ART QUIPS

Monkey Spoon | Kim Foster Gallery

2011-07-23T22:29:00.014-04:00

by Jill Conner

“Monkey Spoon,” curated by D. Dominick Lombardi features work by ten artists who simultaneously create and deconstruct the romanticized myth of bohemian life. The collective quest for the urban legend spurs an array of creative curiosities. But in a city full of diverse cultures and brimming information, the desire to create something new becomes a weight as opposed to a challenge even though one’s reality is not the same as another. “Monkey Spoon,” operates from the space of difference and elicits one paradox after another. Suspended between metaphor and everyday experience, this exhibition captures an imperfect, if not unglamorous, reality.

Nesega Mythology (2011) by Dan Hernandez

The show opens with six mixed-media panels by Dan Hernandez that impose fictitious video-game landscapes upon cracked surfaces, rendering a fake but antiquated, archaeological flair. These pieces not only reveal the a-historic phenomenon brought on by digital technology but also the shortsightedness of the present. However the process of looking underscores much of this show, embedding surprises in the details.

WPA Girl (2011) by Christian Faur

The “Melodie”-series (2011) by Christian Faur consists of nine 15-inch square frames that represent the same portrait using a different arrangement of hand-cast crayons. By returning to the physical pixel, Faur explores the artifice of digital imagery. Peter Drake, however, reaches for the discourse of Realism in two paintings titled “Shrapnel” (2007) and “Tripod,” (2008) that represent unfocused depictions of small action figures which once belonged to his father.

Shrapnel (2007) by Peter Drake

Lori Nix and Susan Wides present an even more layered juxtaposition in their photographs of familiar interior settings. “Museum of Art,” (2005) by Nix captures a non-specific museum interior. The title also rings generic much like her piece from 2006 titled, “Vacuum Showroom.” However the objects in this second piece are spindly and fragile, revealing this photograph as the representation of a miniaturized, doll-house setting.

I, Mannahatta (2010) by Susan Wides

“I, Mannahatta,” (2010) by Wides depicts a ferris wheel towering over three different shopping levels. The miniature and the gigantic weave throughout the picture plane, distorting the sense of space and time. Additionally, the slight blur in the image gives the impression that Wides was also exploring the staged miniature. However this picture represents a true setting, that within the Toys ‘R Us store located in Times Square, New York.

Act I (2003) by Kendall Messick

Photographic narrative takes further twist in the work of Kendall Messick, who documented the later years of Gordon Brinckle, the Everyman World War II Veteran who lived as a reclusive eccentric in Delaware. Messick captures Brinckle in a number of different settings within his house. Much like Joseph Cornell, Brinckle was a cinema enthusiast. However he transformed his desire into a life-size movie theater, located in the basement of his home.

Red Seat Guitar (2005) by Ken Butler

A series of sculptures by Ken Butler also expands on the marginal but in terms of musical entertainment. Butler reconstructs throw-away objects, such as a laptop or a school chair, into functional musical guitars, challenging the adage “form follows function.” Similarly, Dominick Lombardi’s “Urchin”-series (2011) explores the fictional life of a dog, made out of sand and discarded containers. The ephemeral nature of each piece resonates most strongly.

Urchin #30 (2011) by D. Dominick Lombardi

Throughout this show fantasy and reality repeatedly collide. My reality is not your reality. The odd, alien-like “Flowbots” made by Joseph JK5 Aloi on view are also sold as toys in Japan. These small quirky figures compliment his lyrical, arabesque drawings that delve into his personal history. In addition the precarious tilt and imbalance seen in John H. Howard’s surrealist sculptures challenge perception but not physics. The exhibition “Monkey Spoon,” first emerged from a misheard word. From there, Dominick Lombardi put together this exhibition that explored the undefined, serendipitous nature of subjectivity, confirming the fact that not one thing is ever the same.

Eliza Thomas | Wally Workman Gallery

2011-04-27T21:15:00.006-04:00

by Jill Conner

Untitled Moon and Branches, 2011 by Eliza Thomas

The new series of black and white paintings by Eliza Thomas are intricate. They navigate the viewer through fields of gray, the motif of uncertainty, while bringing one into thickets of branches, blossoms and leaves. Naturalism is a significant subject for the artist since its form is at once lyrical and rhythmic, bearing a strong resemblance to Asian calligraphy. Also known as the dynamic moving line, Thomas’ paintings connect nature to the larger scope of humanity by embellishing the illusion of the third dimension, located within the representation of the outlying landscape. Her palette, moreover, captures a wishful, open space that is immediate yet ephemeral. This selection of work marks the artist’s foray away from color and into the complexity of two tones, created by the wash and line of ink and paint across the sheer surface of rice paper.

Oak Study I is a large piece that features a web of black branches intersecting within similar silhouettes of gray, stalling movement and bringing pause. Two larger panels titled Distance and Oak Study V expand on the visual vista even though the second piece appears interlaced with branch-like forms. In both paintings, a horizontal line splits the composition in half, rendering a foreground and background, which pushes the eye to wander throughout the artist’s layered traces.

Untitled 9, 2011 by Eliza Thomas

The rush of white that appears in No Return suggests fluid movement rather than a static portrait of naturalism. However Shadow Study is less elusive, capturing the spider-like gray form of vines that are nearly swamped by the pale color of rice paper. An exceptional series of blossom studies appear in For Gary, Wild Orchids, and Untitled 9, using the traces of ink wash and acrylic to define these icons of nature as objects of a contemplative ambiance.

Eliza Thomas’ abstractions stand out as the strongest works of art in this new selection of work due to the fact that their ambiguity keeps them suspended within the space of interpretation. Having studied sumi-e ink painting with the Japanese Zen master, Shozo Sato, Thomas utilized her studies in black and white to commune with the moving line that has wound itself throughout the vast history of Asian art. The artist’s paintings, however, remain contemporary as each panel reveals a different kind of creative experimentation with traditional Western media.

Brent Green: Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then | Andrew Edlin Gallery

2010-08-08T20:46:00.015-04:00

Jill Conner

House Opened Up, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, mixed media 2010

Since 2005 Brent Green has transformed unique but mundane narratives into quick, sporadic short films that appear as ephemeral and authentic as found objects while exposing the jitteriness of a self-taught artist. This characteristic sets Green’s work free from the bind of history and keeps it original rather than redundant. The artist’s most recent work titled, “Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then,” (2010) initially appeared in two locations, at the International Film Center and the Andrew Edlin Gallery. Along with the artist’s blue-grass style of music, the film and the movie sets recreate a sentimental story about an outsider who lived in Kentucky and built a tall, winding house in order save his ailing wife’s life. Sanity slips away as reality meets fiction and quickly becomes another place, spinning Green’s most recent piece into a transgressive tale.

Mary's First Memory, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, video still 2010

Several years ago, Green was notified about an architectural anomaly outside of Louisville, Kentucky, shortly before it was torn down. While the artist studied and documented the structure, he got to know the life story of Leonard Wood, someone nobody knew but who worked at a small hardware store. With barely any money in his bank account throughout his life, Wood was clairvoyantly resourceful, inventing solutions to problems that had no answer.

“Gravity,” is the artist’s first short film that involves actors rather than puppets or plastic cells of animation. True to style, these actors are not professional and their dialogue is mostly substituted by Green’s spirited narrative. Filmed in the backyard of Green’s home in Pennsylvania, this piece embellishes the details of an odd life lived in the rural countryside.

Mary with Moon, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, video still 2010

Nobody knows where Wood came from, or his wife for that matter, but when they met their friendship carried a unique chimera. The crux of the movie shifts quickly into Wood’s focus on illness and his intent to build a tall, winding house into the sky as some sort of healing machine, destined to save his wife. The Andrew Edlin Gallery featured Green’s rendering of Wood's interior, which looks like it came straight from a fairytale. In France, this type of fanciful thinking is referred to as “Art Brut.” At the edge of sanity, a creative avant-garde swirls but often leads nowhere. Green states that Wood continued to build this structure, long after his wife’s death, until he fell to the ground and spent the rest of his life in a nursing home. Regardless, this short film is deeply memorable due to its erratic, nontraditional structure.

Julie Mehretu: Grey Area | Guggenheim Museum

2010-08-08T20:33:00.010-04:00

Jill Conner

Atlantic Wall, 2008-09

In November 2007 Julie Mehretu appeared on a panel held at Carnegie Hall titled, “Canvas Berlin: Europe’s New Capital of the Visual Arts,” where she expressed a newfound amazement with a city that has been legendary for its history of prolific artists, intellectuals but most of all anti-Semitism. As part of the “Berlin in Lights,”-festival, this panel attempted to clear the air and bring renewed visibility to this historically volatile city, a characteristic that surfaced in the diaries of Harry Graf Kessler, first published in 1971 with the same title. Unlike American abstract paintings which are visually weighted down by the density of the medium, Julie Mehretu has constructed different notions of space, similar to New Objectivity paintings that initially appeared at the Guggenheim when it first opened in 1959. Set within one of the museum’s small side galleries, Mehretu’s paintings immediately wall the viewer into a small space while setting them free, visually. Each painting is 10-feet by 14-feet and pulls one into the scope of illusionistic space, one that is so random such that light and movement work together and entirely skirt metaphor.

“Fragment,” (2008-09) for instance, features a swirl of black and gray clouds that burst out from the intricate line- and lattice-work seen below. Slight outlines of architectural structures appear in the margins but their skeletal forms are entirely secondary, an afterthought. On the other hand, “Berliner Plätze,” (2008-09) captures a layered, terraced and woven image of various motley stone buildings that populate each one of this city’s famous gathering points. Unlike most urban centers, the metropolis of Berlin consists of many, speaking not only to its vast population but its character of complexity.

“Atlantic Wall,” (2008-09) reveals an even more dense selection of markings that tag, cross-out, highlight and deconstruct the subject all at once. “Believer’s Palace,” (2008-09) and “Notations,” (2009) are less colorful and carry a dense gray-scale. However both reflect an intensity that surpasses the others, confirming that the subject of these Berlin-inspired paintings is that of construction and destruction, a dichotomous relationship that is never reconciled. “Middle Gray,” (2007-09) rounds out this small suite and, as the oldest, reflects more of the arabesques and color palette that is characteristic of Mehretu’s style.

In the Spring of 2007, Mehretu was awarded the Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin which led the artist into a two-year investigation of the city as well as its space, history and people that ultimately culminated in “Grey Area,” a series of six paintings that premiered at the Deutsche Guggenheim in October 2009 before traveling to New York City in the Spring on 2010. Berlin is a complicated city for too many reasons to name. The 1927 silent film titled, “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City,” attempted to capture this Post World War I metropolis as one that was still very much connected to the world, an international hub where many desired to travel to and from. But that was six years before Germany’s decade-long fascist era, one that nearly eliminated the city’s prolific history. Now that the German government has relocated its headquarters to Berlin, along with a handful of curious artists, intellectuals and voyeurs, Mehretu suggests that this can be done again, successfully.

John Wesley: May I Cut In? Important Paintings from the Early 70's | Fredericks & Freiser Gallery

2010-08-08T20:07:00.012-04:00

Jill Conner

Leche, 1973

By 1970 critics had decided that abstract painting was dead, an empty genre, while the industrial forms of Minimalism populated galleries and museums, heralding in the new. Following the cosmetic characteristic of Abstract Expressionism, when color and beauty trumped catharsis and reality, the success of figurative painting was identified in the articulation of flat forms, as seen in advertising graphics. Artists such as James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein satisfied consumer demand, providing viewers with sterile icons and images of themselves that were empty of criticism but flush with fantasy. John Wesley’s pop-style paintings features in “May I Cut In? Important Paintings from the Early ‘70s,” at the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, balanced reality with fantasy depicting men, women, children and animals as stoic as Henry Darger’s “The Vivian Girls,” but even more sexually subversive, with a focus on bestiality.

Canada's Toughest Soldier, 1973

“Canada’s Toughest Solder,” (1973) portrays an identical man and woman standing together staring blankly out at the viewer and framed with an array of Canadian maple leafs. In a dark twist, Wesley exposes the flake of Canadian society caused by the shadow of America and its thirst for international war. Yet at the same time, the artist utilizes this irony as a progressive suggestion for the USA. “Mail Order Blues,” (1972) however, depicts a reclining nude woman and associates her untouched body with the guitars above. A series of hands scaling guitar frets appear below, and add a teasing flair to this flat, blue background piece. A similar theme of sexual longing appears in “Sleep,” (1971) Pastel yellow fills the background as a nude woman reclines against her partner’s feet, with her face turned away. Wesley is a master of mystery since it is not clear if the subject is experiencing sleep, rejection or a combination of the two.

Mail Order Blues, 1972

A new take on Greek mythology appears in “Leda and the Man,” (1972) a spoof on the legend of Zeus as goose who once seduced Leda, the Queen of Sparta, as she slept next to her husband. However Wesley turns this theme around and portrays a sock-footed nude man who chases a frantic goose, Queen Leda. This strange sexual tension continues to assert itself in “The Last Gray Hound,” (1971) that portrays an old man bending down in front of a tall-standing gray hound dog. Two others appear on the right, arching back and lying on the floor, but wearing pink clothing like the one seen on the left. Whether this is intended to be a joke about extraneous sports like dog-racing or gymnastics, Wesley suggests that beast and man have managed to exist far more closely than thought.

Sleep, 1971

“Leche,” (1973) broaches the fiery topic of racism in a very multilayered fashion. A blonde woman wearing a blue skirt-suit sits on a stool to the left holding a glass of milk, or “leche,” as it is known Spanish. Three identical young girls lean in this woman’s direction, except the one closest to the glass is slightly darker than the other two, suggesting a bi-racial otherness that almost camouflages with the other figures in the painting. The savagery of class differences appears in “Slave,” (1971) which simply portrays three gray kangaroos facing each other in the background as one holds onto the leash of small gray dog who stands at the center in the foreground.

Slave, 1971

This selection of paintings by John Wesley utilizes the style of Pop art to render dreams, fantasies and taboos that have been continually left out of mainstream discourse due to their sensational content. Moreover, by setting these frozen moments upon yellow and blue backgrounds, the artist creates a psychological ease and frames these ideas as separate icons even though they first appear to be further from any truth. Dreams are never linear but are rich in everything disorderly, telling us more about our orderly selves. Despite this bit of insight, fantasies cannot be packaged and sold like products, leaving them tucked far away within the margins of society.

For All the World to See | International Center of Photography

2010-06-24T14:00:00.008-04:00

Sanitation Workers Assemble in Front of Clayborn Temple for a Solidarity March, Memphis, Tennessee,

March 28, 1968 by Ernest C. Withers

Jill Conner

“For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” curated by Maurice Berger, reveals the divided nature of African-American identity that has been distorted by the mass media. Reality and images were two different phenomena rather than one and the same. Stars from sports and Hollywood like Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson captured how Americans wished to see blacks in America. However it did not counter-balance or even reflect the racism that was practiced across the country such as lynchings, segregation and random assassinations, as see in the case of young Emmett Till.

Missing: Call FBI, 29 June 1964

This exhibition opens with movie footage of Paul Robeson and stills from The Beulah Show. However on the wall opposite, a group of segregation signs appear, openly revealing the instructions for blacks and whites to stand separate. This odd juxtaposition of opposites plays out in another room that features two posters of Caucasian school children, framed with texts that read: “This is America…Keep it Free!” and “Don’t Let that Shadow Touch Them. Buy War Bonds.” Images have functioned as mirrors of identity. When set within the context of mass media, identity turns into a layer of perception that encapsulates specific narratives and prejudice.

Sepia, November 1959

Collection of Civil Rights Archive/CADVC-UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland

In this exhibition, popular culture is exposed as the root of racism. The house-maid and butler, for instance, were objectified in the Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose Salt and Pepper Shakers made around 1950. All of these images and ephemera culminate in photographs of black men assembling in Memphis, Tenessee for a civil rights march, holding signs that read, “I AM A MAN.” This show confirms that there have been no fictional heroes in the mass media who represent the real-life struggles of African-Americans except for the citizens themselves.

Objects of Desire | "Vetrinetta delle Meraviglie: Cabinet of Wonders"

2010-05-30T21:32:00.005-04:00

Jill Conner

May 21 to June 1, 2010

Spoleto, Italy

Aqua, 2008, collage, 15 x 15 inches by Yi Chen

“Vetrinetta delle Meraviglie: Cabinet of Wonders,” revives the romantic love-triangle of fantasy, myth and memory with a series of small-scale collages, found objects, drawings and paintings by Yi Chen, Benedetto Marcucci, Fulvio di Piazza, Sapna Shah and Nicola Verlato. Numerous glass vitrines display these contemporary works of art, evoking a mysterious longing that bridges one back to the heart of imagination where dreams percolate, simmer and abound. Set within the ancient Italian city of Spoleto, this group exhibition overlooks the 13^th-century Duomo and appears like a handful of jewels that contrasts thematically with the bountiful landscape seen in the surrounding hillside.

Lady in Black , 2008, collage, 15 x 17 by Yi Chen

Reality breaks away in Yi Chen’s paper collages, which contain layered cutouts found in fashion magazines, distorting the allegories of advertisement while suggesting an association of someone new. “Tiffany,” (2007) finds its title from the blue bag of Tiffany & Co. located on the composition’s left side. A halo of hair hangs around an unknown face with the S-curve of a model’s body positioned directly below. Three additional pieces titled, “Lady in Black,” (2008) “Aqua,” (2008) and “Afro Lady,” (2008) reflect the same technique but feature various colors in the background that add a sense of depth to these spritely, lightweight portraits. Chen’s single oil painting, “Self Rejuvenation,” (2010) continues to flatten form and reflects the use of sharp-angled brushstrokes that render an edgy figural abstraction as seen in his earlier work.

Sulla strada (On the Road), 2008 by Bendetto Marcucci

Benedetto Marcucci’s collection of jar sculptures feature books sealed in a low-acidic oil, treating these objects of the printing press as relics of a by-gone era. Like Chen, Marcucci explores the flattening of knowledge and culture. “Sulla Strada (On the Road)” (2010) by Jack Kerouac became the narrative of Beat culture upon its publication in 1957 and paved the road to freedom for generations that followed. However “Dizionario delle idée (Dictionary of Ideas),” (2010) strongly hints that the Internet, and other new forms of communications technology, has created a larger a-historical moment leading to a downgraded Western society. As the son of a collector, Marcucci became familiar with methods of assemblage and preservation early in his career. As seen in the two previous objects, “L’Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noise),” (2010) “Il contratto sociale (The Social Contract),” (2010) and “Il restuaro (The Restoration),” (2010) capture paperback editions of classic texts although the artist presents them as rare, archaeological objects of study.

Cascalcada, 2008, oil on board, 31 x 50 cm by Fulvio di Piazza

Fantastical landscapes spin forth in four paintings by Fulvio di Piazza. “Cascalcada,” (2008) for instance, is a phenomenal depiction of knitted yarn and plastic house plants. However when seen from a distance, this painting feels otherworldly. “Catedral,” (2009) and “Fog,” (2009) are saturated with blue, green and black hues that depict volcanic-like masses, punctuated with small areas colored either bright red or white, signifying either lava or smoke. Similarly “Nativo,” (2009) draws upon the details of some fairytales and portrays a face emerging within the surface of a large tree trunk. Fantasy shifts to myth in the small pencil drawings of Nicola Verlato, which set up a heroic narrative. “The Beginning,” (2010) conveys a male figure walking past two Greek-style murals that depict warriors in battle. “Warrior Spirits,” (2010) represents a cave-like interior with limp, male figures floating in space waiting for selection whereas, “The Shield Room,” (2010) reflects the transformation of society’s man into someone who is ready for military battle. “Ritual,” (2010) and “Ritual 2,” (2010) furthermore, portray men and women wildly celebrating Dionysus, the god of excess.

Ritual, 2008, drawing in pencil, 11 x 8.5 inches by Nicola Verlato

The colorful abstract paintings of Sapna Shah add a meditative effect to the earlier themes of distortion, archaeology, fantasy, loss, and betrayal. “Philosophical Fragments XV,” (2009) “Philosophical Fragments XIV,” (2009) and “Philosophical Fragments XXV,” (2009) consist of blue, red, yellow, green and white that interlock and pull the eye into the paintings’ pictorial depth. Two additional color studies titled, “Purple Rain,” (2008) and “Stained Glass,” (2008) focus on the vertical movement of colors using blue, red, green and purple. The subtle color contrasts appear so quickly lending both studies a pleasant, shimmering impression. As part of the larger exhibition, Shah’s paintings provide a quiet, subjective conclusion to a larger group of ideas that are free-floating, imaginative and also undefined.

Purple Rain (from Color Study series), 2008, acrylic on wood panel, 12 x 12 inches by Sapna Shah

This unique collection of curiosities that comprise “Vetrinetta delle Meraviglie: Cabinet of Wonders,” brings together a group of cross-cultural genres that play on feelings of longing and desire. The virtue of this particular cabinet of wonders is the way in which contemporary works of art, such as these, expand upon the narrative of fantasy and offer a new space for dream-like meditation. Encased in glass-covered compartments that recess into sheer white walls, these charms of metaphor not only convey where we come from but also lead us back to the authentic origin of the new.

Ethan Shoshan: I'm always thinking of you even when I'm kissing Another boy | Aljira A Center for Contemporary Art

2010-03-26T10:59:00.008-04:00

by Jill Conner

In English the reflexive verb is used most often in technical writing or personal memoirs, but it rarely appears noticeable when spoken. This particular verb refers the direct object, the self, back to the subject of the sentence or idea. Indo-European languages make use of reflexive verbs more frequently and often without regard to any specific grammatical rules of the language. In other words the articulation of the subject and itself portrays a relation that one has in contrast to others while maintaining a close connection through the stated difference.

The reflexive is complex. It is primarily reciprocal and transitive but can also appear with intransitive verbs. Ethan Shoshan's exhibition at the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark titled I'm always thinking of you even when I'm kissing another boy stands as a personal statement of free associations that are embodied through a series of objects which have been collected by the artist over time. Initially given as gifts, these items have become part of a larger narrative that rings universal, conveying the multi-layered, shifting characteristics of memory and meaning.

Experiencing art outside of a market context is suddenly unique but also quite liberating. Shoshan arranges these gifted objects in a personal order: while numbered on a complimentary diagram, this arrangement does not appear sequentially. But in the end, that is not the point. Feelings, thoughts and memories never adhere to a specific order. Instead it is the personal experience that the artist features with each object.

Two small sea shells, for instance, are displayed on a flat, white surface and appear far smaller in real life when compared to the photographed copy that appears in the catalogue. These small shells were kept to preserve the loving memory of a friendship just like the small plastic bag of hair that the artist once shaved from another lover's chest. Shoshan's additional incorporation of a first-person narrative immediately allows the reader to identify with the "I", the self that is presented. And yet, the self is so often masked away as we proceed through the anonymity of life. Postcards, cards and other ephemera represent a series of experiences that symbolize feelings of passion, love, loss, death, sadness and betrayal - events that are critical in shaping one's individual character.

Is Ethan Shoshan's installation any different than the objects made by artists such as Elizabeth Peyton or Urs Fischer? Both Peyton and Fischer re-appropriate the found object as well as the found image, but in doing so, the object's re-representation becomes depersonalized and far removed from anything specific, except its mode of production: a copy of a copy. The elements of Shoshan's collection, by contrast, are either strictly handmade or found, but not reproduced, preserving the individual imprint of the gift-giver while serving as symbols of particular moments.

When describing this installation, Shoshan refers to these objects as archetypes: the symbolic elements whose meanings we all share. Art, therefore, is about how we connect to an object, as well as others, which signifies a mode of perception that is far different from the recent economic boom in contemporary art. No longer is the idea of value displaced into the dollar. I'm always thinking of you even when I'm kissing another boy divests the art object from its star status but features it within a scope of a larger idea, none of which is for sale. This exhibition marks a beginning. As this idea continues to travel on to different venues, Ethan Shoshan will be collaborating with more artists, who will contribute objects from their own personal narratives as well.

All About Prints

2009-12-22T19:03:00.004-05:00

by Jill Conner

Asteriskpix is always on the road to something new, creating flawless animations that fit smoothly into larger productions. On a recent visit, Richard O'Connor showed some of the work that was done for All About Prints, a project that was aired on American Public Television in May 2009 as well as some fragments from their soon-to-be-finished project titled The Buddha. Although O'Connor still insists that the studio's work is not about avant-garde, high-art but rather about the confluence of creativity and research, the imagery that emerges from this animation studio suggests otherwise.

All About Prints breaks past the wide-spread assumption that prints are less valuable, and a more affordable alternative, to the purchase of an original work of art, like a painting or sculpture. While that is partially true, this show opens up the long history of print making and reveals the fact that not only were these images intended to be low-cost for easy purchase but they were also designed for quick dissemination to a broad audience. Deborah Wye, Chief Curator of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, points out the central role that prints still have in the work of contemporary artists like Christian Marclay and Swoon. Artists throughout history such as Albrecht Duerer, Rembrandt, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Hopper, Kara Walker, Jacob Lawrence and Ellen Gallagher have also explored this as a form of commercial art. However the most interesting facet of this program is the role that the print-making process played throughout both America and Mexico during the 1920's and '30's.

While unemployment swept throughout the mid-Western states, union strikes became more frequent. Moreover, the American population that lived on both coasts was largely unaware of the hardships that had developed throughout the central United States. The WPA was begun by President Roosevelt in 1935, to put unemployed Americans back to work on public projects, but in near-by Mexico, prints thrived where a revolution was underway. Emotional illustrations were passed out in large volume, with the hope that the economic and political struggles of this vast country, located south of the American boarder, could be seen around the world.

Will Barnett discussed his own personal engagement with these life-changing events and stated that American artists were doing their greatest work in the 1930's, which is true given the Red Scare that developed nearly 20 years later. Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros held strong sway over artists who wanted to join the cause for workers rights and social justice, to get the word and image out together. Barnett first worked as a printer for Jose Clemente Orozco and later became the Master Printer at the Art Students League, where he specialized in lithographs.

Although the American Abstract Expressionists took print-makers by surprise, the medium returned with a new focus on popular, consumer culture. Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, created prints that showed images of events as they occurred, an early pictorial suggestion of real-time. Andy Warhol took the print out of the realm of politics and couched it more closely to fashion and consumption. Despite this revival, however, the American print genre will most likely not possess the same degree of political muscle as it did during the early half of the 20th-century.

Arshile Gorky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

2009-12-12T12:18:00.004-05:00

by Eliot Markell

Gorky is one of those well known artists whose work we think we know, but this retrospective is a like finding an open diary. All sorts of intimate things are revealed. Gorky’s seductively drooping, elegantly looping curvilinear forms are his signature move, but to supplement that impression you need to get down to Ben Franklin Parkway by January 6 and re-introduce yourself to this artist’s odyssey.

His life began and ended in trauma and tragedy, in between he made art that sprung from a psyche imbued with creative instinct. The Armenian Genocide of his childhood shaped everything in his art. After the forced marches of Turkish ethnic cleansing, and then watching his mother starve to death, he emigrated to the United States and in an effort to forge a new life and identity changed his name to Arshile (Russian for Achilles) Gorky, in homage to the Russian dramatist.

Fortunately this exhibit contains plenty of drama, particularly the second part of his career. I found the early work after his arrival from Armenia in Boston MA, getting off to a slow start. Some nice, well crafted, but derivative cityscapes and abstracts that don’t hint much at whats to come. The first things that grabbed my attention were a series of works on paper and paintings called Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia based on a small De Chirico painting “Fatal Temple”. The De Chirico is included in the same room which provides a vital connection to Gorky’s inspiration. I’ve always thought of De Chirico as one of the most influential picture makers of the 20th century. Everyone from Fellini to Guston owed De Chirico a painterly debt, so it was encouraging to see some of Gorky’s seminal art emanating from Giorgio D C.

Since I view De Chirco as a painter first and a Surrealist second, I also find Gorky’s origins more about the personal than the graphically inclined imagery of Surrealism’s post World War I dogma and angst. Gorky really starts to get juicy working from a photograph of himself and his mother. Although the oil painted portraiture from this group is a bit on the stiff side, there is a small ink rendering that is as forceful as any Rembrandt pen and ink. Its here that his story becomes almost as compelling as the art you are about to witness. This small work on paper is so freighted with memory and poignancy that it’s almost like a love note, and you know that this sentiment will propel and infuse everything else Gorky touches.

One constant that I found throughout this exhibition is that Gorky’s studies on paper seem to better represent his highly skilled abilities as a draftsman, and generally provide a deeper sense of his visual poetic narrative. I say this with some remorse since I think most artists (including myself) run up against this sentiment. Thats not to say Gorky didn’t paint some highly evolved oils on canvas that contain nuanced and profound composition, just that oil paint is resistant to causal manipulation. Twentieth century artists more interested in interpretative imagery generally put aside the technically demanding requirements of polished oil painted perfection.

Even though Gorky could probably have made his paintings more classically proficient, to his credit he chose to purse a more innovative approach. By the mid 30’s Gorky was ensconced in a studio near Union Square in NYC. His prestigious neighbors included Stuart Davis and De Kooning. There is small group of portraits on paper of some of his cohorts that extol the virtues of fine lines and a steady hand. These drawings carefully carve their subjects like two dimensional busts in a way that Picasso should have envied. Gorky’s painting to this point has not been too exciting, but as he continues to delve into the wellspring of his childhood, a series of paintings called “Khorkom” (based on his Armenian hometown) begin to move into a more unencumbered realm. Color brightens and the rigidity of cubist form starts to loosen and detach from a concrete ground and gain some fluidity.

During the Depression Gorky hunkered down in Union Square while he got involved in the WPA. Although I found his surviving full sized Newark Airport murals overly blocky and heavy handed (obviously influenced by Davis, and not in a particularly good way), again his studies save the day. One small, elongated rectangular format for a mural design including a tri-engine aircraft, is so precise it seems to morph into an abstract graphite engineering blueprint for propellers. There are also a couple of small, playful gouaches that look like plans for toy planes.

In the forties Gorky begins to enter into his most energetic period. Putting aside his portraiture he launches a series of abstract paintings and gouaches based on his plein air sketches. He and his wife and two daughters relocated to the rural Virginia estate purchased by his father-in-law. Gorky had started to work from nature a few years earlier in Connecticut, but paintings such as “Garden of Suchi” based on memories of his father’s gardens in Armenia inform and infuse the work from his Virginia oeuvre. A bucolic dalliance with the birds and the bees inhabit the identity of these paintings, which finally integrate the intimate act of drawing with the broad flourishes of oil paint and gouache. Bursts of color saturate the canvas in transparent washes, fusing intricate lines that seem in a constant state of flux. Solids juxtapose the flatter planes becoming more dimensional, the fuller bodies of these pictures have become more substantially satisfying compositions to the eye. That Gorky’s mature work arose from his interaction with nature defines and sets him apart from his Abstract Expressionist brethren. I find this to be a breath of fresh air in the domain of sequestered urban studios of most other painters of that time (excluding Pollock’s studio in the Springs, but as far as I know although he painted outside, he didn’t paint from nature). Evocative titles such as “Scent of Apricots on the Fields” and “How My Mothers Apron Unfolds In My Life” populate his work from this period and reflect the fecundity seen spread out in this gallery. (Overall I like the way this show is laid out, but for some unfathomable reason the walls in the large room containing all the Virginia work have been painted with large brown swathes in a straight edged design, moving up and down the walls like a graph?!) But even as his work rose to new heights theres still lingering doubt for me surrounding the vacancies and voids that haunt his later art, especially in relation to a sense of missing figure /ground connections. Its as though a fog permeates the croma, subsuming and weakening his
resolve to work through and completely express a sensation.

However this struggle may actually increase Gorky’s aesthetic credibility, he’s not so interested in heroic results as he is in the emotional authenticity of his marks. You can tell he never pandered to critics or collectors; his work and soul is laid bare for all to see, complete with faults, foibles and failings. What a Sisyphean task his life became at the end. Rectal cancer, a younger wife grown weary of illness and depression takes up with a peer, a devastating studio fire that most likely consumed some of his best art (after losing some of my own best works on paper in a gallery fire in Maine last year, I can attest to the acute sense of loss), and then suicide.

Not only did Gorky endure until the end, but he focused his creative energies as a cathartic cure, throwing himself into the series of paintings called “The Plough and the Song”. The first canvas oozes a murky morass of sepia tints, but you can make out the vaunted Gorky passages emerging. By the time he got to the fourth and last version his mood has lifted significantly. The mise-en-scene recalls a sun drenched picnic of abstracted delight. There the good cheer ends. The last few rooms are devoted to his most fatalistic work. The series of paintings titled “Charred Beloved” are a gloomy bunch of smoky grey and black visages that seem less of an homage to the lost art, and more a funeral. Then suddenly the “Betrothal” paintings appear personifying everything Gorky strived for. Inverted lily pads drift downwards pulling our gaze along into a vivid dusk populated by unknowable entities striking classic poses like players on a stage. These epic narratives epitomize the unfettered nature of creative intuition, freeform and dreamlike, yet ironically they were closely engineered by Gorky. Some of his most striking late studies on paper employed the academic grid technique to facilitate assembling his imagery on larger scale. Yet his grids turned out to be a means to an end; they become integral to the visual integrity of his compositions on paper. Its testament to his savvy and guile as a painter that the “Betrothal” paintings seem so animated and elastic.

Of the final work “Diary of a Seducer” is truly spooky and prophetic. Spectral, ghost-like figures gracefully undulate in a softly darkened scene. Prefiguring Guston, a succinctly painted eyeball nestled on a black pillow stares out into the abyss. Finally, in 1947 “Limit”, his last painting, embraces Gorky’s ever recurring void. The black, splotchy form hovering mid-field simplifies everything. There is no doubt that this portends death, but theres no sense of urgency. The feel is of profound ambivalence, its not that he didn’t care, just that there was nothing else left to paint. Arshile Gorky 1902-1948 “I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for awhile”

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum

2009-12-07T00:11:00.008-05:00

by Jill Conner

Several Circles (1926) oil on canvas

The tumbling art economy has led to a renewed interest in blue-chip art, with a special focus on European Modernism. Much to the surprise of New York’s contemporary art community, the Gagosian Gallery exhibited the late works of Picasso during the late Spring, once reviled as his weakest but suddenly considered to be his best. The Museum of Modern Art currently hosts an extensive show on the Bauhaus while the Guggenheim Museum features a focus on one particular member of the Bauhaus, Vassily Kandinsky. While celebrating the 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, “Kandinsky” stands to be the most significant retrospective since the previous one in 1984 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. As each painting is placed chronologically along the museum’s spiral structure, this retrospective not only moves past its predecessor 25 years prior, but it also reveals the influence that Kandinsky’s work had upon the design of the building’s unique and intricate structure. However the sheer number of paintings by Kandinsky creates an entirely separate experience, one that is purely retinal, nostalgic and deeply psychological.

Vassily Kandinsky hailed from Tsarist Russia and, like many members of the general public, grew extremely jaded by the monarchy’s exclusive, singular opulence. Although he studied law, economics and statistics, Kandinsky developed an affinity for the various types of everyday décor that appeared inside private middle-class homes. None of this may seem relevant, but the artist was attracted to the ideas of intellectuals such as Vladimir Sokolov, who disdained material wealth. In other words, the commodity symbolized aristocratic values, not that of everyday society. As a result Kandinsky opened the discourse for non-objective art, a genre that attempted to conflate the spiritual with the visual. Colors, in his view, reflected various musical notes, suggesting that if one spent a significant amount of time looking at his paintings, the viewer could eventually hear a symphony play out in one’s mind.

Riding Couple (1907) oil on canvas

However Kandinsky’s ideas were as avant-garde to Western Europe as Modernism was to America in the late 1920s. After arriving in Munich in 1896, the artist studied painting with Anton Azhbe and eventually continued at the Munich Academy with Franz von Stuck, a German Symbolist who was active in Art Nouveau and founder of the Villa Stuck. Although two of Kandinsky’s early paintings from 1907 titled, “Riding Couple,” and “Colorful Life,” reflect the arrangement of colors and contrasts seen in stained-glass windows, he sought to open up the canvas further, to make painting entirely independent of an art historical past.

Impression III (Concert) (1911) oil and tempera on canvas

When “The Blaue Reiter Almanac,” was published in 1912 with fellow artist Franz Marc, Kandinsky had created a platform for the ethereal nature of colorful space even though German Expressionism held the public sway. “Impression III (Concert),” (1911) portrays a small group of figures on the left, swamped by a deluge of yellow on the right. The composition does not make sense when seen in terms of a narrative. However this piece is its title: an impression made after experiencing symphonic sound.

Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive (1909) oil on cardboard

Two years prior, a painting titled “Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive,” (1909) reflects Kandinsky’s gradual development toward color abstractions. In this instance the green of trees, hills and field blur together when not defined by a dark contrast. The white clouds, smoke and flowers also appear synonymous except for their shapes. By contrast “Little Painting with Yellow,” and “Painting with Red Spot,” (both from 1914) disband with the object entirely and capture a swarm of colors that move spontaneously throughout the picture plane.

Painting with Red Spot (1914) oil on canvas

During the same year, Kandinsky stated at a lecture in Cologne: “I did not want to banish objects completely. I have in many places spoken at length about the fact that objects, in themselves, have a particular spiritual sound.” (1) The cityscape returned in “Moscow I,” (1916) but as a non-linear, spherical scene. Soon before the start of World War I, Kandinsky was forced to flee Germany and return to Russia, where he felt even less at home. The artist’s subsequent paintings lost their bright vibrancy and became darker in tone. Times had changed and he lost a close friend, Franz Marc. Despite this setback, Kandinsky continued his investigation of color as a source of feeling.

Moscow I (1916) oil on canvas

But in the early 1920s, the artist made a return to Germany as a teacher at the Bauhaus. Stark geometric angles and sharp, straight lines characterize much of his work during this time, serving as small frames for the light hues that blur together quietly throughout the background. “Several Circles,” (1926) reached further, toward the edge of the canvas that ultimately came to frame this series of otherworldly, soft-colored circles set upon a black background.

Kandinsky’s work was introduced to American audiences in 1912 but became notable in 1913, at The Armory Show. His reputation grew and by the 1930s he received offers to teach at the Art Students League in New York as well as an artist-in-residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He refused both offers and never visited the United States, feeling far more comfortable in Europe despite its political upheavals.

Various Parts (1940) oil on canvas

Although Kandinsky spent the rest of his life in Paris, following a move in 1933, his ideas found no place within the artistic circles there. By lightening his colors further to light pastels and transforming the canvas into a site for oddly playful biomorphic forms, Kandinsky’s search for the absolute remained a lifelong quest. Coincidentally when Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen arrived in New York City to see how the ideas of the Non-Objective artists had been received, she was struck by the lack of its presence and found American art to be far inferior to what was being produced in Berlin: “America has no style. I am too modern for this country…In this country no cocks crow for non-objective art.” (2) Rebay soon became a colleague of Irene and Solomon R. Guggenheim. Eventually she became an advisor for their private art collection that came to reflect Non-Objectivism, a genre that has influenced generations of American artists.

1. Kandinsky (New York, NY: Guggenheim Museum, 2009) 30.
2. Ibid., 113.

7 Days in the Art World

2009-12-03T12:14:00.005-05:00

by Eliot Markell

Hi Joel,

Thanks again for sending me the hardcover edition of Seven Days in the Art World, I think. Truly the most irritating piece of narcissistic, non-fiction I couldn't put down. Well I shouldn't say I won't put it down, just that I read it without chewing more than I had to. Starting with the "how-attractive-am-I-come-hither-you-influential-art-stud" jacket photo of Ms Thorton, with continued liberal doses of female pheromonal innuendo continuing throughout. Ah yes, it helps to be a sex siren to get ahead in an art market populated with dirty old white men.

I must admit that she can shows flashes of knowledgeable commentary, and clearly knows her way around the hierarchy of cynically corrupt art world masters of the universe. I suppose knowing that the owner of Christie's auction house controls how dealers market artists work in his collection should be of some significant consequence to the laymen, but the whole thing comes as no surprise to me. She does occasionally manage to show a modicum of restraint when it comes to praising Cesar, but goes on to dote on the glories of the pinnacles of art star power without burying anyone. It's this kind of infatuation with the moguls of Chelsea and London (before their recent downfall) that aggrandizes the idea that art only exists if someone is willing to pay for it.Guys like [Takashi] Murakami will succeed in a conspiracy to put in a retail counter to sell womens' accessories in a museum retrospective only if its profitable. Murakami may even have some ability as an artist but, that's not what really interests him,. He'd just as soon sell commodities like oil or gold if it could get him to the top of some heap. It's all about ambition and winning.

By far the most dreary chapter details the day into evening long "crit" at CalArts. A more fundamentally bullshit excuse for tenure you couldn't make up. The so-called "art teacher" [Michael] Asher, who conducts these interminably long, insufferably boring, sessions of delusional post grad mental masturbation, interrupted only by pizza breaks and loudly snoring "students" has really gotten away with one. And like all the rest of the charlatans he actually gets paid. Good work if you can get it.

The chapter on the Turner Prize is also rather depressing. That the nominated artists are so blinded by careerism that they permit themselves to be lined up for a beauty contest must really be humiliating to them in retrospect. Just the fact that they are even in the final four means they already have achieved enough of the goodies to establish themselves for life. For these artists to proceed anyway is a sad statement about how vanity has obscured, and even replaced the real value of making art because you love doing it.

Despite the best efforts by the fashionistas at the helm of the art market to convince everyone otherwise, creating art objects that contain a lasting relevance requires a dedication that transcends financial reward. This is not to say that artists shouldn't get what they deserve, but that they should establish their creative priorities as a way of life and have enough courage, resolve, and ingenuity to stick with it despite temptation.

Water - Edited by John Knechtel

2009-09-20T19:15:00.007-04:00

by Jill Conner

Water (2009) is a forthcoming anthology from MIT Press edited by John Knechtel and consists of several essays that attempt to capture the subject of water in various conditions ranging from raw sewage to domesticated back-yard pools, while underscoring its significance as a vital component to the natural eco-system. While the first two essays by Knechtel and Timothy Stock wax romantic in an attempt to identify a very illusive subject that finds definition in its complex scientific properties, the photographs of Carolyn Turner, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley collectively reflect both its static simplicity and historical mystique. But no matter how one approaches the subject of water, it is a paradox that cleans, pollutes and destroys; it is life-giving as well as life-taking.

The human race needs water to live, but as the population continues to increase, its viability has been thrown into question. Christie Pearson’s essay titled, “The Public Bath and the City,” for example, reveals the anthropological manner in which human kind clusters itself around this particular resource cum product due to the fact that good supplies effectively build stable communities that are set up to nurture future generations. Although water is seemingly available everywhere, it is most often not fit for consumption. Robert Kirkbride, moreover, explores the fact that neighborly communities which grow around water can end up posing as a detriment to future water supply. Kirkbride’s essay titled, “On Water and Development: A Cautionary, Microcosmic Tale for a Watershed Near You,” identifies the natural cataclysms that are set into play when man-made irrigation and plumbing systems are extended into once secluded, untouched natural environments. Despite the fact that our bodies consist primarily of water, water is a tragic force when seen in the ocean or the mountains. When it connects with clouds, through a heightened level of humidity, it changes currents and generates large waves.

Water has become a primary subject of concern for an increasing number of artists, architects, scientists, filmmakers and writers. In 2002, the architectural duo known as Diller+Scofidio built the Blur Building over Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. As part of the Swiss National Expo, this temporary structure could only be reached after crossing a long ramp, and it consisted of a cloud of mist that was pumped upward from the lake's water. Five years later, contemporary artist Roni Horn opened the Library of Water in Iceland for the purpose of offering visitors a place where one could either view the surrounding waters or look at the various ways in which Horn has successfully turned this element into her muse. Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World was released the same year, in 2007, and documented the small civilization of scientists who live upon and study the local ice-scapes, in addition to the unique sea life that flourishes below, along the ocean's floor. In November of this year the Cynthia Reeves Gallery will be hosting H2O Film on Water which will appear soon after the release of Water.

THE BUSHWICK BIENNIAL

2009-09-03T02:13:00.004-04:00

by David Gibson

The constant flowering of bohemia is not a construct of advertising, nor of the whims of a dozen infamous gallerists. It is the generational engine of youth culture, alive and well, striving at the border of the mainstream, throwing out its various statements while at the same time contributing to a community that has registered a similar creative echo for at least 25 years.

Bushwick is the locus of new creative energies, the same ones that are active in many other parts of Brooklyn, especially its neighboring wards of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. This year saw the emergence of its first official celebration, The Bushwick Biennial, brainchild of NURTUREart gallery director Benjamin Evans, in collaboration with Austin Thomas of Pocket Utopia, Chris Harding of English Kills, and Jill McDermid of Grace Exhibition Space. I first heard Ben utter these two words over a year ago, and since then he has worked hard to make it a reality. As the director of NURTUREart, he has seen first-hand what sort of influence the art community as a whole can exert when given proper focus within the scheme of the larger art world.

Certainly the word ‘Williamsburg’ echoes out into the international art world, and so should its generative offspring. Just as Soho created the possibilities for Tribeca and Noho, Williamsburg has spread into the outlying areas of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and further, all along the corridors of the L train and the B61 Bus, and into the minds of New Yorkers, Americans, and people around the world.

Each of the three galleries I visited that weekend had a different focus of interest. The show Fortress to Solitude (an event that was actually part of the yearly organized Bushwick Open Studios, overlapping this year with the Biennial), curated in an independent studio space by Guillermo Creus and hosted by Brooklyn Fireproof landlord Burr Dodd, featured the work of some 22 artists, many of them working out the formal strategies of abstraction, some figurative, and some with text and a combination of elements. Paintings by Amanda Church, Peter Fox, Lisha Bai, and Anna Pedersen presented drippy phantasms that were either visceral, limpid, or gossamer. Other abstract works were more structurally based, combining radically different mediums such as oil and spray paint (Guillermo Creus, Baptiste Ibar), making naturalistic allusions (Diane Carr), and stretching into hard edge materialism (Tom Meacham, Gary Petersen). Another work by Peter Fox is a pale light blue canvas with two words painted in bold red letters, spelling out the expression ‘Idiot proof’, which is to say, anyone can get my art, and anyone could have made it. One very iconic portrait of President Obama by Tom Sanford is overlaid with the words What You Believe Is Already True emblazoned over a half quizzical facial expression of our fearless leader; is this just sloganeering, is the artist poking fun at authority, or is this just a painting about painting? Perhaps we will never know. The title of this exhibition, a play on words originally describing the re-birthed spiritual home of the comic book legend Superman, is a telling narrative about the nature of creativity and how it is specifically vested in areas such as Bushwick. The overwhelming presence of abstraction in the exhibition can be characterized not only as the aesthetic bent of its curator (a painter him self), but also as a statement on the manic focus of Bushwick artists, whose concern is with forms of expression, and though they are a fairly idealistic bunch, such values do not always lead them down the primrose path of ideology. They remain committed to the formalism which inspires them. Hung randomly with a lot of white space between them, we get the effect that spatial concerns still matter in the Bushwick of 2009 as they did in the Soho of 1969, and that giving artists room to think, and showing their work as existing within a systematic but disinterested locality is the best thing for them.

Finally Utopic is not just a pun, it’s the last show in the space that was once the studio of its director, the conceptual artist Austin Thomas, and features work by all the artists she has championed since her project began only two years ago. It has always existed as a sort of playground for artistic intentions, not taking itself too seriously, looking at art as if it were a form of conversation rather than a political slogan or commercial advertisement. Molly Larkey, who is usually a sculptor, here presents gestural rather slapdash gouaches that intimate the beginnings of an idea that may later take physical form; Valerie Hegarty cracks the plaster of the wall before pasting a poster over the hole, that will ultimately rip the image along its ragged edge; Rico Gatson installs Systemic Risk Funky Revolutionthat is one part tautology and one part puzzle. The air overall is one of tentativeness, as if no one statement should predominate and none will last beyond the end of the space itself.

A strong tenor of idealism was evident in works at NURTUREart, curated by Benjamin Evans, though this motif was not always comprehensible in the same way; the works here were by and large non-abstract, or at least not within the limits of a formalist bent. His own curatorial statement states that “These fourteen artists in- volve both optimism and melancholy, and reflect the tensions between doomed worlds, better places and personal mythologies. Themes of transformation and strategies of transformative experience run through the work and link it to the neighborhood that is transforming all around (and partly because of) them. Mike Estabrook’s video loop The Road to 'Nam is both entertaining and pensive, as it combines images of brutality in war and the dour countenances of Kissinger and Nixon with a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby song "If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Of Baked A Cake." We recognize the images from the front page of The New York Times, of a US Okie aiming his gun at a Viet Cong, with politicians thrown in for good visual sense; but the whole arrangement falls apart with the song resounding. It’s so cheery and chummy that war can almost be seen as a big party in which we laugh until we have to cry. Audrey Russel made a special installation on the adjoining rooftop that created a visual and physical spectacle which gallery guests had to step around as they talked, drank, and shared their experiences of the past evening’s activities. Made from pink foam insulation, a large wooden pylon and Xmas lights, Beam Tower with Pink Grass waved around the roof like the froth of an ever renewing tide.

There is something very energizing about always living on the edge, engaging with what seems newly relevant. The Bushwick phenomenon has us looking for the next aesthetic event around every corner.

Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art

2009-08-01T19:54:00.012-04:00

by Jill Conner

Don Voisine’s show of new work at McKenzie Gallery, that opened in April and closed in June, continued the artist’s exploration of empty space, intersection and movement upon square, wood surfaces. Echoing the mid-century design phenomenon that upheld the fabrication of reductive geometric designs, these paintings focus on specific combinations of color. Black and white typically appear in the center as brighter hues provide a visual framework around the edge of each piece.

Thru and Thru (2009) captures a thick black line, juxtaposed to itself in the center of the picture plane, creating the representation of line that moves gradually in opposite directions on both sides of the piece. The red and thin yellow strips of color further reveal that each component of Voisine’s work is equal in measurement. Moving point by point into the realm of flat space, the artist’s overall construction of a painted blank surface is peculiar due to the fact that the titles given to each work create a demand for narrative.

Parisian Heiress (2008) for instance, features two thick black lines that intersect within the center of the wood panel. Both strokes reveal two different types of black paint that layers rather than bleeds. Gloss finish clashes with that of matte suggesting the proliferation of pictorial depth. Although the figure is absent from this work, the lines appear to move back and forth within the frame suggesting bodily movement.

Ding (2008) moves further and plays with the different textures within each medium. In this instance the tilted square lying in between the black and white ones give the impression of a round shape that attempts to roll within the static pink frame. A similar concept surfaces in Sidekick (2008) which consists of two halves that are inverted against each other, creating a sense of staggered movement.

By denying narrative, Voisine’s paintings leave one suspended within moments of contemplative stasis, between our own fantasies and the otherwise vacant character of reality. The artist does not try to mislead the viewer with too many illusionistic embellishments, but instead uses a series of juxtaposing small angles that force a second look. The use of pure geometry accompanies crisp, clean forms that lead the eye toward more space rather than less.

Gustave Caillebotte at the Brooklyn Museum

2009-07-28T18:14:00.009-04:00

Jill Conner

Impressionism and the throes of the Industrial Era could not be further away from our own technologically advanced reality. By sheer comparison the figurative style of times past pales when juxtaposed to the number of mass-produced images that flood us daily. However the Impressionists had something that very few artists have today: the opportunity to revolutionize the picture plane by rejecting the established method of painting, as taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, in favor of something more casual, more spontaneous. Since the Impressionists collected together numerous times to assert their own solidarity against the Salon, creating the Salon des Refusés, these artists were the new radicals and still are. Most of them struggled while living out their own convictions of what painting should depict. Yet their fascination with daily life, to capture it as it was, opened painting to the world, freeing it from the grip of the French aristocracy. The Brooklyn Museum's exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea revealed painting's subtle yet pointed evolution from that of academic classicism to a style that resonated a new sense of atmosphere, an urban ambiance.

The need to break free, into new visual territory began in the 1840s with paintings by Gustave Courbet, whose Realist work strongly juxtaposed the austere Neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Dominique Ingres. Although David and Ingres championed the rigor of French academic painting during the first half of the 19th-century, the Neoclassical style crumbled as the French sought independence and freedom during the Paris Commune of 1871. The early work of Gustave Caillebotte reflects an early fascination with traditional, symmetrical juxtapositions, but his attempt to incorporate movement and action within the painted framework appears to have fallen short of his goal to render an extension of the lived experience.

Floor Scrapers (1876) depending on which painting one looks at, captures two to three men renovating a wooden floor in an otherwise empty apartment. Caillebotte created a number of studies for this piece which indicated that the human model for painting was no longer that of a nude woman standing in a secluded artist's studio, but instead the working-class men who toiled daily in physical labor. In 1877 House Painters skewed the extended viewpoint off to the left side of the canvas while the center portrayed a small group of painters standing outside of a shop window. One contractor maintains a distant view on the sidewalk, standing behind the other two who are closer to the building, standing on ladders. This painting reveals Caillebotte's development of a loose, blurry line that responds to the feeling of the moment. Light is not modeled in paint, but instead various shades are layered between the back, middle and foreground rendering depth and a sense of realistic space.

The new angular city of Paris, as designed by Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, becomes the artist's muse in The Pont de l'Europe (1876) and Boulevard des Italiens. (1880) As seen in Man on a Balcony (1880) and Boulevard Haussmann, Snow (1879-81) the individual remains anonymous while the buildings, street and long stretch of green trees swamp the rest of the canvas. However the dichotomy between the city and country dominates much of Caillebotte's subject matter. As an artist, he was just as content with life in the city as he was with the rural landscape. The Yerres, Effect of Rain (1875) portrays a fragment of water at an angle. White halos appear across the water's surface, revealing the artist's attempt to capture the fall of rain and the dim light within the sky.

Skiffs on the Yerres (1878) combines the artist's new, swift brushstroke with the kind of physical movement that he attempted to capture in Floor Scrapers. Two kyacks emerge from the left corner as the rowers' oars oscillate methodically through the water, maintaining smooth movement and even direction. Caillebotte became a boat-builder in the outlying village of Gennevilliers in the late 1880s, after purchasing a large property with his brother in 1881. Just as Giverny became the ultimate muse of his contemporary Claude Monet, Caillebotte embellished the quaint landscape around Gennevilliers. The Plain of Gennevilliers, Yellow Fields (1884) shows a vast stretch of blurry orange and yellow blossoms that stretch out into the center of the canvas, framed by green fields. Likewise Garden Path with Dahlias in Petit Gennevilliers (1890-91) reflects just that: an empty walkway hedged with flowers, all under the context of a bluish, gray sky.

Gustave Caillbotte had every facet of daily life at his finger tips and chose to focus on those details that interested him most: city laborers and recreational leisure. Work and play were deeply correlated and quickly becoming part of a way of life that was destined to effect everyone, as the Industrial Era continued to usher in new technologies throughout societies of the West. Given the amount of pictorial volume that we find ourselves currently living with today, Impressionism provides both a respite and recollection of a moment when the time of one day could still be extended into a month. Technology had not yet effected fine art even though the Daguerrotype emerged in the early 19th-century and Henry Fox Talbot was printing photographic multiples by the 1850s. Caillebotte and his colleagues were fortunate to have lived as artists in the calm before the storm.

Carol Salmanson at Mixed Greens

2009-07-21T21:52:00.017-04:00

BY JILL CONNER

Diaphany (2008) by Carol Salmanson took advantage of the short days during the last fall and winter and appeared inside the windows of Mixed Greens Gallery. Salmanson's piece sought to give light art, and light sculpture, a different context by connecting it to the city's urban terrain along West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, by allowing viewers to observe from afar. Similar to the medium of sound, light is not itself an object that fits easily within the scope of conspicuous consumption. Additionally Diaphany reduced the spectre of light to a series of colorful, intersecting surfaces that seamlessly piece together an abstract image that harkens back to Piet Mondrian's abstract geometic painting titled Broadway Boogie-Woogie. (1942-43)

Glimmering Grove, 2007

For this particular project, the artist utilized an array of technologies that were couched within a long, narrow space roughly 2-feet deep. Yet, the visual effect that Salmanson created easily gave one the impression that this installation was configured throughout the entire gallery space. Since light sculpture generally needs a dimly lit environment to succeed, Salmanson juxtaposed Diaphany with the cycle of natural light outside. In doing so, the artist did not put her work away within the dark corner of a non-descript gallery interior but rather, turned it outward toward the street at night.

Upon Reflection, 2007

Light, as an artistic medium, began as a supplement to the mundane light bulb in the early 1960s, requiring specific wiring and placement in order for it to function correctly. The overall concept was curtailed to structural restrictions. However due to technological advancements, light sculpture now has the potential to address formalist issues of space, color and contour. Diaphany served as a painting in pastel-colored lights that suggested a non-existant, utopian space while standing in physical contrast to our own. Carol Salmanson is presenting a new light sculpture in Mixed Greens' current 10th Anniversary Exhibition.

Taney Roniger at Slate Gallery

2009-05-14T12:28:00.005-04:00

BY DAVID GIBSON

There is something very obstinate yet enduring in the work of Taney Roniger. Her recent exhibition “Stones and Ciphers” at Slate Gallery in Brooklyn brings together two bodies of work which share a similar aesthetic interest informed by scientific ideas. They manage a specific aspect of abstraction in which method is equal to madness. How else are we to perceive the finitude which characterizes this work, in which all color is limited to hues of black, white, gray, and sometimes sepia, as if the painting were no more than the printout of some military-industrial computer bank? Roniger doesn’t need words to transmit the values in her paintings. Perhaps because she wants to achieve the status of a document or an artifact--both products of excessive effort and detritus relevant to the passing of time.

We look into these images and we see both information and mystery. It makes perfect sense for an artist to be attracted to matters of abstract reality, yet the degree to which Roniger has extended this interest begs further analysis. Nature at this level offers an amazing clarity and symmetry that no other model can teach. The attraction of artists to elements of design is one aspect of this work. But Roniger is also fascinated by the appearance of scientific printouts, and on the algorithmic procedures which emerge from the systems used to measure random natural events. Despite their serial quality, their streamlined and machinelike structure, the fact that these images exist as the demonstrative subset for a sequence of otherwise unknowable events, they are especially admirable as a form of artistic expression.

Roniger gives her works oblique titles which resound with the respect she has for puzzles, whether logic or theory derived. One vertical work within The Cipher Series is titled Prisoner’s Dilemma and the reference is to a logic game in which two people, each of them accomplices in a crime, both tell exactly the same story, making both of them innocent and canceling out the notion that competition is the primary urge in normal social relations; that we have an instinctive need to protect ourselves. Perhaps Roniger is telling us that even at a molecular level, competition, i.e, the concept of kill or be killed, is not just the law of averages, but is the law in word and name. Matching system for system and obliqueness for obliqueness we cannot fail but we drawn into the web of aesthetic expectations that shrouds these works and keep us from being alienated by the streamlined and transparent quality they so easily evoke.

Of Roniger’s second body of work on view, The Stone Series, the best example was titled Embedded Form #1 which most resembles a hill, or even a mere stone, with its edge torn away to reveal a vein of some other ore, perhaps coal or gold, which reaches from one side to the other like the lines in a person’s hand, giving innate dimension to an otherwise consistent substrata of bubble forms that press together, creating a linkage of tangencies which seem to infer density and content. The less consistent vein interrupting them represents a void instead of an exception, a gesture of something flowing from one unknown origin into an uncertain future.

Each of these works combines structural with esthetic perspectives on a field of endeavor which is essentially abstract only because it exists below the level of an everyday visual commonplace. We cannot sense these images via sight, touch, or smell, and therefore we can only know them as textbook illustrations. What an artifact and a cipher both share is the quality of evidence, which adds to their beauty and also lends them a degree of authority that moves beyond cultural reference, manifesting equally as knowledge and inspiration.

For the gallery: www.slategallery.com

For the artist: www.concatenations.org

Interview with Gary Panter

2009-05-02T21:54:00.018-04:00

BY JILL CONNER

Untitled (Two Girls with Guns), 1996

In 2008 Gary Panter returned alternative comics back to the mainstream with “Daydream Trap,” at the Aldrich Museum, “Pictures from the Psychedelic Swamp, 1972-2001,” at the Clementine Gallery, along with a 2-volume catalogue raisonne covering his work from the early 1970s and “Cola Madnes,” that features the ongoing adventures of Jimbo. With “Dal Tokyo,” set to come out in October 2009, Panter continues to mesmerize fans and viewers with a facet of visual culture’s underground that has thrived within America since the early 20th-Century.

In the 1950s, the American government conflated the popularity of comics with the rise of Communism and even blamed these mass-published strips for contributing to the corruption of youth culture. The Comic Magazine Association of America (CMAA) formed to create a new set of standards, known as the Comic Code, which set out to delimit every artist who worked in the industry, taking away creative freedom in favor of publishing structured plot lines.

Even though Panter came of age in Oklahoma after these stringent rules were set in place, he began a prolific career in the 1960s that embraced everything that the CMAA was against. His career eventually peaked in the 1980s when he created Emmy award-winning set designs for the television program, “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” that ran from 1986 to 1991. However most recently Panter has shown himself as an artist who continues to work in an array of media such as paint, printmaking, light and music.

Jill Conner: As a youth of the 1950s, when did you first become aware of the Comics Code?

Gary Panter: I think from references to it in Mad magazine.

JC: The Code was created by the Comics Magazine Association of America out of the assumption that comics from the early half of the 20th- century were corrupting the young generation. Based upon your own experience, how accurate is that assumption?

GP: I remember being really startled and frightened and attracted to weird pre-code horror comic covers. But I don't think that it hurt me, or anyone who was not already disturbed. My daughter reads EC horror comics and I don't think that it is hurting her.

JC: What impact did these political decisions have upon your work?

GP: Comics got cuter. My work incorporated scary and cute comic imagery.

JC: Did you create a particular response to the long list of rules that comic artists were expected to follow?

GP: No.

JC: Your comic career took off just as the punk rock counter-culture started to boom in Los Angeles, California. Did you do any painting there before moving to New York City?

GP: I have been painting big paintings since the late 60s and continue to steadily make paintings. I showed paintings at many alternate spaces in Los Angeles from 1976 until 1985 when I moved to New York. I did a lot of album covers for musicians such as Frank Zappa, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Residents, Chaka Khan, as well as magazine illustrations for Rolling Stone and Time in order to survive and started working with Paul Reubens on his Pee Wee Herman stage and TV projects.

I started getting my comic narrative work in Wet and Slash magazines on a regular basis starting about 1976. While I still lived in Los Angeles, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly started RAW magazine in New York and they began to publish my cartoons in the early 80s. Also in the early 80s I started going to Japan and doing lectures and painting shows. I still paint and make comics and also do illustration, mural commissions and design.

Traffic, 2004

JC: When did you come to New York City and what was the underground comic scene like at that time?

GP: RAW magazine was going strong and there were a lot of experimental comics being done as part of the Lower East Side art scene. Many cities have their own community of cartoonists. At that time in New York, Art and Francoise, Mark Beyer, Charles Burns, Mark Newgarden, Kaz, John Holstrom, Ron Hauge, Mark Marek, David Sanlin and a lot of other artists were making very interesting graphic experiments.

JC: Did you move to New York City with the hopes of becoming an artist for one of the larger comic conglomerates, or was it more for an individual art career?

GP: Comics is something I love to do, but it is one of several personal art activities. I do painting, printmaking, light shows and drawings in sketchbooks. It's another art activity. I have no interest in being part of mainstream comics. My cartoon work is experimental and does not fit into the mainstream comic world. In 1987 I was picked up by the Gracie Mansion Gallery and showed with her until it closed. I have shown with Sandra Gering and most recently Clementine Gallery in Chelsea.

JC: Which comic have you collaborated on with Jonathan Lethem?

GP: Omega the Unknown. Jonathan is a friend and I like his work a lot. That was probably the only time I will do a mainstream comic, because he had asked me to contribute to his series. So it is a novel thing for me.

JC: Your father, as I understand it, was an artist. What kind of work did he make? How did you find yourself responding to it?

GP: My father is 80 years old and lives in Texas with my mom. He paints very imaginative Cowboy and Indian paintings and has all my life. I love his work. There is nothing like it. He ran a dime store when I was a kid and they had comic books.

But what really got me drawing comics was the super experimental Hippie comics of the 60s like ZAP comics by R. Crumb and Robert Williams and other young rebel artists.

JC: Given your shows at Clementine Gallery and the Aldrich Museum, do you think that underground comics has finally arrived? Or will it soon become a victim of conspicuous consumption?

GP: There is a growing number of adults reading comics in the US and new generations of cartoonists writing for them and making comics of a high literary character. One welcome happening in the narrative graphic art world is the number if women who are making personal and literary comics, which was not the case 20 years ago.

JC: Who could you say has been a strong inspiration for your work?

GP: Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney. Oyvind Falstrom, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Cal Schenkel, Jean Dubuffet. Peter Saul. H. C Westerman. Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha.

JC: The Aldrich Museum exhibited your work in 3 parts: sketchbooks, paintings and music. How does your music connect to the visually rich side your art?

GP: My music is collaged a lot like my visual work is made.

Where Was the Airforce? 2001

JC: When I saw some of your drawings at the now-defunct Black Cat Gallery, I only saw a vague connection between the content seen in “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” and that seen in your prints. Do you feel that the design of the stage sets diverged dramatically from your own, personal style?

GP: I was not trying to make Pee Wee's playhouse look like my work. It was a fantasy bachelor pad for a super nerd. We put lots of pop art and painting references in the set.

JC: You’ve mentioned growing up in a missionary environment, led by the Church of Christ, which you later pulled yourself out of. Did this shift away contribute to the tense, erratic line that surfaced in your comics?

GP: It took a long time to think my way out of the church, and I was stronger for it. Yes, it did contribute to the tension and apocalyptic aspect of my art.

JC: Is the Comics Code still as strong as it used to be? Graphic novels are now widely available and do not seem to be connected to a stringent set of stipulations.

GP: Mainstream comics, which I don't see very often, tend to seem perverse and cruel to me, so maybe the CMAA is not enforcing anything any more.

JC: Do you think that comics are getting a renewed interest through the revival of street art? Supposedly the deregulation of internet communication has helped open things up more.

GP: I don't know, but I suspect current comic making and reading are a reaction to exclusive digital action, and related to all sorts of making art by hand activities going on. Of course a lot of comics are completely digital and are still then related to the move toward producer over the exclusive consumer.

Preview: Unica Zürn "Dark Spring" at the Drawing Center

2009-03-28T02:31:00.014-04:00

BY JILL CONNER

In 2006 the Halle Saint-Pierre of Paris exhibited over 100 drawings and watercolors by Unica Zürn, reviving her vast collection of work as an overlooked extension of Art Brut. Zürn was known, initially, as the wife of Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer and spent much of her life reeling from tragedies that tore at the core of her own identity. Born in Berlin, Germany on July 6, 1916 after the start of World War I, Zürn became the embodiment of Berlin Modern, the Weimer society of the Post World War I era, that flourished and crumbled, attracting artists and writers from different countries while the larger populace was torn asunder by the economic fall-out generated by war reparations.

In 1929 when Zürn was thirteen years old, her family’s house, situated in Berlin-Grunewald, was auctioned off with all of its furnishings intact, signifying the loss of her family’s middle class status. Not very long after, she and members of her family became involved with the National Socialist Party. One year after the birth of her first child in 1943, Zürn’s house was bombed. Her second child was born in 1945. As other members of her family died either at war or internment camps, Zürn divorced her husband and fled her family for Paris after meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953. From that point, Zürn began creating a series of poetic anagrams that gradually evolved into elaborately drawn and painted imagery, characterized by marks of distortion. For Zürn, art became the ultimate means of expression, which revealed the war she waged in her life.

Zurn’s art was last exhibited in New York at the Ubu Gallery in 2005. Totemic yet mystical in appearance, her work posed a challenge for writers to sum up since it does not exist within the scope of fine art as we know it, but in the realm of Art Brut, where imagery automatically flows from the mind while entirely independent of both trends and movements. As seen in two untitled works from 1961, Zürn mapped a series of falcon-like forms that each bear an infinite number of eyes. Set up as a dense pattern, the eyes and faces quickly disappear into larger unknown forms. In the catalogue from 2006, Barbara Safarova wrote, “The ‘I’ appears as an effect of signs, insecure in its continual metamorphosis: it can not be fixed.”

The face, in general, became a sight of memory and experience when the artist recollected, for example, the brother who raped her as a child, her grim reaction to the experience of abortion, the memory of her father, and other close colleagues who unexpectedly faded out of her life. When passing strangers in the street, Zürn would imagine these known faces. But eventually no matter how many drawings she created, a sense of satisfaction was not there leading Zürn to tear up some of her art. Barbara Safarova and Terezie Zemankova both suggest: “Some creators show us in their works that perceiving our body as a unified whole, distinct from the rest of the world, is an illusion.” Zürn’s consistent thickly braided lines continually opened up new forms that distorted rather than constructed, while lacking any overt context.

From 1960 to 1970, Unica Zürn was at her most prolific while visiting several hospitals for long periods of time. In her narrative titled, “Man of Jasmine,” (1971) Zürn described her process thus: “Hesitant at first, the pen ‘swims’ above the white surface, and locates the spot where the first eye is to be drawn. It is only when something gazes back at her from the paper that she starts to orientate herself, finding her motifs flowing effortlessly forth.” Wolfgang Knapp has described her art as the product of a psychic state that maintained an aesthetic frame of mind. By the late 60s, Zürn applied heavy black lines as contour and captured beings that bore a resemblance to Hindu iconography.

On October 18th, 1970 Zürn took a temporary leave from the psychiatric clinic at the Chateau de la Chesnaie and returned to see Bellmer at their apartment in Paris, located at 4 Rue de la Plaine. The next day, the artist threw herself over the balcony and died. Whether chased by visions, voices or her own memories, Zürn had lived a broken life. In mid-April the Drawing Center will host, “Dark Spring,” a selection of 50 drawings and watercolors. Titled after the book that captured her life in the third person, the drawings in this exhibition will reflect the sporadic nature of the artist’s mind as well as the various figurations that it took while wandering along the surface of a page.

Gary Rough "I Want To Tell You" at Number 35

2009-03-25T12:37:00.014-04:00

by Jill Conner

When the art market was booming, everyone wanted to be visible. To be seen was to be known, and in the world of it’s not WHAT you know but WHO you know, opportunities bounded forth. As the art community continues to work in the shadow of the decadent era that came to a screeching halt once the financial markets fell apart, it is establishing a new location quite prominently throughout the internet rather than at bars, cafes, magazines and advertisements. In fact, social networking sites like Facebook have connected many disparate art critics and artists with one another, allowing for a series of interesting conversations. Gary Rough’s exhibition at NUMBER 35 entitled “I Want To Tell You” focuses on the odd yet disappointing contradictions that arise when freedom and ownership collide.

Within the gallery’s tiny space, that is slightly larger that a postage stamp, Rough covered each wall with torn pages from a small paperback book: George Orwell’s fictional narrative 1984. Published in 1949, Orwell rendered a metaphorical critique of Stalin’s Soviet Union that focused on the hypocrisy of the government’s outward promise of freedom--attractive to so many intellectuals in the West such as Doris Lessing and John Berger--while political dissidents were pushed to the margins and eliminated from humanity.

Rough utilizes Orwell’s critique as further warning to those of us who have grown comfortable with our own lives, particularly the internet. What initially felt like the New Frontier quickly became a collection of established points that are monitored by a series of third parties. Rough’s installation also includes a series of framed collages and drawings that reflect a redundant, border-line state of mind. “Taking/Giving (13),”for instance, is an extensive collage of the number 13 and appears three times in the show, as if it is a larger component of the artist’s “Failed Pattern,”-series.

One cannot help but feel jailed within this claustrophobic environment as mirrors reflect the gallery’s windows, emphasizing the limited space that one is standing in. The last piece, however, titled “Family Portrait,” from 2003 consists of mirrors placed within the small frames that are intended to render a larger, photographic family portrait. Rough’s use of mirrors, however, reflect the wall on the other side of the room and, once the viewer passes in front, emphasizes that participation in the internet is also complicit with the larger online voyeuristic process. With respect to Facebook, the digital relationships have been relatively carefree, but the corporation of Facebook itself has not only attempted to make everyone’s visual content their own, but others have since complained about censorship and limitations set upon a mode of communication that was initially thought to be free.

Martin Kippenberger at the Museum of Modern Art

2009-02-25T21:37:00.016-05:00

by Jill Conner

The much anticipated survey of Martin Kippenberger titled, "The Problem Perspective," is set to open next week at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition is astounding in scale and crosses an array of media all at once. While Kippenberger would easily lead one to believe that his vast number of multi-media installations, drawings, and paintings together portray him as a jack-of-all-trades and a master-of-none, this show stands as his critique upon the shallow nature of the conspicuous art market, the need for new trends and the disingenuousness that has been placed upon the artistic process.

Kippenberger added a self-portrait in nearly every work of art to frame the context of the contemporary art world upon himself, the individual artist. However due to his representions and appropriations of modern masters like Picasso, Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter, scholars have interpreted Kippenberger's work to represent a longing for such grand status. But Kippenberger's legacy as an artist runs much deeper and joins the ranks of Rembrandt and Max Beckmann, two artists whose work consisted largely of self-portraits. Like Beckmann, he was a contemporary Romantic who utilized the process of self-critique to render reality as it was. In an effort to keep his work relevant, Kippenberger utilized everyday materials and deconstructed the notion of the artist as master. As an anti-artist, one who did not conform to either traditional studio or gallery tactics, Kippenberger exposed the museums' use of "artist as master" for the purposes of marketing rather than aesthetics.

This odd irony is best captured in "The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika'," (1994) which is a large room of various chairs and desks that are intended to symbolize the interviews of aspiring immigrants to the United States. But as nice as the artist's narrative sounds, it does not exist. Franz Kafka's book titled, "Amerika," was left unfinished. Moreover, every depiction that Kafka created throughout his book was based upon pictures and travel books that he came across. Kafka never travelled to America. Kippenberger leaves the viewer suspended between his own vision of reality and what is known, while leaving open the question of what is America? Who owns it? How does anyone know that he or she has arrived to this particular destination?

Kippenberger took his role as an artist seriously. He orchestrated irony quite frequently, revealing the challenge of working as a contemporary artist in this complex globalized world, a place where a person's nationality no longer meant as much as the product that was produced. In the February issue of Artforum, George Baker reflects upon Kippenberger in Los Angeles during 1989. The artist decided to financially invest in Capri, "the somewhat forlorn, outdated (very '80s) restaurant." But before we can ask why, Baker continues with: "someone who knew Kippenberger, or someone who knew someone who knew Kippenberger, will tell you that the artist wanted to back the restaurant so that Los Angeles could have decent spaghetti Bolognese." Therefore Kippenberger did not finally achieve meaning within the last two years of his life, and subsequent death, as Ann Temkin suggests. Instead he was a master of irony throughout and, like Takashi Murakami or Gerhard Richter, he knew what the market wanted. The market was not about aesthetics, about being German or about making subjectively nice art. Rather, it was about anything that could be made fast and sell well. In this, Kippenberger succeeded.

Carolee Schneemann at PPOW Gallery

2009-02-24T20:19:00.044-05:00

by Jill Conner

Carolee Schneemann has been most remembered as a performance artist who dared to show and perform with her body in the early 1960s, when it was entirely taboo to do so. Intent on investigating whether a female sexual identity did in fact exist, many thought the artist used her own body as a canvas. However Schneemannn's art career began as a painter, and she always considered her physical body to be an extension of the paintbrush, and her performances, an extension of action painting. Due to the fact that performance art, at this time, progressed in tandem with larger socio-political movements such as Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests, the complete trajectory of Schneemann's career was truncated and eventually brushed aside once those turbulent social issues, so critical to the era, were seemingly solved. And yet Maura Reilly, curator of this show titled, "Painting, What It Became," has brought back the artist's paintings for further view due to the fact that Schneemann's work has never been considered in its entirety until now.

The first half of the gallery features a mix of paintings from the start of the artist's career and lightly combines them with a small selection of video performances and kinetic sculpture. One of the two earliest pieces titled, "Three Figures after Pontormo," (1957) is a dramatic abstract painting that carries visceral movement through the contrasts that oscillate between white, gray and black. Gradually the back of a nude male figure, standing in classical pose, emerges from this moving maze and makes a convincing connection with the performative nature inherent in Jackson Pollock's practice of Abstract Expressionism. In fact, artists like Pollock who worked during the 1950s did not function in cultural isolation. Poetry by Kenneth Koch, James Schyler, John Ashbery and particularly the performative readings by Frank O'Hara figured prominently into the definition of this art historical moment.

In that context, Schneemann began to imbue the painted surface with other objects in pieces such as "Sphinx," (1962) transforming the drawn line into a tangible reality, or suggesting a connector that could link viewers to art as well as each other. One could also argue that the heavily-layered, mixed-media pieces such as, "One Window is Clear - Notes to Lou Andreas Salome," (1965) appear similar to work made by other artists at that time such as Robert Rauschenberg and his "Combines." However such a narrow, linear view defies the nature of the collectivism that upheld the New York art community at that time. Schneemann, moreover, was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater that promoted the investigation and development of kinetic work, which was primarily performance. Aside from Schneemann, artists like Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Elaine Summers were intent on extrapolating the expression of Abstract Expressionism, so as to move it from the flat canvas and into three-dimensional space.

Making art real, or bridging the gap between art and life, without losing any trace of innovative creativity is a steep challenge that every artist faces. Schneemann's "Fur Wheel," (1962) consists of an inverted lamp shade, covered in fur with smashed beer cans hanging from the frame as ornaments. Mounted on a turning wheel, this piece performs a painting by providing a view of the same image repeatedly. However, the movement is entirely secondary. Schneeman sought to rupture this sense of stasis when performing "Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions," (1963) in conjunction with "Untitled (Four Fur Cutting Boards)," (1963) and again in the randomly drawn piece of "Up to And Including Her Limits." (1976)

With the revolutionary days of performance long over, Schneemann's paintings hang, stand and tilt throughout the space of PPOW Gallery as a sign of the fact that the artist never moved as far away from the act of painting as was originally thought. "Painting, What it Became," is a short survey that focuses on this long-overlooked side of Schneemann's career and constructs the bridge between her two-dimensional work and performances. Although these two genres had occurred simultaneously for quite some time, performance was long mistaken as process. Schneeman, herself, has said that the use of her nude body ended up becoming a distraction to the pursuit of her larger goal: to extend painting into the public sphere. As the shock of the 1960s has shifted away, it is now clear that this collection of paintings initially functioned as formalist investigations into the movement of medium.

Panels at the New Museum and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

2009-02-22T20:14:00.018-05:00

by Jill Conner

Over the last two weeks, the New Museum and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council each hosted an event that directly took on the issues which New York City and the larger, globalized art community find themselves now facing. Budgets have fallen as companies throughout many sectors have laid off overwhelming numbers of staff, leaving many in the art community to wonder what will happen next? Are we headed for the 1970s all over again? "Museums and Civil Society - The Role of Artists, Institutions and Politics Now!" took place at the New Museum on February 12, 2009 and was divided into three panels that were hosted by the Austrian Cultural Forum. The LMCC, on the other hand, presented "The Shifting Skyline: Branding New York in Times of Financial Crisis," on February 18, 2009 which was a presentation by urban sociologist Miriam Greenberg. Although it is clear that all arts institutions will need to reconsider exactly how they can reach out to an ever-evolving community, New York City has made significant advances in preserving its cultural legacy during times of crisis.

Peter Prakesch, Artistic Director of the Joanneum and the Kunsthaus Graz, moderated the three panels at the New Museum that were initially intended as a compliment to the AFC's current group exhibition, "The Artist as Troublemaker: Do We Still Need Them Today?" However given the current global economic catastrophe, each panel confronted questions relating to museums' survival. Laura Hoptman, Senior Curator at the New Museum, did not refrain at all from conveying that the contemporary art market over the last 5 years has been strongly entwined with the entertainment industry. However she made a very good point when highlighting the fact that Americans tend to view contemporary art through the lens of entertainment far more than their European counterparts.

On the other hand Connie Butler, Curator of Drawings at MoMA, expanded on the shifting relationships that artists have had with museums especially with respect to those who worked in opposition to museums, known for their historic, conservative approach. However due to the fact that a generation of curators advanced to significant museum posts after working in alternative arts organizations, the artist-museum dichotomy was bound to change. As an example, Butler announced the Museum of Modern Art's new acquisition of Fluxus art from collector Gilbert Silverman. Fluxus was a group of artist who defied concrete definitions along with the kind of art that was supported by mainstream galleries and museums during the 1960s. Due to that historic disjunct and the fact that most Fluxus art was made in a non-art manner, MoMA is figuring out how to go about preserving and exhibiting these particular works of art.

While curators Maria Lind and Eungie Joo covered a number of methods that have been used to integrate contemporary art and artists within the scope of museum education, museum consultant, Dieter Bogner, effectively identified the museum as a mass media institution that is very political and yet is a historically young concept which involves a very small portion of society. As a designer of museum collections, Bogner also stated that museums need to change their installation displays every 10 years in order to remain a relevant presence within the community that each one serves. With respect to the New Museum and its lack of a significant permanent collection, the avenue for its viability is clearly the relationships that it will be able to engage with contemporary artists at any given time.

Marco de Michelis, Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, declared that contemporary art will be historical within 5 years; however, the challenge facing arts institutions will be the way in which they decide to make use of space. MoMA's new structure attempted to answer this question, but the white-box nature of its contemporary art gallery does not belong to the museum since it lacks any kind of sequence. De Michelis postulated that museums need to create a new identity through the production of a hybrid that combines the objectivity of work with the subjectivity of society.

The third, and final, panel at the New Museum came to the conclusion that the key for museums to continue to remain viable in the future is to focus on the local, suggesting a shift away from the global. Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, painted a somewhat dire picture in announcing that many non-profits will disappear within the coming months, although most are operating in a survival mode at the moment. She did not hesitate to say that blogs are changing things dramatically and could stand to become the new venue for significant coverage of the arts.

A week later at the top of Chase Manhattan Plaza, Miriam Greenberg expounded upon her new book titled, "Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World," and for a moment everything stopped feeling so bad. Greenberg made a convincing link between the representation of the city's skyline and its economy. An early 1970s advertisement from Al Italia, for instance, claimed New York was bound to disappear and was a setback for city officials who had made significant investments in the city during the 1960s. As a result, the New York realized that it had to become more robust financially and also aggressive with how its image was set to appear in media throughout the world.

Filmmakers, for example, were encouraged to bring production to the hard streets of New York during the 1970s around the time when the "I (heart) NY,"-campaign was developed and reproduced indefinitely. While the Bronx was left burning by greedy landlords and the development of "White flight" from the city, New York embraced the new buildings in its skyline with antique boats sailing in the harbor during the Bi-Centennial year of 1976. To this day, marketers are faced with the challenge of how to represent New York City so that tourists, as well as locals, will continue to be attracted to its ever-changing cultural heritage.

Two Solo Shows at Smack Mellon

2009-02-19T01:01:00.016-05:00

Jill Conner

Kristen Hassenfeld and Jennie C. Jones feature two separate exhibitions within Smack Mellon's expansive space. Hassenfeld presents a series of monolithic-sized sculptures made primarily out of paper while Jones offers a compilation of sounds that emanate from several speakers located in the back. When put together, the sound art and sculptural installation play off of one another to create an ethereal environment, transforming the massive gallery space into a cathedral-like setting.

"Dans La Lune," (2009) is a small French phrase that means "head in the clouds" and consists of large, white jewelry-like ornaments that hang at all levels from the gallery's extremely high ceiling as an elaborate visual obstruction. Using the glass crystal ball as her modeling source, Hassenfeld meticulously assembled each component to look like flamboyant, baroque-chiseled forms that are held together by large, hand-made gems. Light emanates from just a few of the artist's assembled spheres lending the entire collection of paper works an ephemeral atmosphere. The choice of materials, moreover, evince a longing for the recent past that has been filled with an endless array of parties.

During the art market's hey-dey, when Williamsburg had taken off as the new destination for contemporary art, Hassenfeld created similar installations for Bellwether Gallery. But at that time, her work played upon the growing greed and excitement that everyone was having while basking in the riches of art, since nearly anything was considered art, so long as it could be sold for an attractive price.

But shaking this memory, light sounds of jazz and rhythm play over and over again in Jones' sound-piece titled, "The Walkman Compositions." (2009) Although Jones presents a selection of drawings that illustrate the evolution of various Walkman designs throughout the 1980s, her effort at sound art is the most interesting of all. Emanating from four black rectangular forms that couch tightly near each other, Jones suggests an object as the basis for her sound piece, although the object itself is secondary and quite irrelevant to the medium of negative space.

As Holland Cotter recently pronounced the end of the art boom, he also suggested that contemporary art now has the chance to operate freely from the pressures of the conspicuous art market. Both artists in these two solo shows at Smack Mellon capture the aesthetic rather than monetary relevance of art. "The Walkman Compositions," for example, re-frames the art experience entirely since it is not just about looking but also about hearing. "Dans La Lune," on the other hand, is so large that none of it can be easily transported or sold as a marketable product. Both installations are what they are: art for experience and not spectacle.

Erik Guzman at Front Room

2009-02-02T20:32:00.012-05:00

by David Gibson

Every artist these days has more than a simple aesthetic, they have their own mythology to promulgate. It’s as if they want to present their art work not only as an example of their creative qualifications, but to manifest elements across the spectrum of their artistic history as individuals. The determination of quality being highly subjective, we are required to engage ourselves with the work on hand to such a degree that its mythos becomes evident.

In the drawings and sculptures of Erik Guzman, we are presented with work which depends upon, and in some cases actually produces, a light source. Think of the light bulb going off in the thought balloon of a cartoon character. Other sources of light are less allegorical but no less mimetic, such as the sun pacing its track across the sky, developing a notion of transience and duration even as it falls prey to the same immutable forces. The sense of alarm, an interruption of daily life to manifest a sense of eventfulness, is the paramount element in any of these circumstances. Light as controlled by man often has an illuminating (sic) aspect which its natural origin does not.

Guzman’s sculptures and bas-relief drawings are unique in my experience of art. They seem to have emerged out of the genre of Science Fiction, specifically one in which hieroglyphics and celestial machines both have a place. I can see references to films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tron, and The Terminator. Yet I also relate them to Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank Herbert’s Dune. Each of these works of literature or film, and the narrative subgenres to which they belong, presents us with a highly mythologized view of reality.

What Guzman’s work shares with them is his love of the opaque and the mysterious. In Clarke’s (and later Kubrick’s) masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are given an alternate timeline to history in which an ominous presence, floating on the edges of humanity’s experience since the days of the caveman, makes itself known. The monolith object operates as a sort of cenotaph on man’s road into the future, marking a flashpoint at which a certain detour must be observed, in order that at least one destination be reserved for persons other than mankind. On the way to this moment, a series of transformations take place through which we are made to feel overwhelmed by transcendent powers. But what takes precedence in the perception of such events is also evident in Guzman’s work: an understanding of manifest visual conditions that overwhelm logic.

The mythology evident in Guzman’s oeuvre takes two routes: the narrative of epics and the mystery of symbols. One may choose either route from which to find meaning. The narratives are oblique yet dynamic, and are etched in horizontal glass panes which sit on little ledges hung on the gallery walls to the left of the first room, and on the right are a set of hanging structures which are illuminated from within but seem to have the glass panes suspended behind cloth strips, so that light passing through them creates a subtle shadow resembling a watermark. The specific markings in the glass panes are oblique to say the least, and feature epic scaled sites which house events of metaphysical or spiritual grandeur: what appears to be either an endless building or a road stretching to infinity, interrupted by a swarm or infestation of small flowing creatures which seem vaguely elemental, as they are accompanied by glowing stars and seem to appear out of a rift in space. A more common figure is the silhouette of a man’s form, just his upper torso and head, with light emanating from him as he travels through a series of labyrinthine spaces toward a grand godlike figure whose own silhouette seems to merge with the fabric of reality, becoming less present while at the same time all-powerful.

Guzman’s sculptures, which are installed together in a second room, are arranged so that the physical space needed for each, and its own projecting light, does not interfere with the others. As one walks around the room one discovers that the programmed movements of each is generated by a motion dictator, as if we were interlopers in a strange crypt. The machines themselves seem to be fashioned from a combination of metal and ceramic material, and they utilize a lot of open space, with portals in the surface so that one can look into the machine as it operates its specific and oblique function. All the metal parts are shiny and gleam in the aura of their own illumination. Approach one machine and the moving part arcs back and forth, with a light inside of it flashing on and off with a dreamy regularity that is almost serpentine. Another starts revolving very quickly, while another seems to fold up into itself, like an armadillo.

The intermingling of a passive mythological element with the dynamic cultural content of wireless entertainment most commonly used in video games but having implications far beyond them is what gives Guzman’s work its rigor. We have always looked to machines for knowledge. The difference between actual machines such as the microwave and the Walkman, and imaginary ones such as jet-packs and laser guns, is often a matter of degree. Each of them extends the reach of what man can do. One of the implications of such far-reaching ability is that it will begin to resemble godlike proportion. The machines in Erik Guzman’s art are like a new species, making the first uncertain gestures into existence, instinctually marking space and extending the range of metaphor for how we see ourselves. Perhaps God is nothing more than a well-designed machine. If so, Guzman helps us to see the light.

Seth Price at Reena Spaulings Fine Art | Review by Jill Conner

2009-01-28T04:45:00.012-05:00

The nuts and bolts of art history and criticism relies upon the proper use of titles with dates. Without correct attribution, a work of art could theoretically be miscontextualized or even misplaced within the span of time. Fashions and fads would be offset as they rely on this apparatus to be relevant. Although each gallery and museum has its own title-and-date specialist to catch and correct the mistakes of writers, Seth Price has portrayed this institutional practice as an obsession of satire laced with irony.

About a dozen poster-sized paintings hang along the gallery walls and depict a combination of 1980s-styled graphics, old advertisements and American paintings of the pre-Modern era with various calendar templates. Price's ironic representation of a painting from the early 20th-century not only occurs as an appropriation, but it is accompanied with full attribution, while starkly offset by the horizontal and vertical lines that piece together a month like October, for instance, with the year 2004. The artist confirms that we are now dated but in deeply layered way.

In this mixture of images that occurs annually during the larger process of calendar production, images are confused within time and separated from the time in which they were created. Calendars, as such, eventually stand to replace the historical moment with a new one while attempting to shift the sense of nostalgia into reality. Although the historical context reverts to the present, it remains a subjective one by providing meaning to whoever is looking at that particular image during a certain month, day and year.

Unlike On Kawara, Price does not approach the obsessive use of dates as an act of Zen. Instead he does what the rest of us resist and gives in to the dominant past, one that continues to frame the moment in which we live. This suggests that the present has no particular image to impart, providing little to no context for itself except within a series of individual experiences. In addition to this collection of dated paintings, Price extends his pun on the historical moment in two polysterene masks that seem to portray someone who is currently unknown but who might eventually be monumental to our times.

Brian Lund at Smith Stewart Gallery | Review by Jill Conner

2009-01-27T19:56:00.012-05:00

In the late 1990s, when the art market began to recover from the crash of the 1980s, everything visual began falling into the canon of contemporary art. By the end of 2008, in fact, nearly everything was art. Magazines had increased their coverage of valid, creative media throughout the last decade to encompass works in music, fashion, sports and film, because everything at that time in society moved so smoothly and appeared so impressive that it had to be called, a work of art. Brian Lund's current exhibition, "A Very Real and Very Dark Time," contains about a dozen drawings that capture a personal translation of major motion pictures into an abstract idea.

Lund has long been a fan of Bob Fosse and his award-winning choreography seen in films such as "Cabaret," (1972) and "Kiss Me Kate." (1953) While watching these movies, the artist devised his own set of symbols and lines that piece together larger Rorschach-like interpretations. "Double Star 80 (3000+ Edit Cuts)" (2008) for example, portrays a skeletal, leaf-like arabesque made from a labyrinth of tiny lines when seen from afar.

"Selected Edit Cuts from Sweet Charity and Lenny," (2008) depicts an overall pattern that hints at the outline of a Georgia O'Keefe. And yet a close-up view of each piece such as, "Double Cabaret (2400 Edit Cuts)," (2008) captures a multitude of circles and lines that move, undulate and double-back both toward and away from each other.

Could Lund be taking one for a twirl? Yes and no. While it would be easy to brush these pieces off as nothing more than a personal fantasy, these drawings carry on where Mondrian left off with, "Broadway Boogie-Woogie." (1942-43) Lund's drawings are not only layered, by offering two different experiences when seen either close up or far away, but unlike the Modern master who sought to capture the angled movements of New York City, these drawings investigate the shape of moving forms that have piqued our own curiosities for decades. By following each line circle and square, visualizations of dancers' jumps, moves and gestures, within the scope of strict choreographic symmetry gradually come to light.

Cordy Ryman at DCKT Contemporary | Review by Jill Conner

2009-01-23T12:21:00.023-05:00

"The first log he chooses lies at the top of a small knoll, in a patch of firecracker weed. He heads toward it; the little red flowers with sulphur-yellow tips seem to part to make way for him and the cable. He throws the bell around the end of the log that is lifted free of the earth where the knoll drops sharply toward the canyon, then secures it in its hook."

- Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion, 1963

Cordy Ryman's selection of new work at DCKT Contemporary breaks down the painted plane and extends the notion of painting from its traditional, flat surface toward an array of tiny modules that are either stacked or collaged together, while bearing different textures. Similar to the complex structure of Kesey's narrative, Ryman revives the genre of abstraction as a way of life, accessible beyond the confines of the Ivory Tower suggesting an innocence and freedom within creativity.

Unlike Postwar American abstract art that was placed high on a pedestal for its independence of form, Ryman captures tactile, but not transcendental, beauty. "Third Wave," (2008) features an array of long boards that are set at different angles along the gallery wall, creating both a physical and visual wave of color. Painted in three different pastel colors on the front while fire-engine red coats the back, this work connects physical movement with a larger abstract idea.

A more poignant piece titled, "Pink Staple 2," (2008) combines a set of drastically different surfaces that alternate a coat of bright red with areas of natural wood, exposed after the paint had been removed by hand it seems. A series of wood staples shamelessly connects both sides of the center, bringing the mechanics of art making into view.

One piece that stands out as a metaphor for the circuity of American art history is "Coil 2." (2008) In this instance the artist pieced together cut boards on their sides, to create shallow recesses that appear similar to a maze. But in this piece, not a single path connects with the other leading the viewer into an aesthetic dead end.

While the notion of quality has been vanquished from contemporary art, Ryman uses this new freedom to stretch abstract paint into an object that contains scraps from his studio. "V3," (2008) for example contains an array of velcro swatches attached to a pale, yellow surface whereas, "Red Frosting," (2008) appears to bear a smattering of wood dust collected from the studio floor.

American abstraction is far from a finished idea. While it continues to move away from particular forms, such as the figurative, the genre has begun to focus not so much on the visual effect of the finished product but, instead, the process and the materials that go into it. As meaning becomes both something and nothing simultaneously, Ryman cuts through layers of historic formalism and transforms the abstract art process into a performative, random act.

Nick Cave at Jack Shainman Gallery | Review by Jill Conner

2009-01-11T21:54:00.024-05:00

Nick Cave's new collection of "Recent Soundsuits," at the Jack Shainman Gallery was more disappointing than it was interesting for a number of reasons. For one, never judge a show by its title. "Recent Soundsuits," would lead those who are unfamiliar with the artist's work to think this show would be a series of unique sound installations, whereas this new collection of body-covering sculptures are intended to serve as physical barriers that shut out the world. In addition, the postcard that depicted a figure blanketed with hand-knit bags suggested that this show would add some enlightenment to the current socio-economic malaise that so many of us currently find ourselves in. However upon entering the gallery, Cave's work launched into the redundant story of the everyday found object.

A series of small carnival figures hoisting an array of objects, such as wooden boats and porcelain birds, extend toward the back of the gallery and gradually prepare one for the artist's new collection of suits that consists of vibrant colors, on the one hand, and mounds of cheap tschochke on the other. In fact some of Cave's new suits look like umbrellas of metal fixtures that attach to the user's head. One consists of an array of metal flowers that extend to the waist while another features a series of large spinning tops and gizmos.

Each one of Cave's sculptures doubles as a very ornate costume that appears to be unusable. The overuse of the daily object also places strong references upon hand-craft that appear primarily in the religious, ritualistic garb found among members of African tribes. While Cave attempts to transform an indigenous concept into something much more fashionable, one can not help but think about those cultures that struggle to live beyond the economic pressures of the Western world. The cargo cults of New Guinea, for instance, place a spiritual significance upon American clothes and products while other societies that thrive within Africa continue to incorporate the daily object into their designs, even if some of those elements are no longer natural in origin but rather thrown-away items found within their surrounding environment.

Janet Biggs at Claire Oliver Fine Art | Review by Jill Conner

2009-01-09T16:24:00.032-05:00

Over the last several years it seemed as if the process of looking at art, combined with what people wanted to see in the object itself, was less about visuality and more about finding the perfect, creative concept that was able to capture the "next big thing." In other words, the process of searching was confused with looking while the art market hey-day lent the impression that contemporary art finally broke free from its Postmodernist past. Refreshingly, Janet Biggs' new 10-minute video titled, "Vanishing Point," at Claire Oliver Fine Art closes the door on the era of appropriation and focuses on the underpinnings of the observational process with a return to Albertian perspective.

Biggs' video begins with the start of a song by a member of the ARC Gospel Choir and quickly cuts to Leslie Porterfield on a motorcycle in the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, as she contemplates another run at maintaining her world record. Once Porterfield takes off, the camera remains stationary. Gradually the biker vanishes into the picture, as if vaporized by the heat, and the gospel choir carries on its song that demands a witness.

The end of the video is unforgivingly loud as the vantage point shifts to that of a small camera placed within the front of Porterfield's bike. At no time does the viewer vanish with the bike but instead transforms the spectator into the subject. The motor roars into the room as the video continues on, what seems like, an endless path forward. Although Biggs' work is set in the stripped-down, simply barren landscape of Utah, her work identifies the complex nature of looking since a subject can be seen, interpreted and experienced from different angles.

Vision, sight, landscape and subject are central to this piece. Looking, as such, is an act that is frequently taken for granted. Even today, crowds flow in and out of art exhibitions at a record pace, leaving many to wonder what exactly was inferred in the brief act of viewing. By conflating observation with spirituality, Biggs also attempts to use this video as a way of celebrating the revived career of Leslie Porterfield, who had suffered a devastating crash in 2007, only to return to her previous success in 2008. Biggs uses three large-format photographs to frame this remarkable event. Each one depicts different aspects of the salty terrain but is nothing like the experience of her video.

Ad Reinhardt at Woodward Gallery | Review by Jill Conner

2008-12-31T16:03:00.005-05:00

Once Frances Stoner Saunders blew the cover of the CIA in 1999 claiming that Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the larger anti-Communist movement operated hand-in-hand, contemporary art critics began to revisit this vaunted moment in American art history in an effort to reconcile “freedom of speech” with the larger tenets of the McCarthy era. The compartmentalization of art away from contemporary culture, toward the realm of politics, impacted artists of that time leading to a restriction of their movements, their creativity and causing them to separate their daily lives from the process that contributed to American Abstract Expressionism. Ad Reinhardt, in particular, used to say, “Art is art and everything else is everything else.” However Michael Corris’ new book titled “Ad Reinhardt,” sheds new light on the artist’s biography as well as his earlier artistic career, that of a comic artist. In addition the Woodward Gallery launched, Ad Reinhardt: In the Minds of Me, that consists of ephemera and letters written by the artist to his mistress of over twenty years, Olga Sheirr.

Ad Reinhardt: In the Minds of Me, at the Woodward Gallery further confirms that there was more substance to the artist than anyone had known. Opening with two tribal-like, triangular drawings from 1946 titled, “Symmetrical Male Figure,” and “Symmetrical Male Figure (Woman in a Man’s Soul),” this collection of letters and ephemera sent to former student, Olga Sheirr, from 1946 to 1966 consistently references classical love and instinctual intimacy as a metaphor of their unique relationship that had long occurred in secret. In a letter to Sheirr dated 1955, for instance, the artist wrote in his typical calligraphic style, “Upsadaisy this insane out of my mind if you’re in my mind and I lose my mind do I lose you.” Clarity, in this case, was passed over for something that sounded more like the rambling writing style of William Burroughs.

However the most important pieces of Sheirr’s collection have been reproduced on photographic paper, such as the tainted pages of “Successful Love,” (1961) by Delmore Schwartz and Italo Calvino’s “The Universal Point.” Calvino’s essay from 1965 discusses the space of the universe, galaxies, overpopulation and co-habitation: “we got along so well together, so well, that something out of the ordinary was bound to happen…And instantly we all thought of the space that could have been occupied by those round arms of hers moving like a rolling pin.” The additional collages and articles torn from other sources further reveal Reinhardt’s amused interest in the clandestine.

The artist’s geometric, hieroglyphic etchings continue to appear within this show. “Symmetrical Two Travelers,” (1946) and “Symmetrical Two Travelers,” (1946) are identical in name but differ in both dimension and signature. The smaller piece was curiously signed, “Albert Radoczy,” another one of the artist’s pseudonyms and placed shortly before the crux of this exhibition, located in the back of the gallery. Several glass cases contain postcards of Persian lovers, kuros, and nude Renaissance figures along with other figures seen in Oriental art. Much of the passion expressed in Reinhardt’s letters paralleled his increasing interest in the exotic nature of Asian aesthetics at that time. In an envelope sent with a copy of Gore Vidal’s “On Pornography,” Reinhardt included his own hand-written poem:

O
I love you
I have to go away from New York
For a week
Or two
Read about art history
Read about pornography
When I’m with Sophia Lauren
In the movies
I think of you
When I’m with Ava Gardner
I think of you
When I’m with the goddesses of Devi or Kali
I think of you
When I’m with you
I think of you
When I’m away
I think of you
Your secret admirer X.

Contrary to popular belief, the figure played a major but subversive role throughout Ad Reinhardt’s life. Michael Corris reveals that the artist’s early career was spent drawing cartoons for two Communist magazines titled, “New Masses,” and “Soviet Russia Today,” that supported the evolution of the Labor Movement in the Unites States. Although he created over 400 caricatures that were published for mass consumption, Reinhardt used pseudonyms such as “Darryl Frederick,” “Roderick,” and “Rodney,” to disguise his true identity.

The connection of Reinhardt’s legacy with this period of his career has proven to be a problematic realization since Corris’ book, while enlightening in content, features no images due to the fact that the Ad Reinhardt Foundation refused to allow the author any right to reprint the artist’s comics with his narrative. But unlike the barrier that Corris confronted, this small but astounding collection of personal love letters will tour to the Pollock-Krasner House in the Spring of 2009, and is forecast to appear in other locations within the near future. Although the Reinhardt championed his own aesthetics at schools such as Brooklyn College, Yale and the California School of Fine Arts and developed the technique of hard-edge painting, most of Reinhardt’s life was a slight illusion, similar to that of his paintings.

Rebuilding the Myth of New Orleans | Review by Jill Conner

2008-12-07T18:51:00.023-05:00

As Liza Minnelli attempts to fill the shoes of her mother at New York City's infamous Palace Theater, the true Judy Garland comeback is taking place in New Orleans, LA with the launch of Prospect.1. This city-wide biennial opened on November 1st and showcases a smattering of contemporary art that will most likely be long remembered after the exhibition's close on January 18th, 2009. Intended to put the city of New Orleans back on the map, biennial director, Dan Cameron, extends this show into a number of neighborhoods and historic buildings in order to bring people of this city back together. For those who will not have a chance to travel to New Orleans before this event closes, New York's Asteriskpix assembled a collection of artist documentaries that provide a small glimpse of what has transpired in that city.

A small clip that features a sculptural installation within the once-destroyed Battleground Baptist Church, captures the extreme loss that still exists throughout the 9th Ward. Dan Cameron and one of the artists tours the church that is currently in the process of getting rebuilt and walks into the main room where a larger-than-life-sized diamond made of black piping stands in the center. As a mixed media sculpture that features the sounds of historic speeches made by an array of popular African-American preachers, this particular installation attempts to revive history of the Battleground Baptist Church which served as a cornerstone of the African-American community from 1867 to 1964.

Performance artist Janine Antoni, on the other hand, places a large wrecking ball culled from the storm's wreckage within a warehouse setting and juxtaposes it with a large video close-up of her eye that reflects a tiny glint of light to one side. For Asteriskpix, the artist embraced both her Caribbean heritage and the city's Cajun history by wearing the costume of a pirate and, with a patch over one eye, discussed how she created this tiny, scant reflection.

However if New Orleans needs anything out of this event of mass destruction, it's money. Srdjan Loncar from the ArtEgg Studios transformed vast numbers of wood blocks into stacks of dollar bills that became part of two sculptures titled "Value," (2008) and "$48,000,000." (2008) Hopefully the cultural center of New Orleans will not go the way of Blues music, a genre that existed long before audio recordings but noticeably shifted and dwindled in strength as a result of time.

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures | Review by Jill Conner

2008-11-16T22:11:00.030-05:00

We've heard it before: "Cindy Sherman is a has-been," or "Her work doesn't say anything new." And for a while it seemed to be truncated in the 1980s, when women's groups protested en masse against domestic violence and rape. Although Sherman was re-appropriating Hans Bellmer's twisted mannequin imagery, the sight of her own face charged the issues. But this time the photographer returns with a literally new collection of work that goes where no woman ever wants to go: graying, old-age.

Although all images are untitled, Sherman portrays the early years of senior life on a monolithic scale as each photograph averages 8-feet in height and 5-feet in width. But these images are not about the photographer. Her identity is lost in the guise of Everywoman, seen daily throughout New York City, and initially appears as a frumpy Jewish mother who looks identical to Mike Myers' rendition of Linda Richman on Saturday Night Live. However her droopy stomach and wide waist are temporarily obscured by the bling of bauble jewelry. The subject's sour gaze and defiant pose remind viewers what they're looking at and what they have to look forward to.

Sherman explores a number of feminine physical evolutions that hit on different stereotypes: the elder Southern Belle, sitting alone inside her faux villa wearing a svelte necklace of natural pearls; the genetically deficient family heir; the Liza Minnelli look-alike; the Upper East Side widow and the aged but sexy cowgirl. Most of these subjects glare outwardly in an effort to share their misunderstood agony. However if Cindy Sherman is her own semiotic, why did I see so many women at the show with blond or graying bob-cuts?

I initially attended the reception at Metro Pictures without anything to expect, much less a show of work by the legendary Cindy Sherman. Although it seems like the crux of feminism has slipped away, the photographer has captured a feminine situation that most women would like to either avoid or suffer through silently. Although a dense crowd lined the sidewalk and surrounded both the artist and her partner, David Byrne, this show was about more than stardom. It's about the future that we don't want to think about.

Arthur Cohen at Jack The Pelican Presents | Review by David Gibson

2008-10-03T03:07:00.018-04:00

These new paintings by Arthur Cohen deal with the connection between masculine identity, a visual sublime, and their tangent to the ridiculous. Cohen again portrays himself but also another person, a curiously mime-like Korean Buddhist monk named Sunim. Both he and the monk are involved in an activity which has shamed generations of adolescent boys, and which remains, well into middle-age, a symbol of their weakness: the rope climb. Just the thought of such an endeavor can transform the most confident male into a quivering mass of neurosis. The fact that most of us cannot carry our own weight as human beings, except when held against the ground by gravity and the motor urgency of our own limbs and the other processes (air circulating in lungs, blood flowing in veins) is enough to shame anyone, not only on a personal level, but a transcendental one as well. Force us to leave the surface of the earth of our own volition and a million warning signals immediately flash. We’re not meant for this.

In his typical fashion, Cohen loves to skewer himself, but saves a modicum of grace for his alter-ego. Sunim looks completely at home on the rope, as if he were just pausing in the garden with his fan, or taking a leisurely jaunt down the boulevard. It would be sensible to ascribe his comfortability to his role as a Buddhist teacher, following the ideal of giving up possession of one’s body, and all of the problems that go with it. Since we have no body, there is no gravity.

While distracting the viewer with the metaphysical conundrum of a man suspended on the end of a rope, Cohen also charms us with his talent. He has a great love of the human form as swathed in different types of clothes, from bright blue athletic jumpsuits to a patchwork of rags transformed into a monk’s robes. He is conscious that a thin veil of appearances is just another way to reveal states of consciousness, as was similarly achieved by two other painterly fashionistas, Edouard Vuillard and Gustav Klimpt. In everyday life we are taught to revel in overt detail, and to judge people by what they wear, even down to the combination of hues and the stitching of every piece of apparel. In his self-portraits there is evidence of a foolish anti-hero, a harlequin strutting upon the stage of life; and beside him the deft and mute Sunim, a hero for the preposessed, a master of focus, and a symbol of beauty.