First Annual LIC Bike Parade
Queens, New York
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Registration 11:30 AM
Workshops 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Parade 3:00 PM - 4:00PM Free / Rain or shine!

Socrates Sculpture Park has more info.

I'm taking the challenge. Or at least half of it.

Orange Flower has started a 30-day macro photography challenge over at Flickr -- not a contest, just a share, compare and don't despair kind of thing (thanks for sharing, Kim). Meant to keep you engaged and taking pics every day.

Here's the Flickr pool; here's the announcement with a list of participants.

I ask because I don't know. It could mean nothing. It could add to the meaning of a work. In Jasper Johns' case, it certainly means at least one thing: big $$. But I want it to mean more.

I started thinking about Johns' signature because I went to his show of drawings from 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery (NYC, through April 12). I noticed in the end of his show that he marked some of his drawings with very precise signatures. It's not just his signature on this handful of pieces. It's "J.Johns / March '06 / St. Martin, F.W.I."

I recently wrote about Johns' "Gray" show at the Met. The show has been trashed online, but I thought it was a tidy retrospective of someone who is still a major force. To sum up: I love his early work, and his later work (after the cross-hatching hayday) leaves me cold and confused. I've been thinking about it since I first wrote about Johns, but now I've got a few thoughts I'll try to add.

It's easy to focus on the ways Johns broke from the previous generation. Johns' debt to the abstract expressionists used to escape me. He's frequently pegged as a pop precursor, which isn't entirely inaccurate.

But seeing the gray paintings, it really struck me how much he owes to their approach to creating a canvas. He's an all-over painter. He sticks to the surface and deals with relationships there. I think it's why the paintings of his I like the most take subjects that are already flat, like targets and flags and maps.

I love Jasper Johns' brushwork. I love the way he can mix paints and let colors (even gray ones) rain onto a canvas in an all-over way that's visually interesting without seeming contrived or over-designed. There's a nervous energy to his brush strokes, a kind of brutal, abrupt elegance to the way he stops and starts.

When you're painting something from life, color adjustments between light and dark and big and small blobs of paint usually describe physical space. You can highlight the tops of cheeks with light mark, model the shadow in dark. But when you deal with Johns, that approach is completely shot. You have a target. Sometimes he'll make a circle in the target lighter or darker (though he frequently erases the color differences) but it's not to describe something in reality. He's not referring to anything but the design. It's pointless to look at a painting of Johns and ask "How big is that flag in real life?"

But when you have his more figurative work, it can refer to things we know the size of. The human body, for instance. Our minds can compare the size and proportion and suddenly, sbconsciously, we're comparing a painting to things otuside of it.

In these paintings, Johns has to do a tricky balancing act of working a surface, but also creating recognizable physical forms. He could make a decision to erase any idea of modeling the figure. But I don't feel like he has. He'll try to shadow a figure, but still keep the rest of the work on the surface, or in a confused place in between.

Look at the image below. Why are there shaded parts? They aren't random, since some of the dark spots seem to be where shadows usually fall.

Photo: MoMA

So why do I go on this long ramble about the subject of Johns' paintings and his signature? It was a theory I had looking around these recent drawings of his. Does Johns feel like he's approaching the end? Does he feel anxiety about whether these works are sufficiently "Jasper Johns"y? I don't know.

There's a drawing of Johns' from the '60s where he signed in the lower right and then made a big X to cross out his name. My theory is that somehow the specificity of the signatures on some of the newer works is related to the specific marks he once froze in time.

He may have once called authorship into question, hiding his enigmatic persona behind his canvas, using generic subjects like targets and maps, but now his work has lost its signature. His new work is not as distinctive as the "signature" work from the '60s.

When I look at the older paintings of Johns', I can't help but feel the beat of his brush hitting the canvas hundreds of times, each stroke marking a particular moment in time. A particular place. Does Johns now have to sign what he used to paint?

Faris McReynolds makes paintings like good baseball pitcher throws spitballs. It's nasty stuff, roughed up and delivered with a predictable inpredictability. There's an amazing moment where you lean in and ask "How did he do that?" And as soon as the question is asked, he's got you.

Check out the photos above, of a painting in his current show at Goff + Rosenthal (NYC, until April 26). One is a detail from the other.

It's a big painting of a bunch of cowboys looking at strippers on a stage. The close-up makes one the of the dancers look like Christ, as drawn by a 5-year-old with a pocket knife. It's angular and direct. Colors are bold and contrasting. Like so many good paintings, you lean in and it looks abstract; you step back and it coheres as an image. McReynolds observes with a touch of rock 'n' roll and a lot of sass.

Check out his blog here, and his music here.

I have a soft spot for Morris' sculptures.

In 1991, I saw a small collection of his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It was like a miniature retrospective of his work. I was just in high school, and growing up in a Richmond suburb, I hadn't been exposed to minimalism or any of the more radical artistic developments from the last 50 years.

Entering the gallery, I saw one of Morris' felt sculptures. I looked at the tag on the wall. It said the artist's name was "Robert Morris."

It was a big, thick piece of felt, slashed horizontally and attached to the walls at the corners, so the middle formed a slow arc. Interesting. I didn't know if I liked it or not. Was it really art? Did it mean anything?

I moved on in the gallery -- and at this point I was unaware that I was in the middle of just one artist's works.

I looked a a very large work in bronze. In the middle, it was colorful but apocalyptic. On the edges, skeletons and other dark forms emerged from the flatness. I didn't know what to think of this work, either, although this time it was a formal problem: the dark imagery seemed too controlled. It seemed kind of cheesy. I looked at the artist card beside the work and it said "Robert Morris." I didn't understand how these two works could be from the same person.

(These images aren't of the exact works I saw, but close enough)

(Image from Angel Flores Jr.)

(Felt scultpure images from Turi McKinley)

The thing that twisted my young mind with the Robert Morris retrospective is that one person could create this cool, seemingly impersonal work that seemed so mysterious, and also this extravagant and explicit figurative piece. It was as if McDonalds made automobiles. That's how crazy this was at first.

I took another look at the felt sculpture. I thought to myself, "Wow. The guy who put all that work into molding skeletons for that crazy nuclear holocaust 3-D painting also took his hands and made this smooth, suggestive sculpture that's just one piece of felt. What's the connection?"

On a simple level, it allowed me to like the felt sculpture. After all, this guy could really do traditional art if he wanted to. But sometimes he chose not to. It was interesting. I started thinking about the connections between different work, and how an artist can develop. How different forms might be good for some things and not others.

I knew what I liked about the felt sculpture. And I tried to justify it at first, in very stupid ways. Like maybe the felt symbolizes something? No. That would be ridiculous. Even then I felt it was ridiculous to have explanations for artwork go very far away from the materials and work itself.

So later I went to the library. I looked up Robert Morris, and from there learned about minimalism. It got high-falutin very fast. But in my introduction I realized that I was free to like it for what I liked it for. An artist had taken materials and realized their possibilities.

My affection for Morris remains. I like his independence. I realize now how rare it is for artist to alter their signature styles. It takes guts and a real interest in creating things, regardless of how they come out and whether the results will remain in signature. After all -- Robert Morris can only be Robert Morris.

Which returns me to last night's lecture.

He was born in 1931. He is not a young man, but certainly does not seem as old as he is. He still has a great spirit, although is midwestern to the core. All the stories he told in a flat affect, in a husky voice that never went up or down. He would hit the punchline of a story and tell it in the same way he told the beginning and middle.

Morris spent the evening talking about trains, mostly telling stories about his time as a teenager in Kansas City, and as a young man who bluffed his way into becoming a train switcher.

He began by evoking the longings he felt in his childhood home, hearing the trains whistle as they came and went. Laying pennies on train tracks with his sister and coming up with a flattened bit of copper.

He told stories about accompanying a horse to Los Angeles as a 15-year-old. Working in an office in the switching yards and having to make up what was in certain cargo trains. Almost getting killed working the night shift because he refused to check the express train schedule.

When he thinks about those days, he says, it's nostalgia mixed with a chill. Railroad days were 'blind time,' he says (also the name of a series of drawings he did while blindfolded). His memories are fading and almost dream-like, says Morris, but one image haunts him.

It's a blurred silhouete. A shadow across the body that 'presses against fragile flesh.'

Listening to his stories of 100-yard trains, working by lantern at night, trains crashing and opening like tin cans, you can see this physicality echoed in his work. It's dark and brooding and solitary stuff.

When someone from the audience asked about a Tocqueville quote about the artist, Morris replied 'It used to be said art is long, life is short. Now it's different. Life is long, art is short.'

Others asked questions, but Morris preferred to answer by pulling quotes out of a hat. They were from W.G Sebald and David Hume.

Finally, someone asked what the Goethe quote was in one of Morris' essays. He smiled ever so slightly and said "I could have misquoted."

With that he said good night.

In the same way we can be moved by the rustic paintings of Lascaux, seeing something innately human in their creation and stroke, we can look at Katy Moran's paintings and be moved at something that will last as long as our DNA does. They are like cave paintings of the future, descended from those damp, rough walls via Delacroix and Joan Mitchell.

There's just something about Katy Moran's paintings that is very, very old. Or really, I mean "old masterful." Old master-y. Whatever the kids call it. (Spray Glue calls them "Victorian.")

Moran, a 33-year-old from Great Britain, has her first show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery currently on view in New York until April 19. Strolling around the gallery, Moran's small oils seemed very reminiscent of Constable's cloud studies. It might be in color selection, especially those seductive greenish-blues and earthen browns, or in her delicately descriptive stroke, or maybe she uses old-fashioned mediums.

Even though there's an aged patina about them, they seem very current. The press release for the show says Moran uses images she finds from the internet or magazines and works until they become abstracted. They are post-abstraction, but clearly refer to something. Her line isn't an invented meander, like De Kooning's elegant late paintings. It's descriptive, but vague, like distant lights in fog.

Julian Hatton isn't exactly a cubist, but his approach to landscape is that of an artist trying to compress multiple perspectives into one flat canvas. His colorful landscapes, currently on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (in NYC, until April 12, so act fast), are suggestive, evocative, and ultimately satisfying in themselves. His work can be a bait-and-switch where, in the end, you're happy to be fooled.

The color is extrapolated, which is to say it's not realistic but nor is it unrealistic, exactly. He'll use perspective lines that evoke a fence by a country road, or a round-ish shape that evokes a pond, but stack them so it's impossible that these things were observed with his feet planted in one place.

You're left going through a space that doesn't make sense, like one of those screwed-up perspective rooms in a science museum. Bathe it in a Mediterranean, Matisse-esque color scheme (by way of Michigan, where Hatton was born) and you have challenging painting that feels like silk.

Painter Thomas Nozkowski spoke to a crowd gathered at the Fisher Landau Center in Long Island City, Queens. The occasion was a small survey of his paintings there (until April 14). Pace Wildenstein also has a show up, of Nozkowski's most recent work (until May 3).

The show at Fisher Landau spans all of Nozkowski's mature period since the early 1970's, and includes 20 of his small-ish canvases.

Mr. Nozkowski, who arrived in his Suburu just as I got to Fisher Landau, is a pleasant and modest man with big ideas and an unassuming manner.

He talked about going to art school at Cooper Union in the early 60's, when the main concern was systemic painting -- creating canvases based on a set of rules. Like, what can I come up with if I confine myself to vertical dotted lines or just these colors, etc.?

Nozkowski recalled going to a gallery in Soho as a young painter and seeing a show with just one 40-foot long abstract canvas. He realized that something was off in the context of abstraction. "Our rhetoric was totally someplace else."

He said he thought these huge works were paintings designed for people downtown painters despised. He decided to reevaluate his assumptions -- and instead of creating gargantuan canvases, he started working on a small scale. He wanted to make paintings that would work in his friends' tenement apartments. He said almost half of the paintings at the Fisher Landau Center were done on canvas board out of a deliberate decision to work with a humble, everyday material.

He joked about how "sophisticated" his thinking was as a young painter in the '60s.

But today, in 2008, it's clear he's still engaged. "For any good work of art," he said, "it allows people to get out of the prison of their own consciousness."

Many of the paintings in his show at Fisher Landau are 16 x 20 inches. Nozkowski quoted Jean-Luc Godard in saying that ethical decisions wind up becomes aesthetic ones (and vice versa). He found the smaller scale was more manageable and it liberated him to try new things. Instead of working three days to prep a large canvas, he could make quicker decisions.

"I was taught by abstract expressionists," he said, "so I don't believe in tinkering."

In the '60s, when he was still working at these systemic paintings, his grandfather dies. He shared the experience of going to his studio and looking at his canvas and realizing he had no way to respond to this very personal event. The "system" just didn't allow for it.

So after that, his paintings all have a particular source. "Every painting I do comes from a source in the real world," he said.

"Now the whole paintings are memos" of real-life events.

When asked exactly how these abstract shapes relate to real life things, Nozkowski listed his inspirations as songs, newspaper stories, and family events. He even said perhaps this talk would inspire a painting. It's not about physical correlations -- he said the glint in someone's eye would not appear in one of this paintings -- but something else.

Asked why so many of his forms repeat, such as what he called a "squashed oval," Nozkoski said "There are limits to how many things you can do."

He used to take a subject for a painting and work it out on canvas until he ran out of ideas, then put the canvas aside and return to it later. Looking around the third floor gallery at the Fisher Landau Center, Nozkowski said "Some of these paintings are 10 years in gestation."

Now, he says, he just works straight through. At any given time, he can be working on multiple paintings. Right now he has six sticky paintings in his studio.

Untitled, 1984, 16 x 20 inches.

Most of his paintings feature a centralized abstract figure on a differently abstracted ground. He says he starts canvases with a kernel in the middle and sees where it wants to go. "I tried to make everything simple so I could see what I was doing," he said. "Composition is determined by the thing itself."

But he says he's "deeply skeptical about our power to read any paintings." He continued, saying "I don't really believe in a visual language." For Nozkowski, it's the relationships that have meaning.

He talked about old Chinese landscape artists who would go out into nature not with a pen and ink but just with their own perceptions. They would return to the studio and use their memories as their "filter."

In response to his advice for young painters, he said "You have to keep working. You have to keep going... We have the freedom to do anything we want to do. And if you're doing boring, crappy work: rethink it."

He summed up his lesson by saying the key to art is the same as the key to life: "Stay interested in things."

In response to a different question, he said "I like the idea of painting being in a complex, multidisciplinary world where it can be tested."

To people are talk about the death of painting, Mr. Nozkowski said "Painting will die when no one cares about it any more."

The Brooklyn Rail has a good interview with Thomas Nozkowski.

I stumbled upon Brgr yesterday, having somehow avoided any buzz or or word-of-mouth. And the days of me seeking out good hamburger restaurants are a distant memory.

But as I was walking back from the art galleries in Chelsea, I happened to see they claimed to have the best milkshake in New York. Could it be true? Could a place without vowels actually have a frosty cold river of frothy, bold taste? I decided to find out.

I ordered a black and white shake. They only have one size and it costs $5.50. After five minutes or so, a small, clear, plastic cup arrived about the height of a soda can. The color of the milkshake was deep sienna. The size smaller than I expected. But the flavor. Oh the flavor.

It was just the right consistency, melted enough not to roadblock the straw but frozen enough to have a slow creep of wintery goodness. The vanilla taste was up-front and all around and the chocolate was subtle and lasting. It's easily as good as Shake Shack's milkshake, which is the most comparable shake I have to compare it to. And there wasn't a line.

Unlike Stand, which I'm boycotting because of bad service issues involving bored cooks brazenly bouncing ketchup bottles off their biceps while I waited for 20 minutes, I'll definitely put Brgr in my list of fvrt NY shks.

Brgr is located at 287 7th Ave (between 26th and 27th Streets), Manhattan.

The biggest change I made to this recipe were adding a lot more carrots, baking at 400 degrees for the whole time, and... the coup de sucre... injecting frosting into the carrot cake cupcakes.

I've put up a food porn photo set from the making of.

Here was the finished product (sorry for the fuzzy but the photo was taken *after* the party):

Here's the recipe, with my modifications. Pretty shamefully ripped off of the Food Network's site, but I hate how URLs can disappear.

2 cups sugar
1 1/3 cups vegetable oil
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 extra-large eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 cups grated carrots (less than 1 pound) Use a whole pound
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts

For the frosting:
3/4 pound cream cheese, at room temperature
1/2 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 pound confectioners' sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat the sugar, oil, and vanilla together in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the eggs, 1 at a time. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. With the mixer on low speed, add 1/2 of the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Add the grated carrots, raisins, and walnuts to the remaining flour, mix well, and add to the batter. Mix until just combined.

Line muffin pans with paper liners. Scoop the batter into 22 muffin cups until each is 3/4 full. Bake at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes then reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F and cook for 35 45 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

For the frosting, cream the cream cheese, butter, and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the sugar and beat until smooth.

When the cupcakes are cool, poke a hole in them. Put cream cheese frosting into a baker's bag and inject the frosting in until it begins to ooze out. Frost and serve.

The recipe makes A LOT of frosting. I only decided to try injecting it when I realized I'd have way too much frosting just for the tops of the cupcakes. Even after injecting, you'll still have enough, in fact, that after your cupcake party you'll come home a little tipsy and find a little frosting in the fridge waiting for drunken consumption. PERFECT.

I made the frosting to taste, adding little bits of confectioner's sugar until it met my exacting sweet tooth. I went ahead and added all the carrots because #1: have you ever had carrot cake that's too carroty? I haven't. And #2: Who wants a stray carrot or two rotting in their fridge, turning gray and limp and lonely?

One note on the bakers bag: you can make it yourself. I rolled up a piece of cardboard into a cone and taped it to the corner of a heavy-duty freezer bag. I taped it to make sure it was secure and that precious frosting didn't ooze out all over the place.

The best things about this recipe: The tops of the cupcakes get slightly crunchy. The raisins and walnuts are delicate and not overpowering, which raisins and walnuts can certainly be. And there's frosting inside!

If bloggers have a roundtable and no one blogs about it, is it still a media event? I'm not sure, but I'll do my duty and blog about it any way.

Hung over and in not a great mood to look at art, I was pleased to listen to the Red Dot Art Fair's blogger's roundtable at the Park Hotel. It featured Carol Diehl (ArtVent, Edward Winkleman, C-Monster, Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), Sharon Butler (Two Coats of Paint) and Joanne Mattera was moderator.

My favorite part was bloggers recounting their favorite big-traffic headlines. Who can top "How to preserve a chocolate Santa butt plug"?

I didn't get a chance to ask a question, but I would've asked: is there something innate in the medium that makes a successful blog unable to have thought-out critical writing? After all, it takes time to look and to think and to write this kind of material. Can meaningful ciriticsm be Twittered?

There were a lot of shocking sticker prices that made me wonder how long the art market can maintain this. The place was packed, however, and there was a lot of good work there. This is one of those cases where I didn't photograph all my favorite work -- just what struck my fancy for one reason or another.

See photos below, with Christie's estimated prices attached -- and my totally unqualified commentary on those prices.

Ida Applebroog, Untitled (Knife), 1995.

Estimate: $5,000-7,000.

DG estimate: Completely worth it. Applebroog seems underappreciated.

Andy Warhol, Untitled (Furniture), circa 1960.

Estimate: $20,000-30,000.

DG estimate: Worth it... if you must buy a Warhol. Seeing this charming tempera work reminds me of how much I like Warhol's illustrations. They're much better than the horrific star-fucking icon paintings. As a painter friend of mine is fond of saying, Warhol was a genius because he painted icons. Who doesn't want Marilyn in their living room? If I were a museum (and I understand that I'm a relic, at least) I would buy one of these pieces instead of pissing money away on another soup can. Who needs another Mao?

Dana Schutz, Untitled, 2001.

Estimate: $120,000-180,000.

DG estimate: Yowsers. I have to admite my heart leaped when I saw this price tag. She's very young -- she got her MFA in 2002, I think? -- and very talented. Clearly this price tag is for collectors banking on Schutz's continued ascendancy so they can have an "early" work. It's a good painting, though: check out the second photo, which is detail of the little bird in the tree on the far right. To paint like that takes Schutz-pah!

Elizabeth Peyton, "Stephen Malkmus," 1998.

Estimate: $25,000-35,000.

DG estimate: Let me go into a brief backstory. I'm feeling bad about a sort-of bad review I gave Peyton for the 2006 Whitney Biennial. A friend of mine read that recently and I tried to explain myself and when it comes down to it, it's not the work I have problems with; it's the money. I'm sorry for reacting against the hype and not just the work. I actually do like some of her work a lot. Some of it I don't care for, but I could say that about Gainsborough.

I like that her life is intertwined with her art and her friends are indistinguishable subjects from her musical interests (yeah, Malkmus, yeah!). The price for this work is actually low compared to some of her other stuff. Is it worth it? I don't actually have the money to evaluate. But if I were forced to spend that cash, I would rather buy 3,500 copies of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and distribute them to the needy.

Robert Motherwell, Untitled, 1975.

Estimate: $20,000-30,000.

DG estimate: Yes. Buy it now. Not only was a Robert Motherwell book responsible for getting me into the idea of abstract art as a teenager, but here you have a funny work where it's clear he's written the numeral "4." It's funny to think of a leading abstract expressionist getting his feet wet in Jasper Johns figures-as-abstraction territory, and for that this seems like an even more important document. The guy knew balance and gesture.

Ray Parker, Untitled, 1967.

Estimate: $3,000-5,000.

DG estimate: Worth much more -- maybe. It seems like a low price tag, but I have to admit that I didn't know his work before seeing the couple pieces at Christie's. Apparently he was a member of that first generation of post-war American abstractionists working in New York. This photo doesn't do it justice, but his work seems very balanced yet dynamic, managing to keep my eyes in a controlled movement (like Cirque du Soleil?). The NY Times has a review for those interested in Ray Parker's "Piece of the Abstract Puzzle."

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life," says John Ruskin, in his long essay "The Nature of Gothic," originally published in 1853. He continues:

It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, --a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, -- is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

Here you have a man explicitly tying the arts of humanity to nature's creations. He's realizing that our lot isn't so separate from trees and flowers and challenges artists, sculptors and architects -- and all human beings, for that matter -- not to challenge the laws of nature but to harness them and work with the flow of life and death.

What seems quaint about Ruskin is the way he creates rules and laws for things like "human life" and "human judgment." I imagine the key phrase is "divinely appointed." Who now advocates for something within human beings that's connected to the infinite?

He was writing in the 19th Century, before Hitler and Stalin and the various tyrannies and wars that proved just how cheap life could be. We are so tied now to individual fates and specific judgments. We are confronted with landfills of evidence of how difficult it is to control human desires, what our lives are filled with and what we leave behind. For Ruskin to argue for craftsmanship and the ability for all workers to exercise creativity and connect our daily lives with nature sounds downright out of touch.

If the pleasure or change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which we have spoken.

This might be my favorite paragraph from the "Gothic" essay. Although he was fighting it, I can't believe Ruskin could foresee the scale to which our culture would embrace "the diseased love of change." I don't think it's just novelty that would make Ruskin wince -- it's the ways in which we've dehumanized our culture in order to create and consume an ever-changing series of new delights.

What's interesting to me is the friction between individuals and collective experience. Change itself has become monotonous from the outside -- just think of how your best-traveled friend's stories can become so boring -- but living in constant change feels exciting and fresh. This is a big topic. Let's return to Ruskin:

Again: the talent of the composer is not in the monotony, but in the changes: he may show feeling and taste by his use of monotony in certain places or degrees; that is to say, by his various employment of it; but it is always in the new arrangement or invention that his intellect is shown, and not in the monotony which relieves it.

So it comes back to the individual's talent for balancing invention and monotony. I take this to mean there is no guidebook -- just individuals making their way, who can reflect and criticize and scheme and praise together. There are no real rules, or no specific rules. It's a constant navigation back and forth. We aren't nature, we are a part of it.

In true mystical fashion, Ruskin sets forth a distant light, tells stories of its brilliance, and tells us to go to it.

It's worth noting that unlike our quiet dignified elders in the living room, Ruskin wrote volumes and volumes and said quite a bit. Despite feeling so passionately about Gothic styles, he was disappointed in even his own architectural constructions. The physical reality of making a building wasn't commensurate with his vision.

It's a beautiful dream, and we can see things leaving tracks to and from his ideas like deer crossing a stream in the snow, but where that river stops and starts we can't hardly say.

There is an orgy of art happening at the Met these days and I encourage everyone to check out the Poussin show (which converted me to playing in the fields with nymphs), the Courbet show (wowsers) and last but not least, Jasper Johns.

There were several surprises for me in the Johns "Gray" show: first, the show is big. I was thinking a small gallery of a handful of paintings. No. It's pretty much a Johns retrospective in black and white, as if you've bought a cheap used copy of a '60s book on Johns -- only they're the real fucking paintings.

The second surprise for me was that I like Johns again.

I used to count him as a living giant, but after the exhaustion of his MoMA retrospective in 1997 and a few sightings of his current work, I'd forgotten how great his early work is. During this "Gray" show, I even came to like pieces that I never cared for, and it may be because I'm reading a book on David Hockney right now and I realize the two share a lot.

Hockney came to art school in the '50s at the height of abstraction's dominance in the art world. He liked to draw, and was attracted to modernism without being an acolyte.

Reading his story, it's easy to see where a young painter could be frustrated with this idea that you have to express yourself purely in abstraction in order to be current and deep.

But if you're young enough, or outside of the art world enough, how could you buy into thinking of abstraction as the only sincere way a painter could work? It's easy to see from the outside that these colors and lines on canvas are a style among many, but still they hold an expressive power. So how does one hold onto that expressive power but do the unthinkable--actually have a recognizable subject? Both Hockney and Johns figured out their own ambitious solutions.

The work that made me a reborn Johns fan in the current "Gray" show is the work called "Drawer." Johns basically takes a canvas and puts the front of a drawer on it, creating the illusion of having a drawer inside the painting. There are the remnants of abstract-expressionism in gray brushwork all over the painting, but you realize immediately that this isn't an abstract work at all. The color and texture are decorative. The subject of the painting is what happens in your mind when you think you can pull a drawer out of a painting--as if behind the canvas, there's a world the art observer doesn't have access to.

All of a sudden, it clicked. Jasper Johns is about surfaces. I don't know why I never thought about his approach, but I think his response to the dominance of abstraction-expressionism is to see it as a physical surface (albeit propped by lots of critical theory and beer).

If modernism did away with illusion and the idea of art mirroring reality, then what gives a work depth? I think Johns' solution was to see the power in suggestivity and the connections between surfaces. Take his work "Tennyson," which is really similar to "Drawer" except for instead of sticking the front of a drawer onto the surface of a gray expressionistic canvas, he writes the word "TENNYSON."

There is no clear reason for him to write that word there. It's about association. It's an evocation, and either it evokes or it doesn't. Could it be a juvenile joke about his gray canvas and Tennyson's "Edward Gray"? Could it be a connection with the poet's mood? The clever, elusive thing about Johns is he gets it both ways: making work that is detached but also expressive by sheer association. (It can also be boring or annoying, but let's leave that aside).

Included in "Gray" is one of my favorite Johns works. "Painting Bitten By a Man" is exactly what the title says: a book-sized canvas, coated with wax, that has had a big chunk bitten out of it. Again, it's Johns playing with the associations of a style. You might think by looking at the canvas that yo uhave direct access to the artist's feeling and emotions. You might think "Clearly, he was frustrated -- he took a bite out of his canvas!" But it could also be a joke -- or just another surface. To me it's hilarious and funny and mysterious, because even if it's a goof I imagine Johns spending time stretching the canvas, laying down the wax, contemplating where to bite, etc. Like the best humorists, Johns comes well prepared.

"Disappearance II" is another typical Johns piece in that it leads to questions about surface and what a painting "really" is. It features a large square-ish canvas, but place on top is another canvas with the four corners folded in, so you get a diamond shape. Looking at the canvas folded in, it's hard not to wonder what's on the surface of the canvas that has been turned and hidden from your view. It's like he's hiding something. But what do you call someone who announces he has a secret?

After the ab-ex house of cards collapsed, Johns' approach became extremely useful as a way of creating meaningful work that doesn't rely on advanced critical theory but uses natural associations and relationships built into people's perceptions. It's neither reactionary or amnesiac. It stokes questions that have no answer, because in the end you realize they're not questions at all. It's like a blind person feeling his way around a room. Feeling surfaces can yield amazing depth.

Joanne Mattera wrote about the show, and includes interview excerpts of Johns, and Two Coats rounds up the reviews.