January 15 to April 6, 2013
Grey Art Gallery, New York University,
100 Washington Square East,
New York City, 212-998-6780

Myself seen by William Burroughs, Kodak Retina new-bought 2′d hand from Bowery hock-shop…, 1953, printed 1984-97. National Gallery of Art, Gift of Gary S. Davis. Images © 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.

We have all heard of Allen Ginsberg, the ecstatic poet of Howl and “Walt Whitman in the Supermarket,” but not quite as many know that he was an assiduous documentary photographer who focused on relatives, friends, and lovers. As a way of recording the moment by someone who fully believed in living in the moment, Ginsberg’s photography tends to produce—at least for this writer—an aching nostalgia for a fast and loose New York whose marginal neighborhoods were not yet gentrified. Despite immortalizing his pals, Ginsberg cannot be seen as a formalist at all. Instead, he was a literary shutterbug who returned to many images he had of his early years , mostly taken of friends on the Lower East Side, and annotated them with anecdotes and stories whose interest is equal to his photographs. In these wonderful, straightforward snapshots, Ginsberg captures a magical time in New York, where rents in the East Village were remarkably cheap, allowing him to write his declamatory poetry and document writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and major counterculture figures like Dylan and Wavy Gravy. If it is true that a certain Sturm und Drang characterized his milieu, Ginsberg nonetheless had the presence of mind to know that this was indeed a magical moment in American cultural history.

While the images may evoke little in the way of fine art interest, the super-size egos of Ginsberg’s pals make their urban romanticism a way of life. Peter Orlovsky, something of a poet but best known as Ginsberg’s long-term companion, can be seen cavorting naked in the countryside; Burroughs’ cadaverous charisma reminds us that, beyond the romanticism, literature of a serious sort was indeed being written; and a classic image of Jack Kerouac silently mouthing off on the street, in front of a statue of a stature in Tompkins Square Park, indicates that wildness pervaded the tissue of relations among these very gifted and equally rebellious proponents of alternative culture. Ginsberg often gave his inexpensive 35-mm camera to friends so they could capture his remarkable presence; movingly, he comes across in the images of himself as a bit goofy, but also warm-hearted man of unusual intelligence. His milieu is the stuff of legend, much of it so well known that Ginsberg’s handwritten explanation beneath his images can seem slightly redundant; but the poet is resolute in his determination to fix in memory the moments of idiosyncrasy and the pleasures of free love that characterized the Beats.

Beat movement poets Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder are both represented—Corso is seen in a tiny attic room in France and Snyder in Zen monastery gear in Japan. Ginsberg himself poses nude both early and late, with the latter image, taken in a hotel room in late 1991, revealing a pot belly and a slightly quizzical expression. His pictures of the seasons in his building’s back yard, taken through the window in his kitchen are so straightforward as to be esthetically negligible, but demonstrate an awareness of nature in the midst of city life. Even so, the images are important because they have been taken by a master poet and historian, whose literary discipline belies the informality and randomness of a life lived on the boundaries of New York, both geographically and culturally. There is a marvelous picture of Neil Cassady, caught in an embrace with a woman beneath a movie marquee featuring Marlon Brando in The Wild One; Cassady, the model for protagonist Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road, comes across in the photo as the charming rogue he actually was—truth always lies just under the surface in these documentary images. Even Robert Frank, the great photographer of America, makes it into the show. In all, the Beats lived life on the edge, filled with a counterpoint sexuality and glamour that remains genuine, largely because the insights of Ginsberg and his friends were so original and new.

William Burroughs, click to enlarge

Gregory Corso, click to enlarge

January 31 to March 2, 2013
530 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-929-2262

Jorge Queiroz, Alphabet, 2011. Vinyl ink on canvas, 23-1/2 x 31-1/2 inches. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Portuguese painter Jorge Queiroz is hot in the pursuit of something new in abstraction.  His show is founded on an original idiom of for the most part organic forms that are captivating and challenging, stimulating the viewer to investigate a seemingly informal but actually highly structured series of paintings. Working in the gray area between realism and abstraction, veering closer to the latter, the artist mixes shapes and colors into rough configurations that contain all manner of formal interest. Faces are laid sideways on the canvas; colors are chosen with something close to abandon. While there is a deliberate choice of freedom bordering on anarchic abandon—and at this point we feel obliged to comment that the tactic is close to cliché—Queiroz nonetheless establishes a niche where he can paint in a process-oriented, unsystematic manner while retrieving what he wants from the past. The implications are clear: we are in need of an idiom which would do justice to the history of painting but which would also show us a way out of excessive reverence for what proceeds us in art.

In the painting Waiting on the Sand (2012), we can see Queroz buld up a figurative tableau on the lower half of the picture: a person in red, holding his hand to his head, while sitting on the sand. Above him, large boulder-like forms in different colors threaten to fall all around him. What is the painting about? Is it a constrained allegory, in which an individual exists at war with nature? Or is it a mere conflation, without extraordinary narrative meaning, of forms and style? It is truly hard to say what is happening in Queiroz’s specialty as a creator of conundrums enigmas past words. His resistance to pure formalism feels contemporary in its implications, just as his attraction to abstract shapes makes the work not only more complicated stylistically, but also less involved with storytelling. H Is for Heads (2012) is an even more complicated abstraction, underscored by various forms that look like they should be legible in a figurative sense, but in fact they never quite are. This amounts to a strategic rule in Queiroz, in which abstraction struggles to move into the realm of a meaningful figuration. The two idioms are never completely at home with each other.

In H Is for Head, we see a painting done with oil stick and vinyl ink on canvas; several inchoate heads can be found on the top of the composition; others are scattered throughout the painting field. A dark-brown blotch holds the center, while a lyric blue occurs on either side of the work. The rest of the canvas contains a complicated mix of forms and colors, accommodating each other none too gracefully. Perhaps the awkwardness in Queiroz’s style shows us that, for the painter, the elucidation of a particular style is a messy affair. It certainly complicates the paintings we see, which are, in the final analysis, rich with intricacies and conundrums that a simple reading of the art won’t solve. Queiroz strives for complexity by mixing formats and roughing up the edges between forms on the canvas—we can see this in The Alphabet (2011), which has a tan-colored, roughly human form on the left. Behind this man-mummy is a broad expanse of an orange background, complete with a dark circle or hole toward the middle of the painting. The orange form curves down on the right, suggesting perhaps a human soldier, but we really can’t ascertain the content of much of what is rendered. With a lot of artists, this might become a tic to worry about, but with Queiroz, real mystery takes place.

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November 2 to December 15, 2012
508 West 26 Street #215, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  212 399 2636

The powerful group of welded-steel artworks on view at Alexander Gray Associates surely makes it clear why Melvin Edwards is one of the strongest sculptors we have today, for Edwards maintains formal mastery even as he has invested his work with materials—chains most especially—resonant of black American experience. Indeed, “Lynch Fragments,” the name of a sequence of pedestal-size sculptures that incorporate chains and elements such as farm tools that pertain to black history, is likely his best-known series. Yet he finds presence and strength in the chains as signs of cultural connectedness, even as his work implies violent repression.

Melvin Edwards, Texcali, 1965. Welded steel,
19-3/4 x 15-1/3 x 8-1/2 inches. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

This double message is transmitted through Edwards’ remarkable sense of form, which results in constructions dense with materials and meaning alike. The “Lynch Fragments” are eloquent but also brutalized shards of content.  The individual constructions, installed at eye level and several feet apart, feel as though they are ready to explode—not without reason, for the first example of the series was made in Los Angeles in 1963 against a backdropof political upheaval. Remarkably, Edwards has continued to make works belonging to “Lynch Fragments,” with the latest example in the show dated to this year.

The iron nexus that the examples of the “Lynch Fragments” afford shows us how one can speak eloquently of prejudice and loss while maintaining a vigorous, even positive, presence as an artist. Most of the pieces are tight with metal objects, fragments, and cultural attributes that pertain to black American culture.  Texcali (1965), one of Edwards’ most inspired works, consists of a chain dangling from a square piece of steel. The latter butts outward and is placed in the middle of the disk that serves as the sideways platform of the sculpture. What looks like part of a C clamp seems to hang off the center left of the piece. At the bottom of the last chain loop are two steel balls, which give the work an assertively masculine authority of self-defense, a stance found often in the series.

The raw intensity of Texcali is understandable in light of the time: the sculpture was made in 1965, the year of the Watts Riots. But its density and that of the others belonging to the sequence also suggest that the constructions are not without hope, even if that hope is based on anger and rebellion. Another example from this year, Nite Work, makes use of tools such as a wrench and small saw, placed in a rough spiral that opens toward the viewer. In its middle are a chain and a bent horseshoe. The imagery can be thought of as having two readings—one interpretation views the work as pushing back oppression, while the other sees the tools as constructive implements. Other works in the show are more abstract: Ways of Steel (1988) nicely celebrates its own materiality, and here the chain that extends away from the sculpture’s open center is a formal element quite free from political overtones. And the massive stainless-steel work To Listen (1990), nearly 90 inches tall, also has a chain. Draped along a diagonal edge of the central panel, it is eloquent and self-sufficiently sculptural.

Curtain for William and Peter (1969/2012), a drapery of sorts, is made with barbed wire bordered at the bottom with heavy chains. This piece functions like another model of resistance–the violence of the materials cannot be denied. Political art in America has often, arguably, been weakened by over-involvement with its own posturing.  It is clear, however, that an artist like Edwards found the right vocation working with steel, in order to propose an alternative to esthetic meekness. It is strange but true that sometimes the material itself carries a resonance that speaks to social frustration.  And  Edwards has made things even more complex by pouring his anger into work that is highly skilled. Edwards represents a unique combination of a close-to-modernist esthetic and a sharp eye for historical implications.

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September 4 to October 13, 2012
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212-673-6466

Fran O’Neill, earthly delight, 2012. Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Courtesy of The Artist.

Fran O’Neill’s fine show at the Studio School demonstrates how the practice of gestural abstraction can remain very much alive in the hands of someone willing to explore and experiment. While Louise Fishman’s accomplished, historically aware exhibition at Cheim & Read shows us a mature artist committed to the lexicon of the New York School, in O’Neill’s paintings we see the pursuit of an originality that really pushes forward the vocabulary of abstract art. Her backwards glance toward the legacy of mid-20th century painting is transformed into a forward leap into the unknown—in the sense that the paintings do not appear to refer to actual things and that the artist is genuinely trying out a language of her own. Building a new vernacular in abstract art is a trying task, especially if the artist knows the history of the genre. In O’Neill there is both a sense of the past and an independence from that past.

It is difficult to work this way, in the sense that the great painterly moments of Abstract Expressionism occurred more than two generations ago. And yet the excitement of this show remains based on the movement of the hand. rising (2012) is an epic composition in which  a series of long, horizontal orange stripes cover the top half of the painting, while beneath them, in the lower right quadrant, are a series of short, often angled gray lines that are a bit darker than the gray ground. The painting’s title refers to the generally upward motion seen in the composition.

O’Neill’s paintings communicate the pleasure of their own making.  Her sense of drama is closely linked to the use of color, which offsets transparent use of compositional structure.   In earthly delight (2012) for example, a six-foot-square work dominated by a saturated purple there is an angular clearing of yellow and green that runs from the center to the upper left.

Fran O’Neill, memory down, 2011. Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Courtesy of The Artist.

mischief (2012), another six-foot-square oil in canvas, is forceful, even startling with a v-shaped structure moving down the middle of the image, cutting into bars of red, gray, and black on either side of the form. Outlined in gray and possessing a center of white, the v-shape plunges toward the bottom of the painting, which is black. In each of these paintings, color is used to strong structural effect; planes of pigment build formal arrangements that are vital to the experience of the work.

Karen Wilkin’s catalogue essay speaks of the artist’s “memories of her Australian origins” and additionally says that O’Neill’s paintings are “united by their rich, saturated color.” Perhaps her foreign bearings bring about the unusual color schemes that are such a striking feature of these works.  It makes sense that someone from outside New York can reinterpret its history of abstraction according to her own lights. memory down (2011), is a square painting done is dark blues and blacks, with the blues forming verticals and the blacks moving across them toward the base of the painting. Melancholic but very beautiful, the canvas shows how emotional O’Neill can be—surely a basis for these works’ memorable presence.

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July 20 to October 14, 2012
225 Madison Avenue, between 36 and 37 streets
New York City, (212) 685-0008

Josef Albers, Variant / Adobe, 1947. Oil on blotting paper, 48.3 x 60.9 cm © 2012 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society New York

Josef Albers, a Bauhaus refugee from an increasingly intolerant Germany, immigrated with his wife Anni to the United States at the end of 1933. The move would be extraordinarily sanguine for the artist, who had been associated with the Bauhaus almost from its inception in 1919, first as a student and then as an instructor. Once in the New World, Albers found the consolations of nature, both in an America that was mostly still unspoiled wildernesses, and in Mexico, whose rectilinear architecture became the inspiration for his Adobe series. Trained early on by his father, who was a master tinker capable of carpentry, house painting, and plumbing, Albers was a man of unusual integrity, in both his person and his art. This independence of mind produced remarkable paintings: The artist’s nearly scientific wish to explore the glories and relations of color gave way to the great, and vast, sequence of paintings entitled Homage to the Square. The Morgan Library’s remarkable show of Albers’ works on paper presents studies for that series, as well as exploratory efforts for the Adobe series, and striking color studies. It shows a very different sensibility from the austere distinction of Homage to the Square.

The kind of exploration exampled in the Morgan’s show plays with the numinous accord of colors arranged in conjunction with each other. Indeed, at one point, Albers is quoted as saying, “The greens are envious of each other,” a slightly comic aphorism born out in two very painterly studies of hues Albers deems as green (to this viewer, black, purple, and gray are also evident in the color sketch). Albers, seemingly impeccable as a rational experimenter, is shown here as both tenacious and tentative in his discoveries, even evidencing an expressionist bent, a far cry from his personality and better-known art. Works on paper have an immediacy and a spontaneity that the supposedly more serious mediums of canvas and linen lack, and Albers takes advantage of this quality, working out structures of luminous tone and subtle structure. There is a red on red on red study for Homage to the Square whose luminescence is so strong it makes the viewer feel that a light source exists behind the painting. Equally interesting is the subtle yet visible difference between the picture’s three kinds of red, with the square in the center painted the darkest hue, while the other two squares are of successively lighter intensities.

Who would have thought that Albers was capable of such moving lyricism in his works on paper? There are drips here and there, and the lines between squared forms are not exactly straight; the edges of the painting are often rough rather than clean. The idiosyncrasies of the work do not add up to much in a conceptual sense, but they result in wonderfully expressive art. The Adobe series, far more rectangular in its forms, demonstrate the inherent attractiveness of symmetry. In one, from 1947, broad swathes of two dark blues act as the background, with the pink adobe house only partially seen and framed on its outer limits by green and, a different ground, black. On front of the pink façade, one sees a rectilinear orange form, with a square in the middle that articulates two black doors. Albers is very much an artist of restraint, but in works like this his restraint is joyous in nature. In study after study, his curiosity gets the better of his hand, and marvelous improvisations result. The viewer leaves with a more accurate, and larger, view of Albers as a painter.

Josef Albers, Color Study for White Line Square, not dated. Oil on blotting paper (with gouache, pencil, and varnish), 29.5 x 29.5 cm © 2012 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society New York

May 5 to July 7, 2012
43 North Second Street
Philadelphia, 215-925-5389

installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy of Larry Becker Contemporary Art

The premise of Marcia Hafif’s fine recent show in Philadelphia has to do with approximating the colors of late Roman frescos—the artist lived in Italy for eight years early on in her career. Her austere monochromes hold the storefront gallery space very effectively; each smallish painting—all of them are hung from the same top level, to maintain a similar visual experience no matter what the viewer’s height—maintains an austerely beautiful presence. The colors, made by Hafif herself, border on the somber and matte, claiming the space before them in a compelling manner. The paintings themselves, dating back to the mid-1990s, are given the series title “Late Roman Paintings,” followed by the materials used to make the picture: permanent red dark, viridian tint, French yellow ochre tint, etc. In some cases, Hafif explains, the colors are lightened by the addition of white pigment, which lightens the color, now described in the checklist as having a “tint.” Hafif, whose reputation is more developed in Europe than America despite her American origins and education, belongs to a generation of monochromatic painters who established themselves in the 1970s and early ‘80s, negotiating a bit of an alliance with the Minimalists but more or less standing on their own.

The ongoing question with monochromatic painting has to do with the contemplation of a deliberately circumscribed object, whose resonance depends as much if not more on the context of available light and space. It is not so much a matter of dismantling color, even though the single unity of hue lends itself to what might be experienced as a constricted expression. That, however, doesn’t hold true for those who experience these accomplished paintings as real efforts to preserve color from the point of view of a purist expression. By historically linking her work to the past, Hafif shows her audience just how effectively contemporary art can connect with aspects of historical painting production. This connection not only concerns the technical media the artist so clearly explains, it also brings back to past to the present, which strikes the audience as a brave thing to do given the ubiquity of art that is neither well made nor interested in art’s history. In some cases, darker-hued paintings are put together, while in others lighter colors are joined. With daylight filling the room from the gallery’s street window, one has the chance to view the works in both natural and artificial light, which represent two very different experiences. Hafif, who is in her mid-80s and who is currently working on her archives, deserves attention for this elegant, accomplished exhibition.

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May 19 to June 30, 2012
525 West 24th Streeet, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-627-6000

Installation view, Josiah McElheny: Thoughts about the Abstract Body at Andrea Rosen Gallery, May/June 2012. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery

Josiah McElheny, a wizard at merging conceptual art with high craft, has consistently looked to historical contexts in a variety of fields to shore up and expand his beautifully made glass containers. In his current show at Andrea Rosen, he has built human-height vitrines to present his assemblages of glass sculptures created in response to a wide variety of artists, modernist heroes such as Popova, Fontana, and Schlemmer among them. Everything about the exhibition is keyed to its contextualization, which adds a distinct layer of complexity to the works in the wood-and-glass boxes. The show, entitled “Some thoughts about the abstract body,” relates to the way clothing and costume design have been abstracted, transforming the person into an abstract entity as much as possible. McElheny has come up with variants on this idea, enclosing within eye-level vitrines and glass sculptures that respond subtly to the inspiration of the artists named in each work’s title. According to press materials, the general idea of experiencing abstraction through the medium of the body might result in a dialogue about the original intentions of those committed to such a transformation.

But the problem, as has happened before in McElheny’s art, is that sometimes the context seems so removed from the actual art that it fails to elucidate the artist’s strategies and motivation. Clearly, McElheny is a master artist, someone capable of creating most anything in glass. Yet the relations of his conceptual bias to his artworks are sometimes obscure. For the less historically minded among us, the artist has produced a marvelous show whose impulses have to do with form rather than the history of design. But, even so, the subtle changes from one glass work to the next depend upon the conceptual frame with which the artist has formed his undertaking. Maybe McElheny’s art is best understood as possessing levels of accessibility, in which one may experience the design as forming a ladder of ascending intellectual difficulty. If we look at the vitrine entitled Models for an abstract body (after Delaunay and Malevich) (2012), we see an upright construction with an austere steel pedestal supporting a box made of wood and glass. Within the box are two examples of hand-blown and carved glass, ostensibly created in response to the works of the two artists mentioned. The two shapes, one rather cone-like and the other molded in an hourglass form, are stunningly beautiful. Still, it is hard to gauge just how the glass forms adapt to the art history brought to bear on their construction.

This is not to question the genuine achievement of McElheny’s projects, generally speaking and including this one. It is just to say that like any good works, McElheny’s art can be understood on different levels. The level of craftsmanship is remarkably achieved, with black and brown vertical striations creating moire patterns that delight prolonged study of the glass. One box is particularly attractive—the one containing works influenced by Delaunay, Rodchenko, and Vialov. Here the vaselike forms, given dark vertical stripes, demonstrate a gracefulness and sophistication that places them in the highest reaches of design and art—and this would be true even if they were not related to the art of historical artists. All in all, it seems the complexity of McElheny’s historical understanding of the abstract body works in two directions: pulling his art back, toward the legacy of modernism; and pushing it forward, toward a statement unified by its context, which enables the artist to do whatever comes next in his imagination. The artist even has some wearable art: life-size, mirrored, vertically oriented rectangles anyone can wear with the help of straps attached to the inside of the art. McElheny’s notions of modernity and democracy in art are put to good use in his sculptures, and now we have a fine show to consider his ideas.

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Denise Green will lecture on her book at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, Thursday, June 28 at 6.30pm (book launch from 6pm)

Installation shot of Denise Green’s paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York’s 1979 exhibition, “New Image Painting” discussed in this interview. Courtesy of the Artist

How did living in Australia contribute to your decision to become an artist? At what point as a child or adolescent did you know you were bound to be an artist?

When I was young, my initiatives in art came from myself. My family did not take an interest in either art or creativity; as a result, my feelings for art arose spontaneously. I followed my own lights in becoming an artist since there was no one in the family to mentor me.

I found my first studio at the age of eight or nine; it was the space underneath my home in Brisbane.  Local homes were built on tall pilings in response to the hot, regional climate; the pilings enabled the air to circulate beneath the houses. Our own home had the additional advantage of privacy, in the form of a picket fence. Safely enclosed behind the fence, I drew for hours on end—I was alone but very happy.

In 1959, when I was a young adolescent, my father enrolled me in weekend morning drawing and painting classes, run by the town’s Youth Welfare Association. This was a transforming experience that led to further development. It happened because my father in fact recognized my increased interest in art and resulted in my increased confidence as an artist: I could indeed draw and paint.

Who made a difference in your first paintings?

Although I saw, as an adolescent, such painters of western landscapes as Roland Wakelin and Sidney Nolan at the Queensland National Art Gallery, I was not inspired by them. Instead, I liked the indigenous paintings I came across, especially the Groote Eylandt bark paintings from the Queensland Museum. These works had a directness and simplicity that have remained with me; the paintings referred to local marine life: a shell, an island, or a fish against a dark background.

Even though I did not yet understand the incorporation of ancestral stories into these artworks, or how the space manifested the sacred, these works resonated powerfully with me. Even now, many years after my emigration from Brisbane, I still seek the paintings out when I return. I am moved by them still.

With whom did you study in Paris? What were the reasons causing you to move to New York in 1969?

I worked with an American painter there, Millie Lachman, whose ideas formed an important basis for my art.  I then completed three years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. But I decided to move to New York because my work couldn’t grow within the rigid conventions of French academic art.

New York has been your home for more than forty years. How have New York artists—or any artist—influenced you?

As happens with most artists, my influences change over time. Some, but not all, I experienced in New York City. My current museum show in Germany, Denise Green: After Ju Chao, Ju Lian, Richter, Wiebke, LeWitt, Albers, Manet, names those artists who have had an impact on the development of new work.  Not all the artists are Western; the two Chinese painters I refer to in the title, Ju Chao and Ju Lian, are 19^th-century Chinese artists whose work I saw at the Hong Kong Museum of Art a year ago. At present, I want to mention Dan Flavin, whose works on paper have influenced my way of making process drawings.

The late 1970s “New Image Painting” show, mounted at the Whitney Museum, played a major role in your recognition as an artist. How was the show important to you?

The Whitney mounted the New Image show in 1978. This was an era when the formalist control of art writing was breaking up, and post-Minimalist art, including Conceptual and Process art, dominated the scene. The New Image exhibition broke new ground in several ways. Until this point, the Whitney Museum had shown established artists—their exhibitions were retrospectives, mostly. By way of contrast, the New Image exhibition presented ten painters who were young and as yet unrecognized; they were allowed to show a good amount of work, from six to eight paintings. Also, previously, the major retrospectives at the Whitney had showcased only recent developments in abstraction; in the case of the New Image show, figurative art made its way into the exhibition.

Thus, New Image show documented recognizable, personalized imagery. The exhibition’s group of artists looked to everyday themes: people, landscape, animals, plants, birds, houses and boats – the stuff of mundane experience. My own paintings contained images that fluctuated between the abstract and real; this interest has persisted up to the present.

What were your further stylistic developments as you proceeded as an artist?

The mainstream commercial galleries at the time did not support explorations in style.  My own manner of working was turning toward exploration and experimentation. Indeed, I wanted to probe the unknown, rather than repeating motifs and imagery.  During these years I was represented by Max Protetch Gallery, then a cutting-edge gallery, who supported my approach.   In the beginning of the 1980s, largely through my association with Semiotext(e), the influential cultural journal, my work came to reflect French critical theory. This meant that I was supporting a new style of painting, one that turned away from the forms of representation in art. So my style changed significantly. My versions of houses, chairs, and vessels were flattened and reduced to their essence, without sharp detail. I set the imagery into a background of single color.

Critics understood my style as an innovative approach because it combined abstraction and representation on equal terms. Yet even before these paintings were shown, I felt myself drawn in another direction.  I had been reading the French theorists Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, the consequence of which was that figuration was gradually abandoned in my painting. Instead, I favored abstract markings, dots, lines and grids. Shadowy outlines of figures and furniture gave way to ciphers and linear markings whose meanings were multivalent and indefinite.

Since the 1990s you have been teaching graduate students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Is there a conflict between teaching and painting?

I teach one day a month, so it really isn’t heavily influential, but I really enjoy working with the students. It’s very gratifying to be engaged in a dialogue with young artists and sharing your experience and perhaps taking them a little further in what they are doing.

You worked as an editor for Semiotext(e), an intellectual journal of a leftist bent. You have also written on contemporary art. How has editorial work influenced your painting?

Although I made the decision to move from France to America, my engagement with French culture was ongoing—I continued to travel each year to Paris. Additionally, I became an editor for the postmodern journal Semiotext(e), whose politics were radical and whose influence was strong.

I had met the journal’s publisher, Sylvere Lotringer, at a party in downtown Manhattan in 1978. Lotringer wanted to expand the publication beyond academic concerns and invited me to join the editorial board. Lotringer’s contributors included such major figures as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Antonio Negri. Interested in the politics of art, Lotringer asked me and another artist, Pat Steir, to join the editorial board in 1978. We introduced him to prominent figures in the New York downtown art scene and collaborated on several editions of this quarterly journal, including “Schizo Culture,” ‘”Autonomia” and “Polysexuality.”

Being an editor for Semiotext(e) meant interacting with the other members of the journal. I was introduced to Barthes, whose argument against figuration fascinated me. In response, I called my New Image paintings “configurations” rather than representations. My defense turned on the argument that I did not expect the paint to build a believable image; instead, I was thinning the paint to create one—this position was gratuitous and even Jesuitical. I remember doing translations of texts by Lacan for Semiotext(e).  I also experimented with Deleuzian ideas, which influenced me to the point of making rhizomatic paintings for a few months; the experiment was not a success. Deleuzian aesthetics, with its ideas of multiplicities, intensities and “becoming,” had implications for media, network and cultural theory, but could not be applied to painting. During this time I also published a book, Metonymy in Contemporary Art, which considered the implications of substituting an attribute of an object for the object itself.

Denise Green, Evanescence (Red), 2007. Wax crayon, pencil, marble dust and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 144 inches. Collection of Robin Bade and Michael Parkin. Image courtesy of the artist and the Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Over the years, you have changed your painting style extensively. Can you explain how and why?

My painting style has changed continually, thank God! It means that fresh ideas are coming into the work.

How does serial repetition function in your art? Did you turn to repetition as a strategy that was influential among the Minimalists in the late 1960s, when you first came to New York?

I think it is a result of being in New York City in the late 1960s.  I have always felt that my paintings had a conceptual bent to them.  This was because I moved to New York during a time of intellectual ferment and exploration and was exposed to Minimalism and theory.  My process drawings are an example of serial repetition carrying into my current work.

What would like to do in the future? What’s next? 

How can any artist state with any certainty what she is going to do?  I respond to events both private and public: the attack of the World Trade Center, the divorce from my first husband, my mother’s death, and the threat of being evicted from studio. My art continues to change; at this point in time, I use scale and color to convey my sense of wonder.

I anticipate surprises. One unusual experience in 2008 was attending the opening of my show in Perth and seeing for the first time a group of black fella (Aboriginal) artists attend my show.  Since early on I was influenced by at their work, their interest in my art was like a circle being completed. I continue to hope that painting can communicate beyond race, class, and place.

Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey, by Denise Green. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)  224 pp, 200 black and white illustrations, ISBN 978-0-8166-7907-2.  $29.95

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April 21 to June 23, 2012
502 and 526 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-243-0200

Brice Marden, first famous for accomplished monochromatic works from the heysday of minimal art, later made interesting, but also to some extent naive, cultural appropriations of Chinese painting. Searching for a tradition through which he could find a way out of the reductivism of Western thinking, Marden based paintings on Chinese calligraphy and ink works. His calligraphic canvases and works on paper are certainly beautiful, but when one takes into consideration that the art he was inspired by comes from such a different place, it proves hard to envision his paintings solely as graceful meditations on Chinese painterly art. It is particularly dangerous, I think, when someone reaches so far across cultures and epochs for imagistic support. I am not suggesting that Marden is a dilettante—he is far too accomplished to be given that label—but it is relatively easy to see the body of work as an act of borrowing, undermined by the attempt to take on too much.

Brice Marden, First Square, 2011. Oil and graphite on marble, 15 3/4 x 9 7/8 inches. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery

So it was with a certain degree of wariness, even pessimism, that I made my way to Matthew Marks’s two gallery spaces on 22nd Street to see his latest, and again Chinese-inspired shows. But I found much that was stunning. At Number 502 there was a fragment of Ru ware, a Chinese ceramic marked by a slate blue color, that served as a measure of hue for the nine smallish panels—Ru Ware Project (2007-12)—done by Marden after he had seen a show of the ceramics in Taiwan, where he had gone on a trip in 2007 (following a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). The press materials indicate that he painted the colors of the 11th-century ceramic glaze from memory; nine canvases, each 24 by 18 inches, make up the piece. Lined up across the wall, the colors are mostly blue, with the exception of the fourth panel from the right, which is a dark tan. These monochromatic panels effectively join Marden’s interest in historical Chinese culture with his minimalist work done two generations earlier. The painting exquisitely makes use of colors that come from a thousand years ago, in ways that dazzle through subtlety. And because the work refers both to a specific Chinese cultural production and to Marden’s earlier efforts, we fully understand the motivation behind the piece.

Then, at 526 West 22nd Street, there is a group of new works done on marble, which inevitably refer to the six-year period, 1981 through 1987, during which he painted on marble and bridged the minimalist paintings with the calligraphic ones. In the new group of paintings, it is possible to see how inventive the artist is; First Square (2011) looks like a transformation from the ancient to the very new. Two bands of color, first blue then white, sit atop a yellow triangle whose lowest side is met by a triangle of two stripes, one white and one green. A dark smudge (the graphite in the piece) cuts across the middle of the painting, rising up on the right-hand side. The work is particularly successful for the way Marden paints the idiosyncratic surfaces of the marble. We see much the same happen in Joined (2011), a narrow, vertically aligned slab of marble marked by pigment and graphite. The top two-thirds of the marble is painted a light green, while graphite is randomly applied, filling in hollows and creating abstract patterns of their own. Here we see Marden’s remarkable versatility adapting itself to the materials at hand, and creating lovely, subtle paintings on the stone. The results are so successful it makes one rethink the calligraphic paintings, which admittedly can be seen as a late revision of abstract expressionism. But little matter the past, for Marden has created a fine body of work now, in the present.

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Hu Bing, Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation, installation at the Flatiron Prow Art Space, 2012. Photo: Richard Kranzler. Courtesy of Cheryl McGinnis Gallery

Hu Bing’s Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation fills the triangular tip that the Flatiron Building interjects onto 23rd Street where Broadway and Fifth Avenue intersect.  Her gloriously crowded installation is made of broken sake bottles hung from the ceiling, shards of automotive glass, iron, resin, and cheesecloth draped chaise lounges. At the apex of the triangle, the artist placed a table complete with colored bottles that are set on broken windshields, while in the center of the piece we find the chaise lounges. The work is about some of the anger and alienation Hu felt on experiencing the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai. The broken bottles are dangerous but also beautiful, signifying that Hu is capable of transforming some of the negative emotions she felt during that tumultuous period in China. Additionally, the broken glass represents the shock Hu felt on seeing cars that crashed outside her window in Williamsburg, where she first lived in New York. Her piece is a dark elegy for survival–by someone who has lived on the edge in two different cultures.  JONATHAN GOODMAN

Hu Bing, Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation at the Flatiron Prow Art Space, March 2 to June 3, 2012.

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