March 7 to April 20, 2013
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

Mary Lucier, Wisconsin Arc, 2009-2013, Single-channel video installation. Color. Sound. 26:00 (video still). Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

In “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire envisions a painter of “the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” He also condemns photography, which for him too easily gratifies the popular desire for images. But Baudelaire’s words about the painter could well apply to video artist Mary Lucier, whose latest piece, Wisconsin Arc, combines constructions of light and contrapuntal movement with a sympathetic documentation of everyday life. In this highly formalized record of bourgeois recreation, comparable to Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Grande Jatte, Lucier engages both popular culture and high artistic ideals.

These new videos were made during two years of teaching in Milwaukee. The works unfold progressively in the gallery, beginning with a three-minute flat screen video at the entrance. Like the predella to an altarpiece, this loop, visible from the street, entices viewers with narrative scenes, leading into “Wisconsin Arc”, the more ambitious projection in the inner gallery. There’s indeed some sense of a chapel in that chamber, with benches before large images of Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum, whose monumental window onto Lake Michigan creates a cathedral-like space, with networks of reflected light.

Shot on a beach near the museum, the more documentary and informal “predella” video, entitled Beauty and the Beast, follows a Hmong family group filming one another on the shore, seemingly aware of Lucier’s camera on them: observing and being observed. Lucier implicitly acknowledges this fundamental condition of our public life, while the obvious fact of the family’s ethnicity leaves open the question of what social divisions underlie the popular democracy of the beach.  As viewers pass into the inner gallery and the more sophisticated recreational context of the art museum, the passage is hung with video stills printed on silk, suspended like prayer flags along the gallery wall. These exemplify the multiple potentials of digital images, including their commercial value. The passage might reference the museum shop with its omnipresent commodification of culture. Like the question of ethnic diversity, the issue of art’s complicity in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” is acknowledged but left open.

Mary Lucier, Beauty and the Beast, 2009-2013, SIngle-channel video. Color. Sound. 3:00 (installation view). Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

These undertones of contemporary media ethnography give way to a starkly formal image in the opening section of Wisconsin Arc, a close-up of a glass with ice cubes. Centered hugely in the frame, it creates a lens through which we view the distorted figures of passers-by on a distant walkway. The message implicit in this surrogate eye is the camera’s authority, as it imposes itself on the visual process. Its active intervention is only extended in the editing of the next two sections.

If we think in musical terms, the middle section would be the scherzo, with its hyperactive pace, as amateur performers move through the space in front of Calatrava’s giant window. Along with this intricately choreographed sequence come layered images of the beach and the lake, dissolving the architectural frame while introducing footage of the family from the “predella” video.

The final section is the longest, set to the leisurely pace of a group of walkers. Now down on the beach itself, the camera tracks a panoramic vista as it picks up and follows a man and two women who are  carrying their own cameras. The man acknowledges Lucier with a glance before strolling on into what becomes a fugue of layered tracking shots. Sequences of the group overlap with one another and combine with other shots until the initial group re-emerges, approaching us again, and the procession repeats itself. By varying the opacity of the layers, and manipulating the speed of the projection, Lucier treats the people and landscape as visual elements in a larger composition.

Indeed, the sixteen-minute duration of this loop prolongs the simple pleasure of viewing and being viewed into a timeless, meditative continuity. Given our conditioned expectation of quick editing and punchy messages, it comes as a mild surprise each time the group reappears for yet another swing along the beach. For those who recognize the musical accompaniment – the intro to Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” – the continuity extends into the past, into a primeval ‘fifties realm, before the invention of video art.

This attitude towards time distinguishes Wisconsin Arc from Street, a video by James Nares currently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nares has recorded passersby in New York in slowed motion and heightened detail, like Lucier, but where Nares emphasizes a sequential movement through space and time, Lucier layers her sequences to create a less linear, more forgiving temporal structure. Like the Soviet experimental filmmaker Dziga Vertov in “Man with a Movie Camera”, which concludes on a human eye merged with a camera lens, she integrates time, space, people and technology.

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November 29, 2012 to January 5, 2013
51 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

Richard Walker, Bust, 2011. Oil on canvas, 22 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

Offered a residency in the historic Haining House near Edinburgh, Scottish painter Richard Walker responded with a series of modestly scaled canvases, setting up his easel each day in the common rooms of the house to depict the objects and furnishings left by its most recent owners. But as he progressed, Walker brought to his project interventions of his own, so as to extend its artistic ambitions well beyond its initial documentary premise.

Like a movie director, Walker deliberately kept the lighting subdued, so as to produce a visual drama of shapes and images emerging from darkness. There’s tension in the seepage of light around shutters and curtains; trees loom, framed by curtains just beyond the intimate clutter of books and lamps. The formal staircase provides a stage for domestic drama. Mirrors sometimes provide ways to enlarge and complicate these interior spaces, but Walker goes much further, to incorporate photography and digital projection, the ubiquitous new media that now extend the scope of our daily lives. They enlarge the compass of his documentation, by taking, for example, a family photograph in one room and projecting it in another, where it seems to be observed by a sculpted head (Bust, all 2011).

These virtual images bring ambiguous life to the memories that suffuse the house and construct new layers in its family history. They provide the viewer with something like trails of clues – a lamp in one painting reappears in another, offering some stable evidence as to the layout of the room. In one painting, Pamela, a woman’s figure – real or projected – appears by a distant pool table, evoking, as Edward Hopper’s often do, some unspoken drama.

Yet here there is no secret story to uncover, no Agatha Christie mystery of hidden crime. Rather, once our attention is engaged, Walker presents us with more philosophical conundrums about the role of painting in its contemporary media environment. Like painters from Chardin to Braque, Walker incorporates the tools of his trade in his paintings: in Brown Interior, for instance, he depicts a glowing laptop along with the projection it spawns, and the scrims and poles of his projection apparatus, as though to make honest acknowledgement of his process. He thus also acknowledges our complexly mediated relations to the past, to one another, and to ourselves in a world as interpreted by Marshall McLuhan.

Richard Walker, Brown Interior, 2011. Oil on canvas, 18-1/2 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

Walker’s argument for painting’s relevance within this contemporary media environment is convincing on the purely visual level, where his painterly touch grounds his conceptual superstructure in materials. Worked wet into a dark ground, his strokes of light hover on the verge of legibility, with a poignancy that recalls the way good painting has traditionally endowed its subjects with life – a drama repeatedly enacted as his paint lends substance to transparent films of projected photos. The images themselves and the shadows they generate provide a formally satisfying interplay of dark and light, punctuated by the emergence of faces or other recognizable details amid more ambiguous patches of luminous pigment, often contrasted to more sharply defined silhouettes, as in Fireplace and Shadow.

Walker acknowledges the heritage of Cubism in these complexly articulated compositions, and his work goes beyond contemporary debates about painting and technology to open up, as Cubism did, a deeper questioning of our commonsense view of the perceived world. His paintings address themes of consciousness and presence discussed recently by the philosopher and perceptual psychologist Alva Noë, who asks, for example, how my awareness of a person in the room next door differs from my perception of the person in front of me, or from a memory of that person. If the eye, as is now generally acknowledged, does not present us with a high resolution photograph of the world before us, then our perception becomes a much more complicated interplay of active construction with the passive reception of light. We select and compose the objects of our attention. Walker’s intriguing blend of active construction with more passive, retinal responses to light obliges us as viewers to seek out the constant structures we take for granted, to ask again the question, “What do we see?” He thus engages his work not just with new visual technologies but also in an evolving understanding of our place in the world.

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March 22 – April 28, 2012
528 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-315-0470

Catherine Lee, Alice, 2009-2010. Glazed raku ceramic with stainless steel wire, 105 units in 5 rows of 21 each, 93.25 x 270 x 1 inches overall, 16.5 x 10 x 1 inches each. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong

Catherine Lee’s new paintings, a series entitled “Quanta” (2011-12), seem to glow from within. Composed on pencil-drawn grids, the paintings are hand crafted in layers of pigment, applied square by square and stroke by stroke.  The grid provides a foil for the sensually inflected material surfaces. What at first glance seem monochromes are actually “duets” between a base color and at least one contrasting color applied over it. The application, without the help of masking tape, leaves irregular edges, and the underlying colors show through to varying degrees; the seepage of colors and flickers of light at their edges create complex perceptual effects. Sometimes they suggest surfaces of low relief, like ceramic tiles or woven mats, but paintings like Slate Night (Quanta #10), (2011) also look like pixelated monitor screens.

As a complement to the 18 oil paintings, the exhibition features Alice, an array of 105 ceramic forms mounted in grid formation on the wall of an adjoining room. Like heart shaped knives, bound at the handles by stainless steel wires, the forms seem archaic and mysterious, displayed like archaeological specimens, sharing a family resemblance like leaves of a plant, but each unique. Their red, raku-fired surfaces recall the concentrated colors of Chocolate Cadmium (Quanta #21), (2012) albeit generated by a different sort of alchemy.  Names of family members and places inscribed on the pieces allude to personal content in a literal way; Alice is the artist’s mother, and 105 the age she jokingly claims. Lee records what Matisse once termed “a moment in the life of the artist”: her objects gather up feelings and memories, invoked in ritualistic repetition, for which the grid provides an armature.

Catherine Lee, Slate Night (Quanta #10), 2011. Oil on canvas, 54 x 54 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong

In Quanta, our focus is less on the individual elements; attention is diffused, but there’s still a psychological charge. If Alice recalls Lee’s earlier wall installations, like her Alphabet Series, (1991-95), in which cast bronze objects with lush patinas referenced an alphabet of place names, Quanta harks back still further, to her Mark Paintings from the 1970s, which were also grids, but more like drawings, with zigzag lines inscribed in each small square; austere and contemplative, like early Agnes Martin, they used the mesh of the grid to establish a personal space.

The irregular patches that fill the grids of the new paintings create a similarly intimate space, but the subject, front and center, is color. Lee favors strong primaries, along with variations on black and white, yet each painting aims to create its own particular effect. The overlaying of contrasting colors, akin to the constructive facture of late Cézanne, opens up a wide array of possibilities. Ranging from six inches square to almost six feet, the paintings also vary in the density of their grids. The small ones, on which the marks have more material presence, include Brevity (Quanta #25), (2012) very dense and virtually gray, and When Things Go Wrong (Quanta #17), (2012) in which black patches over red create the effect of neon.

Lee’s patches of paint recall the famous “yellow patch of wall” in Vermeer’s “View of Delft”, which Marcel Proust’s character, the writer Bergotte, longingly admires as he dies.  Like Proust, Lee associates memories with intense sensory experiences. Her own yellows vary from the warmth of August Like Suns, Yellow Cd (Quanta #20) to the desiccated gold of Ivory Sahara (Quanta #1), (2011) or the lemony Dream of Reason (Quanta #23), (2012). Lee’s patches, of course, are more abstract than Vermeer’s, or than the shapes in Alice, yet their regular repetition is undercut by irregularities of application that keep our attention shifting; elements group and regroup. As in quantum mechanics, where aspects of individual particles remain indeterminate, meaning is displaced onto the overall field. The shifting energies suggest brain activity, as networks are constantly activated and renewed.

Rosalind Krauss argued in a 1979 essay that the grid retains its interest in contemporary art because it enables an underlying spirituality to lurk within modern materialism. She notes in particular its association with nineteenth-century studies of physiological optics, the sort of investigations that inspired painters like Georges Seurat. More recently, the Lacanian art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has brought renewed scrutiny to Vermeer’s “patch” (pan, in French); for him, like Lee, layering of patches emphasizes painting as “colored material rather than descriptive sign”. As Lee negotiates new territory for the grid, moving away from the specific objects and familiar armature of her wall installations – and from literal references to particular persons or places – she generalizes and amplifies the realm of memory, which now seeks a home in the measured sensuality of her seductive fields of pigment. While “Quanta” as a title implies the extension of physiological optics into the globalized space of electronics, the works on view reassert the efficacy of painting itself.

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January 12 to February 18, 2012
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 414-4144

Thomas Scheibitz, A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events, 2011. Oil, vinyl, lacquer, pigment marker and spray paint on canvas, 74-3/4 x 114-1/8 inches. Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

There’s no explicit message in Thomas Scheibitz’s multifaceted project at Tanya Bonakdar, but its sheer scale and ambitious organization demand interpretation. They evoke the idealistic Bauhaus vision of architectural synthesis, and Scheibitz’s inventive integration of collage, painting and sculpture, while rooted in the contemporary visual environment, is inspired by the high modernism of Bauhaus style, with its bold, functional forms and its basis in the grid. The large painting that lends the exhibition its title consists of a grid with nine compartments; the sharply defined planes that connect their disparate contents build tensions between flatness and depth. While Scheibitz inclines more towards the whimsy of Paul Klee than to the systematism of Walter Gropius, there’s nonetheless an underlying dialectic to his method.

Scheibitz begins by collecting images, from the visual information that populates our computer screens to more refined photos of fashion, art and typography, which he assembles on worksheets and then elaborates upon with hand-drawn riffs; these personally inflected images give rise to denser collages, with components loosely organized in vertical/horizontal arrays. Scheibitz brings a sophisticated eye for abstraction to these overall compositions, in which contrasts in context and color generate connections across boundaries: everyday objects combine with images of his own works, classical sculpture with advertisements, and black and white photos with neon. Suggesting a generative function to this cross-fertilization, the five digital prints in this series are entitled A.G.C.T., for the nucleic acids in DNA.

Sixteen small paintings, set widely apart on the walls of the large gallery, could then be seen as cultures, in which essential features of the archived materials are isolated and refined. Often taking geometric figures or motifs from typography as a basis for improvisation, Scheibitz uses bold, dark outlines to carve out shapes, sometimes with cubistic precision and sometimes with cartoonish animation. The outlines lend them a graphic quality, but with a human inflection. A photo of a wedge of cheese gives rise to a ghostly face. The one grid painting in this group, with its compartments ambiguously brushed out, is hung diagonally, like an eccentric window.

Thomas Scheibitz, Worksheet, 2011. Photographs and newspaper cuttings with mixed media on paper, 17-1/2 x 14 inches. Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Sculptures also spin off from these images, sometimes with functional motifs, but elsewhere with more enigmatic whimsy. A white column bears a row of black frames, like an empty film clip, while a vertical box shaped something like a lower-case “h” sprouts a row of balls on its arched spine. But A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events, the major painting in the show, seems to work against this proliferation of images: it compresses its separate compartments into an overall composition.

Into this highly abstracted construction, Scheibitz weaves further allusions to modernist predecessors. Like Mondrian, he restricts himself to black, gray, and the primary colors, albeit freely modulated. At top center is a circle, suggesting the face of a clock – an organizing mechanism for “events”, but without hands, like the clock in Matisse’s Red Studio, an emblem of the timeless space of art. In the center below it, diagonal lines shift from flat patterns into the third dimension, recalling Paul Klee’s pedagogical diagrams of points developing into lines and planes; farther right, the planes open inward to construct a room. Other suggestions of depth imply a hidden internal structure. A wide brushstroke obscures part of the upper left panel, and the arc spanning the bottom center seems part of a bigger circle somewhere behind the grid – perhaps another, larger timepiece. This is a panorama that still leaves things covered up and ambiguous.

There’s an ad hoc quality to the central blue diagonal that breaks out of its frame – order here seems less imposed by the grid than to grow out of it. Scheibitz relies on the Bauhaus method of “Gestaltung”: arranging visual elements on a grid, so as to encourage intuitive orders to emerge. For all its finely articulated construction, “A Panoramic VIEW” retains some open-ended informality, an internalized restlessness. Some areas are only loosely brushed in; colors seep from under the borders of the planes at right center, in contrast to the sharp outlines that define the banana-shaped protrusion to their left, evidence of a constant dialectic between closing in and opening up. The “Basic Events” of the exhibition’s title might well refer to the ongoing proliferation of intuitive connections.

Scheibitz has extended a classical modernist style to embrace our late capitalist culture of constructed forms and digital images. From his informal collection of photographic reproductions emerge not modernism’s high visions of utilitarian progress, but impulses more playful and unexpected. There’s no returning to origins, but by winnowing out the basic visual elements in his archive, Scheibitz taps a reservoir of optimistic energy and affords our imaginations a space of free play.

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November 22, 2011 to January 21, 2012
525 W 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 445 0051

George McNeil, Des Moines Landscape, 1969. Oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe.

Dating from a period in which Abstract Expressionism was being eclipsed by new kinds of art, George McNeil’s paintings of  the 1960s show no let up in expressionistic intensity or compositional rigor. Rather, McNeil seems to hunker down for the long haul, trying to forge something solid and enduring out of Action Painting, as Cézanne did out of Impressionism. Confronted by a climate increasingly hostile to painting, he insists on the basic principles of vivid color, solid construction and compressed space upheld by his teacher, Hans Hofmann; he tightens up his compositions until, as though in response to some neglected principle of physics, gestural shapes become massive, and primitive figures emerge.

A founding member of the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, a group identified with cleanly defined Cubist structure, McNeil found his way into more psychologically charged painting via Hofmann’s combination of expressionistic gestures with constructive discipline. McNeil aspired to be “completely sensate”, a process that, while aiming for spontaneity, involved long periods of revision, during which he sometimes resorted to a blowtorch to remove unwanted layers of dried pigment. As a student, I visited his studio in the mid-seventies: McNeil liked to start from a pile of random objects, using them to establish reference points on canvas, suggestive of movements through space. He showed us a canvas in progress on the floor, stretched on a panel – “so you can jump on it.” Pouring and scraping, he scanned ambiguous forms suspended in liquid pigments for signs of emerging life.

The eight small panels exhibited here are especially dense. Applied with gestural abandon, McNeil’s swaths of paint are charged with inchoate feelings that defy confinement by drawing. Yet out of the same passion comes an urge to organize. Even in a small painting like Des Moines Landscape 7/12/69 (1969), measured fields of deep red and blue are weighed against a yellow shape, and poignant touches of light emerge from the general flux. As with others in this series, gestural shapes suggest ragged trees and glimpses of sky, traces of more recognizable forms. Massive composition is tempered by a seductive lightness of touch, in delicate lines and traces of color suspended in translucent washes.

George McNeil, Game II, 1968. Oil on linen, 75 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe.

These improvisations find fuller resolution in the five larger paintings, all from 1960-1969. The open gestures of Lenox (1960) mass together, and the more self-contained shapes in Asphodel (1962) and Game II (1969) assume the weight and contours of bodies – one hesitates to say “figures”, since they emerge in a less intentional way than do de Kooning’s Women or Guston’s Klansmen. McNeil encloses and squeezes his shapes, trying to endow every area with substance. There’s something wildly eccentric about Game II, in which an elongated “leg” connects to a torso with its head downturned along the side of the canvas, contorted like one of Picasso’s Dionysian dancers. The ochre shape compressed between leg and arm exemplifies the surface tension McNeil cultivates, by lending background shapes a positive character; even the acid-green fields of poured paint around the body assume an enameled hardness, like cloisonné.

Of many artists who studied with Hofmann, McNeil may have worked out most thoroughly his teacher’s fusion of analytical rigor and raw expression. He also exploits Jackson Pollock’s practice of working on the floor, approaching his canvas from all sides, to generate images that could only arise from that process of painting. More than Hofmann, in fact, whose “push-pull” tends to rely on colored rectangles suspended against vertical curtains of paint, McNeil’s acrobats take on a total, more personal, identification with the spaces of his works; they test the limits of the frame with a full range of mobility.

References to figures and landscapes, with place names as titles, call to mind works like de Kooning’s Merritt Parkway (1959), which also cultivates breadth and simplicity. But de Kooning’s mark making is more open, and his figures tend to dissolve into their environments.  McNeil’s assume mass and solidity, even as they develop in more unexpected ways. His weighty shapes have more in common with Philip Guston’s emergent, ambiguous forms of the mid-sixties, which prefigure the outlined objects of his cartoon images.

McNeil worked on through the 1970s, increasingly isolated in New York in his devotion to Abstract Expressionism. His improvised figures – angels, mythological characters – are sometimes humorous but also heroic. In the 1980s, he emerged again on the gallery scene, superficially linked to the youth-dominated culture of Neo-expressionism. But that association, and the exuberant productivity of that period in his work, has tended to obscure the depth and rigor of his accomplishments.  This exhibition helps restore the balance; McNeil’s struggle to define imagery in abstraction argues strongly for his historical significance, both in relation to other Abstract Expressionists and to the overall trajectory of painting after modernism.

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Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973. Oil on canvas. 196.8 x 262.9 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

In his 1994 book, Understanding Comics, artist Scott McCloud considers the cross-fertilization of words and pictures in comics and observes that verbal and visual arts have moved closer over the past century. He might have used Philip Guston as an example. For all his physical involvement with paint, Guston was also a consummate man of words: not only did he borrow from comics and use words in his paintings, but he engaged with language at all levels – avid reader, tireless conversationalist, eloquent writer, and voluble panelist and lecturer. He studied allegory and collaborated with poets.

Appropriately, poet Clark Coolidge, one of those collaborators, has compiled Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations (University of California Press, 2011, with an introduction by Dore Ashton), assembling documents generated during Guston’s development from WPA murals through abstraction and back to the personal form of representation he practiced from the late 1960s until his death in 1980.  These can be usefully read in conjunction with Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works, a compact, multifaceted analysis of that productive last decade by David Kaufmann (University of California Press, 2010), himself a poet and critic.

While Guston liked to stress the continuity of painting, his own career remains defined by rupture, by the paintings of hooded figures in his 1970 Marlborough Gallery show, which not only abandoned abstraction but opened the door to popular culture. Together, Kaufmann and Coolidge offer a framework that helps us understand that move, Kaufmann by placing it in its cultural context and Coolidge by assembling texts that document the ambiguities in Guston’s approach to modernism.

In contrast to Kaufmann’s compressed analysis, Coolidge’s texts offer the raw material of Guston’s words – tangled at times, but conveying his voice and enthusiasm. Protesting how difficult it is to talk about such things, Guston nonetheless attempts to describe his process of self-discovery and self-abnegation. Conversations with Bill Berkson, Harold Rosenberg and David Sylvester about his 1966 abstractions are inevitably somewhat repetitive, yet the persistent reader can profit from their different takes, like stereoscopic views, on Guston’s engagement with his medium, waiting for that “run”, in which something other than his personal will takes over.  Best are the texts that refer to specific works, like the talk at Yale Norfolk, where he tells how the green whiskey bottle emerged in “Bad Habits”, or his conversation with Coolidge about how a painted book “vibrates”.

The books under review

For his part, Kaufmann outlines the situation in the late 1960s, when painters of the Abstract Expressionist generation felt besieged by Pop and Minimalism, with their impersonal, commercial facture; Guston, struggling with dark abstractions that combined Mondrian’s austerity with Rothko’s meditative uncertainty, stopped painting for two years. In the simple line drawings of everyday objects he produced during this hiatus, Kaufmann sees “visual puns” that carry the ambiguity of the abstract forms into the “story” paintings with their masked figures. Kaufmann invokes Wölfflin’s art historical distinction between “painterly” and “linear” styles to lend formal coherence to this stylistic transition, but this formal bridge was lost on most contemporary critics, and on many painter colleagues, who felt betrayed by any  apparent concession to current conditions.

While Guston never really abandoned his mooring in the picture plane, his efforts to restore painting’s vitality posed a challenge to critics schooled in formalism.. In his own words, Kaufmann describes a new “literalness”, where “both mental and physical stuff hangs out on the surface of Guston’s paintings, pressed up hard against the picture plane” (p. 46). Kaufmann charts the evolution of Guston’s work in the context of changing critical stances towards painting in the early 1970s, until “the register had shifted from counterculture to high culture” (p. 41), and writers compared Guston’s work to the absurdist dramas of Samuel Beckett.  He enlarges the context further to include the emerging positive attention to allegory among postmodernist critics, inspired by the translation of Walter Benjamin’s theories.

The two books converge as Kaufmann analyzes Guston’s collaborations with Coolidge in poem/pictures, in which words and images collide to generate force fields of potential meaning. Coolidge publishes one of his own conversations with Guston about things, words, and pictures. Calling images “masks”, Coolidge and Guston meditate on the distance between things and the words and pictures that represent them. Kaufmann shows how postmodernist critics’ narrow approach to allegory ultimately excluded Guston’s personalized stories, again placing his work outside accepted narratives.

Kaufmann pulls together the threads of his observations in a final chapter entitled “Jewish Jokes”. Calling Guston a Jewish comedian seems transgressive in its own right, but also persuasive, as Kaufmann compares his break with decorum to that of his literary friend, Philip Roth. As he does throughout, Kaufmann brings in wider references, citing Cuddihy’s Ordeal of Civility to show how the issue of Jewish identity is submerged in the work of Rothko and Newman. His account suggests that one of Guston’s final accomplishments was to weave that personal heritage into the tradition of Piero della Francesca he so loved.

October 28 – December 18, 2010
546 West 29th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 594-0550

Peter Campus, Docking at Shinnecock Bay, 2010. Digital video, 24 minute loop. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney. Photo by Justin Francavilla

Early photographers with artistic ambitions sometimes blurred their images in order to imitate the effects of painting. Alfred Stieglitz, however, established the modern practice of art photography when he chose instead to develop the camera’s capacity for high definition of texture and detail. In his hands, technology, pushed beyond mere copying, revealed new aspects of familiar things and, he believed, allowed the unconscious to express itself. While Peter Campus’s new videos move in the direction of painting, they also extend this modernist endeavor to heighten perception and psychologically engage the viewer.

The seven works in “Calling for Shantih” seem deliberately pixilated – slowed down and broken up into shifting, rectangular blocks that look like overlapping brushstrokes. Campus’s stationary camera focuses in extended shots on single, everyday subjects; internally layered and blended, their effect is one of dense, saturated color and meditative calm. But the images are hardly static; they draw us in and dislodge us from our conventional visual moorings.

Displayed on stripped-down flat screen TVs, these videos focus on utilitarian scenes near the artist’s home on Long Island – boats at rest or docking, a power station, a barn – accompanied by ambient sounds. The subjects recall Seurat’s pointillist paintings of the working port of Honfleur.  But just as Seurat applied scientific logic to decompose his images and then rebuilt them piece by piece, Campus uses the digital toolbox to dissect and orchestrate the input from his camera. Each video is repeatedly edited in multiple layers, which are abstracted into mosaics of color, into seemingly improvisatory grids of rectangles. When recombined, the grids overlap unevenly, and the rectangles become translucent scrims, which gradually change in hue, allowing different colors to emerge and then to blend back into their surroundings. There’s a primitive fascination to these living images, which seem to breathe, and to respond to the normal movements of our eyes.

installation view of the exhibition under review, Peter Campus, Calling for Shantih, 2010. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney. Photo by Justin Francavilla

The layered rectangular units also recall the primordial modernist rectangles that Mondrian applied to his early studies of sand dunes and ocean. They contribute an expressive inflection to architectural subjects such as “Cable Station at Orient Point”, where they seem to extend the outstretched arms of the building and enhance its monumentality. In “Fishing Boats at Shinnecock Bay” they resemble piled up cargo containers. This weighty architecture seems to resist the flow of time, but change is ongoing – shadows deepen, boats dock, and water flows. In “Dusk at Shinnecock Bay” time makes itself visible in more than one way – most obviously in the flow of the tide across the frame, yet more subtly in the slow-changing colors around the buildings on the distant shore – movement through space accompanies change over time. The modulating pixels suggest the stream of Heraclitus, into which Campus dips at will via digital editing.

The video camera enables the videographer to step outside of his one-on-one relation to his subject; in an early statement, Campus called it a “surrogate eye” and coined the term “durational perception” for the way the arrangement of camera and monitor objectifies the visual process. His works of the 1970s explored this concept in a literal way, disrupting the conventional relationship between camera and subject, as in installations where viewers confronted their images distorted or upside down. Now, Campus finds this sort of hyper-perception in the editing process, which frees him to slow down and re-orchestrate a period of observation. If there’s an implication of higher consciousness in all this (Shantih, I was told, is the name of his cat), there’s also something poignant in Campus’s slowing of time and his intimate articulation of its relentless flow.

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Mercedes Matter, Tabletop Still Life, ca. 1936. Oil on canvas, 43 x 48 inches, Private collection, Florida.

Mercedes Matter has long deserved the retrospective organized by art historian Ellen Landau, currently on view in the Weisman Gallery at Pepperdine University in Malibu. With more than fifty works, accompanied by documentary photographs and a comprehensive catalogue, this is an enlarged version of the show featured last fall at Baruch College in New York City.  It establishes Matter’s role in the development of the New York School and attests to the force of her artistic vision.

Exhibiting rarely during her lifetime, Matter, who died in 2001, became known as an educator through her leadership of the New York Studio School. To those of us who studied there, her personal associations with Hofmann, Gorky, Pollock and others remained mysterious, even though the force of her personality suggested that she was no mere hanger-on. In fact, as evidenced here, her paintings hold their own against those of her colleagues – smaller in scale, yet often richer and more eloquent in their grasp of essentials.

Through her father, the American modernist painter Arthur Carles, and her mother, a Spanish dancer and model, Matter was exposed in childhood to the artistic tradition and avant-garde milieu of Europe. She also underwent the religious discipline of Catholic girls’ schools. In a youthful letter she describes dancing alone on Good Friday while meditating on Christ’s suffering, testifying to a strong inner life, to a personal investment in rhythmic movement and light. The earliest works here –a teen-age self-portrait and two surprisingly mature paintings from age eight – use paint and color with expressive assurance and a suggestion of contained passion.

Her first mentor, Hans Hofmann, cultivated tensions between sensuality and self-discipline, between drawing and color, much as did her father. Both Carles and Hofmann painted cubist abstractions from subjects in the studio, while also endorsing, somewhat contradictorily, the primacy of color. But while Carles generally respected the planar architecture of cubism, Hofmann, whose color involved a more impulsive, expressionistic drive, prepared the way for Jackson Pollock’s all-over improvisations.

Here we can witness Hofmann’s concepts, which she later interpreted in her teaching, emerging within Matter’s own artistic practice and in dialogue with her peers. In early works she abstracts flower arrangements into rectangular planes of color, somewhat like early Mondrian, but these soon give way to more propulsive, looping forms, shaped by competing relations of figure and ground. Initially influenced by Gorky, these works culminate in the early 1950s in paintings like Tabletop Still Life (1952), which have the gritty incisiveness of de Kooning’s Attic, a painting she particularly admired.

Matter seems to thrive in relation to authority figures – to her father, her peers at the Club, or great artists of the past – but there’s always her own powerful persona, which survived the psychic stresses of abstract expressionism and the existential doubts of Cézanne and Giacometti. Her works maintain their own assertive vigor as she negotiates among these influences. There’s an internalized severity to her art; its fierce angularity suggests an appetite for sensual abandon constrained by geometry. Although close friends with Pollock, and an admirer of his work, Matter resisted his method, remarking in an interview, “What I like least … is the liberation.” Closest to Pollock’s gestural abstractions are some open, ethereal paintings that move freely into and around a still life yet maintain a geometric clarity. “Articulation” was a word Matter favored, “activating space”, and shaping the final inflection of every mark.

Mercedes Matter, Still Life with Skulls, ca. 1978-98, Charcoal on canvas, 40 x 44 inches, Estate of the artist

But after 1960 Matter’s work tends more towards density, towards the gradual accumulation of colored marks, as in Cézanne’s late paintings. As for him, direct visual experience, the process of observation, assumes primacy. Still life is no longer a step on the way to abstraction; painting doesn’t point beyond the objects, but hovers around their simple physical mass. Her high-keyed colors become more earthy and muted, and then disappear entirely in the large, powerful drawings, which appear through the 1980s and 90s and often include cows’ skulls collected near her home in Connecticut. Matter excavates the projections and voids of the skulls, as though to impart their airy hollowness to the entire arrangement; united in an overall mesh of marks, the objects seem to levitate from the table.

Giacometti becomes a dominant influence, but Matter doesn’t step back, as he often does, to take in the larger view of the studio; as in cubism, still life remains a close-up affair. Combining artifice and sheer physical presence, still life embodied for Matter the truth of visual experience. She claimed to work from still life for practical reasons, but it must have remained for her a site of origin, a source of fresh beginnings, shrouded in associations with her father’s studio and the art of the past. The objects in her paintings, steeped in emotion, fusing modernist ambition to European tradition, are eloquent in their muteness.

Jane Freilicher, Afternoon in October 1976. Oil on canvas, 51 x 77 inches. cover MAY 2009: Harmonic Convergence 2008. Oil on linen, 24 x 20 inches. Images courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

To a follower of Jane Freilicher’s work, her new show at Tibor de Nagy is something like the renewal of a long-term domestic relationship; there are the familiar views, the repertoire of flowers and objects. That the eighteen works in this show span over forty years raises questions on the process of ageing, on the value of spending so many years on the same motifs. To sustain such an involvement might be considered an accomplishment in itself – or, to some critics, proof of the inherent conservatism of painting, a medium out of step with rapidly changing times.

Whatever the answers to these larger questions, the show encourages us to reflect on Freilicher’s origins among the painters and poets that emerged in the 1950s, and to situate her development under the light our contemporary context brings to bear. One imagines her early, spontaneous studies of the Long Island landscape in terms of the mercurial, collage-like poems of Frank O’Hara, immediate and improvisational. But where he often shifts focus, in response to the abrupt encounters of urban life, it seems as though one incidental encounter – with the window view from her studio in Water Mill – has become prolonged for Freilicher into a lifetime engagement. (Or two, considering the equal importance of the view from her studio in New York.)

But it’s O’Hara’s openness to the inspiration of each new day that sustains the remarkable freshness of Freilicher’s prolonged involvement, along with the other abiding influence of Pierre Bonnard, whose concurrent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum – like one of O’Hara’s chance encounters on the street – sets Freilicher ‘s paintings freshly in the French artist’s context.  Leland Bell, another painter who emerged from Freilicher’s milieu, liked to speak of the “violence” of Bonnard, referring to his abrupt juxtapositions of objects and spaces. His window views, merging domestic interiors and landscapes, certainly serve as models for Freilicher’s own juxtapositions, especially in the way that the table by the window serves as a stage, on which bouquets and other objects are injected into the frame-within–a-frame of the painting.

Freilicher’s compositions are admittedly more self-consciously artistic than Bonnard’s informal configurations of flowers, food, and figures – understandable enough in an American’s embrace of a European model. The distinctive American spaces out her window – the flatness of Long Island or the vertical density of New York – also impose constraints. In a 1952 review, Fairfield Porter, attuned to the struggles of American artists, commended Freilicher’s search for “first principles”, and her “deep affection for all bumbling things”. Inspired by the abruptness of Bonnard, Freilicher finds ongoing support in O’Hara’s diaristic improvisations for her own daily engagement with all that‘s unruly or monotonous in what’s before her; she insists on the flat Long Island horizon as a matter of principle, recording in works like Afternoon in October(1973) what could seem tedious variations in its expanse with easeful, inspired economy and, as Porter puts it, “never a hint of pedantry”.

Freilicher’s work becomes tighter over time, but the spirit of chance encounter remains, as inSummer Afternoon (1987) with its telephone, or From the Studio (1989-91), with its swimming pool ironically placed behind a small painting of a nude. The most recent works included here, most notably Yellow (2009), return to the city and show a growing integration of the view and the table, a tendency to seek out simple forms and related colors that impose an enhanced overall harmony. Details seem less important – perhaps her attention flags, or perhaps her painting simply tends ever more strongly towards those “first principles” that Porter discerned in 1952.

Frances Hynes, Ocean III 2006. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of June Kelly Gallery

Water has been a significant motif in modern art. Frances Hynes’ mysterious and evocative recent paintings at June Kelly provide a phenomenology of its common manifestations – river, ocean, lake – and recall some prominent predecessors. Often associated with escape from the stress of everyday life, water inspires contemplation. It can be sensual, as in the broken reflections of Monet, or appeal to spiritual transcendence, as in the seascapes of Mondrian. Hynes’ paintings, with their seductive surfaces and underlying grids, allude to both. They also have much in common with the more intimate compositions of Paul Klee, which weave image fragments into their material structure. Hynes, in fact, compares her process to weaving, and similarities abound in paintings such as Summer Place: To the Islands (2008), where sketchy boats and distant houses emerge, as though through fog, from a texture of marks that create a luminous surface. There’s weaving not just in the layering of strands of paint but in the larger alternation of outlined rectangular forms with blurred rectangles of pigment, and even in the overall sense of reverie associated with the repetitive process of building the surface.

While Hynes alludes to Maine (and her works also recall the sea paintings of Maine artist William Kienbusch), along with Long Island and Delaware County, her works, composed from memory in the studio, are synthetic images, documenting not the particulars of place so much as the ways these particulars are turned and developed in our minds. There’s casual openness to Hynes’ abbreviated depiction; her snippets of detail might be the schematic notations we carry in memories, just specific enough to restore a remembered state of well-being. Washes and markings of muted pinks and blue-greens generate light, so that these floating traces seem projected on screens.

But these pleasurable effects and allusions to leisure activities bear an undercurrent of introspective solitude. Hynes’ predominantly cool, understated colors lend an undertone of isolation, even melancholy, to these northern landscapes, which often focus on islands and cliffs. By relaxing conventional standards of realistic description, Hynes makes her images immediately accessible to the mind and its fluctuations of mood, and enables herself to explore the modernist vision common to the painters that inspire her (to whom one should add the early Philip Guston). In Ocean III (2006) small strokes of pigment lend substance and specificity to a vast expanse of water, much as Mondrian’s more impersonal marks evoke the sea’s surface in Pier and Ocean (1915). Like his, Hynes’ abstraction is rooted in the tangible space of lived experience. Island Place (2008) is more dramatic: one of the strongest paintings in the show, it launches a wedge of architecture into a dense, blossoming field of blue and pink reflections. The wall of the foreground building, merging with the surface of the water, flattens its expanse and takes us both up above, and deeper into, its painterly depths.

In previous exhibitions, Hynes has used poems by Mark Strand and Seamus Heaney to introduce her work. Her search for a stripped-down language of representation – hardly leisurely in its ambition – stakes out a domain of meaning common to poetry and painting, where details of everyday life can assume new configurations in the mind. There reverie, engaged in the texture of sounds or pigments, can succumb to the rhythms of inner impulse, and images can emerge, energized by memories and desires.