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Friday, March 19, 2004

What's good at The Print Center

 

If you go upstairs at The Print Center there's some work worth seeing.

First, there's Debra Werblud's "Totentanz" (or Dance of Death) installation (above), which captures and reflects light against dark. Thirty curved plexiglas sheets printed with photographs of vultures directly borrowed from Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, hang from the ceiling on down, in front of a light source. The sheets swoop and bank, the dark, forbidding birds blocking light even as the plexiglas glows around them.

Even better are the two grids on either side, 230 zinc plates each etched with an olive tree in infinite detail and variety. The plates catch and absorb the light in various ways, depending on where you stand. They're beauties.

The physicality and instability of light overtakes the bookish sources of this installation--birds published in 1887 in "Animal Locomotion" and the etched plates referencing printing techniques born in the Middle Ages.

But somehow Werblud largely overcomes the flatness of the plates and the original bird images (not to mention the Dance of Death literary sources) and holds the room.

I was less enchanted by the Dance of Death conceit, with vultures and olive trees representing opposites. It was the light and the dark.

Also, the modernity of plexiglas, its filmic qualities and its flexible shape, created from page-like rectangles, talk nicely to the modernity and rigidity of the grids on the walls.

(Werblud, a Penn alum, will speak Monday, March 29, 5 p.m. at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, B-3 Meyerson Hall, 34th & Walnut Streets.)

Less is more
In the other upstairs room, Korean artist Young-Sook Jang's deceptively simple intaglio prints are hard-headed meditations on spatial relationships (shown right, "The Plants").

These prints, which at first blush seem too easily likeable and at the same time easy to overlook for their subdued approach, offer plenty of food for thought.

Two figures rest on a lawn, a large space between, one 3/4 out of the picture--no doubt in more ways than one (shown left, "Two People"). Plants impinge with only a leaf or branch into the roughened background, be it sky or land, a suggestion of relationships in space and time and seasons.

The low-key colors and minimal contrast in these contemplative works would not survive in the riotous profusion of stuff in my house, but if I ever got more Zen in my housekeeping, these would shine.

On the other hand
Downstairs, Lesley Dill's depressed, Victorian, tea-stained multimedia pieces irritated me with their claim to plumb the feminine psyche (shown, "Leave me Ecstasy"). I found the mix of words, images and materials for the most part less than satisfying, and less than understandable--and even repelling in some cases. Excuse me, but if you try to stitch my tongue with words I will not find it spiritually uplifting. I read self-abuse into this. And if that is not the intent, it is certainly the outcome. Please preserve me from this brand of feminism, spirituality, misguided romanticism, art-making, or whatever it is.
permanent link  libby 5:53 PM
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Pricing those Whitney Biennial stars

 

 
Fabulous art market story by Richard Polsky this morning at Artnet. It's hard to argue with his point about pricing drawings by young artists like Marcel Dzama ($1,100 -- he thinks it's appropriate).

But I'd like to say I believe six-figures for Robert Ryman is out of order. (Polsky doesn't -- he thinks Ryman's passed the 20-year-and-still-here test and so $100,000 is ok for a new work -- apparently they can go for $250,000 at auction.) I think the jury's still out on a painter of white whose austere canvases' main characteristic seems to be their prominent positioning of Ryman's name front and center.

When Libby and I saw Ryman's 1993 retrospective at MOMA, we both had an instant gag reaction. In fact, we're still looking for help in explaining why this artist can command so much museum wall space with work that seems so vacuous. (image is untitled drawing 2003 by Marcel Dzama from Richard Heller Gallery)
permanent link  roberta 8:42 AM
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Pow! "To Smithereens" scores

 

Rosalyn Drexler, an artist whose edgy pop paintings were included in several important shows of pop art in the 1960s, is someone you probably haven’t heard much about. (top image is "Marilyn Pursued by Death" 1967)

That’s because while the careers of her peers, artists like Alex Katz, Claes Oldenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, (whom you know) were taking off, Drexler, who was young and married and raising a daughter -- didn’t have a clue about managing her career. (image below "Is it true what they say about Dixie," 1966)

And as a self-taught artist, coming up outside the system and having no mentors and promoters to help her cut deals and win gallery assignments, she wasn't picked up by a gallery.

There was also that little problem of the artist being a woman in a field dominated by men. Or, as Drexler put it when we talked by phone Wednesday, “Women were not bankable at the time.”



I suppose there's also the fact that her work -- darker and more prickly and more pointed politically than some of her contemporaries, (i.e. Katz in particular) -- might have been a hard sell. Drexler's themes -- violence against women; the brutality of boxing; the media's unstinting focus on celebrities -- don't make pretty wall candy. (image above "Intimate Emotions," 1963)

Right now, courtesy of Curator (and artblog contributor) Sid Sachs -- who has a solid history of introducing -- or re-introducing to the public -- women artists whose works are under the radar (previous shows of Ree Morton and Yvonne Rainer, for example) -- has brought a group of Drexler's big, bold, muscular collage paintings to Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, in an exhibit called “To Smithereens.” (image above is "Last Call," 1985)

Run, don’t walk to this show.

Drexler’s works, with their saturated color their high-contrast figuration and their political themes are as fresh as today. Fresher, even. And get a load of her techniques -- she was a collage artist who selected images from newspapers and magazines, then had them blown up (this is pre-Kinkos, remember), and glued them to the canvas, painting right on top of them (she was the first to try this, and as a technique it's effective -- the works feel painted, yet you can see their paper cut-out underpinnings -- it's a nice juxtaposition). She was also the first to make paintings based on sequential images from the television screen.

It is in fact shocking how contemporary these works feel. (image above is "Death of Benny "kid" Paret" 1963, a fight in which a boxer dies in the ring and it's captured live on tv. Image below is "The Bite," 1963)


In a wonderful brochure essay, former MOMA Curator, now NYU Professor Robert Storr compares Drexler’s hard-boiled, noir-ish paintings to the “brooding, maverick sensibilities..[of]Raymond Pettibon.” You may want to think about Drexler as you look at Pettibon’s great room installation in the Whitney Biennial (image below is detail from Pettibon's "Piecemeal Kingdom" wall). In fact think about Drexler in comparison with any young artist in that show. Her work is stronger than the lot of em.


Drexler told me many stories about her works like how she merged art and life in "Art History: Ana Falling" 1989 (above) which merges Ana Mendiata's fall from a New York building with an image from a news story about another woman who fell from a fire escape. (image bottom)

She told me of her friendship with Andy Warhol and how he helped her pack her bags for Europe (he made her take evening gowns...just in case) and about the time she posed for George Segal (she is the woman in the dry cleaning store installation). I'll post the interview when I get it transcribed.

But mostly, I want to encourage you to go see the works and think of them in terms of today's painting. Drexler's works are better than any paintings I saw at the Biennial. They are unblinking in their ability to communicate about an off-kilter world where the status quo sucks.

Drexler, who is also a credentialed writer with several novels, four Obies and an Emmy award to her name (she was a writer for a famous Lily Tomlin special that won the Emmy) will read from one of her works on April 14 at 6 p.m. at the Gershman Y, 411 S. Broad St.

Read Michael Duncan's Art in America review of Drexler's 2000 show at Mitchell Algus and Nicholas Davies.
permanent link  roberta 7:37 AM
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Thursday, March 18, 2004

Green c's

 

Artblog contributor Mark Barry wrote to tell us he was madly painting green seas last week on his Caribbean hideaway of Belize (country south of Mexico by the way, something I had to look up). (this is apropos my post on Manet's pthalo green seas-- see below).

Sigh.

Since we're expecting snew tonight, I thought I'd post Mark's jaunty, green sea. For more of Mark's sea paintings, check his website click on studio and scroll down to Belize watercolors.
permanent link  roberta 9:06 PM
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Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Manet and the gift shop

 

I ran through Manet and the Sea at the Philadelphia Museum and I'll tell you the guy could paint. Manet's works are interspersed with those of precursors like Courbet and the Dutch maritime painters. They're also intertwined with works by contemporaries like Renoir, Monet and Morisot. Now, I'll reiterate that I went through the exhibit quickly, but what I saw was one standard-issue pretty picture after another and then ZING! a Manet would come along and I'd stop in my tracks. (image is "On the Beach-Suzanne and Eugene Manet at Berck," 1973)

Even without the wall labels, I could always pick out the Manets. His documentary-esque paintings -- which have a modern, photo-influenced affect -- turn the other paintings into dishrags (thanks, Alex Katz, for that wonderful dishrag metaphor, uttered at last April's Locks Foundation talk with Robert Storr.)

There's also that Manet palette, with its rich blacks and greys and -- surprise -- pthalo-green seas (you won't see green seas in anybody else's paintings here).

His focus on humans, and on a kind of fashionable humanity (which actually reminds me of what Elizabeth Peyton is doing) also separates him from the rest.

I wanted to take some pictures of the pthalo green seas, but I couldn't take pictures in the show. I snapped this one instead. It's the maritime display in the Manet gift shop (image above right). I won't harp on merchandising, but the display immediately positioned this show for me as a kind of loss leader for the novelty tie-ins.
permanent link  roberta 9:21 AM
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Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Advertising specialties

 

I bought the catalog for the Whitney Biennial. It weighs 7.5 pounds. So if you're going out for a night on the town, carrying your catalog with you, you'll need a little grocery cart for schlepping.

On the other hand, the reason it weighed so much had to do with advertising specialties and artist treats--stickers, photographic transparencies, artists booklets (shown above, Aleksandra Mir's "Che and Concorde" booklet, a series of stills that might have made a nice flip book), large artist pages folded like a book, postcards, even advertisements and a lottery drawing entry form.

All of these treasures were stuffed into a box accompanying the catalog.

The catalog has a luxe flocked hard cover. The box has plain paper cover. Both are in a subdued gray with silver lettering. I love this stuff.

My only complaint other than the weight (It's not heavy, it's art work) is that some of the boxed items lacked signatures or id numbers (every artist in this show has an id number), or perhaps they were so subtle, I couldn't find them (you can see on Virgil Marti's booklet back cover, with the sexy chandelier detail shown above, that he's number 60).

I don't know if not identifying themselves in their bit of extra-museum territory is a form of arrogance (an assumption that you'd recognize the work as theirs) or a form of modesty (can you find the 32 on Barnaby Furnas's round sticker, shown? It took me a while.), or, most likely of all, a product of this computer age, in which we can download and reproduce with such ease, the sense of ownership less of an issue than in the past.

Otherwise, this is like an ancillary art show that you get to take home with you--tres Duchamp. It sort of reminded me of the Space 1026 catalog from last year, more or less a scrapbook of original prints and images from member artists, loose-leaf bound together (with hardware from the hardware store) so the buyer can deconstruct it and hang or frame the favorites (shown, a bumper sticker from Yutaka Sone, whose marble highway junctions amidst a jungle installation on the first floor of the Whitney were not nearly as loopy).

So now I have my memories of what I saw, the catalog images of what I saw, and these paper extras, in some cases reproductions of what I saw, in other cases something else entirely (shown, detail from Ernesto Caivano's unfolded image, which like all of them, is 22 1/2 inches long).



permanent link  libby 8:47 PM
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Bill Walton wins Lois Fernley

 

That headline may sound like something out of Little House on the Prairie but what it really means is that Philadelphia artist Bill Walton has won the coveted Lois Fernley award, offered this year for the second time as part of the Arcadia University regional Works on Paper show.

The anonymously-donated award, ($5,000 in cash and $7,000 towards the publication of an artist's monograph), is one of the largest grants to a single artist offered in the region. (The first Fernley recipient, Tristin Lowe, is completing work on his monograph, a kind of artist's book with an essay by PAFA curator Alex Baker.)

Walton, 73, is a respected materials-fueled artist whose elegant draped cloth, stacked wood and other quiet, contemplative work was seen for years at Larry Becker Gallery. He was selected from among the 460 local artists who submitted entries to the 2004 Works on Paper exhibit. (Image is "Three Fold," gesso and linen) See more images on the artist's website, designed, by the way, by artblog's own Anne Seidman.

Other awards given out this year in connection with the Arcadia show are
--Josh Shaddock (Mildred Bougher Award -- $2,500 cash)
--Janet Towbin (Arcadia U purchased her piece)
--Melissa Ho and John Gibbons/Isobel Sollenberger, collaborators, (Director's Prize--$200, shared)
--Alex Kanevsky (friends of Arcadia -- $100)
--Bruce Pollock (friends of Arcadia -- $100)
--Zoe Strauss (friends of Arcadia -- $100)

The Works on Paper show continues through March 28.
permanent link  roberta 5:40 PM
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Another take on Whitney worth reading

 
Peter Schjeldahl graces The New Yorker again with his comments on the Whitney Biennial. While I don't agree with all he said, I thought he was thoughtful and worth reading. My soundbite version of what he said is he liked the show a lot and liked its coherence.

Now go read what he really said.
permanent link  libby 5:27 PM
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Monday, March 15, 2004

Rosof and Fallon's Biennial listing service, Part 3 actually

 

Here are a few more lists that you won't find in the Whitney's theme groupings (psychedelia, gender/sex, obsession, abstraction, etc). Suffice to say, the show's worth seeing, and so are the many off-site extracurricular activities -- from film and video programs to discussion, dance, performance and even burlesque -- which may be the juice in this otherwise pleasant but standard-issue show.

1. Celebrity list. At the press preview, we saw several artists spilling the beans in the glare of tv cameras.
--Julie Mehretu, dressed in dark pants and white shirt looked like an architect standing in front of her Lebbeus-Woods-like apocalypic city plans (sorry no picture);
--Elizabeth Peyton (image top) looked like she stepped out of one of her paintings, fey and fashionable.
--We ran into Virgil Marti (image right) on the third floor in the Southern Gothic-meets-surfer-dudes section, a room populated by Rob Fischer's barge full of sculptural rejects and photographs by Alec Soth and Katy Grannan and Catherine Opie.

Marti told us he was happy with the show. (His piece looks great by the way and its siting, between Cory Arcangel's darkened video chamber and the craft-influenced work of Jim Hodges seemed perfect.) Marti told us he initially worried about all the pieces in the show that had lighting elements (besides his piece that would be works by Spencer Finch, Mark Handforth, assume vivid astro focus). But he likes the Finch, "beautiful," he said and followed up with "Anyway, it's not a competition." He laughed, looking for us to agree with him.



2. "Drawing Now" crossover list. Three artists who appeared in MOMA's "Drawing Now" exhibit in 2002 are in this biennial -- Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens (image left) and Elizabeth Peyton.


3. The stealth sculpture show list. Libby and I have been wondering whether sculpture is dead. We never believed in painting's death but we do wonder if architecture and installation have beaten up on 3-D work leaving sculptors with nothing much else to do. Well this biennial answers that question with some great sculptural work. And I'm not just talking installations, some of which (Yayoi Kusama, Andrea Zittel) were among the strongest work in the show.

--First there are the works in Central Park (inflatables by Paul McCarthy, bronze cactus by Liz Craft, Olav Westphalen's life-size tiger, David Altmejd's monumental werewolf heads)

--Richard Prince's homages to the American automobile, installed in a chapel-like alcove (image above)


--Olav Westphalen's men in shackles (see Friday's post)

--Liz Craft's old mermaid (image above right)
--Mark Handforth's I-95 pieces (see Friday post)

--Rob Fischer's dead-sculpture barge (image above)
--Julianne Swartz's site-specific sound sculpture in the stairwell



4. The sound and no fury list. Speaking of sound, this show had some noisy work in it. Some of it nice noisy, some of it not.
--Julianne Swartz's group karaoke-bar-take on "Over the Rainbow" had a lot of Bill Murray lounge lizard in it. It was pleasant to hear its strains (either through the clear-plastic tubes or as background to other work)

--Marina Abramovic's multi-screen video installation, which seemed a plea for peace of some sort, had a soundtrack -- of children singing -- that intruded on thoughts rooms away. The songs, in a language I didn't know (maybe Russian?) had a strident, state-sponsored jargon feel, and I couldn't block them out while looking at Robert Longo's zen-like drawing of a curling wave. (image bottom shows Abramovic dressed as death conducting the children's chorus)
permanent link  roberta 8:17 AM
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Sunday, March 14, 2004

Lists: Fallon and Rosof go to the Whitney

 


Silly though they may seem, some of our lists about what we saw at the Whitney seem to the point of what art is about right now. Here are my contributions.

1. How about Jordan Kantor's list (see my post of Feb. 4, 2004) goes to the Whitney? Five of his picks made the biennial and they offered high, middle and low points. Tam Van Tran was a high point, with his voluptuous takes on nature's survival as stationery. The middle point was Hernan Bas, airless watercolors in camouflage colors of fey boyscouts, not even so nice to look at (right).

And the low point was Banks Violette (shown left) with his s&m Merlin-in-vinyl installation, surrounded by romantic drawings of unicorn-y horses. All I could think was this guy has seen too much Matthew Barney.

Others from Kantor's list include Andrea Bowers' photographic graphite-on-paper political drawings of women on the barricades (they were first cousins to Sam Durant's drawings of civil rights protests, also in the show). And Christian Holstad's room installation, pieces from the series "Another Dark Room in Which to Stagger Sorrow." My notes say "inelegant room." From which to stagger immediately, I wonder now, because I can't remember any of this piece for the life of me. Not a good sign.


2. Mirror, mirror. Mirrors kept reflecting me wherever I went in this biennial. Metaphorically speaking, for better or worse, mirrors reflect the self-absorption that's plaguing the art world this year, which seems to be all about style and fashion and posing, nature and the human condition be damned.

The twin highlights in mirror art came from Philadelphia's own wallpaper wizard, Virgil Marti, and the ebullient, obsessive Yayoi Kusama. Marti's flowers-and-leaves-on-mylar defined a Versailles-like cannabis growing room, topped by one of his grand antler chandeliers (shown right). Good sh__. Kusama's "Fireflies on the Water" offered a space-walk through the starlit universe.

Eric Wesley's scaled-down sets for the (faux) upcoming tv production of "...So This is Reality" (shown left) wasn't great to look at, but the concept was on target, as were the mirrors. We've all been looking at the mirror of our tv screens for so damned long that we even believe what's on there is the real world and we are our own celebrities. That self-absorbed culture is precisely what most of the art-making in this biennial seems to be about (but unlike this piece, much of it was not satirical).

The other mirror practitioners left me cold.

David Altmejd's installation, "Delicate Men in Positions of Power," which included birds, chopped-up ape men (two ape heads, shown), wigs and mirrors seemed more like Bloomies on a particularly bad day than a museum of natural history.

Taylor Davis's mirror pieces were minimalist, graceless shapes, all defined by the flat, straight edges of the glass. The concepts about architecture, the viewer and the object seemed banal.

3. Watching paint dry: The artistic tradition of videos that move more slowly than watching paint dry is alive and well at the Whitney. I couldn't stick a single one of them, but then again, there was so much else to see so my patience was pretty thin. The worst perpetrator was Cory Arcangel (BEIGE) and his cartoon clouds drifting ever so slowly across a cartoon-blue sky. There was no there there. There were theres in the rest, but the timing was definitely worthy of failure at Tisch where they teach you exactly how many seconds a viewer can stand looking at something. They include Sharon Lockhart's gatherers of hay (this is real world time, and I can barely survive it), the late Jack Goldstein's underwater sea shots, and Craigie Horsfield's endless shots of life on El Hierro, one of the Canary Islands (shown left).

4. The "Survivor" video award goes to Chloe Piene for "Blackmouth," her roaring Jane of the Jungle covered in mud. Runner up prize is Aida Ruilova's screaming videos with repetitive sound tidbits of desperation.

5. The "Survivor" model's award goes to Chloe Piene, again, for her "Mmasturbator" half-beaver drawings (she spared us the genitalia).

6. At this point I'm feeling guilty for being so snide about a show that had lots of good work in it. So here's a list of things I liked in addition to those mentioned in the Mar. 12 post: Richard Prince's car cemetery; Robert Longo's waves; Alec Soth's life on the Mississippi photos, along with Katie Grannan's freaky Americana (btw, there's also an artist named Katie Grinnan in this show!) and Rob Fischer's "Ten Yards" junk collection, all in the same room talking to one another; Raymond Pettibon's drawings and wordplay; Layla Ali's basketball headed cartoon figures; Emily Jacir's Palestinian prose poems with photos of longing (shown right); Fred Tomaselli's usual hallucinogenic collages.

On top of that there are things I want to think about some more: Laura Owens' painting, Mary Kelly's lint, Philly naive Barnaby Furnas's cinematic blood-and-guts takes on heroic death; and Lecia Dole-Recio's layered skins of color and paper.



permanent link  libby 1:26 PM
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McEneaney, Hockney and the biennial

 

Read Roberta Smith's essay about Sarah McEneaney's ICA show. Among other things, Smith imagines McEneaney fitting right in to this year's biennial, perhaps along side the work of David Hockney.
permanent link  roberta 8:49 AM
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