Installation shot of Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery, Williamsburg, January 5 to March 24, 2013. Richard Timperio is the face behind the iMac. Courtesy of Sideshow Gallery

Richard Timperio lends new meaning to the terms “skying” and “grounding” with the humungous 470-artist group show, Sideshow Nation, at his Williamsburg gallery.  The precedent for such jam-packed art installation that comes to mind is the 19th-century style of exhibition of the great European academies and salons with their paintings hung floor to ceiling to which the public flocked en masse.  Sideshow Nation closes this coming weekend after a two-month run.

“I never liked the idea of a Christmas show,” the artist-turned-gallerist tells me.   “A lot of little trinkets.  Nobody buys them and nobody cares.” In the early days of Sideshow he staged just such an event, with the title “Merry Peace,” but what he has come to prefer is  “an overview – a chance to show what people are doing.”

An estimated crowd of 2,000 attended the opening January 5.  Of coure, if each artist attended with a couple of friends it would get up to that number pretty fast.  People lined up in the cold half way around the block, and Timperio had to stand out on the pavement, in order to let new people in only after previous guests had left.

The official hours were six to nine PM but the galleries were still crowded at eleven. Timperio’s annual salon has become a New York art world fixture: even its premier fun couple, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, were spotted in the line in one recent year.

The hanging is a work of art in itself, a complex checkerboard of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural objects. But then, Timperio is himself an artist, and one who has evolved through a variety of personae..  (His own show at Art 101 in Williamsburg was reviewed by artcritical in 2011.)

Photograph of Richard Timperio by Peter Reginato

WhenTimperio arrived in New York in 1970,  in his early twenties, from his native Ohio, he designed a pinball machine. This was followed by a sojourn in New Mexico, where he was able to make a living in commercial art (and acquired his trademark cowboy hat). Returning to New York in the later ‘70s he did political caricatures for the New York Times and began to devote more time to his painting.

Starting out in a pop idiom, with special attention to rodeos, Timperio evolved into abstraction when, as he says, “I realized that I was more interested in what the paint was doing than in telling a story.”  This was in the early eighties, when he also started to paint on the floor. Dan Christensen, a good friend, was a big influence on his art.

Sideshow had its beginnings in 1995, when the legendary Williamsburg restaurant, Planet Thailand, invited Timperio to hang some art on its walls. In those days, Williamsburg was still a working-class neighborhood where artists found attractive rents. “We would have an opening and you could actually have a dialogue,” Timperio recalls, nostalgically.

But other galleries and young professionals followed the artists, and they, in turn, were followed by edgy boutiques, restaurants and condos: the usual story. Today, a Sotheby’s real estate office shares the block with the cheerfully graffiti-decorated building into which Sideshow moved in 2000, and, grouses Timperio, “Everything costs a fortune.”

Some of the artists showing in this year’s Sideshow Nation are “celebs” like Paul Resika, Bill Jensen, Forrest (“Frosty”) Myers and Dorothea Rockburne.  Others are at least as well known for their writing: Robert Morgan, Phong Bui, Mario Naves; or their dealing:  Janet Kurnatowski, Pauline Lethen. Some are unknowns and/or friends of artists included in the past, and some are tried and true friends of Timperio’s who have returned year after year.

It’s also a family affair, with brothers Don and Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield and son Noah Landfield, husband-and-wife team James Walsh and Ann Walsh,  twins Carol Diamond and Cathy Diamond, and  Timperio’s own artist-childrenWillie Timperio and Cheyenne Timperio.  The younger Timperios both showed abstraction in the past but this year both opted for figuration.

Most of the artists on display are alive, and of all ages, but occasionally room is made for a distinguished deceased.  For instance, a lively self-portrait drawing by the late impresario Willoughby Sharp is in the current show, as is a fine small painting by Dan Christensen.

Being a painter himself, Timperio is not overly enthusiastic about conceptual art.  “It has to have something you can see,“ he says.  He considers the visual “more important than meaning – I’m not big on the word. But I try to keep it as open as possible. I think every generation has something valuable to say.”

Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery through March 24, 319 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

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Xia Gui (1195–1224) Pure and Remote View. Landscape hand roll, partial view. National Palace Museum, Taipei

Jim, you have had a stellar career in the field of Asian art history.  You served for a number of years as a museum curator, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC, until 1965 when you moved to Berkeley where you retired in 1995.  You’ve pretty much received every prize the College Art Association offers.

Yes, and the Freer Medal last year, equivalent for my field of a Nobel Prize!

Congratulations.  How would you characterize your scholarly interests?

I have been, for some sixty years now, an art historian specializing in Chinese painting—secular painting mainly, since I never mastered the doctrines and iconography of Buddhism beyond the superficial level. I have also written extensively about Japanese painting, especially the school called Nanga (“Southern School painting”) which tried to take the Ming-Qing painting of China as its model.

Tell us a bit about the scope of your publications.

I am the author of a dozen or so published books, including book-length exhibition catalogs, several of them done with graduate student input, and numerous articles in learned journals. My books have been translated into many languages; in China, books published under my Chinese name Gao Juhan are extremely popular, selling in the tens of thousands.

So, I’m intrigued to know how the body of new material posted to your website, jamescahill.info builds upon your publications?

It substitutes, in a way, for a book I never wrote. I intended, when I had completed my series on later (Ming-Qing) Chinese painting, to go back and do the early periods, backwards from Southern Song—and that first volume would be titled “A Pure and Remote View,” after the great landscape hand scroll by Xia Gui (a section of which opens and closes all the lectures in this first series.) But I was pulled away from this plan by the series of invitations to do endowed lecture series—Norton Lectures at Harvard, others at Columbia, Harvard again, University of Kansas, University of Southern California – which were published as books on big special themes, instead of the period-art-history books I had planned. I never got back to those.

James Cahill, courtesy UC Berkeley

You’ve published many books, why is this latest material published on the web instead? Does that way of thinking involve any general view of the future of art book publishing?

Quick answer: I wasn’t ready, at my age and weakened condition, to take on another book, with all the fuss of getting permissions, dealing with an editor, etc. Longer answer: I was attracted by the idea of being able to show my viewers all the visual materials (mostly from digitized slides) I wanted to, all  in color, no limits – this after spending decades producing books with highly restricted number of illustrations (plates) and even fewer color plates. We show many thousands of images, including lots of close-in details of paintings. Between my own old slide collection, very extensive, and that of my old department, I probably have access to more of these materials (slides mostly) than anyone else living.

There are over forty hours of the “Pure and Remote View” lectures. The first lecture at my website has already been watched more than three thousand times. They are also accessible on the  website of our sponsoring organization, the Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C.  Berkeley.

A second series, to be titled “Gazing Into the Past,” with lectures devoted to particular Chinese (and some Japanese) artists and paintings of the later (post-Song) period, will begin going up on the web soon. I have already completed a dozen or so of the lectures of this series in draft, and mean to continue making and posting them as long as I am able.

Specialists will of course look at your website as a matter of course. Could you say something, however, about what the many people interested in the art of China who are not experts will find there?

I have always argued against the idea that Chinese painting is an esoteric art that requires some background in Asian philosophies and religions for its appreciation. Anyone who watches the first lecture (or any of the others) comes quickly to realize that I am presenting a pictorial art quite as visually rewarding as any they know in their own familiar tradition. Non-specialists, that is—as I know from numerous responses—will be as visually rewarded, even excited, as they have been previously by the works of their favorite artists: Picasso, Degas, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, Botticelli, whoever.

Ernst Gombrich believed that European painting of the Renaissance and after was the only time that artists have, in his words, “striven systematically, through a succession of generations, step by step to approximate their images to the visible world and achieve likenesses that might deceive the eye.” But I would counterthat with another, earlier tradition equally fits that pattern: Chinese painting through the Song when artists produced deeply moving and philosophically grounded paintings that rank, in my view, among the greatest works of man.

Is your material accessible also to Chinese audiences since the web there is censored.

One very popular website in China, called Tudou (Potato), has posted my lectures and thus made them accessible (they are also on YouTube but Chinese don’t have ready access to that). We are negotiating with organizations in China about the possibility of their sponsoring our project and posting the lectures.

As a veteran scholar, what hopes have you for the future of art history in China?

Great hopes—as indeed I have for the future of China as a whole.  It is too great a culture to continue forever under such harsh restrictions. I hope to live to see the emancipation. Art history in China is presently plagued by a widespread adherence to the “verbal” faction in what they term the visual-verbal controversy—to an art history, that is, based mainly in reading written materials and producing more of them—theory, criticism, a text-reader’s art history–rather than in looking seriously at the works of art themselves. We hope to better that situation both by offering an attractive model for visual art history and by making the materials (images) accessible to everybody. We plan to issue the lectures also on sets of disks, with some provision for downloading the images on them.

I really want to stress my gratitude to the Tang Research Foundation whose director first encouraged me to undertake this project, and has funded it since then, and also to Rand Chatterjee, who has transformed what I originally envisioned (a simple filming of my old slide-lectures, in effect) into what is really a new medium, ideally suited for presenting images and ideas together in ways that are both visually and intellectually exciting. And, best of all, unlike the commercial lecture-series operations, we can present them for free viewing by anyone at any time. With proper publicity we can expand our viewership, and all these benefits, to huge numbers of people all over the world.

I am now 85 years old, a few months from being 86. I am still more or less OK in the head, but running down badly every place else. When I write about old-age styles of artists I note that their late paintings tend to lose depth, become flattened out. I hope the same will not be true of my lectures.

Rachel Churner (left) with artist Joianne Bittle. Courtesy, Churner and Churner Gallery

The poster for the show, which was envisioned by Churner, encapsulates the time-based quality of photography that many of the exhibits are exploiting. “I thought what would be great is if, when you open the poster, the photo turned black as you were looking at it. Just like undeveloped photo paper would do.” Rachel laughs at the mention of the show poster, partly at the absurdly ambitious idea and partly because the absurd idea ended up working so perfectly.

The same enthusiasm flows into the discussion of the three artists being displayed in the exhibition Every Photo Graph Is In Visible. Rachel specifically mentions one of the installations from the third artist, Laitha. Entitled “2X4,” it’s literally a photograph pressed into the wall – “crumpled” – by a two-by-four. To install the piece, Churner will have to cut into the wall of her own gallery and insert the installation. Six months on and three installations in, Churner is still remodeling.

The idea for the gallery began while Churner was still working at Peter Freeman, Inc. “We were dealing mostly in 60s and 70s artwork. But the more that I started working with the artists, the more and more exciting that became.” She began looking for a suitable space, but found that she would be limited by the aesthetic characters of most neighborhoods. She wanted to feature emerging artists, but ones that were less consciously in the vanguard and more dedicated to craft and conceptual rigor. The only place that felt appropriate was Chelsea.

Churner & Churner is located close to the corner of 22nd Street on 10th Avenue. Rachel Churner had to go against conventional thinking about location – that galleries thrive on streets and are choked out on avenues – in pursuit of more important factors. The space had to be small, and location on the ground floor was a must – a spot on 26^th street would have been unacceptable if it meant being up on the sixth floor. It’s a quiet section of the city, and construction scaffolding is slowly encroaching on the gallery front, but foot traffic has still been steady. “We’ve had great foot traffic. In part because of the High Line, that’s really made a difference in people just walking on the avenue. When we first opened it was just because they were looking how to get on it.”

The other Churner in Churner & Churner is Rachel’s younger sister Leah, a film curator and archivist. Churner & Churner is the first major project the two have worked on together, and Rachel comments that their family’s perception of the venture has become its own beast. “There’s this great confusion in my larger family. Because my grandparents assume that now that it’s a Churner and Churner business that we also live together. They have no idea that there are distinct personalities anymore.”

But so far, the two have collaborated very little on the gallery. Leah herself remarks that she helps from the sidelines, mostly assisting at openings and giving input when Rachel is hanging shows. Even the latest programming event – the screening of several short films from the 60s and 70s featuring, among others, a Lar Tusb film of Joe Cocker playing baseball – was, according to Leah, an idea developed and executed solely by Rachel using films rented from The Filmmakers Coop.

It remains to be seen to what degree Leah will include herself in the gallery’s programming and exhibition schedule. For now, it seems that Rachel needs little help. She tosses out a few ideas she has been turning over in her head as she tries to settle on the perfect event. “While the exhibition program is set for the next year, these little things aren’t. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

The Ghost in the Machine, Curated by Stephen Westfall: John McLaughlin, Nicholas Krushenick, Don Christensen, Harriet Korman, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Jennifer Riley, Rachel Beach, Jackie Meier, Thomas Raggio is at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., June 23 to August 19, 2011.

REVERIE, Curated by Stephen Westfall: Andrea Belag, Shirley Jaffe, Alix Le Méléder, Sylvan Lionni, Julia Rommel, Patricia Treib, Stephen Westfall, Stanley Whitney, at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, New York. NY 10012

Stephen Westfall, Wise One, 2011, 36 ? 36?, oil and alkyd on canvas. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

The last thing you expect of cognitive dissonance is a harmonious feeling, and yet that is what you get when you consider Stephen Westfall’s mode of painting and his way of conducting himself in the world.  Rigorous, cool, hard-edged formal abstraction is his painting mode whereas his activities as an educator, critic, essayist and (this season) an especially busy curator of group exhibitions are marked by ecumenism: warmly inclusive and boundary-breaking in the people he selects to write about or to exhibit with/together, he often makes unexpected connections across mediums and styles, generations and allegiances.  His approach is non-dogmatic, suggesting that pragmatism rather than idealism lies at the heart of his aesthetics.

This season he has been the subject and instigator of three New York shows.  His sixth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, his Chelsea dealer, titled Seraphim for one of the paintings in the show, opened at the end of April and followed on from an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, where he had been a fellow, in Summer 2010.  During his residency in the eternal city, Westfall became mesmerized by mosaic flooring in early medieval churches.  The result – an extended series of diamond-shaped bands of color, formats that recall Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella but in ways that, to paraphrase Klee, take the grid for a walk – captured praise from the influential husband and wife critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz.  For Smith, in the New York Times, Westfall’s “syncopated progression of hues, which is more intuitive than systematic, creates a wonderful, jangling destabilization, warping space and confirming scale (not size) as the living energy source that it is.”  For Saltz, in New York Magazine, “it feels vibrantly alive, quirky, open, ever-mutating, and popping with color… Westfall’s work has never felt so free, confident, and his own.”

His New York solo show was followed in the same space by a group show he selected, Ghost in the Machine, that included a large work of his own, a show that juxtaposed artists all working within geometric abstraction but to sharply contrastive ends.  Coincidental with the Chelsea group show was Reverie at Zürcher Studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, which again included a painting of his own amidst a diverse and intercontinental group. Zürcher is his longstanding representative in Paris.

Ghost in the Machine can be read as a kind of manifesto of “impurist” geometric abstraction in which popular culture and humor are celebrated as extensions of abstraction rather than its enemy.  “Some people think that artists deploy geometry as an austerity.  It ain’t necessarily so.” Westfall wrote in a statement accompanying the show.  “All the work here stands for more than one thing: swoony craft, optical dazzle, compression and expansion.” John McLaughlin, the Boston-born Californian whose proto-minimalist paintings have been the subject of recent rediscovery, might seem closest to a purest aesthetic with its allegiance to Mondrian, Malevich and Zen.  Even he allows his color and spatial decisions to be inflected by a Californian aesthetic of gloss and ease.  Jennifer Riley, one of the younger artists in the group, and a former student of Westfalls (he has taught for years at Bard College and at Rutgers, both important centers for abstract painting on the East Coast) makes the connection between her crystalline forms and a Pop aesthetic explicit, if extremely coded, in the title, Starburst for NK, (2009); NK is Nicholas Krushenick (1929-1999), also represented in the exhibition and held by many to be the father of pop abstraction.

If Ghost is a manifesto, Reverie is a visual poem; in place of the rigorous organizing principle of geometry – whether subversive or subverted – this show allows for greater diversity of touch and process, ranging in its modes of abstraction from monochrome (Julia Rommel ) to gestural (Andrea Belag) to minimal (Sylvan Lionni ) to organic (Patricia Treib).  Its presiding eminence grise was the Paris-based veteran Shirley Jaffe, represented by a monumental, tapestry-like collage of glyphs and decals, while another “lifer” – to quote Westfall’s witty euphemism from his supporting statement – was Stanley Whitney, whose gutsy grids are composed of wobbling lozenges of sharply contrastive colors and gently differentiating textures. Whitney’s found grid stood in instructive contract to the meticulously preplanned rigor of Westfall, but rather than suggesting an opposition, it seemed that Westfall enlisted Whitney to say that he, too, arrives at his patterns through feeling and whim as much as any formal logic.

Stephen Westfall, My Beautiful Laundrette, 2008. Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

Westfall has been known for years for his penchant for cheery, upbeat geometric abstraction that simultaneously registers order and disruption.  At first his compositions strike the viewer as well-behaved structures of pattern with decorative correlates in the applied arts, such as plaid, herringbone, chevrons.  Good humored populist titles like “My beautiful Laundrette” or “Candyman” and raucous color schemes hint at subversion of prim minimal grids or Color Field-redolent arrangements of parallel stripe.  But his visual wit goes beyond mere reference to recent abstract art history.  A key element in his vocabulary is the disruptive kink he will admit into his patterning that sets it off kilter; never quite subverting the flatness of the picture plane, he nonetheless allows a breeze or ripple to run across the composition.

The references to other art and the broader culture, coupled with his funky palette, might sound like Westfall belongs simply within the pop or deconstructive camp of Neo-Geo and its derivatives, making him a bedfellow, say, or Jonathan Lasker or Peter Halley.  And there are generational connections, as there are with other abstractionist wits like Mary Heilmann.  But somehow, in Westfall, the attachment to the positive, energetic, affirmative aspect of pattern and decoration always seems in earnest; the subversion is within pattern, rather than of pattern.  He recalls Ruskin’s dictum that “All beautiful lines are drawn under mathematical laws organically transgressed.” He leaves viewers feeling that his intention is to invigorate abstraction rather than to debunk it.  And this makes sense of the community he establishes around himself of fellow abstractionists, and workers within other styles, for whom wit is important but irony is to be avoided.

This article first appeared at the newly-launched website of Abstract Critical, a British not-for-profit organization dedicated to abstract art.  Despite a similarity in name, Abstract Critical is not connected with artcritical magazine, although artcritical editor David Cohen has agreed to submit quarterly reports to Abstract Critical with cross postings here at artcritical.

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