We Live in Public

Last weekend I saw the documentary We Live in Public as it closed the New Directors/New Films Festival at MOMA. Directed by Ondi Timoner, this Sundance prizewinner looks at the enigmatic Josh Harris (above), who made his name in the Nineties with Pseudo.com, threw wild parties, showed up here and there as a clown...um, performance artist named Luvvy, and then, around the turn-of-the-millennium, experimented with putting others and himself under round-the-clock online scrutiny. After living his life "in public" for a spell, he seemed to drop off the proverbial radar, but now, with the release of We Live in Public, he clearly seems to be angling for a comeback of some sort.

Watching the documentary, you might get the impression that Harris was uniquely innovative in devising a kind of Internet alternative to television in the Nineties (when the technology was hardly competitive) and in creating events that suggest that surveillance is more and more part of the fabric of human existence. But the reality is that Harris was not unique in doing such things. Yet, although (or perhaps because) clarity doesn't seem to be his strong point, he apparently pitched himself sufficiently well to make a fortune as part of the dot.com mania and use the money to stage some remarkable events before losing much of the remainder when the bubble burst.

During the Q&A, which was attended by a number of Harris's former associates, I wondered if anyone would confront him about being a kind of a charlatan. But, to my surprise, those who spoke seemed to treasure their memories of Pseudo—even though Harris himself has come to say that Pseudo was a fake company. Likening himself to Jayson Blair, he's written that "I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company."

Puzzling over the Pseudo phenomenon, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that someone such as Harris can build and maintain a following. Some people—a select minority of people in his circle—simply seem to relish the good and/or weird times Harris provided them while the money held out. Others are pretty sore, as some commenters here suggest in response to Harris's confession of fakery.

Back in June, the very first commenter asked how Harris's business is "indistinguishable from fraud." The second commenter wrote "I'm going to start conning elderly people out of their pensions and retirement monies and calling it "Performance Art." The third wrote "I've long felt the stock market is primarily a amusement park ride where people purchase a short time of feeling like they are participating in their economic fate." And so forth.

Another commenter from June 2008:

What the hell made this a 'fake' company? Sure, you can do an IPO with your 'art project' buddies as a lark using all made-up plans and products... but once you are incorporated and you've got a whole bunch of products and people are buying them and investing in you... you have a REAL company, at least by the standards by which we (as nations) define such corporate entities. Even if it started as a fraud, even if it continues to be fraudulent - it's not FAKE! This guy sounds like a douche. Enron and Worldcom aren't considered 'fake' companies just because they were cooking the books and selling stock based on stuff they didn't have. They're just fraudulent companies, and now they're companies that don't exist anymore. Don't see how this is ANY different.

By the end of the year, of course, Bernie Madoff was arrested. And Harris was revving up for his comeback attempt.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

MOMA's March Movies: Ramin Bahrani Mini-Fest

Ramin Bahrani's movie Chop Shop, one of BAT's very favorite movies of 2008 (or 2007, depending on how you look at it), is one of three films to be screened as part of MOMA's Filmmaker in Focus salute to the director. The schedule:

We Mar 4 6:15 Man Push Cart
We Mar 4 8:15 Chop Shop
Th Mar 5 7:00 Goodbye Solo Introduced by Bahrani
Fr Mar 6 6:00 Chop Shop Pay-what-you-wish
Sa Mar 7 6:00 Man Push Cart

Here's a clip from Goodbye Solo. (Warning: Through the magic of YouTube, it segues into at least one other clip.)



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Huutajat: The Shout is Out!

The Museum of Modern Art plays host to a group of shouting Finns this Sunday and Monday, when Huutajat (Screaming Men) performs at P.S.1 and MOMA's Manhattan digs, respectively. I think they'll also be in DC (which still has no voting representation in Congress) on Wednesday. Tipping me off to these events is a group member I know through our mutual interest in a certain publicity-shy writer from Long Island.

From the website of P.S.1, where the group is to perform on Sunday, September 14, from 2:00-3:00pm:

HUUTAJAT (Screaming Men) is a men's choir, that doesn't sing a note. 20-40 decently dressed men enter the venue with a paramilitary manner and scream, bellow or shout excerpts of national anthems, children's ditties or international treaties. The result can be a true life picture or a mean caricature about Western discipline or gentlemen's clubs, about forced sociability or revealed private emotions.

The choir has unintentionally become one of the most popular ambassadors of new Finnish art scene. Their performances have been seen at highly appreciated music festivals as well as in museums of contemporary art.

Petri Sirviö is the founder, composer and conductor of the group. Sometimes, when the choir is out of reach or resting, he also sets up installations with videos, transcriptions and audio devices.

The documentary Screaming Men is now on view at P.S.1’s exhibition Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland through September 15.

I'm told that the group will also perform at 4:00 pm at the midtown MOMA.

Here's a trailer for the movie...


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...and here's some old footage of the group, for all you nostalgia freaks out there.



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BUÑUELIANA

I thought I'd seen just about everything that Luis Buñuel committed to film, but I found this while looking over the offerings in MOMA's Dalí: Painting and Film exhibition:

Menjant Garotes (Eating Sea Urchins). 1930. Spain. Directed by Luis Buñuel. While on location in Cadaqués to shoot scenes for L'Age d'or (1930), Buñuel made this home movie featuring Dalí's estranged father and stepmother in an intimate moment: dining alfresco on sea urchins, a local delicacy. The iconographic sea urchin also appears in Un Chien andalou (1929), as well as in Dalí's paintings of the late 1920s. Print courtesy Filmoteca de Catalunya-ICIC. 4 min.

You won't find this surprisingly charming "home movie" at IMDB (at present), but you have a chance to see it tonight courtesy of Rooftop Films.

Spoilers: The film shows Mr. and Mrs. Dalí spending time together in a cliffside residence. One well-composed(!) shot shows them ascending a set of terraces, with unidentified people on the shore behind them. The climax comes with the meal of urchins, in which Mrs. Dalí pours what appears to be wine for Mr. Dalí, who indicates his approval of the culinary experience.

MOMA OVERVIEW

Right now there's a electric fan blowing in the big atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. It's hanging from a long cord, and swinging in (what I believe is) a semi-predictable pattern. It's simply fascinating—that is, fascinating in a simple way. And it's probably much more interesting than it would've been had the artist, Olafur Eliasson, used an air conditioner instead of an electric fan.

I'm not sure I qualify as a big fan of Eliasson's work at MOMA, but it was fun to sample it. Aside from the fan, I liked the hallways that he saturates in light that makes everything look like it's in black-and-white. Another work is a circular enclosure (right) that changes colors—make sure you look out from within the enclosure, because the colors inside the enclosure somehow change one's perception of the color of the outside area. Got that?

The online Olafur Eliasson exhibition is here.

Elsewhere in the museum, there's a bunch of small shows worth tracking down. George Lois: The Esquire Covers offers a glimpse of how Lois, a cover designer with attitude, was able to get okays even when his edgy work was at odds with the internal copy.

And Focus: Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko offers another of MOMA's well-presented rooms of art.

But that's not all: The photo exhibition Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology presents industrial images in groupings that encourage appreciation of their similarities and differences. I love this kind of thing and dream of one day doing something similar with post offices.



















Images courtesy of Museum of Modern Art

TAKING OFF AND CUCKOO'S NEST AT MOMA

Last Friday night, as previously mentioned, MOMA offered another of its simple but warm film tributes, this time to Milos Forman.

First up was Forman's satirical Taking Off (1971), which is scheduled to be screened again on Wednesday at 6:00 pm. Consider going.

Taking Off follows a pair of suburban parents who take off on an adventure after their daughter takes off to go on an audition. To invoke some old-fashioned lingo, it's a "counter-culture" film with a great pot-smoking sequence that I'm pretty sure I remember playing in the 1970s at "underground" or "head" or "midnight" movie theaters such as the Cine Capri in Old Bethpage and the Uniondale Mini Cinema. It probably played at one or both of New York City's Thalias, too.

Nowadays it seems that Taking Off has become something of a rarity. According to the introductory comments at MOMA, it isn't available on video. The very good print screened on Friday night was apparently retrieved from Forman's garage, prompting the MOMA curator to suggest that the garage would make a good alternative to the museum's state-of-the-art archive located somewhere far from New York City.

Taking Off was one of five low-budget films commissioned by Universal following the success of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider. The idea was to give a set of promising directors free rein and a small budget and perhaps reap similar profits. Of that group, at least three have been showcased recently at prestigious New York City venues: Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (IMDB 6.9), Taking Off (IMDB 7.5), and Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (IMDB 7.3). The other two were Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife (IMDB 6.7) and Hopper's The Last Movie (IMDB 4.2).

A lot of talent went into the making of Taking Off. One of the writers was John Guare, who helped introduce the movie at MOMA (where I think the movie premiered). Also credited as writers are Forman, Jon Klein, and Jean-Claude Carrière, a collaborator with many directors including Luis Buñuel (who worked for a spell at MOMA). Anchored by Lynn Carlin and the terrifically droll Buck Henry with strong supporting performances from Audra Lindley, Georgia Engel, Tony Harvey, Paul Benedict, and frequent Forman collaborator Vincent Schiavelli, the cast also includes Allen Garfield, Kathy Bates, and Carly Simon, with a performance by Ike & Tina Turner—in The Catskills, I think!

Also screened at MOMA on Friday night: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is scheduled to be shown again on Saturday at 4 pm. Producer Michael Douglas (who looks and sounds more and more like his dad Kirk) gave the intro, with Forman talking about how Kirk had vainly tried to send him the Ken Kesey book in the 1960s, only to have Michael approach him about the project years later.

It was weird to see Michael Douglas and Milos Forman talking about the movie and the book so soon after I'd seen them doing the same thing in TVTV Looks at the Oscars at Anthology Film Archives. And it was weird to see Cuckoo's Nest after many, many years, and recognize Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd in what would turn out to be very atypical roles. And Jack Nicholson really does a great acting job, creating a very layered character, who is familiar but with depth and surprises.

I learned from Anne that her friend Marla hated Cuckoo's Nest as a very misogynistic story. The movie can certainly be viewed that way, though Forman made it a point to say that (for him, at least) Nurse Ratched represented the Communist censors who had kept the book from getting to him in Czechoslovakia.

Here's a different interpretation of the story.



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MOMA: SEURAT DRAWINGS AND MAGIC LANTERN SHOWS!

In keeping with a BAT tradition of bad timing, I'm recommending MOMA's George Seurat: The Drawings on its last weekend. I am comforted, however, by the thought that my recommendation is redundant in view of the many raves the exhibition has received. And, if you miss the show, I'll also note that my affection for the show is more respectful than reverential.

I've long had ambivalent feelings for Seurat's work. It just doesn't move me or involve me or delight me very much. This show (covered by Scoboco here) enhanced my appreciation of his work, from the deft early drawings to the later experiments in texture and technique, which seem influenced by woodcuts and photography as much as theories of color and optics prevalent in Seurat's day. Among the drawings, some took my breath away—Seurat's skill with extremes of black and white is very impressive. The inclusion of samples of Seurat's colorful paintings helped me to appreciate them as alternate explorations in the graphic portrayal of light. Yet there's a cerebral, fussy aspect to his work that still keeps my enthusiasm for Seurat in check.

Meanwhile, tucked away in the MOMA lower level through March 10, 2008, there's a charming display of magic lantern work that was still popular in when Seurat walked the eart. The centerpiece of Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows, curated by Ernie Gehr, is the simultaneous projection of five sets of images showing the visual range of magic lantern work. If you park yourself in front of the images and observe them for about 20 minutes, you should leave with a good sense of this form of entertainment, which runs from being transparently crude (see immediately below) to glowingly beautiful (as in a countryside time-lapse display that shows up on the far right at the museum).

J. Hoberman of The Village Voice included the magic lantern exhibit in his Top 10 for 2007, along with I'm Not There and There Will Be Blood, and wrote that the museum should make it permanent. It's just a shame that the it's not being presented with sound, such as narration and music—maybe they could be adapted with sound for presentation as short subjects at the MOMA theaters.



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Here's a promotion for the American Magic Lantern Theater of East Haddam, Connecticut.



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PICKET TICKETS: MOMA MIA!

Has the Broadway strike shut you out of the global smash hit Mamma Mia? Get over it...and see if you can console yourself over at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), which is hosting some excellent exhibitions through early January 2008.

For those unfamiliar with the museum: If you don't show up during the free admission hours from 4-8 pm on Fridays, normal admission to the museum is crazy high at $20 for adults...but that top price is still much lower than what people usually pony up for Broadway shows. (And membership can offer its own rewards to frequent museumgoers.)

As for what's hot at MOMA (aside from the permanent collection, which is filled with works by Chagall, Gauguin, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Warhol and even some women artists), I've heard great things about the big Seurat Drawings exhibition, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Give yourself lots of time and try to go when the museum is relatively uncrowded, is my advice for that one.

The other major exhibition features the wonderful and, in some cases, very large, sculpture of a relative unknown, Martin Puryear. Scoboco has already covered the two floors of Puryear sculpture in some detail, so I'll limit my own remarks. I loved the use of materials, especially the trees, and Puryear's utilization of tapering, with dwindling lengths seeming to fade into thin air. Anne C drew my attention to some craft and technical issues that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, including the seemingly gravity-defying wall mounting pictured here, in a shot of a work that you might think bears some resemblance to a snail or a lever or an Untitled, but which is quite obviously either a dinosaur or a Loch Ness Monster.

You can see the online exhibition is here, but the experience of actually moving amidst, around, and above and below the assembled work is very worthwhile. Indeed, the use of the extreme vertical space in the second floor atrium is a possible breakthrough for the museum, and the experience of initially viewing that floor's arrangement from a fifth floor perch, and then observing it from lower vantage points on the way to the second floor, was mindblowing at first and then uneven but still very worthwhile.

Also on the fifth floor is a tiny, well-curated Alexander Calder exhibit including this object—

























Alexander Calder. (American, 1898-1976). Spider. 1939. Painted sheet aluminum, steel rod, and steel wire, 6' 8 1/2" x 7' 4 1/2" x 36 1/2" (203.5 x 224.5 x 92.6 cm). Gift of the artist. © 2007 Estate of Alexander Calder / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

—which is called a spider but which is really a turkey. Or a peacock. Or maybe a chicken.

Online samples are here, but once again attendance has its own rewards and possible surprises. Not only can you watch the mobiles move (Anne C seems to recommend bringing your own straws), but you can also appreciate the cunning placement of the exhibit between displays of Mondrian and Miro works, which have clear links to Calder's colors and shapes.

The more I think about that kind of placement and well-arranged exhibits such as the long gone Full House at the Whitney, the more I think we can (and should) expect to see curator-based museum exhibits in the times ahead. Not just retrospectives of artists or artistic movements, but artful presentations of works by curators able to make original associations that might not be noticed otherwise. (Perhaps gallery expert Eric is already on top of this possible trend.)

Yet another intriguing offering at MOMA is the New York premiere of Arturo Ripstein's Mexican take on Medea, Así es la vida (Such Is Life), introduced tonight by the director. Says the museum: "The barely controlled rage of the screenplay, the intensity of a uniformly excellent cast, and the fearless theatricality of the direction build to towering emotional impact." Sounds about right for Ripstein, a prolific onetime associate of Buñuel.


Previous Picket Ticket: The Glorious Ones


Photo of MOMA: David Marc Fischer

SERRA AT MOMA

As promised, here is my set of details from the wonderful Richard Serra show at MOMA through September 10.
























Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years takes place in three parts of the museum. In the garden and on the second floor are giant yet gracefully curved panels of metal with varying degrees of oxidation. You can see some of the patterns here, but probably the most typical variation isn't pictured: It's kind of a rich, red velvet look that goes very well with the museum's interior design.
























Up on the sixth floor, in addition to some relatively small works that are like studies in edge and balance, there are other, large works that fill up the viewing rooms like the enclosed Stellas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 29. It's a great, unusual experience to be in an exhibition space that's almost filled to bursting by the art on display. The change in perspective is very refreshing. And, in this case, it can be very humorous.
























The contours of the works frame and enclose and separate and engulf you and the other visitors in surprising and often amusing ways that reminded me of Jacques Tati's Playtime, particularly the scene in which M. Hulot loses himself walking down identical intersecting corridors always to be faced by the same woman seated in a swivel chair.
























A great thing about this show is that it can be thoroughly enjoyed in an hour or so by kids and adults alike. (The second floor seems to offer the most family fun.) You can get in free between 4:00 pm and 8:00 pm on Fridays; a long line tends to form for the 4:00 pm entry, but in my experience it's a lot easier to get in around 5:30 pm.
























Photos: David Marc Fischer

MOMA: JEFF WALL. Scoboco recently wrote up the Jeff Wall exhibit at MOMA (a.k.a. "the MoMA").

And now, at long last, I'm finally ready to express my own opinion.

As it turns out, it's very similar to Scoboco's.

The Jeff Wall show (at MOMA through May 14, then on to Chicago and San Francisco) consists of large photographic transparencies mounted on light boxes. At first the images looked utterly banal to me, but as I progressed through the exhibit, I began to notice how at least some of them were meticulously staged--and, often, very witty.

I also noticed how different visitors seemed to favor different images. And old pal cracked up over a set including An Octopus (1990)--

























--but the work that made me laugh the most was an image of a ventriloquist party where no one was laughing.

The work that made the strongest impression on me was something we almost missed because it was in a separate, out-of-the-way room: Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) (1992). It's a grotesque vision of zombie soldiers that reminded me of Homecoming and now makes me think of Journey's End, too. You can take a look at it as part of this online Jeff Wall exhibition.


Image Credit:
Jeff Wall (Canadian, born 1946)
An Octopus, 1990
Silver dye bleach transparency in light box
71 5/8 x 7 ft. 6 3/16 in. (182 x 229 cm)
Private collection. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich
© 2007 Jeff Wall