The Beastly Life by Sally Eckhoff

Hosannas! The man has discretion!

Barack Obama on boxers vs. briefs:

"I don't answer those humiliating questions. But whichever one it is, I look good in 'em!"

"False Hope" and the Art Biz

It's sad to see art organizations holding their noses and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. None of the people I've seen trust her or believe in her. But their funding situation is dismal, and they're afraid they'll lose what little they're already getting if they don't throw her weight behind her campaign. The accusation frequently leveled at Barack Obama—that he's peddling false hope—is weightless balanced against Hillary Clinton's malleability in the hands of her corporate fans and contributors. She's no more art-friendly than our current president.

Socialism, in Ten Words:

Every adult deserves interesting work and a secure, modest livelihood.
—George Scialabba, essayist, critic, thinker

Free Tree Root Man!

As many of you know, a poor beknighted man in Indonesia is afflicted with growths on his hands and feet that look like tree roots. I'll spare you the pictures. If you want to see them, Google him. He has aroused the concern and curiosity of doctors around the globe. An American doctor flew to Indonesia to diagnose his condition. Apparently, he has some variant of genital herpes, and the growths on his appendages are probably warts. He has some genetic abnormality that caused his condition to get out of hand.
The American doctor flew home with a blood sample, intending to treat the man. But the Indonesian government freaked out and said the man would not be allowed to leave the country for treatment, and in fact the blood sample wouldn't have been allowed to leave either if anyone had known it was going.
Indonesia's president believes that the blood sample will be used to create a vaccine, and that vaccine will be used to exploit poor Indonesians.
"This is horrifying," I said to myself. "Imagine the tragedy of living in a country with such a scientifically ignorant, small-minded leader."
That's us.

Lost in the No-Fun House (two takes)

Mike Nelson’s Pyschic Vacuum (September 8—October 28, at 117 Delancey St.)

Some of us who’ve been fighting the art wars for a long time have grown pessimistic about the future of public art, especially in cities. To artists, the onslaught of new construction in old districts equals the death of affordable living. It erodes our foothold in the world. If contemporary public art doesn’t address that sense of fragility, it acts like a flower in a gun muzzle. It may look nice, but it doesn’t mitigate the threat.

For over thirty years, the spirits of old downtown have been systematically hounded out of their lairs and chased across the river to Brooklyn and Queens. But those of us lucky enough to have taken a walk through Mike Nelson’s installation in the old Essex Street Market, titled “A Psychic Vacuum” have had the rare opportunity to step into the pitiless carnival that was once the Lower East Side.

For an expanded meaning of Nelson’s gesture, we might look at who sponsored it. The nonprofit art organization Creative Time championed the sculptor Red Grooms and his “Ruckus Manhattan” project over thirty years ago. “Ruckus” was a transformative artwork too, though a very different one. Grooms made exaggerated versions of Manhattan landmarks—the Staten Island ferry, the Lexington Avenue local—out of cheap, gravity-defying papier-maché, and they were big enough for the public to climb around and through. The hysterical drama of everyday life in New York became funny, and so did the surly mob that acts it out, and the hulking buildings where they made their living. Grooms was the first—perhaps the only—artist to dissect the relatively new phenomenon of the World Trade towers. If you went up inside the model, you could see floor after floor of miniature executives, barbers, and shoeshiners, all busy at their trades. “We are all the same,” the exhibition seemed to say, “and we work ridiculously hard.”

Ruckus Manhattan succeeded by humanizing New York, by making the scary parts funny—an accomplishment that was at once sophisticated and deeply humane. Mike Nelson has done something very different but equally bold in trying to get that old New York back. He’s not caricaturing the neighborhood, he’s trying to re-uglify it. That’s a humane act, too: we lost Manhattan’s strange carelessness, its gloom and dislocation—the things that disappear along with poverty, that nobody misses unless they’re gone.

After this introduction, it may be hard to conceive of a walk through “Psychic Vacuum” as a treat. But if you like being disoriented, it’s great fun, and is a work of technical virtuosity besides. After you sign the release at the entrance (there are lots of phobia-inducing scenes inside), you enter a dim room that looks like the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant after a nuclear war. Its sense of sadness and abandonment nearly drives you on into the hallway until you realize there’s something off-pitch about it. And there is, of course—the old appliances and debris, even the dust, have been carefully arranged by the artist. “What is he trying to make me feel?” is an appropriate response. And with that, the psychic vacuum is switched on.

A viewer (like me) who deliberately ignored the show’s advance press has to figure it out on his or her own, and the revelation is creepy: “You mean all this weird junk that looks like it’s been here forever is new?” It’s new in the sense that it was gathered, graded, rejiggered, and installed here to create a specific effect. And while wondering further what that effect is supposed to be, you suddenly realize you’ve walked through the same room three times in two different directions, and you’re totally lost. It’s a Blair Witch moment: delicious, or awful, or both.

The manipulation of the inside of the market is so subtle as to be almost undetectable. Walls have been moved and painted, but they still look old. Something (what?) has been done to the floor. The small Buddhist statues underfoot seem added as an afterthought. There are animal antlers in closet-like rooms that could be reception areas for some ghost hotel. A barber chair reclines in a workshop that seems like an illegal dentist’s office. Some of the environments in the smaller spaces are like recitations of Ed Keinholz’s famous works, “Beanery: and “The Wait.” (The latter, which used to be in MoMa, featured a live parakeet.) But unlike Keinholz’s works, the Nelson phenomena makes the building itself into an art material. The ceiling paint is peeling off “Psychic Vacuum” in eerily consistent flakes as big as banana leaves. The question of how Nelson did this is confused with if he did it, and when you finally blunder into a long alcove with a dusty bar along one wall you may wish for a ghost bartender to pour you a cracked tumbler of cheap whiskey so you can stop and figure it out.

At the end of the maze, you find yourself standing in a giant room full of sand. That’s it—an anticlimactic finish, and possibly an ill-conceived one, but still a gentle push to get you back outside into the real world.

Whatever that is.

I like the form of the completed circle, and it seems the creative current of New York has coursed through Red Grooms’s populist fingertips through Mike Nelson’s mystical ones. I hope the energy cycles back into Grooms’s territory. We’ll need something to make sense of the void once Nelson’s exhibition is taken down and a condo has gone up in its place.

Check out Creative Time's jingle here:
http://www.creativetime.org/about/index.html

The Age of Rembrandt (Metropolitan Museum of Art; ongoing)

I wonder if, after taking on de Kooning (below) I ought to have the temerity to write about Rembrandt, but what’s a heaven for? The exhibition of still lives and portraits in this Met Museum blockbuster are irresistible for me, a Dutch-o-phile. Willem de Kooning is, obviously, Dutch, too—but in contrast to his freedom from the iconography of everyday stuff, this show is nothing but icons. The “thinginess” of traditional Dutch paintings is their distinguishing factor, but still derived from the Netherlands’ humanitarian outlook. The Dutch are nothing if not pragmatic, and these paintings treat all the factors of a composition with equal fascination and care. Lemons, cattle, textures of gold and glass, it’s all here as if no loss of vitality were possible over these hundreds of years.

Dutch paintings of animals are among the best in art because they look past the anthropomorphizing impulse and treat the animals as the disgruntled bit players they usually are. Horses are coarse and lumpy; cattle have that distracted look that goes along with having three stomachs and nothing to put in them but grass. (Albert Cuyp’s enormous painting of a bull, hanging in the Mauritshuis in den Haag, shows a the animal accompanied by the one thing rarely seen in pastoral paintings, but which cattle are seldom without: a cow pie.) People occupy the same space physically and esthetically in Dutch art. It’s not uncommon for a character in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting to be laughing, talking to a friend, or taking a shit. One of Rembrandt's most charming drawings is of a woman peeing into a pot. (It's not here, unfortunately. Maybe it's in the Toilet Museum.)

Most people would look through a show like this expecting Rembrandt to steal it, but he has serious competition, especially from Abraham de Vries, a (mostly) seventeenth century painter from den Haag. It’s a portrait of a man with a slightly undershot jaw, lashless eyes, serious but merry cheeks. He’s caught in a gesture of turning slightly to the left. This is one of those rare portraits that looks back at you. The eyes are luminous, expectant. It’s strange indeed to see it in context with the rest of the show and realize that in a Rembrandt portrait, the eyes are black thumbprints that absorb light rather than reflect it.

There's one really bizarre component of this show. It's there at the very beginning: the first thing you see is an encomium to the Museum's patrons who originally bought all these expensive paintings. Being forced to deal with this information has a very nineteenth-century overtone: salute the benefactors, and then we can get on with the pleasure. It's like eating dinner at Tammany Hall.

Perhaps we should be grateful. But aren't we, always? All painters doff their caps to Rembrandt. The museum patrons, generous as they have been, don't belong in the same room where the supplications are done.

Merciful Madness in New York: The Gift Moves Around Chelsea

From the art farm in the Chelsea section of New York City, here is a dispatch.
If, according to Lewis Hyde's principles, some paintings give a gift while others scarf up energy from viewers, Willem de Kooning is Santa Claus. There is no other painter of the last century who brings such bountiful visions and hands them out all over the place. Witness "The Last Beginning," the exhibition of de Kooning's late paintings at Gagosian, to get the full effect. You won't find a barrier between the viewer and the paintings' power, nor will you be distracted by the iconography of everyday stuff. There's only the paint, the invisible brush, the invisible arm, and the informed mysteries of a man's mind when it paints.
Many of us haven't reconsidered Kooning's last paintings, made during the 1980s when he was a sharply diminished version of his younger self, since we originally decided they looked vacant and unrealized. It seemed a forgivable conclusion, since the man was supposed to have been senile when he made them. Interstitial spaces and wandering blue and red lines are a pretty poor substitute for rampaging globs of color, right? "Wrong," says Klaus Kertess's arrangement of these works within Gagosian's pristine space. The paintings can talk you into a new appreciation of their structure as you approach them across the glossy lake of the gallery floor—and approach them you must, as the room is a vast one. As you draw near to these mind-tangles, especially the blue on white ones (the paintings are untitled), the intricacies begin to unfold.
There's no way you can tell from a reproduction how considered the craft is in these late works, and this from a man who, we've been told, was two steps away from being a zombie. The intersection of forms in these paintings have been exquisitely managed. De Kooning has reworked his artless-looking gestures so you can't tell where they sit in space. Something that looks like a brushstroke might have been created by overlapping another area of paint. A line crossing another line might be nipped on both sides by feathered streaks of white paint, making it appear to arch over the surface like a bridge. These soaring, unkinked curves, drawn with a single swipe of a brush, might suggest the contours of women—a vocabulary he'd used for most of his productive life—or they might be free of any reference to animals, objects, the landscape. It doesn't feel within our purview to decide. The paintings pull you closer, make you ask yourself where the hell this man is going—we know perfectly well where he went—and after hours or days, you still won't know. And watch that blue. Prussian, right out of the tube, almost, yet in the corner of one of these later works, a rag of cobalt has worked its way into the line of sight and then back out. Sneaky or obvious, cagey or guileless, planned or pure, these moments will come back to you later, asking you what the essence of painting might be.
Careful, though. The other effect this show has is likely to be romantic, as it always is with me. To walk out on de Kooning, you have to break up with him, and I don't have the heart for it. And he's not going to throw anybody out.
Around the corner at Cheim and Read there's a theme show that raises the bar for any gallery that's given to this kind of activity. "I Am As You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art" is discerning, macabre, and witty: three qualities any show would do well to have.

The first clue that this gathering is a little different is the announcement, which features this 8 x 10 skull drawing by Alice Neel. Now, this is not the Alice we knew, the one in the spotted dress holding forth about the peccadilloes of her portrait-sitters. It's Alice scaring the burghers instead of tickling them, and she sets the stage for the show's other treats, like the monster shown below, by Louise Bourgeois.

"Arched Figure" is made of steel and human ribs, wrapped up in a sinister skin of used pantyhose. The photo is by Fred Gutzeit.

We also have great Munch and Ensor (thank goodness), as well as Paul Delvaux. The brilliant inclusion of a Robert Morris from '85–'86 serves as a reminder that the curator's job, in its best dimensions, includes some historical myth-preservation. I hadn't seen one of these ponderous framing jobs in a good long while, the ones where Morris apparently pressed or molded a sinister grab-bag of body parts into bas-relief and then molded them in lead and bronze. This time around, he used ribs (are these easy to get? there are lots of them in this room), skeletal hands, death masks, a skull crawling with maggots, and a few penises thrown in for good measure. The little encaustic painting living in the middle of this mess looked like it was having its own nightmare.
As a coda to all this revelatory amusement, I have to direct your attention to the Lee Krasner exhibit at Robert Miller. If you've been in the habit of thinking of Krasner as a sort of appendage to Pollack's genius, a tail to his dog, you can stop right now. This show comprises one year's worth of works on paper donated by a respected craftsman, and the paintings, each and all, are wonderful. They crowd in and jump on you. She has found the catalyst of painting in action, and mixes it at will.
I also sniffed around for Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan gallery, though they're showing the fascinating but somewhat questionable Ingrid Calame at the moment. All I got of Yun-Fei was a look at his catalogue, but be advised: his "Last Days Before The Flood" has to be one of the swiftest jabs against official Chinese policy a contemporary artist can make. Until I can see it in person, I'll be moondogging it, waiting for his next appearance.

RIP. Barbaro

Barbaro's timely death on Monday, January 29 chilled my blood. But the public breastbeating afterward didn't do much to warm it up. I've written on the subject on Salon.com; you can read my piece at

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/08/01/barbaro/index.html

WHYY in Philadelphia ran an entire hour about Barbaro on their acclaimed show, "Radio Times," hosted by Marty Moss-Coane. Find it at

http://www.whyy.org/91FM/radiotimes.html

And listen to the RealPlayer version. The MP3 is missing the end.

I feel it important to balance the sadness of losing Barbaro with a more pressing necessity: that of passing the Equine Anti-Slaughter Bill (HR503). Much has been made of the pain Barbaro experienced when he foundered. Consider also the Missouri Humane Society's accounts of the tractor-trailer accident last September in which a loaded killer-buyer's double-decker cattle truck flipped over on its side.

The rescuers had to go in with chainsaws, Hurst tools, and needles, and you can guess what the chainsaws were for. One mare they found still alive had foundered in all four feet. Her owners didn't put her down at home. They sold her so she could try to stand in a trailer that was going all the way to Illinois, there to get a projectile in her brain—the first time around, if she were lucky.

Bleeding heart is not a role I ever wanted to play, but one has to come down on one side or the other on this issue, and this is mine.

What are we going to do with 100,000 horses nobody wants?

Bet My Money on the Bobtail Nag, Somebody Bet on the Clone

(Mule) question of the day: "Can mules have sex? I mean, in some way different from George Michael?"
—Jeffrey Hannigan, Peacham, VT

Clone Pix

Clone baseball cards (left), clones on the track. That's Gem is in the pink saddlecloth, Star in the black one (on right). Jesse Perez up, both mules. Click to enlarge.

Welcome to the Clone Zone

June 10: The world of animal public events is changing faster than ever, thanks to science and breakdowns at the track. Last week, a race was run out in Nevada with historic implications. Here's my report from last weekend's Winnemucca Mule Race and Draft Horse Challenge, home of The Weirdest Eighteen Seconds In Sports.

Winnemucca, NV's three-day mule fest is mostly a competititon among amateurs, with classes for pleasure, halter, and hitch (driving) mules, and a few big horses thrown in to keep things hopping. But everybody goes for the sprint races—a full card of eight mule races per day, with parimutuel betting, clerked windows, purses, jockeys, silks, a gate, the whole deal. Mules aren't as fast as most horses, but that's not the point—the ads with pictures of people barrel racing on Clydesdales were a tipoff. This year, two of the three cloned mules, Idaho Gem and Idaho Star, were to run in separate futurity trials, with the winners competing against each other on Sunday. (The middle clone, Utah Pioneer, was there, but didn't race.) The brothers were under heavy guard at the barn, with the curious public held off by a tape barricade, while the gang out front was handing out cloned mule baseball cards and bandannas. The public was itchy to find out three things: Are they healthy? (Most clones aren't.) Do they really look exactly alike? And the big one: can they run?

The track is a normal oval, but the mules race down one side of it past the grandstand in a straight shot of 350 yards. This ain't Saratoga: a big purse is $2500, and there are as many rocks in the home stretch as Raisin Bran has raisins. Plus, you never see comments in the Past Performances like "bothered foe." But this is Winnemucca. The gate only holds 7 or 8 animals. It's hard to tell where the finish line is, as all you can see are one hooded camera and a funky-looking striped pole about six feet high. The paddock has a grassy mound in the middle of it that gives everybody a chance to act like a mountain goat during saddling. In the first race, a little palomino john (male) mule named Blinkie got smacked in the butt every stride, but a big dark bay molly (female) mule named Miss Lourella smoked the whole field and had plenty of room to wiggle her ears at the finish. Some of the jockeys are in silks, some in jeans. One of the larger men, who earned the name Mr. Floppy by the end of the weekend, didn't look like he could stay on a school horse. One tough and appropriately tiny jock had the wild-eyed look of Gene Krupa doing a solo. Neither of these guys turned out to be the problem, however.

The moment of truth came when Idaho Star was ponied to the post with a smiling Jesse Perez on board. He burst from the gate like an out-of-control phut-phutting party balloon, and zoomed all over the track before settling down to win the race by a good half a length. A couple of races later, it was Idaho Gem's turn. Both mules were trained by different people; Gem seemed fresher but not appreciably different. The entries did the customary walk past the grandstand and were heading slowly down the backstretch to get to the gate when a fast movement alerted the spectators something was up. And here came—bobbling a bit, visibly upset—Idaho Gem with his bridle hanging off his head and his saddle empty. I looked down just in time to see his jockey stomp by the stands, limping. There followed Gem's trainer, Ruby Thomas, leading the mule and swearing like a trooper. The hubbub in the paddock revealed nothing. Would the clone race, or not? I couldn't see the cop cars that were crunching through the parking lot, though later I learned they'd been there. Gem's rider, their intended passenger, was so drunk he'd slid right off.

We all waited nervously while another rider was sought. Jesse Perez appeared in the paddock once again, still smiling, and floored that cloned mule to a solid win. This time, the scientists and their fans linked arms in the winner's circle. A second victory to identical mules. Their times were nearly identical, too. "I'm afraid it means too much," said an endurance rider at my elbow. The crowd liked the clones, that was for sure: a $5 win bet on Gem paid $8.

The unorthodoxies multiplied as the day went on. In the 5th race, I tried to bet the 1A mule, and the clerk at the window told me he'd scratched. Could I get 1 and 1A together as an entry if I'd wanted to? The guy didn't know. I decided to favor a big black mule named Genghis Khan—tall, tucked up, with pointy hips and long gaskins—because if he couldn't run, it didn't look like there was anything else he could do. I put him above another one named Valor, and bunched together some exotic bets. There was no way I could lose. Just before they opened the gate (50 minutes late), the announcer barked, "watch the pony horse!" and what do you know, #5, Genghis, leaped out and slammed right into the chestnut quarter horse who'd led him to the post, knocking the horse into Valor's path. "And it looks like a clean getaway," the announcer chortled, whereupon I realized he couldn't see what was going on and had been making most of it up. There were all kinds of objections later, and 1A actually won, with my two picks finishing up the track. Looking closer, I realized 1A, Bar JF Geneo, was wearing a crystal dangling from his neck. All in all it was an interesting use of $8. The horse, you'll be pleased to know, was fine.