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When New Orleans musicians play the old songs, what once came across as easygoing now carries a streak of bravado. Like other New Orleanians, many musicians have lost their homes, possessions and sometimes family members, and they are traveling long distances to play in their old local haunts. A song like "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" now echoes with the knowledge that some natives of the city will never return. And there are new, bleaker resonances when a Mardi Gras Indian group like the Wild Magnolias sings the traditional song "Shallow Water Oh Mama," or when a brass band picks up the bouncy "It Ain't My Fault."
Vaughan's, a club in the Upper Ninth Ward, is too small for a stage. Mr. Ruffins, a trumpeter, has returned to his regular Thursday gig there after a long hiatus imposed by the storm, and he and his band were nearly backed against the club's wall by the dancing crowd. He was playing and singing old New Orleans songs like "Mardi Gras Mambo," with a jovial Louis Armstrong growl. Yet no one, onstage or off, has forgotten that the Lower Ninth Ward, still in ruins, is only a few blocks away.
Mr. Ruffins finished one set with a pop standard once sung by Bing Crosby, "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams." Halfway through, in casual New Orleans style, he handed the microphone to an audience member, who belted the song — with a line about castles tumbling — and then held on to the microphone long enough to add, "That's for all the people that lost their houses."
Later, Mr. Ruffins agreed. "Those tunes take a whole different meaning now," he said. "At one time in the club, we would just be singing them. Now, I listen to the words."
It is the exhibition's stated ambition to reconfigure the history of sculpture since World War II (and its constant return to the example of Duchamp) that is more problematic. Leaving aside questions about what does not appear at the Wexner—the polemical exclusion of Pop and Minimalism, the limiting of the potentially far-reaching inquiry to only European and North American art—there remains the question of the historical model being implied here. Do we need more family-tree art histories, however ingeniously regrafted their branches, in which the ultimate referent of contemporary art is the work of a past master? A mental melding of Duchamp's erotic objects and his handcrafted readymade duplicates would indeed seem to license the exciting range of part-body, part-commodity creations gathered here. Yet Molesworth's emphasis on his patrimony risks implying that the condition for these objects' invention and importance rests with previous art, rather than with the way they work through the dilemmas of a half century in which people, places, and resources have been used as parts rather than valued as wholes—the dilemmas of a commercialized world where desire is routed through objects in processes that are anything but organic.
Laudable indeed is the selection of Steven Parrino (1958-2005) and Jutta Koether (b. 1958). Steven died on New Year’s Day 2005 in a motorcycle accident in Brooklyn, and seeing his work at the Whitney should bring a few tears. The power in both Steven’s and Jutta’s paintings is in the search for the absolute dead ends of creative practice, not so much to explore them further (they are, after all, dead ends) but for the visceral experience of slamming into them head on. Jutta’s way cool, and dangerously unpredictable in her art. She was the resident critic for everything that was so essential out of the whole Cologne scene, and the art she made for her husband Tom Verlaine’s record albums is equally mesmeric as the music by this formidable leader of New York’s legendary band Television.
WARHOL LICENSING MANIA
In a recent study of licensing income, Forbes magazine reported that the estate of Andy Warhol raked in $16 million in 2005, making the ‘60s art superstar the magazine’s number four "top-earning dead person," right behind Elvis Presley ($45 million), Charles M. Schultz ($35 million) and John Lennon ($22 million), and beating out Dr. Seuss ($10 million), as well as Warhol subjects Marlon Brando ($9 million) and Marilyn Monroe ($8 million). But the real news in the 2005 list is the arrival of Warhol, a new development (the other lucrative dead people were already solidly at the top of a similar 2004 Forbes round-up). So, what accounts for Andy’s sudden rise?
A Warhol licensing bonanza, that’s what. The Andy Warhol Foundation agreement with the Beanstock Group -- a marketing corporation that has masterminded licenses for the Mary Kate and Ashley Olson clothing empire, among others -- started to pay off big last year. Already in 2003, the group won the Licensing Industry Merchandiser’s Association’s "Best Corporate Brand License of the Year" award for its Andy Warhol licensing program, and now one can see why. Current or future Warhol product news includes:
* The new "Warhol Factory X Levi's collection," a collection of men’s and women’s jeans, tops, sweaters and jackets, embellished with dollar sign, Marilyn Monroe, Mao and other imagery ($190-$250 for jeans; $80-$300 for tops) -- set to debut in spring 2006 in the U.S. and Canada.
* A number of gift-shop-type products from the New York-based company Loop, including paper weights ($16 each): bags -- in tote, messenger, DJ, hobo and satchel styles -- featuring flowers, Campbell’s soup designs and more ($26.40-$55); and Elvis and Chairman Mao-themed sleep masks ($11).
* European designer Joao Tovar’s "All Is Andy Warhol" line, on sale across Europe (to see images of some of the clothes featured on an Italian TV show, click here). Tovar’s fashion house, Cultura, is also pushing a CD called Andy Warhol by Cultura, with 25 tracks from the likes of Air, Faultline, Massive Attack, Moby and Unkle.
* Wallets stamped with the Velvet Underground banana, as well as bags using early Warhol ice cream and butterfly motifs, all branded with Warhol’s signature, from Paul Frank Industries, currently available at stores in the U.S. and Europe.
* London designer Philip Treacy’s 2004 line of "Warhol Hats," assorted varieties of beanies, ball caps and fedoras, made from material that features images of famous celebrities as well as Warhol’s late-career camouflage are still available at www.philiptreacy.co.uk, along with a line of bags, including a Campbell’s soup can-shaped clutch.
* Stationary and other items from San Francisco’s Chronicle Books, including an "Andy Warhol Men" silver foil address book, with a cover featuring a silk-screened image of a male bottom ($12.95), the "Pop Box" kit offering "exact reproductions of fascinating ephemera from the Factory years and beyond" ($24.95) and the "Warhol Idea Book," a sketch pad replete with quotes and illustrations ($18.95).
* A 2004 deal with Corbis makes the company exclusive licensor of digital Warhol artwork. The Seattle-based company offers some 500 Warhol images on its website for use by publishers and advertisers -- for a minimum of about $10,000 a pop, according to a company rep.
* Finally -- not a Beanstock licensee, but nevertheless doing its part to build Warholmania -- there’s Factory Girl, the George Hickenlooper-directed movie, currently in post-production, about the relationship between Sienna Miller’s Edie Sedgewick and Guy Pearce’s Andy. The film is such a hot property that it recently prompted a lawsuit by Sony against the Weinstein Company , claiming that it had been cheated out of distribution rights.
Duchamp is invariably referred to as an "anti-artist" and an "iconoclast." This is entirely false. Duchamp was a great art adviser to collectors. He wasn't against art at all; he was against the hypocritical aura surrounding it. More importantly, Duchamp may be the first modern artist to take God's prohibition against "hewn" objects to heart. Fountain is not hewn or made in any traditional sense. In effect, it is an unbegotten work, a kind of virgin birth, a cosmic coitus of imagination and intellect. Like a megalithic stone, Fountain is merely placed on view, pointed at as the locus of something intrinsic to art and as art itself. Duchamp's work relies on a leap of faith: that new thought structures can be formed based on things already in the world. Fountain is the aesthetic equivalent of the Word made Flesh: It is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art, an object in which the distance between image and prototype is narrowed to a scintillating sliver. Just as Christians perceive Christ as the invisible made visible, Jesus said "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," so Fountain essentially says, "He that hath seen me hath also seen the idea of me."
Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to "de-deify" the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art. Fountain is what's called an "acheropoietoi," an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger. Its presence is grace.