Si seulement c’était vrai !  Cependant, la réalité est que les Etats-Unis ont plus de classes que d’autres pays dévelopés.  Si vous voulez vraiment atteindre le rêve américain, déplacez-vous ver le Danemark.  Selon le Guardian, un journal anglais, un enfant né dans la tranche aux revenus les plus bas au Danemark sera sûr d’améliorer sa situation économique puisque seulement un quart d’entre eux restent dans cette tranche.  Même en Grande-Bretagne, le pays de la famille royale et Downton Abbey, les gens ont une meilleure chance que les américains d’améliorer leurs situations financières—42% des américains n’échappent jamais à leur tranche de revenus, en comparaison de 30% des britanniques.

Toutefois, l’atmosphère change avec le déferlement récent du mouvement «Occupy Wall Street» et la présence du candidat présidentiel milliardaire, Mitt Romney.  Bien sûr, l’Amérique n’est pas près d’éclater dans une vraie guerre des classes à part entière: la révolution américaine n’était pas une révolution des paysans contre les aristocrates.  C’était la bourgeoisie (dirigée par les propriétaires de plantations) contre à l’autorité fiscale du roi et le Parlement anglais.  Néanmoins, nous avons commencé à utiliser la langue des «sans-culottes».  La droite accuse Michelle Obama de se comporter comme Marie-Antoinette quand elle porte une nouvelle robe, et Barack Obama, avec son diplôme de Grands Ecoles, d’être un membre de “l’élite” méprisé.  Les adversaires républicains de Romney l’ont peint comme un homme insensible, riche, qui a inconsidérément fermé des usines et mis des gens sur la paille. Le question est, qu’est-ce que l’on va faire à ce sujet?  Cette élection pourrait au moins amener les américains à admettre que, oui, nous avons un système de classe, peu importe combien nous essayons de le nier.

I am participating in a group exhibition in Flinn Gallery, which is housed in Greenwich Public Library in Greenwich, CT.  The opening is Thursday, October 27, 6pm-8pm.  I am also giving an Artist Talk on Sunday, October 30 at 2pm at the Gallery.  The exhibition is on October 27 – December 7, 2011.

DIRECTIONS
Train Travel
From New York City: Take the Metro North ”New Haven” Line from Grand Central Station. Get off at Greenwich.  Trains run about every 30 minutes during week days and every hour on weekends and holidays. It is a short walk from the train station to the Library.

Driving Directions
From I-95 North: Exit 3 ”Arch Street” , turn left on at light. Pass under the Metro North Railroad bridge. Go over Railroad Avenue at the stoplight. Continue on Arch Street and turn right onto Sound View Drive. At the top of the hill bear right and continue on to Fiield Point Road (Town Hall will be on your right). At the second traffice light, bear left to West Putnam Avenue. The Greenwich Library is on the northeast corner of the intersection.  The parking lot is on the right rear of the building. The Flinn Gallery is on the second floor of the library.

Hours 
Sunday – 1:00PM to 5:00PM
M-T-W -F 10:00AM to 5:00PM
Thursday – 10:00AM to 8:00PM
Saturday – 10:0AM to 5:00PM

Stellaktite and Stalagmite, a set of 18 comic boards, constitutes the first chapter of the Thrilling Stories from the Book of “O”. In the first 1940s golden age superhero comic style, Jim Shaw relates us a main event in the Oism genesis: the arrival of “I”.  A center piece for the exhibition is a very large wall mural expanded from one of the comic’s splash panels, with cut-out crystal formations. Shaw is also showing a series of drawings that incorporate Oist and 50‘s comic iconography as well as Anatomy Weird-ohs based on medical illustrations of diseased organs by Dr. Frank H. Netter. As usual, this bizarre story comes alive with Shaw’s great line drawings that look simultaneously meticulous and effortless.

There was also a one big group show (with 13 artists with each showing several pieces) at Galerie Xippas featuring older established American artists such as Carl Andre and Bruce Nauman with younger American artists such as Andy Coolquitt and Rashid Johnson with many young French and English artists as well as artists from Latin America and the Middle-east.  The exhibition’s title, there are two sides to every coin, and two sides to your face, alludes to not only facts of life, but also ambiguity, irony, contradiction, confusion, etc.  As usually the case with big group exhibitions, the theme encompassed a very broad trend that has been popular in most post-minimalist sculptural works.

My last gallery vist of the day in Paris was a bit further away from most galleries in Marais. A small side street (Rue Chapon) near Pompidou in Beaubourg area features many small galleries.  Among them is Galerie Zürcher, which also has a branch in downtown New York and did an interesting mini 5 Lower East Side gallery art fair (called Salon Zürcher) during the last year’s Armory week.  The gallery featured interesting collage works by another American, Brian Belott.

In general, my impression of Paris galleries, unfortunately, was more of the same as Chelsea and LES galleries in New York.  I was also a bit disappointed to see the ubiquitousness of American artists at all levels even though I was very happy to see the shows by Jim Shaw.  I saw more interesting and diverse shows by local artists in Berlin, and that is perhaps because more of the DYI spirit survives there as compared to more commercialized scene in Paris.

At Art: Concept, a SVA alum, Alexandre Singh has his first solo show in Paris titled Assembly Instructions: The Pledges.  The four wall diagrams are proxy-portraits for 3 different personalities (director of the Palais de Tokyo, an actor, and a scientist) based on series of intereviews that Singh has conducted.

At galerie jeanroch dard, an American expat Colin Cook has an interesting drawing show titled terribly beautiful.  In his first solo show in France, Cook is showing the result of his ongoing collaboration with his friend and non-artist, Bill Shambaugh.  The collaboration is conducted mainly through mail: Cook chooses the images and starts the meticulous and academic graphite drawing, which contrasts with Shambaugh’s crude and cartoonish figure drawing.  The drawings show an interesting contrasts of high/low art, which would have been even more interesting if done by one set of hands.

Galerie Karsten Greve showed early paintings (1959-1964) of a Greek painter, Jannis Kounellis, who lived in Rome and participated in Arte Povera movement.

Galerie Richard, which opened its Chelsea branch on 24th Street with the inaugural show of Paul Henry Ramirez, was showing American painter Beverly Fishman‘s The Pharmako Series.  Pharmako Series raises fundamental questions such as excess of drug prescriptions and legal or illegal drug addiction with the depiction of pill shaped and pop-culture infused paintings.

I have been neglecting my blog for a while, and there is a good reason for it. I went to France for 3 weeks for a long anticipated vacation. I have eaten some amazing food and seen some interesting art.  I will post some of those in a few of my upcoming blogs.

Most bluechip galleries in Paris are concentrated in the Marais neighborhood, an old Jewish neighborhood in the central Paris that has suffered a similar fate like Soho and turned into an equivalent of a chic outdoor shopping mall.  Unlike Chelsea in New York, many galleries in Paris are tucked inside the courtyard and scattered throughout the neighborhood and somewhat tricky to find. Best strategy is to go to one of the bigger galleries such as Yvon Lambert and pick up the 6 page gallery guide called Galeries Mode D’emploi, which lists all the galleries in Paris with exhibition and opening dates. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I did.

Yvon Lambert is showing a young French sculptor named Vincent Ganivert, whose monumental sculptures were a good fodder for the other artist shown there, Candida Höfer.  In one of the bigger galleries under architecturally amazing skylight, Ganivert built a 5 pronged arch made of cinder blocks and sustained entirely by tension without the use of any mortar (photo: above left).  In another room, he is showing a white sinks and faucets on plinth with water running on white dishes stacked high (photo: above right).  The sculptures were somewhat anemic but they held interests thanks to unique constructions and craftsmanship.

The other blue chip galleries that had showy sculptural shows were Galerie Perrotin showing Xavier Veihan (above left and below) and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac showing Not Vital (above right).  Both shows were meticulously produced and somewhat empty, but the interaction between the old interior and exterior architecture of Paris and the minimalistic sculptures were interesting.  I also visited somewhat smaller galleries in the neighborhood, that showed more interesting work.  I will write about these shows soon.

Bug sushi, anyone? Sushi, aka cold dead fish with rice used to be the yuck food 20 years ago. Can bugs be next sushi?

I have been thinking about what I eat in relation to not only pleasure and health but also the health of the planet.  As a self-confessed foodie, restricting what you eat is an absolute anathema (“I can’t be a vegan!”), but I do feel the responsibility as a global citizen to do something as more and more scientists are sending alarms about meat-centric Western diet as ecologically non-sustainable.  Recently British newspaper Guardian reported that United Nations Environment Program urged global move toward meat and dairy-free diet. The growing prosperity in large developing nations such as India and China will inevitably increase the demand for animal protein as they start to eat more like us, straining already limited agricultural resources. Extreme locavorism, currently vogue in some circles, is not going to solve this global problem.

A New Yorker (August 15th issue) article “Grub: Eating bugs to save the planet, (by Dana Goodyear)”  which discusses entomophagy (fancy word for eating insects, very New Yorker) in many different aspects, also made me think about some fundamental dilemmas faced by a foodies, who by definition is a omnivorous gourmand detesting any restrictions getting in their way of pleasure. Hence the usual conundrum: how does one balance the pleasure and ethics (or some would say guilt)?

Photo by Hans Gissinger for New Yorker

The New Yorker article points out that insects are economical and ecological alternative protein source only if the cultural hang-ups about eating bugs can be overcome.  According to Goodyear, “[f]rom an ecological perspective, insects have a lot to recommend them. They are renowned for their small “foodprint”; being cold-blooded, they are about four times as efficient at converting feed to meat as are cattle, which waste energy keeping themselves warm. Ounce for ounce, many have the same amount of protein as beef—fried grasshoppers have three times as much—and are rich in micronutrients like iron and zinc. Genetically, they are so distant from humans that there is little likelihood of diseases jumping species, as swine flu did. They are natural recyclers, capable of eating old cardboard, manure, and by-products from food manufacturing. And insect husbandry is humane: bugs like teeming, and thrive in filthy, crowded conditions.”  The very qualities that make bugs so hard to get rid of make them an environmentally friendly food. It also takes far less water to raise a third of a pound (150 g) of grasshoppers than the staggering 869 gal. (3,290 L) needed to produce the same amount of beef.  Yet one of the practical difficulties in popularizing entomophagy is the size of the bugs. Due to their unique morphology, processing insects is labor-intensive, and they are not exactly filling. Unlike some tropical super bugs, most insects in temperate regions of the world are tiny and one needs to eat about a thousand grasshoppers to equal the amount of protein in a twelve-ounce steak.

Silkworm snack

There also is a long tradition of entomophagy in many non-Western cultures. As a child growing up in Korea, I enjoyed snacking on soy sauce seasoned boiled silkworm pupae (Beondegi, 번데기), which still remains popular in Korea and often sold by street vendors as well as in cans in grocery stores. I remember vaguely nutty and mild flavor. But I doubt that I will be willingly eating the same snack again now that my thoroughly Western education (including nightmarish vision of Kafka‘s Metamorphosis) have instilled an incurable case of entomophobia. But after reading this New Yorker article, and becoming even more aware of the hypocrisy of food culture, I am going to try harder to make better choices for me and the planet.  I will limit eating animal protein for special occasions, and buying more organic and local food. But I understand that my individual effort is a privileged position from an educated urbanite: we need more political and social pressure to make it easier and cheaper to eat more variety of healthier food and to find a way to produce enough foods without resorting to pesticides.

George Bellow's painting of Dempsey throwing a knockout punch at Firpo (1924)

Recently watching the idiotic debt ceiling debates and the appalling spectacle of the politicians talking over each other, I kept thinking about the culture of language and the idea of populism. How did the idea of Populism, the idea that the decisions should be driven by the people, a fundamental idea to democracy become so corrupted by negative associations? When did the populism become the lowest common denominator?  By coincidence, (or maybe it is the temperature of the time), I read an interesting article on populism in Le Monde (in Les débat section) called “Le peuple a-t-il un avenir (Do the people have a future)?” I found one of the articles in this section particularly interesting and relevant in my field, the art.

In “Culture populaire et culture des élite, l’alliance ou la mort (Popular culture and elite culture, the alliance or the death),” Marin de Viry argues that the French society can no longer communicate in a common language because of the wide cultural divide.  He suggests that the French people, as a matter of fact, speak 4 different languages: first, the language of an economic elite, who got an MBA from Harvard and works for a global company, and who only have contempt for French culture and wouldn’t care less about Proust; second, the traditional cultural elites, who want to resuscitate the glory days of past French culture, however moth bitten it is; third, what I would translate as tribalists like les bobos (les bourgeois-bohème, somewhat analogous to perhaps hipsters here in America), who are only interested in embellishing and promoting their own tribal cultures (already the readers of Libération and Le Monde speak completely different French); finally, what de Viry calls “the pure victims,” who are indiscriminate, passive consumers of mass produced and artificially manufactured “culture.” The inability to communicate between these 4 groups will eventually create a society and culture that can no longer hold together, which exacerbates political and social problems.  He proposes a new conceptual populism that can overcome this isolation using the metaphor of a cross (more of a framework for ideas rather than a concrete suggestion). In the vertical axis, the new language of populism will incorporate as wide time spectrum of the past and the future, and in the horizontal axis, as much of the contemporary society as possible.

This article made me think about the deep political divide between the left and the right in America, and how seemingly they speak only their own tribal languages completely devoid of the base in reality (listen to 3 minutes of Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin to see the point).  But it also made me think about the language and culture gap in the art world itself: how the art world has lost the common language with the different groups in the society resulting in the vanishment of integrated and profound visual culture; how the artists can only talk to the other artists in their own narrow field but not to the public in general or even to other artists or curators in a different field; how some art critiques and some public are only interested in nostalgia of good old days of Titian, Velasquez, Picasso, Cezanne, etc.  The worst is that the public, in general, can no longer understand the meaning of contemporary art and alienated from this rich cultural dialog, which in turn alienates and isolates the artists, who now only have the commercial and mercantile relationships with the hedge fund billionaires (so to speak), who are only interested in art as an investment. The state more and more withdraws support from the art as art is no longer perceived to serve any public good.

Populism in the art world itself on the surface seem thriving as the museums are popular than ever, filled with the public.  But here also, populism seem to denote the least common denominator, pandering kind of populism, or emphasis on certain kind of tribalism (such as Thomas Hart Benton’s Regionalism or Ashcan School, which understandably was a counter movement to the prevailing trend), not the kind that incorporates the broadest spectrum (including the most challenging parts).  In other words, the museums are mounting only certain kind of contemporary art: rather than thoughtful and difficult work, the museums and art institutions prefer a disneyfied spectacle, the bigger and noisier, the better.  So what is the solution?  Where does the dialog begin? Is is hopelessly late? Or the illusion of one culture itself a pastiche of the past and the vestige of a patriarchal society? At least, artists ourselves should become more aware of our of tribalism and take more initiative in creating dialog with the public.  At least, that might help our own sanity.