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I Can Crawl Again (in Chelsea)
Jacco Olivier, MARIANNE BOESKY, 535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor, November 13–December 11. William Kentridge meets LeRoy Neiman meets the Discovery Channel. Small animated paintings projected from thigh-high plinths directly onto the wall. This is what Donald Moffett tried and failed to do--make lush, moving, painterly paintings. Will someone buy one of these and burn a DVD for me?
Daniel Lefcourt, TAXTER & SPENGEMANN, 504 W. 22nd Street, November 19–December 18. Paintings of lumps of coal on pristine, high-commodity linen. Jet black juicy paint crosshatched with strokes as if from the Zen master's rake. Unrelenting Germanic rigor. Ponderous titles based on books of philosophy.
Martha Rosler, GORNEY BRAVIN + LEE, 534 West 26th Street, November 01–January 30. Extending Richard Hamilton's "What makes today's homes..." collage to feminism and antiwar themes. Lots of hot babes posing nude, working in the kitchen, mowing lawns in stretch pants. Biting wit occasionally goes overboard and gets too obvious with war dead juxtaposed over suburban interiors. The best are the Austin Powers era ones.
Art Battle: Richard Kern vs. Lily van der Stokker, FEATURE INC., 530 West 25th Street, October 23–December 11. Kern's photobooks of hot downtown babes are possibly the most thumbed, greasiest items at the midtown Virgin Megastore. Here he's not as skanky, perhaps reflecting the modifying influence of van der Stokker's gaily colored wall-hugging daybed sculptures, which hold the line for permanent presexuality.
I enjoyed blogger Michael J. Totten's photo tour of Libya (hat tip to Dennis). Totten captures the bleak Soviet-style architecture in Tripoli, vanishing Berber dwellings in the Saharan outback, and some beautifully-preserved Roman buildings, all framed against the empty desert landscape--in fact, there are hardly any people in the photos so the country looks weirdly depopulated. Of course, Ghaddafy has his heroic picture everywhere, which Totten mercilessly ridicules. But wait, isn't Moammar a good guy now that Bush's aggressive warmaking convinced him to "turn in his nukes"? Thankfully we don't have a Libya-esque, state-sponsored cult of personality in this country.
Whoops, well, I'm sure this billboard in Florida paid for by the Bush-backing Clear Channel radio chain is a fluke.
Loop Collection Updated.
Techno Loop [mp3 removed]
Proto-Trance Loop [mp3 removed]
Psychedelic Rock Loop [mp3 removed]
P0rn Loop [mp3 removed]
Filled with random violence, slapstick, silly names, toilet humor, and various other signifiers of lowest-common-denominator satire, Greaser's Palace doesn't so much reward its audience's patience as punish it. Glacially paced and filled with enough dead time and shots of people walking and crawling to fill a half-dozen Bresson films, [it's] well-acted and handsomely filmed but unrelentingly dull. Perhaps worst of all, for a film that aims to shock and offend, its juxtaposition of show business and divinity now seems downright quaint. As a product of an unusually adventurous time in cinema history, Greaser's Palace has perverse appeal. As a comedy, it's virtually unwatchable. —Nathan Rabin
Max Schumacher: You need me. You need me badly. Because I'm your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day.
Diana Christensen: [hesitatingly] Then, don't leave me.
Max Schumacher: It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love.
[Kisses her]
Max Schumacher: And it's a happy ending: Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife, with whom he has established a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell; final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week's show.
[Picks up his suitcases and leaves]