Proto-Pinocchio

I took these photos at the Cincinnati Art Museum this weekend.  They are of Jim Dine's new bronze sculpture, "Pinocchio (Emotional)," a scary/creepy/mystical thing that seems to want to conjure a lot of pop-culture nightmares while also paying serious homage to the original 1883 children's novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.  The statue is imposing, and the glazed patina of it harkens back to Rodin.  High art crashes into low, but also a heavyhanded sentimentality gives the whole enterprise a strange, beautiful kick.  It's as if Dine wants to transform the Disney puppet-boy into a man-boy-god of steel, a cartoon pulled from suspended animation and recast as personal totem.  It was a beautiful sunny day, which only made "Pinocchio" seem a lot more imposing and a little more terrifying.  The facelessness and the wipe open arms are somehow disquieting and Golem-like.  Suddenly it just might come to life and move slowly toward you, like a figure in one of those movies made by the Quay Brothers...    

"Please Do Not Touch"

"Meet Me at the Center of the Earth," currently at the Cincinnati Art Museum, is a revelation.  A survey of Nick Cave's voluptuous costumes, performances and sculptures, the show is not actually an exhibit as much as an "invasion."  I put "invasion" in quotes because that's what Cave often calls what happens when people don his costumes and go gallivanting around town:  art takes over the atmosphere, and even the world.  And in this case the institution.  Cave's flirty, garish, gorgeous costumes merge the kitschy, kitchen-sink glamour of Bob Mackie with the folk-art intensity and precision of Thornton Dial.  Throw in some Leigh Bowery and Jim Henson and Alexander McQueen and (what the hell?) Parliament Funkadelic and you have yourself a militant miraculous mega-party in the RuPaul's Drag Race Interior Illusions Lounge.   

Of course there's the high-minded allusions here to ancient rituals and African dances too, the Shamanistic obviousness.  But what I love about Cave's work is its complete and total showmanship, a dedication to spectacle that creates other worlds just through sheer force of will.  Hulking yet delicate, neon-colored as well as the mucky brown hues of old sweaters, his costumes/contraptions overtake each gallery at the Cincinnati Art Museum, functioning like a smart-assed Greek chorus chanting over and over how both important and unimportant art is.  Cave gets the joke, and his work has both the seriousness and the insouciance of greatness. 

"Please Do Not Touch" state placards on the floor in front of each of his works; I kept hearing that phrase whispered over and over in the haughty, pissed-off voice of a spectacularly resplendent drag-queen. 

Upstairs, Downstairs

At the Contemporary Arts Center here in Cincinnati, a new show by Russian-born artist Dasha Shishkin, titled "I Surrender, Dear," stuns and amazes with its gauzy, junky ephemerality.  Shishkin draws Henry-Darger-like fantasias on fabric, sheaths of beaten plastic, canvas, and other surfaces, and the results have been installed in a psychedelic salon-style merging art-school kitsch with the homegrown and beautiful creepiness of what many people unfortunately title "the art of the insane."  You know what I'm getting at:  this is "outsider art" sucked indoors, and Shishkin has the chops to make it seem both effortless and studied, obsessive and accomplished.  It's one of the best exhibits I've seen here in town in a long time.  The installation has a purposefully amateurish feel, but is spot on; little blue-ink drawings on cardboard provide punctuation to the onslaught of stream-of-consciousness visual poetry, and the motifs and tropes swim through each other like phosphorescent schools of fish. The show is heavy handed and hilarious, but executed with a fresh, esoteric ingenuity.  Shishkin has created a playfully mean spirited William S. Burroughs wall-novel.    

Upstairs, however, is another exhibit titled "Spectacle:  The Music Video."  And this one is a mess.  And the mess doesn't seem on purpose.  I don't understand the point of view in it, or the way it's been installed, or even quite frankly the reason it is what it is.  The wall-text goes on and on about the importance of the music video to culture blah blah and blah, and the exhibition spills out all over the place in an unexquisitely junky tsunami of ephemera and TV screens and headphones, with a few old-school album covers and Polaroids tossed in just to add that nonchalant/arty touch.  I guess there's a big danger in titling anything "Spectacle."  That word becomes an albatross maybe around your neck?  The best part is a little cubbyhole where they've installed an alter to Michel Gondry's yarn-bombing video ur-text.  The rest, at least to me, comes off like a defunct Planet Hollywood.  I think we all know that music videos are "little movies."  And I also think we already know where they fit into the cultural landscape:  they are commercials.  Sometimes intentionally beautiful, sometimes unintentionally, and often not at all.  But they have a place at the back of our minds like little shiny trinkets in a junk-drawer.  When we open the junk-drawer they glimmer.  We look and see what they are and smile and then grab the screw-driver or the allen-wrench we're looking for.  To register the importance of this genre it might have been better just to survey one music-video artist's output, and trace that singular artist's evolution, buttressing this narrative with those "Big Moments in Music Video History" and all the ephemera.   It's a big stupid cliche, I know, but "less is more."  And boy does "Spectacle" prove that.

Little Blue Buckets

I was on a home visit this week and met someone who showed me his prized possession:  a little blue bucket.  I was sitting with him and his guardian filling out paperwork when he pointed to the floor, and there it was.  Shiny, small, blue, inconspicuous.  In a corner behind a La-Z-Boy.  He was totally proud of it, maybe beyond proud, and seemed to have found a place to hide it so he could reveal it to himself and other people whenever he chose.  It was as if he had made a connection with this object that transcended utility, common sense, and purpose.  It was aesthetic, the only object in the trailer that was poetic at that moment.  He said "That's my blue bucket"  a couple times, pointed at it, but he did not pick it up.  He said he used it for all kinds of things, but he didn't specify, except that sometimes it had dirt in it and other times cookies and other things. 

On the way home I thought about the show we've got up at Thunder-Sky, Inc., "Small Potatoes," which features small objects and paintings made by unconventional artists intermingled with knick-knacks and trinkets from thrift-stores and other places (Images from "Small Potatoes").  That show is all about serendipity and ephemera, and when you're in it there's this magic disconnection from art, a flow like being in a Cracker Barrel store after the Apocalypse.  But in the trailer with the little blue bucket was a sort of reprieve, a lyricism glittering from that hidden object.  The little blue bucket was a center of awe, a testimonial to meaning.  It was like both a counterpoint to, and an annex of, "Small Potatoes." 

The little blue bucket escaped art and has become art simultaneously.  The saying goes, "If a tree falls in the forest..."  But that's not it.  I stumbled onto a happiness and a beauty that does not need documented.  It doesn't need justified.  It's just there.

The Comeback Is Back

The Comeback was on HBO in 2005 for one season.  It didn't get picked up for another one sadly.  Starring Lisa Kudrow as a second-rate sitcom star kind of like Shelley Long meshed with Kim Cattrall, Comeback uses reality TV as both its target and inspiration, and in that mix of sarcasm and elation finds a strangely beautiful poignancy.  While Cherish is returning to TV after a long (and definitely not self-imposed hiatus) to co-star in a new sub-par situation comedy called Room and Bored, a reality show about her comeback is being filmed, called The Comeback.  While it sounds a little too smart-alecky and high-concept for its own good, The Comeback never loses its zest for both the humiliation of, and a big-hearted respect for, its star, Ms. Cherish. 

Lisa Kudrow plays Cherish with an intensity and ease that's charming and disquieting, like a Cindy Sherman photograph stirring to life and dropping the high-art Diane-Arbus pretentiousness for some Waiting for Guffman downhome pizazz.  But Kudrow's performance is not solely about skewering the smarm and phoniness of Hollywood, or even about riffing on Guffman's slightly mean-spirited mockery.  Kudrow's Cherish is an exercise in locating the humanity inside of all the decorum and decoration Cherish uses to set herself apart.  In setpiece after setpiece (including hilariously understated bits like having her reality TV show crew follow Cherish to a department store to take back bedsheets, all the way up to the climactic scene in which cupcake-costumed Cherish punches Room and Bored's bullying head-writer right in the gut), Cherish seems confused by, and aware of, a new consciousness blooming inside her.  As she swims through the humiliation she has signed up for, rushing toward regaining her second-rate celebrity status, Cherish also wants to put a stop to the whole runaway-train of it all by continually calling "time out" to the camera-crew following her.  As The Comeback progresses, Cherish seems to be realizing that her whole life has been, and always will be, an exercise in Celebrity Stockholm Syndrome. The punchline is that she never will be able to escape that creepy, slightly masochistic desire for fame.  She will also never be able to get exactly what she wants.  The only saving grace is that at least she has access (albeit of the D-List vareity) to enough fame, photo-ops and chocolate-fountain parties to keep her occupied.

The Comeback's sense of humor harnesses the age-old powers of puke and dog-shit and public embarrassment for its comedic assault, but its use of scatology and scorn is always about creating a space for the Realness beyond Reality TV to reveal its ugly/beautiful grace.  Kudrow captures that queasy interregnum almost every time she's on-camera.  In fact, her Cherish is an artistic triumph, both a paean to the pretty, prissy school-teacher you want to mock but then bring an apple to, and a satire on the limits of the desire for fame and fortune.  Sometimes you can catch Hillary Clinton in Kudrow's gaze, other times Kathy Lee Gifford and every local TV news anchor-woman, or a nosy neighbor lady peeping at your through a slit in her living-room curtains.  The kaleidoscope of Kudrow's satire, however, eventually becomes stained glass.

And good news:  The Comeback is on Sundance Channel now.  Check your local listings.

Great Slobs!



The other night I was channel-surfing and stumbled into On-Demand Land, and then found Adult Swim.  On that I discovered "Tim and Eric's Awesome Show Great Job," a series of 12-minute TV shows that cut up and cook together bits and pieces of:

• The Electric Company
• Gilbert and George
• Sub-par Power Point presentations
• The scatological setpieces in Gravity's Rainbow
• Old VHS training videos for fastfood managers
• Creepy and embarrassing cable-access music and religious programs
• Clip-Art
• William S. Burroughs' riffs
• 1982 Saturday Morning cartoons
• And so on  

The result is a meth-amphetamine beef stew that is inedibly hilarious, but more than that has the purity, meanness and fuckeduppedness of really great art.  Thanks to Eric and Tim.  Two regular-looking slobs who channel Divine and Chevy Chase simultaneously, merging mediocrity with outlandishness and a high-style need to embarrass themselves and everyone else. 

Watched their new movie Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie the other night, after catching the TV show fever.  It's brand new, debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in January.  Most of the audience there at Sundance left the theater before it was over.  But don't you dare.  A masterpiece of poetic horror/comedy/insanity.  John Waters has to be jealous.  The best Will Ferrell movie ever.  And John C. Reily somehow creates a pathetic and poignant character from the sewer/stew everyone else swims in. 

God Bless Tom and Eric.  And therefore America.

Kelley's Heroes

A packaged group of objects from Valley Thrift in Fairfield, Oh.  I asked one of the sales people there how objects were chosen for these "goodie bags," and he told me that the people who work in the back just set aside the crap they think no one would want to buy and at the end of the week they take all that stuff and slide into baggies in an arbitrary fashion and slap 49-cent pricetags on them.  There you go. 

A Mike Kelley piece.

Another Kelley piece.

A photo of the Valley Thrift in Hamilton, Oh.  Very inspiring for "Small Potatoes."

Another shot of Valley Thrift.

Another "goodie bag."

Mike Kelley died this week.  It doesn't matter how or why to me.  It's just fucking sad. 


I was thinking about him last week and a couple weeks before. 


Last week because we were at the Outsider Art Fair and there were a number of paintings and sculptures that seemed to hum his sick sweet little songs.  A couple weeks before because we're curating this new Thunder-Sky, Inc. show called "Small Potatoes:  Self-Made (and Re-Purposed) Knick-Knacks, Tchtokes, and Other Curiosities."  It's a group show featuring artists who create small sculptures and paintings, intermingled with a collection of "knick-knacks" and "tchtokes" discovered in thrift-stores and other places.  


I have been haunting thrift stores here in Southwest Ohio for the last couple weeks (for inspiration and also to pick up some knick-knacks and other crap), and upon entering the first one I felt Kelley's presence emanating through all the objects before me:  stuffed toys, bedspreads, clothes, belts, blenders, computers, all scuffed, worn, blurry, and yet somehow glittering with the meaning of being cast away. 


The junk pile was Kelley's cauldron.  And from it he conjured spells that overreached and then transcended their commonplace origins.  He made nightmarish lullabies and plush creepy vignettes that had no way of being categorized outside of themselves.  He seduced with glumness and grit, and made you believe that art has a meaning outside of words and trends and even thoughts.  


So "Small Potatoes" is a hymn to him.  A very humble, a very unimportant prayer, but a prayer anyway.  


God bless his soul.