social Network (NIN via Pitchfork; trailer)
• Inception, musically (NYT)

Media & Technology:

• When cars fly: Wired / n+1 / Bits (Recommended)
• Pure CSS Fail Whale
• Meta-commentary on Old Spice’s post-racial social media marketing.
• Paywall doesn’t pay (The Guardian)
• Apple’s Antenna(e)gate (The Economist / Daring Fireball)
• AWAD items: Frenemies by tongue (NYT); Tech-neology (NPR)… also, autocorrect in theory and in practice.

Food:

• 101 quick grilling recipes. (NYT; Bittman also talks watermelon)
• From table (or kitchen, at least) back to farm; also, a pig in a blanket, six feet under, etc.
• Salon asserts that Top Chef is in top form this season, though I find that the casting and challenges for D.C. have been less-than-inspired.
• Um. (AdFreak)

NYC:

• The High Line, continued (Revs!) (Highly[ne] recommended)
• Diller Scofido + Renfro’s Culture Shed (PSFK)
• The Economist marks George Steinbrenner’s passing with a rough analogy between the man and the city he came to represent.
• The Times wants to know how we do in Brooklyn.
• Hotels host Manhattan’s nouveau nightlife (NYMag); compare and contrast to : “It is part of the legend of New York, real or imagined, that vastly different cultures can thrive quite separately on the same block.”

Random:

• An older article on Messi. (Wired)
• Do Typefaces Really Matter? (BBC News) (Yes; highly recommended)
• Um. (NYT)
• Yoko D is back (Racked)
• Galen Strawson on moral dilemmas; it’s another version the ‘Original Choice’ (which is not chosen but embraced, or ‘owned’) in Sartrean ontology… (The Stone)
• Moral dilemmas, again (3qd), which (sort of) leads to…
• Lebronicles: He got game theory; the China factor; Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is tragic sans his two-time MVP (is the original online anywhere?), but perhaps not as bad as some outspoken critics might suggest.
• What Caravaggio means to me (The Guardian)
• Where America Really Came From (via 3qd)
• 52 architects choose the 21 most important buildings from the past 30 years. (VF)
• Denzel Washington on Wesley Snipes (who is going to jail): “Wesley is like a mighty oak tree… Many who know him have witnessed the fruit of his labours. I have sat in his shade and even been protected by his presence.”

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the boroughs…

I’ve mentioned tilt shift photography before, but it continues to blow my mind.

…it gives the viewer a sense of being in a smaller world, a bit like the way the world looks to a kid.

–Bryan Solarski, GOOD Picture Show, June 2 2010

Equally amazing: photos of the semi-dystopian ruins of Kowloon & Battleship Island & Kowloon (below) (Dark Roasted Blend via Boing Boing)

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The “How Our Laws Are Made” infographic above is well-executed and fairly clear, if a little busy (GOOD); the Pulp Fiction one below is neat but, as one commenter points out, the story makes more sense the way it unfolds per Tarantino’s script (Flowing Data).

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Art vs. Art:

Greater New York at PS1: I only got around to seeing about half of the exhibit when I stopped by PS1 last week, but I’m sure I’ll have many opportunities to revisit and engage with the work over the next few months, especially once Warm-Up is underway. Nevertheless, I would imagine that Greater New York stands for everything that Jeff Koons’ BMW Art Car (below) is not. (NYT)

That said, I thought that Koons’ art car (unveiled at the Centre Pompidou) turned out fine, though I was a little disappointed to learn that “the design isn’t actually painted on the car; it’s a vinyl wrap covered with two layers of clear coat. BMW says the wrap was lighter than paint and it could be applied much more quickly. That was a key consideration because Koons had just two months to complete the project.” (Wired)

See also: Image gallery of previous BMW art cars via Wikipedia.

For some reason, the ’speed lines’ remind me of this classic Simpsons bit:

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World Cup Buildup:

Sweet concept jerseys. (Fubiz via Notcot)

The Nike Shaman × Project Zoltar collaboration was unveiled over the weekend (Slam×Hype posted the cryptic teaser last week), but I’m still not clear as to what it is, exactly.

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Plus:

• A History of Cool (NYT)
• “A Scene from the Upcoming Film The Elements of Style.” (McSweeney’s)
• The Visible Hand (Freakonomics Blog on NYT)
• Dan Ariely teaser (TED Blog)
• U.S.-China relations over Yves Klein Blue (below); the painter is the subject of another article in the very same issue of the Economist. Coincidence? I think not.