David Rimanelli - Entries - art exhibitions

April 11

TAKASHI MURAKAMI'S LOUIS VUITTON SHOW opens at Marianne Boesky. "Sandy Brant, Ingrid Sischy, and Marc Jacobs invite you..."--to Hell? Pert but raptorlike PR girls screened you at the door; a velvet rope herded the queue. Inside, a stifling environment packed with more PR flacks, video cameras, fashionistas galore; Patrick McMullan snapping pics; security guards with earpieces. A dearth of celebrities, or so it seemed--gasping for air, I stayed all of ten minutes--and scarcely any art people, save for Julian Schnabel, who was coming in as I left. Also Jeffrey Deitch and Mariko Mori, the latter swaddled in very spiritual, snow-on-plum-blossoms white (something Sei Shonagon mentions in her list of "Elegant Things" in the Heian-era Pillow Book). What art I could see looked bad, disappointing. In the elevator going down, even stalwart paparazzo McMullan expressed exasperation at the crowds.

I made a second visit to the gallery during regular hours: plenty of cash-register art--Murakami/Vuitton logo paintings and the like, a large but uninspired sculpture standing on an antique Vuitton steamer-trunk pedestal--but good stuff, too. Watched the "promotional" anime video for Murakami/Vuitton three times. When the archetypal wide-eyed waif, her adventures ended, opens her cell phone to discover a single green leaf, a talisman of the panda that had swallowed her and her phone, leading into fantastic Superflat Vuitton World--a touch of Lewis Carroll here--I couldn't have been more entranced than had I seen Judy Garland clicking her red heels for the first time.

April 15

COCKTAIL RECEPTION FOR THE OPENING OF THE SAATCH GALLERY's inaugural twenty-work Damien Hirst survey (plus selections from the permanent collection). A London mole writes: "A strangely eclectic guest list signaled one purpose of the gallery: publicity at almost any cost. B-list actors (from British soap operas) and celebrities, editors of dailies and glossies, agents, artists, journalists, flotsam and jetsam. Goldie, a DJ famous for his diamond-encrusted gold teeth and guest appearances on EastEnders, drove up in a Spider sports car whose license plate helpfully spelled out GOLD. Miranda Richardson, Jeremy Irons, and Stephen Fry added luster to the party. Only very little of the art was outflanked by the occasion, the guests, or the installation in grandly self-confident Edwardian office space: Lining a paneled corridor, Sugimoto's sepia photos of waxwork wives of Henry VIII looked all too much at home. The effect was exacerbated by Charles S's passion for fake-baroque frames. Labels made grand claims for min or works: 'Each cigarette butt is like a tiny portrait, a tribute to the passing of time, three tobacco-consumed inches closer to the smoker's death' (re: Damien Hirst's giant ashtray). Exposed so often, Tracey Emin's squalid bed begins to take on a diminutive, anecdotal look: This Is What I Did When I Was Dumped. Otherwise, the quality of the work transcended the space and the occasion. Not in detail but in its overall impact--the showmanship of Charles S.

"Spencer Tunick's 'installation' of two hundred naked men and women happened on the river terrace diagonally across from the Houses of Parliament. At one point, some twenty lined up kneeling on the balustrade with their bottoms facing the photographers, who almost outnumbered the viewers. Howard Hodgkin commented that the most erotic sight was the neatly stacked piles of clothes."

April 23

"KARAOKE DEATH MACHINE" AT DANIEL REICH. The final show in Reich's tiny apartment gallery in Chelsea, before he moves to more capacious storefront digs this fall. Albert Tien is credited with the concept, and the invite shows Shoko Asahara, leader of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult responsible for the infamous 1995 poison-gas massacre in the Tokyo subway. The young dealer's new stars, the collective Forcefield and Christian Holstad, very prominent; maybe one hundred other modest works in a pop-psychedelic vein by some twenty-five artists. Very homo, or what Reich discreetly refers to as a "heavy aesthetic element" (e.g., Paul P.'s pictures of available-looking jeunes hommes en fleurs). "Paul P. is from Toronto, where there is a very big gay-and-lesbian archive, and he makes portraits from '70s porno he finds there," Reich explains. "The decorative motifs in the backgrounds of the paintings are actually taken from Whistler, but I don't think it's as much an appropriative thing as it is a subconsciously recognizable element which augments his subject matter. He also does flowers and bats."

April 26

A friend and I drive to DIA:BEACON on a rainy Saturday for a special "pre"-preview. Michael Govan and Lynne Cooke are going to walk us through the space. The in-house press woman sort of got started describing the "approach" to the vast compound. I know it's just her job, but I really wish she hadn't. She kept talking about "Bob" (Robert Irwin) and his intentions. Bob wanted this; Bob didn't want that. Bob really loves the hornbeam trees--really quite special, as trees go. The plantings--my word, but Bob and the Dia people are right in not referring to this as a garden--are quite unattractive and probably the poorest major design element here. Still, this is a far cry from Irwin's folie at the Getty, which resembles a sort of giant topiary toilet bowl. Did the press woman describe Irwin's Beacon lawn-cum-concrete as a sculpture? It's not, even if he is, on his non-Gertrude Jekyll days, an artist.