Indian art alert at Chelsea

Even though Indians have recently been blamed for causing the global food crisis by insular insinuations that they are eating too much (see Sepia Mutiny's Food Price Kerfuffle for an analysis debunking the claim), they have not yet been blamed for producing too much contemporary art. Judging by recent glut of Indian artworks doing the rounds in Chelsea, I must say that if the artworld prices suddenly changed tomorrow (for better or for worse), Indians might get blamed for that too.

I happened to visit a couple of galleries (Stux Gallery and the newly opened Lio Malca gallery) showing works by Asian (primarily Indian artists) and it was delightful.
Again, I am linking to the press releases on the gallery website rather than describe the art.

The Stux gallery had a showing of Contemporary artists from India, Pakistan and Middle East. The portrait by Reena Kallat (first image below) made from painted rubberstamps and the inkjet prints of Prema Murthy are the best of this show.

The collage artist Baba Anand was showing at Lio Malca (G’dS and Demig’ds). The art had a very kitschy feel (done with a mixture of collage and photographs) – I did not like it, but I can see people getting into this kind of tacky, glossy stuff. The artist seems to be alternately making fun of the Bollywood film machine and a motley assortment of Indian gods and goddesses.

Lalla Essaydi (Oil on canvas)

Negar Ahkami (Acrylic on panel)

Prema Murthy (Inkjet on paper)

Jaishri Abichandani (Acrylic on canvas)

Rajul Mehta (mixed media on canvas)

Images from Baba Anand exhibition at Lio Malca

In Flanders Fields - John McCrae, 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

After the touchdown

Phoenix Mars mission image galleries here...

Weekend Pictures

'You can't make this up' department

While Harpers this month profiled penis thievery in Nigeria and the culture bound depersonalization syndrome that might cause a person to actually believe that the organ in question has disappeared, this news item (from reddit) about a cat turning into a woman in Nigeria and a mob attacking her smacks of similar mind/culture dichotomies.

Poetry

Search

After about twenty years, she went back to the city where it
started and boarded one of those city buses, a red, red
one, kind of like the one they had traveled in a
lot during the whimsical, wintry nights;
hopeful, yet fearful of when the
cocoon might give; she then
happens to chance on a
young man two seats
upfront with that
selfsame slouch,
unmistakable,
yet distant.
On a
whim, she
almost reaches
to shout out that
her torturer has now
gone and would not come
again to haunt her any more
and he could come back and stay
with her and live his life full; as if he
were just reborn to her anew; the red bus
stops abruptly and the man catches himself from
falling; turns back involuntarily and catches a very frail
old lady staring at him. Her searching gaze faltering yet again.

Friday linkages

Do you believe in the inherent goodness of human nature and believe that violence and going to war is always counterproductive or do you believe that humans tends to get nasty and brutish devoid of contractual relationships and going to war is a device that repairs broken contracts? A book by Nicholson Baker believes ardently in the former and is getting a lot attention since he argues that the 'justest' war of them all – World War II - was un-necessary. Analysis here.

A neocon who thinks – though that might seem like an anomaly, this essay by Robert Kagan (a long one) has an interesting point of view: In a post cold war era, it is prudent to note that re-alignment of power does not seem to have been directed to the detriment of America but at the two large powers: China and Russia. In Asia and the Pacific, Japan, Australia, and even South Korea and the nations of Southeast Asia have all engaged in “hedging” against a rising China. This has led them to seek closer relations with Washington, especially in the case of Japan and Australia. India has also drawn closer to the United States and is clearly engaged in balancing against China.
The following is telling: Some have suggested that failure in Iraq would mean the end of predominance and unipolarity. But a superpower can lose a war — in Vietnam or in Iraq — without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance. So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy and the predominant military power, so long as the American public continues to support American predominance as it has consistently for six decades, and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: one superpower and many great powers.

Philip Weisss on why married men stray (especially after the state of New York is seeing a ‘straying incident’ every couple of months, this is true - Eliot Spitzer, his successor David Paterson and most recently Vito Fossella). Is sexual straying a personality disorder inherent in men or is it a biological manifestation outside of a man’s control?

Texas (could not) hold 'em (all)

You have to love the verdict. Of course, the aggrieved can appeal.

Chelsea jaunt

I had the good fortune to be in Chelsea for a little bit yesterday and ran into some good and some not so good shows. I visited Jonathan Levine, Mike Weiss and Gladstone galleries. Rather than write impenetrable prose about the art and the artists, I decided to link to the press releases that explain the show:

A couple of quick words though:
Tim Biskup at Jonathan Levine: Multiple studies on a single subject done in figurative/cubist style. He also had a miniature book with an intimate collection of essays and short meaningless poems to go with the show. From reading the little book, he seems like a person who cares about the artworld and its future. Good show.
Christian Vincent at Mike Weiss: Great show, almost a junior Neo Rauch. I could attribute multiple meanings to the painted anthropomorphic forms. I also had an inclination to just stand there and try and understand what he was trying to tell us - alas, I did not have the time and the paintings decided not to give up their secrets easily - really enjoyed this one.
Anish Kapoor at Gladstone Gallery: Characteristic Anish Kapoor - large works, often spanning several rooms - seems more like an explorations of material than form – not too clear what he was trying to tell us other than inferences that one might make between monumentality and translated awe. I happened to run into a giant red breast-like sculpture made of resin and paint in one of the back rooms - of course, it was also a source of curiosity to many of the men around - OK show.


Tim Biskup at Jonathan Levine (cel vinyl acrylic on wood)

Christian Vincent at Mike Weiss (oil on linen or canvas)

Anish Kapoor at Gladstone Gallery (resin, fiberglass and paint)

Recession? What Recession?

Takashi Murakami’s ejaculating My Lonesome Cowboy commanded $15 million at Sotheby's last week while Christie's announced that they managed to rack up the world auction record for selling artwork by any living artist ($33 million for painting the benefits supervisor below). Not to mention, Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1976, brought in $77 million. The exuberant art auction mood was summed up by Barbara Gladstone, of the eponymous gallery, who remarked after the Sotheby's auction, “Recession? What Recession?"

Lucian Freud, 'Benefits Supervisor Resting', Oil on canvas, 59" X 66", 1995

The Collagen is aging

My wife and I are followers of the chronicles of Indiana Jones and look forward to the new installment with hope. Of course, we constantly wonder if Mr. Ford is up to the task of keeping up with expectations during scenes featuring action sequences characteristic of Jones movies after all these years. The New Yorker captured the spirit with this cartoon and I decided to plagiarize.

While on a recent flight

Flying economy class (as usual) - a poem

The father who insists on sitting by the window,
staring blankly to the bleak outside,
running into accidental reflections,
whilst his only child, their little daughter,
bawls at being transferred to the middle row.
His wife pensive,
wondering if they have one child or two.

The family of four, insulated,
man on the laptop (headphones),
woman with the i-Pod, (eyes closed)
a three year old, lost, questions unanswered,
a six month old baby, blocked; pacifier does its dirty deed.
Their grandmother sits across the aisle, closed;
advanced Alzheimer's.

Then we have the obliging old couple (baby boomer?)
responding to a request
to give up their seats and move upfront.
Apparently the pilots discovered,
this plane was rear heavy.
I did not believe them for some reason,
but you can't make those suspicions public, any more.

The young couple four seats away,
furtively steal their urgent kisses
amidst heavy breathing, cheap coke cups, paper napkins
and obese vacationers praying for summer.
I fervently hope they make it
long after
their initial, physical rush.


We had a seat at the very end,
one of those that you cannot recline,
it was all right, minor discomforts – no match for
the free understanding and introductions,
as we collectively head off to hopeful vacations,
cursive beginnings, slipshod divorces and some fruitless seething.

Who is mooning who? Neural Buddhists and the Dharma Bums

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a great essay last week about the paradoxical relationship between scientific research (especially in neurology) and its role in bolstering religion. I am sure most have read or heard about the writeup in some form, but just in case…

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

My only fear is that scientific research in this arena is pliant to construal both ways. Some time back, I had written here about ‘out of body' experiences praising the underlying scientific explanation. However, it is interesting to note that researchers construe the same phenomenon in two radically different ways as seen below.

In the words of a researcher: “There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs. The sensation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena. The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence”.

Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

All said, a great article from David Brooks.

For a more theological discussion on this article, Andrew Sullivan has a great one going.

Nick Walker, Moona Lisa, 200, stencil spray paint and acrylic on canvas, 183X122 cms (source)

Weekend picture

At the altar of consumerism

First it was Murakami selling ladies handbags at the Brooklyn Museum. Now Chuck Close, Jeff Koons and a clutch of other 'brand-name' artists are hawking T-shirts.

Here are three more ideas categorized by economic strata for artists to strut:

For those strapped for cash:
- Artists monogrammed condoms (designed to be washable for reuse - c'mon, you cannot throw away something monogrammed by the artist you adore)

For those with a little to spend:
- Lipstick flavored with the taste of the artists favorite culinary dish (lipstick designed to be edible - even if one does not like the color, this way it can still be a part of you)

For those who do not know how to spend:
- Diamond engagement bands with laser etched artwork (of course, the diamonds must be conflict free)

Some of the reasons that ‘brand-name’ artist come up with to market their creations border on ridiculous. The handbag idea was hatched after the World Trade Center went down and was originally marketed with the premise that such a move will help New York(ers) get out of the prevailing 9/11 sadness (see blurb below).

From the New York Times: Still, nothing the company ever did hit the jackpot like Mr. Murakami’s cherry-ornamented and “Multico” bags, which came about, as Mr. Carcelle explained, after 9/11, when the Vuitton designer, Marc Jacobs, suggested to his corporate bosses that it was no good to mourn forever: fashion had a responsibility, ahem, to help people past their grief. “Marc said,” Mr. Carcelle recalled, ‘If I work with Takashi, and we do something colorful, I think it will help make New York strong again.’

Advertisement for T-shirts: Chuck Close (left) peddling his own design and curvy model on the right struts a Jeff Koons design

Colonialist yokes

If one were wondering what business millions of Burmese had in what was once an uninhabited mangrove swamp typical of the Irrawaddy delta (which cyclone Nargis tore through effortlessly), one again needs to look back to a country's colonialist past.

From the Times:

Before the mid-19th century, the area was a thinly inhabited swamp. But the British colonial rulers saw this as an ideal place to cultivate rice and help feed their empire. They built dikes and drained the land. In the twilight years of British rule, colonial Burma was the world’s largest rice exporter, and millions of Burmese moved here to cultivate the rich alluvial soil. The government says that 6.3 million people lived in the delta before the storm.

Mangu Putra, ‘No More Words II’, acrylic and oil on canvas, 200 X 200 cm (source: artreviewdigital.com)

Mesopotamia morsel

Commemorating the week that the Israel turns 60 years old, the New Yorker has a great two page summary of the historical events that led to this nation’s birth. It is great reading for Mesopotamia watchers and a reflection on the effects that revisionist historians are having around shaping established cultural outlooks. It also lists some of the fallacies behind the birthing, like the one detailed in the novel Exodus by Leon Uris (which had a great effect on shaping Western sentiments around Israel’s birth).

Caricature of Theodor Herzl in the 1896 Annual Journal of the Vienna Journalists Association

Painting Post

Sunil, 'Krishna', Oil on canvas, 72" X 88"

As web pages do a poor job with relative size of images, one more.

Perspectives in abstraction

Artist Robert Rauschenberg died 82 years old Monday this week. His art under the aegis of postwar modernism was different (to put it mildly). Though I am not a big fan of his artwork, the following quote helps us understand the way he looked at art and provides us a better perspective in reacting to art.

Mr. Rauschenberg, describing to writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum:

“To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly. So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Of course, the New Republic has an interesting point (His art stank in the 1950s and it doesn't look any better today. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." Of the dead, speak no evil. But of the works of the dead, it seems to me that we have a perfect right to say whatever we think. And the fact is that Robert Rauschenberg's work has been protected by a sort of critical silence for many years now--at least what little negative comment there has been is more or less ignored. The merest suggestion that the juxtapositions of objects and images in Rauschenberg's paintings, sculptures, and prints are nothing more than arbitrary has left one open to the accusation of being a conservative or a reactionary. And once you have been called those names, you are out of the discussion).

Chuck Close, 'Robert Rauschenberg', 1996, Color digital pigment print, 140 x 112 cm

From the wandering camera...

Jaunts in beleaguered bureaucracy

Soldiers do what they are told to do – it is what they have been trained for. They often come back home with the disastrous effects of wars fought overseas. Often, they have no say over the unfolding action seen in combat zones and in most cases they are cogs helping mesh the larger military/industrial/political wheel. The disadvantages faced by a soldier spending their prime years on a battlefield should not follow the person back home. The least a nation could do for them on coming back home is to offer them building blocks with which they could again step back and become active/productive members of society. Education contributes to a large part of this post-war-rehab. 50 years ago, after the World War, the lawmakers realized this and gave them the GI Bill.

From here: The original G.I. Bill of Rights, signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, paid the full load of a returning veteran’s education at a college or technical school and provided a monthly stipend. It was an investment that paid astounding dividends. Millions of veterans benefited, and they helped transform the nation. College would no longer be the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and those who crowned themselves the intellectual elite.

The original GI Bill did not take into account the galloping costs associated with college tuition and hence needed retooling. There is a new bill in Congress whose passage is being held up by the usual partisan bickering and one-upmanship of Washington politics. Latest news reports indicate a clear and present danger to this bill failing. For the war or not, it is in our common interests that this bill needs to go through. This website has details.

Disclosure: One of our family (a first cousin) is a member of the United States Army and is stationed ‘somewhere in Iraq’. He is only 23 years old.

Pavel Tchelitchew, ‘Hide and Seek’, Oil on canvas, 1940-42, MOMA

Meanwhile in the basement: An oil painting grows...

Racism: Alive and apparently healthy

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

More here.

Shameless promotion and plug

A photograph I had taken of an approaching ship near the Staten Island shore has now been selected by aspiring musician, Andrew Boss for his debut album cover (below). The album tentatively named 'The Illusion of the Moment' is set to be released by Andrew Boss (I met him at a training course) of Staten Island, NY (myspace) and produced by Gena Wernik (myspace).

The release date for the album has not been set but they are aiming for the Fall 2008 timeline. The music album is an EP (an EP, is a release of about 4 or 5 songs, where as a regular album has more). I listened to one of the tracks and it has a nice slow Eagles'sy feeling. I hope they do well with their effort.

Thoughts

I have always had this feeling about steering wheels. This bolsters.

Reluctant Rhythm

Nightly news

Last night I turned off the television; in disgust.
A boy in the country had killed his mother and the rest of his family.
The reporter tried to pontificate with the cultivated stoic calm;
self-serving emblems of professional personas.

The boys friends added to the drama,
providing lurid details of his autism.
The gravitas was added by the expert testimony,
passers-by and a medicine man.

They all seemed caught up in the momentary pepper spray,
than, by extrapolations of our permanent loss (sad, but strange).
It seemed as if this had intruded
our current, still life (we were on vacation).

After that, I felt, I did not commiserate enough,
(as if it were a duty to partake of diurnal suffering).
I turned the television back on again
(hoping to catch details of the deadly crime).

Of course, the presenter had already moved on,
in self-same stoic and steely demeanor,
to a news item that featured a lady who
had shot her family and killed herself.

Must be the weather...

Prose / Pictures

"The sun was going down. I walked, after a few cold beers, to the edge of town, and it was a long walk. All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of hats, just like after work in any town anywhere. One of them gave me a ride up the hill and left me at a lonely crossroads on the edge of the prairie. It was beautiful there. The only cars that came by were farmer-cars; they gave me suspicious looks, they clanked along, the cows were coming home. Not a truck. A few cars zipped by. A hotrod kid came by with his scarf flying. The sun went all the way down and I was standing in the purple darkness. Now I was scared. There weren't even any lights in the Iowa countryside; in a minute nobody would be able to see me. Luckily a man going back to Davenport gave me a lift downtown. But I was right where I started from" - From 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac.