When eyes turn to Rio de Janeiro, and the rest of Brazil, in light of an increasingly stable economical and political powerhouse, the opening of a new market for architecture becomes a possibility for an international audience. However, things don’t change so dramatically from one day to the next. Architects in the city have long been struggling in the shadows of stylistic nostalgia, hampered by archaic planning policies, lack of institutional initiatives and bureaucratic innovation. At a time when these two presents must be reconciled into a single future, the gap in the architecture discourse becomes apparent. Slowly filling this gap with a much-needed critical platform is Studio-X Rio, a satellite project of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP).
Top: Raul Mourão’s series of kinetic sculptures spill onto the adjacent Tiradentes Square, further entangling urban space and architecture forum. Above: Students from Columbia University’s GSAPP discuss proposals for the city
“Brazil is the future of urban transformations”, Mark Wigley, dean of the GSAPP, tells a local newspaper. It is with such grand visions that since 2011 Studio-X Rio has been bringing together professionals, academics, decision makers, students, and the general public to confront the city’s most pressing challenges. Located in a refurbished historic building in Rio’s downtown area, the heart of the city’s World Cup and Olympic-inspired urban renewal, it is interested in the role of cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-continental exchanges in the urban transformation of the city — and other cities in Brazil and Latin America.
Work produced by students from the GSAPP is exhibited to the public
For director Pedro Rivera, “it’s vital that communities perceive Studio-X as an open space where they can actively and meaningfully participate, so every activity at Studio-X Rio is free and open to the public”. These participations take the form of exhibitions, workshops, book launches, research and exchange of experience. Wigley believes this model represents a new form of acting upon the city. Before, research was concentrated inside the academic departments of universities and now this practice starts to expand onto the streets, making the city the biggest laboratory.
One of the recent events on the agenda of Studio-X Rio was a panel on “inclusive urbanism”, focusing on favelaupgrades and compensatory damages for garbage pickers. Panelists included a planner from the federal government’s Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), a Rocinha Favela resident, a Columbia student studying the Jardim Gramacho landfill closure, and a representative from the investment bank Caixa Econômica Federal. Rio de Janeiro, like London’s Olympic preparations for 2012, is using its sports mega events to rejuvenate run down and neglected areas of the city. These developments, however, have stirred an opposition which points out the lack of participatory planning and disregard for the history and culture of local inhabitants.
Columbia University’s satellite project Studio-X Rio is located in a refurbished historic building in Rio de Janeiro’s downtown area
The lecture series entitled Nova Arquitetura Carioca[“New Architecture from Rio de Janeiro”] gives the stage for local architectural practices to bring their voices out to a wider audience. Recent speakers have included Carla Juaçaba, architect of the Rio+20 pavilion for the UN conference on sustainability, and Bernardo Jacobsen, architect of the newly inaugurated Museu de Arte do Rio [“Rio Art Museum”]. This is a welcome opportunity for younger architects, who have great difficulty in entering a market dominated by real estate.
Prominent international figures are also continuously brought into the scene. Some of these have included Caroline Bos (UN Studio), Djamel Klouche (l’AUC), Francine Houben (Mecanoo), Willem Jan Neutelings (Neutelings & Riedijk), Irma van Oort (KCAP), Juan Herreros, and Jüergen Mayer. By connecting people and ideas into a global network, building unprecedented bridges of knowledge-sharing, these events have an impact on the approaches and technologies that local architects use to solve the challenges of the profession.
Students from the GSAPP and Rio’s CAU PUC collaborate on an installation
Studio-X Rio’s gallery spaces constantly host exhibitions, always accessible to the public during the daytime. At times these events spill onto the adjacent Tiradentes Square, further entangling urban space and architecture forum. An example is artist Raul Mourão’s series of kinetic sculptures, which makes reference to the dismantled fences from the square and from across various public spaces in Rio.
The academic activities are not limited to Columbia University and the GSAPP studios. Other architecture schools like Rio’s FAU UFRJ, PUC Rio, ENSA-Versailles and ETH Zurich have also been engaged with Studio-X Rio. These intra-institutional studios present an opportunity for students and academics from diverse backgrounds to participate in the resolution of questions, exchange and test of ideas about the city.
Local architects Bernardo Jacobsen, Guilherme Lassance, Pedro Varella and Carla Juaçaba discuss their recent projects in the lecture series Nova Arquitetura Carioca [“New Architecture from Rio de Janeiro”]
Mark Wigley is not wrong to be over optimistic about the potential of such a platform. In the Netherlands, for instance, the institutions that eventually merged into The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), sought, in the 1980s, to bring trend-setting architects and critics from abroad to produce solutions to specific Dutch case studies. The result was a generation of Dutch architects and students who could deal with concrete problems at the high-level of international standards. A more recent case is the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), which, by carrying out Denmark’s national architectural policy of 2007, has not only been playing a primary role in the success of contemporary young Danish architects but has also greatly increased public interest in architecture.
Caroline Bos of UNStudio was part of the lecture series Panorama da Arquitetura Holandesa [“Panorama on Dutch Architecture”]
Studio-X Rio is not to the same magnitude as these governmental institutions, for it functions first and foremost as an academic forum. However, it has been making up for some of the slowness of Rio institutions that should be functioning at these standards. While the Rio de Janeiro branch of Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil [“Brazilian Institute of Architects”] and the Conselho de Arquitetura e Urbanismo [“Council of Architecture and Urbanism”] provide, to a certain degree, activities and events, they fail to inspire initiatives on local, national and global levels to promote and include the participation of the many parties involved in architecture and construction, both private and public. It is in these fertile grounds that Studio-X Rio has been finding its way and, in the process, defining itself.
Exhibition “São Casas” by artist Luiza Baldan
It has become clear that the architecture discipline is demanding a new melody from the city of samba, both from a restless local young generation and from an eager foreign audience. In the fashion of a traditional samba circle (roda de samba), the solution for the complexities of today’s metropolitan Rio are perhaps to be found in the harmonic composition of an interdisciplinary arrangement. Studio-X Rio has become a hothouse for this type of debate, acting as a creative voice in the city, encouraging intelligent thinking and ultimately demonstrating new possibilities within Rio’s rich cultural fabric at a time of great change. Roberto Costa, architect
Panel on “inclusive urbanism”, focusing on favela upgrades and compensatory damages for garbage pickers
Panel on “inclusive urbanism”, focusing on favela upgrades and compensatory damages for garbage pickers
In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners and designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to avoid major social and economic catastrophes, working together to ensure these expanding megacities will remain habitable.
To engage this international debate, Uneven Growth brings together six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners to examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. Following the same model as the Rising Currents and Foreclosed, each team will develop proposals for a specific city in a series of workshops that occur over the course of a 14-month initiative.
Uneven Growth seeks to challenge current assumptions about the relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down urban development, and to address potential changes in the roles architects and urban designers might assume vis-à-vis the increasing inequality of current urban development. The resulting proposals, which will be presented at MoMA in November 2014, will consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, spatial justice, environmental conditions, and other major issues in near-future urban contexts.
Urban Case Study Teams: New York: SITU Studio, New York, and Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), Rotterdam and New York Rio de Janeiro: RUA Arquitetos, Rio de Janeiro, and MAS Urban Design, ETH Zurich Mumbai: URBZ: user-generated cities, Mumbai, and Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab, Madrid and Cambridge Lagos: NLÉ, Lagos and Amsterdam, and Zoohaus/Inteligencias Colectivas, Madrid Hong Kong: MAP Office, Hong Kong, and Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University, New York Istanbul: Superpool, Istanbul, and Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris
View reflections on the Uneven Growth curatorial process at post, the online platform of MoMA’s research initiative Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age (C-MAP).
Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art.
The exhibition at MoMA is organized by Pedro Gadanho, Curator, and Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
This is the third exhibition in the series Issues in Contemporary Architecture, supported by Andre Singer.
The exhibition and accompanying workshop at MoMA PS1 were made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.
Major support is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.
Secondo appuntamento per il ciclo di tre progetti a cura di Takeawaygallery negli spazi del complesso archeologico delle Case Romane del Celio: Con l’installazione Latinorum Giancarlo Neri suggerisce una diversa percezione delle venti stanze ipogee, trasformando il monumento in un percorso organico: l’intero ambiente diviene scenografia di un atto magico, la scoperta di improbabili tesori disseminati nello spazio del sito.
Le Case Romane del Celio
Sotto la basilica dei Ss. Giovanni e Paolo al Celio, fondata all’inizio del V secolo dal senatore Pammachio, si estende uno straordinario complesso di edifici residenziali di età romana. Il complesso archeologico, scoperto nel 1887 da Padre Germano di S. Stanislao, svela un suggestivo itinerario attraverso oltre 20 ambienti ipogei su vari livelli, in parte affrescati con pitture databili tra il III secolo d.C. e l’età medievale. Un susseguirsi di sale decorate, un dedalo di strutture stratificate, tagliate dalla fondazione della chiesa, mostrano uno spaccato di vita quotidiana ed un’interessante commistione di temi culturali e religiosi. Da caseggiato popolare (insula) a ricca domus pagana, fino alla costruzione del titulus cristiano: queste le vicende del monumento che nasce dalla fusione di una serie di edifici.
Giancarlo Neri è nato a Napoli nel 1955. Nel 1978 si è trasferito a New York dove ha studiato alla Art Students League ed ha vissuto fino al 1996. La prima mostra personale è alla Kornblee Gallery di New York nel 1983. Dopo gli inizi come pittore Neri si è dedicato alla realizzazione di installazioni site-specific di grandi dimensioni negli U.S.A., in Sud America ed in Europa. Tra le opere più note due installazioni realizzate a Roma come “Lo Scrittore” a Villa Ada nel 2003 (poi a Londra nel 2005 e ora in esposizione permanente alla Villa Reale di Monza) e “Massimo Silenzio” al Circo Massimo nel 2007, poi replicata a Madrid (2008), Dubai (2009) e a Rio de Janeiro nel 2012). Attualmente vive e lavora a Roma.
What follows is a brief look at Sandler’s career, and what makes him tick.
WHAT DID HE DO?
Irving Sandler considers his lifework to be his four-volume history of the art of his time, which he began writing in the 1950s and carried through to the early 1990s. The first book was to be titled A History of Abstract Expressionism, until the Book of the Month Club requested 10,000 copies from his publisher—on the condition that it had a “livelier title.” Thus “A History” became The Triumph of American Painting. And the tome is not as dogmatic as its title implies. Sandler’s goal has never been to stake out his own stance on new art but rather, as once said, citing Woodrow Wilson, “to reflect ‘the sympathy of a man who stands in the midst and see like one within, not like one without, like a native, not like an alien.”
The Triumph of American Painting is a work of participatory, living historical activity. Most of his research was artist-based, a fact he makes clear in the book’s acknowledgements: “My first debt is to those artists who generously submitted to interviews, engaged willingly in lengthy discussions, and searched hard for answers to specific questions.” It’s not unusual for an art historian or critic to mingle with artists; it is unusual for an art historian to turn those interactions and the firsthand knowledge that results into the basis for scholarship. This was Sandler’s gift. As he explained, it allowed him to deal “with artists’ intentions precisely in order to capture the embryonic period in the development of their styles—before they were assimilated into art history.” (Sandler admits he did not know the artists of the remaining three volumes as well as he did the artists in Triumph, since “given the number, it was not feasible.”)
In the Abstract Expressionist period of the 1950s, when the principle artists made up a small community in New York, Sandler ingratiated himself with them by showing up at their hangouts—first the Cedar Street Tavern then the Club on Eighth Street—for more socializing and discussions. He befriended artist great and minor, and was purposefully “inclusive,” even in his writing, but he came to develop his own personal “pantheon” of favorites. These included: Mark Rothko, Philip Guston(“Philip would say again and again—as if he had never said it before—that everything in a work of his had to be ‘felt’”), Franz Kline (he “held court at the Cedar Street Tavern almost every night after ten”), David Smith, Tony Smith, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofman (“I always admired Hans’ painting and believe that certain of his pictures—Lava and Agrigento come to mind—must be numbered among the greatest abstract expressionist canvases”), Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still (“as a de Kooning man, it took me time to appreciate Still’s innovation”). Sandler’s “pals” included: Alex Katz (they’re still friends today), Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, Mark di Suvero.
As an art critic, Sandler did not proclaim works to be good or bad in the ex cathedra manner of Clement Greenberg. Instead, he would ask: “What is an artist’s vision, how is it expressed, and is the work a singular achievement?” Greenberg chastised him for his method in a letter, writing, “you don’t mix enough criticism with the description & narration & explication. No artist—no public figure—should be taken at his own word. In the end you do yourself a disservice by that acceptance, however much it wards off what’s called controversy. You have your opinions: why not express them?”
For his part, Sandler felt that too much criticism and art history were written for the writers’ sakes—not truly for the art, or the artists, or even, really, the readers. It was against this type of “self-promotion” and the notion of “writers focused on ideas about art rather than on actual works” than he purposefully sought to place the artists’ thoughts before his own. Although he found much of the art criticism of the 1950s and ’60s to be lacking—or, in the case of Clement Greenberg, having “undue influence”—he did write that “If I had the choice to be someone else, it would be Meyer [Schapiro].”
Today Sandler continues to monitor the art of his time as an art-historian-about-town, writing his books, popping up at gallery openings, and even curating the occasional show, as he did at the Cue Art Foundation in 2010 with Robert Storr. As one article began: “Is there anyone in our Manhattan art world who does not know Irving Sandler?”
BONUS FACTS
– The first work he “really saw” and which “changed his life completely” was Franz Klein’s Chief (1950) at MoMA in 1952.
– Sandler met Mark di Suvero in 1959 when he was looking for an artist in need of work to paint his apartment. Mark di Suvero got $75 and lifelong champion for his efforts.
– He managed the artists’ cooperative Tanager Gallery on 10th Street from 1956 to 1959.
– Sandler became the administrator of the famed artist discussion haven the Club in 1956 (until 1962), volunteering when there were thoughts of disbanding it altogether.
– He was a senior critic at Art News (1956-62), a critic at the New York Post (1960-64), and is currently a contributing editor at Art in America.
– He held a New Years party in 1964 for 200 people. It was “a blast” and, as Sandler later wrote, “turned out to be the major social event of my art world” as the end of Abstract Expressionism’s reign was nigh.
– Sandler co-founded Artists Space with Trudie Grace in 1972, and ever since the indespensable SoHo nonprofit has maintained an artist registry called the Irving Sandler Artists File that has since been transferred online, garnering over 10,000 users.
– He has been on faculty at SUNY Purchase since 1972 and is currently professor emeritus. Throughout his tenure at SUNY, he lobbied to remain in the Visual Arts department (with the artists) rather than be transferred to the Humanities’ Art History Department as the university wanted.
– He once served as the director of the Neuberger Museum of Art.
MAJOR WORKS
– The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970)
– The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the 1950s (1978)
– American Art of the 1960s (1988)
– Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1997)
– A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir by Irving Sandler (2004)
– From Avant-Garde to Pluralism: An On-the-Spot History (2006)
Homenagem a Marcos Sá Corrêa, um dos fundadores da piauí, exibida ontem, no Teatro Municipal do Rio, em solenidade da Conferência Global de Jornalismo Investigativo, promovida pela Abraji (Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo). no site da Piauí.
NEW YORK, November 5, 2014 – CATINCA TABACARU GALLERY is pleased to present Danger Is In The Neatness Of Identification, a two-artist show of American Robin Kang and Rwandan Duhirwe Rushemeza. Weaving composites of varying time, space and culture, each artist engages in ritualized mark-making that oscillates between the time-honored and the contemporaneous. Kang’s and Rushemeza’s coded forms of memory, communication and self-representation grapple with a modern framework, bridging hybridity and cultural remnants within our digital society. But what of nuanced identity? With geographical collisions and visual conflations of technology, these works shall not be subject to neat classification.
Mimicking industrial production through repetition and pattern creation, Robin Kang immerses herself in the process and ideology of specialized labor. The history of connections between the industries of textiles and electronics provides inspiration alongside the cultural identification of the ephemeral patterns of a digital age. Utilizing a digitally operated Jacquard hand loom, the contemporary version of the first binary operated machine and argued precursor to the first computer, Kang hand weaves tapestries with combined computer related imagery and digital mark making. Photoshop spray brush gestures layered with symbols from Pre-Columbian weaving traditions and motherboard hardware blend together amid interlocking threads. The juxtaposition of textiles with technology opens the conversation of reconciling the old with the new, the traditions with new possibilities, as well as the relationship between textiles, symbols, and language. Questioning the presence of the human hand amid a fast changing digital and commercial culture, Kang takes imagery from the now and places it in conversation with an ancient craft.
Duhirwe Rushemeza transforms pattern into durational experience as the marks and detritus embedded in the work reflect her own personal and material memory. As a Rwandan living in Harlem, Rushemeza configures paths towards her in-between state of being. Sources as diverse as traditional imigongo cow dung paintings, Modernism, and childhood memories of deteriorated colonial buildings throughout Africa are mined for patternous inspiration. Unveiling the new series, Signals, Rushemeza explores the depths of unspoken communication and subconscious representations of outward identity–the things we often guard behind our back to keep from others. Sculptural paintings are formed from the industrial materials of thin-set mortar and concrete. Each textured surface reveals components of oxidized metal detritus discovered on the artist’s walks throughout New York City to incorporate notions of memory, displacement, cultural adaptation, and what it means to be an immigrant today.
About CATINCA TABACARU GALLERY
Founded in 2010 by Catinca Tabacaru, the gallery opened its brick and mortar space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in May of 2014. Interested in authenticity and a universal language, the themes of identity, physicality, music, time and spirituality run deep throughout the gallery’s program. As the artists work to push forward the trajectory of their media, the gallery works to evolve the visual experience. Remaining true to its roots of curating and branching out into multidisciplinary projects, the gallery continues to organize events focused on building community and fostering deeper
Francesco Clemente, the painter celebrated for his blend of the erotic and the spiritual, rendered in a rapture of colour, first left his native Italy for an Indian ashram in 1973, when he was just 21. The following year he journeyed to Afghanistan. He moved to New York in 1981 and later explored Brazil and China, and all the while India kept luring him back. Now, in a nod to his life-long wanderlust, he has transformed Mughal-style tents into artworks.
Clemente has been ruminating about how to make a tent into a work of art for decades. “One of the adjectives for my work is nomadic, and the tent is the attribute for the nomadic person,” Clemente says on a sunny autumn day in his Greenwich Village studio. “I’ve given up belonging anywhere, so I belong to the tent. It’s safer to belong nowhere, more convenient.”
Standing 10ft high and nearly 20ft across and covered inside and out with painted angels and skeletons, rainbows and bees, the two tents, “Angels’ Tent” and “Devils’ Tent”, will be the main attraction of Clemente’s solo exhibition opening on November 6 at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, which comes amid the five-month run of his show Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India at the Rubin Museum of Art nearby. In what could be read as a lament for our epoch, the angels are in trouble: one is drowning, another is losing a wing. “They’re very frail,” he says.
Made in Jodhpur, India, the tents’ exteriors were laboriously embroidered and silkscreened by craftsmen, their interiors painted by Clemente; so quickly was the paint absorbed that he describes the medium as even more unforgiving than watercolour. “You can’t correct anything. But as a painter once said,” he adds with a laugh, “it’s easy to do if you know how to do it.”
Still startlingly handsome at 62, with a steady gaze from his large, pale blue eyes – recognisable to anyone who has been transfixed by his self-portraits – and just a trace of silver stubble on his head to match his shorn beard, Clemente exudes a serenity that gives him more the air of a guru than a well-connected artist. He is dressed in a combination of eastern and western attire – jeans and a well-worn blazer with a long maroon kurta – and drops erudite poetic references, from William Blake to Henri Michaux. Incense burns in his vast, window-lined studio, which is furnished with a ping-pong table and filled with paintings he made in another space, in Brooklyn. One is of giant orange winter-blooming flowers, which Clemente quips “is appropriate for this time in my life”. Asked if he really feels old, Clemente, who has recently become a grandfather, says wryly, “I’ve been thinking of myself as old since I was 20. At 20 I thought I was going to die at 23.”
The Village studio, his original in New York, is not far from the townhouse he bought from Bob Dylan. Though he says that, as a teenager, he and a friend used to drive around Naples listening to Dylan, the house’s provenance has proved more of an annoyance than an asset: Dylan fans loiter in front and Clemente is forever buying new house numbers to replace the ones they pilfer.
He recalls that he first travelled to India because, like many young people in the early 1970s, he was disillusioned with the “historical narrative of my time, and I wanted to step out of history into geography. I never had a sentimental or romantic view of India. I always thought of India as a contemporary country with a different narrative, and where the sense of the sacred is still alive. I think the solution to a lot of the challenges of our time would be a return to the sacred, but I can’t imagine how that can happen.”
I get my educated Indian friends very upset by insisting on the unique qualities of India
In 1977 Clemente and his wife, Alba, moved to Madras, where his influences ranged from temples to billboards. India also seeped into his work in subtler ways: Beth Citron, assistant curator at the Rubin, notes that, when he painted, “the sun was so strong he couldn’t quite see the colours until dusk.” Not in a bad way – Clemente’s sensual purples, reds, blues, greens and golds are among his signatures. Says Clemente: “Colour is like grace. Colour is something you don’t work for, you’re given. I wouldn’t say I see it. I would say I feel it. I taste it.”
His immersion in the culture and rejection of such labels as western and eastern, or insider and outsider, are partly what drew the Rubin, which specialises in the art of the Himalayas, to make him the focus of the museum’s 10th anniversary celebration. “He does an incredible job of erasing those boundaries,” says Citron. “He’s always thought of himself as someone who moves between different cultural contexts with facility and ease.”
Which is not to say that Clemente sees no differences between places. “I get my educated Indian friends very upset by insisting on the unique qualities of India because their effort is to show India is just like any other country,” he continues. “When I run out of arguments I say, ‘You know Buddha was not born in Paris, [Sikhism founder] Nanak did not come from Moscow, [mystic poet] Kabir didn’t grow up in the Midwest.’ There is something to that, no?”
In Afghanistan, Clemente observed his mentor, Alighiero Boetti, collaborating with local artisans on his famed embroidered maps. Clemente followed suit, engaging with Indian masters of ancient techniques, as well as New York artists and poets from Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Allen Ginsberg. “To me, it’s part of my reflection on boundaries and the nature of self,” Clemente says. For the Mary Boone show, he teamed with Indian miniaturist Prakash Jay to create a series of works on paper. Clemente painted in watercolour with a loose hand, leaving blank areas for his collaborator to fill with intricate detail according to Clemente’s direction.
‘Moon’, on show at the Rubin
He notes with a certain pride that, while Jay “hates” contemporary art, “he’s very impressed with me because I don’t draw first. I just go straight to making it, which is something unheard of in miniatures.”
Quickly categorised as a neo-expressionist figurative painter with the likes of the then red-hot Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and David Salle, Clemente received a warm welcome in the US in the early 1980s. But those artists struggled to recoup their cachet after the 1990s crash, and Clemente expresses hostility toward the notion of grouping artists “on the basis of what the work looks like rather than what it’s about”.
His own art, whether frescoes, paintings on fabric or prints, tends to be about sex, death, or sex and death. Skulls and genitalia abound, and in “Meditation” (1991), for instance, while three figures copulate, one plunges a knife through another’s chest. “The only two paths in life that never end are the sexual path and the spiritual path,” Clemente says. “You can’t find two people who will tell you the same thing about it. The main thing is there is no end to it.”
The Clementes’ circle is a glittering one – friends include Scarlett Johansson and Salman Rushdie – and his commissioned portraits, which typically depict their subjects with large eyes and in a reclining position, have long been coveted trophies among a certain set – though particularly for women since, he jokes, “I can’t persuade the men to lie down.” The portraits cost upwards of $250,000 and he executes them in a single sitting. Clemente says he seeks an emotional connection with his subjects. “I have to be completely present but also completely removed. I don’t have to buy into the mask.”
To the broader art-viewing public, Clemente may be best known for his self-portraits. “Our identity is in flux, so from time to time I record the make-believe picture of myself,” he says. He has also frequently painted Alba and his friends, and those images bear a distinct resemblance to Clemente, as do many of the other figures he paints. But Citron cautions against reading a “western ego-based identity” into the similarities. “He’s in every portrait because we all bleed into each other,” she says.
Says Clemente: “I can only make work if I think of what connects, rather than what divides.”
Francesco Clemente, November 6-December 20, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, maryboonegallery.com; ‘Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India’, to February 2, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, rubinmuseum.org
A Festa PHUNK! começou em setembro de 2001 formada pelo núcleo de DJs Saens Pena (o cineasta Emilio Domingos),Coisa Fina (a crítica e curadora de artes visuais Daniela Labra) e Arthur Miró (o professor de literatura brasileira e ensaísta Frederico Coelho) e pelo VJ Simpla (o diretor e roteirista Simplício Neto).
A estrada da PHUNK! é longa e consagrada pelo período em que passou a acontecer na antiga sede do Bola Preta, no prédio da Treze de Maio. Entre as colunas espelhadas nos estabelecemos como uma Equipe de Som, criamos nossos laços com a cena cultural da cidade, revitalizamos um lugar tradicional e popular do Rio de Janeiro e tivemos a honra de convidar e ter a participação de grandes parceiros das pistas como Marcelinho da Lua (também presente nesta edição), Digital Dubs, DJ Marco, DJ Babão, Maga Bo, MC Marechal, B Negão, Lucas Santanna, Daniel Ganjamanentre outros.
Em junho de 2014, depois de um hiato de mais de um ano, a PHUNK! se reuniu novamente e fez uma edição memorável no La Paz club. Foi esta edição que deu um novo ânimo ao grupo, que resolveu não deixar passar em branco seuaniversário de 13 anos.
“Continuamos apostando na empatia do público da festa com o local e com o nosso som, sempre se renovando e incorporando os novos grooves e referencias, sem abandonar os velhos clássicos que fizeram nossa fama ao longo desse tempo”, diz Arthur Miró.
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PHUNK! 13 ANOS!
Dia 08 de novembro, a partir das 23h
Na pista principal:
DJs residentes Artur Miró, Coisa Fina e Saens Peña mais os VJs Simpla (que também faz DJ set) e Timba (convidado).
Saint Clair Cemin, A de Amor, 2014, polished stainless steel
80 3/4 x 86 5/8 x 89 3/4 inches (205 x 220 x 228 cm), Edition of 3. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.
Saint Clair Cemin: Myth and Math
October 30 – December 23, 2014
Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 30, 6 – 8pm
Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present Saint Clair Cemin: Myth and Math, on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from October 30 to December 23, 2014. This is the artist’s third exhibition with Paul Kasmin Gallery, following SIX and Saint Clair Cemin On Broadway, both in 2012.
The exhibition marks a further development in Cemin’s pluralistic expanse of work that is both visceral and formal. With his new series, the artist continues to push the boundaries of shape and line, manipulating perspective, and uniting disparate materials and themes within individual sculptures. The seemingly ordered chaos and harnessed movement are indicative of Cemin’s constellation of paradoxical objects. As Cemin states, “I made my work a meeting place for all opposites.”
Simultaneously, an exploration of the rigor of geometry is also entrenched in Cemin’s sculpture. For him, the changeless purity of platonic forms provides a structure through which to illustrate the subconscious, itself disorderly and irrational. Cemin’s personal mythology, articulated through a diverse array of media, shapes, and scales, simultaneously pays homage to structure and embraces the inherent complexity of forms, which change and mutate ceaselessly.
“William Blake said that ‘Eternity is in love with the Productions of Time,’ but, I believe that the Productions of Time are also in love with Eternity, and the result is Myth,” explains Cemin. “Myth and Math is a continuation of this thought that has been the guiding line of my work. Forms come out of Chaos. They represent order but they bring Chaos within themselves, then to it they return.”
Sculptures such as Athina and Cherub refer directly to mythological figures, products of a different time that have been made eternal through storytelling and art. Love and Mathematics explicitly combines the emotional and the rational, two seemingly contrasting concepts which Cemin is able to jointly explore with his chosen artistic medium. A de Amor takes the letter “A” and twists it beyond recognition, simultaneously destroying its meaning and creating a new interpretation for an old symbol.
Saint Clair Cemin was born and raised in the rural town of Cruz Alta, Brazil, and went on to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States as well as abroad and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Fisher Landau Center For Art, Long Island City, NY; Rooseum, Stockholm, Sweden; The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil, among many others. Cemin currently lives in New York and has studios in Beijing and Red Hook, New York.
The exhibition will coincide with Robert Motherwell: Works on Paper 1951 – 1991 at 515 West 27th Street and Sigmar Polke: The Distance to Things – The Proximity to Things at 297 Tenth Ave.
For more information on Saint Clair Cemin, please contact Nicholas Onley, nick@paulkasmingallery.com.
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Paul Kasmin Gallery
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Historically a folk music associated with Brazilian Carnival of the Pernambuco region, the brilliance of frevo lies in its evolution, influenced by religion, elaborate dance, and varied instrumentation. Saxophonist Inaldo Cavalcante de Albuquerque, also known as “Spok,” is considered a frevo maestro with an adventurous mind. Drawing from the democratic underpinnings of jazz, Spok uses improvisation as an exercise in expressing freedom, taking this music from the streets of Brazil to the international stage. His 17-member orquestra demonstrates both deeply traditional roots and explicit jazz elements. Special guests Melissa Aldana and Wycliffe Gordon join the orquestra for their Jazz at Lincoln Center debut. A native of Chile, Aldana is the 2013 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition winner, the first female to take home this prize. Renowned trombonist and Downbeat poll topper Wycliffe Gordon, a former member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, rounds out this performance of our Brazilian Festival.
Brazilian Festival
October 24-25 Only, 6pm-9:30pm
Ertegun Atrium
Frederick P. Rose Hall, 5th floor
Join us to celebrate the dynamic culture of Brazil at our free Brazilian Festival. Featuring live music by Samba Laranja, samples of Brugal XV and Brugal 1888 alongside Brugal Extra Dry mojitos from Brugal USA, and samba lessons with The Ailey Extension (Saturday 10/25 only). The Festival is the perfect complement to SpokFrevo Orquestra in The Appel Room, The Brazilian Duke Ellington in Rose Theater, and Crescent City Samba in Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. All are welcome!
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis perform the music of the late Moacir Santos, one of Brazil’s most important musicians and prolific composers. Santos’ work illuminated the soul of Brazil, creating a truly national music, which has been recorded extensively by hundreds of artists. Melding Afro-Latin influences with improvisation and jazz harmony helped make Santos a genuinely original voice in Brazilian music. Santos was orphaned at an early age, and taken in by a family who helped him take music lessons. He continued to learn the music of Brazil throughout his formative years, garnering an encyclopedic musical knowledge. As a respected educator, Santos mentored some of Brazil’s most established artists. Though late to receive proper international acclaim, Santos’ name continues to reach newfound celebrity among generations of Brazilian musicians and music fans worldwide. Joining the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for this performance is acclaimed Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, who has worked with YoYo Ma, Herbie Hancock, Sting, and more.
CONCRETO 88, ACERVO 186, 1957, Gouache on paper, 13 ½ x 13 ½ inches;
“A painting is not explained. A painting is seen. Words are not substitutes for the direct vision of formal structure, of color relationships, of spaces, of plasticity . . . the organization of equal elements.” –Judith Lauand
DRISCOLL BABCOCK GALLERIES presents Judith Lauand: Brazilian Modernist, 1950s–2000s, the first New York solo exhibition of one of the most celebrated Brazilian artists of the postwar era. Curated by Dr. Aliza Edelman, this exhibition brings Lauand to the wider and long-overdue attention of North American viewers while examining a broader trajectory of her oeuvre. Lauand is renowned as the “Dama do concretismo,” or the “First Lady of Concretism,” for her modernist geometric abstractions that actively unhinge the rational and seemingly impersonal grid of Concretism. Her objective, mathematical, and precise constructions–primary components of Arte Concreta–introduced new geometries aligned with contemporary ideas on space, time, and matter. Lauand was the only female artist invited to join Grupo Ruptura, an artist group initially formed in São Paulo in 1952, and her successful demonstration of postwar Concretism led in the following decades to further experimentations, with figural and popular representation, assemblage, and optical color contrasts. Thus, Lauand successfully negotiated the development of Brazilian avant-garde tendencies after World War II–including the influence and reception of Pop art and New Figuration in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the political disruption initiated during the military dictatorship–continually buttressing Concretism’s critical ideas while formulating her own meaningful intersections with notions of rupture.
Lauand was a gallery monitor at the celebrated II Bienal de São Paulo in 1953-54, and subsequently had her first individual exhibition. She participated in significant group shows, including the III Bienal de São Paulo in 1955; the I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (1st National Exhibition of Concrete Art) in 1956; and the international retrospective on Concretism, Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung (Concrete Art: 50 Years of Development), organized by Max Bill in Zurich in 1960. Recipient of multiple prestigious awards and exhibitor in numerous editions of the Bienal de São Paulo as well as the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, Lauand was the subject of a major retrospective, Judith Lauand: Experiências (Judith Lauand: Experiences), at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2011.
This substantial exhibition brings together over thirty works by Lauand that span the critical periods of her career from the 1950s to 2007. Concreto 88, Acervo 186, 1957, a gouache on paper from her early groundbreaking body of work, readily evokes the photographically-inspired architectural facades in Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas (Photoforms), begun in 1948, a Brazilian vanguard and contemporary of Lauand. Here, Lauand employs horizontal bands across shifting chains to link positive and negative space, rupturing the Concrete grid with rhythmic motion and the perception of subtle contradictions.
To date, Lauand continues to explore her geometrical systems of the 1950s, now reworking her principle set of shapes and networks, evident, for example, in her late oil painting Sem título (Untitled), 2007, where the angles of the chevron appear to unhinge and erupt. Like Max Bill and Josef Albers, whose work from the late 1940s and 1950s had a significant impact on her, Lauand continually investigates the endless permutations of structure. The application of vibrant color further expands her vision of infinite constructions.
This survey is a much needed celebration in New York City of Lauand’s critical significance as a pioneer of modernism, an artist who cultivated her formative career in São Paulo alongside prolific debates and investigations into the critical definitions of the planar surface and abstraction. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated book by art historian Dr. Aliza Edelman, published by Driscoll Babcock Galleries, a seminal and necessary text honoring the artist’s prolific achievements in postwar abstraction, geometry, and feminism.
ABOUT ALIZA EDELMAN
Aliza Edelman, Ph.D., is a New York-based curator and art historian whose research and publications on the postwar Modern Woman have advanced gendered and transnational dialogues among artists, including her contribution to Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s (Newark Museum, NJ), as well as numerous studies and presentations on women, geometric abstraction, and Abstract Expressionism in the Americas.
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor
Reflecting the rich creative diversity of Brooklyn, Crossing Brooklyn presents work by thirty-five Brooklyn-based artists or collectives. The exhibition and related programming take place in the galleries and on the grounds of the Museum, as well as off-site in the streets, waterways, and other public spaces of the borough.
Emphasizing artistic practices that engage with the world, the exhibition includes artists who aim to expand their focus and have an impact beyond the studio and the museum. The resulting work defies easy categorization, taking on diverse forms that include public and private action, the use of found or collected objects, and interactive and educational events, among others. Alongside the drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, videos, and performances on view are several site-specific works.
While acknowledging Brooklyn’s heightened profile,Crossing Brooklyn presents a multigenerational picture that recognizes the borough’s long-established role as a creative center. Other themes explored in the exhibition include history and memory, place and geography, community, nostalgia, exchange, ephemerality, and politics, both local and remote.
For a full list of the artists included in the exhibition, please see the press release.
Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, and Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. A catalogue including a roundtable conversation among several longtime Brooklyn artists accompanies the exhibition.
Support for this exhibition is provided by Lambent Foundation, Sotheby’s, TerraCRG, and Brooklyn Brewery.
Additional support provided by Hildemarie and Alex Ladouceur.
The American painter who broke through in the 1980s with disturbingly voyeuristic scenes of suburban life turns his gaze to the cynical world of the international art fair
Art Fair Booth #4 The Price from the forthcoming exhibition by Eric Fischl. Photograph: Gary Mamay/Courtesy the artist/Victoria Miro, London and Mary Boone Gallery
‘I’d always avoided art fairs like the plague,” Eric Fischl is telling me in his studio on Long Island, New York, surrounded on all sides by his own larger-than-life paintings of art fairs. “Now I have been I still think they are the plague,” he says. “It’s like every single reason for art to exist does not exist in those places.”
Fischl, perhaps the best narrative painter of his American generation, is 66. He remembers how the plague spread. It was subtle at first. One biennial led to another. There was a sudden rash of Expos. It was one of those things that friends thought would be a fad, he suggests, but after the millennium dotcom crash and the collapse of the art market, the pandemic spread as the art world panicked and desperately tried to resuscitate itself as an asset class.
There are now 50 or more international shows, from Dubai to Shanghai to São Paulo, one for every week of the year, following the money, flogging product. Fischl steered clear of all of them for a long while, but finally went to the shiniest of the lot, Art Basel Miami Beach, a couple of years ago, at the request of New Yorker magazine, for an interview. He became grimly fascinated by the spectacle, took a camera with him there and subsequently to Frieze New York, and to the fair in Southampton up the road from his home in Sag Harbor, Great Gatsby country.
Fischl then made Photoshop collages of his hundreds of photos, creating scenes that might have happened. He gestures to the fabulous painting behind me. “The big sneakers here are from a show of Claes Oldenburg’s. The guy with his back to us was a guard at that show. She on the left was from an art fair at Southampton. That guy was from Miami. I mix and match. Same crowd, different clothes. But always the same experience.”
An exhibition of Fischl’s art-show paintings (priced between £200,000 and £400,000) will open at the Victoria Miro Gallery, in London, this week, to coincide with the Frieze art fair. He hopes that people can go to Frieze and then come to his show and see what they looked like at Frieze.
If you have never been to Frieze, his paintings capture much of its dead-eyed atmosphere, its comic and dispiriting juxtapositions. In Fischl’s Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price, a distracted crowd of buyers cluster around an amorphous Ken Price sculpture, not looking. Behind them, an enormous intimate self-portrait by Joan Semmel goes unremarked. “The big collectors do this kind of speed-dating thing,” Fischl says. “They try to get in and out before anyone buys what they are after and certainly before the hoi polloi gets to look. And then you’ve got people who are just there for the social scene. So you have people texting or not paying any attention at all. It is as if the art is not there, or that they think it has no effect on them. But when you stop the moment you can see this weird world that is taking place. They are being regarded and judged by the work itself in some ways.”
In my experience, I suggest, Frieze provides exactly the enervating experience of a Saturday afternoon at Brent Cross shopping mall, except some of the stuff on sale is priced in the millions. Wealth becomes the spectacle, not art.
“If you start with the premise,” Fischl says, “and I know it is a romantic and naive premise, but I none the less think it is true, that artists are looking for love, and they are expressing love in their commitment to what they have made. An art fair is designed so they never get any in return.” He speaks languidly and laughs broadly. “Love is complicated, obviously. But the reason artists do what they do on some level is to say: ‘Don’t look at me, look at this thing I made and you will know the true me.’”
Fischl himself developed that particular faith as a young painter in the 1970s when he started to try to express himself on canvas, first at CalArts, the Disney-funded art college outside Los Angeles, and later in Nova Scotia, where he took a teaching job and met his wife, the celebrated landscape artist April Gornik, and finally in New York. In a world of abstract expressionism and conceptualism he became part of that endangered species, a figurative painter, a storyteller. Despite this self-imposed handicap, by 1985 Andy Warhol was describing Fischl in his diary as “the hot new top artist”; he was the subject of a long Vanity Fairprofile entitled “Bad Boy of Brilliance” which compared him favourably to celebrity artist peers such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat; and his paintings were suddenly selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To understand how Fischl found himself at the centre of that world, a version of which he now satirises 30 years on, you have to understand where he came from. The paintings that made Fischl’s name were drawn from an adolescence spent up the road from where he now lives, in a town called Port Washington. His father went into New York City every day selling promotional films to corporations in the days before video. His mother, spirited and beautiful, was also an out-of-control alcoholic, the “unspeakable” open secret that Fischl, his brother and two sisters did all they could to contain in their suburban idyll.
Fischl’s early paintings exhibited a disturbing kind of voyeurism, in scenes that might have been written by John Cheever or John Updike. The two defining paintings of that period — Bad Boy, which depicts a young boy standing before a woman, perhaps his mother, sprawled naked on a bed, while he feels for her handbag; and Sleepwalker, in which a teenager masturbates in a paddling pool, bathed in Edward Hopper light – were representative of the uncertain boundaries, the disquieting taboos, that became his constant theme.
Fischl depicted the fallout of early 1960s America at war with inhibition, and deeply troubled by that fact. In his recent memoir, also entitled Bad Boy, he recalls a youth in which his parents talked openly about their sex life and “lounged around their bedroom – where we’d visit after dinner to watch TV – completely naked”. When his mother was drinking, which was often, “her whole face seemed pinched and pulled back. Her artificial expression, a Kabuki-like mask, reminded me of a terrifying drag queen. It was impossible to predict what she might do… ”
Impossible, that was, until the day, not long after he had started art school, when Fischl was called to say his mother was critically ill in hospital after driving her car into a tree, an act of suicide. Fischl got back home just before she died and was overwhelmed by the fact he had “not been strong enough, smart enough” to save her from herself. He subsequently became a painter of what had been “unspeakable” because, he wrote, on “some level I wanted to make her life good”. What did he mean by that?
“It was a thing my therapist spent many years trying to get me past,” he says. “The tragedy of her life was that she was creative and intelligent and stimulating, and if she had channelled that in a different way she could have been amazing. She tried art but she lacked the stubbornness to do it. She couldn’t get past the self-critical thing we all have and she would destroy it or fuck it up or not finish it. When she killed herself, I felt I was making art for her. I thought I could make her pain less by succeeding at this thing where she had failed. Which of course makes it pretty hard to own your own success… ”
It took him many years of messing about with abstraction, and other strategies, to realise he had to confront those experiences head on.
“I actually found it harder to paint a specific chair in a scene than to paint the woman passed out on the floor. Somehow the woman passed out on the floor could have been any woman. The chair became something closer to my particular experience. The first brave step was doing that.”
Eric Fischl with one of his art-fair paintings.Photograph: Ralph Gibson
Did it feel liberating?
“It was empowering ultimately,” he says. “I suppose if I had gotten crushed by the critical reception the way I feared when I started to make these paintings I wouldn’t have continued. When the pictures were embraced, however, I went further and further into it.” The breakthrough was Sleepwalker. “I started to try to paint in a representational manner,” Fischl says, “and it was a stretch because I had never been trained that way. My drawing skills were iffy. Trying to render flesh. I was learning in this painting and people tried to persuade me off it. I was being told: ‘You have to find a way of making it look more contemporary.’ I went through a thousand possible ways to do that but it was always everybody else’s idea. In the end I was left with myself. That is something that all artists ultimately have to find: the thing that they can do that doesn’t look like art.”
It seems strange to be talking to a contemporary artist about emotional authenticity, about representation, and about the influence of Degas and Manet rather than Warhol and Joseph Beuys. “There are two kinds of painter, if you like,” Fischl says at one point. “One is somebody like Hopper who creates an image that burns on your retina and you never forget it. You can see it, walk away and still see it. [With] the other kind you are caught up in the authenticity of the energy. The believable moment. Jackson Pollock, you are right there with him. I am essentially the Hopper artist trying to create a frozen moment. The truth about how it actually was.”
Despite that commitment, or because of it, Fischl found himself co-opted into the wild and whirling art world of 1980s New York – his first experience of the milieu he has lately been documenting. Warhol visited his studio, and offered his blessing. “He sought out youth, he was always curious about what was going on,” Fischl recalls. “Most of the artists we admired wanted to be outside society looking in. Warhol wanted to be right at the centre of high society and still be radical. It was as if he wanted to infect it from the inside out.”
Looking back on what quickly became a frenzy of parties and gallery openings and cocaine and booze and money – which had little to do with his original change-the-world ambitions for his art – Fischl admits it was nevertheless “all incredibly exciting. It was like a spinning world, it had real centrifugal force. Traditional art magazines couldn’t keep up so the dailies took their place. Artist’s photographs were appearing in the arts and entertainment pages next to those of rock stars and film stars. It was like a wave had picked us up.”
Fischl was beached not long after just as surely. After one bender too many, after the opening of a solo New York show, and a near car crash, he knew he had to remove himself from the centrifugal world he found himself in. He has a sense that he inherited his mother’s addictive gene, and that he had welcomed the self-destructive aspect of it in some way “in order to survive it, to prove it could be done”. With premonitions of an art world about to finally sell its soul he packed up his studio in New York, moved with April Gornik the two hours out here – following an artists’ path trodden by Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and others — and swapped his previous narcotic highs for more life-affirming ones.
Fischl counts Steve Martin and John McEnroe among his closest friends. After McEnroe opened a gallery in New York on his retirement, Fischl tutored him in art history in return for tennis lessons. He plays most days, sometimes with McEnroe himself, and likes to make connections between his game and his work (“both are performed in a rectangle, and are about gesture and reach and executing an intention, resistance”). He and Gornik bought some land and built their beautiful, brutal 10,000 sq ft minimalist home on the edge of a salt marsh, complete with matching studios. They moved in on millennium eve and Fischl entered what he calls, with a laugh, “his long mid-career period”.
From this vantage, Fischl believes himself to be an outsider to the kind of world he describes in his art-show paintings. His work has continued to sell – his record for a single picture was the $1.9m paid for his paintingDaddy’s Girl in 2006 – and he has moved on from adolescent angst to document and interpret the worlds he now inhabits. He has cast, for example, his unnerving eye over the plutocrats at play in St Tropez as well as the Hamptons.
He is surprised at the way his career has gone. “I had this idea that I was making work that would be shown in museums but that nobody would really want to live with,” he says. “I mean who the fuck wants to wake up and have breakfast with somebody jerking off in a pool? I overestimated museums, though. They were the ones that wanted to put up warning signs in front of the work, whereas the private sector bought it. I would have liked it to be more a public art.”
That particular frustration has crystallised recently around two projects, which were the real cause of his decision to turn his painter’s eye to the art world itself. Both projects were made in response to what he saw as the fracture in US culture after 9/11, and the inability of the art world to address it.
Victoria Falls, 2013 by Eric Fischl.Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Victoria Miro, London and Mary Boone Gallery
In 2002 Fischl, who has been working more and more in sculpture since he moved to Long Island, made a public statue, Tumbling Woman, which was to be a permanent fixture at the Rockefeller centre in New York. The life-size bronze sculpture – he has a smaller version outside his studio – shows a human figure apparently in free fall, just above the ground, as if in suspended animation.
“9/11 was so profoundly shocking – that we could be that vulnerable, that powerless,” Fischl says. “And it was combined with something really freaky: 3,000 people died and there were no bodies. How do you process the mourning? It was like a surreal disappearance. The only way we knew how horrific it had been was in the images of the people who jumped out the windows, that they would choose to die that way. Right away though, the media self-censored and got rid of those images. I thought that was wrong.”
When Fischl’s simple human sculpture was unveiled, there was an outcry. A New York Post columnist suggested it was a cruel and self-serving image and accused him of “riding on the backs of those who had suffered grief and loss in an effort to revive a moribund career”. After that he became public enemy number one.
Who fought his corner?
“Nobody. My dealer tried to protect me a bit from the hysteria. Friends in the press said I should let it drop. The guy who owned Rockefeller Centre, a big art patron in the city, removed the sculpture. He told me he was getting bomb threats and he couldn’t take the risk.” Fischl laughs bleakly. “I told him: ‘No one is going to bomb you over a statue.’ But that is the world we live in.”
Nearly a decade later, in another effort to use art to help communities come together around an idea of America, he laid plans for a touring art show, a basis for a national conversation called “Now and Here”. The idea was to have the nation’s leading artists and poets and musicians make a travelling event that would offer an alternative to the tribal and polarised nature of political debate. “We have been screaming and yelling at each other for years. Still are. I believed art could provide images as a starting point for dialogue. I thought the hard part would be getting the artists with these huge international reputations to get together and think about the same thing at the same moment for once,” Fischl says. “But of course it turned out to be the opposite. The artists were easily persuaded but the money – we tried for funding from corporations and billionaires – never was.”
Fischl was told again that his idea was just a careerist strategy, as if that was the only reason any artist might do anything. “Instead of any grown-up conversation, what we have instead, what America apparently wants, is artists who are doing very expensive toys,” he says. “Jeff Koons is a good example. What kind of culture expresses itself only in childlike behaviour? Shit jokes and childish humour – and is greeted with huge popularity.”
Fischl’s art-show paintings, for all their cool comic appeal, were made to portray the emptiness of that compact. “That world has just become a celebration of money-making,” Fischl says. “I went to a fair a few weeks ago and in the middle of this thing was a De Kooning painting. I thought ‘Wow!’ It turned out it was in a booth for a real estate company. They had this De Kooning for sale as well as the $40m homes. You could buy the house and get the painting for an extra $5m or whatever. The barriers have collapsed between the commercial and the art world. It is not irony – it is just cynicism. The work is not intended to have you look and think twice, which is what irony does. It’s cynical in that they couldn’t give a shit whether you get it or you don’t get it.”
Some of the people in his paintings are clearly recognisable, though he is not interested in putting names to faces. Has he had any response?
“I did have one experience where a girl in one of the paintings saw it at the New York Frieze show and called me the next day to say she believed she was in my painting. She was really thrilled of course. The thing is we don’t see ourselves as characters – so I think people will look and not always see themselves. And anyway, 10 years from now no one will know any people in it.”
Does he believe that all those who recognise themselves as faces in the art crowd see it as a form of flattery?
“I don’t really care, to be honest,” he says. “For me it is more like an admission that this is my world and this is what it looks like.”
Eric Fischl: Art Fair Paintings is at Victoria Miro, London, from Tuesday until 19 December at the Victoria Miro gallery, 16 Wharf Road, London N1
grande entrevista com o grande GREG CAZ que eu achei lá no site DUST & GROOVES.
The mad scientist of Brazilian beats reveals his deep cuts and love for the girls, language, and music of Brazil.
I first met Greg when he was spinning at Miss Favela, A Brazilian bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
He played all the non classic Brazilian tunes you might not think of, when it comes to Brazilian music. not even one touch of Samba. instead, I was shaking my head to some raw bass lines with fuzzy psychedelic guitars, and of course the oh so sexy Portuguese language.
One of the things I like about NYC (and maybe the U.S. in general) is the richness and diversity of the art scene, specially when it comes to music and its roots. so many DJ’s, such a long history of music making, and the abundant of vinyl that was pressed (and still being pressed) and collected thru time, just makes this place a heaven to any one who consume music. you could enjoy a night of Brazilian soul, or some west African funk, or maybe some 60’s Boogaloo? or perhaps you are into 60 Psych rock played only from 45’s? or maybe you wanna get specific on that organ sound? I bet you could find the right gig for you happening somewhere. that’s why I love America, beside the fact that suddenly, I can charge all my U.S. electronic devices I bought in the past and used in Israel, without any adapter. yes, that’s a very convenient reason.
anyways,
back to Greg.
I biked to his house in the Queens, in a cloudy and windy afternoon. the day started out with a beautiful sun, and I thought that I would have the perfect light coming thru his windows. but, god had some other plans, and I arrived to his place in a semi frozen condition and cloudy skies.
A medium sized apartment, living room, piles of records on the floor, a hidden kitchen, more records on some racks in the living room, bedroom with a double bed, more records everywhere, a walk in storage room, filled with records and other collectible stuff (like the whole Wax Poetics magazine catalog).
I’m still in the bedroom, trying to find a place to put my feet without stepping on a record. a stereo machine with a record player just beside the bed. you gotta be fast to flip that record when needed.
records everywhere! the first thing that came to my mind was, is there any order in this setup? I popped this question to Greg, and he immediately started to explain me about the logic. this is here, this is there, but after a while he got confused. ohh, maybe this is that, and that is this. The mad scientist always has his own order in the great chaos. that was also the case with Greg.
so here it is, Greg Caz, 37, Queens, NY. The mad scientist of Brazilian beats (and other stuff of course).
Hit that player button to listen to Greg’s compilation “Baile Funk 2 Agora é Moda”
Q: What prompted you to start collecting?
A: Since the day I was born, I’ve been around people with sizable record collections, starting with my dad, uncles, cousins…it wasn’t till later I realized there was any other way to be!
Q: What age did you start?
A: At conception….literally!
Q: What was your first album?
A: First I remember, around age 3, was “Abbey Road.” The “Wattstax” concert soundtrack was a really early one too.
Q: Initial interest in music? did you get influence from your family?
A: Again, my dad playing jazz and Brazilian records on his powerful 70’s Hi-Fi system all the time. Also, my hippie soul brother uncle Alix (RIP) giving me rock and soul records, starting with the ones I mentioned above.
Q: Any particular musical instruments?
A: I was obsessed with two drummers in my childhood: Art Blakey and Ringo Starr. So for a while I took lessons cause I wanted to be them.
Q: Why music?
A: What else is there?
Q: Why vinyl?
A: Cause that was always the format, holding the covers, going through my dad’s and uncles’ shelves, looking at them and feeling like these big beautiful things held the secrets of the universe….which they did. And the feeling growing up of walking into a RECORD store and seeing them all displayed, shiny and new, well….only sex is comparable, and maybe not even!! (now I understand the proximity of the stereo to the bed. E.P.)
Q: How many LPs?
A: I’d say around 10,000 or so, but it fluctuates….
Q: 45s?
A: Far less, but I’ve got a few goodies…
Q: You are an expert in Brazilian Beats. How did you start with it? When?
A: See above. Again, I grew up around people like my dad for whom people like Elis Regina and Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento were just common knowledge. All my life, if I saw somebody with records like those, I knew this person understood the finer things in music and life.
Q: Do you go to Brazil to get inspiration? Collect records?
A: Both, and see my friends, and hang out with beautiful girls whose language (Portuguese) I speak beyond fluently.
Q: Do you travel to find records? where? how often?
A: I’m ALWAYS on the lookout for records, no matter where I am….especially anytime I travel somewhere. “Hmmm….what can I find here that I can’t find near me?”
Q: How do you organize the collection?
A: Roughly, alphabetically according to genre, although not really, since different gigs of different genres on different nights mean that I end up with piles and stacks everywhere, although I’m pretty good at finding any given record when needed….most of the time.
Q: Have you ever battled for a rare record? what happened?
A: Not really…..maybe times in Brazil or somewhere when I had to plead, negotiate, cajole, etc. But “battle”? Maybe not. I used to be an expert at eBay sniping, though…..
Q: Tell me a crazy story over a certain record
A: A few years ago I bot an original copy of Can’s “Ege Bamyasi” at the WFMU fair in New York. Eight bucks, great deal! And when I got home and pulled it out of the sleeve, a bunch of bags of coke fell out
Q: What’s your partners’ reaction to this obsession?
A: Intrigued, amused, fascinated….but I would say that relationships are HELL on record collections. Women usually have a threshold of tolerance for this “beautiful sickness” that no matter what they say initially, they eventually pass and then you have to get rid of them to make space for their shoes, ha ha ha…..
Q: Any numbers on that price tag?
A: I have ones worth at least several hundred that I managed to get without actually having to spend that much. I never spent more than about a hundred or so, several times, nothing too outrageous.
Q: What part of your monthly budget do you spend on records?
A: Historically, way too much. Lately, not a lot, it’s been a bit tight and rent comes first, so I’ve been really into dollar records these days!
Q: Names of stores, trade shows, flea markets, thrift shops? record conventions?
A: Not too many left these days unfortunately! Academy Records (where I worked for several years), Tompkins Square Books And Records (RIP), Chelsea Flea Market (RIP), Second Coming Records (RIP), Kim’s on St. Marks (RIP) (this is getting depressing), WFMU Record Fair (once a year where it used to be twice), Dusty Groove, my guys Carlinhos and Tony Hits in São Paulo, Notting Hill Record Exchange in London, your mom’s record collection
Q: List 5 rarest 45’s or LPs
A: I don’t know what counts as “rare” anymore these days. Got a great Hungarian funk-rock record by a band named Skorpio recently. Wilson Simonal’s Mexico-only “Mexico 70″ LP. “Zeca Do Trombone & Roberto Sax” (1976) is pretty freaking rare, as is “Edson Frederico e a Transa” (1975). Eugene McDaniels’ “Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse” (1971). All these are “rare,” but “rarest”? Music means so much more to me than whatever the going eBay cost is…..
Q: If a record label would ask you for the perfect compilation of your favorite genre. What would be the 10 top songs? Would you like to publish it on my blog?
A: Impossible. One mix could never capture it…..
Q: What do you do for a living?
A: Lately, mostly DJing (not easy, I’m telling you!!). I’ve been a music retail buyer, journalist, a number of things, but these days just focus on the DJ work.
Q: You have a Brazilian beat night. Where & when?
A: At Black Betty, every Sunday night, 366 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg. Also every Wednesday at Nublu, 62 Ave. C.
Q: So, you make it for a living. what do you listen to when you’re home? Just for joy. Is it different from the music you play on gigs?
A: YES, I listen to music at home, A LOT, and most of it is stuff that drunk partygoers in a club at night could never ever ever understand, sadly…..even if you played it to them in the daytime!!!!
Q: is there an album / 45 that you are trying to find, unsuccessfully?
A: My list is ongoing, and I know them when I see them. I cast my net wide, so specifics are kind of besides the point. I’d like to find a huge stash of cheap original UK 70s pressings on the Vertigo label, for one…..
Q: Do you have any favorite album cover?
A: Listen man, you have to understand that in dealing with people like me, who have long ago crossed the limit that “normal” people stop at in relation to the absorption and understanding of music, questions like “favorite album/artist/genre/label/cover/etc” are utter BULLSHIT. People less consumed with music can easily give you those answers, but me (and those of my tribe) simply cannot, and that’s just the way it is……
Q: Any particular painters/ photographers/ illustrators?
A: Here’s one I can think of: Reid Miles, who did the classic Blue Note covers and designs….
Q: Dirtiest, sexiest , filthiest album cover you know or own?
A: This one makes me laugh. Big Black – “Songs About Fucking” It’s hilarious! Don’t even care so much for the record, just love that cover. I always thought “Thank You Baby” by The Stylistics has a really tastefully sexy cover shot by Si Chi Ko.
Well folks, I hope you learned a thing or two. I know I did. first of, Greg is a funny guy, and honest, and has a pretty “in your face” attitude. I like it and appreciate it. sorry for the bullshit questions, and thanks for the straight answers.
here are some of the stuff that was playing while we were shooting photos, straight from the Caz academy for advanced non-bullshit music. read & learn:
MARCOS VALLE “Garra” (Odeon/EMI, 1971)
The best album by one of my all-time favorite artists, and sheer pop perfection. The songwriting, arrangements, production values, the whole flow of it….sheer delight. Shades of Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, soul music, film soundtrack scores and (needless to say) the whole Jobim/bossa heritage he so proudly carries. The title track by itself is two minutes and 58 seconds of heaven I will NEVER tire of hearing all the time. BIRGIT LYSTAGER “Ready To Meet You” (Artist, 1970)
A Danish pop gem that sounds like what would happen if Astrud Gilberto, Karen Carpenter and Joni Mitchell were combined and put in the studio with Burt Bacharach (him again!). Intelligent, complex songs, breathtaking arrangements, accompaniment from some of Copenhagen’s finest jazz musicians, and if all that weren’t enough, the lovely Birgit goes the extra mile and poses nude on the beautiful gatefold sleeve! This one was incredibly difficult to get a hold of, as you can imagine…..
Great Latin soul/boogaloo record out of Brooklyn, a tough local band of young Latino players led by an African-American pianist. Super-rare and well worth the search. Lots of fun, as titles like “Sex Drive In D Major” and “Hippy Heaven” suggest!
and I would add… is that Karem Abdoul Jabaar on the cover? (E)
TODD RUNDGREN “Todd” (Bearsville, 1974)
Endlessly fascinating double-LP opus from one of my enduring heroes, the great Todd! Recorded over the summer of 1973 (but only released six months later), this brilliant album goes from electronic experiments far ahead of their time to pounding rockers to perfect pop to spacy philosophical ruminations to Todd’s trademark impish sense of humor. Coming off several huge radio hits with a mainstream audience expecting more of same, this (and its immediate predecessor “A Wizard, A True Star,” perhaps even more of a masterpiece) was too brave and individualistic by far, and Mr. Rundgren forfeited his chance to be a bigger superstar than contemporaries like Bruce Springsteen or Elton John. To compensate, though, his enormous (and still growing!) body of work is a vast garden of delights that is still being discovered and influencing bands like Daft Punk and Hot Chip among many others. CRAVO & CANELA “Preço De Cada Um” (Pesquisa, 1977)
One of the most mysteriously rare albums in the Brazilian collecting game, and a warm, lovely, grooving example of MPB in the mid-to-late 70s, before the 80s ruined everything. Solid four-piece band fronted by two lovely female vocalists, great material ranging from vintage Noel Rosa to latter-day originals by special guest Sivuca, all delivered with expertise and conviction. Special thanks to the Japanese for FINALLY making this record available again, however briefly! VAMPYROS LESBOS Soundtrack (Motel Records)
Late 60s German soundtrack from a series of soft-porn films starring the late Soledad Miranda, alternately creepy, groovy, Gothic, funky, and definitely mysterious. This reissue is wonderfully annotated with a cool poster, and the hole in the center of the vinyl is placed in a very, ummm….”strategic” place (I’ll say no more!!!).
Hard to pick a favorite Hutch LP, and in fact there are several I like even better than this one, but it has a great cover. But having said that, this is a PHENOMENALLY great album and recognized as one of his great classics. Great quartet session with Herbie Hancock, beautifully turned out and with great performances from all involved. Includes the first-ever cover version of the Hancock modern jazz standard “Maiden Voyage.”
Os livros podem mudar a vida de uma pessoa? Essa é a principal questão levantada pelo documentário dirigido por Fabiano Maciel. As lentes apresentam projetos que incentivam o hábito de ler em regiões periféricas do país. O longa-metragem é fruto do edital lançado pela RioFilme em parceria com o Canal Brasil, que assina a coprodução com a República Pureza.
O filme dá início à saga literária através dos depoimentos de Luis Amorim, um açougueiro brasiliense responsável por também “disseminar” a leitura entre clientes e funcionários. A partir daí, conhecemos outros personagens interessantes, como o borracheiro mineiro Marcos Túlio; os agentes culturais Kcal Gomes, de Pernambuco, e Márcia Licá, de São Paulo; e Otávio Jr., fundador da biblioteca comunitária do Morro do Alemão, no Rio de Janeiro.
Dentre os depoimentos, ganha destaque a história de Evando dos Santos e sua mulher, Maria José. Alfabetizado durante a fase adulta, ele é o responsável por um acervo de mais de 57 mil livros alocados em sua própria casa, enquanto a esposa revela estar saturada com o excesso de “letras” ao redor.
As narrativas são costuradas por relatos de personalidades já reconhecidas no ambiente literário, como o ensaísta José Miguel Wisnik; o roteirista Marçal Aquino; o artista plástico Nuno Ramos; a crítica Maria Rita Kehl; o escritor Luiz Ruffato e o cronista norte-americano Gay Talese, dentre outros.
Quarta, dia 01/10, às 22h e quinta, dia 02/10, às 19h.
