David Rimanelli - Entries - art industry exhibitions, events - Column

ArtForum, Sept, 2002

May 3

PASTIS. Booked for simultaneous gallery dinners, Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater and Brice Marden at Matthew Marks. The Rothenberg dinner was fairly sedate, the Marden almost clublike in feeling, albeit a rather glamorous club. Agreeable to take a break in the relative calm of the Rothenberg party before returning to the tumultuous Marden back room. As the Marden dinner was breaking up, posters were distributed. In a moment of dada inspiration provoked by the double dinners, art dealer/impresario Earl McGrath offered to have my Marden poster signed by Bruce Nauman (Nauman is married to Rothenberg.) OK, whatever. I didn't expect anything to come of his suggestion, so I took another poster and went looking for Brice. As I requested his signature, Earl appeared behind me, unfurling the other poster: "To David Rimanelli, Sincerely, Bruce Nauman." Mildly embarrassing.

May 10

ELEVATOR AT 535 WEST TWENTY-SECOND STREET. As I made my gallery visits I rode up and down with some guy I did not recognize but who seemed to be casting sidelong glances at me. "Excuse me, are you David Rimanelli?" "Yes." "Well, I just wanted to tell you that I think your writing is probably the most insensitive, thoughtless, and insulting I've ever read." I extended my hand: "Pleasure to meet you."

May 11

RICHARD PRINCE at Barbara Gladstone. More joke paintings, some of them very large, executed for the most part in a sepia-ish palette. The paintings were very ... sensitive. An orgy of underpainting, palimpsests, luscious drips. The jokes were his typical Borscht Belt fare. The bigger joke seems to be about all the sensitive painting. You would be hard-pressed to find a more die-hard Prince aficionado than me, but I was underwhelmed. The artist's book--It's a free concert from now on--is much better. Photographs of his Albany County environs. Supermodel Stella Tennant posing as a white-trash biker chick. Too bad they weren't incorporated into the exhibition--more "texture," as we say.

Dinner at Pastis again. Several toasts. The artist raised his glass to Sid Caesar. I left early. "Congratulations, David!" Colin de Land said as I passed by. "For what, Colin?" "For leaving first."

May 15

FISCHERSPOONER. Jeffrey Deitch's large gallery on Wooster Street tricked up as a multimedia performance space, with multiple stages. A very young crowd, plus a few old folks like me. It didn't really function as art, but I didn't think it worked well as pop music either. Then again, my idea of musical fun is Die Gotterdammerung. Casey Spooner appeared onstage wearing a sort of Turkish robe, accompanied by a posse of female and/or she-male backup singers and dancers. Campy banter among the performers, "girl this" and "girl that," you know the drill. Lavish use of smoke-machine effects. Things improved when Spooner ditched his outerwear, although he seems to have put on some weight--maybe the overabundantly heavy-metal rocker of yore schtick is calculated?

May 23

ROSALIND KRAUSS lectures at Dia on Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage). A packed house--standing room only! Repeated apologies by Krauss for her "meditation" on the work temporarily preempting the work itself (she couldn't show her slides while the video and audio were running). Very early in the lecture she flashed up an image of the Klein diagram. I had to suppress a giggle. Oh no, not the Klein diagram again! Krauss introduced this model in her 1979 essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field"; subsequently the diagram appeared in The Optical Unconscious (1993). She exhumed it again for her Twombly lecture at the National Gallery last year. Needless to say, the artists to whom Krauss applies the Klein diagram are rather diverse--perhaps too diverse. I really couldn't figure out what she meant to say, exactly, about the Nauman piece itself, other than to conscript it for the sort of back-alley "Greenbergian" idea of medium-specificity she has lately advocated. Still, there were a few good moments, e.g., Krauss moving from a slide of some hideous Rebecca Horn thing (Horn "is interested in the monochrome") to a slide of Jessica Stockholder's 1995-96 Dia installation ... "and Jessica Stockholder is obviously interested in painting," her voice plump with sarcasm. This time I laughed out loud.

June 20

Los Angeles. Feeling a bit down in New York after having opted out of the Kassel pilgrimage, I decide to visit the other coast. Went to the ANDY WARHOL RETROSPECTIVE at MOCA, the last leg of its tour after the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Tate Modern in London. Strangely disappointed. Lots of fantastic works, of course, but very few surprises. (An exception: the Johnsian "Silver Coke Bottles," 1967.) The installation did not appear to be either strictly chronological or thematic; instead, artworks were often grouped together to promote a certain dramatic effect. The hanging displayed a real hard-on for the "Flowers," which is fine, but there was something irritatingly random about it: Disaster and Flowers, Mao and Flowers, Warhol Self-Portrait and Flowers, etc. If you're so into the Flowers, then you should put them all in the same room, the way Ileana Sonnabend did when she first exhibited them at her Paris gallery in 1965. Probably the most salutary aspect of the show was the retrospective of forty Wa rhol films curated by Bruce Hainley--one seldom has a chance to view the early films and certainly not so extensively.