Same Old Art

Constantin Guys, Promenade, india ink and was on paper, date unknown

“Who was the first modern painter?” This question necessarily poses problems. In Charles Baudelaire’s essay The Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863 (but written three years earlier), the painter of modernity is not Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet or Edouard Manet. Baudelaire claims that it is Constantin Guys - a former soldier and war correspondent for the nascent illustrated mass press during the Crimean War. According to Baudelaire, Guys was “not precisely an artist, but rather a man of the world.” Guys sketched his surroundings - Parisian streets, night life, bohemian manners, interactions and fashions of the day. But there are other modernities that Baudelaire’s theory does not quite capture.  

Installation of Corot paintings at the Met

In late April, I was lucky enough to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the only day during the week that it is closed to the public. The Corots stole the show.  

Corot, Italian Landscape, oil on paper on canvas, late 1820s  

Corot did not start painting until about 1821, at which point he was in his mid 20s. Considering the career path of professional artists back then, he had a late start. In the beginning he was taught by Achille Etna Michallon, who was one of Jacques-Louis David’s students. Although Corot was trained in the neo-classical tradition of art, which prized ancient Greek and Roman mythological subjects and idealization of the human form - his oil sketches reveal how he broke with his teachers to embrace a different way of looking at the world around him.   

Corot, Landscape at Civita Castellana, oil on paper on canvas, 1826/1827

The landscape sketches at the Met were painted while Corot spent time in Italy in the areas surrounding Rome. A landscape can be a reliable barometer of where painting is headed at the time of its making. That has partly to do with its absence of human traces. The lack of bridges, roads and other such structures that are only occasionally included by Corot, create images of unfolding sceneries that are not yet fully defined and thus ambiguous. To depict the natural world in a sketch means to accentuate how we see and how we go about making visible through paint what is in front of us. Corot used small-sized paper sheets that were later mounted on canvas: this allows for a less constrictive painting approach and creates works that differ from larger-scale paintings on canvas.  Such is the case for The Bridge at Narni, shown below. Paper is easier to transport, cheaper than canvas, and oil paint dries faster on it. With these advantages in mind, Corot is less bound to a traditional painting process while allowing himself more room for experimentation in terms of finding forms, finding colors, contrasting dark with light areas and depicting varying degrees of spatial depth. Ultimately, he asks what it means to represent.

Corot, The Bridge at Narni, oil on canvas, 1826-27

By doing so, Corot arrives - intentionally or not - at a form of painting that has come to be associated with modernity. In this instance, modernity describes how the experienced present is appropriated in a mode of presentness: quick brushstrokes, fluid outlines, flat shapes, suggested space, a limited palette and over all the translucency of each applied layer. Baudelaire’s fleeting urban ghosts and Manet’s brushes seem to have dwelled in Corot’s landscapes long before they were absorbed by city life. 

Edouard Manet, Landscape with a Village Church, oil on canvas, early 1870s

When I read Thomas Micchelli’s contribution about Anselm Kiefer’s current exhibition at Gagosian, I felt compelled to respond. 

In Kiefer’s exhibition we are presented with a series of paintings that interrupt our daily lives and take us back to a dark chapter of World War Two. The show’s title Morgenthau Plan, refers to a proposition made by United States Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr in 1944. Initially, the plan suggested converting Germany “into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.” 

Anselm Kiefer, Morgenthau Plan, Acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas, 113 x 149 5/8 inches, 2012

In his review, Thomas Micchelli cites Anselm Kiefer’s letter to the director of the Henry Moore Foundation in which Kiefer describes how he discovered a link between his recent flower paintings and the Morgenthau Plan. To Micchelli, the problem is that Kiefer painted the flowers first and made the conceptual connection to the Morgenthau Plan later.  As he says: 

“The only problem is that the concept has been retroactively “associated with the flower paintings.” They did not spring from the idea, which bristles with paradoxes (Morgenthau’s radical proposition, presumably based on the belief that the Germans are an incorrigibly warlike race, played into the hands of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and he used it to rally the population, an effort that possibly extended the length of the war).”    

Should Kiefer have found an appropriate topic first and painted his flowers afterwards? Micchelli seems to suggest that if you decide to incorporate content in your art work, you must always develop your work from that particular content and not the other way around. If anything, this strikes me as an aesthetic preference on the part of the critic and not a valid criticism of the work. 

Anselm Kiefer has been using landscapes and nature as war’s ground for decades now. War takes place in, alters and consumes the land it springs from. In this equation, nature is the animated aspect of a landscape and its inhabitants. Human suffering does not need to be depicted because nature takes on any traumas that have also been inflicted on its people. In that regard, it is not surprising (and certainly not problematic) that Kiefer’s paintings of flowers have subsequently become associated with the Morgenthau Plan.

View of Anselm Kiefer sculptures on the terrain of his former studio northeast of Barjac in Southern France    

When Kiefer shut down his studio La Ribaute in Barjac in 2008, he left behind 86 acres with more than fifty structures. The most remarkable  artifacts are his large concrete towers. These monuments have no clear agenda in terms of commemoration or functionality. They are both ruined and unfinished in their appearance as if fabricated by a now extinct civilization. Claimed by nature and only visible from a distance (and through a chain-link fence), La Ribaute demonstrates the many ways Kiefer considers history through the landscape. In this light, it is difficult to imagine that Kiefer would ever paint flowers because he was interested in their many shapes, colors and painterly qualities.

Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny

When Thomas Micchelli evokes the ghost of Claude Monet and his ability to paint water lilies in a way that is still compelling to the contemporary viewer, I immediately thought of Monet’s studio outside of Paris in Giverny. In 1890 Monet bought and then landscaped his estate which became a mixture of studio and refuge. At the outbreak of World War One in 1914, many of the American artists who made up most of the member’s of Giverny’s art colony left the country and Monet’s son Michel joined the French army. Throughout the war, Claude Monet continued to paint in his garden and in 1918, when Germany was forced to sign a peace treaty with France, he donated several of his water lily paintings to the French State. Unlike Kiefer, Monet had flowers and not war, on his mind. Monet’s lilies retroactively became a gesture of benevolence to a country that had suffered great losses in an even greater war.  

The created environments of Kiefer and Monet could not be more different from each other. To use Monet in order to question Kiefer can therefore not be productive. Such a comparison is doomed to fail, because it reveals a misunderstanding of Kiefer’s work. While Monet painted during the dawn of the industrial age, Kiefer started with the devastation that the heavily industrialized armies of the 1930s and 40s brought to many parts of the world.  Natural light is to Monet as the glare of the atomic bomb is to Kiefer. This leaves little, if any, middle ground for them to meet.

Anselm Kiefer, Morgenthau Plan, acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas, 149 5/8 x 149 5/8 inches, 2012

I can see how reflections of flowers on a pond are more accessible and appealing to audiences than war-ravaged soil. But to wish for more “urgency” or “historical focus” in an Anselm Kiefer painting - as Micchelli expresses in his review - is to hope for art to become literal, to explain each of its choices to us, to commit to a set of specified ideas or rather to a viewer’s idea of what it should be. Art that addresses war will never fully satisfy or respond to all of our questions - and it must not.   

In my previous post about Elizabeth Neel’s current show at Sikkema Jenkins, I mention how I wish to be unsettled instead of pleased by an artist’s work. Haven’t the most memorable art works usually unearthed what we might prefer to ignore - either deliberately or unintentionally? 

Kara Walker, Wall Sampler 1, cut paper and paint on wall, 2013

Kara Walker’s concurrent exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, which takes up no more than three walls in the back portion of the gallery, is an unsettling experience. But it would not be nearly as unsettling if we knew exactly what we were looking at. Without its lingering ambiguity her work could easily turn into illustrative episodes of American history. Too often, I have come across articles and opinions by colleagues (close and distant) that criticize Kara Walker’s work for dealing with history and slavery - as though these political, content-related issues preclude viewers from having aesthetic experiences in front of a work of art. 

Kara Walker, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom - Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors, cut paper and paint in wall, framed gouache and ink paintings, 2010

Even though we usually believe that political agendas in art are best realized in video, photography, multi-media installations and performances, it is the most conventional media (paper, paint, etc.) that can speak directly to our deepest and most persistent stereotypes. If you think of paper silhouettes, your first impulse might not be to associate them with sexual and racial violence. To accept the idea that a traditional two-dimensional medium has the ability to tackle sensitive political issues is to overcome our first stereotype.

The second stereotype we might hold dear is that Kara Walker addresses an old-fashioned question - the question of representation: What can and cannot be represented? How can it be represented? And how to show that the past is still relevant today?

Kara Walker, Wall Sampler 1 (detail)

Getting up close to Kara Walker’s work gives her unsettling images a haunting quality. As anonymous as her characters are, they do not remain one-dimensional. The precisely cut paper renders unspeakable violations with threatening clarity. Walker’s decision not to add any further mimetic realism to her figures makes us linger on their shapes: legs, arms, genitals, lips. In particular the paired characters engage each other with vile intimacy. Legs give in, hands pull, push and choke, genitals are exposed, sometimes mutilated and in case of two male protagonists erect and throbbing.

Kara Walker, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness… (detail)

It would be convenient to describe the paired figures as victim and offender. In the detail from Wall Sample 1 such relationship is more plausible. One figure is larger, older with a penis like an infectious sore or vestigial limb gripping the smaller, fragile and possibly expired figure. In the second detail the suggested relationship is less obvious. If the woman on the left is a slave, why is the man on the right in chains? She has him - quite literally - by the balls. A gesture of power, it is also sexually charged and not without mutual pleasure. 

These double meanings and ambiguities sustain my attention when I look at Kara Walker’s images. Violence is carried out and violence is endured - this is the only sure thing in front of us. Seen from up close these actions become more inexplicable, more questionable and more disturbing: softened lips and shafts reveal a tenderness and accuracy of Walker’s handling of paper that should not be, that cannot be. How enticing and revolting to have paper embody such qualities.  

In reviews of Elizabeth Neel’s work, one of the most common and reoccurring descriptions locates her paintings in between abstraction and representation. To point to the double nature of paintings whenever they incorporate visual tropes from both of these painterly modes has increasingly become a favorite sport of critics and artists alike. Admittedly, the resulting tension between abstraction and figuration can sometimes be fruitful. But often enough painters fall back onto neo-expressive ideas about the visible (and invisible) world. The more loose or deliberate the brushstrokes, the more abstract the result. The more controlled and mechanic the application of paint, the more likely a painting addresses questions surrounding representation. The problem with Elizabeth Neel’s exhibition 3 and 4 before 2 and 5 at Sikkema Jenkins is that her paintings remain too dutiful in their goal to employ techniques from the abstract and representational domain. Instead of becoming truly ambiguous as to what they are, her paintings are examples of what it means to cite and collect formal approaches found in painting’s recent history. In fact, we look at paintings that we have known all along. 

Elizabeth Neel, new green, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2013

Starting with Piet Mondrian who - we assume - used paper strips to lay out and paint his horizontal and vertical stripes, the negative tape marks in Neel’s paintings have a ghostly presence. Their ghostliness is mainly due to a lack of presence and this is not because of their reference to an old painting tradition. This lack of presence becomes evident whenever the taped off areas reveal some gessoed canvas or alternatively a thin wash of color. Casual in appearance, they are nevertheless unsubstantial - the taped areas do not offer glimpses of Neel’s painting process. We witness instead a collection of stylistic artifacts wrought and held together by well-established conventions within recent (New York) abstract painting: informality, expressiveness/gesture, mark making, spray paint. As a result, risk-free entertainment is guaranteed.  

Cy Twombly, title and year unknown

Tape marks can add a spatial component if not a third dimension to an otherwise flat painting. They can suggest to be either on top or further behind a painted surface depending on whether they have been painted over or left untouched. In Neel’s case, her tape marks cut through Cy Twombly backgrounds: thin washes applied in circular movements with drips fizzling out at their edges. Because of her reliance on (and not quotation of) certain painterly tropes, any chance to establish paintings that hold their own is in vain.

Wendy White, Easy Rant, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2009

And then there are paintings that are too sparse, vast and white. A sprinkle of gesture there, a touch of color here and hesitation all around. They bring to mind Wendy White’s work with their gestural overflow, yet highly stylized compositions. At least in case of White’s work, her surfaces are animated. Different-sized canvases are put together, forming a cluster and thereby engaging each disparate section with the aim to bind them together. Wendy White switches from abundance to emptiness and avoids lingering on either one for too long. Neel’s paintings, on the other hand, do not depict absence; they embody absence. 

Elisabeth Neel, two mules, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2012

To add to the confusion, several sculptural pieces are included in Elizabeth Neel’s exhibition. The installation in the center of the main gallery left me puzzled. And by ‘puzzled’ I mean clueless. Although, that is not quite true. I am assuming the various wooden beams echo the mechanical aspect of the stripes found in her paintings. 

The installation is an extension of the paintings and vice versa. Placing clay objects on intersecting bars references the less defined, organic aspects of the surrounding paintings. It establishes a dialogue between the objects on the walls and the objects in space - but to what end? How does this sculptural addition change or add to our perception of the paintings? In this context, the installation becomes explanatory rather than open-ended. It explains that the paintings can be seen in relation to the installation and that they share some common ground, mainly formal qualities: there is the organic and the mechanic strain in both the paintings and the installation. They intersect (in space and conceptually), yet they are distinct from each other. Would it not be far more exciting and challenging to the eyes and mind to see an installation that did not try to fit so neatly into the exhibition? Something more risky and less manicured? 

Esther Stocker, What kind of objects are those that we presuppose?, wood construction, 2005

Little known Italian artist Esther Stocker came to my mind when I saw Elizabeth Neel’s installation. One can spend time talking about their differences in materials and approach, but Stocker’s work reaches further by transforming the space it occupies. This transformative ability of art that either modifies the context in which we experience it or how we look at the world is often absent in contemporary art and particularly painting. Instead we usually get to learn how well an artist knows about current art practices, pop culture and what her/his twists are on these. I miss being more unsettled by what I see at exhibitions and maybe it is time to remind ourselves that the most academic of art wants to please. Let’s not be so easily pleased then!    

Esther Stocker, Untitled, acrylic on cotton, 200 x 300 cm, 2010

Installation shot of Andrew Masullo’s work at Mary Boone

One thing I have stated on Sameoldart before and will happily repeat again, is how rare it is to find a painter who has the facility and courage to make work that refuses a formulaic approach to painting. 

Andrew Massulo, 5357, oil on canvas, 2011

The formulaic can be described as a basic formal framework that is repeatedly applied with only minor variations from one work to another. If there is anything that I might call formulaic about Andrew Masullo’s work, it is his palette. Upon further examination, Masullo’s use of color is not formulaic after all, because it allows us to relate one painting to another. His colors come unmixed and although often described as bright, they have nothing in common with the unpleasantly sweet colors of Peter Halley. Masullo’s compositions, to the contrary, are never alike and remain in continuous flux. It is as if the paintings’ primary purpose is to defeat repetition and embrace contingency. 

 Installation shot of Andrew Massulo’s work at Mary Boone

I was lucky to get to see Massulo’s exhibition at Mary Boone on its very last day. And I could not have been more delighted by the hanging and the paintings’ perpetual variation. Most paintings were placed alongside two walls with the smallest ones - each about the size of an iPhone or small paperback - arranged on the gallery’s longest wall.

Composite of small Andrew Massulo paintings (via Altoon Sultan)  

Andrew Massulo took a risk here. One could easily argue (as Will Heinrich of GalleristNY did) that Massulo’s small paintings are “mostly too small to support their compositional battles, and they look more like copies of larger paintings than works in their own right.” But to state that they are too small is to ignore the context of the entire show. Massulo’s exhibition does not emphasize each painting individually: rather, they are presented as social creatures or what we could call nonobjective subjects. Entering the gallery space is similar to watching a flock of different sized birds occupying their assigned wall space. It is a stunning and amusing sight. The paintings in the gallery’s south-east corner form a cluster; they contract and point to each other while maintaining their distinctness. The very small work on the western wall functions as a curatorial counterpoint: they are stretched to the point of breakup, but their horizontal orientation prevents them from tearing and coming apart. They form a chain of paintings, holding on to each other through their minuscule size and related colors.

Andrew Masullo, 5289, oil on canvas, 2011

As long as large sized paintings continue to matter, I will think twice before labeling a small painting a failure or a copy of a larger painting. Too often contemporary painting competes with other media and art practices through sheer size. It hopes that the bigger it is, the louder it can speak to its audience. A  large canvas is generally more forgiving than a small one and often we find ourselves marveling at its super- sized dimensions while overlooking the painting altogether. What we forget in such a situation is that a small painting speaks with a bolder voice. In case of Andrew Masullo’s exhibition at Mary Boone, his work performs like an incomplete orchestra, dissonant at times, but with full force.   

From April 6th to September 2nd Barry McGee has a mid-career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. I had never been to Boston’s ICA before and its location just a couple of miles south-east of downtown in the Seaport district can easily be reached on foot if you happen to arrive at South Station.

The Institute itself is right by the water with its upper floors protruding out toward the bay. When you walk from the West Gallery to the permanent collection you pass through a corridor with a large glass front. There are several rather comfortable benches in the corridor which allow you to sit down and stare off into the distance (and the airport) if you want to disengage with the art for a moment. 

Barry McGee installation view

I have to admit that I never spent too much thought or time on Barry McGee’s work. I came across his cheerful geometric patterns with their Op-Art references a few times over the last years. From up close most of the surfaces are scratched, slightly torn and damaged. These panels are probably found objects, but they do not lend the work any of their worn quality. McGee’s painted panels offer only minimal variations of the same idea. And grouped together as they are in the exhibition, they cancel each other out and become indistinguishable and unremarkable. What I did not expect from the show was to discover McGee’s shockingly literal approach to installation. 

Barry McGee animatronic tagger

A tower of TVs, framed photographs (some of them were excellent) arranged in shape of a wave or skateboard ramp and then - worst of all - two animatronic taggers spraying the gallery wall and a make-shift public bathroom. I felt like I had involuntarily entered a street art theme park that can’t decide if it wants to be documentary, critical or entertaining.

Exactly because of these impressions, I was excited to find myself in front of a wall covered with framed ballpoint pen drawings. They are wonderfully strange drawings. All the fuss and unnecessary complications of the other work in the show seemed forgotten. 

Barry McGee installation view at the ICA

Barry McGee, Untitled, 2010

There is nothing else in the exhibition that comes close to the intricate and slow nature of these drawings. Each piece suggests a surface that is a cross of hair and metal. Equipped with two eyes, these highly reflective and simultaneously absorbent substances could pass as talismans, shamanistic emblems or cartoon characters of unknown origin and purpose.

Barry McGee, Untitled, 2008 

Barry McGee, Untitled, 2008

At once masks and portraits, McGee’s drawings emit a glow that prevents them from remaining in the realm of illustration or graphic art. Nothing is explained or told here, nothing can be named and maybe - for once - we should be trusted to be left alone with our thoughts.

When I saw the Jean-Michel Basquiat show at Gagosian back in February, I wondered why he has been labeled an angry artist so many times.  This designation is partly due to a 1983 interview with Henry Geldzahler where Basquiat described his work as being 80% about anger. But as a descriptor, ‘anger’ fails to explain the manifold conditions of art-making. ‘Angry’ art usually does not go beyond the depiction of tanks and peace doves. It never gets very poignant either. Gagosian’s retrospective-of-sorts ended on the 6th of April and it took me a while to gain some distance from Basquiat’s labored objects before I felt that I could write about them.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, La Hara, acrylic and oil paintstick, 72” x 48”, 1981

You have to be determined, not angry, to produce anything close to the variation and quality of Basquiat’s work. In La Hara, we witness a play on the Puerto Rican jara which is slang for police and refers to the Irish ancestry, namely O’Hara, of white police officers. The figure’s skeletal frame is dominated by bold bands of white. In their horizontal orientation they seem to outline a rib cage. Further down, parts of the pelvis are visible. A grey wash obscures the remaining body by suggesting not only an increased painterly activity, but a physical and possibly violent intention. If we read the structure on the lower left as barrier, then it appears unlikely that it was put in place to stop us or prevent us from crossing it. The danger lies on the other side of the barrier. Once the officer passes it, his force will be unleashed upon us. If anybody is angry here, it is the police officer. And we should run, before this behemoth reaches out at us. Could this be John O’Hara, police officer of the city of Philadelphia who, together with three other officers, broke into the house of Julia Croswell, an African-American, and proceeded to beat, arrest and falsely charge her in 1978? Or is this the re-envisioned  police chief of Gotham City, Clancy O’Hara who for once is taking charge of a city ruled by jokers and bats? The truth is likely somewhere in between.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Obnoxious Liberals, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 1982

After a good half an hour in the exhibition, I saw Basquiat’s painting Obnoxious Liberals and embraced it immediately in an odd mix of joy and shame. Upon seeing it, the first thing that came to mind were the paintings by Jonathan Meese and Bjarne Melgaard.

Bjarne Melgaard, Untitled, 2008

One could argue that the formal and most superficial kinship between these artists is based on their gestural approach to painting and an emphasis on drawing. The black contours, the filled-in and colored fields, the build-up of paint versus thin and exacting lines, the importance of the sketch: all these elements are highly promising and enticing but almost always disappointing in Meese’s and Melgaard’s work.  

Jonathan Meese during a performance in front of his work

When we are asked why we like one work or artist more than another, it is difficult to find a satisfying or enlightening answer. All three artists here are provocative and it is important to be confronted with and persuaded by art that can shake us up. But only in Basquiat’s work do I see a painter who raises questions while allowing his work to be open and infinite at the same time. In one painting, we are looking at a white police officer who is comic and vile. He is an everyday-life kind of beast and a beast made to fit the scale and ambition of painting. We read “obnoxious liberals” on the surface of another painting. We are amused and also irritated. Is he talking to me, the white, male gallery visitor who believes in the greatness of the displayed work?

In contrast to Basquiat’s evocative ambiguity, Meese and Melgaard offer us blunt statements and repetition. Usually these are affirmative, never doubtful and half as amusing as they appear to be. Their works are substitutes for the real stars - the artists themselves. Paintings, sculptures, installations are just an extension of a permanent performance or rather an insistence on being noticed. To get their point across, Meese raised his right arm to evoke the ‘Hitlergruss’ (Nazi salut) at several of his performances, while Melgaard put two white tigers in a cage (Siegfried & Roy would not have been amused).  Meese and Melgaard want to matter and by doing so they rely on an endless supply of “obnoxious liberals” who happily justify their doings. We will be waiting for a very long time before Meese and Melgaard challenge their consuming base in the way that Basquiat did. For once the word proved more powerful than the image.

George Shaw, The Appointment, 19.9” x 29.7”, etching, 2005

Last summer I had the chance to visit the Saatchi Gallery in London, where I encountered George Shaw’s work (in the form of an etching) for the first time. The print that I saw looked similar to the one depicted above. The main subject was a tree in the middle of a clearing with its thick, knotted branches turning flatter closer to the edges of the paper. It appeared like nothing else in the Saatchi Gallery - no flashy subject, no theatricality, no commotion, no hotel lobby wall decoration. Just a tree in a landscape, yet so much more.

George Shaw, The Back that used to be the Front, Humbrol enamel on board, 2008

George Shaw grew up in Coventry, a city about 100 miles northwest of London, known for its machine tool production and formerly the seat of motor companies like Peugeot, Daimler and Jaguar. In a 2011 interview with the Guardian, Shaw describes his up-bringing in the outskirts of Coventry:

“A postwar council estate on the edge of Coventry, with trees, grass and loads of woodland just beyond. The last built-up area before the countryside took over. I don’t think it has ever left me, that sense of possibility and familiarity and possible danger lurking out there somewhere beyond. I haunted the place and now it haunts me.”

Similar to the slow death that devastated the cities of the rust belt across the Northeastern United States, Coventry experienced a transition away from its industrial economy to advanced manufacturing, finance, research and creative industries. This change is not reflected in George Shaw’s paintings. His sites are unaffected by the promise of economic revitalization. Shaw’s paintings of his city are at once landscape paintings and portraits. 

George Shaw, Young Lovers Don’t, Humbrol enamel on board, 2010 

Occasionally Shaw will present a view of a fragment. This can be a wall, an abandoned building, a garage, a fence - always within a small radius of where he grew up. All these surfaces and spaces point to past and recent human activities. His work speaks of the people in his working-class neighborhood without ever depicting them; he captures time passed and lives lived.

George Shaw, No Returns, Humbrol enamel on board, 2009

He is not interested in entering a dialogue in which paint is believed to take on the properties of the thing it depicts. His use of Humbrol enamel - a substance used for painting toy models - is an amusing allusion to paint as an embodiment of childhood nostalgia. Shaw’s work is not a lofty statement about painting as process. He withholds and controls. No wizardry of the paint, no dabs, drips or accidents. The gestures that form the trees and the green gate in No Returns are distinct from each other and are carefully considered. We are looking at something that grew versus something that was fabricated. Not many painters make or even see this distinction. Instead painters prefer to look at the world as a training ground to develop and refine their signature style. And by signature style I do not mean how the application and handling of paint by one painter remains consistent from work to work. That would be to compare a signature style to handwriting.

A signature style leaves no room for difference or differentiation. Any sense for the particular is suffocated by a visual language meant to offer uniformity in place of variety. Whatever finds its way into a painting is made to adhere to a painter’s working method and ideology. When Peter Halley looks at the world, he sees squares, rectangles, grills and lines that criss-cross his canvases like pipes in a very colorful plumbing floor plan. And he has been dedicated to the same vision for the last three decades. It is very much like the ever-recurring day in the movie “Groundhog Day” – without the humor, but with the full horror of repetition instead. Another good example in this context is Tim Eitel.

Tim Eitel, Matratze, oil on canvas, 2008

In his painting Matratze (mattress) Eitel does what he does well which is to produce a painting that is half abstract and half representational. Generally his backgrounds consist of a flat or extremely shallow space, they are monochromatic and are dominated by a low horizon line. In its layout (vertical space with a horizontal line) Eitel’s painting faintly recalls Mark Rothko’s color fields and Barnett Newman’s zips (without the color sensation). But all similarities cease when Eitel includes a figure or tangible object in the foreground as in case of Matratze. What sounds like a neat idea and defines his signature style is not nearly as convincing once it is painted. It even is absurd in that the mattress seems to be sliding off its ground. And the ground is not a solid mass but a grey field (painted with vertical strokes to flatten it out and then overlaid with a mucky wash of horizontals in the hope of adding weight to it). This is not a Cézanne moment in which a plate is neither on nor off the table. Eitel’s mattress is painted to exist in a three-dimensional space while the rest of the painting is resistant to what has been planted on top of it. If we were to call out Tim Eitel on his signature style, it would be to point to the schism between the objects and their background. The objects and the backgrounds they appear on have nothing in common. Both have been forced into unity by aesthetic means: firstly by Eitel’s grey-scale and secondly through his compression of space. 

George Shaw, title and date unknown

In case of George Shaw and his painting pictured above, the relationship between the mattress and its surrounding area demonstrates a more thorough engagement with his chosen subject. The used quality of the mattress - only hinted at in Eitel’s painting - can be identified as a set of descriptive features like wet, smelly, soiled, etc. In Shaw’s work the mattress is an integral part of its natural surrounding. It is not a product of that setting, but a trace of the human activity embedded in this landscape. Shaw’s decision to pick a pale pink flesh tone for the mattress highlights the idea of an object associated with its domestic origin. It appears as if the former innards of a Coventry house have been spilled out into its pastoral outdoor space.

George Shaw, Scenes from the Passion: The Way Home, Humbrol enamel on board, 1999

More importantly, George Shaw’s work remains unconfined by a signature style thanks to his ability to shift from observational paintings that replicate tightly cropped surfaces of walls and buildings to ambitious landscapes enriched with textures and a subtle social commentary. He masters the particular and the general with such variety leaving no room for a painterly routine to set in. 

What strikes me as forceful in Shaws’ paintings is how presentness is not an urgent concern. On the one hand, there is the timelessness of the locations he depicts. By looking at the paintings we do not know if it is the 80s, 90s or the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, George Shaw paints as if today’s art tendencies and preferences have not yet penetrated the lush forest of his Tile Hill estate. To label his attitude conservative, would be deceptive, although Shaw is highly aware of the familiarity sewn into his paintings. The following excerpt from his 2011 interview with the Guardian is as much an acknowledgment of his traditionalist tropes, as it is useful advise to younger artists:

“Sometimes,” he says, almost wistfully, “usually when I have finished a series of paintings, I look at the work and its innate conservatism shocks me. When I was growing up, I thought I was going to be a really contemporary artist doing video and installation work, capturing the zeitgeist and all that, but…” He pauses, laughing and shaking his head as if astounded at the folly of his younger self. “Then, I realised I was just lying to myself.”

If you are a painter wondering about your place in the very long history of painting, accept that painting is no longer about finding or showing truth. Instead, never fool yourself and remain faithful to the moment when painting crossed your path for the first time. 

I was looking forward to seeing Svenja Deininger’s exhibition One Second Balance at Marianne Boesky Gallery for a while. Surprisingly, while wandering the many districts and neighborhoods of New York, you will only occasionally run into the work of an artist who is not part of the city’s art scene. New York, the melting pot of cultures, does not always reflect its diversity in the art shown there. 

Timm Ulrichs, Hornbeam with Concrete Flower Pot, 1969

Svenja Deininger, who was born in Vienna, received her formal training in Germany. In 1996 she attended the Kunstakademie Münster and then continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2000. Before Berlin became cool, Düsseldorf’s academy was one of the most prestigious art schools in Germany, attracting students like Imi Knoebel, Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Katharina Fritsch. Münster is a different story. It is safe to say that its academy is well below the radar even though it has some excellent professors like Deininger’s former teacher Timm Ulrichs. I could not help but suspect that his conceptual and often tongue-in-cheek pieces must have been formative to Deiniger’s early years as an artist, since her rigorous practice is often infused with play.

Svenja Deininger, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2012 

It is not much of a stretch to compare Deininger’s paintings to Tomma Abts’ work. For one there is the small scale that both share. Abts’ canvases are generally about 18 inches by 15 inches. Deininger, to the contrary, is not attached to one particular size. Her paintings can measure 20 by 25 inches and sometimes they reach up to over 80 inches in width. Her strength though lies in the paintings that are about the size of a human head or torso. They are intimate, they are compact, and they easily lock in the viewer’s attention.

Svenja Deininger, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2012

Tomma Abts, Tewes, oil on canvas, 2010

Tomma Abts considers color in relation to the layers and forms that she carefully builds up over time. Svenja Deininger stays close to the surface of her unprimed canvases. She works faster, with drawing and painting often appearing together. Her conceptual take on this medium materializes in shape of the hard, taped edges that separate thicker layers of paint from thin washes. Sometimes graphite lines make their way across a painted area.

 Svenja Deininger, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2012

Deininger’s work is as much about the improvisational aspect of painting as it is about finding closure through that process. The question:”When do I stop painting?” has many answers in painting. In her 2012 review of Amy Feldman’s solo-show Dark Selects, Roberta Smith observed that “a kind of back-to-basics abstraction characterized by simple forms, not much color and an emphasis on process is attracting a lot of younger painters right now. The renewed faith in form is refreshing, and the starting-over feeling is understandable at a moment when so much about art seems up for grabs. But such reductionism can also feel both undernourished and uninformed.”

Amy Feldman, Pressure Points, 80” x 80”, oil on canvas, 2012

Although Smith also points out how Feldman’s work is neither undernourished or uninformed, I started wondering how one can tell an undernourished painting from a “nourished” or rich painting. 

Both Feldman and Deininger reduce their paintings to a handful of attributes that can be described in terms of shape (trapezoids, paraboles, etc.), color, line and process (drips in Feldman’s, underpaintings and raw canvas in Deininger’s case). But their painterly reductions could not be more different from each other. Feldman displays what are essentially organized gestures. This is painting that stops before it has even begun. Deininger, to the contrary, manages to use her reductive approach to set up a painting that withstands the corrosive nature of reduction. 

Svenja Deininger, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2012

Another advantage of Svenja Deininger’s work is how it resists becoming formulaic. Her paintings belong together and share technical and optical similarities, but they never cease to surprise and they always shift, change gear, sometimes more, sometimes less. They are highly mobile paintings, restless in their ever-revolving combination of bare and painted surface; flexible in their application, highly inventive and despite their minimalist aesthetic and palette, they are free of ideological attachements to one or another school. 

Amy Feldman, Owed, 80” x 80”, oil on canvas, 2012

Amy Feldman, Target, 84” in diameter, 2011

Amy Feldman, Whole, 80” x 90”, oil on canvas, 2010

The three paintings above have been produced over the course of two years. When Roberta Smith states how Feldman’s paintings are not repeating the past, it is true to some extent.  They may not repeat the past, but they do repeat themselves. And in their repetition these works become overly reliant on their titles (Whole, Target, Owed). Once this much emphasis is put on language, Feldmans’ paintings are left with fewer options for viewers to interpret them. 

Svenja Deininger, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2011

When reduction becomes a field for painting to tackle, the trickiest of tasks is to find out how much reduction leaves us with too little. When do we know that we have entered an area that does not show the endless possibilities of painting but its truncated beginnings?

Looking back at Svenja Deininger’s first solo-show in New York, her paintings exude a confidence without ever being caught up in it. She creates works of immense exactitude at once thought and felt. In her ability to pick up on every bit of material opportunity that develops throughout the painting process, Deininger has presented a body of work closer to virtuosity than improvisation. To look at her canvases is to witness painting as vital practice with many beginnings and no end.

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961 (welded steel, canvas, black fabric, rawhide, copper wire, and soot)

In April of 1968, Lee Bontecou had a large solo exhibition at the Museum for Modern Art Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen, Germany. Her show then travelled to the Kunstverein Berlin in June of the same year. 

The catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition contains one particularly intriguing contribution by Rolf Gunter Dienst. Dienst, a painter and art critic who played a significant role in introducing the American avant-garde of the 1960s to Germany, writes about Bontecou through the lens of what he calls the “the condition of art in America.”

Dienst describes the avant-garde in New York as an assortment of competing collectives that identify (and differentiate) themselves through style. The fact that specific styles dominate the art of what is considered to be the avant-garde throws a questionable light onto the revolutionary nature of contemporary art in 1968. What exactly makes it questionable though? If you, as a self-proclaimed avant-garde artist, submit your art to the dominating style of one or another art group, your work and the thought attached to it risks becoming nothing more than “group think”  (“Generalisierung,” as Dienst calls it). Your art then is no longer an art made by an individual about you as an individual. And because you then work according to the ideologies of one group, you may become less critical of them. For Rolf Gunter Dienst, a German citizen born in 1932, the suppression or at least manipulation of the individual through a group has some very real and profound consequences. It does not take much to realize that the ruling Nazi party and its attitude toward the individual haunts Dienst’s thinking here. The only thing that might come as a surprise is that he locates “group think” as a danger to artistic individuality. The avant-garde, pace Greenberg, is the last refuge of truly artistic autonomy - not so for Dienst. But it is a fascinating thought nonetheless.

Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Ball, oil on canvas, 1961

How does Lee Bontecou fit in here then? In the eyes of Rolf Gunter Dienst, Bontecou realizes and demonstrates her individuality through her work. This might seem like an overly enthusiastic proclamation, but rightfully so. What makes his observation so striking is the way that we tend to perceive or romanticize certain New York artists and their work produced in the 50s and 60s: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns or Roy Lichtenstein. What about Lee Krasner? What about Agnes Martin? What about Eva Hesse? What about Lee Bontecou?

Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1966 (Acrylic, cord, papier-maché, and wood, 7.5” x 7.5” x 4”)

It is not that these woman artists are completely absent from the discourse in recent art history (see, for example, Anne Wagner’s illuminating book Three Artists, Three Women) and even within the context of contemporary art. The problem lies in how their work is generally discussed: like the work of wondrous specimen. All made (and Bontecou continues to make) art that does not fit neatly into one category. They never belonged to or identified with Surrealism, Pop-Art, Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism: this complicates how to look at and talk about their work.

Rolf Gunter Dienst does not address gender in his essay. But he notes Bontecou’s “withdrawal” from the main art movements of her time without giving any further explanation (she left the Castelli Gallery in 1972 and with it the New York art world). To him the leading artists are undergoing a process of “de-individualisation” and only Bontecou has remained (partly because she was not a member of any boy’s club) resistant and “not manipulated.” Unlike the big names of the American avant-garde she has chosen “complication” over “trivialization.” These are some harsh, but incredibly refreshing words to come across in an essay on the state of American contemporary art in 1968!

Alberto Burri, Combustione Plastica, 1958 (plastic, acrylic, burns on canvas)

MOCA’s recent exhibition Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962 that ended on January 14th, is an important example of how the experience of WW2 and the destruction it brought to large parts of Europe, Russia and Japan affected multiple generations of artists. They shared a sense that art had to be stripped, slashed and burned in order to be build up from the ground again. In Destroy the Picture, Lee Bontecou’s work stands out for a particular reason.

She does not simply dismantle art or question its post-war status. As worn as her material sources look, she patches them up, she joins pieces together that do not belong together (canvas from a laundry store, fabric, copper wire, saw blades, sooth). Her work is reconciliatory and threatening at the same time. Bontecou assembles parts that add up to objects. As wholesome as they appear, her objects resemble war machinery similar to the equipment left behind by fleeing enemy armies. Although defunct by now, they still emit an aura of annihilation. When you stand in front of one of her sculptural pieces, you stare down a hole while the hole stares back at you, ready to swallow whatever comes its way. 

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1962 (canvas, welded steel, wire construction, 57” x 54.5” x 22”)

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1960 (canvas, steel, velvet, 49” x 96” x 14”)

It is not all about brute sentiments in Lee Bontecou’s work in the 60s. Her assemblage pieces are never too mechanic to take on the look of manufactured goods. These are hand-crafted objects recalling structures that can be found both in the natural and industrial world. These are not Jasper Johns’ painted bronze cans or Robert Rauschenberg’s combines either. This is not to say that Bontecou’s work is comparatively better or worse. But what if we talked about Lee Bontecou in the way that we talked about Johns and Rauschenberg? What if we switched the order of hierarchies in favor of Lee Bontecou or Eva Hesse? Would younger generations of artists be looking at popular culture to the same extent? Are there other ways of making art than constantly referencing and manipulating icons of art history? What about the darker aspects of life? How do they fit in?

In an interview in 2004 at the time of her retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Lee Bontecou was asked about her relationship to politics:

“If you say there’s two sides of human nature—I don’t know if I’m going to come out with a sentence [here]—but if you say there’s a dark side of us, the underbelly, and then the inspirational things that are in us, I put those two things in. The jets and the planes, which are beautiful, they’re also killers. So it’s political but not that kind of political. We have wars that man can’t seem to stop, and he makes these beautiful things.”

As open as her work is to different and even opposing interpretations, it addresses some of our most basic faculties: the ability to wonder. Art that is engaging, meaningful and evocative is not about a certain degree of “freshness” or that it makes us feel smart because we understand how it cites other art works. Instead of overwhelming us with something flashy or “ha ha” ironic, art should threaten to absorb us and draw us in. The many mouths that cover the surfaces of Lee Bontecou’s work are exactly that: their openings - with or without teeth - promise to deliver the excitement and fear of not knowing what lies beyond them. The next time you encounter one of Bontecou’s sculptures, allow yourself to test their promise.

There is no doubt that the current exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925 at MOMA will attract many visitors and dozens of reviews. Its biggest achievement is its bringing together of the main narratives of early twentieth-century Modernism while also casting light onto lesser known artists and works. By doing so, the show emphasizes the creation of art works as a result of intersecting ideas, inventions, practices and individual biographies. These artists worked to understand what possibilities abstraction in art could open.  The thesis that emerges is that abstraction was neither a goal nor a uniform phenomenon.

A good example in this context is one aphorism in Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human): “Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… [shining] down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre and bad things, but his judgement, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.” Following Nietzsche’s understanding of artists and their craft, one could also call MOMA’s exhibition Great Workers of Abstraction. And there are many great workers in this show who reveal an admirable hunger for experimentation. There is the Swede Viking Eggeling with his reductive and carefully rendered Symphony drawings, Sonia Delaunay-Terk with her collaged book cover bindings (recalling a trope that has become popular among painters in recent years), John Covert’s beautifully restrained painting Ex Act, Vanessa Bell’s bold configuration Abstract Painting from 1914, Ivan Kliun’s minimal Studies in Color, and Frantisek Kupka’s mark-making piece Nocturne from 1910. Most of these works I had never seen and most of the Eastern European artists I had never heard of.

Frantisek Kupka, Nocturne, 1910

Critics such as Peter Schjeldahl, Jerry Saltz and Tyler Green, have reviewed the exhibition, raising questions about abstraction and early twentieth-century artists in general. Some artists like Matisse - as pointed out by Tyler Green - are absent. Another issue - as identified by Saltz - is the show’s claim to pinpoint the birth of abstraction.

Vaslaw Nijinski, Untitled (Arcs and Segments: Lines), 1918-19

I understand Green’s reasoning and his question as to why Matisse is not included in Inventing Abstraction. But why not include Cezanne then? Even though Matisse was formative to a younger generation of artists in the first decade of the twentieth century, his work often carries over elements from the visible world: interiors, still lifes, figures. The ghosts of the nineteenth century are still very present in Matisse, while the work on display in Inventing Abstraction is reaching for a purified art form. That is not to say that none of the artists in the exhibition look to our visible world. Of course they do. In a way there is nothing else but visible and experienced reality at the beginning of the artistic process. It might be transformed or pushed out throughout the process, but it forms the foundation of any art. And if you are tempted to ask “What is reality anyway and when do we know it is real?” - don’t do it. It won’t get you anywhere. Pinch yourself in the ear if you have to. The occuring pain will remind you of what is real and what isn’t.

What struck me about the works on display is how often their titles would use Composition or Abstraction as their only reference. I am not aware of what the first painting with the title Abstraction was, but when Vanessa Bell titled her painting Abstract Painting in 1914, abstraction had finally made its transition from a technique to a subject. This is no longer a fruit basket or a reclining figure that has been broken down, simplified and flattened out. Abstraction is not what you do to an object. Abstraction is to abandon the object.

László Moholy-Nagy, K VII, 1922

Most of the paintings in Inventing Abstraction share an airy and thin surface quality. The material of the painter - the earthy, slippery and wet substance - is rarely shiny or varnished. It is generally applied in a couple of layers, ideally in one, and Cezanne’s intention to paint the air between the trees has found a new purpose here. It is as if the paint itself is too evocative of the stuff objects are made of. To abandon the object requires to deny painting any tactile quality. 

Mikhail Larionov, Sunny Day, 1913-14

One remarkable exception is Mikhail Larionov’s Sunny Day. His painting is a playground of avant-garde ideas. Letters and incisive lines are scattered over the canvas. Glue and paper mache form colorful lumps not unlike mud while adding to the chaotic nature of what is half painting and half mess. Inventing Abstraction is not about arriving at a final state or drawing a conclusion. Abstraction was never meant to be finished or concluded. Abstraction (hopefully) resonates with a part of us that welcomes all suspension of ideologies and beliefs. Abstraction is a long-term project, acutely relevant and still nourishing today’s paintings - whether they are made of air or soil. 

Jonah and the Whale’, from the Khalili portion of the Jami’ al-Tawarikh (‘Compendium of Chronicles’) of Rashid al-Din Iran, Tabriz, AD 1314-15
Ink and watercolours on paper, dimensions of painting: 12 x 25.5 cm, The Khalili Collection

The curious story of Jonah caught inside the whale has produced many images throughout the history of religious works of art. An early example would be the 4th century mural in the catacomb of Saint Peter and Saint Marcellino in Rome. It depicts  Jonah being thrown into the sea by sailors. Then there is a 13th century Arabic copy of the Jami’ al-Tawarikh (also known as “The World History”) from the city of Tabriz in present-day Iran that shows Jonah coming out of the whale’s mouth. A similar idea can be traced in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s 1600 version “Jonah Leaving the Whale.”

In Barnaby Furnas’ most recent exhibition “If Wishes Were Fishes…” at Marianne Boesky Gallery that ended on December 21st, the whale is at the center of his paintings and drawings. In addition to the tale of Jonah, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” is also used as a source.  I’m somewhat puzzled by Furnas’ focus on the many deaths of whales. In the show’s press release (rarely a good source of insight) the following quote by the artist adds to the confusion: 

“What interested me about whaling in the first place was that they (the whales) gave us light - their fat allowed us to bring God’s light into the darkness of the night so we could see our fingers and maybe read after the sun went down.”

The fat of whales was first used for candles in China, by cultures in the Arctic Circle and across Scandinavia. Candle light can thus be read in practical as well as religious terms as a messenger of hope and enlightenment, a guide through the cold and dark, a source of comfort, etc. But how does this relate to Melville or the story of Jonah? One intriguing aspect of Jonah and the Whale as described in the bible explains why Jonah ends up being swallowed by the whale:

Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.

Jonah 1:1-3   

Jonah chose to ignore God’s request to preach about sin in the city of Nineveh. It is possible that Jonah was frightened to enter the capital of the Assyrian empire known to be an enemy of the Israelites. On board a ship where Jonah thought he was safe, a sudden storm forced the sailors to throw him in the sea as a sacrifice - in the hope of calming the waves that threatened to sink the ship and its crew. The storm ceased and Jonah did not drown but was swallowed by a God-sent whale. For the next three days he was trapped inside the whale and was forced to reconsider his earlier decision to abandon God and the divine task that was brought upon him.

Barnaby Furnas, The Whalers, water dispersed pigments, dye and acrylic on linen, 144” x 195”, 2012

While I was walking around Marianne Boesky Gallery, I wondered if Barnaby Furnas was trying to escape the obligation of a painter:  to push one’s work further toward the unknown and beyond what has already been done and seen. I am not trying to say that Furnas’ recent work has already been done by somebody else. What I intend to emphasize is that Furnas’ work has developed only minimally since his infamous 2002 painting “Hamburger Hill” that recalls a particularly bloody battle during the Vietnam War.   

Barnaby Furnas, Hamburger Hill, Urethane on linen, 182.9 x 304.8cm, 2002 

If anything, his paintings have become more stylized. The loosely painted grassy foreground seen in Hamburger Hill has been replaced in his newer work by blocky shapes rendered in gradually changing shades of dark blue, grey, and green. These newer “inventions” recall early Kazimir Malevich paintings in which the Russian worker is portrayed as a prototype of Leninist beliefs and clad in a look borrowed from Cubism and Futurism. 

Kazimir Malevich, Woodcutter, 1912

Barnaby Furnas, The Flenser, Water dispersed pigments, dye and acrylic on linen 40.5” x 28”, 2012

Of course it would be unfair to pretend as if nothing has changed in Barnaby Furnas’ body of work or that the painterly developments in his current paintings are irrelevant. But it does appear that he has a difficult time leaving behind the splashes of crimson red that have become his signature style. The “signature style” of any painter is a curse and blessing at the same time. You need to work for it and often work for it hard to carve out your niche. Once you arrive there, it becomes harder to imagine your work without it. Also, the galleries and the art market in general do not want to unsettle its customer base. If a particular painting was successful and iconic - as in case of “Hamburger Hill” - then a potential buyer will want something similar. In market terms, the preservation or rather conservation of a “signature style” is regarded as way to measure how even the work of an artist manages to remain. A relatively even signature style is a visible guarantee for high or at least constant quality. In artistic terms, however, the insistance on a signature style only prolongs the death of painting.    

Aside from the paintings Jonah and the Whale #4 or Ahab #1 which are promising and hopefully indicative of a new direction in this painter’s career, the red splashes, drops, smears and runny marks have turned into an ever-present mannerism. And the rigor of Furnas’ sources - the doubt of Jonah, the obsession of Ahab - they have been diminished and reduced to a heavy handed blood bath in which the whale is slaughtered many times over. Hamburger Hill, on the other hand, is made up of bullets ripping through the picture plane. Here the tearing flesh is a thing of beauty and the violence of war is in tune with the violence of painted gestures. All that is lost in If Wishes Were Fishes.

A couple of days ago at MOCA in Los Angeles, I encountered several works of a Japanese painter when I was visiting “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962.” His canvases immediately brought Furnas’ paintings to mind.

Kazuo Shiraga, Untitled (BB20), oil on paper on canvas, 1960

Kazuo Shiraga, Untitled, oil on canvas, 1960

Kazuo Shiraga would usually hold a rope that was suspended from his studio ceiling. Setting his body in motion, he would then move over the canvas with his feet after he had poured and thrown paint on its surface. 

His paintings are charged with an explosive vigor bordering on the repulsive. Various shades of red are reminiscent of bleedings and in other areas pools and lumps of thick dark paint have morphed into dried blood and organic matter. Shiraga’s canvases are sites of dissection and appropriation. His surfaces resemble deep injuries that are beyond repair. At the same time his body movements are recorded and written into every part of the paintings while pointing to the force with which they have been created. The result is a fascinating image of a medium that is brought to life by evoking the workings of death.  

I feel closer to Ahab’s blind rage and Jonah’s fear of God looking at Shiraga’s paintings than thinking of Barnaby Furnas’ exhibition. In If Wishes Were Fishes… Furnas’ work has achieved a level of comfort that is all too pleased with itself. No matter what the conceptual underpinnings are - if it is a biblical story or a novel - for the most part the paintings and drawings on display appear mechanical in their execution; drained of blood, not filled with it. At this point a line from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick might allow for an insight that is otherwise elusive in Furnas’ work:

“Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.”

Honore Daumier, The Promenade of the Influential Critic, 1865

In 1831, a year after the July Revolution in France, Heinrich Heine wrote about the Paris Salon and the art he encountered there. Heine observed that the exhibited paintings are like “poor children of art, to whom a busy crowd tossed only the alms of an indifferent glance.” 

This did not imply that the public was not worthy or incapable of appreciating the paintings on display. To Heine, the visitor’s minds were “occupied elsewhere and filled with anxious politics.” Even though he praised some of the paintings in the Salon, the main reason why many other works failed to attract any attention from the public (and Heine the critic) had to do with a lack of “art in enthusiastic harmony with [its] age, an art that does not need to borrow its symbols from a faded past.”

Heinrich Heine does nothing less than question an entire generation of artists’ vision for art. Furthermore, he questions the Salon itself as a place that promotes art that has, in large parts, become irrelevant. It is a shame that one has to travel back to a time when the phrase ”institutional critique” had not yet been invented to realize that one of the gains of the great revolutions and their democratizing effects was to be able to challenge the conditions of your time, not to accept them as a given.

In his most recent contribution for the “Brooklyn Rail” Irving Sandler arrives at the following conclusion about the state of art criticism in our time: “During the pluralistic postmodernist era there are no longer riveting polemics that absorb critics. Instead, critics tend to be reduced to choosing artists they admire (and in rare cases, dislike) and deal with each individually. Art world discourse has become unfocused and undramatic, and has fallen into a kind of disarray, and in the minds of many, irrelevant.”

If you take Sandler’s observation seriously, which I do, then you have to conclude that art criticism is in much worse shape than it was during Heine’s time. Art fairs and the art they exhibit and inevitably produce has been accepted as a given. Many art blogs and art publications write about art as if it existed independently of the art markets, art schools, art galleries and other related institutions. Have we become lazy, do we find it tiresome to criticize art? Do we fear that this might become a futile exercise in negativity? How did we arrive at this laissez-faire art discourse that is not actually a discourse, but an unending series of opinions, comments and naked praise?

Carroll Dunham at Blum & Poe in 2010

I am sure that you occasionally catch yourself wondering: why does this artist not get more attention? They seem to be doing everything right and still it does not seem to be enough.

At least that was my thought when I saw Deborah Zlotsky’s paintings. I am mainly referring to the paintings that were part of her solo exhibition “Adjacent Possibilities” at Markel Fine Arts a little over a year ago.

Deborah Zlotsky, Waiting Room, 48” x 60”, oil on canvas, 2011   

There are several remarkable aspects about her paintings. Zlotsky pays attention to color, line and shape, but more importantly to depth. We can clearly identify geometric shapes, but their outlines take surprising turns that suggest receding and advancing   forms. Usually this sensation is fortified when a lighter shape is contrasted by a darker value of the same color (e.g. a light pink with a darker pink, a light green with a darker green, a light grey with a darker grey, etc.). As a result, the painted shapes take on a third dimension: they point beyond their placement within the frame and they point back to what lies behind them. In case of Waiting Room it is a glimpse of what could be seen as a light blue background in the lower and upper corners of the painting. In some instances the light blue cuts through the amassed forms causing a flow of air and making the composition seem lighter and less congested. Whatever it is we are looking at, it breathes. 

Deborah Zlotsky, Withrum, powdered graphite on mylar, 14” x 11”, 2009 

That brings me back to her previous drawings of membrane-like surfaces, folds and light rendered to look as if we were inside a porous and pulsating organism. There is more order in her paintings, more linear and predictable structure, and a greater variety of color too.  Despite these differences between the paintings and drawings, they both share an interest in objects that are somehow animated and enlivened.  It is the way these two bodies of work look that speaks of Zlotsky’s ability to take an interest in a particular idea and not do the obvious. Another artist might have stuck with the same drawings and eventually turned these into paintings without changing much of their appearance (and appeal). 

It is rare to see an artist produce such separate and yet closely related bodies of work. Let’s take Paul Klee as an example.

Paul Klee, Crystalline Landscape, 1929

One of the subjects that were of great interest to Paul Klee were the early German Romantics and their understanding of nature as a productive force. Instead of looking at nature as a subject to be copied, Klee turned to nature as a principle of infinite creation.  To study from nature involved recognizing art as an extension of nature’s productivity; to be an artist meant to be ever-evolving and to remain open to contingency (something so desperately needed in contemporary painting where painters usually assume the role of a specialist who tends to a particular style or subject for as long as critics and supporters allow it).

Paul Klee, Growth of the Night Plants, oil on cardboard, 1922

Deborah Zlotsky, Warbride, 36” x 36”, oil on canvas, 2012

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, oil on canvas, 1824

It is the mix of conscious decisions, restraint and then the willingness to take a risk, to let the paint and the materials at hand dictate your moves on the surface that make Deborah Zlotsky an ambitious and ever-surprising artist.   

If you were to ask who invented the idea of “accident” in art, I would be tempted to say it was the German Romantics. In Hamburg at the Kunsthalle where Friedrich’s painting is on permanent display, I found myself sitting down and looking at his “Sea of Ice” for a long while. I think that memory made me slow down in front of Zlotsky’s “Warbride:” the colliding elements, call them shapes if you like, the chaos and simultaneous order, the whites and yellows, the pressure and weight of each part pressing on another. And then the details: a barely visible shipwreck off the center to the right in Friedrich’s painting; a sling of sorts wrapped around a linear piece in the lower right corner of Zlotsky’s painting. These are the moments in a painting that trace the artist’s intention without revealing what that intention is. It is the closest you can get to a sigh just by looking at a painting. 

On my recent visit to MOMA, there were two lines of visitors that had formed inside the museum.  One was a formation of people who wanted to see Edward Munch’s pastel version of “The Scream.” The second line was found at Martha Rosler’s “Meta Monumental Garage Sale.” It is a garage sale and aside from taking place in a museum, it’s hard to see where the “meta” in her garage sale might be. I cannot think of any recent art work (or “solo-show” as MOMA’s website puts it) that left me as uninterested and unengaged as Rosler’s installation.

Maybe it is a lack of enthusiasm and understanding on my behalf, but I really believe that the garage sale is exactly that: a garage sale. Was there no possibility to organize a garage sale in front of MOMA? After paying MOMA’s admission fee, I felt incredibly reluctant to look at donated stuff with (sometimes questionable) price tags. What if visitors had been allowed to bring objects and barter these for what they found at the garage sale? I guess I am interested in a garage sale as an archive and not an actual sale. But at least Martha Rosler was present which might explain the long and slow-moving line of visitors. Thankfully a friend of mine wanted to see the exhibition “Tokyo 1955-1970” and so we did not have time to reflect any further on the alleged metaphoricity of the garage sale.  

After I saw “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” I decided to focus on the work of only one artist instead of attempting a review of the entire show.  All of the works on display help to illuminate how art was developing in post-WW2 Japan and how the experiences of war seeped into the process of art-making determining the choices in material and subject matter. Another thread in the works on display is their awareness of European and American art. This is visible in the assimilation of tropes found within the avant-garde and the dominant culture of the time.

It was not until I saw Jiro Takamatsu’s sculptures that I stopped wandering in the slightly overwhelming exhibition space. Their simplicity came as a shock and their veiled irony was incredibly refreshing. 

Jiro Takamatsu, Oneness of Wood, 1971

Jiro Takamatsu, Oneness of Concrete, 1971

I have been thinking about irony ever since I read Christy Wampole’s NY Times op-ed and Kyle Chayka’s reaction to her piece on “Hyperallergic.” As often is the case with polemic writing and the people who get worked up about it, both Wample and Chayka are equally right and wrong. While Wample argues that irony has been reduced to a life style (similar to a fashion accessory), Chayka is upset that Wampole omits the role of irony within art. Since both of them are writing about two different things, very little common ground can be expected to be found along the way. I think that Takamatsu’s objects are going to be helpful here.

For one, I absolutely agree with Christy Wampole that “(t)he ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism.” This is the example she gives to illustrate her argument: “Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself.”

Kyle Chayka counters that “irony is a less direct, more complex method of communication than superficial honesty or transparency might prove to be. But there’s a responsibility and a weight to that complexity and the choice to use it, and that weight, its particular emotional spin, can sometimes prove useful, in life as well as in art.”

Mark Hensley, Anonymous Grief, acrylic on shelf backing, 2008

I also agree with Kyle Chayka that irony, at its best, is less direct, allows for openness and ambiguity which enriches an art work since it can be understood and looked at from many interpretative angles. But then he includes examples of art that actually feed into what Wampole questions. Two of his examples are Mark Hensley’s “Anonymous Grief” and Tatiana Berg’s “Birthday.”

Tatiana Berg, Birthday, 2011

If irony, according to Chayka, is a counterpoint to superficial honesty, I would much rather embrace superficial honesty than consider Hensley’s or Berg’s work. Their work is humorous and playful and I can get behind that. But the resulting smirk or laugh you get out of their work is extremely short-lived. And what are you left with in the end? I do not see much complexity here. Instead these works contain a sense of irony that has become a permanent state of mind, a contemporary Mannerism or ironic tool box with a fixed set of possibilities. I am not left feeling uncomfortable, uncertain or that any of the two works defies certain categories. There are no surprises here. What I see instead is a safe exercise. Berg and Hensley reference irony instead of using irony to point to something beyond it.

But what does it mean to reference irony anyway? It means that you put out a work that tells us: this contains irony. But the work (and ultimately the artist) does not take the risk to tell us what the use of irony questions, challenges, or undermines. These are the signs of a work of art that is too pleased with itself. Also, with Berg and Hensley I find myself looking at parodies of painterly tropes instead of ironic work. 

Toward the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Schlegel were among the first to theorize the relation of irony to art. According to Schlegel, irony is the synthesis of wit and allegory. The element of allegory makes sure that we are not left with wit alone; that there is another element which “wit” leads us to. “ Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe,” Schlegel wrote. The works by Berg and Hensley are not about the universal; they are about the particular and therefore devoid of an irony that has the guts to go beyond a referential joke. A great example of irony in art is Sigmar Polke’s “The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black!” from 1969 and can be read as a jab at Abstract Expressionism and process-oriented work:

When Christy Wampole  - who is a scholar on Claude Cahun and most likely familiar with irony - mentions seriousness and sincerity as alternatives to our “contemporary ironic mode,” she echoes Schlegel’s “feeling for the universe.” You can see how a phrase like “feeling for the universe” might earn you a round of laughter or accusations of pretentiousness. In that way I understand how irony - our contemporary mode of irony - becomes a mantle of safety, an excuse that obscures what we really think and believe.

Jiro Takamatsu’s work could be misunderstood as “Minimalism,” but it appears to be concerned with more existential matters and less with art. In “Oneness of Wood” a larger piece of wood has been broken down into pieces. The larger, rectangular piece is now a container of its own remains. It is not without irony that a once natural object has been turned into a receptacle of its own left-overs. At the same time it appeals to a larger idea, to the sameness of material, to its artificial if not forced marriage of wood with wood. In its unity, separate ideas and separate processes have become one. And in this oneness we discover a multitude. This is when irony matters: it utters a voice of its own even though it references familiar modes of art. Here, in the simultaneous employment of irony and seriousness, lies an art that has freed itself from art as its sole invigorating source. Let there be more!

After five months on display, the Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate Modern in London closed on September 9th. Almost half a million people saw the show. The number of visitors is impressive, but what does it tell us? Let’s not forget that the show was open during the London Summer Olympics and its location next to the newly renovated Globe Theater certainly helped (even though the number of tourists during the Olympics was much lower than expected). 

If you look at some of the reviews in the British press, it is refreshing to read that unlike the Tate’s ‘endorsement’ of Hirst, some critical voices can be heard after all. One amusing article can be found on the Daily Mail’s website which focuses on art critic Julian Spalding, who was initially banned from visiting the exhibition. There is a lot truth to be found in both ‘Hirst praise’ and ‘Hirst bashing’ and what seems to attract people the most about his work is the air of sophistication, accessibility and the pressing question of “what makes this art?”. The shark in formaldehyde is exactly that: a shark in formaldehyde. But the blue hue of the formaldehyde and the minimal design and white color of the tank changes it from a natural science museum prop to an national art museum piece. And also: the shark in the tank has a longish, pompous title. That will help too.

I do not want to spend any time discussing the show itself as this has been done in catalogues, blogs, articles and essays many times over. Some people love him, most hate him, but the ones who love him have the most money. So there you go.

Damien Hirst’s retrospective ended with a gift shop that I assumed was an integral part of the exhibition. I had not seen anybody taking pictures inside the show, so I asked if it was ok to photograph the most expensive item in the shop, which happened to be another skull minus the diamonds - with some acrylic paint instead. A short discussion ensued and shortly after I was granted permission to take a photograph.

Damien Hirst, Painted Skull in the show’s own gift shop.

The skull above was offered for about thirty-six thousand British Pounds (it failed to sell though) and there were many other items like plates, earrings, necklaces, etc. or in other words ‘tchotchkes’ - many of which sold for hundreds and thousands of pounds. Seeing these items in the show’s gift shop was the closest thing to experiencing a revelation. All questions that I had the moment I left the exhibition galleries ceased at once. Now I believe that the work by artist Damien Hirst is much simpler than I thought it to be. There is no ambiguity, there is no moment of questioning, surprise, open-endedness, suspense or any possibility for his work to be more than what we see when we stand in front of it. If you place your work in a gift shop located at the end of your exhibition, give it a price tag that reflects the current market value for your work and accept that it will be purchased for the suggested price, then it no longer matters what your intention might have been. The question if this is part of a game, a greater scheme, or an ironic gesture simply ceases to matter. It can still be art, but the kind that earns its legitimacy through exceptionally exorbitant financial transactions.

To step into an installation with living butterflies, as in case of Hirst’s In And Out of Love, while most butterflies are in a state of dying or have already died because the conditions do not allow for the intended full circle of life to take place, is a sobering experience and a failed art piece. 

In 1965 Joseph Beuys performed How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare in a Gallery in Germany. There are two remarkable differences between the ‘death-life’ centered work of Damien Hirst and Beuys’ performance.  Firstly, Beuys was separated from the audience by a glass window. Visitors watched from outside the gallery, peeking through the window to get a few glimpses of what was happening inside. This distance is contemplative (a very German take on art and the idea of ‘reflection’ and ‘insight’) and raises awareness of the exploitive nature of the performance. Secondly, the direct contact and close relation with the hare turns it into the subject of this performance instead of reducing it to an object or prop. The piece’s lengthy title suggests that art demands explanation, that it is not a given and that any exchange between art and life is defined by a permeable boundary. Damien Hirst seems to have forgotten that an art work is better when it poses questions rather than making a statement (no matter how ‘bold’ or ‘shocking’).

The best possible situation with regard to Damien Hirst’s work would be if the artificial mystery about his true intentions as an artist became irrelevant thanks to a surge in more critical and in-depth encounters with art among bloggers, writers, art critics, art lovers, art teachers and, of course, artists. There is a lot of work to be done and I hope that art as entertainment will become the rare event it deserves to be. 

When you get a chance to see a painting by Henri Rousseau in person, it is unlikely that you will forget it. You might consider it crude, bold, weird, naive, failed or a kind of art that seems like it belongs to a world of its own. You might be tempted to judge his work too fast, maybe even dimiss it. In most cases, all it needs is some time and close attention.

Henri Rousseau, “Tiger in a tropical Storm (Surprised!)”, oil on canvas, 1891

Henri Rousseau’s painting “Tiger in a tropical Storm (Surprised!)” actually took me by surprise while I was wandering the National Gallery’s (U.K.)  nineteenth-century collection with no clear idea of what to look for. Rousseau’s painting stopped me and I thought to myself “How often do you get to see an artist who paints rain?” There are great examples of non-Western and particularly Japanese prints that depict natural phenomena like snow and rain (for example Hiroshige’s “Rain shower on Ohashi bridge”) and it is possible that Rousseau had seen some of these (like his contemporaries Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh).

Adding a thin glaze to his painting, Henri Rousseau veils the surface, but does not obscure it. Looking at the painting as a whole, one is reminded of the moment right before a storm: the wind pushes heavy rain with such force so that every leaf and tree sways and bends toward the ground. Rousseau has picked this barely tangible phenomenon and fixed it permanently.

Henri Rousseau, The Equatorial Jungle, oil on canvas, 1909

Several years passed before Henri Rousseau continued with what became some of his most important works, his jungle paintings. His frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes - a botanical garden in Paris that featured many subtropical plants not native to France - allowed him to develop a visual vocabulary of the unfamiliar. It is an unfamiliarity that is - at its best - unsettling. This is particularly true in case of the two creatures who are partly hidden in the thick of the jungle. Their appearance recalls caricatures and phantasms with the animal on the right looking like a masked human.  

Amy Lincoln, Jungle with Zebras, 24” x 37”, acrylic on panel, 2012 

I experienced a similar unfamiliarity bordering the unsettling when I saw Amy Lincoln’s work for the first time. There are some striking formal parallels between her and Rousseau’s work. The lushes plants bursting with color (Lincoln’s more so) and elegantly oscillating between flatness and roundness. And let’s not forget about the wacky situation at hand. A zebra that is as alert and aware of our presence as is Rousseau’s masked human. We have entered a fictitious realm that presents a real-life dilemma:  what are we really looking at and why do we not understand what we see?   

Amy Lincoln, Dinner Table with A and K, 27.5” x 37”, acrylic on mdf, 2012

Underneath the deliberate humor and irony of Amy Lincoln’s paintings lies a bitter-sweet alertness. This tension surfaces even more when people enter her pictorial frame. Objects like buildings, street lamps or the beer bottle in Lincoln’s painting “Dinner Table with A and K” reference the reductive approach of illustrations like the ones you might see on a New Yorker cover. But Amy Lincoln is not an illustrator even though she moves comfortably between categories. Her characters belong “here” and “there” at the same time. They are situated in a world and more specifically a city that has been the backdrop of many dreams, visions, expectations, disappointments and myths. If the curtain drops, they will return to their reality and become fully-fleshed humans again. For now they must remain in limbo: characters who perform their comic self while aware of this painterly masquerade.

Henri Rousseau, Carnival Evening, oil on canvas, 1886

Something I have neglected to mention is the handling of paint in cases of Henri Rousseau and Amy Lincoln. There is an attention to detail and slowness of the painting process that defies the general attitude of many younger New York painters. I am not trying to say that one approach is better than the other, but I will always prefer to look at paintings that slow my perception versus paintings that reveal and discharge everything at once.

 Amy Lincoln, Spring Trees with Rain, 15” x 21”, acrylic on mdf, 2012

The handling of paint in Lincoln’s work requires decisions to prevent her paintings from turning into a children’s room wallpaper.  Color choices matter as much as the degree of detail and spatial depth. Every single leaf that we see in “Spring Trees with Rain” has been modeled and shaped to stand out on its own, ripe with volume and heightened plasticity. Her surfaces are covered in individual marks that assume various objects: blades of grass, leafs, rain drops.

Maybe I should take back what I said in the beginning when I called her work “reductive.” In Lincoln’s and to the same degree in Rousseau’s paintings, it is not so much a reduction of the visible world that fascinates me; it is its compression into a more comprehensible form. In other words: when thin layers of paint finally thicken into the objects they describe.

And then, as in case of Amy Lincoln’s “Spring Trees with Rain,” you find yourself wondering what to make of this. If you find yourself in that position, you have already made your way into the painting and you will not regret staying there for a while to  watch the rain.

It has been a couple of days since I read Simon Bayliss’ article on his visit to the three-day conference called “The Penzance Convention” in Cornwall, UK. What makes this article a particularly interesting read is the fact that Simon Bayliss - himself a painter - participated in a conference dedicated to social art practices that generally exclude painting. But as insightful and thoughtful Bayliss’ comparison between the world of social art practices and the world of painting is, his conclusion is surprisingly stubborn and points to what I believe to be a larger crisis within contemporary painting.

Jacques-Mandé Louis Daguerre, The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel, c.1824

If you receive emails from “e-flux” on a regular basis, I am sure that you are familiar with the many conferences, performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, research projects and staged interventions that have become fashionable in recent years. The collaborative and interdisciplinary spirit is not a new phenomenon in art though. The father of the daguerrotype - Louis Daguerre - was a scientist and painter before he turned to photography.

Le Corbusier painting a mural at the Villa E.1027 in 1939

The visionary architect Le Corbusier started out as a Cubist painter and continued to develop his regular painting practice until the late stages of his career. The goal to transform or at least impact and ultimately improve the social fabric of a society through art was discussed in treatises by Kant, Fichte and Schiller (just to name a few). One German word for education is “Bildung” and was introduced to the German language in the Middle Ages. It contains the compound “Bild” which translates into “image.” To educate someone could be understood as forming that person according to an image or concept. To be educated would then mean that one has formed an image or an understanding of the world. But education through art is not the only possibility to look at “Bildung.” Throughout the Enlightenment (and less so in 21st century America), education itself was considered a form of art that would guarantee the continuity and progress of any society.

Seen in this context, I cannot agree to the sharp division between painting and social art practices as suggested by Simon Bayliss. In his article for the magazine “The Painting Imperative,” he compares the goals of social art practices with his impressions from an Alex Katz exhibition that happened to take place in Cornwall at the time of the conference:

“Nevertheless they [i.e. Alex Katz’ paintings] are neither pedagogical nor participatory, and they do not infiltrate the social sphere. The traits of a painting are outmoded today. Socially engaged art not only promotes new ways of making and thinking about art, it reconsiders the power of art in changing the world. Painting is no longer suited to this task. Unlike most social practitioners, who surefootedly seek to address and even reform political issues, Katz like many painters is content with a material-based practice.”

I am not so much interested by what Bayliss concludes about the Katz paintings, but how his article discusses contemporary painting in general.

First of all, I agree with Simon Bayliss’ observation that today’s painting is not socially engaged. But is it really not equipped to be socially engaged? I do not believe that painting is inherently disadvantaged as a medium to make a significant contribution to the larger dialogue on topics of social and political relevance. This is to ignore what artists and in most cases painters have been doing for centuries:

Gruenewald’s Isenheim altarpiece that depicts Jesus covered in sores reminiscent of ergot poisoning - a common form of poisoning among those treated in the Isenheim church where the altarpiece was originally located.

Caravaggio’s first and now destroyed version of “St. Matthew and the Angel” that was refused by the church as it thought the representation or rather misrepresentation of Matthew - a poor and most likely illiterate man clumsily holding a pen while guided by a seemingly disinterested angel - to be unfit for a public display.

Jacques Callot’s series of etchings that show the gruesome and often explicit outcomes of the Thirty Years War. Together with Francisco Goya’s “The Disasters of War” that deal with the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, these documents and works of two-dimensional, traditional art elevate the role of the artist from a spectator or voyeur to an active participant. One could go as far as calling them social interventions with visual means.

Edouard Manet, The Battle of the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama, 1864

The list could go on for quite some time and be extended to late 18th and early to mid 19th century paintings like Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat,” Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa,” Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde,” or Manet’s “Olympia.”

 All I am trying to argue here is that there is no reason for today’s painting - even in the age of multi-media, performance or interdisciplinary artists - to step down and limit its activity to what is believed to be its unaltered or eternal essence. The fixed image, may it be produced in drawing, painting or in print, can do much more than be “content with a material-based practice.” All of the above-mentioned works of traditional art share the following: they mastered their medium and they were socially relevant if not transformative. Why should not the same be true for painting and painters today?

Toward the end of his article, Simon Bayliss writes:  

“The communicative power of painting today is limited however, and its practice lacks flexibility. There is no task for painting now; no responsibilities, and no strategies. The pursuit of ‘art for art’s sake’ is standard practice. It seems that although painting mostly continues to fetishize the art-object and indulge in the pursuit of aesthetics, social artforms have taken on a role within the cogs of society. An interdisciplinary approach is undoubtedly the most logical today, giving artists the capacity to deal with worldly issues using the very fabric and languages which frame them.”

I do not think that Bayliss is alone in his belief. If all we have is either inert painting in dialogue with itself or painting that stands still and does not dare to be more evocative and relevant to the social and political circumstances of our days, then painters and their defenders should not be surprised that other forms of artistic engagement render painting powerless.

I refuse to accept that there is “no task for painting now, no responsibilities and no strategies.” First of all, painters have to give up the idea that their goal is to produce a signature style. It is ignorant to believe that there is this one particular mode of painting for each painter, similar maybe to handwriting, that needs our fullest attention and cultivation. Why choose sameness over difference?

Secondly, painters should not shy away from the social or political sphere as something to be occupied by conceptual artists and academics only.

Thirdly (take it with a grain of humor if you can), if you live in a larger city with numerous galleries and museums, stop going to openings or painting shows for at least three months and see how your own practice develops during this time.   

Painting is too adaptable of a medium to be ascribed only a specific set of functions. Painting is not about the purity of its medium, it is not about the essence of its process. Painting is in fact the most equipped medium to tackle the matters of our time as it is a matter itself.

Walking through Tate Britain’s permanent collection of British Art is far from being a boring endeavor. I usually learn something new each time I manage to pay the Tate a visit. Most people with an interest in the arts and who are not British have a good understanding of French art (in particular of the early 20th century) and of North American art (after WW2). But other than Turner, Freud and Hirst, what do we know about British art?

Gerald Brockhurst, Portrait of Margaret - Duchess of Argyll, oil on canvas, 1931

You know when you have come across an interesting painting. It will make you stop and look twice. An interesting painting tends to hold your attention while making it difficult to arrive at any particular conclusion. At first I thought Brockhurst’s painting was old-fashioned and fairly traditional. Yes, it is painted well, but that alone is never satisfactory - at least to me. What about it then?

I had never read about Gerald Brockhurst. Nor had I seen any other of his works. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Brockhurst was a celebrated portraitist who immigrated to the United States in 1939 (he spend most of his life in New Jersey where he died in 1978). Similar to the Polish émigré and painter Tamara de Lempicka, he made most of his money through commissions. These included socialites, celebrities and aristocrats such as J. Paul Getty, Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor. 

I think what continues to hold my attention in this painting is its lack of painterly excess. When you are capable of producing a fairly even and flawlessly ‘realistic’ or ‘figurative’ portrait as Brockhurst does, it might be tempting to show off and add more to it than is necessary. Painters are usually fond of creating a clear signature style. This is not automatically a bad thing, but it can become a replacement or surrogate for a painted subject. Instead of engaging with a chosen subject through paint, the painter’s style takes over and renders the chosen subject (portrait, landscape, interior, still life, etc.) insignificant. Instead, the chosen subject becomes a playground for “style.”

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 2008

In Brockhurst’s painting of the Duchess of Argyll, a number of factors emphasize the sitter’s gaze. Her hands are not shown and her upper body forms a dark square that is set against a reduced, mountainous background. Her long neck is a strange, glistening form that seems to be pulling away from the rest of her body, mounted by a pale face with dark, bottomless eyes. Brockhurst’s painting is as much a portrait as it is a body in space. One can sense the air that surrounds the sitter. The Duchess does not appear to be fixed on a flat surface, but rather behind it.

Sometimes an old painting can outwit a new one and surprise you by taking your mind on a trip. I am not talking about a trip of self-discovery, truth or of a hallucinatory nature. It is more a lesson in careful looking and is therefore indispensable. 

If you ever had the chance to visit contemporary art museums in Germany, you will find yourself wondering if there is any way around Baselitz’s upside-down paintings. There are many of his paintings in various permanent collections, one could argue too many, as if post-World War 2 German painting consisted of nothing other than Baselitz. 

Re-discovered by a newer generation of painters in Europe and abroad, Baselitz seems to be enjoying himself these days. In a recent interview with the German “art magazin,” he is exceedingly confident in expressing his questionable views on art.

Asked about the biographical subject of his paintings, Baselitz answers:

“You know, there is this tendency in art today that one has to open up as much as possible not by comparing oneself to other worlds, but by incorporating these. Other cultures, age groups, genders - this whole idea of “we are all people in the end.” I find this rather dubious. I insist on the following: remain white and remain black, remain a woman and remain a man, remain German and remain Russian! Naturally, the world is made up of entirely different appearances. But this is uninteresting to art.”

If all artists cared about and dealt with could be found in their immediate environment and experience, we would end up with impoverished art works. Why not make a painting of what is unfamiliar and less understood rather than showing a slice of our every-day surroundings? I disagree with Baselitz and think that - to the contrary -  artists and in particular contemporary painters deliver impoverished works when they do not bother to go beyond pop-cultural references rooted in their childhood (i.e. cartoons, films, TV, music, etc.) or direct observations. Why should it be unthinkable to paint a subject that is outside our cultural area?

And let’s think about artists who might be immigrants to western countries: what does it mean to remain Russian in Germany then? What does it mean to be African-born but living and working in the United States? What does it mean to keep an identity that is linked to your appearance (for example ‘black’) while you feel neither black nor white? What does it mean to remain a woman while you wish to be a man or vice versa? If you agree with Baselitz, you choose to remain ignorant and close-minded. In a way, Baselitz’ world ends with his perception of it. Beyond his world there is nothing to be found. What lies beyond it, is the business of others.

I guess some painters are bad with words and ultimately with formulating ideas. Baselitz prefers to stick to well-defined categories and subjects (e.g. I am German, not Russian; hence my experience is that of a German). Not so much in the way he paints his experiences, but in the way he understands these. While his work suggests openness and experiment by turning the process of painting into a subject in its own right, his work’s scope is, I dare say, conservative. As a German born in Poland and immigrated to the United States, I feel embarrassed for you, Georg Baselitz.

Gerhard Richter’s retrospective “Panorama” has recently arrived at the Pompidou Center here in Paris and even though I had the chance to visit it, I want to go a second time, before I write about it. For now, let’s stick with a show called “Richteriana” that was up from May 12th until June 16th at Postmasters in New York. 

“Richteriana” received a good amount of coverage in various media including Art Fag City, Two Coats of Paint, The Village Voice, ARTINFO and several others. Mainly positive in nature, some of the reviews see the show at Postmasters somewhere between “takedown and hommage” (The Village Voice) or as a deconstruction of the Richter mania (ARTINFO). Several of the articles mention how one of his abstract paintings recently sold for over $20 million at auction. The overall problem with the show is that it is unclear why exactly Richter has been chosen as its subject. If the show’s attempt is to question Richter’s status, I can think of other contemporary artists who are receiving broad institutional support and whose work goes up for millions at auctions. Usually they tend to be at least a couple of decades younger and their work does not reach Richter’s thematic breadth. I would actually be delighted if “Richteriana” was a takedown of Richter’s work or a full-on hommage with a sense of irony. Either one could be interesting. But the work in the show does not dare to take a position. And honestly, why does it have to? Its relation to Richter remains vague and without a vision.

Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience: Security & Comfort, c-print in 7 sections, 60” x 210”, 2012

Hasan Elahi’s photographs, for example, are relevant enough without the context imposed by the show. After 9/11 the American-Bangladeshi artist was put on a FBI watch list designed to surveille terrorist suspects. He responded by surveilling himself and taking photographs of locations and objects such as the toilets seen above and pretty much anything that he encounters in his daily, private life. To compare Elahi’s “Tracking Transience” to Richter’s vast archive of source material called “Atlas” as suggested by “Richteriana,” is like saying that everything that is an attempt at categorizing visual material is in essence Richter’s “Atlas.” That would be absurd and so is the decision to establish a link between Elahi and Richter. I think Hasan Elahi’s work deserves something better than “Richteriana.”

David Diao, Wealth of Nations, acrylic on canvas, 84” x 132”, 1972

The works by artists David Diao, Rory Donaldson, Fabian Marcaccio and Rafael Rozendaal are similarly misleading. They all refer to isolated processes found in Richter’s abstract work - be it technique, color or materiality. None of it is convincing and not because the work isn’t good. It just looks a lot like a calzone that wishes to be pizza. It might be delicious, but it ain’t the same thing.

In Diao’s 1972 work, the paint is pulled over the canvas in a fashion similar to Richter’s squeegee technique. But what exactly is it that Diao did before Gerhard Richter (Richter apparently started his first abstract works in 1976)? All I can think of is how different their paintings are. If you have seen an abstract work by Richter, you can often observe how he starts out with a monochromatic field which is then slowly covered up by successive layers of often vibrant colors that appear torn and are never as even as Diao’s composition.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (769-2), date unknown   

Greg Allen’s “Destroyed Richter Paintings” could have been the most promising contribution to this show. In February of this year the German news magazine “DER SPIEGEL” ran an article on paintings that Gerhard Richter had photographed in the early 60s before he decided to destroy them.

Gerhard Richter, Family Portrait, dimensions and date unknown 

Allen decided to make paintings after the photographs that Richter had taken. But he does not paint them himself. Instead he commissions a company (or rather painting factory) in China to make copies of the photographs. I find this incredibly confusing. I guess that the intention is both to play and undermine the art market. China is not only known for its buying power when it comes to contemporary art (while producing plenty of sought-after artists at the same time). A significant part of its industry is based on bootlegged commodities. Next time you are in a hotel admiring your hotel room art or strolling along the many art shops set up by the Seine River in Paris, take one of the framed pieces and turn it around to see where it was fabricated. That does not mean that cheap reproductions come exclusively from China. You can get more expensive and more accurate hand-painted reproductions “Made in PRC” as well. Then you have established artists such as Urs Fischer or Kehinde Wiley who rely on Chinese labor to keep up with the art market demand and affordable production costs.

Greg Allen, Destroyed Richter Painting No.5, 48” x 46”, oil on canvas, 2012

But all of this does not make Greg Allen’s project any more clear. Maybe if we look at his paintings we will get a better understanding. But these paintings are more than disappointing. They are quite terrible. In particular “Destroyed Richter Painting No.5” is more of a caricature than an appropriation. I wish Greg Allen would have either stayed with a print medium to realize his project or that he would have manually altered the fabricated canvases. On the other hand, how is his project specific to Richter’s work? He could have done something similar with almost any artist. The fact that Richter works from photographs does not help Allen’s approach. 

Gerhard Richter, Portrait of Hitler, 1962, dimensions unknown

In the end, it is Richter who had the guts to venture into unpopular territory and take a risk. It might have been a mistake that he destroyed his painting of Hitler or maybe it was just what needed to be done at that moment. But in 1962 talking openly about German involvement in WW2 was a taboo. The idea that a collective is made up of individuals who are guilty as individuals and not as a group was too much to bear for Germans who had lived through and participated in the war. The student protests that erupted across Germany a few years after Richter had finished his painting were a result of a collective suppression and denial: “I am not guilty. It is the others who are.”  Even in the early 1990s when I attempted to talk to my German grandmother about her brother who had joined the SS before WW2, this was thought of as an unsuitable subject for discussion.   

In Richter’s painting, Hitler appears like a wicked Che Guevara (his iconic image had been produced only two years earlier in 1960). He is both an icon and a threat wrapped in white, cut off at the top by a rectangular shape that contains what appears to be an obscured Iron Cross at its center. The Iron Cross, if that is what we are looking at, holds a particular meaning. It is the insignia of the new German Armed Forces founded in 1955, seven years earlier. The fact that the Iron Cross had also been used by the Nazis becomes apparent in Richter’s painting: to look at Germany’s present means to look at its recent past. In order to overcome the past, one has to be able to face it. And what better medium is there than painting to offer the conflicts of past and present at the same time?      

“All right…I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.“ 

Daisy about her newborn in Chapter One of The Great Gatsby (1925)

When I get a chance to look at a Tamara de Lempicka painting, and so far I have not had many occasions to do so (the last time was in Rome in 2011), I wonder if she wants her viewers to look at foolish beauty or if she is fooling us to believe in beauty.

Nu adossé I, oil on canvas, 1925

On May 2nd of this year Edvard Munch’s pastel “The Scream” sold for nearly $120 Million. I won’t even bother to include a link here, since pretty much everybody has heard about it. In the shadow of this staggering number, a 1925 painting by Lempicka sold for a little over $5 million the same day. The curious story behind her painting is that it had been lost shortly after her 1925 solo show in Milan, Italy. The West Coast owner of the painting, who have had the painting in his collection since the 90s until he contacted an art consultant who then got in touch with Sotheby’s.   

But there is another aspect that makes Lempicka’s painting a rare find. It has to do with her signature. I have come across maybe half a dozen paintings that she has signed “Lempitzki” instead of “Lempicka.” By changing the Polish suffix “-cka” to “-tzki” the gender of the family name is changed, meaning that “Lempicka” refers to a woman, while “Lempitzki” stands for a man.

It is as if Tamara reverses viewing roles here or at least she points to the possibility to look at her nude through a man’s eyes. Tamara’s model avoids our glance, covering herself she turns away from us and thereby assumes a classical posture much repeated throughout painting and maybe closest to the sentiment of an Ingres painting.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Baigneuse, oil on canvas, date unknown  

In another work from the same year signed with “Lempitzki,” Tamara paints a model who lifts her right arm to block out a bright light source located outside the picture frame. The tip of her elbow reflects a glare of yellowish white and protrudes out toward the viewer’s space. Her gesture and the cast shade render her anonymous and faceless. Without meeting her eyes we can explore the rest of her body: down toward one uncovered breast and a strangely twisted left arm that unveils the full flesh of her upper thigh.

Lempitzki, The Model, oil on canvas, 1925

These reclusive nudes do have not much in common with the regular “Lempicka” women. In a painting like that of the “Dutchess de La Salle,” Lempicka’s subject demonstrates self-affirmation, confidence, elegance and an air of upper-class leisure.

Lempicka, Portrait of the Duchesse de La Salle, oil on canvas, 1925

There are also a couple of portraits of men signed with “Lempitzki” in Tamara’s set of 1925 paintings. In the end, one can only speculate what that all means and why she decided to introduce this twist to her signature. Going back to the introductory quote from “The Great Gatsby,” Lempicka must have been aware of the role that most women of her status and age were expected to fulfill. She could have become “a beautiful little fool” herself. But instead she painted some of these “fools” and signed her paintings as man. I like to think of this act as a performative gesture that is opposed to the role of her models: confrontational and engaging. 

Her explorations of sexuality with men and women alike, her proximity to the world of art, fashion and celebrities makes her less a woman starved for attention (although that cannot be completely denied). Why not think of her as a female dandy? Haven’t we talked about the male dandy enough already? Let’s end with one more quote. This one is taken from the 1893 play “A Woman of No Importance” by Oscar Wilde: “Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.” If there is something that can be observed in most of Lempicka’s work, it must be the abundance of excess.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s first New York solo show at Miguel Abreu Gallery ended almost three weeks ago and my post might come a bit late. But the reason I decided to write about it has to do with Roberta Smith’s review of the show and Sharon Butler’s response to Smith’s critique. 

In short, Roberta Smith describes her visit to the exhibition and how at a certain point she must adhere to the press release in order to decipher some of Rosenkranz’s formal and conceptual decisions. Sharon Butler, on the other hand, wonders if Rosenkranz is “overthinking” her work, and entitles her response “The danger of overthinking.” The only danger I can identify in this case is when painting is being underthought.  

Everything is Already Dead (Sprite and Pocket Watch White), Ralph Lauren acrylic latex paint, soft drink, inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper, 2012

First of all, Pamela Rosenkranz’s “paintings” (they are rather applications or demonstrations) come off as amusingly old-fashioned as her work wants to promote some conceptual gravitas. Rosenkranz sticks to an old formula that deems the color white as most appropriate for conceptual art. How much I would have enjoyed seeing Yves Klein’s blue monochromes instead, or at least receive one of his famous blue cocktails upon entering the gallery! 

Because They Try to Bore Holes, 2012 (Installation view of the Pamela Rosenkranz show)

Looking at the installation shot of Rosenkranz’s show makes me shiver. This image conjures my worst stereotypes about contemporary art (hospital interior, dentist office minus a waiting room and medical equipment, fantasy loft of the 1%, etc.) and leaves me flabbergasted as to how exactly Roberta Smith arrived at the term “beautiful” to describe Rosenkranz’s exhibition. Similar to Glen Coco’s conclusions that he draws in his article “I’ m sick of pretending: I don’t ‘get’ art”, I find Pamela Rosenkranz’s work and the mode of Smith’s coverage underwhelming to say the least.

Secondly, I do not quite understand why Sharon Butler sees “overthinking” as a danger. I would argue that Pamela Rosenkranz’s work suffers from a lack and not an overabundance of thought. If you, as an artist, are interested in taking a position and giving it a visual expression, you need to take a position first and you need to give it some thought. The hints and tracks that we pick up and follow in Rosenkranz’s work (art as commodity, commodity as art, what separates “meaningful” from “meaningless,” materiality vs. immateriality, modes of production and so forth) remain unclear, undecided and under-thought. That is not to say that her work is ambiguous or open-ended. It does not have the necessary richness that is needed to allow multiple readings of a work of art. It is, to the contrary, anemic. 

I remain hopeful about the future of more soulful and thoughtful painting. Even though contemporary artists and particularly painters seem to enjoy making art about bad art, I would be happy about attempts to make good painting that stimulates thought.   

In the past two years, I have visited Galerie Mircher many times and often the painters shown there are not that memorable. There is Martin Kasper and his clunky interiors, Pat Andrea’s and Simon Pasieka’s illustrative retro-surrealism, and the teenage sensibility of Nazanin Puyandeh’s work. This time I was a bit more lucky and actually spent a good amount of time looking at Mireille Blanc’s paintings at Mircher. 

Mireille Blanc is a young artist who, according to the gallery’s press release, was “discovered” in 2011 at the Salon de Montrouge that is held annually in the city of Montrouge (a suburb of Paris) to recognize and support French emerging artists. The interesting aspect about this salon is that anybody can apply and by looking at the accepted artists (this year 80 from about 2100 artists were selected), the submitted work is all over the place. Whoever “discovered” Mireille there last year had to sieve through a lot of strange stuff.

I wish I could provide titles and dates with the paintings I photographed at her exhibition, but the gallery did not have a list of works anywhere and I did not feel like starting a conversation with the owner about the lack of information. Let’s just begin with the largest painting in the show.

Blanc’s largest painting (posted above) is installed in the back of the gallery and is easily visible all the way from the entrance door. While most of her paintings are fairly small or medium sized ranging from about 15” in diameter to maybe 30”, this one emulates the scale of a human body. To settle on a small, overlooked object that is a cross between a bottle and a relic is a paint-worthy decision. To enlarge this object and thereby give it a human presence makes the ordinary particular. As a viewer, I find myself unable to ignore this object and I start considering it as a fabricated and recently painted thing. It certainly has a history, but it comes without a story. It is clear - fully rendered and visually articulate - and yet it remains nameless. Often painting is best when it does not try to imitate language and instead points to an area devoid of words. 

Most of her other paintings in the show are not as disarming. One of the reasons is that Blanc bases her work on washed out, vintage polaroids that she buys at flea markets in addition to pictures that she takes herself (this is brought up in the gallery’s press release). Her overall palette draws heavily on a murky color range that appears in overexposed photographs.

Noeud, oil on canvas, 33 x 24cm, 2010

The surface of her canvases are polluted with browns and grays amidst pools of white. Often it looks like the objects in front of us have not been recreated but covered in paint. They are not painted objects, but objects disguised with paint. Her brushwork is very animate. It moves around and across her objects, but it never quite revives a sense of tactility, texture, or weight.

Foret Noir, oil on canvas, 27 x 50cm, 2011

Similar to Luc Tuymans and Josephine Halvorson, Mireille Blanc paints each of her works in one sitting. To work under a self-imposed rule that does not allow (or so we are asked to believe) for a second session of painting demands an economy of painting that is partly conceptual necessity as well as gimmick. Unlike Tuymans and Halvorson, Blanc does not manage to use this imposition to her favor. There are some occasional standouts, like her painting “Chateau” from 2011. But when Blanc’s paintings display passages of gestural accidents, they loose out in substance.  

Chateau, oil on canvas, 30 x 40cm, 2011

In the end, the art world loves its own “discoveries.” The value of a new discovery is more likely to outshine the quality and substance of any work - at least in the eyes of a gallery owner and eventually in the eyes of the public. I think that Mireille Blanc should be given some more time or should allow herself more time, so that paintings like that of her miraculous bottle keep appearing with greater frequency.    

To “discover” an underrated artist and call this discovery your own is the dream of any art-enthusiast. It reminds me of some of my facebook friends who try to outperform each other on their you-tube findings of obscure musicians. It also reminds me of art critics, curators and art dealers who enter this odd competition with what seems to be a demonstration of their own capacity to decipher the good from the great. It is as if they secretly wish to claim some of their artist’s genius for themselves in unearthing and introducing an unknown artist to a wider audience.

The Galerie Karsten Greve in Paris is currently showing work by James Castle who used to be referred to as “outsider”-artist for most of his active career until the 1960’s when his first solo exhibition was held at the Boise Art Museum in his home state of Idaho.  Most of the works on display are no larger than a regular postcard. In some parts of the exhibition they have been arranged into larger clusters.

By grouping many drawings together, Castle’s works on paper reveal their incredibly diverse character. Seen from up close they look like charcoal drawings on cardboard that might have been exposed to sunlight and humidity at some point.

But this is not charcoal on regular paper that we are looking at. James Castle used sooth from a wood stove that he would mix with salvia. Using pieces of sharpened wood, he would then apply his “pigment” onto found paper and package materials some of which came from his father’s post office.

The subjects of his drawings were all to be found in his immediate environment. We see trees, sometimes animals, often barns, old farm houses, dim interiors packed with an array of tools, objects and basic furniture. Everything appears to be strictly arranged almost as if Castle’s priority had been outmost clarity despite the rugged surfaces of his drawings.

At first I did not even know that I was looking at work by James Castle. His name is not indicated anywhere (it is one of these shows where the only information on the walls are red dots) and my first guess was that I was looking at a French artist from the 1950’s who might have been a follower of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. Finally, I found an information leaflet at the gallery desk and was excited to read that this is apparently the first retrospective of Castle’s work in France. The text also points out that Castle was deaf from birth and that he did not speak, write or read. This information prompted me to research if anybody had attempted to diagnose James Castle during his lifetime. In the book “Autism and Talent” by Francesca Happe and Uta Frith one chapter briefly mentions Castle and how he is unlikely to have been examined during his lifetime, although it can be assumed that he was autistic. 

The tradition of “outsider art” (not to be confused with the more specific “art brut”) is an entirely different phenomenon in Europe than it is in the United States.  Here, it is is basically non-existant. A common occurrence in France or Germany are exhibitions that show established and less established artists side by side in the many government sponsored city halls, institutions and art societies. Sometimes I feel like the true outsiders of the art market are the few blue chip galleries one can find in Paris. It is a rather sympathetic reversal of the contemporary art market hierarchy. The quality of these public exhibitions is a different story.

A common thread in declaring an artist an “outsider” is to assign him or her the uncanny ability to reference avant-garde trends without being aware of them. The exhibition text of the Galerie Karsten Greve is no exception: “The perfection of the drawings, Castle’s material aesthetics, and the numerous references to the avant-garde of the 20th century are all fascinating. Although he had never any personal contact with it at all, Castle’s paper works are reminiscent of collages of European art before 1945, and even more of pop art’s view of the everyday aesthetics and the commercial art of the post-war period in the US.” Wow. It seems like somebody was lucky to “discover” James Castle, right?

To explain where I am headed with this, it would like to bring the Prinzhorn Collection into this discussion. The Prinzhorn Collection started out as an institutional archive by German psychiatrist (and art historian) Hans Prinzhorn. When Prinzhorn joined the University of Heidelberg in 1919, he helped to expand an already established collection of art works created by patients of the university’s psychiatric hospital. Three years later, Prinzhorn published a book about this particular collection entitled “Artistry of the Mentally Ill.” Soon thereafter it became a relevant source for avant-garde artists like Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet and others. It is no big surprise, but nevertheless ironic that it was Dubuffet who coined the term “outsider art” in response to Prinzhorn’s publication. The fact that parts of the avant-garde incorporated “outsider art” into their visual repertoire draws a different picture of the role of “influence” than is suggested by Galerie Karsten Greve or even the Philadelphia Museum of Art that held James Castle’s first retrospective in 2009.  

Even though Hans Prinzhorn chooses to use the word “Bildnerei” (production of images) to describe the works of his collection, he sees most of the objects “reaching far into the realm of serious art.” On the website of the “Sammlung Prinzhorn” several remarkable examples demonstrate how James Castle is not a rare exception.

For one there is a collage piece from 1890 made by a woman who is only known as “Mrs. St.” Her collage measures 2.69m and is made out of smaller pieces of paper that have been glued together and painted with ink, graphite and water colors. Some parts of her work might recall quilts or hand-sown fabric, but the odd shape points to a less practical or decorative context. 

In 1894 this photograph was taken of Maria Lieb’s room. A patient at the Heidelberg psychiatric hospital, she was known to take apart blankets and bed linens to re-assemble these into geometric and organic patterns that would then cover large areas of the floor similar to what we would now consider to be an installation.  

When I see museums and in particular for-profit galleries resurrect forgotten or unknown artists, I cannot help but think that they are creating the desire and willingness among art enthusiasts and collectors to:

1) buy their narrative of an obscure genius artist

2) buy the artist’s work and thereby endorse a narrative with mythic content

I do not mean to denounce James Castle and question his ability by pointing to a possible clinical diagnosis as an explanation for his talent. Far from it. I think that the example of James Castle can teach us how an outstanding artistic ability is not something unique to artists. Why should artists be the only ones capable of forming visual responses to our daily realities? The ability to think and produce creatively is something we all share. Having taught art in a psychiatric clinic, in primary and high school and at the undergraduate level, I have come to accept what I thought was just a platitude: in the long-run, we often unlearn how to access the creative part of ourselves.

Some people decide to turn their ability into a career mainly because they receive the necessary support from an early enough age and partly because they might have more luck than other people (in being encouraged by people who can provide long-term support). I really believe that it is rather rare that a great artist is a great genius or a “special” person in any way. A great artist is always a great worker and similar to Prinzhorn’s speculations, it could have been the shift toward the intuitive in modern art that allowed the work of James Castle or Mrs. St. to intersect with that of Paul Klee and Jean Dubuffet. If all galleries and museums suddenly decided to display contemporary works of art without giving away the names of the artists, we would no longer be able to distinguish between outsiders and insiders; how much fun we all would have!

In 2010 I saw an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work for the first time. It was at Anton Kern Gallery in New York and I remember looking forward to seeing his work in person. As much as the color white has been part of a large portion of conceptual work in various media for several decades now, the color gray seemed to have taken over Sasnal’s paintings. 

Wilhelm Sasnal, Hardship 1-4, 2010

One general observation that was shared by several critics in 2010 and continues to be addressed in his more recent work is his deliberate change of painting styles. Robert G. Edelman puts it this way in his 2010 review:

“What may set his work apart is that Sasnal’s response to each image seems to determine what kind of paint application he uses, whether hard-edge, soft-focus or impasto.”

Even though I agree with this observation, an impasto application of paint in an image like “Hardship 1-4” does not complicate or enrich its reading. The white paste of paint is similar to extra frosting on a cake: it does not necessarily make it more delicious, but it looks exuberant. And it reminds us that this is indeed a painting and not a photograph.

Wilhelm Sasnal has repeatedly been compared to Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, but neither of these two artists makes work as graphic and rich in contrast as Sasnal’s. When looking at his paintings I often feel reminded of graphic novels and silkscreen prints, rather than of the suggestive paint found in Richter’s and Tuyman’s surfaces. 

Luc Tuymans, The Secretary of State, 2005

Wilhelm Sasnal, Magic Johnson, 2006

If you compare Tuymans’ “Secretary of the State” to Sasnal’s “Magic Johnson” their difference becomes quite apparent. While Tuymans infuses his portrait with psychological depth, Sasnal’s painting evokes generic likeness. Now, as so often with painters, Sasnal could argue that he intentionally avoids any deeper visual examination of his chosen subject. In the end, we are looking at a representation of Magic Johnson and not at the actual person, right? But I have to admit that I much rather look at Elizabeth Peyton’s painted celebrities than Sasnal’s decal images.

I do admire Wilhelm Sasnal’s attempt to cover a diverse range of private, historical, political and pop-cultural images. In his current retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, about 60 paintings and some of his video work are on display until May. One of the most striking and wholesome paintings in the show is a portrait of his son Kacper.

 Wilhelm Sasnal, Kacper, 2009

Sasnal often leaves out the faces of his painted protagonists. But instead of an obliterated, gray face as seen in “Hardship 1-4” (that is somewhat reminiscent of a crash dummy’s head), the features of Sasnal’s son in the painting “Kacper” are consumed by sunlight and make him unidentifiable. By replacing Kacper’s face with a painted glare, Sasnal does not have to impose a concrete shape (crash dummy head) on an abstract idea (the absence of an individual). In this painting, Sasnal has found a productive and convincing balance between what has been removed and what has been added.

With regard to his larger body of work, this particular painting uncovers a problem that lies in Sasnal’s reductionist approach to painting. If you make a painting by reducing a photographic image to its bare essentials, you simultaneously have to introduce a new perspective in your painted image. When you emphasize a reductive process alone, you might end up with a gimmick like the non-descriptive dummy heads. In the painting “Power Plant in Iran”, Sasnal’s gimmicks are the inverted (upside-down) drips of paint.  

Wilhelm Sasnal, Power Plant in Iran, 2010

The excessive reduction of the Iranian power plant and its appearance as an outlined rectangle does not seem to refer to anything other than its status as painting. What would otherwise be an image that resonates with our current political atmosphere, becomes an exercise in empty formalism. Sasnal’s reasoning seems to be that stripping a charged (photographic) image of its meaning will create a painting that opens up numerous new interpretations. The problem is that by adding drips of white paint, Sasnal pushes his image further toward a painterly context and away from its political realm. This painting is now an object engaged in an inner monologue, completely unaware of its source and oblivious of the world it originated in.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Gaddafi, 2011

In Sasnal’s political work (or rather his paintings with political overtones) the formal experiments often develop a dynamic of their own and thereby raise the question why they had to originate in politicized topics. Would they not be better without their implied subject matter? By reducing and simplifying his paintings, Wilhelm Sasnal ends up with equally oversimplified content. To replace Gaddafi with an array of different-colored dabs of oil paint is neither radical nor enlightening. The videos and photographs of Gaddafi’s last moments show a tyrant turned victim. How can we depict his opposed roles in one painting? Aren’t these questions worth asking for painters?

If all painting can do is to demonstrate its powerlessness in face of history, maybe it should try again and fail better. Being unable to form a clear picture of an event like Gaddafi’s death does not mean that as a painter Sasnal can only evoke painting’s materiality as if to say: maybe I cannot paint this scene, but maybe the paint I use can speak for itself. In matters as complex as history and politics, painters are better off not to rely on their medium for guidance. Instead an artist’s chosen subject matter could have the last word and thereby change how a painter views and uses painting.  

Elizabeth Peyton - “John Lennon Recording Abbey Road, 1969”, 1997

If I am not mistaken, I have posted about two exhibitions at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. I think it is time to say something more positive about their contemporary art choices. Whenever I visit Ropac, I go downstairs to their basement that has two small exhibition spaces. So far, on each of my visits, I have encountered at least one Kiefer work on display in the second room. It is curious that Kiefer seems to be on exhibition there on a permanent basis, but I am quite thankful for that. 

Anselm Kiefer, Title and dimensions unknown

When I came to see Banks Violette’s work, I went to Ropac’s basement afterwards just to see if another Kiefer might have been put up. And there it was. About three meters wide and one meter twenty high it easily filled out the small space it was installed in. The top part of his painting featured a quote from Wolfgang Goethe’s poem “Ein Gleiches” (Wanderer’s Nightsong II) that Goethe wrote on the wooden wall of a mountain hut in 1780. The inscription on Kiefer’s painting reads as follows:

“Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, in allen Wipfeln spuerest du kaum einen Hauch…”

“Up there all summits are still. In all the tree-tops you will feel but the dew…” (The English translation is wordy and mentions “dew” while Goethe describes a subtle stir in the tree-tops.) 

In Germany you will most likely hear this poem for the first time in primary school as an early exercise in national identity. In his painting, Kiefer contrasts its idyllic image with charred mountain tops. It is a truly remarkable experience and once you approach the canvas to look at it from up close you can no longer tell if you are looking at oil paint or burned wood. This is not just some lame analogy, but you can actually not tell the difference. Only touch could resolve the paint’s ambiguity. 

Detail of Kiefer painting

There have been many paintings in past and recent years that utilize paint’s materiality to emulate textures from flesh to smoke. Some names that come to mind include Allison Schulnik, Annie Hemond Hotte, Jyrki Riekki, or Katy Moran. But only few of these painters manage to infuse their medium with the trauma of a violated surface as Kiefer does. Instead most of the mentioned artists produce tender and somewhat nostalgic celebrations of their medium by employing the rhetoric of “bad” painting.

When Gerhard Richter was asked about Anselm Kiefer’s work, the former compared Kiefer’s paintings to the fake foreground of nineteenth-century panoramas. Although meant as a pejorative comment, Richter’s comparison is an appropriate description of what we are dealing with when looking at one of Kiefer’s paintings. On the one hand, we have to admit to their embrace of the spectacle and their quality as staged and highly charged works. On the other hand, they effectively extend the notion of painting without becoming a sculpture. His work has sculptural qualities as the paintings have incredibly tactile surfaces. That alone does not qualify them as sculpture though. In art reviews I often come across the idea that works of art, and particularly paintings, are caught in-between media, as though they are not one medium or another, but both at the same time. This observation usually indicates an excitement about the dual nature of painting. But we do not have to point our finger at post-modern theories to conclude that paintings are both image and object. For instance, the early-modern “icon” has embodied painting’s twofold state for centuries now.

Procession in Amorgas, Greece

I do not suggest taking an Anselm Kiefer painting on a walk around the block (although that is something painter Chris Martin has done many times with his own work) or that it should be adored with religious fervor. I just think that what makes a painting exciting is not to call it something else or assigning it the role of a different medium such as sculpture. The excitement lies in realizing that ultimately a painting has always been and will always be exactly that: a painting.

One of the reasons why painting has been declared dead so many times is that artists seemed to grow concerned with calling it by that name. The fact that one painting might be gestural, or provisional, performative or sculptural, an installation or part of a multi-media piece and so forth, does not mean that it appropriates these other strategies in order to distract from its own shortcomings. To the contrary, these characteristics describe to what extent newer and new media have incorporated painting into their visual language. So keep in mind: next time you visit a performance or installation, think about its painterly qualities.

A few days after my visit to Banks Violette’s exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, I stopped by Galerie Olivier Robert. In the back of the gallery I saw a yellow painting that immediately got my attention. It was just incredibly yellow and hard to overlook.

Elodie Lesourd, The Dead d (courtesy of A kills B), acrylic on MDF, 2010  

I had never heard about Elodie Lesourd before so I wrote down her name in order to find out more about her work. When I finally looked up her website I was surprised to discover that she was yet another artist toying with stylistic and aesthetic elements of Black Metal. I think that settling on a subculture or musical sub-genre like Black Metal can absolutely result in interesting art work. But it depends entirely on how it is done. And that is exactly the issue with Lesourd’s work. When I described Banks Violette’s work as appropriation art I had no idea how Lesourd would actually wring every bit of validity from the concept of “appropriation.” By making a painting from a photograph that depicts Violette’s installation “Church,” Lesourd suffers from an acute case of “referentiality.” Nobody outside an already small circle of contemporary art lovers will get it. And even if you count yourself as part of this devoted inner circle, you still might not get it. Maybe there is nothing to get, right? I have heard that phrase in an awful lot of MFA critiques and artist lectures. Sometimes, when an artist feels the pressure of having to justify their work, they might decide to say nothing.  Looking at Elodie Lesourd’s exhibition history, I wonder if the galleries and institutions who showed her work decided not to ask any questions and to go with the dark and mysterious look of her work instead. Do they even know what Black Metal is?

Elodie Lesourd, Vargsmal (courtesy of B. Violette), acrylic on MDF, 2007 (screenshot) 

It turns out that the yellow painting that I initially liked is based on photographs taken at a performance by the two-member artist collective “A kills B.” As much as I was perplexed by Violette’s relatively lame use of source material in his Ropac show, Lesourd manages to produce something even more tedious. Her work is in dialogue with other contemporary artists and musicians (If you look at Lesourd’s website, you will discover paintings of music and band paraphernalia - and plenty of drum sets). That alone is not a point of criticism. But her lack of critical distance to her sources is.

Elodie Lesourd, Wilso/n (courtesy of R. Wilson), acrylic on MDF, 2009 (screenshot)

Several of Elodie Lesourd’s works (such as Ornament and Crime, War, Black Pointing, Vargsmal, and Riley Serie: Daudi Baldrs) reference the band Burzum and its founder Varg Vikernes who I wrote about in my previous post. Making references to Burzum via highly aestheticized paintings that do not consider his ideology in any way is a naive and convenient decision. Varg Vikernes has been involved with the Heathen Front (by writing articles for their magazine) and other similar-minded organisations although he tends to deny any such ties. His manifesto “Vargsmal” that he started writing in prison is filled with - to just name some very few - anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Immigrant rants. If you want to get a taste of Vikernes’ distorted view on the world, you should read his “essay” on Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik that he published in July of 2011.  

I have been following Black Metal since the mid 1990s and the thoughtlessness going into Violette’s and Lesourd’s work on this subculture is a clear shortcoming. The fact that both artists focus on the more extreme spectrum of Black Metal and particularly Varg Vikernes, appears like a calculated provocation. But to provoke exactly what? I am not sure what that could be.

Would it hurt if both artists were to take further steps in their work and actually dare to formulate a position or at least an idea of why they are doing what they are doing? Artists who raise questions about inconvenient and underrepresented issues have been able to make strong work. One example would be Ken Gonzales-Day’s series “Erased Lynching” for which he manipulated historic images of lynchings by removing the victims.

Ken Gonzales-Day, East First Street (St. James Park), 2006

Instead, we get to endure another round of Black Metal art in shape of the exhibition “Black Thorns in the White Cube” on display in Kansas City and later in Chicago. Curated by Amelia Ishmael eight artists will demonstrate their take on this subculture:

“Engaging with the symbols, history, and myths of the Black Metal music subculture, their images explore haunted Germanic forests, descents into the void, visual translations of sonic experiences, ontologies of Black Metal band logos, and barren western landscapes.”

What about the other, darker issues of Black Metal? I guess the newer generation of artists no longer wants to get its hands dirty.

Damien Hirst at Gagosian

I would like to return to a gallery that I covered here fairly recently, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The day I visited their Alex Katz exhibition I also went upstairs (the gallery’s official “drawing space”) to take a look at Banks Violette’s “Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children.”  The overflow of former Columbia University MFA students in Parisian galleries is remarkable and - at least to me - quite annoying. I haven’t looked into the situation in Berlin, but I am interested to find out what the ratio of former RISD, Columbia, and Yale students is there. I am not implying that Columbia does not produce good artists. But schools like Columbia are capable of equipping their students with a network that most art schools or art departments cannot keep up with. Is this an example of unfairness or is this simply a fact? All I know is that it helps to make mediocre work look sexier. That said, let’s have a look at Banks Violette.

Banks Violette, Pick Your King/Amphetamine Overlord, 2011 

From the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s press release, we get a few pieces of information on some of the drawings included in his show. For instance, the portrait of Jesus is taken from the cover of an album by hardcore punk band Poison Idea. Ok. Fine. And then we learn that the sheets of aluminum are “hand-made.” This additional information left me as confused as looking at the work itself. I can’t follow any of the formal decisions: Graphite drawing taped onto hand-made aluminum sheet. Since Violette often refers to musical subgenres I get that he references certain bands that likely have some kind of biographical significance to him. But how is that enough to constitute an interesting or evocative work? This is not minimalism; this just offers too little substance.

Banks Violette, Untitled (Church), 2005 (Bonded salt, salt, polyurethane, polymer medium, ash, epoxy, wood, galvanized steel, steel hardware, 366cm x 488cm x 732cm)

In 2005 Banks Violette’s installation “Untitled (Church)” was part of his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The story surrounding the making of “Church” goes back to the burning of the Fantoft stave church near Bergen, Norway in 1992. Varg Vikernes, the then 19-year-old founder and musician of the Black Metal band Burzum, was linked to the burning and later convicted of four other arson attacks. He is also believed to have taken photographs of the burned Fantoft stave church that he then used for the cover of his EP “Aske.”

Burzum, Aske, 1992/93

More importantly, one year later Vikernes killed fellow musician Øystein Aarseth and was sentenced to 21 years imprisonment (and subsequently released after 16 years in 2009). His friend Snorre Ruch who drove Vikernes to the scene of crime and back from it, received an eight year prison sentence (Snorre Ruch also composed the soundtrack that accompanied Violette’s installation). During Vikernes trial more information on the Norwegian Black Metal scene surfaced and was picked up by national and international media outlets. Aside from over-exaggerated and sensationalist “facts”, some disturbing aspects included Vikernes belief-system. It turned out that he was not so much dedicated to a Satanist and anti-Christian ideology but more involved with what one could call “Neo Social-Nationalist Paganism.” I have no idea if such a term even exists, but if you feel like obtaining some more information on the radical right that has been and continues to influence certain groups and fractions within Black Metal, then you will be surprised at the amount of hair-raising ideologies cultivated in these circles. For more insights you should watch the 2009 documentary “Until the Light Takes Us.” 

Banks Violette’s installation is effective as an artifact of a youth counterculture (and in this case one individual) that decided to act out a violent and discriminatory aspect of its ideology. As interesting as this incident is for a potential work of art, one thing bothers me greatly. Why did Violette not take his work further and explored the wider implications of this event? Books, crosses, churches or synagogues going up in flames are not only acts of expression, but always acts of censorship or at least signs of suppression. Would that realization have harmed Violette’s vision? I think it would have only enriched it.

Sterling Ruby, BUS, 2010

Aside from the aesthetic appeal and theatrical impact of “Church,” one soon discovers its limits. I am reminded of Sterling Ruby’s “BUS” that was on display at PaceWildenstein in 2010. What both works share is their status as spectacle. I felt like walking onto the set of a movie when I visited Ruby’s show two years ago and some commentators who reviewed the installation linked its appearance to a prop from “Mad Max.”

John Chamberlain sculpture (Title and Year unknown)

There is a difference between a John Chamberlain sculpture that never takes on the literal dimension of its source (wrecked car) and Violette’s incredibly literal embrace of his (burned church). Violette’s decision narrows the scope of “Church.” His installation could have been transformative by giving life to a twisted, dark fantasy that became reality. Instead his piece merely mirrors its source without dissecting what later became a symbol of Vikernes followers. Violette’s use of salt and his forced hint at minimalist aesthetics does not rescue the work from being a particularly flashy piece of underwhelming appropriation art.

The sculptural element continues to dominate Violette’s work. In his show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac it is impossible to look at the drawings without registering the “hand-made” aluminum sheets. And reaching not so deep into the hipster tool box, he decides to lean three of the aluminum sheets against the wall. 

Banks Violette, Budweiser Triptych, 2011

Leaning objects against the wall has become a completely risk-free affair. In the past few years I have seen this method applied all over Chelsea and to a lesser degree in Paris. If I can think of one artist who not only gets away with it, but manages to make it look casual, improvised and really fun and not pretentious, then that would be Chris Martin.

Chris Martin, Installation View of “Paintings” at Sideshow in 2005. 

As disappointing and bland as Banks Violette’s drawing show was, it got even worse when I discovered the paintings of French artist Elodie Lesourd.

(To be continued soon.)

In line with the claim from my previous post, I do believe that when it comes to Europe most Art World eyes are currently directed toward Berlin, London, Amsterdam and Brussels. In the meantime, Paris has been busy developing its own art scene. It is an art scene that comes with flaws, it still relies more on imported than local artists since gallery owners shy away from taking risks. But over the last years new promising venues have opened their doors and even some of the older galleries display an increasing number of artists who will make it worth your while.

Several weeks ago I went to Eric Mircher Gallery on the rue Saint Claude in the 3rd arrondissement. The painter who was showing at that time was Sylvie Fajfrowska (who is also represented by the same gallery).

Sylvie Fajfrowska, Les rencontres no. 5, 2m x 2m, 2010

Upon entering the gallery, a big painting to the right was the first to get my attention. Well, first of all it is large and size alone has its ways of drawing you into an image. I wasn’t crazy about the overall flatness, the robotic stagnation and positioning of the individual figures. The fact that the two characters to the right do not intersect while their arms almost touch makes the painting lopsided. It seems like Mrs. Fajfrowska was aware of the “heavier” right side which might explain the stretched yellow stripe that she inserted in the upper left corner for reasons of counter-balance. Also, let’s not underestimate the role of Balthus for contemporary French painters.

Balthus, The Street, 1933

Fajfrowska’s figure on the left did remind me of the people we encounter in a Balthus painting and particularly of the little round-faced man in his painting “The Street.” Balthus orchestrates and times the movements of his figures so that each of them looks like they are caught in the middle of acting out their role in the painting. The characters in Fajfrowska’s set-up on the other hand could be three people returning from a Halloween party and now waiting at a bus stop. There is not much going on here otherwise. But I have to say that I fell in love with the red rubber boots. The way Fajfrowska depicts how the legs enter the boots and how their red glow continues upward into the legging-clad legs - that alone is a painting in its own right.

The actual pleasant surprise of this show was in the back of the gallery. There several small-scale abstractions by the same artist were hung with plenty of room in-between each other.

Sylvie Fajfrowska, 2, 20cm x 20cm, 2008

Sylvie Fajfrowska, (No title available), 20cm x 20cm, 2008

The most positive aspect about these paintings is there wound form and implied movement, something that I found missing in her larger and figurative work. In addition, Fajfrowska has a great sense of color that many French painters have lost at some point after the 60’s (take Denis Castellas from the same gallery as example; he can learn a lot from Sylvie Fajfrowska). In a way it reminded me of a color scheme you would more likely find in a New York painting show than in Paris. I think this is a reliable indication that something is cooking up in contemporary Paris.

My absolute favorite was a work on paper that threw in a pinch of humor at the end of the show.

Sylvie Fajfrowska, Les brochettes, 35cm x 35cm, 2011

The painting-“brochettes” or “little skewers” sum up the show quite well: 

Treats made of color and paint without much depth of flavor but still delicious and enjoyable. Bon appétit!

Neo Rauch’s Heilstaetten at David Zwirner

If I could name one painter who would have an extremely difficult time to make a name for himself in Europe, it would be Brett Bigbee. When it comes to outsiders and insiders of the art world, Europe likes to play it safe and so we continue to get one generation of Richters, Immendorfs, Baselitzs, Kippenbergers, Eitels and Rauchs after another. With most European eyes directed at Berlin and London, painters of today have inherited and accepted a range of “do’s” and “don’ts.” For example: You “do” leave paint alone and you “do” allow it to explore the free-range chicken in itself.

Andre Butzer, Untitled, 2007

If you happen to be a member of the more “controlled” painting camp, then only “do” you apply control to create context-free subjects, objects and spaces. In that case a viewer can roam through your pictorial interiors without bumping into any significant mental resistance. It surely is easier that way and it feels like taking a nice boat ride into nothingness.

Tim Eitel, Boat, 2005

You do not, on the other hand, betray the belief in an inexhaustible avant-garde. In other words, you cannot give up making art about art. Under no circumstances should you paint a small-sized portrait in which your intention is to establish a likeness without disclosing pop-cultural or art historical references.

When you put these “do’s” and “don’ts” aside, you will arrive at a painting like this one:

Bret Bigbee, Portrait of Ann, oil on linen, 18” x 14”, 2004-2008

I find this painting deeply puzzling. You might ask yourself: “How can you possibly paint like this today?” I asked myself that question. All odds are against Brett Bigbee. He should not be able to pull this painting off, but he does. It does not matter if someone has a problematic relationship with the notion of “beauty,” “aesthetics” or representational painting in general. You cannot deny its intense clarity. It is not a clarity that reveals pores and blemishes. The surface is softened, round, even fuzzy. I am not thinking of Old Master paintings, but of Georges Seurat drawings. 

Georges Seurat, Aman Jean, 1882-83

Brett Bigbee, Study for James, 2000

Ann’s eyes anchor the painting’s clarity. It took me a while to link the oddness of her eyes to the lack of any eyebrows and eye lashes. Without surrounding hair the sitter’s eyes seem boundless in their piercing and yet inward gaze.

In Bigbee’s painting nothing can be easily consumed and taken in at once. Everything on display is solid in appearance with each detail slowing down our viewing process. Ann’s skin is soft and hardened at the same time; trees in the background are generalized and simultaneously particular. We are witnessing a painter affirming his sitter’s presence in paint. This is anything but a new idea, you can even call it old-fashioned if you like. But I can’t take my eyes off this perplexing surface.  

At the beginning of the 20th century the siblings Gertrude, Leo and Michael Stein traveled from the United States to Paris. While Michael, his wife Sarah and Leo eventually returned to the US, Gertrude remained in Paris until her death. Gertrude Stein was not only a writer and poet, but not too long after their arrival she and her brother organized a salon in their apartment which became a hot spot for the Parisian “avant-garde.” Over the years the Steins accumulated an art collection of epic proportions. Their collection includes works by the godfathers of abstract art such as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, and Gris. 

Interior shot of the Stein apartment in Paris

I do not intend to write a review of the exhibition that is currently on display at the Grand Palais in Paris. There are some true knock-out paintings like the Matisse landscapes and a small painting by Manet so thinly treated with paint that one wonders if he saw it as a study or a self-sufficient work. What I do want to comment on is something that has been on my mind for some time and reoccurs whenever I see Picasso’s work.

One room of the Stein family exhibition brings together several fascinating paintings by Pablo Picasso. The center piece is a portrait of Gertrude Stein (which can also be seen in the photograph above) painted in 1906. 

Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1906

Her eyes are not entirely aligned and this slight shift of symmetries occurs in several areas of the painting. The background indicates wallpaper on the right side while the left side reveals a bare wall and what appears to be part of the chair that Gertrude Stein sits in. She is positioned in the corner of a room, but due to the lack of straight lines that trace the architecture of the corner, the room wraps itself around her almost as it it was resting on her shoulders. Picasso must have been looking closely at Matisse’s work and the way that the latter dissolved any distinction between foreground and background. 

Next to the Gertrude Stein portrait (to its left), the curators have placed “Nude with a towel” from 1907. 

Pablo Picasso, Nude with a towel, 1907

Some of the colors that are traditionally associated with portrait painting, specifically the reddish brown tones, are bordered by a radiant blue. If you look from one painting to the other you can see how the figure in “Nude with a towel” fills out most of the frame. What could be a background has become an extension of the body.

Then, to the right of the Gertrude Stein painting, two other Picasso portraits from 1906 have been added. The first one is a gouache of Allan Stein while the second piece is a self-portrait.

Pablo Picasso, Allan Stein, 1906

Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1906

Imagine the following: Picasso lives in our time and has recently finished his MFA. He is now preparing a portfolio of work to apply to post-graduate studies, residencies and galleries. What do you think would be the reaction of the review panels looking at his work? Most of the reviewers would consider Picasso’s work to be uneven and incoherent. While he is now identified as innovator and explorer (or alternatively the most annoying artist who has ever lived due to his ongoing omnipresence), I believe that in our current state of the art world he would have a very difficult time promoting his work. 

Alex Katz, Double Sarah B., 2011

The following day I went to the gallery Thaddaeus Ropac to see Alex Katz’s show “Face the music.” When I was standing in their oversized space surrounded by about half a dozen large-scale Katz paintings, my mind started wandering off to the Picasso room of the previous day. How has Katz been getting away with painting one kind of archetype for the past five to six decades? I don’t recall one Katz painting that demonstrates a departure from his common style. The Alex Katz Collection at the Colby College Museum of Art offers a comprehensive overview of work by the artist from the 1950s onward. Let’s take a brief look at some of his paintings.

Alex Katz, Ada in a purple dress, 1958-59

Alex Katz, Rockaway, 1961

Alex Katz, Stanley, 1973

Alex Katz, Anna Lauterbach, 1978

Alex Katz, Red Coat, 1983

I think I can stop here. This is, to some degree, a superficial take on Alex Katz. I agree. But it is meant to be superficial. The first thing you register when you glance at art is how much a particular object of art diverts from what you think you know about it. You feel challenged in your perception. In case of Picasso, I frequently catch myself complaining about yet another show of his work. But then it is rare that I will leave a Picasso show without a new discovery. All I see in Katz is sameness.The flatness and reductive nature of his figures is not a characteristic he arrives at, but a starting point that never changes. While Picasso displays such rigor, self-awareness, versatility, experimentation, risk and play within one single year, Alex Katz does not manage to divert from his “vision” even once over the course of six decades. His collaborations and attempts at installation do not make up for the lack of diversity and risk. Take a look at my previous post on Joan Snyder and how she keeps up an ever-evolving practice. 

Katz is not alone in this. How about Chuck Close? How about Ali Banisadr, Georg Baselitz, or Robert Longo? How about the painting trio Albert Oehlen, Jonathan Meese and Bjarne Melgaard and their “painted provocations” (how can provocations be so calculated, repetitive and exchangeable?). How about Peter Halley? How about Will Cotton, Lisa Yuskavage, or Neo Rauch? This list could be much longer and include emerging and mid-career artists alike. The idea that painters today have to create a specific niche for themselves is usually confused with dedication and obsession. Be dedicated and obsessed with painting. But why do you have to be obsessed with painting one thing only? Why is the idea of an artist with a specific style a positive feature? Why not paint everything in every possible way? Should not that be the new way of the contemporary painter? The artists who I have listed here are commercially successful and that is why, at least for now, things will remain the way they are.   

I.

Remember when in February of 2009 the US Senate voted 73-24 in favor of an amendment brought forward by Republican (of Oklahoma) Tom Coburn? His amendment intended “to ensure that taxpayer money is not lost on wasteful and non-stimulative projects, such as funding museums, theaters and arts centers.”

I had a hard time reading what Padddy Johnson from Art Fag City posted on her tumblr under the headline “Occupy Museums.” In short, Noah Fischer and the “Occupy Museums” movement want protesters to occupy MOMA, the Frick collection and the New Museum. The reason for this reads as follows:

“Recently, we have witnessed the absolute equation of art with capital. The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by museums are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the art historical cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs. The wide acceptance of cultural authority of leading museums have made these beloved institutions into corrupt ratings agencies or investment banking houses- stamping their authority and approval on flimsy corporate art and fraudulent deals.”

Let’s play a little game here. Let’s replace “museums” with “galleries” and “art historical cannon” with “contemporary art cannon:”

“Recently, we have witnessed the absolute equation of art with capital. The members of gallery boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by galleries are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the contemporary art cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs. The wide acceptance of cultural authority of leading galleries have made these beloved institutions into corrupt ratings agencies or investment banking houses- stamping their authority and approval on flimsy corporate art and fraudulent deals.”

Interesting, isn’t it? Paddy Johnson writes mainly about contemporary galleries and art fairs, but is seemingly unable to understand how certain galleries and art fairs contribute to an inflated art market. Coming originally from Europe, I know that even the Communist Party who has seats in the Senate here in France would never dream of cutting funding or occupying its art museums. Our belief is that it is a fundamental right of the people to access these institutions. According to Paddy’s entry, “Occupy Museums” agrees that museums are for everybody, but they do not want these elitist institutions to divide us any further. I am not sure what they mean here. Are they referring to the entry fees that not everybody can afford? If that is the case, I agree. But would it not be helpful to ask why that is?

To answer this question we have to admit that within the last decade, even before the recent financial collapse, spending cuts have greatly affected museums and other parts of the cultural sector. Earlier this year a conservative group called the Republican Study Committee announced a bill that aims at eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. How does this relate to Johnson’s and Fischer’s “Occupy Museums” idea? Funds from the NEA are allocated to art museums like the MOMA. In 2006, a total of $124 million was available to all art programs and museums in the US while MOMA has an annual budget of $150 million alone. You can imagine that if they received any money that year, it could not have been more than maybe a few percent of the total amount.

If less funds are available to support museum programs, money has to be raised differently. One way is to hope for private donations, as happened in case of MOMA’s recent expansion for which $800 million were raised privately. Since MOMA is not city-funded unlike other museums, raising the admission fee is standard practice (just take the recent admission fee increase of the LOUVRE in Paris even though they are government funded). Starting in November admission at MOMA will be $25 which is, without question, high. But let’s not forget that a ticket to a baseball game starts at about $30, while a movie ticket in New York costs around $13.50. If you are a student and you buy a ticket to the MOMA online, you will only have to pay $12 which is not a terrible deal.  

The other reason why art museums like MOMA are increasing their admission fee has to do with government support.  This is therefore a political issue. A document on NEA’s website gives an interesting insight into private vs. government funding for the arts. In their example they use numbers regarding funding of American symphony orchestras, art museums and other art-related programs:

“Many of America’s leading institutions would not exist if private citizens had not bequeathed their holdings and invested their resources. Consider some broad estimates for American symphony orchestras. According to one set of figures, 39 percent of their income comes from private donations and 12 percent from endowments and related sources. Concert income generates 36 percent of revenue and other earned income provides 9 percent. Direct government support represents only 4 percent of revenue. 

For purposes of contrast, a theater or orchestra in Germany will likely receive 80 percent or more of its budget from direct governmental support. In France and Italy, government support at various levels accounts for almost all of the funding for a typical museum. Even the Louvre, which was asked to find private funding as of 1993, raises less than half of its operating budget. In the United States, however, direct government support accounts, on average, for 13 percent of the total budget of nonprofit arts organizations.”

If anything, Johnson and Fischer should be occupying the US senate.

The significance and importance of “Occupy Wall Street” is to make people aware that big corporations function as a kind of pseudo-government which regulate the financial markets almost at their will. At this point you could argue - as “Occupy Museums” does - that it is big corporations who finance and eventually influence art museums. But that is not the case. According to a study from 2004, the role corporations play in financing nonprofit arts organizations (MOMA is a nonprofit organization) is minimal: only 3% of the total income generated by arts organizations are due to funds from corporations. 75% of these corporations are businesses that make less than $50 million a year while 90% of the money they give goes to local arts organizations.

II.

The other aspect pointed out by “Occupy Museums” has to do with “cultural elitism” of art museums. Republicans like Tom Coburn believe that art funds should be reduced because of their limited merit for government funding. They are considered luxuries enjoyed by a small group of people, one might say by “elitists” (an expression frequently used against Obama during his campaign in 2008). In 1991 Charles T. Clotfelter, a professor of economy and law at Duke University, published an essay titled “Government Policy Toward Art Museums in the United States.” He writes: “One of the central recurring issues that arises in debates over public support for the arts is the tension between the perceived elitist nature of the arts and the populism that is embedded in American politics.” 

To support this observation, Clotfelter uses an illustration that shows how museum attendance depends on the overall income and education of its visitors. This would otherwise support “Occupy Museums’” idea of a division initiated by the museums, except that Clotfelder’s table includes art galleries as well. Art galleries, as we know, are free of admission. Shouldn’t more people be visiting these then? Not if people think that galleries are elitist too.  oops…is Noah Fischer an elitist?

Then Charles Clotfelter states something that actually points out what “Occupy museums” is really about:

“More often, the elitist-populist issue manifests itself in ways less obviously class-oriented, such as the forms of art that should be supported (e.g., the “fine arts” vs. folk art), the kinds of institutions that should be supported (established vs. “emerging”), and the regions where support should go (the urbanized Northeast vs. the hinterlands).”

If you re-read Paddy Johnson’s tumblr post again and if you take into account which art or art venues are being written about positively on Art Fag City, you will realize that “Occupy Museums” wants a shift in what art is shown and how it is shown. That demand is a symptom of a deeply insular debate where art world insiders want to tell you what is good for you and what you should be seeing in a museum if they could make that decision. This is a case of self-promotion and self-interest and not criticism or protest. What Johnson and Fischer suggest is not the beginning of a fruitful debate, but hypocrisy (of course there is lots of room for art museums to improve…most of us could have done without a Tim Burton show or think back to the 1988 protests by ACT-UP against a MOMA exhibition which is an effective way of going against wrong decisions on behalf of MOMA).

I have to agree with Karen Archey’s article on artinfo and I repeat her idea: “Rather than targeting museums, it seems more pertinent to take action through creation of art reacting to its market catering to rich and elite–or maybe even occupying super rich galleries and art fairs. How about the notably evil David Zwirner, anyone?”

 I want to return to Paddy Johnson’s tumblr entry one more time where it says that: “For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art.” True and you, Art Fag City, contributed to this commercialization. How so you wonder? What about as a first step you stop writing about Bravo’s “Work of Art?” 

FIAC came to Paris and is already over. Some weeks ago I was looking forward to it, until I checked the official website and saw the list of galleries: Art: Concept (featuring Gedi Sibony’s retro-minimalism, Jacob Kassay’s silver paintings, Francis Baudevin’s all-too-safe abstractions), Applicat-Prazan (with a questionable Jean Dubuffet painting), Baronian Francey (why does all the work look like it could have been done by one artist?), Guido W. Baudach (with a bunch of painters who all paint like Bjarne Melgaard or Jonathan Meese), Gagosian (yes, being an artist is just like being a pop star), Yvon Lambert (plenty of sterile art),  Florence Loewy (any Spartan would have loved to own one of the objects on display here), Pace Gallery (where did all their good artists go?), Thaddaeus Ropac (THE blue-chip gallery in Paris)…I think you get where I am going with this. A set of drawings by Louise Bourgeois sold for $1m, a Murakami screen for 2 to 3 million euros, Rashid Johnson’s work went for about $95,000 a piece. If you want a few more numbers and a detailed report, read here. 

Art fairs are a strange hybrid. Galleries sell products for a lot of money while these very same products often toy with imagery or themes that are modeled on issues surrounding our consumer culture and our often misleading understanding of what we consider to be “right” or “wrong” (in terms of history, politics, ethics, aesthetic taste, etc.). In the most general way one could argue that “good” art will force you to rethink whatever position you hold. But when you set foot in an art fair, you become fully aware of something that we only question half-heartedly. Galleries are stores. They sell products in order to keep supporting themselves and their artists.

Is that the case though? I remember visiting a blue-chip gallery in Chelsea about two years ago. At that point the financial crises was very visible. Strip malls in New Jersey along the Turnpike and Route 18 had closed, foreclosures were everywhere. Galleries and museums (not to mention schools and universities) were equally affected. I walked into said blue-chip gallery and saw a large painting by Julian Schnabel. At the main desk, the receptionist had a price list lying out. I looked up the Schnabel and could not believe that it was offered for $ 1,000,000. That is the kind of amount you use when you make fun of how expensive art can be. Next to the price was a small red dot. The work had been bought.

The Occupy Wall Street protests demand that certain financial institutions (e.g. investment banks) demonstrate more restraint and come under closer regulatory scrutiny. Among the many ideas that have been discussed to get a tighter grip on the financial sector, one is particularly pragmatic and long overdue. Politicians in Germany, France and to a lesser degree in the United States suggest that the profits passed on in form of bonuses to individual managers be capped. Can we take this idea and apply it to the art world, please? If anything, perhaps a limit on how much a work of art can be sold for could save galleries, art fairs, museums and auction houses from contributing to an overinflated art market. Enough with my ridiculous ideas now.

Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010

Tomorrow I will be attending an artist talk at “Le Bal.” This Parisian venue mainly focuses on photography and video/film and has held some excellent exhibitions and guest lectures for the past three years of its existence. Photographer and writer Trevor Paglen will be discussing his monograph “Invisible - Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes” in which he researches exactly that:  covert operations conducted by the US military and the Secret Service. In addition, I will finally have time to visit galleries all around Paris to find out how contemporary French painting is doing. 

Antony Gormley, Another Time VI, Tuileries, Paris (2011)

Several weeks ago I came across an article in the New York Times. It was on the Jewish Museum’s recent purchase of a painting by artist Kehinde Wiley. The painting in question is “Alios Itzhak.” It was first displayed at Wiley’s Los Angeles gallery Roberts & Tilton from April to May 2011 as part of a series entitled  ”The World Stage: Israel.”

Kehinde Wiley, Alios Itzhak (The World Stage: Israel), oil and gold enamel on canvas, 2011

Before “The World Stage: Israel,” Wiley’s series’ covered Brazil, Africa, Lagos-Dakar, India and China. According to the press release which can be found on Roberts & Tilton’s website, Kehinde Wiley “accentuates international cultures and their denizens, evoking discourse on an ever-expanding examination of globalization.”

Sounds great, if it wasn’t for his paintings. When I look at a painting I want it to find it challenging. In Wiley’s case it should manage to evoke a discourse on the examination of globalization. International cultures, globalization and questions of race remain important issues to be addressed by painting. I am glad that somebody attempts this. But I am afraid to say no critical or difficult questions are being tackled by Wiley in his paintings.

When you encounter a Wiley painting in person, you are struck by the way it looks. First, there is a frame around each of his paintings, hand carved (I would love to know who does them and how much they cost), sometimes plain and simple, often virtuous and decadent. Secondly you have the painting. Usually it is large in size and in that regard it obviously plays with the traditions of 19th century history paintings. Thirdly the densely arranged and meticulously worked patterns. One thing you could never say about his work is that there isn’t much going on. They are unbelievably crowded and busy paintings. The majority of critics and writers seem to stop asking further questions once Wiley’s work has bedazzled them.

There is - no big surprise - a highly efficient German term for the English equivalent “it’s all smoke and mirrors.” The word is “Blendwerk.” It contains two words: “blenden” and “Werk.” The verb means to “blind sth./sb.” while the noun “Werk” describes a “tool”, “mechanism” or “work” (as in “artwork” - “Kunstwerk”). In other words, Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are an excellent example of “Blendwerk.” Let’s return to his painting “Alios Itzhak” for a bit. One of the reasons the Jewish Museum in New York got interested in this painting has to do with Wiley’s choice for the source of the depicted pattern. It is based on a Judaica piece in the museums collection. If there is such a thing as an artist’s signature style, Wiley’s consists of the contrast between figure and ornament. One could argue that all there is in his paintings is one single method: to contrast a historic fragment with a contemporary one. How do we get from this method to “international cultures” and a “discourse on globalization?” I actually have no clue. It seems to me that Wiley’s method of contrasting is not nearly as successful as generally conjured by his critics.

In “Alios Itzhak” we see an Ethiopian-Israeli who looks back at us, one hand on his hip. If you really pay attention, his hand that rests on his hip looks like it is hovering in mid-air. There is not weight on the painted wrist and fist. It looks strangely painted too. It seems too small in relation to the muscular arms. The fingers of the other hand are thin and long. They have a waxy, plastic-like appearance - nothing like flesh or skin. Now, you might be wondering: Why is he paying attention to these details? Two things: Wiley is not the old-master painter that he is so often taken to be. Painting the human figure is difficult and if you have a slight interest in 18th and 19th century portraiture, you will discover quite quickly that the painted figures of Jacques Louis David or Ingres have an intense presence that identifies their sitters as conscious subjects. Of course no painter today has to prove that they can hold up against a David or Ingres. But if you choose to do so, you better be able to keep up with them.

The second part of this observation has to do with Wiley’s sources. For his paintings he always uses images of the models he photographed. The problem of a seemingly weightless arm, elongated fingers, folds in the skin that look “wooden” and non-organic, a peculiar flatness and smoothness of the overall figure as in the painting “Alios Itzhak” stem from a painter who is looking too closely (probably by using a projector) at the photographic source he is copying and thereby forgetting about his subject. Every painter working with photography knows that you have to depart from your source in order to make it look “right” and coherent as painting. Wiley might be able to sell all of these “flaws” as full intentions to a public who no longer goes to museums to look at 19th century paintings or cares much for contemporary figurative painting in general. If they did, they would realize that Wiley is not considering history painting or depicting individuals in his paintings. He is not interested in questioning and representing identity (may it be cultural, historical, racial, global). All he does is to produce handsome paintings - Blendwerk -  by transferring his staged photographs onto canvas, layering them with semi-relevant patterns, sometimes adding gold leaf and inserting all of that into a richly decorated, supposedly hand-crafted frame. I am saying “staged” photographs, because a video posted on Roberts & Tilton’s website offers some valuable insight into how Wiley seeks out his models and how he arranges them into poses after what is nothing more than a quick interview with each of them. Is that how you get to know the person you are painting? The degree to which he utilizes and copies photography makes it impossible for me to have a serious discussion of his work in regard to history, identity and the individual’s role in them. His portraits are closer to airbrushed merchandise than to empowered subjects.  

Airbrush work by Tanner (via elance.com)

Just to make sure that I am not being misunderstood: I am not criticizing Wiley’s use of photography. What I am criticizing is the significant role that photography plays in his process and how he does not acknowledge it in the final product. Instead we are supposed to believe that we are looking at a contemporary take on history painting. The paintings of Kehinde Wiley fetishize the surface too much. They fail to point beyond their superficial interest and allow a meaningful discourse on race, identity and globalization.

I am not sure if I would want to see Wiley’s assembled photographs on their own (before he starts a new painting, he plans and assembles its individual layers in Photoshop). I think they would only reveal how their references to history, to propaganda (in case of the China-series) and global cultures are as empty as the too smooth and oddly generalized faces in his paintings. And why should I be admiring or marveling over a painting whose maker openly admits that he has assistants who paint the patterns for him, because he “can’t bear to do the decorative stuff?”  Are you really willing to spend time on reading more into his paintings than there is and paying up to $130,000 for one of his works? According to blogger John James Anderson, at least some of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are being painted in China by workers/artisans. I have no way of verifying this claim, but considering the highly generic and at times amateurish rendition of certain figures (arms, hands, noses, hair, skin, etc.), it would make sense.

After researching Kehinde Wiley’s work for several weeks, I am left with the following questions:

Why is Wiley’s world of painting mainly populated by men? Are the poses of his male sitters applicable to women? Is his work possibly addressing masculinity more than race? How are the many conflicts, ethnicities and cultural traditions of Israel understandable without Palestine and its people? Does the person Alios Itzhak add up to nothing more than a painted photograph sandwiched between one layer of religious ethno-kitsch and a baroque frame?

Jarrett Min Davis, Ambush at the Pass, 2011, oil on canvas

I had never seen or even known about this painting until recently, but it shows you how acutely relevant old paintings can be. I am talking about Cornelius Norbert Gijsbrechts’ painting “The Reverse of a Framed Painting” from 1670.

It is not too modest in size (66,6 cm x 86,5 cm) and if you imagine it in a room with Dutch still life paintings, you will also understand how this work does not have any trouble asserting its presence. What I find so fascinating is its restraint. I don’t even want to try to call it “minimal,” “conceptual” or a 17th century Morandi. All these labels would miss the painting’s point (while being completely ahistorical). But what could that “point” be?

A classical trompe l’oeil work will put a variety of objects - either man-made or natural - and textures on display. The more it teases your eye, the more you are willing to believe its dizzying mastery. You forget that you are looking at a painting. In his painting, Gijsbrechts stops the trickery and reverses it: all there is to see is the back of a wooden frame and the painting it holds. It is impossible to think of anything else but to acknowledge how there is a skeleton under the painting’s stretched skin. And by turning around a painting and pointing to its wooden framework, Gijsbrechts reveals a more urgent sense of “reality” and “the real” than any demonstration of trompe l’oeil mimicry might achieve.

Helene Appel, Leek, oil on linen, 72cm x 118cm, 2009

Similarly, Helene Appel is not interested in regarding an object as mere training ground for a painter’s technical capabilities. Although Appel is clearly capable, she is mainly dedicated to painting the object in front of her. The raw linen becomes the background. It has to suffice since what matters is the dissected leek. Everything else would be too much and distracting so she decides to loose herself in the object instead of the paint she applies. It is mark-making nonetheless, but with a higher degree of control.

To paint a flower could easily be one of the hardest tasks for a contemporary painter. In the wrong hands, a painted flower will evoke sweetness, delicacy, femininity minus the possibility of sexual or for that matter any other connotations. And if you paint a flower to be ironic, then you have chosen too easy a target. It is trickier to take a flower seriously, instead of using it to stage your own superior sense of irony, bad taste, folk art, or kitsch. Georgia O’Keeffe has covered the gendered and organic aspects of floral objects - so what else is there to do? The Dutch have painted the hell out of almost every plant and some of their ancestors like Michael Raedecker (who I will return to soon) continue this tradition of the meticulous to this day.

Joan Snyder, Are Mine, oil, glitter, rosebuds and burlap on panel, 2010 (via Joanne Mattera)

But when I look at Joan Snyder’s Are Mine from 2010, I do not only see a work by a painter who has been restless for about four decades now, but I also see how rosebuds and paint form a forceful alliance. The burlap which is mounted on panel reveals a network of layers and fissures. At times we stare into dark red gaping holes in where dried rosebuds form an insulating layer – partly protective, partly gutted – around these strange wounds. There is violence at play here. The occasional lip marks which have been painted on the burlap’s surface do seem like attempted imprints of tenderness. Yet they become disturbing elements in an overall raw display of all things lovely.

Dana Schutz, Flowers, oil on canvas, 2002

If we take a look at artists Dana Schutz and Lisa Yuskavage to inspect their approach to flowers, one can only be left with bottomless disappointment.

Lisa Yuskavage, Night Flowers, aquatint and etching, 1999

If you can’t even handle a flower, you should probably rethink your abilities and reach as a painter.

In 1996 the New Republic magazine’s art critic Jed Perl said the following about Joan Snyder: “Snyder isn’t a great artist but she’s a formidable painter, and her best work holds perfectly in the imagination.” For some reason this does not hit me as praise. That might have to do with the first part of Perl’s sentence. If you start a sentence with what somebody IS NOT, you don’t really want to know how this sentence ends. So, Jed Perl, does not think that Joan Snyder is a “great” artist. Perl wrote something along these lines about Gerhard Richter in a review of his retrospective at the MOMA in 2002.  I guess Snyder is in great company then and here is why she is great:

I wish artists would not give into stardom so quickly. Let’s be honest. How many of the younger artists want to be known and appreciated? I am recalling standing around with some New Yorkers, holding a beer, while my conversation partner was glowing with excitement that they had talked to Peter Doig at a party. Or that Martha Rosler had answered their question at a guest lecture. In a way this responds to a natural desire. You spend time with your work day in, day out and you just want people to like it, support it, buy it. And then, in addition, you want to be fully associated with your work. You want to become your work. You want to be equally as important as the work you do. The best method to identify an artist who thinks that way is to look for “style.” The more a painter is looking to produce a so-called “signature style”, the more likely that artist is thinking in terms of marketing themselves. If you are truly dedicated to your artistic practice, you will continuously evolve and change. I don’t see Dana Schutz or Lisa Yuskavage moving into new territory. Schutz has been following a recipe which combines quirky storytelling with a set of ever repeating visual vocabulary. And Yuskavage has basically been painting one archetype trapped in the same sexed-up fairy tale for the past twenty years. Not so with Joan Snyder.

To see for yourselves, just follow this link: http://www.joansnyder.net/paintings.php. Her paintings span a range of styles, themes and subjects which you rarely get to see these days (and is comparable to the continuous practice of Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha). Of course you have painters today who work in a million different media. They will start knitting if necessary, do a performance if asked or try out Adobe Premiere and Flash if the right equipment is available. But most of the time I get the sense that they are just trying to keep up with whatever is hot at a particular moment. You could argue that you only get to see Joan Snyder’s range of painterly approaches due to the time she has been active as an artist. Fair enough. What is also true of her work is that it has been open to change and evolution over time.

Joan Snyder, First Anniversary, oil, acrylic and spray enamel on canvas, 1970

The organizational structure of an early painting like First Anniversary is revisited in Sustained from 2007. And even though she is usually affiliated with “stroke-paintings” (of which First Anniversary is an example), this stylistic feature of her work is only one of many. 

Joan Snyder, Sustained, oil, acrylic, seeds, glitter, pastel, cloth, paper mache on linen, 2007

For instance Women in Camps from 1988, a painting with collaged photographic materials has - neither in motif nor in style - very little to do with her “stroke-paintings.”

Joan Snyder, Women in Camps, oil, acrylic, wire, wooden dowel, photographs on linen mounted on board, 1988

And then in 1985 Synder paints two strikingly dissimilar paintings: The Orchard/The Altar and Bedeckt Mich Mit Blumen.

Joan Snyder, The Orchard/The Altar, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1985

Joan Snyder, Bedeckt Mich Mit Blumen, oil, acrylic, cloth flowers on canvas, 1985

Joan Snyder’s greatness as a painter lies in her ability to be capable of work that avoids a safe formula and references nobody else, but herself.

Dash Snow, Polaroid, 2005

A little over a week ago an article by Howard Hurst was published on Hyperallergic. According to the editor Hurst’s article is the first in a series which will ask various critics to provide a list of 10 underrated artists.

It caught my attention because of a few unintended hilarities. In the first one Hurst writes about the work of Paul Wackers: “Though he lives in Brooklyn, you might not guess that from his work which, though full of tension, has a sort of West Coast twang.”

Paul Wackers, “P.M.A.” (2007)

This painting by Wackers has Brooklyn-hipster-art written all over it. If you have a few hours on a Saturday and you happen to be in Brooklyn, please take time and visit some of the galleries there. You should not be surprised to discover that most of the paintings on display are indistinguishable from each other. Spray paint is still pretty popular. Revealing sideways drips associates spray paint with a quality commonly known in painting, although in Wackers’ case this realization is not much of a surprise or challenge. Do you see these triangle shaped patterns in the lower left corner of his painting? Keep them in mind and you will start seeing them everywhere. For example in some of James Esber’s and J. Fiber’s work (J. Fiber is a collaboration between James Esber and his wife Jane Fine who can be found at Pierogi). Another characteristic in wide use among many of the young artists throughout New York is “landscape.” It comes in endless variations and there are some interesting takes on this old topos (I will come back to this in the near future). For some reason the Utopian aspect of “landscape” has become the most dominant attribute (e.g. Jimmy Baker, Michael Schall). But often it is being reduced to a backdrop or a testing ground for exercises in abstraction. Unfortunately I would count Paul Wackers among those in the latter category. For many painters the process of leaving a mark which is not fully realized and unfinished can be an exciting experience (I am not being sarcastic here). You settle on something which is not yet a “thing” or anything in particular and then you contrast it with an opposing idea: a sharpened, more linear and realized form made up of multiple colors and planes. Thomas Nozkowski is without question a master of these understated abstractions and his approach is echoed in the work of a younger generation of New York painters. 

Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (8-128), 2010

From all 10 artists discussed by Howard Hurst only Martha Clippinger’s work made me linger for an extended period of time. 

Polarity, acrylic and oil on wood, 2008

First of all, not all of her work is equally convincing and at times it is reminiscent of Tom Burckhardt’s, Ted Larsen’s or Richard Bottwin’s aesthetic sensibility. But let’s not hold that against her. We are talking about a fairly recent graduate student and most of her 2010 paintings and objects are strong and more independent than her earlier work. Her installation piece Polarity does recall and partly relies on Pam Lins sculptures/paintings.

Installation shot of Pam Lins exhibition “Owl”

Compared to Lins work, I do prefer the element of improvisation in Clippinger’s objects. She allows her work to remain imperfect and that way it never slips into a state of becoming an artificial and purified art commodity. That is particularly evident in her smaller wall pieces of “assemblage paintings.” Each of Clippinger’s pieces indicates an origin and functionality beyond that of the gallery context. In other words, Clippinger’s wooden materials bear traces of their former life. On the other hand, the slickness of Lins objects merely recalls what they are supposed to be: art in a gallery which references contemporary art within the New York context. It is a very fine line that distinguishes “art” (Clippinger) from “art about art” (Lins).

Installation shot of Martha Clippinger’s work

Martha Clippinger’s work does powerfully assert that DADA’s reach for the mundane and its attempt to infuse life with art is far from over. Let’s hope that Clippinger will no longer have to be put on lists with underrated artists. 

A majority of the work exhibited at “La Maison Rouge” favors humor usually of the ironic kind. It is often refreshing but at the same time the work reminds you of particular tendencies shared by the global art market. Looking at work with ironic content makes you feel good. It offers little resistance, takes few risks and counts on your common sense that you “get it” soon enough. A good example is the collective “The Royal Art Lodge” (active from 1996-2008): an amusing array of drawings, a few paintings and sculpture which at times look and read similar to New Yorker cartoons. From its six members only Michael Dumontier is standing out. His drawings, paintings and installations toy with minimalism and could easily be in danger of becoming too anecdotal. That does not happen. Dumontier’s allows the viewer to step out of his work’s references to offer an extended and second look at how much very little can contain.

What looks like matchsticks arranged in the shape of a tree is a small painting on paper by Michael Dumontier. 

Set in contrast to Dumontier are the flashy installations/sculptures by Marcel Dzama and Jon Pylypchuk. It does not come as a surprise that Dzama is represented by David Zwirner while Pylypchuk can be found at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Jon Pylypchuk, Don’t Press too Much Luck, mixed media, 2006

Just so that you do not misunderstand me: their work is enjoyable, quirky and fun. But so is visiting Disneyland without children or watching “Happy Tree Friends” which brings us back to an old problem: commercial art.

I don’t think it is a problem if artists make money with their art. Far from it. I also do not mean to label art as “commercial” once an artist receives a certain degree of exposure. The problem is rather that the critical distance between popular culture (TV, YouTube and internet “phenomena”, movies, music, consumer culture at large) and the work you make as an artist is often amiss. If there is one thing that artists should be dedicated to, it would be to point out the difference between going to an Apple Store to check out the newest products or visiting a gallery to see an exhibition. Dzama and Pylypchuk and in the end their galleries Zwirner and Petzel are not helping to separate themselves from common market strategies. It is possible to have an unique idea, offer quality and still be profitable. And the first step toward this goal is to demonstrate critical consciousness as an artist and as a gallery. 

To clarify what I am talking about here, I would like to give one more example. Let’s take a look at some work by Marcel Dzama. It is “Untitled” and a collage on paper from 2006.

It is a funny collage ridiculing what we have come to know as the main actor of “asymmetrical warfare.” A term which comes with historical weight and which, in the end, we don’t fully understand anyway. The differences in scale give the fighter a toy-like appearance which is enhanced by a rifle almost the size of his body and eyes popping out from under the ski mask. 

Now let’s see what the next image is about. A work by Helmut Herzfeld or better known as John Heartfield. I could not find a larger version, so this will have to suffice:

The work was created in the early 1930’s and the caption reads:

“God’s tool?                                                                                        

Thyssen’s toy!”

Heartfield created this collage for a worker’s magazine to point to the ties between Fritz Thyssen - the heir of one of Germany’s most influential industrial families - and Adolf Hitler. Isn’t tiny Hitler cute as a toy? Yes and no. What makes this work remarkable are several things. First of all, when Heartfield created his work. In 1933 the SA ransacked his apartment which forced him to move to the Czech Republic before he had to flee to the UK in 1938. In other words: fabricating collages the way he did was pretty dangerous (not that I am saying Dzama’s collage is not effective because his life wasn’t endangered at any point).

Secondly, Heartfield is simultaneously a journalist. He uses his own tool of collage to point to a fact that was not part of common knowledge at the time his satirical work was published in the AIZ - a magazine which united intellectuals and workers. What Heartfield points to is the commercial use Hitler had for corporations and the influence they had on him in return. 

Thirdly, at first sight we have a comic situation which seems to be pretty straight-forward in that it illustrates a relation between a corporation and a politician. The caption poses a rhetorical question and answers it immediately in the following line. In that regard, one could argue that Dzama’s work does what contemporary art should be doing: it is not instructing, it is not trying to direct the viewer in a specific direction, it is - in other words - more open to different readings and thereby slightly irritating. Really though?

I can’t resist calling Dzama’s work a cop-out. Because his collage is open to multiple readings, he avoids the tricky nature of a subject such as the guerrilla fighter. At the moment, the guerrilla fighter plays a significant role. He has a real historical and political dimension. Let’s think of the Taliban or insurgents. They were around in 2006. Does Dzama avoid a more explicit reference, because it would be “too obvious?” There is nothing engaging about presenting a generic, slightly manipulated guerrilla as a stand-in for today’s politics or media culture and their invocations of foreign threats to our oh-so-precious Western lives. What is more difficult to tackle is to find out what a contemporary guerrilla is. To present us with a cutish do-it-yourself template will not get us anywhere close to that question. And the worst part is that Dzama’s work does not even want to do that. If artists have a voice and an opinion, they should make use of it. You don’t have to become an activist or give up your own view on the world; simply push your views a bit more so that they don’t feel that comfortable or easy to you. Otherwise, I am not able to distinguish Dzama’s work from what you can find for free on deviantArt under “G.I. Joe Custom Cubeecraft Templates.”

And just in case Marcel Dzama considers the Cubeecrafts to be worth it, then he should offer their creator his place at David Zwirner.

It seems safe to say that La Maison Rouge - a museum for contemporary art in Paris - is really getting better with every new show they put up. I remember that “Tous Cannibales” which took place there earlier this year was very much a mixed bag: some few good pieces of work paired with an overwhelming amount of weak contributions. This time with “My Winnipeg” the situation is different. There are several artists who participated in this show that I want to discuss. 

Today I want to start with Wanda Koop. She has one large painting in the exhibition and a couple of smaller pieces. It is her large painting “Native Fires” which got my immediate attention.

It is a big piece. 3 by 4 meters, acrylic on canvas applied thinly on the surface. I usually enjoy seeing acrylics thinned down to the point where they start resembling watercolor. It is also a reduced image dominated by greens, blues and grays. Nothing that is screaming at you or begging for your attention. The only source of color are the two orange flames or lights which release smaller dots toward the sky (and simultaneously on the surface of the water as reflections). Since it is one of the first works that you see upon entering the la maison rouge space, it stays with you and like the Ueber-mother that Mrs. Koop appears to be to Canada’s art scene, you keep returning to her work to find out if the other artists in the show can keep up with her. Well, actually they can thanks to the variety and rigor on display.

After I had seen the show I learned a great amount about Winnipeg, its history, culture, local myths and so forth. I was eager to find out more about Wanda Koop, since her other works in the show had not convinced me. When I got back, I looked up her website, read about her work, found out that she is a member of the Order of Canada (now THAT is an accomplishment) and realized that most of her work isn’t that great. I think I was lucky to see one of her strongest paintings in person and it is a great painting. But what about her other work?

Green Zone (Color Bars), acrylic on canvas, 24” x 36”, 2006

The thin layered paintings are a specialty of hers and I can easily embrace that. Most of her paintings feature landscapes or spherical spaces that are very immaterial and minimal. But by “minimal” I mean too simple and anemic, not challenging and question-raising. And there is this tendency in her work - as many painters do - to rely on a fool-proof, ever-repeating repertoire. In her case it is mainly horizontal and vertical strips of different colors, sometimes wider, sometimes more narrow. At times they warp into rectangles, squares, circles or they come together to form a target. I found these to be incredibly artsy and somewhat missing the point to draw a contrast between the flowing, immaterial and natural forms on the one hand and the geometric shapes on the other. 

I think the best cure for forgetting about that side of her work is to go back and see “Native Fires” again and again and again.

The day I decided to go to see Claude Cahun’s retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, I read about Cindy Sherman’s newest “collaboration.” Far from her usual projects, Sherman decided to think up a limited edition makeup collection based on three different character embodied by the artist. The company distributing the line is MAC (Make-up Art Cosmetics). MAC’s statement reads the following:

“WITH THE HELP OF PROPS, MAKEUP, PROSTHETICS, WIGS AND SETS, ARTIST CINDY SHERMAN EMBODIES THE POWER OF TRANSFORMATION. IN THE CAMPAIGN WE’VE LONGED FOREVER TO CONCEIVE, CINDY SHERMAN FOR M·A·C CREATED THREE CHARACTERS USING THREE DIFFERENT PALETTES OF POSSIBILITIES.”

Since when does Sherman embody the power of transformation? Is that it? After decades of being a photographer/performance artist this is all she has been doing? Looking at Sherman’s “collaboration” I actually start believing it, because why would you decide on a makeup collection? I really can’t wrap my head around her intention other than the extra money that most likely came out of that “collaboration.” And what are you supposed to do with that make-up?

I guess this would be an option:

Are potential buyers going to believe that they are participating in a collaboration with the artist? This is not democratic participation, for sure. This is somebody trying to sell a bad idea dressed up as art.

In a quote by Cindy Sherman, she states:

“I didn’t want to make ‘high’ art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn’t thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn’t want the work to seem like a commodity.”

I can’t even count the number of artist who continue to pull out the same old story: if I avoid painting, my work will not become a commodity. Guess what? It does not work that way and now that her work “Untitled #153” from 1985 sold for $2.7 million at auction, she needs to come up with a new quote.

I dare to say that Claude Cahun would have - in the true Surrealist spirit - created an edible makeup line for cats which brings me back to my initial reason for this post. I had not heard or read about Cahun, before I saw the exhibition and I am glad I got to discover the person and artist. 

Claude Cahun, Untitled, 1932

The commitment, depth and radicality of Cahun’s work was sobering in lieu of what I know and appreciate about Sherman. Claude Cahun extended her interest into writing (prose and poetry), stage performances, sculpting, drawing and photography. Even though she shows an interest in the male and female body, her interest is not superficial or a mere play with both sexes. It is an investigation into identity and gender in general and she carries it out taking masculinity and femininity equally into account. Sherman’s work has never provoked me to think that way. 

The other main difference between Cahun’s work and many contemporary performance artists is that instead of reacting to social, cultural, political, individual, etc. conditions by means of improvisation and performed introspection, her work and her actions actually offer rigorous resistance to these conditions. Sometimes behind closed doors in more subtle ways, sometimes out in the open with unparalleled boldness. One example of her resistance is an episode from the mid 1940s when she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe were living on the isle of Jersey. When it was annexed by the Germans, Cahun and Malherbe started to take actions against the occupation virtually single-handedly. One of the actions they undertook was to design a condolence card with the words “Thank God, the war is over for me now” which they had typed in the shape of a cross and placed on the grave of a recently buried German officer. 

It probably is unfair to compare this act of resistance with Sherman’s commercial decision of creating a make-up line. But just allow your mind to go that road and see for yourself how yesterday’s “provocateur” Sherman has lost her bite. 

Picture of Claude Cahun taken shortly after her release in 1945 holding a German soldier’s badge of the Reichs-eagle between her teeth.

Richard Tuttle, Walking on Air, 1, 2008

Art Fag City: it ain’t art criticism.

Although you can leave your comments for each post on “artfagcity”, people usually choose not to take advantage of that option. Maybe it is for the best. But a recent post on the defacement of a Poussin painting at London’s National Gallery has stirred a heated discussion.

It seems that Will Brand of “artfagcity” seems unwilling to rethink his quick and unmindful assertion that a) that Poussin has  not received that much attention in centuries and that b) Poussin is irrelevant anyway. But take a look yourself.

People, what is up with art history bashing? You just want to look at and talk about art that was made within the last few years? Think a bit more long-term, please. It will do you good.

One last thing. T. J. Clark’s book “The Sight of Death” should be a mandatory read for Will Brand. Art Historian T. J. Clark fills an entire book based on alone-time he gets to spend with two of Poussin’s paintings at the Getty Museum. The result is not so much that he tells us what we already know about Poussin, but how looking at an “Old master’s” work which the art-interested among us seem to know inside out, is a journey of discoveries and ultimately an experiment in seeing, thinking and writing.