Nam June Paik's Global Groove at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

The proximity of my studio in Olive Tjaden Hall next door to the Johnson Museum of Art has led me to frequent the museum fairly often, whether for getting soup during the week at the 2 Naked Guys Cafe in the lobby, or simply to loiter with or without intent.

The Johnson is a relatively new museum, opening in 1973. Cornell University had no centralized art collection until the organization of the Andrew Dickson White Museum in 1953, which was located in the A.D. White House, now the home of the Society for the Humanities. The A.D. White Museum grew into the Johnson Museum with the support of alumnus Herbert F. Johnson '22. The Johnson is a small but spectacular I.M. Pei design, a small concrete tower on the north end of Libe Slope, with views on all sides. The view north towards Cayuga Lake over the thick trees of Cayuga Heights & beyond being particularly pastoral & picturesque.

I.M. Pei's design is notable on several levels. For a concrete tower, with a bunker-like aspect, it is also paradoxically light & airy. There is a 3-storey sculpture deck on the 2nd floor which floats above Libe Slope, with views towards the Arts Quad & the original buildings of the university: Morrill, McGraw & White Halls. The best views are at the top of the building: the 5th floor Asian galleries which has views on all sides & the 6th floor conference room, which has a wall of window facing north to the lake. The galleries vary considerably in size & proportion, which also influence one's experience of the entire building: it seems much larger than it actually is, there are a lot of different kinds of galleries. Such variety expands one's sense of the place.

With the recent expansion completed, some of the existing spaces have been retrofitted, in particular the Asian galleries on the 5th floor. Included in the Asian galleries is a space for modern & contemporary art, which are currently installed with 2 Nam June Paik videos. Yesterday morning I watched Global Groove (1973) which I hadn't seen in several years.

At the risk of dating myself, I had seen Paik in the past at Anthology Film Archives, and even earlier, once I saw Charlotte Moorman, which was as exciting as when I saw Yma Sumac perform at a tapas bar/piano bar in Chelsea, years & years ago. In our virtual world it now seems kind of impossible - a flesh-&-blood encounter now seems moot, likewise both Paik & Moorman now fall into a purgatory of history. Paik's videos look utopian in what is now our hellish conflation of technology & capitalism aka the internet.

The ebullient silliness of Paik still seems potent to me: What is best about television is the ability to change the channel, randomly, & that is what Global Groove is like - going from one thing to another with a kind of hilarious velocity.

If there is a dark side in Paik, it is in the credits: Global Groove was made in conjunction with an experimental television workshop in Binghamton. Now all that (the idea of experimental television, Binghamton as something more than the depressed town it is now) seems lost. Although we still have the specter of tap dancers, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman, et al to remind us of better things.

William Eggleston @ the Whitney

As much as I admire the work of William Eggleston, I am perplexed at my disappointment in the recent retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Arranged in a counter-clockwise arrangement on one floor, the work was arranged chronologically by its initial execution, from mid-1960s black-&-white prints, to the images seen in William Eggleston's Guide and Alamos, video work now edited & entitled "Lost in Canton," the 5x7 images recently published & exhibited at Cheim & Read, images from the books Election Eve, the Graceland guide, the Democratic Forest, and most currently some images from Kyoto.

Other than a few vitrines of early catalogs which include images by Eggleston, some less-than-finished c-prints (in contradistinction to the radiant dye transfer prints matted & framed on the walls) & the luxuriant privately published 2-volume Election Eve, there is little acknowledgment of the important role of publishing in Eggleston's artistic trajectory, as well as the role of John Szarkowski & the Museum of Modern Art in establishing Eggleston as a serious artist/photographer. These are mentioned, but in a negligible manner. Instead the viewer was offered a stream of luminous prints - albeit in itself an aesthetic feast - with little notation beyond that. Frankly, the curating of the show seemed minimal at best. Work was simply there, without much context. Also, what was not mentioned is the recent printing & circulation of images initially made in the 1960s & 1970s (the black-&-white prints, the 5x7 images & video). Instead the work was presented as a seamless chronology, without any notation as to the actual circulation of the work, which is much more erratic than such a timeline suggests.

I did get a perverse amusement in the installation of the video of "Stranded in Canton" which is anarchic & meandering & rather dark in its excesses: it is common practice now to bring small unruly uninterested children to museums, evidently to instill a sense of high kulchur in the tykes. & to see the numerous small children watch as a nude guy w/ long hair tries to shove a liquor bottle up his ass while screaming "This is LOOOOVE!" had its own special moment for me.

My guess is that Eggleston, like others of his generation & orbit (Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand) has worked quite a bit, in general, & the organization of the material, it's perimeters as a body of work, comes later. This is a practice outside what is taught in MFA programs, or the expectations of what an artist is supposed to justify in public. In the films of Eggleston he is almost maddeningly oblique in his insistence on the priorities of formal graphic qualities, while to our contemporary eyes, his images are loaded with content: class differences, race relations, commodity culture, history rendered in minutae of home decor, suburbanization, anomie, great introspection & also a sense of withdrawal from a teeming world. By the same token, Eggleston really doesn't have to say anything at all & if anything, he seems all the more refined for not doing so. Aside from his taciturnity in discussing his work, I think there is still a highly sensitive engagement with the images. & Eudora Welty (herself a wonderful photographer) wrote about him: why bother to add on to that?

Perhaps the great Eggleston show will come in future generations when there is no gallery or Eggleston Trust to intercede or dominate in any exhibition. It occurred to me that there was a similar occurrence with the Whitney 1995 retrospective of Richard Avedon, which was dominated by dictates & demands of the Avedon studio, likewise in the later show of Avedon portraits at the Met. Or the recent Met show of Diane Arbus which had a party line of intense hagiography if not downright fetishization of her everyday set-up (including a reconstruction of her darkroom with an eternal enlarger light on). There's something to be said for the non-interference of long-gone artists in terms of organizing shows about him or her. Otherwise it is more advertisement, more spectacle, more hokum for us to swallow, at best.

Oliver Herring, Nathan; 50,000 Beds

Last Sunday I attended the opening at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT, of "50,000 Beds" a project by Chris Doyle, of videos produced in hotel rooms in Connecticut, with exhibition venues at the Aldrich, Artspace in New Haven, and Real Art Ways in Hartford. The shows are comprised of videos made specifically for the project, all of which involve use of a hotel room somewhere in Connecticut. Curiously, the catalogue for the show includes a listing of participating hotels with contact information, which indicates a kind of touristic agenda, although the videos could hardly be seen as infomercials for scenic CT. Or one could consider them the kinds of infomercials one could at least hope for.

Oliver Herring's video "Nathan" is of "Nathan" dancing in a strenuous balletic manner in a tiny crowded & otherwise undistinguished hotel room. Nathan is tall & in a suit. The suit has an artificial aspect: it does not seem to fit the boy. Or it does not fit his movements which are extremely athletic & both graceful & rough. Tumbles accompany leaps & pirouettes. Stretches collide with the furniture. & one can hear huffing, puffing & the thuds of Nathan's body hitting walls & floor. As I understand it, the video was done with a certain amount of spontaneity, without a defined choreography, the exertions of the eponymous Nathan and chance forming the perimeters of the medium. Oliver Herring's camera work is hand-held & as improvised as the movements of the boy Nathan. The video reminded me of silent film comedy & also the "New American Cinema" of downtown NYC in the 1960s. Quizzed about his working methods, the filmmaker Ron Rice once answered, "Turn the camera on." Oliver Herring's video reminds me of the intense beauty that can be found in everyday delirium - incantatory, full of longing, parodic, witty. It is just fun to watch. What is truly distinctive about the work is an exultation of energy, which I would attribute to both the hard-working model & the very alert videographer.