The Beastly Life by Sally Eckhoff

My Front Legs

The Kentucky Derby ran itself out in a cloud of controversy and damage. I watched the race, and had to keep reminding my astounded companions that the horse who came in just behind Big Brown was indeed the filly, Eight Belles. But shortly thereafter, the camera strayed and showed, for a second, the unmistakable black body of that filly lying motionless on the track. "What's she doing over there?" one of my friends asked. "That couldn't have been her coming across the finish line." For a second we thought a horse had gone down around the first turn and the field had simply run away from it. But that turned out not to be true.

Big Brown pulled wide for an awe-inspiring win, and the seventeen-hand filly, Eight Belles, who came in second, continued her "gallop-out." All racehorses do this after a race; they can't simply be slowed to a walk after they cross the finish line. While Eight Belles was gradually throttling down her torrid pace, she started galloping funny, her jockey said. Then she went down. She had smashed both front fetlocks (ankles) and fallen to the track. She had compound fractures, if you can imagine it. The vet was on the track with a euthanizing shot even before the race crew had time to erect the barrier around her. She was dead as dead could be.

I just got home from buying a bottle of wine, and the guy behind the counter is a pedigree consultant. I had to ask them what that meant. He said, "I help people buy racehorses." His take was that the Derby is a tough race for fillies with such a big field. They bump each other around so much. He speculated that she might have had a heart attack and fractured her fetlocks after that. Who the hell knows. Anyway, he went on to say, "breeders are killing the sport." They're retiring horses too early—Bernardini and Hard Spun, for example—and starting horses way too early, too. He described how a two-year-old who can run really fast training fractions can bring a higher price than an untested horse, but that such a two-year-old might not really be ready to run that fast. The guy said that Eight Belles really shouldn't have been in the race in the first place. She was big—a seventeen-hand three-year-old. Jesus.

I don't think Polytrack will help. I don't think anything will help. The owners are too eager to make a profit off the price they pay to buy a horse, so they're not going to want to keep these young horses at home while they develop. But they should. I wouldn't race them until they were five if it were up to me, and I know some exercise riders who agree with me. I have never discussed this with a jockey, though. I'd like to.

Artists' Statements: Cool to Read

Check these out...there are some surprising things here"

http://www.pegi-eyers.com/txt/77_artists_statements.html

Thanks to Pegi Eyers for compiling these.

On the roster of things to do in 2008

My revealing weakness.

http://www.skowheganstatefair.com/agrifairs.htm

Overheard at Peace 2000, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn

"We always like to think that natural things come easy."—Henrietta Mantooth, painter

"I hope my stuff's awful enough to get in."—Anonymous, spoken of Art Omi, an art foundation outside of Hudson, NY

"People self-replicate instead of running against the grain."—Marvin Cohen, writer

"We all need to get out more."—Someone popping their third beer

"I had a really good time yesterday. I tried on thirty dresses."—Young woman

"Can you add your pigment to any kind of house paint?"—Grown-up man

"Smell me. I think it's vanilla."—Another grown-up man

"I asked the students where they were going for winter break, and and they say things like, 'Antarctica.'"—A dedicated university professor

"Are you in this show?"
"No."
"Say yes. No one will know the difference."—Someone else

Brooklyn is the place to be. Sideshow's huge group show (more than three hundred artists) is a high-quality hodgepodge, cram-'em-up-to-the-ceiling style—fairly common in downtown venues now, and more a decorating scheme than a piss-take on the French salon esthetic. Here, it delineates the idea that getting onto a wall in any New York borough is the best anyone can do. You're going to have a lot of company, so you might as well learn to dig the atmosphere. This gallery definitely makes that sour little dose of reality into a decent flavoring for the salad of work. This show is all ostentation, acrobatics, pomp, and humor.
There are lots of things to like here: Jerelyn Hanrahan's two ceramic busts, Fred Gutzeit's psychedelic paintings and drawings—hyperrealized, labor-intensive. Also a string of beeswax hand grenades, Claude Carone's murky, classical abstraction, Portia Munson's big flower C-print, something by Carl Fudge, a molten blue powdered lumpy panel by Art Guerra, Tim Wilson's rural tableaux painted on trophy plaques, Francine Tint's painted nougat, Vincint McLaughlin's striped lozenge that looks like an exotic beetle that got run over by a road-painting truck, Katherine Bradford's two guys lugging a canoe, Eung Ho Park's wild irises (the kind in your eyes) mounted inside bottlecaps, and Joe Ballweg's ink wash of a supplicant (or a hostage).

What Performance Artists Are Doing: A Critic's Guide

The useful list, by Diane Torr, Edinburgh, Scotland

the don't do it again performance
oh you did do it again performance
oh well don't do it again performance
ok stop it this time ok performance
oh you did it again performance
will you ever learn performance
why is your face red performance

What Sculptors Are Doing: A Critic's Guide

Useful categories for understanding sculpture, compiled with the help of Jeffrey Hannigan, professor of Industrial Design at Fitchburg State College and MIT:

The Whatsit
The Useless Piece of Furniture
The Lecture on the Wall
The Surveillance Equipment Intrusion
Graduate Student With A Crane
I Hate My Body (And Yours Too)*
Didn't Ann Hamilton Already Do That?

*a subset of It Sucks To Be Human

A New Kind of Book Review: Jean Lowe at McKenzie Fine Art

Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion
Jean Lowe
February 14–March 15, 2008
McKenzie Fine Art Inc.
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.mckenziefineart.com

Someone—it may have been Robert Hughes, in a long-ago appraisal of Julian Schnabel's output—commented that although anyone can elevate his or her social status by buying a painting, nobody gets much of a boost from buying a book. Not true, you're thinking. There's nothing like settling down in a busy café and cracking open a copy of Ferdydurke or What Is The What. Depending on the crowd you run with, though, the books that make you look best may be the ones the fewest people seem to want to read. Think what we would have learned about each other if we'd gone around slipping twenty dollar bills into every shelf copy of A Brief History of Time.
Fake books, the kind we used to make in high school theater clubs, would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. No, not The Yellow River by I.P. Daly or Jump Off The Bridge by Hugo Fürst. Jean Lowe's fake books on display at the Mackenzie gallery in Chelsea, in Manhattan, are hand-built of pâpier-maché and painted with enamel à la Red Grooms in his Ruckus projects. They are revealing of a lot of common poses and wishes, and thus are not only very funny but eerily instructive. Over a hundred of them are arranged on big, Ikea-style bookshelves, also pâpier-maché, and there's also a pâpier-maché grand piano in the middle of the room. A grand piano in anyone's living room is, of course, the sign of a cultured family, and this one looks like the real item on first glance. But it's actually a snack dispenser. Standing next to it, I heard melting ice dripping out a plastic hose into a bucket.

This show accomplishes a lot of things at once. It lampoons the collecting of art as a social qualifier, makes fun of the Christian right (examples to come), and above all piques the citizens—most of the population, apparently—who don't read books about anything important. Jean Lowe's titles are all nonfiction, and it's all, in a sense, about you.
The construction of these objects—execution, materials, a temporary feel that suggests parade floats—is exactingly funny. The typefaces are roughed in and retain the character they do in a good book cover: the graphic design says "cheap," or "girly," or "buy me, you sucker," or all three. Some of these titles, such as Exclusive Spas of the World and The Doubleday Illustrated Children's Bible could easily be real, but not the situations they're presented in. Help me Make Up My Mind, Lord comes with a cover illustration of a tray of gooey doughnuts. A Sense of Place, which seems like it ought to be a nature book, has a picture of a sprawling southwestern suburb on the jacket. Rural America is decorated with a Cargill plant. And Invasive Species proudly presents a picture of a KFC bucket and an empty Pepsi takeout cup with what looks like Korean characters on it. There are a lot of people I'd like to give Lowe's version of Family Values to. Right under the title is a photo of a fat, self-satisfied SUV.

But if we're giving out prizes for laugh potential, the titles that don't need visual explanations are very possibly the best. Panhandling Pointers, The Philosophy of Binge Drinking, A Shiv for Sheila, Hospice Lockdown (a Tom Clancy murder mystery), and my favorite, Hey, I'm Trying to Get Stoned Here, work fine by themselves. It's tempting to wonder whether Jean Lowe gets together with her friends and a couple of cases of beer to make this stuff up. If so, whoever thought of Foucault on Bull deserves a night on the town.

Okay, okay, you may be sighing—we get the joke. The strength of this exhibition, though, is in the examination of what sort of humor this really is. There are several different strains here: the icon-busting, the embarrassing, the counterintuitive goofiness à la mode. I especially liked The Clue in the Meth Lab by Carolyn Keene, nineteen-fifties period-correct in orange on cop blue, with a colophon of Nancy in silhouetted profile, magnifying glass in hand. In First Time for Skipper, the cover illo makes it looks like she's being picked up by her (female) gym teacher. So you see, there are other appetitites at work: the agony of retro awkwardness, the uncompromising nature of real art (exemplified by a bloody Judith and the Head of Holofernes on a Bible study book), the futility of the self-help ideal, and the unavoidable truth of just plain bad behavior. You may have to dig hard to figure this out, but this is all message stuff. Just Ask God—Lasting Freedom from Joint Pain has a garden slug on the cover. It's refreshingly absurd until you realize that slugs have no joints.

Decent funny art is all too rare, and it must be said that the best part of this show its be its pessimism. It is good to be reminded that we, as artists and art-goers, aren't above any of the pretensions Lowe mocks. At the same time, these could be the ultimate Baudrillardian objects: all books, we realize, are reproductions with no originals. There are no fancy editions of bestsellers for fancy people: all books are read alike (albeit at different speeds), an inevitability enforced by the Dale Carnegie-esque title, Your Purpose In Life, with the picture of a woman flipping burgers on a vast grill. And although it's amusing enough to have a chuckle at the expense of the squeaky-clean family values people, with all their purpose-driven rhetoric, Growing Up Isn't Easy, Lord when your dad is sitting next to your two-year-old self getting hammered on Michelob Light, as he is in yet another one of Lowe's books, and hundreds of thousands of living rooms across the country at this very moment.
The final note of this show, if you stick with it for long enough, is a sad one. It seems we're easily taken in by the right combination of corporate identity, phony cheer, and runaway evil. Nobody wants to be a patsy or a cultural petri dish, but we have to admit that this show is funny because it's convincing. The characterizations that seem so artless at first are dead-on. We are bathed daily in sex for sale, food sublimation, consumerist fantasies, and self-deceit. And how do we propose to rise above the soup? By more reading, of course.

In case you're wondering, these objects are for sale.

One visitor to the gallery out-joked Lowe in the sign-in book by writing her name and adding, "Will steal your ideas for the theater."