I began reading "Klee," a biography of the Swiss artist by G. Di San Lazzaro. It was written in Italian in 1957, and at first I enjoyed its eccentricities, or what seemed clearly like writing from another time and place. Just on the first page, Lazzaro talks about Klee's feeling the "lure of the Mediterranean" and the artist's "penetrating eyes are characteristically African." There's something liberating about being able to say whatever you want, even if it doesn't hold up. I was hoping the book would lead to unexpected insights about Klee's work. It didn't. I couldn't even finish it because the writing relied too much on stereotypes and romance.
But early in the book, I learned a little something that made me feel even more of a kinship for Klee. He was a stay-at-home dad and would watch his son while his wife brought home the bacon. (Jennifer has always wanted a t-shirt that says "Mom brings home the bacon. Dad brings home the Francis Bacon.")
Here's an interesting passage:
"In the little flat in Munich," so the artist's son, Felix Klee tells us, "my mother practised her profession every day. She gave music lessons from morning to night and her husband, still the unknown artists, had to see to the chores and look after the baby. The little kitchen was his room; there his pictures and drawings saw the light, there glass was etched, photographs developed, nappies washed and sockes mended . . .
In that same kitchen he made me wonderful toys with great skill--toy trains, a cardboard railway station and a puppet theatre. The heads were clay, the costumes cut and sewn by himself, the scenery pasted and painted. A careful record was kept of the family's income and expenditure, new pictures catalogues, a diary kept in which everything was entered down to my temperature and my progress in learning to speak . . .
In the afternoons, my fathertook me to the outskirts of the town--he, furnished with a folding chair, an easel, a box of colours and a bottle of water; I, with some of my toys. For the summer holidays the whole family left for Berne to stay with my grandparents, or for Beatenberg where a great-aunt kept a hotel."
Perhaps the boy who wanted to be a little girl and wear frilled knickers was being punished by fate. In the Klee's small flat the roles of man and woman were reversed.
Felix Klee's account is so charming and sounds incredibly bucolic. That Lazzaro would even think of this life as punishment is one reason I couldn't finish the book. It's not just from a different time and a different country. It's from a different universe.
Just came across this letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse. It seems like great advice in favor of losing preconceptions and hangups. (I wish I could credit who passed it on to me, but it was through Facebook, which has become too unmanageable and unwieldy. I click a link and read it hours later and then lose all hopes of tracing the source. C'est l'internet). Here's the beginning:
Dear Eva,
It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don't! Learn to say "Fuck You" to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!
Sebastian Smee writes an excellent call for the trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to think again before the continue with their plans for an ultra-modern expansion by Renzo Piano. (This article struck me like a thunderbolt. Too bad the title of it doesn't match Smee's impassioned plea. My subtitle would be better.)
Just as it did in her day, Gardner's palace museum still invites us to turn our back on the driving rationalism of modern life: on standardization, on uniform lighting, on the rush to embrace the new. We are invited to enter through an exterior that is deliberately reserved and opaque, whereupon we find ourselves in the most extraordinary sanctuary - a place of mystery and medievalism, of marvels and eccentricities: a jumble of anachronisms that bizarrely combines aspects of a Venetian palazzo, an enclosed medieval garden, and a monastic cloister.
That is about to change.
I love the old museums that do not look like cafeterias. My favorites have been the Gardner, the Morgan Library, and the Barnes. Are you seeing a pattern? All three of these museums have felt the need to accommodate the rush of visitors and all three have turned to architectural schemes that destroyed the special character that made them, well, special. Two of them are even using the same architect (Piano, who is actually great when he's not making high-end malls for the viewing of art).
I'm hoping the Gardner caretakers can find a different solution.
I'm reading Jed Perl's "Antoine's Alphabet," a book about the French painter Antoine Watteau. Perl makes an alphabetical attempt at putting Watteau at the center of modern Western painting. Every letter of the alphabet has entries that range from informative to descriptive to tangential. Under "F," for example, Perl writes about Fans, Flaubert, Flirtation, Fragments, and Friendship. Some of the entries are just anecdotes from Perl's life that have to do with Watteau's themes; others are stories about people indebted to Watteau or concerned about his influence. And what is Watteau all about? This paragraph struck me as an enticement:
The human mind is artless, elegant, clumsy, penetrating, chaotic, obscure, a hopeless mix of serenity and hysteria, the lofty and the low-down, clarity and murk, and Watteau pulls his drawings and paintings straight out of this messy material, these moment-to-moment shifts in perception, apprehension, and feeling. His paintings suggest a mind that is, like all our minds, at once self-indulgent, unreliable, relentless, lucid, obtuse, unruly. And like the rest of us he allow his thoughts to drift, his moods to shit, his focus to go out of focus. We've all woken up in the morning feeling blue and then, an hour later, unaccountably, felt cheerful. Or vice versa. We know what it means to be confounded by our own emotions. Watteau's working methods, so far as we can see, mingled long periods of meditation and periods of frantic labor. He was willing to fuss over small things and do big things quickly, and by utilizing this erratic approach, he somehow managed to transcribe the vagaries of the human mind onto canvas, giving the painting a psychological texture like nothing else in the history of art. We accept Watteau's opacitites and obscurities becase we know what it is like to find ourselves, in the midst of even the simplest task, thinking about something entirely different.
I just finished reading Guy Davenport's A Balthus Notebook. Lots of instigation in this book, and I thought I'd share one bit, if only because it speaks to my newfound love of cave painting:
Centuries before Plato beauty was a kind of good, and the appreciation of it a pleasure. Beauty has also traditionally been an outward sign of the soul's beauty. Balthus integrates this ancient tradition with Darwinian naturalism (beauty as sexual attraction). Darwin suspected that there was always "something left over" after sexual attractiveness has done its work, and that this something was what we call beauty, and that it may have given rise to art. The grace of line in a Lascaux horse is not the horse, but something that has been abstracted from it.
I finally finished the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail (OCA). This trail follows the path of the old water delivery service between the Croton Aqueduct and New York City. The aqueduct went 29 miles from bucolic natural land, through the suburbs of Westchester County, and ended in the city. The aqueduct is no longer used, but the land it was on has been wisely converted into a long trail that serves as an escape from the hectic congestion of New York. Beginning in the Bronx and going in a fairly straight shot, one can feel many miles away from hte world of concrete, taxis and construction.
Before Iris was born, I walked about 20 miles of the trail. Since then, I haven't had the opportunity to finish the OCA. Last week, however, Iris was in daycare and there was a clear sky and moderate temperatures. I pounced on the opportunity to walk in the woods.
Getting off the commuter train at Scarborough, I picked up the trail and immediately realized I had chosen the best time possible to walk the OCA. The woods were ablaze; leaves were falling and in full fall splendor. I reached for my camera right away, but to my chagrin realized I'd forgotten it. So I decided to make some sketches in the little sketchbook I always carry with me. Every so often, I'd stop and do a quick scratchy sketch of something that caught my eye. But these weren't enough. There was something of my experience of the trail that was missing: COLOR.
I began grabbing leaves from the ground and looking very closely at them. I was amazed at the variation, of course, but also how the variations spoke to a lot of my current artistic concerns.
Off symmetry: Autumn leaves can look like Rorschach tests. Green splots mirror each other on brown leaves, almost perfect mirrors - but not quite. There are slight variations on the symmetry that makes the leaves more dynamic and alive, in process. There is a classical beauty to symmetry, and the variations make them seem more in motion.
Soft and hard: When I would bend down to pick up a particularly interesting leaf, I frequently wouldn't know if I was going to feel something brittle or soft. Leaves on the ground are dying and turning crunchy, but frequently they were soft and wilted. Usually the darkest browns, reds and purples would feel dry and the lightest greens and yellows would be moist. But it's not always the case. Feeling a yellow leaf with dark brown edges is always surprising and intimate. One gets to know where the leaf is in its life.
Two colors: Like an exercise by Joseph Albers, leaves can "fool" your eyes. I picked up an ocher leaf and thought it had blue spots. I looked closely and found the spots to be a different color when isolated, a more neutral green. But these two colors together effect each other in our mind in ways that aren't true. No color lives in isolation.
Edges: My paintings are always exercises in how edges are formed. Do colors bleed into one another, forming a soft boundary, or do they sit next to each other with hard boundaries? This is an untrue question. Look at an impressionist painting and you know why. Those pointillist canvases of little flecks of color are thousands of "hard" color decisions that add up to a soft effect. The idea of an edge truly depends on perspective, and I was surprised at how the microscopic colors of leaves reinforce this idea. Look at the spine of a leaf and you might be surprised to find how the leaf's colors reinforce the hard edges. For instance, a dark brown spine might look dark only because there's a soft border of yellow that bleeds into an equally dark brown on the leaf.
Complements: Thank you, thank you! No, really. Please, I don't deserve all this adulation. Stop. Who told Mother Nature that green and red are complements? And yellow and purple? Is it coincidence that color theory, which says complements make each other more intense, complements the color of leaves when they're at their most brilliant?
Line: Leaves can have such an astounding color rhythm. But it probably shouldn't have surprised me how much of the color is determined by the structure. One can look at a leaf like a painting and see the Renaissance war between desegno and colore. It all comes back to Venice and Florence! The Italian masters were forever debating what makes a painting special -- the way it's designed and laid out or its use of color? Thankfully, leaves provide a very clear answer: these ideas are inseparable. The most beautifully colored leaves come from a relationship with the way the veins unfold.
I could go on, but writing all of this makes me want to paint. Below is a painting I did after coming back from the trail, and the quick sketches I made in lieu of a picture machine. It's good to get out of the city once in a while.
I just finished Ross Feld's wonderful book "Guston in Time." Feld belongs to that line of poets like Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara that were deeply involved in visual art. He brings an incredible eye and descriptive power to Philip Guston's work and also a great asset: he was one of Guston's closest friends in the later years.
This book lays open the minds of two artists struggling to get at something in their work and arguing over what it means to create. The book is quite short, and much of it consists of letters between Guston and Feld. Guston had given up abstract painting and was considered a traitor by many in the art world. He said he could no longer spend his life just measuring whether a dab of red would suffice on the picture plane. Abstraction and "pure" picture-making held no more allure for him. He had to paint recognizable forms and figures.
Guston tells Feld about teaching at Boston University and watching a student trying to paint a mural with a clock in it. The student fussed over how to paint the clock, working a long time and re-working it over and over. In the end, says Guston, he went over to the mural and grabbed the student's brush. "You want a clock? Here's a clock!" he said, and painted in a crude clock.
I was quite taken by the following paragraph written by Guston. The underlining is all by the artist. At issue is why paint one thing over another. Why fuss over how to paint a particular form? Why paint at all? Guston says this:
Ross--what is creating--this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it--throw off the dross--make the architecture and content impossible to take apart--not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet, working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unmanageable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces, transforms the meaning. I know I'm going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa [Guston's wife], in the next room, just said "Did I hear a big sigh?")
Well--perhaps one should remain satisfied just to stay on the treadmill--to remain on it--maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My God! A lifetime spent--to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself--to come in the studio next day and feel--"I did that?" Is this me--To catch oneself off-guard?
"You want a clock? Here's a clock!" Oh, if it were only as direct and simple as that!
While in the library a couple weeks ago, I came across Gregory Curtis's book "The Cave Painters." It's a slim volume that is an excellent introduction to the art produced in the caves of western Europe from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. By the time I finished it, my mind was awash in ideas about my own painting and what it means to put paint to a surface. The strangest thing about the study of cave painting is that it's almost a forensic science. Anthropologists gather evidence, chart history, where things appear and how often. But there's an elephant in the room: why?
Why did people go to the caves to produce art? No one knows. And there is a stigma on the people who seriously study cave painting to actually create coherent theories as to why. The dominant thinking now is that we'll never understand why these paintings were created. I sympathize with this point of view. There's just not a lot of evidence. My regret is that I can't listen in to the lunchtime conversations of the people who study this stuff. There have to be interesting and provocative ideas out there that will never be published, just talked about.
The most fascinating thing to me is the evidence around how sophisticated the cave painters were. When you think about someone 30,000 years ago painting an animal the size of a Jackson Pollock painting 15 feet off the ground, it gets bewildering. They had to build scaffolding. There are still rope impressions from where the painters would jam would into rock crevasses. They had to pull in pigment. They had to create brushes. They had no light, and so needed illumination. And how did they learn to draw like that? A lot of recent research has proven the most impressive compositions weren't haphazard. They were planned and painted in to create the stunning overall effect we still get today. It's not an accident that we feel things upon seeing these paintings.
Towards the end of the book, after he narrates his visits to several caves, Curtis explains why anthropologists still copy art from the caves, even though photographic technology has never been better. It made me think of all my art classes where I had to copy work from other artists and all my surprise discoveries whenever I did it:
The art needs to be copied as well [as be inventoried]. Making copies is a long, often tedious process. In that way it is very much like an archaeological dig. And, like a dig, it is absolutely essential because, strange as it sounds, it is impossible to see the art merely by looking at the wall. The intense concentration copying requires reveals signs and images that were invisible before. Michel Lorblanchet, a distinguished prehistorian with considerable artistic talent, made copies in a cave named Pergouset. He had visited the cave more than twenty times, often with colleagues, and thought he knew it well. But when he began to make his copies, he discovered numerous animals and signs that hadn't been seen before, including a vulva some eighteen inches across that, once seen, becomes the first thing anyone notices on the wall. Lorblanchet worked in the cave for three years making copies. His copies show twelve horses, three reindeer, three mountain goats, one stag, a bison, an auroch, four undetermined animals, sixteen signs, the vulva mentioned above, and twelve undetermined traces. Years earlier, when Leroi-Gourhan visited the cave, he saw only an isolated mountain goat, a horse, and a bison. What Lorblanchet was able to see compared to what Leroi-Gourhan saw is the difference between copying and merely looking.
Below are a couple renderings by Henri Breuil, a new hero of mine. While he was working, the dominant theory about dating work from the caves was that there was a linear progression of art history. According to anthropologists at the time, so-called "primitive" work had to be done before more sophisticated work, since human beings get more and more cultured over time. Breuil, a religious man who took on the dominant Marxist-atheist anthropologist at the time, thought that life doesn't progress so cleanly. That certain people would choose a cruder, more raw style of painting. Over time, Breuil was vindicated and proven correct.
I've included just these images because I was charmed by them.
Today was a memorial service for painter and teacher Carl Plansky. I was enlisted to speak as one of his students. I have so many fond memories of Carl and felt honored to be asked, even though I felt inadequate to the task. He was a big presence in my time at the Studio School last year, and his influence will always be felt in my painting. He's just one of those strong voices on my shoulder. The best part of the service was seeing the people from Carl's life and getting an even richer sense of the man. Sadly, I had to leave after the service because Iris was not being a happy baby.
For my birthday last January, Jennifer decided to buy me a few tubes of really nice oil paint that she knew I would never buy myself. She knew I love Williamsburg paint and that I felt a connection with Carl. Sneaking on the internet, she found Carl's e-mail address and e-mailed him about wanting to get me a nice gift of colors. She gave him a budget, and Carl generously gave a gift of much more paint than she asked for. He sent me a small box with the paint (see above), explained that he carefully chose colors based on my interest in glazing, and in big letters wrote the word "ENJOY!"
That word is the first thing I think of now when I think of Carl. He led a big life and was in love with the things around him. That word seems like good advice.
You can read the first piece I wrote after his death here, and what I read today at the service is below. I don't know if Carl would've basked in all my remembrance or thought it too indulgent. But he was a special man and a very influential teacher to me, and the more I write the more I remember. I guess it's a way for me not to let go too quickly.
I knew Carl during the last year as a student at the Studio School. I was humbled to be asked to speak since I didn't know Carl for as long or as well as many of you, but I did get to know him very well as a teacher and mentor.
Perhaps it's the mark of a good teacher that they make their students feel special. Carl certainly did that. I've asked other students in the past few days about their memories of Carl, and I think Georgia Marantos summed it up well: He made us all feel special, because he was always himself with us, and he was a special person.
He was funny. He was smart. He had a big heart. And sometimes he could be a big pain in the butt.
Carl would come into my studio and actually take a long time to look at my work. I mean really look at it. He would pace back and forth, looking at my latest paintings, and I would hold my breath because I never knew what he was going to say.
The first time I met him, I recognized his accent and we bonded over being from Baltimore. Things were going well. We were laughing and bonding. Then he pointed at my paintings and told me "You have a problem. A big problem. You don't know how to use color."
On that first day, it set a pattern for my encounters with Carl for the rest of the school year. Just as we were laughing or joking, he would swoop in and critique in my work.
I was crushed. This was fundamental. Here was a man whose name was synonymous with color telling me I don't know what I'm doing. What was I supposed to do?
Carl eased me down. He said not to worry and that he suspected I am a "secret colorist." A secret colorist! I felt honored. But I'm still not sure what this means, other than my palette contained covert, unseen colors that should have been using instead of the ones I actually used.
But I chose to feel good about it because Carl inspired a kind of good-natured faith. I felt like I had a hidden reservoir that was untapped. Carl got excited about something in my work, and that got me excited, too.
Rebounding from my color problem, I always asked him questions about color, trying to intellectualize it, and he knew more than anyone on that subject. But in the end, his advice was to "pick a theory, any theory, and go with it." It wasn't an intellectual subject for Carl, even though he knew everything about it. "Go with warm against cool," he said. Just do it. It's just a matter of commitment.
Later on in the school year, Carl saw some of my paintings and said, "These look great! It's like you've never had any academic training!" I laughed and paraphrased him, saying "Oh, it's like you have no idea what you're doing at all!" He laughed, too, but then got serious.
"No," he said, "it's like you've actually felt out the colors for yourself. You feel these colors, and it's not just academic. It's really working." From Carl, this was high praise. I'd brought life into my work. My decisions had come with experience and feeling. This was the morality of art that Carl passed on to students: life and art cannot be separate. Personal commitment and experience matter. As a student, hearing this from Carl was a breath of fresh air.
Carl Plansky took a moral stand about what it means to make art, and I think that was one reason he dismissed so much of the art world. He looked at the work in Chelsea and so much of it just didn't matter.
He always told me to "trust my mark." It wasn't some kind of hokey idea of self-confidence. It was a deep understanding he had about the limitations of art and the limitations of life and what made them both so important. Their highest values are the same: honesty, bravery, and passion. They matter.
Carl Plansky was honest, brave and passionate, and I can't say enough about how much I will miss the man. But I am lucky because his voice - direct, funny, thick, and wise - will always be with me in the studio.
Former Artforum editor Joseph Masheck and MoMA's John Elderfield have a good conversation about Piet Mondrian and his retrospective in 1996 in the video from Charlie Rose below. It's clear Rose doesn't know much about Mondrian, but his combative and aggressive questioning eventually gets at something interesting.
And speaking of something interesting (and Joseph Masheck), I came across this quote by Thomas Nozkowski at artist Ashlynn Browning's site:
I think any artist reaches a point at which their motor skills have developed. Once their brain/hand coordination's gotten to a certain level, they finally know how to do their own paintings. And it's a terrible moment. A terrible, terrible thing. Before that, it's all adventure. I'm gonna crash and burn or I'm gonna make it happen. Suddenly, you can make it happen, and that's scary. It's really the worst position, I think, for an artist to be in, and you have to find a way around it. Years ago, Joe Masheck and I were talking about Renoir's Society of Irregularists, the fight against what Renoir called false perfection. He said something like, "I'm going to start painting with my left hand and mess it up on purpose." And fifteen, twenty years ago, Joe and I were saying, "This is really lame, what a rotten idea." Now I find myself getting older, and I think: Oh, my God, now I know why he was saying this. He was asking: How do you keep up the energy that you had when you were on a tightrope? How do you make a new tightrope for yourself?
Similarly, John Elderfield quotes Mondrian in the video: "I'm not interested in making paintings. I'm interested in finding things out."
(The Mondrian discussion in the video starts around 39:45)
I'm slowly making my way with acrylics. It was hard to give up oils, which I know I'll go back to, but having my studio in my apartment means not being able to use all the lovely toxic chemicals that I feel the need to use with oils. So I'm diving into the world of plastics.
The pieces below are all 9" x 12". A funny thing has happened where I've begun starting pieces with particular feelings, ideas and colors in mind. And then I put them down and the painting speaks to me about what it needs. Because my ideas and feelings are different, each piece calls for something different to be completed. I used to worry about cohesiveness. Now I just think that's silly. Who lives their life worrying whether one day will fit the next?
I published a piece on these two artists over the Examiner. I've been in the studio a lot lately, working with acrylic paint in a serious, sustained way. I've always avoided it because the colors don't come naturally to me. I can be blown away by other people's acrylic color, but mine always has seemed artificial and harsh. Somehow I've gotten over that hump (and will post pics soon). In any case, I've been thinking a lot about how artists' approach liquidity.
After disappearing into the abyss of Independent Film Week for a documentary about a gold-mining town in Colombia that I'm working on, I'm finally back in groove of making art, thinking about art, and writing about art. Yesterday I posted my latest piece for the Examiner: an interview with Matt Held, who has received notoriety for having the idea to paint portraits of people based on their Facebook profile photo. Since much of the art world is about ideas but fails to find a suitable visual form, I was skeptical about seeing Matt's show at Denise Bibro. But after seeing the paintings, I was a true believer. The man can paint, and the work looks fantastic.
The experience added to my continuing problem with the role of ideas, which are allied with words, to art, which is allied with the visual/spatial sense. It's an age-old dilemma of how much of our experience comes through language, and how much transcends it. On the one extreme would be postmodern structuralists like Derrida who say our experience is completely formed by language. On the other extreme would be anthropologists and biologists who say language is simply performing a biological function of soothing and communicating desire.
I write in order to understand, but also in order to make myself look harder. Sometimes the writing seems incidental at the end of it. What matters is the process of having to look at all the elements of art and figure out what compels me to keep looking. I'm reading Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and came across a nice passage that seems to get at what I'm struggling with:
People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
Dreiser was a newspaper reporter as well as a novelist. Because of my time as a journalist, I developed habits of observing and letting facts speak for themselves. Capturing the subject is the most important thing, and your opinions as a journalist are secondary. Above all, this takes great empathy.
Dreiser, who I was expecting to be a horrible writer, is actually quite good. His characters are made by circumstance, but have certain points of decision where they can change their lives. At one point in the book, a man who has stolen a great deal of money laments that the newspaper accounts of his robbery accuse him but do not understand him. A moment's decision isn't just a moment's decision, but the result of a long chain of circumstances and decisions.
All of this is to say that life is complicated. To judge based solely on ideas or words is to ignore the incredible human component that's been built up behind an idea. And when an idea works in the flesh -- as does Matt Held's show -- then the debate is done (for the moment).
After I finished my latest review at the Examiner, a piece on his drawing show at Peter Blum, I did a Google News search to see if it popped up. It did, but I also found this other article about the practice of artists trading work to each other. As a poor artist and father, this quote from artist Alessandro Raho made me laugh:
I suppose now that we've got our son, Roman, we're aware that pieces have a certain value, though that isn't why we acquired them. It's an area we know about, so why not take advantage of that? The Alex Katz I got was definitely a good opportunity. I suppose it shouldn't be in the dining room -- it's only a matter of time before Roman throws food at it.
Over at the LA Times, art critic Christopher Knight has fired a salvo in favor of academic sanity in the war over an archive that may have been Frida Kahlo's.
A collection of some 1,200 items, which contains everything from small paintings to recipes, is hotly contested. Knight sums up the controversy in a blog post:
More than a dozen prominent people have claimed the archive is a fake, even though none of them has seen it.
Frida Kahlo 007a Like I said, bizarre. The archive's owners, Leticia Fernandez and Carlos Noyola, haven't even made a definitive claim that the 1,200-piece archive did in fact belong to Kahlo -- although their initial research certainly leads them in that direction. That's why they acquired it in 2004.
Several notable artists who lived and worked with Kahlo and her husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera, have examined it. Arturo Bustos, Arturo Estrada and Rina Lazo are convinced of its authenticity, and they have attested as much.
The question for Knight, and the art world generally, is why a knee-jerk barricading of authenticity happens whenever new material comes to light. The choice isn't between immediately accepting or not accepting. The imperative is to investigate and do what artists and scholars should do: look.
I was not expecting to find what I did when I went to see Roxy Paine's "Maelstrom" installation at the Met. You can read my piece on it over at the Examiner.
I was really surprised by the survey of Jack Tworkov's work at UBS Gallery and I just had to write about it. Tworkov is almost more like a European artist than an American one. His focus is on intellectual engagement as much as egoistic triumph. It's rare for painters here to write and think about art as eloquently as they create it, but Tworkov certainly shines as an exception that proves the rule. This show is a must-see.
Catherine Kehoe has surveyed contemporary painters about what colors are in their palettes, as well as how they're arranged and what brushes and mediums are used. Ever wonder what colors Paul Cezanne used? How about Christopher Chippendale, Susanna Coffey, Lois Dodd, John Dubrow, Emily Eveleth, Janet Fish, Alex Kanevsky, Catherine Kehoe, David Kelley, Ken Kewley, Dik F. Liu, Nancy McCarthy, George Nick, Richard Raiselis, and Hal Reddicliffe?
There's a lot of provocative information here. Who knew so many people loved Winsor Newton?
I've put up my latest review at Examiner.com: a look at Carol Bove's "Plants & Mammals" show at the Horticultural Society of New York. I'm usually a fan of luscious materials and sensual, highly-worked surfaces, which Bove flirts with but never in an overt or focused way. She's doing something special and compelling, and it will keep your brain rolling around issues of surface.
I've got a new gig writing art pieces for Examiner.com. Even though it literally pays in pennies, I'm hoping it will be a good way for me to focus my thinking about art and be more active in seeking out new shows I wouldn't ordinarily see.
My first review is of PLOT/09 at Governors Island. Read it and favorite me and I might be able to start leaving change for tips at the coffee shop.
Roger White and Dushko Petrovich, co-authors of the new pamphlet "I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette" appeared on the Brian Lehrer show on WYNC to talk about the dos and don'ts of art world behavior. Listen to the whole interview embedded below. This is good anthropology of communal behavior in a place where honesty is seldom prized but importance is always sought-after.
The best part of the interview is when a listener asks what his response should've been after a friend shit onto a piece of paper at an art opening and then afterwards asked "What did you think?"
Jennifer came across this passage in Peter J. Conradi's biography of English author and philosopher Iris Murdoch that reminded me of Matisse's notorious comparison between art and a comfortable armchair. In a dialogue by Murdoch, Plato and Socrates argue about the meaning of art. Plato says art is an evasion, that it prevents people from confronting the gods. Socrates answers:
You say art consoles us and prevents us from taking the final step ... It may be that human beings can only achieve second best, that second best is our best ... Homer is imperfect. Science is imperfect ... our truth must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best, that all our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn't mean there is no difference between the good and the bad in what we achieve. And it doesn't mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest truthful spirit. This is our truth ...
It may even be that ... good art tells us more truth about our lives and our world than any other kind of thinking or speculation -- it certainly speaks to more people. And perhaps the language of art is the most universal and enduring kind of human thought ... We are all artists, we are all story-tellers ... And we should thank the gods for great artists who draw away the veil of anxiety and selfishness and show us, even for a moment, another world, a real world, and tell us a little bit of truth. And we should not be too hard on ourselves for being comforted.
Another reason why later Cezanne is better than early
I read this passage from Annie's Dillard's Living By Fiction , her exploration of what makes writing meaningful, and thought it could be applied to painting just as well:
We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work's integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures towards stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama--suicide, rape, murder, incest--or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.
Here's a funny video of Paul McCarthy lampooning Willem De Kooning. McCarthy, of course, is an internationally famous artist whose work is closer to "South Park" and "Pee Wee's Playhouse" than De Kooning. His work is full of one-liner antics and the chaos of creative destruction. McCarthy gained notoriety outside the artworld for making an inflatable dog poop the size of a house in Switzerland. The wind caught the poo, flying it several hundred yards into power lines and a children's home.
I stumbled across a hilarious interview between Allen Ginsberg and conservative columnist John Lofton from 1990. Lofton begins the interview aggressively asking if Ginsberg is crazy. Ginsberg talks about seeing a shrink and Lofton is mystified why the poet doesn't know his psychiatrist's religious beliefs.
GINSBERG: I know some, through body language and the response to the
immediate situation in front of me, which is what I am really
interested in, rather than, say, this conversation. I'm dealing with
you in terms of how you display yourself here, not the history of your
thoughts. I'm trying to deal with the evidence or manifestation of how
you present yourself here--your harshness, aggression, and insistency
and--
LOFTON: Why not call it my perseverance? Isn't that a nicer word? Or guts? Or tenacity?
GINSBERG: I would say there is a little element of S&M in your approach. Power.
LOFTON: No. I would say this is more like the kind of sex you like.
GINSBERG: And I would say this is the kind of power relationship you like, judging from your behavior.
LOFTON: Well, that's certainly what S&M is all about--power..
GINSBERG: And you seem to like that don't you? Have your sexual fantasies ever involved that kind of power relationship?
LOFTON: No, not to my knowledge, I'm a Christian. So I don't fantasize..
GINSBERG: Do you ever have sexual fantasies?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: None at all?
LOFTON: No, I said I am a Christian.
GINSBERG: You've never had any sexual fantasies!
LOFTON: Before I was a Christian, I had them, absolutely.
GINSBERG: And since you're a Christian you don't?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: And when you had them, did they involve any dominance/submission fantasies!
LOFTON: Mine were pretty orthodox heterosexual kinds of fantasies. But
there's no doubt they were bad. And I am so glad that Jesus Christ
delivered me from them.
GINSBERG: You have no erotic dreams now, at all, that you remember!
LOFTON: None that don't feature my wife, no.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
LOFTON: It's an amazing thing what Jesus can do for a person.
GINSBERG: Uh-huh.
The conversation turns towards Ginsberg's affection for young boys, which Lofton calls rotten and sinful.
GINSBERG: I should say my sexual preference is not just for boys, but also for middle-aged men, straight men, and women. I've occasionally had fantasies about making out with trucks as well as beasts. And maybe I'll be making out with you, before it's all over. [laughs]
LOFTON: Well. maybe I could drive that truck while you make out with it, perhaps an eighteen wheeler, with the pedal to the metal.
GINSBERG: Now there's your fantasy. [laughs]
LOFTON: Excuse me. but you raised the idea of having sex with a truck.
GINSBERG: You extended it.
LOFTON: I'm just trying to accommodate you. I even offered to drive the truck. And you attacked me. But to hell with you. I won't drive the truck. Get your own truck.
The conversation moves to the nature of the mind. Lofton doesn't believe Ginsberg has any qualification to talk about "the mind" when his experience is only with his own mind (and to Lofton, Ginsberg's mind is sinful and deranged).
GINSBERG: I'm observing my own mind and consciousness and reporting on that and trying to be candid. Walt Whitman, who was a very great poet and, incidentally, gay, said he thought that for poets and orators of the future the great quality would be candor, frankness, truthfulness.
LOFTON: Well, Walt Whitman suffered from, if I may say so, what might be called terminal candor--not unlike yourself.
GINSBERG: You don't like Whitman?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: Have you read Whitman?
LOFTON: Some.
GINSBERG. Do you remember the name of the poem you read?
LOFTON: Yes, one that says something like: "So I make mistakes. I contradict myself. So what? I contain all things," This is absurd. Talk about arrogance.
GINSBERG: Dig this.
LOFTON: I'm diggin' it.
GINSBERG: He says: "Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes," Do you know what he meant by that?
LOFTON: Probably nothing good. And I doubt if he knew what he meant.
GINSBERG: Yeah, he did. I know what he meant.
LOFTON: How do you know what he meant?
GINSBERG: [laughs] Because I am large. I contain multitudes.
LOFTON. But you might contradict yourself.
GINSBERG: Yes. And I certainly will contradict myself.
LOFTON: This will be one of your multitudes the ability to contradict yourself.
GINSBERG: That's what Whitman is saying.
LOFTON: It's gibberish.
GINSBERG: That our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about negative capability. He said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind without an irritable reaching out after fact and reason. Meaning that that part of the mind which judges, and irritably insists on either black or white, is only a small part of the mind. The larger mind observes the contradiction, and contains those contradictions. The mind that notices that it contradicts itself is bigger than the smaller mind that is taking one side or the other.
LOFTON: You speak very confidently about this. Where do you get your ideas about what the mind is?
GINSBERG: By direct observation through meditation practice.
LOFTON: But at most this would tell you only about your mind, wouldn't it? You were making statements about the mind.
GINSBERG: I should say I noticed this about my mind and John Keats noticed it about his mind. Sure, you might want to check our which side is right but when you get irritable about it and insist on one or the other, black or white, it's likely you'll eliminate some information from both sides.
LOFTON: Is nothing black-and-white?
GINSBERG: Nothing is completely black-and-white. Nothing.
Ginsberg's point dovetails nicely with a recent article about how babies see the world. For a long time, we've thought of newborns as being blank slates that get filled up by experience.
Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they've revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.
The article goes on to talk about how artists' and musicians' minds physically work more like children's, keeping an openness to life without preconceptions. It even compares a baby's mind to the Zen idea of beginner's mind, which is something Ginsburg was very interested in.
And just to add more to the mix, here's Kool Keith's crazysexy ode to Mack trucks:
They say the only part of the economy that does well during recession is education. So now that I'm jobless, I'm looking forward to the opening of the University of Trash at SculptureCenter this Sunday.
The University of Trash is an experiment in alternative architecture, urbanism, and pedagogy taking place in SculptureCenter's main space. Drawing from utopian ideals and radical urban projects undertaken since the 1960s, the artists will create an installation that functions as a temporary, makeshift University - hosting courses, lectures, presentations, and workshops. A Free Skool program will operate within the University, offering the public the opportunity to propose their own courses - open and free for all sign up and attend throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Working collaboratively with students, local organizations, activists, and academics, the artists have been gathering and researching material related to activities of the 1960s countercultural Appropriate Technology movement, experimental pedagogy, adventure playgrounds, Non-plan, emergency and low-impact design, the vernacular of informal housing, and historical sites of activism.
Louise Fishman uses thick brushes to set down bold abstract marks on big canvases. Her work strikes me as modest but adventurous, like someone who sets out walking from their home and winds up at Tierra del Fuego. She accumulates honest, limited brushstrokes in a way that's deliberative but fierce. Her titles are emotional: "Fugitive," "Swarm of Dreams," "A Certain Marvelous Thing."
Her current show at Cheim and Read is a must-see. She uses a lot of strong vertical and horizontal marks, usually modest in length and ambition, but with incredibly bold, clear colors that seem to vibrate and create a deep space.
This canvas is like an impenetrable thicket of blues and blacks, forming a kind of basket to project your thoughts and feelings. These photos don't do the work any kind of justice. Sorry Louise -- but these should inspire you to head to C&R.
I have a bad habit of defending the indefensible. So let's get this out of the way: Lisa Yuskavage doesn't need defending, especially from me, for the following reasons.
I don't especially like her work
For better or worse, her place in the history of painting over the past 15 years is pretty solid
She will continue to collect incredible sums of money for her painting
But in a recent article by Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic calls her work dated and welcomes a new guard into the current mess of the art world. Reviewing her last show, Saltz says it feels "stuck in another time."
Other critics, like David Cohen, focus on the abstract, painterly qualities in Yuskavage's latest work. I think Saltz gets it absolutely right when he catalogs her influences and what the work looks like.
Yuskavage's beanpoles, voluptuaries, and ugly ducklings make it clear that her work is less connected to classical art than to calendar illustration, cheesecake, dirty playing cards, Vargas, and Thomas Kinkade. These aren't meant as insults. Yuskavage's influences also include Hallmark greeting cards, Russ Meyer, the Hudson River School, Maxfield Parrish, seventies Penthouse, Impressionism, third-string Italian masters, and the kind of naturalist kitsch the Nazis liked. This mix is kinkier and more interesting than any discourse about technique and critique.
All these critics seem to miss something. There is a mysterious x factor behind the most interesting paintings because they come by necessity.
Yuskavage always looks like she's on top of her game. Looking at her paintings, one thinks she can technically do anything she wants, which makes her work seem more like a decision than a necessity.
So, seeing work so connected to cheesecake, it seems like a marketing gag. Her work seems like a goof on prurient interest. She's a good painter choosing to work with inflammatory, attention-grabbing images.
That might be the case, I don't know. But I was convinced upon hearing her speak (read my report here) that there's something else happening in these images.
Yuskavage recalled a deep crisis in her painting when, after graduating from Yale, she just couldn't paint. She looked at her work, which showed a deft handling of paint, lights and darks, color, etc., and thought that is sucked. She had no connection to what she was painting, and stopped working for about a year.
Then the bouncy breasts came in.
Yuskavage started painting these ridiculous icons of the uber-feminine. They were cartoons, really, but she felt like she had to paint them.
"I need to do these paintings to breathe," she said, "I know what it's like to make paintings I hated and I almost died."
This is something critics will not understand, but it's something artists know too well. You get to a point where you're deeply involved in a particular imagery and it won't let you go. Is it deep? Is it shallow? It doesn't matter. You have to do it.
That's the most frightening, courageous and stupid thing of all: that your work could mean nothing, and you still have to do it. Because it's yours, but it's also not yours. Something beyond your control compels you.
Abstract painters have it easy in this respect: their imagery is more difficult to pin down. What happens when the deepest recesses of your imagination holds cheesy characters out of '70s Penthouse magazines? Yuskavage takes us there.
One can talk about the meaning of her paintings. They've certainly generated a lot of discussion about the male gaze, feminine experience, etc. But above all, the meanings must be personal. I could talk about how Yuskavage, a middle-aged woman who I believe doesn't have kids, painted a lot of elusive children in her latest show (one was playing in a graveyard). That's personal, but obvious and programmatic. Subject matter and imagery might be our connection to things outside of ourselves, but there's something happening even deeper than that.
None of this is to say she's making great paintings. But I feel the need to point out there's a difference in critical and artistic necessity. The critics will always observe and try to shape historical movements and classifications. The best artists are up to something else, and the best thing I can say about Yuskavage is that she's more of an artist than a critic, no matter her marketing acumen.
On my last birthday, people asked how old I am. I confessed to being 34 years old, and expressed relief that I've made it past Jesus's age. I thought it was a stupid joke, but people laughed. They would laugh to the point that I had to keep saying the joke. All day I was telling a joke I didn't believe fully in because it got a positive reaction. It was better than just telling the truth, plainly. Now I know how Bob Saget feels on stage, and now you know a little bit about what it's like seeing the New Museum's current show, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus."
The premise of the show is that it's a global review of artists who are under the age of 33. There's a lot of provocative, interesting work in this show, and it's varied enough that most visitors will find something they connect with.
Not surprisingly, artists raised in the internet era like working in different media and are willing to create an overload of material. It's not about crafting objects as much as it's about the rapid churn of creativity. That idea, which has been around for a long time, is especially timely when there's so much information (including art) out there. The only way to rise to the top is by doing more, bigger, faster.
So, for instance, we are greeted on the fourth floor by Josh Smith's wall of panel paintings of varying individual interest. None of them may hold your interest long, but there are a lot of them to look at.
Josh Smith, Untitled, 2008
Once an artist abandons the idea of specific, personal connection between the work and the viewer, it leads to strange places. There is a broadness to a lot of the work in the New Museum show, which becomes both a strength and a weakness.
Cyprian Gaillard's video of fight clubs sparring in the streets of projects in Belgrade is set to a soundtrack by Koudlam and becomes exciting to watch, if only because it features large crowds of men beating the shit out of each other. The wall text makes note that Gaillard shot this footage illegally, as if Gaillard were putting himself in danger. And that may be true, to some extent, but make no mistake: this footage is shot from at least 100 feet away from the fighting, from an elevated platform. The video is only cut when Gaillard changes locations.
Gaillard's film becomes a Gen-Y equivalent of anthropological classic "The Ax Fight," which is an ethnographic analysis of what happened during a Yanomami fight in Venezuela. Unlike that film, however, Gaillard provides very little context and doesn't seek to analyze. Instead, he provides an electronic soundtrack. There is a sense that this sort of thing happens out of boredom and frustration in the projects. The world is imperfect, so why try to figure out details?
Here's an excerpt of the video, but is not exactly what's shown at the New Museum:
One of my favorite pieces in the show was Faye Driscoll's video called "Loneliness." Driscoll had a friend take photos of her dancing around her apartment, wrapped in a green tablecloth. Then she edited the photos to music by Dynasty Handbag. The small screen, tucked in a hallway, is intimate and personal and strikes at the core of what a lot of art is about -- rejoicing in life, and staving off the demons of time.
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski's paintings impressed me as strong combinations of abstraction and figuration. Like other work in the show, the specific is subsumed by the general. In a series of portrait-like paintings, what becomes important is the gestalt of a head and not the details. This is a kind of primal reading of reality, where flesh is the byproduct of a deeper force. It comes to fruition in a painting he does of a great battle scene under a kitchen table, where rows of figures in uniform become expressions of something greater.
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006
This idea of something greater makes the work in this show less chancey but also less strong. The idea of interconnectedness is taken for a given. Commitment is rare, because nothing is taken in isolation. If one thing leads to another, why stay with one thing?
Unfortunately, this habit of mind leads to a watering down of what could have been the best work.
Ryan Trecartin is one of the finest video artists working today. And by fine, I mean he's so foyn. His past work overflows with creativity and is jam-packed with weird referential fragments. Trecartin and his friends create elaborate environments and he edits to overstuff his video into a manic hyperreality. Any one moment in his video leads to a dizzying array of references and associations. For instance, in one moment he's dressed in white drag, stroking his hair while snowflakes fall. It's strange and alarming, but one can't help but think of Snow White, Mariah Carey videos, or any number of images.
It becomes a bit like W.B. Yeats's philosophy of poetry -- to use broad, symbolic images to connect with deep, internal human associations. Trecartin's references aren't always deep, but there's an unstoppable, restless searching to them that's instantly endearing.
In his installation at the New Museum, however, he's taken over two rooms and installed broken pottery, wacky furniture, headsets, etc. It's like Trecartin's video environments have spilled into real life. And guess what? I couldn't pay as much attention to the video. The video ceases to be a metaphor and becomes real life. And if Trecartin's sets become real life, then it's just more stuff in the world, too distracting and confusing to be metaphorical or symbolic.
I kept coming back to an important question while strolling through the museum: Is art special? What makes the art experience different than entertainment? We can have personal experiences watching TV or surfing the Web. Does it matter that this work is "art" and not just on YouTube? Can art be on YouTube? Clearly, for this generation where different platforms are just different ways to experience the same thing, the answer is yes.
But I'd like to get back to the title of the show. Not enough people have commented on it.
Why didn't they call it "Younger than John Belushi" or "Younger than Chris Farley"? Both of these men died at 33. And why 33? Is there actually a religious component to the work that demands Jesus actually be a reference? Outwardly, of course not.
But the reference to Jesus is appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, in a show that's about global art practice by Generation Y, irony is front and center. My guess is most of the artists on display aren't religious at all; what they share in common is the overload of imagery and symbols created by lives submerged in mass media and the internet. Jesus becomes another reference. And in a world of infinite connectivity and endless references, the stronger the better.
The other aspect to this name is the idea of salvation. With the idea of avant-gardism thoroughly discredited -- artists are in no way paving the way to an ideal future which non-artists will follow, which was a subtext to the Gaillard video -- there is a lingering question of what art is for. Of course, I'm not talking about the kind of art that has always been with us since the cave paintings. I'm talking about the kind of art that sophisticated people pay money to go see in hopes of ... what, exactly?
It's not salvation, but it's a kind of eternal cool. In a thoroughly materialist society (in both the Marxist and the shopping sense), there is a premium placed on the experience of youth.
In a pre-youth culture era -- that of the existentialists comes to mind -- the feeling of incompleteness people felt was connected to a loss of faith. Now, post-Beatles, post-hippie, most adults have gone through the furies of youth and graduated to a similar feeling of incompleteness.
There is no Jesus or loss of God to blame. So curators and collectors go to the fountain of youth for an answer. And let me tell you, friends: there are no answers there, either.
From his essay "What Abstract Art Means to Me," 1951:
Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need.
The need is for felt experience--intense, immediate, direct, subltle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.
Everything that might dilute the experience is stripped away. The origin of abstraction in art is that of any mode of thought. Abstract art is a true mysticism--I dislike the word--or rather a series of mysticisms that grew up in the historical circumstance that all mysticisms do, from a primary sense of guly, an abyss, a void between one's lonely self and the world. Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel. Its abstraction is its emphasis.
One wonders what Motherwell would say about "funky abstraction," or someone like Mary Heilmann, or even Al Held.
Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Peter Saul's world. He's an artist drawn to the shocking and outrageous. He twirls everyday forms around his finger like a wedding ring; he's married to the wild explosion of surplus and junk in American life.
A stellar show of his early work is on view at George Adams Gallery in Chelsea (through April 11). Saul's later work becomes more dayglo and provocative as it gets more character-based.
In the early drawings, though, we see Saul beginning to grapple with comic books and highways and refrigerators while the art world was still in its abstract-expressionist hangover. Everyday objects tend towards the abstract and become occasions for whimsy and endless whirl.
In some ways these drawings remind me of Antonioni's great finale to Zabriskie Point, where a brand new suburban home explodes in the American desert, sending all manner of consumer goods tumbling through the air to a Pink Floyd soundtrack (go to 3:30 in the video below for the explosions. Trust me: it's worth it).
But where Antonioni is making a movie about the catastrophe of modern relationships that are intertwined with suburbia and consumerism, Saul is taking a bumpercar ride through their birth.
There's been a lull in my posting recently since the sweetest thing came into my life: Iris Ellington Swartz Turfle, my baby girl, born February 12. For all the cute pics of baby drooling, and adults drooling over a baby, check out my Flickr account. I'm sure loyal DG readers will understand why art blogging was one of the last things on my mind.
That doesn't mean making art has gone to the back burner, however, as I've entered an extremely productive phase and have been very busy in the studio lately. I'll post pics soon of what's bubbling out in this very green time.
And, as life with a newborn becomes more manageable, look forward to more regular posts here.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share a great quote I found from an interview with Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman that relates to a lot of my past year in the studio.
As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he came to realize that his anxieties about not making anything of value were an atavistic relic from the religious notion that something exists which can be called Supreme Good, or that anything is perfect. When he'd dug up this secret idea, this relic, had seen through it and amputated it, he lost his artistic inhibitions too.
"My work always exists in an interior space," sculptor Fred Sandback wrote in Notes from 1975.
Sandback, who currently has a show at David Zwirner until Valentine's Day, made minimal sculptures with string.
Like his teachers Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Sandback can sometimes seem cool, but he is always engaged in something very specific to a material, to a room, to a moment.
Sandback uses string to creates imaginary planes. It's so simple. It's a bit like Les Nessman's imaginary office on the sitcom WKRP only, you know, less lame.
Sandback takes a simple, playful idea and pushes the tactile and imaginary qualities as far as they will go. The black string seems to float off the floor, while red looks like it's firmly planted. He uses intervals and repetition to give and take solidity of the planes, and shadows to bend space.
This is conceptual sculpture anyone can understand and take joy in. Photos don't do justice to the architecture the string makes you start seeing.
I love that when I went, Zwirner had run out of press releases but was still giving away copies of Sandback's tips for children to appreciate the sculpture.
In that essay, "Children's Guide to Seeing," Sandback compares what he's doing to the game of cat's cradle and encourages kids to get some string from the museum guards.
"Your fingers might do some thinking while you wander around and look at my sculptures," he says. And this, for me, is the key to what makes this work great: it's conceptual work that's not dictated by ideas, but by experience.
"Often cat's cradle is about making a little place," writes Sandback, "just for yourself, or to share with someone."
His small, quirky sculptures mix different materials in strange ways that create particular little worlds. Things that don't ordinarily go together - like heavy bronze and Japanese paper - somehow play nicely.
From a distance the room looks like a high-end toy store, with bold colors and strange forms. Up close, each work reveals itself slowly in the materials.
One work, "bamboo from sail to plow," uses bamboo in a way that compliments and supplants nature.
We know how bamboo grows, but Newman cuts it and reassembles its sections in a related way to natural bamboo sectioning, as if twisted while growing.
It's this eye for the natural behavior of materials that lets Newman pull this kind of cheeky behavior. It's not about accumulation of different objects, or the pastiche of unlikely partners.
Newman sees the properties in different forms and materials and respecting them enough to see a conversation with other materials. In the end, there is an organic whole not because of the materials but because of something else that's embedded in them.
In a video produced for the show, Newman says "All the sculptures have disparate things in them. It's kind of how believable - if that's the right word - is it that these foreign materials have been captured in this complete structure."
Painter Pat Lipsky gave a talk last night at the NY Studio School on "The Right Color."
Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, "An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness."
"There has been a devaluation of beauty," Lipsky said, referring to a review by art critic Robert Hughes where he asked if creating beautiful objects is enough to make good art.
She recalled creating her early color field paintings in 1969, which were made by applying acrylic paint to wet canvas with sponges.
These were "one shot" paintings that she would do in one sitting in order to capture a particular spirit (and they were very big, some as long as ten feet or so).
If she made one of these paintings and it didn't work, she threw it away.
"There was nothing else to do with them," Lipsy said. "Either you hit it or you blew it."
A painter to the core, Lipsky gets excited at the technical details. She enthusiastically recalled creating over 100 different tones for her painting "Episcopalian Pandemonium," which is based on a watercolor she did. When she talked about switching from acrylic paint to oil, it felt like a moral choice.
Because she is so connected to materials, she has no time for conceptual art.
Talking about Marcel Duchamp putting a shovel on display as a piece of sculpture, Ms. Lipsky said the shovel is, to her mind, "the perfect instrument to handle his work."
Lipsky, looking elegant in a black suit, quoted Proust at one point during her talk. "I never saw the same sea twice," the French author said.
For Lipsky, we never see the same color twice. One color put beside others changes the value. Like the sea, color is very specific -- but very vast, too.
I like women, I like art, and I like New York. So of course I'll be seeing Chiara Clemente's portrait of five female artists living and working in NYC. It's showing at Film Forum. Here's their press release:
It's an affecting love letter to the city which strings together the self-told narratives of five women artists (ages 30 - 80), each of whom has a passion for art-making inseparable from her devotion to New York . Swoon, the youngest, exhibits cut-outs directly on city walls and subways, and exudes idealism and energy while carrying a two by four the way some women would carry a briefcase. Cairo-born Ghada Amer mixes media -- embroidering with painting -- to confront sexual taboos that cross cultural boundaries. After experiencing the New York Dolls in San Francisco , Kiki Smith realized she needed New York 's energy to create her wildly influential paintings and sculptures; Marina Abramovic, originally of Belgrade , is a performance art pioneer who often uses her own body as a canvas. And Nancy Spero returned from Paris with artist-husband Leon Golub in 1964, to meld art and activism during the Vietnam War and become, in her own words, "a woman warrior."
A young girl asked this of her father while they looked at Børre Sæthre's "Stealth Distortion (...must have seen it in some teenage wet dream)" at P.S.1 on Sunday.
The dad said he thought it was fake, but didn't elaborate.
This is what I imagine it would be like to visit Universal Studios Oslo.
Looking at the work of Guy de Cointet is like house-sitting for a stranger.
There are suggestions of a complete life and the openness to imagine one's self living it. The empty spaces and incomplete artifacts of foreign ideas encourage flights of fancy.
De Cointet, who died in 1983 before reaching his 50th birthday, was born in Paris and worked in Los Angeles. He would overhear bits of conversation or take lines from soap operas and create a graphic space for them to live.
He also performed dramatic readings of nonsensical books and staged pseudo-soap operas. A video of some of this work, along with over 20 drawings, is on view at Greene Naftali until Feb. 14.
In combining found text with invented geometric shapes, de Cointet is the precursor to an artist like Tucker Nichols.
The disjunction of text and image seems related to another California artist, Raymond Pettibon. There's a special appreciation for montage with these artists that may be the influence of movies, although instead of Hollywood it seems more like Godard's experiments with juxtaposing sound and image to create more than the sum of parts.
The seduction happens in the viewer's reconciliation of fragments.
I encourage anyone interested in the art of drawing to go see Don Bachardy's show at Cheim and Read, "Christopher Isherwood; Last Drawings" (ending Feb. 7).
Bachardy, who was Isherwood's partner for over 30 years, documented the writer's last years with large, quick drawings that are direct, deceptively simple, and quite moving.
Terry Winters' "Knotted Graphs" at Matthew Marks closes tomorrow. Winters creates a conceptual space with layered transparent paints based on scientific ideas of knot theory.
This has been in my "write about" list for almost two months now because there's something profound in the way Winters combines personal brushwork and line with seemingly impersonal patterns and scientific illustration ideas. I think a bit of Matthew Ritchie, who also has this fascination with how scientific ideas can be made fleshy. I ran out of time to write about it, but this show is worth taking the time to see.
Last week I wondered what it meant to be a Yaddo Artist. As it turns out, you can decide for yourself on Jan. 24 (my birthday!), when there will be a Yaddo Artist Studio Crawl through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. More info here. Participating artists include:
David Baskin
Andrea Belag
Louise Belcourt
Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy
David Brody
JoAnne Carson
Patty Cateura
Emily Cheng
Lisa Corinne Davis
Joe Diebes
James Esber
Rochelle Feinstein
Jane Fine
Joshua Fried
Joanne Greenbaum
Stacy Greene
Sally Gross
Dennis Kardon
David Kramer
Melissa Meyer
Amy Myers
David Packer
Oona Ratcliffe
Gina Ruggeri
Katia Santibanez
Jonathan Santlofer
James Siena
Joan Snyder
Natasha Sweeten
Alexi Worth
"Sometimes I'm afraid of yellow."
-Willem de Kooning
"As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring."
-Wassily Kandinsky
Make up your own mind by listening to The Scene is Now's "Yellow Sarong" (which was later covered by Yo La Tengo). Watch Ken Nordine's "Yellow" put to animation:
The agenda is on at the NY Studio School. Artist lectures every Tuesday, scholars and critics every Wednesday. David Salle, Mark Greenwold, Joyce Pensato, Jerry Saltz and more. Full schedule after the fold-
As part of their show "Regift," the Swiss Institute is sponsoring a project by artist Maria Eichorn. Here's the press release for anyone who may have an unwanted Texas-shaped jello mold hiding in their closet:
REGIFT, curated by John Miller, will be on view FEB 18 - APR 4 2009; the exhibition focuses on the chains of obligation that gifting generates, on one hand, and the incalculability of gift values, on the other.
I happened upon an exhibit at the New York Public Library that celebrates the storied history of Yaddo, the artists' retreat in upstate New York near Saratoga. Yaddo has hosted many great writers, artists and composers, from Langston Hughes to Philip Guston to Sylvia Plath. The list goes on and on, one luminary following another. I remember when a former teacher of mine told me she was headed to Yaddo; I hadn't heard of it. By the time I Googled it, I was in awe. My teacher kicks even more ass than I thought!
Walking through the documents and letters in the show, I began to wonder and dream: Would I ever wind up spending a summer at Yaddo? What does it take to get in? And what does it mean to be a "Yaddo artist"? That's when I stumbled upon a precious display case that deals with sculptor Eva Hesse's application to Yaddo - and subsequent rejection.
Hesse is now celebrated as an innovative sculptor whose pioneering use of unorthodox materials, like rubber and fiberglass, blazed the way through post-minimalism. She died of a brain tumor in 1970.
But in 1967, Hesse applied for a stay at Yaddo. She had two enthusiastic letters of recommendation from critic Lucy Lippard and sculptor Brian O'Doherty.
Upon seeing her work, which would later be much acclaimed for how she handled materials, one Yaddo committee member said Hesse had "bad taste and weak form."
Another committee member said "I'd like to see more craftsmanship in her work."
They didn't get it. Hesse's application was denied. To decry Hesse for her craftsmanship is like criticizing punk for being too loud. It's just beside the point. (Click on the graphic to see the rejection letter full size. I apologize for the crappy photo, but it's dark, I wasn't supposed to take a photo, and my camera lens has permanent scratches.)
Institutions are funny. They come to represent so much more than they actually are, which is always a conglameration of individuals. Each has their own biases and shortcomings. If you need an example, just remember this: I was once an Emmy judge.
It reminds me of when I was working at a Web producer and we won a "prestigious" Edward R. Murrow award. I asked my boss, "Isn't this great?" He proceeded to tell me about a big newspaper award he once won for breaking business news coverage.
His piece that won was actually a re-write from an old profile of a tycoon that someone else had written. Newspapers do it all the time. But, sensing the timing and tone of the piece was right, the Daily News submitted it for an award and it won. It had almost nothing to do with his ability as a reporter, and only a little to do with his abilities as a writer. A handful of people in a room reached a consensus.
Included in the Yaddo show is a letter from 1960 by committee member Morton D. Zabel, who blocked applications from the poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He writes:
I recommend that they be passed over; it is fairly certain that difficulties would result from their visits. Moreover, I myself do not believe they merit consideration as writers, whatever their present reputation may be.
Zabel also blocked Gore Vidal, because he "may offer a problem." So ask yourself if you want to be standing with Zabel, or with Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Vidal. This is another part of institutions: self-preservation. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does foster a particular kind of conservatism.
Rejection by anyone who is on a committee like the one at Yaddo can seem like an authoritative verdict on your work. But sometimes it's just two or three people who can't appreciate your work, and the judgment of time will not be on their side.
I've given a piece to this worthy cause. For only $75, you could buy a Jeff Koons and make the world's first Koons paper airplane. Or use it on your Swiffer. Or you could get an Ida Applebroog or Robert Longo and keep it on your wall forever. No matter what, the money goes to a worthy cause. What's to think about?
The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge
A Benefit for Visual AIDS
Start the New Year off right -- over 1,600 postcards unveiled at Metro Pictures
January 9-10, 2009
Hosted by Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street, NYC
The Benefit Sale -- ONE DAY ONLY!
Saturday, January 10, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Over 1,600 original postcard-sized works of art. $75 EACH. Buy four, get one free! Works are signed on the back and displayed anonymously. Artists' name revealed only after purchase. First-come, first served
$5 suggested admission
The Preview Party
Friday, January 9, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
$75 admission* includes one raffle ticket. Additional raffle tickets $20. Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show! No sales, but one lucky raffle winner selects the first postcard. More prizes: Keith Haring the new 10lb $100 Rizzoli catalog & artist multiples from ARTWARE editions and Tulip Enterprises. Special hosts: The Imperial Court of New York. Plus a silent art auction. Wine courtesy of Wine & Spirits Magazine. *Participating artists attend free.
2009 participating artists include: Vito Acconci, Ida Applebroog, David Armstrong, John Baldessari, Barton Lidice Benes, Nayland Blake, Ross Bleckner, Patty Chang, Marcel Dzama, Tony Feher, Adam Fuss, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Mary Heilmann, Arturo Herrera, Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Kalup Linzy, Robert Longo, McDermott & McGough, Barry McGee, Julie Mehretu, Marilyn Minter, Slava Mogutin, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Paul Pfeiffer, Jack Pierson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Joel Shapiro, Kate Shepherd, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Harry Swartz-Turfle, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kara Walker, John Waters, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, T.J. Wilcox, Fred Wilson, and so many MORE!
Clearly I don't take the Q train enough. I haven't seen Bill Brand's subway zoetrope in person yet, but the NY Times has an article on its restoration. Created in the late '70s, Brand's zoetrope is based on the 19th century invention that showed movement with a series of still pictures seen through slits. Decades later, the subway zoetrope was abused and in disrepair from graffiti and neglect from the city. Brand, getting access with an MTA key someone slipped him long ago, spent years lovingly going back to clean graffiti from his work in this abandoned train station until it was a hopeless cause. Now, after getting funding for clean up and proper lighting, it's back in full force. Below is good video of it since the Times's stinks. I love how the passengers totally dig the suprise in the first video.
Here is great vintage news footage from the early '80s, including interviews with passengers and artist Bill Brand talking about the zoetrope's conception and construction.
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.
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.
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."
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 as she looked at different crops. Eventually, she was fine with it. It doesn't really matter that much, she told us.
A shocked student in the crowd asked her whether this small editing makes the difference between artists and non-artists. Strauss's answer was perfect: It doesn't matter. If you think the tiny difference between the sidewalk and the wall makes a big difference, you're losing sight of the content of the photo.
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 space between the lowest branch on a tree and the ground). "There's nothing more useful in art than what you don't know," Kahn said.
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.
Painter Leopold Plotek reflected on his early work last night during a lecture at the New York Studio School. Skipping over the first five years of his "juvenilia," Plotek showed slides of paintings based on shadows and fragments of architecture he saw in Italy. Although the paintings might look abstract they were based on things he saw in reality. "I've never actually painted a non-depictive painting," he said.
After working in this particular mode for years, Plotek said he reached a point where he wasn't interested in painting like that any more.
"You run out of steam when you can actually give instructions to someone else to do your painting," he said.
Holland Carter tips his hand when he says "because the artist doesn't call on painterly competence, the work stands out in a gallery scene that has, overall, the ready-for-prime-time surface sheen of an M.F.A. show."
Carter is a critic whose job is to see lots of shows. Of course he's looking for standouts. It's like a chef saying the glass souffle was exceptional. Well... yeah. There's a tie to art as commodity here that makes the duty of art to be new and different. The Joe Bradley brand is certainly soaring.
Bradley's work is to art what phone sex is to real relationships. Real relationships can be soulful, maddening, heart-breaking, and always stay with you. It's not the gossip about the relationship that's worth talking about; it's not the things your friend said, or how the relationship relates to the history of gender. There's an actual, direct experience that's worth something, even if it ends poorly.
In an artist talk at the Studio School Tuesday night, painter Ruth Miller boiled down her life's work: "I love still life. I love objects. I love looking."
That affection has carried Miller, 78, a very long way. She returns to the same subjects, painting the same tree over and over, or doing multiple canvases from the same still life set-up.
"I never tire of working from the same tree, as long as I can find more challenges," said Miller. "It's like entering a world that I can slowly take possession of."
I had a talk about Chelsea yesterday that ended with a group of artists cheering the idea of galleries going under during the economic downturn. We were talking about the art world in general, but Carol Diehl at Art Vent has a different side of that coin: only the professionals might survive. And there aren't a lot of professionals out there.
Carol took a group of collectors to several galleries and was met with frustration:
Highlights: waiting for more than 20 minutes while gallery assistants looked for someone who could give us a price (all the pieces in the exhibition were priced the same--$200,000). The impeccably dressed young woman who rattled off a canned speech about the artist's political intentions for the work without regard to the glazed-over look of her audience. The gallery associate who referred to my clients as "You guys" and told us the price was "like $75,000." The dealer who joked about the price of a painting and another who asked my clients how they felt about the elections. And finally, in a gallery rife with assistants, asking to see work by a particular artist and being told that anyone who could show it was "in a meeting."
Now that Obama's been elected, the New Museum with install Elizabeth Peyton's "Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention August 2008" at the artist's current retrospective.
The painting is in Peyton's typical Isn't-life-touching-and-fleeting mode and fails to capture any of the strength or individuality of Michelle Obama, who's a hell of a woman and deserves a better portraitist.
As Intelligencer predicted, as soon as Obama won the announcement was made. It makes sense - Peyton's subjects are always winners, aren't they?
In 1957, psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term "psychedelic," a conflation of two Greek words meaning "soul manifest," to describe drug experiences that altered one's perception of reality. The same year, Life magazine published an article on the visionary qualities of hallucinogenic mushrooms. "The genie was out of the bottle," said New York Times art critic Ken Johnson, in a lecture at the New York Studio School on Wednesday. And art hasn't been the same since.
To be sure, Johnson wasn't talking about the commercial excesses of psychedelia, or art meant for stoners. It's more about a theory of mind that shifts after using drugs like LSD, shrooms, mescaline, or pot. Johnson's idea about the post-psychedelic shift in art is interesting and far-reaching, and difficult to talk about if only because of the stigma that comes with talking about drug use -- even if it was mild experimentation 30 years ago.
Johnson has interviewed a number of artists for whom the psychedelic experience permanently changed the way they perceived the world. Artist Chris Martin said "For many artists of my generation, it is crucial."
David LaChappelle's show at Tony Shafrazi included giant pieces made of corrugated cardboard (which the gallery makes sure to note is recycled). Although there was a piece featuring Paris Hilton, the imagery was certainly original -- including a funny piece with moving parts called "Art in Heaven."
There are some incredible paintings on view for Christie's Impressionist & Modern sale this week. Three caught my attention and I realized they had a similar subject matter: two women in domestic interiors.
Matisse's women are maternal, Vuillard's are quiet and luminous, and Milton Avery's are sophisticated and chatty. It's beautiful stuff, and I've listed the auction prices in case anyone wants to surprise me with a package. Just make sure to get signature delivery -- those punks in my building already made off with my birthday presents.
For a few years now, I've kept a list of art shows I want to see at galleries and museums in New York. It's a little file on my Mac and I've updated every few weeks or so, as information comes to me. I try to keep a copy of the list on me at all times, since I never know when I'll find myself in midtown or the Upper East Side with a little time on my hands. Of years of ridiculously hording this knowledge, it finally occurred to me that other people might find this list useful in the quest to find quality art shows.
It's a page that I will update on a rolling basis and users can check into to see if there's anything interesting showing. I've put a handy graphic up on the right for easy access.
Since I haven't seen most of the shows on the list, I can't guarantee quality. Let me know if you've seen a show that you don't think deserves to be on the list, or a show that should be on it but isn't.
Speaking at the NY Studio School last night, artist Ron Gorchov recalled seeing a frustrated painter friend kicking work off a balcony in the mid-1960s. At that moment it occurred to Gorchov that "It's important to do something you really want to do." For Gorchov, the elusive goal has been to get fields of color to float in a room. At 78, he feels like the work he's doing is the "most fluent and fertile of my life."
Gorchov first came to New York in 1953, meeting Mark Rothko on his second day here. It was a different time, he explained, and meeting famous artists was as easy as going to their bars. At the end of meeting Rothko, Gorchov made an overture and said they should get together soon. Rothko balked, saying "No. Have a few gallery shows. It's a small place, and we'll meet."
When Gorchov tried to get an introduction to painter John Russell through a mutual friend, the friend said no. "Nobody would introduce each other," Gorchov explained. The atmosphere was competitive. "They were all jealous of each other."
Golub's work is ugly. During the 1960s, while American boys were being sent overseas and the Vietnamese were getting fire bombed, the New York art world became ever more interested in minimalism and formal approaches to art that were divorced from the reality of people's every day lives. But Golub, working in Chicago, insisted on engagement. He achieved renown painting scenes of mercenaries, killers, victims of napalm attacks, anonymous third world fighters, and dogs attacking (like the drawing below).
I was fortunate enough to hear Golub speak in 2000, four years before he died. I found him charming and erudite. He was a man with a lot to say. But a show currently at Ronald Feldman (until Nov. 15) demonstrates the limitations of his approach.
I returned a book of writings by German artist Gerhard Richter to a friend today. The book, called "Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writing from 1962 - 1993," is a compilation of Richter's notes, interviews and exhibition writing. As much as I dislike Richter's especially German pretense to objectivity, and as much as I find his subjects boring, and his approach half impotent, his writing is challenging and engaging. What follows are some of the best quotes I found in the book. Some I agree with; some are nonsense.
The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason.
All we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.
To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.
Sharon Butler (of Two Coats fame) has a good piece in the Brooklyn Rail about how artists now have better options to do short runs of books because of digital technology.
Until recently, publishing options for artists, unless funded by dealers, publishers, grants, or trust funds, have been limited. In theory, book projects were aimed at bypassing the gallery system to the artist's economic advantage, but in practice, the need for outside funding simply added another gatekeeper.
Enter cheaper digital resources like Lulu and Blurb. If I can ever finally finish my presidents project, perhaps this would be a good outlet?
Two shows worth seeing in Chelsea close tomorrow. Judy Glantzman's work (pictured above) features layered images of body parts -- faces, hands, feet -- in mysterious, mandala-like configurations. (Sorry for the crappy photo -- it really doesn't do this work's subtle shimmer any justice.)
Sometimes the figures emerge from unprimed canvas in the colors of bruised skin. Faces turn into other faces, spout tears which become animals, and then out of the shape will form a bird. If it sounds strange, it is. Sometimes the paintings are like a Renaissance sketchbook, with exuberant lines searching for forms.
Judy Glantzman at Betty Cuningham Gallery, through Oct. 11.
Jeronimo Elespe's work can be the reverse, like forms searching for a subject. He creates his small oil on aluminum panel work over long periods of time, layering colors and shapes in a way that ends when masses start to develop. I like this his work is so small (yes, that's my beefy finger next to one of his landscapes). It's quite intimate, and the process of attention shows in waves as layers emerge, one over the other. Elespe works from memory, which alters how things look as people and places start to be less discrete and confined. That elusive, open quality sprouts from this work.
Jeronimo Elespe at John Connelly Presents, through Oct. 11.
Vik Muniz, the artist famous for recreating iconic artworks in different media and then photographing it (think the Mona Lisa in peanut butter and jelly) has moved on to a kind of sculptural painting that recreates the backs of great works of art. The photo below should help demonstrate how lame and uninspired this idea is.
Go west! Don't go west! Alison Elizabeth Taylor's bind
Artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor came to the NY Studio School last night to talk about her work, which is full of contradictions. It's full of wildness, but also tight control. Sometimes her work, which these days is made of different shades of wood veneer, seems stilted. Sometimes it seems crazy and out of control. Her medium itself demands purposefulness and planning, but her imagery is wild and seems very personal.
When she was talking about her early work, she called them her "anti-history paintings." Of course, to have such a thing means you feel burdened by history. The object of disaffection becomes a kind of controlling factor. Call it a theme.
Painter Julian Hatton spoke last night at the NY Studio School about his work, some of which I review here.
Hatton spoke about his experience of nature, frequently invoking his childhood in Michigan, where he said there's about two months of good weather each year. He contrasted the cold, flat landscape there, across the lake from Fond du Lac, with his experiences on the east coast, in Maine, and also in Brittany, France.
He recalled painting in the late winter and early spring in France and seeing how cold the colors in that landscape are. Then, one day in early June, he experienced the entire landscape awakening with color. He connected Bonnard's experience in the north of France with the cold color palette that becomes very warm and intimate. Hatton said he'd never experienced anything like it, and clearly there was an affinity for that liveliness in a cold landscape.
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.
Artist Robert Morris spoke last night at the New School as part of the Sculpture Center's "Subjective Histories of Scultpure" series.
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?
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."
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?
I took some time today to stop by the Christie's in Rockefeller Plaza for the First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art preview. The auction happens April 1.
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."
Reading John Ruskin is like sitting in a living room with that good old grandmother of yours who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and everything after. Not the annoying one who talks about being part of "the Greatest Generation" (though that seems to be more of an anxiety-born boomer label for them). I'm talking about the one known for her patience, thoughtfulness, inner strength and forgiveness. Perhaps she's named Mildred or Barbara and she's tougher than you and twice as kind. Reading John Ruskin's thoughts on art reminded me of her.
"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.
After hearing so many negative things about the inaugural show at the new New Museum, I really draged my feet before heading down to check it out. Since the waves of negativity primed me for a bad show, I was in the best possible place to go see it: Things could only look up from what I was expecting. Right?
Right.
It's not as bad as you've heard, but let's face it: it's still not good.
The show features lots of work using disposable materials, magazines and cardboard boxes and couches found on the curb. This doesn't make it a bad show. What makes it a bad show is the lack of originality or ambition.
Since it was my first trip to the new space, I kept thinking about the shows I saw at the old New Museum. One of my favorites was Tom Friedman, whose work was done with fingernail clippings, bubble gum, and construction paper. I loved his show because he seemed to think long and hard about his mediums and what strctural power they had embedded inside their physicality. When he made a bird skeleton out of fingernail clippings, it made sense. The shapes and endurance of fingernails speak to the toughness and texture of bone.
However, when someone paints an old iron plow neon orange, it's just there. It's novel without being connected. The response doesn't resonate, and maybe that's the point.
The thing I kept thinking was that art has to be more than what creative people do when they're bored. It's hard for me to fault artists. I fault curators, who might be out of touch with the larger world or experiencing anxiety about art's importance.
The work that greeted me when I came onto the fourth floor out of the stairwell was Oliver Laric's YouTube montage of people singing 50 Cent. It's a great video. I've rated it as a favorite on YouTube and given it 5 stars. But let's face it: In a museum, it's boring.
I love the Web. I love that people respond to a song, do their own versions, and mix it up. But doing a straight montage of 50 different videos and showing it in a loop where users have no control and can't really interact is completely antithetical to the way the Web works and the way people have begun to demand more of a say in popular culture.
I just kept thinking about an abstract curator, knowing the internet is somehow changing art, but not quite knowing how things are changing. So you go with something you know -- a video loop -- that has the internet as its subject, only without any of the power or magic of realy interactivity.
How about a station where museum-goers can do their own mix of these 50 videos? How about a booth where they can sing and record their own versions? One-way art about interactivity doesn't seem to work so well.
And that experience captured my experience of the show generally. There were ideas there, but they weren't given form or pushed far enough. I don't demand masterpieces, but I do want more from art than to experience it through headphones.
I finally made it out to the new New Museum on Bowery. I have fond memories of the old building in Soho, although I would always leave that space remembering the awkwardness and particularities of a museum shoe-horning itself into a very old building not designed for museum display.
The first thing I noticed approaching the new building on Bowery is that it looks like a prison, except designed for Dr. Caligari. I understand the steel fence is supposed to operate like a scrim, filtering out light to a shimmering effect. Instead, it just looks like constrictive chain link. WIthout many windows, the steel looks like it's designed to keep people in.
The charming, weird character of the old space -- the space I was sometimes frustrated with, but always remembered -- is gone. No more mini-mezzanine or exposed brick or little spaces for curators to figure out. That's been replaced with a lot of new space for exhibits. There are three floors for New Museum shows.
The space is generic. Large white box warehouse space that could be in Chelsea or Cleveland or anywhere. It's monumental space with high ceilings that can actually house monumental sculpture and painting (ironic, given the first show is called Unmonumental).
This big generic space is theoretically flexible -- they could build temporary walls for each exhibit. That didn't happen for "Unmonumental," but I hope it happens in the future. Otherwise, it's just a big space with a bunch of things thrown in, formless.
There are some good things about the new building. I love the roofdeck (see above). It actually looks like an advertisement for a new condo building, and in real life it looks that way too. Like living in the future, when the future is pretty much the same as the present except for lots and lots of white minimalist design. That effect is mixed in my mind, but any time you can be outside and mix public space with the open is OK with me.
And I feel like I should say the best thing about the new New Museum is the bathroom. There's a fantastic mosaic mural in there of grayscale flowers on bright orange. The flowers are comforting and the gray and orange accents the pixilation effect. So I guess that's new. In any case, it's a hell of a way to take a piss.
Could the new space be better? Yes. Is it better than the old space? Probably. For me, the most important thing is that they've made room to show more work. At a certain point the architecture isn't the point. Creating good shows is.
I went to the Whitney Biennial today. I plan on writing a longer review, but I thought I would draw up a list of words and phrases out of my notebook to maybe give the tenor of what's up. Like most Biennials, it was a mixed bag of work. Very few stand-outs for me, but the mood was very strong -- like a lo-fi Indie rock album. If it's supposed to be a portrait of the artworld moment, then the curators did a good job. Here's my list :
found objects
involuntary medium
slap-dash
rickety
DIY
boring games
shifting perspective
transferrence
one thing becomes another
antiquated realism
nostalgia
consumer expression
mixed media, mixed message
optimism
rebuilding
creating a 3-D experience
unfinished space
seduce, reuse, recycle
disappeared past
fragility
juxtaposition
permeable
escaping the museum
jerry saltz is excited
publicly private
multiplying perspectives
personal response to mass media
at an intersection
life-sized collage
faux decadence
nature is gone
if artists are questioning art, curators aren't
For anyone who believes painting's connection to an artist's observation of nature, Rackstraw Downes is a hero.
Downes can spend months on a canvas, going out to a site every day for a half hour or so -- so the light remains the same each day -- observing a scene and making sketches from nature. And when I say nature, I don't mean the glorious American escape of the Hudson River painters, or even Downes' classmate Neil Welliver. I mean the complicated and well-trodden landscape of populated America. Much of Downes work, in fact, is of busy urban street corners.
The first thing you notice about Downes is how realistic is paintings look. And then the second thing you notice is how unrealistic they are.
The straight lines can curve, the colors can get flat. I wondered at first whether he was using some kind of wide-angle lens. But upon third and fourth looks, his canvases become complicated and personal. His dedication to repeated, specific observation has not taken out his choices.
Downes is only cold in reproduction. In person, his canvases are alive. From the rough texture of his canvas to the controlled elegance of his brush strokes and blobs of color, Rackstraw's vision is his own. His colors are push vibrance and saturation to the point of being unrealistic.
I had several experiences of leaning in to look and having realistic details disappear into abstractions (see detail above). He can radically simplify a field of color, how to describe a mountain, for instance, that retains fidelity to the overall vision and becomes very formal and broad on the micro level.
Below is a series of six paintings he did of a barn in Texas. It's the same barn, painted from six different angles. There's an accompanying chart for when and where these canvases came from. Like most other things, in Rackstraw Downes' art it's specificity that matters.
I apologize for the photos above--it's impossible to convey the charms of Juan Usle's warm, charming paintings.
He paints in thin, translucent layers, grids mostly, to which the press release for the show credits his living in New York City part time. I'm not sure about that, but the discrete blocks in much of this work makes me think of the many discrete days Usle had to sit down to get his canvases to glow like they do.
Chris Martin is at the end of his rope. The top of the ladder. There's nowhere to go. So why not play?
If Pollock was melted Picasso, Chris Martin can be melted de Kooning with shellacked Wonder Bread (really!) sorted by a hairbrush. Most of his work in the current show is abstract and contains added collage elements to make the paintings three dimensional.
I was reminded of Joan Mitchell's roll-up-your sleeves ethic to get every last drop out of a surface. Her canvases always look like she's worked hard to make her surfaces shimmer. But those were the days of abstract-expressionism religiousness.
These days, when abstract paintings are just abstract paintings, Martin's look like he's worked hard to create something novel, with loud clashing colors, bulbous islands of cushion affixed, lines of gesture dragged through a dump of paint. His real spiritual forbearer is Stuart Davis' jazz-inspired abstractions of commercial art and American signage.
Chris Martin has said that he's "turning up the volume" of painting. It's hard not to listen.
It says a lot about artist Robert Irwin that my favorite work of his has never actually been created. Irwin is a conceptual artist, horse race afficionado and dreamer whose artistic career is sketched in Lawrence Weschler's superb book "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees." This book gives Irwin's conceptual art a humanity that experiencing it in person does not.
Weschler's book traces how Irwin went from being a precocious teenager winning national figurative drawing contests to joining the second generation of abstract painters in Los Angeles, to becoming a mature artist stretching a rope in the desert for no one to see.
Until the 1980s, he refused to allow his work to be photographed or reproduced because he believed the context for art as important as the piece. In the late '70s, Irwin pushed the Marcel Duchamp art-as-context idea into boredom, like when he transformed an empty room at MoMA by replacing the lights and running a string along the room. The point was to get people to notice the environment in which art is situated. Most artists working today know where this line of thinking ends, and lucky for us Irwin did it so we don't have to.
At one point, Irwin created these clear glass columns that were designed to be almost invisible. The idea was that a viewer would look across the room and, not seeing an "artwork" per se, notice a slight refraction, a visual hiccup through the glass, and question their visual experience of a particular place. Or at least notice how the eye is working with physical expectations layed out by the brain. When you consider this piece you see the basic Irwin contradiction: he was creating art that's not meant to be looked at.
Irwin came to make art like this after his experience of creating beautiful abstract-expressionist canvases that were about the surface of the painting, creating space by with and color. It talks about his long days in the studio, making one mark on the canvas and then retreating to ponder its relationship to all the other marks, figuring out whether the picture plane had been compressed or expanded, how this figure related to the ground. Weschler would think and think on the surface and how a viewer would enter the painting.
Once you see the artwork as a surface, you notice all the other surfaces around it. For instance, for Irwin the sides of the canvas became as important as the front. The viewer's experience wasn't just frontal, after all. And then he worried about the back, and the light that hit the painting, and the wall it was on, and then the building. He became not just a perfectionist (although he was accused of being that) but someone who saw the canvas as unending.
He was questioning the foundations of art. At one point in the book, Irwin is invited to join an exchange program where artists were invited to work with scientists. Most artists continued to do what they were already working on, only at a bigger and more complicated scale. (Think Warhol meeting up with Polaroid folks in order to produce larger, more fabulous Polaroids.) Irwin joined with a Buddhist NASA engineer and fundamentally changed the artwork he was doing. Talking to Weschler, Irwin says that there are people in every discipline who just continue working at the traditional elements of the trade, and there are those who work on a more philosophical level. These people, according to Irwin, have more in common with conceptual thinkers in other fields than with traditional practioners in their own field. Irwin has more in common with a physicist who thinks about quantum theory, in other words, than with Norman Rockwell.
Weschler's book, which was originally published in the early '80s, keeps artspeak and technical philosophy at a blissful minimum. Instead, we hear the voice of Irwin, funny, anecdotal, searching. He recalls his days betting at the racetrack in order to make a living, and his youthful days cruising southern California as a teenager. If, like me, you can feel scammed to pay $20 admission to an empty warehouse just to read wall text to a fluorescent light in the corner, this book is indispensible.
The German painter Georg Baselitz rose to fame in the '70s and '80s for his fearless and direct confrontation with his nation's disgraceful 20th Century. At a time when his teachers and the German art world embraced American pop art, Baselitz went art brut.
He was kicked out of his East German art school and came west to make big, sloppy canvases that snaked with wide swaths of bright color, black outlines, sloppy drips. He painted an infamous canvas of the child Adolf Hitler with an erection the size of a salami. It was all very scandalous to a nation trying to forget the past.
For years, Baselitz painted all of his canvases upside down. It's hard to say why. There's the formalist's explanation: that modern paintings are always about the surface of the canvas, and nothing could reinforce that like a decade or two spent seeing form first, subject second. The painting painted upside down (and not just hung upside down) is seen as abstract form instead of as a picture of known objects.
I've never been satisfied with the formalist explanation, since I think most successful drawing and painting is done by seeing the world abstractly anyway. And since Baselitz isn't what you'd call a finicky draftsman, it's hard to say he was using the technique to see anew.
A political explanation -- that Baselitz saw the world as upside down -- is just too corny.
To me, Baselitz's methods have always been about scrapping to get out of the dilemma of being a German artist after Hitler. But like a dog on a tether, he pulls as far as he can and finds himself leashed.
In his show of paintings now at Gagosian, the East German emigre is at it again.
His "Remix" paintings, two of which are photographed above, are Hitler redux. They feature so many dirty Charlie Chaplin mustaches and wagging cocks that you'll think you're at a Fatty Arbuckle party.
The imagery is strong, explicit, unavoidable. He's taking on big subjects. He's standing atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall with paintbrushes in his hand and painting his nation.
However, this dilemma of a German artist unable to avoid the Nazi era can almost be seen as Stockholm Syndrome. "Being preoccupied with your past gives you something to hold onto," he says in an interview (about work that does not show Hitler, but more "folk" elements of German art).
The tragic horrors of National Socialism were unavoidable to Baselitz's generation. Now Baselitz, who is 69 years old, has returned to suite of images he made when he was young. Now they're writ larger and with more clarity. In the painting above, Hitler emerges from the soil fused with a nasty rootball that stretches its tentacles firmly below ground.
"What I could never escape was Germany, and being German,” said Baselitz. He says he uses the term "remix" because it comes from youth culture, and it's not just the rehashing of old material. It's a return to an approach, to a freshness of dealing with what's inescapable.
Baselitz uses Hitler the way an American might use McDonalds or JFK. It's part of his national mental landscape, to the point of being interestingly banal.
I almost walked through Sophie von Hellerman's show at Greene Naftali without thinking, which is to say without really looking. My eye went to a canvas that features a group of figures gathered around a table with a huge drawing or map unfolded on top. I couldn't figure it out visually, what it was. Then I marvelled at how little von Hellerman used to suggest a figure -- a dash of line here and a blotch of color there -- and became enchanted.
Her work looks soft and sloppy, but don't be deceived. It's strategic and suggestive. She is often described as dreamy or Romantic, and it's easy to agree. Her imagery is magical and her method is to work around the concrete facts. Instead of drawing the meat of a subject, she'll dash a minimal outline or wash a color field that's very non-specific. She applies pigment directly to unprimed canvas -- like Morris Louis -- so the colors have a subtle glow.
Take the photo above: two faces looking at a group of bees. One face washes out, as if a shadow. The bees could be a threat or a discovery. It's Sophie von Hellerman's art to suggest a different world that looks like our own, viewed through honeycomb.
Will Ryman's work can look like hell, which is absolutely perfect for the monster hangover he's laid out in Marlborough's new Chelsea space.
Ryman spent ten years as a writer and dramatist and first created sculpture for one of his plays in 2001. Narrative and character tension is still there in these playful sculptures that wear their handmade qualities pretty raw.
"Tuesday Afternoon" is made of two large sculture groups. One is a teeming city street with all sorts of characters and a beautiful lamp post. The other is a larger than life portrait of a man in bed, surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, Doritos, and beer. These two sculptures are designed to be read as happening at the same time -- a Tuesday afternoon.
The bed is amazing. There's a larger-than-life slapdash quality to the intimate way Ryman has formed each cigarette and Dorito with wire mesh and paper mache that's reminiscent of Claes Oldenberg. It takes disposable culture seriously not for irony's sake, but because junkfood and beercans are the props in our lives. Is the man on the bed asleep with a cigarette? Closing his eyes and dreaming? Maybe the street scene is a figment of his imagination. To me the man on the bed is the best portrait of a hangover I've ever seen. Ryman's suggestiveness plays well with the concrete messyness of his technique.
These are not photographs. Robert Longo's charcoal drawings are incredibly life-like -- and huge (note the scale in the second photo, where you can see the first photo reflected, along with other gallery-goers).
His latest show, called "Children of Nyx," is a small group of drawings of children and infants. The children all seem to be asleep, eyes closed and lips slightly parted. Seeing these kids is like seeing a movie theater from the outside. You can only guess at the dreams inside.
Nyx was the Greek goddess of the night and creation, mother of Sleep and Death. Longo's drawings capture these associations perfectly.
The children are slightly unsettling. Their faces are luminous but surrounded by a coal black, as if they're being seen by flashlight. The black void, combined with the six-foot scale of these drawings, makes them suggestive and towering and slightly ominous. What seems peaceful at first can become precious, precarious, in danger. Is this what it feels like to have children?
There's nothing like eating a southern breakfast under a team of manatee angels. I was eating biscuits and gravy at the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville, NC, when I became enchanted by these small, colorful paintings on the walls. There was a swarm of blubbery angels and a potato boy. They were cartoony but very textured. The paintings have a beautiful, milky encaustic surface that makes the wild imagery even more mysterious and dreamlike. I decided to e-mail artist Julie Armbruster about her work. [Pictured left: Her Evil Nature Could No Longer Remain Hidden. 4 x 5 inches. Click on photo for larger image.]
Gusto: How did you become an artist?
Julie Armbruster: I have always loved the idea of becoming an artist, but I originally studied to be a teacher. After I tried teaching at a private school/cult in Connecticut I decided I needed to be a better artist if I wanted to be able to teach. So, I enrolled in the most fantastic MA program at NYU to study painting in Venice, Italy. It never occurred to me that being an artist was a viable option, but I spent months enjoying the idea of it. I had a fantastic studio in Venice off of the Zattere and spent every waking hour working out my ideas. The more [time] I spent painting and drawing the more I became addicted to the idea of making a go at exploring my personal vision more seriously. I spent the next two years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn trying to keep my head above water and make enough money to earn free time. It was a losing battle and I decided to move to a place where I could work less for money and more for myself. I moved to Asheville, NC in 2005 and have been working on my paintings ever since.
Lisa Yuskavage gave a talk yesterday at the New School for the Public Art Fund. She showed slides of her work since college and how her work evolved from somehwat precious, quiet paintings about light to big, outrageous canvases of caricatured naked women. She talked about the breakthrough moment when she had her first New York show in 1990 and actually hated the work she put up. "I remember thinking 'oh my god my work sucks'," she said. She took a year off from painting but came back with the kinds of canvases she's so well known for now.
She talked about how her breakthrough involved thinking of herself as the master of the figures she created, and how she took great pleasure in being cruel to them. She likened her new painting style to Dennis Hopper's gas-snorting sadist in the movie "Blue Velvet." Here are some of the choice quotes from her talk.
"It was as if I switched places, now I was the top and painting was the bottom"
On not understanding when people talk about her "technique": "Every way I start a painting is different and every way I end a painting is different."
"I couldn't stand painting from life ... I needed to make stuff up."
On Modernist teachers: "Make it flat? I didn't even know how to make it spatial... I was really curious about rendering ... It felt kinky and perverse to render."
After making all these kinky paintings from models, she asked "When are you going to paint yourself, coward?" Instead of painting herself, she did the next best thing: she solicited a woman who looked like her to pose for paintings.
"I got glasses" (on why work she did in Rome was so different)
On Renaissance sculptures: "They were always about one figure being abused by another."
On people thinking her paintings of two naked women is about lesbianism: "Whatever."
On reading Itten and Goethe: "The Germans are really good on color"
"Fiction is always what it is ... That's the important thing to remember about painting. It's always about the painting."
When someone asked her about John Currin, she seemed amused at the rivalry that people assume exists and said that they're friends. "He's an incredible artist and a wonderful person."
On reading criticism: "If it's bad, first you cry. Then you say 'fuck it' ... As long as they spell my name right."
"Ok, you hate my paintings. I need to do these paintings to breathe... I know what it's like to make paintings I hated and I almost died."
On agreeing with conservative critics, specifically Hilton Kramer's broad points about the art world: "Then when he offers the alternative, it's so bad."
In his evocatively meaningless art installation from 1977, David Salle manages to mathematically determine just how many elements an art work should have to seem important. The answer is four.
A recreation of "Bearding the Lion in His Den" currently fills the back room at Deitch Projects (until March 24). Although it was made before Salle painted the towering collage work that made his name, "Bearding" is a 3-D form of the basic David Salle idea. That idea is to come as close as possible to making a work that means something without crossing the line.
In the middle of the dark room is a wooden plank with ten lightbulbs. A large black and white photo is on either side of the room, each illuminated by a dim grey lightbulb that's suspended from the ceiling. On the left, the photo is of a speeding Formula One racing car. On the right is a photo of a group of black children holding hands in a circle. A song is playing (Tim Buckley's "Song for the Siren"). While the song plays, the light bulbs are dark. When it ends, the gallery becomes quiet and the ten lightbulbs on the floor flash and sparkle like fireworks.
The lightbulbs, the music, and the two photos work to create the impression of meaning. You can connect two or three things, but never do all four coalesce into a larger meaning. In many ways, Salle's work is about leading your mind down paths that stop at dead ends.
I kept creating narratives in my head that only broke when I got to a last element. For instance, the lights on the floor reminded me of the tall ready/set/go lights they have at Formula One races. The music, which is mournful, could indicate a tragic end for the race car driver. But what does the circle of black children mean?
The pastiche of unrelated images in Salle's work is frequently compared to Robert Rauschenberg's cluttered canvases. The most apt comparison is to Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing," which is exactly what the title says. Rauchenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing to see what happens when you erase the marks of an artist. Is it still art? Does it matter that an artist is doing the erasing?
Salle's work is based on erasing meaning but leaving behind the symbols of it.
See the installation here. A photo of the original 1977 installation is available here.
Movies used to have boring credits. Saul Bass changed that. In his intros to Vertigo and The Man With the Golden Arm, he married graphic design and motion pictures into a new art form. Check it out.
I've raved before about him. Now it's time again for me to plug Seth, a comic book artist whose new book "Wimbledon Green" has just hit stores. He's got an elegant line and a wistful style. He's graced the cover of your favorite Aimee Mann record. Now read the Onion interview with Seth (and check out the great photo).
Your DG editors are big fans of Seth, born Gregory Gallant*, the Canadian indie comics artist (or "graphic novelist," in the parlance of our times). In fact, we like him so much that we bought an original drawing a few years ago at a signing at Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, Mass.
Interviews with Seth are fairly rare, so we were thrilled to see this one in Bookslut, in which he discusses, among other things, his notorious nostalgia:
The modern world is very ugly… and the pop culture is so mind-numbingly dumb that you have to make a conscious effort to shut it out. That’s why I’m considered a “nostalgia guy.” I just like things from the past better. I don’t want to live in 1932, but I sure wish some of the elements of that time had survived into this time. Though obviously, their fascination with “progress” is the worm in the apple that created this shitty culture we inhabit. It’s a complicated question. And believe me, no one is more confused about his feelings about the past and the present than I am. I find, as each year passes, my understanding, and feelings about the 20th century are more muddled. The only thing I can say with real certainty is: The mass culture of our current age makes me feel like I need a shower.
Other great Drawn and Quarterly artists we love include Chester Brown, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet, Joe Matt, Adrian Tomine, and R. Crumb (hey, that's two references in one day).
*Coolest name in the world for a comic book artist.
Since Harry has been too busy at work to blog, I thought I'd post some links to some excellent fairly-recent art articles. I'm no art scholar, so you'll get just the facts from me.
The Guardian Online (I get all my links from the Guardian these days, it seems) on my sister's favorite, Alice Neel and Edward Hopper, as well as a Robert Hughes piece on "defend[ing] art against the degrading power of the wealthy collectors" (bring on the "art fascist" epithets!)
Gusto alumni R. Hutcheson has cooked up a delicious art project to see how many people he can get to view one of his paintings. His sideshow circus style will bring a smile to your face. Take a look.
Our Favorites are the "Fudge Packer" (Not What You're Thinking!) and the "Gymnast's Guillotine"
How did we miss this? Gusto seldom misses an opportunity to plug Danny Gregory, particularly his lovely collaborations with The Morning News.
Anyone who has ever flown in an airplane (or, incidentally, watched the "Props" game on Whose Line is It Anyway -- Anglophiles' version, please) will appreciate The Sky Mall Pop Quiz.
The fine folks over at Sharpeworld have scanned in two full issues of seminal 70's punk rock/new wave rag Wet for your viewing pleasure. Don't you owe them a big kissy thank-you?
Wet had outlandish DIY collage, loud graphics, and innovative typography. It was L.A. at its finest. Visit an archive of Wet covers here, and read a brief intro to the magazine here.
People always object to boxing as a barbaric sport that insults human decency. But would those same people object if squirrels were outfitted with gloves and went 12 rounds? I think not.
Pictured at left are real animals in a real boxing match. Of course, these animals have been dead for over a century and have been posed by 19th century taxidermist Edward Hart (b. 1847 - d.1928).
"This my pet peeve about artists," the former buffalo rancher said. "They assume buffalo have horns like cattle. But they're built differently, damn it."
Ok, I'm a freak for Lucien Freud. First I post about the London showing of Freud's latest work, and then I get into a long philosophical argument in praise of Freud in comments at TMFTML. Now I'm going to repeat: Freud is here. In New York. In America. Come one, come all! In an ideal world, retirees would hop into their RVs and camp outside the Acquavella Galleries on 79th Street and make their autumn years full of Freud's feisty paintings.
NY Times critic Michael Kimmelman reviewed the show yesterday.
Artist Danny Gregory is back from his vacation in the Dominican Republic and has the sketchbook to prove it.
I first discovered Gregory's watercolor sketches on The Morning News, where he spent a day at the Martha Stewart trial and came back with great unexpected drawings. He's also collaborated online with TMN editor Rosencrans Baldwin to draw characters from Baldwin's Brooklyn neighborhood. In his latest book, Everyday Matters, Gregory documents his daily life by drawing the things around him and writing a observations on his life and community.
There were a few good art shows on 57th Street yesterday; fortunately I got there on the last day of one the of the better ones.
Kraushaar Gallery showed Leon Goldin's "Five Decades of Works on Paper" (which ended on April 10; work shown left). Goldin's abstract charcoal drawings seem drawn from life, but yet are completely abstract lines and shapes. The one exception is probably the most beautiful and haunting of the works on display.
You can immediately understand the trees, horizon line, and pathways in his "Riverside Park" from 1964. Goldin will scratch and rub charcoal into the paper and then erase it so a ghostish gray emerges from the heavily-textured paper. The battle between the neutral grays and blacks of the charcoal and the warmth of the paper keep the drawings vibrant. In "Riverside Park" Goldin the allows the creamy paper to be as strong and surprising as his stout chalky line and foggy erased grays.
Goldin's work is about proportion and balance, how to harmonize line, mass and color within a rectangular surface, and how to organize a seemingly random marks with a muscular poise.
In the same building at Tibor de Nagy, Jane Freilicher is showing paintings of flowers and cityscapes. The show is an extended riff on the color orange versus the color blue. Hilton Kramer talks about the show so I don't have to (even though I don't like it nearly as much as he does). Also at Tibor de Nagy is Edwin Dickinson's pictorial paintings of domestic scenes where all colors fade towards neutral in an overall blur. Both shows are up until April 17.
What happens when you mix brawny American primitivism, cubist angularity, and the surrealist quality of claustrophobic stillness? Hello, George Ault (pictured right)! Zabriskie Gallery has brought together drawings and paintings from the 20's and 30's that Ault painted while living in New York City and Woodstock, New York. The drawings are can be surprising in the way he builds up a cloud with marks only around it, or the way he marks a room's corners with light instead of dark. Sometimes Ault expresses a tree in just a few lines; sometimes he obsessively builds up pine tree needles with hundreds of strokes.
If you're looking for variation, Ault isn't the only one to express it. Alexandre Gallery is showing works by fourteen artists. There are classic moderns like John Marin and Marden Hartley, as well as contemporary masters like Neil Welliver and Lois Dodd. The nicest surprise in this show is Adele Alsop's gestural paintings that mix pinks, greens, and creams (pictured below left). In one piece, she captures a forest scene with the sun coming up by painting flesh-toned tree branches writhing in the sun that's instantly recognizable as both realistically accurate and creatively original.
Lois Dodd's small landscapes can be about a simple thing -- like the tension between flecks of orange leaves and a steely blue tree, or red laundry hanging in front of a green shack. And did I mention they're showing a painting by Neil Welliver? The current "Selected Works" is up until April 17 at Alexandre, and then comes Mr. Welliver's "Oil Studies" beginning April 24. Yes, I'm going to be camping out for that one like a middle-aged divorcee standing in line for Kenny Rogers tickets.
Robert Hughes reviews painter Lucian Freud's show currently on view in London, and appearing in New York at Acquavella from April 28 - May 27. The Guardian has a bunch of good stuff for the Freud obsessive -- a short profile, a piece on his horse's ass, and a sneak peak at his portrait of artist David Hockney. One of Freud's models describes what it's like to sit for Freud. Check out the catalog for Freud's first show at that gallery here. (via TMFTML)
Elizabeth Peyton is a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter. She is most famous for painting images of Kurt Cobain and Leonardo DiCaprio and other pop icons. Peter Schejdahl, reviewing the current show at the Whitney for the New Yorker, describes Peyton as "the moral center of the Biennial."
Peyton's work is charming and very likeable. Its small scale (her paintings are usually less than 20 inches tall or wide) and recognizable subject matter make the work inviting. She has certain skills as a colorist and decorative designer in the tradition of Matisse and David Hockney, with whom she shares a room at the Whitney.
But in a more sane art world, Peyton would not be in the Biennial yet. There are no surprises in her work. There's no sense of her confronting a formal problem and finding an innovative solution. In one of Hockney's paintings at the Biennial, he renders a living room couch with huge stripes of orange and white that curve over at the top. It's simple, gutsy, and unexpectedly pleasurable to look at. And it sticks with you long after you've seen the painting. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Peyton has a bored, scratchy drawing of a photograph of Walt Whitman, done as if it were a student assignment.
In many ways, Peyton is to the current scene what David Salle was to the 80's. Both are devoted to photographs as the source for their paintings. Photos have been a source for artists for over a century now, but what makes Salle's and Peyton's use of them different is a devotion to the photograph as a physical object itself, and not just the record of a physical moment in time.
When using photographs as a source, painters must choose between rendering the image as an illusion of three-dimensional space, or treating the image as a jumping-off point for the act of building up a surface of paint on canvas. Many artists choose to go back and forth between these two ways of translating a photo within the same canvas.
Both David Salle and Elizabeth Peyton take a third way, treating the photo as a photo. Perhaps for this reason, both artists are vastly improved by photographic reproduction in books, magazines, and the web. But when you actually see Salle's painting of photograph of a woman spread-eagled, you think of the photograph, rather than the woman or the painting. And so it is with Peyton's paintings.
Peyton's style is a kind of sloppy transluscence. She prefers wide swaths of color on her small paintings, in thin layers that reveal her process of adding paint. Unlike Salle, who transcribes the photo as closely as he feebly can, Peyton slathers on paint in a general way, as if replicating a washed-out Polaroid.
Peyton's work is an image of an image, and what she finds most compelling isn't the subject matter (Kurt Cobain the human being) or the painting itself (Kurt Cobain as a subtext for painterly accomplishment) but rather the style of representation (Kurt Cobain as icon). If this seems all very meta, it is.
The Village Voice's art preview breathlessly describes her "amazing knack for capturing pop-idol images of exhaustion and celebrity with the perfect virtuosic ennui for our time." Peyton's art is very much about her time.
She doesn't take the role of heroic artist. Unlike Salle, who built huge pseudo-complicated paintings with bravura that went nowhere, Peyton creates small canvases, in a choppy half-finished style, that seek to quietly describe a sensibility. It's less about being an individual creator and seeing things specifically, and more about being a collector and seeing things in a general way.
As with Diane Keaton's collection of thrift-store clown paintings, you're not meant to linger too long on any one canvas, but rather to appreciate the entire body of work as a genre. Every piece is a sketch meant to describe the larger project, which is Elizabeth Peyton's hip and eclectic taste. Peyton skips over the difficult challenge of creating rich individual works.
Every issue of Rolling Stone and Premiere magazine comes with a trove of images for Peyton, and all she has to do is apply her signature style without looking too hard or thinking too much. She brands herself, with everything rendered in her pointy, androgynous signature style.
We're in trouble when artists consider their own work ready-made. When Duchamp presented a bicycle wheel as his own work of sculpture, it was a radically new way of looking at both the world around us and the art world in particular. When Peyton decorates the sullen look of a rockstar and it appears in a major museum, it only confirms the status quo with a cool, world-weary sigh.
The Whitney website says "her quietly familiar depictions erode the anonymity of typical media images." Peyton is a painter whose subject is the media, and her way of eroding the anonymity of corporate images is to do bad paintings of celebrities.
But let's be optimistic. I feel compelled to write about Peyton because in many ways she's teetering on the edge of dueling ideas about what art is. The pseudo-social science-influenced humanities, coupled with market pressures, have lured artists into thinking of their oeuvre first, and their actual paintings second. There is an intense pressure on artists to develop a signature style and subject, and produce a pre-defined product rather than letting artistic identity develop over time through the hard work of taking on formal challenges. It's easier to sell, and easier to create, a signature than it is a painting.
Right now Elizabeth Peyton has more signature than painting. One of her paintings at the Whitney is a copy of Leonardo's "Woman with an Ermine." Of course, copying great work is an instructive technique for artists to learn how great artists of the past worked through formal problems. I'm hoping this means Peyton's on the right track, and not just tooting her own horn.
Update: After getting spending more time with Peyton's work, I had a slight change of heart on the occasion of an auction of one of her pieces at Christie's. Read about it here.
Just because the NY Times describes this year's Whitney Biennial as "easily the best in some time," don't expect big changes in the kinds of work that are shown. The Biennial is always about the art world, and the art world has been astray for a long, long time.
But since there's so much wrong about the show, I'd like to point out what's right. I'll be returning to look at many of these artists again, and probably revise my opinions. But here are my highlights.
Amy Cutler uses surrealistic imagery (like women's torsos on bicycle wheels) and trees in a sparse, patterned way that keeps her canvases full of intensity but still very quiet.
Barnaby Furnas is the Quentin Tarantino of the show, using the subject of violence as a tool for dazzling formal experimentation. Some painters quietly go to abstraction when they want to squeeze, squirt, and spray on their canvases. Furnas paints bodies disintigrating, bullets whizzing, and heads exploding on the Civil War battlefield.
My favorite work in the show may have been Amy Sillman, whose palette pits warm and cool temperatures against each other, oranges and reds against purples and blues. She refers to landscapes in the paintings shown at the Whitney, but the subject is where your eye goes, how one abstract form visually competes with others.
I'm also intrigued by Zak Smith, who did over 700 small drawings inspired by Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," and David Hockney, whose recent paintings compress scenes from his Los Angeles house into bright abstract spaces of pure color. There are others who deserve my attention; more later.
If you're coming to New York for dirty pictures, don't bother going to Ninth Avenue. Right now the lewdest show here is at the Met. "Playing with Fire: European Terracotta Models, 1740–1840" features small clay sculpture. Among these are neo-classical pieces modeled on Greek and Roman myths, and a common theme was the grappling/embracing of the man-beast Centaur and a fiesty lass. One sculpture features the Centaur spreading the woman's ass while the two struggle, and his fingers going into regions Hugh Hefner would find a tad shocking. Perhaps Camille Paglia's right about the high porn of classical antiquity. If you go, be sure to catch "Poets, Lovers, and Heroes" for more old-school nasty.
A Cup is a Cup
Falling Down
Moving Along
Not My Memory
River Crossing
Beginning After
Clinton Township
Your DG editors are big fans of 
Since Harry has been too busy at work to blog, I thought I'd post some links to some excellent fairly-recent art articles. I'm no art scholar, so you'll get just the facts from me.
The fine folks over at Sharpeworld have scanned in two full issues of seminal 70's punk rock/new wave rag 
People always object to boxing as a barbaric sport that insults human decency. But would those same people object if squirrels were outfitted with gloves and went 12 rounds? I think not.
Artist Danny Gregory is back from his vacation in the Dominican Republic and has 
There were a few good art shows on 57th Street yesterday; fortunately I got there on the last day of one the of the better ones.
What happens when you mix brawny American primitivism, cubist angularity, and the surrealist quality of claustrophobic stillness? Hello, 
Lois Dodd's small landscapes can be about a simple thing -- like the tension between flecks of orange leaves and a steely blue tree, or red laundry hanging in front of a green shack. And did I mention they're showing a painting by 
Robert Hughes 
Elizabeth Peyton is a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter. She is most famous for painting images of Kurt Cobain and Leonardo DiCaprio and other pop icons. Peter Schejdahl, 
When using photographs as a source, painters must choose between rendering the image as an illusion of three-dimensional space, or treating the image as a jumping-off point for the act of building up a surface of paint on canvas. Many artists choose to go back and forth between these two ways of translating a photo within the same canvas.
But let's be optimistic. I feel compelled to write about Peyton because in many ways she's teetering on the edge of dueling ideas about what art is. The pseudo-social science-influenced humanities, coupled with market pressures, have lured artists into thinking of their oeuvre first, and their actual paintings second. There is an intense pressure on artists to develop a signature style and subject, and produce a pre-defined product rather than letting artistic identity develop over time through the hard work of taking on formal challenges. It's easier to sell, and easier to create, a signature than it is a painting. 
Just because the NY Times describes this year's 