DEADLINE

at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - ARC
(à coté de la Palais de Tokyo)

your last words. your last meal. your last experience listening to music. your last kiss. your last sarcone's hoagie. imagine all these. i mean, imagine knowing full well that it may be your very last, this one right here, in front of you, this person right here in your arms, and this last morsel of hoagie, it's the last one for you.

i highly recommend watching the video above, the curator's statement about the deadline exhibition. in brief, the exhibition centers around the idea of "last works," primarily of artists with terminal illnesses, who fully aware of their imminent ends, infused their last oeuvres with a force that we healthy people cannot imagine. years ago, i wrote a paper on Deleuze, Peter Greenaway, and the impossibility of imagining auto-defenestration. while it's possible that we can imagine all those experiences falling from some too-high elevation, it's frankly impossible to imagine our own bodies hurtling through a space at such a great speed that the impact would kill us. and so, it's with this sort of awe, terror, and curiosity that we approach the works in Deadline.

the show features works by: Martin Kippenberger, Hans Hartung, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gilles Aillaud, Hannah Villiger, Absalon, James Lee Byars, Joan Mitchell, Chen Zhen, Willem de Kooning, and Jörg Immendorff.

Absalom's three videos, entitled "Bruits," "Bataille," and "Solutions," are short films of actions, respectively: yelling in bursts until the throat is too raw to continue (i cried watching this), fighting off imaginary enemies whilst wearing a suit, and the artist at a table eating, drinking, smoking, being calm.

The Death of James Lee Byars (excellently reviewed here)

Robert Mapplethorpe's last series possesses a sort of gloomy luminescence not uncommon to his earlier work. but in this setting, in this context it's a much seriouser thing.  take for example "Bust & Skull," image below.  perhaps it ought to've been titled "Pan, Death, Self Portrait."

Jörg Immendorff's enormous untitled works from the last years of his life reflect the evolution of the disease from which he'd suffered, "lateral amyotrophic sclerosis."  more than any other artist included in this exhibition, Immendorff's works seemed to be the artist's great triumph...the crowning achievement of his entire oeuvre.  i'm aware this is arguable, and it's a loaded thing to say, but i'm just saying. and what's further, the last years of his life were pretty scandalous... i'd forgotten..

also on view at the Musée...  Albert Oehlen. Albert, i love you. not because you work with trash and found objects, or because your painting is trashy and bad-it's really bad painting-or because your collaging together of various found imagery is so awkward and almost unconvincing, but you see color in a way i never have. you see all those places where too many hues come together as awkwardly as your imagery...where the oils go all muddy, blur, and find their ways again. and your artist statement is pretty ok too :

the title of the exhibition comes from Abstract

Reality, an album by a very good metal band Nasty

Savage.  I personally didn't take it seriously.  Maybe

they wanted it to be, but I think as a title it's a bit 

wacko.  It sounds as if they were trying to be 

abtruse and hard to understand.  I like it when

people take it as a swear word, or meaning a

sickness or a mess.  That's very close to my

definition of what my work is.

his interview with the preeminent Glenn O'Brien lives here .

Oehlen is represented by Luhring Augustine, whose website is here.

and with that i leave you Nasty Savage ...serious smoke machine footage here...