Flip assessment.
Plagens, Peter
To the Editors:
First Thoughts on Flipping Through the September 2008 Issue of
Artforum
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Cover: Jesus, there's ten bucks' worth of paper alone in
this thing. It's like the September Vogue, in more ways than one,
actually. Take the cover photo, for instance.
Inside front cover: Everybody's got a Chinese artist ... or
they did up until this summer. Now Korean artists are de rigueur too.
And it's always--well, not always--about an agglomeration of a
whole lot of little things.
Page 10: All those Asian artists and yet the Contributors are still
ail white.
Page 13: Cecily Brown--I just don't get it. So militantly
ordinary. Is there a catch? If you squint, does something weird appear?
Page 15: Steve McQueen--"We also celebrate the recent success
of his first feature film." Everybody wants to direct.
Page 16: Mario Merz--that's the way you should look when
you're an old artist. As craggily wise as the Sphinx but with
fuck-you hair. Go, sideburns!
Page 51: Christian Marclay--Paula Cooper wouldn't just trot
out that old Video Quartet, would she? Naw, probably new work. I'd
rather it were the old multiscreen, projected Video Quartet, though.
Couldn't get enough of it when it was first out, keep wanting to
see it again.
Page 56: So that's the end of the full-page ads leading up to
the columns. A mil-page ad in Artforum says "important!" no
matter what you put in it. And the idea behind them seems to be not to
inform (i.e., show what the art looks like) but to tease, with little
ironies.
Pages 58-59: A two-page spread for a grand gallery, Capitain &
Petzel, located in Berlin on Karl-Marx-Allee. I'm not the only one
to see the irony in that, right?
Page 61: The wrong font for the headline word shit in the Andres
Serrano ad; neither says shit nor goes way against it for effect. You
gotta be Ed Ruscha to do these things right. And the sense most
associated with the perception of shit is smell. I bet it's missing
in the show.
Page 71: My son in LA likes Michel Houellbecq. (Then again, he
likes documentaries on Ed Gein.) I always liked Robbe-Grillet.
What's that one I read, about the mirror in the room? And those
Nouvelle Vague films--some of them made from Robbe-Grillet scripts--when
I was in college: You got to see bare breasts. The article's only a
couple of pages; I should read it.
Page 80: Clever ad for Mary Ellen Carroll. I have no idea who she
is, though. I have no idea who 75 percent of the artists advertised in
Artforum are. I'm slowly losing it, falling behind. But the query
on Phillips stationery settles as too cute, and I end up mildly
resenting the ad. But then, mild resentment is my default setting.
Page 83: Anne d'Harnoncourt at age thirty with that ridiculous
beribboned pigtail. Most memorable thing in the magazine so far. Do the
youngsters know who she was? Do they care?
Page 94: Nice placement for the Yves Saint Laurent ad. Close enough
to a gallery ad to kind of fit, but then slightly "off," so
you stop and take a look. What did they oil her up with? Is that why
there's plastic on the wall?
Page 109: Gay art, right? A guy's packet on an iPhone photo.
If it were upskirt with panties, would I think it so wearisome?
Page 129: You can't even do Medardo Rosso straight, i.e., a
full picture of a nice sculpture in the ad. It has to look like Alien to
get any attention. Page 133: I know I'm a conservative, because
this Caro gets to me. The angles, abutments, overlaps, hollows, etc.,
plus the risky yellow and the faint whiff of furniture--they're all
delicious.
Pages 140-141: Nice conflation, again, of fashion and art. Except I
don't want to buy a shirt half of whose inflated price pays for
this ad.
Page 143: I refuse to read about "Experiment Marathon
Reykjavik."
Page 152: Ultraclean typographic ad from Marc Jacobs: "You
know very well who we are. You should be grateful we even reveal the
names of the cities where our stores are located." Did you read the
profile in the New Yorker? That'd put anybody off.
Page 156: Cesar--big thumbs, cars on the walls at the Venice
Biennale. Never got him, either. Seemed like being French could ruin an
Oldenburg. And there's "priority admission" for this guy?
Like, people are standing in line?
Page 165: "Service Aesthetics"--I gotta read this one
because, well, it'll be on the test.
Page 173: That chalky burnt orange! What a color! I could use it
for collages, but I don't want to fuck up my copy of the magazine.
What to do?
Page 183: Josef Strau's "Top Ten." This guy is so
serious, his little blurbs are more like tiny lectures.
Pages 186-192: Big investment by Bfasblondeau.com in Geneva--seven
consecutive full-page ads. The pages are too dissimilar, though, for
collective impact. But, c'mon, Plagens, this isn't selling
soap to the masses. A different kind of coding is at work here.
Pages 194-195: 'S MaxMara--am I seeing a pattern here? Was
there a whole lotta negotiating in the pacing of the fashion ads
throughout the magazine? Obviously, the clothes purveyors wanted to pop
up "unexpectedly" among the gallery ads, so that fine-art
pixie dust would rub off on them.
Page 199: Ah, the "Previews." There's one I wrote in
here somewhere. That's why they sent me this phone book of a
magazine for free. I got sixty bucks for the preview. Somehow, the
magazine seems a more substantial payment.
Page 207: 1 shouldn't pick on Rachel Churner; she's
innocent and didn't write the author's credit. But this
"[So-and-so] is a [wherever|-based [whatever]" stuff has got
to go. I understand the inference we're supposed to draw, that
artists or writers or curators or whoevers aren't bound by
geography. You can paint or be a professor in Podunk and still hop on
the Web or on a plane and go global. Even New Yorkers don't want to
seem like they're not as well acquainted with Shanghai or Doha as
they are with Chelsea and the Museum Mile. If I had any guts, I'd
rebel next time: "Peter Plagens is an artist who lives down on
White Street." Or irony: "Peter Plagens is a White
Street-based painter."
Page 221: David LaChapelle--about as tasteless as you can get,
precisely because it's so bowdlerized into tastefulness. But
that's probably the point: Making war-is-hell look like
movie-poster not-hell is supposed to remind us how society bowdlerizes
war. Makes Martha Rosier look like John Heartfield.
Page 223: A curator of European sculpture on Andrea
Palladio--Artforum wouldn't stick something so pedantic-looking
into this mix, would they, unless there were something special to it?
Bookmark and read.
Page 224: As of now: a moratorium on automobiles made out of
something peculiar.
Page 234: Okwui Enwezor pull quote: "I wanted to imagine Asia
as part of the new destination of the evolving system of global art and
cultural markets." As we used to say at Newsweek, "News
flash!" I probably should read this just like a Wall Street Journal
writer should read an interview with Secretary Paulson, but I think
I'll pass.
Page 248: Ah, there's my "Preview." I thought it was
a little gem when I wrote it, but it doesn't read any better than
anybody else's.
Page 249: Do these full-page ads buried in the center of the
magazine (please, dear God, let me be at least halfway through by now!)
have any impact? By the time you get to them, you've OD'd on
cleverness. Pages 249-395: A dead zone of total ads. Nothing less than a
full page has any impact at all, I'd guess. It's all a blur to
me.
Page 396: I don't know who Michael Clark is, hut then again,
what I know about dance you could, as the radio comedian Fred Allen used
to say, put into a thimble and still have room left over for an
agent's heart. I do go to a recital once in a blue moon, and 1
usually like everything I see. All right, this is a must-read.
Page 412: Given Kenneth Anger and given the photograph (one Hitler
Youth's arm around the back, and hand on the shoulder, of another;
the embracer is starting to giggle and the embracee looks a little
"Uh-oh"), I suppose the essay--and Anger's film, Ich
Will!--is about gayness in Nazidom. Got to read this one, too.
Page 424: I usually hate "appreciations," because, coming
along as they do long after the obits and way before the serious,
researched assessments, they're usually celebrity friends of the
deceased in the grip of the impossible task of having to say something
hagiographic and trenchant at the same time. But Rauschenberg is a giant
and these people are the real deal. So I'll read 'em all.
Page 442: "Openings." On a hunch--and because life is
short--I'll pass. May history prove me wrong.
Page 451: A fuck photo, right there in Artforum. Does the art
department at Idaho State subscribe? As I'm wont to do, I went
right to the conclusion of the Jeff Koons review and read, "These
works stand, like the subject of Brooks's Paradise Spell, between
the present and the future--but they betray less heaven's proximity
than the obscene folly of its very idea." OK, I'll put ten
bucks on the rest of the review's revealing that this reviewer is
dissing Koons while trying real hard not to look like he's square.
Have to read the whole thing to find out.
Page 456: It's a crapshoot as to which reviews to read. Nobody
can read them all, and it feels, well, irresponsible not to read any. I
do like the way tiny reproductions function, as did the Colt .45 in the
Old West, as the great equalizer. Here, at least, painting and sculpture
stand a chance against all those vast, electrified installations.
Page 485: Inevitable, wasn't it: a Ph.D. program for artists.
Yeah, it says here the degree is in art history, but it's "for
artists with a substantive academic background in art history and theory
who wish to pursue their research in an environment geared towards
doctoral study." "Research" or "art," or are
they synonymous? And c'mon, it ain't the
"environment," it's the piece o' paper with
"Ph.D." on it. "Dr. Rauschenberg? Yes, we have a very
nice table right down front for you. Enjoy your evening." Nothing
wrong with artists having Ph.Ds, but they should get Ph.Ds in something
real (like German or civil engineering) and then go be artists if they
want to. I'll get flack for saying this. They'll say,
"Know-nothing." I'll say, "Warehousing people and
milking tuition out of them is still warehousing people."
Inside back cover: "Hip Hop's Crown Jewels"--an
auction at Phillips. Yawn.
Back cover: Somehow, the Bruno Bischofbergcr ads still do it for
me. Somebody ought to do a retrospective of them. But man, are those
kids white.
--Peter Plagens
New York
A TRIBUTE TO
KENNETH ANGER MICHAEL CLARK
