Oxygen Is Overrated
Malouf, Virilio, Blouin, a manifesto for modern living, and a trip to Los Angeles. Plus: getting high on O2
It’s always a bad sign when an artist decides to make a show “about art history.” I’m not talking about, like, Fred Wilson; I mean people who suddenly decide they need to plumb the depths of the canon. The motivation may be sincere, but the move usually comes across as a little desperate, a tacit admission that you’re out of ideas.
Mathieu Malouf has a new show up at Nahmad, and there are two groups of paintings, both with explicit art-historical motifs. One set of works, in acrylic, focuses on cavorting penguins, including one with a roundel composition invoking Matisse’s Dancers. Another group, in oil, gurgitates classic tropes involving nude female subjects—Leda and the swan, the odalisque, and so on. Oh you naughty, naughty boy.
The penguin paintings are in fact fun—graphically crisp, cheeky, and dumb as a dorm-room poster, in that Kippenbergery way that Malouf has mastered to make the stupid seem sophisticated and seen-it-all. The penguins hover above their cheesiness and their hollow eyes are a little bleak to boot.
The paintings of women, however (it feels vaguely sexist to call them that, but the show is baldly titled Women and Penguins), are overburdened and plagued by the sarcastic quality that can overtake Malouf’s work. Which is itself ironic, because in his artist’s statement, he says explicitly that the paintings are NOT intended to be arch: “The women in my paintings . . . are not cynical.” He claims, “I am genuinely trying to make beautiful paintings. Not beautiful by contemporary standards of beauty, but something more atemporal or enduring.”
Malouf’s work has at times been very good. Here his dense application of paint comes across as jokey: History, it’s so thick! Once you get a trollish rep, it’s hard to take any gesture seriously. The female figures are mostly conventionally grotesque, but despite his declarations, it’s hard to take the show as an attempt to seriously interrogate ideas about beauty. And am I supposed to take the desultory cracked-plate citations of the king of cheese, Julian Schnabel, as earnest homage? Keep your eyes open for a big Schnabel-aissance, btw, you heard it here first—he’ll make the perfect Trump II museum retrospective.
I do love one outlier painting, a small head-and-shoulders side view of a woman in a doughboy-era army helmet. And the pervy two-swan Leda painting has a strangeness and formal gravity—is it the wallpaper that saves it?—with a little black swan joke to boot. Part of the work’s strength comes from its reference to Degas’s Bather/Tub works. As metabolized at Nahmad, Degas’s opaque, sublimated horniness suggests a frustration about art itself, some painterly blue balls. Here’s hoping the artist finds some relief.
Manifesto Alert
The opposite of speed is silence. The image is mute and a little mercurial. Visit the optometrist once every five years, then every four years, then every two. If I can’t stick the swab in the canal, how am I supposed to clean my goddamned ears?
Angelicism having fizzled and reached its expiration date by this point (surprisingly, yet in the way of all media outlets online, with a pivot to video), the Discourse needs a new engine of guidance for the perplexed. Lo the arrival of a supreme messianic vision in the form of “Manifesto Turbo,” distilled by myself and artist Michele Abeles on the occasion of her outstanding new show at 47 Canal, up through March 16.
Our program for the gloaming American century is nervy but not nihilistic, defiant of puny imperatives to explain; rather, it’s meant to be plunged into like a cryobath or a dunk tank at the county fair. Isn’t that what you want, experience that’s authentic, unmediated and true?
If you want to do your own research, begin with the ecstasy of being understood. Narcissus would have lived to a right ripe age if he hadn’t recognized himself. Echo wasted away to a voice, meanwhile, which is not the same as reverb. I read The Metamorphoses on a car trip across the country before all hell broke loose. On the Road is just typing, not vision, Truman Capote said, or so one version of the story goes.
Read the rest here. Promulgate widely, read only between the lines, derive meaning in infrathin slices, apply ass-backwards and under the auspices of St. Jude. The soul you save may be your own.
Attention Los Angeles!
Spigot will take any excuse to visit LA and next week offers a perfect one—the Frieze and Felix art fairs, the latter of which I’ve written about so enjoyably in the past. Angelenos, please invite me to what you’ve got going on, offer me car rides and hot tub berths, and act crazy so I have something salacious to get the clicks up. The official Spigot party will take place one night at the Chimneysweep in Sherman Oaks, details TBD.
Books
Paul Virilio was a self-trained architect, and it shows. His prose is clotted yet frenetic. He combines the architect’s obsession with arcane terminology with the do-your-own research guy’s propensity to bombard you with one obscure fact after the other, always expecting you to take his word for it that they’re true. Top that off with a French academician’s love of neologisms, and why the fuck am I reading Virilio anyway?
Oh right, I was writing a manifesto about speed. (See above.) Also I keep trying out Virilio every few years because his themes are all so important: the relationship between war and speed, logistics and the state’s operationalization of violence. Dromology is one of his key coinages, which is the study of the logic of speed, based on the same Latin root that gives us velodrome (and also dromedary). As you would imagine, the dromos is central to Virilio’s Speed and Politics, first published in 1977, then issued in English by Semiotexte in 2006.
For all his annoyances, Virilio comes at you with compelling arguments, if I understand them right. The state’s job is to make war, which is bound up with economic interests, and the way to win wars is speed. He charts a historical-technological progression in combat from battle to the dispersion and ungrounded quality of combat at sea to the unfixed nature of terrestrial combat that comes with the arrival of motorized armor, and so on.
It would be nice however if Virilio explained things every once in a while, or connected them for us dullards. On one page he’ll be talking about how Mao failed to forestall China’s accession to the Western model of “intensive growth,” on the next discussing Hegel’s complaints about Livy’s approach to writing history (too repetitive) and on the next describing how feudal society was, once conquered by German’s “dromological elites,” governed by the logic of the army on the march.
Reading Speed and Politics, it’s hard not to get a little incel–reading–Sun Tzu. How can I apply these tactics to everyday life? One of the cooler concepts I picked up from the book was the idea of the glacis. Literally it refers to the slope that runs downward from a fortification; metaphorically, it’s about maintaining a zone of zero traction around oneself that keep adversaries at bay.
Which weirdly made me think of Mathieu Malouf’s Nahmad press release and its naif pose, as well as the one from his 2017 show at Green Naftali: “Like people, some of [the paintings] are visually appealing, smart and funny while others feel really wrong—not in a good way. They land like a thud and have no humor. All characters and events in this show—even those based on real people—are entirely fictional. All celebrities are impersonated… poorly. Due to its content, it should not be viewed by anyone.” Innocence and self-deprecation: two ways to put the would-be critic on the glacis.
Media Watch
Very disappointed not to be interviewed for the NYT exposé on Louise Blouin and her recently auctioned Hamptons mansion. On Spigot’s current deadline I have no time to go into details, but in 2006 I was hired to be senior editor at Modern Painters when Blouin bought the mag and brought it to NYC as part of her would-be media empire. I was lucky to get the job and also lucky to get fired before the company started stealing Social Security withholdings instead of sending them to the IRS, as the Times reports. I actually wrote an entire novel about working at the place. Agents, hit me up.
Anyway I visited the oceanfront manse in question once for a brainstorming retreat, though I use the term brain with some hesitation. The pool was nice.
The article disappointingly leaves a lot of questions open, primarily about how she blew all her money and how much she had in the first place: her finances were always a source of mystery and speculation. I’m assuming the NYT couldn’t get their hands on enough paperwork or enough sources to go on the record. Instead we get only her purported friend Ross Bleckner chucking at her social desperation. Which makes me actually feel a little bad for her in the end.
Inhalants
My doctor recently told me I needed to clean up my act, so I thought, fuck it, I’ll try oxygen. You can just buy it; I had no idea. The can I got allegedly contained five liters despite weighing as much as two paper clips. It was just sitting there at my local independent pharmacy’s checkout, ready for an impulse buy at a pricey $12.99.
One advantage of oxygen, I figured, was that I could use it while working. A productivity-enhancing high: the new American dream. Thus I went promptly home, sat down at to do some editing, and cracked my can of Boost. I hadn’t done any huffing since ca. 2021 in Seward Park—the pandemic, crazy times—and my impulse to fill my lungs to capacity and hold my breath for as long as possible may have been counterproductive. After four or five gasps, which tasted ever so slightly like plastic, I felt more like I was going to pass out than climb a mountain. My eyesight dimmed slightly, as it does before you faint, and I came down with a headache.
Later in the afternoon I decided to try again, following the instructions on the can more closely, huffing only for 1–2 seconds, three to five times in a row. Still nothing. I did still feel slightly hornier but that was likely a kind of autoerotic asphyxiation. People tell me it’s good for hiking at altitude, but don’t believe the hype: oxygen is bullshit.