“Imagine…”

Dave Hill at Saturday Sessions, MOMA/PS1

“…by John Lennon…”

“…is almost impossible to masturbate to.”

“Almost.”

So went the pervy confessionalia of Dave Hill, a mumblecore loner whose favorite thing to do after sexual intercourse is “step out from behind the curtain to laugh at the naked people,” who recounted a weekend tryst with a Japanese toilet (for those in the know, Japanese toilets are high-tech, easily available, and intimately ac-”commod”-ating, no pun intended). Referring to the customizable, automated bidet, he recalled, “It touched me like this,” rolling his pointer finger like a caterpillar reaching for a leaf – and then told how he utilized the toilet functions designed “for woman parts.”

Mr. Hill, whose drawn face and flexi-finger I won’t forget any time soon, was part of last weekend’s Saturday Session at MOMA/PS1. That session in particular was curated by Miriam Katz, an Artforum editorial researcher, Hunter College graduate student, and weekend comedienne. Described as “experimental comedy,” though more comedic than experimental, the event also included live performances by Jon Glaser, Jenny Slate, and Reggie Watts, as well as newly commissioned videos by Maeve Higgins and Rory Scovel. (My apologies to those last two, whose videos I wish I could have watched on the monitors on opposing walls. Sadly, the sold-out event was just too crowded, and I couldn’t get close enough to view them. Luckily, a quick youtube search makes up for this.)

Jon Glaser, wearing a green mask like the Green Hornet (vintage, not the husky Rogen fail) also took the priapic prompt, though his penis-humor was more sweet and family-friendly than prurient and late-night.

Jon Glaser

But it wasn’t just the guys with minds in the gutter. Jenny Slate, better known as the voice of Marcel the Shell hilariously revealed to us her twisted brain’s fusing of Y2K meltdown with an imaginary sexual predator: “a rogue ATM would kick in my dorm room door and [NSFW].” She described – and reenacted – her childhood Lolita, imitated her angel-voiced Dad who wails like a Disney heroine, and argued for her unusual vulnerability to kidnapping.

Jenny Slate

Humorous in a more arch, ironic, and gently acerbic manner was the boom-bap teddy bear, Reggie Watts. If you didn’t get enough from the previous posting, here is another video.

Framing his live music-based performance in the tradition of John Cage (pronounced “kah-ZHAY”) whose work he suavely and concisely explained as being less about the notes and more about the space in between, he ruminated aloud about performance versus “performance” (ya dig?), invoked Ghost in the Shell, and led us into a rhetorical ambush about metaphysically simulated reality, a la Brains in a Vat. Heavy! No wonder he has that thicket of curls, must be to insulate such a probing brain. He’ll be in next autumn’s Performa Biennial, let’s check in again then.

Reggie Watts at Saturday Sessions, MOMA/PS1

What could live comedy have to do with the art world? Don’t we prefer our jokes painted or printed onto canvas? It must have something to it, because I saw such art world professionals as David Velasco, Mark Beasley, Eliza Ryan, Sam Wilson, and many other artists, too. Maybe everybody needed a weekend pick-me-up after being justifiably depressed by all the bad news coming from, well, every other continent. Turn that upside down. Or not.

Segments from Johanna Burton’s lecture at SVA, “Taking Pictures,” presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department.

"Elastic Youth: Interpreting the Scrunchie"

After last season’s wave of lectures as performance – e.g. Alexandre Singh, Terence Koh, Bruce High Quality – self-conscious as they were – a satirical response is long overdue.

David Riley, Scrunchis Emeritus

Part of the “Free” exhibition and program at the New Museum, curated by Lauren Cornell, dis magazine commissioned artist and musician David Riley to present “Elastic Youth: Interpreting the Scrunchie.” Outside of his scholarly pursuits, David is half of the band Mirror Mirror.

As a reminder, the Scrunchie is the donut-shaped, frilly, elastic band for consolidating long hair when its voluminous cloak is unwelcome and temporarily preferred bound and out of the way.

Nicholas Scholl of dis introduces David Riley

Attendees learned from David that the Scrunchie was invented by Rommy Revson, popularized by Debbie Gibson, distributed to teens through shopping malls, and collectively discarded around 1994. It became accessory non grata for ten years, and has recently experienced an afterlife for the careering, cosmopolitan woman who is just too busy to care if you don’t like it.

Indeed

Women have all the fun. Men can’t wear scrunchies and men have no analogous accessory. Males could wear scrunchies, just as they could wear heels – but that’s talking about sex, not gender. Gender conventions determine that a man wearing a scrunchie would be abnormal; a man seeking a Scrunchie would have already breached theterritories of traditional masculinity by growing his hair long.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Ruining Their Looks...), 1982

And though men have bandanas, caps, and sweatbands, men lack their very own counterpart of the Scrunchie.  Brimmed hats, like Scrunchies, are functional, but hats are prophylactic against rain, sunshine, and eye contact. They are also a standard with more than a century of cultural precedent. The bandana denotes a social class, just like the scrunchie, but the bandana is an appropriated handkerchief, and not a discrete product. Sweatbands are just plain gross and categorically inappropriate unless you are running – and winning – a marathon. But even then, everyone will be looking at your chafed nipples and not your sweaty headwear.

Kim Gordon, Hair Police, 2009

The Unscrunchables

The gender imbalance was not part of David’s lecture, however. Instead, David retraced the Scrunchie Spirit through teen girls, music videos (Debbie Gibson), film (Heathers), sports (Shannon Miller), celebrity sightings (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and an uneasy relationship with Sex and the City (taboo unless haute couture and huge). He examined the semiotics of “Scrunchie” from Prototype to Used and sited the Scrunchie market as coincidental with the growth of the American shopping center.

Highly Scrunchable

One success of the Scrunchie, we understand from David’s lecture, is how Rommy Revson nailed it on the first try. First, the Scrunchie is inimitable, because anything similar invites lawsuits that will make her richer and richer. Second, its simple, general form is purposeful beyond improvement. Indeed, subsequent attempts to market the Scrunchie with zippers and even-more-decorative shapes seem laughable, if not desperate. Finally, the Scrunchie is so close to universal that it passes as both fashion and “un-fashion,” for lack of a better term.

Equally Scrunchable

Let’s hope this lecture engenders a lineage of future endeavors that simultaneously mock American consumerism while using the consumable product as a portal to social and economic dynamics. Silly Bracelets? Pogs? Fanny packs? Laser discs?

Koh intern and vamp, Val

“If I were a member, I’d be livid,” whispered one super fierce publishing figure last night at the National Arts Club, referring to the dinner jacket-clad grown-ups who weren’t there for the Terence Koh lecture, who might have felt uncomfortably bumrushed by the scores of the artist’s ab fab fans, friends, a-KOH-lytes, and KOH-konspirators.

Garrick Gott and event organizer Stacy Engman, NAC Chair of Contemporary Art

To appease the outnumbered, but patient and actually very welcoming real NAC members, and to satiate the hungry, anxious club visitors, refreshments were abundant, including exotic absinthe spritzers, chocolate covered ants, port wine cheese spread, and Campbell’s soup with straws.

Who was there? Who wasn’t?

NAC President Arlene S. Hamsun introduces Terence Koh

Marina Abramovic, Klaus Biesenbach, Phil and Shelley Aarons, Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Cecilia Dean, Adam McEwen, Jeffrey Deitch, Mary Boone (happy belated birthday, still sexy at 58), RoseLee Goldberg, Kathy Grayson, Sophia Lamar…

…and lots of fashion people I can identify only by their looks.

W.W.W.D.?

The patrician, oil-on-canvas dinner jacket set would have been pleased.

Armchair historians

At 45 minutes, with nearly 400 images handpicked from local libraries and the artist’s bookshelves, individually scanned to ensure the highest quality, Terence Koh’s Art History 1642-2009 was a whirlwind tour of Western and Eastern Art, mostly chronological from 1642 to the present, and admitting into the Koh canon a few book covers, party photos, vintage porn, and even some line graph charts to diagram art market confidence.

Autumnal Degas moment at the NAC

Who was in it?  Who made the Terence Koh Canon?

KOHlympia

Marcel Duchamp, Vermeer, Velasquez, Warhol, Koons, Aurel Schmidt, Adam McEwen, Marina Abramovic, David Shrigley, Goya, Rembrandt, Judd, Bourgeois, Wojnarowicz, William Blake, Hockney, Rob Pruitt, Kelley Walker, Dash Snow, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Karen Black/Kembra Pfahler, Christian Holstad;

Maurizio Cattelan, Aaron Bondaroff, Muntean/Rosenblum, Yoko Ono, Bianca Jagger, Nauman, Robert Smithson, Yayoi Kusama, James Lee Byars, Girodet, Chardin, Flavin, Jenny Saville, Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, Murakami, Zhang Huan, General Idea, Dan Colen – not in that order (no McGinley? no AVAF?) – and that’s just a fraction of art history according to Terence Koh – which is more expansive than the Eurocentric humanities courses I took in college.

RIP Jeanne-Claude, Long live Bruce High Quality

Koh spoke his own private ida-Koh language, which sounds something like Proto-Indo-Cabbie, though I heard someone ask Terence if it was Swedish.

Tonight at NAC

He barely stopped to breathe, only taking breaks to sip from his glass of vodka.  He frequently strided away from his lectern to gesticulate and indicate details of the projected images.

A few times, he ranted at a rapid-fire clip, sounded like a Sotheby’s auctioneer, notably while discussing the Jeff Koons chrome bunny, which at the scale of the projection, looked like a anthropomorphic Sputnik.

RIP Dash Snow

Terence shouted and waved his arms indignantly while covering pictures of Hitler looking at artwork, and in the more emotive moments, slowed and spoke solemnly, especially when Dash Snow appeared, and when he displayed AA Bronson’s heartbreaking AIDS revelation, Felix, which is, for me, one of the most moving images of contemporary art since I first saw it in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Long live AA Bronson

In these heavyhearted moments, Terence sounded plantive and morose, though somehow resisted tears.  His lecture was politically charged, addressing, for example, 20th Century China and the Reagan administration’s delusional failure to intervene during the incipient AIDS epidemic.

Ups and Downs

And although nobody but Terence understood his words, he still said a lot, contextualizing himself and refreshingly reminding us that ultimately, art is remembered for being seen, and all that matters is how it looks!

Shrigley vs. Seymour (vs. Brant)

Is this the new Terence Koh, post market crash, post Snow?  Still cheeky, but more substantial, orchestrated, polychrome, narrative, and profound?  Let’s find out at his “secret” performance tomorrow evening at Tompkins Square Park.

Ike-Koh (gesundheit!)

Oh, and rumor reveals a potential Terence Koh/Lady Gaga collaboration! DisKOH Stick!

Photo of Matthew Barney by Elizabeth Peyton

“Male beauty is a more free area of beauty,” she declared, mildly.

Yes, it is!  Male beauty is more expansive than female beauty.  It is an undeveloped and wide range of “types,” numbering much higher than the constricted fjords of female beauty and its “types.”  Which is unfair.  Maybe male beauty is liberated because it isn’t as codified.

“Women’s beauty is more cliché somehow,” she continued, hesitantly.

Hm, okay, well, I guess you mean that the standards of female beauty are outmoded.  But whose standards? Botticelli’s Venus is nothing like Agyness Deyn, this decade’s Twiggy, who looked like a boy, which…returns us to male beauty.

Agyness Dean, sizzling at any age

“There’s something about men finding their individuality as an object,” she concluded, quizzically.

As an object?  Is that all I am to you?

Elizabeth Peyton @ SVA

Superstar Elizabeth Peyton selflessly accepted SVA’s invitation to do a Distinguished Alumni Lecture – open to the public – an act as generous as the a$tounding donations she’s made to SVA Alumni Benefit Auctions. As an alum, I was excited; and I can’t even fathom how thrilled the throngs of undergrads must have felt to see a mid-career titan open up about her work, collected in depth by MoMA.

Elizabeth Peyton @ SVA

Looking neatly coiffed, rosily passionate, and unambiguously lovely, the artist had envisioned a slideshow, with iTunes accompaniment, of paintings and photographs of her numerous, numinous friends; instead of delivering the stream of penetrating insight the audience might have anticipated.  The playlist is below.  Was this a good idea?

Elizabeth Peyton's desktop

-What’s that adage?  ”Something-something-something…don’t say anything at all?”  It censors me here, but doesn’t explain her muteness there.  I learned that her eclectic taste in music spans generations and subcultures; and that she paints the musicians she listens to, or maybe listens to the musicians she paints.  For example, Brandon Flowers of the The Killers pops up in her jukebox and in her work. Same with Julian Casablancas, who in his own words, canonized an avoidance tactic unlike that quoted above, which applied to the individuals filing out early: “So I walked out/ Oh, baby, don’t care no more, I know this for sure, I’m walkin’ out that door.”

In life, Elizabeth Peyton paints exquisite, secular icons that exhale intimacy while bursting with bold gesture.  Her work would stir Ingres, who once wrote, “A painter is perfectly right to be preoccupied with finesse, but to that he should add force, which does not exclude finesse – far from it.  The whole of painting resides in drawing that is at once strong and delicate.  Let anyone say what he will, painting is a matter of drawing that is firm, proud, and well characterized…”

Emitting phenomenal glow, her paintings are beacons to guide me through the torrents of soulless painting, and they draw me near, like a maternal whisper.  Her idols are poised like royalty and wistful like poets, and they shimmer with splendid, nectarous colors that make my mouth water.  I love them.  The subjects and the objects.  My senses cheer in their presence, just as my organs thrive with vitamins.  In his lyrics, Julian Casablancas wants to “steal your innocence,” but in her paintings, Elizabeth Peyton wants to preserve it forever, making each of her dreamy subjects a “container and record of their time.”  Just look at her Sid Vicious: merely a bad boy too big for his britches, not a dirty needle-addled butcher.

But do the paintings speak for themselves?  What do I know?  ”This amphitheatre is really nice,” I heard someone say.

The Peyton playlist (“Peylist?”), note that the linked versions aren’t nec. those played tonight:::::

1. Led Zeppelin – Over the Hills and Far Away

2. The Notorious B.I.G. – Everyday Struggle

3. The Clash – Stay Free

4. Patti Smith – Frederick

5. Nirvana – Rape Me (Acoustic)

6. David Bowie – Lady Stardust

7. LCD Soundsystem – Someone Great

8. Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone

9. The Killers – Mr. Brightside

10. The Jam – In the City

11. Julian Casablancas – 11th Dimension

12. The Horrors – Scarlet Fields

13. Hellhole Ratrace – Girls