artblog

Saturday, August 28, 2004

Must read

 
Roberta Smith's article yesterday about political art shows in New York coinciding with and provoked by the big RNC blowout is a must read.

Better yet, there's an audio slide show with a lot of images. Access that at broadband or 56K modem speeds. (username: lrrfartblog; password: artblog) I don't want to be accused of inciting a charge on New York but I'm dying to see all this stuff. There's even an Elizabeth Peyton-ification of John Kerry available for viewing at Gavin Brown's.

Former Philadelphian Dean Daderko's Parlor Projects in Brooklyn gets a prime mention for its good show and for one great piece, "Kissing President Bush" by Rachel Mason. (image from NY Times and Parlor Projects)

Smith says the RNC may well be credited with instilling vigor into the city's art scene. How about that for a positive spin on things?
permanent link  roberta 11:31 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Projekt 30

 
I don't know who Project 30 is but suddenly I'm on their mailing list. It appears to be a group of artists who for about a year have run a juried online art show of works by emerging artists. The website is opaque about many things but it seems legit.

For $35 an artist can submit 5 jpeg images and be considered for a two-month online show. (No sound or video capability however) 30 artists are chosen for each show, and when I checked out the August array -- up now -- I found it to be heavy in photography, light in drawing and painting and sculpture. Some of the work was very interesting although some struck me as a little slight. There are two viewing sizes which is nice -- 800x600 or 1024x768 and as with many things cyber, flat things look best.

A pleasant surprise was running into work by Philadelphia artist Keith Sharp. (top image is example, though not in this show) Sharp is a Creative Artists' Network artist and an inliquid artist and I've seen and admired his work around Philadelphia (Muse Gallery and elsewhere) for years.

(Below is a sample of Sharp's "same but different" series which for some reason tickles me.)



Project 30's organizing the October show and deadline for submissions is Sept. 1. You can apply online or download an app and snail mail it in. Click the box marked Prospectus. By the way, they seem to give a prize -- $500 -- for best of show.

Anyone know where this outfit hails from?
permanent link  roberta 10:31 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Friday, August 27, 2004

MFA matters continued

 
From Charles Hankin

I do think advanced degrees are important. The more knowledge the better.
Witmer's "Refrain"- to me is about the movement of space back and forth. I would refer to Arnheim .

I agree that making relationships is the best part of grad school. (image is "Wissahickon Bridge" by Hankin)

--Charlie

From Mark Barry


I did a semester at Brooklyn College and was too eager to get started, so I left. It is an important political advantage especially if you went to Yale. Look at the gallery rosters in Chelsea, or at the White House for that matter. But at those prices you could buy a lot of supplies. If you think you need grad school do it. Otherwise get to work! (image is "Girl Sleeping" by Barry) --Mark
permanent link  libby and roberta 8:30 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

God and the artist

 
The paths to spirituality are numerous and even Madonna, the anti-Christ herself, has turned into Esther, seeking spiritual enlightenment via the mystical Kabbalah.

I'm not being cynical here. I'd have to come down on the side of spirituality as a basic human need. So it's no wonder that so many artists are putting forth work in that spirit.

The question is, why does some of it succeed and some of it not succeed. I've seen a lot lately, and the hallmarks of success, while not completely consistent, suggest some approaches work better, some worse.

The bottom line is that for betting on the ponies and betting on godhead, you gotta have a system.

And it's gotta be intense.

Loose and airy doesn't do the trick. Pastelly doesn't do the trick. Gesture doesn't do the trick.

Here's a random very short list of a few of the artists who succeed in my book:

Jacob el Hanani
Bruce Pollock
Mark Rothko (image left, "No. 36, Black Stripe")
Mary Judge
Yayoi Kusama (image top, "Fireflies")
Vija Celmins

Some of them may not even think of themselves as doing spiritual work. But that's how I see it, because each of these people puts me in touch with the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life, and the wonders of inner and outer space .

I think that if you want to capture that feeling of awe so someone else can follow you there, you've got to go somewhere intense, and not just dance with the colors or the pleasure of the mark-making.

What put me on this topic was the number of AbEx works I've seen lately, so many of them a sort of earth worship that just doesn't translate to a viewer.

A couple of artists at Third Street Gallery (I went there because I know one of them, Carol Wisker) are exploring things spiritual.

Wisker's work was pretty, with the more systematic, compressed work packing a stronger punch than the diffuse colors with the larger scale (image, a smaller piece, "103 degrees, Arizona"). Most of the works were named after places in the desert, but imagery in the larger pieces, for the most part, disintegrated in the pastelly colors.

Michael Sebright's main effort, a huge installation made with Justin S. Proudly, announced its material presence too loudly, drowning out any larger message. I found some pleasure in passages--the moving hardware, the sand on the floor, the sense of Shoji screens and seashore homes.

But Sebright's concern seemed to be about sacred spaces. He calls the installation "Passage: Gate," and included a Biblical quote on the wall. Sebright included a lot of verbiage about sacredness in his statement as well. And a bunch of fragile architectural assemblages included collaged passages in which the words "sacred space" turned up more than once--but the message seemed confused.

The star of the show was small and dense, a sort of architectural Venus of Willendorf, a chunk of distressed wood with a space carved out of its center, some words (again archaic mumbo jumb to me) collaged on (image left). This one held a spirit in its core.

permanent link  libby 5:21 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sexy mushroom girl and sexy dream boy

 
I finally got over to 222 Gallery to see Deanne Cheuk's Mushroom Girls. Libby told you about the work in her First Friday roundup. I liked the almost clinical detail the artist and designer included in her mushroom paintings which, with their austere white backgrounds, reminded me of odd little botanical studies. They were sensuous and sexy.

I had to ask about the mushroom floor lamps. (pictured) These odd and sweet lights which the gallery folks plugged in for me, were found by the New York artist at a flea market somewhere. Phil Otto of ODG, 222's parent, was there when I dropped by, and told me the lamps arrived with all the rest of the work without any attribution, and the gallery folks had thought maybe the artist made them. That's what I thought, too. No matter, they were a perfect accompaniment.

I asked Otto if there was a connection between 222 and Cheuk and he said he had known her work for some time. Apparently their design auras had crossed paths from time to time. Cheuk has done work for Urban Outfitters which is one of ODG's clients. And Cheuk was art director for Tokion magazine and ODG designed the offices for that group.

Dream boy


Meanwhile at Arthur Ross gallery on the Penn campus, be sure to see Scott Kahn's dreamy Surrealist works. I wrote about them for next week's PW. It'll be in a listings box (does anyone ever look for these things in the listings? I wonder).

The work is lovely in a traditional, surrealist fashion. (image is a group of portraits -- sorry it's cockeyed.) There's a no blade of grass shall go unpainted quality that I loved.


Purposeful scale shifts (figures with tiny, tiny hands; a telephone that looms in the foreground like Godzilla) made the work a cross between naive painting (like our fave Sarah McEneaney -- and some of those early American folk painters) and Salvador Dali who took lots of liberties with clocks and bodies.

Kahn's show is in conjunction with the Penn Humanities Council lecture series 2004, "Dreams and Sleep." (Kahn is a Penn alum (1967). He shows with Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery and has a concurrent exhibit there)

The Penn lecture series kicks off Sept. 9 with a talk by art critic David Cohen. Read.



permanent link  roberta 7:05 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, August 26, 2004

MFA, MFA not, MFA, MFA not...

 
If you're picking the petals off daisies, trying to determine whether grad school in art is worthwhile, here's what contributors Doug Witmer and Rob Matthews had to say on the subject, in answer to Roberta's call for opinions:

Matthews writes:

I was once told "you only need to go to art school long enough to know you no longer need to be in art school" (image, top, one of Matthews's "Dumbest Man over Knoxville" series, reviewed in post).

Witmer writes:

First off, I had an "ok" grad school experience. I feel like my work definitely developed and I met some truly great and inspiring folks, both fellow students and advisors. Some I keep in touch with, some I don't.

I tell people considering an MFA to think of it as one-stop shopping where you spend a few years buying time, studio space and a captive audience, some of whom will give you a percentage of useful feedback. Petty scraps, politics, and other weirdness-you-can't-predict (like the time I was told by a visiting critic in all sincerity that getting into drugs..."or just a drug-of-choice"...would be a good move for my work) will be included in the price and is unfortunately unavoidable (image right, Witmer's "Refrain," which Roberta said back in January "echoes the church's pipe organ and stately columns with a rhythmic, up-down array of skinny, black rectangles in procession").

You do need an MFA to teach at certain schools. But there are also other ways to get time, studio space, and useful feedback.

[Editors: Any more comments on whether an MFA is worthwhile? Email us (below).]





permanent link  libby and roberta 12:14 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Old friends and new

 
Here I will pull together a laundry list of end-of-summer things.

Libby told you about the summer group shows at Fleisher Olman, Schmidt-Dean and elsewhere. See her posts here and here respectively.

Schmidt-Dean's show is up to Aug. 31. Go see it for the works Libby mentions but also to check out the new painting by Mary Murphy (top image). Murphy's last show at S-D was digital prints based on photographs run through Photoshop.

The images were all grotesques -- faces pulled apart and turned into rivers of flesh with eyeballs floating around like beach balls. Portraiture and self-portraiture, the works were great. Here the artist is painting from the grotesque source material -- with equally wonderful results.


Robert Straight, included in the show with a nice orangy architectonic painting, (not shown) is someone whose geometric paintings I've admired for years. Straight has a show coming up this year with new, looser work, according to gallery owner Chris Schmidt. The work is smaller and in gouache. "It's new for him. It has the same energy, but it's done looser and looks hand-done," said Schmidt. Can't wait.



Speaking of artists changing their m-o's, Howard Greenberg is represented with several pieces in the show. Abstract and lovely, but in strikingly different ways, Greenberg's disparate works represent two different periods in the artist's oervre: first, before he went to graduate school (image right) and second, post graduate school (image left).


The older works, smaller and full of a rough, experimental ad-hoc-ness that verges on anti-art, appealed for their references to rough walls, chipped paint and light falling through windows and onto interior spaces. Diebenkornian. Well that's what I got out of them anyway.

The newer works, which are also architectural in nature appear to me to be looking out instead of looking in. And while their crispness may incorporate the artist's new home base in Maine the hard-edges create a more intellectual, less visceral product that might come from too much thinking and not enough just plain doing. Sol Lewitty.

Artblog buddy Astrid Bowlby told me one time that you have to go to graduate school to understand you didn't need to go to graduate school. She said it better than that but that's the gist of it. Any thoughts about pre- and post-graduate school changes in your art, all you MFA's out there?

Upcoming on Walnut St.

Fleisher Olman's upcoming show of work by Cuban-American outsider artist Jose Felipe Consalvos are collages so fine -- delicate and colorful, obsessive and antique -- they're inspirational. Look for them in October. (image)


Doing the laundry in style


I've always had an interest in design. At first I thought it was different than art. Now I know it's in the family. So I watch it and try to figure out what's good and why.

A few years back, I wrote about Karim Rashid's Morimoto restaurant design for Azure magazine. That gave me an introduction to what's being done on the high end of things.

Since I'm on Rashid's mailing list, I'll pass on to you this new item from the wavy designers workshop: He's designed the bottles for a new line of eco-friendly laundry and cleaning products for something called method. Check their website for more. My info says you can buy Rashid's bottles with their products inside at Target.






permanent link  roberta 7:36 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Veiled meanings

 

I stopped in at the University City Arts League a few minutes ago to check out Michelle Marcuse's show of encaustic paintings, "Hive and Hue."

The imagery was a mix of shapes that suggested landscapes and architectural interiors and exteriors delivered in a flattened out, up-against-the-canvas pattern, any suggestions of spatial depth removed except through the layering of the waxy colors. For the most part, the colors were pale and sun-bleached.

The piece with the strongest composition was "Universe" (top right), which almost suggested a human stand-in figure, the ground below, the sky above and scary stuff. A suggestion of personal content also came through in "Unfinished World" (left), with its dinner plate circles, suggestion of a window, some floaty biota shapes.

Marcuse, who has a BFA in painting from Tyler, was born in South Africa, but even with gallery information that mentioned something about apartheid and black and white, I came away from the show not knowing what Marcuse cared about, other than wax and color.

The layering, veiling and architectural blocks reminds me of work by Catherine Gontarek that showed at the Arts League (and got a nice review in the Inky from Ed Sozansky) in January, but Gontarek allows some personal darkness, inner space and serendipity to shine through her mix of swatches of fabric and blocks of paint (right, Gontarek's "Night Behind the Corner").

permanent link  libby 5:20 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday this and that

 

From artnet...

T-SHIRTS FOR KERRY
Buy an artist-designed t-shirt and support John Kerry for president. Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg is mounting a display of custom t-shirt designs by over 75 artists, Aug. 23-27, 2004. The shirts are $30 apiece, with the proceeds earmarked for the Democratic National Committee. Among the artists are Polly Apfelbaum, Dike Blair, Mary Carlson, Rico Gatson, James Hyde, KK Kozik, Louise Lawler, Christian Marclay, Marilla Palmer, Laura Parnes, James Siena, Amy Silman, Jim Torok and many others.

And from Pierogi...

I couldn't find any further information on the Kerry t-shirts, but this Pierogi event looks like a winner. The gallery is having a 10th anniversary celebration called Pierogi A Go-Go which includes a mini car race. Make a little car (you can purchase a kit) and go race it. The online gallery of cars from past years is worth a look. (image is unattributed car from a past Pierogi race event.)
permanent link  roberta 7:57 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Whodunit? Sweden and Philadelphia

 
The latest sally in the design-as-an-artform war arrived with my Sunday newspaper.

There in the Ikea catalog were photos of the designers alongside some Ikea products and a brief selling pitch almost masquerading as a statement of purpose.

I'm still deconstructing the craft vs. fine art war, but clearly the design vs. fine art war has eclipsed it or at least become the newest incarnation of the same thing.

But back in the old craft war days, the issues were usefulness vs. pure aesthetics, female vs. male provinces, the subtext being that crafts didn't require a stroke of genius and god-given inspiration whereas art did.

In the new design war, the usefulness vs. pure aesthetics issue has fallen by the wayside, as well it should have. Why diss something for being useful?

Because design comes out of the architecture side of the aesthetic world rather than the art side of the world, Bauhaus form-follows-function is a natural, historical part of its theory (left, view of Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology). But as art museums show more and more design (even the Philadelphia Museum of Art has its design section, small though it is), the categories become weaker and begin to merge, and voila, we've got artist genius designers, too.

I would have thought the better plan was to eliminate, not broaden, the artist-genius category, since it's the source of so much posturing and embarrassing nonsense, not all that different from crystals and pyramids. But to fit the artist-genius paradigm, the design team has given way to the individual, and I feel that claptrap about genius and stroke of inspiration, i.e. art world mumbo jumbo, is about to overtake what has always been a discipline mercifully tempered by practicality.

The portrait photos are just the next step, pushing the designers toward full Hollywood treatment.

I'm not saying that designers should not get recognized. I'm just saying that we're watching another celebrity cult form being born.

I suppose it was already in the air. Even my new mattress has a designer signature attached to it. Somehow, I don't think mattresses require genius or inspiration, just engineering, hard work, good materials and some thoughtfulness. And that's not that different from what art requires. Hard work, good materials, some thoughtfulness (well lots of thoughtfulness). (right, detail from Picasso's "Guernica," which reflected a lifetime of hard work, good materials, lots of thoughtfulness)

permanent link  libby 3:55 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Just plain beautiful

 
Check out this photo on Cinque Hicks' Bare and Bitter Sleep blog.

Hicks has a new camera and he took the most fabulous shot of a lightning storm just north of Austin, TX.


Hicks' blog is on my daily reading list. He's got a nice mix of studio ruminations and fresh responses to what he sees around Austin and elsewhere.

permanent link  roberta 11:29 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Whodunit? Norway and Philadelphia

 
Somebody (or bodies) stole Edvard Munch's "The Scream" from its home in the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. The act was done right in broad daylight and in front of a bunch of gallery goers.

Stealing art = bad. Read BBC.

But somebody gave a loan of a tiny Vermeer, "A Young Woman seated at the Virginals," one of the few Vermeers in private hands, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and it'll be on view here until March for all of us to see.

Loaning Vermeer = good. Read Inky. (username: lrrfartblog; password: artblog)

Most interesting questions: Who loaned the Vermeer and is this a tryout for the little object's final resting place?
permanent link  roberta 10:53 AM
Comments? Let us know.