What's up

This closing crept up on me after I happened by a month ago, but Piri' Miri Muli' readers within proximity of the St. Lawrence River who haven't seen the Peter Doig show are here advised that it ends upon closing today, in the area where he spent his adolescence after the show opened in Edinburgh, the nation of his birth, headed to Fondation Beyeler in the half-canton of Basel-Stadt where readers have it for all of next winter. Seeing it in Montreal sets it against the backdrop of the landscape paintings of the "Group of Seven" which Doig internalized while at the same time seeking escape to the Royal Academy of London for punk culture and the easel masters. The German Daniel Richter, about whom the phrase "the Return of Painting" has often been used, wrote an essay about Doig in 1990, around the time that Richter, who shares Doig's passion for music and album art, was moving from abstraction to figurative composition. Richter's depiction of the figure, at times deploying an illumination suggestive of autonomous human energy, as well as landscape brush work, use of color influenced by psychadelia, and abstracted planes with a representitive function can be traced to the influence of Doig, even as Richter has taken it in compositional directions influenced differently by literature, philosophy, activism, and European master archetypes. The influence of the Group of Seven, who by choice worked oblivious to the avant-garde trends of New York and Europe, and Doig's earnest emulation of both the painterly techniques and embrace of the pre-modern of Gauguin, an influence derided by Ashley Bickerton, a graduate of CalArts conceptualism and 90's New York, in lesser practitioners as "stupid Gauguin fantasies of island life.. dollops of local color spooned on, nauseatingly obvious images of kitsch slices of exoticism," caricatured in wallpaper by Sigmar Polke, is updated in a manner that makes it central to the practice of painting in the face of photography (which Doig works from) and concept. So mounting this show of Doig's in Montreal reflects not only a civic pride in a local boy, but lets the works share the building with Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, David Milne, and others, revealing how that tradition's formal, painterly focus on nature helped revitalize figurative painting. Doig's film posters for his own repertory cinema in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad suggest that genre's influence on his work, as the various versions of Pelican (two of many below), in which a man dragging away a pelican is shown at the precise moment he sees his witnesses, employ cinematic methods of focus by highlighting, in turn, the man and the pelican, from one painting to another in a way that can only be found in painting.

That place and the Contemporain have a sampling of Riopelles up, the latter in a show on local abstraction (which actually just ended), though Riopelle found abstraction unattainable, and where the Adrien Paci show has also closed but the Albanian funeral dirge that he contracted for himself can be uploaded for today's Shavasana..

In Toronto the AGO has a capriciously rotated show of Beuys drawings, sculptural assemblages by David Altmejd that seem to get more critical attention North of the border than in these parts, and for those of you that wondered why they should go to the effort of creating a real work of art when a fake one would suffice Wifredo Prieto has placed one real diamond amidst a pile of fake ones for you to spot.

NYC: It's good to see the Werner show of small Polke drawings before and after the MoMA show as it allows contemplation of his commentary on commodities with fewer crowds, but it gets crowded too. It is bizarre at times to see all those people looking at Polke paintings (which includes youthful parodies expressing his distate for pure conceptualism) in the big show which includes his masterpiece Paganini, which I've likened to Richter's later masterpiece The Owner's History Lesson. The Gauguin show there is essential; including his original prints for the Noa Noa pamphlet and his sole casted sculpture, from someone who beheld a lot of them 'prominent' in urban settings. Also near Werner is Raymond Pettibon's surfer works on paper over the years, in which Polke-like cartoon renderings glide upon (I will not attempt surfer slang) Courbet's and Turner's dear coasts with the bo's'n's 'surfing trumps art' spieling.  The Met's SE Asian Hindu/ Buddhist show includes early Ganeshes from Vietnam, one where he is a much unadorned pachyderm, one in which he holds a horseradish and one on a sort of pedastal unusual to Indian carvings... similarly themed Himalayan works from the period in Brooklyn's holdings are still at the Rubin. Free chocolate at Zwirner.

Eagleton describes St. Patrick in The Truth About the Irish as "the first individual in recorded history to write against slavery. He is also said to have driven the snakes out of Ireland. Some people suggest that they ended up in Chicago's city hall." Meanin' to upload some tunes for the occasion, like this footage of Packie Russell, a year before Topic Records recorded the Russell family in 1974, a stone mason who would hold fort on his concertina at Gus O'Conner's pub in Doolin, where Dylan Thomas, G.B. Shaw, and Synge also sought refreshment in their day, the latter making famous the boat ride from that port to the neighboring islands at Yeats' insistence. While his brother Micho toured internationally, Packie chose to stay there: 'I am only an ignorant countryman living on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, in the county of Clare, on the western coast of Ireland,' where Wallace Stevens imagined 'the head of the past.'



Paddy Keenan, the "Jimi Hendrix of the uillean pipe" was one of the founding members of the Bothy Band..



The saying 'all Keenans are related' has been passed down from I don't know where, but in Iniskeen, where Patrick Kavanagh grew up and my family came from, the gene pool is small, the lower edge of its county lines bordering County Meath, where Paddy was the son of the piper John Keenan, an Irish Traveller, of which Eagleton says "in 16th and 17thC Ireland, professional travellers were often skilled craftsmen, as well as poets, doctors, seers and druids.."

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Also raised in County Meath was the Bothy Band's Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, here in 1976.. ..(embed disabled)..

The Clancys stir Ed Sullivan's Hibernian blood with their "Johnson's Motor Car" at 1:40.. Edward Said wrote "the problem of Irish liberation not only has continued longer than other comparable struggles, but it is so often not regarded as being an imperial or nationalist issue; instead it is comprehended as an aberration within the British dominion."



Two tactics from that history that noticeably carry over into current imperial governance is the use of catastrophes like the potato famine to impose economic monopolies, recently evident after the Haiti earthquake, and the complicity of the native financial elites in that reorganization and everything else..



John Cage: "I don't see the difference between a gallery and a church. And I don't know the difference between a church and anything else, hmm? That's what's meant, I think in Finnegan's Wake by the word "roaratorio," which I used for my music. The oratorio is in the church but the roaratorio is everything outside the church, hmm? And there's no difference between oratorio and roaratorio. Or another example is Tibetan Buddhism - not meditating is the same as meditating.. in the spiritual sense. If that attitude is taken, then it is." "You don't roar in a church but you roar in life, or roars take place in life, and among animals and nature. That's what this is. It's out in the world. It's not in the church. Or you can say, the world has become a church, hmm? ..in which you don't sing, you roar."

Paco obviously could have had any set up for Saura's Flamenco and he chose a circle in which he sits before what appears to be the sunset in an imagined pre-industrial Spanish coast, accompanying his brother Pepe's singing as when he was growing up..



Here in 1972, around the table with his brother for Bulerias "Cepa Andaluza"..



The "Mediterranean Sundance" perf in  Friday Night in San Francisco is I think one of the hardest songs to get sick of, and before you do.. this version has the video of Paco's fingering..



A rumba from the early 70s.. with Camarón..

What's up for two more days and a few months out west

Craft Morphology Flow Chart

The first posthumous retrospective of Mike Kelley has another two days at MoMA PS1 in Queens before opening in his home turf on March 31, having begun in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum where it was organized.. there was no doubt talk of subjecting the herd at MoMA Midtown to this expansive display of what Kelly termed his "Dysfunctional Bauhaus for the new religion of victimization" but aside from space considerations, mounting Kelley at a former school was irresistible as noted by curators and reviewers alike as he draws from the rituals, posters, vandalisms, and culture of schools as in his 1995 architectural work "Educational Complex" "his model of all the schools he attended omitted the rooms he forgot, which he attributes to repressed memory of trauma.."* in which, as with pop culture, he didn't believe in or attempt a psychic separation but one of critique that, by his account, led to works that were interpreted as the very nostalgia he despised for pop culture and school, developing at a moment between the Pop High Renaissance ("I'm from another generation. I have a more critical relationship to mass culture") and the arrival of the money and art stardom: "The art world is very different from what it was when I was young. When I was young, the art world was where you went to be a failure." In 1968 at age twelve in Detroit, his father a janitor his mother a cook, his aesthetic seemingly worked out, he placed a mock entry in a patriotic poster contest of ironic 'bad art' and won the contest. He got a dose of "Greenbergian formalism" at Michigan Ann Arbor where he roomed with Jim Shaw until he and Shaw went West, where Kelley soaked up and chafed against John Baldessari's "reductionist" Conceptualism at Cal Arts** in the mid-to-late 70s that has become fashionable in academic poetry over 30 years later. Kelley was emphatic that the artist does not arrive at meaning unwittingly "I don't believe in hiding intentionality," welcoming viewers though "to look at something and like it for the wrong reasons" as he says he does, not seeking what he termed Duchamp's non-retinal "reliance on hidden material that the viewer does not have access to for his meaning." Duchamp, of course, didn't hide The Green Box, and left it to the viewer to decode what he sought to express and represent -including the unwitting and unexplained - in so doing, evading the reduction of a Conceptualism for it's own sake as Kelley later did in his own way. "My early work - in part under the influence of the Conceptual Art generation of the 1960s and 1970s - refused to acknowledge that there was a historical 'I' in the work.. Meaning would flow in a kind of mythical third person, as if I.. were absent and the historically grounded reader were absent. Then I realized that this was a lie, a reiteration of the voice of dominant culture. So I tried to deal more with the specific aesthetics of my own lower-middle-class background."

Pay For Your Pleasure (above), created for the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, consists of a hall of blown up, institutional posters of authors and artists implying their practice is the sublimation of the criminal mind "I do not understand laws. I have no moral sense. I am a brute" (Rimbaud) "If you encounter charlatans, reason with them.. if they resist, be bold enough to drown them" (Giotto) "I erect myself at the exact point where knowledge touches madness, and I can erect no safety rail" (Balzac) "I call 'monster' all original, inexhaustible beauty" (Jarry) leading to the 'low art' of the work of an actual local criminal which is studied to decipher their psychology. I saw this installation in his previous retrospective and the criminal's work was an uninteresting portrait - this time the criminal's was good enough, a sort of cosmological abstraction, that I thought the previous concept had been forgone and a work of Kelley's had been inserted - as he is all over the map graphically, including attempted skill levels. A hallway is typically decorated to condition the visitor to the decorum sought in the rooms and this does the opposite, as when he proposed*** to decorate an office complex by blowing up cartoons on secretary's desks to a large scale, placing "If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport" in large letters next to the conference table. The exhibition includes From Our Institution to Yours (below) in which he blew up drawings made by his art school's security guards, warning the working class against 'false images,' as the personification of animals exists in church and state as well as folk art and cartoons.

I think Mike wants us to see Accatone soon

Kelley stressed in interviews that his trauma involved his encounter with the dominant culture and repeatedly denied experiencing familial abuse, a suggestion that the magazines continue to circulate to explain his suicide. He was politically passionate, describing himself as a Marxist and dialectical materialist: "Every state that's against (Bush) helps him get reelected because the population hates anything that's against the dream that he's proposing, so any time anyone says anything that counters that dream, people reject them (and) make him even stronger because people want to live in a fantasy world of American hegemonic dominance." As with Pop, his work often appears to be the full extension of Art Therapy rather than a critique of it: "Beuys had a notion of art as a curative process. I don't have that delusion. Art doesn't cure you, it makes you aware of the problems you have. Art used to be a personal sickness that showed you were better than other people. In actuality art is just saying 'let's just point this out and we can talk about it, I'm no different from you, I'm no better than you, I'm not special, I'm no genius that cut off my ear. I'm just another schmuck like you.' What I like about Beuys is that he had a very egalitarian idea of art. I don't believe that either. A lot of people don't have the talent, the strength to stand outside the culture and make a fool of themselves. He was a professional fool. What I dislike about a lot of contemporary artists is that they want to be hipsters. They're not willing to be fools, to put themselves on the line in some shared emotional way. They want to be better than other people, and that's to me worse than wanting to be the outsider and tragic and a suicide and all that crap.'"

The snowfalls have left Clyfford Still-like markings on the exterior of PS1, and Still would be an example of an artist for whom a single work has a resonance which, if somehow quantified, could score relatively favorably against the resonance of his entire oeuvre - Kelly, despite flashes of mastery of materials and inventive draftsmanship, inhabits the other side of that scale, as he was prolific and evocative with a minimum of repetition, so conducive to the Posthumous Retrospective space this is. Despite his many imitators, there will never, ever be another show like this one.

* His We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic: Fourteen Analyses was a critique of the socialization of art
** ..after Art Institute of Chicago rejected him because he was 'too Chicago' as they were trying to copy Baldessari at Cal Arts
*** Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry

invadieron el muerte..

A bird lived in me.
A flower traveled in my blood.
My heart was a violin.

I loved and didn't love. But sometimes
I was loved. I also
was happy: about the spring,
the hands together, what is happy.

I say man has to be!

(Herein lies a bird.
                              A flower.
                                             A violin.)

-Juan Gelman, Epitaph, tr. Ilan Stavans
 



"You see, that's what I said with my poem. Everybody waits for the next death of the next late great jazz musician. That's what it concludes with, sayin' everybody is waitin'. Like all the record company pirates put out legendary performances of all types of stuff that wasn't around when you were alive. It's like everybody waits 'til you're dead, then you get all the recognition. But what good is it when you're dead, if you're alive right now and you're not gettin' recognition, you know what i mean.." (Roy Campbell, Jr.)

In a book of verses spattered
with love, with sadness, with the world,
my children drew yellow ladies,
elephants trudging across red parasols,
birds imprisoned in the margin of a page,
they invaded death,
the large blue camel rests above ash-gray words,
a cheek glides across the solitude of my bones,
candor defeats the disorder of the night.

-Juan Gelman, The Victory, tr. D.J. Flakoll & Claribel Alegría



"A heart stops, another starts, it beats and bleeds within the chest, it whispers, it speaks the truth – listen! The soul, sometime staggering under life’s challenge, is straining every unseen fiber, then desires and fears are seen no longer; the soul is but a stillness somewhere in space. The heart speaks to the soul. Listen to this internal dialogue. See with the eyes of the heart; Listen when it speaks, for the heart is born pure." (Yusef Lateef)

The main thing
to be against
    is Death!

 Everything Else
      is a
      Chump!

 -Amiri Baraka, Ancient Music

Three shows of paintings on the Upper East Side this week: James Rosenquist at Feigen (34 East 69th Street, til Jan 10) centers around two large-scale paintings from 1973, but for those (like me) who didn't see the forty foot long version of his Holy Roman Empire Through Checkpoint Charlie at the 2006 Art Dealers Association show, a smaller version is there on lithograph, as well as a 2004 litho of The Xenophobic Movie Director or Our Foreign Policy (right), a selection of other paintings, and Rosenquist-related works by Ray Johnson.

A sampling of Peter Doig's early canvases are at Werner (4 E 77th St) til Jan 4th (below, Red Siena); these will apparently not be in his retrospective that runs Jan 25-May 4 in Montreal.

Iran Modern (til Jan 5): This was my first visit to the Asia Society and as Piri' Miri Muli' readers would no doubt expect, the listings in the 1991 Blue Guide put lofty notions in my head about seeing the 50 2ndC sculptures from Kushan period of North India etc. but the price of admission doesn't mean they have room for a permanent and temporary show at the same time, because the upper floors consist of conference rooms set up by the Rockefellers to foster better relations between the US and Asia, and the Iran show has been in the works for well over a year (insert conspiracy theory here). Their timeline is available online, in which the curators don't omit recollections like "In August (1953), as Iran continues to suffer economically due to its blockaded and boycotted oil industry, the CIA, British Intelligence, and a cadre of Iranian military leaders engineer a successful coup to overthrow Mosaddegh and replace him as Prime Minister with a Shah loyalist general" and "with aid from allied intelligence agencies based in the United States and Israel, the Shah founds SAVAK (in 1957), an internal security service soon to become notorious for its zeal and ruthlessness in hunting down political dissidents in all arenas of public life"; included is a photo of a large crowd of women protesting in support of the Ayatollah in 1978. The threat of SAVAK is portrayed in the two paintings of Nicky Nodjoumi here; a wider selection of his Neo Rauch-like tableau are reproduced on the Taymour Grahne site from their Nodjoumi show last fall.

The curator of the Tehran MoMA sponsored, upon its opening, a retrospective of Nodjoumi in 1980, but after some folks from the new Islamic government saw it he had to flee the country and leave the paintings behind. Even more tragically, Bahman Mohassess destroyed most of his artworks before he moved to Rome in 2006 and died there four years later. Seeing the collection of his paintings and sculptures here was a moving experience; his work is heavily influenced by European traditions and deeply psychological (right, Minotaur). Premiering this year in the festival circuit was Mitra Farahani's documentary about him, Fifi Howls from Happiness, referencing Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece while suggesting a commission like Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse and, like Rivette's film, it doesn't appear to have a dvd distributor.

A policeman was telling me recently the yuletide brings calls of (1) suicides; (2) domestic violence; (3) family fights; (4) relatives that threaten gatherings they're not invited to, as well as the other stuff..

It almost escaped the attention of Piri' Miri Muli' that someone has been uploading a lot of Andalusian Villancicos Navideños this winter.. I embeded La Macinita's from the Saura/ Storaro film a few years ago which is still my favorite Xmas video and it will likely remain that way,* but he uploaded that one w/ better pic and sound (but you'd have to check out the dvd for the English translation**)..



and a Camarón Villancico with Tomatito..



and one of Carmen Linares'..



This Lavoe/ Colon Asalto Navideño has some merry Yomo Toro solos..



Ah that concert.. from 1978.. I suppose this isn't an Xmas song unless they're telling Santa it's a bad neighborhood but it's Hector-ific especially near the end..



Here they're telling Santa he and Mrs. Claus are yesterday's news, unless they mean someone else. It's all about Santa all the time here tho..

* Last years' embed was close, a tune I first heard, as Piri' Miri Muli' readers know, accompanying Alain Sechas' installation Les Suspects rotated into the Pompidou permanent collection.
** Basically Joseph and Mary are broke and they need a room..

What's up for two more days

Medal for Dishonor: Propaganda for War

Yes, two days left to see David Smith's 1955-56 Forgings at Gagosian 980 Madison, which "translated the spontaneity of a brushed line drawing into sculptural form," as he was known to say "I belong with the painters."  I have received word from the nice folks at the Smithsonian that though the Hirshhorn Museum stores four of Smith's Medals for Dishonor* from the late 30s and though they have 197,000 square feet of exhibition space, a large portion of which is devoted entirely to sculpture and all of which could contain sculpture, the medallions have not been displayed in the rotating gallery of sculptures since 1986, which was for the show "Relief Sculpture: Selections from the Museum's Collection."  Florence wanted the collection, where the Medals would go toe to toe with Ghiberti, as did London (Elgin Marbles), Zurich, Purchase, NY, and Tel Aviv.  My solution: a museum where angry masterpieces are guaranteed permanent exhibition.. they will come..

Medal for Dishonor: Elements Which cause Prostitution

Medal for Dishonor: War Exempt Sons of the Rich

Since I started writing this post, the gang was good enough to extend the Smith show til Jan 11, but at 980 Madison the late de Koonings and William Eggleston 1978 sky images are ending, and next door, the Balthus photos make a great date if for some reason you want your girlfriend to dump you.  Midtown: Kabakov at Pace, ending, and on 19th Street the lines will be very long for the last day of Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Rooms but if you show up at 10am it should be warm enough.

* All fifteen were shown at Matthew Marks in 1994-95.

What's up

I am going to be checking out the rue Blomet show and some other stuff in a few days before they close up in the Big Sugar Plum but there's noteworthy shows 'round here, like, for instance, the Princeton Art Museum is cookin'.  I am forced against my inclinations (as Piri' Miri Muli' readers know) to lavish praise on curators all around, like Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles' selections for a four-room Latin American photography survey (right, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio's And it is silver, cement, or breeze) and the Kelly Baum-curated New Jersey as Non-Site (til Jan. 5) which combines a generous selection of the Robert Smithson/ Nancy Holt oeuvre related to the Garden State with mementos of Allen Kaprow and Dick Higgins' happenings on and around George Segal's farm, Segal's own works, a whole section of Amiri Baraka in Newark materials proffering the ability to sit down and chill to his jazz collaborations, and, as they say in the two neighboring media markets, much, much more.  An excellent film documentation of a late 50s Kaprow happening gives one the impression that the South Brunswick farm is a folly that Segal bought with his art money, but Segal was an aspiring painter yet to turn to sculpture that Kaprow took under his wing, and the farm was being assiduously worked, purchased with the money his parents saved up from their butcher shop in the Bronx.  Segal's works in the show can be seen by day trippers in tandem with his Depression Bread Line, the only "sad" work in Seward Johnson's DisneyFrick Happy Land* (Grounds for Sculpture) where you can analysand it on the couch in Mister Munch's Centrally Heated Screamyland and see sculpture from folks who have happened by Johnson's Atelier.  If that's not happy enough there's a great Trinidian roti shop by GfS's entrance** at Nottingham and Ward.

The Non-Site show's location in Central Jersey means you have to drive through a part of NJ to see it "I do not say walk.. the sane man will want his.. by car. Even if it is by public omnibus. It is not a country to walk in.." unless you live in the Princeton area.  The show prominently features Kaprow's observation “the New Jersey Turnpike, as it passes through the industrial complex around Newark, is better than art,” and some have already speculated that Smithson was influenced by Tony Smith's 1966 recollection in ArtForum "..in.. the 50's, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike..  it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that's the end of art. Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that..." (pdf)  Some have also speculated that Smithson's earthworks (left, Line of Wreckage) may have been influenced by Marcos Grigorian, the Armenian from Iran featured in the Asia Society's Iran Modern show who was creating earthworks, inspired in part by the Holocaust, in New York in the late 50s.

Smithson's explanation of the Non-Site: "The Non-Site ... represents an actual site in New Jersey.  It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it - this The Non-Site. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn't look like a picture. 'Expressive art' avoids the problem of logic; therefore it is not truly abstract. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely 'new sense of metaphor' free of natural or realistic expressive content. Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that 'travel' in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions" relates to Piri' Miri Muli' themes (at times incorporating Smithson) of the interpretation of the visual world - for instance, Chogyam Trungpa's "samsara is the entrance, samsara is the vehicle for nirvana" preceded immediately by "there is active behavior, then passive, then active.. the first moment producing and giving birth to the next.." Daumal's wanting to see Mount Meru was paradoxically an active desire for the passive, while the Smithsonian and Cagean view of the ubiquity of the resonance of the material world was passive in its observation of, active in its recording of, a subject which was both passive and active. Daumal at different times would seem to appear in three points of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy schema: as the artist/master, as the top level of reactive ressentiment (towards Breton) and as the ascetic man, in his devotion to Gurdjieff.  Deleuze: "the fiction of a world-beyond in the ascetic ideal.. is what gives the world a value of appearance or of nought.. the ascetic ideal (also expresses) the affinity of reactive forces with nihilism as the 'motor' of reactive forces." Gurdjieff thought that artist should not arrive at meaning unwittingly, differing from the views of Hegel and Adorno, while Daumal, a year before he met Gurdjieff, wrote about Rimbaud "the object of criticism.. is to show luminously how the poet wrote a necessary corpus of work, bound by a rigorous determinism to the whole of the contemporary world, and supported by a law just as perfectly inflexible.. This freedom, the source of all values is (as Spinoza understands it, and any other meaning is impossible) that of the man who frees himself by thinking of himself as determined by universal will."  In Daumal's schema the active poet is valued over the "useless, sterile, odious" passive poet.

Also the Philly Museum is liberating a selection of the Surrealist works which were donated to them with good intentions but kept in storage for years so the curators could display inferior works, til March 2.  The Imagist poet Walter Arensberg donated his collection along with the Duchamp mausoleum because Philly made the longest contractual commitment to keeping the Large Glass and Étant donnés on display but gathering dust for years were Duchamp's erotic works, donated by Arensberg, now in storage to make way for Jasper Johns paintings, along with Arensberg's donations of Di Chirico's charcoal Victorious Love, an etching by Masson, and Leonora Carrington's wonderful etching The Dogs of the Sleeper (right).  There's also a donated Wifredo Lam (The Spirit of Morning), a donated 1934 painting The Bullfight by Picasso, both stored til now (I thought Picasso was taught in the art history programs), Kay Sage's The Unicorns Come Down to the Sea, and a delightful newly acquired Matta To Escape the Absolute.  Elaborating all my pet peeves about Philly culture would take me more than a little time and soul-searching, but one way to make room for good paintings would be to put the academic paintings in Gallery 155 in storage and stop hanging the works of Van Gogh, Manet, and Courbet in the hallway of all places. The Met has the large academic paintings in the crowded hallway and the important paintings in their own destination rooms.  Oh and a teeny weeny room displaying 16 major Venetian Renaissance paintings stolen from the John Johnson estate has had the naming rights sold to Arco Chemical Company, and the nice folks at the chemical company apparently are not, as I am, requesting that the works of Titian, Bassano, and Veronese are displayed at eye level, properly in a John Johnson wing.  "Properly" doesn't enter into it - Philly would be seen as a cultural beacon only after the Johnson works are returned to a reconstruction of the intended house museum, the Barnes works returned to his estate, with the mediocre boondoggle built for the Barnes works rededicated to become the Museum of the Mafia (I assure you, people would come see that, if they "properly" don't pull punches).  Oh, and they decided to take down the tribute to Albert Barnes, surprise, surprise; oh, and the museum that promised to bring art to the “plain people” now charges $22, surprise, surprise (I used to pay $1 to get in without a reservation); oh, a Barnes board member now admits they were all lying about the Barnes in Merion having financial problems, how'd they keep that out of the Inquirer and Bulletin.  Meanwhile the city is still broke because the same crooked people are running it. They hired Frank Gehry for the art museum renovation because he's the Most Famous Architect, First Class, Money's No Object but when he (who developed amongst visual artists in LA) unveiled his proposed exterior the board said "Ewww- that's weird, no way!" (the Philly art establishment said the same thing about Barnes' collection before they were told it was worth billions).  The Penn alumni, unlike their Princeton counterparts, can't have their collections shown at their alma mater unless they've snuck a ancient artifact home from the Mayan trail because the death squad cheerleaders in the anthropology department have successfully kept the art history department away from their gravy train of dusty, empty rooms that haven't seen a thoughtful acquisition in over 40 years, but I won't get into my views on the topic while I look forward to the rue Gramet show and Yuletide carols.

* Frick was known for collecting light works of art. I suppose I would like the Grounds better if Johnson did a three dimensional Third of May or, as Joan Fontcuberta is featured in the Princeton show, his Googlegram 5: Abu Ghraib would look good there as a sculpture for photo ops..

** Route 33 only seems to have an exit for northbound though, on your way out. If you're going S, I guess you can take Klockner Rd. N to State Street E