Martin Kippenberger Review "The Problem Perspective" at MoCA Grand

Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective
At Museum of Contemporary Art – Grand Avenue
September 21, 2008 – January 5, 2009

“…In this country, History happens at your Front Door…”

b. 1953 d. 1997

Martin Kippenberger wrote the following words onto a painting, “Verfallund Ende des offentlichen Lebens”, I stopped dead in my tracks. I recognized something big here. I understood enough German to understand the jist of what it meant. I knew it wasn’t a quote from his own mouth and that he must be referring to another written work, here I find Richard Sennet to close this gap.
Richard Sennet explains his theory of the “tyranny of intimacy” in his work of 1977 “The Fall of Public Man” by saying, “The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality through experiences of closeness and warmth with others. The reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood as evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology of intimacy: social relationships of all kinds are real, believable, and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person. This ideology transmutes political categories into psychological categories. This ideology of intimacy defines the humanitarian spirit of a society without gods: warmth is our god. The history of the rise and fall of public culture at the very least calls this humanitarian spirit into question.”
There is a struggle in the career and works of Kippenberger, to say it is a feeling of “coming to terms” with some unknown thing is a misunderstanding not just an understatement. One might say that it is some kind of guilt of growing up post WWII in Germany not understanding the weight he felt in the air and on the faces of his neighbors. This same idea of closeness or intimacy or in Kippenberger’s case, the lack thereof, from the fact of being born a bit too late was one that he couldn’t achieve with his neighbors and their shared history of what just happened here.
Its not guilt that I think Kippenberger was after idealogically, he saw that his fellow Germans were not so full of guilt but even worse, he saw them as being ashamed. Full of shame for a previous generation’s misstep in the path of history. That they would carry this shame and look down when the glances of the rest of the world came over them. That they would only wish for its erasure, it shouldn’t have happened and we feel awful about it, heads down forever feeling. I am not saying that Kippenberger would trade this shame for pride, but to him admitting and understanding is far better than regretting and revoking history.

Kippenberger writes about his piece, “Put Your Freedom in the Corner, Save It for a Rainy Day” of 1990, and explains further by saying, “The Wall is a part of German History. Now that all that’s left of it is a bit on Potsdamer Platz, it no longer feels like you’re walking through a wall. History is something you need to feel. First they weren’t Nazis, then they weren’t Communists. So what were they? They pulled down the wall without asking us and smartly wiped out some German history. The wall ought to have been preserved. We don’t need excavations, like in Greece—in this country history happens at your front door. Joseph Beuys thought the wall should have been seven centimeters higher---on purely aesthetic grounds. Everybody cheered when the wall was pulled down. That’s the wrong way to handle history.”
So now what? The Wall is on a world tour, we can see it, we can touch it, get our pictures taken next to it. We can be proud that we have an image of ourselves standing next to a bit of the Wall, is that it? Is that a different type of pride that we can have that Kippenberger didn’t want for his neighbors? I have one of those pictures of myself and I’m proud of it but I know it’s not what he meant. Does this mean that this retrospective is overdue and should’ve happened while he was alive? I think so.
"Kippenberger was an overrated painter and an underrated artist. In the end he turned everyone against him. His attitude is continued on today not in painting but in Vice Magazine and contemporary youth." paraphrased from Daniel Richter.

Dennis Matthews
November 7th, 2008

Interview with John Kilduff of Let's Paint TV

Interview with John Kilduff, star of Let’s Paint TV
August 2008


Dennis:
How did Let's Paint TV start and when?

John:
It started in 2001...I had been doing another cable access tv show
titled "the Jim Berry show" for about 6 years and I was getting tired
of doing that show (it was a improv/sketch/experimental show) but it
didn't have anything to do with painting.

Dennis:
What is your memory of the 1st episode?

John:
I got a cup of coffee and a box of donuts and painted them on the
show.

Dennis:
Tell me about your experiences at the Oscars? America's Got Talent?

John:
Well, it wasn't the Oscars...I think u mean "VH1's Big in 06' where I
was on the red carpet running on the treadmill, painting, and mixing
drinks.....I offered them to the stars as they walked by......it was a
blast / Some stars were cool with me and others where a-holes.....
Tyra Banks show?
Tyra was nice too. I offered her the painting and she declined. AGT
was a trip as it was a gigantic audience and my easel fell down...everyone seemed to hate me...but one person in the audience applauded for me so that was nice...Hasselhoff said to me back stage that his daughter wanted to get the painting.

Dennis:
Off the top of your head, what are a few of the most unusual things
you have been asked to do by a caller? (The real good suggestions,
Dirty is OK)

John:
run naked, have sex while running, i will think of more....

Dennis:
Why is multi-tasking so important in today's world?

John:
I think it is what we are meant to do....now a caveman can't drive a
car and check their blackberry while sipping on an latte but we
can.....and I think we need to embrace it!

Dennis:
With laws being made banning things like driving and using cell
phones, its seems that multitasking is becoming legally unpopular, do you think this will cause people "to take one thing at a time"?

John:
I suppose...except...it will only takes us backwards...... like
painting....there are always people who want to go back to the good
old days when you had to learn to draw first and you studied the
masters, etc...

Dennis:
Drive-thru liquor stores, Utopian ideal or Could be taken further?

John:
totally! take it to the limit...one more time (that's a song)........you
know great things come about from throwing things into the
blender....dreaming the impossible dream (another song)

Dennis:
Do you feel appreciated, yet?

John:
in the underground world ...yes...but as far as mainstream....no....and
I am pretty sure it will stay that way too.

Dennis
Do you think we (America) get it? Do you find it more popular
elsewhere in the world?

John:
I would say, everyone gets it...mainly the big response is from people
from Europe, US and Canada.

Dennis:
What's next for Let's Paint TV?

John:
Touring the world singing, exercising, cooking, talking, painting, and
who knows…is on the agenda.
Though, I am thinking of starting a paperclip factory and settling down too.

Eric Sall Interview

High and Wide
Interview with Eric Sall
By Dennis Matthews
September 2008

Eric Sall is a painter I met while he was receiving his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and I was working on my BFA a couple years ago. Ask him about the time I kicked his skateboard into the elevator and sent it down to the ground floor of our studio building. Still I was invited by Eric to his opening in the Chinatown Gallery District here in Los Angeles and requested an interview with him. The show consists of a selection of three of his strongest paintings. While a new gallery space, Eric’s work is large and any gallery needs to provide that breathing space to properly take in the worlds Eric creates in his paintings. Bright, funky, constantly on the go the paintings don’t wait for you, they consume you voluntarily or not into that mishmash and globs all done in his seizure-inducing palette. The reverberations that run amok in his paintings can easily be compared to the sound of feedback of a guitar coming unplugged from a live amp. Except the noise created is pleasant to the ears, in this case fascinating to the eyes.

His show is up at Acuna-Hansen Gallery, titled High and Wide, it runs from September 6th to October 18th. The gallery is at 427 Bernard Street.

Dennis:
A little bit of background about yourself? Where did you grow up
and go to college and grad school?

Eric:
I was born and raised in South Dakota, first Sioux Falls, then on to
the Black Hills, Deadwood area, ya know, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity
Jane, the wild west...after high school I moved to Kansas City to
attend the Kansas City Art Institute, and after that I spent five
years making art away from school, one of which was at the Roswell
Artist in Residency program in Roswell, NM...Then on to Richmond
Virginia for grad school, VCU



Dennis:
What was your first experience with art?

Eric:
I come from a pretty artistic family, my mom's parents were both
talented drawers, my grandma still likes to paint to this day. My
dad's mom was an interior designer a long time ago and has always
had a wonderfully decorated house. Both my parents went to college
for art but left early once they started a family. My mom still makes all
sorts of things, mostly craft based, but paintings too. My dad can
build anything and is a great drawer too. I can still remember a few
paintings of his that were around when I was younger, political
pieces from the 60's, one of a young black man with a huge afro in
front of an american flag, and another with a Trotsky-esque figure
surrounded by different symbols of peace, war, communism, and also
some random designs. I just always remember thinking art was
something normal.

Dennis:
Influential artists or movements?

Eric:
My early influences before I knew any significant art figures were
skateboard graphics, cartoons, and album cover art. I practiced re-
drawing my favorite images from these things all the time, and tried
to come up with my own logos and such too. I've always loved
Picasso, Basquiat, Baselitz, Guston, I guess all the real painter's
painters....I've been looking at a lot of DeKooning and Gorky
lately...I spend a lot of time at the MOMA in New York and think the
collection there is outstanding. There is a new Van Gogh show up now,
and his surfaces are pretty awesome....

Dennis:
If you weren't a painter, what do you think you would be doing?

Eric:
I wanted to be a professional skateboarder when I was younger... I
love the outdoors, plants and such, and I love design and order, so
maybe a landscape architect or something...



Dennis:
If another medium was it for you, what would it be? Any ideas of
exploring something additional to the painting work?

Eric:
I like photography, but haven't done any projects in quite a
while...I've often thought about sculpture too, but I never know
where to start, so I make the paintings as if they were sculptures...

Dennis:
How do you come up with your titles? They sound political or from
the media, Is this important to you or do you want viewers to
understand their references?

Eric:
I look at the paintings for hours and hours as I make them and also
after their finished, and eventually something starts clicking in my
mind, maybe a phrase, maybe just a word, but from there I look at
dictionaries a lot and also song titles. I usually end up picking a title
that I think says something about the painting, maybe highlights a
certain aspect of the piece, but also one that is not too didactic...
because I'm also hoping to say something that is poetic in some sense, and maybe something that is ambiguous too. The three paintings in
the Acuna Hansen show have titles that can definitely read as political, for instance "Stockpile" can allude to hordes of weapons, but I initially came up with the title while I was thinking about beaver dams and
the act of stocking up something for the winter..."Fair and Balanced" is obviously the same phrase that the Fox Network uses to describe its
news coverage, but it also sounds humerous to me, because the idea
of something being fair or balanced in a painting seems likes
something a painter may think (or over-think) sometimes.... also that specific painting really looked to me like some strange object that was having trouble keeping its legs below it...In the end I want
the titles to exist similarly to the paintings, and that is to say,
somewhere between familiarity and poetic ambiguity...

Dennis:
Your paintings go through a lot of reworking, and we've talked about this before,it brings to mind the issue of
"doubt" that Guston wrote, taught about,and worked through his
entire career. What I prefer to call a healthy distrust, what are your
thoughts on this?

Eric:
Some paintings come easy, most come hard though, and for me I
often feel most comfortable when I am uncomfortable with the
painting. A major part of my process is to set about challenges that
must be dealt with, ie, how to make a geometric shape coexist with anorganic blob, or how to reinvigorate old dry clumps on a canvas, or
how to get rid of the best part of the painting and still make it work.
I've been reading the deKooning biography, and there is a part that
talks about how long it took him to paint Woman 1, something like twoand half years working nearly everyday on the same surface, and the
biographer states the difficulty for deKooning in finishing the
painting "lay mainly with excavating an image that satisfied his
feeling for a buried truth." I think that says a lot about what it
can mean to make a painting. You don't always know what your
searching for or striving to depict in the process of painting, but
sometimes, hopefully more often than not, you just know when it feels
right, and that is often the hardest thing to articulate. The crazy thing
is that I've looked at Woman 1 so many times at MOMA, and to me
it still looks as if it was painted yesterday and only took a few hours tomake.

Dennis:
As a fellow painter, I know that this business of 'what does finished look
like' is a strange affair,
your paintings seem to always be in a perpetual
state of 'in progress', do you feel that if the painting is an opponent
who just won't stay down (like in a boxer who lost the match rounds
ago), how would describe your relationship to this idea?

Eric:
I think I may have answered this in the previous answer...but I will
add that even though most of the paintings do eventually become
finished, and I'm usually very happy with the results, I do feel that
each painting has an infinite number of ways that it could be worked
and finished, and in that regard I guess that is why some paintings
change so many times before I finally consider them finished. In a
way I think that this is very similar to the idea that any person's
life could take any number of paths from beginning to end, and it
still is just that one person's life. Remember that movie "Eternal
Sunshine of a Spotless Mind", they tried to erase their memories, and
after going about new versions of their lives, they are still drawn
to each other...maybe no matter how you paint the painting, you get
to a result that was intended all along...ok, this is sounding a bit
new-agey or something....

Dennis:
What's the biggest change or event to happen most recently in your
work and life? What are you excited about that's going on?

Eric:
Some of the recent paintings I made, none of which are at the Acuna
Hansen show, were easily the hardest paintings for me to finish in a
long time. Many of them took a good year to make, and I guess it
goes back to the desire for struggle, or some sort of challenge to find meaning in the process. After I finished that group of paintings, I
made a newer group that I finished very quickly, essentially allowing the paintings to happen in just a few painting sessions. I find that the paintings can carry as much weight as some of the others that are
worked over so much more. It's not necessarily something new for
me, and I'm not abandoning making paintings that take a long time to finish, but there is something refreshing about the quicker ones...

Dennis:
What's next? Talk about some shows coming up.

Eric:
I will be back in LA next month to do 2 group shows, one at Rio
Hondo College that is organized by Chris Acuna Hansen (of Acuna
Hansen Gallery), and another at an alternative space called Fakespace
LA, over at the Santa Fe Artists Colony, which is a new space that
some dear friends of mine started. Also in October, I will have a few
new pieces in a group show of gallery artists at ATM Gallery (NYC) thatwill open at a brand new space for them. I have a few other things in the works but they are too new to discuss....
Aside from that, I am moving into a new studio in Brooklyn any day
now at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Residency Program, which is a
free studio for a year.

Dennis:
Right out of grad school, hell before, you really hit the ground
running...How did you deal with the pressure that must have caused
or did it just create more motivation to keep rockin' in the studio?

Eric:
I firmly believe that I developed a very strong work ethic as an
undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute, maybe even a midwestwork ethic, where I have always felt that the work (painting)is the
most important thing, and that if I just continued to work hard and
push myself, the rest would fall into place, for better or worse. Now
of course you know it doesn't just "fall into place" per se, but if
you really believe in your work, it makes it easier to deal with the
stress of the successes and the failures, because its not always a
romantic and exciting world to be involved with. I know that what I
do is a fragile thing, and it is sometimes crazy to expect anything
out of it other than self satisfaction. Most of the pressure that I
do have I put on myself, to continue to challenge myself, to try new
things, to stay interested and excited...and I am not a stress free
person because of it, I definitely have anxieties, but somehow I am
able to keep that out of my studio when I am working. I guess in the
end I just love doing what I do, and don't really know many other
things that are as satisfying to do. I do take breaks from making
work though, to visit family and friends, or if we can travel
somewhere for fun, these things are important. We used to have a
yard and I would spend a lot of time outside planting things and
hanging out with our dog, watching things grow. Those are relaxing
things to me, and in turn a good way to deal with pressure and stress.

Dennis:
Alright, now just for fun; What kind of music do you play while making your work?

Eric:
I love music and listen to lots of different things when I work,
basically anything from classic rock, indie rock, soul, funk, jazz,
hip hop, dub, noisy shit and ambient nothings, and anything in
between...basically the itunes is on shuffle, but I always work with
music on, always....

Gris Grimly Interview

Gris Grimly
September 16th, 2008
Questions by Dennis Matthews

Related: Screening of Cannibal Flesh Riot

1. How long have you been doing this kind of work and when did Mad
Creator start?

The Mad Creator, as in THIS Mad Creator started the day I was born. I’ve been drawing ever since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I would have to say the style started from that point and evolved with every influence that seeped into my brain. I’ve been working professionally since 2000. But Mad Creator Productions the company was established in 1998. When I started it, I promoted it like a small band with ground roots tactics. I started a mailing list by gathering info from publishers, record labels and other art based companies. I would then send out a Mad Creator postcard twice a year. I still do. I made stickers with my devil head logo to hand out and stick on open surfaces. I also made t-shirts with the devil head logo to sell. Anything to brand the name Mad Creator Productions.

2. What was the 1st project you did that made you think "Wow I could do
this forever!"?

Actually, I was working at a coffee house and painting on the side. I think that is the only time I ever thought “I could do this forever”. But I don’t work at a coffee house anymore so I guess I failed.

3. In a city like LA where networking is key, have ever been handed a
project from out of nowhere, you know felt like it was pure luck?

I don’t really network. But I would have to say everything that happens seems to be a part of a cosmic plan. Many projects that I have received or events that have occurred seem destined or as you say “pure luck”. But I wouldn’t call it luck. It is more like coincidences that we can’t explain.

4. Your friends are big fans of what you do and seem to do anything to
help out, Is it hard to balance the networking you have to do and those
good friends you have to keep? (How do you find the time?)

I don’t network. And I definitely do not put friendships in jeopardy to kiss someone’s ass or further my career.

5. Tell me about your fans, can you describe some of the more
unexpected types you've met?

They are all unexpected types.

6. Any strange run-ins at Comic Cons that you can't seem to forget?

Not really. You see many strange things at comic con and after a while it all just becomes wallflowers.

7. What's been the biggest change or event to happen most recently in
your work life?

I would have to say taking on film as an art form. I have only been dabbling in it for three years now but have become bitten. In 2005 I chose to produce and direct the short film “Cannibal Flesh Riot!” and went out there and did it. It is now a new art expression for me.

8. What's next for the Mad Creator?
I am working on a sequel to the Edgar Allan Poe book I illustrated. I should be done with it by now, but still have quite a few pages to do. It is scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2009. I also just recently directed a music video for the band Ghoultown starring Elvira. I am currently editing that for an October 08 release. But we plan on releasing it with some additional footage and a couple singles as a limited edition CD/DVD in the Spring of 09.

Index Review

Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection
LINK
At the Temporary Contemporary at Geffen MoCA

August 24th 08 – December 15th 08

When seeing a show on Conceptual Art, especially this show, bring a friend. A designated driver, in a sense, is definitely needed here. The many branches of this genre are displayed here, sometimes confusing but mostly confronting. “Index” is a show with multiple personalities, with every voice in its head talking all at the same time. It swings from the dry and mundane to literalized Institutional Critique, always maintaining a strict line of humor and irony.
Frances Stark’s “Structure That F(its My Opening)”, Allen Ruppersburg’s “The Fairy Godmother”, and the queen of Institutional Critique Andreas Fraser makes an appearance with “Little Frank and His Carp” of 2001, all of which are hilarious additions to this show.
Each of these pieces reminds us that Conceptual Art shouldn’t be so serious, that a critique doesn’t need to be negative or heavy handed. Fraser goes on an audio tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao, one narrated by Frank Gehry who through his descriptions of his architecture turns Fraser on sexually. She, at his voice’s direction, begins to feel up the walls of the foyer and then herself at the delight of fellow patrons of the museum. When watching this video, I’d suggest paying close attention to her facial expressions in reaction to Gehry’s words, if you can.

Fraser goes through a full range of emotions, from frightened when he mentions “trapped” and “no escape” to delight when asked by him to touch the walls. Who would’ve thought an official audio tour could be sexy, only when literalized by Fraser she reveals much of her self and how it could be misheard. I would call this the first art work you’ll see when entering the show, depending how you travel through the show it could easily be the last, but I think it should be both first and last.
The installation of the show requires a bit of patience getting through pieces displayed that felt like they were required to somehow validate the lengthy history of Conceptual art.
If you can make it all the way to the furthest wall, you’ll hear some rock n’ roll playing in a darkened room. Here you’ve come upon Mathias Poledna’s “Actualite” of 2001, featuring Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennet of Rilo Kiley, seemingly rehearsing a song. The video loops and one is never sure where the beginning was, a stark distinction from a better known video by Matt Stokes, his “Long After Tonight”, not in this show, is much more chronological with a clear beginning and end.

But both videos are not real, they feel real undoubtedly, but are great recreations of real instances in a time warp. Created way too late about possible past events, set then but filmed now. In “Actualite” the illusion is very strong until once the drummer looks at the camera when she’s smoking, and becomes self-conscious that she broke the illusion. You see that “Damn, camera caught me looking at it!” expression on her face.
Bruce Connor’s “Eye-Ray Forever” is also featured in the exhibition, although it is at quite a distance from the other themes represented, it somehow fits overall. Greil Marcus talks about Connor’s film work in his novel “The Shape of Things to Come” and I think the following is a great summation of what this show was going for ideologically, Marcus says, “-that it seems not only still present but in the future, a promise that what is truly American will never change, that the future will most of all resemble the past.”.
Conceptual Art, I believe, would agree and subscribe to this line of thought, which their lineage is clear yet allowed to be jarring and inconsistent from the family tree. Overall “Index” is a strange assortment of works where the few outweigh the many that “needed” to be displayed.
Dennis Matthews
September 6th, 2008

Second Chance

SECOND CHANCE
By Dennis Matthews

One of the best shows in Chicago this summer was down the street from SAIC at the Chicago Cultural Center. It was free every single day and a rare show that illuminated the art of India whose artists don’t have many chances for exposure in America.

Ranbir Kaleka is one of the artists featured who will be back for a second chance in Chicago at the Spertus Museum at 610 South Michigan Avenue. (That’s about 5 Blocks south of the Art Institute and the Maclean Center).

It is always best to let the artist tell the story so…“The image may fall on the retina in an instant, but its reading takes place in time. Paintings usually reveal their details/nuances only gradually through many viewings. Our own state of mind at different moments reveal different relationships within a painting. A great painting (I am not referring to my work) is never depleted, it always holds back a little for your next visit.”.

Kaleka comes from the town of Patiala in the Punjab region of India. Born in 1953, Ranbir is one of the most strange and intriguing multimedia artists that I have recently been introduced to while living in Chicago. Turning the corner towards his sixtieth year, Kaleka has not lost pace with many younger artists working in the chasm between video and painting. He lives in New Delhi and London most of the year, and spends much time teaching and “keeping up with my deadlines.” as the artist has told me through exchanges of emails over the last few months.

Kaleka’s work is carefully painted images of people on canvas on which he projects video of the same people who slowly come to life. The video projections are of landscapes, trembling motions of the people as they begin to interact with each other or the story, and sometimes things like a white horse walk into the scene. To quote the artist, he says, “Technique and method are secondary, except in those cases where the 'process' of 'making/creating' a piece is the 'meaning' of the 'work' and the end product is just the ' by product'.”.

The video installations rely on our imaginations that what Kaleka is presenting could happen to us, for instance if you sit still on a stool for too long a horse may stop by. His work brings to mind other artists such as Bill Viola who presents slow videos that are clearly mixing animation with the still, ever-lasting image of a painting to bridge our expectations of art even further. On the website, AnotherSubContinent.com, Ranbir says of his work that, “When I do heads, I try to make the face particular and at the same time general. What I am trying to say is that every face, how so ever ordinary looking, has a distinctive character and mark of individuality. I try not to make an easily readable face as we are not easily definable. Looking at a face for a long time can be a humanizing experience, some aspect of the face invariably begins to look attractive…there are no ugly faces. There are two things I am doing while painting a face...I try not to fix it but bring ambiguity to it and then bring intensity to its presence.”.

This work will also be an permanent multi-media installation commissioned by Spertus Museum, Chicago. Tentative title, ‘Thus time passed and we got used to many things’. The new Spertus Museum is scheduled to open on November 30th, 2007.

The Spertus is a center for research of Jewish Studies that will soon open their new building. You’ve probably seen it walking to the Utrecht or down to the Field Museum, it’s the cracked, folded glass building being built on Michigan. For the most astute observer it was the site of an installation of Jewish “bad words” by Mel Bochner done in what he called “holocaust yellow” on black at his lecture last fall.

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies

610 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605
FREE

all quotes courtesy of the artist and originally published on www.AnotherSubContinent.com
www.rkaleka.com

Nonart object review

Dennis Matthews
November 27, 2007

How I spent my Friday with the most important
yet pointless monument in Chicago.

A lone tombstone is anchored on a street corner near Chicago’s Orange Line 35th/Archer stop. No one is buried underneath this marker though. A reminder of the history of our city’s foundations is mostly forgotten amongst garbage, a bad neighborhood, and fencing that demands that this historical preservation site shall go no further. Nearly shadowing the monument is a single condo that sets a bar higher than the neighborhood cares to reach.
Chicago is a great city for history fans and those that visit will probably learn something before they leave. There are great monuments to important events in the history of the entire nation, like the Haymarket Riot and the Water Tower, but this marker may be the biggest deal of them all. Besides appearing to be a dead guy in his own cemetery, it refers to the two of the first Europeans who traveled all the way to the Gulf of Mexico from the Great Lakes.
Well not quite so far, the two explorers Marquette and Joliet stopped at Arkansas fearing if they went any further the Spanish would capture them. The oddness of what looked like a single grave marker stopped me and I felt forced to investigate. There are many things about this monument that I have problems with, for one it was put up by the Bigane family in 1973 who appear to have no connection to either explorer. But they thought it was important to have this made on the 300th anniversary of the expedition. And further to put it in a completely culturally irrelevant area. I mean it doesn’t even get tethered to the really nice park across the street. Seriously fudge the details here and put up a fountain or place to walk a dog.
The travels they embarked on led to LaSalle later claiming the second fourth of America for France. Alongside the Mississippi river, he would set up very successful trading posts making the Louisiana Purchase more of buying a ready-made market. According to what the text on the monument claims, “We thank God for these natural waters and lands which we hope may be saved from pollution.” Marquette and Joliet’s experiences are remembered here in hopes that it will save the area from being trashed. The text on the stone further talks about how much the two explorers also found like Indian trails, waterways and apparently Wisconsin was also discovered during their travels. At least this grand historical event will always have its ten foot by ten foot street corner.

Tara Donovan vs. Julia York

Dennis Matthews
Show Comparison
November 8, 2007

Tara Donovan at David Weinberg Collection
300 W. Superior, Ste. 203
Tel 312-529-5090
Tue-Fri 10-5:30, Sat 10-4

versus

Julia York at Perimeter Gallery
210 W. Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60610
(312) 266-9473
Tue-Sat 10:30am-5:30pm


Hey where did those chicks just go? What you see isn’t what you get; in fact it actually leaves you and walks away. Appearances, disappearances, reflections and ideas of what constitutes form are formidable foes for viewers of the work of Julia York and Tara Donovan.
Showing in Chicago this month at Perimeter Gallery and David Weinberg Collection, respectively, are two young artists whose approach depends on the particularities of which material is being used at the time. Last year, in obvious awe, the critic Fred Camper wrote an article in the Chicago Reader, which praised the work of York at the Sculptural Objects and Functional Art fair. In this article he mostly gives a biography with snippets culled apparently from an interview (when it took place is not mentioned) in lieu of saying anything solid. Camper outright feels the need to explain that York’s objects “they’re obviously not functional.” in his write up on the work.




The gross misconduct that train of thought will lead to while attempting to find a critical viewpoint is hardly productive. To expend the bit of energy needed to come up with that realization might have been redirected to saying something, anything in the essay.
Taking it further there is a mention of tying her work to her dyslexia, which albeit is very weak but an easy way to keep writing about something else, although self-admittedly important to her work. Perhaps it would be more believable if York had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, it could explain the attention span needed for her process at least. Working in Philadelphia for the last seven years, Julia York has stretched her work across the United States and Canada with her lengthy exhibition record while maintaining a Residency at The Clay Studio.
An equally obsessive, yet much more successful so far, artist is Tara Donovan showing an installation one city block away at David Weinberg Collection.
Relying on mass-produced materials that are easily obtained and even easier to be manipulated into very deceiving forms that clearly conjure up all things organic. This stepping out of the realm of expectations of the material utilized is found in the work of Donovan and the “functional”-ity of York’s ceramic, glass, and mineral oil works. Doesn’t the work of both artists do something, they function oddly yes but they act, they react to the movement of he who views them. They flash, sparkle, and tend to get aggressive if left at “eye-candy” level. York’s images will disappear when you walk too far away, exit stage left, if you’re not looking then York is out the door too.


Donovan’s “reefs” aren’t much more solid as objects either. (In fact I kicked a piece, it kind of went flying). They shimmer it all off and are, in fact, pretty honest objects about what they do which is nothing. Camper should have seen their lack of function and the unapologetic tone Donovan’s objects take with their viewers. Though fixed on my return visit, to see roughly five thousand dollars get misplaced by my foot was an anxious moment in my recent life.
Here’s hoping that York speeds up and over the success Donovan has had in the last few years. High prices and cheap material really only leads to a huge margin of profit, not profundity or even curiosity this is where York has achieved leaving Donovan in the dust.

Interview by students of Dennis Matthews

Interview with Dennis Matthews
a short survey of questions given to the artist on October 24, 2007

Dennis Matthews is a current graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As he prepares to leave school, possibly for good, he reflects on where his work begins and his particular angle of what to be a working artist means. An organizer of many shows and events, mostly out of lack of other hobbies he would say, Dennis Matthews has been involved with the arts for nearly a decade. His entire life has been broken into short periods of living across the United States and the world, not one to settle or to be happy with just maintaining a mediocre view or acceptance of what’s presented to him. His current projects involve arranging his own lectures, exhibitions, teaching, and “keeping a few paintings in circulation”. Most recently the work has been shown at the Chicago Art Open and at the 101 Paintings Show at Co-Prosperity Sphere. The biggest project he embarked on over summer 2007, is to present the 2005 Venice Bienalle representative of India, Ranbir Kaleka at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in late November as a Visiting Artist. He would say jokingly that, “Its just a little of what I do here.”.

1. Although you have done many different kinds of work, do you have a process or aspects that you always use?
2. Are the artists that you are most drawn to visible or apparent in your own work?
3. Where does your inspiration come from?
4. How do you take drawing into painting? How do you approach color?
5. Do you sketch first? Do the abstract shapes create an image? Do you know what it’ll look like?
6. What are you trying to accomplish with your paintings? What’s your thematic focus?
7. Does the MFA program at SAIC provide real insight on how to build a career as an artist? Once you graduate, do you feel as though you will be equipped to accomplish your dreams or goals?
8. If you were going to start a movement, what would you call it?
9. If art was not an option, what would you do with yourself?

1. I think it comes down to rely on a very involved process. Very hands-on approach. I started art as a screen printer, working with an ex-graphic designer. I’ve been into photography at times, the crop, composition is a the most relevant pain in photography whether as attempting it or as a viewer.
2. I think a lot about the structuring of my favorite works, the step by step, the how did they do it. People like Wifredo Lam aren’t stylistically apparent in my work but the concern of décor versus an attention to detail. What’s there and what’s just out of frame is important.
3. Many areas, recently I’ve been thinking of comparisons and how anything one knows is by way of referring to another thing we assume as related. A “its just got to be this way” moment, that helps us understand why we’re still looking at an object or idea in art. I’ve also been looking at patterning, décor, and how they can be used to redirect one’s focus in viewing a work to literally highlight the comparisons being made.
4. I feel like I am always drawing at every stage of a work. My videos even rely on a ‘drawing’, a schematic. Even the drippy, gestural areas are careful and lengthy.
5. I have photographic evidence of sketches. I wouldn’t say at any point that I was an image-maker. Its all comparative, relational, I’m interested in developing curious relationships within each painting.
6. A reverberation is the aim not a communicatory thing. A pinball machine way of viewing, even if one does not follow how to enter or leave a work they’ll bounce around.
7. Yes. Yes. Both. “…as an artist?” It’s the agenda of the individual artist of how they’ll choose to function in the system of the art world. My peers would only be lost if they weren’t looking at function and only at developing connections.
8. I don’t really believe in movements. It gets really complicated and artists tend to get tacked onto something that they weren’t that interested in, a don’t judge me by the company I keep thing.
9. Probably be someone’s accountant, you know a business I was comfortable with. Everything in my work is pretty calculated, its my approach to many things.

Jeff Wall Review

Jeff Wall Dennis Matthews June 29th to September 23rd 2007 The Art Institute of Chicago's Regenstein Hall Jeff Wall, born in 1946, is one of the leading artists of the photo-conceptualist movement started by several artists living and working in Vancouver, Canada. This grouping of contemporaries in the movement, such as Rodney Graham, are a community of artists who with the use of large format photography have expanded the realm of expectation and further increased the dividing line between the viewer and the image's subject matter.
In the work of Jeff Wall we are no longer only left witness to the grand events of everyday life, the subject is not some other story being told it is yours. Told most definitely through the common language of art history, as easy as we recognize Munch's "The Scream" being used for selling credit cards, we have Wall taking up two views on the subject, offering us a choice in Man on the Street of 1995. In images such as this one we have Wall "blatantly devising his shots, he induces us [viewers] to ask exactly what is we ordinarily read as "natural"---and why," Richard Vine, writer for Art in America comments.
The advent of being able to manipulate photographs by way of computers has only strengthened the illusionism and insight of his work as we see the changes clearly in this retrospective. Jeff Wall's newfound digital edge on more traditional photographers has not made his efforts any easier. The stages upon which his dramas are played still take weeks of constructing the final image and months of planning how to even get the images out of the vault of ideas and into some kind of feigned reality that almost stops at believable.
The use of montage in fusing two moments after each other as the one incidental moment he has just snapped blends ideas of what memorization and a replaying of a memory is, they may just be the same thing Wall suggests. In an interview for the last retrospective of his work, he tells Arielle Pelenc that, "...the illusion that something was there in the world and the photograph is a trace of it. In photography, the unattributed, anonymous poetry of the world itself appears, probably for the first time.", it would be clear to say that the work remains aware of the fact that every photograph is only a presentation of a possibility of its own occurrence.



In 1977, Wall traveled to Spain where he was enlightened by his encounters with the lit up ads on bus stops. One of his most ambitious early projects was in the following year with "The Destroyed Room" where he used this format when it was exhibited. The strength of its art historical overtones could not be left unattended to by the viewers and its magnificent contemporary presence in 2007 a generation later shows that it will be viewed as the turning point to greatness in Jeff Wall's career.
Revival, decay, danger, and the grit involved in our everyday are painted across each lightbox illuminated like grand Spanish Renaissance work such as Murillo's many "Mary Magdalene"s from the inside out, they flash to us a feeling and a suspicion that the adjective amiss may be an understatement. Jeff Wall's "The Vampire's Picnic" is a classical copy of Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" but it carries the composition close to the original, there are many new characters introduced in this image.
Some clearly mimic the gestures of the contemporary Master Manet's while the others appear to be lost in the feasting, one man holds a pair of a lady's shoes the owner not to be found in the composition. The literal bloodline I am referring to is being carried on in the work of today's photographers who are providing new possible routes for the expansion of our usual expectations of the art form of making it appear like one can always click at the right moment.
In the last dozen years, the work of Jeff Wall has gained a cinematic sheen and set production level of his stages for these moments. The scale of the final images refer more to projections of films than the wall coverers of the previous generation of large abstract painters.
One of the most memorable sets of works are his "Movie Watchers" beyond being a bearer of regrettable haircuts, its the same daze we find in the misplaced vampires at the picnic. Jeff Wall has created those suspicious, unforgettable moments that have happened to all of us and re-presented all of the times we didn't trust our experience of some occurrence as not really happening at the time.

Judith Geichman

Interview with Judith Geichman
By Dennis Matthews on October 17, 2007
1. If you weren’t an artist what do you think you would be doing?
2. Material and process seem to be at the forefront of the experience of your work, is this a reaffirmation of the impactfulness of painting versus digital media’s ease to create bold images?
3. If your work could create or be combined with sound, what would we hear?
4. What was your first experience with art?
5. Last good show/Favorite painters?
6. How far back would you go in Art History? Modernism? Is it over?
7. If another medium was it, which would it be?
8. In the most recent installation there were a group of Sumi Ink drawings, these careful arcs, the slight whips of the brush, seem to evoke an Eastern air, donde esta tu influence? (Motherwell’s Eulogy to the Spanish Republic?)
9. How do you deal with a painting’s success relying on a balance of both accomplishment and resignation?
Bonus Round:
* I like Motherwell, Franz Kline versus Robert Motherwell who wins?










1. If I had the science and math skills it would be a surgeon. Visual experience of going through the body, dissection, another world, glistening, bloody, physical. How these things are attractive, unknown. Or a chef

2. Don’t worry about competition, out of fashion doesn’t matter, empower it, do what I got to do. The Personal is essential to a (success). Growth, cycles, images revealing other actions. Teaching, traveling, experiences feed the work. Loss and joy can be worked through in a singular piece. Turn off what It ought to look like. Comes up over time. Iceland, M. Louis Atl Retrospective (gave support) Editing! How things are momentary in the contemporary world, fragility has become more apparent.

3. Opera, theaterical, Bjork, sigur ros,

4. Staring at little imperfections, notches/dimples in cement. Making pictures out of just shapes…Looking gave me a lot of inspiration, way of reinvolving myself outside of what was really happening lifewise. My dad was a bartender, met a lot of people, one sold art books, he brought back a series of time life feature books. Kept pictures of art early on, treasured these playing cards (Goya’s boy with bird cage)

5. NY Chelsea, dutch paintings at Met., Gagosian show late de Koonings. Neo Rauch, (Carroll Dunham, Terry Winters) (people following) Brice Marden, Lydia Dona, Eva Hesse. Fraganard, the past!

6. 18th century, cave walls at one point, modernism can be here and fresh, defining such a challenge. Not over, dialogue of space, paint quality, talking about painting is happening, engagement with how to

7. Times when I needed to make things, sculpture, involving my hands, figuring out how to add to the painting work with something 3d.

8. Pat Steer, Chinese paintings, scholar rocks/paintings, atmosphere, first place I go to at the Met. Poured, curious, created a figure/ground. Southwest/Iceland Lava areas (seeing images emerge)

9. Start with chaos, clear is not there, enough random acts add up to develop to a point that it can be listened to as to what happens next. Belabored is gone, allow the last painting guide the next. Year and a half. Earliest they were let go, developing faith, recognize mystery.

10. It’s a tie, Kline first, Motherwell
Elkins :painting as liquid thought. Yves Klein print painting.

Answers Judith Geichman by Dennis Matthews on October 17, 2007

Negative Review of "Gray"

Jasper Johns Dennis Matthews
Gray
At the Art Institute of Chicago
Nov. 3rd to Jan. 6th

What is this? A retrospective or an excavation of some half-brained theme? The concept of a retrospective is odd and can only get more odd when the artist would be included in an overall one of the last 40 years of American Art also. Anyone who gives such an integral artist a bad review on his retrospective, let alone the last one he’ll probably be alive for, is crazy. A good review is no more allowed in my mind either, I mean if you’re crazy successful in your late 20s, 28 to be exact, and that was fifty years ago then what’s the point of this sort of reiteration. It’s a lot of fun and nice to see it all at once, but it is hardly an inspection as in the second half of the word; retro-spective.
A retrospective is about the development over years of an artist and how they have met all challenges along the way. These challenges come from exploring differing mediums and investigations of similar themes in one’s work. How do we even begin to judge a looking back on the work of one artist when we cannot separate the development we are being shown from the context of the same work’s early success? My question needs an answer that only a parallel universe could give us about Jasper Johns’ growth. Can we go through his garbage that would be more enlightening to me about who he is now.
A few guidelines can be utilized if we want, simple stuff like how technically well is it done, but I don’t want to. Where my concern lies is, does the strength of individual ideas had by the artist abandon his overall theme for the sake of one’s progress?

Do we follow his train of thought in the exhibition, is the curator successful at relaying the what for, the “Why is this show happening again?” was my biggest question after several visits. Even if conceptual progression is not linear, is it coherent, is the artist just rambling along but we’re not supposed to notice that an art historical figure like Johns may not be saying anything anymore.
Are we even interested enough fifty years later to “shadow” the artist through his career in the guise of a formal retrospective? I keep using the word retrospective but the Art Institute of Chicago doesn’t, to explain I feel that it really is a surveying of a lifetime of work and that it shouldn’t just be trying to pluck a theme out of thin air then curate a show out of it.
Do we want to even ask why does John care about 0-9 and the complications involved with such a concept? I think Johns is concerned with the idea because it is about ascribing worth by a method of counting used to define what quantity looks like. How the multiple extends to many media and reflects, in art, a disillusionment of concepts like quantity, of bountifulness, security, and brings up the question of what is the real worth of material things. I see the foresight in Jasper Johns’ work, this idea of quantity and its repercussions slides over to, what I think is, a premonitory feeling of how artists like Andy Warhol would abduct this idea a decade later than most of the earliest work in “Gray”.




Honestly, this show is a bore it only becomes a curiosity to see a lot at once of one artist. It could have used half as many galleries to get the idea across that gray is a really important color but more so as a concept to Johns. Really I got it, I trust that you worked these ideas out but I don’t need to see the 6 lithographs of the painting. Either way, the painting came first in every case, can’t you just move on from an image. Jeez if Johns had just picked one image to do, once you know, he would’ve had all the time to do all types of images.
This vocabulary is stifling for intelligent viewers; its dull without the use of the color gray, “Seizure-inducing-Yellow” couldn’t save this show. I feel that he is shown to be very lazy or just not interested in his own work. Early success will kill personal inquiry of one’s own work apparently. I am left as a painter, art historian, teacher, critic with the impression that Jasper Johns stopped being involved, there came a point probably because of the immediate success he had that his work wasn’t personal any more.
There are many ridiculous moves in this exhibition beyond the convoluted descriptions of the wall text. One example is in the number motif gallery, where the voice of the curator is heard saying, “The work plays with the graying of the black-on-white printed elements when seen from the distance required to take in the full canvas.”. Nobody’s smart enough to not be stopped by that wad of crap. I translated it to mean very simply that, if you can see the whole painting at once from where you are standing, then its numbers will look blurry.


The work “Periscope (Hart Crane)” is an excellent example of this too. We are told that every element in this painting is to allude to a “desperation” of its subject, Stephen Crane a poet who committed suicide by drowning. This subject for Johns is expressed by way of the three primary colors, both in text form and as actual color. Did I miss that lesson in color theory? Suicide equals red, yellow, and blue? Really doesn’t give me a feeling of someone who didn’t want to keep his head above water anymore.
What’s less valid about this work is when we notice that there is a 1972/1994 Flag piece. So you did a carborundum wash in ’94 over a ’72 litho? Good thing this piece happened to be in your own collection…otherwise its burglary and destruction of property, jerk. In the same room is a 1960 Flag made of Sculpt-metal from the collection of Robert Rauschenberg, very nice of him to put this one on loan for the show. They are the only case of a break-up becoming a friendship I guess, I would’ve sold it personally.
I imagine Jasper Johns, now aged 77, being one of those stubborn old man characters shown in the movies, like a Walter Matthau if he had been a painter. I see Jasper the man in the show, but it’s not a nice experience, I see him picking up a paintbrush, telling us to shove it and don’t ask questions. I heard he was here in Chicago, did he see this show? I thought I saw him on the street the other day, if it was really Jasper Johns I am not one hundred percent sure, but he didn’t look happy.

To The Museum and Beyond Final

THE GETTY CENTER IN LOS ANGELES
December 22ND, 2049
From the desk of Dennis Matthews, Director;
PRESS RELEASE & STATEMENT TO OUR MEMBERS

Apple has taken upon a partnership with the Getty Center in Los Angeles, tentatively titled the GettyApple Project. After the success of the Ipod, Iphone, and Itunes at the end of the last century, which led to the incorporation of all types of media not only at the home but also in the hand wherever one would go. We now see an opportunity for a grander experience.
The newest innovation of Apple will be called the Iglasses for the museum goer. The Iglasses will effectively replace the audio tour we have all become way too familiar with, the disenchanted and most often misinformed musings of the curator in question of the exhibition relayed through a clunky set of headphones and a bloated remote control one had to carry through the show.
In what will become the most exciting innovation since mandatory moving sidewalks in our cultural institutions, the Iglasses will give the museum goer the option to literally choose their own adventure.
Originally developed early this century as a webcam utility device, the Iglasses have dabbled in every area of our lives from keeping us awake on late night drives to digitally replacing bad actors with your favorites in the movies of your choosing.
The steady decline of museum popularity in the last fifty years has led Apple to reinvent this technology for the sanctity of our disappearing sense of culture. For example in recent years, many forms of cultural expression such as poetry and photography have disappeared entirely, due to their artistic and societal irrelevance and all around depressing nature of their subject matter most of the time.
Today the culturally inclined will be able to load a program for visitation of any institution at home, teleport to the institution, see exactly what they’d like nothing more nothing less, and the moving sidewalks will be programmed by your Iglasses to tour the viewer around.




Providing only generalized factoids that can’t be recanted by some book, wall text, or some delectable curator, the Iglasses will tell you what it is without telling you that its only that. Remember TiVo? Similar but with culture whatever that may be to you, well its all up to you!
Taking a cue from TiVo, the Iglasses will also allow the patron to fast forward past drab blockbuster shows like After Whistler at the High Museum and Homer & Hopper at the Art Institute of Chicago. By fast forward we really mean that the moving sidewalks will speed up and strap you into your chair, dumping you off at either the gift shop or the next art work in your program.
Enhancing a viewer’s experience is no longer enough; our mission is to exaggerate the experience. Anticipating the desire for and providing for an easier trip to the museum, all tours of the collection will be now self-directed as programmed through the visitor’s Iglasses.




Never-ending arguments about what to go see and in what order will disappear entirely when the Iglasses allow each member of your family to create their own tours. The Getty Center in Los Angeles and our new Now Art Wing will be the first testing ground for this new technological incorporation and remixing of the collection.
Since the opening of the Getty Center in 1997 the next ways of viewing art has been at the forefront of our mission. We even went to the lengths of building a Tram that divorces any “walk-on” viewers that wander in from the street level; it is to be an experience. For us it is our patrons’ nervous anticipation of what lies upon the hill that we offer.
The exclusive art museum you ask? Well of course there’s no VIP list, only wonders awaiting for those that climb the hill to come discover their own sense of culture in visual actualized form expressed through unique art objects.
The stakes were raised from this move, the resort museum was invented, and we could not allow let downs in the hearts of viewers. The art museum as the next hot vacation spot was here. Therefore the experience of the museum couldn’t let the illusion of escape to break even for one moment.
This idea had to pertain to the collection also, genres had to adapt, such often misused tropes of art like Realism and Figuration had to be forgotten and moved back to storage or sold off, literally swept under the rug never to be seen again. Seeing a still-life and feeling hungry would interrupt the escape that art, especially abstract, non-committal art offers.
The structure of the Now Art Wing will be a series of pods similar to garden conservatories encased in kaleidoscopic glass with moving sidewalks complete with benches ala the Jetsons that drop the viewer off at their next destination of culture. Taking advantage of the lush landscape and proximity to the Pacific Ocean and the city of Pasadena, the Tram has been extended in many directions to tether other destinations to our institution.
Imagine this, after a long day at the museum you can vacation at the beach or shop the beautiful streets of Pasadena. Of course all routes are one way, from the museum only. A city bus can take viewers back to the parking garage where they must have left their cars, at the foot of the hill the Getty Center stands upon.




Or just relax in our gardens now free of those indiscernible distractions that were popularized in the last century and called “public sculpture”. We don’t believe in that concept of letting art beautify through corrosion and exposure, we put it inside and keep it there, art is too important to allow it to deteriorate in the hands of nature. (Garden, Beach, or Shopping options only $150 per person!)
We, at the Getty Center aren’t here to tell you how it is. We are interested in what you think and what you want to see. So much so that we opened a research facility on the grounds from the very day of our founding, where you can tell us how it is (background as a verifiable scholar not longer required!).
The technology of the Iglasses also allows for an easier, more efficient tracking of statistics of the visitors and what they came to the institution to see and how long they viewed each art work in their program. If the question is what is more true now, well we are now gathering an answer from the public one validated through plain old pure statistical collection. The different works with the most of each category will be at the top in our hierarchy, (categories to be determined and altered as statistics change.).
It’s more than a surveying though in our minds, we will be rating art works in accordance to their popularity and relevance to other works in the collection. The Getty Center is a forward thinking, progressive institution and we are not afraid to let the public vote art works off the hill. We trust you and only want to learn about what do you want to see more of or in our next exhibition.
If Mondrian loses to Picasso, then Piet retires with no regrets, after all dead men can’t make for sore losers. And if Pollock and Durer are chums in the minds of the public then the wall texts and the installation of the collection will have to reflect that.
In this post-wikipedia age of editable history that only has to be agreed upon to remain published and available, the museum has to let the public create their own lineages and truth in art too.
This will also allow for works to reemerge from decades of storage room limbo due to popular demand. We have anticipated the problems that may arise from this such as the Art Institute of Chicago becoming the Picasso Institute of Chicago or the Met becoming the Matta.

It is indeed a slippery slope we have created but the most exhilarating ride to take all the way down. We at the Getty Center think you are smart, that you have your own sense of history that is undeniable to you and more excitingly so one that is unique to you as an individual. Other museums may ignore you but the Getty Center knows that you feel that way; your vote always counts with us.
Even the craziest vagrant on the street knows history and can quickly tell you how it all went down. Sure Old Saint Nick may have founded America just the other day. And with the help of Vice President Easter Bunny defeated the Commies in the Civil War. But who are we to say that the vagrant couldn’t see history, specifically art history, in the way he’d like.
Our belief is that the public has tired long ago of the miss musings of some defiant curator’s pet project always taking that familiar condescending tone with them. As for administrating and handling the usual business of an institution, we will maintain a committee board. Our committee functions as a group of delegates that can only cast the same vote that their districts tell them to for purchasing and in organizing every new exhibition.
Absentee ballots will be available and necessary in this situation for many of our members don’t live in Los Angeles. Sample images of prospective acquisitions will be linked to their corresponding check boxes as to avoid any confusion and the purchasing of work that didn’t receive the popular vote i.e. how we fixed the Electoral College system in 2012 by putting the candidate’s face next to where you put the check.
The New Acquisition of Now Art committee will be searching far and wide for art works that point elsewhere in the collection that have grown off the ideas of the Now Masters like Lawrence Weiner, Alan McCollum, Louise Lawler, and Joseph Kosuth.
In a way this will require of new acquisitions to be institution-specific to the Getty Center but will anticipate and allow for many works that are able to speak of art in general.
In the first decade of the century we witnessed an incredible achievement and invention in the form of “Personal Sound Amplifiers”. These wondrous devices allowed one to watch television without disturbing other people in the room.
It allowed people to spend time with their families without having to listen to them, you could be listening or the game could be on. The more particular users of this product would dim their television sets to a step before off and still be able to hear every play of the game.
The Getty Center and Apple thought long about this desire to immerse one’s self while seeming to be all there at home. Why not take a spin through the museum and see all your lost loves at your own leisure? Spending time with the family doesn’t have to involve television; you could all learn something over dinner.
Which brings us to our next exciting opportunity for advancement in the field of culture. The Iglasses will also have an option of home viewing, where you can tend your own garden while seeing the masterworks of the next generation. Can’t make it to the Getty Center? Our collection and your masterpiece mix list will come to you. (Do not operate heavy machinery, attempt to drive while using this product, or use illicit drugs or alcohol).
Debating where to go next summer? The Iglasses will now allow you to compare our institution with selected works of numerous other museums and cultural centers of the world. On that note you can even see the library at the zoo and vice versa, good luck studying with lions roaming the stacks!

Bibliography:
Iglasses
http://www.i-glassesstore.com/
TiVo
http://www.tivo.com/
After Whistler
http://www.docsnews.com/high.html#whistler
Homer
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/homer
Hopper
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/hopper/visitor
Wikiality and Agreed Upon History
http://spring.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/01/307864-stephen-colbert-causes-chaos-on-wikipedia-gets-blocked-from-site
2000 presidential recount