artblog

Saturday, December 06, 2003

Abstract relationships

 

Post by Anne Seidman

I fit in with the description of an age-appropriate art-Neanderthal because I make and am interested in abstraction. I also admire all this kooky, awkwardly-represented, young, dreamy, figurative work. Much of this work is just as difficult to debunk as abstraction but I am attracted to it for the same reason that I find non-figurative work intriguing. It attempts to reveal just what makes us human.

This exposure might involve literal relationships with others, ourselves, politics, animals, philosophies, nightmares or something as simple as how we create and organize form. Ultimately this discloses to ourselves and others just who we are. (image is "Stripes" by Seidman) --Painter Anne Seidman is a regular contributer to artblog
permanent link  libby and roberta 2:22 PM
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First Friday survives snow

 


How sad, I thought, as I trudged through the icy, slushy streets, the wind driving the icy snow into my face. An artist has an opening on a night like this, the dough is spent on the reception, and no one comes.

And truly, when I arrived at Locks to see what artist Neysa Grassi was producing these days, the place was pretty empty, with maybe 10 people present.

But the work kept me engrossed for a good 45 minutes, by which time a crowd had gathered.

The work, gouache on square or near-square paper, the largest about 15 inches square, some without much color, some glorious with colors, used a similar technique to her oils--layers and layers of paint screening and editing the lower layers like scrims or veils or thin skins, creating depth and interest without use of perspectival space.

Which brings me back to our discussion of abstract work. This work offers two key things--beauty and, as Roberta said, enough real-world illusion (landscape, body, etc.) from which to conjure a narrative, much like the way instrumental music suggests directions for imagination to let loose.

I can see dark nights through windows, and church domes through veils of dust and history in this work. I see figures (even though I would bet figures were not on Grassi's mind) and critters in dark, watery ponds. I see ornamental iron work and hair and ribs. And the longer I look, the more I see, as the lyrical surface paint gives way to the details of the deep reaches.

These paintings may be about time--or not--but they require time and contemplation. I cannot say if they will survive time, but why not? Surely culture is not so dictatorial that only a Westerner familiar with our art traditions can find pleasure here.
permanent link  libby 2:12 PM
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Transcendent process--a reply

 
Post by Peter Kinney

[Editor’s note: I invited Peter Kinney to give a second point of view--see Sun. Nov. 23 post, “Real estate update”--on Joe Plageman’s work at Highwire Gallery.]

Have you ever tried to make a drawing with a black gum leaf while walking in the forest? I would give up. Joe doesn't. The unusual burgundy from this leaf is his unique discovery, as are the subtle violets from the Asiatic day flower, and the rich umbers from a variety of tree marrows, and many others (shown, Summer Toy of a Stump).

The materials are an exploration, but more, they reveal a unique mystic's communion with nature, the forest, and especially the MacAurthur Woods, one of the last stands of old growth in our area.

There is movement, a sense of growth and flight, an airiness to the spirit world Joe has created ("Great Mulberry Moth"). In the vegetation drawings (eg., “Spring Dawn Meeting"), I feel as if looking up at light filtering through trees with squinted eyes: evanescent forms and spirits emerge from shadows or the blinding light of the sun.
Even if the colors shift, their hues will remain unique, tinted with the light of a spirit who feels deeply about his materials and vision(shown, Man and Beast and Bird).

There [was] a good video in the Gallery created by John Van Zant that gives more about Joe's process. John's videos about Joe and other Highwire artists and musical events can be seen on Comcast Cable in some areas.

--Artist Peter Kinney is a friend of Joe Plageman as well as a fellow founding member of Highwire Gallery
permanent link  libby 1:39 PM
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Friday, December 05, 2003

Storytelling our way to the future

 
Good points, all, Libby. I especially like what you say about museums and insiders and the quality thing.

As for Jan Baltzell and Tom Nozkowski (and a host of others I like), let me clarify. I never meant to imply I hate abstract art. Far from it.

I find that Nozkowski and Baltzell's works take me by the hand and lead me to human stories. There's enough real world illusion (landscape, body, etc) to hook on to. And once hooked, I'll conjure a narrative -- and for me narrative is crucial. (By the way you can see Nozkowski's work now until Dec. 20 at Max Protetch.) (image is the artist's "Untitled" 2001)

I'm not sure you need to be an insider to understand their work. Perhaps you do. Certainly you need to be able to spend time with it, and that's something, as you say, most people don't do.

What I am kerflooey about, I guess, is how to tell 21st century stories with abstract (20th century) means. To a certain extent a human story is a human story no matter what century you're in. But, and this may be just me, I feel that the story of our cyber-warrior culture and civilization-clash world needs storytelling means other than abstract ones.
permanent link  roberta 8:18 AM
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Thursday, December 04, 2003

Driven to abstraction

 
Well, Roberta, you are a terrible trouble maker. After all, not that long ago (Oct. 5, to be exact), you wrote a rave about Jan Baltzell's abstract paintings.

Of course, only people of a certain age are painting abstractions, these days. Walk into any hip young gallery and you've got cartoons, fashion statements, stuffed animals, natural objects in unnatural spaces, unnatural objects in natural spaces, etc. (Shown, "Wigs," from Andrew Jeffrey Wright's show at Spector.)

The main trouble with abstraction is that most people don't get it most of the time. And art lovers get it only some of the time.

For one thing, there's a lot of dross out there. For another, you've got to be steeped in art to get abstraction (shown, Kandinsky's Black Lines). It requires a viewer with time to ponder, who is familiar with painterly and rendering strategies, with some art history, and with a willingness to look at the brush strokes and past them (the brush strokes, after all, are not enough to hold the interest of your average bear or even your average art lover).

The problem with a lot of abstract painting is not that different from the problem with a lot of representational painting, i.e. not so interesting, not so good.

I'm thinking here about those Dick Perez baseball paintings coming to PAFA Jan. 7 to celebrate the new Phillies stadium. To me, this is lowest common denominator art, appealing to everyone who loves a representational picture--and baseball, I guess.

But imagine yourself 1,000 years from now. The game of baseball has disappeared from earth along with most of what we now call civilization. Someone finds one of these paintings, like this one showing Richie Ashburne sliding in to home. Surely, this would be mysterious to you. Who's that scary-looking guy in black? Is the guy flying in the air an angel? Is he going to kill the guy who fell? Is the guy who fell someone special?

What seems today to be nothing more than a picture might seem like art in the distant future, having gained an openness that wasn't there at the time it was painted.

I wonder how many Renaissance paintings or Medieval paintings gain their mystery from our ignorance. They make us wonder who that girl in the pearl earring really is, but perhaps, in her day, everyone knew who she was or what kind of person she was.

While enjoying pictures of the world is part of our nature, not everyone enjoys art more than snapshots. Why else would so many people own no art, not even prints and reproductions, which are cheap, and why else would so many people put up movie posters and snapshots of their friends, to the exclusion of art?

So art isn't for everyone, even when it is representational. And abstraction has a smaller audience, yet. And it's the size of the audience that gives art its best chances for survival. So you may be right, that abstraction is the Neanderthal of the art world -- but not if the art world has its say:

Art museums are skewing the survival prospects of abstract art by having so much of it in their collections (shown, Hans Hoffman's The Gate, part of the Guggenheim's collection). Here, it's the extremely informed art viewers who are making the choices and not vox populi. In truth, they may be too far into their theories and interest in paint's materiality to notice that few others are looking.

So 1,000 years from now, when you discover a color field painting (shown, a Jules Olitski screen print) that survived the bombs down in the museum sub-basement, will you say, look at this giant color swatch for floor covering, or will you say om?

My guess is you will save the om for a Tibetan Tanka that takes you on a representational trip around its image and into the beyond.

On the other hand, we have tons of pattern that we admire from other cultures, so why wouldn't Futureworld admire ours?

Abstract is pretty hard to decode, and some of it seems just silly to me (I'm thinking Robert Ryman whites, Ad Rheinhart blacks).

But what do you make of Thomas Nozkowski (shown, Untitled)? I don't think you'd throw him on the trash heap that readily.

.
permanent link  libby 9:19 PM
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Wednesday, December 03, 2003

The veil and the mirror

 

I never painted an abstract picture until I got to Tyler. That was after taking classes for a couple years at PAFA. In response to an assignment to paint a self portrait (don’t laugh) and spurred on by some macho impulse to do it my way, I let loose with the big brushes and big gestures and turned in something abstract -- and laughable. The teacher, to his credit, told me to get real.


He meant two things, first, that my abstract painting was out of character for someone he knew as a cartoonist. And secondly, that self-portraiture, at base, is not abstract.

So what exactly is the impulse to make abstract painting anyway? I’ve been thinking about that alot lately as I saw the NY Abstract show at Klein Gallery and read Raphael Rubinstein’s recent Art in America reviews of eight contemporary painters (most of them abstract).

Libby and I have both been in a stew about painting and we've been talking about it incessantly. (For some of Libby's thoughts, see her great post of Nov. 28). I agree with her that the best art delivers thoughts about human concerns.

So where does that leave abstract art? Are there human concerns in a stripe painting? Do drip and stain and color field paintings really make you think of the human condition? (I know I'm being very general, but I saw a big Morris Lous stain painting yesterday at the PMA and for the life of me it was just like Marimekko...) (image top is Louis's "Alpha" 1960; image right below is Marimekko cloth design)



The metaphor for paintings is usually the mirror or window. But in my experience, abstract paintings are veils. Can you make an abstract painting a mirror? Maybe a painter like Neyssa Grassi, whose work evokes both the body and the mind, with her knotty, intestinal imagery, is making abstract mirrors. Grassi's show of new gouache paintings opens Friday at Locks Gallery. (image above is Grassi's "Both Worlds," 2002)

How about Chuck Close? He's a photo-realist who uses abstractionist means. (see image, left, and detail, right, below, of Close's "Paul")

For me painting abstract -- which I come back to from time to time just to try again -- is like trying on a beautiful, exotic sweater to see how it feels, see how the cut of it works on me. While I’ve made a lot of pretty abstract paintings, they never feel like “me” though. They tell me a little about my dialog with myself but to someone outside my head they’re just pretty pictures.

Here’s my question, and I’d love some help with this. Is abstract painting different from other art in that it's veil-like instead of mirror-like? Is it a separate branch on the art family tree? Is it, in fact, a dead end...the Neanderthal of art?

I’ve always thought the huge color field paintings that take up so much museum wall space would not stand the test of time. I still think that, so I guess I’m biased to begin with. But now I wonder if Jackson Pollock’s work, or Mark Rothko’s, for example, will also undergo revision downward in the canon and become interesting footnotes in art history texts instead of something considered seminal.

Not that I want to bomb art back to the stone age, but what is driving the never-ending story of abstract painting. Thoughts anyone?
permanent link  roberta 9:56 AM
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Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Keeping my LeWitt's about me

 
I ran up to the PMA today mostly because I hadn't been there in a while but also because I've been stewing and fretting about contemporary painting and I wanted to go look at what's up there just for point of comparison. (More on that later)

While looking around the contemporary wing I found a new (to me) work by Sol LeWitt. The label on the wall -- a piece of paper that said "temporary label"-- looked very official. It announced that the work, "Splotch," from 2002-3, was a gift of Calder and Cole McNeill.

Now if you're like me, you think of LeWitt as a guy whose work is all hard-edged geometry. (see top image of "Isometric Figure (#1 to 5)," a linocut from 2003)


"Splotch," is an animal of a different stripe. (see image right -- a little fuzzy but you get the idea..for professional snaps of some earlier, more modest splotches, see Barbara Krakow Gallery's website.)

A sculpture that looks like a Lego or Crayola meltdown, the work is sinuous and non-geometric in the extreme. Made of fiberglass, construction foam, plywood, epoxy resin and acrylic paint, "Splotch" is perky and fantastic. If LeWitt's other work evokes building, domus, architecture of the real world, this piece evokes games and unreality. It's the Rock Candy Mountains. And without being cuddly or cute, "Splotch" also encapsulates the cool of video games and 3-D cyber graphics programs.

The curators sited the piece just right, in a room with two other masters of cool -- Warhol and Donald Judd.

Burt and Turtle

I enjoyed my LeWitt encounter then stopped in the Video Gallery where a strange-nature piece by Burt Barr, "Autumn, One of the Four Seasons" 2003 was running. (For more, read this from the PMA's website) No more than six minutes and 42 seconds, the piece became more disturbing with each minute as I tried but couldn't quite decode what was happening.

Two turtles move slowly and seem to be interlocked. The rear turtle keeps raising his head and wiggling his arms and the front turtle hardly moves except to stick his head out every so often. Are they mired in the mud and struggling unsuccessfully to get free? Are they doing it in their own inimitable turtle way? There were no handy gallery notes nearby and my own anthropomorphizing cast the story as a life and death struggle in the mud. Whether or not that's right (and reading what's on the website, I suspect I'm dead wrong) the level of "objective" documentary reportage -- without the voice overlay (Crocodile Hunter where are you?)-- left me in limbo, a place I ordinarily don't like. But, in retrospect, I appreciate the piece's open-ended-ness and applaud its strange beauty.
permanent link  roberta 5:49 PM
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Sorta wrong

 
I got an impassioned note from Max Lawrence, telling me I got it wrong (see Tuesday, Nov. 25 post "Old masters vs. olde peculiar") about the shared attribution of "Olde Peculiar" with Jesse Goldstein. Here's the correct info: Most of the work in the exhibit was Lawrence's alone. The work I chose to highlight was shared with Goldstein. Vox Populi--and Lawrence--didn't diss anyone.

I guess the bottom line is that labeling needs to be clearer.
permanent link  libby 1:56 PM
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Odds Bodkins

 

Speaking of photography...and speaking of photography focussed on the body, somebody at the Philadelphia Museum of Art had fun with this one -- a photo show featuring work in which the heads are cut off (or veiled or somehow obscured). Actually, Photography Curator Kate Ware's new show, "The Faceless Figure" -- which goes back in time to 1870 for a snapshot by French amateur photographer Felix Bonfils and marches forward with 60 works by Edward Weston, Burk Uzzle, Minor White, Sebastiao Salgado, Sol Mednick, Lee Friedlander and others, could be the funny, odd reverberant photo show to see this winter. (image top is Friedlander's "New York" 1966, an example of the artist working in this genre)

Pair it with that other head-less experience at the PMA right now, the Schiaparelli show. Never have so many maniquins gone headless in the service of fashion and art. (image is Schiaparelli's Lobster Dress, on view in "Shocking" until Jan. 4)

"The Faceless Figure" may be quite an uplift for amateur photographers -- proving that what we do naturally may have value in the long run.

Show opens Dec. 20 in the Julian Levy Gallery, first floor. Ask for directions.
permanent link  roberta 8:58 AM
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Monday, December 01, 2003

The persistence of film

 

I’d been meaning to write about the photography show at Nexus last month before it closed, but somehow it slipped my mind (shown, Douglas F. Herman’s “Skywalker,” a cross-processed C-print).
The show was a competition sponsored by the City Paper and the Center for the Photographic Image, the latter a group of local photographers who are trying to get some synergy and cooperation going amongst themselves and other photographers, said Boru O’Brien O’Connell, who was gallery-sitting with the photos when I got there.

Some of the cooperation was practical—sharing of printing equipment, he said.

This reminded me that there’s another group of photographers joining forces. I bumped into some members of the Philadelphia Photographer’s Initiative in the spring one First Friday, displaying their work on the hurricane fence on 2nd Street. Hmmm. Might be a movement.

Some of the 64 images out of 650 submissions from the five-state region were more original or more riveting than others. The favorite theme seemed to be Americana.

A couple of standouts were the startling Herman print and Shannon Slattery’s Winter Before War # 1 and 2, tiny gum bichromate pinhole photos (shown, sorry for the reflections), tiny landscapes that suggested huge fields covered with stubble and snow with barely readable marks that looked more drawn than photographed. Chilly.

The show included several digital prints; but about a third of the images were gelatin silver prints, and about half were C-prints. The strong persistence of film in art photography surprised me. I’m not sure why I was surprised, since my friends who are photographers also stick to film in their art work. But in the business and casual photography world, digital has pretty well crowded out film.

My tour guide, O’Brien O’Connell, had two photos of his own in the show, both posed, large C-prints. Here’s “Self-Portrait with Family.” (I’m apologizing again for reflections in the glass.) His other photo of a worker (a model) in a lab was even more claustrophobic.

Although many of the works in show seemed young, there were enough strong pieces to make me slow down and look.





permanent link  libby 10:00 PM
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Cornell clarified

 
Ever wonder why everyone raves about those obscure Joseph Cornell boxes? I, for one, thought perhaps they were part of some culture past to which we had lost the key.

Well, four brief explications by Cornell collector Robert Lehrman of some of his own Cornell boxes ran in the Penn alumni magazine, the Pennsylvania Gazette.

The commentaries were captivating and poetic, and were meant to pique interest in a new, picture-loaded book--"Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay … Eterniday"-- published for Cornell's centennial birthday celebration. Lehrman is one of the authors.

Check it out.



permanent link  libby 8:47 PM
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Oh, for the Ides of March

 

Here’s a little news that made me want to fast forward to March RIGHT NOW. It’s the lineup of 2004 exhibits at the Fabric Workshop and Museum which includes a stellar assortment of national and international talent with new solo work and an interesting group show focussed on film/cinema/video.

Mar 6-May 29 -- international art hottie Ernesto Neto will install his new collaborative piece made with FWM (the work's been shown in NY at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery -- this will be its Philadelphia debut). (image is Neto's "Walking in Venus Blue Cave, 2001)

Mar 27-May 29 -- also hot Kara Walker will install a hand-fashioned “untailored” cyclorama she’s been working on at the FWM. Using bamboo, balsa wood and cotton sheets for construction, the old-fashioned movie machine will project some of Walker’s trademark antebellum figures on painted walls.


The 2004 list continues with this tantalizing group (no dates but I’ll let you know)
--Matthew Ritchie, solo exhibit (read more on Ritchie's installation -- pictured above -- up at MIT)
--Laura Owens, solo exhibition
--Do-Ho Suh
--Teresita Fernandez
--Jean Shin

More immediately on the horizon in January, “Experiments with Truth,” a film-video group show guest-curated by London-based teacher and curator, Mark Nash, will dwell on the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary art and cinema and the influence back and forth between high art and Hollywood. (I just saw American Splendor again this weekend and that’s an amazing amalgam of docu-fiction -- with cartooning to boot.)

FWM will pull out the stops for this one producing a catalog and consulting with architects Elisabeth Diller and Rick Scofido and others on the exhibit design. Nash is co-curator of Documenta 11.
permanent link  roberta 9:01 AM
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Sunday, November 30, 2003

Arts in crafts

 
I'm not sure exactly why I haven't walked into Wexler Gallery until now. After all, everything looks swell in the windows.

I suppose part of is has to do with it being more like a shop than a gallery, its goods all aglitter. And part of it might be a little Philadelphia stodginess, a slowness to welcome what's new.

But I passed by last week and pushed myself through the door, having been tipped off by my husband and a friend of his about some great, rock-like pottery upstairs (shown above, Lip Vessel, by Randy O'Brien).

Now I had just seen some rocklike pottery over at Snyderman, giant clay boulders by Paul Chaleff (shown left), that didn't move me one way or the other. So when I went in, I was thinking rocks in the sense of something realistic.

But the rocks at Wexler, traditionally shaped clay pots with amazing glazes, were not in the least realistic. Their claim to fame were both intense colors (oh, I'm so sorry my picture doesn't quite capture the wonderful glow) and these fissures, created by four layers of glaze that crack to reveal the dark underglazes, looking sort of like a dried out, crazed mud flat . It's one trick but it's a good one.

Wexler, which is a crafts gallery, also carries things that qualify as art, such as the little crocheted steel-wire suits of clothes by Donna Rosenthal (shown, Warrior Clothing). Just 3 or 4 inches tall with rhinestone buttons and beautifully made, they are loaded with meanings. Clearly, these perfect little suits were not made to dress a doll, nor were tiny chainmail tutus a likely outfit for a warrior.

Wexler also carries work by Heeseung Lee (shown, left to right, Lee's Landscape Vase with Butterfly and Landscape Vase with Peacocks) and Rain Harris, two clay artists whose art resonates with meanings beyond the level of craft. We've written about both of them before. Anyway, if Snyderman and the Works are galleries, so is Wexler. I'm sold.


permanent link  libby 5:09 PM
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R-E-S-P-E-C-T yourself

 

I want to recommend two shows now at the end of their runs, the group photography show, “Self-Centered,” at Creative Artists Network (up through Dec. 4) and Jessica Doyle’s installation “Exist” at Project Room (through Dec. 5).

Both exhibits are body-focussed and both deal with slippery issues of selfhood -- self-image, self-loathing, self-loss, things that often get pigeon-holded as womens’ issues but are really more universal.



Jessica Doyle’s installation -- wall drawings, video projection, potted plants and a little garden fountain -- weaves together the fact and fiction of a life. There’s myth-making in Doyle’s wall drawings, which lent a kind of Lascaux cave strangeness. (images above and left are details of Doyle's wall drawings) As for the video, (in which you see what looks like home movies of the artist and her baby daughter growing up), it felt like truth.

The total package is a lovely acceptance of self -- foibles, aggrandizement and all.


Meanwhile at CAN, the more body-oriented of the two exhibits, color photography does some mythmaking of its own in the hands of out-of-towners, Kelli Connell (Texas), Jen Davis (Chicago) and the team of Robin Lasser and Kathryn Sylva (California)

Davis and Connell both work magic with self-portraits. Connell, who twins herself and appears as both halves of a couple in scenes of domestic intimacy, makes the more startling work. (image right above is Connell's "Road Stop") Her close-cropped compositions -- some taken from a birds-eye view -- are identity conundrums that reverberate with broader issues of surveillance, duplicity and gender stereotyping. Cindy Sherman must be an influence.

Davis, a plus-sized artist who poses herself alone or with another woman, treads on the concept of otherness and pulls it off nicely in images that ache with loneliness. (image left is Davis's "Primping")


On the other hand I found works by Robin Lasser and Kathryn Sylva, which pair images of women with quotes from patients with eating disorders little more than accomplished advertising posters, which is, I think what they were made for -- an educational awareness program for the public. (image above is "Andrea" by Lasser and Sylva)
permanent link  roberta 12:35 PM
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