From the Editors

Guy did a show of the sculptures with Robert, which Lucy saw. He showed the horse piece and the Steve Martin piece and the vacuum cleaner piece. Lucy brought Steve, who brought Max, who then came by Guy’s studio for a visit. Max put Guy in touch with Susanne, who worked for Francisco, and Francisco brought some of the work to Basel. Guy went there and people really liked him. He went to parties. He met people. He called Ellie from Jörg Immendorff’s boat.

How to Behave in a Museum
Timothy Aubrey

People were more naked than when they had come in, having spread various articles of clothing around them and, staring down at all the bodies, I thought I might be watching the beginnings of a lazy, pointless orgy. There was a lot of American Apparel—and the array of bright primary colors also reminded me of a kindergarten class during nap time. But then looking above waist-level, there were plenty of people engaged with their electronic gadgets, having adult conversations, catching up, and so forth.

I Was Here
Sarah Hromack

You studiously avoid making eye contact with the desk attendant (who studiously avoids returning your fleeting glances) while quickly scanning the list of names. If throwing caution to the wind, you might even flip a page or two—nonchalantly, though, lest you appear to be idling or, even worse, genuinely interested. Admit it: You, too, are curious to see who’s out and about.

On the Aesthetic Edutainment of Man
Roger White

The primary reactions these artworks elicit are physical dread, ontological vertigo, and an old-fashioned appreciation for their carefully managed artifice. Thus when the works are praised, critics use accolades like “spectacular,” “obsessively detailed,” and “completely believable,” but also “unnerving,” “claustrophobic,” and “spatially and emotionally disorienting.” According to their peculiar logic, which combines material literalism and an interactive idea of storytelling, the most effective way to represent the trauma of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks would be to confront the viewer with an actual, wrecked skyscraper.

Mullican Mullican
Jessica Slaven

Although he employed the usual implements—dry-erase board, slide projectors, podium, video projector—his manner of speaking was pretty unusual: he breathed heavily into the microphone, paced around, closed his eyes, requested that somebody turn off all the lights in the room (sending us into complete blackness), borrowed some keys which he annoyingly jangled, and drank directly from a water pitcher while nervously laughing at himself. At one point he even called the audience “distracting.”

The Empire of Conversation
Dushko Petrovich

Still, our visitor was managing to make some important friends; they were nominated for big prizes, showing at the right galleries, museums even. Tipsy, they patrolled the circuit of private views, charity auctions, and dinner parties with an aristocratic (and hedonistic) diffidence. Somebody usually had a V.I.P. pass or an invitation card, and they followed these wherever they led, coaxing bouncers and hosts or whomever until they got in, at which point they could begin complaining about the quality of the event. After one show, they dined with Tracey Emin, her large breasts perfectly curtained by a starched white blouse. (They were not impressed.) After another, they danced in a basement club that displayed beautiful women, in modified Victorian outfits, in semi-private cages. (They would not pay for sex.) Most of the time they just ended up in regular bars, but you had to know which ones. (Maybe they’d text you later.)

Black Bleeds Red
Jason Murison

In retrospect, the summer of 2008’s punch-drunk decadence held more than a few warning signs for the art world: artists’ assistants enjoyed $300 lunches in Basel, the Times Fashion supplement enlisted front desk “gallerinas” as models, summer interns had personal drivers. Simply the staggering number of creative-class 20 year-olds on the L train with full-sleeve tattoos should have indicated to us that we’d finally, inevitably, overextended ourselves.

Did Anyone Understand Chinese Art?
Christopher Hsu

The real litmus test of imminent success was the reaction of that other, mirror market, the exalted culture of counterfeit brands and pirated goods that is so constitutive of life in modern China. If a given artist’s works were fakeable, and if the people who flogged fakes sensed that the knockoffs would find buyers, then this was the surest sign that his name was destined to be misspelt in Western magazines.

Go or No Go
Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Hoey noted that an infrared ScoutGuard game camera took these grainy black-and-white shots of the yard. A deer, possum, and raccoon were captured in the camera’s bright flash, their faces startled, eyes glowing. She wasn’t sure what would happen with these pictures, if they might be used in a new series or not, and next pointed out a slime mold growing in a bucket near the door, perhaps another subject for a future body of work.

What is This Art World You Speak Of?
Naomi Fry

The dispatches were ongoing, scintillating, ever-accelerating: a former child actress turned boho fashion icon canoodling with a “bad boy” NYC artist; a notably pneumatic starlet rubbing up against appropriation art worth more than the budget of her latest project; a hip-hop great and his triple-threat wife scoping out the booths at a sun n’ surf art fair; the art world, it seemed, was not only cleaning up, but also looking totes glam in the process.

Fully Empty
Claire Jarvis

The show’s unique project: to manufacture an authentic stardom that reaches beyond the realms of MTV, reality-show celebrity, or even youth; one that could constitute, in fact, a new mode of being in the world.

You Are Someone Special
James Bae

No matter how closely you watch them, nothing really happens in the short films of Corinna Schnitt. In 18.8.2005, the artist sits immobile on the edge of a cliff in the Grand Canyon, a stalagmite in tourist’s clothes, on the film’s titular day. The tableau, recalling countless captured moments in perfunctory American vacations, is broken intermittently by the ominous presence of birds of prey circling over the calcified figure.

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Post-minimalist

Decades ago, Richard Serra borrowed an expensive Brancusi book from an artist I know. He kept it too long, ignoring several requests to return it. When he finally brought it back, almost a year later, he casually mentioned he “got forty ideas” off the Romanian.

Post-Brooklynist

A friend had gotten fed up with the annual rent increases. He decided to tell his landlord off and move further into Bushwick. It was really satisfying. He hired an agent and they eventually found an acceptable place: about the same rent, three stops further out. When he went in to sign the lease, he encountered the same landlord behind a different desk.

Post-racist

Gagosian has hired a lot of black security guards.

Post-gallerist

An op-ed in the Times chronicled the decline of a very popular gallerist. They described her eyeglasses, her sales figures, the boyfriend she met online, the saltines she ate for Christmas. They did not go into detail about the thousands of dollars she owes her artists.

Post-painterly

A few years ago, everybody “used to paint.” What did we used to do now?

Post-critical

We made ourselves so familiar with the past, learned so much about its modes and movements, diligently collected and studied its images, that it made sense, this persistent desire to be judged as if from the omniscient future. We loved the past, and this (always-postponed) ideal critique would finally allow us to merge with it.

Post-graduate

Everyone wants to talk about the MFA as professionalization, the sorry state of art pedagogy, the circling sharks of the gallery system. What nobody wants to talk about is debt.

Post-careerist

378 people applied for the job, a two-year visiting artist gig in a small city. Interviews were conducted on both coasts, plus campus visits, followed by much debate on the seven-person committee. Eventually, they voted 4-3 to hire the girlfriend of the guy who had held the job before.

Post-ironist

During the Age of Irony, you could be relatively sure it was irony. These days, you check and double check. Now that’s ironic.

Post-boom

Ergo propter boom?

The slopping and lapping of animated milk in trudging, animated Diet Coke bottles, sliding in and out of earshot as the image turns on its axis at pace, is the best thing about this video. Actually, it’s the only thing about it.

“Zeigen: An Audio Tour Through Berlin”
Curated by Karin Sander
December 4, 2009 – January 10, 2010
Temporäre Kunsthalle

Sound works were solicited from the entire phone book of Berlin artists (599); the artists’ names were posted at eye level in Helvetica 12 pt; headphones were distributed. Listening was strangely intimate and the best thing to stare detachedly at was the other people. There were a few chairs.

“Conversation Pieces”
Curated by Jens Hoffman
Act I: January 9 – February 6, 2010
Act II: February 13 – March 13, 2010
Act III: March 20, 2010 – April 14, 2010
Johnen Galerie

In a pile of emphemera I found one idea: what if, rather than demanding that we take a time out, exhibitions actually wanted to be viewed one, after, another.

John Baldessari
“Hands and/or Feet”
November 20, 2009 – January 16, 2010
Sprüth Magers

But who eats poetry these days?

“For The Use of Those Who See”
November 22, 2009 – February 14, 2010
KW

This show will be remembered as the moment when, decades into the white cube’s crisis, someone finally decided to paint the walls. (The solution would be officially recognized only years later, when it occurred to someone else to turn on the lights.)

Owen Land
“How can you believe anything he says?!”
November 22, 2009 – February 14, 2010
KW

I SAW AN AD – reads a text opening one of 36 filmed vignettes comprising Dialogues (2007 – 2009) – “WANTED: MALES AND FEMALES TO ENGAGE IN SEXUAL INTERCOURSE.” I DECIDED TO APPLY. An actor appears, a sexy coed opposite. His face thaws to a puddle. Knights in White Satin swells. She’s as deadpan as the piece itself, and likewise a mess. “Can you turn that 60s music off?” she says. He switches it to Foreigner, mumbles something about their heartbeats. IT TURNS OUT – the closing text reads – SEX WAS JUST THE HOOK. THE STUDY WAS ABOUT HOW PEOPLE RESPOND TO MUSIC ON THE RADIO.

At MOMA, Hewitt’s works are being called “photography,” but this creates a problem: they aren’t snapshots and they aren’t still. I call them drawings. They draw relationships between the failures of the black power movement and the structures, both architectural and institutional, that house its remains. On top of that, these works racially engage minimalism’s longstanding pursuit of the nature of the object. Hewitt deftly organizes the spatial properties of her works to illuminate the way in which things and ideas flicker in and out of objecthood. Last thing—Hewitt’s rough critique is hardly a funeral dirge for “the movement.” She is forcing the eye into new habits of looking, and complex histories are disinterred by these relentless optical maneuvers.

Lincoln’s Hands
Indianapolis War Memorial and Museum
Indianapolis, Indiana
Permanent Collection

The nature of camp, a spasm that careens between horror and laughter, is to appear both rigorously controlled and out of control at the same time. It refuses to take sides, land, encamp. Abraham Lincoln’s bronzed hands, severed in a pink fabric-lined vitrine, operate within the rhythm of camp: who put a Jeff Koons in the Indianapolis War Memorial and Museum? Moreover, the Camp Spirit surfaces time and time again here: a bench and street lamp parked next to a wall-sized Eiffel tower say This is Paris; wounded soldier mannequins display delicate, feminine faces (whose lips are red with what—lipstick or blood?). This is a good thing: camp in a war museum de-territorializes that space, derailing its jingoistic mission.

Malcolm X’s Hands, Phyllis Wheatley’s Hands
National Great Blacks in Wax Museum
Baltimore, Maryland
Permanent Collection

Looking at my photos, I notice that I have primarily taken snapshots of hands. Here, amid life-sized depictions of branding, rape, and dismemberment, I am afraid of what is born of flash, wax, and face—I fear Accidental Camp in a museum whose aim is to accurately represent an American legacy of torture. Camera, do not make fun. Later, on the computer screen, I revisit Phyllis Wheatley’s dangling poet hand, Malcolm X’s graceful revolutionary hand. Then I recall Lincoln’s gold hand, swollen from 19th-century high-fives. We call that The Handshake.

“Screwed Anthologies”
labotanica
Houston, Texas
November 27, 2009 – December 31, 2009

The organizing principle of this exhibition of video, performance, and sound art is the Houston hip-hop phenomenon called “screwed and chopped.” DJ Screw, inventor of screw music, had a “screw shack” where any CD could be dropped off and “screwed.” Returned, it played dream-slow; each word and beat was a wonderfully retarded prelude to the vertiginous speed to come. Conventional wisdom assumed that the now-screwed CD – this sweet and sour slow and fast – was part and parcel of an air conditioned, traffic jammed club commute: the joy of a slow touch and the night to come. But the now-deceased DJ Screw delayed the internal workings of the song because he wanted the listener to comprehend the politics of certain lyrics. Slowness as literacy. Literacy as pleasure, again. Curator Ayanna Jolivet McCloud: please bring this show to Brooklyn.

Home-made Smuggler Boat
National Border Patrol Museum
El Paso, Texas
Permanent Collection

This institution, devoted to illustrating the range, material production, and prowess of US Border Patrol operations, is without windows. Banks of florescent fixtures shed equal light on all of its objects (handmade motorcycles, simulated tracks in the dirt, a painting of a lost girl found, an actual helicopter, a newspaper clipping about 1970’s border protests…) A rusted boat made of car hoods welded together, manages to glow within the dim, greenish light. It was once a blue car speeding down the road; it is now up-ended, on the half-shell, its interior exposed. The object is evidence: a metal fact that law-breakers were caught, collected, and dispatched.

The boat is too beautiful. It starts acting like an art object when it is supposed to function as a scalp. I realize I have forgotten why I am here because I want that boat. Possessiveness is eclipsing all the ethical battles that polarize the space. Ideologies, political and aesthetic, attempt to rule my reception of things, and even this small government museum doesn’t provide respite from these art world tensions.

Rozenta’s Pool
Arden Modjeska Home and Garden
Modjeska Canyon, California
Permanent Collection

A woman emigrates from the European interior. She becomes a star in the Silents and builds a mansion in the canyon where the last grizzly bear in Orange County will be shot in1903. Inside is what you would expect: still rooms with glass globe lamps, a piano, a chandelier illuminating the head of a buffalo – fine, fine things. Outside are extinct pools, dry and hollow. The floor of one, Rozenta’s Pool (c.1899), is tiled in an arrangement of squares at odds with the pool’s organic, uneven contour. It’s a quiet kind of struggle: one geometry against another. It pleases the loner, trips the skater, and disappoints the swimmer.

Kerry Tribe
“The Moving Image: Scan to Screen, Pixel to Projection II”
Orange County Museum of Art
October 3, 2009 – March 21, 2010

A long time ago, I watched Here & Elsewhere at the New Museum, and my memory of it persisted long after the fact. Tribe’s video generated the illusion that California was surfacing in New York. In the dual-channel video, one screen registers the flush palm trees of SoCal, while on its twin, a pale, red-headed girl enacts one half of a familial encounter. Her father (British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen), questions his daughter from off-screen in a manner that echoes a college level oral examination. She does her best, and sometimes his voice registers that perhaps her best isn’t quite what he was looking for. She wants to please him, she rapidly adjusts her answers, and her falter fascinates: the child in thrall to the father. The film resurfaces in Orange County this year – so close to the site of its inception – because it’s worth repeating.

“Darcy Lange: Work Studies in School”
Cabinet, Brooklyn, New York
December 3, 2009 – January 16, 2010

On the subway, I carefully hide the cover of the paperback I am reading, and still, the man next to me gently inquires: “Excuse me, will you please tell me the title of your book?” “Uh, it isn’t a very nice title,” I respond, gingerly revealing Student as Nigger, a cult pedagogy classic first published in 1967 and reprinted 500 times. The book, written by civil rights activist and educator Jerry Farber, was intended to reveal the micro-processes of subjugation at work in the classroom.

In the 1970s, Lange, a New Zealander initially trained as a sculptor, entered working class schools in Great Britain to examine such processes. He shot footage of classes in session; he went on to record the teachers watching the initial footage, and then the students doing the same. Toward what end? I watch children squirm, shift, and drift as time rolls by. The teacher cajoles, and answers are given – sometimes dolefully, other times with pleasure. If we analyze Lange through Farber, do we believe that Lange is revealing the systemic control of the classroom? Does he provide a DIY method for the system to fix itself? Or does Lange’s work perform just enough social tinkering to avoid the pure disruption of actual change?

Cabinet offers a roving predecessor to the current crop pedagogical investigations within the art world. At the gallery, the visitor reengages this reflexive cycle of “watching learning.” Then and now, the fantasy of a secured audience is in play, the perennial boredom of the classroom sublimated.

Agnes Denes
“Philosophy and the Land II: Works from the 1960s to the Present”
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
October 29, 2009 – January 16, 2010

My infatuation with Agnes Denes’s Wheat Field (1982) lasted from 2000 to 2003. There was much to recommend it: site-as-palimpsest (the work grew on a landfill cluttered with debris from the construction of the World Trade Center, in what would later become Battery Park City); accidental audience (office workers noted the rippling wheat field beneath their windows); and an attention to the lifespan of its materials (the harvested wheat was distributed throughout the world – or, according to nay-sayers, fed to NYPD horses). But affection either deepens or it ends. The destruction of the World Trade Center changed the work in ways that pointed, for me, towards a disengagement: I avoid that hole, its associations, and its souvenirs.

It’s 2010, and I like her again – of course, it’s a bit circumstantial. Lately I’ve noticed a number of works made, in the 1970s, around or about Niagara Falls. In 1974, a family home in Niagara Falls was torn asunder by Gordon Matta-Clark (Bingo). In 1975, Bas Jan Ader, seated in a gallery in Amsterdam, read a short story called “The Boy who Fell Over Niagra Falls.” He drank from a glass of water as he read, his last swallow timed to align with the end of the narrative. A work of Denes’s from 1977 documents the view from a ledge near the landmark, where she camped out for seven days and nights. Why so much work at one boundary and not the other? Our fraught border has plummeted southward – what new works will gather at that edge?

On bad days, the cartoony figuration of the 00s seemed hamstrung by its own cheerfulness: saccharine palettes, goofy neo-expressionist paint moves, and folksy touches sometimes failed to convey the horror of the decade. It was like a finger puppet show about Abu Ghraib. Eisenman, a forerunner, brilliantly sidesteps this problem by tethering the ebullience of the style to a direct and affecting social narrative. The resulting collision – happy paint, miserable people – captures the mood of stunned desperation now permeating the cultural sector like piss soaking into carpet.

Richard Hawkins
December 10, 2009 – January 23, 2010
Greene Naftali

The alabaster buttocks of Greco-Roman statuary salute Japanese teen haircut models. In the vitrine: David Bowie and Slash get slapped on Francis Bacon reproductions. Collage is for making friends.

Shannon Ebner
“Invisible Language Workshop”
October 30 – December 19, 2009
Wallspace Gallery

Ebner’s cryptic text-pictures recall the linguistic investigations of early conceptual art, and unfold in the gallery like a series of proofs; this is why, perusing the exhibition, I had the not unpleasant sense that I was walking around inside a giant textbook.

“The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s”
November 7 – December 19, 2009
Luhring Augustine

Some real gems here, from Pistoletto’s fabric bale to Kippenberger’s ale can, but I’m tired of sniffing the underwear of the Neo avant-garde.

Rashaad Newsome
“Standards”
October 22 – December 19, 2009
Gallery Ramis Barquet

The collages in the front room (juxtaposed auction-house swag and music-magazine bling) demonstrated, sadly, that luxury is a universal language resistant to all deconstructive operations. The video in the back (dissected hip-hop hand gestures set to Carmina Burana) did something else. It was like channel-surfing late night cable, during a bout of insomnia, and feeling that at any moment the fabric of pop culture was going to rip apart and reveal the true nature of absolute reality.

“Jr. and Son’s”
December 12, 2009 – January 23, 2010
Zack Feuer Gallery

Where everybody knows your name and nobody says you can’t paint pirates.

It is a minor regulation of human nature that if a man retains any interest at all in sport at age thirty, his interest will grow only deeper and perhaps more desperate as he gets older. For some, the passion flows thickly early on in childhood and never tapers. One is thinking of those men who, if they have not got tickets to the game itself, organize to gather around the television on a Saturday, or to go to a bar, with friends, on Sunday afternoons; who can carry a bright green or mauve or orange polyester oversize jersey on their backs lightly enough; who during the week visit internet message boards or Facebook to expatiate on players and techniques among friends and strangers alike.

For another set of fans, the interest in sport is only germinal through adolescence. It is likely that this faction is filled with those who were as boys quite useless and uncomfortable in their shorts and white socks: shivering, hardly running, loathing the shower and changing room rituals, resenting the jocular, acerbic man who got to wear tracksuit pants in February and order them around, even afraid of sports like cricket or baseball that involved the smaller, harder, faster orbicular objects – although things had always played out quite differently in their imaginations. As they grew up, and as sport became less mandatory, less participatory, less of a physical activity and more a sedentary leisure of watching, so it began to take root in their lives. The difference is, for this type of person, by now thirty or forty, it often exists as a wholly private enthusiasm, an hermetic ardor, like voyeurism or gardening. Not for him are the beery mass crowd-events of the arena or the sports bar. He watches at home, on television or the internet, preferably alone.

The first boy comes to know physical domination, or at least bonding and teamwork, on the field. As he gets older, richer, busier, lazier, or fatter, he enjoys more the off-the-field solidarity, the vicarious physical conquest and feelings of nostalgia that watching sport imports. For the other boy, though, sport has evolved into a subject of knowledge and memorization, of research and statistical analysis, of connoisseurship, even of interpretation. As a measured and recorded event, it enters at last his own domain of capability. It could be seen as a surpassing of his own body, this empowerment, but if not that, then at least some form of redress for the myopia, the goose pimples, the butter fingers, the jelly legs, and the lily liver, all the palestral embarrassment that for years he has suffered of himself.

Suspense

Beneath the external distinguishing characteristics – mechanical, geometric, aesthetic – of a given sport, there is a peculiar architecture of suspense that specifies the experience of watching it. The rules of a sport act as an internal valve that constricts to build suspense, and opens to relieve it. The tension itself derives from the general condition of opposed strengths, or to put it another way, from not knowing who will win. But how great the ebb and flow of the tension, and when it releases: there are many different ways of not knowing.

In the aggregation-type sports, points are accrued until an agreed terminus is reached, either in time or in total number. These points can be won consecutively in a fixed sequence of a limited number of possessions or opportunities (baseball, cricket); or consecutively in a fixed sequence of indeterminate number (football, rugby league); or in less fixed sequence (basketball, rugby union); or at any time, without any fixed sequence (soccer, hockey). And there are the literal first-past-the-post-type of sports, i.e. any kind of racing.

Tennis and its relatives, like ping pong and volleyball, present a queer combination of the two types: an accumulation of points in no fixed sequence in order to pass a nested series of posts (game, set, match) first. The result of this combination is that, for tennis watchers, the result of every contest, as a function of its rules, is always substantially in doubt until the final ball has been played, unlike any of the sports mentioned above. Tennis shares this quality with apical-type contests like the various lifting, throwing, and jumping disciplines. But each orchestrates the release of tension in its own way.

A singularity in all of sport is the nature of the suspense in boxing, whose sober points system exists in parallel with a constant and overriding sudden-death regime: an abrupt, irrational tour de force overturning the rational calculus, a brutal coup that comes from somewhere arguably outside the realm of sports entirely. A spray of blood, a collapse of muscle and bone onto canvas, wild roaring.




Empiricism

The rise of the purely statistical reporting of sport, and its reclusive experts, is evidence that what is irreducible in sport is what is empirical, and not aesthetic or cultural as some would have it – that it is fundamentally a set of phenomena to be measured and compared rather than a sensuous object or performance one beholds. It is for the same reason that the pleasure in watching a match accrues principally from the pulsing of tension, while the appreciation of the moments of sublime physical grace and skill or fluid and instinctive teamwork is, strictly speaking, only auxiliary. Another way of seeing this is to consider the existence of systematic odds-making and betting on sports.

It is possible for people to enjoy a sporting event just by following the graphical or verbal description of its completed actions, or their quantification, without ever viewing the physical movements and embodied decision-making that vivified them, though one presumes they would enjoy it more if they did. Amongst other effects, radio stations and fantasy sports leagues profit from this. Others can become enflamed by games or entire leagues in which the standard of play, as a spectacle, is very low, as long as both sides in the fight have a decent chance of winning. Neither is cultural specificity an insuperable barrier to understanding and enjoying a sport, as it is for some art forms: uneducated, I can grasp what is intrinsic in sumo wrestling or kabbadi but never in Chinese opera, not even minimally. The aesthetic and cultural lineaments of a sport can be removed and what remains is still sport. But the same cannot be said of the rules, the measurements, and the scoring, all that structures the play of probabilities, the facticity at the heart of sport.

The resort to optical technologies to determine the outcome of close calls in various sports confirms the priority of the empirical. Whenever there is a disputed refereeing decision during play, or a player appears to have broken the rules, the controversy never concerns how attractive was the coordination of eye and hand during the offense. It is inevitably about the thickness of lines, inches, relative positions and times. Likewise, an allegation of cheating beforehand – an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs, for instance, or someone bribing the match official – is always at root a complaint that the balance of strengths has not been properly disclosed to the viewer, retrospectively ruining the pleasurable suspense of the contest and casting suspicion on other contests. It is an issue with the experimental conditions.

The essence of sport is early modern in this respect. For people involved in an indeterminate and multiform culture, who spend most of their working lives looking at art or making it, reading about this or that media success, or wondering about so and so’s family connections, it is a welcome interval. One team is categorically better than the other. Frauds are ruthlessly found out. The best, most talented player is always given the most money.

Final Form

In the U.S., you read about your local franchise in the Sports section. In Britain and the Commonwealth, the back page of the daily newspaper is usually titled Sport. There may be something more than inane morphological difference here (though I also notice that while in Britain you say maths, in the U.S. you say math).

Sports, plural, would imply a panoply of different contests connected by some vague criteria, such as: it must be physical, it must be a competition with rules, it must be contested by human beings. And there are many “sports,” such as fishing, car racing, dog racing, and poker that seem to bend or break these fuzzy rules and demand a separate term. In any event, Sports connotes a kind of plenty, a multiplicity of athletic achievement, a democracy of effort, abundant choice in entertainment and good cheer. Sport, on the other hand, seems however diffusely to gesture towards an ideal, probably a classical Greek one, of peacetime physical competition between people – sport in itself – that transcends even the winning and the losing. In this sense, every striving in every match in every sport is pointed towards an unreachable perfection, a single, abstract, and final form. There is a slight analogy here to the relation of the term art to the arts, the latter term, of course, comprising things like macramé, kazoos, and tap dancing.

What?! I can’t believe Larry Gagosian’s wide net landed the Coolest/Creepiest Mom Ever. Like going to see Un chien andalou at the Broadway Multiplex. I almost lifted my Gagosian boycott when I found out the photos were all of a naked man named “Larry.” But alas, it wasn’t the proprietor – only the artist’s husband. I have a naked spouse at home so I decided to pass.

2. “Manzoni: A Retrospective”
January 24 – March 21
Gagosian Gallery

Manzoni is of course famous for canning his own shit, labeling it, and selling it at the fluctuating price of gold. While this man was obviously brilliant, I started focusing more on the price of gold – it’s really going up! Now, I only accept gold for services rendered. It took a great deal of haggling and coercion to get Paper Monument to pay me in gold for this piece, but we finally settled on a price of 1/8th of a gram per word. They said they would mail me “a few nuggets in a can” after the new year, whatever that means.

3. “Zero in New York: 1957 – 1966”
November 6 – December 20, 2008
Sperone Westwater

This show was technically in 2008, but it took me until 2009 to realize that I missed it. So I figured what the hell, let’s put it on the list at number 3. Besides, it seemed like not going to see the work in person would be a hard-line stance that the Zero group would appreciate – art shouldn’t be bound by things like “place” and “time,” right?

4. Maya Lin
“Recycled Landscapes”
September 24 – November 13
Salon 94

Ever since I was “terminated” from this “establishment” it has been difficult for me to swallow my pride and slink back there as an “invitee.” Plus, do you know how incredibly difficult it is to get to East 94th and Madison from Bushwick? Literally and metaphorically…

5. Josh Smith
“Currents”
February 14 – March 14
Luhring Augustine

Oh man, I used to really like this guy’s work! He just paints his name over and over again, which is such a “fuck you” to The Man. But then he started curating all of these shows around town and never once used my work – which is total B.S. It pissed me off to the point where I skipped his recent show (which weren’t even name-paintings, but some paintings of fish and flowers, I think) out of spite.

What’s that? Oops. I’ve just learned that the artist/curator, Joshua Smith, isn’t even the same guy as the painter, Josh Smith.

6. Peter Doig
“New Paintings”
January 17 – March 14
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Something is terribly wrong when I miss a show of my favorite painter at my favorite gallery. Am I really that busy? I did manage to win both my fantasy baseball and my fantasy football leagues this year. It could be time to start thinking about priorities.

7. Bernadette Corporation
“The Complete Poem”
September 17 – October 17
Greene Naftali Gallery

OK so I think this show was by a collective of artists who make art about their make-believe corporation and who have also written a book about the make-believe founder of another gallery – Reena Spaulings – which is a real gallery that shows completely different, real artists but is also the invention of this make-believe corporation. I’ve never been to a party with girls named Reena or Bernadette, but I can only imagine girls with those names shooting me dirty looks and dismissing me in some Alemannic dialect, so it definitely felt safer to stay home. I’ll take Tracey Emin any day of the week. Sure she’s a raunchy, hooched-up cougar, but at least you know she’s a real person.

8. Tracey Emin
“Only God Knows I’m Good”
November 5 – December 19
Lehmann Maupin

What can I say? I love me some Mad Men and it conflicted with this opening. For all I know this show is still up, but I’m really worried about Don and Betty at this point. How are they going to keep their marriage from falling apart???

9. “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus”
April 8 – July 12
The New Museum

The best is when someone recommends a group show to you that they haven’t actually seen, and then you don’t ever go yourself. The result is sort of like that bit about the blind men and the elephant. You’re left with benign sound bites like “some girl sleeping in the middle of the museum” or “no one that age even paints any more, it’s all digital.” Therefore the only mental picture I can conjure up for this show is Jesus doing a DJ set with his Mac laptop. Holla.

10. “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”
March 1 – May 11
MoMA

I distinctly remember leaving to go see this show the same day our basement filled with 2 feet of water. I had to go back and deal with Roto-Rooter. What a nightmare. Do you know what those guys charge? Now I have to have get the basement completely re-painted, and on top of that the water bill from that month is outrageous, but do you think the City Water Department cares? Forget about it.

“A simple equation that encapsulates this chapter is risk = threat × vulnerablity.” (p. 68)

In 2004, riding the general wave of optimism about the country, Lonely Planet commissioned its first-ever guide to Afghanistan. But by late 2007, when the book was finished, things had gotten so bad that the US, Great Britain and Australia were all advising their citizens against non-essential travel here. Thus, Lonely Planet ended up printing a guidebook to a place no normal tourist would ever visit.

In theory, the book could still be useful to the roughly 7,000 abnormal tourists—the aid workers, anthropologists, diplomats, and consultants—who already live here, but unfortunately most of these people aren’t allowed to stray very far from their compounds. In Afghanistan, one’s freedom of movement is tied to the kidnap insurance paid by one’s employer: The more you’re worth, the less you wander.

Pretty much everybody here is worth more than I am. As a freelance journalist, I have no insurance whatsoever and can therefore go anywhere I want. So I felt like I was the perfect audience for this book. Finding a copy, however, proved difficult. No bookstore in Afghanistan carried it, and the two copies mailed to me by the publisher both mysteriously disappeared into the Afghan postal system. I had to make an alternate arrangement.

So it’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I find myself standing outside my friend’s armed guest house, having made a deal: M—we’ll call her that, so she can keep her job at the UN—will let me borrow her copy of the Guide, so long as I help her break her employer’s strict security guidelines. And she has to call the rules out as we break them, I add. “Rule number one,” she whispers, as we stroll out the gate past her curious guards onto the street, stepping carefully around the sidewalk’s crumbled rock piles and open sewers. “No walking.”

A tattooed former punk rocker who stripped her way through college, M is now draped and shapeless, her curls tightly clamped under a black headscarf. Worse, she’s dating some British antinarcotics agent.

“Well, he’s got a car,” she explains. (Afghanistan is like high school: Mobility is the big problem, so a guy with a car is automatically hot.)

“Plus, he’s got a beard,” she adds.

“I have a beard,” I say.

“That’s true,” she says.

We spend the next hour browsing the jewelry and textile shops on the famous, and Lonely Planet-recommended, Chicken Street. “UN Rule number two,” she says, modeling a rough-hewn silver ring from Turkmenistan, “No Chicken Street.”



—

“Speaking some of the local lingo helps and never more so than when it’s time for a meal.” (p.62)

I had pork ribs for dinner last night. In a strictly Muslim country, that’s no mean feat. It was my friend Lyn who discovered the illegal butchery in the basement of a South African security firm. In a windowless den plastered with beer posters and calendar girls, just alongside the pool table, stood a grill with a massive exhaust pipe that went all the way to the roof. “Indoor grilling at its finest,” said Lyn. Convenience was king: A person could reach into the refrigerator, pull out some bloody contraband, and toss it onto the coals without taking more than three steps. “All of Kabul could be on lockdown for three months,” she said, “and these guys wouldn’t have a clue.”

It had taken Lyn three years of living in Kabul to find just such a place, so she bought all the ribs she could carry and shuttled them back to her compound—the one I wandered the darkening streets for a half hour trying to find. Streets are not named in Kabul, so even the taxi drivers get lost. “Wait,” she’d said when I called her back for more directions, “don’t you see the three story house with the green balconies?” I did not. “All I see is a naan shop,” I whispered, so as to not call too much attention to my English. “And a blue sign with an arrow that says ‘Marco Polo Inn.’”

Like the intrepid Venetian, I did finally arrive, and as I settled into the wicker sofa on Lyn’s back deck with a full plate of ribs and slaw on my lap, I sipped a Foster’s and reflected on my little journey. The unmarked streets force everyone to use landmarks when getting and giving directions, but the landmarks used by expatriates and locals are usually completely different, so, often as not, you need a fellow expat to guide you. A Kabul native who has stared for years through the plexiglass of a little wooden guard hut on the sidewalk might have no idea that there is a German restaurant just one block over, with tablecloths and wine and waiters in white shirts serving schnitzel for $16.50 a pop.

If the locals and the maps are of only partial help, there isn’t much room for the restless-dog approach, either. Danger cramps the wanderer. One cannot—as I often do in new cities—just take a jog and randomly discover places. Even if you could jog here (and I hear there’s a crowd of bold early risers who run at dawn, before the sun wakes up the dust and the gangsters), you wouldn’t see much but locked gates and barbed wire. So, the bar was set pretty low for the Afghanistan Travel Guide. Just the fact that it had a decent city map felt vaguely insurrectionary. I’d lived in Kabul almost a year already, and this was the first real map I’d seen.

“Anyone staying in the city for any length of time is liable to pick up the ‘Kabul cough.’” (p. 87)

By noon, M and I are sweaty, asthmatic, and lost. Everywhere we go, we are the object of curiosity and also scrupulously ignored. The dust of the city sticks in our throats. M sighs as we double back once again past the same row of teashops, next to a river flowing with garbage. Goats munch the trash, and boys pick for tin and other saleable junk. A gray-haired woman in a burqa stoops to glean the least rotten of the moldy fruits. Beggars post themselves at speed bumps like toll collectors.

Seeking help, we follow the Lonely Planet map to the Afghan Tourism Office, which turns out to be a sort of two-room corrugated tin shack perched on the roof of a government building. Inside, we find five men arranged among dented metal office furniture. The men smile at us, slightly alarmed. “Salaam Aleikhum,” I say, shaking each of their hands in turn. “Do you have any pamphlets?” The smell of cooking rice wafts in through the window.

Pamphlet-less, we head back downstairs and down the block to the National Gallery, where all the paintings I read about in the Guide have been taken down, though no one can tell us why. Then the Sultani Museum next door charges us a princely $4 each to walk through a few rooms of old Korans and other antiques, inventively labeled. A coin with a loose-limbed lion stamped on it is described as “Golden coin that absurdist is stand on its surface and appears in a confidential condition. Related to 2-3 Christian.”

I turn to our book for guidance. “Poor labeling lets the exhibition down,” affirms Lonely Planet. “It’s frustrating, but an oddly appropriate metaphor for the troubled state of Afghanistan’s heritage.” Indeed, the Guide’s tone is starting to annoy me.

We hail a cab to the Kabul Museum. (“Rules number three and four! No riding in non-UN cars. No public taxis.”) Our driver is a mournful-looking guy with stubble on his chin and a brown cardigan a size too small. He’s eating grapes and offers us both a handful. He seems friendly, and on impulse I offer him a little extra to wait for us while we visit the museum.

After being frisked at the entrance—M in a special women’s shack where they go straight for her boobs—we enter what the Guide says was once one of the greatest art collections in the world. “That a museum still stands is little short of a marvel,” it says, so we weren’t exactly optimistic about the collection itself.

But the quality of the museum is at first a moot point, as my aesthetic experience is interrupted by a momentary—but familiar—panic: I suddenly recall a story from the security training course I took before coming here, a scenario which involved an unknown driver using his cell phone to call in his friends to kidnap you. Which is plausible, I guess, and, after all, I’ve left our taxi driver alone with his grapes and his cell phone and an hour of time to kill. Kill! I stare at 12th-century pottery rescued from Taliban looters and try to puzzle out a solution to the present crisis. Finally I confide our predicament to M, who simply shrugs and whisks upstairs, leaving me alone to head outside and tell the guy to leave. I mumble an excuse and give him forty cents. He nods sadly and drives off.

Returning to the collection, I find M upstairs in a gallery of deities and ancestor figures. Tall and fat, the sculptures seem surprised to see us. They were carved, I learn, by a fiercely independent tribe called the Nuristanis who live on the country’s eastern border. Not that I’ll be able to visit them any time soon. “The failures of postconflict reconstruction,” observes the Guide, “have allowed an Islamist insurgency to smoulder among the peaks and valleys that dominate this part of the country.” So put away the hiking boots, because the “beautiful woods and slopes of Nuristan…remain as distant a goal as ever.” Like much of the book, the passage attempts to be cheerful about Afghanistan without being cheerful about its future. But I’m starting to find the Guide’s candidly self-absorbed tourist aesthetic refreshing. After reading so much Afghanistan analysis that’s either scary, depressing, or just plain dumb, I guess I can appreciate a book with a more modest agenda.

“Behavior such as … continued support of Chinese restaurants, most of which are fronts for brothels, make it hard to insist that Western culture is not having a negative effect on the country.” (p. 74)

One understands a city from its opening lines, the first things strangers ask you at a party. In New York it’s “What do you do?” and “Where do you live?” In Kabul it’s “How long have you been here?” and “When are you leaving?”

Out the other evening with some fellow inmates—unshaven capacity advisors straight from Harvard Law, Dutch war correspondents back from the front, a well-coiffed Scottish PR man burnishing the ministerial marble, and a delicate English boy counting civilian casualties—we polished off bratwurst and beer at the German restaurant (yeah, the $16.50-a-schnitzel one) and then headed out to hear what was rumored to be “the first Afghan-American punk band” but what turned out to be a couple of indie kids from LA who hired Afghan musicians to play on their new psychedelic folk album. We sat in plastic chairs on a perfect lawn in a highwalled compound in the most expensive part of town watching a pixie-haired 22-year-old whisper-sing lyrics to songs like “Be Gone Taliban,” while her father sat in the front row with some other Afghan men in suits. Waiters bowed under enormous platters of mango and watermelon.

Punk rock it wasn’t. And yet this show was all about street cred.

“It’s a gimmick,” the guitarist, Max, told me afterwards. But because their singer is Afghan, “It’s an organic gimmick.”

“So, you came all the way to Afghanistan to say you came to Afghanistan?” I asked.

“It’s like when Bob Dylan went electric,” Max said, gesturing at the barbed wire. “Rock and roll has always been about taking risks.”

In a way, Max is right: Risk is the social currency of expatriate Afghanistan. Apparently, it’s no longer necessary to even leave one’s walled compound. Just plop down on a guarded lawn somewhere in Kabul and you’ve earned the right to say you’ve arrived.



—

“…these gardens are the loveliest spot in Kabul.” (p. 87)

It is after four o’clock when we finally make the long taxi ride out to our last destination, the first on Lonely Planet’s to do list. Babur’s Gardens, recently restored by donors, is just on the edge of the city. “Rule number five,” says M, her voice sleepy with late afternoon. “Out of zone.” Her headscarf slips a bit, and our driver adjusts his rear view.

The Gardens are encased in a peach-colored fortress with a door shaped like a keyhole. Inside feels like another world. There are trees here, first of all—walnut, quince, and apricot—and the garden is carefully landscaped, with a series of quartered rising terraces split by a central watercourse. Among the picnickers I even spot two women. They stroll along in matching dresses, stiletto heels sinking into the grass.

“What’s that smell?” M sniffs.

“I think it’s fresh air,” I say happily.

I’ve shifted her back to talking about her new narc boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s future ex-wife. (There is something about war zones and break-ups; either one will follow the other.) “Living here is like a permanent adolescence,” M says. “You can reinvent yourself daily, you can play with guns, and when bombs are falling it’s easy not to notice your life is falling apart.” I ask her where she’ll go after she leaves Afghanistan. “Sudan,” she says. “I just applied.”

Around us on three sides rise the mountains of Kabul, sprinkled with illegal squatter dwellings that cling to the steep slope, as if a tsunami lifted the little houses then turned to stone just before breaking. The shacks are as brown as the rocks. Looking closer, one can find a tableau of Kabul life: A woman in a purple burqa carrying a pot on her head, two girls in bright orange blocking a narrow lane like miniature traffic cops, a man arriving home in a Japanese 4×4.

The sun slips behind the mountain and there is a chill. I notice people packing up their blankets. The park is closing soon.

“Maybe we should go,” I say.

“Just another minute,” M says, relaxing her shoulders.

I follow her gaze out to the city where we just spent our day. The low sun makes gold of mud roofs. Dust hovers like fog. Already there is snow on the mountains. I feel grateful for the book that brought us here. The bit of bravery required to be a tourist may not be noble, but it feels useful in some way. We’re not quite voyageurs, but at least we’re not hiding. I think of the thousands of expats behind barbed wire fences and I want to tell them: Friends, come out. Our distance from the Afghans is growing; our security rules spread fear and distrust. I wonder if next year we will be able to come here. I turn to say some of this to M, but her eyes are closed. And just then the quiet is pierced by an angry amplified voice. It is the guard and he is screaming into his megaphone leave leave leave the park leave the park leave the park the night is coming is coming night is coming.

(from Paper Monument Issue Two)

Laurette makes a habit of scrawling I AM AN ARTIST on the stationary of expensive hotels – Chateau Marmont, Hotel Costes, and Helmsley Park Lane, to name but a few. The juxtaposition between location and self-affirmations is primarily a taunt: for deluded romantics, who hope to someday be interrupted by room service; for ideologues, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a fluffy bathrobe; and for the rest of us, who, upon recognizing the names, will simply wonder how he affords it. The medium is, after all, the message.

Babette Mangolte
(Dance scene)
Broadway 1602

All successful denim ads share three features. The image must be in a scratchy black and white; it must show a (male or female) Mick Jagger doppelganger (if not in pout, then at least in groin); and the photograph must always imply that the pants aren’t the point. Babette Mangolte’s frenzied shot of young dancers in the 70s had me fooled.

Aya Haidar
Untitled, 2008
Bischoff/Weiss

Aya Haidar defaced envelopes and letters addressed (and, apparently, mailed) to world leaders. An address in Beirut, Lebanon, “is destroyed” courtesy of the artist’s poison pen; post-invasion, Haidar’s Beirut stands for “Be Ruthless.” Mr. Mervat Tallawy, Under-Secretary General of the U.N, is redubbed “an executive retard,” while the Economic and Social Commission for Beirut “never came through.” Her contempt is playful, creative, and scathing; just call her playa haidarter.

Yona Friedman & Jean-Baptiste Decavèle
Balkis Island, 1996 – 2000
Galerie Anne Barrault

This project uses photographs Decavèle took in the nearly inhabitable region between Greenland and the Bering Strait as a backdrop for Friedman’s ghostly Tipp-Ex (whiteout) drawings and transparencies. The images evoke an apocalyptic vastness; their collaboration, a striking loneliness.

Regina Virserius
Atlas-Imago Mundi, 2008
Eric Dupont

Regina Virserius’s photographs could serve as illustrations for a Michael Pollan book. Food (not too much, mostly plants) is presented cleanly on a black backdrop: bursting figs and ripe pomegranates, slim-stemmed leeks and glasses of milk, piles of grain and potatoes and water, tea, and coffee. Even the meats are easy on the eye: slick, smooth, and bloodless.

Galerie Alain Gutharc

Alain Dutharc’s booth looks just like a Paul Smith boutique – all reds and angles and taxidermy chic. Except it was designed by Christian Lacroix.