I just got finished reading Jerry Saltz’s review of the current Rauschenberg retrospective at the Met. It’s an all-around decent review. Jerry’s an all-around decent writer, if not without his quirks and gimmicks. But one sentence stuck out in particular—he describes Rauschenberg’s famous 1955 piece, Bed, as looking “like sheets after lovemaking.”

Now, as luck would have it, I have a very good memory and about two years ago in one of his reviews, Jerry described a Twombly piece as looking “like sheets after lovemaking.” So aside from the fact that Jerry Saltz seems to have a handful of go-to phrases, this begs the question—Jesus Christ, Jerry, How on earth do you make love?

Here is what Bed looks like…

Here is what a Twombly looks like…

Never in my life, after a good round of “lovemaking,” have I looked down to discover sheets that look like either of these two pieces. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of great sex before, sex that could only be described as “crazy” or even “nasty.” But still, I’d be confused and terrified if my lovemaking ever created bed sheets that looked like a Twombly. It would mean that someone had been seriously maimed in the process.

Now it turns out that I’ve met Jerry Saltz and his wife Roberta Smith. In fact, Jerry was my adviser when I was a graduate student in Chicago. Both Jerry and Roberta are terrific, intelligent and charismatic people. But, my goodness, either Jerry is making stuff up or he’s having some type of intercourse that I can’t even picture…

At Hunter College’s MFA open studios last weekend there was an artist displaying “Art Punk” T-shirts emblazoned with defiant art slogans. All the Tees were lame, but one in particular—the one that said, “Fuck Clement Greenberg”—struck me as extra-lame.

Ah, to be back in the days when Clement Greenberg ruled the roost: tough-minded artists’ used to sweat it out in their vast SoHo lofts, pondering the notion of “flatness.” Painters would dutifully comply with Michael Fried’s latest marching orders in the pages of ArtForum. There were lots of acrylic stains being mixed up and applied to unprimed shaped canvases. To be considered an “advanced” artist there was only about three things you were allowed to do…

Those were the 1960’s. By the 1970’s there was lots and lots of conceptually-minded work being made with one underlying message: Fuck Clement Greenberg. It may have reached a fever pitch in the 80’s when Greeny (my pet nick-name) came to represent the iron fist of the Patriarchy.

But 25 years later to be making a “Fuck Clement Greenberg” t-shirt and expect it to be transgressive is sad, sad, sad. It would be much more punk rock to wear an “I Love Clement Greenberg” Tee. In fact, I’m wearing one right now.

Thanks Clem. It’s a little disappointing that you seemed to think that all popular art was shit. This would certainly disappoint my comic book-loving comedy friends. But I still respect you anyway…sort of.

So I was going to write a little something about the new Luc Tuymans show, “Proper,” at David Zwirner. But I thought instead, I’d post a portion of what kaveri wrote about the show for a class she’s taking in graduate school.

I’m posting it after she gave me her grudging consent. She says that it’s incomplete and needs revision and was dashed off for a class at RISD and certainly not her best work…

“Proper” consists of 10 paintings of enigmatic subject
matter that, thanks to a few key images – a couple
dancing on a ballroom floor emblazoned with the State
Seal of Texas; a portrait of Condoleeza Rice –
collectively read as loosely referring to the current
state of political affairs in America. In this
context, the painting titled “Demolition” – which
depicts a huge cloud of smoke – suggests September 11.
It’s a typical Tuymans work in that it holds back more
than it tells. We don’t know for sure if we are
viewing the routine and innocuous work of a
construction crew or the aftermath of a terrorist
attack. Neither the deadpan, one-word title nor the
image will settle the matter. The smoke filling the
canvas both obliterates and constitutes the imagery of
the painting – a painting which comes extremely close
to literally depicting nothing. This sparseness of
information, this ambiguity in terms of what is
represented and what it means (or how or ever whether
it means) are some of the themes of “Proper” and of
Tuymans’ work in general…

…Elliptical and enigmatic treatment of weighty
historical subject matter has been a consistent part
of Tuymans’ approach from the beginning of his career.
But the history refered to in “Proper” isn’t yet
history—unlike colonialism or the Second World War, it
is transpiring right now. How, then, to deal with
elements of the Tuymans style that we’ve become
accustomed to reading as elegiac? The muted palette
that in previous paintings seemed to derive in part
from their source material in fading old black and
white photos doesn’t make quite as much sense here.
Why not the lurid colors of CNN?

This leads me to wonder whether Tuymans’ vocabulary,
developed initially to deal with history and memory,
is now being applied in a formulaic fashion to a
ripped-from-the-headlines topic, to lesser effect. Can
the same strategy of photo-mediated, emotionally
stifled, weighty topic/weightless representation make
sense all of the time?

This doubt is exacerbated by the larger scale of the
canvases and the heightened elegance and refinement of
the paint handling in “Proper.” In most of Tuymans’
work from the nineties, small scale and a
matter-of-fact, almost machinelike laying-on of paint
contributed to the effectiveness of the work (an
example would be his “Der Diagnostische Blick” series
of portraits, which included only horizontal
brushstrokes.) This deliberate, self-imposed
limitation of means –including the muted palette and
thin paint – was a formal enactment of the limits of
representation that his paintings dealt with
thematically. And, like the eloquence of a novelist
writing in the voice of an inarticulate fictional
character, the clumsiness of those paintings had an
expressive power of its own. Inadequate signs bent under the burden of meaning, of memory, of
history, Tuymans’ best paintings from the nineties
possessed a conceptual rigor and muted emotion that
isn’t quite matched in “Proper.”

That’s what I thought of Candice Breitz’s work when I saw this cover of Modern Painters magazine. “Who is this ridiculous person, posing like some 80′s retard,” is what I thought. “Is this Candice Breitz?”

No, actually. Nor was it some post-Fisher Spooner ironic nightmare dance group but a still from a pretty thrilling video piece.

I have my tastes and pop-culture infused video pieces are not one of them. I rarely think about Michael Jackson and think even less about Madonna but Candice Breitz’s piece made the two seem awesome and dazzling.

You walk into a dark Sonnabend Gallery and against the wall is long horizontal row of about 15 HDTVs, turned vertically, each one showing some sort of nutty Michael Jackson fan in front of a black background—some are extreme fans (like the guy on the cover of MP), dressed up to sort of look like MJ, others seem like milder fans, they all seem to come from different walks of life; for some reason, one is a belly-dancer. And the brilliant part is that they’re all singing the entire Thriller album in unison, without any accompaniment, and they’re all really into it. You realize that Breitz must have put an ad out for Michael Jackson fans to sing along to the album for her in front of the camera (they’re all wearing tiny earphones, that you can’t see) and then she synched them all together so that they sound like some sort of insane chorus. The funny thing is that they’re all pretty good singers so that you don’t ever think, “what a bunch of loser wannabes.” Instead, you sort of become one of the Michael Jackson fans yourself and you feel like singing along. The piece seems to take away all of the annoying gloss of MJ and makes the music feel more personal and intimate.

The same is true for the Madonna piece in the other room. This time the singers are stacked in a large grid and are behind white drapery. I think they’re singing the True Blue album (it’s the one with “Like a Prayer” on it). And they’re all pretty good, and they all have a totally different style of singing but it all works so well together (they’re also whiter and gayer then the Michael Jackson fans). You end up thinking to yourself, “isn’t life great? Aren’t people just terrific?” Which is a very rare experience to have at a gallery in Chelsea.