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large detail of a still from a video of Iannis Xenakis' "Pithoprakta" (1956), which has the composer's sketches and renderings accompanying the piece itself [currently installed at the Drawing Center]

I love music, especially unfamiliar music, and since I've now been listening to the stuff for a good part of a century, that means my taste may not be shared with most people. The music of Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is a case in point, but judging from the fuss being made over this composer recently, and that without the excuse of a major anniversary, maybe I'm about to go mainstream for once.

It's been a couple months since I first decided to do a post about the wealth of opportunities we've been given lately to hear the Greek-born composer's powerful and very idiosyncratic music. It's now the middle of March and most of the concerts to which I'd been looking forward have already happened. I'm ashamed to admit I've only been to two. The first was “Xenakis & Japan”, at Judson Church February 28, an evening of music and dance devoted to the composer's interest in Japanese music and theater and presented by the Electronic Music Foundation.

I find it extremely difficult to write about music on this blog, even though all my life it's been at least as important to me as the visual arts, and probably more so. I've had no significant education in anything other than the liberal arts (which, contrary to what some think, actually do not actually include any form of "art"). I am able to write about the visual arts at least tentatively, from my position as an unlearned, passionate observer, and not least because I have the help of a camera. The performing arts however are a serious problem for me, since I am normally unable to photograph the art, and stock promotion photos which are seen over and over again bring nothing new to the subject. The performing arts are an incredible challenge.

In fact I had little excuse to miss the opportunity of writing a short bit about Xenakis, since here there was a real possibility of including images. I'm thinking of the beautiful studies with which the composer rendered his aural creations on paper (creations which he sometimes described with performances in light and space as well). Maybe only John Cage's own lyrical (yes, lyrical) drawings could match their output, their dynamism, and their beauty.

score for John Cage's "Chess Pieces" (1944)

There were some eight or so concerts of Xanakis' music listed on the press announcement released perhaps two months ago by the Drawing Center, and over the following weeks I learned about a number of others. We've now moved beyond all their dates, but the composer/architect/artist's sketches and renderings remain on view on Wooster Street (with pretty extensive musical accompaniment on headphones) through April 8th.

In the second recent concert I attended in which his music was programmed it seemed to have been designed to play a minor role, as surprising as that may seem to anyone acquainted with it. In a concert at the Paula Cooper Gallery on Tuesday evening Xenakis was only one of three contemporary composers featured and his contribution was both the shortest and the only one which did not require a dozen or more players.

In addition to the visual art she exhibits in her eponymous gallery, Paula Cooper has always hosted, in the description found on the gallery site, "concerts, music symposia, dance performances, book receptions, poetry readings, as well as art exhibitions and special events to benefit various national and community organizations". The page also reminds us that, "For 25 years until 2000, the gallery presented a much celebrated series of New Year’s Eve readings of Gertrude Stein’s 'The Making of Americans' and James Joyce’s 'Finnegans Wake.'”

I remember many of these occasions, including two important ACT UP fund-raising auctions Cooper hosted in 1990 and 1991, which were extremely important for AIDS activism, and for me.

Gertrude Stein came back to the the Paula Cooper Gallery this week, through a performance of Petr Kotik's "There is Singularly Nothing". The instrumental frame of the performance, by his own instrumental group, The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, was an intensely-elegant affair. This roughly one-hour work, which incorporates a delicious text ["Composition as Explanation"] from Gertrude Stein, an American treasure, was first performed in the early seventies and re-invented, with different directives to the four singers, for the March 16 performance.

Collaborating with the SEM for the evening was the new-music concert series, Interpretations 21. A small vocal ensemble, augmented by Thomas Buckner and Gregory Purnhagen, who had solos in the Satoh piece, was shared by the two larger works.

The concert had begun with the world premier of Somei Satoh's "The Passion", an oratorial using an abbreviated version of the Christian biblical text described by the name. I cannot account for the choice of subject by a Japanese composer whose own experience and music are both actually founded in the philosophies of Shintism and Zen Buddhism. I did recognize some poetic allusion, although perhaps accidental, in the fact that the performance of this Passion took place in a room dominated by a full-size sculpture of the scaffold used to hang the workers known as the Chicago anarchists or "the Haymarket Martyrs" in 1887. The installation was created by Sam Durant, the artist currently being exhibited in the gallery, whose recent work work has dealt with capital punishment.

Xenakis' 1976 virtuoso piece, "Mikka 'S'", for solo violin, followed the Satoh piece. The performer, Conrad Harris, stood high above the audience, at one corner of the scaffold Durant intended, bare of all but its familiar water dispenser, to double in function as a worker’s break room.

A postscript, from the text of the Kotik piece, Gertrude Stein on "modern composition":

Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical.

[image of Cage's notations from greg.org]

the last balloon

I had contributed something like a hundred or so inflated balloons to Man Bartlett's "24h #class action" the day before, but when I arrived at Winkleman Gallery Thursday afternoon around 4:15, almost 24 hours later, it was too late to add to my score. The artist however had been going strong all that day and throughout the night before. I managed to capture one of the last long, narrow balloons he tossed onto the sculpture from the cubby he had created behind it.

Thousands of inflatables were about to disappear at the stroke of a pin, without ever having achieved a single polished mirror finish.

It was picture time.

the sculptor and his tools

final group intervention commences

the attack underway

last pops/wheezes

empty packaging, sadly showing suggested Koonsian applications

not a puppy in site

Wednesday's schedule for #class began at 2 with a "Feminist Tea Party" hosted by artists Caitlin Rueter and Suzanne Stroebe. I saw some of it at home on the streaming video (while drinking coffee) but was unfortunately not able to make out most of the discussion. I arrived at Winkleman just as they were leaving with the accoutrements (tablecloths and porcelain cups; the finger sandwiches, cookies, and cupcakes presumably having already been shared with the issues).

Man Bartlett was just about to begin his own much-anticipated 24 hour event, "24h #class action", described on the site as "a marathon group intervention involving systematically blowing up hundreds of skinny balloons and popping them, without creating or harming any cute little puppies." Any reference to proceedings inside the big bucks Olympian "art" world of bright shiny stuff, paid santa's workshop helpers, and undisguised commerce - certainly including the current New Museum show - is not a coincidence. More from the artist:

A simple physical action, over time, can radically shift consciousness, specifically when combined with “real” and “virtual” social interactions. It is in this context that “24h #class action” plans to poke a pin into Koonsian psychological dramas.

Beneath its surface this intervention is an exercise in futility and one of joyous absurdity. The balloons will only take their long, phallic shape, without further form, and will eventually be liberated or executed. Is it possible to both celebrate and critique? Does it matter that risks were taken by Koons (and others) to create this ridiculously expensive series? Is ambition alone worth applause? Is the fact that 5 balloon dogs were fabricated a triumph? Is it “relevant?” What I’m grappling with is a complex relationship to the artist’s work, and really to all Art and Everything. And duration exposes fascinating avenues in the headspace to drive down.

Or, you know, we’re just blowing up balloons that we get to pop at the end, which is fun too.

the artist contemplating his canvas

and getting into his metier

less than 24 hours to go

Shalin Scupham joins the "group intervention"

the artist during Magda's presentation

Bartlett and his helpers began blowing up balloons at five, but took a break a little over an hour later when Magda Sawon of Postmasters Gallery arrived to host "Ask the Art Dealer." She had vowed to "truthfully answer any and every question posed to her as long as it does not involve her weight, social security number or other people's money." She was incredible. Barry and I had already thought of her as a community hero, but now she belongs to the world.

Magda holds the room enthralled

Ed Winkleman, the gallerist who made #class possible, was also in the space yesterday, with the third session of his own intervention (as a gallery owner) in what he had titled, "Shut Up Already...I'll Look at Your Art!". The project, the fruit of an artist's "anonymous proposal", according to Winkleman, (someone tell me whether that anonymity is still being maintained) has him working out a pledge that he would spend a portion of his time during #class in viewing, for no less than 10 seconds each, images submitted via an open call on the internet. The third of seven rules specifies that he and his guests would be "monitored by a volunteer as they view the work to assure full compliance with the rules." On Wednesday his monitor was the artist Bernard Klevickas. Images of work he has seen can be found here.

a very open call

all heck breaks loose as Powhida exceeds the estimate

A number of art enthusiasts found their way to Winkleman gallery, and a Saturday in "#class", this past weekend to take part in the (unbilled) "T-Bill Gaming" event. Tom Sanford and William Powhida had set up a projector and screen linked to a laptop, allowing gallery visitors follow the Phillips de Pury auction, "NOW: Art of the 21st Century", in a live simulcast which began at noon.

Fans were invited, Sanford's own blog had announced, to participate in a "relational aesthetics art project" involving "the sometimes-overlooked art of book making". We had been invited to "watch the excitement unfold as shadowy and anonymous international art patrons determine the actual market value, not only of the works, but also of the hundreds of artists themselves!"

Fully in the spirit of the month-long project created by Powhida and Jen Dalton, the installation was described as an attempt "to make the world of contemporary art auctions more accessible to the Average Joe on the streets of Chelsea."

The excitement in the gallery was building for hours as the auctioneer moved closer and closer to lot #257, a drawing by Powhida, "Untitled (Dana Schutz), which the artist had donated to a Momenta Art benefit five years ago. All heck broke loose when it went for $1,900 ($2,375 including 20% premium, and before taxes). The piece exceeded the high end of the auction house estimate. Since only a few years earlier someone had taken it home for $150, it certainly represented a good "investment" for its original owner, even if neither its author nor the non-profit space to which he had gifted it shared one penny of the bounty.

At some time in the midst of the excitement buildup the artist himself was heard to say:

No artist should have to watch this

For the artists and their friends and confederates in class that afternoon it was good fun, but mixed with the fun were melancholy thoughts framed by the sudden and direct confrontation with the reality of the art market. Inside the auction gallery however it all appeared to be only about money.

I'm sure we all had far more fun in class than did the crowd a few blocks south. I have a decent amount of experience with New England antique and estate auctions, and some familiarity with New York art auctions produced by a slightly less prestigious house than this one. I had always associated auctions with great fun and drama, even for the parsimonious participant, so I was shocked at how hurried and perfunctory the proceedings were on Saturday. Not a whit of drama - and no wit - came from the podium. The only excitement generated by the house (as opposed to that created by our own party on 27th Street) happened when the man in the $5000 suit, who normally finds himself selling off Picassos and Rauschenbergs, started the bidding on one item at $9 (it finally sold for $100).

the gamers

bets placed

the board

Diego Rivera Agrarian Leader Zapata 1931 fresco 7' 9.75" x 6' 2" [large detail taken from a slightly oblique angle, of the painting in MoMA's collection]

Of course there was Rivera, and Kahlo, but most of the other committed pinko commies hanging around inside the Museum of Modern Art have been largely hidden from our history, from the institutional history of MoMA, and from the history of the art and the artists themselves.

Leading a tour of the Museum on 53rd Street this past Monday, artist and teacher Yevgeniy Fiks started to sort things out for the record. Barry and I were extremely fortunate to be a part of the discreet group of enthusiasts which he directed in a "Communist Tour of MoMA".

One of my favorite parts? Enjoying the fact that any number of other museum visitors who happened near us were learning more than they had bargained for when they walked into the galleries of the permanent collection that afternoon.

If you missed the road trip clear your calendar for Fiks' presentation, "Communist Modern Artists and the Art Market" at Winkleman gallery March 12, another event in William Powhida and Jen Bartlett's month-long project, "#class".

I've uploaded below images taken at a few of our stops (devotions, secular "stations"), and Barry has a more narrative report, assembled from his notes, on his own site.

Jacob Lawrence

Jackson Pollock

Henri Matisse

Marc Chagall

up against the wall, spread over the hood, or face down on the ground; then into the computer

From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them.

Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet the New York Police Department is compounding this intolerable indignity by compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police.

Not only are most of the people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is no defense for this policy. It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease.

These are the first angry paragraphs of Bob Herbert's righteous and powerful Op-Ed piece in today's Times, "Watching Certain People".

And none of this is even news! Why do most New Yorkers continue to be indifferent to what's being perpetrated within what is generally considered to be one of the world's most diverse and most liberal societies?

Herbert's outrage is rightly directed at the racism so dramatically demonstrated by the statistics, but we would be ashamed of and alarmed by the police tactics themselves even if they were exercised within a completely homogeneous society.

While no one is contending that the practices of the New York City Police Department [NYPD] are equivalent to those of the Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo], the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit [Stasi], or the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti [KGB], how much emulation of the tactics used by systems we call totalitarian will we tolerate in our guardians? Do we care at all as long as we think "decent people" aren't being harassed, intimidated, and permanently documented?

New York City has taken its cue from the nation's irrational and hysterical response to the events of 9/11, the so-called "Patriot Act", and produced a number of its own unconstitutional police toys in the name of "security", some of them (as in the case of the federal operations) with absolutely no relationship to terrorism, or indeed patriots, and none of them able to promise safety to their white middle-class or wealthy authors in any event.

At what point will we know it's gone too far? If we're indifferent to what's happening or simply not paying attention, how will we know when the land of the free and the home of the brave has actually become a military/police state, its population cowed into submission by fear of the other, to be hunted down in its midst or somewhere on the other side of the planet?

[image, illustrating NYPD stop-frisk statistics for the first half of 2009, from revcom.us]

hanging out after class

Thanks to everyone for following the #class collecting panel last night, both those inside the space and elsewhere online (there were over 1700 people watching the live stream at one point). We had a great time!

Thanks above all to Julia Weist, our facilitator, and the rest of our lovely and distinguished panel, whose names many may not have gotten when they were introduced.

Greg Allen
Denise Kupferschmidt
Adam Simon
Kianga Ellis
Austin Thomas
Ben Tischer
Jonah Groeneboer

And many thanks also to Ed Winkleman and Murat Orozobekov, our hosts, and to Jen Dalton and William Powhida, the overtaxed artists who dreamed up and continually enable #class for us all, for their own own vocal contributions to the conversation last night.

Barry and I were pretty pleased with how it went off, although we were surprised that most of the discussion stayed with practical issues, and, in spite of our pretty modest efforts during the evening to provoke it, there may have been little that would satisfy the larger project's intention that participants would meet "to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system."

We wanted to keep a light hand on the wheel, and more or less let the room run with the discussion, but we had hoped it would move onto a more theoretical level. We tried to nudge it in that direction, including posing the question of whether there was another way than the collecting model to serve both artists and the larger culture. In the end however, the "class" system survived the evening pretty much intact.

All of which makes me anticipate even more keenly the #class event which will discuss Ben Davis' "9.5 Theses on Art and Class", on a date not yet established.

art hell [section of chalkboard-painted wall in the gallery]

Bruce High Quality Foundation We Like America and America Likes Us 2010 vehicle and educational implements, dimensions variable [detail of installation]

I feel good about the Whitney 2010. While I like excitement, I resist hype like the plague. This Biennial has been accompanied by neither, which at the very least gives visitors a better chance to experience the individual works for themselves, and unencumbered with a theme. There is some very good, even awesome work on the three floors of the exhibition I saw at the preview (the floors not devoted to favorites from earlier years), but for me none of them had so fundamental an impact as the Bruce High Quality Foundation installation, "We Like America and America Likes Us".

In "Art Class", a 2007 piece published on Artnet, Ben Davis had described Picasso's "Guernica" as "the most successful political image of the 20th century". His argument was that isolated artistic gestures cannot resolve social contradictions "without any social movement backing them up to give them force", continuing:

This does not mean that art or artists cannot play any political role; it is just that some model besides the middle-class one of "my art is my activism" is necessary, one based on concrete solidarity and practical action. Picasso’s Guernica is the most successful political image of the 20th century. Guernica, in fact, embodies the fact that art’s political value is determined in its relation with mass struggle, not in its individual content -- the imagery of the painting, moving as it is, is completely drawn from a vocabulary of forms Picasso had already developed in previous work. Yet, during the Spanish Civil War, after its appearance at the Spanish Republic’s booth at the 1937 World’s Fair, Guernica was literally removed from its stretchers, rolled up and toured internationally to win support for the Republican cause. In England, visitors brought boots to send to the front.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation seems to be taking a different route with its own institutional, social and political critique, probably one more suited to our own politically-lethargic times. Bruce's confrontations with our own tropes have been found just about everywhere: on our streets, our waters, our public plazas, even inside the galleries and expositions of the system they speak to.

I have to confess to a penchant for political art, and to a number of years spent in sort of a groupie relationship to this arts collective, and yet "We Like America and America Likes Us" is one of the most affecting works, in any genre, I've ever encountered. Where do we bring our allegorical boots?

We are all wounded, wrapped in felt. Are we inside an ambulance or a hearse? What is to be done?
Like much of what Bruce does, it's not conventionally "beautiful" - except as truth is beauty, and yet the incredibly elegiac recorded remembrance of "America" which accompanies the fast video montage of heterogeneous clips projected onto the tall Cadillac windshield is riveting, and profoundly moving.

I don't know the length of the loop (and there was no indication on the museum's wall text); but for all I know it could be as long as the melancholy story it tells.

Especially for those who will not be able to visit the Whitney, I have some excerpts. The text, recited by a luscious, soothing female voice, begins:

We like America. And America likes us. But somehow, something keeps us from getting it together. We come to America. We leave America. We sing songs and celebrate the happenstance of our first meeting – a memory reprised often enough that now we celebrate the occasions of our remembrance more often than their first cause.

And a little later I listened as the gender pronouns slithered over each other in ecstasy, and in sorrow:

We wished we could have fallen in love with America. She was beautiful, angelic even, but it never made sense. Even rolling around on the wall-to-wall of her parents’ living room with her hair in our teeth, even when our nails trenched the sweat down his back, and meeting his parents, America stayed simple somehow. He stayed an acquaintance, despite everything we shared. Just a friend. We could share anything and it would never go further than that.

No one really knows how love begins. A look on his face one time after we’d made love – a text message too soon after the last one. When did we become a thing to hold on to rather than just something to hold? We didn’t know America was in love with us until it was too late. Maybe we couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. America fell in love with the idea of us, with some fantasy of us, some fantasy of what America and us together would be, before we had a chance to tell him it could never work, we weren’t ready for a relationship, we weren’t comfortable being needed, we didn’t have the resources to be America’s dream.

It wasn’t easy letting America down. As we stuttered through our rehearsed speech we watched the change on her face. We could see the zoom lens of her attention clock away. We could feel ourselves receding back into the blur of the general population.

The last lines are:

There was a time we thought we were nothing without America. When she left, we realized all the excuses we’d been making. All the problems we’d been trying not to address. We drunk dialed our memory of America just to hear what we were thinking. We worked late and we told ourselves we had to, that the work came first, that this was an important time in our lives and that love could wait. Just wait a little longer and we’d fix everything, we’d say. Solving the America problem, our lack of attention, our disinterest in sex, our never being home, our thinking of her as a problem – it would have to wait.

[installation view of the rear of the curtained 1972 Miller-Meteor ambulance/hearse]

[text from the audio of the installation courtesy of the artists]

portraits of the collectors, at home (featuring a sculpture by Maria Alos, in one of over two dozen images Fette pulled out of our apartment, and now displayed on her gorgeous site, the flog.)

Barry and I are putting together a panel which will gather at 6 pm February 27, as a part of William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton's month-long project "#class"* at Winkleman Gallery. The two artists say their initiative is partly a response to the Dakis Joannou/Jeff Koons show opening in March at the New Museum, but they describe the larger scope of their bold, and very brave venture in this excerpt from their press release:

#class will turn Winkleman Gallery into a "think tank", where we will work with guest artists, critics, academics, dealers, collectors and anyone else who would like to participate to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system. By "current market system" we mean the commercial model and attendant commodification of art, but also the unquantifiable, intangible, unpaid aspects of participating in the art world.

There are already a large number of events and, well, "classes" scheduled, and more are still being added. As I understand it, anyone who has a proposal can get in touch with the artists, who will be in residence, so to speak, inside the gallery throughout the period of the project.

Barry and I have chosen to talk about collecting, how to go about it with even the most limited of resources and ambitions, how to avoid making it a job or a contest, but instead a reward, a continuous delight, and one which can be shared. We're calling the discussion "Collecting with Your Eye, Not Your Ears". The announcement materials for our particular segment read:

What motivates collectors to acquire work?  Is it what you hear about an artist or is it the work itself? It can't just be to fill the New Museum or flip at auction! Barry Hoggard and James Wagner have been invited to lead a discussion around how and why people build private collections, with an emphasis on the committed enthusiast with limited funds.

The evening is intended to address collecting, not as a hobby, furniture or investment, but as a way of repurposing a worthy human impulse in danger of being reduced to a convention, an adornment, even a racket.

We will be referring to our modest, pretty diverse and now sizable collection, which we've just made available on line (our timing was only a coincidence, but our biggest surprise was learning that no one else does it). We will describe the collection's genesis and current form, and how we live in the middle of it, although we know that even in its most general description, our approach may not work for everyone.

Helping us to move beyond our own experience will be a panel in which we expect to include one or more artists, collectors, advisers, gallerists, curators, enablers and connectors, with some of them doubling in those roles. We are inviting a number of people to sit around the big table whose experience can inform the discussion further, and I hope we will all be fortunate enough to find the room host to others who have heard about the event and are interested in the subject.

We intend the evening to be as non-hierarchical as possible: It's free, open to anyone who wants to come, and everyone is welcome to participate in the discussion and its energy. Just watching and listening will be okay too.

The artist and information science specialist Julia Weist will be our moderator/facilitator.

*
check out the daily schedule in the column to the right on the #class site

[image courtesy of Fette]

the rotating "Featured Work" page on the collection site, "grabbed" today, February 15

Barry and I have been working over many months on an online catalog of our own collection in order to make it visible to a larger public. The Hoggard Wagner Art Collection site is intended to serve the work itself, the artists who created it, and the people with whom we can now share it.

We expect that the collection, not including future acquisitions, will exceed well over 1000 items when we have finished documenting it.   Although it seems we have barely begun, we're fully committed to the entire project.

Those elements of the site that have been finished can now be seen on line. The "about" page will provide more information and context.

RELATED: It's only a coincidence that we were first able to activate the site (although it's still in beta form) just before the beginning of a month of programs at Winkleman Gallery devoted to a general reconsideration of the art market in the aftermath of its virtual collapse and the attendant threat to the integrity of museums and other arts institutions [see the blog for the "show" here]. The timing of these ambitious programs, organized by William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton under the rubric, "#Class", is not a coincidence: They are intended to coincide with the opening of the Dakis Joannou/Jeff Koons New Museum show.

[Disclosure (to be more fully-elaborated in a later post): Barry and I will be a part of "#Class", with a panel/room discussion on February 27, "Collecting with Your Eye, Not Your Ears"]