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Saturday, December 20, 2003

Art bibliophile tells all!!

 

[Ed. Whenever I stop by for a chat and to look at what's on the walls at LaPelle Gallery, owner Rodger LaPelle has a new book to tell me about. The books are always about art and usually I haven't heard of any of them. But Rodger makes them seem fascinating. Anyway, Libby and I asked him to put together his reading list so we could share it with you. Below is Rodger's annotated book list for your reading pleasure.

The books seem like a great bunch of gift books. By the way, some of the links are to amazon.com and other online book sellers -- but not all. Some are informational links. You can purchase each book online, in some cases used or discounted.]

Post by Rodger LaPelle

These are my recommendations for readers interested in the world of art.

1. "I Bought Andy Warhol" by Richard Polsky. An insider's revelations of the behind-the-scenes of the Andy Warhol phenomenon . Deals, prices, characters. I shook hands with Andy when he had his first museum show at the ICA. Later I bought and sold just one soup can print in the 70's. Polsky also does a column on auctions for Artnet.

2. "A hero of Our Time" the Story of Varian Fry. by Sheila Isenberg. In 1940 a Young Varian Fry goes to Marseille, France, and helps 1,500 intellectuals escape from the Nazis, including Max Ernst, Jaques Lipshutz and Marc Chagall. A story of a life-and-death adventure. I remember following the course of the entire World War II by reading the Inquirer but mostly Life Magazine at a young age.

3. "Faustian Bargain" by Jonathan Petropolos. Who made out well in the art field in 1932 to 1945... in Germany. Artists, dealers, curators etc. flourished because Hitler intensely loved art (of a kind) and sponsored it to the hilt. I think Hitler's main ambition was to build the largest art museum in the world in his home town of Lintz, Austria and he was going to fill it with great art by hook or crook.

4. "An Artful Life" by Pierre Assouline. The seventy-two-year career run of art dealer Henry Daniel Kahnweiler. How he started and lost his gallery twice and came back in Paris is especially interesting to those in the trade. He was Picasso's dealer, and I found that art dealing is such an absorbing process that it is very hard to give up. Kahneweiler was in it till he dropped at 96 years of age.


5. "Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece" by Cynthia Saltzman. One picture can be worth ten million words... some of which are in this book. Basically about the 17 owners of the highest-priced and highest-sold painting in the history of art. The first purchaser was a woman art student from Denmark.


permanent link  libby and roberta 10:22 AM
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Friday, December 19, 2003

Currin and Grosz

 

I was reading Paul Johnson's "Art: A New History" last night, a rather iconoclastic work as it turns out. Johnson is not an art historian but an journalist and art reviewer and he comes at it as a populist with a passion for art (his father was a painter as is he).

Johnson's dismissive of a whole bunch of 20th century artists, including Picasso and Matisse. He rounds up all the isms--dada, surreal, future, cube, fauve) and summarily executes them as "fashion art." Flavor of the week, he means, and too swayed by market forces and by fashion.

He makes a distinction between fashion art and what he calls the "pure" abstract art of Paul Klee and Kandinsky which he thinks has merit.

Predictably, he likes figurative art and gives points to David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth (I said he was a populist) and Norman Rockwell whom he calls "a Dutch genre painter transmuted into 20th century America."


Which brings me to George Grosz and Otto Dix. Johnson says George Grosz, whom he dubs "the gifted German line artist," helped start a new movement called the New Objectivity or Neue Sachlichkeit which sprang up out of a rejection of modern art's isms.

This new movement was to tell it like it was. And Grosz and Dix (who was also in the movement) working at a time of war and corruption did just so.

Anyway, I just want to add Grosz and Dix to the discussion as artists dealing with real things as opposed to Currin, who, as Franklin says, is dealing with art -- and doing it very fashionably.

(image, top is Grosz's lithograph "The Hero," image, right is Dix's "Trench Warfare")

permanent link  roberta 8:03 AM
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Thursday, December 18, 2003

 
Post from Douglas T. Witmer, Part I

[Editors' note: Abstract painter Douglas Witmer is reponding to a series of posts on abstract art. He had so much worth saying that we divided his post into two sections. Here's section one.]

...The painter Chris Martin once said "Do what you love as precisely as possible."  I imagine then that a big problem for any artist today (including myself), in a visually super-saturated environment, is discerning what it is that you REALLY love (shown, painting by Agnes Martin, probably not related to Chris).
 
If I work on the (naive) assumption that every work of art springs from the artist's honest personal process, words or categories such as "abstract" or "representational" (or add whatever movement/style you want) have only a little bit of value as related to the actual qualities of the piece.  How do you tell, though, if the work is of honest (loving) intent?  Yeah, that can be hard (shown, Kurt Schwitters' Maraak Variation I). But a lot of times intentions show through, don't you think? …
  
The feeling of seeing
…Related to the discussion of abstraction being apart from the body, I would like to suggest that we feel ourselves seeing.  And as a reminder, seeing is a bodily event. 

I think simple seeing is undervalued in the contemporary art environment. (I'm remembering the countless grad school arguments we waged over work none of us had ever actually seen!)  In my experience, abstraction, reliant on its retinality, physical properties and free of "recognizable imagery", is still a powerful format for exploring the sensation of sight and visual perception in a somewhat "pure" way (shown, untitled piece by Kazimir Malevich work).

I make personal life connections or experience transformation as I move from my physical feeling of seeing this kind of work inward to the (perhaps no less physical) emotional sensations (feelings) that come next.
 
…The thing about this description of how abstract art can be experienced is that it makes it seem easy.  Which makes me think of music. 

Cultural conditioning

I've noticed that folks can listen to instrumental music (which I would argue is more abstract than abstract visual art if only for its added element of time) and find it approachable or engage it in a way they would not do with abstract art (shown, Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 28-Second Version).  I've never quite understood why this is so, though my hunch is that it has to less to do with the art and more to do with the viewer's cultural conditioning. 

I'm interested to watch people view my abstract paintings, and I use the instrumental music analogy often and with good success to the ones with the wary expressions.  After all, I hope for my work to be seen and have meaning to others (shown, Brice Marden's D'Apres la Marquise de la Solana).
--Doug Witmer is an abstract painter who shows at Peng Gallery.
permanent link  libby and roberta 6:19 PM
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Currin and Cadmus

 
Post from Franklin Einspruch

I ascribe John Currin's success to the fact that he uses traditional painting methods to make bitter statements about the tradition of painting. At last, the ruling party in the art world, which equates the subversion of art with its progress, can have its cake and eat it too.

I tried to give Currin a shot as a satirist along the lines of Paul Cadmus, an underrated painter who skewed all kinds of human foibles while producing some of the best figure drawings of the 20th Century. (image is Cadmus's "The Fleet's In!" from 1934)

Currin is a wooden draughtsman by comparison and since his target is art, his art is about art. That is very definition of academic, and I find both his work and his popularity to be a cynical exercise.

-- artist Franklin Einspruch writes and produces artblog.net

permanent link  libby and roberta 5:39 PM
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Black is beautiful

 

I saw the Coltrane exhibit at Slought Foundation in West Philadlphia yesterday and I'll say this about two of the abstract paintings included in the 8-person show.

Quentin Morris's and Stephen Pusey's black circle paintings, which bear great resemblance to each other, encapsulate Coltrane's impulse towards musical experimentation -- in two fell swoops. I found Morris's piece ("Untitled" above) moving, its tightly-coiled energy and hints of destructive and constructive power mesmerizing. And Pusey's piece, ("Equinox" below) which supplements the painted black circle with vigorous pencil drawing over it and on the wall, lyrical and understandable in the context.

By the way, both artists installed their pieces at the same time on parallel walls in two different rooms of the space and neither artist knew about the other's piece.

This show, which is part-documentary and part-visual art exhibit devoted to the legendary Philadelphia jazz master, John Coltrane, was organized by Slought with help from the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies, Larry Becker Gallery (which represents Morris) as well as from a host of musicians who are participating in a series of concerts at the gallery.

Slought's reaching out to diverse sources and communities for their programming is becoming something of a trademark. It's better than the real thing.

Finally, check out Slought's web-design tweak -- text-enlarger buttons on the front page at the top. Click on 10 point, 11 point or 12 point type for your reading pleasure. It's a user-friendly addition to a site that swims with text.

permanent link  roberta 8:12 AM
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Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Callas, Streisand, and now Kwan

 
Tout le art monde who had made their reservation at 15-minute intervals turned out for Gabriel Martinez' one-night "Confidence and Faith" installation/performance Saturday night at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

As far as style goes, this was a swell event--the champagne flutes, the mystery of what was behind the closed doors, the waiting for your turn.

But once inside, the event had its ups and downs.

The high points included the high-brow music performance produced by modern music ensemble Relache, with its trio of black-clad musicians providing live music as ice skater Michelle Kwan performed a perfect program on video, recorded, from what I understood, at the National Figure Skating Championships in Philadelphia two years ago. A reading of Brian Boitano's advice to Kwan of how to overcome her Olympics jinx provided a hint of why the piece was named Confidence and Faith.

The upstairs highlights were the two white rooms. In the first one, the white walls were sliced like skated-on ice, the reference to razors and sharp ice-skate blades offering a frisson of danger. The second white room included a white floor covered with a crunchy mix of glitter and sand--and a row of wall-mounted pedestals holding cast wax saints (cast by Cate Midgett of the Project Room)--votive candles that seemed too beautiful to burn, inspiring people to speak in hushed tones. Awesome.

But I didn't quite get some of it. The first room remained mysterious, faux blood dripping down luxurious, white brocade patterned with crosses, a white dove precariously perched on the side of a block of resin on a pedestal. All I got here was Catholicism and danger and maybe spending too much time on one's knees.

I liked the St. Theresa medals hanging off the upside-down holly bush. And the last room was "I Will Survive" made concrete. Its darkness contrasted the white room of saints and hope that preceded it. A disgusting, cement-coated pile of stuffed animals cascaded down from the ceiling while the play-by-play commentary on Kwan's less than perfect Olympic performance blared from an old-fashioned record player in a credenza.

All in all, the piece offered style and mystery. Its one-night stand was a fine reflection of the evanescence of Kwan's one-night performance and one awkward moment that ultimately deprived her of the gold medal. But so much drama over what was merely a performance seemed disproportionate to me. Perhaps it's the perfect piece for Philadelphia, land of the crazy sports fans.

--photos by jj tiziou
permanent link  libby 12:44 PM
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Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Lost identities

 

Waiting rooms usually have only the blandest things hanging on the walls.

But where I am waiting (for physical therapy) these days,hanging on the wall are three photographs that I find quite interesting.

Like much art in public spaces, it hangs unidentified and unattributed. And oddly enough, it seems to take up not enough of the wall space. Two of the photos are paired closely on an otherwise empty wall. And the third hangs practically across the room.

The photo that first attracted my eye presents an aerial view of a grid of swimming pools each with a boxy suburban home to match (see image above). The lucky homeowners who move in here will never have to share their pools with their neighbors. Afterall, each house has its own pool; and each pool is exactly the same, each house is exactly the same. No need to worry that you're not exactly like your neighbor.

It reminds me of my three-year sojourn in Pasadena, where neighbors barely spoke and driveways right up to the front door guaranteed that they'd never have to speak. Pop out the door, pop into isolation of your car and go, go, go.

The grid of pools hangs next to an aerial view of swimming pools attached to beach hotels (shown left). These pools are no plain rectangles. They have baroque flourishes and richness made to attract patrons to share the space, although the sadness and seediness of an unpopulated seaside resort cuts the mood.

And on the far side is a view of waterslides, the narrow, wiggle of a blue, man-made line right next to the gray-green, complex splendor of the ocean.

Whoever hung these pictures is probably long gone, and probably no one remembers the photographer. But if you're out there, I think they're splendid pictures, and while you're identity is lost to me for now, at least you have an identity.
permanent link  libby 5:04 PM
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Currin, but not in the flesh

 
Post by Emily Brown

I write you as one who has only seen articles and reproductions. I just can’t stop myself from writing you now, because your news is fresh and I’ve been thinking about [John] Currin (shown Currin's The Veil).

The painter’s attitude is brazen and narrow, perverting the affectionate work of Norman Rockwell [and] parodying the American Dream.

It is hard to deny that as a culture we are in a quagmire of consumerist addiction and self-involvement, and John Currin is making this point again and again.

He tells his moral tale in a shallow if seductive voice. The people he portrays are not admirable or even likeable; rather, he plays on the senses to engage the viewer in their situations.

I am tempted to compare him negatively with Hieronymous Bosch (shown Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights detail), but don’t care to honor him with this connection.

There is something very cheap about Currin’s view of life. He lacks the subtleties, the range, the inspiring ‘other side’ that the great ones have given us.

--Emily Brown's show at Gallery Joe ends Dec. 20



permanent link  libby and roberta 3:27 PM
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Concrete abstractions

 

Post from Jeff Waring about abstract art

(see posts of Dec. 3, 4, 5 and 6 for more of this thread)

Libby and Roberta, ...Maybe [abstract] is too vague a term...I want abstractions to be concrete or cathartic or resonant. Imagery is ultimately metaphor, and often idealized. Imagery is abstract. ...

I do get tired of clever art and idea art. Pop commentary and pretentious minimalistic décor, both encrypted with insider information, are unfortunately a true expression of where we are.

We are stuck on ourselves, [we] love commentary, [we] love meaning, [we] love order and control and [we] need attention. The more inward we lean the more obsessive our views. (image is Paul Klee's "1914" which has a nice concrete abstraction thing going on)

--Painter Jeff Waring is a member of Highwire Gallery
permanent link  roberta 10:58 AM
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Pause for beauty

 

We interrupt this major discussion to bring you images from the homefront.

Nexus, which seems to be bringing in one outside show after another, now has "Cambodia: Crossing the River," a museum-esque anthropological show with photographs by James Wasserman and costumes and masks made by Chamroeun Yin, a Cambodian refugee who is also a master tailor and dancer. Yin's jewel-encrusted costumes -- which look too tiny to be worn but were -- are set off against pumpkin-colored walls in the front space. (image top is costume Yin wore in a dance performance) Color photographs of performers also dot the room. For more on Yin see the Philadelphia Folklore Project website.

And in the back space, Philadelphia photographer Wasserman's black and white shots of the streets and countryside make a poignant essay about culture surviving (and elephants surviving, too) in the aftermath of tragedy. This show's up until the end of December by the way.(Wasserman image left shows an elephant in a field in front of a new high-rise building going up)

The things you overlook

I saw the Nexus show with Nel Pak a Dutch artist who was visiting town for a day. Our friend Ann Northrup was taking her around. We strolled into the Clay Studio and before I knew it Nel was out in the hallway completely enthralled by Isaiah Zagar's jewel-encrusted (and crockery, and mirror and bottle and ...everything-else-encrusted) stucco wall. That was it for the Clay Studio. (image is Zagar's mosaic in the 5th floor stairwell)

We climbed the stairs all the way to the top, Nel exclaiming and touching the wall's fanciful array of objects, delighted at what she kept finding.

Her response made me realize that I don't even see the Zagar's piece anymore. It was good to be awakened from my visual slumber.

Finally, I offer this trifle. The vending machine on the 3rd floor landing in the Clay Studio stairwell. It's full of things like clay glazes, tools and elephant ear sponges. And a type-written warning over the dollar-bill slot tells you (presumably from good inside information) that you better not use the machine if you've got clay on your money because the clay will destroy the dollar bill reader. The idea of clay as the destroyer of the electronic money-reader tickles me. (image is that old vending machine)
permanent link  roberta 7:41 AM
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Monday, December 15, 2003

Bragging rights

 
Post from Mark Barry

With regards to [Kara] Walker and [John] Currin, I admire their work a lot.

The edge they may have originally had for me is tamed by overexposure.

As much as I like Mr Currin's painting I equally dislike the boasting, something about being the greatest painter working or similar. Only Ali is the greatest, beyond him it becomes just silly, paint already.

--Mark Barry is a painter living in Baltimore.
permanent link  libby and roberta 5:12 PM
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Double bind

 

So here's my comparison of the day.

Remember how so many African-American women artists are upset by the work of Kara Walker (which I admit to adoring), because Walker has gained extraordinary recognition from the white art world for work they feel demeans African Americans?


Well, it's not so different from my reaction to John Currin.


Like Walker's work, Currin's is disturbing. It has the beautiful painting thing going for it at the same time that it feels demeaning. And, like Walker, he's using that tension to make a social comment that's the antithesis of the apparently demeaning content.

No wonder these two make a lot of people squirm, myself included for Currin.
permanent link  libby 6:52 AM
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Sunday, December 14, 2003

Too much of a good thing

 

Our big day in the Big Apple, besides Currin and Harlem and Gorky, also included Lucas Samaras and Lucas Samaras and Lucas Samaras (shown, one of his dye diffusion prints--a self-portrait of course--in the Whitney collection) at the Whitney.

This Roberta said she found depressing.

Not me, except for the flashing thought that this show reflected the entirety of his life. Is it enough to expend most of your life force in making so many self-portraits that they fill a floor of the Whitney?

(This thought was reinforced yesterday when I saw “My Architect,” the Louis Kahn documentary by his son Nathaniel. I came away filled with sadness for a charismatic man who did brilliant work (shown, his government building in Bangladesh) and served as an architectural guru for those who followed him, but was not quite a whole human being.)

Not only does Samaras’ legendary self-absorption appear to be limitless (the show is appropriately named Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras), but so were his means of expressing it.

Amongst Samaras’ strengths are that his psychedelic pieces don't look dated; that his self-portraits in old age are as beautiful as his youthful ones; that his materials and methods merge insider and outsider art; that he did groundbreaking work in the use of manipulation of Polaroids; and that he extended self-exploitation as an art form to new heights and lengths.

Besides the famous, distorted polaroids, I was wowed by the intense pastels and the fine draftsmanship of the drawings.

The boxes, mirroring his own not-so-sweet self, were, as usual, a mix of over-the-top decoration with creepy materials suggesting pain and danger.

The performance/body art/danger bring to mind the dreaded Marina Abramovic and her self-flagellation (shown, her belly cut with razor), work I detest, but somehow in Samaras’ work, the pain and danger remain metaphorical and metaphysical, not physical. This goes to prove the guy isn't so crazy after all.

My main complaint was that a whole floor of LS is half-a-floor too much.

By the way, this was the Whitney’s second major Samaras show. The first was 30 years ago, and the Whitney is the largest repository of Samaras’ work in a public institution, according to Whitney Director Maxwell L. Anderson.

permanent link  libby 1:23 PM
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The Europhile

 

So here’s the thing about John Currin. Looking at his art is depressing. (image right is "Fishermen" 2002)

Libby and I spent quite some time with the Whitney show. We went through it backwards and forwards, we deconstructed meaning and cozied up to the brushstrokes. We pondered and cogitated and when all was said and done I came away saddened. Here’s a guy who can paint like nobody’s business and he’s angrier than heck, painting up things that are one slap in the face after another.

I’m not saying I need to be kissed by a painting but I don’t like to be shouted at non-stop and I feel like Currin is shouting and slamming doors like a teenager. The work has a badgering quality. It’s the Don Rickles of art. (Not my favorite humor.) (image below is "Rachel as "The Hag" giclee print, ed. 200)


I read the press packet from cover to cover. Larry Rinder, who brought the show to the Whitney (it originated as a collaboration between the the MCA Chicago and Serpentine Gallery, London) seems a little ambivalent. Here’s his wrap-up:

“His work is intentionally challenging, and when most successful, it leaves us less sure of our aesthetic tastes, less comfortable in our social roles, and less secure in our sexual or gender identities. In exchange for these calculated feelings of discomfort and unease, however, Currin provides a host of exceptional images that are visually rewarding, imaginatively fresh, and technically superb.” (image below is "Heartless" 1997)

According to a Currin interview with William Stover I read in press materials (it was excerpted from the publication accompanying the "John Currin Selects" exhibit at the Boston MFA), Currin talks as irascibly as he paints. He's mad at American painting -- and mad that he’s an American.

He feels that European painting aspires to high culture and that American art has always aspired to be democratic -- ie not high.

He implies that European art can make masterpieces, but that democratic art (American art) can’t. He wonders if a democratic culture has any use for masterpieces.

He feels there’s something priggish about American art and he says Americans never paint flesh unless it’s tied to the s-e-x subject.

He says “American painting is doomed to be folk art.” By that he means that Americans get caught up looking for authenticity in their art, something he believes Europeans don’t do.

“...authenticity is a worthless value in art, he says.”

He calls Warhol an ironic folk artist...

All I can say is his arguments seem like harping. And as for painting our way to the future I’m not sure Currin’s combination of conservative Europhilia is the way to go. It seems to be digging painting into a big, deep, interesting hole. (image left is Lucas Cranach "Lucretia" 1532)
permanent link  roberta 11:17 AM
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