LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 77

The flight from New York to Paris is just a couple of hours longer than the flight to L.A. so when my editor gave me the choice of covering Art Los Angeles Contemporary or the Paris/Nice bicycle race it was, as they say in neighboring Belgium a pas de cerveau (trans. 'no brainer'). 

What I know about bicycle racing barely extends beyond what I've picked up peddling along the Manhattan waterfront with my regular posse of stock analysts and security traders. They told me to watch Germany's John Degenkolb and that while in Paris I should go to Dominique Bouchet and make sure to order the rack of lamb. I mention this to illustrate just how out of touch the Wall Street crowd is from the rest of us. To think that someone who makes a living writing art criticism would spend sixty bucks on a piece of meat even if it did come with polenta is more evidence than I'll ever need to see just how insulated these guys are.

But the sad and indisputable fact remains that it is they, my buddies in their ridiculous lycra bicycle tights, who are closer to the pulse of the art world than I'll ever be.

While sharing a couple of fabulous bottles of Pouilly Fumé with some Italian sportswriters I was reminded of just how marginal we arts professionals are with our expensive graduate degrees and fancy specializations. Here in Magny-Cours where the race just completed its third stage nothing could be further from the world of ideas. My Italian colleagues are bemused at best at the thought that someone would be willing to shell out 36 million euros on a stainless steel balloon dog. To them it's just another symptom of the madness of money. What gets them impressed (and their astonishment is truly contagious) is when a man can cycle over 1500 kilometers in a week's time and not collapse into a coma.  

Right before I left, my buddy Nathan, a market maker at Nyx Securities (can someone please tell me what a market maker makes) bought a small sculpture at an art fair in Madrid. It's by a young Catalan artist named Eddie Jiro who though well known in Europe is just beginning to make a name for himself in New York.

Probar mis Calzoncillos, mixed media, Eddie Jiro 2014

Without batting an eye, Nat paid 74,000 euro.

He thinks it was a bargain.

I did the research.

He's right.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 68

The fine art of photography is a frail craft crushed under the democratizing weight of the smart phone.

Only cataracted conservatives and technology infatuated Tories would deny this lamentable yet incontrovertible reality. For years we've been tipped off by Webster's with their recent inclusion of the term 'visual asset' as a feeble futuristic synonym for the word 'picture.'

One notable exception is the work of the French Canadian artist Jean-Marie Mikita.

Cecilia of Les Andelys, Ciba-Gel chrome print on linen, Jean-Marie Mikita 2013

Mikita's work, well-known for years in the francophone world, has only recently come to the critical attention of the New York art press. With his ironic meta-narrative critiques of the medium itself, the work bounces and distorts like a series of fun house mirrors steeped in Lacanian jouissance.  

Cecilia of Les Andelys which I recently saw in an exhibition at Fortune & Price, is a billiard table of rebounding references that call to mind the monumental still-lives of George Braque.

Mikita is certainly a talent worth watching. Whether he can remain vital while using the fossilized medium of photography is still an open question.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: THE CORPORATE CABARET VOLTAIRE

I recently attended a seminar called Mindfulness & Self Realization. The focus was on what was called "self-defeatism." It was hosted by the Milestone Colloquium, a company that specializes in what is known as the "Human Renovation" industry. Often overlooked by both economists and government officials alike this under-regulated industry generates somewhere between 300 and 700 million dollars a year.

The reason why I went was because the featured

Micah Carpentier, 1972

speaker was Roberto Carpentier-Katz, nephew of the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier. Katz is the executor of the Carpentier estate as well as the executive director of the Micah Carpentier Foundation in Barcelona. His credentials as a motivational speaker seemed dubious at best so I asked my editor Dolphy Cane to send me to Los Angeles to find out what this was all about.

I've long been fascinated by the developed world's obsession with personal growth and repair. While most of the planet is too preoccupied with the existential necessities of finding food and potable water, we in the West are unique in our preoccupation with happiness. The added enigma of Carpentier's involvement gave me the perfect opportunity to witness one of these forums first hand.

The workshop took place at one of those

nondescript corporate auditoriums with uncomfortable chairs, a scarcity of windows and a surplus of harsh florescent lighting. Carpentier's presentation was a boilerplate of recovery jargon, watered down Schopenhauer and a dog's breakfast of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy-lite. 

Things got interesting midway when he unexpectedly brought up his uncle. 

In 1972, shortly before his death, Carpentier published a marvelously strange pamphlet entitled The 48 Stations of Ecstasy. It was a satirical manifesto impishly written in the spirit of Dada. Long forgotten by all save for a few Carpentier scholars the work offers comic advice for the disquieted and the lovelorn. Arch recommendations like "create your future because the past can't be plagiarized" and "imagination is anti-democratic" are characteristic of this hilariously mocking compendium of empty aphorisms. 

That his nephew Roberto is now peddling his parody as a legitimate self-help manual would undoubtedly give the mischievous Micah a wicked, antic, artistic pleasure.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 51

Of the seventy-nine insider trading convictions meted out since 2009, seventy-four of the convicted felons were high-profile art collectors. This amazing statistic had gone unnoticed until one of the remaining five philistines recently decided to curate a show.

Arjam Mahandraberg, date unknown

Arjam Mahandraberg, a former analyst for GRD London has put together one of the most unusual exhibitions of the season. If there are consistent threads of taste among the miscreants I will leave it to others to tease them out. To me, the only common denominators were the State of Connecticut and the price tags.

The unusual venue for the exhibition, a former boxing gym on Peck Slip in way downtown New York, is close enough yet far enough from Wall Street to allow the obvious ironies to marinate.

All the art in the show is for sale having been duly

Dirge, Currado Malaspina, 1998

confiscated by the Feds as ill gotten non-fungible assets. The arbitrary, almost callous installation of the extremely uneven work gives the show an upscale thrift store feel which is not altogether inappropriate. Pieces by artists as varied as Koons, Coswell, Malaspina and Katz can now be seen as a form of contraband giving their works a mutinous, innovative recalcitrance, a quality they so sorely lack on their own.

One leaves the exhibition with the distinct impression that if this is any evidence of the cultivation and taste that money buys then indeed crime does not pay.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NUMBER 41

There's a very special West Coast form of domesticated cool. Every time I visit a gallery, art museum or art fair in southern California I imagine opening up a micro-brewery or inventing some new recipe for double-yeast artisanal egg bread. 

Don't get me wrong. Living the past four years in Williamsburg I'm no stranger to countercultural commodification. Together with black and white cookies, onion bagels and pizza, branding bohemia is something of a New York City specialty. 

But there's something about the Pacific Ocean that bevels any edge that might survive among the fringe.

I was recently in Los Angeles covering yet another Art Fair, this one taking place in an impossibly lit former airport hanger in Santa Monica. I was reminded of Duchamp's famous complaint about the redundant beauty of nature. Every single work in that overly capacious space looked, smelled and tasted like "Art." 

Beastiality XXI, Youseff Zved, 2014

 From Youseff Zved's Beastiality paintings to Maristella Lvov's 'Redwood' holograms the walls were replete with that icy self-consciousness of hip, academic detachment. Even Eckel Moonse's typically transgressive videos looked like infomercials as they were projected in high definition on monumental razor-thin liquid crystal screens.

One notable exception was the work of the Paris-based artist Currado Malaspina. His new series of large works on paper, taxonomie dix-Neuf, are sly, private, poetic enigmas that deal with the arbitrary coding of language and the proto-humanization of signs.

taxonomie dix-Neuf N.14, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Malaspina's hot flame of disjunctive ambiguity felt conspicuously out of place hung next to the cool chic work of his contemporaries. But then again, Currado has always been such a square. 

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NO. 33

One terrific advantage of being a New York critic in L.A. is that you are automatically endowed with advantages that would be unimaginable in the brawling, hip-checking, high-paced competitive intellectual world  of Manhattan.

As a visiting writer I was entitled, together with a very intimate circle of about 200 international colleagues, to preview the LA Convention Center's LA Art Show of 2014.

At the risk of alienating the local scribes who by contract were banned from the pre-pre-preview I would like to offer a brief assessment of this West Coast grand bizarre of pictures, statues and prints.

My choice of words are deliberate for though the event is billed as an "art show," the format resembles more a county fair than a cathedral of culture. Lacking even the slightest pretense toward gravity or high mindedness the tin chorus of cubicles are filled with what can only be described as potential components of snazzy interior design. That the investment potential of these baubles is foregrounded by the participants never for a moment dispels the obvious neutrality of the works at hand.

Gliedmann no.11, Lars GroßesJuwel, 2013

Even the controversial Berlin based artist, Lars GroßesJuwel's monumental steel sculpture Gliedmann no.11 was tamed by its surroundings. Measuring close to 35 feet in height and 120 feet in length, the work was situated just outside the center's South Hall J. I must say that in the bright southern Californian light it looked more like a dismantled billboard than a disruptive "interplay of irony and subversion."*

It's fair to note one notable but qualified exception. Toward the back of Hall K in booth number 61a5 - shared by the Vienna based gallery Malen nach Zahlen and L.A.'s Torn Curtain - is an interesting project by the local artist Dahlia Danton. Metro Stations of the Cross consists of 347 small drawings of churches, cathedrals and monasteries throughout Athens and its environs.

Metro Stations of the Cross no. 212, Dahlia Danton 2013

 With funds from the Hellenic Center of Arts and Culture and the Orange County Martial Fund Danton traveled to Greece to document every Christian house of worship within striking distance of public transportation. This impressive project was thwarted when Danton was severely stricken with food poisoning but she did manage to nearly complete the Athenian leg of her journey.

I was so taken by the work that as soon as I was done with the dim task of writing about the fair for Dolphy Cane's Vernissage Magazine, I hopped on a plane for Mykonos where I'm defering the churches in favor of the beaches and the pubs.

*From the catalog essay by Los Angeles critic Frank Gilui 

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NO. 29

Up until a few months ago, my familiarity with the work of Cuban artist Micah Carpentier was casual at best. Though very much a part of the standard Latin American art historical narrative, his stature has always been dimmed by the legends of Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera. Attempts to correct this traditional misjudgement have been feeble at best.

from The Song of Degrees, Micah Carpentier, 1971 (courtesy of the Carpentier Foundation, Madrid)

It has been my great good fortune to have recently made the acquaintance of Carpentier's nephew Roberto Carpentier-Katz . A native of Puerto Rico, Carpentier-Katz divides his time between Manhattan and Madrid where he directs the Carpentier Foundation. His is a labor of love since the Rivera-Kahlo lobby has done everything in their power to suppress or diminish his uncle's legacy.  

I made a special trip to Spain in order to research the Carpentier archive as part of a book I am writing about the relationship between Roberto Bolaño, José Bañón and Micah Carpentier and I was astounded by what I saw.

Aside from the remarkable work, the press clippings alone added up into a veritable bildungsroman of hope, triumph and crushing despair, a dispiriting story worthy of the most tragic of operas.

Nonetheless I came away fairly ebullient. How often does one discover for oneself new source of cultural caché? Few of my hipster colleagues in Brooklyn had ever heard of Carpentier. My editor, Dolphy Cane thinks there isn't much of a story here and my girl friend who is an adjunct professor of Latin American Literature is stubbornly convinced that the whole thing is a hoax.

Which is all fine with me. I will bask in my uniqueness for a little while longer while I wait for the world to catch up.