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Saturday, November 15, 2003

Separation anxiety

 

Post from Ditta Baron Hoeber
[Ed. --Ditta is referring to my post of Nov. 12 on the Photo Triennial at Woodmere.]
Roberta, I agree that putting Caire's work into a separate room underscored it in a way that somehow made it uncomfortable and made the room and the work seem unconnected to the rest of the exhibition. (Ed. --Image is a stereo Daguerrotype from 1853. There are several such early works in the historical section of the Woodmere show)

...I think it would have made a great difference to have more blank wall between the groupings. it would have made the show into a collection of poems or short stories rather than one long run-on sentence with parenthetical remarks in the next room (Caire).

..as to Larry fink I think it's interesting that you use the word shock. I suppose in today's art climate Fink's visceral, emotional, sensual images do shock. We are so used to the ironic, the detached...Fink is not ironic. He photographs satin and wool with such intense pleasure and knowledge that it raises one's body temperature. And he photographs skin with perhaps a shocking degree of compassion...
--Ditta

permanent link  roberta 1:15 PM
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Knuckling under

 

Post from Doug Paschall, Woodmere Curator


[Note: Doug Paschall, curator of the Photo Triennial, wrote to clarify a few things about the show. For more on that see my post of Nov. 12. I've shortened and paraphrased from his more lengthy email.] (image is James Toogood's watercolor painting "The Woodmere Art Museum, 1994)

--Charmaine Caire did get more wall space, some seventy or so running feet to other photographers' fifty-five-ish running feet... we spaced out Charmaine's work more widely on the walls...

--Woodmere’s galleries are quite distinctive [Ed. --I’ll say -- that rotunda space with the balcony is not only distinctive it’s theatrical and odd]...sometimes it’s magically appropriate, sometimes it’s awkward.

--Our founder, Charles Knox Smith, who built these galleries before the aesthetic of free-flowing space, simply had no way of knowing that I would want to exhibit seven photographers equitably in these rooms.

--When I laid out the Triennial, I had the option to reduce the size of each photographer's display so we could squeeze them into the large "rotunda" gallery...but that’s not ideal or good for the art or the artists.

--Instead, I went for a bigger show requiring all our galleries. There still would have been an option to keep from showing any of the photographers in the central Schnader Gallery (lest any be "gulag-ed"), but that would have split the exhibition into two very distant halves with a big hole in the middle. Yuck.

--So I opted to use all the ground-floor spaces and had to decide which individual would get the Schnader Gallery (putting two photographers in there would have given each considerably less wall space than the photographers in the other galleries were getting). I chose Charmaine. I think I chose well. Her works seemed to offer a visually and conceptually potent "knuckle" between the other galleries of the show.

--I'll face this dilemma again in three years, when our next Triennial rolls around, and I'm open to suggestions. --Doug Paschall

permanent link  roberta 9:34 AM
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Friday, November 14, 2003

Jerry doesn't truck with fundamentalists

 

The art critic of the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz, came to town to do crits for Penn's art students, and also to give a talk at the ICA, which turned out to be about Jerry Saltz (shown schmoozing with Parkett Editors Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and Ali Subotnick at some opening event) and about writing art criticism and being an artist--three things he knows about because he's done them all.

Now, his talking about himself is a good thing, because he's a charming guy, with a touch of Woody Allen self-deprecating humor--as in pointing out his baldness (hard to miss) and his short stature (also quite visible to all present). Plus he's got the New York cabbie directness. Well, he didn't talk about being a cabbie, but he did mention that he was a long-distance trucker for a while--far too long a while, since he hated it after only 10 miles into his first long run. (All right, he didn't specify 10 miles; I made that up because a few miles sounded less interesting.)

Art by the truckload
But he had plenty to say that was worth chewing on. Like, I was stunned to hear he sees 30 to 40 art shows a week. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. How does he do it?

Of course, in New York, if you walk around Chelsea or 57th Street, and go up and down in those buildings filled with art galleries, it's a lot easier to see a lot of stuff than if you have to hike from Broad and Spruce to Broad and Cherry to Old City and then out to Chestnut Hill, etc.

But even with the benefit of New York's compressed art districts, I don't know how he does it. Looking at art is hard work. I'm in awe. Maybe he dismisses more shows out of hand than he suggested.

On first takes at an art show, he said, "Sometimes I walk in ...and say oy, oy, oy, this is crap. ...Sometimes you hear something in yourself you didn't expect to hear. Sometimes, you come all the way around." Now how he has time to do that and see 30 or 40 shows, I do not know. It takes time to hear something in yourself that you didn't expect to hear.

Theory for fundamentalists

But my favorite point he made was that theory was crap. "I think it's all a question of subjectivity," he said. So he likes what he likes, and you like what you like, and they're not necessarily the same, or more valid or less valid. They're just different. "Theoreticians of art to me are frankly the fundamentalists of art," he said.

This is where Piet Mondrian (shown left) comes in. He said looking at a Mondrian is its own experience. Now I'm a little unclear, here, except that I think he's saying the theory is the painting and vice versa, and therefore theory is part of the experience, so in that case, theory is ok. But I'm not sure if that means he thinks Mondrian is ok or not.

The pleasure principle
Saltz went on to say that art is not about understanding. It's about experience--and pleasure. "Pleasure is an important form of knowledge. We just went through a period whan that was put ...off limits," he said. And he added, you can't separate what you like and what is good.

Around this time he also mentioned that 9/11 made post-modernism obsolete. (Isn't this theory?) But after 9/11, standing outside the art work, the hallmark of post-modernism, was no longer possible. "Now history is something we live," he said.

A bit later he implied a negative comment about Robert Ryman's white paintings (shown right, "Surface Veil III") without exactly specifying why, but I took it to be, where's the pleasure? At least that's why I complain about Ryman's deprivation of color.

Disingenuous reviewers
Shortly before I left (I had to leave a little early), he started complaining about all the boffo reviews that get written. (I believe my ears turned pink. After all, I'm such an enthusiast, and I tend to save my energy only for work I like.)

"If not all Goya is great, not everything in Chelsea is great. ...I don't like criticism when you don't know what the critic is thinking," he said, and complained about happy reviews with the only touch of opinion in the last sentence. "Really, what this is about is the credibility," he said.

His advice? "You have to listen carefully to yourself." You have to hear the things you may not want to hear. And then you have to "deliver up those voices, positive and negative."

Because Saltz was talking to art students, he explained why he drove the truck of his life straight into a less-than-lucrative career in art criticism. He himself had been an art student once (but never finished art school or any other higher education, he said), after which he garnered what others would take as hallmarks of artistic success--an NEA grant, a show at Barbara Gladstone, a review in Art Forum magazine. But he said he still felt like he wasn't measuring up, and eventually he stopped creating art and became a trucker.

He said artists wanted fame (which he defined as being loved by strangers and immortality), sex, and money, and the arc of his career confirmed that these were not his motivating factors.

(He wasn't saying he didn't want sex; he was saying he was content with monogamy; he's married to New York Times Art Critic Roberta Smith.) His point about money was he doesn't make much as a freelancer. And art critics don't achieve immortality (perhaps he forgot about John Ruskin, whose immortality is known to a select seven or eight old English majors like me; hell, maybe he never heard of Ruskin either; Saltz's point is hereby made).

Saltz also said he doesn't talk to artists about their work and he doesn't like when art dealers talk to him. (Roberta F., my artblog partner in crime feels differently about this. I am on the fence.) Even when Saltz looks straight at the dealers, and is therefore not looking at the art work, they don't get the hint that it's about the art work, stupid. (Ok, he didn't say "stupid." That was me, again.)

Write for artblog
As I left, Saltz was calling for more artists to write art criticism. If you're an artist and think this is something you might want to do, keep this publication in mind, dear readers. As Saltz said, there's no money in art criticism. But for some of us, the pleasure principle takes right over.

By the way, the previous post is about Ingrid Schaffner's talk on Dali's "Dream of Venus," about which she wrote a book. Schaffner's talk, simultaneous with Saltz's, is posted by an artist who's willing to be a critic now and then, as well as be our friend, Ann Northrup.

Saltz, too, was peddling a book, "Seeing Out Loud." He hopes you go buy it.

permanent link  libby 1:31 PM
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Dreaming of Dali

 

Last Tuesday there were two lectures I really wanted to go to, Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz’s talk at the ICA (see Libby's post above) and ICA Curator Ingrid Schaffner’s talk about her new book, “Salvador Dali and the Dream of Venus” at Swarthmore. Of course the talks were scheduled at the same time...and I couldn’t go to either. My friend, painter Ann Northrup made it out to Swarthmore and phoned in this report.

report by ann northrup

Dali’s “Dream of Venus” was a pavillion/funhouse at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. It was one of the most popular -- and shocking -- buildings in the fair. [You entered through a door framed by a woman’s legs; inside were bare-breasted women swimming in a tank and women sleeping next to some lobsters -- not your typical fair fare.]

In her lecture, Schaffner talked about Dali as a populist and a kind of P.T. Barnum of the arts. She then linked Dali’s themes -- art as spectacle; art for the masses, art involving sex and death -- to work of Matthew Barney and other contemporary artists. Here are a few of Schaffner's examples:

--Jeff Koons -- the 7,000-flower Puppy. (image, right)

--Damien Hirst -- the death showman (see dead shark in formaldahyde below, titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" 1991) Hirst's show at Gagosian brought in 7,000 viewers per day, Schaffner said...almost as many as went to the Museum of Modern art during the same period (8,000 per day).

--Barney’s Guggenheim exhibition which had a funhouse atmosphere.

--Gregor Schneider’s “Totes (Dead) Haus u r,” a curious death funhouse -- a house-within-a-house the artist's been working on since he was 16 years old. He now cuts it up and re-assembles it in museums and other spaces...and you can walk through it. (Schneider has work up now at Barbara Gladstone Gallery (but not the Haus...)

(I wondered if the folks who made the movie “Being John Malkovich” know about Schneider...)

--Mariko Mori and “Dream Temple 99, a womb-like space you can walk through.

--Thomas Hirschorn’s "Cavemanman," 2002, a post-apocalyptic cave wallpapered in duct tape that you walk through. (image right)

Questions raised by Schaffner: Is all this spectacle art due to some contemporary state of anxiety in the world? Do we need new levels of stimulation and amusement all the time? And are the boundaries between pop and high culture breaking down?

As for the role of the curator to judge all this? Schaffner said she doesn’t mind presenting spectacular art...if it has ideas...(That's no pat on the back for the stuff.)

About Barney, Schaffner said
--a work of art should be open-ended and not prescribed...Barney’s world is sealed off and hermetic, but it does reflect the culture.
--It’s a hideous culture display when the country’s at war.
--it’s like Baroque art. It sweeps you off your feet.

In conclusion, Schaffner said “This [contemporary] work shifts the ground of operation and it’s important to experience the appeal of that.”

Hmmm, what does that mean? I guess you make your museum more spectacle-friendly and bring in that rock star [i.e., Patti Smith, whose drawings are at the ICA.]
--See Ann Northrup's mural "Pride and Progress" on the side of the William Way Center at Spruce and Juniper Sts.

permanent link  roberta 9:17 AM
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Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Vermeer 1, Currin 0

 

Re: Roberta's Nov. 11 post expressing surprise at Charlie Finch's love of John Currin.

Finch is so over-the-top smarmy-kissy that it's embarrassing.

I wonder what the back story is, because, as Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz mentioned yesterday at the ICA, the only artist everyone likes unequivocally is Vermeer (shown, Soldier and Laughing Girl), and if you can figure out what it is that Vermeer has, then perhaps you will be able to define what good art is.

The rest is purely subjective. And surely John Currin is no Vermeer, and therefore not worthy of such a ridiculous defense (or was it an offense?).

permanent link  libby 6:05 PM
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The shock of the photo

 

I just saw the First Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography and thought it was a) a good show; and b) a great idea -- that is, a great idea to have a regularly scheduled, regional round-up in photography. Let's get one started for painting. sculpture and video, too, how about?

Here’s something I’ve been mulling over. Woodmere Curator Doug Paschall who curated the show told me he put Charmaine Caire’s large color prints, made with set-ups of toys and backdrops, in a separate gallery space so that their big, bright affect didn’t beat up on the quieter work in the show (I'm paraphrasing, he had a more curatorial way of stating the case). (image above is one of Caire's works) The result is that it almost looks like Caire got more wall space than the other artists. But Paschall says not. All the artists were given the same amount of space.

I find Caire’s photo set-ups less shocking than Larry Fink’s work which can strike with visceral impact. (shown left, Fink's "Washington, D.C." 1975)

Maybe the shock in Fink’s photographs is quiet and less obtrusive in a group show than the bold, staginess and didactic messaging in Caire’s works.

Anyway, the separation of one artist’s work in a group exhibit can be read as either a gulag-ing or a special treatment. That’s just the way it is. I don’t know if this is a problem or not but I raise it as an issue.

permanent link  roberta 11:24 AM
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003

This and that

 

Did you read nay-sayer Charlie Finch’s lusty defense of John Currin at artnet?

Finch is head over heels about Currin’s paint and his subject matter, which, every time I see it, gets to look more and more like Norman Rockwell-does-Mad-magazine schtick. Unreal, and I mean Finch and Currin.

...I went to Tin Man Alley last week in Northern Liberties to see the paintings by Chris Mars and Daniel Martin Diaz, which I recommend. Tin Man, which sells retro-toys and art by artists from the Juxtapoz Magazine stable had a sign on the front window saying excuse them while they expand the gallery space. I asked owner Jonathan Levine if he was moving and he said no. He was converting his basement toyroom into more gallery space. Seems the toys aren’t selling too well. But the art is. Many works, in Mars/Diaz show (range of $2,500 and up) were sold. Mostly to non-Philadelphia buyers. Levine's clients for the West-coast leaning product line are mostly non-local, he says. (image, left is by Mars; right, by Diaz)

...rhizome has an article about a new book published by MIT Press, “Women, Art and Technology,” edited by Judy Malloy, herself an internet pioneer and editor of the electronic publication NYFA Current (formerly Arts Wire Current). The book documents the importance of women working in new media -- everything from video to interactive art to virtual reality and net art. Women...the mothers of invention.

permanent link  roberta 8:59 AM
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Monday, November 10, 2003

First Friday: Stretching clay's limits

 

Whether your cup of tea (shown, Jill Bonovitz's "Untitled") is ceramic tea pots or non-functional sculpture, you'll probably be wowed by the work on display at the Clay Studio's "Mastery in Clay 2003" show and next weekend's auction of more than 260 pieces from nearly that many artists.

The quality is high, the range wide, from clay artists local and from across the country invited by the Clay Studio to participate.

Joan Takayama-Ogawa's "Golden Dogwood Teabag" teapot, with its saucy lipstick spout and high-priced glaze seems to raise issues of Asian women in American culture.




A straightforward object like Sarah Jaeger's porcelain bowl (shown) with its metalic glaze and rippling rim offers something irresistable and voluptuous to look at. The delicate tears in the tissue-thin lip of Mary Roehm's porcelain "Torn Bowl" offers a pared-down approach to the same material, which, in its natural color, resembles skin.

The crowded, plant-like spikes in Kyoko Tokumaru's "Germination #3" (shown), the cartoony cat-in-the-hat faces confronting eachother in Janis Mars Wunderlich's "Family Fight" (it looks like it was inspired by a teapot about to boil over and blow its whistle), the texture of Harold N. Schaefer's "Python Vase," are just a few of the many, many things I admired in this show.

I'm not sure how the Clay Studio sustains one terrific show after another, but it must be doing something right.

permanent link  libby 9:45 PM
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Sunday, November 09, 2003

First Friday: Invasion of winter and public spaces

 

The cooler weather, the early darkness changed the 2nd Street outdoor scene to something somewhat less inviting. But galleries that otherwise might get passed by looked warm and inviting.

So Roberta and I went to Exhibit 231, photographer James Abbott's gallery at 231 N. 3rd St. Abbott's own photographs were hanging along with some by Joel Katz and by Trish Thompson. Abbott said the photos had been up for the open studio tours, and he decided to leave them up for First Friday.

Abbott's own work, mostly multi-frame panoramas from his recent Outer Cape Artist-in-Residency program in Cape Cod, were wonderful, weather-infused meditations. Their sweep of landscape and point of view suggest how narrow our place and vision in the vastness around us. At the same time, delicate textures call the eye back to what's local and tangible.

Also interesting were Joel Katz's documentary photos of a Good Friday procession in Italy, the ritual garb looking startlingly close to Ku Klux Klan sheets (it's that religion and politics theme again).

All this made me think some more about the fly-on-the-wall approach to taking pictures on the street of people we don't know. The camera's peephole changes the terms of private identity in public spaces. We have come to accept it in news photos and National Geographic and diaristic Web cams, but in some sense those peepholes rob us of our unselfconscious relationship to the world around us.
abbott, james

permanent link  libby 7:49 PM
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First Friday: Painted Bride stirs up the pot

 

You'd think that art is art, but who's going to which gallery on First Fridays is instructive. At Snyderman, and the Works, its middle-aged, well-heeled people who can afford to buy. At Wexler, it's also well-heeled but the age skews a little younger. And at the Painted Bride, it's jeans, wild hair and artists (not all young), who look like their money has its limits.

While the demographics sometimes indicate quality, sometimes they don't. What they really indicate is degree of risk. I don't mean whether the art itself is edgy or risky. I mean whether investing in the art is edgy or risky. Down at the Bride, there's less certainty that this is stuff going somewhere.

But there's a good chance that it's stirring up either society or art standards.

So it is with "Say Something: The Art of Politics," an exhibit that opened First Friday at the Painted Bride, curated by Cavin Jones (shown above, his "To See Through Eyes That Only See What's Real") and In Liquid. In addition to raising some political issues, the show raises the same issues of quality that Robert Asman brought up in his Nov. 6 post.

I find that when I agree with the political point of view, the clear message seems somewhat less offensive than when I don't agree. Plus humor helps. So I got a kick out of Karen Fiorito's image of Jesus, bleeding heart and all, with the legend, "God Bless the USA...and no one else" (shown). Though it's funny, I doubt that George Bush would enjoy this print.

Nor am I sure what to think of Leroy Johnson's powerful suite of 10 shadow boxes depicting the horror of lynchings and racial hatred, with newsclips of white and black America and images of men hanging off little 3-D wooden gibbets. I didn't disagree with what I understood him to be saying, and the work had the power to startle me, repel me, and reconnect me to the brutality that we'd just as soon forget.

Johnson, whose clay work I much admire for its merger of poetry and anger ("Precendent" shown here), chose not to be poetic here. Does the passion carry the day or is this work too unambiguous? I'm interested to hear what others have to say.

Adelaide Paul's "Canned Ham," with little gold pigs all around a goofy, found lithograph, is the American Dreamboat gone awry down on the farm with his corn-fed piggy. Again, the sense of humor leavens the message, and here the message is open to interpretation.

Paul's "Vatican Dreams," however, is heavy-handed, with the little sheep without genitals standing on a closed trunk, his kiddy-printed underpants at his feet. If I didn't know about all the recent priest scandals, I could come up with other interpretations, but at this moment in time, those interpretations are irrelevant. My question is, can we wade into an issue with a clear right and wrong and still make art? And if the clear issue goes away over time, does the work become something better?




Don Colley's "Different Stripes" (shown), however, was beautiful enough and ambiguous enough to avoid the political art pitfall of heavy-handedness. This one, with its striped zebra, striped clown, striped sky and striped frame I liked without reservation.

permanent link  libby 5:59 PM
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First Friday best

 

All right, so I didn't see everything at First Friday, so this may be a little unfair, but I saw one perfect thing that topped seeing everything, and if you have time for only one show this month, you have to pry yourself out of the house and see this one--"Ed Bing Lee @ 70" at the Works Gallery.

The 70 is Lee's age, which helps account for the accomplishment and extraordinary craftsmanship. But the work is also young and exuberant and full of wit and creativity--things there's no accounting for because they are gifts.

Lee's work has Pop art (see Vessels: "Coke" above) and pop culture, minimalist grids, art-historical quotes and appropriations, basketry and sculpture--all compressed and reimagined via thousands of colored-thread knots.

The pieces are tiny--4-inch "vessels" and 3-inch orchids, for example (shown right Paphiopedilum: "Sandra Bay"). Even the largest pieces, fan-shaped quotes from famous paintings--like "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe" paired with a relatively large, Pop-style hot dog with a voluptous mustard squiggle (that brings to mind Wayne Thiebaud and Roy Lichtenstein), for example--are compressed into a folding-fan-sized space.

Half-hitch knots are the basic macrame knot, said Lee at his opening. But the knots are hidden in the back, so what shows looks like a stitch, making some of the flat products resemble needlepoint at first blush. But the sculptural shapes, parts of which he sews together--as in the Earthcrust and Rocks series (shown left Earthcrust: "Limonite") or the orchids--use the knots' ability to turn a corner.

One of the earthcrust pieces takes 200 hours to produce, Lee said, and the only thing he uses to stabilize the material as he works are a piece of board and a Bull Dog Clip--sometimes several Bull Dog Clips, he adds.

Lee began this work 25 years ago, but he's still pushing the edges of the envelope (shown below right Vessels: "Delta" and "Epsilon").

I was at this show with three others with disparate tastes, and the work of Ed Bing Lee had us all darting from object to object, calling to one another to take a look.

Lee has some local connections, including teaching fiber for 10 years at what is now the University of the Arts. Don't miss his work as it passes through town again.

And while you're at the Works, check out the tiny teapots, some shown on the Works web page, and Deb Fleck-Stabley's clay statue with its face mug ancestry (shown left).


And upstairs at Snyderman, toward the back amongst the assortment of works from artists the gallery carries, the exuberant glass objects by Einar and Jamex de la Torre -- their "Kidney Bean Pot," my fave, was hidden in a dark corner. My image was so bad, even I couldn't bear to run it, but you can get a sense of their work at Snyderman's home page. Click on artists and de la Torre.

permanent link  libby 12:02 PM
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