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imomusOne of the things the Unreliable Tour Guide says, in as quiet a voice as possible, when passing through Lucas DeGiulio's room at the Whitney (green bottles set into the wall offering views of a parallel world, twigs in pots) is that since delicacy, fragility and sensitivity are the ultimate taboos in this loud, brash world of ours, this is the most subversive work in the Biennial. And, you know, I sort of believe him. I mean... me.
On Saturday I left the Whitney early and headed for Chelsea. Because of my working hours, I haven't really had time over the last couple of months to comb through the commercial galleries in the world's densest art district. I only managed to see about a third of the shows before heading for Stux on West 25th to see an excellent Tamy Ben-Tor performance, but I thought I'd make some big generalisations here and just say that I thought the work I did see in the commercial galleries fell into four broad categories:
1. Parody-politics-porno-kitsch-satire-revulsion. This is bitter, cartoony work which hates yet also celebrates an age of cynicism. It's libertarian, but also attacks right wing libertarians, whose energy it cannibalizes in a rather disturbing way. It could be Ashley Bickerton depicting fat Western slobs on Bali or Ivan Witenstein's rambunctuous show at Derek Eller Gallery, "Infidelicious, U2, peace and other queer shit, Bonding across lines of difference. The abortion of cool, Grey Broadway, It's a ghetto sound wave now!" It shades off into a land of goofy, dorky cartoon imagery, like Sean Landers' drowning pig-beast or Uwe Henneken's funny Bob Ross-plus-goofy face paintings at Andrew Kreps (see photo above, right, also featuring Tracy Nakayama's reworkings of "The Joy of Sex"). Somehow all this imagery strikes me as manic, and I switch it off the way I switched off a one-hour Terry Gilliam animation special the other night on TV. It's just too violent and idiotic, even in its apparent condemnation of violence and idiocy.
2. Formalistic, rather dull. Helen Verhoeven at Wallspace might be an example, or some painter I saw whose gimmick is to paint the effect of shuttling a VHS video tape forward. This is mostly painting that looks like other painting. There are lots of rather dull galleries in Chelsea that show work that's probably worth a lot of money, or sells well, but just has this "art inspired by other art" look to it. It feels remote, academic and head-in-sand, not particularly trendy or angry or... well, anything, really. You walk in and walk out.
3. 80s-style glossy agit-prop liberalism-guilt, plus "world art". Jenny Holzer's show at Yvon Lambert sets the tone: Holzer has blown up classified documents about human rights abuses in Iraq. The show crackles with self-righteous anger. Or perhaps the Palestine show I saw on West 26th Street sums it up: pieces made by Palestinians, not particularly remarkable as art, but remarkable for their origin in a troubled warzone. This is art angry New York Democrats can get behind. Not nihilistic, guilty.
4. Twee, lyrical, funny, gentle, whimsical, poetic. Art for tender-minded introverts! This is where we came in! Lucas DeGiulio's work fits this category, and so do my friend Yuh-Shioh Wong's paintings. Roberta Smith in the New York Times was slightly impatient: "Ms. Wong's work falls into the overpopulated category of small, endearing, casually improvised art that seems to long for a lost childhood, but one hopes she is just passing through this stage... But her tendency toward cuteness is balanced by a likable recklessness and a clearly confident sense of color, scale and touch." It needn't be painting, though. Michael Bell-Smith's electronic work, shown at Foxy Production (a nice, twee gallery with good taste for good-hearted, shy people, the same way Tomlab is a nice, twee experimental label with good taste for good-hearted, shy people) is probably my favourite thing I saw in Chelsea this weekend. The Little Prince-like character above is a piece of his. It reminds me a bit of the work of my San Francisco friend Sean Talley. Sean makes absurdly, cutely reduced video games (follow the link to play one). He's also the boyfriend of Hikaru Furuhashi, who I blogged about in my Hello (and goodbye) flowers! piece about art and ethics.
This gentle, twee sensibility is, it seems to me, both playful and ethical. It's also thoroughly Japanese in its tender lyricism. Another American who's come to these values by way of a Japanese girlfriend is Lullatone's Shawn Seymour (actually, I believe he's now married to Yoshimi). A Japanese friend who makes work very much in this spirit is Tam Ochiai, who shows at Team Gallery. Words like "eccentric" and "fragile" come up in descriptions of Tam's work. I feel like he's "one of us" in the sense that he used to date Takako Minekawa, and his concerns are familiar to anyone who's been immersed in her 90s albums "Roomic Cube" and "Cloudy Cloud Calculator". I stole some of his puns when I put together the Mashroom Haircat project in Tokyo in 2001 with Emi Nekozawa, the cat girl ("haircat" is a Tam motif).
Tam dropped by the Whitney last week and we shared a cup of tea. He's a shy and attractive, somewhat feminine man, someone I'd fall for easily if I were a shy and attractive feminine girl (and Japanese). We'd go shopping together, at Agnes B, then buy some cakes. No doubt we'd be as wispily cute as the couple in Tam's little book, published in 2005 by Little More and Team, "Tail Tale". It's as cutely formalistic as you might expect. The story is of two friends, ttt and mmm. They're girls, and cats. They eat a lot of cakes together, and count the stars, and hook on different colours of tail each day. The atmosphere evokes Alice in Wonderland, Calvino's Cosmicomics, Olive magazine, Queneau's Zazie on the Metro...
I sat in a congee restaurant in Chinatown yesterday, feeling a bit frail, reading "Tail Tale", and was charmed, heartened and healed. The book felt like the biggest "fuck you" to war and brashness and violence anyone could deliver, and yet it wasn't saying "fuck you" at all. In fact, it was saying:
"Without meaning anything in particular, mmm said to ttt: "I really want to go to Brazil." ttt also thought that Brazil sounded good. It would probably be a lot of fun. Look at Brazilian music and you realize that somehow there is something just slightly sad about it. And what sort of tail do you suppose is fashionable in Brazil? Tails striped like school jackets in England, only with lots and lots of colors, etc."
There's also a character called Mr Beaver and one called Mr Squirrel, and they play chess. Whenever Mr Beaver is about to lose at chess he plucks out his cream-coloured front teeth and uses them as chess pieces. You have to read it for yourself, it's totally subversive!
On Saturday I left the Whitney early and headed for Chelsea. Because of my working hours, I haven't really had time over the last couple of months to comb through the commercial galleries in the world's densest art district. I only managed to see about a third of the shows before heading for Stux on West 25th to see an excellent Tamy Ben-Tor performance, but I thought I'd make some big generalisations here and just say that I thought the work I did see in the commercial galleries fell into four broad categories:
1. Parody-politics-porno-kitsch-satire-revulsion. This is bitter, cartoony work which hates yet also celebrates an age of cynicism. It's libertarian, but also attacks right wing libertarians, whose energy it cannibalizes in a rather disturbing way. It could be Ashley Bickerton depicting fat Western slobs on Bali or Ivan Witenstein's rambunctuous show at Derek Eller Gallery, "Infidelicious, U2, peace and other queer shit, Bonding across lines of difference. The abortion of cool, Grey Broadway, It's a ghetto sound wave now!" It shades off into a land of goofy, dorky cartoon imagery, like Sean Landers' drowning pig-beast or Uwe Henneken's funny Bob Ross-plus-goofy face paintings at Andrew Kreps (see photo above, right, also featuring Tracy Nakayama's reworkings of "The Joy of Sex"). Somehow all this imagery strikes me as manic, and I switch it off the way I switched off a one-hour Terry Gilliam animation special the other night on TV. It's just too violent and idiotic, even in its apparent condemnation of violence and idiocy.
2. Formalistic, rather dull. Helen Verhoeven at Wallspace might be an example, or some painter I saw whose gimmick is to paint the effect of shuttling a VHS video tape forward. This is mostly painting that looks like other painting. There are lots of rather dull galleries in Chelsea that show work that's probably worth a lot of money, or sells well, but just has this "art inspired by other art" look to it. It feels remote, academic and head-in-sand, not particularly trendy or angry or... well, anything, really. You walk in and walk out.
3. 80s-style glossy agit-prop liberalism-guilt, plus "world art". Jenny Holzer's show at Yvon Lambert sets the tone: Holzer has blown up classified documents about human rights abuses in Iraq. The show crackles with self-righteous anger. Or perhaps the Palestine show I saw on West 26th Street sums it up: pieces made by Palestinians, not particularly remarkable as art, but remarkable for their origin in a troubled warzone. This is art angry New York Democrats can get behind. Not nihilistic, guilty.
4. Twee, lyrical, funny, gentle, whimsical, poetic. Art for tender-minded introverts! This is where we came in! Lucas DeGiulio's work fits this category, and so do my friend Yuh-Shioh Wong's paintings. Roberta Smith in the New York Times was slightly impatient: "Ms. Wong's work falls into the overpopulated category of small, endearing, casually improvised art that seems to long for a lost childhood, but one hopes she is just passing through this stage... But her tendency toward cuteness is balanced by a likable recklessness and a clearly confident sense of color, scale and touch." It needn't be painting, though. Michael Bell-Smith's electronic work, shown at Foxy Production (a nice, twee gallery with good taste for good-hearted, shy people, the same way Tomlab is a nice, twee experimental label with good taste for good-hearted, shy people) is probably my favourite thing I saw in Chelsea this weekend. The Little Prince-like character above is a piece of his. It reminds me a bit of the work of my San Francisco friend Sean Talley. Sean makes absurdly, cutely reduced video games (follow the link to play one). He's also the boyfriend of Hikaru Furuhashi, who I blogged about in my Hello (and goodbye) flowers! piece about art and ethics.
This gentle, twee sensibility is, it seems to me, both playful and ethical. It's also thoroughly Japanese in its tender lyricism. Another American who's come to these values by way of a Japanese girlfriend is Lullatone's Shawn Seymour (actually, I believe he's now married to Yoshimi). A Japanese friend who makes work very much in this spirit is Tam Ochiai, who shows at Team Gallery. Words like "eccentric" and "fragile" come up in descriptions of Tam's work. I feel like he's "one of us" in the sense that he used to date Takako Minekawa, and his concerns are familiar to anyone who's been immersed in her 90s albums "Roomic Cube" and "Cloudy Cloud Calculator". I stole some of his puns when I put together the Mashroom Haircat project in Tokyo in 2001 with Emi Nekozawa, the cat girl ("haircat" is a Tam motif).
Tam dropped by the Whitney last week and we shared a cup of tea. He's a shy and attractive, somewhat feminine man, someone I'd fall for easily if I were a shy and attractive feminine girl (and Japanese). We'd go shopping together, at Agnes B, then buy some cakes. No doubt we'd be as wispily cute as the couple in Tam's little book, published in 2005 by Little More and Team, "Tail Tale". It's as cutely formalistic as you might expect. The story is of two friends, ttt and mmm. They're girls, and cats. They eat a lot of cakes together, and count the stars, and hook on different colours of tail each day. The atmosphere evokes Alice in Wonderland, Calvino's Cosmicomics, Olive magazine, Queneau's Zazie on the Metro...
I sat in a congee restaurant in Chinatown yesterday, feeling a bit frail, reading "Tail Tale", and was charmed, heartened and healed. The book felt like the biggest "fuck you" to war and brashness and violence anyone could deliver, and yet it wasn't saying "fuck you" at all. In fact, it was saying:
"Without meaning anything in particular, mmm said to ttt: "I really want to go to Brazil." ttt also thought that Brazil sounded good. It would probably be a lot of fun. Look at Brazilian music and you realize that somehow there is something just slightly sad about it. And what sort of tail do you suppose is fashionable in Brazil? Tails striped like school jackets in England, only with lots and lots of colors, etc."
There's also a character called Mr Beaver and one called Mr Squirrel, and they play chess. Whenever Mr Beaver is about to lose at chess he plucks out his cream-coloured front teeth and uses them as chess pieces. You have to read it for yourself, it's totally subversive!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 03:55 pm (UTC)whatever happened to the gentle people?
Date: 2006-05-15 03:58 pm (UTC)Yes, I think the world needs more of this.
I think we're seeing the death of moronic cynicism as you put it, but like the iraqi insurgency, its death throes may last a good while, particularly in a society that values kool above kawaii.
For instance, off the sophomoric but intermittently amusing SomethingAwful.com, their Field Guide to American Hipsters Part II. (http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3585) Note the Jarvis Cocker vs. Sailor Moon illustration on the first page, and the entry for "twee twits" on page 2. Is this all just black-goth-fashion-skulls in better clothes? Or on some level are the SA team poking fun at the absurdity by taking on an ironic meta-hipster role in narrating all this?
Re: whatever happened to the gentle people?
Date: 2006-05-15 04:09 pm (UTC)I don't think I qualify as a Twee Twit (http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3585&p=2):
simply too soft and gentle for this world
Hmm, yes and no. I have to wear ear protectors because New York is so noisy, but that's because my ears are fucked after decades of loudness and excess.
He cannot abide bright colors or harsh materials, so he is usually swaddled in soft, pastel sweaters and corduroy pants.
I like bright colours, they remind me of the 1960s. But I also like soft clothes, and am wearing corduroy pants right now.
He might have a beard, because shaving is far too scary
Nice explanation for stubble, yes!
He is mumbly and soft-spoken, but he doesn’t mind being unintelligible; he wouldn’t want to impose upon you unduly by putting forward an idea.
NO! I SHOUT THROUGH A BULLHORN AND BLOG BIG IDEAS WHICH I THEN FIGHT OVER!
He’s a cat person.
Yes!
He’s almost too much of a feminist to tolerate the act of sexual intercourse.
No! When it comes to sexual intercourse I am rather macho! Plunge and stab!
He’s had the same girlfriend for eight years, and he doesn’t mind the fact that she’s gained a little weight. They throw the nicest dinner parties.
Absolutely not!
Belle & Sebastian
No way, too rock and roll! Give me Lullatone any day!
Re: whatever happened to the gentle people?
Date: 2006-05-15 04:30 pm (UTC)however, I think everyone knows someone who is!
Recently Chart magazine (Canadian) put a group photo of Broken Social Scene on the cover and it seemed to be 30 identikit scruffy-to-extravagantly-bearded guys, plus a couple of women. And looking at a lot of band photos lately, it seems the dandy aesthetic in pop culture is MIA.
Re: whatever happened to the gentle people?
Date: 2006-05-15 06:03 pm (UTC)Re: whatever happened to the gentle people?
Date: 2006-05-16 04:16 am (UTC)The calm before the storm, I assure you.
Re: whatever happened to the gentle people?
Date: 2006-05-15 07:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 05:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 07:22 pm (UTC)i want some of that soup. it would go well with the saltines i'm eating already 'cause i'm sick.
the words "Mashroom" & "Haircat" make me really really happy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 11:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 08:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 03:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 06:07 am (UTC)Michael Bell-Smith
Date: 2006-05-15 08:24 pm (UTC)Now thanks very much for steering me toward Michael Bell-Smith. Watching the movie of the cascade of parallel horizons (a dreamy, cruddy, bronzy reminiscence of 16-bit Super Nintendo landscapes) was one of the loveliest things of art I've seen since I've been smart enough to look at art en general.
Re: Michael Bell-Smith
Date: 2006-05-15 10:54 pm (UTC)The generalisations are just a plot to hang specifics on... like Bell-Smith.
Now, where's that movie you're talking about?
Re: Michael Bell-Smith
Date: 2006-05-15 10:58 pm (UTC)Re: Michael Bell-Smith
Date: 2006-05-16 12:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 02:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 03:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:37 am (UTC)"fat Western slobs"
There's maybe been a bit of an emphasis in the underground on being "wispy" as a prerequisite for being a good-hearted, shy person. Perhaps we're still reeling from William Howard Taft in the States, but it seems like a tacit connection has been made between body mass and personality. That's...sick. And I'm not saying that because I happen to be fat; I'm saying that because I happen to be fat, and good-hearted, silly. I won't say I'm twee, but I will say I'm silly.
I realize that "fatness" has become complicit with "Americanness" for many people, and for good reason: we're a fat fucking country. But at the same time, we must always remember: body mass does not equal character content.
OK. So maybe I'm off-base, or paranoid, or a combination of the two. If I'm completely wrong about this subtle strain running through the underground world, then please, Momus et al., tell me. Otherwise...why?
-Rob
Aww! Show a little h
Date: 2006-06-06 07:58 pm (UTC)In contrast it strikes me as pretty anti-idiotic.
Highly subjective though. Shouldnt be the worst thing in art.
I wouldnt put it in a political context of "violence" at all.
But maybe im missing something.