The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
February 2008
ArtSeen
“I am not now nor have I ever been…”
by Mira SchorArtSeen
Now I’ve got your attention. I am following a time-honored tradition and taking a page out of Marina Abramovic’s playbook. At the MoMA symposium “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts” at the end of January 2007, she introduced herself that way (as she does at every feminist art event to which she is invited) to an audience that included Harmony Hammond, Ida Applebroog, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, Faith Wilding, and dozens of other major women artists who have identified themselves with the feminist movement, who were not invited to the podium, and whose presence in the room was like a barely acknowledged 300-lb. GUERRILLA GIRL.
Miami Beach: Swimming in Pigment
by Sharon ButlerArtSeen
To feed Two Coats of Paint, my daily blog about painting, I comb the Internet for art reviews and commentary from all over the world. It’s an enriching process but not very tactile: online, the artwork, galleries and museums remain distant and two-dimensional.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Assistant
by Graham T. BeckArtSeen
This particular artist employs dozens of assistants and I’ve known a good deal of them. They told me that the workweek could be seven days long with 18-hour shifts and no overtime pay. One confided in me, like an Upton Sinclair character: “In his studio, people come in and they get chewed up and spit out and it keeps going.” This assistant has a college degree, an impressive resume that could place him in a number of other fields, and plenty of friends willing to do him favors. Still, he did two tours of duty in this dehumanizing studio, and when he finally left, it was to assist someone else. There is something about working for an artist that keeps him in the field. Every assistant I’ve spoken with admits to a similar attraction. It has something to do with practical education and the tradition of artists and apprentices.
Merlin James Paintings of Buildings
by John YauArtSeen
It is very easy and probably even comforting to think of Merlin James as a contrarian, and certainly many people do, but this lets you off the hook. The reason he has been pegged this way is because he is a highly articulate painter and writer who openly rejects the belief that painting is dead, and even has gone so far as to say that painting should not be included in exhibitions of works done in other mediums, such as video and photography. In his championing of non-mainstream artists such as William Nicholson and Jean Helion, James creates a space for his own painterly investigations that courts, but never becomes, kitsch or (like the critic Jed Perl) self-righteously reactionary.
Al Taylor Early Work
by John YauArtSeen
The art world finally seems to be catching up with the sculptures and drawings of Al Taylor (1948-1999), who stopped painting in 1984, and began making constructions in 1985 (he made his first mature drawings as early as 1974). Dating between 1985 and 1990, this exhibition of “early work” serves as an introduction to the first five years of a wildly prolific and sustained outburst of sculpture and drawing that lasted fifteen years, ending with the artist’s premature death at 51.
Thomas Ruff
by John YauArtSeen
Thomas Ruff’s latest exhibition of large-scale, modified digital photographs is a continuation of an Internet-based project, jpegs, which he started in 2004. It expands upon his earlier, Internet-based nudes, where he downloaded and categorized, then altered and enlarged, low-resolution images of pornography. Like looking through an irregularly faceted window (or visual filter), the resulting shift from instantly legible imagery to pixilated squares of color was creepily brilliant for the various questions it raised about the spread of voyeurism and the seamy underbelly of the World Wide Web, which both isolates and empowers individuals as faceless members of hidden subcultures.
Robert Jack Before and Aftermath
by Shane McAdamsArtSeen
A few weeks ago I took on a challenge to list ten good young abstract painters. It turned out to be more difficult than it sounded. I mulled the idea over for several days with little success. Later that week I went to to see Before and Aftermath, an exhibition of abstract paintings and drawings by Robert Jack. It didn’t fatten the list, but it did shed some light on the issue.
Ivin Ballen 50/50
by Lynn CrawfordArtSeen
Does the term late capitalism still define the period preceding the system’s predicted downfall, or could it, like late childhood, refer to a stage of development? Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, Things (Les Choses) suggests that there is a connection between things and happiness, that Western consumer culture—troubled as it may be—quite possibly holds previously unseen and unpredicted promise for its citizens’ welfare (though the nature of this link might be tricky to discover). In an interview about the novel, Perec said “you have to be absolutely modern to achieve happiness.”
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/ SANAA
by Benjamin FriedmanArtSeen
When the Whitney Museum was completed in 1966, who could have guessed that New York would have to wait until the 21st century for another building of comparable brilliance? With the opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in December, a long era of disappointment has finally come to a close. The building, designed by the Japanese firm SANAA, is the finest piece of architecture to go up in the city in 40 years.
Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century
Collage: The Unmonumental Picture
by Thomas Micchelli
ArtSeen
The New Museum opened on the Bowery in December, garnering near-universal praise for its ethereal, SANAA-designed building and pitiless abuse over its ghastly inaugural show. That exhibition, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, is still with us, but on January 16th it expanded to include Collage: The Unmonumental Picture, the second of a four-part series, with sound art and online montage on the way. At the very least, Collage, which lines the walls surrounding the first installment’s lamentable collection of assemblages, gives you something other than the sculpture to look at. And if not for Nancy Spero, Mark Bradford, and Kim Jones, that’s about all it does.
Anselm Kiefer: Paintings and Sculpture
by Thomas MicchelliArtSeen
What is it about Anselm Kiefer’s art that inhibits unfettered admiration? I write this as a longtime fan, someone who was left reeling from his big show at Mary Boone in 1982. Of the dozen or so artists vying for prominence in the 1980s under the mantle of Neo-Expressionism, Kiefer seemed to have single-handedly legitimated and fulfilled the promise of Postmodernism. His compression of history, legend, myth, philosophy and literature, exploding like a thunderclap in the Minimalist void, had gone the farthest to restore painting’s bloodline of pan-disciplinary signification.
Brooklyn Dispatches Authentic Beauty, or The Real Phony
by James KalmArtSeen
Sometimes as I peddle to endless art openings, studio visits, multi-million dollar museum extravaganzas and the ever-expanding galaxy of art fairs, I’m occasionally struck by parallel sensibilities or common developments. As a spate of recent shows here in Brooklyn seem to indicate, a subtle shift seems to be taking place with regard to culture’s perception of beauty. Whether or not the exhibits of a few disparate artists constitute a movement or trend, they do serve as a gauge for the very contentious subject of “authenticity” and its apparent ascension over beauty in the hierarchy of aesthetic experience.
Katy Grannan
by Stephanie BuhmannArtSeen
Another Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, San Francisco area-based photographer Katy Grannan depicts the same person, Nicole, in various Northwestern landscapes and interiors. Grannan worked with Nicole for almost three years and established a comfortable intimacy with her subject. Her pictures show a woman thriving on the opportunity to reinvent herself shot-by-shot. There is no naiveté here and Nicole, whose personality is unquestionably complex, is always aware of the camera’s presence.
Katy Grannan The Westerns
by Tessa DeCarloArtSeen
Like many Easterners who’ve been uprooted to California, photographer Katy Grannan has found herself simultaneously unsettled and ensnared by the Golden State’s seductive sunshine and mania for personal transformation. That unease and fascination brilliantly inform her latest series of pictures, which are on view in galleries in both San Francisco and New York.
Hugh Walton *UCKED
by Lauren RossArtSeen
Hugh Walton’s first solo show of his career melded bittersweet humor with personal disclosure in four new high definition videos (all works 2007). In the main gallery space, three of those pieces were shown on flatscreen monitors, mounted to the wall. In preparation for each, the artist froze liquids into single or paired words in blocky letters. Each word or phrase, doubling as the piece’s title, was fashioned from a different liquid: Tough Guy from spit; Totally Fucked from alphabet soup; Pissed from… yup, piss. After recording the words as they melted from solids to liquids, the artist played with running the videos forwards and backwards at increased speed, using slightly different approaches for each.
Julian Schnabel Navigation Drawings
by John YauArtSeen
What aberration allows bad artists to make terrific films? Why is it that the clichés that make for turgid art become acceptable and engaging when they are translated into celluloid? I am thinking of Julian Schnabel and Jean Cocteau, who, besides being self-aggrandizing artists who have made interesting films (all of Schnabel’s films focus on a male hero who must overcome external and internal obstacles but ends up dying young narratives that seem of a piece with his histrionic painting style), also share a misguided obsession with Pablo Picasso. "I am as close to Picasso as you’re going to get in this fucking life," Schnabel once foolishly said
Behind the Seen
by Jillian SteinhauerArtSeen
I’ve always found the term ‘street artist’ somewhat suspect. Yes, the label is apt for someone who paints graffiti on building walls or places paper sculptures on city sidewalks, and yet we don’t go around calling artists who show in galleries, ‘gallery artists.’ Those people are just artists. They don’t need a descriptor, a qualifying moniker. Street artists, as the perpetual redheaded stepchildren of the art world, are forever stuck with one.
Alberto Burri
by Valery OisteanuArtSeen
The exhibit at Mitchell-Innes & Nash is an overview of the lifelong work of the late Italian avant-gardist Alberto Burri, a mini-retrospective of one of the most mysterious members of the Arte Povera movement. Burri’s collage-paintings have an immediate 3-D effect, as they are made from patched and stitched brown burlap, mailbag canvases, cracked mud, burned plastic, discarded wood and other found materials mounted on stretcher frames that extend the work into the rarefied realm of assemblage-sculpture.
Extending the Universe: Conceptual Art, Women, and the Structuralist Paradigm
by Robert C. MorganArtSeen
In his book Structuralism (1970), the renowned Swiss philosopher Jean Piaget revealed the affinity between the structure of language and the function of systemic processes in developmental psychology. Piaget’s investigations closely though indirectly paralleled the work of conceptual artists of the same period who were more interested in clarifying their art through structural parameters than in terms of aesthetic form. For example, Sol LeWitt and Hanne Darboven, who began to work directly with language and systems as early as 1966, both challenged the notion that form in art was necessarily the result of an expressive intention. Instead, they believed art should exist within a logical structure, namely, the grid.
Frankenstein (Mortal Toys): a miniature spectacle
by Warren FryArtSeen
Victor Frankenstein, his sister Elizabeth and brother William played hide-and-seek in the woods outside Geneva, their laughter and giggling voiced by two performers seated in plain view on either side of a small proscenium stage. This was the most lighthearted moment in Frankenstein (Mortal Toys), a bittersweet prelude to Victor’s study at the University of Ingolstadt, followed by the flowering of his scientific genius and the disasters his creation would wreak upon his family.
Barry Le Va Voltage
by Ben La RoccoArtSeen
Thought, as I experience it, is generally an unpredictable, often murky process. Sometimes a whole strain of interesting thought may spring on me fully formed and unannounced, one facet leading smoothly into the next, complete and beautiful. If I’m lucky, I have a pencil handy. But those are rare and beneficent days. For the most part, the act of thinking is a muddled, disappointing and tedious journey over well-worn ruts and patches of quicksand up to my neck.
Richard Artschwager
by John YauArtSeen
Richard Artschwager (b. 1923) is an American original, and, like Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) and Peter Saul (b. 1934), he will never be seen as a mainstream artist. In his introduction of his longtime friend, Malcolm Morley (another interesting misfit), which he read at the Skowhegan Awards ceremony in 1992, Artschwager said something that holds true for his own work: “Originality in art usually comes about by doing some damn fool thing and then finding it to be not so dumb.
Love/War/Sex
by Hrag VartanianArtSeen
Exit Art is an oasis, one of the only professional alternative spaces in New York that takes a chance with carefully curated new work, effortlessly interspersing established and emerging talents. Saying that, their current show is a mixed bag of ideas about the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, their resulting impact and their mind-numbing role in our lives.
Rackstraw Downes
by Greg LindquistArtSeen
Rackstraw Downes’ paintings reveal the material function of the American landscape. He works onsite, with attention to the slow, unfolding process of seeing and a meticulous, almost microcosmic depiction of detail. Many of his previous vistas—cement factories, ventilation towers, garbage dumps, oil fields, refineries, culverts, ditches and sewer mains—have focused on the interstices of industry, contraposing the natural and man-made. Yet, if asked about an agenda, Downes would likely respond with an explanation of his interest in the formal problems of representing what and how one sees, hesitant to broach social or political concerns.
A Tribute to Michael Goldberg (1924—2008)
by Janet Coleman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Lucio PozziArtSeen
My mental snapshots of Michael Goldberg start circa 1968 on an Easthampton bay beach. It’s windy, early spring. Our party of daytime drinkers is crouched on the dunes, smoking Gauloises and pot. The one at the shore line pouring the Bloody Marys tells me Goldberg’s backstory: Back in the Fifties, when he made his precocious reputation, he signed his paintings “Michael Stuart.” The youngest second generation New York School Abstract Expressionist came from the Bronx.
