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Saturday, January 29, 2005

Art in America fire sale!

 
Did I mention that I dropped my subscription to the magazine? What with all the reading I do online and all the looking I do in the real world I hadn't been looking at my AIA copies except to thumb through them (obits, news and bob reviews mostly) for about a year. I'm a long-time subscriber (1991) and it was a big step. But we get the New Yorker (readable and thoughtful reviews, mostly NY oriented) and the New York Review of Books (readable and thoughtful reviews of idiosyncratic shows, mostly NY oriented) and in the cyber world I read artnet, the NY Times, the blogs, the Guardian, artforum and hook up occasionally with things like rhizome so I figure I'm not missing much.

My $39.95 per year for AIA will go to purchasing art. What a good thought!

AIA's been $39.95 every year I've subscribed. Never has there been a reduction in price that I know of. Until now. I got a solicitation in the mail and they're having a sale!! $24.95 for 12 issues. I thought it was maybe to sucker me back into subscription land. (they had previously sent me a form asking why, why did I leave them...what did they do wrong...). But no, just now when I checked their website and clicked on subscriptions I see that it's not just for lapsed subscribers but it's for tout le monde. Check it out.

AIA, like all print publications, alas, must be hurting from all the online competition. I wish em well but I'm not re-upping.

permanent link  roberta 2:39 PM
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Friday, January 28, 2005

Snow, Fresh Paint and History

 

I left Milwaukee and came home to Philadelphia and it looked pretty much like Milwaukee.

(image is the 12-inch snow blanket in Milwaukee last Saturday.)


Anyway, I wanted to yak a little more about the past -- like the past of American art in a show I saw at MAM. But before I do, I'll make this right turn detour to mention a Chicago artist and blogger, Cynthia King, whose Fresh Paint blog is a snappy, opinionated site about art in Chicago...and Milwaukee! Yes, Cynthia has been all over the Calatrava and MAM and is also an enthusiast. Read her posts here and here. She's also been to Wausau WI (how many can say that!!) and covers the new Patrick Dougherty sculpture project there.



Because the world is small and artists get around, I'll mention that the globe-trotting Dougherty did a project at Swarthmore a couple years ago. And talk about chutzpah (see Libby's post on Matthew Ronay for more on that), when you go to Dougherty's website and click on installations to see where he's been, a map of the world comes up and you're told to click on any continent you're curious about to see what he's done there! ...The Dougherty global cartel.)

I've bookmarked Fresh Paint and encourage you to check it out. (image is Milwaukee artist Joel Skaja working on an ice scupture for the city's second annual ice sculpture competition. Skaja told me his piece, which would be a totem pole of Milwaukee logos, was one of 18 entries in the contest which included a $750 prize for the winner.)

Meanwhile back to the past



Right now, the Milwaukee Art Museum is hosting a travelling exhibit of early American art (1770-1920)from the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Having just recently experienced the early American art at PAFA, I felt I could compare. The DIA exhibit had outstanding works by famous early artists: five John Singleton Copleys; a couple sublime Thomas Coles and Frederick Churches; a number of Martin Johnson Heades; and a George Caleb Bingham. (Shown right is Copley's "Watson and the Shark," 1782, one of three versions of a painting commissioned by Brook Watson to commemorate an event that happened to him while swimming in the Havana harbor. Watson went on to be a rich merchant in London.)




After that early period showing people, the sublime mountains and vocanos and nature in general, the show got a little weaker with only a few works by major artists like Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent and not the best works by these artists. Moving into the 20th Century, the Ash Can school (again, not represented by its best works) was downright depressing. And American Impressionism in this show seemed silly and jejeune. ( Left is Bingham's "The Trapper's Return, 1851. On the far left in the boat is a bear cub.)



The show of 90 paintings and sculptures was pretty crowded with viewers the snowy Friday that Cate and I saw it and I have to believe the non-threatening historical exhibition is a draw. There's nothing controversial about a history lesson. It just is.

The best works in the exhibit were Copley's "Watson and the Shark" (above) and Heade's "Hummingbirds and Orchids" (1880s). Both works had drama, delicious color, sublime nature and that anthropomorphozed animal thing going on, making them instant stand-outs. (bottom image is Heade's "Seascape Sunset" 1861, with some frozen waves sticking up over a cherry red horizon line. The wall plaque said it showed Heade's worries about the impending Civil War.)


I believe the PAFA collection goes deeper into early American art than this (albeit circumscribed) travelling exhibit does. But given the drawing power of the Detroit exhibit, I have to believe PAFA, if it markets itself smartly, will do well with its new reinstallation of its strong early American art collection.

I'm thinking about art museums in general and how they serve the public and will get it together in another post.

permanent link  roberta 8:37 AM
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Thursday, January 27, 2005

 
Feeling beaten down by so much academy-style art, lately, I pointed my nose toward the Matthew Ronay talk at the place that specializes in all that academy-style art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (here's my post on the series of upcoming artists' talks there).

Ronay was one of the artists at the Whitney Biennial this year, and you didn't hear anything about him from either Roberta or me because neither one of us was too crazy about his installation, "'70s Funk Concert Model" (left).

Nonetheless, I was yearning for something hip and New York and NEWWW after all that old-fashioned painting.

Ronay (accent on the last syllable) is a cute 30ish guy, not too tall, a little scruffy, and he makes art that's also cute, not too tall, but not in the least scruffy. The Brooklyn-based artist was introduced as a maker of super-realist miniatures.

I'm taking a moment to look up super-realist. hold onnnnnn......

From World-Wide Arts Resources:

The Hyper-realism movement originated in the late sixties and early seventies when artists began producing paintings that appeared to be photographs. In painting, Hyper-realism is synonymous to Photo-Realism. Also know as Superrealism, the movement was most popular in the United States but spread to some parts of Western Europe. In the sculpture medium, artist often used casts of the human figure to create true-to-form...

No. I don't think so. What I saw were pop-color painted shapes that have a jaunty, up-beat look. Clearly the guy is not a super-realist. What he does make are (sometimes super-sized) cartoon shapes in 3-D, made from strata of MDF board and sanded to mass-produced-looking perfection. I have to go with Pop, not Super-Realist.

Ronay himself is a funny mix of upbeat and downbeat all at once, political and not political.

He started out by saying he wasn't a political artist, but he bemoaned the current absence of cultural artifacts making reference to what's going on in the (political) world.

His piece at the Whitney was a salute to three '70s funk bands--Earth Wind & Fire, Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, and Mandrill--that produced cultural artifacts of protest--i.e. protest songs (right, part of "'70s..." that salutes Mandrill, which Ronay described as being in the spirit of Henri Rousseau--"harmony in the jungle but some sense of danger").


Ronay added that what passes for culture now is Brittany Spears, and she, "is not articulating anything" (left, "Irreversible Algorithm" from "'70s...," showing redesigned french fries being tested on animals).

By saluting the three bands, Ronay is hoping to communicate that kind of political content without himself being political.


So Ronay showed the lp covers from the three bands and he played performances from EW&F and Mandrill to show their approach to saving the world with peace and love (I'm translating what he said very very loosely). (Right, "Unfair Fulcrum," a reference to George Washington Carver and the peanut versus corporate bureaucracy, is part of "'70s...")

No way would you understand all this, looking at the installation. Nor did Ronay care if you didn't get his narrative, although he had quite an elaborate one. "For me, you use your subconscious to inform you about what your conscious would never tell you," and so he expects people to intuit what his work is getting at.
After all, he said, what people say they can see in Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even" is miles from the object Duchamp actually made.


Here's a sampling of some of the topics he talked about that related to his work--the merger of fundamentalism and capitalism into a government of pure evil; why people left Europe for North America (image left); ecological disaster and how it will play out, etc. etc. etc.

I suppose I found the Q&A to be the most enlightening part of the talk.

Here's some of what he said in answer to questions:

I'm interested in a kind of oral tradition, using these contrived kinds of narratives as a possibility for thinking. It's not the only interpretation.

I don't want it to be about sculpture. It's more about symbols and language. [He did say something about semaphores in the course of his talk, especially in reference to his biker-gang piece, but all I could think of were advertising logos.]


There is no initial idea. I do a lot of drawings. ...They don't come from me. They come from the energy of the universe. [Then, after editing the drawings several times he said he figures out what the project is about.]

I have all the time while I'm making stuff to invent the narrative (image right, from biker gang project, shows biker and his old lady engaging in sex on a waterbed with bucket of french fries at the perfect moment).

The paradox for me is I'm a maker. People who are conceptual artists put all this thought into something simple. [He saw his own work as needing to be read the same way we read conceptual work, bringing our own ideas to it.]

[He said his work was not surreal. Surrealism is about shock value, and his work is not about shock value.]

It's an allegory. I don't want to be a propaganda creator.

While the individual pieces Ronay makes are charming and cartoon-like, his installations are simply confusing to me, merging too many ideas and visual loci to make a coherent statement. Maybe if I were a New Age type, they'd just permeate my subconscious.

And I ought to mention, to give you a feel of things, that Ronay used a number of taboo words that we all use in private in the kind of public forum where you'd normally never hear them. I was sitting toward the front, but I could feel the intake of breaths behind me as he f-worded, c- and p-worded (male and female anatomy parts), and s-worded his way through the talk.

There's a certain level of indulgence for young men and their incomprehensible stories (and their verbal inappropriateness). I think here of Matthew Ritchie and his cosmologies, as well as Paul Swenbeck, and his German legends.

But me, I think we ought to be able to access the meaning of the art some other way besides New Age subconsciousness. I should have known what I was in for at the beginning of the talk, when Ronay said that pop music had an advantage over art, because it had the advantages of language and accessibility. I read that as an excuse not to make his own work accessible.

There's a paradox here, because visually, the objects are quite accessible, but the combos are inscrutable.

I happen to think that good art is accessible. It's a problem when the artist doesn't really care whether or not he communicates.
permanent link  libby 5:15 PM
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WHYY calling

 
I got an email from Joel Rose, WHYY's arts and culture reporter earlier today asking if we could talk about the Mark Nash curated video extravaganza, "Experiments with Truth," that's at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. See Libby's post and my post and my PW review for more on that show. (image is from Zarina Bhimji's piece in that show.)

Rose is putting together a story for the radio station that'll air tomorrow morning on the local part of Morning Edition at 6:33 a.m. and again at 8:33 a.m. (Here's the WHYY schedule -- click Morning Edition for more.) We chatted and I waxed on and on about the show. Rose said he'd already talked with Nash and with Isaac Julien. And I think he was looking for me to cut through some of the art speak he received from those two. For example, Question: what is the show really about?

Anyway, we had a fun chat and I hope he can edit me down to something useful and amusing. Off the record, (but on the record here!) we talked about the FWM's future now that the city got its promise of money to pull down the Gilbert Building to make way for an expanded convention center. (The Gilbert Building is where the Fab is, as well asVox Populi and Highwire Galleries and Asian Arts Initiative.) I said I'd heard the Fab was thinking of moving to the Parkway (Museum Mile anyone?) but that I wished they'd buy a warehouse in Kensington instead. Wouldn't that be better for their experimental goals and mission? And isn't that more cutting edge? Why would they want to be with the Barnes, Calder and the PMA anyway? I don't get that.

I told Rose I was posting about his report tomorrow and he broke out into a verbal sweat, knowing he might have some additional listeners. Turn on that radio. It's art time.

permanent link  roberta 3:20 PM
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Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Staying afloat

 
After reading Roberta's post about how the Colatrava addition saddled the Milwaukee Art Museum with an enormous debt, I started thinking about the Barnes' building costs and then the Bellevue (WA) art museum's sorry fate.

I have no new information. Just free-floating worry.

Anyone out there with knowledge of these projects and how these things tend to turn out, please write in and share.
permanent link  libby 4:34 PM
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Portraits of the artists

 
I was looking at two shows of painters with fine academic technique--Tina Newberry at Schmidt-Dean Gallery and Christopher Gallego at Seraphin (left, Newberry's "Help (the badge)," 10 1/2" x 11").

I'm not so interested in the differences in how they apply paint--Gallego's brush work is juicier and freer, Newberry's nearly invisible. But its the other decisions that make these two bodies of work stand in relief from eachother.

What you get from Gallego are mostly literal views, sometimes surprisingly large canvases of the objects in his studio, beautifully painted.

The choice of a pair of rubber gloves, hanging over the edge of a surface still-life style, seems like a self-portrait, as does a large canvas portrait of a bag of plaster. There's not much other information in these paintings, just light and texture captured. Mainly superb painterly technique and draughtsmanship hold your attention (image right, "Bag of Plaster," 26 1/4" x 20"; image left below, "Rubber Gloves," 8 3/4" x 12") .

I found these more recent paintings of single objects of greater interest than Gallego's ambitious earlier ones that were filled with the details of his studio, beautiful though they were. I'm hoping this (barely) metaphorical approach means that he's on his way to being more than a mere recorder of what he sees.

In contrast, Newberry's canvases are small in size--20 inches is a large dimension for this show. The content is specific to herself and her life, but not so specific that the rest of us can't relate or find our way in.

She's unsparing toward herself, her shoulders slightly droopy, her hair pulled tight, her eyes sliding to the side for a peek (at herself in the mirror or at some intruder in her space). She dresses herself in costumes to poke fun at her own character flaws--the paintings are called names like "Self-Appointment" , and "Li'l Rebel" and "Li'l Officer." And she's angrier than a hornet, posing herself in front of bullet-pierced target papers, or fondling a wooden gun, or wielding a wooden dagger (right, weilding a wooden dagger in "L'il Rebel," 20" x 15 1/2") .

Some of the portraits are more icon-like, in others Newberry places herself, sometimes in multiples, in studio and home. You might not know what triggered a painting, but you get that she is regarding herself as a difficult, even dangerous creature at the same time that she is mocking her own intensity (left, the icon-like "Self-Appointment," 12" x 12").

In contrast to painter Bo Bartlett (see post), another realist who plays with metaphor and hews to the Academy tradition, Newberry avoids overweaning size, the cocky claim to sing the song of America. Instead, she paints herself as Napoleon or George Washington, hand stuck in her jacket, but she's got on plaid shorts, and her bare legs and feet, fail at attaining the look of a conqueror. By sticking to humor, Newberry takes the kinds of metaphors that sometimes sink Bartlett and shows how, with a little honesty, they really can work (right, "Li'l Officer," 20" x 12") .

What I like about these portraits, with their old-masters colors and technique, are the modernity that humor and a little post-modern irony confer.

permanent link  libby 3:10 PM
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White out inside

 
Photographs by Cate Fallon


Before the snow storm began last week my sister Cate and I, visiting family in Milwaukee, actually got out to see some art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. I've told you about the Santiago Calatrava addition to the museum in a previous post but since I just can't get enough of it I'm going to treat you to a few more images and say a little about the art inside. (top image shows the moveable wings (brise soleil) of the building. They're wide open -- weather permitting, they open them each day.)


Here's some "Fun Facts" about the building that came in my press kit.
--Roughly 20,000 cubic yards of concrete were used (81 million lbs.). If the concrete were formed into a 1 x 1 sq. ft. column it would reach 102 miles into the sky.
--there are approximately 915 separate panes of glass. Fewer than 6 percent are standard issue window glass (flat panes). The other 94 percent are tilted, curved or both.
--An average-sized, two-story family home would fit comfortably inside the reception hall.
--One acre of Carrera marble was used for the floors. (image shows the marble floors and the rib-cage like hallway.)
--Comparing the MAM Calatrava to a Boeing 747-400, the MAM is longer (293 ft. vs 240 ft.) and has a wider wingspan (217 ft. vs. 211 ft.)


In what must be the museum's project space housed in the Calatrava addition's front (the Schroeder Galleria) there's a site specific work by Liam Gillick, "Ovningskorning (Driving Practice, parts 1-30)" in which the British artist and writer made a word piece with 30 phrases to correspond with the 30 arches in the gallery. (image left is me taking a picture of the wall text. I do that sometimes when there's no handout. It beats note-taking.)

The story, which was not linear as far as I could tell, had to do with an experimental Volvo car manufacturing plant in Kalmar, Sweden. The plant had a socialist-fueled, worker-centered approach to car making. The plant closed recently. I found the idea behind the piece poignant and fitting for Milwaukee, a place that used to be a manufacturing powerhouse (Milton Bradley, Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz -- all those breweries, Allis Chalmers, etc.). Milwaukee, after loss of almost all its manufacturing base, (Harley Davidson remains) is now a tourism and service-industry town.

(image below is looking out a window at Lake Michigan. Did you know that inside the breakwater, the lake freezes?)



Speaking of art and tourism, while I was visiting, there was an announcement that the city's tourism and marketing board had decided to adopt the Calatrava building as its signature logo for all advertising for the city. This makes sense for a building that is a signature building, a kind of Eiffel Tower destination. (Read more here and here.)

My hope is that MAM gets some dough out of the transaction. They gave the image freely in hope of generating more visitors to the museum. (The MAM, you may recall, is trying to dig out from under a $25 million debt they incurred when the Calatrava building went over budget.) (image is again looking out at the frozen water. Did you know the Army Corps of Engineers dug a navagation channel in the St. Claire River in the 1960s and it's gotten bigger over time and is now considered responsible for Lakes Michigan and Huron "draining" away down the river into the Atlantic Ocean? The lake levels are down a foot. Read more.)

Once outside the Calatrava wing we looked around the contemporary collection a little and spent some time in a travelling Mark Lombardi exhibit that we had almost given up finding and then stumbled upon while on our way out. I'll tell you more about that in another post. Here's a shot of a piece in the contemporary wing, a place with so many great pieces on display it makes me cringe when I think of the stinginess of the fare available in the contemporary galleries in our own PMA.



Tony Oursler's "MMPI (self-portrait in yellow)," 1996, is, like much of the artist's work, sad, funny, angry, poignant and compelling. (image is detail) Oursler's face is projected on the little yellow doll. He speaks ridiculous platitudes and cliches like "I never tell lies... Most people are fake... Animals are better than people." The work was sited near two, large-scale blow-ups of film stills, one from Matthew Barney's Cremaster series and the other from Shirin Neshat's "The Rapture." The triangulated arrangement with the three film/video makers was kind of spooky -- like odd family portraits of dad (Barney) posing in a dress, mom and her friends (Neshat) pushing a boat into the water and baby (Oursler) caught under a chair after presumably doing some mischief.



I'll leave you with this lovely sky picture taken from the air. The night was clear and the air was calm. The snow-covered ground looked like lace without a regular pattern.

And the planes, both Cate's to New York and mine to Philadelphia landed early.
permanent link  roberta 2:25 PM
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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Repositioning art

 
Post from Rob Matthews


Well I haven't found a mention of the artblog in the new Art in America (Feb 2005) but Virgil Marti did get a good review. There's also a nice (but very late) article on Vincent Desiderio's work from his last Marlborough show.

By the way, you mentioned a while back that Tristin Lowe has a sculpture up at the PMA (his chair piece)[image, Lowe's "Disfunctional"]. What most museum-goers don't get to see is that once every week or two, the chair gets "repositioned".

The chair is sliced up along the legs in different places and somehow or the other you can rearrange how it sits: it either leans to the left, leans to the right, the legs get pulled in opposite directions. It's fun to walk in on Tuesdays and see what new position it's in. You might ask someone in the contemporary section if they are documenting the different sittings.

--Artist Rob Matthews is a contributor to artblog and is now in "Torrid," a show at Kutztown University along with a raft of other interesting artists.
permanent link  libby 6:28 PM
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Monday, January 24, 2005

A painters' question

 
Every mark we make is somewhere in space, somewhere on a surface, and that seems to be the question behind "Field Questions," a show at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.

I was led a little astray by the gallery notes, in which curator Sid Sachs wondered about the relevance of abstract field painting in a world of war and tsunamis. It seems to me a red herring. These abstract field paintings do not speak directly to war or disaster.

What they speak to are the issues of being alive (in states of war, peace, disaster, joy, misery, belief, doubt and cynicism) and humanity's place in the world.

To put it another way, what struck me about these works were their Existentialism, the artists' decisions to make marks of specific kinds that serve as metaphors for the human condition.

I had my favorites in the show--Aaron Williams body bits and other painterly, modeled illusions floating in a flat, flat field of blue or white. What I loved about these body bits were they seemed to be copies of cut-outs from photos of nudes, with their hard, curvy edges. The forms were an affirmation of existence and an affirmation of paint against paint (image right above, "Barely," and left, "Flag").


I also was mad for Chris Martin's poignant paintings at once geometric and map like and architectural, the round circles reminding me of Pac-Man, each a human searching for a path on this earth and beyond the green door. Martin covers the space with bars and holes, limits and escapes (right, "No Title," and top of post, "Goodbye Mother").


Tyler Professor of Painting Dona Nelson makes pieces read like challenges to representational art and its safe conventions. Her modeled surfaces barely escape being totally disgusting, yet end up affirming some kind of control that is her own. "Rest" (image left), magic marker on canvas, is drawn like a puzzle without the art-school lessons of perspective and modeling, the planes evoking cubism with an anti-elegance that charmed me.

"Untitled" (image right) and "Painting for Malcolm" are gloppy reliefs tamed by color-- anti-landscapes, anti-portraits, anti-paintings, anti-canvases. According to the gallery notes, "her works involve an automatism that is this side of outsider Surrealism." Sounds good to me.

Others in the show were:

Harriet Korman, whose "Untitled" (below) offers a dizzying space via wedges of intense color that form a landscape or a streetscape that challenges invaders of the human kind;










Carl Ostendarp, who offers a relatively small-voiced squiggle of fuschia in the corner of a giant landscape-oriented field of spring green (image, "Untitled," below);











Ron Gorchov, whose painting, "Iris" (below), on a torso-shaped canvas is an affirmation of the body's central position in any declaration of existence;















and Joe Fyfe, whose thinly painted gestures on rough burlap surfaces offer a contrast of sensibilities and material that surprise. I especially liked his "For Steve" (below), which struck me as a Barnett Newman zip painting, the green wavery landscape line/zip offering a promise that stands in contrast to the thin orange gesture--a human peach color, perhaps--barely contained by the painting.





















permanent link  libby 3:59 PM
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More on the Americas North by South

 
Post from Tamara Kostianovsky


[Editor's note: Kostianovsky is one of the artists in The Americas--see post]

The pillow piece "Ah...Felix" by artist Marisa Telleria-Diez (Nicaragua)(image left) pays homage to artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (image right) and references his untitled photograph of two pillows that was displayed on billboards in NYC in the early '90s.

I was looking for more info on the original piece by Gonzalez-Torres to include in this email and I came across a website that analyzes it very smartly.

--Tamara Kostianovsky is the curator of exhibitions at Esther M. Klein Art Gallery
permanent link  libby 3:39 PM
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Barnes musings around the Internet

 
For a hilarious take on the Barnes' move to Center City, check out John Perreault's Artopia post (image, Dr. Barnes, his puppy and his art).

You may not be able to last the course--Perreault never heard about our short attention spans online; I confess to skipping a paragraph or two--but the highlights were:

1) the virtual museum proposal near the end
2) the cynical suggestion that the inhospitable, yawning spaces along the Parkway defy the kind of art-museum hopping that tout le monde keeps yakking about (thank god someone said this; I've been thinking about it all along; the prospect is more daunting than gallery-hopping in L.A.)
3) a building proposal that nearly gave me a stitch in my side from laughing.

permanent link  libby 9:33 AM
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Sunday, January 23, 2005

Snow day

 
Wind, snow and Eagles. Who wants to post? (Image, our let's-go-to- the-movies party in the driving snow, yesterday afternoon.)

Then again, if you haven't read today's art story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Barry Le Va, you might want to. It's really good. (Here's our sign-in info: name, lrrf; email, libby@rosof.org; password, lrrfartblog).
permanent link  libby 5:00 PM
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