Culture

This is pretty crass. Tyler already posted it (Don’t miss his image), but I got the email too and wanted to share.

We would like to bring to your attention a fraudulent situation or at the very least, a misrepresentation.

The artist Jack Pierson has been making what he calls “word sculptures” for over 15 years now. The works are composed of found and retrieved signage from locations as diverse as Las Vegas casinos to defunct 42nd Street movies palaces. In a catalogue representing the collection of the Whitney Museum, they are described as “ready-made objects to express the pathos underlying the American Dream — a pathos embodied in the mismatched letters of old movie marquees and commercial signs from which his work is created… His found letters are, in a sense, discarded dreams, their original purpose long forgotten.”

These works have been documented in numerous books chronicling contemporary art and are in the collections of the Whitney Museum, The Musée d’Art Contemporain in France, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. They have also been published in box sets of postcards available at many museum bookshops.

Around a year or so ago, imitations or forgeries of these works began to appear in BarneyÂ’s clothing stores throughout the country saying such things as “fabulous, courageous, and outrageous.” They are formally weak plagiarized versions of Jack PiersonÂ’s work and we want you to know that they are not by Jack Pierson. Many people have assumed they are. They are, in fact, made by Simon Doonan, the chief window dresser at BarneyÂ’s. Jack Pierson has asked that he remove them but he has refused.

We regret this lack of integrity on the part of Simon Doonan and BarneyÂ’s. They obviously have no respect for artists or the art world.

Sincerely,
John Cheim

Here is an image of a real one, provided in the gallery’s email:

Jack Pierson DESIRE/DESPAIR, 1996

Jack Pierson’s show at Cheim and Read opens at the end of this month.

For future reference, the store is “Barneys” not “Barney’s.”

NOT CLOWN
by Steve Moore + Carlos Treviño

DIRECTED by Carlos Treviño

In a time when clowns are tortured and circuses banned, a renegade troupe enacts the story of a girl who longs for their outlawed life.

I don’t know if there are tickets left, but there are two more performances (tonight and Saturday) of “Not Clown” at Soho Rep. It will be the best $15 you have spent on theater lately.

I have to say, this isn’t the play for people expecting a Broadway show. It’s more in the spirit of the good East Village / Lower East Side work I saw in the late 80s and early 90s. It’s disturbing and strange. I will admit that, at times, I found it annoying and repellent, and wondered what I was doing there. By the end, I realized the dramatic reasons for those sections, and felt it was one of the best things I’ve seen in the theater in a long time. Those of you who know us probably aren’t surprised to read that we like art that annoys, disturbs, and then pulls it all off briliiantly.

The company presenting it, Physical Plant is based in Austin, Texas.

I don’t have time to write more right now, but wanted to get this posted so maybe some more people can go see it.

Like starlings on a trash-strewn field the hipsters alight together, peck intently for a time, and at some indiscernible signal take wing again at once. If they are the American avant-garde it is true, I think, in only this aspect — the unending churn of their tastes, this adult faddishness in the adolescent style.

From My Crowd, Harpers, March 2006, by Bill Wasik (the inventor of the Flash Mob)

Favorite things seen in Chelsea on Saturday:

Brock Enright & Ivan Hürzeler’s Forest at Cynthia Broan

You have one more week to see it. Go on the hour and watch the 50-minute film. It’s more than worth the time. It’s a disturbing Lord of the Flies meets Outward Bound experience.

J Shih Chieh Huang at Virgil de Voldere

The show already closed, but the image may give you some sense of the magical environment.

William Powhida’s wall drawing at Schroder Romero/Plus Ultra project space

The image above is a detail for the part that points to Schroeder Romero.

John Pilson’s videos at Nicole Klagsbrun

The description for this one is:

In Wisdom and Charisma, a group of middle-aged men, who used to play Dungeons and Dragons twenty years ago, meet after work for a session of the role-playing game. Seated around a corporate boardroom table, the Dungeon Master, dressed in red, leads the others in debating pathways through astral planes and portals of pandemonium while stationary, control room-like, cameras allow for the reactions and silent exchanges between the players to be fully scrutinized. Their clothes and body language indicate their executive occupation and social standing, a strong contrast to their adolescent pastime.

Photos from other shows, plus some images from Williamsburg, will be up on Flickr soon. As always, use the photos (newer) link on the upper left to get to my latest photos.

The best thing from Sunday in Williamsburg was the group show at LMAK Projects, curated by Franklin Evans. It’s a top pick on ArtCal, and up for one more week.

I was surprised by the number of people who had really negative things to say about the Scope fair. I found it to be a great deal of fun, and filled with a lot of interesting art. I particularly enjoyed a number of the German galleries. Check out the photos I took at Scope. I suspect some people found the wackier stuff, including the installations in the middle, not “serious” enough and therefore wrote off the whole fair as unserious and lacking in good work. The way Todd Gibson described it makes sense to me and is closer to my view of it.

Many of the anti-Scope crowd also complained that The Armory Show was too much about money. I don’t see how we’re going to get some magical middle ground, in which the market rewards precisely the correct people, and no more. I also find the attacks on Scope a bit humorless. I’m big on the idea of having a huge variety of work available for us to see, knowing some of it will be good and some will be bad. I like this part of Art Fag City’s post on Armory:

No one can be impervious to the sales hype the fair brings out, and since so much of what is shown at this fair pushes a formalist aesthetic, it is hard to know the difference between those things that are legitimately good and what merely looks good. Everything looks like you should buy it.

Lately I feel I have encountered a lot of art that feels middlebrow, but is made with great skill.

While I find some aspects of the current market off-putting, I’m also happy to see a huge number of artists making money from their art. Under those conditions, froth happens. Yes, a lot of people that make crappy art will be deemed marketable, but I prefer that outcome to one where almost no one sells work unless its already certified as blue chip. We live in a country where there is very little public funding for art. Even if there were, given the Neanderthals in charge, we would probably end up with a lot of flag paintings, and I don’t mean in the style of Jasper Johns.

I have finished uploading and labeling 192 photos from last week’s art fairs to my Flickr feed. Go here to see them.

ARTList has a great interview up now with Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City, one of my daily blog reads. On the lighter side, this excerpt is very funny (emphasis mine):

EM: Who do you think are some of the most influential artists today?

PJ: I think the most important work being made today is in the medium of new media, which isn’t clear to many yet, but it is why artists like Cory Arcangel (who I suspect will be the next Jeff Koons), MTAA, Marisa Olson, and PaperRad are mentioned so frequently on Art Fag City.

The funniest thing I heard about the art fairs was said to me last night at the closing party at White Columns.

I was telling an artist that James and I attended every fair except DiVA, even Fountain. His response was, “Diva? Was that the LA one?”