The New York art world is clearly suffering from a bi-polar disorder, because three weeks ago, there was so little going on, I considered reviewing my own performance piece “8 hours Fucking My iMac” and today I’d like to shoot anyone who gives me an additional story to report on. Since posting a to do list is about as interesting reading as last years tax return I will refrain from giving readers a complete run down of topics that this blog should be covering. And, if I a little self restraint I would also keep from giving you the short list, but AFC has thought this concept has been long overrated, so the short list it is. The top three things on Art Fag City’s “art to discuss” list are anything Performa related, Frequency at the Studio Museum, and the Orozco show debacle that closed last week at Marian Goodman Gallery. Not all of these things are going to be covered in today’s post, but you can expect to see them soon.
Let’s begin today’s discussion with the following question:
Q: How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: I don’t know, I didn’t stay to see the end.
My first admission revealed above: I did not see the whole Marclay performance last Friday at EYEBEAM. Don’t get me wrong, the guy is brilliant, and of those who make video and improvisational sound there are few better, but let’s not pretend this is easy listening. My idea of a good time is rarely defined by sitting in a crowded room for over an hour watching a video with no dialogue or text and non-linear music. It also isn’t spending time discussing the ball sack of the token art audience naked guy. Okay, well maybe it is, but come on, who doesn’t like gossip?
Playing to an audience large enough to draw the ball sack guy is the type of “problem” most artists wish for. Of course, Marclay also has a few problems many wouldn’t wish for, such as consistency. Over the past 25 years he has made work that ranges from fucking brilliant to distinctly average, the result being a number of bad reviews for average shows. Now, ideally artists would be treated equally by the press in this regard, and Marclay’s bad press over the years for subpar works would not stand out, but these days there are too many soft balls being thrown for this to be the case. Let’s face it, if Band , the set of instruments no one can play, were made by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, nobody would have said a thing. Certainly no one said anything about how derivative their Marclay inspired piece “Every Shot” is, when the Met showed it last summer in The Timeline of Art History. Meanwhile, Marclay was pretty much universally panned for Band, a piece that rehashed centuries of “experimental” instruments. I guess you get off easy if you’re only ripping on one artist.
Marclay’s latest work, Screen Play, is filled with classic Marclay moments, the performance revealing the beauty of movement recorded over the last 70 years. Marclay juxtaposes the spinning of a dancer, with the spinning of a washing machine, and brings together images of moving water, vehicles, cowboys on horses, and more. Through all this, an improv band plays and a series of animated dots and lines are layered on top of these images. The animation is by far the least interesting aspect of the piece since the dot placement looks a little too much like a bad exquisite corpse project to take seriously. There are a lot of problems with the seemingly non-sensical use of the dots in particular, since we’ve all seen this sort of thing before, and I’m not sure it was ever that interesting. In addition, the animated lines share a lot a visual similarities with corporate advertisements for natural resources or the Olympics, which in this case, is not a good thing, since improvisational art and commerce have never had that much to say to each other.
Now, I’m certainly not going to pan the performance as a whole, because generally speaking I think what I saw was good, it just wasn’t perfect. We all know Marclay can and will do better, which is why we’re all going to his next show, his next lecture, and his next performance. In fact, this element of uncertainty, is a layer to his work that I enjoy almost more than anything else, because without doubt, flawed brilliance is infinitely more interesting and engaging than brilliance itself.
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