Steve Wheeler, Introducing Miss America II, 1947, Tempera and ink on paper, 9 ¾ x 11 7/8 inches, courtesy of David Findlay Jr Gallery

David Brody: I find myself drawn to Steve Wheeler’s work with reliable fascination, purely on visual terms. But the backstory is interesting. First, there’s his problematic identification as one of the Indian Space Painters (ISP), an association he sometimes rejected –– even asserting his independence from the group with fisticuffs late in life; by this time he seems to have descended into a bitter alcoholic hermitage, and at the opening of an ISP show in which he had been included against his will he caused a ruckus.

Indian Space Painters, by the way, is a great band name; as the name for an art movement, though, it’s almost too descriptive, or proscriptive, which is presumably why Wheeler scorned it.  But also, he had been hanging with the big boys at the Cedar Tavern, and he may have wished to be seen as part of that crowd, many of whom had shared Wheeler’s interest in biomorphic tribal exotica and mystical archetypes.  But legitimately, while Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, et al., went beyond the literalism of that early interest, Wheeler’s superdense, hyperdimensional substrate never fully relinquishes Tlingit eagles and Aztec glyphs.

Putting aside the issue of Wheeler’s imagery for now, his paintings were retardetaire on grounds of technique alone.  He eschews drips and tornadoes of gestural fury; instead, he designs impregnable fortresses of interlocking color planes from careful preparatory drawings.  Philip Guston cited Paolo Uccello as an influence, which is apparent in his ‘40s friezes of warplay, but Wheeler’s work is much closer in technique, and maybe spirit, to the space-packing battles of Uccello.

In any case, he missed the art history boat; while his old Cedar Tavern friends were ascending the mountaintop, Wheeler was dying in splenetic obscurity.   He always had fans –– the work’s sheer persistent quality keeps it alive.  As the wheel of poetic injustice turns, Wheeler now begins to seem, to many contemporary artists, more directly relevant than the canonical New York School artists.  Art history pinches back on itself all the time –– particularly American art history, in which, for example, the dogged conservatism of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Burchfield, or Edward Hopper becomes avant-garde in retrospect. So was Wheeler just ahead of his time?  Certainly he must have believed that, or he couldn’t have packed so much heat into the paintings.  They just burn and burn as you look at them.

Drew Lowenstein: Yeah David, there is, as you say, alotta heat in Wheeler’s paintings.  Given how well these paintings grab and hold our attention, it’s easy to understand why he was thrust into the position of front-man for the Indian Space Painting group.  He seems to have been a true believer in the extraordinary and in his capacity to harness and merge it into his own art. Moving from the Mayan to Kwakiutl to Modernist sources, he was no intellectual slouch either. The work pulses. It’s evident how informed he was.  He put what interested him through a sieve.  Although he achieved a synthesis of these complex pictorial languages, did he ever move past these influences, and does that matter anymore, and if not, why?

In Wheeler’s hands, such material is symbolic, psychological, ecstatic, perhaps even religious.  The passion behind his multi-pronged approach, and the single-minded obsession to get it down on paper or canvas elevates the work to the level of a document of belief.  This may be why he continued to mine this abandoned and rarefied area while the Abstract Expressionists moved on and sucked up all the oxygen in the room. In today’s culture, Wheeler’s small-scale, eccentric, tightly wound paintings aren’t retardataire anymore, but instead may appear as agreeably quirky.

DB: Let’s talk about Steve Wheeler: The Oracle Visiting the 21st Century, the show we saw together in January at David Findlay Jr. Gallery, which hangs a selection of his paintings and drawings alongside some work by ISP artists and also a number of contemporary artists who, it is claimed, have affinities, such as Tom Burckhardt and the late Elizabeth Murray.  Even if one doesn’t agree with every choice, I applaud the acknowledgment of Wheeler’s relationship with the present.  Some of the selected artists, like Burckhardt and Luke Gray, have been directly impacted by Wheeler –– as you and I have been, along with Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, James Siena and many others I’ve talked to.  I think Wheeler particularly appeals to those who seek a kind of psychedelic intensity that is obsessively under control.

DL: This show is a lively mix.  The curators have made inclusions, such as Keith Haring, that broaden the interpretation of Wheeler’s aesthetic.  Luke Gray, whose work I’m seeing for the first time, and Tom Burckhardt look particularly good here.  The paintings of Wheeler’s contemporaries Robert Barrell and Peter Busa also stand out. I agree there is an intergenerational affinity in the Findlay show, and it’s great that some people feel that they have been impacted. It’s worth noting that Luke Gray exhibited at Gary Snyder gallery when they were showing Wheeler’s paintings, so in that case there is a clear connection. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I do think sometimes it’s hard to determine direct impact versus rapport. I feel like my interest in dense composition came from Wheeler’s contemporary, Maurice Golubov, whose retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1981 affected me so strongly that I contacted him directly. I was surprised and appreciative when I first saw Wheeler’s paintings at Gary Synder’s gallery in the early ‘90s. And perhaps Bruce Pearson feels differently, but my recollection is that we schlepped to the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in1997 to see the Wheeler retrospective because we developed through related aesthetics, liked his eccentric compositions, and were interested in his marginal status.

Tom Burckhardt, Economy Skeleton, 2012, Oil on cast plastic, 40 x 32 inches. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery

I wonder why some recent American abstraction has recoiled into tight, early modernist formations?  Some of it often resembles what George L.K. Morris or John Ferren were doing in the ‘40s when they were playing catch-up with Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee. The contemporary version is usually small scale, with a labor-intensive commitment – a kind of industrious Protestant work ethic that says this is serious busywork. Perhaps this is part of the psychedelic intensity wrought from obsessive control that you mentioned earlier. Tripped out and buttoned up – a strange mix, no?  Isn’t the psychedelic experience also about losing control and being subsumed, or are we currently really locked into the age of Adderall as we recycle Stuart Davis?  I think in some ways Howard Hodgkin can be psychedelic and Fred Tomaselli may not be. The psychedelia-in-art-is-cool consensus can also be troubling.

DB: Well, what is truly “psychedelic” is an interesting question. Though for the record, I’m a fan of Tomaselli and indifferent to Hodgkin.  And you’re right, there’s a fashionability/marketing factor attaching to the term, which can be annoying and juvenile; it often has nothing to do with the kind of uncanny visual alertness combined with an experience of sublimity –– of the terrifyingly beautiful –– that I think of as psychedelic.  All good art is psychedelic, in a sense.  And losing control can be psychedelic too, as you point out, but in my view only if the chaos leads to hallucination, as with a Victor Hugo ink spill that becomes a castle in the air –– only when loss of control is allied with extreme precision. Chance is still very active in American abstraction, but maybe more for its Duchamp/Cage lineage than for its let-it-all-hang-out expressionism –– a drip is not enough, it has to be a “drip.” Wheeler’s Montclair show got featured sympathetically in the New York Times, and became a must–see art event.  Having to make a pilgrimage across the Hudson may have contributed to the impact, but what I saw immediately was that Wheeler doesn’t rely on pattern, symmetry, and repetition for his psychedelic intensity; there are no algorithms, no grids, no top-down organizing rules.  Thus your eye is on its own trying to sort things out, but you don’t mind at all because the color is plain gorgeous –– impeccable really –– and the shapes are never wimpy; yes, rather like Stuart Davis.  But while Davis is always cool and in balance, however angular, like ‘40s Bop, Wheeler makes me think, jazzwise, of an eccentric novelty act perfectionist like Raymond Scott.

DL: David, that’s a great point about Raymond Scott, who I just listened to on your prompt. The Wheeler/Davis contrast is a useful one.  In a sense Wheeler stands on Davis’s shoulders, enabling him to bypass Henri Matisse and Neo-Plasticism so he can plumb deeper depths.  Of course Wheeler is twenty years younger.  Putting his considerable formal talent aside, is Wheeler’s resonance also due to a drive to express his belief in the universal mind? Or dare we ask, does a bit of content that he found contain some kind of “truth” that resonates, no matter how much we try to push past that paradigm? Working in the mines of Pennsylvania, below the surface, must have left Wheeler partial to ideas about interiority, mapping and psychological theories of the sub/unconscious mind. He also helped to point out that Northwest Native American art can be as powerful a source for Modern artists as African Art.

In some of the more open and decorative pieces, such as Portrait (1941), and Julius Mayer Sonia (1950), I can’t help wondering how aware Wheeler was of the Transcendentalist Painting Group in Taos, New Mexico, during the ‘30s and ‘40s, particularly the paintings of Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson, who also held mystical beliefs.  And although I’m excited to see Inventing Abstraction at MoMA, I also wish they would do a show of American Abstraction from 1925-50 that included Indian Space Painting, Transcendental Painting Group, American Abstract Artists, etc.  A couple of shows at the Whitney lately have nibbled around the edges of this period, so that’s good. Fortunately, Findlay and D. Wigmore Fine Art each exhibit this neglected yet essential chapter of our history regularly.

Steve Wheeler
Julius Mayer Sonia, c.1950s
Oil on canvas, 20 x 26 inches, courtesy of David Findlay Jr Gallery 

DB: Yes, these old-school galleries do a great job of keeping the work on view, and seem better informed about the interstices of American abstraction than museums.  In general, well-constructed, earnestly transcendent abstractions, including the kind that were made in Taos  ––  Thunderbird meets Kandinsky –– have been relegated to the historically tangential.  Perhaps they get associated with western-themed landscapists of an earlier generation like Ernest L. Blumenschein, an excellent painter who few take seriously due to a certain touristy quality –– a credulous skin-deepness.  I’ll venture that the better done these Taos paintings are, figurative or abstract, the less they have tended to resonate.  Georgia O’Keeffe’s reputation sometimes seems to rise above, sometimes sink below, her widespread popularity.  She remains a feminist icon, a fearless perfectionist, a visionary, yet gets tarred by this same brush of the literal, the romanticized, the too-conventionally polished.  On the other hand, Marsden Hartley passed through Taos, and his early abstractions, and in most cases his expressionist landscapes as well, remain a touchstone for every serious American painter I know.

Another interesting case linking both sides of the landscape/abstraction divide is that of Lawren Harris, the biting poet of the frozen North, a Canadian landscapist worthy of comparison with the best of Hartley and Rockwell Kent; he got hypnotized by Theosophy, left his proper Protestant family in Toronto and spent the years 1937-40 in New Mexico, where he embarked on some pretty far-out planar abstractions –– awful really, and hard to understand without the naïve earnestness of the Transcendentalist milieu.

Artists like Harris, Bisttram and Jonson or the non-Wheeler ISPs do seem too well-behaved for contemporary taste (and I’ll note here that Harris proudly declared his “marriage” with his Theosophist lover –– they had absconded to the States one step ahead of bigamy charges –– to be spiritual, and entirely celibate).  But I’m pretty sure the same taste would go gaga over these paintings’ trippy visual pyrotechnics were they known to be in service to maniacal partying, à la Haring or Kenny Scharf; or outsider mysticism à la Alex Grey; or the resplendent punk-sacred à la Tomaselli.  If these Taos artists were taking peyote with D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge, in other words, dancing naked around the bonfire, presumably this would make the work cool again, right?

Steve Wheeler, Woman Eating a Hot Dog, 1950-75,     Oil on canvas, 30 x 33 inches, courtesy of David Findlay Jr Gallery

DL: Ha! Sure, spectacle is a hot marketing device, so throwing some nakedness or drugs into the story always provides a hook. We all agree that the sacred has impacted images throughout history. Back in the ‘40s, it’s likely that Gordon Onslow-Ford, a painter also interested in the visionary, was aware of the impact of hallucinogens. Originally from England, Onslow-Ford came to New York and wound up in Mexico for seven years. Wheeler might have attended Ford’s lectures at the New School in Manhattan; a lot of artists did.  Ford eventually headed to northern California, where his associates were Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican (the artist Matt Mulican’s father), also brilliant, original abstractionists investigating energetic imagery.  As a whole, they are a tremendously interesting group too.

As you point out, there is something of the well-behaved in Jonson and Bisttram.  I’m partial to Jonson anyway, despite the fact that he never loses sight of decorative design values.  Perhaps this is why these painters are often overlooked or even lumped in, as you suggest, with landscapists like Harris who used exaggeration to simplify and visually heighten form.  This stuff must have been everywhere. I was watching Cover Girl (1944), with Rita Hayworth, the other day and noticed that the set design for her dance scene was one of these symbolic/abstract landscapes, complete with the misty cloud via fog machine.  The simplify-and-exaggerate formula used by these landscape painters may also have been the fine art version that the designers, stylists and animators of Disney films like Snow White (1937) favored – a romantic, brooding, central European illustration sensibility that still pops up today in Hallmark cards, or even Inka Essenhigh paintings. Strangely, though Mickey Mouse culture has been bashed for its conservative values, Disney’s romantic themes, animistic nature worship and visual splendor sensitized many children to idealism and counter-cultural issues like environmental conservation and even class inequity.  And then there was the stoned-out vibe at revival houses in the mid ‘70s when Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) would re-run. No little kids at those shows.

 DB: A weirdly self-conscious compendium of styles, Fantasia still amazes stone cold sober. The “Rite of Spring” section, in my book, is great cinema, and convincingly painterly at that, even though it makes hash of Stravinsky.  On the other hand, Fantasia makes a farce of the high idealism of abstract Visual Music in the opening Bach Toccata and Fugue section –– I find the experience fascinating yet excruciating.  For either extreme, I look at classic animation backgrounds all the time.  There’s a lot to unpack in the way fairy tales, fantasy, and sci-fi preserved western art traditions below the radar of modernism, including, as you point out, certain “improving” moral values.  Though Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley put those moral values pretty thoroughly in their place.

Maybe you are suggesting that Wheeler’s approach, as with cartooning, begins to seem more and more contemporary.  Some of his titles support this view: Wheeler’s street-savvy Woman Eating a Hot Dog (1950) or his Introducing Miss America (1945) vs. Willem de Kooning’s categorical Woman IV (1952) and Pollock’s mythic Pasiphaë (1943).  Wheeler doesn’t fling paint around in search of a subject.

DL: Regardless of Wheeler’s contemporary appeal, for me he stands out because he resists polish and sometimes pushes composition to the edge of comprehension.  Unlike the Transcendental Group in Taos, or the modernists in New York who floated politely assembled geometries, Wheeler’s compositions seem to build volcanic pressure internally. Though he made preparatory drawings, when we look at Wheeler’s paintings he seems to be wrestling with energetic forces that he can barely keep a lid on.  He willingly stepped into treacherous territory.  I guess this is also why we like him, he really means it…he is a believer.

DB: He packs signs into a resolute, atomic-age aesthetic crush, then works the variables of color and linear hierarchy into critical mass.  A plurality of contemporary painters have used a similar strategy, for example Pearson, Burckhardt, and Murray; they get to abstraction by submitting found objects, or found fragments of style, to enormous pressure.  This additive, sign-saturated version of abstraction, not invented by Wheeler but pushed to a limit case by him, allows many contemporary painters to manifest, like Wheeler, a quality of true belief in painting, above and beyond artistic ideology.  Yes, we respond to Wheeler because he is a believer, and more than that –– something close to a prophet.

DL: High praise indeed.

Elizabeth Murray, click to enlarge

Bruce Pearson, click to enlarge

January 11 to February 10, 2013
101 Grand Street, between Wythe Avenue and Berry Street,
Brooklyn, 718 302 2242

Elizabeth Riggle, Overture (for Bob and Ray), 2013. Oil on Canvas, 99 x 54 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Surrounded by Elizabeth Riggle’s lithe paintings of vertebrae, constructed with anatomical know-how, it may strike you that the artist’s very name suggests a limber spine.  And indeed, in Riggle’s show at Art 101 spinal structure sets the agenda, but painterly wriggle room keeps things flexible.  Working in oil in a range of sizes and surfaces, with brushwork splitting the difference between firm modeling and springy graphics, the artist remains faithful to the particularity of bones, each with its ordained role in what she calls the “vertebral opera.”  The two most impressive paint-dramas are a small, monochrome vanitas on wood, Dens Attentive, with vertebra standing in for skull; and Overture (For Bob and Ray), a large canvas in which Riggle riffs on boniness with flamboyant erudition, reimagining the sacral, the lumbar, and the cranial as levitating bulges of fresh, buoyant color.

Gallery open Friday through Sunday, 1 to 6 PM

November 28, 2012 to January 19, 2013
536 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-633-6555

David Humphrey, Pink Couch, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 inches. Courtesy of Fredericks & Freiser

David Humphrey is a jolly image-smasher.  Since the early 1990s he has been notable for paintings of surreal sexiness, postmodern snap, and painterly discrimination.  Overall, there has been a consistent trend from the small and dense to the large and loose.  Some of the loosest paintings yet are currently on display at Fredericks & Freiser; the thinning atmosphere might explain the space helmet on the astronaut who appears in a couple of them.

Wet gesture and windswept void have frequently invaded Humphrey’s sun-kissed suburban moonscapes, paint grammar vying flamboyantly with body and terrain.  But in Humphrey’s recent work, broom-sized gestures and dizzyingly thin expanses of acrylic glaze, hideous/gorgeous and outright quarrelsome, set the figures and their settings adrift in a storm.

In Scratcher (2012), for instance, a sleeping orange man has been severed by a huge blue-gray swipe that’s as feral as a Cy Twombly scrawl or an Albert Oehlen smear.  A zone of elegiac translucency surrounds the sleeper’s foreshortened, Transavanguardia-esque head and exposed nipple.  But the close harmony is shouted down by another huge swipe, this one icky-green, which dominates the upper right.  Below, a flagstone barbecue bolsters a black cat succubus who exacts vengeance on the orange man, or his sleeping bag, or body bag, as it continues past the gray swipe’s amputation.  The cat, whose eyes combust with infinitesimal fireworks, tracks bloody claw marks into the orange, reclaiming it from the calamity of abstraction.

Perhaps the artist’s own 1994 review of a Carl Ostendarp show (reprinted in his smart and lively collection, Blind Handshake) let this particular cat out of the bag:

His work encourages us to wonder if abstraction’s traditional aspiration to inhabit a space outside language has become a point of ridicule. Is a burlesqued form of that aspiration the new way of sustaining it?

And here is Humphrey in a complementary vein on Jörg Immendorff (2007):

Bigness, for Immendorff, was always complicated by crappiness, which, in the vernacular of ’80s German painting, indicated critical distance combined with a refined anarchistic connoisseurship; the artist must not show too much interest in the painting’s quality or risk betraying its radicality.

Put these two insights together and you get something like Humphrey’s new work: paintings that are acerbic and tangy, and resolve, if they do, only at a “critical distance.”  Which is the closest we can get, the paintings argue; nowadays it just isn’t possible to probe true feelings, even exalted ones, or base ones, without first seeing them for the mediated texts they really are.

Irony in Humphrey’s hands, though, is just a starting point for a risky and committed involvement with the karma of the medium.  I see him as a poster boy for the Democracy of Postmodern painting: Sure it’s the absolute worst form of art — except for all the others.  Humphrey’s “crappiness” is exactly what hones the claws of the cat in Scratcher.  She­ is desperate for a toehold at the very threshold of prowess.

Other paintings come down at different points along the spectrum of control, as if rehearsing the history of painterliness.  Kicking Back, (2012) is as cool and masterful as anything Humphrey has done, despite the aggressive presence of a huge brown smudge.  That’s because the smudge hovers within a hierarchy of signs: it can work as a POV depiction of one of those relaxing puffs after a tough day at the office, exhaled by the owner of the receding blue slacks (implicitly the viewer) who plays footsie with her Manolo Blahniks. The upturned floor’s consolidated whiteness, color-boosted with a yellow gradient, wafts the brown smudge right against our eyes, where it functions surprisingly well as Rembrandtian brush-smoke.

David Humphrey, Changing Sneakers, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Fredericks & Freiser

The fleshiest brushwork in the show, and also the most diagrammatic, can be found in The Red and the Blue, (2012) a complex homage to De Kooning, adapting the master’s signature late palette — with strategically placed eyeballs and tears, misregistered glyphs, leftover body crevices, and a possible fart joke added for spice.  Pink Couch, (2012) features, hanging over the furnishing of the title, a Magrittean painting within a painting.  The gag here is that this school-of-Resika landscape is stolidly fluffy while everything outside the frame is John-Wesley superflat, notably a cartoon cutie pie of color — a dubious composite, perhaps, of Manet’s Olympia and her African attendant, complete with cat.  (Is she teasingly covering up, or cowering?)

Humphrey is able to engineer pronounced stereo separation, in many of these paintings, between mess and mastery, between mimicry and mockery.  He dials it up to 11 in Changing Sneakers, (2011) which hurls an enormous abstract pile-up — Thomas-Nozkowski-meets-Amy-Sillman-as-crushed-by-John-Chamberlain —  at a light-struck figure shedding his photo-crisp Nikes.  But the determined young hunk lifts his eyes in another direction.

Everything about the clean-cut bantam in Changing Sneakers reminds me of Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ben, in The Graduate.  Humphrey himself invoked the iconic scene in which Ben is accosted with friendly career advice — “Just one word….Plastics” — in an essay on the sculptor Ian Dawson, who deforms plastic toys, just around the time of his own switch from oils to acrylics; his paintings ever since have been doing R & D on survival skills for “a world now more dramatically polymerized than anything those 1967 characters ever imagined.”

Acrylic surely has its weaknesses: it lacks, of course, the viscous, flesh-like luster of oils — also, for that matter, oil’s tendency toward mud, which in some hands is a renewable resource.  But Humphrey does not reject acrylic’s sickly pallor out of hand, and casts his lot with its plasticky strengths: chiefly, that it dries fast, allowing an artist with racing thoughts to stream consciousness.

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October 5 to 28, 2012
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn (718) 852-4396

Mary Carlson, Four Part Snake, 2010. Glazed ceramic, 41 x 12 x 14 inches. Courtesy of Studio 10

Slaying dragons is messy work, usually reserved for saints and heros, but Mary Carlson takes on a few at her Studio 10 exhibition.  Her weapon of choice is a delightfully brittle sword, the medium of glazed ceramics.  Ceramicists have been baking the hallucinatory and the terrifying into grotesque ornament since antiquity. Carlson, though, is after more than decorum.  Using clay with searching sculptural ingenuity, she defies the tendency of ceramics to prettify, and thus succeeds in killing her beasts and having them too.  Viewers may smile at her delicately clunky monsters, but their unwieldy, segmented bodies, stricken eyes, and elaborate snarls and teeth can leave bite marks of genuine pathos on the soul.

Besides large-scale dragons, Carlson includes a gathering of tiny figurines of dragon-slaying saints inspired by Renaissance depictions, their features and attributes nervously indicated without being overworked, and a pair of toddler-sized fists in glazed porcelain whose exquisite breakaway wrists resemble hatched eggshells.  The mastery of craft in these smaller works contrasts with her cloddish dragons, which flaunt clay’s almost comedic inaptness for hazardous duty.  (Equally outlandish weapons for dragon slaying, a plastic cocktail sword and a tinfoil spear, are wielded by a couple of the saintly figurines.)  The humor in Carlson’s choice of materials cuts both ways, not only against the grandiose tenets of monumental sculpture, but against the cuteness of artisanship; and by the same token her dragons resist pervasive clichés, whether Wagnerian or Potteresque.

Big Blue, a misshapen, 13-foot-long serpent laid out on a feasting table, is all the more hideous a monster, and all the more compelling a sculpture, for abusing teacup materials.  As if digesting a kill in one place while pinching to nothing in another, the dragon’s body – assembled from separately-fired stoneware elements drizzled with blue crackle glaze – swells in a way that makes one think queasily of a blocked intestine, or of an enormous tapeworm crashing a dinner party.

Mary Carlson, Catherine of Alexandria (after Pintorichhio), 2012. Glazed porcelain and plastic sword, 7 x 3 x 3 inches. Courtesy of Studio 10

Carlson’s no-nonsense tabletops, custom fitted to her dragons, can also suggest pathology slabs or fish market counters.  Four Part Snake (2010), though, is not quite ready for filleting: its googly, doglike eyes flicker with the last light of fateful recognition, perhaps of betrayal, while its gaping, floundering head tips the balance of its useless coil of a body like a spent cornucopia.  On the floor below we find a separately titled piece, Pool, which, given its placement, reads as the pitiable creature’s blood.  Yet this shiny pink, plate-sized lump looks more like fake vomit –– it’s as comical as it is tragic.  Is this wounded Goofy dying for our ridiculous, insatiable sins?

However you read Pool, there is blood everywhere in this show, and it creeps up on you. The most carefully modeled and most fearsome of Carlson’s dragons, the fully decapitated Head (2012), rests fang-first on a crimson stain of such direct address –– a spill of watercolor on paper ­­–– that the theme of blood begins, likewise, to soak in.  Meanwhile, Head’s upturned, severed neck reveals Carlson’s expertise in managing folds of interior and exterior, while displaying architectural scale and trim; no fragile table ornament, this bloodthirsty fragment might have fallen from the cornice of a sacrificial altar.  Here and there on the gallery walls, meanwhile, red-beaded embroidery takes the macabre form of enlarged bloodstain splatters and forensic drips.  Even those white porcelain child’s fists can be seen to be tinted red at the thumbnails –– nail polish, perhaps, as applied by Lady Macbeth.

Dragon’s blood in pre-Christian legend could be lethal or magical –– a drop of it scalded Siegfried, yet empowered him with the comprehension of bird talk, thus saving his life.  Carlson’s subversive mastery of different craft traditions (previous work has included a crocheted giant squid, cast brass chicken feet, and vivisected upholstery) always seems aimed at some down-to-earth enactment of ambivalence between death and transfiguration.  She succeeds best of all when indulging a gruesome sense of humor.  If her inner demons tend to resemble slavering, woeful-eyed dogs as much as Renaissance dragons, it only enhances our appreciation of their double nature.  Like the brilliant, curlicued monsters of Raphael and Pinturicchio, Carlson’s, in their own vivacious way, are not quite despicable enough.

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Michelle Segre, installation view of Lost Songs of the Filament at Derek Eller Gallery, 2012.

Cross-breeding the Pop gigantism of Claes Oldenburg and the oozing precionism of Paul Thek, Michelle Segre was at the forefront of a 1990s “return to order,” sculpting imposingly meticulous wax enlargements of natural vanitases—fungal, moldy, and crepuscular.  For all their prescient affinity with the ecological critiques of Roxy Paine, Keith Edmier, Alexis Rockman, et al., Segre’s works seemed to be more interested in channeling the traditional gravitas of Henry Moore.  The new body of work on view at Derek Eller, however, building on several years of funkier, more fantastic surrealism, constitutes a glittering rebirth into the wild.  These colorful improvisations of twisting metals, tensioned fibers, found objects and eccentric plops of plaster electrify the air around them with slightly dangerous charm and something of the ingenuous resourcefulness of toddlers’ drawings, without sacrificing an ounce of Segre’s crisp sculptural command. In some works literal bones of earlier sculptures have been delicately encrusted as relics, their fastidious density tuned like crystal receivers to the play of alien transmissions.

June 1 to June 30, 2012 at 615 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues, New York City, 212-206-6411

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May 6 to June 9, 2012
1 University Plaza, Brooklyn
Hours: weekdays 9am to 6pm, weekends, 10am to 5pm

Installation shot of work by Elana Herzog in the exhibition under review

The exhibition [B19] The Psychic Life of Objects invites artists to mull over the architecture, furniture, and overstuffed décor of Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud’s Vienna office at Berggasse 19, that meth lab of the modern psyche.  The results are smart, absurd, elegant, and wacky –– and sometimes eerily coincidental.  The very photographs, for example, that first documented this shrine and underlie many works in the show were taken by the father of a professor now at Long Island University, where [B19] happens to be mounted –– so the curators Matt Freedman and Laurence Hegarty discovered in medias res.  But read their poignantly hilarious essay (posted on the Romanov Grave website) for particulars about this and other visitations of the uncanny.  There, one also learns that Freedman’s father was a consulting psychiatrist at the trial of John Wayne Gacy.  This murderer of 33 boys was too charming, it seems, to be ruled unfit by insanity, and was ultimately executed –– which may inform one’s encounter with Jude Tallichet’s cast of the requisite analyst’s couch from Professor Dr. Freedman’s office.  Tallichet’s vivid red rubber mold is propped up with fragile struts –– fragile premises? –– and perhaps transmits, infinitesimally, Gacy’s lounging impress.

In all, 19 diverse and lively artists (a coincidental number, no doubt) steer a course between Eros and Thanatos.  Alan Wexler intertwines the misbehaving legs of a pair of chairs of subtly different hue, which reads as libidinous transference.  Francis Cape bends his more solemn, deadpan carpentry to an atypically modern prototype, a therapist’s chair, while referring us to an auto accident that confirms there are no accidents.  (It was en route to therapy.)

Jane Irish, Winter Soldier in 1971 Urn, 2012. Low Fire whiteware, china paint, underglaze and luster, 15 x 11 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Rob de Mar models the hanging plants of B19 minus the dirt and pots, exposing root structure with a flourish that handily maps the subterranean to the subconscious; while Kyle LoPinto turns Freud’s cigars into gnarly rawhide turds, or maybe dried foreskins.  (Sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture, but assuredly not in this case.)

Bill Morrison has made a stately video from archival science films and text that tells the story of his great-grandfather’s rivalry with Freud in the race to exploit the new wonder drug, cocaine.  (Another coincidence: the Morrisons lived across the street from the Freedmans.)  Elana Herzog vivisects Persian carpets with shag sunbursts, telling a story of –– as one of her titles indicates –– Civilization and its Discontents.  David Humphrey’s madcap figurine-assemblage and paintings epitomize free association, libido, and the pleasure principle.  Here he pushes the clutter on Freud’s desk to a cacophonous weirdness zone; while Jennie Nichols’ take on the same subject is somber, orderly, and brown with mock-antiquity –– by way of chocolate bunnies.

Jane Irish’s critical role in [B19] is to remake Freud’s collection of Greek urns as Meissen porcelain, adding an up-to-the-minute anti-war message.  In John Huston’s movie Freud (with an uncredited script by J.P. Sartre) Monty Clift as the father of psychoanalysis is unble to pass through the gates of the cemetery where his own father lies buried, a eureka moment in his derivation of the Oedipus Complex.  Dramatically compressed or not, it’s true that Freud never went six feet under: his remains are on permanent display, as Irish’s proleptic ceramics remind us, in one of his urns.  Fine contributions from Joe Amrhein, Matt Blackwell, Peter Drake and others round out this seriously irreverent exhibition, one in which a seemingly familiar totem brings forth abundant new taboos.

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March 23 to April 15, 2012
464 Seneca Avenue, between Himrod and Harman streets,
Ridgewood, Queens, (718) 381-2962

Jane Dickson, LV42 (Binions), 2012. Oil on canvas, 24 x48 inches. Courtesy of Valentine Gallery

Jane Dickson’s sunless, shadowless neon casino interiors and exteriors grip your eye with a blunt, slow-burning shrewdness, getting right to the point about matters that have deep roots in the torch-lit hells of Caravaggio, the flickering purgatories of Georges de La Tour, and –– nearer to hand –– the existential roadside mercury vapors of George Ault or Edward Hopper.  It is no special insight of Dickson’s that night-for-day Las Vegas is the punitive afterlife our vapidly apocalyptic moment deserves, but artists who’ve risen to the subject –– photographers and filmmakers by and large –– tend to take the visual spectacle at awestruck face value, while treating its thematics with moralizing condescension.  Dickson’s steady, sober vision strips the distracting fluff away down to architectural bones that show casinos to be a kind of peopled re-enactment of 20th century abstraction at its most positivist –– from Kandinsky to Frank Stella to Richard Anuszkiewicz –– and maybe all the more despairing for that.

Dickson’s hieratics of the everyday made its first impact with sharply lurid shadowplays of the Times Square sex industry in the 1980’s, and has various contemporary affinities, including with the East Village punk realism of Martin Wong and Eric Drooker, the luminous urban structuralism of Yvonne Jacquette, and the visionary deliberation of animator Suzan Pitt.  But it is Georges Seurat’s melting conté crayon studies and his Pointillist artifice that now resonate most deeply in Dickson’s erosion of contour, her sensual treatment of auras of light that simplify figures almost to the point of cartoons, yet short of bruising their essential dignity. For some years Dickson forced the issue by painting on Astroturf, a medium of extreme scatter, honing her rationalizing eye on green and blue noise.  Here she applies the softly brutal lessons-learned to canvas, with a new emphasis on subtle contrasts of surface and paint handling.  One might say that Las Vegas’s neon, in all its hyper-synthetic cheer, does for Dickson what blazing limelight did for Seurat: for him, the circus; for her, it’s Circus Circus.

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February 4 to April 14, 2012
522 West 22nd Street and 502 West 22nd Street
between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-243-0200

Terry Winters, Cricket Music, 2010. Oil on linen, 88 x 112 inches. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery

For Terry Winters to be the great painter implied by euphoric reviewers of his recent work, including his current exhibition at Matthew Marks, worthy indeed of comparison with Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Johns (immortals invoked by no means merely as influences), then he would have to have a profound way with materials, specifically with color.  He certainly brings a strong graphic intelligence to bear, making the most of near monochrome palettes, notably earth browns and blacks with acid orange overtones at the beginning of his career.  A characteristically dynamic engagement with printmaking seems to have taught Winters how to work layers of contrasting oil colors additively.  The resulting informational overload can be arresting, intensified by the besmirched hues that ripple where wet corrupts wet.  Restricting the palette has been good for Winters.

In his current body of work, Winters uses only the pigments traditionally known as lakes –– fixed dyes, which are luminous, oily, and transparent.  This particular palette constraint began with the Knotted Graphs (2008), part of a methodology that also involves the direct tracing, evidently, of superimposed topology diagrams.  Winters has said that the choice of transparent colors is intended to reveal the layers of his process –– though process has always been Winters’s primary declaration of strength; and in any case, liberal admixtures of opaque white in these works tend, just as much, to cover things up.  What is revealed by the lakes, given that Winters has access to a full turn of the color wheel is –– all too plainly –– lackluster chromatic sensibility.

One might well be reminded of Matisse by Winters’s topological still life, Tessellation Figures (4) (2011) in which toothed disks, presumably of higher-math pedigree but resembling flowers, hover in puffy, sensuous bursts of blue-tinted white over crisscrossing patterns of watery blues and greens. In the 1910s, Matisse would set greenery against blue-white tablecloths with similar intent.  But that palette served merely as theme, allowing Matisse to weave a set of variations in which, for example, virile blacks, luscious roses, and wounding slashes of red and green might elaborate a creamy illogic of light that burns as it caresses.  When Winters, by contrast, tries to expand the blue-to-yellow color space of this work with washes of red, he creates gormless dead spots.  Where he sticks with his home colors, he runs out of ideas: whole quadrants of the canvas feel abruptly colored-in –– and not with the panache of Alex Katz, nor the deliberately less than ingratiating haste of Martin Kippenberger.

Cricket Music (2010) is even more stagnant.  The painting clings to blue, gray, and white after forays into a wider palette –– so the translucent process reveals –– attaining the sickly, over lit pallor that recalls black-and-white video played on a maladjusted color TV.  If only Winters had gone all the way!  Instead, the light is generically dappled.  The title apparently refers to a sound composition by Walter De Maria, but seems to gesture also at the synesthetic moonlight chorusings of Charles Burchfield.  Either way, the painting’s interfering knots and pentagram fragments, which should vibrate and dance with Winters’s big ideas about nature, information, and the cosmic manifold, are stuck in one-dimensional color space, all dressed up with no place to go.

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures (4), 2011. Oil on linen, 80 x 76 inches. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery

When Winters brings chromatic contrast into play the effect is no more musical.  A smattering of blue tiles detaches and pops from the torquing chain-link of orange and white diamonds that prevails in Tessellation Figures (11) (2011), while, reciprocally, orange diamonds intrude on the blue and green carapace of Tessellation Figures (6) (2011).  These lunges of blue/orange opposition issue muddy skid marks, but no secondary tonalities to sustain the drama, to give it heft and suspense.  Nor does Winters seem to grasp how an acute, further dissonance can thrust a simple antagonism into visionary, perhaps psychedelic keys –– the sort of lateral move that is second nature to color voyagers like Phillip Taaffe or Dana Schutz.  A richer palette does build up in Tessellation Figures (9) (2011), which shows Winters plunging into the interstices of his overlaid patterns of whited purples and yellows, oranges and blues, but there is little sense of color architecture beyond layers of binary opposition, and the result is a kind of Monet lite.

If, in his prints and drawings, and indeed in his more urgently graphic paintings, that strategy of color-as-information can often hit, it consistently misses when Winters has to lean on deep color thoughts to create breathing room, which is what he has had to do since domesticating his diligently tangled brushwork within traced topological patterns.  For all their spatial signifying and handwringing, these Lissajous curves, knot states, and sunflower spirals arrive flat on the canvas and tend to stay that way.  We can view, down the block in an ancillary Marks space, Winters at work surfing, grabbing, and printing similar images as transparencies suitable for overhead projection –– except that here they are laminated into witty collages and presented as a suite called Notebook (2003-11).

The gee-whiz science porn that has long caught Winters’ eye collides in Notebook with other found imagery and text, in ways that often bristle with dada absurdity, caustic observation, and sheer silliness.  Could this be the rebirth of a buoyant self-critique distinctly lacking in Winters’s work since the cannily constipated husks and pods of the 1980s?  In one of the Notebook pages, an oil color chart is overlaid with text purporting to graph “skill level” against “challenge level.”  Where challenge is moderate and skill low, we get “worry”; adjust the skill variable to high and we get, with flawless logic, “control.”  The full diagram comprises four pin-wheeling oppositions of attribute, as if to decode the gridded march of purple and gold paint chips beneath –– though one can’t help speculating as to the artist’s broader interest in a skill/challenge paradigm.

We don’t normally associate the prodigious Winters with “apathy,” “boredom,” and “relaxation” –– qualities resulting, according to the graph’s diagnostic wisdom, from a low challenge level as plotted against ascending degrees of skill.  But neither do his current paintings come close to the high-challenge states of “anxiety,” “arousal,” and “flow,” those usually reliable attributes of the Winters expressionist juggernaut, varying according to the flux of his proficiency.

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January 5 to February 11, 2012
511 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 989 5467

In previous shows, you had to ask to see Lori Ellison’s drawings.  Her elaborate doodles on lined paper were kept behind the desk, in plastic sleeves or retained in their floppy, spiral-bound notebooks.  At McKenzie, a number of these densely florid ballpoints have finally been liberated.  Delicately mounted on the wall, they assume their true dimensions.

Lori Ellison, Untitled, 2003, ink on notebook paper, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art

Drawing is fundamental to Ellison’s practice.  Worthy of contemplation on their own terms, these works are the quaking earth beneath the relatively quiescent structurings of her better-known paintings.  Deprived of the context of the drawings, Ellison’s careful geometric abstraction can look almost too polished, too knowing.  In proximity to the drawings’ thorny touch and seismic agitation, however, these Insider paintings look a lot more Outsider.

The biomorphic logic of Ellison’s goth drawing sensibility bursts at the margins, pushing against the limits of dime store materials and human perseverance –– as urgent and resourceful as a prison tattoo.  By default, it induces mesmerizing claustrophobia.  One drawing piles up tiny wagon-wheel rosettes in airless suffusion; another seems to depict undulating skin caught in a shallow relief of ropey netting; a third could be a dissection study of spongy tissue squashed into a box.

Not all the ballpoints are super-dense.  One pleasingly restrained drawing floats what looks like a continuously bending, mile-long bicycle chain above a luminous, wooly ground.  Another airy drawing suggests an unraveling Celtic knot, with fine indications at crossings as to which strand passes above and which below.

If these images are abstractions, they are carefully illusionistic ones, with light-struck volume and precise contrasts of texture, weight, and surface.  On the other hand, Ellison can elicit dizziness by graphic means alone, as with one lapping curve motif that generates something like inside-out, space-filling yams.  Even more purely graphic are her numerous grids and webs: impossibly dense, emphatically wobbly, but geometric to the core.  And it is these ballpoint abstractions of triangles and squares, informed by the occasional lighter touch just described, that locate points of departure for Ellison’s current painting practice.

McKenzie is showing a few earlier paintings, more sculptural and imagistic, but Ellison’s recent two-color gouaches on wood panel, methodically constructed by applying a dark pigment over a light ground of near hue, are the main event.  They are calm where the drawings are frantic; polished and professional where the drawings are abject.  Even when taking direct handoffs of restless motifs from the drawings, the paintings tame these pressurized nets, cages, and cells, toeing a line of polite, measured exactitude.

Three untitled gouaches from 2011, for instance, one purple, one green, and one blue, make use of a freely tiling triangle motif.  The blue version exploits variations in paint density to release the eye into the pattern’s winding, ambiguous depths, which are only implicit in ballpoint.  When this improvisational mesh of geometry is activated, it can dance like the phosphorescent scales of a dragon.  Here, the upgrade in materials provides elegant compensation for the loss of the drawings’ scratch and fury.

But that is the exception to the rule.  The purple and green versions of the motif, though lovely, remain comparatively inert; as with most of these gouaches, the paint is applied with as little inflection as possible, flattening the image into a dispassionate, serially tinted monochrome.  The two paintings that carry off this cool approach best are lively figure-ground interplays of overlapping rectangles, which look as if Ellison had scattered decks of tiny cards over the light-colored ground, applied a coat of darker color, and then removed the cards.  Jagged conjunctions, reading as perforations, suggest fragments of Islamic ornament.

Lori Ellison, Untitled, 2010, gouache on wood panel, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art

Typically, however, her patterns are both more rigid and more handmade, and any associations with sacred architecture or textiles, rather than buoying the paintings up with transcendental energy, tend instead to anchor them in the busy-work of their construction.  Two gouaches, for example, interweave negative and positive triangles into concentric oval bands, like a hooked rug, around an oval void.  Again, Ellison rests her case on the pattern alone, and this one has its nuance and starry fascination –– even, perhaps, a narrative of memento mori in the vacated portrait niche at its center.  But these modest devotional panels remain actual-size.  Their repudiation of psychic sweat, rather than releasing the pattern to do its cosmic work, seems to take for granted that the decorative should lead to the visionary.  As I suggested earlier, Ellison’s paintings can seem all too quotational: not only of tribal, folk, and religious arts, but of Mondrian, Reinhardt, and Frank Stella; of Agnes Martin, Myron Stout, and Bridget Riley; and most of all, of a generational embrace of “hypnotic geometry” –– Raphael Rubinstein’s description of the post-psychedelic Brooklyn-centric scene in which Ellison is well known.  (Rubenstein’s phrase comes from a brochure text written for Ellison, to which  I also contributed.)

At McKenzie, however, Ellison’s paintings can be seen in context as healing balms of meditative objectivity, counterbalances to the blazing obsession of her drawings. The careful craft of her small, luminous gouaches redirects the drawings’ arrested teenage alienation onto higher planes–planes to which Ellison aspires with all the dogmatic fervor of the self-taught convert.  Ellison’s knowingness, in other words, is the exact opposite of Insider sophistication.  If the paintings presume too much, it is from a rare, authentic mixture of erudition, innocence, and desperate hunger.

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October 6 to November 5, 2011
536 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 633-6555

Gary Panter, Sweat It, 2010. Acrylic on canvas: 35.5 x 79.5 inches. Courtesy Fredericks & Freiser, New York

Gary Panter’s paintings are but a subdivision in his empire of imagery, which ranges from astonishing sketchbooks and seminal underground comix to set design, illustration, and packaging.  This graphic cornucopia is conceived and executed, most of it, in layers of color separation, even when not in fact being prepared for printing; with acrylic as with comix, Panter’s customary technique is to improvise figurative outlines atop vividly colored background fields.

This layering methodology sets limits on the paintings, a selection of which, from 1986 to 2011, is on view at Fredericks and Freiser.  But it can also be a strength, since Panter’s line is legendary.  Jimbo, Panter’s punk expressionist comix hero, who first saw the glare of night in 1983, virtually originated a style of jittery, apocalyptic humor the times required, while tearing an anarchic hole in the defiant hair shirt of crackerjack craftsmanship pioneered by control freaks like R. Crumb and Robert Williams.  At Fredericks, a Panter painting on paper, Deadlier Than Male (1986) exemplifies Jimbo’s adventure-comics-on-angel-dust savagery.  Its potent black linework chisels blocks of background color with jagged menace.  More recent works on paper, such as Flypaper, Wanting, and Water (all 2004), float a cutesy, cartoony syntax of robots, gizmos and widgets in black outline over layers of broadly brushed neons in a Polke-like perceptual jumble.  Here Panter’s command of line as a highly credentialed designer and mastermind of retro-futurist style achieves doodling momentum, with painterly effect.

Gary Panter, Door Jam, 2009. Acrylic on canvas: 44.5 x 35.5 inches. Courtesy Fredericks & Freiser, New York

On canvas, however, Panter can seem lost.  A group of new wide-format friezes dispenses with the outline, opting instead for blockings-out of photographically derived figures that float over a vibrating geometry of chromatic opposites.  Sweat It (2010) is both the best and worst on view.  Its foreground layer, a mod squad of leather-clad hippies, enacts bits of counterpoint with the forced-perspective Op striping beneath, which comes to suggest a knock-off Vasarely Don Kirchner bandstand.  But confoundingly, Panter is unconcerned to rework areas where flesh and clothing wash through, stranding the responsive eye in a nowhere land common to all his canvasses;  however interesting as images, they tend to be neither substantial nor atmospheric enough to be self-sufficient as paintings.

Panter’s ambivalence about painting is quite different from the allergic reaction of comix gods like Crumb and Williams to the pretensions and hypocrisies of Modernist rhetoric, let alone contemporary gallery chic, which are specific targets of their wrath.  Panter the historian recently co-curated a show of Zap Comix originals at Andrew Edlin that hung concurrently with MoMA’s German Expressionism, The Graphic Impulse, and certain lineages were apparent.  On one side, there is the “radical conservatism” of Otto Dix and George Grosz (the phrase is from Carroll Dunham’s first-rate Artforum appreciation of Dix) –– their twisted, precisionist truth-telling and Dada shock tactics –– which one can see reborn in the masterful taboo graphics of the psychedelic underground.

German Expressionism, however, was powered by alternating currents.  Grosz and Dix themselves were cattle-prodded by the fracturing vision of Kirchner (Ernst Ludwig, not Don); his most profound student, Max Beckmann, influenced farther descendants such as de Kooning and Guston –– all part of the canon despised by Crumb and Williams, but swallowed whole by the omnivore Panter, who has never had a chip on his shoulder about painting.

Still, Panter disdains the fleshy physicality of the medium.  Painting needn’t be thick, but it must be tactile –– the rush of vision needs something to work against: resistant facts, tooth.  Perhaps Panter, like many another contemporary painter, misreads the expediency of Warhol and Rauschenberg (like Panter, an escapee from a Texas religious cult).  It is not so easy to straddle the crevasse between real McCoy and reproduction, between object and image.

This divide goes back to the essential bipolarity of the German Expressionists, who jumped on printmaking and pamphleteering to spread word of the fiercely subjective new art as broadly as possible.  The genius of the marketplace may yet resolve these vectors.  But at the Edlin show, it was a bit of a toss-up as to whether the pristine Chelsea setting added art value to the venerated Zap originals, by virtue of admission to the market’s most gated community, or subtracted cult value, by tendering these relics as mere drawings made by mere artists.  “Today,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936, “the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden.”  To put it another way, the more copies in circulation, the more sacred the original.  But Benjamin’s prophecy was only half right: the oft-cited “aura” of the unique, old-fashioned art work has not, correspondingly, withered away, despite the coolest, most mechanized flattenings of Rauschenberg, Warhol and their heirs; indeed, because of them.

The most seductive canvas in the show, Door Jamb (2009), is a rebus of kiddy-consumerist textures in bright blues and greens against a floating world of orange and purple –– yet tellingly, it looks that much better as a page in Panter’s limited-edition book “The Land Unknown.”  In ink, the painting’s chromatic pop is more saturated, like an Ad Reinhardt Golden Book; its candy-coated innuendoes –– a magic wand, a keyhole, a leaky pipe –– work as trapdoors to adjacent red light districts in Panter’s graphic sprawl.  The reproduction, in this case, has all the aura.

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