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Thursday, January 29, 2004

Eye opener

 
My neighborhood eyeglasses emporium, a hole-in-the-wall on Penn's Campus called the Modern Eye, snapped me to attention yesterday when I went in to have my glasses repaired (oh, I stepped on them).

There was this nice painting, looking about 30 inches square, that included some specs (shown). Who done it, I done asked, and they said, Mitchell Gillette. Hey, I know that guy's work. And then I looked some more, and there hung some enormous, more typical paintings of his--very surreal--and all I could think was, if this tiny, little shop could fit in these two 5-foot tall paintings, so could everyone else.

Start buying art.
permanent link  libby 4:05 PM
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Name that picture, er person

 

This just in from the seamless collaging of images department. Josh O.S., a Philadelphia-born artist now living in Brooklyn will be showing his Photoshopped collages at Space 1026 in February.

The images use photographs of international power players of the last 20 years and merge them with, in some cases, Rennaisance paintings. (top image is Nancy Reagan made over)


Some of the work in the show -- called "The New Money O.S." -- is tapestry size, 72" by 60" or thereabouts. Themes are a mix of anti-globalist and anti-media -- and all the source material looks like it was downloaded from the Web or from tv (pretty globalist of him, now that I think of it).

Shrunk to our artblog scale, the work looks like record album covers. But I'd go see them big because they seem to have enough detail to keep you going -- and enough content to keep you smiling. Opens First Friday, Feb. 6. See you there.

permanent link  roberta 1:28 PM
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Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Kort answers to Immendorff questions

 

I went to the press preview of the Jorg Immendorff show and because it was so sparsly attended (as in me and Mr. Sozanski) I got a one-on-one walk-through with curator Pamela Kort, a bouncy, no-nonsense enthusiast for all things Immendorff. Mr. S. squared off with Robert Storr, the show's other curator. (image top is an early Immendorff work. The turtle, says Kort, is innocence, is him.)

Kort and I started off on a rocky footing...

She: Anything you want to know... just ask me.

Me: (not knowing anything and not having a question in my head) ...there’s sure a lot of German words in the paintings. It would help to know some German....

She: Well, he is a German artist.


After that, shall we say curt Kort exchange, we cruised nicely, and the curator was a delightful guide, someone who must have always been the smartest kid in the classroom and who’s happy to share. (Storr, by the way, was the other smartest kid in the class.)

Kort was invited to co-curate the show by Storr. She's American but lives in Germany and has written several books on Immendorff. She also worked with the artist on a recent project, the opera “The Rake’s Progress,” which the artist turned into a story about himself and the art world (he’s the Rake).

Kort told me the artist was a Maoist student revolutionary in the 1960s. He was also a utopian thinker. One of his art projects was the creation of an imaginary art academy, “Lidl” (pronounced “little”).

Lidl, which riffed on things diminutive, and, says Kort, was a stand-in for the artist, had a small faux building which he put inside a little classroom at Dusseldorf Academy. Immendorf drew up a campus plan, even painted a mascot for the school, a dog.


(Image left is from the "Cafe Deutschland" series)

Immendorff was a performer and would walk around with a “Lidl” flag which he would put in various classrooms. Kort says this was like him saying “Here I am, Lidl, “ich.” (There’s a painting of him carrying the Lidl flag in the exhibit.)

Another time, he walked around the city with a wooden brick tied to his leg. The brick was painted the colors of the German flag and labelled “Lidl.” He was arrested for desecrating the German flag. (The brick is in the show, too.)


Kort says the artist’s work has always been about himself and about art and the role of the artist and that his oervre has been about “refining this disposition.”

Much of the work in the show has never been seen by an American audience. For some reason, a few pieces belong to a corporation in Iowa.

“He’s not afraid of erotic energy,” says Kort, who pointed out an example (a unisex three-way in the Rake’s Progress painting). (image above is "Rake's Progress")


“The work is very contemporary. That’s the reason we did the show now. Young people are interested in this...[self-referential utopian art-making]

“I don’t know much about politics but I know a lot about art,” said Kort, who then went on to talk about Marxist-Leninist theory.

She also pointed out Immendorf’fs Mao-love which continues up to the moment. In fact, you can make a “Where’s Mao” game searching amidst the layers and layers of imagery in the Cafe Deutschland and Cafe Flor paintings. (Hint, look up and left -- of course.) (see detail above from "Rake's Progess" for example)

The show was called “I wanted to be an artist” for two reasons. First, Immendorff himself wanted that title. Secondly, the phrase refers to an early sequence of paintings in the show, a group of works called “I wanted to be an artist.” The picture and word pieces form the artist’s Marxist-Leninist self-critique.

In sum, go see this show. It’s a high flying burst of energy by an artist, who, I’m told, by the way, is seriuosly ill with ALS.

Storr and Kort are hoping this major exhibit convinces a U.S. museum to mount a show of Immendorff’s work. I’d say they’ve got a case.



permanent link  roberta 10:35 AM
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A little bow-wow wow

 
I just got a note from artblog contributor Anne Seidman with a couple of tidbits about David Guinn's new doggie mural on Lombard (see Jan. 21 post).

The dog pictures are portraits of pets whose owners had won lotteries enabling their pet to appear in the mural. And the bull terrier standing guard at the lower right corner of is none other than Sarah McEneaney's beloved "Daisy." (Sarah's retrospective opened last week at the ICA.)
permanent link  libby 5:50 AM
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Monday, January 26, 2004

Nara on the West coast, Nara and Yo on the East coast...and Randall Sellers, too

 
Alex Worman's L.A. Confidential at artnet is chock full of stuff any snow-inflicted East coast dreamer might find interesting. Best of all is the information on the 44-year old Yoshitomo Nara and his show at Blum and Poe and local boy Randall Sellers's exhibit of drawings (being snapped up quick) at Richard Heller Gallery.

And just so the West coast can have a little envy of us, here's a photo taken at the Nara opening at the ICA Friday (thanks to our pal John McInerney at ICA). Pictured are the artist, and Georgia and James from the band Yo La Tengo.
permanent link  roberta 8:36 PM
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Into the valley of death...

 


When I mentioned Matt Pruden's piece, “Robert Falcon Scott Dreams of the Pole (Aurora Australis),” to Roberta this morning, she said it was up at the most appropriate time—when our leader, to take our mind off the deaths in Iraq, announced a program to put people on Mars.

The installation in the Window on Broad at UArts refers to Scott’s 1912 expedition: His team of explorers arrived at the pole a month behind Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and then perished on the way back. Their loss was England’s loss as surely as Sputnik was our loss—our failure to be first.


And kind of like space, there was no there, there. Pruden called the effort absurd: “The North and South pole are completely imaginary places. They undertook an incredible physical ordeal to get to an imaginary place.”

Part of what interested Pruden, he said, was how the poles “became these blank screens that so much person hubris, nationalism and fantasy and romantic fantasy got projected onto.”


The installation, which is best seen at night, when the forbidding reflections and the scratches in the glass don’t block your view, includes white-covered books on an icicle-draped mantle, the gold pages reflected like a ghostly polar aurora in a glass above the books. The central image is terrific in an otherwise forbidding space (kind of like the Pole, perhaps).

Pruden captures some of the romanticism and folly of an English gentleman trying to prove himself and conquer for his nation an unforgiving arctic nature that he knows only through books and photographs and his imagination.

Pruden has a show coming up at Nexus Gallery in March, by the way.

permanent link  libby 5:42 PM
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Meanwhile up in Collegeville

 
In a big weekend of Philadelphia openings, I slipped away with my friend Bay and her husband George for the opening of their friend La Wilson's retrospective at the Berman Museum. The 80-plus year old Wilson, a self-taught assemblage artist from Hudson Ohio was showing forty-four, mostly small-scale wood boxes filled to the brim with common objects placed in extraordinary juxtapositions. (top image, "Interchange," 1999)

Wilson, a sprightly, white haired charmer who showed up for the opening wearing black leather knickers and a black sweater, didn't start making art until she was in her 30's when, as a wife and mother she was encouraged by a friend to start making things. She took one course at the Akron Art Institute and was off and running, pulling together large and small pieces made from collections of scavenged stuff (chalk, pencils, dominoes, dice, stones, rulers). She and her family lived with the work in the house, in some cases tucked right into the architecture. (image below right, "Transitions," 1986)

Her family didn't consider what she was doing art. "My kids thought it was fine, it was something that Mom did," she said.

It took a number of years of producing work and showing in group exhibits in the Akron and Cleveland area before Wilson's work, in 1983, came to the attention of Akron art dealer John Davis who gave her a solo show in his gallery. Davis, who understood the important relationship between Wilson's art and her home environment, installed the gallery as if it was a slice of Wilson's house -- he painted the walls with bright colors and moved in furniture, rugs and a piano from the artist's house. People loved it and the show all but sold out. (image below is "New York Option" 1990)

Wilson is a natural art maker. Her pieces have an unforced charm that comes from someone who works intuitively, loves her materials and arrives at poetic juxtapositions so open you can read a world of meaning into them. You might think of Lucas Samaras when you see the extravaganza of materials crammed into a small box, in some cases using mirrors. But unlike the hot, self-absorbtion of Cosmos Lucas, Wilson's world is a cool and calmly-reflective place, each box like a kind of museum or teaching tool asking you to reflect on relationships yet not spelling it out.

Wilson had a bottle phase where she filled small glass insulin bottles with beads and colored thread, then assembled them in grids or -- tumbled them into a larger bottle. These latter works have a ship in a bottle niftiness. They also have a gorgeousness arising from the crisp glass, the sinuousness of the swirly thread and the shiny, bubbliness of the beads. (see botton image, "Bottleneck" 2002)



Here is Wilson talking about Art, with a capital A. "Art is a way of life. It should be where people are, which gives it a chance to live. If it is withdrawn, put in an artificial situation, even in some museums, it may die," quoting from the show's catalog essay by Edward M. Gomez.

Davis, who represents Wilson, told me he will be opening a new gallery in New York this year. He and Wilson are already planning her first show in that space. "Her new work is big. It's more powerful than ever," he said. I can't quite imagine big works by this tiny, modest artist but I can't wait to see them.
permanent link  roberta 9:19 AM
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Sunday, January 25, 2004

Portrait of the artist as a giant baby

 
Roberta and I headed toward what we hoped was not the swan song for the stellar international art events that Moore College of Art has been holding over the years.

The show at Moore is "Jorg Immendorff: I Wanted to Become an Artist," curated by Robert Storr and Pamela Kort. It's the first solo museum exhibition of this 58-year-old German artist's work in the United States.

And to kick it off, Moore presented a symposium Friday that attracted about 80 intense art lovers, willing to fork over the $20 and listen to a lot of talk about one guy.

What a great panel, with five people who came at the material with such different approaches.

Besides Storr (former senior curator in painting and culture at MOMA and now a chaired prof at NYU) and Kort (curator and art historian as well as author of a book on Immendorff), the panel included Arthur C. Danto (philosopher and art critic for The Nation), Isabelle Moffat (Hamburg-based art historian with lots of Immendorff creds), and artist and critic Stephen Ellis (who has written extensively about German art of the '80s) (shown left to right, Moffat, Danto, Ellis, Storr and Kort).

(The show, by the way, is tops and we'll weigh in on it later.)

Here are a few of the highlights of the symposium, "Jorg Immendorff: Arguments with the Present; Conversations with the Past," which focused on the contradictions within Immendorff's art (shown, "Setting Germany in Order"). Otherwise I'm hard-pressed to synthesize in any way:

Some comments from panel moderator Storr: Immendorff shares with Anselm Kiefer and Gerhart Richter the impulse to excavate the German past (shown, Richter's portrait of an American Phantom jet), exemplified in Immendorf's "Cafe Flore" painting, which includes a portrait of Max Ernst, who represents German culture lost during the Nazi era. (Storr later said that Immendorff says the people in his work are not about theory, so portraits of disparate artists like Francis Picabia and Ernst and Marcel Duchamp and Georgio de Chirico in one painting is not an embrace of their contradictory artistic practices.)

Whereas U.S. art in the 1980s split in two threads, neo-expressionism and the conceptual sons of Marcel Duchamp, Immendorff unites the two traditions, as "an artist of ideas" who uses emotional self-expression.

Some comments from Kort: Immendorff, an iconoclast and a follower of Joseph Beuys, adopted Beuys' pose as the "solo, pantomime artist" genius (his paintings often including himself as an actor in history).

Some comments from Moffat: Immendorff's mixing of the personal and the political, a la Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Beuys, has influenced younger German artists, and his use of ugliness in his painting is "a safeguard to keep from being too comfortable" (shown, "Rake's Progress").

Some comments from Stephen Ellis: Immendorff's work presents unresolved paradoxes--more than one point of view within a single work. "It had to do with the political split in Germany, the post-war division," and it allows the viewer to delay interpretation, following the artist's train of thought.

Some comments from Arthur Danto: In Germany, unlike in the U.S., painting is a political act. Immendorff's buddhistic babies of all races (see image at top of post) reflect a concern with being an artist without being an artist, i.e. being a pure infant, "a way of being, not thinking." To Immendorff, Danto said, "the enemy of painting is the painter's best friend--to paint badly."

In the United States, art was about creating good art within the traditions of art history, cut off from life and politics, whereas "Germans are interested in something deeper, darker and more mysterious."

Discussion:
Disagreeing with Danto, Ellis said that German artists weren't interested in killing the forms of the past but in "kicking [them] so something else comes out."

This comment led to a discussion of the ugliness in Immendorf's work. An aesthetic of ugliness is in the tradition of German art history, said Kort, as well as a belief in the will of the artist to form art. She cited Adolf Wolfli and Max Beckmann as part of this tradition (shown Beckmann's "Paris Society").

Moffat raised the contradictions implicit in Immendorff's collective town, Lidl, and how his politics of collective dialog (Immendorff was a communist) stood in the way of his ambitions to be recognized "He fears his identity will be erased by the politics," she said (shown, untitled).

Storr enlarged on this idea, saying Immendorff assumes the persona of naivete. He provokes and expects resistance, yet he's looking for allies and adulation as he does so.

Danto further enlarged: "He had perfect pitch for the infuriating gesture." Somehow, this ability to poke instigated the German police to raid Lidl. "It's like raiding the dollhouse," Danto added.





permanent link  libby 12:14 PM
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Doing the Tengo at ICA

 

Post from Rob Matthews
So what were critically-acclaimed, indie rock, Matador Records recording artists Yo La Tengo doing at the ICA opening Friday night? Something to ponder. If you were on the landing or stairs where the bar was located and saw a medium height fellow with a large head and frizzy hair wearing a bright purple shirt, that's one of the band members.
(image is a nice shot from their website, a marquee in Knoxville, TN)

In case you're unfamiliar, the band is considered the royal family of the indie rock world...reigning now for a solid 15 years. They're kind of the Velvet Underground for the 90s which is to say that they take basic folk-pop songs and throw a bunch of noise and feedback on top of it. The best thing out of Hoboken since Sinatra.
--Philadelphia artist Rob Matthews will be featured in the upcoming, one-night event, Wagons East, in Brooklyn.
permanent link  libby and roberta 9:56 AM
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