Thursday April 15

On Tax Day, I saw a pile of kick ass art. Most of what I saw were further examples of hybrid multiples.

I started at the Louise Bourgeois at Barbara Krakow. There are approx 8 double spreads of Twinrocker paper printed with intaglio plates and letterpress. These were printed by Peter Pettengill of Wingate and are then hand painted over by Louise. The images weren't very evocative to me, but these were not prints, or more importantly should not be tied to printerly rules. Who cares if there is a layer of intaglio under the drawings? They're work better if you consider them unique works of art rather than some type of multiple. Yet they are editioned. The other complication is that they suggest a book in their presentation. Yet their individual voices are what Louise was pursuing. I'm not sure why this wasn't a book, but whose going to tell her that she could push her work further?

Second was Anthony Greaney's gallery. Currently up is a quick show of some of the greatest hits from his galleries short existence. Daniel Ellis has an object on exhibit that I thought was a painting the first time I saw it, but turns out to be an ink jet print for lack of better word. Does it make it a print? Printers would hate you if you said so. What's the difference between it and a digital photograph? Just because it doesn't use a lens to make the image? They both are built up of 1's and 0's and are filtered through some kind of adobe product probably. It's just a bit squishy how this will be received. He could clearly make multiples of this, but chose not to. An ink jet doesn't sound sexy and raises the archival issue for collectors.

Later I watched Joan Jonas perform at MIT, where they gave her an award for being one the awesomest peoples ever, and right they should. Her work last night was about glaciers and pulled text from an Hilda Doolittle epic poem, the title of which I didn't write down. It was performed at a desk with a video monitor over her hands, involved many of the same sounds, methods, and themes found here. The drawings are not on paper. They are not for sketches. The video is not for posterity. They are not the finished work. The performance is not to be looked at, but viewed through the monitor. Where is the work located in this? Which part of this is the thing?

Her work is performance for video, but has to be live. How does one document this ethically? Should there be a recording of the various people working on the performance and on the video screen? Should you be able to produce copies of the screen image as the work? Are the various flat images on paper/transparency/actual objects important to the object, or are they incidental? Meaning, would the institute purchase the pictures used under the camera if they bought the work? She raises more questions than I have answers.

Either way, along with some great people to hang with, it was a wonderful day.