artblog

Friday, June 06, 2003

Fog and clear skies

 
Ambiguity sells. In our postmodern world where seemingly nothing is what it seems, the more mixed the message, the more appealing. Yuskavage’s paintings -- or Sally Mann’s photographs of her children, say-- are not quite Tide or Oreos, where truth in packaging is required.

The ambiguity of whether the images are porn (child porn in the case of Mann) or post-modern feminist (Yuskavage) is part of their sales package. They can be either, both or none of that, and maybe the potential audience for the works (i.e. buyers) is larger that way. Of course critics love this stuff and that’s also smart packaging – get a critic riled up and it spills ink and creates buzz.

Some artists are not clear on what their own content is. They make art out of passion/obsession/need and don’t quite get it themselves. I suspect Yuskavage is aware and I know that Mann is aware of the ambiguity of their subject matter. (I just watched "Art:21," the PBS documentary--excellent, btw--in which Mann says "If it doesn't have ambiguity, why bother," or some such.)

Which brings up the most un-ambiguous contemporary artist of them all, Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light." Now here’s an artist who’s got a Wharton marketing sensibility – focus-grouped and market-driven. I saw a lot of Kinkade images in California last summer (image above is a Kinkade), in galleries in tony Carmel by the Sea and shopping mall galleries in Monterey. Fairy tale houses set in firefly-rich woods, they are pure, middle class fantasy. Art for comfortable people -- nothing to upset the apple cart. The guy is selling safety at a time of terrorism and war/battles.

That's not new, of course.
Artists respond to their times, and for every Goya, painting the horrors of war, there’s someone else painting escape from same. Pre-Raphaelite painters (see "Lady Lilith" by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti) were selling a pretty escape (their embrace of the morbid was part of their message, and for that generation, part of its charm).

But here I am talking about the business of art again. It’s First Friday and I’d rather go out and look at the stuff. Although I may buy something.

permanent link  roberta 9:50 AM
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La difference

 

Post from Tim McFarlane

I saw Yuskavage's show (her "Kathy on a Pedestal" right) at the ICA. Some of her show I liked, some of it I didn't. I'm not always thrilled with her choice of colors, but they lend a lot to the strangeness and mystery in much of her work that I find lacking in Pierre et Gilles'. Yuskavage's often odd-looking, sexually charged female figures set in similarly strange interior and exteriors at least hint at something more going on beneath the surface. Her images, while often having a typical pin-up feel, usually have this off kilter look about them that can have you really questioning your original response(s).

What I've seen of Pierre et Gilles's work leaves me with nothing more than the feeling that I'm looking at over glamorized, airbrushed and Photoshopped commercial ad images. The sets, make-up, and ungodly idealized models leave little to no room for other interpretations. I say this taking into account that Pierre et Gilles' work is photography based and our culture is drowning in images that are very similar to theirs. As art, Pierre et Gille's work doesn't rise above it's source whereas most of Lisa Yuskavage's paintings do.

--Tim McFarlane

permanent link  libby 9:09 AM
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Thursday, June 05, 2003

Painting dollar signs

 

Pierre and Gilles, Lisa Yuskavage, everyone in the art world is out to sell. But when does art aimed at selling become bad art?

I'm still hoping someone else weights in on Yuskavage or P&G.

Meanwhile I want to add to the mix Giorgio deChirico's multiple versions of the "Piazza d'Italia" paintings (one is above), that showed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. Are these paintings, all quite similar, to be dismissed as mere art commodification? According to curator Michael Taylor, deChirico was inspired to factory-like production of multiples by Andy Warhol.

And then there are the similarly produced Haitian images of life in some tropical Eden from the Haitian painters' cartel (that's a joke). These, like the deChiricos, are not quite identical but nearly so, and they are made to sell (to right is "Paradis" by Daniel Louis).

I am a fan of the Haitian work and the deChirico work, both of which, when not lined up chockablock on one wall, feel heartfelt and mysterious to me.
permanent link  libby 8:05 AM
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Tuesday, June 03, 2003

What's the diff?

 

Anyone out there think that Pierre et Gilles is substantially different from Lisa Yuskavage (Yuskavage painting, left) vis a vis Tim McFarlane's post below. Yuskavage's work stirred up differing views when it appeared at the ICA two years ago.

--posted by Libby and Roberta

permanent link  roberta 4:45 PM
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Local painter wants to know why

 

Post from Tim McFarlane...commenting on Pierre et Gilles post, 4/26/03

In one word...wwwwhhhhyyyyyyyy? I didn't see the ad in question, but whenever I see an image of their work, I just think it's a waste of space. Maybe they are commenting on the shallowness of fashion, celebrity, etc...or celebrating it, I don't know and don't much care. The work seems like nothing more than sugar-coated fluff.

While I can understand the reaction to it in the context of the other articles and ads in that issue of AiA, I think most people see it for what it is, the probable result of too much money and no real talent.

--Tim McFarlane shows his paintings at Bridgette Mayer Gallery.

permanent link  libby 3:16 PM
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Religious art in disguise

 

Libby, I loved your post on the sky. The Richard Misrach image makes me think of Mark Rothko and wonder if sky art is the new, post-modern abstract art -- you know, abstract but not really.

Then again, casting your eyes heavenward is something religion is always telling you to do. Maybe sky art is religious art in disguise.

Some of the best sky art portrays the night sky, and if there's religion in there, it's existentialism. Vija Celmins' drawings, for example, are marvels of cosmic intimacy and darkly, beautifully existential. Celmins (who was also in that Sea and Sky show at Arcadia) evokes a pattern-less universe in which questions and wonder are the best response. The drawings are deeply spiritual – they’re like mandalas, but not.

permanent link  roberta 7:32 AM
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Monday, June 02, 2003

The earth's the limit

 
Looking at the enormous sky above the ocean at Cape May, today, I am reminded of my tour of galleries in Center City last week. What passes for landscapes, in the modern art world, are skyscapes at heart (see Michael Pyrdsa’s “Miles from Nowhere,” here, at 96 inches wide, offering a vast expanse of untilled sky over a vertiginous stretch of unpopulated, but heavily farmed land).

Pyrdsa’s paintings at Gross-McCleaf weren’t the only dominant skies on view.

At the Creative Artist’s Network’s tiny weeklong show at 1701 Market (see post for TK) I saw Ben Johnson’s skyscapes, pale tan and almost the same color as land, represented by just a thin stripe of land across the bottom of the paintings; I saw Dominic Episcopo’s tiny Polaroid, “Golf Range #1”, a bit of fence dominated by a purply-pink sky; I saw Diane Tomash’s monotype, “Sleepy Town,” which was mostly sleepy sky.

And then I thought of the “Sea and Sky” show at Beaver College (now Arcadia) two years ago (shown here, a piece from one of that show’s artists, Richard Misrach).

Why sky? It’s tough to do an idyllic landscape with a nice little path representing the road of life in a landscape that is littered with detritus from industry, landfills, suburban sprawl, and concrete highway superstructures interrupting every square mile.

But the sky still looks like sky (and the sea still looks like sea). And out there is the edge of so-called civilization, in rockets, airplanes and space stations. It’s still a symbol for the romantic adventure and the hope for the future—because it stretches the limits of human understanding.

That star out there may be where we settle next. That rocket ship may be our only path to life after the nuclear disaster that destroys us. It’s the small man in the vastness to a degree no landscape offers in these times of instant messaging and instant remote transmission from the war in Iraq.

Which is not to say that there aren’t any modern landscapes left. But their subject matter is depressed, elegiac, angry. For the classical landscape and its impulses, artists are looking up.



permanent link  libby 9:51 AM
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