Category: Culture

Alma Thomas Watusi (Hard Edge) 1963 acrylic on canvas 47.5″ x 44.25″

I thought it was a joke, but the story seems to be true. The Painting by Alma Thomas, one of the 45 artworks the Obamas chose to borrow from national museums to hang mostly in the private quarters of the White House, has quietly disappeared from the list.

[By late October, “Watusi (Hard Edge)”], which had been the only painting listed for the East Wing – and reportedly destined for Michelle Obama’s office – was no longer on the list. The Hirshhorn confirmed that it had been sent back, but no one involved with the White House loans would say why.

Right-wing bloggers had gone super crazy over the choice of Thomas’ work and it now appears they’ve been able to both assault the personal aesthetic taste of the President and his family and exercise a cultural veto with national ramifications.
Greg.org has much more on both Thomas and the crazies whom her quiet work incites in this blog post published before Thomas went missing.

ADDENDUM: Richard Lacayo has still more, in this TIME/CNN on-line piece, datelined November 5th.

[image from the Hirshhorn]

details of Urs Fischer’s “Ix” and “David”


detail of Urs Fischer’s “Last Call Lascaux” (other than the fluorescents, and one “exit”, everything is wallpaper)


large detail of Urs Fischer’s “Yarlsberg (Reverend)” reflecting two other mirrored blocks

I had forced myself to get up much earlier than I ever really want to, which normally would have been a drag, but I was actually looking forward to yesterday’s press preview of “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty“, excited to learn what all the fuss was about, and wanting to be amazed and excited.
There had been a lot of advance press, not all of it entirely auspicious, about the big deal show being installed down on the Bowery but I had decided I wasn’t going to let talk about big money, cronyism, and way-too-“interested” patrons and curators affect what I thought of the artist’s work itself.
But while I was still listening to the short introduction by Massimiliano Gioni, who may or may not be formally employed by the Museum but who is described in NuMu’s press release as having “organized” this exhibition, I started to feel a grumpy coming on. Then, soon after alighting from the elevator on the fourth floor where we were confronted by enormous and weighty cast-aluminum abstract sculptures, one of them hanging from the ceiling, that spoke to me more of hubris than any kind of original aesthetic or penetrating intellectual breakthrough, but I’m not equipped to argue with the thousands of pages written in praise of Fisher’s work, these five contracted pieces made in China probably not excepted.
The third floor space is where the magic happens. You’ve probably already read about it: Fischer has essentially created an enormous trompe l’oeil box. Every square inch of the walls and ceiling (which is actually a faux ceiling, including beams, constructed two feet below the real one) was lined with wallpaper which had been printed with photographic reproductions of the areas it covered, including images of the lighting, vents, door handles and exit signs, as it all appeared after the previous show had been taken down (the purplish color of the walls, while deliberate, relates to a photographic idiosyncrasy). There are four small-to-medium-size sculptures installed in various parts of the room. On my visit they elicited almost as much interest as the wallpaper, but if I were to be asked, I’d come down on the side of the room itself. While I didn’t miss the details, like the photographed scuff marks and small nails from the last exhibition, I was charmed by both the idea and the reality of the room as a whole, its evocation of so many historical forms of visual illusion in art. I felt like a bumpkin in seventeenth-century Rome or eighteenth-century Bavaria, and I volunteered as much to anyone who looked like they would listen.
The Second floor is also a piece by itself (although no one seems to know whether it will be offered to collectors or museums only as a whole), and it may be the most successful part of the entire exhibition. “Service à la française” is an installation of dozens of mirrored chrome boxes each imprinted with a photographic image of some ordinary item which seems to have struck the fancy of the artist. The four sides and top of each box display precisely-documented sides, front, back and top of separate objects in the shape and volume scale of their original subjects, but not in one scale shared by all (a red public telephone box is approximately the size of a frosted Fruit Loops bar cookie).
I lingered for some time, walking around inside this orchestrated array of “monuments”, perfectly-engineered and finished. I felt the impact of the work gradually alter from surprise and amusement to sweetness and, well . . . , coziness. If the piece is autobiographical, it’s probably equally biographical, for everyone else, even if the visitor has never played cards, used a phone box, eaten a frosted cream puff, opened a lipstick, or touched a porcelain obelisk.
And then I was back on the first floor, where I already knew a different artist had an installation in the Glass Gallery opening the same day. Barry and I had known nothing about Nikhil Chopra until then, but we took a look at the materials which were thinly spread out in what looked like separate attractive and intriguing installations. A sign on the wall to the right described something of the artist’s work and announced that he would be in residence in that gallery for five days next week, beginning Wednesday. We almost left (it was 12:30 and neither of us had had a breakfast) but decided to take another look at the the long narrow space and, in spite of the fact that we saw the note on the screen describing a three-hour performance we were quickly and irreversibly drawn into one of the video monitors on the floor.
It was an edited version of a 2007 performance by the artist, “Yog Raj Chitrakar visits Lal Chowk“*, and we watched it to the end, when we found we were both feeling better about the world than when we had arrived.
The Mumbai-based artist’s work is described on the Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts site as “located in the border region between theatre, performance, painting, photography and sculpture.”
Employing extremely modest means, and unassisted by any treatise or critique (at least none we had seen), the artist was able to touch both of us in a way nothing else had all morning. The impact of the literally awesome funding, resources, coordination and engineering required by the structures and objects installed in the three floors above us couldn’t hold a candle to that delivered by this brief excerpt/detail of Chopra’s work, a looped video monitored within an unpeopled set. I had forgotten what it feels like to be truly “amazed and excited”.
I don’t know what all this means, but I went out the door smiling, even though the rain had not let up.


detail of Nikhil Chopra’s “Yog Raj Chitrakar visits Lal Chowk” in the Glass Gallery

*
in the city of Srinagar, the capital of the disputed, but India-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir

Paddy Johnson Jill Magid I Can Burn Your Face 2009 custom pillow 18″ x 18″ x 5″
and Iliyan Ivanov, Apocalyptic Unicorn 2009 stoneware pet food bowl 2.5″ x 6″ x 6″
each edition 1 of 3 [installation view]

Ouch. Late again. “Scarlet Fever“, an oddly-intimate group show at Hogar (little more than a handful of artists who studied and worked on their MFA’s at Rutgers around 2000-2001), closed on Monday, and I had fully intended to do this post well before it disappeared.
I decided to spotlight this shrewd piece by Paddy Johnson not because it shows she is any more closely identified with the school’s mascot, the “Scarlet Knight”, than her colleagues in the show but because in a modest and wry way it seems to pull together (or finish off) so much of what has been described as the leading edge in the art world over the past decade, in art both material and conceptual.
Johnson‘s public visibility is very much a function of her popularity as an arts blogger, so when we learn that she called in her art for this exhibition it seems perfectly natural. Working off the only thread which held together the group of artists represented in the show, she did an on-line search using the term “Rutgers MFA” and found a Jill Magid neon image, “I can burn your face“, and Iliyan Ivanov‘s “Apocalyptic Unicorn” triptych. Still on line, she then placed an order with Cafe Press, an internet site that prints images on all sorts of things (cups t-shirts, etc.), for a pillow and a pet food bowl, and asked them to be shipped to the gallery. Johnson calls the pair, mounted here on a white wooden shelf, a couple of “unlikely alumni gifts”.
The other artists in the show were Saul Chernick, Michelle Forsyth, JJ Garfinkel, Andrew Guenther, Matthew Day Jackson, Michael Maxwell and Clifford Owens. I was only able to salvage the few images which follow. Even then, because of the reflection on the plexiglas I had to be satisfied with a detail of one of them, and, unusually, even a closeup shot hardly begins to suggest the depth and complexity of that piece (check out the description of the medium).


Matthew Day Jackson LEM Interior 2 2009 laser-engraved burned wood and plastic 48″ x 36″ [installation view]


Andrew Guenther Plate Face #5 2009 acrylic on canvas 45″ x 35″


Michael Maxwell Self-portrait in another dimension 2009 saffron, poppy, indigo, lapis and other natural pigments, crushed quartz crystal, silver leaf and crylic on giclee print 67″ x 45″ framed [detail]

Michael Williams Bon Voyage 2008 oil on canvas 60″ x 40″

[detail]


Michael Williams In the Woods 2009 acrylic on canvas 64″ x 96″


Michael Williams Peanut 2009 oil on canvas 96″ x 64″

[detail]

I’ve already said that I love this guy’s painting, beginning with “At Mr. McCooks“. As for Michael Williams’ current show of new paintings at CANADA, “Mr. Big“, I’ll only add that he certainly doesn’t disappoint, and that he definitely hasn’t held back.
Have I already said that this is one of my favorite galleries ever?

a part of Nancy Spero’s 1989 installation on the wall of the main room of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street

Nancy Spero died on Sunday. We miss her already. But while the world is made so much poorer with our loss, her great spirit and her phenomenal work will always brighten our lives – and strengthen our resolve to be almost worthy of her courage.
Light those lights!

Related: a note on Spero’s partner, Leon Golub, with a link to his 2004 NYTimes obituary

The only way I’m going to be able to show images of even a portion of the more interesting shows I’ve already seen this season is to go over them in a short series of entries, each combining a handful of exhibitions, and to include only a picture or two, the identity of the the artists and the venues, and a very few words.
I’ll proceed, roughly, in the chronological order of my visits.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Thee Fracture Garden 1995 mixed media 12″ x 12″ (on 20″ x 16″ Arches paper)

Invisible Exports’s show of work by the legendary and heroic artist and performer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “30 Years of Being Cut Up“, closes on Sunday (October 18th). I took this shot of the radiant artist during the opening reception last month:



[first image from Invisible Exports]

The Bruce High Quality Foundation University

awaiting creation

Flush with the accolades of the academy which it critiques, the creative, enterprising and inspired Bruce High Quality Foundation is expanding its role and operations into pedagogy itself. On September 11th the art collaborative’s latest (and perhaps inevitable) creation, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), opened the West Broadway doors of its new operation, hosting a reception for its fans and any number of potential matriculates, both learning-thirsty and insurgent.


engaged

Jade Townsend

Jade Townsend Sick, Sick Wind 2009 installation, variable dimensions [detail of installation]

I’m showing an image of Jade Townsend‘s pig-shaped battleship, the centerpiece of his show, “Sick Sick Wind“, at Priska Juschka. It closed today but I’m sharing it now not just because it was an extraordinary construction, but because it gives me an excuse to delight in the memory of Duke Riley’s Naumachia, of which it was a particularly dramatic part.

“Heartbreak Hotel” at Freight & Volume

Kadar Brock The Impossibility of Love in the Fourth Dimension 2009 oil, marker and spray paint on canvas 20″ x 24″


Kim Dorland Untitled 2009 oil on panel 20″ x 16″


Lucas Moran Neon & Lilacs 2009 oil, gorilla glue and acorn tops

This group show actually closed on August 12, just before the fall season opened in earnest, and that was the day I visited it. As a late summer show, it was pretty much below the radar for most gallery visitors; I thought it deserved much more notice than it must have gotten, so I’m posting a few images. “Heartbreak Hotel“, at Freight & Volume, included new work by Fanny Allié, Erik den Breejen, Kadar Brock, Kim Dorland, Andrew Guenther, Jonathan Hartshorn, Annamarie Ho, Peter Hutchinson, Min Hyung, Misaki Kawai, Peik Larsen, Jim Lee, Lucas Moran, Danial Nord, Daniel Ranalli, Max Razdow, Michael Scoggins, Russell Tyler, Tabitha Vevers, Eric White and John Yau.

“The Female Gaze” at Cheim & Read

Anh Duong The Lure of Disillusion 2008 oil on canvas 85″ x 45″ [a self-portrait]

The Cheim & Read exhibition, “The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women“, also closed in (late) September, but it had settled into the gallery for a blessed three months, encouraging return trips. Barry and I went only twice; it wasn’t enough.
The artists included were Berenice Abbott, Marina Abramovic, Ghada Amer, Diane Arbus, Vanessa Beecroft, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Kathe Burkhart, Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria Civera, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Anh Duong, Judith Eisler, Tracey Emin, Ellen Gallagher, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Chantal Joffe, Deborah Kass, Maria Lassnig, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Marilyn Minter, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, Collier Schorr, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, Hannah van Bart, Hellen van Meene, Kara Walker, Francesca Woodman and Lisa Yuskavage.
It occurred to me just now that, since the gallery’s partners, John Cheim and Howard Read, do not mention the name of the curator in their press release, this awesome show was itself almost certainly the product of a male gaze: Maybe there’s hope for us all.

[image from Cheim & Read]

we must cultivate our garden

NURTUREart is just about the smartest, most generous and most completely rewarding non-profit around for both supporting and showing the unfamiliar and the unexpected, not least because its mission is not only about emerging artists, but about emerging curators as well*.
This remarkable institution’s 2009 benefit will be tomorrow night, October 12, at Claire Oliver in Chelsea. There’s more information here.

The image at the top is from the current show in NURTUREart’s Bushwick gallery space, titled “Plan B“, a group exhibition curated by Krista Saunders. It’s a detail of work by The K.I.D.S. and Secret School, “Growing a Network of Secret Gardens”, a site-specific mixed-media installation which inhabits, in the phrasing of the installation label, “the entire neighborhood where they work and play”.

*
At least 50% of the artists included in their Gallery Program shows must be from the NURTUREarts registry of artists who do not have representation, and each year curators are invited to submit proposals to their Emerging Curators Program for review by a rotating panel of experienced curators, arts professionals, and members of the board.