The Inevitable Olympics as Cultural Mutiny, Dennis Oppenheim-No free rides to Beijing, and LEARNING at STOREFRONT, a site specific masterpiece

SO
I’m sure you were all watching as China after much anticipation, frustration and climate control blitzkrieg, skyrocketed into 21st history last night. Funny how much the ceremony, steeped in obsolete and irrelevant traditionalism, owed so much to contemporary art (Xu Bing and Gu Wenda in particular); Funny how “official” Chinese contemporary culture in general is inevitably mixed up with its antiheroes – Ai Weiwei as the reluctant king of the bird’s nest, Zhang Yimo as 6th generation cultural minister, Cai Guoqiang as national pyromaniac, etc.... Funny watching as the foreign press still diligently sniffs out anything that resembles infractions of human rights, often at the expense of mistaking Chinese incompetency for repression... Funny though, how competent China actually appears to be, shoving its 41Billion dollar Olympic face at the world while even Kobe Bryant is willing to cut Beijing a little slack for not scrubbing every atmospheric inch free of smog.

Funny how all of this comes on the heels of Kung Fu Panda’s box office domination and China intellectual flagellation “how could we let Hollywood feed us our own culture and how come it tastes and looks soo good?” Funny that pres Bush (would you get out of there already) talking religious freedom and Taiwan cloaked as “Chinese Taipei” is allowed into the spotlight if only for a moment.

Funny that we’re finally here, alive and well! after all those damned numbers clocked themselves into eternity on Tiananmen Square.

Enjoy the games! Dennis Oppenheim will.

He came to my opening at Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC where, after weeks of postponement and Adobe Illustrator hell, I finally got the Hangzhou (see previous entries) piece up in one piece. Dennis, still shaggy haired and wearing a black t-shirt after all these years, will go to Beijing to see his 18ft high safety cone sculptures which are installed in the Olympic Village… he’s paying his own fare because no one invited him to see it- The powers that be obviously don’t know a VIP when they see one. He’ll probably watch Kung Fu Panda on the plane and eat fusion fare just like us after our splendid month in NYC where we were fed a daily dose of China bashing ala NYTimes and a lot of scary pollution statistics that made us think about changing our flight more than once.

Anyway please click here and then here for a look at LEARNING FROM HANGZHOU in an exceptional site-specific manifestation (Storefront is renovating its facade and the piece –which is all about the relationship between advertising and construction/architecture/urbanization is mounted as a billboard on the construction blind around Storefront. The opening was held inside the blind, literally in a construction site… very nice site specificity… not to mention another aspect mentioned by Peggy Roalf in DART “It's as if New York has been presented with a public reading wall, much like the public newspaper reading walls that can still found in China.”) Yep I’m still my favorite artist.

Now back to women’s weightlifting … and I thought women were smarter than that.