While cavorting around Europe and going to various conferences and festivals for a brief week and a half, I was on the Hans Ulrich Obrist tour, I saw him three times in totally different locations across Europe, and the in between time, he was in New York, Reykjavik, and Granada (well-documented in pictures by Artforum.com). A dream project of mine is to map the globetrotting Swiss curator's travels. In a way, I don't think HUO is any better or worse than other curators, but his absolute ubiquity is near legendary and this ubiquity is worth capturing, how many others, probably not even businessmen or travellng salesmen or diplomats have the travel route of the indefatigable HUO. The relatively low-cost of travel coupled with globalization make HUO a cultural harbinger. Though other art folks travel quite a bit, I don't think anyone does it like him

I have a dream project of a HUO map of the world, wherein every place he travels would be mapped and if he visits a place more than once (London, New York, Basel) the circle of his visit gets larger with the number of his visits in the center. The map would be updated according to HUO's travel schedule which is regular.

Wherever there's creative entrepreneurship or urban cheerleading events or academic conferences, HUO will be there. Like a Tom Joad for using creativity for the purpose of development, HUO will be there. From China to Russia to LA to Dubai to Granada to Cagliari to New York to Sao Paolo to Dakar, HUO has been there. In the end, if I were looking to hire a spy, I'd recruit HUO.

I think this could be a beautiful web project if any web designer's out there want to collaborate on the HUO Map of the World, either as a Google Maps or Google Earth hack.

Back in Los Angeles, listening to the distant ranchero music, while the sirens rattle by and the heat wave doesn't seem to ever break, the small talk next to me at the cafe is an offhand chat about physical abuse from a greaser and his girlfriend wearing an semi-ironic traditional Mexican dress and matching blue flip-flops. "I haven't seen my father in fifteen years," he says. "My grandfather was a noble laurate," she replies. LA small talk, maybe it's the same in Milan and I just didn't understand it.

Rough landing from Italy, which I guess is how it goes sometimes, you leave your life on hold for three months and somethings bound to break. But happily back and happily posting from the blog. thanks for all those for their patience. When you self publish like this, a magazine of one, life comes on and off, at normal magazine you meet your deadlines or you take a sabbatical, so it goes. Only a few like Tyler Green over at MAN or Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation are indefatigable bloggers, say what you will about their coverage, love it or hate it, but they're as regular as Ex-Lax.

The Expanded Field is getting regular.

I apologize for my lackadaisical approach to the blog, working many many hours a day, will be back in Los Angeles in a week and will resume daily blogging from there.

In the mean time, enjoy this peculiar animation by BLU called Muto. I don't normally go for this stuff, but there's something particularly brilliant about this one.

At the Berlin Biennial, I tried to interview every artists whose work the Biennial had shown to me for the first time (whether I heard about the artists before that moment or not), as you see in my post below, Ahmet Ogut was one, and here Tris Vonna-Michell is another.

Perched in the top floor of the five-story Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Vonna-Michell has rebuilt Detroit. Not in an architectural model (though there is a map), Vonna-Michell has rebuilt Detroit as a recording studio, a stage, and an installation. This Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art” in German) includes many different elements including the artist himself who will be on hand for much the exhibition, ready to perform at a moment's notice.

Composed of slide shows, sound, moving images, installations, and objects, the installation (if we call it that) takes up the entire top floor. Vonna-Michell uses Studio A as his point of entry into the imaginary of Detroit. In 1959 Motown Records created its first recording studio, the famous “Studio A.” It was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week from 1959 until 1972, recording some of the most famous Motown hits of that period from Aretha Franklin to Marvin Gaye. Although in 1968 the company moved it’s headquarters to a ten-story building in downtown Detroit, artists continued to record in “Studio A”.

“Studio A” acts as both a point of entry for Vonna-Michel but also a point of rupture for Detroit. Now Detroit is an abandoned industrial city, still struggling to find its identity after the automobile industry collapse. Berlin becomes and interesting contrast to the Motor City in a city that suffered its own set backs and identity confusions and seems to be bouncing back.

This interview as well as the last one was made with Luca Legnani and produced by Check-In Architecture.

I keep a handful of museum subscriptions on my Reader most of which are only sporadically updated, something that Tyler Green at MAN has regularly and rightly kvetched about. And MOCA rarely updates it's podcast, but lately they've loaded a few really nice podcast to coincide with their current exhibitions, a handful wth with Lawrence Weiner, recently here in Milan for a show at Massimo de Carlo with ponytail, beard, tattoos, and attitude looks like the coolest motherfucker in the world.

The other podcasts that I'm downright delighted with is a conversation between Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy, who started out as teacher and student, but kept a dialogue going for forty years. In the above photo, they sort of look like good and evil pictures of one another. Kaprow in his blue jeans and trimmed beard looks the light-hearted post-60s conceptual guru which in some ways he is (if guru is not quite the right word, it's the closest thing I have in my arsenal to describe his attitudes and influence) and McCarthy, the man in black, his beard longer and more unkempt, but no less jolly in his grin than Kaprow, not far from the butt plug Santa he was hawing not long ago at Michelle Maccarone. Both of them radically affected younger artists both in their practice s artists and as teachers, I never really thought as one in a historical continuation of the other, I usually connect McCarthy to the Viennese Actionists, but this conversation shows the differences and connections between the two artists in a perfectly pointed way.

Some future art history dissertation or exhibtion to be sure. Either way enjoy.

A raft of Lawrence Weiner tracks and the McCarthy/Kaprow conversation here.

While in Europe I've been working on this project called Check-In Architecture (making videos, writing essays, conducting interviews, maintaining a second blog, travelling incessantly, etc), I've been a bit lazy about posting the details but I'll get to that sometime in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I did an interview with an artist I found really compelling at the Berlin Biennial named Ahmet Ögüt. Ahmet himself goes into a lot of the background information about his projects and practice, so I'll let him do the talking on this one.

This is another instance where the Italian saying that I've grown to love duly applies:

"Morto il papa, se ne fa un altro."
"The pope dies, another is found."

So awhile ago I felt like the only one publicly mourning the demise of the Art Center program (alum Michael Ned Holte later wrote a strong obituary in Artforum, Dec, '07) in Art Criticism (a program I might add, that for better or worse, supplied LA with about half of its current art critics), and now USC with its deep pockets has found us another, a brisk 9-month MA in Arts Journalism. Is this program better than the last? It's a little hard to tell.

The breakdown: well, when USC says arts journalism they really seem to mean every word of it, it's not necessarily criticism and its not necessarily about art. The people who are heading the program are largely drawn from newspaper journalism (last time I checked its pulse, it seemed a bit weak to me) and appear to run the gamut in cultural criticism (a Pulitzer or two in their ranks). The program will ally itself with all the other preexisting schools of the arts (including the the School of Architecture, School of Cinematic Arts, Roski School of Fine Arts,School of Theatre and Thornton School of Music.)

In my mind this could go either way, it could honestly train good journalists and critics who will head out into the world, fully prepared in the most advanced ideas and approaches to art, a smattering of history and discipline specific information as well as an expanded view of cultural critique in general. Or, it could be a bit stagnant, less than experimental, preparing students for jobs that don't exist anymore. Music critics will likely be interviewing (Insert Name of One Hit Wonder Band) for trashy music magazines, art critics will be writing fifty dollar reviews for websites while to scrape together a life from gallery, museum, and/or teaching jobs, and book critics, do we even have many of those left anymore. Edmund Wilson is turning over in his grave. Clement Greenberg's scepter was shattered by Krauss, though a few it's pieces can be found stuck in the side of Artforum and Frieze.

Ready to apply? The deadline for applications is July 1.

Information on the program can be found here and here. If you want to apply (all you budding critics and seasoned pros looking for a break from a stormy career) the place to do so is here.

A couple of nights ago at Galerie Konrad Fischer (in the high pitch of Gallery Weekend Berlin) a man in his thirties, short hair, button shirt, blue jeans, screamed at the top of his lungs while a stylish lesbian played tambourine alongside, screeching in a regular rhythm. Clothes came off at one point as they moved from gallery to gallery in the building. The woman’s shirt became unbuttoned, the man’s pants descended round his ankles, his green American Apparel undies shifted down around his thighs, he shat into his hand (not pausing in his screams) and smeared it onto his forehead. The German gallerists said nothing. But of course, called the police.
As for the shitsmearing American Apparel model, exceptions exist as with anything, but transgressive performance art is more often than not bad, boring, and shudder inducing. But not the shudder of shock and horror that the artist may be shooting for, but a shudder of pity and embarrassment. This was true here, but to call the police about a lame stunt made the gallerists look like harried shopkeepers trying to keep there customers from seeing anything unpleasant, rather than the hip patrons of the arts they play themselves off to be. I don’t know which, but one of the dealers (if not all) called the cops to be sure. And how many came, around 10 cars and a gaggle on bikes. It just would of been more honest if one of the dealers just grabbed the offenders and bounced them out.

One man, one woman, one tambourine, one turd, ten cop cars: Germany!
A new slogan for the Paterland. No offense really to Germany, my countrymen often act foolish as well.

Polizei: Were they artists?
Gallerist: I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Maybe.

The performance artists, or what have you, were arrested.

The Berlin Gallery Weekend is everything the Berlin Biennial is not. An amorphous, inclusive poetic drove the Biennial, which was concentrated on younger and unknown artists, and in the end, perhaps came off as institutional, and maybe just a little bureaucratic. The Gallery Weekend is about the market, famous artists, and of course is as unbureacratic as the Germans are able to be, which, truth be known, is still a stiff.

Everything is a bit disconnected, or maybe I just felt lost there. Berlin I haven’t figured out yet how to navigate. I never end up where I intend, a .66L bottle of Becks gripped in my hand as I get turned around and waste time on taxis and tubes, and then people smear shit onto their foreheads.

Here for interviews, artists have either blown me off (Aida Ruilova) or thrown me out of their studios for perceived transgressions (Carsten Nicolai when Nicolai’s gallerist dropped a photographer I was working with off at his studio and she started taking pictures without his express permission). Some people have been very gentle and generous, Thomas Wulffen, Jaro Straub, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Vladko Vladov, Aaron Moulton, John Kleckner, Mariano Pichler, Susanne Schuricht, and others to be sure, but the cold shoulder acquaintances, self-important gestures, and market pressures came to bare bitter fruit for me.

On Sunday, I went saw nearly every gallery in Berlin.

Shrug.

Maybe the hype was directed at the collectors, and hardly a pfennig spent on impressing (with actual ideas and well-developed artistic visions) foreign art critics of low-to-middling reputation, not very surprising. This is not to say that many gallerists weren’t entirely pleasant to me (though some were patently stupid, such as the vapid assistant at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri that when I asked why Matthieu Mercier included antique baseball masks alongside his finish-fetish formal sculptures, simply answered “Why not?”). And that a few of the non-profit and collector’s shows weren’t without quality, many were. But overall a conservative turn by harried shopkeepers.

Besides a distaste for Beck’s and Mercier, I’ll take away from Berlin an admiration for a handful of artists (and shows) at a handful of spaces (Mona Hatoum at Max Heitzler, Tomas Schmit at Barbara Wein, "The New World" at Artnews Projects, Edith Dekyndt at PROGRAM), but overall a sense that Berlin is caught in two contrasting modes, between it’s history as an alternative art community and its fledgling market.

In the end the Biennial and the Gallery Weekend make nice contrasts to one another, both amorphous but for different purposes. As much as I thought the Biennial shapeless, it chose thoughtful work for seemingly non-commercial reasons. It chose them as one vision of what a biennial and, in particular, this biennial should be.

The Gallery Weekend offers a rather different vision. Though quality has not been wholly dispensed with, it merely becomes a measure of an index, an index whose main purpose is not innovation, artistic process, history, or even humanity, an index whose main measure is money. It’s okay, art and artists adapt and survive, but one can’t help but hear about the halcyon days of Berlin in the 90s (or New York in the 70s) and not wince that they’ve passed. Though I kvetch regularly about money, the market can have a little bounce and energy that the academies and alternatives often do not. A conversation, tension, war, between the two I think is healthy. Usually one dominates the other, or in rather sophisticated societies with an absence of market fund art through the government and universities, which often creates academic art, intellectually well-built but often without energy or ambiguity.

The city is in weid place art-wise, but its still a beautiful city and it attracts more and more artists everyday. If anything its the artists that really amke a community of cultural producers interesting. Why are they coming to Berlin?

It’s damn cheap and beautiful and overall, a very easy place to live. I’m ready to jump the sinking American ship myself and dog paddle over to Berlin for an apartment in Mitte for 500 euros. Not that it ain’t sinking in its own way too, just perhaps at a pace I can deal with.

Gilles Deleuze in Abecedaire complains about the ubiquity of academic conferences, which he thinks are downright silly. The only encounter, he says, that one can really have, are with works of art and not with other intellectuals.

I tend to agree with him. And I've always enjoyed the fact that the august art magazine (and my sometime employer) Artforum has largely stayed out of the intellectual fray when it comes to panels, (us critics have better things to do with our time, like cadging free drinks at openings), but the brand has a certain weight, so when they say they're having a conference, not only can they get some pretty heavyweight actors from the art world to participate but also get the rest of the world, or at least me, looking in their direction to see what they come up.

At Artworld Salon, Jonathan TD Neil introduces the cast of characters at the Artforum panel (titled simply "Art and Money") with aplomb and efficiency:

"The panelists included Tom Crow (much esteemed if somewhat dusty art historian currently installed at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts), Amy Cappellazzo (International Co-Head of Christies ’s Post-War and Contemporary Art department, art world punching bag and proud mother of the auction house as “big box store” analogy), Yinka Shonibare MBE (perhaps the very definition of the post-historical, post-colonial, post-black artist), Kathy Halbreich (former Director of the Walker and now MoMA’s image disciplinarian-cum-Kultur defender) and Jeffrey Deitch (maestro of the art world spectacle who never met a hipster he didn’t like); it was, to say the least, an almost perfectly diverse array of the art industry’s different player positions. Tim Griffin (Artforum’s soft-spoken editor) moderated the event."

Only editor Tim Griffin, our critical representative to this tea party, comes away unscathed from Neil's assessment of the panelists.

And if Neil's play-by-play of the panel is as accurate as his introduction, it would seem that when it comes to art and money, even the most significant players have nothing interesting to say, or rather things I've heard all before and am simply tired of hearing again.

For one:
if I hear someone say Warhol one more time, I'll reach for my gun.

It's curious that this particular artist has come to so dominate what we talk about when we talk about art (especially in relationship to money). Don't get me wrong I like Andy's shenanigans as much as the next red-blooded American with a penchant for pop. But then I grew up.

Artstars, popstars, money grubbing millionaires, philosophers and charlatans, authentic artists and wheeler dealers. Art and money, again? Can we change the subject? Or at least say something new?

This isn't another tiresome tirade delivered from a golden perch atop the ivory tower about the evils of that bad old market, but then again, such complaints are trite because they're true.

The market is bad, it's always bad. Anything that can turn Picasso into pork bellies and back again, I must say, leaves a vomity taste in the back of my throat. I admit that the killing floors of the art fair or auction house are not quite so messy as their less than metaphorical equivalent (unless of course their hawking the work of a Viennese Actionist).

In the rest of the world, mostly they're just talking about money, I'm glad at least that somewhere, art gets top billing.

Who know, maybe the moneychangers have permanently taken over the temple, maybe they've always had it. Fuck 'em. We'll build another.

I've been living in Italy and they have saying here I've grown to love:
When the pope dies, we make another.

When this art world dies, finally passing it's last stale Warhol into the toilet we call the marketplace, and then keels over dead from its own gluttony, we'll be here, finishing off the last of the free drinks, and we'll make another.

++++++

And for my precious few readers out there, thanks for waiting out the strike.