The Highly Opinionated Newsletter V

The Dia Center for the Arts

The Dia Center for the Arts redefines the nature of art so broadly as virtually to eliminate art as we know it. Experimental forms predominate to the exclusion of work requiring traditional skills. Installations and videos are the form of choice. Representational painting, when it appears, integrates childish and cartoonlike pictures into childish and cartoonlike statements. The less the relationship to anything familiar, the more successful the effect is considered.

The Joseph Beuys exhibit in the first gallery begins in a deceptively innocent manner. Works on paper mingle imagery and abstraction in a way that reveals signs of intelligence and ability. This soon gives way to gigantic rectangular stacks of brown felt used for insulation. In answer to my queries, I was told that the insulation represents energy storage. Rags hanging from a line are mobius bands. "What do they mean?" I asked. No one knew. "Perhaps the artist is combining the theoretical and the mundane," I volunteered in jest. Because, hey, you never know.

The piece de resistance is an assortment of discarded items: piles of rags, yellowing Wall Street Journals, hay, twigs, chips; discarded gloves and cane, all lit, for better viewing, by a rundown electric heater. It's deja vue all over again. Hello, Marcel DuChamp.

A Douglas Gordon video was called, Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right. Since the film looked about as clever as its title, I decided to pass.

Robert Irwin's work consisted of white net partitions. "What is this supposed to be?" I asked. "It's interactive," was the reply. Interactive is today's buzzword. To my untrained eye, it looked like nothing so much as a series of small deserted rooms.

Thomas Schutte's bad drawings and bad sculpture make a bad impression. Drawings consist of weird pictures and letters. Shoes on racks and unmatched socks hanging on lines form sculpture. Again, it's deja vue all over again. The reappearance of the ready- made, ad absurdum. Crosses line up in paintings and on table tops in a facile series that depends upon the association of religious and funeral imagery.

That's it. But it's more than enough. Art is being deconstructed out of existence.

Gentle Indignation
March 1999

I was visiting galleries at 24 West 57 Street sometime soon after. The elevator door opened onto the third floor and the open door said TAG. Inside was a deserted room with racks of clothing visible on the sides. Before us was a reception desk.

With the Dia experience still in mind, I was confused. "Is this a gallery exhibit?" I asked the nicely dressed portly man behind the desk.

"No, it's a business," he said. "But if it were, I'd be the best thing in it."