February 8 to May 8, 2013

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street at Lexington Avenue
New York City, 212-772-4991

Víctor Grippo, Analogía IV (III) [Analogy IV (III)], 1972, Wood table, ceramic and acrylic dishes, metal silverware, cotton and velvet tablecloths, natural and acrylic potatoes; installation dimensions 29 3/4 x 37 1/8 x 23 3/16 in. (75.6 x 94.3 x 58.9 cm). Edition 3/5, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

This exchange took place well before the advent of the digital age, at a time when artists were still writing postcards, sending faxes, telegrams, and actually speaking on the phone. Open workalso makes clear the variety of ephemeral media being employed by Latin American artists, such as inexpensive chapbooks, Xeroxed papers, black and white video, documentary photographs, and diagrammatic drawings. Conceptual Art was proto-digital in that the ideas (software) for digital transmission were being disseminated before the hardware became available and the electronics became miniaturized. But herein lies an important caveat: that decade’s best work was much more complex and ambiguous than our contemporary digital reproductions and sound bites have led us believe. The fact is that many small publications and critical surveys on the subject, in one form or another, may not exist on-line, including out-of-print publications, carbon-copied essays, important letters, manifestos, symposia transcripts, audiotaped interviews, and videotaped panel discussions, events, and lectures. Just because Conceptual Art is about “ideas” does not mean that all the significant work exists in digital form, just as not everything digital even begins to approach the complexities of Conceptual Art.

Similar ground to this exhibition was covered in Global Conceptualism (1999) at the Queens Museum of Art, and Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited), edited by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Jose Miguel Cortes (Universidad Politechnica de Valencia, 1990), which proved an invaluable resource in Spanish for artists in Europe and the Americas.  Open Work also establishes an important connection with the Centro de Arte y Comunicacion in Buenos Aires, founded in 1968 by Jorge Glusberg, in which New York conceptualists were often invited to work in Latin America. Each of these events occurred outside the mainstream of activity in northern Europe and the United States, and thus, preceded the more recent interest in researching conceptualism in various regions of Latin America as seen in this exhibition.

Luis Camnitzer, Sentence Reflecting the Sentence That States the Reflection, 1975, Wood, brass, and glass, 13 7/8 x 9 3/4 x 2 in. (35.2 x 24.8 x 5.1 cm), Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

The exhibition title’s Open Work is taken from a term first used by Umberto Eco in 1962, in which he identifies a revisionist aesthetic based on ambiguity, participation, and information in contrast to Benedetto Croce’s insistence on intuition and expression introduced in his book, Aesthetic (1908). The curator Harper Montgomery cites Eco as a source for the exhibition given the semiologist’s interest in allowing viewers, listeners, and readers to complete the work. Sometimes participation is an explicitly political component of the artwork. A good example would be Victor Grippo’s installation Analogia IV (1972), a modest table with two settings, separated in black and white, in which the viewer may presumably share a lunch with a peasant worker. The Brazilian artist Antonio Dias’s taped grid with open spaces on the floor is more concrete. Titled Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (1968), the grid designates a space without authority or control from the outside, obviously in reference to repressive political regimes in his country’s past.

Another Brazilian, Hélio Oiticica, presented his relaxation installation, Nests, at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970.  We learn, however, in Jeremiah W. McCarthy’s essay in the exhibition catalog for Open Work that this work was, in fact, a last minute replacement for another film projection installation that he called an “Intentional opened visual-spectator act.” According to the essayist, Oiticica’s proposal was rejected because “the medium possessed subversive potential,” less in relation to the content of the film than in the artist’s rejection of using Olivetti’s formidable Information Machine. In addition to the actions of Cildo Meireles and Rafael Ferrer who questioned the relationship of high modernist art to late capitalism, the graphic works of Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter also embodied a strong opposition to the restrictive entitlements and alienating effects of the New York art scene.

The influence of North American artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner, and Donald Burgy, is present in a manner that offers a kind of necessary tension, while contributing an important advance to some of the more indigenous aspects present in the work of their South American counterparts. Here I am thinking of the time pieces and performances of David Lamelas, Eduardo Costa, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujin, all fascinating artists. In the context of this relationship between artists working in the two Americas, Open Work makes virtually everything—no matter what the work’s original intention – a series of stains by Ed Ruscha, for example – appear as a political statement. This is most likely how the artists included in this provocative and curiously intimate exhibition understood their work at the time – forty years ago– that, indeed, context is what determines content.

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Editor’s Note: Robert C. Morgan, who is a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of several significant studies in the area of global conceptual art, including Del Arte a La Idea: Ensayos sobre Arte Conceptual (Madrid: Akal, 2003); El Fin del Mundo del Arte y Otros Ensayos (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2000); and  El Artista en el Siglo XXI: La era de la Globalizacion (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2012).

Sanford Wurmfeld, II-15 (R-G/=V), 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 180 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Sanford Wurmfeld is quite simply one of the most informed and articulate painters working with color today. It is not only a matter of what he knows and says, but of the chromatic clarity of his large-scale optical paintings. One of the most important, yet understated aspects of his unforgettable series of perennial grid-based patterns, currently on view at Hunter College Times Square Gallery, is their complex integration of primary and secondary hues and values. (Wurmfeld taught at Hunter from 1967 until his retirement in 2006, from 1978 as chair of the art department.) What Wurmfeld reveals is a sequential modulation of color that ultimately staggers the eye/brain mechanism—and let’s include the emotional charge as well. With color theories informed by such luminaries as Leo Hurvich, Josef Albers, and Dorothea Jameson, Wurmfeld has evolved his own profoundly investigative manner of working as one of our leading geometric abstract painters. His indefatigable visual articulation of color and light derives from a process of sheer focus and assiduity that inform numerous magnificently executed, large-scale paintings in this first-rate exhibition. Missing are the full-scale circular dioramas that embrace the viewer with a saturation of color on all sides. Three major installations of these have been executed and shown elsewhere, but they have yet to be seen in New York.

Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013, February 15 to April 20, 2013, Hunter College Times Square Gallery, 450 West 41st Street (between Dyer and 10th Avenue), New York City, 212-772-4000

March 30 – April 30, 2011
528 West 29th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 239-1181

Joseph Kosuth, Ulysses, 18 Titles and Hours, 1998. Neon, transformers, installed in the exhibition under review. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

In his essay Art After Philosophy, Part One (1969), Joseph Kosuth argued that when art is reduced to ideas, the function of art displaces the necessity of making a conventional art object, and therefore the context in which the idea is placed becomes all-important.  For much of the work designated as “conceptual art” over the years, this has become standard practice.  For Kosuth (among others), who valued the earlier ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, the context of the idea was ultimately more important than its material form.  At the outset of his career in the late 1960s, when still in his twenties, Kosuth fabricated neon word installations, leaning plates of glass, and dictionary definitions printed as negative Photostats as a means to emphasize ideas. The transmission of these ideas is largely dependent on language — as revealed in a recent exhibition at Sean Kelly — and relies heavily on the manner in which language is appropriated and integrated into work.  Ironically, the quality of design and craft — often discounted in conceptual art — in Kosuth’s work appears aesthetically seamless as shown in a recent installation of texts by Samuel Beckett, and in another earlier series of time-based phrases taken from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1998).  In both works, neon light effectively transmits the language embedded within each installation.  Also included in the exhibition were a series of the artist’s iconic dictionary definitions, titled Nothing (1968), which hung in a conventional side-by-side display directly on the wall.  Whereas the original Los Angeles exhibition used inexpensive Photostats of the various definitions of the word “nothing,” the work was later refabricated on canvas to ensure preservation.  And, as it was later discovered, a motivating factor for doing this work related to his reading of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, which was published by Grove Press in English in 1967.

While, in recent years, some of Kosuth’s installations have tended toward repetition through systematic overdetermination, occasionally something exceptional will appear on the Heideggerian horizon that reaches beyond the predictable. The current work, titled “Texts (Waiting for–) for Nothing,” Samuel Becket in play, is one of these occasions.  In this unusually reflective conceptual opus, the artist has formulated a strategic core that pulls together relevant aspects from two earlier works.  Typically dense in its literary, philosophical, and semiotic references, Kosuth’s tripartite installation manages to make all the elements appear as simple as pie (or as dense as pi).  In his dialectically reductive black and white installation — a quality willfully apparent from the beginning — Kosuth reaches a kind of apotheosis in this homage to Beckett.  This suggests a subtle turnabout in artist’s thinking.  Traditionally adverse to hermeneutic or metaphysical concerns in art, it would appear that he has extended his purely linguistic connection ascribed to his modus operandi of the 1980s into a poignantly dark and light theatrical presentation.

Joseph Kosuth, 'Texts (Waiting for-) for Nothing', Samuel Beckett, in play, 2011. Neon, transformers, detail. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Here Kosuth appropriates texts from two early works by Samuel Beckett, titled Texts for Nothing (1950-52) and Waiting for Godot (1948-49).  The first is a group of abstract narratives or ruminations, while the second is a well-known play first performed in Paris, 1953.  In combining the two works by Beckett, Kosuth offered a trace of potential meaning – a  quality often exempt or eliminated in his work.  Given the slow, steady, dramatic incantation of the words traveling laterally across the upper reaches of the four walls close to the ceiling — using a technology known as “cancelled warm neon light”—I found the work illuminating from a phenomenological point of view as it moved to the core of  “meaning” in Beckett’s work without jargon.  The intensity of this kinetic operation was further augmented by a small black and white framed reproduction of a painting by German Romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich, in which two figures are poised by a tree, thus echoing an affinity with the original stage set designed by Sergio Gerstein in Paris. As Beckett’s word fragments merged – appearing and then slowly dissolving into the dark void – I felt the sensation of entering a simulation of descending twilight along with Beckett’s two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who – in the play – speak to one another using a hesitant metaphysical phraseology while stranded in a barren landscape.  (I once performed the cameo role of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, while a student in Boston, during my rather short-lived theatrical career.)

However, the metaphysical words of the Beckettian characters perpetually end without any perceptible resolution, that is to say, they perpetually end in/with nothing.  Somehow this nothingness is emotionally moving in the context of Kosuth’s opus – and not merely because it happens to coincide with the concluding proposition in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, for which the artist was formatively aligned.  Nevertheless, the intersection between Beckett and Wittgenstein — not to mention the obsession with relativist time in James Joyce, for whom Beckett served as a personal secretary during his apprenticeship years – intuits on some level the commitment of Kosuth in maintaining his focus on the foregrounding language in art. While he may ignore the potential significance of a critical contextualization coming from the outside as he continues to function within the context of language, he remains at his best when he allows “nothing” to stand in the way. This work is amazing without reprieve, a masterwork that carries the original intent of how conceptual art functions at its best and therefore achieves validity. It is the intersection between art and language, a topic that engaged me over thirty years ago as a doctoral student, nearly as much as it does today – particularly when confronted with works of this caliber.

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March 8th – April 2nd, 2011
958 Madison Avenue, between 75th and 76th streets,
New York City, 212 570 5786

Marjorie Strider, Green Triptych, 1963. Acrylic paint, laminated pine on Masonite panels, 77-1/2 x 94-3/4 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries

One advantage to having a downturn in the art market is that critics, gallerists, curators, and collectors have an opportunity to reflect and, perhaps, rediscover what they have missed during the infestation of mediocrity we have endured over the past few years. It takes a hefty dose of mediocrity to jump start an art market barnacled in the doldrums of selling bear rugs and blowjobs as the recent SCOPE Art Fair has made abundantly clear.  Yet once we get a tingling – ever so slight – that quality is somewhere on another horizon, this will appear a hopeful omen (for some) that things are beginning to change. In such a period, the tendency to resurrect works of art that would have scarcely, if ever, made it through the portholes of acceptance in more lucrative times is reassuring.

Ironically, Marjorie Strider’s hybrid paintings, fraught with protruding buds, butts, breasts, and luscious red lips, are being seen collectively at a gallery for the first time since their exhibition at Pace in 1965.  These are being shown along with a more recent group of bathers and facial close-ups of women that bridge the old with the new. For those counting, it’s been  45 years since most of the early formative works have been shown or seen. Of the recent work, the alluring large-scale close-ups seem closer to the present than the full-figured bathers.  In the sixties, Strider was a formal artist – akin to Roy Lichtenstein – who employed Pop imagery in her paintings.  She considered the gargantuan carved petals in Red Roses (1962), the alluring bikini breasts in Come Hither (1963), and the fertile asparagus stalks bound with pink rubbers in Green Vertical (1964), as all basically coming from the same family.  In that the paintings are employ carved reliefs, they are heavy.  Painted with bright colors on laminated Masonite, the  “built-out” elements are either in pine,resin-covered foam or, later, polyurethane.  They are wonderfully conceived and executed. Another major work from this period, Green Triptych (1963), reveals a standing bathing beauty adorned in a green standing bikini. Strider has never concealed the fact that these came from Playboy or other girlie magazines. What makes these images ironic, even subversively Pop, is that the artist’s formal and art historical knowledge did not ignore, for example, the influence of Venetian altarpieces.  In such works, including Girl with a Rose (1963), the passage between Renaissance-style figuration and portraiture is transformed into a full-fledged secular Decameron, reminiscent of the tales of Boccaccio.

Marjorie Strider, Girl with Rose, 1963. Acrylic on Masonite panel, 45 x 20 x 2 inches. Courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries

A great deal has been made of Strider being a woman in a male-dominated art movement of the 1960s. Issues of gender and feminism surround the question of why has this artist and her work been so intensively ignored.  While attitudes in marketing contemporary art have historically favored men to the exclusion of women, this has most directly manifested itself in former connections between art media and the market. There are obvious ploys in making contemporary art easy to grasp, and therefore saleable.  One such ploy is the association of select artists to one another, in the way, for example, that putting together Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Oldernberg and Rosenquist into one powerful gallery in the 1960s relegated Rosalyn Drexler, Robert Indiana, Mel Ramos, and Marjorie Strider, among others (such, for instance, as those seen in the important exhibition, “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968″ at the Brooklyn Museum last Fall) to the sidelines of attention. The problem here is also a critical and curatorial one, where critics fail to bring these artists into the dialogue and where curators fail to make aesthetic connections that are not entirely within the scope of the famous five.

However, the marketing issue is not only a gender issue, and the gender issue is not necessarily an isolated content issue.  Thus, it becomes problematic in trying to argue the case internally that Strider was a feminist whose work throughout her career was severely focused on this one idea (or ideology).  Having known the artist, and admired her work since the mid-1970s, I have always found her attention focused on her work, which I believe to be original in its subject matter and experimental in its application of materials.  Intriguing in its demeanor, her energetic and insightful work is never without a certain paradoxical force and humility, intellectually gratifying in opening new thresholds of understanding about the post-human condition and about the role of women in a highly mediated era. She has always believed in herself as an artist, which is one reason I am gratified that finally a glimmer of recognition has found its way in her direction. Marjorie Strider is an example to any artist, younger or older, regardless of gender or race, that to believe in your work is ultimately what counts, and never to give up doing or believing in what you feel your art requires.

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January 11 to March 26, 2011
100 Washington Square East
New York City, (212) 998-6780

Esteban Vicente, Untitled, 1985. Colored paper and gouache on canvas 25-7/8 x 39-3/4 inches. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia

In his life and work, Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) traversed the 20th Century. Primarily known as an abstract painter and celebrated as a vivid colorist, Vicente was described by colleagues as a paragon of Modernism.  Those who knew him well also recounted his fierce authenticity, poised demeanor, and dignified manner of contemplation.  His was a radiating presence whether in the act of painting, conversing with a friend, or in dialog with students.  His work as an instructor in drawing and painting took him from Black Mountain College to the University of Michigan, from Berkeley to Yale, and finally to the New York Studio School.  He considered teaching an important asset to being an artist and it inspired a life-long sense of fulfillment.

A Spaniard, Vicente was born in Taregano in the province of Segovia, moving to New York as a young artist: he lived and worked in a spirit of nobility under relatively humble circumstances.  He seemed to dislike the notion of having studio assistants, secretaries, preparators, or groupies of any sort.  His intellect was never divorced from his feelings: art was a matter of harmonizing these qualities through the act of seeing.

The current exhibition, Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, focuses on his collages and small sculptures.  The story goes that he began making collages from newsprint and magazine clippings in 1949 while teaching at Berkeley, this method of working suggested to him by his friend and colleague Elaine de Kooning.  In fact, Esteban went beyond simply using cut and torn scraps of paper. He would enhance the surface by employing other traditional materials as well. These would include gouache, charcoal, and colored pencil over the pasted elements, which were mounted either on board or canvas. The energy that comes across from this five-decade survey corresponds, to varying degrees, to such practioners  as Jack Tworkov, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Eduardo Chillida, and Michael Goldberg.  Oddly, however, there is virtually no trace of Robert Motherwell’s collage aesthetic, which he must have been been aware of at the outset of his collage-making. As Vicente’s experimentations with collage progressed, he grew increasingly more involved with light, as had already been made apparent in his paintings.  According to artist Dorothea Rockburne, it was the luminosity of Vicente’s color that made his work distinct from paintings by American or recent emigrant painters from Eastern Europe.

Esteban Vicente, Kalani Hawaii, 1969. Colored paper and charcoal on cardboard 52 x 40 inches. The Harriet and Esteban Vicente Foundation

By the year 1962, Vicente’s collages were in full swing.  He was painting his cut and torn papers with gouache in many cases before they were applied to the surface.  Also, the color becomes richer and brighter.  We see this in two collages from 1962, Orange, Red Black and Black, Red, and Brown, both from the collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia (a magnificent museum in the heart of Spain, founded shortly before the artist’s death).  This absorption of color within cut and pasted papers continued throughout the 1960s, culminating in a 1969 visit to Honolulu with masterworks such as Kalani Hawaii and Kaabumanu.  The exhibition contains a relative paucity of collages of a comparable quality from the 1970s and early `80s. However, by the late `80s, Esteban springs back into form with a luster of soaring shapes, with an untitled work from 1988 where primary colors function in relation to thin nondescript washes, and with another untitled piece from 1994 of various cut white shapes on canvas. A similar approach in used in another collage on canvas from 1998 in which orange and green cut forms amplify four striations in white.

Although rarely discussed by American critics, Vicente’s sculptures, collectively called Divertimiento and dating from1960 to -1979, constitute one the true pleasures of this exhibition. Rather than monumental works, they are intimate extensions of collage or assemblage, a style of building or constructivism in miniature scale, displayed here in vitrines.  They remind me of the delicate bronze Etruscan hairpins on permanent display in the Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The delicacy of Vicente’s sculpture is a study unto itself as these works represent an originality of three-dimensional form rarely seen or recognized in recent Western sculpture. Some are made from gessoed foam core, others from small pieces of painted wood. The height rarely exceeds a foot, and often less than eight inches.  To study these forms involves concentration as if one were analyzing a lyrical theorem, an oxymoron, if there ever was one. They are paradoxical and assured, clear, and yet, also ambiguous. They are a type of sculpture that exceeds any reference point to how we think about art today.  It returns our consciousness to those who worked in caves and enclosed dwellings from some prelinguistic epoch.

My only professional connection to Esteban was in 1999 when, surprisingly, we were each awarded the Premio Arcale by the Municipality of Salamanca. He was given the prize in art, I for criticism.  Given his age and the condition of his health at the time he chose not to travel from New York to Spain for the ceremony.  My disappointment was that I never had the occasion to shake the artist’s hand.

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Jannis Kounellis, Untitled / 12 Live Horses, Rome, 1969

In the early 1960s, American Minimalism set the stage for a discourse that involved a divergent attitude toward sculpture. Often referred to as “primary forms,” artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin embraced the abstract pragmatic notion that materials constituted a structure contained by its own language. They sought a more or less uniform placement of modular units, such as cubes, cut pieces of felt, angular shapes, or readymade florescent light fixtures. By the end of the decade, these artists came to see an opposition between their empirical aesthetics and the more psychological and political content appropriated within the context of installation, performance, and body art.

When the Greek-born Jannis Kounellis entered the scene in 1967 as a seminal artist at  the outset of the Arte Povera movement in Genoa, his tendency was to reject what he saw as a superficial split between aesthetics and politics.  Instead of separating the two, Kounellis believed they could function on equal terms in relation to one another. While considered radical at that time, especially in 12 Live Horses, shown at L’Attico Gallery in 1969, the symbolic art/life/political position of Kounellis has gradually been accepted over the years through a remarkable series of large-scale installations, primarily shown in Europe.  The importance of the current large-scale tome, titled Jannis Kounellis: Stations on an Odyssey, 1969-2010, authored by curator and art historian, Mark Scheps, recounts the artist’s work in twenty-two installations by a sculptor who implicitly offers a holistic alternative to the dualistic pragmatism of Minimalism.  In shifting his observations away from the empirical parameters of Minimalism, Professor Scheps acknowledges the work of Kounellis as an Odyssey, which, in this case, is comparable to the complex mental structures conceived by Daedelus in the labyrinth as “a universal myth, a microcosm of human fate, a metaphor for our relationship to the world, an existential space, a utopia in permanent evolution.”

For Kounellis art cannot be separated from either life or politics.  Therefore, when he works with materials such as steel, wool, gas-jets, stones, hemp, wooden beans, bells, words, and live animals, such as horses and parrots, in relation to politically loaded architectural sites, he closes the breach between the literalism of Minimal art and a heightened allegorical context derived from history.  His acute stylistic syntax transcends the kind of singular object by which sculpture was identified in past centuries, and shockingly imposes on the viewer a confrontation of hard materials that ironically reveals the poetry of light. There is nothing  pretentious or superficial in these installations. They are meant to be what they are. When you see steel I-beams riveted over window shutters, a photograph of the artist biting a steel plate with a lit candle against his nose and forehead, piles of stones or fabric piled within a threshold as a blockage, or carcasses of beef hung against steel plates heated with gas lights, there is poetry, to be sure.  But in contrast to the kind of poetry read on a page, these brutal, confrontational installations suggest something more violent, something malevolent that impedes the motion of the body from movement, from evolution, or from making any kind of political progress towards a possible future where the quality of life takes precedence over the perennial insistence of political oppression and mindless power.

It is clear in works, such as Exhibition of Winter Landscapes in Pistoria (1993-94)  or the Stommeln Synagogue in Pullheim (1991-92), that Kounellis’s installation are not merely a formal exercise but an exacerbation in which the aesthetic posture combines with the force of a political resistance against the human weaknesses evident within a historical moment.  Instead of positive change, there is a sullen discrepancy positioned against human beings struggling for a livelihood and freedom with the course of their everyday lives.  A more recent example would include the Church of San Augustin in Mexico City (1999-2000) in which stones and draped coverings combine with steel crosses on the diagonal in a modular format. Against the Minimal aesthetic comes into play as the political resistance makes itself evident that persecution is counter to humanity and to future progress in the real sense of moving ahead to establish a more compatible world.

Finally, this book – accompanied by Scheps’s insightful narrative, and its exemplary design where, in fact, the presentation of the book appears all in black and white as if it were an extension of an textually embodied installation  – reveals Kounellis as not simply an artist working within the “expanded field” of Rosalind Krauss, but as a compelling humanitarian artist who feels the disjunction of time as the consequence of misguided incentives toward power and the inescapable seduction of power, which fully encapsulates the human condition, even after the launching of postmodernism. In many ways, this is the correction that Kounellis offers to the practice of art– not as a sparse conceptual diatribe, but as a tactile, material means to intuitively establish a counter regime, an apotheosis of a kind that goes again the diurnal routines of existence that in many ways blind us from the larger realities that constitutes the endless tragedies found in history and the architecture that harkens the evidence of these histories.  This is the project of Kounellis, a European project, to be sure, given that Americans have only recently confronted terror without fully understanding its consequences or its aftermath.

Marc Scheps, Jannis Kounellis: Stations on an Odyssey, 1969-2010. New York: Prestel, 2010. ISBN 977 8379 1350 127. 360 pages, $120

Audrey Flack, Wheel of Fortune (Vanitas), 1977-1978. Oil over acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 inches. Courtesy of Gary Snyder Project Space.

Long considered one of the innovators of photorealism, Audrey Flack emerged on the scene in the late 1960s with paintings that embraced magazine reproductions of movie stars along with Matza cracker boxes and other mundane objects, that referred ironically to Pop Art. As one of the first of these artists to enter the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Flack later came to excel in vanitas paintings that combined painted renderings of black and white photographs along with detailed arrangements of elegant objects including fruits, cakes, chocolates, strings of pearls, lipsticks, tubes of paint, and glass wine goblets.  In works such as Wheel of Fortune (1977-78), she would represent decks of playing cards and other ephemera related to gambling, adding a mirror and human skull, for good measure.  Her recent exhibition of Cibachrome prints, curated by Garth Greenan for Gary Snyder Project Space, is titled “Audrey Flack Paints A Picture” and is accompanied by five actual paintings.  This show reveals the painstaking process employed in making these fresh and original paintings from the late 1970s through the early 1980s during a highly significant and intensely productive period of her career.

( Gary Snyder Project Space, September 16 – November 6, 2010 )

Julian Schnabel, Untitled (Mickey Rourke), 2008. Reproduced in the book under review. Courtesy Prestel Publishing

In becoming aware of Schnabel around 1979 – who, in those days, was showing at the Mary Boone Gallery – I was admittedly skeptical, largely due to the excessive application of objects, such as steer horns, branches, and ceramic plates, that adorned his painted wooden panels. In retrospect, my problem was less with the rancorous appearance of these objects than with the presumed semiotic connections being imposed upon them by that new colony of infestation, “art writers.”  In spite of Schnabel’s curious lack of formal demeanor, his ambitions were clearly bent on reviving allegory in painting (and eventually in film).  In comparison with the fray of emerging painters of the time, Schnabel’s work had a certain radical touch, somewhat insouciant in comparison with the “Tenth Street touch,” shown by painters twenty-five years earlier. By removing himself from the cynicism employed by commonplace expressionism in the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself closer to what astronauts called “the right stuff.”  While the broken plates and sprawling tarpaulins did not gel with my minimalist sensibility, they eventually managed to uplift the squandering anti-aesthetic discourse of those decades to a more physical level as painting moved from its soporific semiosis into the limelight of spectacle. Through a series of unhampered surface disruptions, Schnabel transformed the heavily mannered paintings of his early years into a curious, if not elusive lightness outside the reach of Transavantgardia, East Village graffiti, or the kind of American art school painting epitomized by David Salle.

Lightness in painting is difficult to obtain nowadays, and when it occurs, it appears differently then it did in certain Northern Baroque painters, such as the Alsatian steward, Sebastian Stoskopff, or that dour Dutchman, Frans Hals.  Yet, by the twenty-first century it appeared necessary to rejuvenate this point of departure in painting toward an instant photographic point of view.  Some of the most magnetic photos in this jerky, smudgy sequential portfolio are the sepia-toned and painted, 18 X 24 inch Polaroids of American actor qua wrestler Mickey Rourke. What makes these images of Rourke so appealing is the immense bravura, the tattooed torso, and the unguarded grimace of this postmodern Peter Lorre, this half-crazed, persistently debauched, sex-ridden actor that will go down in history a cut above the pretentiously bewildered dungaree-boy, Johnny Depp. Somehow one cannot avoid praising Schnabel’s generosity as he positions his lens on his subjects.  This would include the magnificent aging Lower Eastside rock star, Lou Reed, who bears a simulated King Arthur sword amid the overgrown flora at the artist’s seaside domicile in Montauk, and Herculean tenor Placido Domingo whose feigned machismo reverts to a sublime Etruscan melancholy. There are others, of course, ranging from the perennially elegant actor, Max van Sydow, to the stubbornly coy Christopher Walken.   Most touching perhaps are the rough-edged Polaroids of Schnabel’s two sons, Cy and Olmo (the latter’s head is framed in a shawl on the cover of the book). These are the intelligent wild children of nature, youthful fauns in the out-of-doors cavorting in the garden of delights, bearing the pulse of a generation in the throes of conflict twixt the virtual and the tactile realities of human emotion.

There are also a portraits of Frank Stella, Rula Jebreal, and Takashi Murakami – each posing as if for a screen test – clearly casual, yet carefully articulated, each representing selfhood liberated from the director behind the camera. There is an art to doing this, and the art is convincing throughout the book. Even when the scenery appears vague and uninteresting upon first glance, there is an overall sense of a purpose in the photographs, a sense that the subject and the scenery belong to art.  Rather than dwelling on objects, Schnabel focuses on light.  Rather than the furniture in a room, we are shown an installation. Rather than the pose of a rephotographed psychotic from the 19th Century, we are shown a contortion of a human head slightly tilted to one side. The hands imply an irregular occurrence where the mind rapidly diverts from the presumed innocence of the sitter’s expression.

In turning the pages of these highly engaging and visceral Polaroids – a photographic technology that reached its peak in the early 1970s – I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s remark that to make art requires that the artist revert to obsolescent techniques that preceded the latest advance.  I immediately relate this to Nam June Paik, known for his ingenious assemblages built from old 1950s TV cabinetry, but it may apply just as well to the work of Schnabel. Polaroids offer a certain arcane accuracy to the user that is full of surprises. Because of the clumsiness of the large camera, it is not always easy to control or to hold in place. As a result, happy accidents may occur, with a kind of accuracy the artist may not have intended.  One gets the impression in looking at these Polaroids that Schnabel is somewhere between painting and film-making, and that his life is a constant quest to discover a world that he has not yet experienced.

The culminating affect of this portfolio, edited with an introduction by Petra Giloy-Hirtz, elicits a feeling of intimacy.  This raises the question as to whether Schnabel seeks to capture his destiny through a transformation of what is common into some higher level of meaning. I enjoy the suspension of this notion, as it does not force the issue. Instead, there lingers an exuberant, tantalizing world in which everyday life becomes an adventure, filled with emotions that continue to blossom forth as the camera moves happily from one portrait scenario to another, always on the edge of expectancy.

Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Julian Schnabel: Polaroids. New York: Prestel, 2010. ISBN 978-3-7913-5076-9, 192 pp. 100 color illustrations, $49.95

installation shot, Le Tableau, Cheim & Read, 2010, with works by Charline von Heyl, Serge Poliakoff and Sarah Rapson. Courtesy of Cheim & Read.

Le Tableau, curated by painter and critic Joe Fyfe, is a typical example of what happens when hermeneutic hypothesis trumps the ability to discern qualitative significance in painting. There is a tendency in synchronic exhibitions these days to foreground an explanatory text in such a way that the works chosen become merely ancillary to some theoretical proposition. In the case of Le Tableau, without the printed, accompanying text, it would be different to grasp exactly what this exhibition is trying to tell us. Fyfe separates his concerns as artist, critic and curator from the legacy of Greenbergian formalism by advocating less the concept of  “the flatbed picture plane” and more the “material means and/or structure of painting as a form or figure” as, for example, found in post-war French painting from the 1940s and ‘50s.

In fact, , I’m fully in support of reviving attention to post-war French painting, based on my own experience in seeing works of these painters in the late 1960s on my first excursion to France.  Even so, and in spite of Fyfe’s handsome text, there is a paucity of work in this exhibition that catches a glimmer of what this mid-century period in the recent French painting (at least from this American’s perspective) was all about.  Le Tableau is a gathering of a few modestly scaled Ecole de Paris paintings by Jean Fautrier (measuring just under 9 X 11 inches), Serge Poliakoff, and the French-Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle ( 7 X 5 1/2 inches) along with a recent work (2009) by Supports/Surface painter Claude Viallat, whose rise to prominence came in the 1970s.  A mediocre painting by the otherwise remarkable Hans Hartung is included, yet pales beside anything that was shown in that artist’s phenomenal retrospective at the Maeght Foundation in San Paul de Vence in 2008.  There is no work by Pierre Soulages, Wols, Gerard Schneider, or Georges Matthieu to stand in support of the eclectic, motley choice of slightly larger works from recent French and American artists. An exception is the sumptuous Untitled (1959) by Joan Mitchell, who can be claimed equally by America and France, particularly in this most heraldic moment of her development.  Fyfe is generally correct in characterizing Mitchell (from the late 1950s) as “an insouciant semiotician of the painterly mark.”  What made these paintings so eminently important for Mitchell was her propensity to stop short of de Kooning’s sweeping brushwork, and to focus intensively and unabashedly on destroying the surface. Paradoxically she maintained the force of restraint so as not to kill it entirely as her anxious marks became signifiers of an explosive, personal content, both self-determined and utterly convincing.

Jean Fautrier, Terre D'Espagne, 1956. Oil on canvas, 8-3/4 x 10-3/4 inches . Courtesy of Cheim & Read

The exhibition also includes Kate Moran, Jonathan Lasker, Merlin James, John Zurier, Juan Usle, Jean-Francois Maurige, and the late Milton Resnick, among others.  Fyfe participates in the exhibition himself with an elegant sewn work using felt, cotton, and jute (from Southeast Asia), and thereby implies that the French approach from the 1950s is his own proper context. The positioning of one’s own work in such an exhibition is perhaps more problematic today than it would have been three or four decades ago, a time when the overall emphasis on the market was known but considerably less obvious than it has become.  While Fyfe may hold a clear commitment to the intellectual aspects of advanced painting, the presence of his work in Le Tableau appears somewhat overstated.

Reopening the book on Michel Tapié’s Art Informel and Tachisme is certainly welcome, but the kind of contiguity and consistency between then and now is simply not clear in the works selected for this display. The balance is off, and the installation is often awkward. There is not enough strong work from the early period in Paris to get a definitive idea as to where recent abstract painting from New York and France may have found an unforeseen place in the current century. Fyfe’s comparison of two nearby Chelsea buildings by architects Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel as a way to characterize the extreme aesthetic differences between America and France I find to be absurd. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the kind of abstract painting advocated by Greenberg, criticism based in qualitative judgments is still relevant. This is where the application of theory in terms of justifying much of this exhibition becomes highly problematic, and where Le Tableau falls short of its potential. Even so, whatever one may think of the thesis of this show, a  new look at postwar French painting relative to the present deserves more institutional support as better works by these earlier French artists could have turned this rather hesitant exhibition into something of real significance.

Ross Neher, Armistice, 2007. Oil on canvas, 28-1/4 c 32 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Ross Neher’s modest one-person exhibition at the 210 Gallery in Brooklyn reveals something very important about abstract painting: In the best work, there is always more than what initially meets the eye.  Following Neher’s career as a painter for over two decades, I have become increasingly cognizant of the way he grabs something he has actually seen in real time and space and proceeds to refine and/or embellish it as an abstract pictorial theme in multiple variations. In this recent exhibition, he only showed a fraction of the work he did between 2003-2009 based on detailed notations of the walls of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.

This was not his first encounter with late Renaissance architecture. Neher performed precisely the same procedure during a visit to Umbria in 1997.  On that occasion, Neher saw the magnificent Palazzo di Consoli in Gubbio and immediately commenced a thorough analysis of this architectural monument. He studied every inch of the Palazzo, but from the perspective of an abstract painter, rather than an architect.  In addition to the form, he investigated the light, and the effect of light at various times of the day (not unlike Monet at Rouen).

As for perspective, Neher apparently perceives little distinction between the convergence of lines on a horizon and how the shifting patterns of light alter the manner in which he sees these persistent linear demarcations.  In one way, illusion enters into a synthetic view of the architecture where the light is subtly transformed into contrasting hues, as in Faro (2006), or modular values, as in Dark Sforza (2005) – the latter being an iconic painting that serves to clarify the artist’s intention as he moves between representation and abstract form. In either case, we see canvases divided into an system of beveled rectangles where relatively shallow spaces are placed within the structure of an unequal grid. To achieve the effect of two levels of space, a perspectival illusion is created within the interior framed edges. In addition, the paintings use color and tonality to emphasize the inner and outset aspects of the grid.

Ross Neher, Faro, 2006. Oil on canvas, 31-1/2 x 33-1/4 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

By avoiding rhetorical pretensions, Neher takes the concept of abstract geometry to another level. In his kind of painterly phenomenology the abstract picture plane is susceptible to certain limitations ,unless it can be brought back to another form of representation, in which case painting itself becomes the issue.  As revealed in Dark Sforza or in a slightly later square painting, Gray Faro (2007), he seeks to transform abstraction through empirical observations of historical architecture into a kind of imaginative form, thus balancing the illusion of perspective in relation to color modulation and light.

While there is little doubt that his spatial grids have cubic portals of variable dimensions that provide an interesting contrast in relation to the color harmonies, modulations, and contrasts, his approach has virtually nothing to do with Cubism. If anything – upon seeing horizontal rectilinear paintings, such as The Red Zone (2004) or Interlude (for Bridget Riley) (2005) – I would say that there is a certain Mannerist impulse in these works that verges on Expressionism. And yet, it is ultimately no more Expressionism than it is Cubism.  Rather I would read these paintings as a form of optical painting, although one that avoids the trappings of what Victor Vasarely termed the “optical kinetic.” there is nothing superfluous in these paintings, everything counts. But in some cases, the awkward feasibility of the forms resembles a style of Mannerist painting that would finally have their roots in a kind of opticality where the viewer is expected to fill-in the absences within the various interior frames.  This happens largely because the surfaces are somehow never complete. Like Giacometti’s late sculptures, the intensity of the work suggests an unfinished quality. Thus, Neher’s paintings are perpetually transforming themselves in relation to the optical phenomenon of seeing.