http://www.dailygusto.com/ Looking around. Trying to figure it out. en-us 2009-06-27T08:14:43-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/06/another-reason-why-l.php 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.... Art harry 2009-06-27T08:14:43-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/06/playing-with-paul-mc.php 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.... Abstraction harry 2009-06-13T09:10:35-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/05/sex-with-trucks.php Books harry 2009-05-09T05:43:24-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/05/your-diploma-is-garb.php 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. The LMCC has a good interview with Cataldi.... Art harry 2009-05-08T12:17:20-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/04/louise-fishman.php 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. Louise Fishman, Telling, 2007 Louise Fishman, Concealing and Revealing, 2008 Louise Fishman, Geography, 2007 Louise Fishman, Cooked and Burnt, 2007... Abstraction harry 2009-04-13T06:58:21-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/04/defending-lisa-yuska.php 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... Art harry 2009-04-13T06:21:51-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/04/jesus-doesnt-save-an-1.php 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... New York harry 2009-04-12T09:33:40-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/04/robert-motherwell-on.php 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.... Abstraction harry 2009-04-01T06:43:04-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/03/peter-saul.php 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. Peter... Abstraction harry 2009-03-31T10:40:57-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/03/must-post-more.php 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... Art harry 2009-03-29T06:24:22-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/02/fred-sandbacks-world.php "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... Abstraction harry 2009-02-06T10:56:32-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/02/john-newman.php John Newman is a materials guy. 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. Over a dozen of Newman's sculptures are on display in a show at the New York Studio School gallery. 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.... Art harry 2009-02-05T08:03:07-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/02/when-beauty-is-enoug.php 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... Abstraction harry 2009-02-04T07:42:03-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/02/our-city-dreams-open.php 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... Art harry 2009-02-04T07:01:57-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/02/is-that-a-real-unico.php 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.... Art harry 2009-02-03T06:13:12-05:00