For those of you who missed last night's evening at An die Musik in Baltimore, I thought I would share the introduction I read before the reading of the poems and Lorraine Whittlesey's remarkable performance of her musical settings for "Einstein Sailing: A Photograph" (from The Clock Made of Confetti), "A Song of Spirals",  "Baltimore Was Always Blue", "Poem on a Single Word from Richard Serra's Verb List", and "Everything But The Ashes" (all from The Enemy of Good Is Better), and the new poem "Song." The performance was digitally recorded and we hope to have DVDs and CDs available in the near future.

A FEW RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ART SONG

The omens are good: this performance takes place in a hall named after one of the most famous Art Songs ever written, An die Musik by Franz Schubert (1817). I wish to briefly discuss some other lucky features about this evening, a notably happy event, hopefully for you and certainly for me because I am here to enjoy it and most distinguished composers who set poems to music, unlike Lorraine, have used texts by Dead poets. In the twentieth century examples include Copland’s 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson, Kurt Weill’s Four Walt Whitman Songs and the wide variety of deceased American and European poets found in the 129 Songs by Charles Ives. More recently (2008), Peter Lieberson used poems by Pablo Neruda to produce a beautiful set of love songs for his wife, the distinguished mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson; Neruda too was long gone. Using the words of a dead poet has obvious advantages for the composer and almost none for the poet. The original intent of the poet and the tone of the poem can be ignored when the poet is not around to object. Conflict may arise because poems are meant to be read aloud; in fact, a poem properly laid out on the page should function like a musical score, instructing the reader how best to perform the poem, where the breaths are taken, what the points of emphasis are and how long the pauses should be. These properties of the poem are potentially competitive with the musical setting but a member of the Dead Poets Society can hardly object to the treatment his poem receives at the hands of an inattentive reader or composer. As you will hear for yourself, this has not been my experience with Lorraine, whose attentiveness to my words and my intentions is beyond compare. Not being dead I have had the pleasure of seeing her at work and tonight am delighted to participate in the launch. In fact I would imagine there have been very few instances in which the premiere of a new cycle of Art Songs was presented by both the poet and the composer.

This brings me to my next point. One of the ways in which poems achieve their own afterlife is the attention of a distinguished composer. There are too many poets in the world, too few readers of poetry and precious few composers like Lorraine. We tend to think of the nineteenth century as the high-water mark of the Art Song but its most famous practitioners, Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf, often used texts by German poets who are not much read today. Of course Schubert could set a bill of fare or a restaurant check to music. These composers liked the repetitive rhymes, insistent rhythms or meters, and syrupy Romanticism of the poetry they used, all of which served their compositional ease. As you will hear, Lorraine has not chosen the easy way; she has selected poems written in a wide range of forms that cover a number of complex and painful subjects; at all times, her seriousness of purpose has felt like a badge of honor. She’s been faithful to the pitch and rhythm with which the poems are read aloud, at least by me; her working methods feel familiar to any poet who writes poems that attempt true metaphoric justice to a painting or sculptural object. It seems to me that such ekphrastic poems bear the same relation to visual art that the Art Song bears to poetry; the Art Song shares the musicality of poetry and the poem shares with paintings the central importance of images. The difficulty in each case is the marriage of a shared property with due honor to both parties and their ineluctable differences. The goal is mutual enrichment. Lorraine and I hope you will enjoy this joint presentation of how text can be amplified by music.

Click here to download:

songsofsalcman.pdf (108 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

songsofsalcman.pdf (108 KB)

In splendid March weather, sometimes crisply clear, sometimes unseasonably warm, my wife and I took the morning train to New York for the welter of art events that currently surround The Armory Show, said welter collectively now termed Art Week for its concatenation of selling fairs, well-timed museum shows, special entry dinners and parties, lectures and demonstrations, and even a trio of superfluous contemporary art auctions! The two main annual events are the Armory Show held on Piers 92 and 94 and The Art Show run by the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America) that actually takes place in the Armory (got that?) at 67th and Park. More about both later. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the entire experience when the Art Tribe gathers in its headquarters city is the endless flow of gossip. As soon as we parked ourselves in our hotel we had lunch with our oldest and dearest art world friend and dished about the sudden collapse of Knoedler, America's oldest and formerly most prestigious gallery. The next evening we had a lovely dinner with our oldest and best friend in the medical world, and his new friend, also a physician, and talked art. The third evening we escaped by having early dinner entre nous at MoMA (of course) and seeing a Broadway musical, our first in years, The Book of Mormon. We only escaped dinner Saturday night by changing our train reservation and getting back to Baltimore. Between Wednesday lunch and late Saturday afternoon we ran into an old artist friend showing at the Armory who spoke of her plans for a public art project in New York, talked with a young dealer friend trying to manage unmanageable success, learned of unplanned personal tragedy and joy for other purveyors of art, repeatedly bumped into our circle of art collecting couples and friends from Baltimore and New York, discovered the very quirky behaviors of some of our favorite artists, a discovery which needlessly confirmed once again our lack of interest in becoming dealers ourselves. In the course of these events we saw much good art, usually at a museum (the Chamberlain retro at the Guggenheim, the Cindy Sherman ditto at MoMA, and the Whitney Biennial), experienced good vibes at the hot new fair The Independent, at the Whitney and at the ADAA show, and thought the fair at the piers logistically improved but dull, dull, dull.

 I- The Armory Show

This year's Armory Show (the one at the piers, remember) was a slimmed down affair with 70 fewer exhibitors so that the booths were larger, the aisles wider, and finding one's way about was much easier than in the past. The truly frightening temporary staircase formerly connecting the two piers blessedly was gone and the miserable chance of finding a taxi on the West Side Highway at the end of the day greatly eased by a flotilla of free vans to satellite fairs in other parts of town (this aggravation one of many that keeps Art Miami/Basel the top event on the calendar). The thinning of exhibitors, I suspect, like many diets, was partially willed and undoubtedly partially forced as if the art world had contracted diabetes. We spent most of Wednesday afternoon on Pier 94, the Contemporary wing of the Armory, where 150 commercial galleries participated. Although David Zwirner had returned and Lisson and Victoria Miro were present, many heavy hitters from Manhattan and London were missing: no Gagosian, Pace or White Cube, no Luhring-Augustine or Waddington. 

This allowed younger and more adventurous dealers like Kavi Gupta from Chicago, where the Armory’s Commissioned Artist, Theaster Gates, shows, and Sean Kelly, a more established conceptually based gallery, to vie for Best Booth at the Show. Gates channeled his inner Joseph Beuys and used blackboards to record his daily conferences and intimate conversations with arts administrators, a type of performance art new to the Armory; we returned on Thursday to experience it first hand. At Kelly, Leandro Erlich’s cabinet of glass slides, La Vitrina Cloud Collection (London) (2011) was a favorite of most visitors (me too). In general, painting was everywhere but not in a major key (i.e. a lot of Jason Martin); video installations and sculpture were thin on the ground. One exception was Alice Aycock at Thomas Schulte (Berlin), who was happy to talk about her large-scale models for even larger tornado-like sculptures scheduled to appear on Park Avenue. Sprüth Magers was strong at the Armory and showed even more cutting edge work at The Independent. Inevitably, artists included in New York survey shows (i.e. The Whitney Biennial, The New Museum’s Generational) held simultaneously with the Armory Show or having retrospectives (Cindy Sherman at MoMA, John Chamberlain at the Guggenheim) were present. The Armory Focus section this year had Nordic countries as its theme (19 galleries) with not much interesting art but a free and open space that was lively fun. One escapee from that ghetto, Bjarne Melgaard, was the subject of a joint exhibition by three galleries, Guido Baudach (Berlin), Krinzinger (Vienna) and Greene Naftali (Chelsea). Having previously been seen in Venice this was something of a star turn but the very large and messy paintings merely continue the late efflorescence of German Expressionism initiated several years ago by Dana Schutz. Also receiving considerable publicity was Wang Du’s  squadron of bin Laden plaster busts, called “Image Absolute”, at Laurent Godin (Paris). Wonderful things by more senior and established artists were a rarity; even small drawings and photographs by such as Polke and Richter were banished to the other pier. Exceptions were the beautiful prints by Polke at Mike Karstens (Munster) who worked with the artist to produce them, and the early drawings by Imi Knoebel and classic photographs by James Welling at Galerie St. Stephan/Schwarzwalder (Vienna). Many of these artists are as “classic” as they are contemporary. The paintings and rubber castings of Robert Overby, a deceased and recently rediscovered artist, had work at several Contemporary booths (like Fredericks & Freiser and/or Rhona Hoffman); he would have certainly jazzed up the offerings at the staid Modern section.

Leandro Erlich

II- More Armory

And this brings me to the primary issue facing the Armory and its bifurcated display. Who and what is contemporary is often an arbitrary matter: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Picabia, and Eva Hesse still seem very much of the moment, while lots of living artists are busy trying to revive yesterday’s news. An early 1970s David Reed at Peter Blum looked quirkily adventurous in comparison to much of the younger painting on view. Conversely, a senior artist trying something trendy, Donald Moffett’s recent sculptural cacophonies at Marianne Boesky, produced confused relatives of Franz West (invisible at the fair), Richard Tuttle (also missing) and even Rachel Harrison. But how would you know? Must dealers segregate their newer artists from modern and recently contemporary classics because they fear too close a comparison will reveal the shallowness of the merely new? The one-person show by Tomory Dodge at CRG is a good example; it consisted of lovely small canvases, abstract with plenty of squeegee work (i.e. Richter-lite). But there was nothing better to compare it with. Conversely, in Miami and Basel (or at the ADAA fair) a nearby authentic Richter, Kentridge or Judd might be available as an important measuring stick by which viewers (and dealers) could judge the new, and a useful teaching tool by which hundreds of young artists who attend such events (whether they are exhibiting or not) might become inspired to elevate their artistic aspirations, not to mention the visual and emotional jolt such art gives the visitor when turning a corner and spotting something truly grand. All of us live for such moments; to be denied them at an art show seems the very definition of perversity and why I think the Armory has jumped the shark. It will always remain an important and lively souk, a convenient marketplace for the omnivorous hordes and gawkers but if it wants to be relevant to serious collectors, critics and museum personnel, it needs to be better curated like the ADAA and Maastricht. It shouldn’t just exist as a mercantile event and it shouldn’t fear a diversity of media and artistic generations. 

Tomory Dodge

We saw the so-called Modern Armory show (you know, the one on Pier 92) on Thursday and it seemed small-scale too, so much so that the presence of a single 13.5 million dollar Richter abstract stuck out like an unwelcome relative at a funeral. There were no large paintings by Joan Mitchell, Rothko or de Kooning to compare it to. At that price point there should have been a worthy Picasso on view but Galerie Thomas (Munich) was not up to its usual standards even if it gave us a wonderful wall of works by Joseph Beuys. We toured this fair with a friend, a senior sculptor of kinetic art and enjoyed some of the paintings on view. Despite the recent concerns about forged copies of Abstract Expressionist paintings, medium-sized canvases by Motherwell and Vicente seemed to be all over the place (e.g. at Melberg from Charlotte); small Franz Klines on paper were also in multiple booths, ditto Stamos, Michael Goldberg (who looked good), Norman Bluhm (who did not), and Soto. One of Richard Hamilton’s most famous prints, “My Marilyn” (1965) was at Alan Cristea (London) and was more expensive than a lot of paintings. Some of the good booths were James Barron (Rome), Armand Bartos (New York), and Maggiore (Paris/Bologna) with a wonderful selection of work by Morandi. German dealers vied for Best Booth; Ludorff (Dusseldorf) had an outstanding selection of Albers, Richter, and other German heavyweights, while Springer/Winckler (Berlin) was especially strong in small drawings and painted photographs by Polke and Richter. They always seem to have the best material by post-World War II artists. The Starn Twins at Hackelbury (London) have made a successful return into the limelight with both photographs and fragments of The Big Bamboo, but why do they not qualify as Contemporary artists? Ditto the wonderful Robert Mangolds at Senior & Shopmaker.  California abstraction has recovered nicely; John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin were displayed in several booths. Some of the few surprises included the great early Sam Gilliam at Wigmore (New York), and the Grace Hartigan and wall of Hershey bar collages by Al Hansen at Zoubok (New York); the progressive strip-mining of the 1960s and 1970s by the art market continues apace (no pun intended). 

III- What The Armory Can Learn From Two Other Fairs,

 Three Museum Shows and Two Gallery Exhibitions 

On Thursday we cabbed it from the Modern portion of the Armory (Pier 92) to the Art Show (the ADAA fair) at the Armory on 67^th and Park. This fair also has slimmed down but only slightly. Many of the galleries that used to regularly show at the Piers now exclusively exhibit at this “blue-chip” fair where there is a healthy mix of the contemporary and the modern, the booths are more strictly vetted, and the percentage of contemporary work and single artist displays has steadily increased. The Art Show is easier on the feet (now that I know where the secret first floor bathroom is located) and more uniform in quality than its bigger, brasher rival on the piers. All of these are good things that the Armory will need to gradually adopt. Memorable one or two person exhibits included Lynda Benglis and Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, with the twists in her sculptures visually rhyming with the rabbit entrails in the photoworks by Fuss, and a harrowing series of zombie-like painted faces with gouged-out eyes by Daniel Hesidence at D’Amelio. Altogether, 35 of the 72 dealers mounted shows of this type. Metro showed early photocollages by Cindy Sherman and Marian Goodman Francesca Woodman’s peek-a-boo self-portraits, timed to coincide with the start of her retrospective at the Guggenheim. Sarah Sze, also on view at Asia House, was at Tonya Bonakdar. Most unusually, Peter Freeman gave his booth over to prints, drawings and paintings by James Ensor. The Ensor booth was just one of several scholarly presentations. An almost complete set of David Wojnarowicz’s “Rimbaud in New York” photographs at P.P.O.W., in which the artist hid behind a mask of his own face, were a revelation to anyone who only knows them from the book of the same name. Note the galleries involved in these exhibitions, most of them no longer showing at the Armory. Other heavy hitters from New York included Barbara Mathes, Acquavella, Sperone Westwater and Barbara Gladstone. The fair was comfortable in size and easy to navigate. 

On Friday we saw the wonderful John Chamberlain retrospective at the Guggenheim in the morning and stopped by the Albert Oehlen painting show at Gagosian before heading to the Whitney Biennial. Chamberlain (1903-1995) famously invented the use of compressed and twisted car parts to fashion his sculptures. With their trippy colors, raw surfaces and elegant gestures, the pieces from the 1960s seem like a collision of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop. But the show also contains pieces fabricated from paper, aluminum and rubber. The wonderful trip up the ramp at the Guggenheim proves once again that its architecture is much friendlier to sculpture than it is to painting and that objects make the building even more beautiful. Oehlen (b.1954) comes from the generation after Richter and Polke. His newest works seem like an attractive mash-up of several painterly styles with abstract expressionistic strokes slathered over nods to his predecessors, including photo-lithographed sections a la Rauschenberg and some of Damien Hirst’s larger spots. These are big decorative paintings with no emotional urgency. 

IV- The Lesson Continues 

There is a great deal of emotional urgency at the Whitney. Everything Roberta Smith and Peter Schjeldahl have written about this year’s edition of the Whitney Biennial is true: it is the best exhibition of this type in years. My wife and I floated with delight through the three main floors, amazed at the giant performance space installed at the top, with a Green Room (Wu Tseng) containing video and objects from a reconstructed Los Angeles bar for Latino transvestites, and a fanciful dressing room for the changing cast of dancers and performers. The other floors are also “open” plan with exhibits by far fewer (and younger) artists than before, incorporating every known medium (video, photography, performance, sculpture, painting), somehow spatially interpenetrating one another without disturbance. The heart of the entire Biennial is in two adjacent rooms, one with a five screen digital projection “Hearsay of the Soul” by the director Werner Herzog (b.1942) on the art of Hercules Seghers (1589-1638), a printmaking wizard and contemporary of Rembrandt, and the other an installation by Robert Gober about the life and art of painter and self-mutated wannabe hermaphrodite Forrest Bess (1911-1977). Both of these remarkable achievements point up what I have been saying about the intellectual and aesthetic benefits of cross-fertilization between older and newer art. The only way that I can describe the experience of seeing Herzog’s film is to compare it to the moment my wife and I first saw a Kentridge video at Documenta. Herzog’s camera takes us on a low-altitude flight across the scumbled surfaces of Seghers’ prints while a searingly beautiful mix of old and new music (Handel and a work by the cellist-composer Ernst Reijsseger viewed on a progression of screens in heart-breaking close-up) further amps our individual meditative response to the art as if it were a kind of Chinese scroll. Segher was a failure in his life but not in his art and his anonymity, erased by this film, is a minor tragedy in comparison to the madness and social exclusion experienced by Bess. Bess had a split soul, one that he acted out in his magical little paintings, hovering between comic abstraction and the late symbolism of Klee, and in the attempt he made to split his own genitals. To a gay artist like Gober, from a later more tolerant era, Bess must seem a predecessor almost written out of the history books. Many years ago I saw a small show of his paintings at the Whitney and was never able to forget them. Only the most general aspects of his biography were mentioned; now Gober has laid the entire story out and it only makes the paintings more mysterious than they have always seemed. 

Hercules Seghers

The Biennial has many other highlights, including an artist (Dawn Kasper) who is practically living in the Museum with all of her belongings (Schjeldahl is right again, she is very friendly and eager to engage you in conversation), another (Luther Price) who hand-makes his slides and distresses them by burying them in the ground (the results are gorgeous), funky paintings by Andrew Masullo, and a magical scrim by the German Kai Althoff. I remember a Biennial in 1992 when I was handed a button that said I should be ashamed of being white. This Biennial is free of hectoring, free of pressure and all about inclusiveness of every kind. It doesn’t posture and doesn’t argue for any particular way of making art or any particular style, and it doesn’t argue with a visitor’s preconceptions; you float in and float out. It’s a kind of therapy for the mind, like Matisse’s famous armchair; later, out on the street, you feel again the joy of life. 

V- Closing Thoughts 

On Saturday morning, the theme of openness and freedom of movement was re-enacted once again. We first went to see the opening of the Fred Sandback show at David Zwirner on 19^th Street in Chelsea. Sandback (1943-2003) was educated in philosophy and art at Yale and was inspired by the experiments of Judd and LeWitt to invent an almost Zen-like response to Minimalism. Minimalism was more than machine-made modernism, obdurate, repetitive, and cell-based. It was also a phenomenological act in which the viewer’s experience of his own body and the architectural space within which he and the Minimalist object were located was altered. Sandback’s solution was to make the space of the object permeable and make the architecture an equal partner in the art. Like Flavin’s famous use of fluorescent tubes to alter the room’s atmosphere, Sandback used acrylic yarn strung between buried points to suggest the planes of his pieces. His “sculptures” have no inside or outside and no definite dimensions since they can be reconstructed in any space (like LeWitt’s Wall Drawings) according to a conceptual plan. Despite their apparent delicacy, they can be stepped through and over; the viewer is free to experience the entire space, indeed can see every element of the space unimpeded and the sculptures themselves, often made with diagonal lines, look different with every movement the body makes. In addition to several sculptures, the exhibition contains many of the beautifully spare original drawings. This is a museum-quality show, one not to be missed. 

Our second and final stop was the third incarnation of New York’s newest and most revolutionary art fair, The Independent, held in the Dia Foundation’s old museum building on 22^nd Street. Here you will find no booths and no counters. All of the exhibition spaces are free form, each dealer’s work area abuts that of his neighbor, the goods on display speak directly to one another, and the dealers (like the live-in artist at the Whitney) are happy to speak with you and walk you around. There are only 40 exhibitors but they cover a range from international professionals to young start-ups. The Independent also displayed the widest range of contemporary sculpture and objects that we saw in New York. Spruth Magers from Berlin and London came with some of their most adventurous artists (for example, Thea Djordjadze’s combination of plexi sculptures and giant blue carpet), Jocelyn Wolff from Paris showed objects by Isa Melsheimer, Elizabeth Dee, one of the co-founders of the fair with an array of work, and Fergus McCaffrey put on a beautiful display of paper pieces by Jiro Takamatsu, one of the great Japanese conceptual artists of the 1960s that our Americanized Eurocentric vision ignored until recently. Each floor was filled with old friends in a convivial space with the same beautiful light that illuminated the building in its previous incarnation; all of this conspires to create a sense of intimacy. The art here feels like uncommon treasure rather than an expensive commodity trapped within the closed off spaces of the piers, dim and airless, where one feels trapped in an endless rush of competition and the desperate attempt to remain au courant. 

Post-Modernism can be faulted for a lot of problems in the art world: impenetrable jargon in contemporary criticism (now abating), an emphasis on money and fun in place of Modernism’s serious purposefulness, a self-consuming irony that replaces true invention with a pastiche of the past. But Post-Modernism has also brought everyone into the game, men and women, gay and straight, Western and otherwise, by reducing the heavy hand of prescriptive formalism and by foregrounding the artist’s identity as critical to the work he or she produces. That sense of openness has now affected the physical and organizational structures of our best art fairs and museum shows; we saw and felt it everywhere for at least one week in March.

Dear Friends:

the time between the end of January and National Poetry Month (April) promises to be a busy one. I wanted to send out a brief reminder in regard to a series of rescheduled art events, including poetry set to music at An Die Musik and lectures on Post-Modernism in Contemporary Art at The Walters Art Museum.

MUSIC AND POETRY 

On Saturday the 4th of February, at An Die Musik LIVE on North Charles Street, there will be a cabaret performance at 8 PM by Joyce Scott, famous Baltimore sculptor, bead artist and chanteuse, and Lorraine Whittlesey, one of Baltimore's most important composers. In this latest edition of "Ebony and Irony", Joyce and Lorraine will be performing a new poem of mine, "Song", the first that has been set to music. An die Musik LIVE is at 409 North Charles Street, 2nd floor; the phone numbers are 888-221-6170 and 410-385-2638. Your host at An die Musik is Henry Wong. This event is rescheduled from an earlier date. 

And on Saturday April 28th, help celebrate National Poetry Month at An Die Musik LIVE; please join Lorraine Whittlesey and myself in an entire evening devoted to her beautiful musical settings of my poems! Each poem first will be read and then performed; you will be able to hear for yourself why composers have chosen to use poetry for their songs and how profoundly the emotional impact of a poem is  amplified by its musical setting. 

ASG LECTURES ON POST-MODERNISM AT THE WALTERS

I will be giving a series of four Art Seminars Group (ASG) lectures on Post-Modernism in Contemporary Art at The Walters Art Museum. These will be held on four Wednesday mornings at 11 AM in the main auditorium. Non-members of the ASG are cordially invited to join us for a modest fee ($10.00 door charge). The dates and subjects are as follows:

Wednesday, February 15: Lecture I: Origins; What Is Post-Modernism? (Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Architecture & Literary Theory)

Wednesday, February 22: Lecture II: The End of the Signature Style (Richter, Polke & Nauman)

Wednesday, March 14: Lecture III: Feminism, Photography & Identity Art (art in the 1980s and 1990s)

Wednesday, March 21: Lecture IV: New Media, Art and Fashion (the impact of Post-Modernism today, Koons, Hirst, Murakami etc.)

In previous years, I have given ASG lectures on the Brain and Creativity, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. For further information please contact Virginia Remsberg, coordinator of the Art Seminars Group, P.O. Box 2, Baldwin, MD 21013, at 410-879-1947 or 443-604-3601 (office@artseminargroup.org).

Hope to see you at some of these events. With best wishes for the upcoming arts season,

Michael

More than a year ago I was asked by library science students at the University of Wisconsin to take part in a library as incubator project answering questions about what libraries had meant to me through the course of my life. The entire essay went on-line just today, November 17th, together with three poems from The Enemy of Good Is Better. In addition you can watch, without interruption, an entire poetry reading that I gave in Atlanta at the Academy of Medicine on behalf of Tom Lux and the poetry center at Georgia Tech. This feature was completely unexpected, yet another kindness from the University of Wisconsin: Parallel Press at the library in Madison was the publisher of my fourth chapbook, Stones In Our Pockets (2007), obtainable only from their web site.

Sent from my iPad

On a beautiful early November weekend, when the maples were just turning bright red, orange and yellow, my wife took me to Chicago for my birthday. We had not been back to the City of Big Shoulders since the construction of Millennium Park and the erection of Renzo Piano's Modern Wing at the Chicago Art Institute in the Spring of 2009. Briefly put, the combination of the enlarged Museum and the Park has created one of the great public spaces in the United States. We saw it on Friday, our first day, in mild temperatures under a clear, sunny sky and the experience on Sunday in blustery Chicago gray was different but still thrilling. I would highly recommend the route we took, first greeting old Impressionist and Post-Impressionist friends in the original Michigan Avenue building (Caillebotte's rainy Paris street scene, Renoir's unique seascape in violets and purples, Seurat's Grande Jatte, surely the only painting to ever serve as the inspiration for an entire Broadway musical) and then finding the corridor on the 2nd floor that takes you into a small open cafe on the 2nd floor of the Modern Wing and the startling transition into an entirely different sort of space. The Café Moderno serves as both a rest spot and a balcony from which you can take in the long central axis of the building. Sit down with coffee and cake and enjoy the view of Piano's magnificent Millennium Lobby stretched out towards a glass curtain wall a city block away with its view of the trees and Frank Gehry's band shell in Millennium Park. The ceiling above you is cleverly louvered in Piano’s usual manner and the relative thickness of supporting cables, pillars, mullions and glass panes is exquisitely proportioned. Everything seems to float. As you face the lobby, galleries on your left are devoted to architecture and design. If you turn right, a spectacular Clyfford Still beckons you towards American Art, 1945-1960. Not until you cross a narrow hallway running parallel to the Millennium Lobby and pass through a pair of giant double glass doors do you notice that the Still is on the far wall of a relatively intimate room created by a pair of floating partitions, the one on the left holding a terrific Franz Kline, the one on the right a late drip painting by Jackson Pollock. In effect, the space is devoted to three types of gestural abstraction. The end room to the right of the Pollock contains early surrealist-inspired work from the 1940s by Newman, Gottlieb and an early shambles by Pollock, looking too much like Hans Hofmann, as well as an Ad Reinhardt of woven black, one of the best things by him I have ever seen, and a wonderful early Motherwell in tan and dun. “Excavation”, the Institute’s great black and white de Kooning was off in New York on loan to his retrospective. Clearly, curatorial choices in this part of the wing are made on the basis of aesthetic affinities and not by "school" so that the room to the left of the Kline contains work by artists interested in color regardless of their relationship to Abstract Expressionism. The far wall here is hung with an early Morris Louis Veil, the two side panels with Rothkos from his best period and the wall behind you with a Diebenkorn Ocean Park. The room at the far left announces the coming transition to more contemporary art with a strong Chamberlain (a plastic skirt hanging from the crushed metal), a Kusama net and a Jasper Johns cross hatch painting among other good things.

Contemporary Art Since 1960 is entered through a separate doorway off the narrow outer hall. The rooms have a larger footprint but the ceiling heights and excellent natural lighting remain uniform. Entire rooms are given over to the touching work of Félix González-Torres, the white paintings of Robert Ryman, a small clutch of Ellsworth Kellys, and a special exhibition devoted to Ana Mendieta. The late cartoon style of Philip Guston gets its own room, by now a curatorial cliché, one partially justified by Chicago's parochial interest in the so-called Hairy Who movement. The latter results in the highly unfortunate decision to give an entire room to the jejune work of the movement’s leader,  Ed Paschke, a kind of outsider artist, and the even more disastrous decision to have his room back up against the immediately neighboring space devoted to twelve (!) magnificent and sophisticated paintings by Gerhard Richter. These include "Mouth" (1963), perhaps the earliest significant Richter in any American museum, two early group portraits in his photorealist style (one en grisaille, “Christa & Wolfi” 1964), his famous silvery socialite in a smeared evening dress, “Woman Descending a Staircase” (1965), a play on Duchamp's notorious Nude, not one but two paintings from his equally famous candle series, a late (1993) photorealist still life of a vase of flowers, and a magnificent suite of four abstracts ("Ice") from the late 1980s. There are some excellent group displays that rival Richter's solo. We especially enjoyed the post-Minimalist room with its Tuttle cloth octagon and the great "Hang-Up" (1966) by Eva Hesse, the Minimalist room with its running-V by Stella, a floor piece by Carl Andre and an early painting by Brice Marden, and the large Arte Povera room in which an excellent Pistoletto mirror piece and beautiful Pier-Paolo Calzolari of leaves and neon on the walls, were surprisingly joined to good effect with a circular Robert Smithson of glass, mirrors and gravel on the floor. 

After looking at so much, it's time to take a break. Head for the gently descending ramp that Piano has designed to convey his guests over the old railroad tracks and across a major street into Millennium Park, from the World of Art into the World of Nature. Once again the magic is in the details: the handsome handrails made of naturally gray wood glisten in the sun as if made of metal. In the distance you can see the frou-frou of Frank Gehry's band-shell at the far end of the concert lawn, its cacophony of curves bringing Chicago a touch of his Guggenheim in Bilbao; the Gehry nicely contrasts with Piano's rectilinear forms and the giant silver jelly-bean of Anish Kapoor's major sculpture cum meeting point, the latter set down on a concrete plaza in the park like an alien spacecraft. The Kapoor, like Piano’s ramp, further emphasizes the join between the natural and the man made. In Kapoor's highly polished and convoluted surface, the subtly distorted reflections of the park's glowing trees, your own body, your family and hundreds of smiling strangers cavorting in the open air, as well as the slight twist to the surrounding Chicago skyline, all of it creates a sensation of joyful community and unstable movement. Like I've said, a great public space. Given all this, it seems to me that the other major sculpture in the park is a failure. Except at night when the large faces on its video screens become visible, the two giant monoliths by Jaume Plensa have a heaviness and lack of playfulness out of keeping with the rest of the ensemble; during the day time they seem to be trapped within the chain-link pattern of their outer skins and their rigid rectilinear shapes. Fortunately, this installation keeps to its own space and is almost invisible from the Museum and completely separate from the Kapoor and the Gehry. After so much fresh air it's time for a little exercise; the slope of Piano's ramp allows you to easily climb back up towards the Art Institute and see it from another perspective. The Modern seems to contain everything that Piano has learned from a lifetime of designing museums. The escalator bay hung on an outer wall in its own glass case not only echoes the train yard below but the externalized escalator and air-ducts of Piano's earliest masterpiece (with Richard Rogers), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1972-1976). The flat magic-carpet roof flying above his floating walls and the giant glass curtain internally giving on a Sylvan prospect echo the design of his Beyeler Foundation building in Basel (1997).  When you come back from the park, your tickets allow easy (and friendly) re-entry into the museum. Refreshed by the natural world you are ready for the early American Modernists in the old building, Hopper's "Nighthawks" and Grant Wood's "American Gothic" among them, and the Picassos and Matisses in the new Modern wing where European Art, 1900-1950, is displayed. One misses the conversation of Seurat's Grande Jatte with Matisse's gigantic "Bathers By A River" but the lighting of the cubist and fauve masterpieces is much improved and the wonderful Cornell boxes no longer look as if they live in a dim blue dungeon. Chicago collectors and donors are famous for their interest in Surrealism and now the Abstract Expressionists are only a short-distance away from the treasures that partially inspired them. Piano's Modern wing is freely in the Park and of the city in a way that the Met in Central Park and the National Gallery on the Mall fail to be; the building and the park are intimately aligned. In Chicago, the city crowned with our greatest architectural heritage, the city of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Renzo Piano has added yet another jewel.

II

Further north along Michigan Avenue, in the chi-chi precincts of the Miracle Mile and Water Tower Place, a less salubrious structure stands, the squat and uninviting Museum of Contemporary Art, a brutalist toad. Its friendliest side is towards the back in the direction of Lake Michigan; out front it offers an enormous pile of steps that no one dares to climb and an obdurate concrete face. Unless you are strong of leg, you must enter it through jowel-like cubes at either side. The exhibition spaces are equally chilly with almost no natural light and not enough room to display even a fraction of a significant collection. When we visited on Saturday a terrific Minimalism show was on view, Then and Now, contrasting the work of five young artists in the Now to one side of the building with a selection of pieces by their distinguished predecessors on the other  (Then). This arrangement had the unfortunate effect of placing the new work in a sort of ghetto and blurred the lines of influence exerted between specific pairs of artists; on the other hand, it helped exercise the mind by forcing you to make connections between what you were looking at in the Now and the appropriate artist in the Then enclave across the hall. There the usual suspects were well represented (a Judd Stack and a beautiful Judd Progression, a Black painting by Stella and a Protractor variation in startling and vibrant hues, a Tuttle cloth octagon, an Albers Homage to the Square), as well as German minimalists not ordinarily seen in this context (except at Documenta), Charlotte Posenenske and Franz Erhard Walther chief among them. One floor-bound Posenenske construction was beautifully rhymed with a Richter shadow painting on the wall behind; an early Marden was paired with and humorously aped by a Blinky Palermo textile "painting". The artists in the Now are five in number: Leonor Antunes, Carol Bove, Jason Dodge, Gedi Sibony and Oscar Tuazon. Of these, Carol Bove (b.1971) appeared to be the most interesting. She displayed a pair of mirrored towers with chain-link fine mesh sheaths, a painting made from peacock feathers and a canvas coated with a painted net so visually indeterminate that I could not decide whether it had been pasted on or painted. In this respect it resembled one of Tuttle's early wire pieces installed with both a penciled and actual shadow on the wall behind it. A room-sized installation of suspended leather belts by Leonor Antunes (b.1972) was also very impressive: a three-dimensional Cold Mountain painting by Brice Marden. The constructions by Gedi Sibony (b.1973) seem very much of our time, sculptural objects made of architectural materials and scavenged from dumpsters à Felix Schramm, Rachel Harrison, Theaster Gates et al.

Michigan Avenue used to be the center of the commercial gallery scene but the number of interesting dealers there has been sorely depleted. R.S. Johnson is still the place to go for drawings and prints The estimable Richard Gray, now with a branch in New York, has a relatively small space in the John Hancock building where he was showing Jim Dine’s usual hearts and bathrobes. Next door on the 25^th floor, Valerie Carberry was showing paintings by Ellen Lanyon and Philip Pearlstein; the usual. The new centers are in River North, within a block or two of Superior and Franklin, and the West Loop, at Washington and Peoria. Pioneered by Klein Art Works (closed 2004), the two areas contain both cutting edge and blue chip galleries. Alan Koppel in River North, who I remember on Michigan, remains a major secondary market dealer for Richter, Duchamp and classic furniture (see the selection of work he’s put into Tru, one of Chicago’s best restaurants). The West Loop has Kavi Gupta, who shows Theaster Gates, Scott Reeder (currently having a show at the MCA), and Zak Smith, among others, in a wonderful space on Washington, one of Donald Young’s galleries (his other space is in The Loop) with two giant light boxes by Rodney Graham, and the grande dame of Chicago contemporary dealers, Rhona Hoffman on Peoria, currently showing beautiful expressionistic “paintings” by Siebren Versteeg produced by digital algorithms. We didn’t have time to visit many other galleries but Chicago clearly has a vital art scene and seems to have recovered from some of its recent losses. We expect to see it more often in the future, especially now that old friend Lisa Corrin is in charge of the curatorial program at Northwestern University’s Block Museum.

August 17, 2011

I took advantage of a day trip to meet with a poetry publisher in New York to quickly see some art. With two extra hours to spare and the temperature in the ‘80s, I cabbed it to Leo Koenig’s gallery on West 23^rd street in Chelsea where the best reviewed gallery show in the city was concluding an almost three month run (June 21 to September 3, 2011). It’s almost exactly a year (June 10^th, 2010) since Polke died and it’s still hard to believe that we lost him at such a young age. Based on the relatively few examples previously seen of his camera-based output and the photographic sources used in his remarkable paintings on canvas and paper, it was well known that Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), one of the great creative forces in world art since the end of the Second World War, was passionately interested in photography. The current show, “Photoworks 1964-2000”, makes clear Polke’s evident mastery of this medium and shows him to be as inventive in photography as he was in all other areas of his artistic practice. Born in Lower Silesia, Polke escaped to West Germany in 1953. He worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory before entering the Academy in Dusseldorf when he became one of the most prominent students of Joseph Beuys (1961-1967). In 1963, he and Gerhard Richter (b.1932) came together to form one of the great creative dyads of the twentieth century and, deeply influenced by Warhol and American Pop Art, founded a cynical half-serious movement called Capitalist Realism. The two artists filled a storefront with their sardonic paintings about consumer culture and were present throughout, sitting on the furniture and answering questions as if they were living sculpture. Like Braque and Picasso or Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, the partnership of Polke and Richter could not survive their contrasting talents and ambitions. Photography is a good example of their differences: Richter uses it as a source and a tool, Polke uses it as an end, Richter reproduces his snaps with exquisite precision in his paintings and over-paints his photographs so as to obscure them, Polke manipulates his negatives during the printing process and over-draws his photographs in such a way so as to clarify their power. Five large photographs of clothed skeletons in the Palermo catacombs (1976) look like nineteenth century studies distressed by the Starn Twins; their emotional power belies the artist’s reputation for cool satire with an interest focused on process. A sequence of pictures starring a cucumber or pickle is more obviously Dada-like and filled with Polke’s typically humorous take on the otherwise serious business of the art world. The legume is clearly a stand-in for the male member and is put through its paces, bent over and drinking from a cup or balanced on a pair of breast-like spheres. Less successful to my eye were experimental blue-toned abstracts made with radioactive materials; the mercurial artist was always using thermally-sensitive lacquers and chemicals in his paintings and drawings and obviously extended his experiments to photographic media. These experiments may have hastened his death from cancer. Unlike Richter who worked like most successful contemporary artists with a team of fabricators, Polke worked alone in his studio; each of his works was created by his hands. This manner of working presented physical dangers and the advantage of stamping his personality on everything he made. Both Richter and Polke eschewed the signature style, Richter created separate series of photorealist and abstract paintings, Polke frequently combined realism and abstraction in the same painting. In photography, however, Polke seemed to advocate a kind of ascetic purity; if only his photographs existed, Polke would still be regarded as one of the greatest artists of the last half-century.

Untitled, 1972 , Untitled (Biennale), 1986, Untitled (Palermo series), 1976

For the past few months, I had debated with myself as to the necessity of seeing any of the current shows at the Whitney Museum of Art but as I needed to make a meeting on Madison decided to take an extremely frightening and expensive cab ride from the West side to the East side of the city. The Whitney (as usual) is going through an agony of re-definition; it is poised to leave its magnificent Marcel Breuer home for a new emporium at the foot of the High Line in Chelsea. In preparation it is mounting a series of exhibitions to highlight the founding collection of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the artistic doyenne who created the museum, and the rather wan results of the first iteration are on the second floor. The museum hopes that some of the artists and their works will be re-evaluated by art historians and the art-going public but this is not likely. The Salon-style hanging of retardé paintings by Aaron Bohrod, Eugene Speicher, and such worthies as Georgina Klitgaard, is not likely to change the general view of American art in the 1930s as something old-fashioned and perishable prior to the arrival of Abstract Expressionism. Hopper, Demuth, O’Keefe, Stuart Davis, and Sheeler have no reason to fear for their displacement in the pecking order. But I started on the top floor, where the recent re-hanging of the Singularities series was encountered (not always pleasantly, except for the magnificent L-beam series from the Minimalist phase of Robert Morris ) and worked my way down.

Gradient, Arcangel

On the fourth floor, I encountered the Corey Arcangel (b.1978) show, a display of works created within the past two years by one of the true pioneers of digital art. The Whitney used to be notorious for creating “mid-career” retrospectives of artists who were still starting out (Salle, Schnabel, Fischl etc.); the focus of this snapshot is far narrower (work from 2010/2011) but it fits one of Arcangel’s themes, the fugitive nature of the latest thing in digital technology and consumer culture. Unfortunately, Pro Tools is among the most intellectually and aesthetically shallow exhibitions that I have ever seen. You get to see the chronological progression of video bowling games, modified by Arcangel so that the player always throws a gutter ball (big guffaw); you can swing a real golf club in a digital golf game that he has (similarly) altered so that the image of the ball never heads for the hole (ditto). Watch the artist establish his relationship to Duchamp’s Readymades (sigh) by stacking boxes of flat screen televisions and precisely reproducing high fashion sunglasses in bronze. An expert programmer and writer of code, Arcangel never actually uses Pro Tools in this show (!) named for the popular music software but does employ Photoshop’s default gradients to produce gaudily colored, vary large, chromogenic prints that the lazy catalog essay compares to the non-representational and improvisational imagery of Abstract Expressionism. The prints are visually impressive but having nothing to do with the imagery, content, surface facture or psychological resonance of Ab-Ex, a subject about which either the artist or the “curator” seem to know little and care less. Color Field painting of the Noland, Louis, Olitski school would have been a far more apposite comparison. There are precious few other objects in the show that have some aesthetic and visual interest: the entertaining product display tables, set in motion by programmed motors, that resemble Sol LeWitt’s cubic structures doing the Twist; the “drawings” made by early pen-printer technology and segmented line sculptures that are simple but effective; the supercuts and video remixes sampling random sounds to produce classical compositions, a general strategy that achieves much more in the hands of Christian Marclay, and so forth. Are we having fun yet? This show is like a child’s video arcade; a false promise of the future based on a flimsy premise.

Feininger, The White Man, 1907, col. Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza

Feininger, Carnival in Arcueil, 1911, Art Institute of Chicago

On the next floor down, the Whitney has mounted a rare retrospective of the American-born German Expressionist Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956). Born in New York, Feininger moved to Germany at age 16 and studied in Berlin. He was initially a cartoonist and was recruited to provide humorous pieces for the large German population living in Chicago. Examples of his two comic strips drawn for The Chicago Tribune are among the most revelatory objects in the exhibition. He did not become a fine artist until age 36. Well known for an all-too decorative and simplistic cubist style, which he repeatedly applied to church steeples and sailing vessels, Feininger’s earlier paintings from 1907 through 1912 share a color sense and graphic fierceness akin to the work of other major German Expressionists and their stylish distortions owe much to the comics (see The White Man, 1907). Instead of being a follower, the early Feininger anticipates Art Spiegelman, the Yellow Submarine of the Beatles, R. Crumb and Mr. Natural, and the late career of Philip Guston. His strangely elongated figures, often seen from below, seem like Art Nouveau dandies but some of them are priests and others are prostitutes, many of them bopping along. Even in his best work, Feininger's strong interest in architecture led him to repeat his own motifs, such as the acqueduct in the Carnival scene (1911). A member of many avant-garde movements in Germany, The Bridge and The Blue Rider chief among them, Feininger taught at the Bauhaus until the rise of the Nazi Party. The artist and his partly Jewish wife moved back to New York in 1936 and there he stayed, sometimes composing music or carving toy figures in wood, while his power as a painter gradually deteriorated. When I was a child, I remember walking into furniture stores with my Mother and encountering a wan landscape or seascape style in which dun blues, browns and greens, and elongated triads of lines “abstracted” church steeples and ships at sea. Always pleasant and non-threatening, Feininger's mild work launched a thousand imitators; this decorative above-the-couch style became the polite apex of conventional abstraction. Early versions of his cityscapes and seascapes look stronger as woodcuts. With rare exceptions, the original Feininger models from the 1920s and 1930s rarely achieve the pointed energy of his early cartoon-inflected work, much of which I had never seen. It would be interesting to put on a show in which the early Feininger was paired with the street artists (i.e. school of Barry McGee) and cartoon art he indirectly influenced. We should take him down from above the couch.

Feininger, Kin-der-Kids Panel, 1906, MoMA

Sailboats

Dear Editor:

I was happy to see the exchange between Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist in regard to his recent book, The Master and His Emissary (October, 2010); I look forward to reading it despite his position on Modernism and Matisse. Any conversation on art and the brain is more than welcome in the pages of a humanistic journal. However, as a practicing physician and poet, art critic and neuroscientist (formerly of the hard-headed volts and amps variety), I have long argued that the separation between art and science is artificial and harmful, and that their essential cultural commonality, for both practitioners and audiences, is encapsulated in a pair of dyads, science and discovery, art and invention, that we all instinctively know. This insight came not only through active practice on both sides of "the divide" but by close reading of Henri Poincare's classic essay "Mathematical Creation" in a marvelous book by a poet, Brewster Ghiselin's The Creative Process. One explanation for the popularity of right brain/left brain discourse is the tendency for the general public to see art and science as inherently at odds. Not only are the intuitive thinking processes of some scientists fundamentally "artistic" in nature (cf. Einstein) but the products of scientific work, like color-coded fMRI scans of the brain, increasingly resemble the products of contemporary visual artists. In fact, color-coded fMRI scans have been displayed as art works at the Venice Biennale. Historically speaking, the progress of art and science would seem to depend on the elaboration of new metaphors and similes; the metaphor-making function is an intrinsic property of the brain. Even the brain must explain itself to itself by means of metaphor, often borrowing the dominant technology of the historical period in which it finds itself, witness the progression of brain models from telegraph to telephone network to computer. An overly deterministic view of the brain in which most lower functions and every higher function is parceled out to some defined territory (or one side of the brain) is inimical to the deep capability the brain has for serially throwing up multiple possible solutions (i.e. novel combinations of thoughts) to problems and rejecting all but the one, as Poincare says, that is most useful, a usefulness imbued with the character of "beauty and elegance". Even for the most dramatic and critical functions, there are relatively few well-defined areas or, alternatively, too many areas. We now know that there are multiple visual systems and multiple language areas. A few differences are clear. The right hemisphere is mute; almost all humans have their language centers in the left hemisphere, including most left-handers. Even songbirds have their singing center in the left hemisphere; no one knows why this should be so. One of the first special advantages ascribed to the right hemisphere was spatial finesse (as in drawing) but it is the left hemisphere that projects the right leg and the right arm into space and it is the right hand that draws in most artists. Is there not a spatial center in the left hemisphere too, the functions of which are obscured in the aphasic patient? So it may be going a bit far to say the gift for music is located in one place and the gift for imagination in another. On most scientific questions, one can be a splitter or a lumper; a distributed or holistic view of the brain is just as easily supported by fMRI as a more rigidly defined set of functional areas, and such a view has the advantage of not dividing one creative tribe from another, the priests from the singers. I have argued that the brain has two physiological properties that uniquely prepare it for the elaboration of Poincare's new combinations and the eventual selection of true solutions, some of them metaphors: firstly, the vast majority of the cerebral hemispheres consist of associative cortex, brain not assigned specific functions (e.g. speech, vision) but devoted to forming connections between neuronal pools across great neuroanatomical distances, so that new ideas can converse like whales sounding to one another across vast oceans, and, secondly, the brain contains an enormous number of neurons and connections, almost on the order of the number of stars in the universe, the function of which can best be understood through probabilistic mathematics. New ideas and novel metaphors are almost guaranteed by random association in the prepared mind. This argument is available on-line through the Knowledge Network of the New York Times. Only in recent years have I learned of Frost's wisdom in these matters. In The Constant Symbol (1946), Frost, putting on his best aw-shucks manner, says:

THERE ARE MANY OTHER THINGS I HAVE FOUND MYSELF SAYING ABOUT POETRY, BUT THE CHIEFEST OF THESE IS THAT IT IS METAPHOR, SAYING ONE THING AND MEANING ANOTHER, SAYING ONE THING IN TERMS OF ANOTHER, THE PLEASURE OF ULTERIORITY. POETRY IS SIMPLY METAPHOR. SO ALSO IS PHILOSOPHY—AND SCIENCE TOO, FOR THAT MATTER, IF IT WILL TAKE THE SOFT IMPEACHMENT FROM A FRIEND.

As I scientist I have long wondered about how the brain performs its magic; as a poet I should have known that a writer would have found the secret long ago: the brain is a metaphor-making machine.

Yours sincerely, Michael Salcman