Michael Salcman's Blog

CHELSEA DIARY, No.35: Is The Armory Show Friezed Out?

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:24:00 -0400

March 6-9, 2013

There was already a slithery mix of snow, rain and sleet falling in Baltimore on Wednesday morning when my wife and I bravely or foolishly decided to keep our appointment with Armory Week in New York. So we boarded the train not knowing what to expect from the possible nor’easter Saturn or from the art world. By 11:30 we had dropped our luggage off at our hotel, the streets were dry and we made our way to West 57th to visit two of our favorite galleries, Marian Goodman at 24 West and the newly relocated Peter Blum at 20 West. Seeing Blum in his new space really made us feel old; he occupies the light-filled gallery where Ameringer spent several years after Blum/Helman was in the same location for a long time. We knew them all. Now Blum has left both SoHo, nearly empty of galleries, and Chelsea, a wind-swept, storm-cleansed area filled with gigantic commercial emporia to head back up town to a more traditional art environment. Here he is still showing an excellent mix of conceptual objects and process-oriented paintings. The latest in the latter category is Rosy Keyser, born in Baltimore, who attaches Duchampian objects, sawdust and videotape to slashed canvases with a decidedly morose darkness and chemical veneer a la Sigmar Polke crossed with Motherwell or Kline. Keyser is not afraid to acknowledge her sources but has the emotional energy and intellectual verve to stamp the work with her own personality. We thought it unlikely that the Armory Show at the Piers (94 & 92) would contain anything this fully conceived, let alone the estimable large wall drawings and films of the more senior Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman.

Rosy Keyser Unfortunately, our prediction proved correct. This wan edition of the Armory show at the piers took place on the 100^th anniversary of the much more exciting original Armory Show in 1913, the one that introduced America to Matisse, Duchamp and Picasso; as it happened this year was also the 50^th anniversary of the much more elegant Art Dealers Association (ADAA) fair (actually held in the Park Avenue Armory) and the 25^th anniversary of Warhol’s death. We saw the Armory show on Wednesday afternoon with the “VIP” crowd; they were assailed by shopping bags and tea shirts designed by this year’s commissioned artist, Liz Magic Laser. In a lousy conceptual follow-up to last year’s Theaster Gates, Laser trumpeted the average income of the fair’s attendees, the cost of a booth and other fiduciary details better left unspoken. This was the most dispiriting Armory Show in history. As the Times made clear in its review, it’s a little late in the day to crown Warhol the symbolic father of an art fair. The link between art and commerce or art and fashion is blatant enough without rubbing it in the face and eyes of those hoping to see visually significant work. Reducing the number of booths, increasing the width of the aisles and emphasizing single-artist shows only made the vacuity of the work on display more evident. For a change, the classic modern section on Pier 92 was even more depressing than the giddy contemporary scene on Pier 94.There were exceptions. The wrap-around flat screens of Diana Thater’s new flower-themed video at Zwirner were beautifully imposing and the re-discovery of a classical African-American Minimalist forefather, McArthur Binion, by Chicago’s Kavi Gupta was inspiring. The two best group shows were at Francis Naumann’s booth, where the eponymous Duchamp scholar convinced a number of contemporary artists (including Sophie Matisse, the granddaughter of Henri) to do clever riffs on the master’s Nude Descending A Staircase (1913), and at Armand Bartos who managed to collect his usual number of late-modern treasures, including an Andre floor piece, two de Kooning drawings and a ravishing Cavallon painting. Major pieces by the great figures of the last 50 years were thin on the ground; no doubt some of the best dealers are waiting for May’s second edition of Frieze/New York, either as participants or if they were at the Armory show saving their best things for the other fair. Unlike Miami, the piers felt empty without the presence of Sonnabend, Barbara Gladstone, Pace or White Cube; a few real Warhols at Gagosian and fake cardboard Brillo Boxes as free Armory gifts for the rich hoi polloi couldn’t make up the difference.

The state of the Armory show was a frequent topic of conversation at dinner that evening with close art world friends and the next day at the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory (it confuses cabbies too: the Armory show is at the piers and not at the Armory, got that?). Major changes are afoot. There’s a new business model on the horizon given the paucity of mid-level dealers, the financial pressures on small galleries in Chelsea, especially after Sandy’s sojourn in their basements, the dominance of internationally-oriented mega-dealers like Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner and White Cube, the faltering of the entry-level art market at auction and of young galleries in the face of unrealistic rents and artist expectations. Everyone we spoke to, including collectors, thought the Armory was crowded, physically unpleasant and artistically uninteresting. Blue-chip dealers and visitors continue to be charmed by the ADAA show, its manageable size, it’s relative calm and quality, and the chance to have a meaningful conversation. On the other hand, the Frieze show attracts deep pockets that fly in on private jets to attend the May auctions; more and more dealers will leave the Armory for Frieze and some will follow Peter Blum’s lead and leave Chelsea. The most memorable one-person shows at the ADAA fair on Thursday included one by Jannis Kounellis, the Arte Povera master, who closed off the entire front of Cheim & Read’s booth with a giant wall of steel plate, cobblestone and ancient sewing machines. We also liked the copper-foil covered paintings by Tam van Tran at Ameringer, the stellar collection of Motherwell’s work from every period at Lillian Heidenberg (the recent publication of the gorgeous 3-volume catalog raissonne is going to change Motherwell’s market), the dark thinly striped canvases by Sean Scully from the early 1970s at Lelong, and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, the works in different media by Damian Hirst at van de Weghe. Early circus-based Milton Avery paintings from the 1930s made for one of the most unusual and powerful shows at the fair; the fact that this took place at David Zwirner only made it more bizarre. Other strong shows were those of Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin, Sal Scarpitta at Boesky, Mary Corse at Lehmann Maupin, Zarina Hashmi at Luhring Augustine and Louise Lawler at Metro. At Pace, Kiki Smith seems to be making decorative product for the market; John Zurier’s paintings looked washed out at Peter Blum. One of the most beautiful group shows was at Barbara Mathes; there were impressive pieces by Italian process artists like Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi as well as a stunning black and white painting by John McLaughlin. Terrific things were to be had at Brooke Alexander, including an early Albers. Sitting there one had an excellent view from across the aisle of a remarkable Frankenthaler paired with a luscious Morris Louis at John Berggruen. Two wonderful young photographers, who don’t use cameras and new to us, were Chris McCaw and Alison Rossiter at Yossi Milo.

John McLaughlin at Barbara Mathes, ADAA

Before visiting the ADAA Show we had an early morning private view of the remarkable Surrealist drawing show at the Morgan Library followed by the special treat of seeing Inventing Abstraction at MoMA. Both exhibitions expand their respective fields by emphasizing formerly little known artists (like the Spanish-American surrealist Federico Castellon) or by revising the geography of pioneer abstractionists (i.e. Eastern Europe). The MoMA show practically opened with five major paintings by Frantisek Kupka, from Czechoslovakia, and an extremely imposing mural-sized work by Picabia. Important contributions by women were everywhere from figures such as Sophie-Tauber Arp, Sonia Delauney and Georgia O’Keefe. However the primacy of Arthur Dove’s 1911 drawings, as old as anything by Kandinsky or Kupka, were not in the show, and his role as O’Keefe’s role model was scanted. The influence of Robert Delauney on American Synchromists like Morgan Russell and Stanton McDonald Wright was never clearer. Balla looked like a major artist here, not just a niche Italian Futurist and a single gigantic painting by David Bomberg revealed why all later members of the so-called School of London revered him. There were lessons to be learned in every room. And we ran into Baltimore friends everywhere who also regretted going to the piers. After the ADAA fair we had cocktails at our hotel and a fabulous dinner at Blue Hill in the Village.

Kupka: Madame Kupka Among the Verticals, MoMA, 1910-11

Friday morning the bad weather finally arrived with slush and snow but it didn’t stop us. We took a cab from the hotel to the Guggenheim and explored its massive tribute to the Gutai artists of Japan (1955-1971), a group of visionaries who seem to have invented minimalism, process art, happenings, interactive sculpture, artistic social action and just about everything else at the same time as or even earlier than their contemporaries did in the West. We felt overwhelmed by our ignorance. One of Gutai’s earliest and most significant members was Atsuko Tanaka, the inventor of the notorious electric dress (1956). There were beautiful paintings by the group’s founder Yoshihara Jiro and by Sadamasa Motonaga. Off the ramp the Guggenheim had an excellent survey of contemporary art from Southeast Asia (mostly political, some of it derivative in form from Mona Hatoum) and a nice survey of Hashmi’s meditative prints and paper works. Then it was off to the Met to learn the art of painting from Matisse, In Search of True Painting. In this grand show the degree of his struggle with materials and composition came alive as never before. Subjects were represented by pairs or trios of paintings illustrating his approach to revision; almost always the most recent version was the best solution to the problem he had set for himself. An increased degree of abstraction, a scumbled or bare background and a liberal use of black were frequently used strategies. In other rooms single works were surrounded by a squadron of photographs Matisse himself had ordered made of each stage in the construction of a masterpiece; he had engaged the photographer with the specific goal of educating the public as to his methods in an attempt to dissuade their belief that it all came too easy to him. It obviously didn’t but the final result always appeared effortless. Lastly we tried to see the fashion, modernity and impressionism show at the Met but the crowds were too much for the small distances between the paintings and the vitrines containing dresses, shoes, hats etc. Many of the paintings were not first-rate and our feet were killing us. So off for drinks at the Algonquin and a ride uptown for another wonderful dinner. By then the rain had stopped and the snow had melted from off the streets.

Tanaka, Electric Dress, 1956

Saturday’s weather was the best for our highly adaptable schedule: clear skies and warming temperatures arrived just in time to see The Independent fair in Chelsea and lots of galleries. We started out on West 20th with a private tour of David Zwirner’s newest gallery, an impeccable five story building designed and constructed to museum standards. The opening show in the public spaces came from the estates of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and the works (floor boxes and quadrilateral light pieces, respectively) were of size as they say. In an upstairs viewing room we saw the best three-piece survey of California finish fetish imaginable, a John McCracken blue plank, a Craig Kauffman plastic color curtain hung on a bar and a translucent De Wain Valentine yellow pyramid. Whether you call it California Minimalism or Light and Space, it looks gorgeous, some of it done so early it had to come from the example of John McLaughlin and not from New York. Another room was practically wall-papered with outstanding drawings by Al Taylor. The less intimate series of galleries on West 19^th will continue to show contemporary shows by gallery artists. On West 21^st street we visited an outstanding group show of New York Minimalism at Paula Cooper and a remarkable show of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings from the 1950s at Gagosian. The single most impressive object in New York has to be Miroslaw Balka’s The Order of Things (2013) at Gladstone. Two gigantic steel reservoirs of water colored to look like oil re-circulate their liquid contents from bottom to top, from behind forward, the “oil” pouring down into the boxes towering above you like spouting oil wells. A small wooden platform (the original organic source of the oil) gives one a place to sit and watch all the menacing grandeur and ponder its implications.

Balka: The Order of Things, 2013

After all this, the 40 galleries on three floors at the Independent didn’t give one much to delight the eye or confound the brain. As before the fair was located in the former Dia Museum at 548 West 22^nd street. All of the art received beautiful natural lighting through the building’s many windows and the absence of conventional booths (and terrible or non-existent labeling) caused the offerings to interpenetrate the space of their neighbors. You often couldn’t tell which gallery was showing which artist even if you could identify either one. For oldsters like us the single miserable elevator and the two-way traffic on the narrow staircase were a nightmare but each floor had convenient bathrooms. The best looking gallery space was that of Maureen Paley, a real pro and a refugee from the bigger fairs. She showed new drawings by David Salle and a nice contrasting pair of Rebecca Warren sculptures, one organic in lumpy ceramic, the other a pair of steel bars leaning against the wall like bent skis. Bjorn Braun’s colorful bird nests at Meyer Reigger, rescued by him and embellished by finches with colored ribbons and threads supplied by the artist achieved a good deal of notoriety. A display of bundled money (“Art Cash”) from 1971, originally made by Experiments in Art and Technology ( Rauschenberg’s E.A.T.), at the stand of Broadway 1602 was a cheeky hit. There were terrific Richard Aldrich paintings, big and small, at Bortolami, and deposed dictator faces on the clocks by Meschac Gaba at McCaffrey were worth a brief conceptual chuckle. This fourth edition of the Independent was the weakest by far and not a disconcerting competitor to the more established Armory and ADAA shows.

Bjorn Braun, Bird Nest, The Independent

The gallery offerings on West 22^nd weren’t much better. Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks is still using stuffed bunnies as stand-ins for his black/white and gay/straight identity issues and Elger Esser’s enormous photographs at Sonnabend still look like over-exposed plates from the nineteenth century. We get it. So we hurried over to 24^th street and saw every imaginable size of Alighiero e Boetti’s woven alphabets at Gladstone’s original location; a very colorful treat. William J. O’Brien’s simulacra of paintings created from a wide variety of materials according to minimalist principles of organized chaos looked a little dry and academic at Marianne Boesky. At Andrea Rosen, Aaron Bobrow’s first NY solo showed some punch; his abstract paintings seemed to have turned their backs (i.e. stretchers) to us in displaying their rents and imperfections much like his urban videos do. There was video by Ragnar Kjartansson at Luhring Augustine and lots of little paintings by Andrew Masullo, the smallest of which seemed the best composed and the least like Tom Nozkowski. Gagosian on West 24^th was absolutely packed for the retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the legendary artist who can look like the best mash-up of abstract expressionism and Pop (1981, 1982) you’ve ever seen or, towards the end of his brief but explosive career, totally out of control.

Al Held, Cheim & Read

On 25^th Street we visited Cheim & Read and saw the enormous Alphabet paintings by Al Held; these were so cropped that it was often impossible to discern which letter was the subject of any given painting. They gave the impression of true massiveness, a feeling usually encountered only with Minimalist sculpture. At the Pace outpost on 25^th there were new paintings by Jim Dine in a new style or with a new subject (thank goodness); the most abstract work he has ever produced. In this centenary year for the Armory Show of 1913, Dine’s new and very welcome paintings look like Orphic relations of Stanton McDonald-Wright and Robert Delaunay. We really wanted to see some more galleries on West 26^th but four days of gallery-going, museum-tramping and art-fair roving had finally done in our legs. So we aborted our mission, headed back to the hotel and cabbed it to the train. Much of the best art we saw all week was at the galleries on our last morning. Whether the Armory can ever deliver the excitement of 24^th street remains to be seen.

CHARLES STREET DIARY, No.7: AI WEIWEI's RETROSPECTIVE AT THE HIRSHHORN MUSEM, February 14-15, 2013

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:06:02 -0500

My wife and I celebrated Valentine’s Day in Washington. After a delightful poetry reading and panel discussion on the subject of Love and The Brain at the National Academy of Sciences on the evening of February 14th, we headed to one of Washington’s best restaurants, Bistro Bis (you should too), and made the acquaintance of its charming and elegant manager, Don Leak, who also turns out to be a writer! He told a hysterical story about his aunt coming to his grandfather’s funeral and bringing a platter of fried chicken that she dumped into the casket much to the chagrin of the rest of the family. Her retort? “Well, if he can smell the flowers he can certainly smell the chicken!” The next morning we drove over to the Hirshhorn’s concrete doughnut on the Mall to see the Ai Weiwei retrospective, “According to What?”, before it closes on the 24th of the month. If you care at all about contemporary art and whether it can encompass profound thought and deep feeling, you must see this show before it closes.

Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957, the son of Ai Qing, a revered Chinese poet, and has spent most of his career in Beijing and Shanghai; he is arguably the most important Chinese artist in the world and the most significant legatee of the Warholian mantle. When the artist was an infant his father was denounced and the family was sent to a labor camp in 1958. They did not return to Beijing until 1975. Like Warhol Ai is a master of media, many of which only came into existence after Andy’s death. Weiwei uses the internet, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, to organize his followers and fans, to crowd source themes, to disburse his videos and political messages. Unlike Warhol, superficially cool and disengaged, Weiwei is a “hot” artist who uses his sculptures, buildings and installations to promote social justice and change in Chinese society; as a result he has become a primary target of abuse by various governmental agencies, including the police and the taxation system. Financial penalties have kept Weiwei a virtual geographic prisoner even when he is otherwise free to roam around the country; the government also has bulldozed one of his studios (2011). He has been kept under house arrest and beaten by police in Chengdu (2009) so severely that he required neurosurgical drainage of a subdural hematoma or hemorrhage within the skull. Naturally he managed to export hospital pictures of his bandaged head out onto the internet. You will see the MRI scans of his brain at the Hirshhorn. Like Warhol he is never without a camera and frequently photographs himself with his middle finger raised in front of a major cultural monument or symbol of governmental power, not just Tienamen Square but the Eiffel Tower and the White House too. The retrospective at the Hirshhorn contains all of his most famous photographs including the black-and-white pictures he took during the ten years (1981-1993) he spent in New York learning to be a conceptual artist, meeting with other emigres as well as Allen Ginsberg. When he wasn’t at Parsons or the Art Students League, Ai was in Atlantic City supporting himself by playing blackjack. During this time he came under the influence of Duchamp and when he returned to China for his father’s final illness he was more than ready to lead his generation of artists out of their traditional working methods and conceptual beliefs. The show also contains suites of color photographs you can walk on documenting the urban renewal and destruction of traditional Beijing neighborhoods as well as the construction of the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium designed by Weiwei and Herzog & De Meuron (2008). Upstairs there is a fascinating, almost hypnotic display of more than 7,000 images on 12 television monitors (2012).

Weiwei is a product of his post-Minimalist times, assembling photographs in architectonic and geometric arrays, arranging seeds on the ground to produce a photographic image of Duchamp (just cross a pollen floor piece by Wolfgang Laib with the general strategy of Vik Muniz), building concatenations of useless furniture (e.g. Table With Two Legs On The Wall, 1997) or bicycles (like Orozco), erecting generic model buildings (think Laib again as well as early Joel Shapiro and Monopoly tokens) out of compressed tea leaves. Almost always, there is a political or cultural point to his activity, one that often contrasts the present day world (China) with its cultural or ancestral roots. The walls of the museum are liberally stenciled with Ai’s philosophical musings on art, culture, freedom and human dignity. After helping found several artists groups in China, Art Stars (1978) while attending the Beijing Film Academy and Beijing’s East Village group after his return in 1993, Weiwei produced artist’s books (the Covers series), architectural projects (1998) and his distinctive series of useless tables, screens and chairs constructed from rescued materials scavenged from destroyed temples. He started an architectural and design firm, cheekily named FAKE Design (2003), and began his Blog (2005). In 2008 a massive earthquake in Sichuan killed thousands of young schoolchildren who died in shoddily built schools constructed so as to maximize the amount of graft paid to government officials. Weiwei initiated an extensive citizen’s investigation and has prosecuted the results through his art and through the new media in such a way that he has become the Chinese regime’s most prominent target for personal retribution. I have already discussed some of the unhappy results. Fortunately, Weiwei’s international prominence has protected him somewhat. He exhibited at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and was featured at Documenta 12 in 2007. His retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2009-2010), “So Sorry”, featured a giant array of 9000 children’s backpacks in bright colors (Remembering), one for each dead child, knitted together to form giant Chinese characters on the facade of the building; these characters spelled out the sorrow of one of the mothers who said: “She lived happily for seven years in this world”, very much like the young children recently murdered in Newtown. His Sunflower Seeds (2010) in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, 100 million hand-painted porcelain objects created by a team of 1600 workers, caused a sensation. The recent documentary film, Ai Weiwei Never Sorry (2012), available on Netflix and nominated for an Oscar is not to be missed. In October Weiwei’s performance of a cover of Gangnam Style dancing with his hands held as if in shackles went viral on YouTube; not unexpectedly, he was not allowed to attend the opening of his Hirshhorn retrospective.

In the lobby of the museum you first encounter one of his most popular pieces, a visually transparent tower constructed out of linked bicycles (Forever, 2003), the most traditional sort of Beijing personal transportation, now useless and slowly giving way to the city’s unmanageable auto traffic. Upstairs there are “maps” (c.2004) of China fabricated from re-cycled Tieli wood from dismantled Qing dynasty (1644-1911) temples, one too tall for the average person to see the country’s outline, another that appears as negative space in the end of a fabricated log. In either case, China has disappeared from view. Weiwei’s furniture similarly focuses on the disappearance of traditional crafts and Chinese “style”, the famous concatenation of 40 antique Qing dynasty chairs called Grapes (2008) or the corner piece, Table With Three Legs (2006) made from late Ming or early Qing dynasty (1368-1911) wood. Weiwei’s most notorious repurposing of traditional arts and crafts occurred as a performance piece early in his career (1995): he dropped a series of Han dynasty pots (206 BCE- 220 CE) on a city street, an action memorialized here by a sequence of three giant photographs. His most colorful productions have been the Colored Vase Series in which Weiwei takes Neolithic pots (5000 to 3000 BCE) and casually paints them by dipping them into cans of industrial paint; he then arranges them as Allan McCollum-style multiples. They are astonishingly beautiful. So too the hand painted Han dynasty and Tang dynasty (618-907) pots inscribed with the Coca-Cola scrolling logo (1997), the most direct evidence of Weiwei’s debt to Warhol and the influence of Pop Art on his career. The exhibition even includes an echo of the site-specific Remembering from Munich: a giant Chinese serpent made of linked children’s backpacks slithering flat against the ceiling of the Hirshhorn’s second floor. You first see the serpent’s head on your way up the escalator. There are other treats that deserve mention, including Weiwei’s version of Tony Smith’s prototypical metal cube, Die, this one made of mahogany, its surfaces everywhere imprinted with the same pattern seen on a small cigarette case (also displayed) owned by his poet father and the outdoor series of giant bronze animal heads representing Chinese astrological signs (2012), subtly altered and arranged in a circle within the central plaza of the museum. This installation was previously seen at Columbus Circle in New York. As I have often said, much of the best of so-called post-Modern art displays Pop imagery within the context of Minimalist structure; think of those 1980s stacked vacuum cleaners Jeff Koons placed in a Judd box and how he lit them with an array of Flavin fluorescent tubes. A recent review of Weiwei’s show in the New York Times couldn’t have been more wrong-headed; he was criticized as an inferior object maker who had not invented his own forms and praised more as an inspirational public figure of great moral courage. In point of fact, Ai Weiwei is that rarest of cultural figures, someone like Goya, an artist whose very excellence as an image-maker acts as a partial disguise for the risk he poses to politics as usual, a man who commands a profound understanding of aesthetics with a deep understanding of power.

Poetry in Washington For The New Year

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 15:07:18 -0500

I am pleased to tell my readers about two upcoming poetry events in Washington DC that may be of interest:

On Saturday, the 19th of January I will be participating in a launch reading and party for the new on-line issue of LINES + STARS, a Washington area journal of poetry and short prose. The journal also publishes an annual print compendium of the work that has appeared throughout the year. The reading will start at 7 PM and take place at the DC ARTS STUDIOS/ WILLOW STREET GALLERY, 6925 Willow Street, NW, Washington DC 20012. You can learn about the DC Arts Studios at http://www.dcartsstudios.org/. Our host is Rachel Adams, the Editor of LINES + STARS.

And on Thursday the 14th of February, I am very proud to join panel members, Helene Fisher, a biological anthropologist, Claudia Hart, artist and curator, and Bianca Acevedo, social neuroscientist whose work/research includes the “neurobiology of love”, at one of the regularly scheduled Cultural Forum Events put on by THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. The subject of course will be Love and the Brain. The readings and panel discussion will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 PM in the auditorium of THE KECK CENTER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington DC 20001 (202-334-2000). It should be a very brainy way to celebrate Valentine’s Day! You can get directions on the web site of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.nasonline.org/. Our host is JD Talasek, Director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences. You can reach his Senior Program Associate Alana Quinn at 202-334-2415.

Hope to see you at one or both events.

HILARY MANTEL'S GLORIOUS NOVEL, "WOLF HALL"

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 17:09:00 -0500

I have just finished (belatedly) reading “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, her first novel to win the Booker Prize (2009) and the start of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. The book truly is a masterpiece, as poetically written as any long poem. It magically ends with the two word sentence (spondee) “Wolf Hall”. It describes the loving relationship of Cardinal Woolsey and Cromwell and reverses our usual estimate (see A Man For All Seasons) that Cromwell was the monster and Thomas More, actually an evil religious fanatic, the saint. The book includes a lengthy description of a book by Pacioli, the mathematical monk I have recently gone bonkers over (he taught Leonardo math and was one of the originators of the concept of The Ideal City, as described in my in-print essay for LPR on the greatest Renaissance painting in existence without a known author— The Ideal City in permanent residence at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore), as well as Cromwell’s friendship with his portraitist, Hans Holbein, and Wyatt the poet. Mantel did five years of research to produce the book, the finest historical novel I have read in several decades, brought to life by casting all events in the present tense as seen through Cromwell’s eyes and heard in his consciousness. Mantel avoids the use of archaic language but the narration placed in Cromwell’s head is never less than gloriously beautiful, filled with sounds and smells, and acute psychological insight.

Mantel has just won the Booker Prize (2012) a second time, an almost unheard of feat, for the second installment, just published, “Bring Up The Bodies”.

A stronger recommendation I cannot make.

CHELSEA DIARY, No.34: After The Storm

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:55:00 -0500

CHELSEA DIARY No.34: After The Storm

November 17-19, 2012

My wife and I were due in New York for a poetry event on monday the 19^th so we thought to take advantage of the weekend and see some art as well and find out how Chelsea was recovering from hurricane Sandy. The worst storm in the region’s memory flooded the most important concentration of commercial galleries in the world with four to five feet of the Hudson. Flooding was especially severe towards the southern end of the area from 19^th to 23^rd streets. Even the massive David Zwirner gallery had to shut down. On saturday the 17^th, We went directly with our luggage from the train to Mitchell-Inness & Nash on west 26^th (we had called ahead to make sure they were open); Lucy Mitchell-Inness is the head of the Art Dealers Association of America (the ADAA) and she and David Zwirner were collecting contributions to help the smaller galleries survive. The Times had reported that many of the Chelsea buildings had un-renovated basements and first floors from their factory days and that the back rooms of galleries, often used for art storage, historical documentation and financial records, were four feet deeper (one presumes to allow drainage from the factory floor!) than the public exhibition spaces. As a consequence, several dealers lost more than 90% of their stock and important files; the impact of this on both gallerists and the life-work of artists cannot be fully imagined. Almost three weeks after the Halloween storm you could still see the high water line on the outside of buildings (!) and most of the major galleries on west 24^th (the street of Gagosian, Luhring-Augustine, Barbara Gladstone, Andrea Rosen, Metro and Marianne Boesky) were closed and under repair. It was mid-day on a Saturday and very good weather; the streets were quiet and the open galleries almost empty.

The most spectacular show on west 26^th was at Mitchell-Inness & Nash, a celebration of Color Field painting from the 1960s with half a dozen extremely large and very beautiful pieces: two by Frankenthaler, a Noland chevron, two by Louis, a glorious unfurled and a lovely transitional painting, and an early Stella from his pre-Black period. Now that the anti-Greenberg fires have been damped and most of the artists, excepting Stella, left to history, the taste for such painterly opulence is sure to drive a market more and more bereft of first rate work by the earlier abstract expressionist school. Next door a Chinese mainland artist new to us, Lin Tianmiao, was showing at Galerie Lelong an excellent installation of giant samplers (“Badges”) in hooped frames embroidered with misogynistic terms for women in Chinese and English; these words were then pronounced by a child’s voice looped from a speaker in the ceiling. Lelong has always had a strong feminist bent. You may wish to see Lin’s her first retrospective at the Asia Society Museum uptown. James Cohan across the street from Lelong had new work by Trenton Doyle Hancock, most of which was too busy for our taste. On 25^th street we stopped at Pace to see yet another Chuck Close celebration of his art-world friends in large portraits, almost photographic but made up by cells filled with abstract lozenges of color. The best was a triptych of self-portraits in which the center one faced dead-ahead and the other two Chucks were turned slightly in towards the center from right and left, much like the well-known display of Richter’s forty portraits of famous men from the 1970s. At the other Pace venue we saw Michal Rovner’s latest work, more wondrous illusions of moving people and branches projected onto stone surfaces. Of course the line between what appears to be a magic trick and technological kitsch must be tread very carefully. Driscoll has moved the venerable Babcock Galleries from Madison Avenue to Chelsea’s 25^th street; the show of very tall horticultural paintings by Marylyn Dintenfass was very attractive if not quite up to its “Drop Dead Gorgeous” title. At Cheim and Read was a big show of work by Tal R, an artist we first saw at the Rubell Collection in Miami; the subjects and handling seemed to me wholly derived from the late flowering of German Expressionism in the 1920s. And that was it; two streets, the shortest Chelsea outing in memory. So we gathered our luggage, checked into our hotel and made for upper Madison at 80^th, and the start of the nicest walk we’ve had in years down the former center of the art world. At Barbara Mathes we encountered a very good show of post-minimal or post-conceptual painting by Italian artists from the 1960s to the present. Apart from Castellani the other three artists were new to us, all of them puckering, pricking or cutting away the canvas as good sons of Manzoni and Fontana. The most poetic shaped canvases seemed to be those by Agostino Bonalumi (b.1935). On east 79^th Acquavella treated us to a full retrospective of confectionary still lives, street scenes and portraits by Wayne Thibaud, the west coast popster, a darling of the auction houses and formerly not a favorite of ours. Go see this show and you too will become a convert convinced of his technical mastery, the suave way he abuts abstract horizontals (shadows, countertops, walls) into objects so as to hide mini-Noland stripe paintings in figurative work, getting to eat his cakes and purplish icing too! Next door, at Skarstedt, a nice collection of early joke and cartoon paintings by Richard Prince were good for a laugh or two. At L & M on 78^th we saw the complete bronzes made by Calder when he wasn’t using sheet metal and wire; quite a few of the bronzes are accompanied by their plaster models . Most of them were made in 1930 or 1944. Calder balances the tips of bronze pivots on a table top or the head of an acrobat with the same masterful engineering used in his mobiles. Who knew? Calder’s contributions to 20^th century art history seem to grow bigger and bigger all the time. And Cy Twombly at Gagosian (980 Madison) seems to have saved the best for last, not only the remarkable suite of eight giant paintings in orange-red, green and yellow on the 6^th floor but his formerly un-exhibited photographic oeuvre on the 5^th. We especially liked the studio shots of his white plaster sculptures, our favorite works by Twombly, these looked much like Brancusi snaps. But the last paintings take your breath away (sold out at 7 to 10 million each). Gone are the self-conscious stylistic tricks of signature scrawl, thin color and obscure references to Greek and Roman culture. In these final works, alive with clashing colors and spontaneous drips, Twombly has at last admitted to and joyfully embraced his Abstract Expressionist roots.

Gagosian’s flagship finally has a neighbor at 980, the romantically named Venus Over Manhattan gallery, though most people will guess the name of its chief backer, formerly a money manager and private collector. Here you will find a lively exhibition, almost a retrospective of work by Jack Goldstein, one of the founding members of the Pictures Generation, who, together with Cindy Sherman, inaugurated the Metro Pictures brand. Goldstein’s West Coast appropriation strategy hinged on motion pictures and Disney; after a flurry of excitement he was forgotten until he committed suicide in 2003. Since then his star has once again risen. There are several large classic paintings from the 1980s present, as well as a reconstructed installation and a film from the 1970s; all of this fine work is presented in an unnecessarily dark and spooky cinder block environment. Two small but excellent group shows are well worth your time and they are both in the 1018 Madison building at 78^th street, recent British sculpture by Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon and Tony Cragg azt Van de Weghe, and a show on the theme of red paintings with a terrible example by Warhol, a wonderful Philip Taaffe and an excellent Kusama. Either show is sure to cause object envy. You can skip the hot (temperature) and annoying, impossible to walk through, installation of dolls and books by the current flavor of the month Bjarne Melgaard (and you thought he simply ripped off his painting style) at Luxembourg & Dayan on 77^th street.

And that was all for gallery going on this trip. We had reached the Whitney Museum at 76^th street and needed to drop in on its two retrospectives, one for Richard Artschwager, a pioneering conceptual sculptor and painter at the junction of Pop and Post-Minimalism, the other a mid-career survey of Wade Guyton, one of the hottest contemporary artists in the world. Like the reviewers in several prominent publications, I have never liked Artschwager’s work and unlike some of them this show did nothing to change my mind. He practices a type of conceptual art that would be more interesting without the objects actually being constructed. He is a master at producing a kind of studied visual boredom, his favorite and almost only color being Formica grey, the jokes in his sculptures (except for the magnificent early tables) obvious and forgettable, and his manner of “energizing” ordinary spaces with oval BLPS or blips stupefyingly dull. We’ve seen all of this show before, in a previous Artschwager exhibition. Guyton, on the other hand, is a major find, an artist who has rescued minimalist painting by running canvas through large inkjet printers and incorporating the accidental wheezes of automation and computer design into his elegant “painted” X’s and his “sculpted” chrome-plated U’s. Often seen in tandem as one half of Guyton/Walker, Guyton on his own has managed to carry forward the abstract experiments of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. That he is an American who studied at Hunter College is no small revelation either. Let us hope that little of his work was destroyed in the basement of Friedrich Petzel’s Chelsea gallery. On the other hand much of it can be reconstructed by re-opening some computer files and further wrestling with his printer.

On Sunday we began the day with the wonderful Picasso show at the Guggenheim, a survey of paintings, sculptures and drawings done in black and white (almost never in gray!), fully exposing his supreme graphic gift for visual invention. No other colors were needed here. Once you’ve seen it, a Picasso show in black and white, like solutions to some mathematical puzzles, seems like the most obvious and inevitable thematic conceit for a great exhibition. When Picasso wasn’t inventing cubism, energizing surrealism or expressing his disgust at war in the most horrifying way, he was doing portraits at a level of plastic beauty only Matisse could rival. No wonder neither one of them could ever let go of the figure. This exhibition leaves you breathless. At the Metropolitan, on the other hand, we dropped in on a show with the most banal theme imaginable, the importance of Warhol to subsequent art. Duh. Every bad thing you have heard about this show is true and worse than described in the press. Important artists who have pushed the envelope of mechanical reproduction, like Wade Guyton, are left out or, in the case of Debbie Kass, seen all too briefly. The wall panels imply that everything here is simply a variation on a Warhol theme without carefully explaining how Richter’s work, for example, veers away from Warhol in multiple major ways. The show is an excuse to display the Met’s holdings in Warhol in an attempt to play up its hipness. The new curators coming over from the Tate have a lot to do.

Between poetry events Sunday evening and the next afternoon, we managed to squeeze in a visit to MoMA on Monday morning! If you are a member you should go right now and experience the members-only early viewing hours when you can commune with Munch’s “Scream” in paradoxical quiet or look at a nearby roomful of great Matisses without anyone else in the room! No crowds, no noises, no acoustguides clicking away. Subtle shifts in the permanent collection are always welcome; the Minimalism rooms have been cleaned up and Joseph Beuys has finally been given his due, surrounded by the great German artists he taught, confounded or annoyed: Polke, Kiefer and Richter. The best thing at MoMA right now is the posthumous exhibition for Alina Szapocznikow, “Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972”. This is figurative work with a visual and conceptual punch you don’t often see. Unlike Bourgeois, It wears its feminism lightly and almost looks like what Kiki Smith’s decorative effusions might have achieved if she was powered by the desperation of external events. Alina was born a Polish Jew and died at 47 from cancer. She has a way of morphing flowers into people’s heads that is quite disconcerting; a female Paul Thek, an even more intense Hannah Wilke. The other good show takes as its theme avant-garde artists working in Tokyo from 1955 to 1970; it is interesting to see the Japanese sensibility wrestling with Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism ten years after the atomic bomb. A lot of this work could have been made in New York except for the very strong Surrealist influence in both the objects and the paintings, a kind of melding of European and American concerns. Martha Rosler’s Monumental Garage Sale in the atrium of MoMA allows visitors to the museum to browse, haggle over and buy lots of donated and scavenged stuff. Seen from an upper floor it has a pleasantly coloristic effect on the otherwise architecturally imposing and bland space and fills it up nicely. What this has to do with her notorious career as a primarily political artist is anyone’s guess and why either MoMA or the artist feel comfortable about this marriage of convenience has not been suitably explained by anyone in print nor do I feel compelled to do so.

CHARLES STREET DIARY No.33: DIEBENKORN'S OCEAN PARK PAINTINGS at THE CORCORAN, September 19, 2012

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:36:00 -0400

On the way to a poetry reading at Busboys and Poets in Washington, my
daughter and I had an opportunity to see the magnificent survey of
Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series at the Corcoran Gallery. I have
always liked Richard Diebenkorn’s work (1922-1993), my wife and I own
a copy of the Arion Press volume on the selected poems of Yeats as
chosen by Helen Vendler and illustrated by a suite of his etchings,
but I was never fully convinced until now that he was a truly great
artist. Even the retrospective at the Whitney Museum a few years back
did not fully convince me because it included small groupings of his
work from every period. As magnificent as he appears in the early
abstractions from Berkeley and Albuquerque, and as wonderful as his
Bay Area realist work from the 1950s and 1960s appears to be, the
Ocean Park series from the late 1960s and 1970s is really the core of
his achievement. The show at the Corcoran was of a size and quality to
fully explore this critical period in a manageable and exhilarating
survey of prints, drawings and paintings from his most substantial
contribution to the history of modernist abstraction. That the basic
outline of this work comes from a famous early painting of a dark
window by Matisse has always been known but the care and excellence
with which Diebenkorn explored and extended the coloristic
explorations of his hero has never been made as clear. The extensive
use of underpainting and delicately scumbled pentimenti to produce his
ultimate masterpieces was truly revelatory; the combination of greens
and ochres and flesh tones, not to mention the variety of astonishing
blues in a variety of hues, many of them placed next to violets and
reds in astonishing juxtaposition, marks Diebenkorn as the true heir
to the experiments of Matisse. In these works the figurative
imperative of the older artist is carried into the logical extreme of
abstraction, a line that Matisse could never bring himself to cross.
Even more than Motherwell and Rothko, the Ocean Park series represents
the apotheosis of Fauvist mark-making and color. The first room is the
most dramatic, a collection of the earliest and finest paintings in
the Ocean Park vernacular. Paintings like Ocean Park No.6 and No.11
make evident the landscape and figurative roots of Diebenkorn’s
sources as he attempted to deal with the bird’s eye view of
California’s agricultural fields and meadows. In addition to Matisse’s
Porte fenêtre à Collioure (Pompidou, 1914) one recognizes the source
of his work in the near-abstract partitions and figures of Bathers by
the River (Art Institute, Chicago, 1916). In a room towards the end of
the exhibition one can see magnificent etchings and lithographs that
have all the optical exuberance of watercolors and paintings; it is
easy to mistake these reproductive works for unique drawings and works
on canvas. Diebenkorn was not only one of the greatest painters of the
20th century but one of its finest printmakers. The small paintings on
cigar box tops, usually created as gifts for friends, have a scale and
visual interest that rival the work of Franz Kline in their mastery of
scale and impact. Towards the end of the show there is an almost all
black canvas that symbolizes Diebenkorn’s recognition that he was
coming to the end of the series, that he had done all he could do
before age and infirmity limited him to works on a smaller scale. The
show is scheduled to close in the near future but it has been
memorialized in a series of recent monographs devoted to the Ocean
Park theme. It is rare today to see work that combines the process
oriented ethos of the 1970s with the once eternal search for the
beautiful. Diebenkorn’s art is a life-affirming, visually dazzling
display of how the mastery of traditional media can produce an
experimental exploration that lifts one’s spirit well-beyond the
claims of more dryly-considered conceptual approaches. It would be sad
beyond belief if Diebenkorn represents the end of a tradition that
connects the classical and romantic tendencies of abstract
expressionism and high-minded minimalism with the more contemporary
concerns of the present day.

Ocean Park No.6, 1968, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Matisse: View of Notre Dame, 1914, MoMA & Diebenkorn Ocean Park Drawing, 1971

CHELSEA DIARY, No.32: Frankfurt & Heidelberg, Germany, June 7th to June 12th, 2012, The New Stadel Museum

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 22:18:00 -0400

We left Kassel on Saturday June 9^th and took the train back to Frankfurt, the banking capitol of Germany and its fifth largest city, a town we had previously used only for its airport and magnificent train station. We had also made a couple of very quick trips there to visit Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art, the MMK Museum Für Moderne Kunst, a magnificently quirky building with a great collection of contemporary art and entire rooms devoted to Joseph Beuys, Jochen Flinzer and Markus Raatz, among others. The Museum is located on the north bank of the river Main very close to the city’s cathedral. Unfortunately very little of the permanent collection was on display, most of the galleries devoted to a citywide celebration of photography, Fotografie Total, a great deal of it documentary in nature. But the exhibition did include wonderful mini-retrospectives of Jeff Wall’s illuminated boxes and Thomas Demand’s photographs of architectural subjects simulated by cardboard constructions. The big surprise was seeing large photographs by Gustav Metzger, the rediscovered painter presented in such depth at the Documenta Halle (see Chelsea Diary, No.31). In front of a mural-sized photograph of an automobile action in London was the actual partially destroyed vehicle.

Beuys

The following day we went to the south bank of the river Main to visit Frankfurt’s “museum mile” where one of Germany’s most important museums, the Städel, is appropriately located between Durer Strasse and Holbein Strasse. Very fortunately for us, the Städel had recently opened its new wing for contemporary art in February. We essentially spent the entire day at the museum starting on the top floor (Old Masters, 1300 to 1800) and working our way down through Modern Art (1800 to 1945) and Contemporary Art (1945 to the present). The collection begins with a bang: a remarkable series of three vertical panels by an Unknown Flemish Master that immediately puts the lie to the Renaissance as an exclusively Italian or southern phenomenon. The extraordinary collection includes a beautiful Madonna and Child by Bellini, The Geographer by Vermeer, The Binding of Samson by Rembrandt and the breathtaking Portrait of a Young Woman by Botticelli. In the modern section, entire rooms are devoted to Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, both of whom spent considerable time in Frankfurt. The German Expressionist collection is further set off by the inclusion of works by two of their heroes, Munch and Matisse; the latter is the remarkable blue still life last seen in the MoMA survey of Matisse and abstraction (Fleurs et Ceramique). The Modern Art floor begins its display with the world-famous portrait of Goethe reclining in the Roman countryside by his friend Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. The contemporary collection is located beneath the Städel’s garden situated in the center of the other buildings and illuminated by a series of large disc-like windows in its ceiling. The large circles arrayed against the grass look like a gigantic installation by Yayao Kusama. Highlights include wonderful examples by every major German artist including several works apiece by Gerhard Richter (The Large Curtain), Sigmar Polke, Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, and international stars like Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol (including his version of Goethe’s profile taken from Tischbein’s painting), Jasper Johns and Alexander Calder. The Städel, like the National Gallery in London, is primarily a picture gallery with relatively little sculpture but has excellent examples of photography and works on paper. It is altogether one of the most impressive and easily navigated collections that we have ever seen.

Botticelli & Matisse

On Monday we took a day trip to Heidelberg to visit the ruined castle (the Schloss) so beloved by both German and English Romantic poets with its plaque memorializing Goethe’s last meeting with Marianne von Willemer, his great love. We also went into town in search of apfel beignets, that extraordinary desert reportedly invented at the Hotel Ritter where I last tasted it thirty years ago. They no longer serve it but a kindly chef at our hotel in Frankfurt made it for us later that evening; the taste of it was just as I remembered, an experience straight out of Proust.

CHELSEA DIARY, No.31: DOCUMENTA 13, KASSEL, GERMANY, June 7th to June 12th, 2012, The Dystopian Documenta

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 21:43:00 -0400

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artistic director of Documenta 13, is not shy about her political allegiances nor about her overriding concept for the 13^th edition of the massive international art show that the smallish city of Kassel holds once every five years. According to Art Forum, she wants international art workers (“cognitive laborers”) of the world to unite in “resistance” to the borders that confine nations, “spaces of knowledge and experience”, in support of universal ideals and hopes, “healing and recovery.” As a consequence, this Documenta is the most thematically unified and visually boring collection of works devoted to the usual inarguable preoccupations of the left: an overly-generalized pacifism and opposition to war irrespective of any redeeming cause for conflict, the well-documented horrors of colonial oppression especially if carried out by Israel and the West, and the immanent danger posed by desecration of the planet. Thoroughly dystopian in outlook, Documenta offers little visual surcease, the usual kick of pleasure one gets from viewing beautifully made and inspiring objects. Unlike other major events on the world-wide art calendar, Documenta is truly avant-garde in spirit and has a full five-years to discover talent and commission projects. As a result one can almost always learn something useful, gain the acquaintance of the work of new artists, and gauge the evolution of new intellectual or artistic trends. In this regard, Documenta 13 is likely to become a very influential exhibition, almost as epochal as Harold Szeemann’s “When Attitudes Become Form” (1968). Enlightenment was not exactly the expectation my wife and I had when boarding our flight to Frankfurt last Tuesday and taking the ICE to Kassel for the professional preview on Thursday and Friday.

On our first day we were able to cover almost all of the major venues surrounding the Fridericianum. Entering the latter on the ground floor we encountered five large, almost completely empty rooms devoted to Ryan Gander’s creation of an artificial wind (a new wind?) blowing through without evidence of visible fans; this singular effect caused much confusion as to whether there was an actual draft present, especially as most of our stay in Kassel was under gray and breezy skies. In one of these wasted spaces three small sculptures by Julio González were exhibited in an elegant vitrine next to a photograph of their original, almost identical installation at Documenta 2; in the other largest room, the Director had the poor taste to place a vitrine containing letters addressed to her by the artist Kai Althoff. In the half-moon Rotunda behind, Christov-Bakargiev has jammed dozens of relatively small objects in one of the most claustrophobic and visually unsatisfactory conglomerations ever seen at a major art show. This physically torturous area was touted as “The Brain” of Documenta 13 but gave hardly any evidence of concern for the care of its eponymous organ. Even the relatively smaller crowds at the press opening threatened the surfaces of four, unprotected Giorgio Morandi paintings in order to peer into numerous glass cases containing fused detritus from the shelling of Beirut, a perfume bottle and other souvenirs taken from Eva Braun’s bathroom (where the photographer Lee Miller famously washed up the day of Hitler’s suicide) and a metronomic multiple by Miller’s lover Man Ray with a photograph of her eye affixed to the needle. Miller’s documentary photographs tightly placed on a wall were a highlight as were some of the original painted cans and bottles Morandi used to create his still lives. Lawrence Weiner was present to give an inaudible interview on the meaning of his art and Judith Barry stood on the official red (bath?) carpet and gave an incomprehensible explanation of her folded paper polyhedron, apparently the Rosetta Stone to The Brain. On the floor near Barry’s case was Sam Durant’s beautifully carved simulacrum of a sack of marble dust made from the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Survivors of violence included eight small carved figurines (c.2500 BCE) from Afghanistan, the Bactrian Princesses, among the most enthralling visual and anthropological experiences in the entire exhibition.

Upstairs on the first floor were several room-sized installations: stacked propaganda posters by Ida Applebroog with very angry words on them; a large woven map by Alighiero Boetti enshrined with a video devoted to a search for where he lived and his weavers worked in Afghanistan; anti-capitalist drawings by Mark Lombardi graphically illustrating interconnecting webs of influence and money; a physics demonstration about uncertainty and lasers from the laboratories of Anton Zellinger (not an artist); and a pair of 1930s paintings by Salvador Dalí ostensibly celebrating the brief period in which he was a socially conscious (i.e. anti-Franco) artist. In point of fact, Dalí was a proto-fascist who was ex-communicated by the Surrealists because, in part, he refused to denounce Hitler: an inconvenient story left out of the wall labels and the catalog. I would be remiss in not mentioning my first experience with Charlotte Salomon’s delicate paintings about Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust in which she perished; they seem to be more about words than images and many were arranged as a kind of theatrical script. The usual dominance of text, video and photography in most contemporary art surveys is joined in this Documenta by a special emphasis on ceramics, textiles and books. The most moving example of the latter, a synthesis of Mark Dion and Anselm Kieffer, were books designed by Michael Rakowitz made from marble fragments of the Bamiyan Buddhas. These works, referencing the Holocaust and the Taliban, were displayed on tables adjacent to cabinets containing source materials, burnt books from a Jewish library and further unusable fragments from the Buddhas. The presence of Emily Jacir in shows like Documenta is by now a curatorial cliché; she covers an entire room with photographs of end papers from Palestinian books “stolen” by Israel in 1948. I am still waiting for an exhibit devoted to the widespread expulsion of Jews from Arab lands throughout the 20^th century. The most overpowering anti-Colonial installation was Kader Attia’s immense collection of horrifying photographs and disfigured statues, documentary papers, books and World War I souvenirs detailing the horror of the first World War and the collision of cultures in Africa. The most astonishing tapestry was a woven photo-realist “painting” by Goshka Macuga, really a diorama, found on the curved wall of the second floor. Here too, Llyn Foulkes, an idiosyncratic art star of the 1970’s, makes his reappearance with spookily lit three-dimensional painted tableaus somewhat related to the San Francisco style of Jess.

Michael Rakowitz

Next door to the Fridericianum, in the much smaller Ottoneum, a miniature museum of natural history, was the ghetto in which environmentally-concerned artists were placed. The rooms were hot and humid with the exhibits frequently displayed in subdued lighting. We were rapidly exhausted and only partially relieved by the library of wood samples created by Mark Dion in the splendid isolation of the second floor. And after that is was on to the modern Documenta-Halle where the ground floor was devoted to a segregated display about “the future” of painting. This building contained a number of notable discoveries: brightly colored small paintings of imaginary landscapes by Etel Adnan, quickly reminding us of the power of pigment and the general absence of color at the other exhibition sites; new paintings by Julie Mehretu in her usual style; an outstanding installation of projected images and paintings on rotating mylar cylinders by Nalini Malani, an artist well known to us for her spectacular cultural investigations (yes, you can be both conceptually driven and visually enthralling); and the wan warehouse of famous paintings by many artists from different periods (Richter, Warhol, Vermeer etc.) copied by Yan Lei. The two major discoveries are rediscoveries of older artists, Gustav Metzger (b.1926) and Thomas Bayrle (b.1937). The very large room devoted to Bayrle’s motorized sculptures made from automobile parts and an enormous photo-collage of an airplane truly looked like the work of a much younger artist. The best sculptures re-arranged operating pistons and cylinders into formal geometries; the projected engine sounds were almost certainly due to recordings and not produced by the visually hypnotic movements of machine parts. Less successful were the wall-mounted sculptures made from windshield wipers and their motors. Metzger is a Holocaust survivor who has spent several recent decades in radical politics, participating in demonstrations and trying to mount installations in which automobiles would be destroyed and engine exhausts would be used to produce poisoned environments. But before all this, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Metzger was a painter, chiefly on paper and often on large metal plates. Almost the entire output from this period was displayed in horizontal cases covered by thick velour sheets to protect the works on paper from sunlight. This arrangement promoted prolonged looking since each cover had to be lifted by hand and held while the painting was inspected. Metzger seems to have worked his way through the entire 20^th century, beginning with abstracted figuration from Maillol and Picasso and ending with dynamic blocks and swaths of color a la de Kooning and Kline. It seems that the future of painting is its past.

Thomas Bayrle

We even made it to the Orangerie (it held nothing of real interest) at the head of the large neighboring park, the Karlsaue, but did not go out to visit the many works displayed in the landscape because we wanted to save our rapidly decaying supply of shoe leather for some of the off-site projects. We had been invited to a dinner that evening in honor of a Documenta artist and decided to explore several of the off-site projects on the way. We managed to see a multi-screen video by photographer Gerard Byrne in a large ballroom, the subject of which seemed to be a theater piece about outlandish or imaginary sexual practices; a room-filling display of Richter-like gray splotches on book covers by the video artist Paul Chan, each book opened with its pages facing the walls; and a wonderful series of small paintings resembling television color bars by Francis Alÿs in an ex-bakery. Our final two stops proved to be among the highlights of our trip and a wonderful education in so-called relational aesthetics, Tino Sehgal’s performance piece in another abandoned room in the Grand City Hotel and the renovation of the neighboring Hugenott House by Theaster Gates. Gates has been renovating dilapidated buildings in Chicago and the Hugenot House in Kassel is his first European project. He brought over an entire team of wood workers, equipment and supplies from Chicago, built a stage for musical performances by the Black Monks of Mississippi, installed some of his sculptures and renovated each of the bedrooms for members of his team. Whether the renovation will outlast the 100 days of Documenta remains to be seen by this artist’s unique combination of music, architecture, urbanism, sculpture and trans-cultural conversation is ambitious beyond belief. Entering the pitch-black cavern of Sehgal’s space proved similarly immersive. Unseen hands and bodies pushed us into the center of the action. After 15 minutes of Buddhist-like chanting, singing and clapping, we were squeezed out of the space as the twenty performers in “This Variation, 2012” intoned that we would have to discuss the experience again. That night at the dinner, well-known dealers, artists and museum curators agreed that the personal interactions involved in these two projects were highlights of Documenta 13 and perfect emotional substitutes for aesthetic experiences of the most significant order.

The next day, on Friday, we first went to the old train station (Hautbahnhof) where the art was displayed in four separate buildings; as Roberta Smith has pointed out, Documenta 13 is and feels enormous, not always to the advantage of the art or one’s energy level. Here one could find (with some difficulty) the latest multi-screen projected video cum objects by William Kentridge, a meditation on the nature of time. As usual, the mix of animation, sculpture and live-action performance (especially by Kentridge himself) was visually enthralling but his work threatens to become increasingly hermetic and professorial. Also impressive was a large “factory” installation of clothing presses, sewing machines and fitting forms made of carved wood by Haegue Yang, a ghostly presence amplified by headless dummies wearing the finished garments. Our next stop was the Neue Gallerie where we checked out a number of other artists before walking all the way down a major highway and back up to the aditus of an underground bunker from the second world war in order to view a striking video by Allora & Calzadilla, the American representatives at the last Venice Biennale, playing in a sort of grotto. This work, a combination of anthropological research, performance, political siting and creaturely participation (ours as well as that of a vulture) seemed a perfect encapsulation of our Documenta experience. Documenta 13 lasts 100 days, it will close September 16^th, and contains 200 artists spread out all over the city of Kassel, in museums, movie theaters, houses and hotel ballrooms, not to mention special events in Kabul Afghanistan, Cairo Egypt and in Canada. The catalog comes in three volumes, only one of which (the Guide) is essential. If you can possibly attend it, you should. After all, an event like this comes along only once every five years and this incarnation is unique.

The Death of The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore

Thu, 24 May 2012 22:56:08 -0400

I am in mourning. The death of the Contemporary Museum feels more like a suicide. On Monday the 21st, word came that the Board of Directors had voted to put the Museum on “hiatus”, not an official closure but suspended animation, a time for the Board to reconsider the Museum’s mission and it’s role within the artistic ecology of the city. The evolutionary niche the Contemporary occupied from its founding was always uncertain and contested; some of the bigger, older animals in the urban jungle felt threatened and did not always play nice. With a budget of less than $400,000 and a small staff, the Contemporary’s survival critically depended on smart programming and smart leadership at both the professional and volunteer level. At the start, in the capable hands of its founding director George Ciscle and founding curator Lisa Corrin it had both in spades. The initial model of a nomadic museum, without a collection or permanent home, was revolutionary and drew a half-page article of appreciation in the New York Times. Like a blue jay raising eggs in the nests of other birds, shows like Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society and Going for Baroque at the Walters drew new audiences to cooperating institutions and national accolades and prizes. Leaders at the Contemporary went on to major careers at much bigger stages, MICA, the Seattle Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, and Site Santa Fe as examples. Other staff sank into obscurity, a not uncommon fate in the curatorial world. Ten years ago, half-way through its run, the Contemporary moved into its own white box across the way from the Walters. Some shows were still done in the community but most were presented within its own four walls. Great exhibitions like Snapshot and Chris Marclay’s at the Peabody still happened. In recent years, the shows became much more conceptual, more about politics and prose, better read than seen. Visual nourishment and poetry was thin on the ground; the audience shrank. A perfect storm of problems must have further disheartened the Board: the recession and it’s unlovely impact on non-profits, the loss of the white box and it’s favorable rental arrangement with the Walters, a series of short-timers as director (the delightful Irene Hoffman excepted) who were either off-putting in some way or unashamed careerists. The Board may not have had anyone on it with the requisite energy and expertise to keep things going artistically during a necessary interregnum in the director’s chair. Who really knows? As some in the art community have pointed out the end came with uncomfortable suddenness and without any explanation to artists involved in the current exhibition. But Baltimore as a whole needs to look deep within itself and ask how smaller towns like Cleveland and Cincinnati are able to find big donors and public support to not only keep their museums of contemporary art alive but build them must-see venues. Twenty years is a nice run and a good time to reassess the mission if the Museum really is on hiatus and not simply delaying the inevitable. But it’s probably the end of the dream. R.I.P.

A FEW RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ART SONG, Lorraine Whittlesey & Michael Salcman at An die Musik, April 28, 2012

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:17:00 -0400

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.

CHELSEA DIARY No.30: Art Week In New York: Has The Art Fair Jumped The Shark?, March 7-10, 2012

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:17:00 -0400

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.

Save The Dates: Lectures & Musical Readings

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:33:31 -0500

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

CHELSEA DIARY No.29: MoMA and Cattelan at the Crossroads, December 17-18, 2011

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:31:00 -0500

Last weekend, my wife and I went to New York primarily to see the de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the Cattelan installation at the Guggenheim (for that’s what it really is), and the Will Barnet exhibition at the National Academy Museum. What we didn’t expect at the Modern was the members’ preview of the striking Sanja Ivekovic’s retrospective and the infelicitous re-hang of its fabled art collection from 1945 to the present. Still, the de Kooning show gets pride of place.

Many extraordinary things have been said about the de Kooning show, and even though he is a truly remarkable artist, I mean extraordinary in the sense of foolish, unnecessary claims made on his behalf by critics who seem to have just discovered the man: that the show at nearly 200 objects wasn’t large enough, that de Kooning’s only peers in the 20th century were Picasso and Matisse, that de Kooning’s late paintings are just as wonderful and authentic as the ones that came before and that in each of the seven (!) phases of his career (this in the catalog’s hyperbolic introductory essay) he had explored or invented a new type of pictorial space. In regard to the latter I would point out that even Einstein needed fewer dimensions. De Kooning was wonderful almost from the start; even as a teen-ager he could draw like an angel. The visual evidence in the opening rooms makes clear his indebtedness to Picasso even if the wall texts do not; the early male and female portraits in pink and green tonalities are as impressive as anything he would do later in his career. The show is remarkable for pulling together as many pictures from the early series as possible so that the eye can easily compare the energy level and degree of distortion in both the first and second rounds of Women paintings; it is all too easy to forget that the famous Woman I and her sisters from the early 1950s represent the third group of paintings devoted to this motif. In between, from the late 1940s into 1951, de Kooning painted his great black and white abstractions; these were the works that confirmed his importance for Greenberg. It was about this time that de Kooning visited Franz Kline’s studio and suggested that the younger artist use a projector to enlarge the oil drawings he had made on telephone book pages. Kline’s abstract drawings from these years have the same thin, looping line as de Kooning’s works on paper. To a degree I never previously appreciated, the Dutchman’s black and white paintings are filled with drips and thrown paint; he and Kline and Pollock seem to be marching into the future together, de Kooning more frequently employing letters as abstract elements and usually working on a more modest scale. The arrival of Woman I in 1953 after almost two years of work ruptures the introverted gloom of the abstractions and ruptured de Kooning’s relationship with Greenberg. The artist would continue to alternate between “pure” abstraction and the figure for the rest of his life, famously noting that every abstract painting cannot but help carry “a resemblance” to the real world and that oil paints were invented to paint flesh. After the room of black abstractions, it’s a thrill to see all of the pictures from the third series of Women paintings on a single wall. The Whitney’s picture of her on a bicycle is the closest to the powerfully small collage that precedes the series, given to MoMA by Thomas Hess and confined to a tiny wall in the previous room. Both the collage and the Whitney picture have the famous slipped (de Kooning as “glimpster”) toothy smile taken from magazine pictures of pin-ups; it would have been nice to have installed the collage in closer proximity for direct comparison. The late Woman V from the Carnegie initiates her dissolution into the abstract landscapes de Kooning would paint in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These landscapes, whether “urban” like Gotham News or taken from “nature”, whether painted with the wrist (de Kooning’s much imitated brushstroke style) or with the “arm”, are the last indisputably great works. In them one sees his process of progressive simplification as he ages, a process he would employ throughout the 1970s and 1980s; these early landscapes are first crowded with painterly incident and made with small brushes and collaged newsprint before moving on to large housepainter’s brushes and the arm. By the time de Kooning starts dissolving his nudes into pink backgrounds, as if they were sinking into flesh-colored water, the paintings go limp and flaccid. de Kooning must have known this because he turned his attention to sculpture and printmaking in the 1970s and de-emphasized painting. His prints are remarkable lithographs in black and white, usually vertical, with some sense of his arm motion retained but he was not a natural sculptor; his bronzes look small and cramped, without a sense of space or scale, repetitive figurations most notable for their naked preservation of his fingerprints in the clay. When he starts painting again, thin ribbons of color, usually primaries, float on white grounds, recapitulating the process he used in tacking colored papers to the surfaces of his earliest canvases in the 1940s. The Museum of Modern Art is not a disinterested bystander in attempting to pump up the critical success of the late paintings; with the exception of a great black abstraction and Woman I, MoMA was singularly immune to the power of early de Kooning and the magnificent display in the first few rooms is highly dependent on the collections of other institutions. In this regard compare the holdings of the Art Institute in Chicago and the Hirshhorn in Washington with those of MoMA. In the last two rooms of the show, however, MoMA contributes three late paintings but the museum’s advocacy won’t make the paintings any better than they are. Some are attractive and some were primarily made by de Kooning without too much help from his assistants (the issue of his progressive mental decline completely ignored on the wall panels) but they are generally weak tea in comparison to the unbroken line of masterpieces from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Appropriately enough, as de Kooning ages and the work becomes more recent, his long career is compressed into fewer and fewer rooms, entire decades zoom past just like time does in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, flying by in fewer and fewer pages as the novel unspools. When we were there you could see visitors voting with their feet; once the late 1970s arrived, they headed for the exit.

Woman I, 1952

MoMA seems to be going through a kind of identity crisis, confusing its mission with that of P.S.1, the branch office in Queens devoted to more recent art. This is the only conclusion one can reach based on the recent rehanging of the “permanent” display of post-war art on the fourth floor and the selection of art from 1980 to the present in the contemporary galleries on the second floor. People come from all over the world to see the certifiable masterpieces in MoMA’s incomparable collection of modern and contemporary art; the selection and display of art in this institution are a highly sought endorsement and serve an important educational purpose, one that is or should be distinctly different from that provided by a commercial gallery or small parochial collection. Thanks to Ann Tempkin’s radical revision of the historical record, there are no works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke or William Kentridge, three of the world’s very greatest artists, anywhere to be seen in the world’s greatest modern museum (I did not thoroughly check the little ghettoes devoted to drawing and photography). Do you need to know anything more? Upstairs the Minimalism room gives equal space to the New York and West Coast varieties of this movement with the end result that Andre and Stella are separated from Judd and Flavin. There’s nothing to be seen by Robert Morris and no object by Sol LeWitt, only a beautiful series of etchings somewhere else in the Conceptual gallery. Of course, so-called conceptual art is foregrounded throughout the building together with its sister persuasions of feminist and identity art. As revised and recently taught, painting has almost disappeared from post-1945 history, replaced by an entire wall of Hannah Darboven’s utterly boring and endless sheets of daily ruminations. As usual there are no Color Field paintings by Louis, Noland or Olitski (a long-standing MoMA prejudice) and no hard-edged abstractions by Ellsworth Kelly (a former favorite), John McLaughlin, Richard Diebenkorn or Josef Albers, important precursors to Minimalism. Even Abstract Expressionism has been slimmed down in favor of political correctness: one painting each by Pollock, Newman and Rothko, each of whom used to have their own stunning rooms, and nothing by David Smith, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell or Franz Kline! That’s all the visitor gets. In point of fact, the list of great artists omitted from the re-hang comes to mind rather more easily than the list of those prematurely enshrined. Where as usual is Joan Mitchell? Some omissions are refreshing; I didn’t mind the lack of a late Guston cartoon painting, one of the most over-used curatorial cliches of the past decade. It was good to see a pair of Richard Hamilton works in the Pop room; two Lichtensteins and two Warhols were more than enough. Hanging Rosenquist’s Marilyn next to Warhol’s was a nice touch, and the two Eva Hesses looked great on either side of a wonderful Joseph Beuys. But the rest of the post-Minimalist contingent looked wan and incomplete: Arte Povera was thin on the ground and one atypical early piece each by Serra and by Nauman is not enough. As usual, there was nothing by Tuttle and nothing by Christopher Wilmarth. Minimalist painting was restricted to the annointed Robert Ryman with nothing by Agnes Martin, Bob Mangold or Brice Marden (except a late work in the lobby). We had to go to the Guggenheim the next day to find a beautiful room of work by the entire group and Ellsworth Kelly. On the second floor at MoMA, the installation began with Jenny Holzer, a minor Barbara Kruger and Cady Noland. Even Cindy Sherman was not to be seen. On the whole there was a capriciousness that could not be explained except on a political basis and a sort of getting even: if you or your group have recently received a retrospective you’re too well known or too good or both so forget about any space here. Of course art that seems “over-exposed” to a New York-based curator trying to be “adventurous” is often an aesthetic thrill for an international visitor or a student from our own shores. The quality of the physical installations also varied: the small room devoted to Hannah Wilke was a wonderful mini-show of this highly under-appreciated and courageous artist but who came up with the idea of making you walk through a cleared space in the middle of a rectangular floor piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, thereby splitting its physical integrity as to shape and diminishing the glitter of its silver-wrapped candy star-field. The highlight on the Second Floor had to be the recreation of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s show at 303 Gallery in 1992, complete with rice cookers, refrigerator, stripped frame walls and living guide, not to mention periodic servings of Pad Thai, memorializing the birth of “Relational Aesthetics”.

Rirkit Tiravanija above; Felix Gonzalez-Torres below

The general insufficiency of the art on display in the more contemporary galleries at MoMA was only further heightened by the fascinating show the Museum has given to Sanja Ivekovic, a Croatian artist previously unknown to me, who routinely deals with feminist issues and political freedom in an environment somewhat more threatening than Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. Not infrequently, great art is created in the emotional pressure cooker of political oppression and violence, this was certainly true in the case of Russian poetry, and it may be equally true here. Her survey “Sweet Violence” covers 40 years of work, beginning with videos, performances and photocollages from the 1970s, her Women’s House series, ongoing from 2002, and the recent “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” (2001) outdoor installation cum brouhaha recreated with documentation and a gold-leafed statue of a pregnant woman on a soaring obelisk in the atrium at MoMA. Rarely has that despised architectural space been used nearly so well. Carol Kino in the New York Times describes Ivekovic as an anti-Abramovic because she is more political and less focussed on her own personality and on spectacle. In poster-size photographs from the “Women’s House” series, appropriated ads of models wearing high-fashion sunglasses have the names and logos of the manufacturers obscured by capsule case histories of abused women; these works were plastered on walls and inserted into magazines as faux endorsements. The public nature of her work and the mix of text and image recalls Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger but the anger here is more subtly employed, diffused by elegance and luxury; in addition, the personal and the political are intertwined with an economic critique. “Rosa Luxembourg” consists of an eight foot high statue set on a 34 foot high pillar; it is named for the feminist heroine of Marxism and was originally planned for the Luxembourg square in which a similarly gilded but non-pregnant statue of Nike is located. On the original’s base are quotations about the heroic war dead of the country; in Ivekovic’s version the base is inscribed with “bitch”, “kultur”, “la justice” and other politically loaded words. From the start of her career, Ivekovic has resisted commodification and this has probably limited her visibility in the United States. This powerful show is certain to give her problems of a different order.

Two views of Ivekovic’s “Rosa”

The next day we visited the National Academy of Design to take in a small retrospective for Will Barnet, painter and printmaker, given in honor of his 100th year. Barnet is still with us and even though he now uses a wheelchair, he is still painting and still comes in to Academy where he has long held forth in their school. My wife and I had never visited the Academy, even though it is fortuitously located across the street from the Guggenheim Museum, in whose metaphoric shadow it is all but invisible to most of the art-going public in New York. There was a magnificent Chamberlain sculpture in the old mansion’s staircase rotunda. The Academy’s collection contains many presentation pieces given by painters, sculptors and architects at the time of their election. We sampled some of the salon-hung works, including a fine William Merritt Chase portrait of a young girl against a red background (At Her Ease, 1884) and the incomparably sad yet wonderful Self-Portrait by Thomas Eakins (1902), before heading into the Barnet show. Barnet is known for his 1960s and 1970s pieces about lonely women set against New England buildings as if they were characters in an ancient Grecian frieze and for portraits of friends and family posed with wonderful cats (The Blue Robe, 1962). Before and after these popular works he has explored a polite and decorative form of abstraction linked to Steve Wheeler and the Indian Space Painters of the 1940s, an adaptation of Northwest Indian art. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Barnet was a better artist as an urban-scene painter in the 1930s and that his prints are generally superior to his paintings.There is a stiffness to his forms and an “illustrative” quality to his figures that is not enlivened by his excellent sense for subdued color. In both Barnet’s realist paintings and his abstractions, the dominant emotion is a meditative calm; perhaps that is how he managed to live such a long and productive life without ever setting the wider world of art on fire.

At Her Ease by Chase above; The Blue Robe by Barnet below

Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective across the street at the Guggenheim was our last stop of the weekend. Cheekily named “All”, the show contains almost every photograph, installation, super-realistic figure and taxidermy animal produced in Cattelan’s career; the pieces are hung on cables and platforms from a special rig erected just below the magnificent oculus of the building’s central rotunda. The artist (b.1960) claims that this installation is the last art work of his joke-filled career. Apparently he has punctured all of our pretensions and in doing so has made as much money as any one can possibly spend; Cattelan is one of the best-selling and most expensive artists in the world. My wife and I first encountered him (or an actor hired to take his place) walking around a show at MoMA in his Picasso papier-mache head and sailor costume. In good post-modernist form, the flying Picasso is here as well as a clever riff on a Serra prop piece made with a broom and bunched fabric, boring variations on Fontana’s slashed canvases done in the shape of a Z for Zorro, as well as much less funny pieces showing Hitler praying in British school-boy pose, a dead J.F.K., two upside-down cops as a “memorial” to 9-11 and much much more. We began at the top of the ramp and walked our way down seeing each of his greatest hits from a new vantage point on every level. Cattelan’s cleverness is just short of profundity and “All” is an excellent example of what Kimmelman calls “festivalism”, the tendency for a level of art production that caters to the international exhibition scene and houses the size of McMansions. Throughout the show there were examples of little Cattelan effigies, peeking out of holes, riding tricycles, hanging from the top of a safe; these Mini-Me’s are cute in a subversive way though way too reminiscent of the small version of Dr. Evil in a Mike Meyer’s film. One can only hope that Cattelan is telling the truth and serious about quitting art for other pursuits; unfortunately, he has the example of Duchamp before him and the master’s own publicly-announced “retirement” from art in order to play chess. The founding father of post-modernism spent almost two decades in secret working on Etant Donnes, now at the Philadelphia Museum; I am sure that Cattelan’s trickster heart is planning something similar with a less salubrious outcome likely.

A characteristic piece by Cattelan above and a view of the entire installation from below

Poetry on the Web

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:09:55 -0500

Sometimes you happen on wonderful things by Googling yourself; I guess I haven’t done that enough in recent months! One of my prose poems from The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011), Contra Chekhov, first published in the journal New Letters, was selected by Verse Daily on November 11th. The web site Is very kind to you as an author: it lists all the thumbnails of your books on Amazon and provides, as far as I can tell, a complete or nearly complete listing of your poems on-line. What a delightful surprise to have such a useful feature on the web. 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

CHELSEA IN CHICAGO: Chelsea Diary No.28, November 4-6, 2011

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 11:20:00 -0500

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.

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.

Chelsea Diary No.27: SIGMAR POLKE, COREY ARCANGEL & LYONEL FEININGER

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:00:00 -0400

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

An Unpublished Letter for Poetry Magazine: This Is Your Brain On Poetry

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:00:00 -0400

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

Chelsea Diary No.26: SERRA, CARO AND SCULPTURE IN NEW YORK, May 25, 2011

Fri, 27 May 2011 12:12:00 -0400

I arrived early in New York for a poetry event that evening and thought I might spend the day looking at modern and contemporary sculpture in the company of a master object-maker, Roger Phillips. The day was really hot and humid; I spent most of it carrying a sports coat and a small briefcase, sweating like mad. We met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the first complete retrospective in New York of Richard Serra’s drawings was being held. Serra (b.1939), a post-Minimalist sculptor devoted to process and the exploration of weight, mass and anxiety, and how such forces impact the psychological state of viewers moving through his pieces often attempts to do something similar with his drawings. Like other contemporary sculptors, notably Nauman, Tuttle, McCaslin, Whiteread, and Shapiro, he eschews painting, and produces drawings as independent works of art when not confronting his primary sculptural materials— in the case of Serra lead and steel. He does not use drawing as a preparatory step in fashioning objects but not infrequently makes his sculptures the subjects of later drawings. Serra is known for massive steel plate sculptures and torqued ellipses, gigantic constructions designed to change our subjective experience of the space around us and our bodily response to a shifting alignment between the orientation of our bodies and the orientation of the environment in which we find ourselves. But Serra is also a pioneering artist in the use of video (as early as 1968 when the first hand-held cameras made video practical in an artist’s studio), and such inartistic materials as thrown lead, rubber and neon. Eva Hesse was a close friend and inspiration. His first wall-sized drawings, made about the same time as Sol LeWitt’s initial wall drawings, always black and always made from oil sticks of pure pigment, have something of Ellsworth Kelly’s attention to fundamental shape and proportion but without the elegance of Kelly’s paintings. Serra’s wall drawings have an obdurate nature that dissuades most visitors from entering the Met’s galleries. They are viewed in silence and in privacy, possibly the ideal conditions for judging Serra’s art. Serra denies that his drawings are “sculptures” by other means and yet he claims for them some of the same impact as his steel plates, a sucking in of light, a sensation of weight and gravity, an oppressive feeling of doom. But seeing this show convinced me that most of the drawings designed to do this share nothing of the weight and ponderousness of the sculptures; instead, the work presented here was more like “drawing” than I expected, mark making that schematically outlined a space without physically occupying it. Only the wall drawings extending all the way to the top of the Met’s walls shared some degree of movement and threat with the best of Serra’s sculptures. One could see this in two installations of paired rectangular and/or square oil stick patches: in the first (“Blank”, 1978), the rectilinear shapes went half way up the wall and did nothing for me even when I stepped midway between them, in the second considerably larger and taller pair, the shapes seemed to be teetering off the wall, ready to topple over their viewers. This was the Serra we had known to grow and respect over the years. Roger, a sculptor of moving plates delicately balanced on fine bearings, complained that too many of Serra’s drawings were about stasis without any evidence of tension between balance and imbalance, movement towards the earth and resistance to gravity. Of course, this is also true of Serra’s sculptures, half of which are about stasis and weight, and half of which are about indeterminate coordinates and threatened collapse. The thickly textured drawings made in 2001 after rounds and torqued ellipses, some in response to 9-11, were the most beautiful in the show and it was wonderful to see the sketchbooks and the four primal videos from 1968, especially the classic of Serra’s ink and oil-stained hand vainly trying to catch pieces of lead dropped by an unseen Phillip Glass, the composer. Drawings on framed paper from every period carried an impact that the gigantic wall drawings only pointed to in a schematic way. When Serra’s drawings possess some of the properties of traditional draughtsmanship (e.g. white space and figure/ground), they appear most powerful and more resolved. When he is being more obviously “experimental”, the drawings are too often overblown, political and angry; all of which may be saying the same thing. Still, it’s a grand show, revelatory in its contradictions and one not to be missed.

Serra, “September”, 2001

Up on the roof of the Met we went to see the celebratory show of five large mostly steel sculptures by Anthony Caro (b.1924), an artist with a program and a personality diametrically opposed to that of Serra. Caro is often disparaged for his English sense of “tastefulness”, the desire to balance his compositions and create order and/or beauty. Just prior to the onslaught of Minimalism, Caro was the inventor of several firsts: he took sculpture off its pedestal, placed it on the floor and made it horizontal, thus eliminating the anthropomorphic reading so often applied to the welded steel sculpture of David Smith, his model; under the influence of Clement Greenberg he adopted the color sense of Noland and Olitski and painted his sculptures in single colors, thereby unifying their structure and reducing the palpable weight of the steel. Perhaps because of his association with Greenberg and his continued use of part-by-part composition in welding and bolting together his mostly found and cut industrial components, two no-no’s in the new world order of Donald Judd, Caro’s reputation began to plummet after the 1970s. This small but excellent show was mounted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his first exhibition of work in steel and even in the heat and humidity of the Met’s rooftop garden I was struck again and again by Caro’s sheer inventiveness and productivity. The oldest work here, “Midday” (1960), looked better here than it normally does in the sculpture garden at MoMA, resplendent in a new coat of taxicab yellow, properly situated against a limestone wall of the correct scale, its jaunty imbalances and giant protruding bolts reminding us of the sense of play Caro seemed to have lost as he got older and more famous. “After Summer” (1968), his largest sculpture of the 1960s, painted a pale gray and made from tank tops saved from David Smith’s studio, looks like a large horizontal bug, its mostly symmetrical arrangement of sail-like shapes devoid of movement and tension. The more recent works often have representational motifs or artistic references that steal away some of their inherent power: the Met’s own “Odalisque” (1984) has the eye searching for her reclining back and the hand of Matisse, the tower-like “Blazon” (1987-1990), painted red, incorporated a gate-like element that made it look too house-like, and the squat, boxy “End Up” (2010), with its lens-like central cylinder and wooden base looked too much like a camera. But “End Up” made at the age of 87 looks nothing like most of Caro’s work and was one of my three favorite pieces in the show. He’s still exploring and if like an old slugger he’s lost a step or two, Caro remains one of the most creative forces of the last half-century. As a side note, our enjoyment was blunted by watching the completely inattentive “guards” ignore multiple episodes of people touching the art; one visitor even placed his backpack on “Midday” and left it there while adjusting the rest of his ensemble!

Caro, Midday, 1960, collection, Museum of Modern Art

Speaking of Donald Judd (1928-1994), Roger and I saw him next. We cabbed it to Chelsea, to the enormous David Zwirner emporium on West 19th Street, now representing the Judd Foundation, to take in a show of nine large, floor-based anodized Boxes, each made in 1989 and reunited for the first time. Three feet tall, and nearly seven feet wide and deep, the silvery aluminum boxes are open on top. Within their sparkling surfaces, Judd has inserted a variety of beautiful Plexiglass colors, some as floors and some as vertical planes of floating hues. These planes hang at staggered heights above the floor and vary in number and placement from box to box. Judd is channeling his inner Malevich and the Albers in his soul; reflections of the planes, beautifully lit by the gallery’s skylights, create crosses and shadows resembling the paintings of his forebears. The box placed nearest the entrance contained dark blue and aquamarine and almost made me stop breathing. Roger and I agreed, this was the most uniformly beautiful show we saw all day proving again the “Maximalist” nature of “Minimal” art. On West 20th street, at Anton Kern, we saw Nine Faces, new paintings by Mark Grotjahn (b.1968), one of the stars of recent years, who seemed stuck in his post-Rayonist, post-Butterfly painting phase. He’s on much surer footing here using a couple of ovals for eyes and his familiar exuberantly colored astral lines radiating from one or two central points to create mask-like faces full of intense mystery and subtle threat. Roger and I had different favorites but agreed on the muted painting that seemed owl-like. The show devoted to the romance of Picasso and Marie-Therese at the West 21st outpost of Gagosian was spectacularly extensive and museum-like with heavy borrowings from the Tate, the Modern, the Met and the Guggenheim, among others, and a thorough exploration of its subject. Drawings, paintings and sculpture from 1931 through 1937 reinforced the art-historical view that ties Picasso’s shifts in style to the succession of women in his life. Exhausted by this unexpected stop we paused for a late lunch and rushed through the Jasper Johns show at Matthew Marks on West 22nd, admiring the large silver colored cast of his famous Numerals hung as a painting and the one small section similarly and sensibly hung but were seriously put off by the display of other small casts held up on tall plinths as if they were truly two-sided objects. The inner workings were not as interesting as the outer surfaces, one would have sufficed as a demonstration; these “sculptures” are really reliefs and cry for the wall. On West 24th, we visited John Chamberlain’s (b.1927) first show since he switched eminent dealers and landed with Gagosian. Chamberlain has not lost his gift for twisting and compacting car parts into interesting objects nor his deft approach to color. Nevertheless, the show was an interesting example of how the enormous spaces in Chelsea condition the working methods of even our most senior artists. Faced with the very high ceilings at Gagosian, Chamberlain created very tall, generally vertical pieces, some on narrow “bases” as if the sculptures had waists. Roger kept changing his mind as to their general excellence; only one of the pieces, modest in scale and color, a collection of silver car bumpers, fed my congenital art envy. Much more striking and unexpected was the retrospective devoted to Salvatore Scarpitta (1919-2007) at Marianne Boesky, not only our first detailed look at his work (ever), despite shows beginning in 1958 with Leo Castelli, but also a cornucopia of work by his contemporaries (e.g. Manzoni, Fontana, Rauschenberg) and his students at the Maryland Institute College of Art (e.g. Koons) and other places where he taught. He is infamous for having largely given up art-making in favor of car racing. His wrapped paintings, found and wrapped objects turned into sleds, and actual hand-made automobiles, have many, many resonances with Arte Povera, Bruce Connor, Christo and Joseph Beuys. We dropped in for a quick taste of other shows on West 24th Street but as a group none of them had the earthy bite of Sal Scarpitta, a man seriously overdue for rediscovery and reevaluation. We left his show quite amazed and went our separate ways, having never before seen so much major sculpture on display in a single New York day.

Judd, Untitled, 1989

A BRIEF NOTE ON BEAUTY

Wed, 18 May 2011 11:24:00 -0400

A poet-friend of mine asked me today for “a few words on beauty”; I thought my response might be of some interest even if constrained by its brevity:

I have been much affected by Theodor Adorno’s (Frankfurt School, post-Modernist) view that no theory of the Beautiful can be complete without a theory of its opposite, The Ugly. That he comes at the end of a line of thinkers on Aesthetics beginning with Kant, Hegel and Clement Greenberg who emphasized The Sublime as one criterion of the beautiful is somewhat astonishing. The Sublime (the ocean, the sunrise, the forest, sexual climax) often contains within it a superficially confounding element of Power or Threat, Fear, even messiness, features clearly visible in the great paintings and sculptures of the 20th century. One stands in front of Picasso’s late portraits of Dora Maar or Guernica and thinks at once, without really thinking, “how beautiful” despite the obvious ugliness of the subject matter or the perverse treatment of a human being. Before Kant, Aristotle used Mimesis or fidelity to nature as the primary criterion for beauty and quality in art; Kant used the subjective sensation aroused by the work and whether that feeling approached our experience of the sublime. Paintings like Picasso’s clearly fail both tests. But Hegel and Greenberg situated beauty and quality within a progressive historical process of Modernistic or Utopian perfection or perfectability. For a scientist such as myself, there is much to admire in this theory: it judges achievement in modern art by the same criteria applied to modern science, discovery and newness. Einstein and Poincare, both writers on creativity, clearly felt that Beauty or elegance was a chief criterion by which to judge the correct solution or the suitability of a solution to a mathematical problem. Such solutions are often intuitive, they “feel and look right”, and convey tremendous heuristic power that gives emotional satisfaction to their creators. Clearly their physical embodiments, numbers and symbols, do not share the properties of a Matisse painting but they do satisfy Kant’s subjective criteria. Kant thought that we possessed a built-in aesthetic muscle in our brain similar to our capabilities for ethical reasoning and rational thought, hence his tracts on each of these subjects, and he felt that this capability could be exercised and refined. Given enough knowledge we know what we like and know it when we see it. I have always felt that the mathematics of the brain favors certain aesthetic solutions over others, the golden mean and rectangle in our visual cortex, tonal music over atonal noise in our cochlea, correct syntax in our poetry. The ability to see “beauty” in works of art that disobey these psychophysical principles, I believe, depends greatly on cultural learning or else Jackson Pollock and Arnold Schoenberg must forever remain strangers to our individual aesthetic capabilities. Hence Adorno’s interest in social conditioning and a theory of Beauty’s opposite.

Michael Salcman

May 18, 2011

Some Thoughts on Blinky Palermo

Tue, 10 May 2011 20:08:00 -0400

When an artist dies young, especially if he or she is a great artist, there is the inclination to bemoan unfulfilled potentialities. And yet there is Raphael (d.1520), dead at 37, who seems to have achieved anything he or any other artist might achieve, not to mention the terrible eighteen months in which the world lost two of Blinky Palermo’s heros, Piero Manzoni (d.1963) and Yves Klein (d.1962), at 30 and 34 respectively, and the slightly older modern masters, Franz Kline (d.1962) and Morris Louis (d.1962), who died at fifty, fully formed in the majesty of their work. Arguably the most important artist of Post-Minimalism, Eva Hesse, died at 34 (1970) from a malignant brain tumor. She was an almost exact contemporary of Blinky Palermo but the paths they took were decidedly different. More recently, Moira Dryer, a post-modern artist and studio assistant of Elizabeth Murray died at 34 (1992). How does one judge if their art was fully formed and whether the art would have changed if the gift of years had been vouschafed the artist?

The art of Blinky Palermo (1943-1977) recapitulated his life; he was born an orphan and his name conferred no secure identity. Even his art remains an orphan, like an orphan drug or disease, of interest only to specialists, and it cannot be securely placed within any given movement of the 1960s or 1970s. Palermo’s birth name was incorrect and the name he was given by his adoptive family (Peter Heisterkamp) was already his third; when he began to make the first mature art of his tragically brief life, his classmates and his mentor, the German uber-artist Joseph Beuys, gave him the moniker of an American gangster who had managed the career of Sonny Liston. They knew how much he loved American jazz and art and how his new way of making a painting would require a change in persona. Walking around the beautiful retrospective of his work at the Hirshhorn Museum one immediately grasps his love of Malevich and Mondrian, his relation to Newman (a favorite of Beuys), Yves Klein, Ryman and Tuttle. Several of these immediate predecessors decisively influenced Palermo, an artist described by his teacher Beuys as possessed of “porosity”, a tendency to absorb any influence around him and make it commune with his own spiritual quest. Palermo created several distinct bodies of work, often working on them simultaneously, the early abstractions on canvas (Malevich and Mondrian), the quirky objects, equally sly and humble (Klein and Tuttle), the luscious paintings made of stitched cloth (Marden and Polke? who else?), the wall paintings and drawings (LeWitt) and the late paintings on metal (Ryman). Palermo sometimes anticipated his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, and sometimes followed; he adjusted each style and method of working to his own needs. In the 1960s and 1970s, Palermo was like Gorky in the 1930s, an artist working through and against his progenitors, Cezanne, Picasso and Miro. When Palermo died in 1977, he was not through experimenting; his early death carries the same meaning as if we had lost the Gorky of the 1940s and the dawn of Abstract Expressionism, a movement Palermo loved. You feel the loss in the final gallery where he starts to mix gestural painting with his original geometric style.

Palermo escaped to the West from East Germany, like his two great friends, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, and was part of the solar system that surrounded Beuys. Like them he needed to find a way to escape the influence of his teacher. Palermo chose pure painting and abstraction, a methodology dealt a death blow during the Nazi Reich. Remember, he took this up while Richter and Polke were painting Pop-inflected representational paintings and staging politically tinged happenings a la Beuys. The retrospective teaches us how engaged he was with architectural issues, not only the wall paintings (not on display) but the horizontal and vertical aluminum plinths that substituted for corners and walls. This interest is immediately evident in the drawings and plans for installations, one of the most famous the rooms he painted to contain Richter’s sculptures of his own head and that of his friend’s. The decidedly quirky “objects” that stood in for his paintings during the 1960s share the insouciance of Tuttle on a majestic scale; the blue lance and shield wrapped in electrical tape (Blue Disc and Staff, 1968) echo the Iliad. His famous paintings made of cloth wrapped around stretcher bars (Stoffbilder or Cloth Pictures) and sewed by the first Mrs. Richter have a color sense that the early Mardens can only dream of; shy contrasts of ephemeral greens and other delicate colors in horizontal bands like Kelly in a dream. About the same time, Polke began to paint on fabric. Palermo’s late masterpiece, “To The People of New York City” (1976) looks better here than it does at Dia in Beacon, 40 slabs of paint on metal plates, in the colors of the German flag, black, yellow and red and fifteen groupings. Colors shift between the horizontal and the vertical in a mathematical procession recalling Sol LeWitt. That the paintings were designed when Palermo had already returned to Germany only emphasizes their signaling quality, how they function as a message in a bottle. Because Palermo specified the distances between the plates in any individual grouping but not the separation between groupings, the ensemble requires a minimum of 275 linear feet of space but changes with the architecture in which it is exhibited. Returning through the exhibition from its chronological conclusion, the slow curve of the Hirshhorn allows one to see all of the piece and drink in its slowly mutating surface. Palermo deconstructed the relationship between architectural space and painting before this strategy became fashionable but he was a pure painter first, last and always. This was his declaration of freedom from Beuys and why Richter and Polke loved him.

The only problematic aspect to the exhibition is the confusing lack of wall labels; surely these could have been placed at the extreme ends of the large walls rather than ganged up in positions where their relationship to the contents of a particular room was completely problematic. The previous day we had visited the scholarly show of reliquaries at the Walters Art Museum and were struck by the very low positioning of labels on the exhibition cases and the very small print; for a show devoted to the display of highly unusual and relatively unfamiliar artifacts, we found the signage highly frustrating and less than informative. In the Palermo show it was extremely difficult to discern the age and provenance, let alone the location of any individual work. After the Hirshhorn we motored to American University for a look at the show devoted to recent unstretched canvases by the estimable African-American abstractionist Sam Gilliam (b.1933). Gilliam’s installation was a return to his signature invention of the 1960s, the painted canvas freed from any framing support. His new drapes of pure color remain a remarkable testimony to his skill and the fecundity of Color Field Painting. The strangeness of such paintings would have greatly appealed to Palermo, an artist who devoutly wished for a future for painting and managed to explore in high style more than one possible solution.