1) Presented, arrange, collect, desire, settle for less, curate, objects, things, marriages between things, chachkas, collectibles, value (decline and rise of), display, craft, choosing, connoisseurship, taste, disruption of fields, rings created by an object thrown in a pond, Duchamp, readymade, the readymade and the occult, barometers of value, commodity, ‘replicant fading’, domestic maintenance (feather duster), Pop Art is Liking Things, Warhol, Warhol ‘raids the icebox’ at RISD ’70, Oldenburg (Maus Museum), accelerating of time in the production of antiques, death, the photogenic, sour childhoods (Koons), the art dealer’s discriminating ‘eye’, creating atmosphere, the gallery as ‘showroom’, the dead air of the display case, trophy, trophy ‘wives’, ballerina as Picasso’s ‘trophy wife’, Donald Judd, Judd boxes as ‘traps for time’ (Smithson), poetry, nostalgia, authenticity, ‘distressed’ surfaces, ‘outsider’ art brought inside, ‘outsider’ art left alone, proclamations, Artschwager’s exclamation point, Disneyfication of Chelsea, “It all started with a mouse…”, color, scale, corresponding dimensions, levels, A Judd wall piece installed on the walls reveals a interior shaft of reflections when looked down from close proximity, alchemy, lead into gold, ‘Antique Roadshow’, personal narratives, panel of experts, family myth, attic treasures, salesmanship, ‘shelf life’, belief systems, Next Year’s Stella and Next Year’s Pontiac (Hickey), first, earliest, original, the fireplace mantel as installation art, shopping surrealists, display of wares, Cornell as archivist, plastic, hardware stores, the 60’s, gift shop as final room in exhibition, Gods & Monsters, ‘Star Wars’ at the Brooklyn Museum, curators replacing artists, artist as brand, IKEA, production costs, fakes, the staging of objects, interior decorators, Andy and Jed, Victoriana, federalist, ‘plating’ food, Arte Povera, Pino Pascali, “…they don’t match but they flourish” (Marisa Merz), Italian design, catalogues, celebrity objects, icon, trafficking in kitsch, Prince’s car hoods, Robert Watts, cause and effect, relics, Fritsch’s Madonna, reliquaries, sealed into a tomb for use in the afterlife, aliens, angels, orcs, imps, toys, novelties, conceptual folk art, set theory, Holy Grail, African Fetish, trade show aesthetics, Scott Burrton’s chairs and tableaux’s of furniture, department store as museum, re-gifting, bronze or dark chocolate, distinguishing features, ‘Hoarders’ reality show, getting one’s ‘ducks lined up’, Indiana Jones reaching for a ‘carpenters cup’, props, hard-edge painting, scenarios, physical elevation in regard to an objects status, mixed signals, memorabilia, office party as institutional critique, categories, hierarchies, benign neglect, wall units, souvenirs (my Fort Ticonderoga cannon), trends in collecting, shrink’s office, Duchamp’s comment on American plumbing and Smithson’s reaction, recontextualizing, one thing canceling out another thing, fleets, model making, model boats, scrutiny over admiration, Hummel Wars, art object as ‘host’ to embedded pockets of shifting value……..
2) Haim Steinbach’s exhibition drifts like a flotilla across the walls of the Tanya Bonadakar Gallery. I recalled the opening scene of ‘Star War’s with Lucas’s reimagining of the space ship as elongated triangular multi-tiered platform fortress.
3) 60’s art was hard and bright while 70’s art was soft and dispersed. In the 80’s art got hard again.
Tim Maul 10/2/11
in memory of Richard Hamilton