THE GUGGENHEIM.

The Gugg is responsible for one of our happiest New York memories: on our very first visit to Manhattan, when we were but a wee artfag, we stopped in front of its wheeling modernist curves to indulge in a hot dog from a street vendor; it was a Polish sausage with hot mustard and sauerkraut, and for whatever reason - the rarified atmosphere of the Upper East Side? - no hot dog has ever tasted better. But we digress.

In fact, our timing was not at its best; a storied survey show of Spanish painting was in the midst of being taken down, and so the main rotunda was closed. Alas, we had to make do with the side rooms. We began with Tacita Dean, incarnated in the form of a gigantic painted photograph and two films. The Informative Wall Plaque told tales of Ms Dean's enduring and tragic love for the medium of film, tragic because of said medium's waning popularity in the face of that encroaching behemoth known as Digital Media. We share Ms Dean's regretful, elegiac sentiments: a collection of pixels is no substitute for the impression of light on celluloid.

The print was of a burly oak tree, some 15 feet tall and 10 feet across. We failed to see what this had to do with the mourning of celluloid, although one could claim a tenuous conceptual grasp via the tactile process of the hand-made: Ms Dean has, with the aid of white gouache, carefully and laboriously blanked out the tree's surrounding forest. The solitary, towering oak cuts a terribly imposing figure, to be sure, and has a booming emotional impact, but any further hard-selling of its metaphorical primacy to the scarcity of 16mm cameras is, we're afraid, falling on deaf ears.

The centerpiece of the small installation was a projection of a 40-odd minute film of the final days of the last remaining celluloid film factory in France (suburban Paris, to precise). The film is unquestionably gorgeous: Ms Dean captures the processing plant section by section in a series of static long-shots. There is a simple poetry to her shots: different sections of the factory are, of necessity, lit in different ways, and so we see the to-and-fro of the factory workers filtered through profoundly saturated ambient light: midnight blues, amber yellows and deep cadmium reds. Again, the IWP stressed its funereal longing and elegiac poetry, and this time, the declamations were of a piece with the film. It seemed to us to be a slow accounting of days; no need for plaintive dramatics: this is how the factory began, this is how the factory lived, and this is how the factory ends, a great mundane hive of lab-coated workers soon to be liberated from their service to film.

An interjection: the most amusing part of museum-going is watching the crowd of plebes marching along in tired obeisance to the drum of cultural enlightenment.  There were, at the Gugg and at the MoMA, great swaths of the great unwashed, slouching and droopy-lidded, who would rather have been anywhere else in the world than staring at this Art, alternately perplexed or frustrated at the opaque, arbitrary, or perverse notions of the artist, their sense of duty feeding their resentment of art for all their days to come.

This was especially apparent in the small exhibition in the next floor below, where the photography curator had installed a small show called "Family Pictures," cobbled together from the Gugg's permanent collection. This show had "stop-gap" written all over it, as anything remotely involving either children or a group of chummy people was thrown in for good measure. To wit: Rineke Dijkstra's photographs of knobby-kneed adolescents standing alone and awkward on a Yugoslavian beach. Do not mistake us, ladies and gentlemen, we enjoy her work tremendously, but these particular photos have as much to do with Family as an oak tree has to do with film. Robert Mapplethorpe's Jesse-Helms-enraging naked kiddie photographs were on display (one of whom, we were surprised to deduce, is of Susan Sarandon's daughter), as were Sally (yawn) Mann's briefly controversial portraits of her nude brood.

It wasn't all a lost cause: Tracy Moffatt's superlative "Scarred For Life" series was presented, wherein Ms Moffatt forces a narrative of the repressed, abusive and vaguely incestuous nuclear suburban family by juxtaposing deliberately grainy, faded photographs with telling captions. (Our particular favourite involves a small shame-faced boy in Dorothy Gale drag faced with a wildly gesturing man whose caption reads: "He was playing Dorothy in the school's production of the Wizard of Oz. His father got angry at him for getting dressed too early.")

CHELSEA.

The first thing we noticed about Chelsea (the gallery end of it, anyway) is that it is awash in Mac computers and irony. Regarding the former, it is possibly not the most perspicacious of sociological insights, but nevertheless: at every gallery we visited, without fail, we were met by the soft white plastic glow of an iMac; we're sure this portends something, though exactly what - beyond gallerists taking design notes from the sets of "The Devil Wears Prada" - we could not say. The latter is of more significance. Nearly every show we attended embraced smug detachment and the knowing glance as their primary conceptual strategy; almost no one embraced their purported subject matter with any degree of sincerity (we'll get to the exceptions, darlings, never you fear). As much as we cherish knowing glances, their overuse tends to sicken the atmosphere, and we left this enclave of the newly-chic wondering if anybody cared about anything at all anymore.

Judging by his latest show at the Anton Kern gallery, Wilhelm Sasnal is too lazy even to bother deploying irony in the first place. After earning much well-deserved praise for his earlier work, whose simplicity of formal vocabulary and painterly execution belied a brooding cinematic undercurrent, Mr. Sasnal seems to have skipped over the customary middle part of an artistic career and plunged headlong into artless, incontinent decadence. Mr. Sasnal retains his formal simplicity, so much so that the show looks like it was farted out as an afterthought. Hasty is the order of the day: sketchy two-toned faux-kitsch landscapes abound; attempts at figuration are strictly of the all-thumbs undergraduate variety. The only thing that managed to snag our interest for any length of time was a hazy early-Guston-esque (forgive us, O Philip for dragging your name into this palaver) abstraction, which managed to do mesmerizing things with subtle shifts of colour. Still, too little, too late: one painting in a gallery the size of an airplane hangar does not for salvation make.

Jonathan Monk has also downshifted into the smarmy. Now, we were never great fans to begin with, but the smug complacency and juvenile one-note sarcasm of his show at the Casey Kaplan gallery simply made our acid reflux kick in. Upon entering the space, we are met with a man (or at least, the closest one can come to a man via some expert manipulation of wax, rubber, hair and oil paint) lying on the floor with the hood of a Volkswagen beetle emblazoned with an upside-down peace sign propped up on a nearby wall. The man is bathed in blood, and, according to the gallery attendant, is meant to be Chris Burden. The whole affair is apparently a very expensive what-if, as in "what if, when Chris Burden had himself shot, the bullet struck him square in the chest ha ha?" This is the shallowest, most unidimensional attempt at conceptual thought, groaningly unfunny, and an awful lot of time, money, and craftsmanship was wasted on it. The VW hood apparently signifies that other Burden performance (you know, the crucifixion one), and the peace decal signifies yet another Burden performance, which in turn signified the Cold War arms race; according to the gospel that is the gallery statement, Monk's arrangement is "a playful reconciliation." Leaving aside the petty grammatical issue of just what is being reconciled, and not to speak ill of the postmodern dead (Baudrillard R.I.P.) but really, ladies and gentlemen, a VW hood can only signify so much, let alone a survey of Cold War paranoia.

And that's only in the entrance hall: the rest of the gallery is filled with similar smarmy self-congratulating assemblages and oleaginous art-historical winks: earrings affixed to a photo of a Nauman sculpture (this, apparently, is a "completion" of the Nauman piece, which leaves one wondering what Mr. Nauman has to say about all this), a neon sign of the word "Leicester" in reverse (Mr. Monk's birthplace. We're sure this is of the profoundest significance). The worst offender was a smoke-filled room where a red laser traverses the space only to land upon the cigarette tip in a photo of Rene Magritte smoking. If nothing else, this whole affair reminded us of something Vice Magazine once wrote, wherein they complained that art nowadays consists of a lunatic hiring a team of contractors to enact his every ridiculous whim. Judging from this show, Mr. Monk is too lazy for lunacy, but still, this strikes us as the worst kind of conceptual art: a series of poses rather than ideas, one-liners in the guise of thoughtfulness, fatuous posturing buttressed by the seemingly invincible bona fides of an over-inflated reputation.

Anish Kapoor's show at the Barbara Gladstone gallery only added fuel to our indignant fire. Installed in the smaller second floor gallery, the room was ringed with abstract watercolours. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, that about sums it up. A reddish wash here, a bluish wash there, a greenish wash over there, and wham bam thank you ma'am, here's your show. If this were anyone other than Anish Kapoor, the whole affair would be dismissed as the dizzy results of a pensioner's weekend art class, for that's what it most resembled.

Trust Nan Goldin to save the day. Her "Other Side" series, named after a drag bar in Boston, documents her then-clan of queens (this was the early 1970's), and is on display at the Matthew Marks gallery. We find Ms Goldin's work extremely difficult to talk about (let alone write about) precisely because of its total lack of the usual encumbrances built into a work of art. There is no concept in any strict sense of the word with Ms Goldin, never any polemic, no layers of distance from which one can assay an intellectual approach. Her work is pure witness, pure feeling, which is something that her many followers and copiers have never managed to capture. Against all odds, given that we're speaking of strangers (to we viewers, anyway) posed, sometimes candidly, sometimes not, in front of a camera, one feels in Ms Goldin the blaze of authenticity, of immediacy. We have consumed her work religiously, and over time, we feel as if we know her subjects as intimately as she herself does. Her camera is not a mediator; with Ms Goldin, it is an open window. And so it was, touring around the gallery, sitting down to watch the "Other Side" slide show, seeing the oddly familiar faces of her world - Frankie, Ivy, Naomi, then later, Taboo!, Jimmy Paulette, Misty, Joey Gabriel, Greer Langton - flash by to a score of pop music that resembles nothing so much as a mix tape, that we began to tear up. In giving us these flashes of her life, Ms Goldin opens herself entirely and profoundly to us, and the affecting power of her work is entirely commensurate with that act of self-revelation.

Lest you think, after all this ranting against the skewed glance and all this messianic praise of genuine affect, that we are in any way anti-irony, we offer up our love of the Pierre Bismuth show at the Mary Boone gallery. Bismuth is a master of what we have come to term the Intelligently Lazy Gesture, and he has yet to fail us. His show at Mary Boone consists entirely of ads for his and other Manhattan shows in Artforum (his own ad consisting merely of his name in a handsome typeface, set against a monochromatic colour field), blown up to Richard Serra-esque proportions; 20 foot tall slabs of Pierre Bismuth advertisement is propped up gingerly in the arena-like space, assuming the monolithic scale and presence of totems. This makes a great deal of perverse sense: what on earth could Mr. Bismuth (or any artist, for that matter) do that could compete with, let alone surpass, the tastefully hushed solemnity of one's own advertisements? In their own cranky, and absurdly industrious way, these are Borgesian gestures; they are the potential of art on the grandest scale, and thus, far better than any petty and disappointing reality Mr. Bismuth could hope to cook up.

We did not expect to be moved by Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija's video installation at the Friedrich Petzel gallery, but we are nothing if not open to surprise. The video, entitled "Stories are Propaganda." The video consists of a series of disconnected shots: clips from a TV show, a mound of sand (a "snowman" according to the gallery release), a magician in a darkened, filthy alley pulling a rabbit out of a hat, a long shot of the pristine white rabbit cavorting in a brackish puddle. The narration begins with the expected procession of lefty suspicions and postmodern whimsicalities, until the latter half: over the magician and rabbit footage, the narrator enumerates a nostalgic list of "remember when"s: "[...] before you could get an espresso in Hamburg or Milwaukee," and so on and so forth. Initially, this feels modish and insincere, but the list continues and continues, until, magically enough, one is swept up in the ever-rising current of regret and nostalgia, and one can't help but float along in this tragic wish to reverse all the bad progress, both mundane and global, made over the past 30 years.  

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.

Now that we're back on the topic of Big Museums, another interjection must be made: we couldn't help but notice as we made our way through great heaping mounds of humanity, that both the Gugg and the MoMA represent simultaneously the most geographically diverse and least ethnically diverse cross section of international unwashed masses. We heard a veritable Babel of languages, and saw only Caucasian. In fact, the only place to find Black and Latino people in a Great Manhattan Museum is either in the coat check, or standing in the corner of the room, in a security outfit.   The sole exception to this rule seems to be the Frick, who has the good taste to demand of their coat-checkers and security guards that they be white.

But we digress. The great draw at the MoMA was the Jeff Wall retrospective, which, we are happy to report, lives up to all the hoopla. We have to slightly sheepishly admit that Jeff Wall moves us despite total and deliberate ignorance of the voluminous mounds of theoretical yakking that accompanies his work. All the talk of the Vancouver School, of conceptual photography goes out the window when we find ourselves face to face with his dazzling light boxes. What we love in a Jeff Wall is, first and foremost, the visual spectacle: the precisely arranged tableau compositions, where all the random disorganized chaos that attends everyday life vanishes, and details occur precisely, with mathematical symmetry. Consider the majestic panoramic sweep of "Restoration," whose entire composition hinges and orbits around the rusty dome off to the left of the picture plain; the studied anarchy of the light-bulb arrangement in "After The Invisible Man," or the placid chaos of "The Destroyed Room"; or the way in which every element of the room in "Morning Cleaning, Mies Van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona" mirrors the X-pattern of the marbled walls. For us, the pleasures of Jeff Wall consist in the fragmentary impossibilities and contradictions hidden away in his seamless photographs like Easter eggs. The crisp, mannered perfection of his vistas are brilliant in their own way: in each of his photographs, in narrative after implied narrative, they offer a world of total consumption, where every detail, no matter how apocryphal, is crisply limned, and has its own proper corner from where it can speak its piece, adding yet another layer of meaning to the hyper-real tale that unfolds before us.

PS1

For those somehow not in the know, PS1 is a former public school turned alternative art exhibition space turned MoMA satellite, a gargantuan Romanesque affair looming over Queens. So for those keen for a day of exhaustion (as we were) one can breeze through the MoMA in the morning, stop for a quick hot dog, jump on the subway, and, presuming one is comfortable navigating the byways of New York's tackiest borough, pop on over to PS1 in the afternoon. There are a staggering array of shows on at any given time, certainly enough to exhaust even the most dedicated of art enthusiasts (we would just like to state, for the record, that, while we succumbed to sensory overload after but an hour and a half, Mrs. Artfag was still at it like child on amphetamines). While we were there, there was a tribute show to Jonas Mekas(2), a comfortably-sized exhibition of Vic Muniz photographs, and a sprawling group show curated by no less than the founder and curator of PS1, Ms Alanna Heiss, entitled "Not For Sale," to say nothing of the smaller installations that filled every corner (and bathrooms!) of the four storey complex.

The only show worth going on at length about is the "Not For Sale" show, for the simple reason that, given Ms Heiss's indie cred, this was the most ridiculous farce of a show we have yet to see. The show's raison d'être was some kind of resistance to the crazed, cruel capitalism of the New York art world. Ms Heiss rang her nearest and dearest, and asked them to donate for this show works that they would not (or could not) sell. So who are these artists? Are they, as one might intuit, peripheral artists, worthy craftsmen toiling earnestly on the unforgiving sidelines of Gotham's art scene's cruelly neglectful gaze? People whose work is deserving of mass recognition, but cast aside by the market forces, championed by this institution of the alternative? Heavens no; the walls are lined with superstars: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Julian Schnabel (blech), Dana Schutz, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, Christo, Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, Lynda Benglis, David Salle, Ed Ruscha, Matthew Ritchie (and this is just a partial list). We found this all to be vaguely insulting: to begin with, one can't build an anti-consumerist show from people whose work is greasing the art market's wheels. Or rather, one can, but one runs the risk of outing oneself as (a) a fame-whore of the profoundest sort ("look everyone - these are my famous pals whose rarest work is available to me at the ringing of a telephone!") and (b) as a dullard of the profoundest sort, someone utterly incapable of recognizing a hypocritical contradiction, even when they themselves have plastered it across the immaculately white walls of several rooms.       

A QUICK NOTE FROM THE UNDERGROUND.

Thus far, we have only been detailing our daylight viewing habits. Some of our evenings (the ones we see fit to narrate, that is) were spent in the arms of the New York Underground Film Festival. We shall not bother to detail every program consumed, but end our travelogue by sharing an epiphany.

It concerns one Mr. Ryan Trecartin. We have been eyeing him with intense suspicion ever since we came across his name in the pages of Artforum, where his singular genius was extolled by none other than that perpetual coddler of damaged fags, Mr. Dennis Cooper. Mr. Cooper was working himself into a hyperventilating frenzy over Mr. Trecartin's epic "A Family Finds Entertainment," which largely defies description, but has loosely to do with the adoption of a runaway hit-and-run victim by a houseful of hard-partying cartoon psychotics, and is ladled with heavy doses of camp. We had seen snippets at the Whitney Biennial (and what a dog's breakfast that was, ladies and gentlemen), and seen it in full at Pleasure Dome's recent "Bad Boys" program, where it was the star attraction. Even after the full 40 sensory-assaultive minute running time, we could not come to a firm opinion of Mr. Trecartin's work; there were moments of starlit genius, where the lunacy of his cast and their improvisatory abilities made for utter brilliance. And there were just as many moments that came off as mannered and irritating, like the grating antics of an overindulged and understimulated child.  

We met with one of Mr. Trecartin's shorts at an Underground Film Fest program, and we have been further edified. In fact, we are currently happy to hop on his bandwagon (even if we are a little leery of how crowded it is, and how fast it's going). The short, entitled "(Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me)," concerns the perils of internet dating, single motherhood and constipation, and involves many of the same characters that populate "Family...". As you might be able to glean from our description, it involves the same general tenor of "Family...", but this time, the brief running time has reined in Mr. Trecartin's more indulgent sensibilities. Despite its apparent insanity and the ludicrous behavioural tics of its characters (at one point, the single mother, cruising the web for a lover, locks her baby in the shower to get some alone-time), the durational brevity forced a more stringent structure on the proceedings; the video, in all its antic absurdity, came off like a Bach fugue; the unfolding of motifs was made transparent, its progress made clear while still maintaining its anarchic tone. Consider the final moments of the video: throughout, Catherine Pimples (the heroine of the constipation storyline) holds court from the toilet in a lake-house. The final moments of the video finds all the characters in the bathroom with her. Mr. Trecartin (in character as Tammy) raises his hand like an orchestra conductor and leads his introverted, self-referential characters, all still trapped in the bathroom, in a slow, rhythmic chorus of "What's outside? Oh my God!" as the camera makes a slow pan of the surrounding environs. This single moment casts an illuminating pall over the entire video, revealing its parallel strands of containment and sequestration (both social and intestinal).

And so it is that our little travelogue winds to its end. If you will forgive a little self-referentiality, ladies and gentlemen, conclusions are difficult matters at the best of times; how can anyone sum up something like New York? Despite the forecasts of its bust, its entropic destabilization as the North American art centre, its predominance continues unabated. This is what we mean when we call it a faith, rather than a city; like any grand metropolis, there is nothing intrinsic about it that broadcasts its importance. It is the belief invested in it by its citizens, and in turn, by its visitors that makes it magnificent, and that keeps it so. We can think of no better evidence for this faith in its nucleic necessity than a passing comment that the missus made, as we were walking home from an NYUFF screening: we were discussing its dizzying state of hustle and bustle, its sublime decay when he remarked: "when the apocalypse happens, it will start here." Indubitably. We couldn't have put it better ourselves.

--------------------------------------------------------------------