Jeffry Cudlin: BY REQUEST


OK... OK... work with me here... this is really cool.

Let's start with my good bud Jeffry Cudlin doing a set of performances this Friday where the very tall Mr. Cudlin dances in various DC art galleries (Conner, G Fine, Curator's Office, Hemphill, Irvine, and either Project 4 or Civilian), trying to get the directors to dance with him - that alone is worth tagging along to see Martin Irvine or George Hemphill doing the tango with Cudlin). He will be dressed the way he is in the PR photo above (by Josh Cogan) -- i.e., tucked, taped, and wearing a gold string bikini and go go boots. Video of it will be in the show.

Then Jason Horowitz is working on a 23' long, 8' tall photo for the show that I think we will all find interesting and will "make people at the opening uncomfortable."

Somewhere along the way Cudlin is doing a photo shoot with the highly talented and creative Victoria F. Gaitán that involves "realistic fake boobs (not like the ones in the PR) and a severed pig's head."

What is all this Mr. Campello? Just read the release:

This June, the ideal Washington, DC art show will take over Flashpoint Gallery. Artist, curator, and critic Jeffry Cudlin has engineered a celebrity-obsessed exhibition that purports to reveal in excruciating detail what collectors, critics, and museum administrators think area artists should be making.

For BY REQUEST, Cudlin approached seven DC art world luminaries and asked each to fill out a 20 page survey. Questions were all multiple choice, and attempted to uncover everything from preferences regarding paint handling techniques; to opinions about museum “fluff” shows and art blogs; to each patron’s personality type. Pink Line Project founder Philippa Hughes; blogger and critic Tyler Green; The Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski; Irvine Contemporary gallery director Martin Irvine; National Portrait Gallery Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings Anne Collins Goodyear; collector and curator Henry Thaggert; and uber-collector Tony Podesta all agreed to play along.

Once the surveys were completed, Cudlin recruited an atelier of seven area artists working in a variety of media and styles. Torkwase Dyson, Victoria F. Gaitán, Jason Horowitz, Jenny Sidhu Mullins, Cory Oberndorfer, Kerry Skarbakka, and Trevor Young all accepted commissions from Cudlin to create personalized pieces based on the survey data.

There was one small catch: Cudlin insisted that he be depicted in every work of art, thereby inflating his own importance in brokering all of these transactions, and transforming himself into the show’s biggest celebrity. The resulting images are at times outlandish, featuring Cudlin cross-dressing, holding a severed pig’s head, and even sporting a pair of fake latex breasts, courtesy of an FX makeup artist.

In BY REQUEST, Cudlin plays with the notion—popular with many contemporary artists and theorists—that the chief content of art is social. If art ultimately depends on exchanges of information, capital, and power, then simply examining the agendas of people in positions of authority should tell us all we need to know about why art looks and works the way it does right now.

All of the finished pieces in the show will be assigned numeric scores by the seven patrons for whom they are intended. Critics need not second guess: the gallery will include informational displays of facts and figures indicating whether the patrons regard these works as successes or failures. BY REQUEST offers the promise of complete transparency for the DC art world and, perhaps, a model for other artists desperate to become relevant.

Sounds amazing uh? I'm really looking forward to this but I remember that the last Washington guy who promised "transparency" has really disappointed me lately; it's a good thing that I know that Cudlin won't.

Plug the damned hole!

Wanna go to a gallery opening this week?



Anna U. Davis opens at Longview Gallery on Thursday, June 3, 2010 from 6:30pm - 9:30pm. The show goes through July 1st, 2010.

NEA Considering Re-Instating Individual Artists' Grants

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman told the Denver Post that he is considering reinstating endowment grants to individual artists. If he succeeds, the move would be a landmark political moment.

Read the story here.

Trescott on the Corcoran's director

"Greenhalgh said the Corcoran, under his tenure, not only had to repair its physical plant but also relationships with Washington's donor and arts communities, which began to look at it as troubled rather than innovative.

"The Washington public is not the shyest in the world. One received advice from all over about what should happen," he said. "This place had to be systematically fixed. We had to think about the roof. The college numbers had been flat for a generation. So many galleries had been turned over to storage." The cost of needed repairs was estimated to be $40 million at one time.

By August, Greenhalgh said, all of the galleries will be reopened, the permanent collection reinstalled, a suite for contemporary art established and a new initiative, called NOW, created to showcase emerging contemporary artists."

Read the Washington Post story here.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the exhibition program for the new NOW initiative. I hope that it surprises me in a good way. My past experience with what current museum curators' consider "emerging artists" and what the rest of the art world considers "emerging artists" are way different.

It didn't use to be that way. In the past, museum curators used to take chances.

Way back in the 80s, when the Whitney Museum gave some American artists their first ever museum exhibition, that was a great definition (for me) of what a museum can do for a true emerging artist. I won't even mention the names.

So for Sarah Newman or whoever at the Corcoran is putting together (or has already put together) the NOW exhibition schedule: if the artists who are being selected for NOW have already had a museum exhibition, then you're too late and they have already emerged.

Work harder and seek out the truly emerging artists that are making a name for themselves all over the place and not just New York and haven't yet had a single museum show, like someone did for Gerhardt Richter in the 80s.

I can think of a few names right off the top of my head and it's not even my job.

Just plug the damned hole!

Corcoran looking for a new director (again)

The director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Paul Greenhalgh, has announced that he will resign on June 1 to become director of the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia. His move is the latest in a series of major changes that have taken place in the D.C. art scene in recent months.

Details here.