a magazine review that reads more like a stream of consciousness

The magazine I got from Mencher was the ARTnews magazine – the December 2011 issue.  Altho you’re not supposed to judge something by its cover, I do it all the time.  It’s abstract in the way it’s designed.  It looks so watercolor or water got spilled onto something that used to be colored a bit more geometrically & now it’s running all over the place.  I like it.

Since it’s an art magazine, you’re immediately blasted with images.  Altho these images are advertising for shows in various places.  A lot of the shows are high end & are located in New York.  I don’t think I could afford those.  However the Smithsonian “Black List” show featuring black figures of higher standing who have achieved things in art, sports, politics, activism, business, & wherever else sounds like something I would’ve went to if I was around Washington DC.  But the magazine on the whole is just like a fashion magazine, filled with tons & tons of ads – except they’re all for galleries.  I’m not sure which I prefer.  I mean it’s easier to think & react to “oh that person isn’t attractive & their image is constructed on some white anorexic ideal of beauty” than some of these paintings.  Some of these paintings that are being advertised which are in themselves advertising shows… I’m not so sure what to think.  It’s just OH.  Especially those modernist geometric / abstract expressionist things.  Those are just beyond me.  They’re made of such bullshit, in my opinion.  There’s the one by Miriam Schapiro, supposed “Feminist Visionary” & all I see are orange lines & this thing that looks like a diamond.  It’s just beyond me.  I give up.

I must say that most of the layouts of the ads are simple & clean.  There’s a picture of the work, there’s some negative space, there’s some information & titles, & we’re done.  We’re not trying to do a thousand things @ one time.  They’re hoping to catch you with the highlight of the show, I’m assuming.  & some of the ads don’t even have art @ all – just really exciting graphic designs.  Like the Madrid / ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair ad.  I love how it looks.  It really caught my eye.

On the ARTTALK / tentative Letter from the Editor thing, there’s a little tease of the Van Gogh Fashion show.  & that tease features one of the dresses – Starry Night in a dress.  I’m not digging the design, altho I do dig the idea.  & I guess the show was made by 2 self-taught sisters from California who wanted to take Van Gogh’s pieces into the truly 3D world.  Me gusta.

OH MY GOODNESS.  I actually went to one of the shows the magazine described!  It’s Francesa Woodman’s hauntingly profound entire body of work @ the SFMOMA.  She’s a cult figure because she died so young, yet had so much talent.  I think I’ll give you the link to my tumblr post because it really moved me.  I am so happy Paul Mueller took us to that show to experience it.  It made a lot of people uncomfortable because of the nudity, but for some reason… hell I’ll just post it: http://tealrallythong.tumblr.com/post/17203479944

Here’s an excerpt of the post I made [feel free to read the rest.  I actually encourage you to]:

Her earlier work… breathtaking.  I wish I could stay in that exhibit forever.  You could just feel the duende in her work.  You could feel the death & the struggle & the darkness & the bubbling blackness oozing everywhere.  It got into your skin & your bones; it got under your nails; it made you want to itch.  Sometimes it was very uncomfortable.

There were some Dostoyevsky vibes I got from the pictures.  There were so many shadows.  So much so that sometimes the subjects were drowning in them.  They were blurs, going through the motions, abstract & fleeting.  & things were always subjected to the corners, to the confines of life.  You could feel sensations of being trapped, being misunderstood, being ostracized.  There were feelings of emotional numbness & blankness.  Even some disillusionment.

There were definitely major Sylvia Plath vibes.  The subject is always the female form - or nearly always the female form.  The human psyche is actually the female psyche & sometimes how fragile it can be.  How a female can be dancing on the edge.  How a female can be trapped under a Bell Jar.  How a female can be so misunderstood & alone in her suffering, in her sexuality, in her day-to-day living.  In the world.

& even some ultraviolence in there - especially with the female form.  There were some really aggressive scenes that sometimes put your teeth on edge - ultraviolence like things.  There were pictures with ropes & clothespins on the female’s breasts, waist, torso.  It was uncomfortable & stifling.

I like how the magazine isn’t just about galleries, too.  Here they’re also highlighting a memoir & some sort of zine.  It’s good to see that they’re not elitist about other forms of art.  Also having a feature on Sylvia Plath isn’t bad, either.  Nor is that little sketch she made [I didn’t know she sketched; wow.]  Actually her decision to ditch art professionally because she didn’t think she was good enough & switch to more writing types of pursuits reminds me of my own decision to do the same.  We both doodle / d in our spare time, but not to the point of wanting to “show” anything.  Altho now her pen & ink drawings are being shown.

The NEWS section is very detailed & deep & the stories range: a painting that might have been painted by Leonardo; a light show by Tracey Emin; James Cuno as the new Getty Trust president; the Kabakov Ship of Tolerance vision; & others.  & then there’s book reviews right after that.  Neat.  Oh my, a review of a Jackson Pollock book.  I’m going to adhere to the “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything @ all” suggestion of humanity.

Even tho there’s a lot of ads, there’s also a lot of content.  I do adore this “Looking @ Art” piece by Lilly Wei about the Ming / Qing dynasties & the changing visions of artists @ the time.  Inside are lovely paintings – especially the fish.  Like Wei says, a lot of the pieces look really modern – how things are set up on the page, the brush strokes, sometimes even the subject matter.  A lot of this work foreshadows a lot of the other art movements to come; Wei gives an example of all the varying brush strokes & experimentation along with it foreshadows the Post-Impressionist movement.  Oh & the next writing piece has one of Cezanne’s works for comparison.  It’s like they almost planned all of this.  But the article is actually about art gambling – I mean art stealing – I mean art dealing.

One of the main stories is about George Grosz & the scandals he’s caused.  You’re welcome to glance thru the article – because it looks rather in depth & well documented & all of the accompanying photos & portraits are fascinating… but I honestly don’t find this very interesting.  I’m really looking forward to the fashion photo shoot.  Usually it’s the other way around but that’s how it is this time.  I’ll probably go back & re-read it later [it is rather extensive.]

Altho these satire pieces – those really did intrigue me.  On tumblr & the internet I’m accustomed to reading / regarding satire pieces whether it’s the Onion or some snarky little sarcastic tumblr comment or some ironic little picture deconstructing our society or if it’s Banksy on the side of a wall.  There are 3 pieces & they’re all very interesting & I actually read all of those so:

1.       Biting the Hand That Feeds: realizing hesitancy about the art market price-tagged thoughts; asking the hard questions; curating hype 101; exposing the resume culture; exposing the paradoxes of critiquing the market & then gaining from it; exploring the Twilight Zones of art; stripping the art speak out of art; advising to “paint n----s… doing historically white shit; no I really like that last idea that’s wonderful more people should do that.

Dear Art World, I feel you sitting there trying to process the CRAZY shit going on.  I’ve been for months, & it’s driving me INSANE.  Fuck, it seems counterproductive to EVEn talk about this shit, because EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS WHY “SHIT IS REALLY FUCKED UP” or why I’m wrong.

. . . The Art World is NOT separate from SOCIETY and THIS is how shit gets all FUCKED UP – PLUTARCHY, motherfuckers.

So, in my useless capacity as a tool artist, I’ve made some pictures about this SHIT that are FREE to look at, and they’re ALL derivatives.

2.     The Joke’s On Us: “The Art of Pranks;” the NYPD Vandal Squad Task Force; Make Art That Benefits Everyone Not Only the Elite; prank theory applied to modernism; Rrose Selavy; Andy Warhol & soup cans; Dada urinals; sound poems; Merda d’artista – 90 cans of artist shit; no but they’re not jokes, they’re pranks & there’s a difference, bro.

3.     When Satire Becomes Art: political cartoons provide us instant, brutal wit; caricature has been around since Leonardo; animals are common subjects in satire since the Middle Ages [apes & spiders & insects, oh my]; fashion is another common subject, greatly exaggerated; the pen can be mightier than the sword; good example: Chagoya reproduced / appropriated an 18^th century cartoon & replaced the original with Obama’s head : “The Headache” [the demons are the conservatives as he tries to pass healthcare reform]; but all of this is art whether you agree with it or not.

There are 19 pages of reviews.  19.  I’m assuming that this is a really important function of the magazine, besides all the ads & the little writing pieces. The breakdown is this: 4 pages are on national shows; 4 pages are on international shows; and the rest of the pages are dedicated to shows in New York.  Perhaps there’s a bias, perhaps that’s just where all the quality gallery shows are, or perhaps it’s a combination of the 2.  A lot of the shows are on painting series and collections of various genres, but there are also photography shows and other mixed mediums.  The Grey Art Gallery in NYU has a Yoko Ono piece and a lot of modern symbolic & simplistic things – like a tv with a single beam of light like emitting from it.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.  Richard Learoyd’s piece with the Man with the Ocotpus Tattoo seems very promising.  Lots of grey backgrounds, lots of hyper clear forms, lots of attention to details with bodies “sprawled out as landscapes of skin” (110).  I love the humanity that the review suggests the shows has: the furrowed faces; dialated pupils; scabs; and emotions.  That’s the kinds of stuff I just love to eat up.  The Beauty Culture show in LA sounds like something I would’ve went to because it’s about the high cost of beauty – especially the psychological cost.  There’s the weight-loss camps that remind me of the Girl Culture book Mueller had me look @.  Both the show & that book feature a bunch of all of these nuances with models & average folk together struggling against the ideals of beauty.  Oh & there’s a huge Manet show in the Musée d’Orsay.  But all of these have already passed & now I feel really sad.

Oh I guess they trolled me.  The only bit about the fashion show was that small little blurb & small picture in the beginning.  Oh wow.  So I just flipped thru this entire thing endlessly for almost nothing.  That happens in even art magazines, I suppose.  Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the entire magazine as a whole, but wtf I wanted more Van Gogh fashion.  If you’re gunna put it on the cover, you need to give more than a few paragraphs & ONE picture on ONE dress.