The result has the emotional depth of a broken in cotton combined with the warm and dry performance of an extraordinary merino. It's all very luxurious in a very simple way and super expensive to boot, but quite simply we are in love and this bad bitch is going to take all our money.
The result has the emotional depth of a broken in cotton combined with the warm and dry performance of an extraordinary merino. It's all very luxurious in a very simple way and super expensive to boot, but quite simply we are in love and this bad bitch is going to take all our money.And so we go back to the Luce, sitting in the space with her big, big eyes and all, and we say, Look, this is how you do it. I like it. I like it a lot. Now, you take a long piece of cotton, you hang it in a line so that it's not hanging too low, and then you tie it in a knot and you pull it out. So you have a cotton piece that goes from the floor to the ceiling and you take the cotton and tie it to a box so that the cotton goes down and then it hangs back up, and you take the cotton and tie it up and you tie it back down and you tie it up and you pull it out.
The other works are very boring. One of the strongest ones is a pair of clay female figures, with heads like a chicken. A small piece called Shapes is a brilliant example of the stone, black, and gold typical of her past work. It's really quite breathtaking, but one wonders if she couldnt have thought up a better title for it.I was going to go on and on about how wonderful of a job the paintings are, and how admirable their effort to be, but I couldnt, because they lack something. To me they look like they were made by someone who has an eye for color and a good sense of play. But thats not quite right, for there is no play here; the paintings look as if they were made by someone who has never looked at the world with the intent of creating what he sees. They look as if they were made by someone who is simply not interested in what color looks like, and who may never be able to get any further beyond a pretty picture.I have to admit that I have some reservations about this show, for in a few months the work has been so good that I thought I was going to have to change my tune a bit, and that would be better. It seems to me that the only way to make the work any better is to stop making it and stop making it. I dont know what it is, but it looks good.
The tragedy of the subject is that in a single show it's all too easy to forget that there is a history of the images in this piece, but this is a terrible problem since it's a shame because of the context. What the tragedy is is that it's not entirely clear what the historical context is. In the best of the pieces (I have the most interesting ones) it's quite clear that it's an old (and apparently familiar) picture—that's how it appears on the wall and what it means. In the worst it's hard to remember what's being represented or why it's there, so it loses a lot of its power as an object. The great works, on the other hand, have a vague, poetic quality that seems to be made up of the sort of physical tension that we know from Gertrude Stein. In the best of the works there's a great deal of play with the wall and the viewers experience there, but it's not quite so direct and as strong. It's a little too minimal, and its two-dimensional quality gets in the way of the statement made on the wall. I was looking at a drawing, I think, by an artist who, like Pollock, seems to be trying to become an old-master painter. What it comes down to is that the artist in question is painting what he thinks he knows best and that works of art are the best at the present. I think the fact that he's got a certain level of success and that he's been widely acknowledged by others makes a difference in the people's minds, but I think the difference between the artist and the public is as insignificant as that between a seaman and a seaman who live together in the same building.
In fact, it seems to be almost beyond me, seeing all the things in her work that are about money and the power dynamics between the sexes.I don't know if she knows that money can be a magnet for sexual desire, but she does. There's a lot of money in it, especially in art, and it keeps people interested. I think she knows this, I think she really does. I don't know if she knows the power dynamics that she's got in the world today, but she seems to have had enough experience with that to know how money and power operate.
Pamela Kort is a contributing editor of Artforum.
©2024 Lucidbeaming