NYC Art

Stacking Blocks Again

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:42:00 +0000

Anyone who was dissuaded to post comments on Stacking Blocks, please give it another try. You can now sign in using your Google/Blogger ID, or sign up for a Stacking Blocks ID, or comment anonymously. And everything should be easier.

Tim Folzenlogen

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:10:00 +0000

There are some people, like Alan Moore, who believe that comic books -- the comic strip -- can do certain things as a medium that other media can't. They point to the particular, peculiar way that comics combine images and words and note that this has a certain effect on the brain which can't be matched by other, more glamorous media as books and movies.

When I hear this kind of thing I tend to nod my head and agree, but some part of me still feels that this is like some backwater town, some burg of a couple hundred, trying to proclaim that its way of life is just as culturally rich as any big metropolis. I mean, at this point in Western culture we've all learned that parroty nod of the head while we intone, "Photography is art. Comic books are art. Graffiti is art. Everything is art." Movies may be where the money is, and books the prestige, and music's got the audience. But comics have something special, too! Now ask yourself for specific examples of comic books as great art: The picking's are slim, aren't they? Lumpen Harvey Pekar? Dry Chris Ware? Sounds to me like Westley gamely trying to convince Count Rugen that he and Buttercup can live comfortably in the Fire Swamp.

I will admit, though, that there have been a small number of times -- exactly three so far -- when comics have really had that powerful effect on me, when suddenly I realized that they do, in fact, have something other media do not. Two were, perhaps not surprisingly, in books written by Alan Moore. The first time -- not to jump on the current movie bandwagon or anything, but I have to be honest -- the first time was during the climax of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. I'd been reading the comics as they were published and that climax, spread across several pages, was so powerful, so surprising, so moving -- I read and re-read that book many, many times. It was a moment.

The second time was in the middle of Moore and Williams' Promethea where Moore is writing about this very phenomenon, how in some way the combination of the written word and the images of comics tap into the human nervous system in some powerful way unmatched by other media; and in the middle of this discussion Hermes turns to look out of the page and winks at the reader.

Now, in no way did I think this was real in the sense of Hermes actually looking at me. Obviously it was just a book (actually, the first time I read it was on a computer). I didn't think I was suddenly hallucinating. But as I read and looked at that moment in the comic, it was as if a door inside me had opened, as if I had received some kind of True Communication, as if -- I can't explain it -- as if I'd had a brief glimpse of a truth of the universe that was, not magical, but deeper and more powerful than science could explain today. Something inside me opened and a wind blew through. It was pretty amazing.

And now, the third time. Which is, says the essay writer, why we're all here.

Recently Tim Folzenlogen got back in touch with me. Three years ago I'd written e-mail to him about his work, which I liked very much, and we swapped messages for a while. As sometimes happens over e-mail, though, we totally failed to understand each other. I'll take the blame; everything I typed seemed to come out wrong. These things, they happen. He surprised me a little while ago by writing again; he had no memory of our previous messages (which is why I save all of my e-mail) but had found my link to his site and liked my writing. He decided we had some kind of rapport now and he asked for my address so he could send me copies of some "sexy cartoons" he'd made. He wanted my opinion. I sent him my address.

The package arrived a few weeks ago. What I opened was not a few "sexy cartoons." What I opened was a 110-page graphic novel. The first eight pages are originals and addressed to me directly. The rest of the book is a photocopy of a sketchbook he'd made for Stefan Stux and dropped off at Stux's gallery.

Tim Folzenlogen, 2009, ink on paper, 8.5x11 inches

The very first page is a drawing of the artist, looking at me, with a word balloon: "YO CHRIS. WHASSUP?"

I can't say I was blown away. I wasn't creeped out, frightened, elated, excited, aroused, horrified. I was...I don't want to say deeply moved because that sounds like I might've cried, which isn't quite right. I wasn't stunned, either. I was...I don't have the right word. I felt, again, as if some true connection had been made. He introduces me to his girlfriend. She's nude. So is he. This isn't as weird as it sounds, because it's not lascivious in any way, not prurient. It's almost childlike. Something clicks, something at my solar plexus, something opens, there's a breeze like the world's tipping....

I have no idea what to think about this. I have nothing to explain it in words -- not yet, anyway.

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Juliana Romano, Wei Dong, Julie Evans

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:12:00 +0000

I have here a small pile of things I've been meaning to write about, including a bunch of good stuff I saw at the Bridge Art Fair. Somehow I've been putting off getting to all of it, though, so in the interests of moving myself along, I've decided to write up just a short review of two shows I saw which I didn't like. That way I can get right to the things I did like. (Skip the negativity if you want by scrolling down to Julie Evans.)

Juliana Romano, Keep the Dark Out of Your Mind, 2008, oil on panel, 18x24 inches

First up, Juliana Romano at Marvelli Gallery (until April 4, 2009): Feeblist junk. One accidentally decent painting (pictured here); the rest I wouldn't hang in my doghouse, if I had a doghouse, which I don't.

Wei Dong, Altar, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 66x29.8 inches

Next, Wei Dong at Nicholas Robinson (until April 4, 2009): Very definitely PAINTINGS. They're skillfully executed in a strong academic style with just the right amount of idiosyncrasies. Wei Dong exhibits all the superficial skills to denote Art, to tell anyone looking at his paintings that these are certainly Art. And the subject matter is just weird and baffling enough to qualify as Contemporary Art -- no stuffy still lifes or pious saints for us! No, we need meaty rotting Chinese mermaids with disturbingly over-rendered sex organs. In short, this show is slick, soulless, and not worth anyone's time.

Julie Evans, Lesson from a Guinea Hen #3, 2008, mixed water based media and color pencil on paper, 22x30 inches

And now the good stuff: Julie Evans at Julie Saul Gallery (until April 11, 2009). As always I have to encourage you to go see the works in person, because the JPEGs don't even hint at the subtleties of these paintings. In particular Julie uses a glittery, faceted black that doesn't come through at all; it lends the deepest darks of this series the wonderful quality of gemstones on velvet.

What Julie has managed here is nothing short of wonderful. She perfectly balances abstract, loose, random acts of watercolor, subject to the lovely whims of paint bleeding across wet paper, with very precise strokes and dots of gouache and pencil arranged in careful geometric patterns. The result is a series of paintings of enchanting beauty which appear to be unfolding before your eyes as you observe them. Julie's use of color is extraordinary, too, with bright yellows against crisp whites, olive greens butting up next to blacks, pinks and purples dancing throughout. If all of that weren't enough, she has the sense to keep her compositions hanging in negative space, exquisitely aware of the emptiness around them.

It's clear that Julie has been absorbing and borrowing from Indian textile patterns; she owes a debt to her sources, especially for her colors. In places she even quotes directly, using traditional lotus forms among others. But she comes by this influence honestly; according to the gallery staff and her own biography, she's spent time living in India.

Julie Evans, Paharihaze, 2007, acrylic, gouache and pencil on paper on wood, 15x18 inches

I loved her work so much that when I saw another one of her paintings, an earlier, brighter one, hanging behind the gallery desk, I asked if I could go behind to get a better look at it. That prompted Phil Whitman (listed on the gallery site as a Preparator) to take me over to the gallery drawers so he could pull out another show's worth of her earlier paintings, most of which were watercolors on paper glued onto wood panels. You can see much of what I saw at Julie's site but, again, you can't catch the full beauty of her work. Thank you, Phil!

It's clear from seeing her past paintings that Julie's progressing, evolving, and gaining confidence; her most recent work, in the show proper, is clearly built on her earlier work, and better, too, although less expansive in color and in filling her ground. In a way you can watch over the years as she steadies herself, stabilizes what she wants to do, and then begins to pare down, distill, and concentrate the essence of what she's doing. Her earlier work is less assured but more controlled; she's broken free of obsessively constraining her paint and the results are fantastic.

You have about ten days. Get to it.

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A Little Light Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:12:00 +0000

The other night I had a wet dream.

This isn't all that odd but it's been happening to me more since I've become undepressed. This most recent emission started me thinking, though: If my nervous system can cause me to have an orgasm without any of the appropriate external stimulation at all, it follows that my nervous system contains within itself everything needed for me to orgasm. Therefore all the seemingly appropriate external stimulation is unnecessary.

Generalizing from this I conclude that my nervous system contains within itself everything I need to be happy. (This is a particularly bitter pill given that for the past few years my nervous system has decided to withhold that from me and instead let me be depressed all the time.)

Stendhal wrote, in a quote I have taped to my easel, "Beauty is the promise of happiness." Or, in terms of Darwinian survival, beauty is an outward sign of reproductive fitness. Or anyway my apprehension of someone's physical beauty is my nervous system's measure of that someone's reproductive fitness. I think they'd make me happy. I think they'd make a good mate. I would like them to make me orgasm.

But that orgasm isn't in them, it's in me. My happiness isn't intrinsic to that person, it's inside my nervous system. So what does that make them? Some kind of complex key to unlock the happiness inside me?

Beauty may be the promise of happiness, but it's an empty promise. Reproductive fitness does nothing for the individual's happiness. Having children who can go on to reproduce themselves doesn't help me have a happier life in general, or anyway it doesn't need to; once I've had those kids and raised them to a certain point, I can be unhappy. I can even die. And it won't matter a bit to their survival or the survival of my genetic material or the species in general. Darwinian survival isn't an individual matter.

So what's the point of beauty?

I wrote once, not too long ago, that maybe it's time art became about the creation of beautiful objects. Now I'm thinking about changing my mind. I think I'd rather not have my art promise happiness; I'd rather my art unlock the potential for happiness inside you.

I don't know if art can do that. I don't know if I can make art that does that. But it's something to aim for.

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GeoMetrics II

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:04:00 +0000

I'm behind on some reviews -- I haven't written about the Bridge Fair yet, and I have a few other things here I haven't gotten to, some of which I really liked -- but in the interests of getting this down while it's still fresh, I'm going to skip ahead and write about the most recent opening I went to.

Of course that only opens up more problems. How do you review someone like Joanne Mattera, when she invites you to the opening, has always been nice to you, and greets you with a kiss on the cheek, even if you already wrote a somewhat less than kind review of her curating abilities? It's tough. I'm feeling like I might be thinking more positively to make up for the last couple of reviews I've written. I don't know. It's so hard to be really honest and open. A friend recently wrote to me saying, "People will not love you for your honest opinion, especially if you are not Holland Cotter. And what is an honest opinion anyway? Most people have a hidden agenda. Honest opinions are always mitigated by intention. We have our personal agenda, be it political, economic, or whatever."

I sincerely don't think I have a hidden agenda. I'm just doing for others what I'd like done for me.

Anyway, maundering aside, it helps when you really do like a show, and I really do like GeoMetrics II, at gallery onetwentyeight until April 19, 2009. Don't let the title of the show turn you off; I know, it sounds kind of lame, like some junior high school math textbook from 1977. Frankly the title is the worst thing about the show, which, in the scheme of things, is really good, because it's the least important thing about any art show.

There are some really excellent paintings in this show, which is loosely based, as you might have guessed, around the theme of geometric abstraction. The curator, Gloria Klein, is a longtime hard-edge abstractionist herself, and she has one of her own paintings up, which I didn't even realize at the opening. Somehow I failed to put together the name on the wall next to the work and the person Joanne introduced me to.

Gloria Klein, Beach Umbrellas, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 30x30 inches

Gloria's work immediately reminded me strongly of Tim Mutzel's, which is kind of backwards, since she's been painting for around forty years, and Tim's a child in comparison. Gloria's work is a colorful multifaceted shattering of the picture plane, resolutely flat and yet suggesting multiple depths, like a kaleidoscope. She's a fan of red -- this particular canvas is red all the way around the stretchers -- and blue comes across strongly too; although when you really look at it you can see just as much green and yellow bouncing around. Gloria paints all over, like the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters the hard-edge style descended from, and her painting shares that expansiveness you find in their works, that space-filling you can feel in your ears, as it were.

Joanne Mattera, Vicolo 35, 2008, carved encaustic on panel, 18x18 inches

Joanne Mattera, Vicolo 36, 2008, carved encaustic on panel, 18x18 inches

Joanne's two paintings are next to each other near the front of the gallery. I was surprised by them, because I'd seen the JPEGs, and these don't reproduce properly at all. At a smaller size, it looks like maybe she's strung string across a canvas; somewhat larger and it looks like image compression has caused color fringe artifacts across the surface. But no, not at all: In each of these, what Joanne has done is lay down encaustic in layers, over and over, and then gone back in with a carving tool and scraped out lines. So each line reveals, through the layers, a varying sampling of the colors she's laid down. The carving is, of course, imprecise and in places stuttering and halting, so you can see the effort and manual nature of the carving, which both brings out and is brought out by the different colors. The effect is far too subtle, in terms of resolution, to look correct in reproduction. In fact these paintings are closer to sculptures; what you also can't get until you see them in person is the very tactile nature of the encaustic, the way its waxy sheen communicates, with the carving, how it feels, like candle drippings or crayons; with Joanne allowing the encaustic to lap over the edges of her panels like the rind on good cheese. Elegant, simple, precise in their imprecision -- very wabi sabi, as the Japanese might say.

Steven Alexander, Calypso Rose, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 30x30 inches

Not far from Joanne's encaustics is one of Steven Alexander's encaustic-like acrylics. I wrote about his work before and his work here didn't change my mind; he still manages to take something potentially cold, a very uniform kind of abstraction, and make it good and heartfelt, basically by messing it up. His distressed canvases are the result, I learned from talking to Steven, of a lot of layering and not, as I jokingly suggested, from leaving Stephen Westfall out in the rain for six months. I also learned that I guessed rightly about how he gets that encaustic-like surface: He mixes his own paints from raw pigments and an acrylic base, which is naturally matte and milky. By varying the concentration of pigment -- mainly by using less than you'd find in a commercially prepared acrylic paint -- he keeps that encaustic-like surface. His control of his medium and his layering result in paintings that look battered but are essentially bulletproof; Steven confided in me that he ships his work to galleries rolled up and lets them re-stretch the canvases when they get them. This is in contrast to encaustic, which is comparatively delicate. Joanne said she always has to watch for people poking her work with a fingernail to see if it is, in fact, wax.

Lynda Ray, Float Copper (top) and Driftway (installation view), 2008, encaustic on panel, 14x18 inches each

Just along from Steven's work is some more actual encaustic, two paintings by Lynda Ray. (I'm showing the installation view of the paintings here because the colors are closer, to my eye, than the images Lynda has on her own site.) Her work is what you expect from the medium, with its thick oozy and puddled colors looking less brushed and more poured. Lynda's abstraction, like Steven's, tends towards the handmade. Her hard edges aren't that hard at all; instead they waver into each other, lap over in spots, and even drip and sag a little. Steven's paintings look weathered; Lynda's look handmade, homely, like a needlepoint sampler. In a way -- and I don't mean this as an insult -- they're like hard-edge for the home, like cozy Frank Stella. Human-scale abstraction, without the cold intellectual distance so common in the style.

Lorien Suarez, Wheel Within a Wheel 28, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 24x20 inches

Moving around to the back from there we find Lorien Suarez's contribution. (Interesting note: Lorien has this painting on her site long side up; in the show, it was hung short side up. Further, the image on the show's site is kind of duller than the real thing; but the image I put here, taken from the artist's site, is, to my eye, significantly brighter and peppier than the real one. I'm not sure, then, what orientation is correct -- or even if there is a correct orientation -- and I'm not sure which image is the best to illustrate the work.) This was the painting I was most looking forward to after seeing the show online; I have to admit to being disappointed in it in person. It's good, but I really wanted it to be better. I think the basic trouble with it is, well, it's acrylic. If it were in oil I think that alone would improve it. Instead it comes off as kind of flat, lacking presence; and the blending is not quite right, which could be a problem with the medium (I've had my troubles with getting acrylics to blend properly). Also, the colors are so basic, so clearly straight from the tube. I feel the whole thing needs some modulation. Judging by Lorien's site, this whole series is a lot more interesting than this representative; maybe any of the other ones would've been better. It's hard to say.

Facing each other across the space in front of Lynda's painting are two works by Larry Spaid and one by Laura Battle. For some reason none of them are on the show's site; it may be a coincidence, but neither did any of these low-key works make much of an impression on me. They all seemed competent, quiet, sort of suitable for tasteful corporate decorating. I do remember that Larry's works were framed behind glass and this made the already subtle works difficult to see well.

Bruce Pollock, Red Square Cluster, 2009, oil on canvas, 24x24 inches

Next I want to award the Best in Show ribbon to Bruce Pollock for his vibrant painting Red Square Cluster. Maybe it's just a demonstration of Audrey Flack's dictum -- "If you can't make it big, make it red" -- or maybe I just tend to like that red-to-yellow spread, but this painting really caught my eye and held it. Initially it reminded me of the old Koch curve fractal, only of course using circles within circles. On closer inspection the resemblance breaks down, however: The painting is too hand-made for a fractal, too irregular. The circles aren't all precise, and there's evidence still of the lines Bruce used to lay out the composition. The JPEG here smooths out the edges and also compresses the color range too much; the original is sharper and more energetic, with a visual vibration coming off the surface from the imperfect glazing of paint.

Michael Knutson, Crossing Oval Coils XII, 2009, oil on canvas, 30x30 inches

The Koch curve comparison continues with the next work by Michael Knutson. His isn't fractal at all but it does use the hoary old Star of David motif, which tiles nicely with hexagons. The trouble with this painting is two-fold: First the color scheme is far too basic; combined with the regularity of the pattern, which although warped is basically the same across the entire canvas, the whole painting just kind of slaps you once and then hangs limply, too busy and yet too staid all at the same time. And second the texture of the oil paint clashes with the style: A pattern as dense as this one really needs to be painted as flatly as possible to avoid the brushwork from heading off in directions at odds with the pattern itself. The result of the wobbly paint application is that the already-overwrought pattern loses whatever coherence it might have held across the picture plane, and the whole composition collapses into a nervous wiggly noise of contrasting primaries. It kind of hurts your eyeballs without giving anything back.

Mark Dagley, Distressed Orb, 2009, oil on linen, 30x30 inches

Following along we reach Mark Dagley's work, which is something of an opposite to Michael's painting, being amazingly unbusy, to say nothing of nearly lazy. This work completely failed to catch my eye or interest me in any way. All I saw was muddy, and further inspection didn't improve on that, so I moved on.

Julie Gross, Mirro-B', 2008, oil on linen, 23x24 inches

Curiously, at first glance Julie Gross' painting made me think of Mondrian. I say this is curious because she doesn't have a straight line in her work while Mondrian, of course, has nothing but straight lines in his best-known work. I should be thinking of him when looking at Julie Karabenick's paintings -- about which more in a bit -- but not Julie Gross'. And yet it seems to me she's doing for circles sort of what he did for rectangles, letting them flow into and out of each other while arranging them in space. Her colors are nothing like Piet's, either, but I can't shake the feeling that she's approaching her work similarly. I do sort of wish her colors here were a little bolder; judging by this work and her Website she's going for a subdued kind of early 1970s palette, with smoky blues and avocado greens and muted earth tones. I'd like to see her come to a middle ground along with Lorien. Still, this painting certainly is a good one, with a solid composition and a positive feeling of flow.

Julie Karabenick, Composition 78, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 30x30 inches

Finally, back by the door, we find Julie Karabenick. I also wrote about her work before, and again I don't have much to add. She still has that Atari 2600 thing going, both in terms of color and the low-resolution pixel feeling of her lines; that's not intended as an insult or to take away from the work at all, but just shows my personal associations. I still feel I'd like some more texture in her work -- texture that works with her designs, not to distract from them. Again I'll use the word jazzy: her paintings are jazzy.

Overall I liked this show a good deal. It's one of the few shows I've been to where I'd even like to compliment the hanging; the flow of the show from one work to the next enhances the experience. I think Joanne even brought that to my attention but she didn't need to. I felt it as soon as I walked in. It's definitely worth a trip over to the Lower East Side. In fact it's easier to get to since it's closer to a subway stop than anywhere in Chelsea. Back when we were hanging the Blogger Show, James Kalm suggested that the Lower East Side (some people have taken to typing that LES but I'm resisting) is the next up-and-coming art neighborhood, and maybe he's right.

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Stacking Blocks

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:55:00 +0000

I'd like to invite anyone reading this to go to my new forum, Stacking Blocks: A Conversation About Art and join in. I've made signing up as easy as possible and I'd love to see you there to discuss the kinds of things unsuitable for a more one-way discussion like this blog.

Of course NYC Art isn't going anywhere. I've got three or four new reviews in process and they should start showing up soon.

Lisa Dinhofer

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:20:00 +0000

Lisa Dinhofer, Kaleidoscope, 2009, oil on wood panel, 48 inches diameter

Meanwhile, next door to blogpix in Denise Bibro proper, you can find Lisa Dinhofer's In the Round (March 5 through 28, 2009). If the painting I've put up here looks familiar to you, then maybe you've been through the Times Square subway station at some point since 2003; Lisa's got a 90-foot mosaic there, and I'm pretty sure at least one smaller one I've walked past between the bus terminal and the 7 train. I'll always have a soft spot for subway art -- except for the horrid Tom Otterness, whose work should be melted into ingots and dropped in the Marianas Trench -- so maybe I'm biased, but I enjoyed this show.

The show is titled "In the Round" because all the paintings are round -- get it? Get it? In lesser hands this might look simply gimmicky, but in Lisa's -- okay, it's a bit gimmicky anyhow. I'm not sure why she chooses round panels over the typical rectangle but I guess it's okay. Certainly when she's concentrating on spheres or marbles or planets or whatever they are the round panels make some sense, and she clearly likes the swirling vortex motif -- or is it the exploding singularity? Hard to say. Most of her paintings (and the couple of drawings in the show, too) remind me of looking down into those coin funnel displays in the science museum, you know where you donate your loose change for the fun of watching it roll elegantly around and around and down and down until it drops into the hole at the bottom and into some charity's bank account with a plunk.

Lisa Dinhofer, Light Travelers #1, 2007, oil on wood panel, 44 inches diameter

Only in Lisa's world it's not pennies making the trip, it's marbles, butterflies, dragonflies, and other winged beasties. And the funnel isn't just curved plastic, it's the glowing fabric of the universe, or a bursting supernova, or a black hole, or maybe a rolled-up chess board from Alice's Wonderland.

And, yeah, it's a bit gimmicky. There's a feeling that Lisa's hit upon a successful formula and she's repeating it with slight variations. But you could say the same about Chopin; in fact it's not a bad comparison. Like Frédéric's little pieces, Lisa's paintings are charming, disarming, harmless diversions -- not deep, not earthshattering, not overly exciting, but well-designed clockwork entertainments.

There are a couple of drawings on display where Lisa works in colored pencil on black paper; these reminded me so much of drawings my father did for me when I was a kid -- in particular a drawing of the Enterprise from Star Trek amidst planets of his own invention -- it almost made me tear up. So maybe I'm biased that way, too.

blogpix

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 02:39:00 +0000

I missed the blogpix (March 5 through March 28, 2009) opening but managed to make it to Denise Bibro the very next day so I could be greeted by Olympia Lambert saying, "You're twelve hours late or twenty-four hours early!" It seems I not only missed the opening, I also was going to miss the Blogger Panel Discussion the next day. Such a shame, too, because really there's nothing more fun than a panel discussion, especially involving people whose job description involves zero contact with other humans. Oly mentioned that, among others, Bill Gusky was going to be there, and I'll admit missing Bill is a shame, because he's a funny, interesting, all-around good guy. I mean, I don't know him that well, for all I know he kicks puppies and drowns kittens for fun, but he's a good guy to hang out with for a few minutes and his Facebook posts are entertaining. And, really, what else matters?

Oly then happily took me through blogpix. I could discuss the work openly with her because she's not the curator for the show; Oly is more of the meta-curator for the show. As she explained, she chose the art bloggers who'd be the curators, and she gave them a mission statement: Choose artists who don't have gallery representation, or don't have much presence in Chelsea, anyway, or who you feel are underappreciated or overlooked in some way. Oly chose Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof, the pair behind Artblog; veritable force of nature Joanne Mattera; and Hrag Vartanian, who I honestly had never heard of. (I should mention at this point that I've shown work with Roberta & Libby and Joanne, met them, and talked with them. Hrag -- no idea who he is.)

Christopher Davison, Black and White Sculpture, 2006

Entering the space Denise calls Platform -- a somewhat separate room from her main gallery -- we were immediately met by an ugly hanging critter by Fallon & Rosof's entry Christopher Davison. Its provocative, evocative title is Black and White Sculpture and it is unpleasant and dopey, a half-houndstooth half poorly sewed figure hanging from the ceiling like a morose monkey. I made immediate noises of distaste and Oly chided me saying, "We love our sad little monkey" or something to that effect. It is hideous and badly made. It is not deserving of her love.

Neither are the other Davison works in the show, all of which are not so much disturbing as they make me worry about the artist. He looks like he could use a little therapy, maybe a nice pet. Certainly not any more time with his pencils and gouache, through which he clearly wishes to infect us with unhappiness. His flat, unmercifully unskilled drawings are unrelieved by any bright spots of skill or compositional interest.

Julie Karabenick, Composition 71, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 28x28 inches

Almost directly across from those, though, are a couple of good-sized jazzy paintings by one of Joanne's picks, Julie Karabenick. Julie's working in a variation on Mondrian, expanding his strict vocabulary to include criss-crossing squares and angular loops, while also extending his palette beyond the primaries and secondaries. Julie's work is certainly energetic and Oly and I batted around some ideas of what they reminded us of before concluding that she was channeling a kind of Atari 2600 aesthetic. Her colors definitely come right off of early game cartridges and the big blocky pixels feel just like Adventure. I'd like her work better, I think, if it had more texture -- Mondrian's paintings are never wholly flat, but Julie's taped hers obsessively and painted so smoothly between the edges that the faintest extra thickness where the paint laps up against the tape shows up in sharp relief.

Steven Alexander, The Primrose Path, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 48x36 inches

From there it's easy to turn right and see the rough-hewn paintings of Steven Alexander. Oly said she thought at first they were encaustic, and indeed they have that dull waxy sheen you get from that medium, that feeling that you're seeing the pigments through some translucent glaze. But they're acrylics. I suggested that maybe Steven mixes his own acrylic paint using gel medium and raw pigments; he could use less pigment to get that encaustic-like texture. His surface is roughly prepared and very uneven; the result is to take what might be unexciting hard-edged abstraction and give it an earthy, flawed quality, like Stephen Westfall's work left out in the rain for a few months. Which would honestly improve it.

Ben La Rocco, Constellation, 2009

Next to Steven we found Ben La Rocco, Hrag's entrant in the show. I found Ben's work simply too crude. The paintings feel like studies of studies, like someone barely even made an effort at applying paint; almost no sense of color, almost no sense of style, but just enough of each to avoid being anti-color or -style. I felt immediately that Ben's work was just too clunky for me. Very uninspired in every category involved in arranging paint on a surface.

Sharon Butler, Siding 1, 2008, oil on wood panel, 12x9.75 inches

On the other side of Steven is Sharon Butler of -- as Oly and I said over each other as she introdcued me to the work -- Two Coats of Paint. Hers is probably the most professional, serious, best work in the show. Somehow Sharon has painted a few small works here -- there are two on the Website and I think there were four, maybe five, in the gallery -- which look as if they were painted in the heyday of geometric abstraction in the 1940s. Her color scheme is almost the same as Morandi's, maybe a little more colorful in some cases. I found the effect kind of neat, but at the same time I had to wonder: Are these homage or pastiche? Are they sincere or ironic? Does Sharon come naturally to this style, or is she deliberately copying? As I looked at the paintings I found this cognitive dissonance eroding my faith in my appreciation of them.

I made a motion towards one of the panels, which looked as if a chunk had been taken out of it with a circular saw. "Don't touch that," Oly warned me, "it's alarmed."

Reese Inman, Projection III, 2008, acrylic on wood panel, 30x30 inches

On the way out -- or on the way in, if you turned right at the ugly monkey -- are the last (or first) two works in the show, two pieces by Reese Inman; like Sharon, she was chosen by Joanne. From viewing distance Reese's works appear to be made up of dots of different size and color glued to a flat surface. The resulting grid is clearly reminiscent of a computer graphic. Move closer and you see, not dots glued to the surface, but what look like raised spots that may have been left after the surrounding surface was removed, as if by a router. The dots themselves have a certain color shift on top that looks more like layers that were sanded through than colors layered additively. The result is much less than the sum of its parts, though: For how much visual interest her labor-intensive techniques add, she might as well be gluing plastic dots down. Visually the two works are mildly interesting, with that added "How does she do that?" fillip; but ultimately interest flags due to the narrow color range and staid pattern. Go to Reese's site and you'll get a lovely explanation of how these relate to computer algorithms and musical experiments and so forth, all of which I'm sure is very exciting if you have Asperger's and are up past your bedtime, but which wrap up into extremely dull paintings.

The Emperor's Pimply Ass

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:42:00 +0000

Many years ago, back when I was still in college, I had this idea that I was going to pursue being a fine artist more seriously. I was living just over the river from Manhattan and figured, hey, now's the time. I'd read an ad in the back of a magazine requesting artist submissions for a New York gallery and decided to give it a try.

I spent several days carefully taking slides of my paintings and a few drawings. Slides! That's how long ago this was! I didn't have the right equipment but I'd managed to scrape enough funds together to buy some clip-lights and photoflood bulbs and some professional slide film for my 35mm camera and an 18% gray card. I also had grit and determination and stick-to-itiveness and all those other good old American values that lead to success. Also a magazine article detailing the steps to taking good slides of artwork, because this was before you could go on the World Wide Web and get a tutorial. I set up in my dorm room and took my slides and got them developed for some ungodly amount of money and sent them off.

One day I heard back from the gallery. I'm not sure how I heard from them. I guess they wrote me a letter -- they couldn't have called me because I didn't have a phone and almost no one outside of college had e-mail (how did we ever survive those benighted times?). I heard back from them that they were interested and wanted me to come in for a meeting.

I was flattered and excited. This could be the break I was looking for! I hadn't ever considered a career in fine art, or any art at all for that matter, because I'd thought it was an impossible dream. But this gallery -- a New York gallery -- was interested in me!

So I made the trip into Alphabet City, which was still, at the time, a dicey neighborhood. I'd brought a friend with me as protection. We found the gallery, the only one on the block, a few steps down from the street, quiet and empty except for the gallery representative I was to meet with.

We talked about my work and she seemed to be taking it very seriously. She mentioned my use of color and the violence inherent in my drawings especially. She seemed mildly distracted, a little flaky around the edges, but she spoke in somber tones and seemed very professional. It was with the utmost professionalism, then, that she finally introduced the gallery's rate sheet: This much for a show, this much for publicity for the show, this much for refreshments at the show, and so on.

I walked home with my friend, crestfallen and confused. I couldn't believe this was how galleries -- New York galleries -- did business. I had always thought they took chances on artists they believed in, hoping that sales of the work would pay for their expenses. It never occurred to me that they might charge the artist for these services. It seemed...unfair. I worked out fairly quickly that this was something of a scam. And anyway it was a moot point: I'd barely gotten the money together to make slides, I couldn't afford the cost of a show with this gallery.

I dropped the dream of being a fine artist. Clearly it wasn't for me. My parents were right: The important thing was having a real job, somewhere I could make money and get promoted to management and wear a shirt and tie and one day retire with a pension and an annuity and health benefits. The important thing was getting a degree from a good school, which is what I went back to that day.

Of course what I narrowly missed getting entangled in was a vanity gallery. Vanity galleries are considered beneath contempt in the art world. It took me many, many years before I'd even stick a toe back into the New York art scene, but when I did, I learned that, while a layperson might not be able to tell a real gallery from a vanity gallery, everyone involved in the scene knew which were which and saw the vanity galleries as what they are, namely scams run by unscrupulous scum preying on the gullible and ignorant. Vanity galleries are so far beneath notice you'd be hard-pressed to get a reputable dealer to even discuss their existence. And as for the artists who exhibit there, well, at best they're misguided fools, and at worst no-talent zeroes who can't get their work shown anywhere else. Paying someone to allow your work to be shown? That's no road to success.

Unless, apparently, you can buy a nice enough venue. For example, the Brooklyn Museum. They've whored out some of their precious real estate to the Rubell family and allowed them to mount the show Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection. Right there on the official Website it says they got their pet curator Mark Coetzee -- he's the former "Director of the Rubell Family Collection" -- to "organize" the show. So a collector of an artist, who presumably has some financial stake in the artist's reputation, gets to show the works they've collected in a museum, thus improving the artist's standing. Pretty good deal. Everybody wins: The museum gets a show on the cheap, maybe even some kickback donations; the artist gets a career boost, even if he's a Feeblist of such poor standing he's beneath such luminaries as Peyton and Dumas; the collector gets an improved return on investment as the artist's standing improves; and the director/organizer gets a paycheck for doing nothing but moving the works he recommended from one wall to another. Everybody wins!

Oh, wait, I forgot. Everybody wins except you, the art viewer. You're forced to look at crap instead of good art. Check out the Emperor's naked pimply ass. If you're lucky, maybe he'll fart in your face.

I'm Argumentative

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:27:00 +0000

One of the deep questions of philosophy -- perhaps the only question, really -- is this: Why do we do the things we do? I ask myself this often, especially when I find myself mired in something I really regret having started. There I am, sprawled on the couch with the jar of honey, two Bic pens with erasable ink, a bag of cedar shavings, half a bottle of tepid Poland Spring, and a #27 Torx screwdriver, and I wonder, what the heck was I thinking?

More frequently, though, I find myself in the middle of a fervent online conversation, desperately parsing yards and yards of electronic text, feverishly interleaving quoted parts of previous stages of the argument with carefully worded rebuttals, each delicately balanced on that sawhorse of clarity and contempt peculiar to online discourse. I spend hours and hours on these things, not every day but in fits, and when I think of the time I could've spent writing something more constructive -- like this, say -- I shudder and go pale. And the question I must ask myself is this: Why do I do these things I do? Or, more particularly: Why, when I see someone has written something incredibly stupid, do I feel I have to correct them?

Because that's what this comes down to. My need to correct things. Not that I'd claim I'm always absolutely right. I know I'm not. I'm wrong all the time. I'm wrong so often I don't know why I ever believe anything I say. But still I see something I think is stupid and I absolutely have to make it clear that I don't agree. Why can't I leave it alone? Why can't I just let it slide, let whatever it is sit there, harmlessly boneheaded, redounding to the discredit of the original author? Why do I need to get involved?

I've done a lot of soul searching on this over the years and I can tell you in no uncertain terms what it is not. I don't do it to look good. I don't do it to prove how smart I am, or to show off. I don't do it to show how wrong anyone else is or to make anyone else look dumb. I'm not trying to leave the world breathless with my awesomeness. Because if I were, I'd hope I'd have learned by now that it doesn't work. No one loves a pedant even when they're right, and I'm wrong way too often anyhow.

And yet I persist. An acquaintance writes a brief note about President Obama and the Freedom of Choice Act and I spend half a day debunking the story and then arguing with her about abortion, a subject I very pointedly have no opinion at all on. (She defriended me on Facebook by the time we were done.) Mark Cameron Boyd makes an offhand remark in reply to J.T. Kirkland's status line on Facebook and it metastasizes into a Proust-sized tome of aggrieved whinging on the subject of not a whole lot in particular. (Mark defriended me on Facebook by the time we were done.) Or Franklin -- himself no slouch in the Department of Pedantry -- corrects my use of "quadriplegic" and I correct his correction. (We're still friends. For now.)

In fact, have I told you how Franklin and I met? Someone, I forget who -- I think it was J.T. -- posted a quote from and a link to the Walter Darby Bannard Archive, an online compendium of all of Darby's articles and essays. I liked them, agreed with them, found them interesting, and started reading the whole shebang -- and noticed some errors here and there, mostly from the (largely automated) transcription from print to digital text. This bothered me, so I began sending corrections to the keeper of the archive, who happened to be Franklin. From there I visited his blog and made some comments and we swapped more friendly e-mail and then one day I realized we were friends. We've since gotten together in person a few times and hit it off just as well in real life as we did online.

Did I start copyediting Darby's writing because I like trying to tell a capital I from a lowercase L in a sans serif typeface? No I did not. Was I trying to impress Franklin, a guy I didn't even know? Not at all. Currying favor with Darby Bannard? Um, no. Would any normal person take on such a job, for free, just because they felt like it? I doubt it. So what was I doing?

I think I know what I was doing. I was doing for someone else that which I'd hope they'd do for me. I truly want to be corrected. If I make a spelling error, I would like it pointed out. If I use a word incorrectly, I want to know about it. If I have my facts wrong -- or totally don't know what I'm talking about -- I want someone to tell me.

Because simply knowing something is important to me. I don't understand why, exactly. But it is. My curiosity is infinite. It cannot be satisfied. I want to know everything there is know about everything. I want to speak all languages and read all the dead ones. I want to know how a bird flies, how to tell a turkey vulture from a hawk, and why the hedgehog can never be buggered at all. I read once about how there are some pigments used by Aborigines in Australia which are completely secret: No white person can know where they come from, how they're made, or even how they're used. Secrets! In this day and age! I was horrified.

To me, simply knowing is a virtue. I don't know why I feel that way but I do. I have an endless capacity for absorbing facts. The other day I went on a field trip with my son and his sixth grade Turkish class. Yes, he's taking Turkish in sixth grade. We all went to a nearby Turkish cultural center. There I fell into a conversation with one of the other parents and my son's teacher, who is herself Turkish. I was able to talk intelligently about Turkey and its inferiority complex because I've picked up a few things here and there about the place. And I learned something I didn't know: It would be illegal for my son's teacher to wear her Muslim headscarf to work in Turkey. They're so desperate not to be seen as a backward nation, so eager to appear secular, that they're curtailing religious expression.

I find stuff like that fascinating.

So at last this is me: I argue not to teach, but to learn. I want to be relieved of the burden of my ignorance.

I understand this is weird. It seems to me that most people would rather stay ignorant. And discussing things upsets some people so much they'd rather stop being my friend than continue. And if they don't want to be my friend any more -- even of the Facebook variety -- so be it. Not that I'm dumb enough to blame them entirely for being upset. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that anyone who defriends me over an argument does so because they're intellectually weak, although I'd like to think so. I know I can be abrasive, insulting, dismissive, frustrating and difficult, as well as a number of other even less-pleasant things. I don't mean to be, and I try not to be, but, well, it doesn't always work.

Still it seems to me that some people would rather remain ignorant, holding on to their wrong-headed beliefs, settling in as dwarfish, stunted creatures in their tiny cramped holes. Whatever makes them happy, I guess. I'd rather crawl outside and stretch and see some new stuff, even if the attempt to stand up straight and walk means tripping over my own feet and landing in the mud most of the time.

I read somewhere that mud is good for you.

Chuck Close

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:17:00 +0000

Speaking of Lisa Yuskavage: At her opening on February 19, I saw Chuck Close cruising around in his extremely cool wheelchair, which can rear up on two wheels. It's called an iBot and is apparently no longer being made despite how awesome it is. Being able to go up on its hind wheels like that has the salutary effect of a) making the user look like a badass cyborg Transformer and b) bringing the user's face up to eye level so they don't have to feel like they're being talked down to all the time.

For those of you who don't know: Mr. Close suffered a spinal artery aneurysm which left him a quadriplegic thirty years into his nearly fifty-year-long (so far) art career. I didn't realize he relies on a wheelchair until I saw Joe Fig's sculpture of him. I found out then that we both use Gamblin paints -- so we have something in common, that we're both former airbrush artists who now use Gamblin. Sometime later I saw a documentary about his career which filled in more details.

I greatly admire Mr. Close. I can only imagine the difficulties and frustrations he's had to face. It seems to me to be bad enough to find oneself paralyzed; to be paralyzed when you're an artist is that much worse; and then to be a paralyzed airbrush artist -- I don't think anyone who hasn't airbrushed can appreciate the level of precision, control, and practice it requires. Mr. Close's airbrush works show he was an absolute master of his instrument. To have all that taken away -- I've heard about more than one painter who, after having a stroke paralyzing their dominant arm, re-learned to paint using their other hand. That's impressive. But what Mr. Close has done is an order of magnitude more difficult.

I wish I could've talked to him to tell him how much I admire him. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Instead, I'm telling you.

Lisa Yuskavage

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Lisa Yuskavage, Reclining Nude, 2009, oil on canvas, 72x51 inches

When I read that Lisa Yuskavage was having a new show at Zwirner (February 19, 2009 to March 28, 2009) I looked forward to seeing what she was up to. I liked Lisa's work. Several years ago I'd made a trip down to Philadelphia specifically to see her first solo museum show there. But since then I hadn't seen any of her paintings in person, or anyway not many. So I thought I'd enjoy her latest show.

I don't know if, over the past few years or so, I've become more demanding or Lisa's gotten worse. But, damn, these are some crappy-ass paintings. They look like color studies for some triple-X animated feature, like pre-production work for some awful Ralph Bakshi abortion. Each one is slipshod from start to finish, as if she threw them together at the last minute. And since Zwirner's gallery runs the length of the block, I found it telling that most of the space was closed -- did she not have enough work? What's she been doing since her last show?

Lisa still has a nice line at times, some curvy forms which, in another context, might pass for what's often called "sensuous". But here it's put in service of content so puerile, technique so desultory, and composition so lifeless, it's completely wasted. The series of paintings here is almost autistic in its obsessive repetition, except no autistic person would ever browbeat anyone so mercilessly with their desire to be accepted. This collection of paintings nearly whimpers in its asking to be loved for the tricks that worked so well in the past; overall it's not so much shocking or outrageous as it is pitiable and sad.

Lisa Yuskavage, Pied, 2008, oil on canvas, 11.75x9 inches

I get the same whiff from Lisa's paintings as I do from John Currin's, namely that of a painter elevated to stardom before they had any idea what they were doing. Now she's groping around trying to figure out what to do next -- giant babies in harsh locales? Fat vulvas in flooded rooms? Twats as landscapes? -- without having the slightest idea what got her where she is. Particularly disingenuous are the few "pie face" paintings here: Is it whipped cream? Is this bukkake? Maybe it's supposed to be an attempt to stir up controversy, but the only contoversy I see is why such sophomoric content and hamfisted technique is left out where people can see it.

Urban Perspectives

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:36:00 +0000

If you stretched a rubber band all the way to where Denis Peterson was the last time I saw him and then let it snap, today you'd find him off where the rubber band ends up. Last time he was painting refugees and inmates of prison camps and victims of genocide. Today he's painting New York City street scenes.

I have to try really hard not to judge him. As he told me at his opening, he couldn't paint those people any more: He was crying while he painted. It's a difficult thing he was doing, and, really, was it his responsibility? Was what he was doing important in any sense? I can't answer those questions. That alone is enough to make me think I shouldn't judge him. So I won't make any more excuses for Denis; I'm going to stick to my general philosophy of art and concentrate on how the paintings look, despite my initial discomfort over their wholehearted embrace of Pop, with their meticulous recreations of billboards, magazine covers, neon signage, corporate logos, and other urban visual clutter.

Denis Peterson, Fashion Avenue, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 36x32 inches

Denis is working much closer to home these days. This show focuses exclusively on New York, specifically midtown Manhattan around Eighth Avenue. He says that he moved from his refugee paintings of Don't Shed No Tears to portraying the homeless of America; then he found himself spending more and more time on the backgrounds, on the buildings and signs behind and above his subjects. Following his nose the way artists often do, he began photographing and painting the world he probably knows best as a lifelong New Yorker, that of the vertical world of the city sidewalk.

I say vertical because these are certainly not a pedestrian's eye view of the city. The people are there doing their business, caught in startling yet somehow breezy clarity, studiously -- like good New Yorkers -- ignoring the photographer/painter and the bustling signs and windows above and around them. But the humans are just one part of the scene; most of the canvases are taken up by minutely observed advertising, building facades, streetlights, traffic signs, signals, and, off near the top, maybe a patch of blue sky.

I raved a lot about Denis' technique last time and all I can say now is, it wasn't enough raving. His latest series is a showcase for how far he can take his abilities: He is, really, an Olympic-level athlete of painting. I've seen a lot of fantastic painters in my time, academically trained and otherwise, but Denis -- Denis is in a class by himself. He is the Michael Phelps of painting, the Usain Bolt of airbrush and paintbrush. He makes Vermeer look like Jackson Pollock.

Keep in mind I'm just talking about technique. But the comparison to Vermeer is good in more ways than one: although good old Johannes was known for interiors, he painted regular people doing regular things, and Denis is doing the same with his street scenes. And they're both clearly photographically based; there are some holdouts who refuse to believe Vermeer used a camera obscura but I think the case is pretty well settled. Since Denis is alive and kicking, thankfully, we can ask him how he does it, and he can tell us that his compositions start with multiple photographs which he assembles. Then he adjusts details, makes changes, moves this here and that there, with the final result a scene that never really existed but which is a distillation of a real place. He transfers the composition in different ways -- projecting, tracing, and so on -- and then he begins to paint.

And there, frankly, is where the magic happens. The last series of his I saw was stunning in its evocation of a photo: If I hadn't been told otherwise, I probably would have assumed his paintings were digital prints on canvas. His current series is beyond that, beyond photography, beyond photorealism; Denis calls it hyperreality, but even that's too crude because it still has the word "reality" in it. Photos possess within them a paradox: The closer you look at them, the less you actually see. The same is true of most paintings. Get close enough and you start to see photo grains or blobs of paint or pixels. But not with these; the closer you get the smoother the paintings become. Even when Denis is using a brush and not his usual airbrush, when you get your nose right up against the painting, it's still smooth, perfectly formed, exactly rendered. Denis is using the paintbrush more, too, and it shows, but really only if you look very closely and carefully. I actually prefer his brushwork slightly since it's a little more lively, even though he's still many miles from impasto.

The results of all this technique and choice of subject are technical marvels and entertaining documentaries. Even though the precise moment of each painting never exists, it's nevertheless true in the sense that it's a minor drama enacted every day. The signs and buildings of New York City are fluid, ever-changing, and no snapshot could possibly capture more than a momentary portrait of any given vista; but Denis, through his art, manages to snare a true, timeless sense of how the city feels.

But it's a funny thing: Under the slickness of these works, the Pop-ness of it all, the sheer advertising campaign shininess of the paintings, I think what comes through most of all is Denis' sensitivity. It was less obvious in Don't Shed No Tears because all I had for comparison was that series; now that I've seen more, it's clear that underlying all of Denis' work is an acute sensitivity, a deftness and lightness of touch, an infusion of caring, not just for the technical aspects of painting, but also for the subjects he chooses. He spends about 200 hours on each painting and during that time he truly comes to understand what he's painting and, more, he transmits that understanding, transmutes it somehow into his art.

It's also worth noting that, in this latest series, Denis carefully hides his signature. I'm a sucker for a puzzle like that. I always used to love studying Hirschfeld caricatures to find his daughter's name. I live for that stuff. Also it gave me something to do at the opening.

Denis' show opened at the Mark Gallery in Englewood, New Jersey, a very fancy neighborhood with a downtown mostly made up of Talbots, sushi restaurants, and Audi and Mercedes dealerships. Being a close personal friend of Denis' -- he immediately and warmly greeted me as "Emmanuel" -- I got to meet the gallery owner, Arielle Mark; her wonderful husband, who was also the official photographer; and David Kapp, one of the other artists in the show. Because I've made it sound like it was all about Denis, but in fact he was just one of three. There was also Ben Aronson, who I didn't meet, even though I really liked his work.

Ben Aronson, Closed Ramp, West Side Highway, 1997, oil on panel, 52x46 inches

Ben's work showed an excellent grasp of atmosphere with a brilliantly deep palette of jewellike tones vibrating against gauzy passages of haze. Although basically impressionist in his approach, and showing the same kind of attention to light and air, Ben delves much more deeply into the shadows of the city.

David Kapp, Go, 2008, oil on linen, 28x28 inches

David's work impressed me somewhat less, maybe because I felt I understood how they were made. Not that I could have painted them myself, exactly, but that they were within my abilities; they were made up of things I could do, unlike the other two artists' work. I saw David's paintings as basically surface-level Impressionism, with a lot of brushwork taking over for a lack of detail and understanding. There's an element of mobile phone photography to David's paintings in this show, as if he just transfered and painted over very low-resolution JPEGs without even squinting at the actual contents.

Arielle certainly put out a fine spread of food and drink, including -- a first at any opening I've attended -- a roving drinks server. There was some really incredible hummus and some sushi that had been out a little longer than it should, but that's what I get for arriving late. I hate being the fat guy at the buffet, though, so after sneaking a few bits I commenced the gallery ramble, which is what you do after you've already looked at everything once but still feel you have to hang around a few more minutes.

Daniella Sheinman, Venus No. 2, graphite on canvas, 78x54 inches

My ramble took me into the office following a glance at a large work by Daniella Sheinman. It caught my eye because it was the kind of thing I might do, sort of. As I walked into the office I was slightly startled to find a young man sprawled on a couch fiddling with an iPod. He turned out to be Arielle's son, and he admitted he'd invited himself to the opening before realizing he had absolutely nothing to do there.

Then I noticed another piece leaning on the wall. "Anna Druzcz!" I said. "I know her work from Williamsburg!" (Before you ask: Yes, I do talk in hyperlinks.)

Arielle's son then told me how he'd seen Anna's work at an art fair -- some kind of small works affordable art fair or other the name of which I didn't catch -- and he liked it, so his mother looked at it, and decided she liked it also. "I have one in my bedroom," he said. "Mom got it for me for my bar mitzvah." Lucky kid! And good for Anna, too: A sale and a gallery all in one go.

Gerry Andrea, The Piano Scene of Dave McKenna

Some more rambling, some more meeting people. I ended up talking to Gerry Andrea, an illustrator and artist who used to do album covers for jazz records on the Columbia label among many other things. Got to love those old jazz LP covers.

Englewood might not be the center of the art world, and it may not look anything like Denis' paintings, or Ben's or David's, for that matter, but it does have this going for it: After I said my good-byes to everyone, it was a short drive home.

Adam Fowler

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:41:00 +0000

Two words describe the weather on the night of Adam Fowler's opening at Margaret Thatcher Projects: Cold.

I'm sorry, I lost a word there because my face froze. It was so cold people were cuddling up with witches' teats to keep warm. Still, there was a healthy turnout at Adam's show.

Adam Fowler, Untitled (64 layers), 2008, graphite on paper, hand cut and layered, 5.5x8 inches

When last we saw Adam he was doing pretty much the same thing he's doing now: Drawing lots of loops and curves in graphite (that's pencil to you and me), cutting out the white paper in between, and stacking the results in layers. The final works are somewhere between drawings and sculptures. They're elegant, minimalist, and, all in a group, let's face it, not very exciting. Individually taken they're lovely little works, although they're more reliquaries for obsession than beautiful objects. I like them better when he switches it up a little. For example, in the pictured piece, in the upper right you can see a few loops that curve more tightly than the others. I like that.

Adam's only real change from three years ago that I can see is now some of the pieces are laid flat on plinths slightly over waist height. I think this is an excellent improvement. One of the problems with Adam's work is it doesn't work at all from a distance; as you approach them, from across the room, each piece just looks gray, an indistinct blob of undifferentiated fuzz. Standing in the doorway to the gallery it doesn't look like anything's really on display. But place the same work flat and you can't approach it: All you can do is get up to it and look down, so you first apprehend it from the proper viewing distance. You can get closer if you want (or if you're very short) but you can't get farther away -- pretty much everyone is forced to see the work from the same approximate distance, about half arm's length. Which is pretty much right.

I met Adam for the first time that night. He's just what you'd expect, a slim, bearded monastic, appearing as if he just stepped out of his cell. But cheerful and friendly, like a happy monk. I asked about the works laid flat. He said he did that because he didn't want each one to have a definite orientation -- there's not supposed to be a defined "up" with his pieces. It's just that, when you hang it on the wall, it has to have an "up." But if you lay it down, you can view it from any side.

So, really, pulling the pieces off the wall solves two problems. More of them should be seen that way. Maybe at Adam's next show they'll all be lying down.

Larry Poons, Last of the Red Hot Abstract Expressionists

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:50:00 +0000

Is it okay to call Larry Poons an Abstract Expressionist? I'm not sure. He's been around so damned long it's hard to say what he should be called -- he's outlived more movements than most people get to see in their lifetimes. I'm going to go ahead and call him an Abstract Expressionist because that's what he's doing now, I believe. If you see his most recent show at Danese and don't agree, well, you're blind. It looks to me like he's gone all the way around and back again and here he is, about 72 years old, not only still kicking but still working, and not only still working but still working at six feet by six feet, and working every inch of that canvas.

I won't say that the show bowled me over. But I was affected a lot more than I expected to be. Larry has that in common with Jackson Pollock, too -- I never expected Pollock to do much for me, but when I finally saw his work in person, wow, it knocked me back. Larry didn't hit me that hard, maybe because I don't sense that laser-like intensity of focus; rather, Larry's more meandering, questing. Maybe that's just because he's made it a lot farther than old Jackson ever did.

But I'm leading off with Pollock and Abstract Expressionism because Larry's latest show is rooted in that tradition. The works in this show are all large, all-over, tactile, almost scultped, and best viewed from that sweet spot where the painting just fills your field of view. Stand there and the world of the painter opens up to you. It's a world, in this case, filled with tentative marks, mostly right-handed dabs and strokes, mostly low-chroma, fleshy colors. The texture varies from mere stains on the canvas all the way up to thick oozing strokes, from grainy crumbles of nearly pure pigment to gluey translucent strands of almost pure acrylic gel. Every so often Larry dips into the brighter hues, whipping out a pink close to fluorescence or a deep sapphire blue.

Larry Poons at Danese, 2009, installation view: Check out the staple!

Looking more closely at the work you can see some of his methods. It's clear in some cases he ended with the same canvas he began with; the edges are neatly taped off. In other cases he's working in the time-honored Color Field tradition of cutting smaller pieces out of larger canvases; the paint heads off and around the back of the stretchers. I assume from this that he works on unstretched cotton duck and only mounts the paintings later. Another tradition he adheres to is that of the messy studio: I found a loose staple dried to one of the paintings. Some future conservator's going to have fun with that, gluing it back on periodically.

Larry Poons, Calling You, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 67.25x114 inches

Danese thoughtfully didn't have anyone showing in the smaller spaces off the main gallery. I'm not sure anyone would want to compete. This also allowed the gallerist to set one painting aside to stand by itself in a small quiet space. Amid the hubbub of the opening, this was like a little chapel, where visitors, perhaps sensing the atmosphere, only went in two or three at a time. And there is the best work in the show, a lovely, lyrical painting called Calling You.

Unlike the other paintings in the show, Calling You isn't painted on raw canvas, but instead is based on an underpainting of ultramarine. Ultramarine was once upon a time the most expensive pigment in the world, not just because of its rarity, but also because of its clear, ringing beauty. During the Renaissance it was often reserved for the gown of the Virgin Mary. Here Larry has used it as a powerful foundation, keeping this painting from quietly humming to itself like the others -- instead it sings. Across the field of blue his strokes play freely -- I'm mixing metaphors here. It's really not something to be described, only, as the best art should be, experienced.

If I say the show didn't bowl me over, that's all together; Calling You all by itself is absolutely fantastic. Make the trip to Danese for that alone.

Some people talk as if past art movements and styles are settled, done, and dead. But on the wall they're just as alive as we want them to be. It takes someone like Larry Poons to come along and show us that truth.

[Note: I'd like to thank Alexandra Woodworth at Danese for getting me the JPEG and details for "Calling You".]

Art in the Free Market

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:20:00 +0000

Anyone who believes the free market allocates resources most efficiently needs to stay in an Atlantic City hotel and casino for a while. The waste is staggering. And I'm not some tree-hugging Al Gore-loving granola-eating ecoweenie, either. But as an engineer by training and a fan of Bucky Fuller I find any waste upsetting. It always seems to me we should be doing a lot better. I keep thinking, is this really the best we can manage? Isn't there some way to channel some of this money off to people who could really use it for something?

Amongst that waste -- with the electricity running all those empty slot machines and the heat keeping warm all those long desolate hallways and various other unoccupied nook and crannies -- there's a lot of artistic effort wasted, too. I was heading into the bathroom by the pool when I noticed the vestibule was decorated -- colorful cars by the men's, fashion sketches of dresses by the women's, natch -- with actual hand-pulled prints. Down in the corner was penciled in: "1/1". I'm not sure of the exact process, but it looked like something where the artist paints on a plate which is then pressed onto the paper. Very colorful. These particular ones weren't great art or even good art, but quality is not what I was thinking about.

Paying a little more attention as I moved around the hotel showed me that the place was positively crawling with artwork, both originals and limited editions of one kind or another. And a few photos.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was at an opening for a group show where I ended up in a conversation with two of the artists talking about commissions with international hotel chains. One had been asked to do 40 paintings in about as many days for about as many thousands of dollars. "Not a good payday," he noted, although personally for that kind of opportunity I'd maim a grandmother. The other chimed in that he'd been offered a commission to do about a hundred paintings for the lobby and some suites of a Manhattan hotel, but the hotel company wanted to get the reproduction rights to the works too, and run off prints to fill in the rest of the rooms. He didn't think it'd reflect well on him or his work.

And not too long before that I noticed that my online art friend Harold Hollingsworth was reporting that some of his latest series of paintings, which my wife really fell in love with on his site, are going to decorate a Nordstrom in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Since he’s out on the west coast I wouldn’t get to see his work, but when the store opens in March I’ll be able to zip on down and check it out.

I've often thought -- not to pick on Harold, for whom I am nothing but happy and whose paintings really do look great -- I've often thought when looking at department store or hotel hallway art, that those niches seem like they'd be some kind of art purgatory. Like playing in a professional cover band. You know, where it's got all the motions of the real thing but is somehow ersatz, somehow less. I also wonder, at the same time, if I'm not being unnecessarily dismissive. And now I'm also pondering: How much of the art world is subsidized by hotels? How many artists surreptitiously sell work to the various chains -- good lord, they're accepting money from Paris Hilton! -- and don't mention it on their resumes?

Personally I think we'd be better off leaving the hotel walls empty and just letting hotels send checks to artists: That saves on shipping costs and we wouldn't have to look at mediocre prints outside the bathroom. But then, judging by my yearly budget, I'm clearly unfit for deciding the most efficient allocation of resources.

How's My Graphic Design?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:09:00 +0000

Facebook is wonderful. Through that I can get all sorts of entertaining things to comment on.

Today my friend Qi Peng -- why he's my friend I don't know, but then I don't why almost anyone is my friend -- Qi Peng posts a link to William Powhida's blog, who is linking to Buck Naked's blog...and I'm already tired of explaining this. Shorter version: There's this blog called How's My Dealing? which apparently is supposed to be an obnoxious, truth-telling, badly informed, very brave blog about galleries and dealers in the art world. There's a Deathwatch on what galleries are in danger of closing -- or we wish would close already? -- and all kinds of other breathlessly important things to art and artists.

Sounds great! Just one problem: I CAN'T READ THE DAMNED THING. It's like the evil horrid malnourished spawn of late-1990s Wired layout. The only thing missing is the BLINK tag and that's probably because Blogger sends a hit squad out to your location if you try it. Any time anyone uses a different color for every letter in a sentence you know you're in trouble. It's like when I got one of those multicolor pens back in grade school and wrote all my headings in four different inks for a week. And when the anonymous blogger isn't writing in all different colors, the text is black on dark gray -- news flash, that's pretty much impossible to read.

And it's not just the layout and colors, which are bad enough, but the style, which is, like, hyper Page Six smacked into a brick wall. What the hell does "Gallerists Respond: Pete Surace has commented on RARE, granted bonus O and renewed benefit of the doubt" even mean? It's not English, it's not any kind of language. It makes those blind items -- "Who was that dapper English actor with a hit movie in theaters vomiting into the sink with at Club Wazoo?" -- look like Shakespeare.

I think I learned my lesson on anonymous bloggers back when Edna was still active. I'm going to share that lesson with you now: Put your real name to it, you coward, or shut the fuck up.

Zach to Artists: 'Suck It'

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:26:00 +0000

Artinfo reports that Zach Feuer is dropping artists from his gallery due to the weak economy. He's quoted as saying, "Now is the time to have a lower overhead and be small and lean." Because, after all, keeping an artist's name on your Website costs money. Why move to a smaller space or a less expensive neighborhood when you can tell artists to go scratch? Especially when you can swap out a potentially cranky living painter for a nun who's been dead for 20 years.

My favorite part, though:

Feuer’s old roster was heavy on painters, while the pared-down group contains only three. “[I] wanted to make sure there were no redundancies, with two people covering the same area,” he said.

Because, after all, one painter's pretty much the same as another.

Dear Zach: May you choke on your Rainbow Backwash.

Shot Across the Bauhaus

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Okay, those reviews I promised? Coming. Really. I mean it. Probably.

In the meantime: I don't know if you ever read my other blog, Probable Working Sequence, but if you don't, you don't know that I've had a studio in Brooklyn since August. I have. Over the past few months I've found myself drawn into the neighborhood. These things happen. You see the same guy behind the counter at the convenience store, you see the same people on the train, you bump into the same people at Lowe's. It's inevitable.

Today I finally reached the point where I picked up a copy of the free local paper with my bagel. It's the Brooklyn Paper, subhead: "Brooklyn's Real Newspaper". I'm kind of sorry they don't have a sub-subhead, something like "The Paper, with News on it, really, from Brooklyn".

The February 7, 2009 issue leads off with a great article titled ART ATTACK by one Mike McLaughlin. I'd like to give Mike credit -- and I really do mean this as a compliment -- for taking a subway station's worth of advertising and turning it into a blistering article -- with carryover! -- belittling the Museum of Modern Art and, by extension, all of Manhattan. Mr. McLaughlin accuses MoMA of attempting to poach museum-goers from Brooklyn by filling the Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street subway station with posters and informational displays and digital gewgaws about the paintings in their collection. Mike apparently loves loves loves the Brooklyn Museum and feels like MoMA is a pretty crappy johnny-come-lately to the New York museum scene.

I personally love these little internecine borough squabbles, since I grew up in Staten Island, which is always the loser. The idea of Brooklyn asserting its superiority in anything is something I find endlessly amusing. Brooklyn's main claim to fame, to my mind, is that it's nicer than Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx, which is sort of like saying it's less virulent than smallpox, the bubonic plague, and influenza.

Then again, it's worth reiterating that I grew up in Staten Island and yet have never been in the Brooklyn Museum. I didn't even know Brooklyn had a museum. Why would they? I thought they kept all their art in Manhattan like everyone else.

My favorite part of the article, though, is the eminently unbiased, objective, and newsworthy table which I reproduce for you here:

Brooklyn Museum	INSTITUTION	MoMA
1825	FOUNDED	1929
Bursting with Egyptian and African art	STRENGTHS	Large collection, if you like that kind of thing
That "Star Wars" costume show	EMBARRASSING MOMENT	Once hung a Matisse upside-down!
No money for subway station ad campaigns	WEAKNESSES	$20 admission price
Native	RELATIONSHIP TO BROOKLYN	Interloper

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking about heading to the Brooklyn Museum sometime soon. Did you know they're native to Brooklyn? I'm thinking they need a subhead: The Brooklyn Museum: Brooklyn's Museum.

Why There's So Much Bad Art

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:41:00 +0000

I'm going to lead off by demonstrating a great technique. I'm going to magically cast a glowing aura of erudite gravitas over my whole essay. I'll perform this amazing feat by quoting a few lines of one of the most popular poems in the English language. It's perfect for this kind of magic because, first of all, it's really dark and portentous and therefore really sincere and important; and second of all it's really short, so it doesn't tax anyone's brains too hard. Part of the magic of appearing erudite and grave involves not straining yourself too hard. (Strain too much and you just look constipated.) Thirdly, the poem is so incredibly well known you don't have to look too hard to find a copy.

Okay, so here comes the magic. Get ready for it.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

from The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

See that? Isn't it wonderful? Now I look really serious and smart and can move on to the main part of my essay, which is to lay out who the worst are and to build up some passionate intensity in the best.

I have been too respectful.

This might seem a bit much for me to say. You might think I'm an amazingly disrespectful person with the things I've written on my blog and elsewhere. But you're not in my head. You don't know what I really think. And I often find myself trying to phrase things in a nicer way. I pull my punches. Sometimes I just avoid saying things -- even really obvious things -- because I'm too respectful.

I grew up lower middle class in New York City. My father was an auto mechanic and my friends were sons of firemen and construction workers. Roofers and carpenters. Janitors. People who worked with their hands. One thing I was taught growing up was the value of hard work because working hard was something the people around me knew about. They worked hard to get what they had. They respected work.

They also extended this ethic to others. When you met a successful businessman, you showed him respect, because to become successful, he must've worked very hard. The more successful he appeared, the more respectful you had to be.

What I've learned over the years, though, is that actual success, the appearance of success, and work are three separate items. You can have any one of them without the others.

When you walk into a hardware store, let's say, you can be reasonably sure, unless the store is new or going out of business as you stand there, that it's making enough money to continue. As my dad would say, it's makin' its nut: Selling enough merchandise to cover its expenses. You can look around on the shelves and not ask yourself, does someone buy all this crap? Because someone does. The store sells enough fertilizer and paintbrushes and screws and nails and whatever else to pay for its rent and employees and dusty stock of enameled cast iron cookware. If you meet the owner of the store, you show him some respect, because he's running a successful business.

The same is true of a dry cleaners, and a liquor store, and a Chinese take-out place. Because no one opens a 7-11 for the cachet, for the prestige, for the access to a higher class of people. These places all make their nut or they die.

Not all businesses are like that, though. There are businesses that people go into because it looks like fun or because it makes them feel better about themselves in some way. Businesses that come with a certain class, that allow one to rub elbows with better people than you find on the street. Movie studios. Restaurants. Antique shops. Art galleries.

If you approach the people who own and run these places the same way I was taught to, you can end up in trouble. Because you might walk into an art store and look around and think, "Who buys all this crap? Well, someone must, because the store's still here and the rents are really high in this neighborhood." And you might be respectful to the owner of that gallery because you think they're running a good business.

Are they really? You have no way of knowing. For all you know, the gallery owner sells heroin in the South Bronx to pay for their art store. They could have a well-paying day job, or a trust fund, or a rich spouse. There's no reason at all to think, when you want to know who buys all this crap, there's no reason to think that anyone does. It could all really be exactly what it appears to be: Worthless junk.

Of course at a certain point the appearance of success can become success of a sort. People continued to invest in Bernard Madoff's enterprises, not because he actually had a good business, but because he appeared to have a good business. People threw good money after imaginary money. Likewise, someone might buy a Jeff Koons sculpture because Jeff Koons is a successful artist. Never mind if his reputation is all hot air: If enough people buy his junk because he appears successful then he becomes successful.

Alas, I was brought up to be respectful to people who appeared to be successful. I'd probably have been respectful to Charles Ponzi, Jack Abramoff, or Bernard Madoff. If I met him, I'd probably smile and shake George W. Bush's hand. Because it's hard to be disrespectful to people, and I was brought up to be polite and respectful towards successful men. I was never really taught to question that success.

Gradually I've learned it's a bad idea to respect those who don't deserve it. They won't respect you back and you'll look like an idiot. They'll use you for what they can and they'll treat you like crap otherwise, because they don't need your respect. They didn't earn it and they don't want it. They can drop you like a used Kleenex because their business isn't real. It's trickery. It's fake. It is, in fact, bullshit.

Worse, if you appear as if you might even slightly threaten their bullshit, if you perhaps suggest they face the emptiness and worthlessness of their endeavor, then they really won't like you. And if you continue to show them respect after that, well, then you'll just look like a lickspittle.

I don't want to look like a lickspittle. I don't want to toady. I don't want to tie myself in knots trying not to say the obvious thing, trying to be polite, trying to maintain a veneer of civility in the face of gross stupidity, cupidity, and egoism. I don't want to be nice any more. As the great philosopher James Woods once said, "There's only one thing you get from eating a bowl of shit, and that's a bigger bowl of it the second time around."

I think I've eaten the biggest bowl of shit I'm going to.

My plan is not to attack people for no reason. I have no intentions of being entirely negative here. I have no desire to expressly go looking for people I can pick on.

However, my plan is to stop being nice to people who don't deserve it. I'm going to praise those who earn praise and denigrate those who earn denigration. I'm not going to sit quietly while stupidty reigns. I'm going to renew my commitment to total and complete honesty. I'm going to strive to write down the truth as I see it, and I'm going to strive to see things truly.

This is going to make people angry. This is going to, at some point, make you angry. Too bad. For everyone who thinks that they're allowed to wave their ignorant opinions and unlettered ideas around in public without being called on their bullshit, I offer this quick course in logic: Reasonable people can disagree. You disagree with me. That doesn't mean you're reasonable.

Editorial: Who Cares About Museums Anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:04:00 +0000

I'm going to take a break from my usual format here and do a little editorializing. I do have a review I'm supposed to be writing but it hasn't made it down the pipe yet. It'll get here. Or maybe it won't.

In the meantime my efforts have been going -- well, mostly they've been going nowhere. But a little of them have been expended over at Ed Winkleman's trying to have a discussion about attitudes towards art. Specifically, administrators at Brandeis University have made some noises about possibly closing the Rose Art Museum and selling off its art because -- or possibly in case -- they need the money. Ed is horrified. In fact he writes, "it's highly insulting to treat a collection as rich as the Rose's as mere property...[it is] a significant slice of our collective culture and a collective commitment to preserve it, as such, for future generations."

But Ed refuses to consider that his gallery might be part of the problem. You can go over and read all about it, but it's long and there's a lot of chaff in there; or you can take my shortened version here:

ED WINKLEMAN: Brandeis University thinks it's okay to just sell off all its art. Personally I blame the government, and the wing-nut branch of the conservative elements in it in particular, for this very American ambivalence toward culture.

FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH: Maybe, before you blame the Bush administration, you should consider what role you yourself, and Winkleman Gallery artists, have had in developing that American ambivalence toward culture.

ED: This isn't about my gallery! And anyway you're just jealous!

Ed thereafter closed down all discussion about his own artists, which is a real shame, because to me they're at the very heart of the issue. Because as I see it, you've got an administrator at Brandeis who says, "We're getting low on cash. What can we do to trim our budget such that we can continue to provide an education to our students? Maybe we can close down the museum. After all, it's full of dusty crap no one understands or cares about, but which we can sell for some good money."

And who comes out of the woodwork to decry such a horrible plan? A guy who runs a gallery that shows shoes sculpted out of licorice and calls them art.

"Obviously we're on the right track," says the administrator, and calls up the auction house.

I mean, really: How can any non-artist be expected to take art seriously when what they get from the people who ostensibly do take art seriously is a display of push brooms with flags on the handles or Christopher K. Ho's "Happy Birthday", which not only doesn't even exist as a physical work of art, but can't be understood by anyone who isn't already involved in the art world? If contemporary gallerists have that kind of contempt for art and the art-going public, how can anyone expect a bean-counter in a cubicle to pay serious attention to them?

Keep in mind that this isn't about Brandeis per se or the Rose Art Museum or the worth of their collection. They could have the greatest art collection in the world for all I know. The important thing here is, when someone approaches a subject about which they know very little, they'll judge the tree by its fruit. And if Winkleman Gallery is the fruit, they just might decide to cut down the tree.

What's frustrating about this is Ed's cutting off this end of this discussion as if he's completely uninvolved. Well, Ed, you asked the questions. How can Brandeis contemplate such a thing? With supporters like you out there, pretty easily. You write, "I could not in good conscience now advise an art student to consider this university." So that means you want to keep your kind of artists out of Brandeis?

"Win-win," says that Brandeis administrator, and the museum is on the block.

Gandhi said we must become the change we wish to see in the world. If you want art to be taken seriously -- the way, for example, chemistry and physics are -- then stop fucking around.

Linear Abstraction, Half Colors of Quarter Things, Off the Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:23:00 +0000

Just a quick trip into Chelsea, a surgical strike, as it were, zipping in and out as quickly as possible while still, one hopes, giving the art its due. I probably would've skipped it if not for my new Facebook friend Gary Petersen, who happened to have a couple of paintings in a new show at McKenzie Fine Art, which is pretty much irresistible to me.

Gary Petersen, Departure, 2008, oil on canvas, 50x36 inches

Gary's a hard-edge abstraction painter, I guess you'd say, with his curving lines and bands of color. He's sort of like Frank Stella without the bombast -- Stella seems to demand that you like him because he's so IMPORTANT while Gary is just there, and you can like him if you want. Maybe that's a function of the scale of the work, since Gary's two paintings together probably don't make a quarter of the area of a typical Stella.

So the paintings won't blow your hair back but they are good, solid works. Jazzy enough to keep from being wallpaper. And I like Gary's color choices. I asked him how he works out his color schemes and he confided in me -- I hope it wasn't too confidential -- that he makes it up as he goes along. He said one of his teachers once told him his color sense was dreadful and he needed a course in color theory, but Gary managed to avoid it, and I like the results.

I wish there were more of his paintings in the show so I could have more to write about them, but there are just the two; and they're the best things there. I can't even be critical of the other work because it slid right past my consciousness like an overcooked egg off a plate.

Next door at the usually uninteresting Jeff Bailey Gallery things weren't much better: A few interesting things sprinkled between some deeply boring things, with a set of paintings kind of in the middle.

Zohar Lazar, Slow Peel, 2008, gouache on paper, 15x22 inches

On the interesting side is Zohar Lazar and his part Surreal, part James Rosenquist gouaches. Right there you're thinking wackiness, but somehow the mix is less wacky and more intense, although not, to my mind, as intense as it wants to be. These paintings have all the self-seriousness of classic Surrealism but lack its creepy inscrutability; they don't exactly make sense, but they seem to fit together a little more comfortably than they should. The gouache certainly robs the paintings of some of their impact. Zohar's technique is excellent but the inherent flatness, the heaviness of the medium drags down his imagery. No matter how much you work at it, it's hard to make a car shine in gouache.

Chris Gentile, End Times/Amend Times #2, 2008, C-print, ed. 5, 114x11 inches

Chris Gentile, meanwhile, holds up the bottom end with a short series of hilariously pretentiously titled photos. Photos of...I don't know. Stuff. Maybe not even photos. Maybe Photoshopped images. Maybe raytracings. I have no idea and have no interest in finding out. They're visually inert.

Joshua Marsh, Pitcher (square), 2008, oil on panel, 16x16 inches

Somewhere in the middle is the work of Joshua Marsh, whose simple but blazingly bright still lifes invite further inspection and then turn out not to be as interesting as you thought. They look sort of like photo negatives, and studies of negative space, and there's some exploration of shapes within shapes, and then it all sort of fails to come together in any kind of coherent way. There's something here, and I hope Joshua goes digging for it, but at the moment it's not enough.

Finally I stopped in Lennon, Weinberg because I saw some more hard-edge paintings and thought I'd see what it was. It turned out to be Off the Wall, a show mainly interesting for the large number of French people at the opening, there to see, I guess, the five French artists in the show.

The show's gimmick is a lot less fun than that, though. "Off the Wall" -- this one guy, he painted right on the wall! Far out! And this other guy, his sculpture grows, like, out of the wall! Sort of! And this other artist, they piled a whole bunch of boxes!

Maybe Mr. Lennon's dad or Mr. Weinberg's father-in-law is in the housepaint business or something and the gallery's just a showplace for painting over different types of stains -- acrylics! graphite! oil pastel! -- since Stephen Westfall had just painted the back wall of the room which now hosts the pointless scribblings of Gilgian Gelzer.

Off the Wall, installation view (Pierre Mabile, Philippe Richard), 2009

Pierre Mabille's paintings -- and don't forget the parts that are Off the Wall! -- are a little better, if, I guess, you really like those little wooden plugs used to repair knots in plywood. In different contrasting colors. Frederique Lucien cuts up her canvas -- exciting and transgressive. And Philippe Richard has a tangle of multicolored sticks which reminds me strongly of something I've seen somewhere else but can't place. Maybe a kid's construction toy.

Altogether deeply shallow. Time to go home!

Josh Garber

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:27:00 +0000

Josh Garber, Fervent, stainless steel, 78x44x34 inches

I just wanted to mention that, as of my most recent visit to Chelsea last Thursday, Josh Garber's wonderful sculpture, Fervent, as featured on this very page two years ago, is still available from the Robert Steele Gallery. Every so often when I wander by I see it sitting in the gallery and I think, how is this still here? Because it can't possibly be overpriced. It's too good at any price.

I'd miss seeing it, I suppose, but someone should really buy it already.

Marlene Dumas

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:04:00 +0000

I wasn't in the Museum of Modern Art to see Marlene Dumas' show there. I was there, along with apparently half of everyone in New York City, to see the Van Gogh show on its second-to-last day. While I was waiting for my Van Gogh ticket time to roll around, I wandered through the building, starting with Marlene. Why not? I'd expected to really dislike it. I've seen her work online and it looks like something I'd despise. Jerry Saltz said it was dreary.

The first thing I thought of at the show was Jasper Johns. The work reminds me strongly of Johns, particularly the recent Gray. One thing Marlene has in common with Jasper is their touch: Marlene has a lovely painterly brushstroke at times, the kind of gestural calligraphy that cries out "I'm a serious painter!" It's the kind of thing that makes me realize why some painters are lauded in excess of their gifts -- if you don't know anything else about painting, if your eye is completely blind to real quality, this kind of brushstroke can appear to be genius.

Marlene Dumas, Self Portrait at Noon, 2008, oil on canvas

Another thing Marlene has in common with our old pal Jasper is contempt for other people. It radiates off of everything they do, a disapproving frown hanging over all their work. However, Jasper's disdain results in paintings that have little or nothing to do with humans at all -- no relation to their concerns, feelings, or thoughts. In fact I feel his paintings float out in this intellectual vacuum with crystallized vapors of composition and color theory hanging around them in the void.

Marlene's contempt instead seems to have made her very angry. She seems determined to paint the ugliness of people, whether dead or alive, young or old. Her anger even affects her colors: I got the feeling that she looked at the beauty and subtlety of pure, unmixed pigments and thought, "I can't paint the horror and agony of human existence with these. I must make them as unpleasant as possible!" That's how these works are like Jasper's Gray show: Every color has been dragged down towards the low end of the chroma scale. They've all been pounded flat and lifeless, the better to portray the existential anguish of being human.

In this, Marlene is lucky: In the current art climate, ugliness equals honesty. Because her paintings are unabashedly nasty and unpleasant -- even images of babies and pregnant women, and really how much must you hate people to make even them grusesome? -- her work can be freely embraced as being honest, expressive, dripping with meaning, drenched in content, and, as she's female, larded with commentary on the state of bourgeois male-dominated society.

Sadly, this all appears to me to be a pose. If it's not a pose, then it's pathological: Marlene needs Prozac. And if she's not depressed or faking it, then I'd have to say maybe she's just not that good a painter. Maybe this is a case of someone making ugly work because it's the best they can manage. The online verbiage actually uses the phrase "extraordinary technical quality" which is either hilarious or very sad depending on how you look at it; either our civilization's declined so precipitously no one knows what quality looks like any more or the verbiage writer went batshit crazy trying to make Marlene sound fantastic. There isn't even the hint that Marlene can draw very well.

But there is that touch, that brushstroke. It's nice. When it's working for her, it can be quite evocative, elevating yet another painting of a dead distorted person into something, while not exactly beautiful, at least approaching bearable. When the touch is absent, however, the work melts into a distasteful morass of bile.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Collector's Eye, Kate Clark, Vincent Desiderio, Sara Eichner

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Rywalt) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:20:00 +0000

Cold weather pounced on New York City last week, making it good weather for walking but notso hotso for being indoors; or rather too hotso, since all the buildings have the heat cranked up to about 95 degrees. Joe Rosato claims it's just everyone's way of saying "Screw you!" to Nature -- if Nature's going to make it that cold out, then I'm going to make it really goddamn hot inside!

That's okay, though, because last Thursday you were better off wandering aimlessly outside looking for a coffee than you were entering Chelsea galleries and looking around. It was a staggeringly lame night for the opening shows.

I don't remember what order I staggered in so I'm going to go in no particular order, although I'll save the best for last. My gallery postcard pile has Trenton Doyle Hancock on top, so I'll talk about his show, titled Fear, at James Cohan.

I fear it was very bad.

Get it?

Trenton Doyle Hancock, A Tippy Head Run, 2008, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60x60 inches

No, seriously, it wasn't really totally completely awful, it was just lame, in the entirely accurate sense of the word: This is a show barely limping around, dragging one misshapen leg behind it, collapsing in exhaustion every so often, and reaching weakly for the crutch across the room. It's feeble, a mish-mash of graffiti and 1930s animation and cartooning tropes, like warmed-over late period Philip Guston, combined with a pathetically limp color scheme and a total lack of draftsmanship. It goes nowhere, does nothing, and looks like crap. The only halfway decent thing about the show is Trenton's painted all the gallery walls with black-on-white raindrop shapes, giving the rooms a neat atmosphere. It probably would've been better, however, to have left all the paintings in a dumpster somewhere and the walls blank white. Titanium dioxide, all by itself, is more interesting than this show.

Next in my pile is Collector's Eye at Gana Art, which took over the space from some museum-type organization thing that never showed anything I wanted to look at. New owners, same result: Two floors of junk. Whatever collector's eye is the basis for this show is blind -- but wealthy. The show consists of one floor of dusty old relics from Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Damien Hirst, Tom Wesselmann, Anthony Caro, Cy Twombly, and a few others. Upstairs is given over to some Korean or Korean-American artists who won some kind of contest or other. I think. The gallery Website is in Korean and all I know how to say in Korean is "Please don't eat me."

Whether or not you like the slew of well-known artists, these particular works are most likely the ones you don't like. Anthony Caro gets high marks from people whose opinions I respect, but the tiny (I almost tripped over it) Caro bronze here is forgettable. I couldn't even find the Cindy Sherman piece, unless it was the utterly pointless black and white photo. Lichtenstein's a hack and Wesselmann, well, I have liked his work before, even prints, but this one is beyond me. Miró is represented by a lumpy rock exhibiting none of his usual airiness. You might accidentally overlook Stella's work, and a Stella you can overlook is a rare thing indeed. I didn't see Hirst's work in the show, I don't think, which is a blessing, since if they managed to find a bad Miró, can you imagine what a bad Hirst would look like? Probably like the climactic scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

So, having narrowly missed having our faces melted off, let's see what's next in my pile. I have here Kate Clark's Perfect Strangers at Claire Oliver.

Kate Clark, The Map is Not the Territory, mixed media sculpture (organic & synthetic materials), 59 x 90 x 30 inches

Kate Clark should get together with Hyungkoo Lee. I think they'd make a fine pair of obsessives: He could build skeletons and she could wrap skin around them and maybe, just maybe, they'd leave the rest of us out of it. The main difference between them, though, is I think Hyungkoo wants us to laugh, or at least chuckle, while Kate, I imagine, wants us to be disturbed.

I expected, in fact, to be disturbed by her work. But somehow it failed to disturb me or, really, interest me all that much. The most interesting thing about her sculptures is wondering how they're made. I think what she does is take a taxidermy specimen and take apart the animal's head. Then she rebuilds the skin of the head into a human-like head. The final result is a very realistic-looking animal with a very realistic-looking human face. The faces she builds are excellently made and nearly look alive, especially with the ceramic (or plastic, I guess) eyes.

That sounds disturbing. But I found the result curiously tame. I suppose part of it is simply mass: There are very few sculptures on display. Maybe because they're hard to do and take a long time. Also, well lit in a bright gallery, maybe the figures lose some essential mystery. Maybe the gallerist at Claire Oliver should take a cue from Hyungkoo's gallery, Arario, where his works were set up in dark rooms with black walls like a real museum exhibit. Not that I thought those were great works of art or anything -- imagine that cartoon characters are real creatures, and that archaeologists and naturalists could dig up their skeletons and display them -- but the show was a triumph of exhibit design.

Whatever the reason, I was impressed by the craft of Kate's work, but not by the actual work itself.

Speaking of unimpressive work, I also stopped in the huge, fancy, well-appointed opening at Marlborough Chelsea. I usually avoid the place because they're usually showing massive Tom Otterness bronzes. I see enough of his nasty work at the 14th Street subway station as the A train doors open and close on my way to my studio. All those Rodins and a Calder destroyed in the World Trade Center but these stupid little Otternesses we still have to look at.

I didn't wander into an Otterness opening, though. Instead it was Vincent Desiderio. You'd think I'd like his work, since it's somewhere on the line between academic realism and Impressionism -- a sort of latter-day Manet kind of style. Vincent likes nudes; one whole wall of the gallery is taken up in a long painting of a dozen or so naked people sleeping. This large work is provocatively titled "Sleeping." He also has up a couple of big nudes, and they're nice and chubby, the way I like them.

Vincent Desiderio, Nude I, 2008, oil on linen, 49.5x67 inches

And yet I wasn't taken with the work. None of it. It's technically very accomplished, and with none of the approbation that usually implies; nothing feels especially cold or distant, stiff or mannered. Everything's nicely loose and comfortable and...um...you know, I don't know. None of it grabbed me at all. I have no idea why. Maybe I was just cranky. Maybe it's his diffuse atmosphere, like all his paintings are showing through Captain Kirk's Love Interest Soft Focus Lens. Maybe it's his academic titles -- Nude I, Lily in a Round Chair. Maybe it's the gallery. Maybe it's me. I don't know.

And now the best for last, although the best in this case is certainly faint praise. I stopped in to see Sara Eichner and her latest show at Sears-Peyton, Plane Equlibrium. I gave Sara a rave review two years ago. (How much of a rave I didn't remember until I saw my review printed out and displayed in a binder in the gallery.) I'm deeply sorry to say that this show was not as good as the last one.

Sara did tell me that she had some trouble settling on a new direction in her work, which is at least partly why it's been two years since her last show. I'd hate to quash her motivation at this point, but I have to be honest. Sara told me she likes the idea of showing her process, leaving it visible, as she did in these latest works; I think it detracts greatly from them.

Sara Eichner, overlapping planes-blue bricks, 2008, pencil and gouache on paper framed, 30x22 inches

It's hard to see what she's done in this image because it's too small and digitally noisy but basically she's left the scaffolding up: It seems she starts her paintings by drawing in a grid in perspective which she then uses to guide her pattern's placement, whether it's bricks or tiles or wallpaper or whatever. That's how she's always worked, but now she doesn't cover the entire surface, or erase the pencil, so the guide lines are all still visible. Now, I take it as an article of faith that a work of art isn't necessarily bad just because you can see some of how it was made. But for Sara's work it seems to take away from the sense of her building a space for the viewer to be drawn into. Rather than feeling as if I'm looking into some infinite volume, I feel as if I'm looking at an architectural rendering. And not a terribly exciting one at that.

Sara's also reduced her palette. Some of her regular colors are still in evidence, but only the quieter ones; and, more importantly, she's stopped putting two sharp colors up against each other. Where her hues vary, they're the slightest of shades apart, almost identical -- as you can see here in the JPEG, the colors are the same as far as a digital camera is concerned. The vibrancy has drained from her pigments.

Also gone is the sense of inside/outside. The last show was split between bricks and tiles from the outside walls and wallpaper from the inside; this show is almost entirely outside walls, except for a couple of wallpapers, at least one of which looks like a holdover from 2006.

Eric Fischl wrote to me after my review of his show saying he knows how hard it is to not like an artist's work and then have to change your mind about it. That's hard, but it's not nearly as hard as the opposite, where you find an artist you admire misses the mark. That's really difficult, both to see and to write about.

So I'm reluctant to criticize the show this way. Also because, looking over the work -- if I could diagnose someone from their paintings -- I'd say Sara has become depressed. And I'd hate to depress her even more. I hope, instead, that she takes my thoughts however she needs to so her art gets even better than it was; whether that means ignoring me, calling me names, or taking my words to heart isn't important. What's important is that she makes great art. Sara clearly has it in her.