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).
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?"
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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!
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.
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 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."
