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Saturday, December 18, 2004

Junto

 
Young gallery workers don't always get the chance to show their stuff as they slog away thanklessly doing clerical work that keeps a gallery working smoothly. But John Ollman, of Fleisher-Ollman, had his young crew curate, with some interesting and surprising results.

"Junto" is their second annual invitational, curated by artists Brendan Greaves, William Pym, and Jina Valentine, and it's pretty interesting if a little uneven (but then, I find most group shows uneven). The show is named after a historical Philadelphia gentleman's intellectual and social club that Benjamin Franklin established to make sense of and synthesize the knowledge of his time. The work in the show is pretty wide-ranging, and much of it has an outsider quality, which makes sense for a gallery that specializes in outsider art.

Farthest outside perhaps were Kate Norton, from Alaska, and W. Benjamin Smith II. Norton's fur collage or assemblage, "Kimodo," (top image) seems like a talisman against the scary side of nature, a moose-legged creature hanging on a clothesline. It looks nothing like art as we know it, and yet it's got plenty of mojo. Smith's drawings and paintings, many with religious themes, look like the deranged scratchings of an obsessive, but they are filled with powerful wit and unexpected imagery. My images of Smith's pieces, alas, didn't come out.


Hein Koh's iconic paintings of food and food-related ceremonies have 3-D touches in the paint surface and also in objects that are part of the display. One painting shows giant sushi, a nearly terrifying experience, displayed on its ceremonial flat plate. "Happy Thanksgiving" (right) has a real chair at the foot of the holiday table, bringing the painting into the space and standing in stark contrast to Charles Willson Peale's "Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peal and Titian Ramsey Peale)," with its 3-D stairs at the bottom (image left, from the American Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art).



Peale's stairs are squarely in the trompe l'oeil tradition in which it's hard to tell where the painting ends and the real stairs begin. But Koh's chair, with a forlorn stuffed animal draped across it, in no way pretends to trick you. Its reality stands in sharp contrast to the over-the-top flat, decorative and ceremonial quality of the painting with its wacky perspective. And then there's the mutt at the top end of the table, presiding. What a ceremony!




Back in the mainstream of the art world are Kara Crombie's three videos. I saw "Drink" (still from video, image right) in its entirety, a good thing since this video had a punchline. Crombie, who videotapes herself, sits crosslegged on a window seat, drinking a super-size bottle of soda. She speeds up the tape so she looks like a junkie, all twitchy and jerky--a lot like Ray Charles. The sugar high and the bubbles from the soda finally elevate her until she floats right out of the picture.

Self-obsessed videos are a mainstay of the scrappy, youthful art world, these days, because the cheapest models for artists are themselves. These auto-videos are the modern equivalent of the self-portrait.

In "I am so fun" Crombie sits stuck at home looking like a social loser alone on the sofa, pigging out and playing a video of herself. In the video within the video, she's a hot ticket, her dancing figure and colorful lights superimposed over her stay-at-home persona while Donovan sings "Hurdy Gurdy Man."


Also in this show is Isaac Resnikoff (see post here for info on his recent show at Vox Populi), his hand-crafted wooden cornball satire delivering sliders about a culture gone wrong and scary (shown here, "The Citadel"). This work is a little smoother than what Resnikoff showed at Vox, and although it retains the child-like vision, it has lost some of the weird goofiness. I miss that.

I don't know that my other opinions on the work in this show are fair, given how short a time I spent with the work, but on first take, here's what I came away with:

Also in this show are Jessica Doyle's grids of childbirth and motherhood, which seem precious compared to her bold murals (see Roberta's post here on her show at Project Room); Michael Barker's facsimiles of teenage-crush notes imply his life has gone downhill since then; and Marc Zajack brings us found footage of near-naked women sparring in a sauna, voyeuristic but shy about showing its point.

Also Maya Winters' liver painting (right) was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and was augmented by a facsimile liver on the floor. The white background and flat painted planes puts this work squarely in contemporary art--liver as Ralph Lauren model.

Arden Bendler Browning who recently showed in "Philadelphia Selections 5" at Moore College and had a solo show at the University City Arts League, showed more of what I'd seen before--agitated, stitched-together slices of painted canvas that join an outsider ugliness to nature content.

John Gillespie's plaster, monochrome pieces are idealized, macho and faux-diecast, reminding me of Michael Greathouse's wonderful toy-like space models (see post on Greathouse's exhibit at Vox).






Thomas Vance's cardboard cities bring me back to where I started--outside the mainstream.
permanent link  libby 12:24 PM
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Friday, December 17, 2004

Sticking up a little for Ryman

 
Post by Mark Barry

Just back from icy New York. Saw Robert Ryman at Pace. Lots of paintings in the show. Lots o' white. Some tedious, but after a little adjustment, several are quite beautiful (see Libby's post for another view). The paint can be luscious. I like the play of the white off the under painting and the toying with the edges (image, "Section 2" 1996).

--Artist Mark Barry writes for ionarts.
permanent link  libby 3:44 PM
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Agnes Martin, 1912-2004

 
Larry Becker, whose gallery is devoted to minimalist art, sent out the announcement last night. Holland Cotter's appreciation is in the NY Times this morning. Read here.
(user id: lrrfartblog, password: artblog)

Artblog contributor Doug Witmer listed Martin in his list of favorite artists.

Here's my writeup linking to a wonderful Roberta Smith story about Martin.

permanent link  roberta 6:43 AM
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Thursday, December 16, 2004

Going to the chapel of black

 

How it came to be that I like Quentin Morris yet abhor Robert Ryman and remain undecided about Ad Reinhart is one of the mysteries of my convoluted mind--and then again, maybe not (right, Morris' "Untitled (November 2004)" and "Untitled (September 2004)").

Morris and Reinhart both create all black paintings, and for Morris it's a 24-7 blackout career (for Reinhart, a 24-7 blackout reputation, but he does other paintings and art as well). Robert Ryman creates only supposedly all-white paintings, but he waffles, interrupting the white with color and prominent hanging systems and his name. More on the comparisons later.

Morris is in all his glory right now in a solo show/installation at the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The installation brings to my mind a prayer space, the Mayan observatory atop Chichen Itza and a calendar based on maps of the moon (left, "Untitled (January 2004)").

Morris, a local artist whose work is an evergreen presence (everblack? Everlast?) at the Arcadia Works on Paper show, has found more ways to create black-out art than any other artist ever, I'd wager, because he's been at it 40 years with a monastic constancy that suggests he's thinking about more than just pigment.

And just in case you made the mistake of thinking he's an all pigment-and-materials all the time guy, this show is a firm reminder that he's going in lots of directions at once as he drives straight ahead into midnight.

So beneath the flooding light of the clerestory windows in the Morris Gallery, on all-black walls (a surely comic relief from all white ones), Morris has hung 13 black canvas circles, their rough, stringy edges cupping to create giant platters that catch the light at the edges differently from the way the flat centers do. Each circle, painted with silkscreen ink and polymer acrylic (except for the one that's spray painted), looks different--some cloudy, some pock-marked and geographical, some blacker, one almost gunmetal gray--and taken together the variations serve as a commentary on the blindness in that old joke of what white folks used to say about black folks and black folks about white folks--They all look alike to me (installation view at Morris Gallery).

Morris is African American and race is one of the many issues embedded in this art. Morris is also a PAFA alum, and it's back when he was a student that his obsession with black became his quest.

The meditative elegance of the installation say Zen. Turns out Morris is a practicing Buddhist.

In art terms, I'm reminded of Anish Kapoor's Extreme Pigment-colored cavities in rocks that practically vibrate with the mystery of whether they are holes or pretend holes or the presence of some higher form (Kapoor's "Untitled," left).




I'm also reminded of James Turrell and his light and astronomy games that also raise depth and divinity issues, as well as cosmology (right, Turrell's "Kielder Skyspace").

But Morris is working in the opposite direction, turning what people expect as nothing, as a black hole, into a something. Interestingly enough, this too suggests cosmic expansiveness and spirit. (I just want to add that it's almost unfair to cavil with artists thinking of black as a negative, because when black competes with colors in a painting, it tends to recede, losing its detail and its surface material presence.

By eliminating the colors, however, Morris keeps your eye on the surface, where he has managed to make a lot happen. He also keeps your eye on the fabric or paper or whatever support.

Part of what I find interesting in this installation, however, has to do with minimalism. Morris is using a minimalist strategy of circling the rooms with equal-sized circles, 72" in diameter, but he's subverting the minimalist multiplicity with variety and detail that defy any notion of mass production.

And here's where I have to contrast him to Ad Reinhart, who is a minimalist, taking the particularity out of each point in the painting and reducing it to what looks like a black-on-black industrial grid. Reinhart is closer to Pop, closer to reproducibility, and nowhere in the realm of Godhead. The two artists interesect at color choice and at materiality, but Reinhart's materiality is controlled and commanded, whereas Morris's materiality is humanist and filled with idiosyncracy and gesture.

As for Robert Ryman, who Roberta and I once decided bought his lifetime supply of paint at a really big White Sale at Pearl Paint, he's not a minimalist and he's not about spirit and he's not about race. He's about himself and his material (witness the size of his name on some of his paintings--in some cases the only relief from whiteness). Thin (left, Ryman's "Case").





In addition to the 13 paintings in the installation, the outside hall has four spray paint-on-paper pieces with chewed up edges that speak of wearing away. Some of them have lint and dust. Like the circles, some have creases, scars and bits of whatever beneath the paint surface (right, Morris' "Untitled (September 1992)").

While I couldn't personally ever make such a choice in a world of glorious colors, Quentin Morris has done it convincingly--more convincingly than the two art big-boys whose monochromatic canvases are icons in the modernist play book.

The show, which is up until Feb. 11, is accompanied by an excellent essay by Gerard Brown. He blathers on even more than I did.

Also, Larry Becker Gallery, which contributed to the PAFA show, has some Quentin Morrises in a group show that runs to Jan. 22.








permanent link  libby 9:35 AM
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The halls, the walls, then the art

 

I've been mulling over the FWM'"Experiments with Truth" and it seems to me that the show is an experiment in architecture. In addition, while ostensibly a video exhibit, the video component seems like a lesser concern than the big film program coming in in February in which many of these documentary video/filmmakers will be present to discuss their works after they're screened at places like International House and University of the Arts Connelly Auditorium or Scribe Video Center.



This architecture experiment is not a bad thing -- in fact it's great. But in a way it's the most exciting part of the exhibition at the Fab. For my money architecture trumped the videos. (top two images are the FWM 6th floor hallway at the press preview with installers putting on finishing touches.)

The Fab has long worked with architects and designers to alter their space, sometimes in the service of the art, other times just to alter the space, like the Jorge Pardo makeover of the entryway and video lounge. (And the Steven Izenour flower cutouts that line the stairway between 5th and 6th floors.) So for the institution to enlist the hot team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Lyn Rice of Open Office to make the space video friendly is a natural. And they done good. The use of the padded walls inside the screening chambers and in the hallways is effective noise block; the scrims at the end of hallways allow icy almost cyber-white light and are fitting, 21st-century illumination.

The whole ambiance was prison -- a great psychic accompaniment to the videos. Well, I loved it. I loved it more than I loved the videos which got repetitive and seemed to offer less rather than more (exceptions: works by Francesco Vezzoli and Isaac Julien which were gorgeous and mesmerizing).


The videos themselves are, as Libby said in her post, and I said in my PW review, worth a watch. But most of them can be digested in a minute or two. They wear their messages on their sleeves and are not narrative. There's no punchline and no matter where you slip in, the ambiance, message, vibe is the same. (image left is scrim in 6th floor hallway, very effective in creating icy ambiance)



But really, the videos, like I said, are the appetizer. The main course comes in February (here's the program schedule) with the film screenings. (image right is Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi's "Frammenti Elettrici: New Caledonia" co-produced by the Fab and making use of the FWM's groovy, double-sided scrim projection techniques. You're seeing the work through a scrim with the artist's names printed on it.)




I'll end with a word about and a shot of Mark Nash, the guest curator, looking very, very cyber blue at the press preview. He's a soft-spoken Brit, who as co-curator of Dokumenta 11 worked with many of these filmmakers before. At the press preview, he was friendly and full of information about the works and about the impeti for making them. I look forward to hearing more of what's on his mind at the panel discussions.
permanent link  roberta 8:25 AM
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Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Art apocalypse coming soon

 
Post by Samuel Yun

(Editor's note: This is part of the critic bashing thread [see Hot Topics in the left-hand column]).

Kevin Finklea's post is right on. I believe that most "glossied" criticism is saturated with "monies" that support the market machine of high-priced art. But, even after [Finklea's] quoting Bridget Riley, I feel that high-priced art, or any art, is doomed to the vampire-like existence of the pop, R&B and country music industries. Formulaic approaches to modern modes of art will become standard, expected, and attractive to investment. This will ultimately cripple personal and intellectual exploration in the visual arts, since the artist, investor and critic are bombarded with money and the corresponding pressures to flow with the whim of the market (image is of Samuel Yun's "Mustang").

I know this all sounds pessimistic, but I cite the underground voice of early '90s music. I'm still hearing the same songs on "modern" radio since that time. In fact, any new music that's released, underground or not, still sounds like early '90s music. Furthermore, the indoctrinated listeners of this generation will carry on the demands of the head vampire into the satellite and internet radio age. The agrarian landscape of the arts will, in my eyes, become a rusty industrial behemoth.

Our culture is unrepentently bound to money and the pursuit of it. The visual arts will follow in suite.

Now let's go buy a painting that looks like a painting.

--Artist Samuel Yun is one of the directors of the online gallery, The Vacuum.
permanent link  libby 8:01 PM
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Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Deadwood press

 

Post from Sid Sachs

[Editor's note: Sid is responding to a post by James Rosenthal, part of a series of posts on the state of art criticism in town and in general. For the full series to date, check under hot topics, left.]

Yawn yawn yawn. Do the work Jamie. Do the work.

I am too old to hear the bees buzzing the same refrain. It has been done or
at least attempted. It keeps being done. Arts Exchange. The New Art Examiner. Artblog. If you want serious criticism just do it yourself. Don't settle, don't write journalism but do some research and think and make a damn historic stance. Don't wait for others.

And lets praise those great people who put it on the line with Momenta,
Blohard, White Box, the Project Room, Slought [Foundation], BaseKamp.

And curators like Elsa Longhauser, Paula Marincola, Dick Torchia, Ingrid Schafner, Judith Tannenbaum.

You think Duchamp cared that no one noticed? Rudy Staffel just did the work. Georgio Morandi just did the work. Myron Stout just did the work. What are you expecting? (image top, Morandi's "Natura Morta.")

When Longo and Sherman et.al. were pissed about Buffalo they
made Hallwalls.

Be proactive, not whiney. Just do something and don't expect.

Break out of the box. Get involved politically; kiss Fumo's fumes.

--artblog contributor Sid Sachs is gallery director of Rosenwald-Wolf at University of the Arts.
permanent link  libby 9:13 PM
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Views real and otherwise

 
Digitally processed art has taken giant steps as artists have figured out how to overcome the flatness and insubstantiality of computer imagery. A case in point is "Nocturne," an exhibit of work by Thomas Brummett at SchmidtDean Gallery (top image, Brummett's "Nocturne #2").

Brummett's current show bowled me over when I stopped in the gallery the other day. I don't think it was just because I had in my memory Brummett's previous outing several years ago at Schmidt Dean, with lovely digitally printed portraits of nature--seed and flower pod images--that smacked of Victorian book plate and that fell apart on the closer you got (you can see some of these on here).

This new show first of all has a wonderful glow, with images that come from photographs Brummett took in Northern California, the Everglades, Arizona and Switzerland (right, "Nocturne #3").

The light areas are golden and limpid, taking on some of the inspired feel of Daguerrotypes and ambrotypes. Against the golden background are nearly silhouetted trees and shrubs in very horizontal landscape/scroll/filmstrip presentation. The limits of each frame (the work goes through a series of analog and digital processes to reach the final iteration) are marked by a dark line that is a presence that suggests window frame as well as film frame. Like a window mullion, the view beyond is what dominates.

Chris Schmidt said the work was inspired by Japanese window gardens, a conceit that replaces or integrates with what's really outside the window to give a spectacular illusion of a view of untouched nature (left, "Nocturne #1").

We who spend so many of our hours peering into the false digital world or watch too much television can find the cyber-route to nature here.

The work, while it has a Victorian touch, also has a drama and confidence that takes Brummett to an entirely new level.

Also at SchmidtDean were Pop- and Op-inspired acrylic-on-panel paintings with high-key, sun-drenched colors by Dennis Beach. The show also included a couple of sculptures of concrete and plexi (see installation shot below).

The painted work is snappy and made me think of surf boards and sunsets over the Pacific, not to mention Pacific Islander patterned talismans. It also made me think of fraternity paddles. And a square-shaped piece was Barnett Newman on peyote (left).

The paint handling is pristine and looks silk-screened in its perfection and drenched colors. Although the patterning is ebullient, the perfection of its application and planning as well as the perfection of its substrate make me yearn for something a little less controlled.

The sculptures that didn't have the op paint treatment seemed subdued.

Coincidentally or not, Beach's name is perfect for what he's up to, in the fine tradition of Jack Eden the garden reviewer.

I should just add that I stopped by SchmidtDean right after a show of photographs and prints that seemed for the most part belabored, precious and earnest. Brummett's work hit my eye with gusto, and he and Beach reminded me why I like looking at art.
permanent link  libby 4:23 PM
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Barnes locale picked

 
The Barnes will move to the Youth Study Center location on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Mayor John Street announced today. It's a relief to me--and I'm sure to the residents of the nearby neighborhood who must be happy to see the depressing Youth Study Center replaced and the ball fields--the other proposed site for the Barnes--preserved.

I had been worried about the Barnes replacing one hostile community with another by usurping the important community ball fields, which serve as an important locus for community activities and neighborhood spirit.

Fortunately, replacing something that was definitely functioning and serving the public well with something that may not fly at all is no longer an issue.

Today, Ed Sozanski got in a final (I hope) whine about something lost by moving the Barnes. But it's lost anyway. The Barnes was going to go down the tubes. I call the judge's decision making lemonade out of lemons.

The Philadelphia Inquirer today also wrote oodles about the Barnes, and naysayer Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has come to his senses and sees the point of survival over romanticism.

As for Lower Merion Township and its whining neighbors, they are hoist by their own petard, having failed to support the Barnes in a timely fashion by finding a way for more parking and more visitors. But the township is not the only entity that deserves blame. It's a long saga of blame starting with Dr. Barnes himself and running through the institution, its staff, its board. Long-range thinking and planning were not part of the picture.

Seems like someone came to their senses, twice, to make the Barnes move possible, so kudos to the Street administration and Judge Ott. Golly, I hope this all works out. The art is tremendous. Let people in to see it, asap. In the meanwhile, if you yearn for the good old Barnes/estate/private collection phenomenon, make your reservation now.
permanent link  libby 3:53 PM
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Chromatherapy

 


I've been reading David Batchelor's book "Chromophobia" in which the author argues that high culture has long been anti-color (chromophobic) except for the portion that has been wildly pro-color (chromophilic). The book is well researched, the writer, who is also an artist, is witty (not only did he coin the snarky word "chromophobia," but there's a chapter about color as cosmetic and it's titled "Apocalypstick.")

Apparently the philosopher Kant, for one, is a typical chromophobe. Quoting Batchelor: "For Kant, colour could never participate in the grand schemes of the Beautiful or the Sublime. It was at best 'agreeable' and could add 'charm' to a work of art but it could not have any real bearing on aesthetic judgement." Rousseau and Joshua Reynolds, likewise, believed colour gave sensory pleasure but that art's gravitas resided in form, shape and line according to Batchelor's book.

Of course my reading this book has directly to do with the Olafur Eliasson's
Your Colour Memory" at Arcadia, a chromophile work for the 21st Century. We've sung its praises here and here. (image at top is of Eliasson's "Your Colour Memory." Photo by Aaron Igler.)

Batchelor spoke at Arcadia in October as a corollary to the exhibit. A quiet Brit with a sense of humor, his slide lecture laid out the book's argument and was particularly notable for its number of slides -- one, a grey on white illustration from an early edition of Melville's "Moby Dick." Libby and I enjoyed the somewhat mumbled talk in spite of the lack of color slides. The whole idea that color is a cultural outcast -- other and not to be trusted -- seemed right.

And it got me thinking about how artificial our colors are now. Fruit, flowers, everything has been jiggered to produce extraordinary shades that are sold as natural. But when push comes to shove, we want our walls white; the art on it subdued shades we can "live" with. And our favorite clothing is...black. While Batchelor's theory applies to art, which has mostly if not entirely been divorced from world events, all the talk about color made me wonder about chromophobia as applied to skin color. I guess you could argue that chromophobia in that realm has never not been a force driving world events.



I wasn't really thinking about color when I ran up to the PMA to see the Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medicis exhibit. But color, in all its seduction, was one of the high points of this wonderful, edgy portrait show. (Here's my PW review if you didn't catch it. )

If color wasn't integral to the works of art here (and not just there to add charm) I'll eat my pencil. "Lady in Red" by Bronzino (shown above) encased in her voluptuous lava flow of a dress was female power incarnate. Just try to separate that color from the form. In fact, from flesh tones to the indefinite colors of the walls behind her, color is part of the story and inseparable from the composition and the meaning.



Pontormo's "Youth in Pink Cloak" is another piece in which color is meaning, form and chromatic pleasure. Here, the (again) mountainous cloak is a foil for the slender teen whose cocky, hand on hip posture belies an uncertainty that's quintessential child on the verge of adulthood -- all self-doubt and self-consciousness. Pink -- a color that's a compromise, a color that's almost there, is perfect for this cloak and for this sitter. Whether there's artistic license in the cloak's color choice is doubtful, according to the write up in the show's catalog (a great book by the way, full of stories of the homicidal powerbrokers the Medicis and their topsy-turvy times of plague, war and insecurity perhaps more like our own than we'd like to think.) The cloak might be ceremonial and the youth might be a page at the court. Regardless, the portrait is a triumphal wedding of color and subject.

Pontormo and Bronzino weren't chromophobic. They were free with their use of color and lathered it on generously. I'm wondering now about color field painters who serve up generous portions of out of the tube color in works so large they are off-putting. Could it be that those '50s and '60s painters were actually chromophobic and that their paintings do more to distance and separate the viewer from the idea of color than they do bring the viewer and the color into dialog. (Paintings of that era send me running from the room and I like to think I'm a chromophile.)

I heard another talk last week that wasn't about color but did remind me of the Pontormo show. Jed Perl, critic for New Republic, spoke at UArts Friday night in conjunction with the school's second year MFA exhibition (up now at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and in the lobby of Hamilton Hall, and, I believe, also at the Icebox). Perl's topic was tradition and how artists can mine traditions without being traditional or conservative. The argument was about how studying a tradition and looking hard within it artists could adapt it for a new generation. It reminded me of the new wave of portraiture by young artists who, knowingly or not, are distilling from an old traditions (that include Pontormo and Bronzino), in ways that don't seem conservative or traditional.

("Your Colour Memory," by the way, is up through Jan 9. and Arcadia's Richard Torchia wrote to say they'll have hours over the holidays -- like New Year's Eve and New Year's Day! (but no Christmas or Christmas eve). Don't let this one slip away without seeing it.
permanent link  roberta 9:15 AM
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Monday, December 13, 2004

Barnes belongs to the People, at last!

 
Judge Stanley Ott ruled today that the Barnes Foundation may move its galleries to Center City, Philadelphia. Read Patricia Horn's story here at Philly.com and KYW's story here (image, a portrait of Dr. Albert Barnes by Giorgio deChirico). Philly.com user id: lrrfartblog; password: artblog.

The judge must have been reading Libby and Roberta on artblog. If you want to read more artblog commentary on the Barnes, check out the thread in hot topics at the left.


permanent link  libby and roberta 2:02 PM
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Eels and the genius artist

 
Post by Dan Schimmel

A response to Colette Copeland’s post on the show at basekamp.

I once had an argument with several other artist/curator types at a bar north of Northern Liberties. The issue was whether there was a difference between looking at a painting in real life (i.e. standing in front of it) or looking at a reproduction of that same painting in a book. I argued there was an immeasurable difference in experience and in the information that was transferred via the experience. I was one against many, and everyone else, to my complete astonishment claimed there was no difference at all (right, a digital reproduction based on a photograph of a 6.5-foot-square, oil-on-canvas painting, Schimmel's "Swimmer," that he made in his studio, presumably by himself)!

I haven’t seen the show at Basekamp, so I am really responding to something in the artblog review, just to be clear and fair. But my recollection of the heated argument (in the best sense of the word) with that group of ‘post-Duchampian’ peers (my characterization), as well as some passages in the artblog posting, pushed some buttons.

I find most of this ‘artist as genius’ rhetoric (too often a ubiquitous call-to-arms of the ‘anti-establishment’ establishment art crowd) absurd and tied to a deep political agenda that is more reactionary than enlightened. And I find the art and exhibits that come out of this reactionary stance, for the most part, very heady and ironically non-communicative of anything significant, other than a critical attack on a mode of communication that has become esoteric and marginalized, anyway (i.e. art in general).

It’s really kind of funny and ironic that art projects by artists and curators claiming to be about art and audience, and the attempt to be less ‘white-box’ and more ‘of the people,’ in the end reduce the audience even more, or so it seems to me.

The project described in Copeland’s posting, and others of that ilk, seem more like inside dialogues between people in the know who like to think they are outside the traditional audience. And I’ll be the first to say I am of, or associated with that ilk! So I am not attacking or criticizing any of my peers. I actually think all points of view are valuable and needed to sustain a dialogue and keep things from getting stale.

The cultural space in which art operates is getting smaller and smaller. On the other hand it influences far more accessible mass-media modes like television/magazine commercials and cinema, but quickly changes in translation to something more akin to fashion.

Art itself has a shrinking audience. And attempts to launch critical attacks from within, in the guise of ‘outreach’, using the level of discourse that we of this art club traffic in, is merely rattling the chains. I mean, who is it that comes to see these shows anyway? Us!

I am not against any of this, I just see it as....i don’t know.....’in-fighting’. Like the U.S. Senate. And to really simplify things, the sides seem to be drawn on pre- and post-Duchampian lines, though not in a chronological sense, more in the sense of attitude.

Which artists and curators would play the part of the "Democrats" and "Republicans" (if we could even use those terms as characterizations) would be an interesting discussion. The conclusion might be surprising!

As a painter, I always feel under attack for being part of the ‘old guard, establishment, white-box, escapist breed’ in the eyes of artists like those doing tricks with eels and mock reproductions of old paintings. In the end, we are all artists. We are all trying to give visual form to our ideas and communicate something from within to share without.

Painters, sculptors or any individual artist who spends a lot of time locked up in his or her studio ALONE do not necessarily see themselves as genius or separate. Would any of you have told Emily Dickenson to go out and party more??? I don’t think Pollock or De Kooning cared one way or the other. I mention those two because a lot of the redundant flack I keep hearing (it’s been a decade now since graduating Art School) against painting. The ‘individual artist in his studio’ attack is, I think, a generalized, stereotypical and hostile reaction to the hyperbole of some of the art historians and critics who tried to deify those dudes and dudettes who were busy slapping sticky color shit to canvas.

Lofty aspirations of art historians and writers like Clement Greenberg, who used his pen like a baton to orchestrate a movement (pun intended), served their own grandiose sense of genius! (And it’s interesting that most of that art and curated exhibits I am taking issue with, for the purpose of this long-stemmed rant, are really based in theory and written words, not the art. In other words......

Anyway, if I seem defensive, it’s probably because I presume the worst: that many of my peers (artists and curators) associate painters as bedfellows with commodity, entitlement and elitism. I would argue that those eels are more elitist than a simple painting. It’s a good debate.

--Dan Schimmel is an artist and director of the Esther Klein Gallery




permanent link  libby 9:39 AM
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Sunday, December 12, 2004

Searching for the promised land

 
Some of us go to the future and outer space; some of us go to Celtic myths and German fairytales. But we're all searching for some better place that helps us get a grip on the place where we really live--a safe place (top image, Charles Hobbs' "Under Weathered Hills," 36" x 48", acrylic on board).

And that's what you can find in "Tiers of Descent," Charles Hobbs' work at Vox Populi. Hobbs take on paradise is paradise lost, the subsurface land of goblins and elves and gnomes. In his paintings and sculptures, he is creating an idealized vision of magical nooks and crannies, forests beneath midnight skies filled with Disney silver stars, floating worlds brimming with lush greenery, multilevel landscapes fed by cascading waters.

Like so many young landscape artists, Hobbs is working with materials that scare me to death--glassy resins for layered paintings that look like jewels, cast fiberglass for wood-like lands of Wynken, Blynken and Nod and wooden shoes that sail the sky, safe caves, and hands holding the landscape safe (left, "Untitled," materials fabric, fiberglass, paint, wire).

He's also working with less toxic materials like fabrics and wire and ribbons.

I can see the relationship of his subject matter to Clare Rojas' funny little gouache drawings of primeval territory (Rojas had a nice thumbnail review by Roberta Smith in Friday's New York Times, fyi) and Paul Swenbeck's references to Germanic legends as well as to the woodblock plates that accompanied my childhood copy of Grimm's Fairytales. The results are magical and worth a visit to Vox.

Taking fantasy to a different shore, Jillian Mcdonald's videos at Vox turn fandom into humorous weird-dom. In the series of videos including "Me and Billy Bob," she inserts herself into movie clips that she slows down and loops. The result suggests a relationship between the actor/object of her desire (she's got more than one, including my personal fave, Johnny Depp) and herself. The results are a cross between hilarious and unsettling, and raise issues of obsessive love and the culture of celebrity. I found the videos both interesting and creepy and worth a look. The idea is easy to grasp immediately, but the ambiguity the images generate bears some prolonged looking.

Also showing at Vox, "Bad Intentions," Mauro Zamora's acrylics an water colors of nature retaking man-made spaces. The monochrome images have a silk-screen affect of layers and sharp edges. I want these to be more interesting to look at (left, "Trees and Glass, 12" x 16").

William Lohre's untitled show mostly of untitled models made of paper give as little away as he seems to desire (no titles, no list, no nothing). His White House has artillery and missile launchers on top; his gun rack has a pair of American flags; and his medieval castle/fort is another place that implies embattlement and a desire for safety. I can't get much further than craftsmanship and ships in bottles--i.e. how does he do it, although he does do it nicely.


permanent link  libby 4:04 PM
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