I'm in the worst mood after a horrible art weekend.

Last night I hung out with my friend Andy and we attempted to go to the Zandoozi Gallery, which was advertised on another website as being open until 9pm. Come to find out it closed at 6. That actually wasn't so bad, though, as we took the opportunity to just walk around downtown looking at art through windows.

The lovely Jennifer's art was showing at Zandoozi and although I feel her brushwork is a little bit overwrought, her work is admirably assertive for someone who up until two years ago was a demographic numbers cruncher. I'll be interested to see where she is in another 2 years. The gallery has chosen to show her most boring painting on its website.

It all went downhill from there. We cruised over to the Kathy Womack Gallery, just because I could see its lights from where we were standing. My God... This gallery has replaced the pretentious, yet serviceable Raj Gallery, which specialized in poorly framed art photography and digital prints. Womack's art almost defies description in its bubbleheaded, insipid vision of the world.

Womack's dopey, cackling, skeletal socialites turned my stomach. These anorexic shells of women live in some dream world where the champagne is always flowing, someone has always just uttered something witty and acerbic, and (one assumes) the husbands have just successfully closed that big merger at a healthy profit.


One of Womack's gross portraits

On her website, she insists that she herself is not an upper crust socialite, but you have to wonder at the company Womack keeps that all of her women literally have grins bigger than the spaces where their brains would be. Thank God she's also a racist so that black women are by and large spared the treatment of her grotesque imagination. Her misogyny reminds me of a Vanessa Beecroft installation, except that Beecroft at least has the courtesy to make her hatred of women blatant. Womack hides hers behind bubbling champagne and layer upon layer of chiffon and taffeta. And tiaras for crying out loud! Tiaras!!


Some crap by Vanessa Beecroft

As if all this weren't enough, I went by testsite tonight in hopes of something thoughtful, interesting. Testsite is The Fluent Collaborative's revolving exhibition space, housed in the home of the guy who runs the thing. He basically turns his foyer and living room over to an artist to install some art project.

This month it's an Anjali Gupta/Jason Singleton collaboration. I was a little disappointed by the installation: shelf after shelf of identical card files in vaguely oldfashioned boxes with little post-it notes stuck out of them here and there. (I discovered that the "cards" were fake, like stage props--they're all stuck together and hollow on the inside.) For the first one and a half seconds the boxes made sort of a nice visual rythm throughout the room. But after that, they just sat there and gave you nothing. The post-it's all had what appeared to be little hand-written snatches of unattributed quotes from some high literary source. They were dimly interesting, but overall I was left with a very "so what" feeling.


One of the Gupta/Singleton boxes (detail)

But then I came home and read this shit at the Fluent Collaborative site:

We are pleased to announce the fourth installment of testsite, which pairs artist Jason Singleton with writer Anjali Gupta. Their collaboration will fall loosely between a semiotic assault and an ongoing architectural intervention, documented in the form of exegetic diagrams, official status reports, and finally, a transcribed discussion of the success and/or failure of their endeavor.

Give me a fucking break! What the fuck is a "semiotic assault and an ongoing architectural intervention"? Cut the MFA crap already. I'm willing to be talked into believing that that description means something, but what I saw tonight was surely an assault of nothing but boringness. What started as something tolerable, if disappointing ended up being some of the worst stuff I've seen in a while thanks to that description.

This is the kind of thing that makes me more sympathetic to Sir Kyffin Williams with all his old fart grumbling. Talk about art with no love, no passion. It almost makes me long for the foggy moors of Wales.

current music: Donna Summer, This Needs to Be Your Style