Francesca Pastine at Eleanor Harwood

I admit to being attracted to art that has no emotional content, preferring to let the artist deal with it.

When I subscribed to ARTFORUM in the 1980's, I would write poems in the margins of the magazine or on top of any image that inspired me. Once I made a book of them and called it "Poem for Six Pieces of Paper." 100 copies were printed. It's a beautiful book, with a green cover and the poem printed on six pieces of heavy vellum paper, but when I look at the poem now I see the poem only makes sense if you know they were originally written on the pages of ARTFORUM.

Another project that occurred to me then, but which I never actualized, was to count the number of advertising pages in ARTFORUM and compare and contrast that number with the number of editorial pages. And once that number was determined, to see if there was any relationship between advertising and editorial; for instance, to determine whether a full page ad in ARTFORUM, say, for Gallery X, would yield a review for an artist showing at Gallery X.

ARTFORUM is stuffed with advertising, pages and pages and pages of it, as many as Vanity Fair or Vogue and far more than The Economist.

It was with a little nostalgia and regret that I toured Eleanor Harwood's great little gallery last evening, taking in the show there of pieces by Francesca Pastine. What Pastine has done with ARTFORUM is quite good, rendering exquisite smallish squares from the magazine itself with nothing more than an X-acto knife. The pieces felt like homage and revenge at the same time, but maybe that interpretation is is my imagination. I for one really liked the way the little screws looked in the upper corners of each piece.