Lily Ludlow Lovers 2008 graphite, gesso and acrylic on canvas 48″ x 48″
[detail]
Canada gallery is showing some beautiful erotic paintings by Lily Ludlow along with a multi-channel video, “Sewing Circle”, in which she collaborated with Allen Cordell. I love the paintings.
When I started this entry, because I was also so charmed by the beauty of the detail’s abstraction, the clarity of the lines and the subtlety of the colors it revealed (the rich textures can really only be seen if you’re right there), I was tempted to do something I rarely do, reverse the order of the two images you see here, making the larger one into a thumbnail and showing the detail shot first, and full size. I guess it’s an old publishing trick. I like the way it sometimes gingers things up, but I decided that the full painting, although it was very dimly lit in the gallery, was just too beautiful to diminish or underplay. It also displays some of its own ginger.
Author: jameswagner
don’t let Art Fag City die!
Paddy Johnson is having a year-end fundraiser for her increasingly indispensible cultural blog, Art Fag City. Contributions are tax-deductible, through the generous support of another of New York’s precious resources, Momenta Art. Go here to Paddy’s site for more information and an easy contribution form.
Tom Moody has assembled, on his own site, an impressive, but unassailable description of what her site means to the arts community it serves:
Johnson’s blog is a necessary counterweight to the institutional writing that constitutes current criticism: magazines chasing ad dollars, 501c(3) organizations that have to say nice things about everyone, and museum curators at the beck and call of powerful board members. Johnson produces a staggering amount of original content each year, including interviews, essay series, and reportage. Her comment boards are moderated in a civilized fashion and are a good place to hash out issues that aren’t being discussed elsewhere. Plus she is that rare writer that can cover both the art gallery scene and the online scene with equal knowledge and confidence.
In J.M. Barrie‘s “Peter Pan“, the play, the novel and the film, children are urged to clap to show that they believe in fairies, lest Tinkerbell die. I feel a bit like when we were first asked to save that little sprite, but this time we’ll need to do more than clap if we’re going to help keep Art Fag City alive.
[1915 image, by Francis Donkin Bedford, from Project Gutenberg]
baby Jesus with eye shadow
This is a seasonal post – but with a twist.
Although I’m a refugee from a Roman Catholic youth, a steadfast atheist for almost 50 years, I suppose I may still be somewhat conflicted about the baby Jesus.
For some reason, when I saw this delicate little ceramic infant a number of years ago inside the gift shop at New Mexico’s ancient El Santuario de Chimayo, I couldn’t resist snapping it up. At first the priest didn’t want to part with the pale-skinned hand-made figure, even though it was on the merchandise table, but he eventually agreed to sell it. It turned out to be the last one in stock, and he wasn’t sure they’d ever get another. Maybe he had fallen in love with it himself, and maybe he sensed I wasn’t going to use it for conventional devotion.
Okay, it was the eyes that got me.
I lay him down carefully in some raffia on the cherry tea table every December 24th; it’s always the most Christmas-y thing in our apartment. We’re actually both pretty devoted to this child, even though our own convention is that he gets packed away in a few days until his return appearance next year.
When the kid looks up at us through that fantastic eyeshadow, I like to think he’s trying to tell us something we already know.
R.H. Quaytman at Miguel Abreu: “the blind spot”
R.H. Quaytman Chapter 12: iamb (Fresnell lens) 2008 diamond dust, silkscreen, gesso on wood 32.5″ x 52.5″
R.H. Quaytman Chapter 12: iamb 2008 silkscreen, gesso on wood 40″ x 24.75″
[detail]
R.H. Quaytman Chapter 12: iamb silkscreen, gesso on wood 32.5″ x 20″
The gallery press release tells us that the subject of “Chapter 12: iamb“, R.H. Quaytman’s exquisite and very brainy solo show which opened recently at Miguel Abreu, is “painting itself and, specifically, its relationship to the blind spot.” The notes go on:
Like actual vision, Quaytman�s paintings have a blind spot, whether it be from a light source in the picture, an optical illusion, a trompe l��il effect, the absence of color in a black and white photograph, or the picture in plan. This recurring �absence� enables the works to activate one another, yet it also often shifts the axis of legibility between neighboring paintings.
About the images I’ve uploaded here: Since her show is about �absence�, I suppose I should consider that I had fair warning. Color is always a problem, and the pixels on a screen can play havoc with reproduction under the best of circumstances, but the first two images above are, more than usually, only an approximation of what you will see unmediated when you stand in the gallery itself. For example, the detail I show here, of a section located one third of the way from the right edge of the painting, actually includes parts of two color fields (this is more apparent if you move back from the computer screen).
Fortunately, since it’s a part of the work being shown (each piece is intended to be viewed both by itself and in the context of its neighbors) the installation is also a triumph. It’s museum quality, and I mean that in a good way: I felt like keeping my voice down, I suppose out of awe or respect, and that’s not my usual approach to new art.
Kate Gilmore at Smith-Stewart
Kate Gilmore Higher Horse 2008 single channel video [large detail still from installation video]
Kate Gilmore’s current installation at Smith Stewart is even more gripping than I’d expected, and I’ve grown to expect a lot from this smart artist.
While you pass through the debris left over from one of the performances documented on the monitors inside the gallery, Gilmore can also be seen in three other recent videos, equally and typically engaging, and very physical. Her face is often obscured in her work, as it is here. But in these four pieces, dressed in high heels and skirts, Gilmore’s costume at least is a star, neatly color-coordinated with some element of her artist-built sculptural props. In each case she is, as usual, totally involved in half-goofy challenges presented by her sets, but in the video installed furthest from the door, “Higher Horse”, where she introduces two husky males armed with sledge hammers, she appears more as frightened, cornered prey than as the wild, ransacker encountered elsewhere in the room.
Gilmore’s work, regularly evokes responses like horror, frustration, pity, anger, compassion, empathy, fear, love and admiration, and certainly bemusement, humor and delight. None of these appear alone, instead they’re all tangled together in my experience of the pleasures of her art.
And I’m not alone.
Kate Gilmore Walk this Way 2008 single channel video [large detail still from installation video]
Kate Gilmore Between a Hard Place 2008 single channel video [large detail still from installation video]
Kate Gilmore Down the House 2008 single channel video [large detail from installation video]
Maureen Cavanaugh shines in 31 Grand’s final show
Maureen Cavanaugh Black Flowers 2008 oil on canvas 9″ x 12″
Maureen Cavanaugh Old Room 2008 oil on canvas 10″ x 10″
I liked these paintings when I first looked at them, and I find they’ve only grown more beautiful each time I’ve returned to them (in photos). Maureen Cavanaugh‘s solo show at 31 Grand, “Stay With Me“, which closed one week ago, was terrific, but unfortunately it proved to be the final regularly-scheduled exhibition in the gallery’s space on Ludlow Street.
And then last night we were excited to be able to drop by the gallery for one last blow-out show, “Death Is Not The End“. It was a one-night only thing, a retrospective group exhibition of artists who had made appearances in 31 Grand’s spaces in Williamsburg and Manhattan over the nine years of its very full life.
The strength of this last brilliant flare of an installation, and the crowd which poured into the space one last time last night, should attest to what I read as prophecy in its title: It’s not over. I know nothing more about the future of the art world than anyone else, and less than many, but I expect Heather Stephens and Megan Bush will be back, either together or separately; the love and the respect both have earned for the work they have done over the past decade should foretoken as much, and more.
The artists included in the show last night were:
Adam Stennett, Alessandra Exposito, Eric White, Barnaby Whitfield, Carol “Riot” Kane, Fanny Bostrom, Randy Polumbo, Francesca Lo Russo, Helen Garber, Mike Cockrill, Jade Dylan, Jason Clay Lewis, Jason Cole Mager, Jason Weatherspoon, Jeff Wyckoff, Joel Adas, Jon Elliott, Karen Heagle, Kristen Schiele, Kyle Simon, Lauren Gibbes, Magalie Gu�rin, Maureen Cavanaugh, Megan Leborious, Michael Anderson, Michael Cambre, Michael Pope, MTAA/Michael Sarff, Nelson Loskamp/Electric Chaircut, Orly Cogan, Paul Brainard, Rebecca Chamberlain, Sean McDevitt, Spencer Tunnick, Tim Wilson, Tom Sanford, Ursula Brookbank and Claudine Anrather
the Obama/Warren mutual annointing thing: total wack
Hieronymus Bosch The Mountebank 1475-80 oil on panel 21″ x 29.5″
I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten, and when I open them I want to find that fat mountebank gone.
I’m very much in and of this country, but I’m not a member of Rick Warren’s wacky faith-based syndicate of dupes. I’m not a Christian of any description, and I’m also not a Jew and not a Muslem or Bah�’ist. I’m not Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddist, Confucian, Taoist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Druze, Shamanist, Unitarian or Yoruban. I’m also not a part of the Prince Philip Movement.
In fact I’m not a member of any magic cult, and I’m not a part of any other kind of club. I like to believe that I can think for myself. It’s a competence I continue to hope I might share with every American adult, in spite of all the sad evidence to the contrary. At the very least I’d like to think that the person chosen to occupy the office of President of the United States of America can and does think for himself. Yet it now seems pretty clear, as he’s about to be anointed on the steps of the Capitol, that even our latest almighty one doesn’t think for himself, or at least that he doesn’t want us to think that he thinks for himself.
It’s not only that I am appalled by Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver an “invocation” at his, no, . . . our truly-epochal January 20th inauguration ceremony. No, it’s much bigger than that: I object to the fact that even in the twenty-first century, in order to get a proper send-off into the most important secular office a nation can award to one of its citizens, the President-elect of my country feels he has to enlist the public help of any crazy sky pilot to formally summon the private imaginary friend the two of them share.
NOTE: If I were to object only to the specific choice of Warren as the next American high priest, I would hope I could come up with more reasons than those connected with his vocal opposition to gay marriage, comparing it to incest, pedophilia and polygamy. This seems to be all that most people find appalling about Warren.
I would add, and this is just for starters, that he does not believe in evolution; that he would deny women the right to their own bodies, comparing abortion to the Holocaust and those who defend a woman’s right to choice as no better than Nazis; that he has said that women should submit to their husbands; that he believes that Jews who do not convert will surely roast in hell; that he has advocated the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; that he has said that Christians who advance a social gospel (the religious crusade against poverty and inequality) are Marxists; and that he opposes stem-cell research.
But enough. �crasez l’inf�me!
[image from Web Gallery of Art]
David Gordon’s “Trying Times (remembered)”
why, . . . it was just yesterday, and now it looks like tomorrow
DO NOT miss it, if you’re any where around Chelsea today, Friday or Satruday. There are still three more nights to see a (sorta) revival of David Gordon and the Pick Up Performance Company’s 1982 “Trying Times (remembered)” at Dance Theater Workshop, and Barry and I both recommend it highly. You don’t really have to bring any special equipment with you to enjoy this beautiful piece, but, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the choreographer and the company, it wouldn’t hurt to see it after: 1.) a quick study of its history, here [Gia Kourlas for Time Out] or here [Claudia La Rocco for the NYTimes]; 2.) a look at David Gordon; 3.) a peek at the phenomenal Valda Setterfield; and 4.) some background on Stravinsky’s gorgeous 1928 “Apollo“.
Deborah Jowitt (sadly, one of the only reasons still left for picking up a copy of that once-indispensable Downtown rag, The Village Voice) will also help with her review, whether you read it before or after experiencing this wonderful work.
[Steve Gunther image, of Pick Up Performance Company dancers together with dancers from the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts, taken from Pick UP and supplied by DTW]
Ann Lislegaard at Murray Guy
Ann Lislegaard Crystal World (after J.G.Ballard) 2006 two-screen video [two large-detailed stills from the double-screen installation]
Murray Guy is showing two beautiful projected animations by Ann Lislegaard in its space on 17th Street. They’re both seriously conceptual, but the looping double-screen animation, “Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard)”, sections of which are seen in the two images above, is incredibly exquisite to boot.
Aside from its virtues as art, for those who already feel they’re being force-fed a surfeit of holiday color: This frozen minimalist world is the perfect antitoxin.
Van Johnson: still hidden in the New York Times closet
I know it from the very personal relationships the man enjoyed with good friends of mine who regularly hosted this sweet man in their homes. Van Johnson was quite queer, even if he didn’t seem to want it broadcast everywhere.
It’s too bad the obituaries in the NYTimes and other MSM outlets I’ve just looked at on line still seem to think that queer is, well, . . . too disgusting to talk about in public, thus perpetuating the climate of fear and loathing in which Johnson grew up and which continues to waste and destroy lives even today.
ADDENDUM: By way of media corroboration, I just found this copy of a 2004 obituary of Evie Wynn Johnson, the woman the star married in 1947, It appeared in the The Independent.
[image from ioffer]