Fiber at the Pompidou 6

Winding up our fiber scavenger hunt at Centre Pompidou, here's a piece that I loved.  Or at least I think I loved it.

Sergej Jensen is a Danish artist now working in Berlin, who often works with distressed and found fabrics, even though he calls the finished works "paintings."

Sergej Jensen, Sans titre, 2011, details below

















How do I love this?  Let me count the ways.  I love old, stained, bleached fabrics that look like they've lived a full and exciting life.  I love mending, as the horizontal slash painstakingly hand-stitched back together.  I love frayed edges and dangling threads.  I love happy faces.

The only worm in the apple is that I'm not sure Sergej sewed this himself, and faithful readers will know my ambivalence about fabric/ation.  I did some google research and found that he does outsource some of the production (boo, hiss) to his mother (all right!!!).

To justify my affection for this work, I'm going to imagine that Mom showed him how to use the sewing machine and this piece was his practice.  If not, then Sergej, you better learn how.  Mom won't be around forever to do the heavy lifting for you.

Fiber at the Pompidou 5

OK, I gave you a week of frivolity, including the vast spectrum of Mom's junk, from pathetic to sublime.  Now back to art.  Not done with my search for fiber at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

You may remember the famous Manet painting "Olympia" from art history class.

Here it is revisited by Larry Rivers, in "I Like Olympia in Black Face."  With lots of fabric, as you might imagine in revisiting a painting in which the sumptuous drapery is almost as important as the two women.

The excellent wall notes at the Pompidou explain:

Also it has faux flowers, if you like that sort of thing.

Junk can be valuable

I collect junk.  I pick it up from the street as I walk; I glean it from the workroom, the garage, the discarded mail, other people's trash pickup piles.  I make art with it (or plan to).

One of my favorite forms of junk is ephemera -- the fancy term for paper stuff.  In particular I love ephemera from foreign travel -- used Metro tickets, city maps, museum passes, hotel bills, menus, beer mats, newspapers, all the stuff that from home might not be very special but from away is très exotique.  I bring home packs of the stuff when we travel overseas, and I tell my relations to not buy me souvenirs, just bring home junk.

So my son, recently traveling in Europe, did as told, even though he travels light, just a backpack for a month's journey, and the pack of ephemera grew over the weeks.  Good boy.

As he went through security in Barcelona to finally come home, he was pulled aside for further questioning.

Where did you start your trip, señor?

Germany.

Where did you stay first?

Frankfurt.

Which hotel?

Ummmm.... some hotel near the train station.... ummmm.... can't remember the name....  Adler, maybe.... if you have wi-fi I could pull up my email and find where I booked it....

[ Then inspiration struck!  The pack of junk for Mom!  He pulled out the pack of ephemera, leafed through it, and found a bill from the hotel!  The security guy was good with that.  But wait.... ]

After Frankfort, where did you go next, señor?

The guard took him through the entire trip, city by city (seven or eight in all).  If there wasn't a hotel bill in the pile, there was a bus or train ticket with a time and date stamp, a museum pass, a restaurant flyer, an ATM receipt.  

The guard eventually said, semi-apologetically, "You understand why we did this -- you have been here so long with so little luggage!"  He didn't understand, but that's another discussion.

Different readers might take different morals from this story.  The one I take, of course, is that collecting junk can be good for you.

Photo suite 84 -- they're watching

Sign of the week

I don't get it -- am I supposed to complain or drink?

Collaboration in the big leagues 2

Yesterday I wrote about a "collaborative project" memorialized in the New York Times, featuring an "artist" who stole his friends' work for a show.

Today's article on collaboration is a review of an exhibit at a New York gallery that reminds me of those old movies -- hey kids, let's put on a show!

Seems that an artist thought up a nifty idea and invited 13 of her friends over for an art party. They set up an assembly line and produced 40 paintings, each pretty much the same as the others.

Here's how the reviewer describes it:  "(Artist A) got things rolling with a large gray shape that seems to have suggested to several other participants a Mr. Potato Head waiting to happen.  (B) added eyes and nose.  (C) applied ears.  (D) contributed bright red glasses frames and (E) provided a halo.  (F), (G) and (H), as well as (I), surrounded this character with various abstract elements in colored pencil, brown paint, red and magenta silk-screen and black ink.  (J), (K), (L), and (M) made various physical interventions using yarn, string, fabric and a pen knife.  (N) collaged an image of potatoes for Mr. Potato Head's mouth, until supplies ran out and he substituted pictures of other produce.  (O) whispered an insult into each canvas and applied a Band-Aid."

Doesn't that sound like good fun?  Do you suppose it was fueled by an alcoholic beverage or two?  I'm sure it was, on both counts, but is it art?  The reviewer didn't think so.  "Apparently there was no one in charge of quality control," she wrote.  What a delicate way to put it.

Untitled, 2013, collaborative painting  















So my question is very similar to my question yesterday -- what was the gallery owner thinking?  Aren't there enough artists out there making real art, one or two of whom would give their left arm for a New York show?  And what was Roberta Smith, the fine art critic for the Times, thinking when she wrote this review instead of tearing up her notes and taking the rest of the day off?

I am not terribly upset that the big-time art world has questionable priorities.  I know that it rewards some people who arguably don't deserve it, because they hit the lottery and somehow got onto the gallery circuit.

But every now and then it gets so ridiculous and self-indulgent that I wonder where all the grown-ups have gone.