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Saturday, January 01, 2005

Happy New Year!!!

 

Here's a cozy image to keep you stoked until the next post.

Love, peace and warmth in 2005.

Roberta and Libby
permanent link  libby and roberta 9:29 AM
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Thursday, December 30, 2004

Web art frustrations

 
The trouble with the internet as we all know is there are no filters to separate the wheat from the chaff. So we rely on institutions to keep us on tracks--universities and libraries and respected publishers for facts and information, art museums and galleries for taste.

Well, I was noodling around Dia:Beacon's site thanks to a link on Doug Witmer's new blog and noticed the Artists' Web Projects link. Last time I had looked here, right around when Dia:Beacon opened, it wasn't worth a look. But this time there is quite a list of things, ranging from the brand new to an archive that goes back to 1994.

The quality, however, is a mixed bag, some of the work feeling just like play, some of it feeling like please, a little play would be nice around here, and some of it just plain impenetrable. But there were rewards as well.

In the top group, I'd put Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenshied's "Zombie + Mummy," which offers a mix of little cartoons that are amazingly low-tech in their presentation but quite amusing, some swell graphics and some web-site satire that I thought was hysterical (image above a web-page still from "Zombie + Mummy").

The first three were annoying for different reasons. The Ana Torfs "Approximations/Contradictions" was stifling and stifled and really a music project; the Glenn Ligon was just a photo album (left, a page from Ligon's "Annotations") . These two didn't take much advantage of the techno-wizardry that seems to me belongs in a Web project. Allen Ruppersberg's "The New Five Foot Shelf" hit an early dead end and I have a feeling that can't be all. I clicked, moved my mouse, looked all around for more, but nada. And the Marijke van Warmerdam's "And then the Chimney Smokes" required me to download and then put the movie on a CD. Life's too short.

But go into the archive. There's more there, and some of them are quite amusing--but not much by the standard of art. Dia needs to do an editing job.


Here's a suggestion: anything that requires a lengthy download ought to offer a quick sample. Otherwise your wasting your time on a pig in a poke.

For someplace that does this sort of thing better, I'd go to the Vacuum for the current show, especially the Hedwige Jacobs pieces on the third floor (right, a still from Jacobs' "Night and Day").
permanent link  libby 10:31 PM
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Just perfect

 

So what is perfect anyway? I grew up with a father who was always looking for it, expecting it, demanding it. I never knew what it was but I lived in fear of it.

Dennis Beach's practically perfect in every way sculptural objects at Schmidt-Dean got me started thinking about artists seeking perfection. Libby referred to the surfer dude ambiance of Beach's brightly-colored, surfboard-like works in her post. Indeed the beach and the waves are all over Beach's work.

The freestanding sculptural wave (shown at top) made of glued wood and laminated into that perfect rams horn curl is a little bit of magic. Is perfection that bit of magic when something comes together and seems to defy gravity and achieve a pleasing shape?



Is there perfection in the mathematical implications of torque in Beach's other big sculpture? (shown) This piece—patinated white concrete bars stacked (no armature) into the Fred and Ginger-like dancer—exudes a mathematical correctness and elegance that says, like all Beach's works, that he's a seeker of the perfect moment, perfect object, perfect work.



Maybe perfection comes in the process of working? Beach crafts his pieces beautifully. He paints them with love. The process of making them is not one of satisficing but one of seeking the perfect object.

Tom Brummett, whose new, elegant landscape photographs are paired with Beach at S-D, has sought the perfect picture through the window in his works. This is a Japanese conceit, the perfect scene through the window. Are the Japanese as a culture fueled by the search for perfection?

Brummett's works, imbued with the hard work of the photographer's darkroom where all the magic occurs, have an alchemical charge. They feel transformed. They may be perfect but they're not real. they're magic. Lots of photographers have alchemical leanings. Is the moment of transformation in the darkroom a perfect moment?

Self-Taught Perfection



Then there are works by the self-taught artists. You can see a wonderful perhaps perfect round-up of the best—Traylor, Hawkins, Castle, Pierce, Von Brunchenhein—at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in an exhibit celebrating the collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

These works could not be less perfect in one way. But they are completely perfect in another. Often made of crude materials and imbued with a brut force of their making, these are works whose makers were not looking for perfection. (shown is Sam Doyle's "Dr. Boles.")



Artists like William Hawkins, who painted building portraits (like the Yaekel Building, shown left), didn't worry about getting the building perfect. If he needed to show perspectival space, he didn't paint it, he added on a chunk of wood or two to create 3-D illusions. (like here, look closely at the windows far left and far right).

Hawkins also used photographs in the same way to create illusions of space in works that are otherwise flat and iconic. Like some folks, Hawkins is a satisficer. When he couldn't make it perfect himself he used something else to make it perfect. A satisfactory bit of perfection.



People study drawing for years and can't achieve the perfect negative spaces of Bill Traylor (shown os "Untitled (House with Multiple Figures)). Not only does Traylor's work pour out on the page without mistakes (is that perfection...no mistakes?) but his subject matter—people drinking, dogs fighting, folks up on the roof presumably baying at the moon—is a complete universe of human comedy, Shakespearean, without the sweat and rewrites.

Black Perfection



Quentin Morris's installation at PAFA pushes the artist's 40-year long exploration of all things black into a new dimension. Morris's decision to paint the walls of the gallery black is a perfect decision. It opens the work up on a cosmic voyager level that is delicious and inviting. This chapel of black circles on black walls is so simple in its idea it passes into the realm of perfect elegance and perfect simplicity. (shown is installation detail)

I don't really know what perfect is. I don't know whether it is good or bad, right or wrong. Maybe it's in the eye of the beholder, like beauty. To my mind, a perfectly muddled and muddied drawing I've done can be perfect if I love it completely. And really, with each moment blending into the next and life hurtling by at astonishing speed, what's perfect today may well be irrelevant tomorrow—or perfect tomorrow, depending on who's looking, who's thinking, who's searching. Me, I'm a satisficer but I appreciate perfection when I see it. And I think about it a lot.
permanent link  roberta 8:34 AM
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Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Susan Sontag, age 71

 
Her book "On Photography" is still the book to quote almost thirty years after its making. The writer died yesterday of leukemia. Read the NY Times appreciation by Charles McGrath. (user: lrrfartblog; password: artblog)

The Times is running some pre-web archival material about the writer, like a Dec. 18, 1977 book review of "On Photography" by William H. Gass.

http://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-photo.html

Here's a gush I agree with:

Every page of "On Photography" raises important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them in the best way. In a context of clarity, skepticism and passionate concern, with an energy that never weakens but never blusters, and with an admirable pungency of thought and directness of expression that sacrifices nothing of sublety or refinement, Sontag encourages the reader's cooperation in her enterprise.

permanent link  roberta 6:56 AM
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Tuesday, December 28, 2004

When it's public it's got to be big

 
My mantra for years has been small is beautiful. I say it to all the young artists I meet who tell me, apologetically, while standing in front of their reasonable-sized art, that they're working on something bigger... or that they want to work bigger.

Small, I tell them. Small is the way, not bigger.

But sometimes big is the way after all —when there is a reason ...when the scale makes sense. Like with former Philadelphia artist Randy Bolton's huge new banner prints in his solo exhibit "Twice Told Tales" at Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. (top image is a diptych "Thin Ice.")



Bolton, whose digital prints I've admired for years, has ratcheted his work up and out of the realm of intimate viewing and into the realm of public art. (Read my recent post for more on Bolton—and Cranbrook)

The new works, printed on fabric by an industrial printer (and hemmed by the artist who learned how to sew on a machine to do so) have messages on them in words and images. And while the banners have the authority of public service announcements ("Never take more than you need" is one maxim), their touch is light and not preachy. This is not your know-it-all big brother authority figure counseling "just say no."



Bolton's announcements are witty and wry — and their beauty and old-fashioned charm are seductive. And their advice, at bottom, is "think, study, consider the consequences and don't be hoodwinked by con artists." (shown above left is "Never take more than you need." Bolton's wife, artist Kathleen McShane sits on the log and gives you an idea of the scale of the piece. Right is "Not Tonight, Honey.")



Bolton's push to big makes sense in an artist who has always spoken in haiku-like messages about big issues. Even when he works small, Bolton's message was always big. He's ever one to debunk the prevailing wisdom and show it as nonsense. And he's ever about the importance of personal responsibility in life. "Don't follow the leader because he's going over the edge," is a recurring theme as is "Who says the wolf is big and bad?" (image left is a triptych "Yours, Mine, Ours." Bolton carved images from the work onto the small log stools that sit in front of the work.)

The artist, who is something of a bibliophile, finds his source material is children's books—the antique variety and not the great literary works of Beatrix Potter or Lewis Carroll. Bolton mines the mass-produced school textbooks that paraded Dick and Jane before generations of children in lessons that taught reading with a subtext of obedience to authority.


Any artist with a rebel's soul would find that source material plum pickings. Bolton has mined it for years collaging imagery from this book and that and packaging it anew with punchlines so different from the source material they might have been written on Mars. (image right is "Rise and Fall.")

I saw these prints first in September when I visited Cranbrook where Bolton is head of the Print Media department. He laid them out on the floor in his house to show me and they consumed the big room—eleven ft. high, and almost as wide (or wider in the case of some diptych and triptych works.) The scale was such a radical departure from past works I'd seen at Schmidt-Dean Gallery, his Philadelphia dealer, that it was exciting. Of course these works were made for a museum exhibition and works in a museum can well afford to be big.



But there's big and there's big. These works have an urgency to them that's beyond museum. I suppose you could consider them wartime works. They were not made in a vacuum of artist sitting alone in a garret dreaming. They respond to the world at large and take a stand against the rampant follower-ism abroad in the land. That's a bold message and a public message that needs a home where the many can experience it and not just the few. (image is "You can't get here from there.")



We're living in a time when art's messages are small and intimate. But if there's any medium with a potential for making big messages and big statements, it's printmaking whose history includes poster making and rabble rousing to wake the sleeping masses for some action or other.

When I think of contemporary printmakers with big messages, I think of Jenny Holzer who, like Bolton, is a cautionary maxim writer. And of course printmakers past, like Honore Daumier and Goya, were big voices in their days making public art about politics and life.

Printmakers like Holzer and Bolton have found ways to dust off and return printmaking to its roots in public messaging. I wish more printmakers would follow this path and fill the galleries, museums and walls of the cities with art that engages the public in discourse about our world. We sorely need it. (bottom image is "Same old, same old." All the photos in this post were taken by Bolton while he was installing the show. )

permanent link  roberta 9:33 AM
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Monday, December 27, 2004

Sam Maitin dead at 76

 

I learned on Christmas Day that Philadelphia artist Sam Maitin had died. He was 76 years old (image, Maitin's "Much Happiness 2," collage).

Maitin is scheduled to have three simultaneous shows at the University of Pennsylvania in February, one at the Arthur Ross Gallery, one at Hillel, and one at the Burrison Gallery. A Penn alumnus, Maitin also taught for a time at the Annenberg School for Communication there. He was working on a number of pieces at the time of his death Dec. 23.

His work was collected by museums around the world, including The National Gallery of Art, the Tate, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MoMA. He spent time in England on a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1968.

The bright exuberance of his work--prints, collage, paint, murals (there's one in the Wood Building at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and one at the Annenberg School at Penn) and sculpture--made his work a perennial favorite with public institutions and the public in general. Other public pieces include a dimensional mural at Temple University's Dental School, outdoor sculpture at George Washington University, and a 70-foot tapestry in China.

Color was the key to his work, said his wife, Lilyan Maitin. Included in his oeuvre, in addition to colorful lithographs, are a number of 5-color wood-block prints.

His long-time friend, photographer Seymour Mednick, who knew Maitin from their days together as students in the mid-1940s at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, now the University of the Arts, described Maitin as a mensch. He made posters for the Arts Council at the Gershman Y, taught art there, and served on the board at Fleisher Art Memorial for a time (image, "Untitled," 2003).

When the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance decided to put art in the advertising spaces on bus shelters, Maitin designed the first poster, said Maitin's daughter, Ani. He involved neighborhood children in creating an outdoor mural on the side of Fleisher Art Memorial. And Bread and Roses Community Fund presents a Maitin print each year for its annual award.

Maitin loved people and loved to talk. His daughter and wife remember all the distinguished visitors who gathered at his house. Artists, writers, photographers from here and abroad, from England and from China, heard about him and came to him seeking his help and his friendship.

His enthusiasm and energy went to a large number of good causes. Among the many projects that threw himself into were rescuing the Louis Kahn archives now at the University of Pennsylvania, saving the facades of a row of historic federalist buildings threatened by demolition and fighting to save the Lucretia Mott housing in Philadelphia's Society Hill from redevelopment and the residents there from displacement.

At the time of Maitin's death, he was nearing completion of a piece for the Please Touch Museum, and was working with the architect of a condominium project and recreation center near the airport. All the projects, said his wife, will be completed by the teams of people with whom he had been working.

The funeral was yesterday, a miserable, gray day, said Mednick, who afterwards hunted for a nearby piece of stained glass that Maitin had made for a family, not far from his own burial site. After looking inside a dismal mausoleum and dismissing some dark red-and-blue windows as clearly not Maitins, Mednick went along the back of the building and at the end of a collonade, "there was this shining, sunny stained-glass rectangle. It was astonishing to see anything this cheerful in all this gloom." A companion piece to that square of stained glass is in the works.

Memorial service plans are still being made.
permanent link  libby 10:41 PM
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Gift of giving

 
Videos of Philadelphia artists at work are popping up on artist Vincent Romaniello's website (image, Romaniello's Untitled 420, 24"x32", mixed media on panel, 2004).

The project is an outgrowth of the usual artist frustration with media coverage of the arts. "I don't understand why [if] the local stations can bring a portable camera to [videotape] someone's backyard,...their pets, ...tailgate parties, why can't they just go to First Friday or somebody's studio?" Romaniello said.

The technology has arrived

When I talked to him last week, he said he began posting the videos in September because the technology suddenly came together in the past year:

1)the low cost of high-speed internet connections

2)the quality and low price of digital video cameras

3)computer memory both for RAM and storage space. A 4-minute video takes up 4 gigabytes. Before, the whole computer only had 4 gigs.

4)dvd burners and even dvd players.

5)the software for sound and video editing became more mainstream—-it's now fairly easy to learn to use professional quality software.

(Speaking of technology, although I had no trouble looking at the videos a few weeks ago, today they refuse to play for me.)

It's a gift

Romaniello is a dreamer--and a softie. He's doing it for the artists, he says, with hopes that his efforts will bring recognition to his subjects, people who he admires for staying true to their personal vision as art-world fashions come and go.

"I'm looking to have a variety of different genres covered. So far...one's a mural artist and she also does weaving [that's Kathryn Pannepacker]. We have a collage artist whose work is very romantic, sentimental maybe [Giuseppi Riviera]. I guess you would call Tim McFarland's work maybe reductive, geometric, and David Foss, abstract expressionist. It doesn't necessarily relate to what I do at all, my personal interest in artwork."

Ultimately, he hopes to create about 20 videos. And he's thinking of broadening the content from artists to gallery owners, art critics, people in the museum world, even First Fridays.

"I want it for the artists," he said. "I want people to come see their work." Romaniello has some other reasons too. He wants people to see how hard artists work. He also wants to give fellow artists a chance to look inside one another's studios, to share methods of working.

"I thought of it as something else I've added to my website. Guests. They're my guests."

This is my slightly belated Christmas story for 2004.

permanent link  libby 10:24 AM
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The market and the way we live now

 


I was brought up cold out of my post-Christmas reveries yesterday morning by an article at artnet by Richard Polsky. He's the guy that does the art market watch (i.e., auctions -- secondary market) and the piece, a 2004 wrap up talking about how particular big name (brand name?) art was trending at auction -- up, down or status quo -- was like a hammer hitting home again and again about monetary value, worth and history.

Polsky's comprehensive list of hotties past and present seemed to show most artists on the upward trend or even keel which spoke as much about the market being good for art as it did for the art being good. (image is Duane Hanson's "Old Man Playing Solitaire" (1973) which passed at auction in 2004. Polsky's comment was that collectors were skittish about Hanson's work because "living with another "person" is just too unnerving.")

Money talks and whether or not these up-trending marketable artists are what will be remembered as Art in the 20th and 21st centuries is not clear. But Polsky's piece clarifies in a moment how market forces advocate on their behalf.

Libby, to whom I confided my depressed state of mind, exhorted me to remember that most artists don't make art with the secondary market in mind, being fueled by higher thoughts about making a significant art statement or a lasting thing of beauty. True, so true. In fact some artists make art without regard for the primary market!

Now I've always been jaded about art and commerce, to say nothing of the wheels of commerce in general. It's my baby boomer, coming of age in the '60s upbringing. But in addition, perhaps when I hit the Polsky article I was under the influence of a BBC costume drama Steve and I watched on video the night before: "The Way We Live Now."



Based on an Anthony Trollope novel, the piece was about a get-rich scheme with gullible souls throwing money after what seemed a good idea then getting burned when it turned out someone was pocketing the money and not building the thing. With all the scenery and scenery churning acting (notably by David Suchet who played the main character), the four-episode potboiler was depressing for its truthfulness about the way the world works. So how could the art world be any different from this? Well of course it isn't. It is the way we live now.

Oh, one more thing about that BBC production. The press was some mighty force in the piece. People were ever reading the papers which were not only giving them news but commentary and editorial content as well. It was in fact the press that was able to unmask the swindler and turn the tide of opinion. Hmmmm, that's a positive note to end on.
permanent link  roberta 9:31 AM
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Sunday, December 26, 2004

In memorium 2004

 
Rebecca Westcott; Gretchen Worden


permanent link  libby and roberta 8:56 AM
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