artblog

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Global art hotties

 


MoMA Assistant Curator of Drawings Jordan Kantor's talk at Arcadia last week was a lecture on globalism on art's fast track.

The trends, the artists, their work--all cross international boundaries.

From this I got the feeling that we were examining products from the global artists cartel. We will tell you what kinds of work to make and what kinds work you will be paying attention to, boys and girls. (This is not what Kantor said; it's what I came away feeling.)

Kantor, who curated Arcadia's first class Works on Paper biennial (up until March 28 and definitely worth a visit), presented his idea of where the cutting edge is in drawing these days and who's there (oldest pick born 1958, and most in their 30's), or at least who popped up on his personal radar screen in the past year.

So here's his list of drawing hotties to watch (I've added a few visual aids and a lot of links):

Banks Violette (b. 1973, Ithaca, NY, lives in New York) (shown at top, "Misfits")

Jay Heikes (b. 1975, Princeton, NJ, lives in Minneapolis and New Haven)

D.L. Alvarez (b. 1962, Stockton, CA, lives in Berlin) (shown right, "Meddle")

Martin Eder (b. 1968, Augsburg, Germany, lives in Berlin)

Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1968, Berlin, lives in Berlin) (shown left, "A and HP Drinking Beer")

Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, OH, lives in Los Angeles)

Fernando Bryce(b. 1965, Lima, Peru, lives in Lima and Berlin)
brycematerial

David Rathman (b. 1958, Choteau, MT, lives in Minneapolis) (shown right, "Remember Now, Women and Children First")



Aaron Morse (b. 1971, Tucson, lives in Los Angeles) (shown left, "Leatherstocking")

Michael Borremans (b. 1963, Geraardsbergen, Belgium, lives in Ghent)

Christopher Orr (b. 1969, Scotland, lives in London) (shown right)

Chris Vasell (b. 1974, lives in Chicago)

Hernan Bas(b. 1978[?], Miami, lives in Miami)

Birgit Megerle (b. 1975, Geisingen, Germany, lives in Berlin)

Paul P (b. 1977, Hamilton, Canada, lives in Toronto)

Christian Holstad (b. 1972, Anaheim, lives in New York) (shown left, "Pulling in the Reigns")

Mathew Hale (b. 1962, Swindon, Great Britain, lives in Berlin) (This guy must be an internet resistor. I could find nada on him worth linking to.)

Katja Strunz (b. 1970 Ottweiler, Germany, lives in Berlin)

Top Changtrakul (b. 1970, Bangkok, Thailand, lives in New York and Bangkok)

Silke Schatz (b. 1967, Celle, Germany, lives in Cologne) (shown, an installation)

Tam van Tran(b. 1966, Kontum, Vietnam, lives in Los Angeles) (shown below left, "Beetle Manifesto," made with chlorophyll, a substance to which I have a personal aversion, having nearly swooned from its odor once at a show at the Mattress Factory in which the artist scrubbed the space with chlorophyll)



The talk

The talk, entitled "A Curator's Report: New Trends in Contemporary Drawing," ( I saw about 130 people before the talk began, and Arcadia Gallery Director Dick Torchia but the number at about double that by the end of the talk) also put forth a number of trends on the international art scene.

First, Kantor said that there's been a resurgence of drawing in the art world, with important artists like Raymond Pettibone and Marlene Dumas using drawing as their primary practice. Drawing was no longer just a process, a sketch on the way to a final product in sculpture or painting or some other medium.

Trends in drawing:

These seemed to be the trends (I'm heavy into lists, today):

--The New Gothic/youth culture, pop culture, with debased (huh?) and nostalgic elements

--political critique/current events

--personal fantasies, imagined narratives, usually small, the new pictorialism

--public representations of sex and private representations of the psyche and where they intersect

--formal concerns/process over subject matter

So have fun making List A (artists) match list B (trends). Kantor's talk made some of the connections but this post is altogether too long for me to add that.

Kantor also noted how many of the artists had moved from one country to another, for example leaving New York for cities like Berlin, where there's public support for art and living is less expensive.

At this point I'd like to alert you to Doug Witmer's thoughtful (Feb. 1) post about the Arcadia show, and his concern that this homogeneity of one big, happy art world is rubbing the edges off of regionalism.
permanent link  libby 12:49 PM
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Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Bedside globalism

 

My bedside table has a stack of books this high, many tossed my way by my husband, Steve, whose near-addiction to Amazon has put me on a first name basis with the UPS guy.

I pulled a book out the other night that seems relevant to Libby's globalism-in-the-wind comment and Doug's regionalism questions.

It's The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World history by J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, father and son historians.

I'm wading in to the book and picked up the following from the first chapter. Basically, the McNeill's offer a retelling of human history that says human interactions have always formed a kind of "worldwide web" and that history is the story of the ebb and flow of these increasingly complex and larger webs.

Here's their take on today:

"At present human society is one huge web of cooperation and competition, sustained by massive flows of information and energy. How long these flows, and this web, might last is an open question."

I don't see our web imploding any time soon but it's interesting to think that it might.

Meanwhile, I'm off to see some of the region's burgeoning photography web, now reaching its tentacles out all over the place in venues like Abington Art Center, Swarthmore's List Gallery, Lehigh, Temple/Tyler, ADM gallery, Art Alliance -- and that's just a few.

Is it me or are there now more venues for photography and more photographers working here than ever before?
permanent link  roberta 9:07 AM
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Political art alert: Larry Fink at Lehigh

 
A show of staged photos inspired by pre-war German art is up at Lehigh University until April 12.

Photographer Larry Fink originally made the photos, which rely on Bush administration look-alikes, for a New York Times Magazine spread for Sept. 16, 2001. Then 9/11 came and the photos were dropped. After trying to sell them to a number of publications like The New Yorker and Harper's, he tried to sell them in Europe. No soap.

The show, called "Larry Fink: The Forbidden Pictures," looks great on the Web. I can't wait to get there and look as soon as the weather lets up.
permanent link  libby 9:03 AM
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Monday, February 02, 2004

ICA hot and cool

 

In an unlikely pairing, the ICA has somehow managed to hit a just right note, with the international, hip art of Yoshitomo Nara, from Japan, and the personal self-portraits and auto-biographical paintings of Sarah McEneaney, from Philadelphia.



Nara's angry little figures are incredibly cute as they glare and snarl from their canvas or paper surfaces. Japan, a place of extreme social conformity, has no control over these cartoony forcefields of anger, many with cat-like eyes, or fangs or some other sign of animalistic menace, tempered by Pop sweetness and slick perfection. The multiples also give a sense of the society that turned toys labeled "Made in Japan" into cultural icons.

In contrast, there's an energetic little boy quality to the random drawings and sketches that fill out the show, scribbled and scrubbed onto scraps of paper and bursting with words.

And that same little boy has created a couple of huge, perfect fiberglass puppies panting with eagerness and love.

Between the perfection of the large pieces and the roughness of the sketches, are paintings on paper like "Soldier" (the middle painting), which shows a pathetically sweet little boy-man emerging from (or ducking into) a hole as flower explosions detonate all around him, surely not a war imagined by a boy at play, but rather a bad dream of veiled threat and coercion masked by faux sweetness.

Upstairs is a retrospective of Sarah McEneaney's paintings, all quite the opposite from Nara's commercial tone. Each painting feels lived in and reshaped into McEneaney's mental spaces (shown, "NJT, 10/01").

The carefully painted details and impossible perspectives, in the unforgiving medium of egg tempera on wood, provide a realism that has nothing to do with recreating phographic images. In "My Myomectomy," for example, the point of view is from a place floating above the artist's stretched out body and also from the artist's undepicted head on the pillow.

In "Morning," the view of McEneaney's kitchen and living room, solves the perspective of the crazy angles of reality like a jigsaw puzzle, all of it suffused with warm, morning light. The artist presents the her life and her life's work without irony, giving the work an earnest power rare in these post-modern times.

A McEneaney exhibit at the ICA is a big deal, a Philadelphia artist paid the kind of respect usually reserved for international players. The opening of the show attracted a mob of local artists and admirers. The place was packed even beyond the usual opening-night standards, making it impossible to see the work, and nearly impossible to find the artist.

The ramp project, Aleksandra Mir's rethinking of a map of Tokyo, with original street names, tried to make the best of a thorny space. A friend who's been to Tokyo liked it, but I sort of felt like it was "Lost in Translation," with still another layer of Western incomprehension. The demand for a grid and the Roman alphabet and English words seemed unreasonable to me. The flags denoting the locations of McDonald's was the equivalent of erecting the American flag on the moon or the Union Jack at the Poles--cultural imperialism, I thought, and more globalization than I'm ready for.

permanent link  libby 5:50 PM
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Sunday, February 01, 2004

Web design may threaten art everywhere

 

Post by Doug Witmer

[Editor's note: We've been to several art events these past two weeks in which globalization of art has been a theme, including the Arthur C. Danto lecture and the Jorg Immendorff symposium, both posted. The Arcadia Works on Paper opening was part of what inspired this thoughtful post.]

I hardly read the art magazines I subscribe to. One of the main things I seem to do with them is just look at pictures and the ads for different galleries (left, an ad in Art in America). Now I'm a new father and for the past few months my way of visiting galleries has been letting my fingers do the walking across my computer keyboard.

Lately I've been really aware of how many gallery (and museum) ads, publications, websites, and actual spaces are so similarly designed. It's making me begin to wonder...where did this "taste" come from?

And by extension, I'm beginning to think about the possibility that art being made today is conditioned to be part of this "design" continuum. And I (call me paranoid) have a fear that when I work, I might be making semi-conscious micro-choices that are based on an assumption of these white boxes as an initial venue. And what does that do to the work (shown, Web page templates)?

Do folks think there is some kind of identifiable "international style" of art? Or maybe more of an "international attitude" expected of artists?

The idea of regionalism, suggested to me in my art upbringing as not necessarily a positive thing, now becomes interesting. I was thinking about that as my baby and I tried to see the art at the opening of the Arcadia works on paper biennial (shown, Eliseo Art Silva's "Boy With Camera"). Does regionalism exist anymore? Is this a good or bad thing? If someone were to describe the regionalism of Philadelphia, what kind of words might they use? Is it possible or desirable to identify oneself as being part of any regional milieu?

--Philadelphia artist Doug Witmer is in the Repetition and Transformation exhibit at the Philadelphia Cathedral, up until Feb. 22.
permanent link  libby and roberta 11:30 AM
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Who needs art criticism: Danto speaks at PAFA

 
When philospher-art critic Arthur C. Danto talks, lots of people listen.

About 130 people showed up to hear the art critic for "The Nation" today at one of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art's lunchtime Visiting Artist Lectures, in which he explained his philosophy of just what modern art is--and why the art world needs him to be a critic rather than a philosopher. His talk, sprinkled with the names of philosophers who had gone before him including Hegel and Wittgenstein, seemed perfectly pitched for an audience apparently filled with philosophy students as well as art scholars.

Danto started writing about art at the time when the pedestal and the picture frame disappeared. Gone were two key signposts announcing that what you're looking at is a piece of art (shown, a Cezanne in a picture frame).



"Here's art that can't be told apart from a shipping carton," Danto said, recounting his eureka moment in front of Andy Warhol's facsimile Brillo boxes (shown) in 1964.

Here was a piece of art that looked no different from a shipping crate. Yet art it was indeed, just as the shipping crate was not art. So how's a viewer to determine whether something is or isn't art, without a pedestal and without a frame and without the usual art content of the past?

Danto's answer? Art had to have content--and we're not talking about boxes of Brillo inside. Art had to have meaning. A work of art must be about something and must somehow embody that meaning, Danto said.

And the job of the philosopher was usurped by this new art, that generated its own meanings and artists that generated their own philosophies. Minimalists and Conceptualists were philosophers about what they thought an art work was. (Pop art, he said, was more social than philosophical, aiming to overcome the division between high art and popular art.)

With the role of philosopher taken over by artists, the role of the critic became all the more important, said Danto.

Art's meaning needed to be decoded by critics. No longer could a piece of art be looked at and understood all at once, the way Michelangelo's audience understood the message painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (detail shown). As Hegel had said in the 1800s, art no longer satisfied our spiritual needs.

Danto also pointed out the Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop art all undercut some of the old assumptions about art, including that it was a work of genius, that it required skill and the artist's hand, or that it had to be an object of some special kind. A work of art could be anything--a hole, a game, words.

If anything could be art, then that was the end of art as it had been historically understood. "It was the first time civilization had been in such a situation. Artists could make what they wished."

Danto also questioned the painting-was-dead era. "Painting was contested for ideological reasons," Danto said. It represented white male, colonialist elitism. Philosophically, though, painting was still a player in the art world. There's no reason in the concept of art to declare the end of painting, Danto said.

He added that all art was "conceptual, with a small 'c,'" including Michelangelo and Artemisia Gentileschi (shown, her "Susannah and the Elders"), and then went on to say that art from other cultures for the most part no longer had the immediacy of understanding that religious art from primitive cultures or the Middle Ages had, thanks to globalization.

"Everyone is entering into the same consciousness structure," he said, noting similar problems for critics across the globe, including China (shown, Zhang Huan's "Buddhist Relics") and Japan. He saw this pass as a confirmation that his original position that art as we knew it prior to the '60s was dead and that we were living in a different kind of time.

From all this, I gathered that artblog was needed more than ever. It's a confusing art world out there, and somebody's got to discuss its implications.

I'm not sure that artblog is what Danto had in mind, however.
permanent link  libby 11:07 AM
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