Veneer Magazine Blog

Grifting: Serpentine Gallery 2008 Summer Pavilion

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:24:50 -0800

Here is the new Frank Gehry Serpentine Pavilion in London. This above image is of the primary program facility = a coffee shop. Note the make-shift plastic umbrella and the Ikea table for adding cream.

Ve 04 Reception

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:58:32 -0800

(Thank you Matthew and Laura for this photo.) Others: Los Angeles Anacortes A good example of how to represent our brand in retail environments: here At a conference

WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT: OK?

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:40:32 -0800

I held off on this one for a long time because no one wants to be 'that guy'. I don't know if you guys know this, but I'm kind of close to the powers that be here at Veneer Magazine, I don't want to brag but I'm just saying...anyway, just so you know ok... Anyway, I didn't really like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. What I mean is that, let's be honest, I liked it just fine. It was an excellent way to spend an afternoon: I was very entertained. But let's just be serious: I felt like the whole place was an exercise in questionable faith with a Tom Waits aesthetic. I had the Tom Waits phase in high school and if you're going to come at me with "At least it makes you, y'know, think...whether it's showing you stuff in good faith, or if ANY museum is showing you stuff in, y'know, good faith.." stuff: please. I didn't want to have to say this: I was born "thinking". I'm not really that turned on by seeing something that "at least makes me think about it". I can eat a pizza and when I eat it I think about it. My girlfriend just does not like to eat cheese, result: I have been "at least thinking about" pizza for days. The grass is always greener, know what I mean? (We had delicious lamb roast yesterday and I'm talking about pizza - am I some kind of beast?) Anyway, the pizza museum in LA was closed and I went to this technology place. And for the most part, encountering an institution that played so freely but consistently with display conventions and the like was a joy, but it was when I got to a display on a beautiful but (as presented to us) entirely opaque system for doing symbolic logic (a subject loaded with sadness and regret for me) with building blocks and hand-signals that I really lost the track. It's like they were showing me this system as if it were a joke, or just something nice to look at: like a Design School thesis show. Or worse, like jackasses who laugh about the way we used to make and use knowledge but who can't find anything funny about the way we do it now. Like somehow what was shown was there because at one point, someone had erroneously connected it to the outside world, and instead of wondering at the possibility that opened, we were to laugh at the gap between it and the world we know. It was obscene and sad. At it's worst it felt like Cabinet Magazine fascinationism with a McSweeny's sense of 'the quirky'. It felt like a cool smart person that every time you meet them you want to punch them in the face. It was hard to get so worked up when you were looking at dioramas of streamlined trailers or a theory of memory based on cones, but when they took it to symbolic logic made into physical holdable forms I went nuts. Encountering beautiful material presented in such a straightforwardly ugly, base and uncaring way made me nearly vomit. Listen assholes: MY EYES ARE UP HERE!

Grifting: Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroids

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:25:31 -0800

Thank you, Silvia Wolf, for finding these and showing us their importance. Thank you for hiding the small exhibition in the peace of the Mezzanine amidst the clutter of the Whitney's 2008 Biennial dregs. I had forgotten how much this man's images mean to me. I believe this to be another good exhibition. It's currently on view.

Grifting: Keith Boadwee

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:25:22 -0800

Despite the debate raging presently over whether or not Portland's art scene is a site of hope or despair, twee crafts or conceptualism, disappointing in broad strokes or streaked with moments of impressive, even visceral, pleasure, the heavy parade of shows tromps on, some good, some bad, most unseen by even the most discerning townies, and here we are, right in the beginning-middle of a grift about Keith Boadwee's show, This Is A Low, at Rocks Box. DISCLAIMER: this is maybe one of four art shows I've been to in Portland in the last few years. SPOILER ALERT: Boadwee dies. Just kidding, but I did really like the show. The San Francisco-based Boadwee is most famous for giving himself paint enemas and shitting on canvas, which is something that is perhaps not as shocking now as it was in the identity-politics-1990s. Still This Is A Low is super gay. Is that why I like it? It's hard to say. Boadwee's work is both funny and dick-based, without ever really crossing the line into "crass." Example: California Souvenir (above) is a sex-toy memento of our nation's finest state. Abstract from purpose (sans butt), something vulgar can be a chotcke, or, if you read it politically, a celebration of California's relatively lax gay marriage laws. Untitled (Piss In Mouth) is best. It's so well-executed that it's not even shocking, just beautiful. In many ways like that Serrano piece, Piss Christ, only this has the added benefit of being the most simple closed-circuit human system I've ever seen. Nothing wasted, right? Plus I love to imagine that fucked-up scenes like these are happening in sunny backyards all over California.

Grifting: Melissa Dyne and Portland, Oregon

Sat, 31 May 2008 08:35:13 -0800

For years: I've had a very hard time getting excited about grifting work in Portland, OR. It's not hard to explain. However, Melissa Dyne's recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft [MCC] is good. It presents a problem, but also extends a hilarious answer to Portland's lack of interfacing with good, conceptual work. Sure, a generalization: it's hard not to notice that there is something craft about much of the work created/exhibited in the NorthWest. This is the work that is on pose. This is even the work that comes to fruition in an attempt at social practice or whatever. It's all kind of boring and executed skillfully ineffective and desperate (in a bad way). When it comes to constructing a forum for exhibition of said work, what we get is often lazy (not krunk) and ill-informed or ill-lit. It's only when something as stupid as showing slightly more conceptual work in a museum of craft that things start to get better. It's as if someone finally started asking questions about greater contexts or venues. The dumb magnet was just turned off momentarily. Dyne's work is a piece of glass sitting atop a pedestal. Straight up. Beautiful. Rhetorically, she frames it in lieu of a masculine gesture or test of strength of said glass. She's interested in its form's perceived change over the course of the exhibition. She interested in materials. The glass is of particular manufacture. It seems important to her. There is no danger in the glass harming an onlooker in any way. There's not much of a risk in general inherent in the work. Yet, the real risk seems to be in relation to the extent to which MCC is able and willing to extend its interest to a piece of ephemeral nature. For an institution whose boutique competes with the size of the exhibition space, they surprisingly respect Dyne's piece, a lot. The best part of this exhibition is watching how MCC spent its energy making it all happen. The exhibition, although great, is totally small (one piece, some photographs, a web cam). For a show of this stature, MCC invested a noticeable amount of spunk: there's the opening and also a panel discussion, a noontime chat, lecture, artist talk, discussion group and (get this) exhibition tour. Also: a webcam. It's incredible. I love it. I hope that it is not the same ten people at every event. I hope that through the language of craft is Portland art able to find its audience. After reading over one of the multiple well-printed texts on the exhibition, I found myself asking if MCC has a inferiority complex about the relationship between conceptualism and craft or if they (MCC) are just being crafty and skillfully promoting an exhibition, no matter what the scale or form. Craft has a hard time understanding a gesture. This is why a craft museum exhibiting a calculated gesture is completely poignant. Maybe I'm being too generous to think that the artist's piece was meant to question the relationship between craft and conceptualism or--for that matter--between Portland's art and, like, Chihuly lovers. Maybe the fact that the piece is on display at MCC is a fluke and could have been exhibited at any number of mediocre institutions in this very small city. I hope not. I think that Dyne is smart. I like this about the work. I like this about her past work and her lexicon for explaining it. I think that she is one of the few there in Oregon who is capable of turning the dumb magnet off. Let's hope that there are more. Moreover, let's hope that other galleries and institutions there can respect the work like MCC does Dyne's.

Ve 04/18: The beginnings from Nebraska

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:43:13 -0800

Seriously.

Grifting: Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life Pt. 1

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:27:16 -0800

The curator does right by letting the artist make the decisions. A very good small show at the Wattis in San Francisco is the result. The group exhibition organized by McCarthy puts on display a very eclectic lot of work related to the memories of McCarthy's career. Also: some of his own work makes an appearance. It is very good.

Ve 03/18 Reception Images and the Internet

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:27:52 -0800

The third issue of Veneer Magazine has been posted online. Reception photos are starting to roll in, as well: our favorite thus far is here. Astute reader: here. Also: various post-production images: here, here, & here. I almost forgot: We used the font "Courier" and made a movie trailer to promote this issue to bookstores. Enjoy!

Grifting: Museo Particularo

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:28:53 -0800

It's the beginning of February and it's hot. We literally navigate piles of rubble on foot, following Museo signs. The streets are dusty and the locals are staring at and smiling at the gringos. The Museo is a house. For a moment we worry that we've misunderstood something, and consider turning back, but a young man in his 20s meets us on the stoop before we can knock. In Spanish we ask about the decaying advertisements (painted Tyrannosaurus Rex, the word "fossil" in some form) for the museum that we've seen. He leads us around back. What is this? Holy shit. It's happening again: Essentially, we are led to a barrack of esoteric shit. The man's father was (1) a wanderer of the desert, and (2) obsessive-compulsive about collecting, and subsequently organizing, the things that he found out there. The unspoiled desert between the Mexican state of Chihuahua and Texas is a mysterious one. Unexplained lights appear on horizons at night. It's known for high amounts of drug trafficking, while locals live with and around the specter of a proposed immigration-deterrent, "La Entrada," or "The Wall." What kind of things did we find in the Museu Particularo in Ojinaga? Well: rusted tools, hair dryers, what we can only presume to be legitimate dinosaur fossils, stamps, guns and weapons left over from the Mexican Revolution, Mayan goblets of gilded silver, arrowheads, taxidermic little creatures, etc. It is a mess of stuff, some of which may belong in a "real" museum, whatever that means. Although, for what it's worth, if one was to catalogue all these items and ferry them to the correct "institutions," one could hardly imagine that any two objects might end up in the same place. All of these artifacts are housed in nothing more than a quarters: two small, windowless rooms with dirt floors with stuff nailed to the adobe walls. It is hard to move without knocking something over. Is it only about making a junk room available and free to the public? Not really. There is a very concerted effort made "to display," and even to tell stories. We weren't able to leave without understanding through our very broken Spanish that one of the family's friends had died recently and hence a shrine to him in one of the corners. Or: how the collector had acquired such a collection of mounted animal heads. Little separates the Museo Particularo from the other, more well-known forays into outsider curation: the Palais Ideal du Facteur Cheval, the Temples of Damanhur for example, or even Watt's Towers. It is truly the kingdom of one man, the result of hard work and a very particular(o) kind of tender megalomania. Did it stem from a desire to taxonomize the magical garbage of the Chihuahuan mountains? Did our curator see an absence, and dream to fill it? What happens when the collector is no more? When I think about "true museums" my logic can be very simple. It is obvious that the Museo Particularo is incredibly honest -- so much so that the experience of seeing the display is gorgeous and heartbreaking. I do trust it like no other. And what does this say about me? I'm a tourist, sucker for this kind of beauty.

No Photography

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:52:43 -0800

Here is a place that is also interested. Thank you, (0V0), for sending this in.

Grifting: Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:41:08 -0800

I can be annoyed. Granted, my expectations for the only non profit contemporary gallery exhibiting in Marfa, TX, might have been too high. Nevertheless, Ballroom Marfa's recent group exhibition "Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice" is a slight disaster. The BM press release never mentions a curator, but instead just says "Organized by Bob Nickas." Honestly? This is much too heavy-handed to simply be "organized." The two galleries are full of art sand: One white, the other black. The audience can't step on the sand and are thus pushed to the perimeters of the rooms -- or, rather, the "desert/desert island." It falls flat. Or, it falls like a bad attempt at Dali. Sadly, there is nothing poignant or absurd about it. Moreover, I'm pretty sure that a couple of pieces were included in the show not because they added to the theme "Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice," but rather because the organizer thought at the last minute that said pieces might save the show. To you, the artists, I'm sorry that we saw your pieces in this context. I also feel like there was this half-assed sentiment from the organizer: "It's only in Marfa, No one will see it." Also, literally, "Marfa is in the desert. Let's make a desert exhibition." It's gone all wrong. And not in a good way.

Ve 03

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:52:16 -0800

We just got word that production of Ve 03 is 90% finished. It should be in your mailboxes and at our bookstores soon. Sincerely, Harsh

Grifting: Poetess Sappho

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:39:07 -0800

This head of Sappho is located in the Archeological Museum of Istanbul.

Grifting: Death of Nam June Paik

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:39:55 -0800

Notes on the January 29, 2006 death of seminal video artist Nam June Paik.