Kelefeh Sanneh has an article on Will Oldham in The New Yorker, called, appropriately enough, "The Pretender." The editorial slant is that Oldham has to play a role to feel comfortable. He bristles at any suggestions he's calculating and putting on a character, but warmly created the persona of Bonnie "Prince" Billy in order to connect with more people. He avoids his indie rock ghetto, and doesn't want to be thought of as an Americana country/western/blues hillbilly. Fair enough.When I told Jen the name of the article, she asked whether David Berman had written it....
Sometimes I love a show that's messy and sprawling. "Beyond the Canon: Small American Abstraction, 1945-1965" at Robert Miller is one of those shows. The point is to complicate the history of abstraction, to go beyond the Art History 102 roster of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, etc.The space is chock full of all manner of abstraction, creating a real map of what American abstraction looked like during the era. There were some real gems from many artists I hadn't heard of, and the range of abstraction was even greater than I thought. Honestly, there are a lot of paintings that don't work in this show. But it's like looking at old newspapers instead of history books. There's a real virtue in bringing a contemporary eye to a more unfiltered body of work. Below are a few that caught my eye....
Elmer Bischoff, Untitled, 1952 Here's your last chance to see a room full of great jazzy abstractions from Bay Area artist Elmer Bischoff at George Adams gallery. The show closes tomorrow. Though I love his later representional stuff even more, this work from the late '40s and early '50s shines with his rhythm and evocative West Coast color sense. Click here for more info and images at George Adams....
Two citizens of the world, (almost) ready to embark
Tony and Rebecca are beginning their great affair. After quitting their jobs in D.C., putting their house on the market, and moving back to Tennessee, they're embarking on a six-month journey around the world. They will start in India and plan to end in Italy. Godspeed, you crazy enchiladas! I'll be tuning in....
Joanne Mattera has some great pics from the Red Dot Fair in Miami. I was struck by Jorge Fick's work, which is all about color and shapes forming a simple but dynamic space. I love how he uses tone and his figures get a lot of movement. The picture above, called "Two Potatoes," is appropriate for both Christmas and, obviously, St. Patrick's Day. Humor is undervalued in abstract art....
"When I walk into a gallery now, I don't see anything. It's as if the artists spent all their time trying to find ways how not to do anything. Just because you don't do anything, doesn't mean you've said something. And, as Harold Rosenberg once pointed out, just because you don't say something doesn't mean it's true." -Willem de Kooning, 1966...
Zoe Strauss is an American artist. Which is to say she's pragmatic, works too much, and is completely crazy. The Philadelphia photographer talked at FIT on Saturday. She told a crowd of students that she only started taking photos three years ago, didn't go to college or study photography, but has already appeared in the Whitney Biennial and now has a book coming out (called America, in celebration the Robert Frank's The Americans). Until three years ago, she was a babysitter. Strauss is impulsive, tentative, and talks in circles about her work. She said she feels uncomfortable teaching because the students don't work enough, and she has a hard time divorcing herself from personal feelings about the work during critiques. My favorite part of the talk came when Strauss talked about the photo above, and navigated us through her feelings about the composition. The swath of black on the far right drove her "nuts," she said, but she just had to live with it. Similarly, she beat herself up over whether to center the photograph on the vertical line on the wall, or the line on the sidewalk. She couldn't figure it out, and the small difference loomed large...
Walking around Soho, I saw a poster from about 50 feet away and had to do a double-take: Why would a gallery plaster the street with posters of an Alex Katz self-portrait? Once I got closer, I realized the mistake. It's just an ad for Grand Theft Auto IV that happens to feature a character that looks like the artist (and in Katz's flat style). But still. Since this is the fourth installment of the notoriously violent game, maybe they're trying a different approach to keep it fresh. Summering in Maine, cocktail parties, lunches with poets... The kids are going to love it!...
Given the infinite number of possible subjects in the world, it's hard to believe any painter has ever been strapped for an idea of what to paint. But it happens. It's happened to me. Last night, painter Wolf Kahn gave a talk on "Finding Subject Matter," along with a four-point program to get through the problem. Kahn is a total pro. With his shock of white hair and a grandpa sweater, he speaks with the ease and assurance of an artist who knows who he is and who has done this kind of talk over and over again. He is a funny storyteller and an engaging personality. He began his talk by apologizing for repeating anecdotes, but that certain stories are the best illustrations of certain point. He said he tries to keep people from taking his workshops more than once because the facade of clever spontaneity crumbles once you've heard the same story a few times. His four ideas for finding a subject matter were: 1. Explore the visual field. Look around you, and try to paint the things you don't know the name to (his examples were the space between a figure's ear and shoulder, and the...
It's true: Petah Coyne has a Martha Stewart problem. Which is to say she's thoughtful, gracious, interesting to meet -- and emotionally impossible. Her current show, called Vermillion Fog (at Galerie Lelong until 12/13), made me swoon on first seeing it. There's something so engaging in her sprawling sculptural installations of bubbling, waxy flower blobs that pulse with taxidermied birds clawing and brawling....
I picked up Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" from the library a few weeks ago. I've always admired his engagement in the political and social realities around him, although sometimes his work veers into illustration. But some pieces hit me hard. His painting of "The Passion of Sacco and Venzetti" in their coffins haunts me. Shahn believed in the innocence of both Sacco and Venzetti, and painted them compassionately as corpses laying below a triumvirate of academics, bureaucrats and the judge responsible for allowing a travesty of justice. I believe Shahn was wrong about the two Italian men being wrongly accused. I don't think both Sacco and Venzetti were innocent; there is a lot of evidence to indict Sacco and plenty to exonerate Venzetti. As I read more about the case, a strange thing happened. Instead of dismissing Shahn's work, I began to appreciate it even more....
