David Hartt at Graham Foundation

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The potted plant in art. Was Broodthaers the first underlining the theatricality of its installation, the artificiality of its use as staging, the stage, decor of a gallery.  The potted plant can only ironize with temporality clashing against that of the gallery, a greenery that extends beyond it. I've been collecting art images with them for a while a now, its a trope, one of the few home decor choices regularly entering the space of art.

David Hartt at LAXART

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Chris Kraus spent a book speculating where art belongs, and Hartt wagers a similar bet that its at the cusps, the liminal sites of production where thriving is reciprocal to collapsing  - "interstices" - siting its video depciting the limits of culture, (a video channel for each Siberia and Alaska's edges) within that endlessly theorized de-centered center of post-modern enterprise, the Bonaventure hotel, Jameson, Berger, Baudrillard et al. The symbolic gesture, heavy handed as it is and theorized to no end by the takeaway, recedes with the video's actual deft estrangement of the entirety of its enterprise. The documentation does no service to the weirdness of taking time out of your beautiful Los Angeles day to enter this both bustling and dying image of de-centered centered post-modern architecture, somewhere between mall and airport, and entering a now defunct, dead, flower shop, and see the video's imagery make the comparison almost ham-fistedly well between the these forms of death-in-life existence of the Russian left and American right (reversed in the documentation) centered at this supremely weird hotel.  The power less in the juxtaposition of its symbols, but the differing sensibilities of the founts, reflected en abyme as one revolves again and again through the doors of its manic brand semiotics of fractured capitalism, the video at its best when its toys with the tone of meaning, going from Levi's ad to generic cohort of stock images reflecting its jazz soundtrack. A revolving floor capitalist realist funhouse disavowing the usual white walled gallery "purity" by adopting the sale's floor as its code, and all the art fairs along the way, a capitalist gimmick that works really well.

See too : "Rainbow" at Queer Thoughts , David Hartt at Carnegie Museum of Art

David Hartt at Carnegie Museum of Art



The score’s initial passing resemblance to Bepler’s Cremaster score, heavy on atonal art standards, quickly dissolves into deconstructed pastiche, a fun free jazz lobby music suspending, like the film’s forever-digressed plot, a never-coalescing, and distending like cremaster muscle the foreboding long shots of architecture’s banal non-ness, opposing Barney’s continual erection - square shots on male architecture - with your more standard on-the-fly montage cuts of hollywood banality, Hartt’s sometimes fun Tacita Dean style ride. The home of Ebony/Jet comes off as far more interesting merry-go-round than Dean’s even most alluring Kubrickian evirons.
The exhibition's documentation mirrors the film’s fetish of architecture.