Technical Difficulties

 

We went to the Bjork show at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC a few days ago, and it was so disappointing it kind of was like a dream, like one of those abysmal, banal dreams you don't write down and only half-remember, blurry and a little worthless but also full of strange feelings that aren't really attached to anything specific, just in a stupid dream and then not.  I read all the reviews before we went, and just about every visual art critic in the city panned the show with such brio and sinister joy I truly wanted to prove them wrong.  I'd read a bunch of crap about the David Bowie museum show from a couple years back, and when I saw it in Toronto it was brilliantly what it was:  an exhaustive fan-letter, a scrapbook of ephemera, clothes, video, everything Bowie presented in such a blatantly superfluous manner you could only get caught up in the gloriously stupid and heartfelt celebration.  So the critics were wrong.

 

But damn are they right on this one.

 

This Bjork gig is not heartfelt or stupid or joyous.  It's just a sleepwalk of a thing, with some mannequins wearing Bjork-face standing around in her costumes in front of oddly un-meaningful backdrops ("un-meaningful" almost to the point of being bad jokes:  see above), with an accompanying headphone Euro-trash narration written by some Icelandic poet and spoken by some Icelandic speaker that tries to make Bjork into a bland feminist galactic/volcanic myth, but all of it kind of fades away as you walk through feeling sunk and tired and just well disappointed. 

 

Bjork definitely needs to record a cover version of Leiber and Stoller's "Is That All There Is?," and that sucker needs to playing on a loop for the duration of this sad little adventure.

 

The scale is wrong.  It's small without being intimate, which makes everything feel cheap.  And even in the dinky "auditorium" showing the MoMA-commissioned Bjork video for one of her newest songs, a romp through a volcano that ends with our girl slapping herself really hard on the chest (the one great image in the whole she-bang), you feel claustrophobic, as if Bjork is a genie that the curators somehow managed to shrink back into a bottle.  What a depressing feat.

 

Maybe a museum show for Bjork was just a bad idea in the first place?  One of the great things about her is her insanely beautiful opacity, her ability not to be a human while being one, that little-girl-getting-a-spanking face, those kitty-cat eyes that seem forever to be boiling over into laser-beams, that squeaky voice collapsing earthquakes and spider-webs and satellites and murderous-screamings into tones and melodies from an outer-space too dreamy and fucked-up to be sounds...  She's poetic without poetry, mysterious without mystery:  she just is.  A museum show tries to nail things down usually, but a really bad one like this uses thumbtacks and Scotch-tape.  What needs to happen with Bjork perhaps is a show that helps to obscure her, release her from costumes and cheap vignettes into a realm beyond institution and showing.  She needs real grandeur I think that isn't about "knowing" her, or "understanding" her, but somehow being attached briefly to her (for lack of a better term) "star." 

 

You don't get that kind of thing when the video-screens don't work.  And that was the last impression we had at the Bjork MoMA thing.  Waiting in line to go into some dinky makeshift theater to watch a survey of her videos and ka-blam:  "Sorry ladies and gentleman, we're experiencing technical difficulties.  Check back in a little while."

 

And there you go.

Size Matters

"Put any of MoMA’s art in that building and it will die. And certainly contemporary art does not work there. Even granting that the Williams-Tsien facade is singular (I once compared it to a Kleenex box), the proponents of this building love it as an abstract ideal of a space for art, a platonic thing apart, a fetish," Jerry Saltz has written about the razing of the American Folk Art Museum. 

Originally unveiled in 2001, the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the American Folk Museum as a sort of paean to folk art.  That's probably what is killing it now.  Although there is a lot of debate and hand-wringing happening about the whole incident,  Saltz seems to be the spokesperson here for institutional truth: the reason the building needs to go is because it kills contemporary art.  The backstory is pretty simple:  MoMA bought the building in 2011, around the time the AFAM was running into major trouble as an institution.  AFAM almost folded last year, but is now back to where it started in a lobby somewhere.  And now MoMA wants to demolish the building in favor of more "big" space.

It's almost like a comeuppance, this tragedy, for any of us who ever had the unmitigated gall of taking something so small and insignificant as "folk art" seriously.  After all, Saltz is letting us know in his piece that "folk art" is not "contemporary art."  Saltz loathes Williams and Tsien's creation because it evokes the strange smallness and unnerving disjuncture that a lot of folk/outsider/visionary/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it art elicits.  He does not know how to categorize something unless it is categorical, defined by tradition, and I guess great big.

Comparing the bronze, beaten, carefully obtuse facade to a "Kleenex box" and then the whole building to a "fetish" is probably the way he sees most of the art that used to be, and would have been, showcased inside the thing.  Something is missing, Saltz is letting us know:  size.  Bigness rules.  Saltz, and the MoMA and its legions, are doing Gordon-Gecko drag here.  Those big MoMA works of art ("big" both literally and figuratively and historically) can't be housed within that itty-bitty Joseph-Cornell shitbox called a "folk art museum."

It's really kind of sad the disrespect not only the arcitecture is getting in this whole weird battle to destroy a "Kleenox box," but also the art that once was celebrated within it.  A lot of folk artists work small, with weird, inarchivable materials, in strange and platonic ways that look dinky and silly, I'm sure, to Saltz' eye, especially when compared to actual "contemporary art." 

If folk art is the Rodney Dangerfield of the artworld, then Saltz' "contemporary art" is the Donald Trump, and the Donald right now is saying, "You're fired" to art that doesn't take up a lot of space literally but that can expand in your head if you give it half a chance.  Same goes for Williams and Tsien's intricate, origami-lush little building. 

"You're fired, Mr. Kleenex Box."

The Artist Is Annoying

 

 

So Bill and I were bored last night, channel-surfing, and finally decided on this documentary on HBO called Marina Abramovic:  The Artist Is Present, about "the grandmother of performance art" and her recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  What an experience 14 minutes of this thing was.  We could only take 14 minutes though.  It was like a parody from the get-go, and as I watched I kept laughing at every move this thing made:  the pretentious, pseudo-Phillip-Glass music, the long close-ups of the artist herself with her side-swept braid hanging over her left shoulder like a beautiful snake waiting to whisper to you, and of course the always fun back-story of how performance art was in response to painting blah blah and blah. 

 

The interviews, especially with Abramovic herself and the curators and critics chosen to speak because they love her, had the starchy self-important self-indulgence of a really good Christopher Guest blow-out, except of course nobody was joking around.  14 minutes in, when the doc follows the artist to her backwoods compound and she is making vegetable soup for some of her followers, I kept thinking this just has to be a joke.  But then no:  the followers get off the Greyhound outside her country estate, walk onto the grounds, take off their clothes and have a fun little group-baptism, in the artist's pond.  One follower says into the camera:  "I've never thought about life in this way before."  Or something like that. 

 

The language used is about how performance makes us question civilization, but I didn't question anything about art or civilization watching the 14 minutes I watched.  I just kept laughing.  Not from the outrageousness of Abramovic's stunts (like the artist driving a van around in circles for hours screaming outside a museum, or the artist standing inside the museum naked and brushing her hair saying how she must look beautiful).  I was laughing at how archaic and dumb performance art looks now that it's been codified and registered as art.  And I kept thinking too, about "outsider art" (of course) and how it is right now going through that same codification, that same institutionalization.  Doing shocking things is no longer funny or epiphanous or even silly; it's just an exercise in self expression, which kind of deflates all the bull-shit critics and curators say about Abramovic.  I kept thinking:  who cares?  Watch any stupid reality TV show and you'll get the same fix:  outrageous people doing stupid things, in clothes or not, is what it is.  It doesn't elicit questions, or even interest.  It is now officially background noise.  

 

 

 

We ended up watching Guest's For Your Consideration on DVD, because somehow actual parody is funnier and more relaxing than unintentional parody I guess.  Plus Catherine O'Hara's slam-bang even empathetic skewering of an actress thinking she's on the verge of super stardom somehow reminded me of Abramovic's performance in The Artist Is Present:  flaky, sweet, creepy, and in the end so self-indulgent the fact that the empress has no clothes is not even jarring or upsetting.  It's just the way things are.  No big whoop. 

 

Knock yourself out Marina, right there in middle of the MOMA.  I guess some people might be impressed or nostalgic.  Who knows?