Aboard Jet Blue

(continued from yesterday on board Jet Blue from JFK to Long Beach…)

We saw a fair number of art exhibits in the course of our afternoon in New York, but I’ll spare you most of them. Not that they were terrible, Bush. I see lots of art that’s absolutely competent in every way—the product of the graduates of the hundreds of schools and universities turning out qualified artists into the world, all of them expecting to be heard, but relatively few of them ever actually making it to a gallery for consistent representation. And those that do… well, frankly, I fear that it has more to do with their commercial possibilities than with the quality of their work. Ellie remarked that the new gallery scene in Chelsea is far less appealing than the old one in SoHo—and I don’t think this is just nostalgia for the good old days. There is something pitilessly commercial about those beautifully designed new spaces that have been springing up in Chelsea in the past five years of so, and a stroll through gallery row is somehow less fun than it used to be.

I want to talk about Damien Hirst, one of the leading artists of the (now not so) new British shock merchants who stormed this country in the “Sensation” show a few years back. He’s moved on from that infamous shark suspended in formaldehyde and the farm animals sliced in half to a new series of photorealist paintings—a startling move in itself perhaps, but shocking mostly in its choice of subject matter: the coldly sterile equipment in an autopsy room, along with studies of autopsy procedures and the exposed viscera and entrails, open corpses, and so on. Not to mention subject matter that has attracted him in the past: pills, medical supplies, and rows of colored dots… All painted with surprising skill (we didn’t know he could paint, and wonder nastily if perhaps he got some help?) and in great size and quantity. A cheeky finger in the eye of those of us who had built certain expectations based on his past work with, I sense, a strong element of self-parody and a snide commentary on the gallery system—this at the uebergallery of uebergalleries, Gagosian—and its need for product to support its disproportionate overheads. It was, to say the least, provocative.

First prize for me went to Lucas Samaras. I’ve always been attracted to the unsparing self-examination in his work, and feel that this is something that I aspire, at least, to share with him. His work is a complex body-mind experience, and one which requires our presence and our interaction. Samaras has always been fascinated with the evolving possibilities of new media, too, and unafraid to investigate that potential. You walk in on his current show and find yourselef confronted with row upon row of simple desks with I-Mac computers—something of a colorful spectacle in itself. The artwork takes the form of thousands of manipulated still images and a good number of “Imovies”, all accessible by the viewer interested enough to explore the myriad layers of computer memory, and many of them featuring the artist himself, clothed or naked, in studio or out in nature, playfully imagining ever-changing virtual environments in form and color. It’s a wonderfully rich tapestry of visual experience, at once intimate and transpersonal, a blend of the imaginative and the real.

I’ll save Tim Hawkinson until tomorrow, Bush. We saw his show at the Whitney in the morning, before leaving, and I’m still chuckling at some of his inventions. Then, I guess, back to politics. But this trip has been a lot of fun. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. And, I have to say, it will be a pleasure to be home again, in just a few more hours.