I concur

with this

Socialist Realism, wave of the future?

The period of Soviet socialist realist art isn't the cultural wasteland it's often made out to be. It produced some excellent artists, some of whom pushed the boundaries of the doctrine (see, A. Deineka, for instance), but let's remember that not only was it officially approved, it was officially demanded. So, yes, some of the war images BoingBoing links to are powerful, but many are also kitsch—not well executed and not particularly imaginative. They're meant to be propaganda—political content laid bare—intended to produce a very specific reaction among the citizenry of a country at war. So I find it ridiculous that Alllie laments (in the same post) the sad fact that Western art didn't follow suit in the decades following Goya's Third of May and Van Gogh's Potato Eaters.

Really? Blatant politicizing is the heir to the impressionists and postimpressionists? No, Picasso's Guernica is the heir. Barbara Kruger, Leon Golub, and Nancy Spero are the heirs. Even Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed is the heir.

Anyway, what really interested me in the slew of Soviet war images here was the Pimenov painting On the Front Road.

I thought I'd seen something just like it. Turns out I had.

Seems ol' Pimenov liked to recycle ideas. This one, called New Moscow, is from 1938, so it preceded the one above.

Emory Douglas at the New Museum

I managed to get to the New Museum last week to see two shows there before they closed. One was a survey of work by Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Culture who transformed the Panther's revolutionary call and righteous fashion sense into the most recognizable visual vocabulary since the Russian avant-garde. Douglas's graphic elements are no doubt indebted to the experiments of the Soviet artistic vanguard ( the Bolsheviks sported the black-leather-jacket look, too), but he managed to parlay the Panther's political anger into a series of posters, illustrations, and newspaper layouts that are as focused, productive, and imaginative as the program it espoused.

It's hard not to be attracted to the Panther's ideals. Their focus on economic and political grievances ("Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, Peace") among minority groups and their institution of social programs designed to alleviate poverty and a lack of health care are significant even now—and are still being debated today.

Tron meets Pynchon?

Mariah Robertson at Marvelli Gallery.

Take my word for it, it's good stuff.

You press the button, we do the rest.

When my then-eighteen-month-old son took an interest in a visiting friend's old digital camera, she gave it to him, and he's been snapping pictures with it ever since. (He's now almost three.) He's so often focused on pushing the button that where the camera is pointed or where his tiny digits are located is of little consequence. We have lots of pictures of eyes and boogery nostrils. The other spaces he ends up capturing—objects on the desk, the carpet, his own face—are surprisingly fascinating. I'm not going to argue that they're formally inventive, but there's something to be said for leaving out the first half of "point and shoot." For instance, he'll take a series of photos of the corner of the ceiling; seen successively, it's like stop-motion animation.   

They remind me of the maybe half dozen photos that always arrived in my packet of vacation pictures. Often of the dashboard of the car, a blurry, rain-dappled window, a close-up of my leg on the car seat, these accidental images were frequently more interesting than the intended ones. They were atmospheric, evocative of single moments rather than larger experiences. The mottled colors, dampened light, and odd angles seemed rich in their abstraction. 

Our digital camera has really destroyed that randomness, the amateur's thrill of not really knowing what you're getting. 

90 Years and Counting

Belly Button Redux

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Insidious Ben Jones

Ben Jones has the video paintings from "The New Dark Age" show posted on his site here. I watched the flickering colors and patterns, mesmerized, for about half an hour. With my mouth open.

Viva La Toña!

A documentary by Betty M. Park about women wrestlers in Bolivia! Mamachas del Ring will screen as part of the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. Friday, November 13, 9:15 pm, at the Museum of Natural History.

Print is dead, long live print, Part 2

Another one of my favorite exhibitors from the NY Art Book Fair is the Zurich-based Nieves. Their table was chock-full of little books and zines, and I wanted everything. The one I bought is Glamour Banner, a 20-page black-and-white zine (really more like a minicomic) printed in an edition of 150 and created by an artist collective in Los Angeles called Sumi Ink Club. The group, which is open to anyone, creates works like these as a means to encourage social interaction. Nice idea, but what I really like about the process is that it produces a dense, tangle of many different styles that merge into a rhythmic whole, and no one element can be extracted from the larger arrangement.

The front and back cover together display the main drawing:

The inner pages offer detailed views:

They've worked in color elsewhere:

There's a bit of Keith Haring in the colors and playful, rounded, maze-like designs. The vibrating hues also make me think of Ben Jones's work, though his juxtaposed colors are far more intense. Perhaps it's the Ben Jones Approved Patterns that I spot in Glamour Banner. But then, I see them everywhere—which, of course, is very much the point. 

And, look, a Ben Jones postcard I appropriated from PictureBox. Mmmm, Ben Jones Approved Hot Tub. I spent a while at the booth with Dan Nadel bemoaning the sad and incredible fact that Jones, whose solo show at Deitch earlier this year was among the best exhibitions by a young artist, and Gary Panter, one of the most original artists of the past few decades, don't have gallery representation—not to mention critical attention. Panter's influence on a younger generation of artists has yet to be fully understood, though one can certainly get a sense of it from the work of a number of artists, including Brian Chippendale and C. F., both of whom have new books coming out from PictureBox this spring. A lot to look forward to. In the cold winter interim, I'll keep occupied with Mat Brinkman's Teratoid Heights, which ought to be landing in my mailbox any moment now.  

Print is dead, long live print

As the battle for dominance in the war of the electronic reader heats up, it's heartening to attend an event entirely devoted to the possibilities of printed matter. The NY Art Book Fair, which moved out to P. S. 1 in Queens from its usual Manhattan quarters, featured more than 200 presses, publishers, and dealers from around the world. Lots of great stuff, though it only makes me wish for a regular exhibition space for books among the myriad art galleries in NYC. Remember MoMA's brilliant "The Russian Avant-Garde Book" so many years ago?

Speaking of Russians, the aptly named Lubok, a German publisher of "picture books," featured some of the most luscious examples of book art: gorgeous special-editions by Volker Pfüller and Katja Schwalenberg. Both consist of linocuts composed of vivid, velvety colors. These, from Schwalenberg's book.

It's a shame that Schwalenberg's Frau Wow, a book that won a Red Dot award for design in 2005, hasn't been published in the US. It's almost wordless, so it wouldn't require much in the way of translation. In 21 chapters, Schwalenberg employs a wide variety of media and styles to examine the many facets of being a woman—you know, harness racer, coquette, S & M goddess. The book's pages are awash with nuggets from twentieth-century art--Philip Guston, Martha Rosler, Jacob Lawrence, Gary Hume. Did I mention it comes with 3-D glasses?

 

I also snagged this postcard from the Lubok booth. 

I think I look like this a lot, minus the hat.