If you couldn't get the picture,
Maybe you can read the writing on the wall. -- George Jones
by Jerome du Bois
If you thought the first part of Catherine's piece on Glen Lineberry and Lisa Greve was incendiary, better bring a biohazard suit for Part Two, coming up soon. But be patient; this stuff is painful to write.
Like Catherine, I'm numb and off-balance from the fuckover, so I missed an ass-kissing puff piece about those two by one of their sycophants, Ernest McIntyre. McIntyre's article contains two facts, previously unknown to us, which set us on fire again. Aarrgghh. These people are hard to believe. I'll let Catherine tell you about those facts. Instead, here I'm going to reprint McIntyre's entire piece, in the interests of the record, fisk it a little, and then I'll post our experience of the Grand Opening -- the people, the vibes, and the art. Yes, that was us, gawkers -- The Man From Tombstone, and The Mod Queen with the full-length black shirred-satin gloves. Thank you all -- truly, sincerely -- for staying away from us.
Fisking Ernie
Here we go:
"Wow!" The unexpected expulsion of the word echoes across the great spaces of the expanded Bentley Projects art gallery.
The accent was Japanese as were the words that followed. She spoke little English but was clearly taken with Glen Lineberry's expanded downtown Phoenix art gallery.
Glen Lineberry. Remember that name; you're going to be hearing it a lot in the coming years. Lineberry is the one who looked at a dilapidated downtown Phoenix building below the railroad tracks, saw a possibility, and, against conventional wisdom, set out to make it happen in a big way.
It was big news last year when Lineberry and Bentley Dillard decided to create Bentley Projects, Phoenix's largest art gallery, at 215 E. Grant St. Eyebrows rose in unison across the Valley when word leaked out that Scottsdale's renowned Bentley Gallery was opening a space at Third and Grant streets. The next word spoken was typically a disbelieving "Where?"
If you're trying to picture where exactly that is, think two streets south of America West Arena. Before Dillard and Lineberry rolled the dice and rolled in major works of art, the closest thing to contemporary art in the area was neighborhood graffiti.
Lineberry has changed all of that. He came close to opening galleries in both New York and London but felt "that the intellectual ferment and creative expansion is so vibrant in Phoenix that this just seems to be the place to be."
Expanding minds and spaces seems to be right up Lineberry's alley. When the 10,000 square feet of space opened a year ago, it was considered huge. Since then, he has purchased the entire city block and expanded Bentley Projects to 35,000 square feet, all under one roof. That's bigger than a World Cup soccer field.
World-class works by American masters such as pop artist Jim Dine, glass artist Dale Chihuly and the late abstract expressionist sculptor Louise Nevelson share the exhibition spaces with established and emerging Arizona artists. Fritz Scholder, Diana Clauss, David Kessler and Ellen Wagener are just a few of the many local artists who will be exhibited in the nearly 20 exhibits planned for 2005.
"Our plan is to mount dramatic, installation-based exhibitions as well as smaller and more intimate shows," Bentley Projects director Lisa Greve said. She walked as she talked, explaining Lineberry's concept for the gallery.
"Forget everything you know about art galleries," Greve said, while signaling to an installer that the painting of Shigeru Oyatani should be hung a little more to the right. She explained that visitors to BP, as staff members call it, "can have coffee and lunch, buy a book, look at fine rugs and even have their paintings framed -- all on site."
Although Greve is clearly the person in charge at BP, she gives the credit for bringing in the likes of Arcadia Farms, the Poison Pen Mystery Bookstore, David Adler Rugs and the Framer's Warehouse to Lineberry.
"I know of only one person who could both envision what this building could become and then actually do it," she said, with a nod toward Lineberry, who was across the room talking to a client.
This, she said, is only the beginning. Besides planning special musical events, lectures, book signings and other community-related outreach programs, there's something big in the works. Neither Greve nor Dillard nor Lineberry are talking, so don't bother asking.
Judging by what Lineberry has achieved in one year, the one thing you can be sure of is that when you find out, your verbal reaction is likely to be "Wow."
End of the McIntyre piece. Now, three things:
Glen Lineberry. Remember that name; you're going to be hearing it a lot in the coming years.
Today, if you Google "Glen Lineberry," the very first entry is my pointer to Catherine's article. The entry appeared there within 24 hours of our postings. Welcome to the power of the blogs of The Long Tail, Mr. Control Freak. (And if you don't know what that is, you're not the economist you brag on about.) Welcome to the way some business will be done in the future: honestly, with transparency, and no hidden knives. Our work may not stay the #1 Google for long -- but who knows, here comes Part Two and then there's "My Emails With Glen" -- so keep Googling, people, please. (This warms my heart whenever Catherine despairs, "I'm the only blogger I know who writes for my enemies.")
[Update: about six hours after I wrote the above, we checked again, and now the #1 Google is not my pointer piece but Catherine's Part One itself. This points to an accelerated interest, doesn't it? Now that's what I'm talking about!]
He came close to opening galleries in both New York and London but felt "that the intellectual ferment and creative expansion is so vibrant in Phoenix that this just seems to be the place to be."
What crap. I've lived here, and looked at the art here, much longer than this man (and his wife together, probably). The intellectual ferment in this town is on the order of trunk-lab meth, and the uncreative expansion features galleries of low-rent cartoonists, opportunistic muppetsmoms, striptease and other sleaze. The rest of the galleries closed, or went nonprofit. (Soon you can read my take on the fate of shade. RIP.) As for New York and London, with his MOR inventory, he'd be almost invisible there. Every Midtown gallery, which is what his would be, would swallow him up. NY and London were bullshit feints. McIntyre dutifully holds the microphone up for the line.
Finally, the other spear carrier, Lisa Greve, makes her Ecce Homo gesture:
"I know of only one person who could both envision what this building could become and then actually do it," she said, with a nod toward Lineberry, who was across the room talking to a client.
Jesus. Where are the votive candles? I can think of a lot of people who could do what Glen Lineberry is -- maybe -- doing. I say maybe because we know for sure there's a little red hole in the middle of this enterprise, bleeding quietly. And our experience with their behavior . . . Catherine will tell you more, later.
The Bland, Grand Opening
Big empty heads (by Jun Kaneko), big empty hearts (by Jim Dine), three giant wooden armless, graceless Graces lacerated by chain saws (Dine ditto), and one hundred empty Army boots hanging from the ceiling in formation: scale counts at the Bentley Projects Grand Opening, January 8, 2005. It covers what's basically corporate painting and sculpture -- what artblog's Franklin Einspruch, in an inspired phrase, calls wall furniture-- blown up large, but still subdued, smooth, distant, safe, and with all the mysteries of form and content either never present, never allowed, or leached out -- some polished-to-a-hair perfection crafty tables and bowls, and way-overpriced conceptualism by the anemic vampire Dominique Blain.
We'll get back to Blain, but first --
Whoa: Here we are, out in public -- we never expose ourselves like this -- among this city's art elite -- almost all of them, like us, dressed in black, only, unlike us, not nearly as well -- my darling on my arm, in these giant concrete spaces that open into one another. This is our fifth visit, so we know our way around, but there's some new stuff (e.g., the Blain), and one thousand people as well. They barely fill the enormous spaces, so we are free to promenade through all the salons without squeezing by anyone.
We spoke to nobody but each other (and Glen Lineberry and Brady Roberts, in a minute). We saw many people we had criticized, and several of our outright enemies, but nobody approached us, nobody bothered us; not one. How surprisingly civilized. Thanks again. And, since we have no friends, we were free to examine the artwork and talk about it with each other.
[Aside: Ironically, little did we know at the time that the biggest betrayal and threat was not from some knucklehead from Roosevelt Row or Grand Avenue attacking us physically, but the people who ran the operation that surrounded us at the moment -- in fact, that man right there, Glen Lineberry, standing with Brady Roberts.
We approached. I congratulated him, and handed him a gallery-warming gift, a bottle of The Macallan, Cask Strength. He took it, thanked us, then introduced us to Brady Roberts. After that, he pointed out the amenities like a maitre'd, and left us on our own. I mention this because I found out later that Lisa Greve, who had greeted us at the door, had text-messaged him immediately, "knowing we were nervous," to help us be comfortable. But we didn't talk to either one of them for the hour we were there. And if this inside baseball bores you, move on. This is for the record.]
As I said, this was our fifth visit, and much was familiar, but this was our first visit under the delusion that we were going to be working with these people, and I began to get an uneasy feeling: this stuff was soulless. Ours isn't.
Take Mary Bates and her glorified CAD prints -- the red monochrome, for example, that looks like a conch shell tortured flat into shaded triangles. It's perfect, and beautiful, and boring, and you could hang it behind the administrative assistant's desk. And it falls leagues behind the gloriously odd kaliedoscopic micrographs -- of real things, Mary Bates, tangible and incarnate -- that the crazy scientists post in contests all year round. ("Here's Vioxx soaked in gin.") Or create a large photograph of the center -- just the center -- of the Orion Nebula, the place the extreme born-again Christians call the Door to Heaven. You know, Mary, these eyes have seen things in fifty-five years. Your work is smug, tight, flat, and self-satisfied. It sits on its ass. Remember Mark Tansey's aphorism? "A painted picture is a vehicle. You can sit in your driveway and take it apart, or get in it and go somwhere."
The Vernon Fisher: a typical blackboard piece. Lineberry had rhapsodized about it on one of our earlier visits. Fisher has never impressed me with his enlarged, intellectually elliptical telephone-pad doodlings. On that earlier visit, a gallery assistant was moving the thing, and I saw the wonderfully intricate dadowork and scaffolding of the support -- using perfectly smooth and exactly angled 1 x 1 birch -- that Fisher had had to invent to keep the blackboard stable. It was truly beautiful, and the gallery assistant and I talked about for a minute -- how we admired not just its beauty, but that the guy figured it out himself. Artist as engineer. I left that lesson wondering how a guy who could craft like HC Westermann wasted his time with pomo noodlings?
Gary Lang's big colorful stripe-and-circle painting looks like something you see going down the escalator in the airport, or Nordstrom. Or, I suppose, in someone's "Great Room." (Whoever came up with that appelation?)
The dead matador was still there, still dead. They'd moved him (for inspiration?) to the employee lounge, with its pool table and plush chairs.
Jim Dine's big bronze hearts used to throb in the window of Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale. Now they're down here, still looking for a home. Jun "I'm Going To Need More Bronze" Kaneko cast several big five-foot hollow heads, painting or embellishing them, but they still stand dumb as stumps, perfect images for the complete lack of inspiration that brought them into being: empty-headed promises with nothing to deliver.
As for Dominique Blain: the less said, the better.
More to come on the Bentley Projects fiasco.
Posted by Jerome at January 17, 2005 10:57 AM | TrackBack