december 28 / MOMA
Friday I managed to get to MOMA to see the Brice Marden show. First, I wandered around to see what else was there which turned out to be a very good idea. The high point was seeing Pipilotti Rist's Ever Is All Over a video installation from 1997. The piece is made-up of two overlapping video projections. On one side rolls and pans over lush, perhaps tropical vegetation bathed in sunlight. The other shows a woman in a elegant light blue dress strolling down a car-lined street holding a long flower stalk. Periodically she swings the yard-long stalk, smashing car side windows. There is a soundtrack which helps to add a sense of bouyancy to things — some kind of guitar centered instrumental piece. At one point a police officer strolls by and gives a friendly wave. I found it mesmerizing, and watched the looped piece several times.

I also very much liked seeing some poster size screen prints of Eduardo Paolozzi in a big show called Eye On Europe, Prints, Books and Multiples, 1960 to Now. The Paolizzi's images are very mod 60's images with great electric color. I finished up with the Marden show. The show is very good, although I didn't get truly excited until the last three rooms (most recent paintings).

december 17 / Chelsea galleries
Lyle Starr at Alona Kagan / 540 W29 / November 3 - December 23
I first saw Lyle Starr's work at a great gallery that used to be on W14th Street — the Tate Gallery. They consistently showed exciting new artists. At that Tate show, Starr was using silhouettes of a whole variety of things, and they were nested one inside the other. After that, the next show I saw, at a Soho space, the images shifted to just figures and they became overlapping with the complex patterns of transparency seen in the current show. The work is consistently strong with great color and trippy effects as the eye puzzles to make sense of the color shifts and recognize the bodily forms.

Saint Clair Cemin, Jac Leirner, James Hyde / Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W22 / dec 14 - jan 27
I've seen lots of great installations here since Brent Sikkema became Sikkema Jenkins & Co earlier this year. The space works wonderfully wtih the shows they've been doing, and makes the old space seem cramped. I've long found Saint Clair Cemin's work interesting without really being very taken by it — or perhaps fully understanding what he was getting at. Here, the multiple Supercuia pieces really grabbed me. The breast or phallus-like forms come in multiple hot colors as well as polished steel. There was one other more naturalistic but still strange and striking piece (in polished steel also).

On one large wall (below) there is Jac Leirner's, "144 Museum Bags." While the critique of comsumer fetishism is a strain of art I tend to find tiresome at this point (please, no more Barbara Kruger), I thought the Leirner piece fit in well with the show and had a nice wan humor.

A week and a half ago I saw the new David Lynch film, Inland Empire. In NYC it's screening only at the Independent Film Center in the West Village, which I hadn't been to since it opened (sometime in the last year or so). It feels a bit like a more comfortable version of Film Forum in Tribecca, although my 3rd row seat was tilted back so far I felt like I was in a barcalounger.

Apparently after failing to find a distributor, Lynch is handling that himself. Inland Empire is more artpiece than movie, and while sharing a primary theme with Mulholland Dr., won't appeal to the relatively wide audience it did. Although Mulholland Dr. could be challenging to fully make sense of, I thought one could be leave it in a state of mystery and still like it. It felt organic, had great performances, beautiful imagery and fine cinematography. Inland Empire was shot on digital video (handheld I believe) and looses some of the great visual pleasure Lynch is so good at. There are striking images and scenes but here it's in washed out greys and yellows and has a lo-res look.

Perhaps I failed to watch closely enough, but after the first quarter or so of the movie, I lost a sense of what was going on narratively. While much of the film is emotionally dark, it ends on an upbeat note which felt sort of arbitrary. My favorite parts of the movie were several scenes of a group of hookers doing dances — to "The Locomotion" and under the end credits, Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" (with one of the women lip-syncing the lyrics).

Friday I saw, the new Almodovar movie, Volver. It's a great movie by a filmmaker who seems beautifully in his stride. The stories are complex but told with ease. The performances are spot-on. And of course there is great visual style. A few gems: great animated end-credits; a beautifully composed shot from overhead of Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) standing at a kitchen sink, her cleavage artfully displayed; a scene where Raimunda, with her dead husband's blood on her neck, answers the door, and brushes off a question about the blood as "women's troubles." There's a dark mystery at the center of the movie that interestingly is introduced almost casually, and as things progress Almodovar gently manages to find humor in the situation.

wandering manhattan on beautiful autumn day / friday, october 2
After a busy month, I decided to make an easy day of it which included catching a couple of current public art projects, a few galleries and a movie. The movie was "Little Children" directed by Todd Field ("In the Bedroom") with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. I liked this a lot, although be warned it is very disturbing. Kate Winslet is consistently exceptional and has choosen some great rolls (okay we'll try to ignore that uber-schlock boat movie). She was great in Enormous Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of my favorite movies of the last couple of years. All in all, she is perhaps my favorite actress, and on that basis alone I would recommend it.