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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DL: High praise indeed.

Elizabeth Murray, click to enlarge

Bruce Pearson, click to enlarge

Installation shot of the exhibition under review, Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings (2012) at Lehman Maupin Gallery. Courtesy the Artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

In an eerie augury of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught, Chelsea galleries in October 2012 were full of art about disasters. Three separate exhibitions put viewers face-to-face with the calamities, natural or man-made, of recent years. Although widely varied in their tone, each beckoned viewers to consider themes of fragility, vanity, and culpability.

At Lehman Maupin, the Japanese artist Mr. used a room full of clutter to depict the horror and chaos left by his country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The installation Metamorphosis: Give me Your Wings packed the gallery’s center with furniture, toys, books, boxes and chattering television sets. The artist covered the surrounding walls with graffiti and canvases painted in the Manga style. Teen magazines, thick with soft-focus photographs of adolescent girls, were piled and strewn everywhere.  With the focus on aspects of Japanese culture that fascinate Americans—the magazines and the Manga illustration—the installation seemed quite like an alternative comic book store that had been run through a centrifuge. Rather than mourn, I felt I was being asked to browse.

Not far away, Thomas Hirschhorn’s room-sized display Concordia, Concordia at Barbara Gladstone commemorated the recent cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy. Entry to the main part of the gallery was blocked by floor to ceiling wreckage. With paintings on the ceiling, flat panel televisions on the floor, and lamps hung sideways from the wall, the whole scene was topsy-turvy. Skeins of unwound videotape cascaded over piles of orange life vests, and in a reminder of the film Titanic, heaps of broken plates. Seen under the glow of unshielded fluorescent lamps, the installation’s tawdry materials—brass, Styrofoam, fake wood paneling—were a poignant reminder of cruise ships’ paper-thin luxury. That Hirschhorn took a stand on his subject’s banal materialism made his pile of clutter more effective than the previous one.

Ejecting myself from the airless nightmare of the Concordia, I found momentary relief in a serene and spare arrangement of curved metal bars at Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery for Ai Weiwei’s installation, Forge. A quiet interplay of form and void focused thoughts on the granularity of matter and how, viewed from a distance, disconnected bits add up to solid forms. Little did I know that the bits I was looking at were actually rubble from the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Ai’s two-part installation, which continues at Mary Boone’s midtown location) featured twisted rebars recovered from concrete school buildings that had collapsed on their young occupants’ heads.  The artist’s orchestrated recovery of the rebar, depicted in a video shown in the back of the gallery, brought dozens of volunteers together to painstakingly collect, clean, transfer, and hand-straighten thousands of pieces of the material. His bold maneuver was at once performance art, craft, political defiance. The undertaking’s communitarian ethos effectively condemned the enforced communitarianism of China’s overlords (who use the word “harmony” as a euphemism for censorship). It also, of course, helped land the artist in jail.

By making disaster art that was not itself a disaster, Ai captured his subject the more effectively. Whether his approach differed from those of Mr. or Hirschhorn as the result of artistic sensibility or culture of origin I cannot tell. Regardless, this multi-national array of disaster exhibitions—and the recent horrors of Sandy—remind us that disaster does not respect nationality. Where human beings presume themselves to be invincible, nature is there to show them otherwise.

Exhibitions discussed in this article:
Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings at Lehman Maupin Gallery, September 13 – October 20, 2012, 540 West 26th Street;
Thomas Hirschhorn: Concordia, Concordia at Gladstone Gallery, September 14 – October 20 , 2012,  530 West 21st Street
Ai Weiwei: Forge at Mary Boone Gallery, October 13 to December 21, 2012, 541 West 24th Street/745 Fifth Avenue

click to enlarge

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Joyfully Precarious: Ivor Abrahams (Posted June 7, 1999)

Ivor Abrahams, Privacy Plots III, 1972. Screen print. Image courtesy of Artnet

Ivor Abrahams is a sculptor of protean creativity, a pioneer since the 1960s of the use of wacky materials, a prolific and inventive printmaker. A distinctive presence on the British scene, his closest peer among Americans would probably be Jim Dine: they have both played in a Pop kind of way with Greco-Roman statuary. Abrahams has a much more idiosyncratic touch, though, which is fiddly, playful, at his best quite goofy. He is a grand master of the tacky sublime.

Another American who springs to mind, just to establish bearings, is Richard Artschwager: they share a career trajectory from artisan to fine artist, timed in each case to coincide with the emergence of Pop. Abrahams originally followed his father into the window dresser’s trade, and there is often an elegant wit to his proscenium-framed improvisations, but he is equally the scion of a high academic tradition.

He studied with German classicist Carel Vogel at the Camberwell School, London, and was apprenticed at the Fiorini bronze foundry. An energetic tension between artifice and finesse and a dichotomy of nonchalance and composure both point to this mixed background, this transgressing of boundaries between high and low.

In the late 1960s and ’70s he got hooked on the theme of gardens, making sculptures, installations and prints in resins, latex and — his favorite exquisitely gruesome material — flock. With humor and poignancy, these works explore the British obsession with gardens, especially as it manifests lower down on the class ladder. His art reveled in the contradictions of the proletarian backyard, in the way a once aristocratic language of ornamentation got mangled in the social transition. His vision, however, never has the harshness of social satire; it’s exercised by a sense of bathos, more than critique or ridicule. This gives the work an aura of mystery, of participation in the ambivalence and artifice it explores.

Personal circumstances led him away from his earlier explorations and back to the figure — real figures, that is, not the mere statuary he had been involved with. Teaching life drawing to a patron activated a fascination with the figure in motion, while chronic asthma forced him to banish flock and resins from the studio. He was highly successful with his bronze nymphs and naiads, which weren’t offered tongue-in-cheek as earlier admirers would have expected.

That was in the ’80s. With some startling results, he now seems to be synthesizing his earlier preoccupation with space, texture and ornamentation with what he has learned of the body.

Abrahams’ newest works are cutouts in laminated card, which show the artist at his awkward, quirky, inventive best. In the “Head of the Stairs” series, the card is montaged with his own vertiginous photos of stairwells. The card is then carved and constructed into vaguely anthropomorphic shapes, mostly heads and shoulders. The viewer’s gaze is sucked into a receding vortex of the images, while the juxtaposition of planes pushes the gaze back again. There is something joyfully precarious about these pieces, poised as they are between the ephemeral and the monumental.

Abrahams has been the subject recently of three simultaneous exhibitions in London. A small print retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts is nicely timed (with its garden theme) to coincide with their Monet blockbuster. The Mayor Gallery presented a packed display of new sculptures and maquettes, and Ian Mackenzie is showing Abrahams’ giclé Isis prints.

Eye Vibes: Bruce Pearson (Posted June 8, 1998)

Bruce Pearson, Love Doesn’t Always Have to Go Wrong/Love Doesn’t Always Have to Go Bad, 1997. Oil & acrylic on styrofoam, 6 x 8 feet. Image Courtesy of Artnet

The view from the sixth floor exercise studio where I work out at Broadway at 72nd Street is filled to the bursting with Beaux-Arts sumptuousness. Excluding sky and ground and receding at an angle to the ubiquitous city grid, this fabulous tableau is a gaudy, dense overload of brick, masonry, ironwork, statuary. To the gymnastic viewer, suspended upside down in some Francis Bacon-like frame contraption (the studio follows the Pilates system) and gyrating back and forth, the architectural details mush together, disengaged from any established decorative order, forming an abstracted all-overness. Nestled between two apartment buildings, however, is an advertising slogan, interjecting bright, crystalline meaning to this jungle of effects: “Depression is a flaw of chemistry not character,” it announces, giving a phone number with the implicit offer of pharmaceutical release.

This strange mixture of facade and relief, decoration and semiotics, the inversion of order, is all good preparation for the work of Bruce Pearson, who is included in the current group show in the Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art. I thought of my private “ready-made” landscape when I first saw Pearson’s weird psychedelic reliefs in his Williamsburg studio back in the fall. His pieces actually use wacky lines and slogans appropriated from the mass media which in turn serve as his titles, but my little “flaw of chemistry” number is unlikely to cut much of a figure to a man who goes in for the likes of “Something that seems to symbolize in quotes reality” and “Another nail in the coffin of objectivity,” not to mention “Violence and profanity supernatural strangeness and graphically rendered sexual situations.” These are all titles of pieces in the MoMA show. Curated by Lilian Tone and Anne Umland, this cogent and sexy little exhibition also includes Karin Davie, Udomsak Krisanamis and Fred Tomaselli.

Unlike the ad in my West Side cityscape, the semiotic in a Pearson is organically wedded to its defining form. One has to be told it, but his compositions are made from fantastically contorted renderings of a given phrase. The letters are stretched beyond legibility and — in some works — the sentences are mirrored vertically and horizontally like a folded cut-out paper doily. Text is then given texture when the linguistic motif is carved into Styrofoam. Actually, what I observed on my studio visit is a mind-bogglingly meticulous process whereby each letter is separately cut (with a hot wire) and built up in layers like the strata of a geologist’s contour model. The final stage of production is the painting, as fiddly and concentrated, it would seem, as the plotting and carving had been in their turn. It was appropriate that the Projects Room show partially overlapped with the Chuck Close retrospective at the same museum for Pearson’s enterprise is close to Closean in its mind-numbing labor intensity.

For “Closean” it was tempting to have said “Sisyphean,” only in Pearson’s case (if not Close’s) that would be too judgmental. Nonetheless, skill — as in dexterity concentrated in time and degree — is a problem for contemporary art appreciation. It has taken us a long painful century to get used to the idea that economy counts for more than effort, that dash takes priority over muscle, to believe, sincerely, that less is indeed more. What are we supposed to do, then, when an artist presents us with the fruit of his or her own, personal, persnickety, craftsy fingerwork? Frankly, we shudder with a certain embarrassment. For our delectation an artist — no less — has done all THIS? It’s as if an honored dinner guest has washed the dishes.

There is a difference, however, between the skill quotient in Pearson and Close. In Close, the photographically derived image is immediate and omnipotent; the fiddly handmade fact of its facture is only gradually realized, and once established merely a cause for prying wonderment. In Pearson, by contrast, the facture meets with some correspondence of slowed-down effort on the part of the viewer. The surfaces, gooey and gaudy though they are, offer the prospect of reward for leisurely regard. Which is a longwinded way of saying that Pearsons might actually be beautiful as well as interesting.

Actually, the first association a Pearson triggered in my mind was with the kind of mindless modernist wall relief that was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, usually knocked out in concrete by the architect rather than any named artist, to lend warmth (as — modernist taboo — an afterthought) to an otherwise soulless entrance way or public interior. But then I began to discern some semblance of hierarchy; it wasn’t gratuitous texture, there was method in the madness. Before I was told about the texts I began trying to “read” the images, but I saw them rather as maps, as circuit boards, even, with fanciful empathy, as the aerial view of some futuristic organic city. It was then that crescents and H-blocks started to make sense as letters, and I was on the way to Pearson literacy. Funnily enough, during my pre-signifiers phase, when I was still enjoying form for form’s sake, I was reminded of Torres-Garcia and early Adolph Gottlieb and their primitive tabulations of pictographs.

Once I was initiated into the secret of Pearson’s encoded messages I quickly regressed. I didn’t see the point in straining my eyes to decode banal sentences which were there for me, anyway, with a friendly word from the artist (or, at the Modern, from the label). But this didn’t — and doesn’t — inhibit my pleasure in his work. I was able to go back to my primitive fantasies, in some ways actually enriching those fantasies with my new knowledge. The experience of willfully not-reading while, in my own way, reading, of picking up the vibes of meaning without the meaning per se, can be compared to looking at an image from some culture whose iconography is a closed book to me — say Tibetan — without bothering to read long and bewildering explanations or wading through a gazetteer of deities.

A lot of contemporary art has a complicated story behind its facture. The way things are made, and the reason they are made that way, are integral to the work, and the supposed experience of it. There is a “get it” factor. A click in the brain and you move on. Much rarer, and of course more satisfying, is when the conceptual element doesn’t circumvent the visual experience but instead conditions it. Of course, the link between facture and effect has to be manifest, otherwise how and why the artist went about making the work is of no more relevance than what he had for breakfast. There is a great moment in Balzac’s story, The Unknown Masterpiece, in which the master extols the final stroke which brings an image to life. “No one will thank us for what is underneath,” Frenhofer tells the young Poussin as he corrects the work of their mutual friend, Porbus.

In our postmodern culture that hardly pertains; where everything is at once surface and symbol — and remember, Wilde warned us, its equally perilous to remain on the surface as it is to penetrate it — art is equally what you get and the manifest evidence of how it arrived. Of course, as an art form painted relief is a wonderful tease, sending the eye into oscillation between surface and depth, neither of which yields. Pearson surely knows this. It is with similar acuteness that he sets up oscillations between detail and whole, legibility and texture, image and idea. His art is a kind of simultaneous equation in which the tension between process and result on his part forms an equivalent to these forced oscillations on the viewer’s. He keeps the eye busy.

“Projects 63: Karin Davie, Udomsak Krisanamis, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli,” May 14-June 30, 1998, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Bruce Pearson is also included in “Wall Paper,” June 2-July 2, 1998, an exhibition of works on paper curated by Lisa Jacobs at the Nicholas Davies Gallery, 23 Commerce Street, New York, N.Y. 10014.

Letter from London (Posted September 21, 1998)

Damien Hirst, Ashtray (Nicotine) at the Pharmacy, 1998. Photo: Gust Vasiliades

Damien Hirst’s infatuation with the medical profession is as unceasing as the journalistic profession’s is with him. Hardly a day goes by that there isn’t some press reference to the master of the specimen-in-formaldehyde, the medicine cabinet, the pill-like colored spot.

This summer the medics became interested in him as well. The artist-entrepreneur’s designer eatery in trendy Notting Hill Gate came under the scrutiny of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. The group objected to the name — Pharmacy — on the grounds that the public could be misled. Imagine rushing in with a Prozac prescription to find a crowded bar with waiters milling around in surgical aprons, and floor-to-ceiling cabinets of decorative, but empty, packets of drugs.

At Hirst’s Pharmacy there are plenty of alcohol solutions and tonics available, but not the kind that doctor had in mind. Upstairs, in the dining room, exquisite wallpaper sports a pill motif, Hirst’s fin-de-siecle answer to William Morris, while the canvases on the wall are his ultra-stylish arrangements of dead butterflies on monochrome grounds.

While we’re on the furnishings and fittings, the masterpiece here — and probably the best Hirst I’ve seen anywhere — is an Arman-inspired men’s-room vitrine including heaps of used medical detritus behind a wall of thick glass.

The Royal Society’s objections were of course ridiculous, and were probably as much a gambit to advertise itself in the national media as anything else. To oblige, Pharmacy rearranged the letters on its minimal white exterior into the anagram “achy ramp,” although the restaurant employees still say “Pharmacy” if you phone for a reservation, which you need to do weeks in advance if you want a table at a civilized hour. The food’s rather good, as it happens, less oppressively carnivore than Hirst’s other “joint,” the revamped Quo Vadis in (London’s) Soho, where the upstairs bar is decked with pickled relatives of that which is on the menu.

It’s funny that Hirst’s sculptures, unpalatable in art galleries, look so at home in chic eateries. A contrast with Rothko’s Seagram murals, which were bequeathed to the Tate Gallery in 1969 when the artist decided they were just too god-damned spiritual for a restaurant.

Pat Oldenburg (far right) and others in Claes Oldenburg’s Circus: Ironworks/Fotodeath at the Reuben Gallery, February 1961. © Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York

Between 1959 and 1962 Robert R. McElroy was virtually the only professional photographer attending and taking photos of downtown happenings at venues like the Judson Memorial Church, the Reuben Gallery and the Green Gallery.  He took thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of these early avant garde artists’ performance, although less than a hundred have been published and republished in books and anthologies.  The recent show at Pace provided an opportunity for an in-depth look at this historically vital photographer.  But what of the man himself?

McElroy was born in Chicago on January 1, 1928 and grew up poor in a working-class Irish Catholic Depression household. He developed his interest in photography at Lane Technical High School where he joined the camera club. He left school to enlist in the Army, but only after the recruiter guaranteed that he would be assigned to the Still and Motion Picture unit.  He was stationed in Vienna as a cameraman in the 63rd Signal Corp movie team, making short films for the occupying forces, like a documentary on the Salzburg Orchestra.  He returned home in 1948 and received his high school degree, but was recalled for the Korean War and sent to a school for combat motion picture and still cameramen. He was never sent abroad, but it is clear that this very specific training informed his photographs of the happenings, making them as lively and energetic as the performances themselves.

Despite this training in filmmaking it seems he was committed to still photography.  When he enrolled at Ohio University on the G.I. Bill in the fall of 1952 their photography program, headed by Clarence White, Jr., was one of only two in the country at that time. Ohio proved his first step on his road to New York, not only because of the technical training but because of the fellow photographers he met there, especially Paul Fusco, a fellow G.I..

McElroy and Fusco also met a group of younger students who shared similar attitudes and interests in art, photography: I.C. [Chuck] Rapoport, a future freelance photographer for Life and Paris Match; Adger Cowans, future assistant to Gordon Parks; Don Moser, a Life photographer and later editor of Smithsonian Magazine; and Jim Dine who joined the group when he transferred from University of Cincinnati in 1955.

Pat Oldenburg (on ladder), Henry Edelheit (center, in glasses), Fred McDarrah (right, with camera) in Claes Oldenburg’s Circus: Ironworks/Fotodeath at the Reuben Gallery, February 1961. © Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York

Their experience as veterans set Fusco and McElroy apart from younger members of this creative group. Pat Sayer (Fusco’s future wife) recalls how “Mac and Paul spent hours and hours in the darkrooms and studios of the photo department.  In fact, Mac didn’t really hang out with the rest of us very much.”  McElroy’s “lone-wolf personality” came through: “Mac was far too anti-social to sit and schmooze with the crowd that was there….  Like the other veterans there on the G. I. Bill, he would usually run out of money toward the end of each month and I remember Paul saying that Mac lived on fried egg sandwiches.” To make ends meet, McElroy worked as an assistant in the photography lab.

He kept an emotional distance from people and it was a quality that would define him for people who came to know him later.  But McElroy’s passion for taking photographs was also evident and perhaps “his way of interacting with people.”

New York soon beckoned. The two big picture magazines of the period, Life and Look, were based there.  When Fusco graduated in 1957, he landed a job on the staff of Look. As Fusco remembers, “by 1958, [we] were all kind of in the same place, starting our careers in the impossible, unbelievably competitive city of New York.”  Fusco’s apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village was the scene of numerous parties as well as temporary sleeping quarters for college friends relocating to the city.

McElroy was one of the last of the Ohio group to come to New York, having stayed on at Ohio University as a teaching assistant, completing a master’s degree in 1957.  His master’s thesis was a study of the “physical characteristics of the camera on the manner in which the photographer sees his subject.”

He moved back to Chicago and started working for the Montgomery Ward Department Store but with encouragement from Fusco he moved on to New York in June 1958. A few months later he was working as a studio assistant at The Lionel Friedman Studio, whose clients included Karastan Rugs and Seagram’s Seven.  McElroy and a second studio assistant, a young Ron Galella, assisted in building sets or moving props for in-studio shoots.  They also developed film and printed for Friedman and even did stand-in modeling before the real model arrived.  McElroy would work freelance at night, or would go around photographing in New York, trying to sell photos to magazines.

Dine also arrived in New York at this time and was soon contacted by Marcus Ratliff, a high school friend from Cincinnati. Ratliff, who was studying at Cooper Union, had plans to start a small gallery in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church to show his own and his friends’ works.  Ratliff also invited another high school friend, Tom Wesselmann, to join the venture, and it was a group show of Dine, Ratliff, and Wesselmann that opened the Judson Gallery on February 14th, 1959. Meanwhile, Ratliff had seen and admired some ink drawings hung in the library at Cooper Union by Claes Oldenburg, who was working there one day a week and Oldenburg’s first Judson Gallery show, Drawings, Sculptures, Poems, opened May 22, 1959.

During 1959 McElroy was still working at Friedman’s studio, and had begun attending theater events in and around Greenwich Village, taking headshots of actors, many now forgotten, but some, like a young Anthony Zerbe, went on to become famous.  By the end of the year he was sharing an apartment on East 19th Street with Ohio graduate Don Pasternak.  He also found himself pulled into the orbit of another new gallery, The Reuben Gallery.

Lucas Samaras in Claes Oldenburg’s Circus: Ironworks/Fotodeath at the Reuben Gallery, February 1961. © Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York

Encouraged by Alan Kaprow, Anita Reuben, an occupational therapist, whose sister Renee was an artist and who had seen exhibitions at the cooperative Hansa Gallery, found a loft space on Fourth Avenue at Tenth Street, and opened the Reuben Gallery in October 1959 with Kaprow’s first ‘happening’, Eighteen Happenings in 6 Parts. The Reuben Gallery brought together artists from the Judson Gallery as well as artists who had studied with Kaprow at Rutgers or shown with him at the Hansa.

Ratliff remembers McElroy as “part of the scene…He was a bit stocky, had a pock-marked complexion, had straight slightly blondish-brown hair parted on the left, always had his camera slung over his left shoulder and usually wore a faded Levi jacket; he smoked a lot.”

Although McElroy might have been around the Judson Gallery, his first photos of artists’ events were taken at the Reuben Gallery in January 1960, at the opening of a group exhibition of Dine, Robert Whitman, Lucas Samaras, Red Grooms, Kaprow, Oldenburg, Pat Passlof and others. One month later he photographed Dine’s performance at the Judson, The Smiling Workman. Dine remembers McElroy “sticking to you like glue.  He was this silent figure just photographing.  He never had a tripod.  The fact that he recorded so much of my work is an accident because I never asked him too.  But now, we’re all very happy he did.”

For the next three years McElroy photographed the works, exhibitions and performances of the artists associated with the Judson and Reuben Galleries in-depth and then followed some of them to photograph their activities in storefronts and other spaces in downtown Manhattan and the Green Gallery on 57th street.

McElroy often found dramatic angles from which to shoot outdoor happenings and installations.  He captured Kaprow’s 1961 Yard installation of “used tires, tar paper mounds, barrels,” for instance, in Martha Jackson’s courtyard with an aerial color photograph from about two or three stories above.  He shot Kaprow’s Courtyard (November 1962) in the  courtyard of The Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street, both from the roof of the hotel and from the ground looking upwards. Whitman comments on how McElroy’s “photographs are very helpful to see what was going on in the piece in terms of its construction or formulation of various parts.”  In one picture of The American Moon (December 1960) McElroy points his camera down as the audience looks up at Lucas Samaras swinging above their heads.  This “wasn’t part of what the audience saw.”

In addition to the inherent artistry of his work, another thing that sets McElroy’s photographs of happenings apart is his use of color.  None of the other photographers working downtown at this time – Fred McDarrah, John Cohen, or Rappoprt – photographed performances in color.  Thus, McElroy’s color photographs of these events are unique, a first for the time.

McElroy was Oldenburg’s “favorite photographer” and Oldenburg invited him to take photos of his works and performances during December 1961. He photographed Oldenburg’s sculptures in The Store on East 2nd Street, and after the space was converted to The Ray Gun Theater, he shot all the performances held there each weekend, from February to May 1962.   According to Patty Muschinski, the performers gathered at The Store on Sundays to clean up, have films made of the performance, and recreate particular parts of their performances so McElroy could photograph with better lighting conditions and without the distractions of a live audience.  Color film demanded better lighting and more complicated and an expensive developing process, but it also meant that McElroy captured the range of Oldenburg’s performances with fidelity.

During the summer of 1962, McElroy came every day to the Green Gallery where Oldenburg and his then wife Patty began creating works for Oldenburg’s Green Gallery show, working all day sewing, stuffing, painting and arranging each piece.  He also photographed Oldenburg’s one-time performance called Sports, which took place “in the show after the show closed.”

McElroy started working at Newsweek in January 1, 1962, printing in the darkroom, for about a year, until he was promoted to staff photographer, a position he held until he retired in 1990.

However, Oldenburg and Whitman continued to invite McElroy to photograph their performances into the late 1960s. In the spring of 1965, he photographed Oldenburg’s Washes, held in Al Roon’s health club swimming pool. In December 1965 it was Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse and Whitman’s Prune Flat, on the same program at Filmmaker’s Cinematheque.  It was obvious both these artists appreciated that McElroy was capable of photographing any event, whether it was in a small, poorly lit space on the Lower East Side or an open theater space with a huge crowd of spectators.

Robert McElroy’s photography of the Downtown scene is something completely unique in the history of that era.  He captured events in all their multiplicity and continues to give new life to the happenings and performances he recorded.   As Oldenburg later recalled: “I recognized, and I think everyone did, that although happenings were supposed to be done one time and then never remembered; it was part of the theory that we were supposed to make art and then throw it away.  Nevertheless, it was very important to photograph it because it was very visual and remembering it was best done through photographs.” McElroy’s photographs make it possible for us to ‘remember’ performance experiences that, were it not for him, would be lost forever.

Mary Corse: New Work
February 2 – March 10, 2012, Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West. 26th Street, New York City, 212-255-2923

Installation Shot, Mary Corse: New Work, February 2 to March 10, 2012. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery

The concurrent exhibitions of Doug Wheeler’s environmental light installation at David Zwirner Gallery and Mary Corse’s light-infused paintings at Lehmann Maupin Gallery provide us with an exceptional opportunity to understand how L. A. Light and Space art can sensitize us to the subtleties of the world around us.  These two artists rely on fields of white, intense lighting and a mobile observer to provide some exhilarating surprises.  While both Wheeler and Corse privilege direct perception over thinking, there are also some significant differences in the ways in which their art creates heightened sensory awareness.

Over thirty years ago, the psychologist William Ittelson drew a critical distinction between environment and object perception.  In object perception, one surrounds the object; in environment perception, one is surrounded by it.  One observes an object; one explores an environment using many sensory modalities.  Ittelson noted that with environment perception “the very distinction between self and nonself breaks down: the environment surrounds, enfolds, engulfs….”  What makes the work of Wheeler and Corse so innovative is that it causes us to alternate between object and environment perception.   This is consistent with Venturi’s preference in Complexity and Contradiction for both-and over either-or.   As we will see, these two L.A. artists accomplish this balancing act in different ways.

Your adventure in Wheeler’s Infinity Environment begins in the antechamber where you appear to be facing a luminous translucent wall that makes you hesitant to move forward.  So you approach it very slowly.  Your initial surprise when you reach the “wall” is that it is not solid, but rather an opening into a space filled with what appears to be thick fog. The morphing of a diaphonous wall into a vaporous fog creates a shift from perceiving an object to perceiving an environment.  Once inside the space, you can’t see its perimeter, so you can’t figure out its shape without extended exploration.  As you reach out your hands in front of you, you can see your fingers clearly but your don’t know how much further the space extends.  So again you walk slowly.  The next surprise is that your feet provide you with some critical information.  Suddenly, the floor begins to curve upward and outward in front of you but your outstretched arms do not hit the wall.  Are you inside a giant egg?

Installation shot, Doug Wheeler: January 17 - February 25, 2012. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery

The effects Wheeler creates are most dramatic and thrilling if you inhabit the space alone, but this has generally not been possible due to the popularity of this exhibition.  Indeed, your entire experience is radically altered by the presence of other people who appear to be crystal clear, almost hyper-real.  By observing the positions of the other people, you can see how far the floor extends in each direction. In this space, “you feel with your eyes” (Turrell) and see with your body.  The sensations created by this Infinity Space range from disorienting to frightening to exhilarating, often alternating within an individual.   And to heighten the experience, Wheeler gradually modifies the ambience by shifting the lighting from dawn to dusk and back again over some thirty minutes.  This extreme environment attunes our sensory-motor system to differentiate things it never noticed before, a major goal of the Light and Space artists.

Mary Corse’s wall paintings are essentially two-dimensional.  One would, therefore, expect them to function as objects and not environments.  But, almost magically, the tiny glass microspheres embedded in Corse’s five large white paintings invite you to treat them as environments to be explored.   You notice immediately that each painting changes dramatically as you cross in front of it so what you experience is not one painting, but multiple different paintings.  For example, the large work, Untitled 4 Inner Bands shifts from an absorbent matte cream-colored monochrome with barely perceptible vertical bands to a stark white mirror-like surface that glistens and reflects your head and body movements.  As you move back and forth in front of the painting, you see anywhere between two and five vertical bands which reverse their colors as you move, the darker ones becoming light and the lighter ones becoming dark.  From certain vantage points you can detect some horizontal brush strokes that first appear as ghostly vapors and then become eight defined horizontal bands that weave across the vertical ones to form a grid.   Careful looking and continual movement combine to provide an uncanny experience that simulates key aspects of environment perception.  The ambiguity of the overall encounter resembles a reversible-figure task used in Gestalt psychology research in which the  perceived image shifts dramatically from a vase to two figures or from a duck to a rabbit.  This effect results from the limitations of our perceptual apparatus that allow us to see only one of these images at a time.

Wheeler and Corse create different kinds of ambiguity to achieve their effects.  The ambiguity of Wheeler’s void is one of a homogeneous field in which you seek to discover its boundaries, so as to both find your place and try to locomote effectively.  With Corse, the problem is not lack of structure but competing structures.  Monochromatic surfaces, minimal geometric bars, and abstract expressionist brushstrokes inhabit the same canvas and alternate taking center stage.  However, in both Wheeler and Corse, what turns looking into seeing is the coordination between looking and doing.  What we do affects what we see; what we see affects what we do.

Finally, each artist takes you on a journey that explores the relationship between order and disorder in different ways.  In Corse, if conditions are right, one’s movements can control the fluctuation between order and disorder in a back and forth dance that can be highly pleasurable.  In Wheeler, there is a more entropic experience that, at least momentarily, is more frightening and disorienting.  Control is neither possible nor desirable for Wheeler.  In his “whiteout” environment a lack of control is central to the participant’s experience of boundlessness. Despite these differences, Wheeler and Corse provide something that is very atypical for the New York lifestyle: there is a slowing down of our internal clock.   We are able to surrender ourselves to a kind of stillness that sets the stage for retuning our sensory-motor system.  This sensory learning increases our ability to differentiate the essential from the unessential in the course of exploring realms where objects morph into environments and environments morph into objects.

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September 15 to October 22, 2011
980 Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-744-2313

This and cover: Installation shot of the exhibition under review, © Jenny Saville. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

Jenny Saville’s “Continuum,” her first show in New York since 2003, will delight her many fans with a bold new theme (her art newly energized by the experience of motherhood) and an invigorated interest in drawing.  Those fans happen to include people in high places.

Word has it, for instance, that John Elderfield entered the collectors’ evening of his MoMA de Kooning exhibit with Jenny on his arm, as if to say: the belle of the ball is the Dutchman’s successor. Elderfield is author of the catalog essay for Bob Dylan’s show of paintings, sandwiched by Saville’s, on Gagosian’s Fourth Floor.  (A drawing in her Pentimenti series acknowledges de Kooning in its title, alongside Velazquez and Picasso.) Simon Schama is another devotee.  Writing in the Financial Times of September 24, his opening salvo diminishes Lucian Freud in comparison with Saville.  Next he insists that her only peers in the depiction of babies are Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt.

As I’m beginning to have a Dr. Frankenstein moment, a confession is in order.  Years ago, as a cub reporter on the Times of London, I was sent around Britain to investigate the state of art education. They told me to assemble a roster of talented students to feature in a side bar to my article in their Saturday magazine.

Jenny Saville, Propped, 1992. Oil on Canvas, 213.5 x 183cm. The Saatchi Collection, London

At the Glasgow School of Art I was seduced by Saville’s work.  Who wouldn’t have been?  Deploying an assured, preternaturally effortless painterly realism, her oversized paintings of oversized women were not just visually arresting, but smart.  Into the surface of one of her obese sitters she has inscribed defiant words by Luce Irigaray, the French feminist theorist much in vogue at that time—except the words were in mirror writing. Saville then erected an actual mirror some distance from the canvas.  To get the text the right way around you had to see the image reflected, with an attendant loss of painterly luxuriance.  This literalized a tension between texture and text, form and content.

The Times picture editor loved the painting, bought it from the degree show, and ran it on the cover.  Charles Saatchi must have flipped over his breakfast reading.  He wasted no time in prizing the painting into his own collection.  Evidently the advertising mogul felt no compulsion to read Irigaray, however, as he ditched the mirror.  The rest, as they say, is art history.

This is not to insinuate that when she acquiesced to her powerful new patron’s structural change to her intended installation (progressing, so to speak, beyond the mirror stage) she lost her subject but found her form. That would be churlish as there was no descent from theoretical or political high ground in her work.  On the contrary, her fascination with the strengths and vulnerabilities of modern women grew as she explored self-image through such themes as liposuction and transgender. She rapidly became immensely and understandably popular.  She found a way to niche gender studies within a late flowering of the grand tradition of the swagger portrait.

Tracing antecedents to Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck, this genre reached its zenith in the belle époque with John Singer Sargent.  Modern exponents included Augustus John.  The sitter is surrounded by trappings of worldly success matched in sheer opulence by the artist’s masterfully dashed off brushstrokes.  Saville’s provocative twist was to extend the bravura technique and monumental scale of such painting to naked and isolated (or in some cases sardined) young women.

Like Sargent and John, part of Saville’s problem is that she has always been too good for her own good.  This is what causes Schama’s crass comparison with Freud to backfire.  It is precisely the crabbed, cramped, awkward-to-the-point-of-absurdity knottiness of Freud’s obsessive gaze and tortuous touch that elevates his peculiar work to old master status.

Jenny Saville, Red Stare Head II, 2011. Oil on canvas, 106-1/2 x 85-5/8 inches. © Jenny Saville. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Mike Bruce

David Sylvester, writing in the 1950s about Freud’s School of London peer Michael Andrews in terms that apply equally to Freud himself, detected “the awkwardness of almost every modern painter who has not been content to solve his problems by simplifying them… The modern artist who aims at the inclusiveness of traditional European art runs up against the difficulty of recovering that inclusiveness without embracing what have become the clichés of the tradition, and the awkwardness arises from trying to have one without the other.”

There is no awkwardness in Saville, but there are many historic trappings of it, precisely indeed the clichés to which Sylvester refers.   An extended drawing series, examples of which are included here, is titled Pentimenti.  In these, ostensibly provisional and retained charcoal lines are not merely expressive but axiomatic.  True pentimenti arise in the struggle to find position, to define form; they are retained either because the artist has no interest in disguising what led to the discovery; or else, sometimes, because they add texture, and thus heft, to an image (think Matisse, whose pentimenti somehow never undermine the illusion of single shot miracle in his charcoal drawings).  Or else, a tolerable mannerism, pentimenti can signal the effort and time that were necessary to fix the image and thus are part of that image (Larry Rivers, Frank Auerbach, Eugene Leroy.)

But in Saville there is simply no resistance to her Midas-touch genius.  Her pentimenti have nothing to do with process, everything to do with look. Appropriated from tradition but recalibrated in purpose, they now become an animation device.  As in Futurist painting, not to mention comic strips, they denote the swish across the picture plane of bodies in motion.

The effortless repetition of near identical figures from canvas to canvas, or page, incidentally, points to the use of an overhead projector.  The same head from 2006 of a girl with a birthmark – the image used on the cover of The Manic Street Preachers album Journal For Plague Lovers that proved too disturbing for British supermarkets who covered it up – recurrs in several canvases on Gagosian’s sixth floor.  Nothing wrong with projectors: artists should use whatever works.  And Saville’s girl provides a powerful, compelling, evocative head.  But the brush marks that differentiate iterations of this head one from another, like the charcoal pentimenti in other images, bear no relationship to the discovery of form.  The latter is almost a form in the bureaucratic sense, something to be filled out.  This in turn renders the brushstrokes meretricious.  In real painting, the quasi-abstraction of manipulated material, its pleasure-inducing stresses and strains, the improbable juxtapositions of hatches of color, the alternations of meticulous construction and desperate dash, all arise from the struggle to achieve plastic equivalence to perceived or imagined reality.  Saville, on the other hand, merely deploys a battery of special effects to achieve an appropriated look of painterliness.  That’s why she is impeccably slick where Freud is self-questioning to the point of being cack-handed.

(If you want to gain an art historically accurate context for Saville’s technique, by the way, forget Rembrandt, da Vinci and even Freud and direct your attention to her British contemporary, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, and his handsome, serviceable depictions of Seamus Heaney and John Mortimer in London’s National Portrait Gallery.)

That Saville disintegrates in comparison with Freud is as sad for Freud himself because, as Alex Katz surely understood when he decamped recently to Gavin Brown to keep company with the likes of Silke Otto-Knapp and Elizabeth Peyton, nothing galvanizes attention for a senior male artist quite like hot young protégés.  The School of London suffers deeply in reputation from its near-overwhelming (thank god for Paula Rego) maleness.  Nothing could better boost a blockbuster museum survey or book on expressive figuration in Britain than the chronological and alliterative sweep implied by the subtitle “From Walter Sickert to Jenny Saville”.  Luckily, “From Francis Bacon to Cecily Brown” remains plausible.

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Black Mountain College and Its Legacy at Loretta Howard Gallery

September 15 to October 29, 2011
525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 695-0164

Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 featuring, among other works, Kenneth Snelson's Easter Monday, 1977, foreground, and Jack Tworkov's Day Break, 1953, to left

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.

For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.

Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the Black Mountain College Bulletin, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite tapestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.

Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, Composure and his Homage to the Square (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.

Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 showing two works by Kenneth Noland: V. V., 1949. Oil on canvas, 15 x 18 inches and (right) Soft Touch, 1963. Magna on canvas, 69 x 69 inches.

Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting V.V. (1949), and Soft Touch (1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.

Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled Black Mountain Number 6 (1948).

The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting Asheville.

Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her Gradient and Field (1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.

There are some sore omissions and unnecessary inclusions in this exhibition.  It’s hard to justify the absence of Jerry Van de Wiele, for instance, especially when Helen Frankenthaler, who was at Black Mountain for just a week visiting Clement Greenberg and hardly a part of the community, is represented.  Enticed by a letter from his friend the painter Jorge Fick (represented in the show by a selection of late works), Van de Wiele enrolled as a student in September 1954. When classes were suspended during the winter of 1955 he returned to The Art Institute in Chicago where he convinced two friends, Richard Bogart and John Chamberlain (the latter represented by later sculptures) to follow him back in the spring.

Black Mountain poets in a vitrine in the exhibition, Black Mountain College and Its Legacy exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011

There are, however, amazing moments in this show that allow you to look across rooms and down hallways to draw associations, such as when Jack Tworkov’s hefty gestural painting Day Break (1953) is seen through the undulating stainless steel beams and cords of Snelson’s large Easter Monday (1977). Tworkov is also represented by two ink studies for House of the Sun, an important series of paintings the artist began at Black Mountain during the summer of 1952.

Upstairs hang three abstract paintings by Emerson Woelffer, invited to Black Mountain in 1949 at the request of Buckminster Fuller (represented by a large sculpture and two posthumous prints). A group of five collages by Ray Johnson hang next. Johnson was on campus from mid to late 1940s and studied with the likes of Albers, Bolotowski, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold, Motherwell, and Charles Olson. His collages, all done later, incorporate and at the same time upend the learning of these historic teachers.

While the College did offer classes in language, anthropology, and science, the arts remained the focus of the curriculum. An impressive selection of rare books by the Black Mountain Poets is assembled in a large vitrine on the second floor on loan from the collection of James Jaffe. The show provides first edition printings of Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and Jonathan Williams to name a few. Among the various publications sits the prospectus for the 1951 Summer Institute, which includes a terrific image of one of Black Mountain’s most remarkable dancers, Katherine Litz.

Photography was officially added to the curriculum in the fall of 1949. Hazel Larsen Archer was something of the resident photographer. Her images of a spiky-haired John Cage, a contemplative Willem de Kooning, and Merce Cunningham dancing in an open field (reprints of a few are included in the exhibition) are some of the most historic images of the school. She is credited, among other things, with giving Rauschenberg enough instruction with the camera to let him do with the instrument as he pleased. Archer, along with students in her class, decided to produce the magazine 5 Photographers, showcased here.  Aaron Siskind, a photographer particularly admired among the Abstract Expressionists, arrived in 1951 as faculty. Works from his North Carolina Series (1951) are on view, accompanied by works by Arthur Siegel and Harry Callahan.

Merce Cunningham dance class, Summer 1948. Merce Cunningham (left), Elizabeth Jefferjahn (foreground). Photo Clemens Kalischer.

A highlight of the exhibition comes with the projection of footage of three early dances by Merce Cunningham:: Septet (1953), Antic Meet (1958) and Story (1963). It is captivating watching Cunningham dance his own choreography and while the footage has been available to Merce Cunningham Dance Company, enabling the company to recreate these historic pieces in detail, this is the first time the footage has been publicly shown. Septet was created during the summer of 1953, the year of the company’s official debut, and is one of the very few dances Cunningham set to music.

Story (1963) features sets and costumes by Rauschenberg, assembled using anything the artist could find outside the door of the theater. This work speaks to the great collaborations that took place at the College, including Cage’s Theater Piece #1 (1952). Created over lunch and performed later the same day, the piece features Cage, Charles Olson, and M.C. Richard reading from ladders while Rauschenberg plays records and Cunningham dances.

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy is an impressive show and a remarkable undertaking considering the many facets of this historic school.  Continuing a streak of themed shows at Loretta Howard that include last year’s Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965-1974, the exhibition strives to make connections within the period, although sometimes lacking the tight editing necessary to make such associations more visible. The mystic Ruth Asawa is represented with a single work: an untitled looped wire sculpture from early 1950s hanging overhead. It would have been insightful to see one of Asawa’s later drawings as well in this context.  The exhibition, spread out over two floors, makes for a great treasure hunt, but it’s difficult to experience the true impact of the show in its totality. The catalogue is a bit of a disappointment with some annoying historical errors. Pat Passlof’s name is misspelled. for example, and she followed de Kooning to Black Mountain with the intent of studying with him not Mark Tobey, as recounted here. Chamberlain was never on faculty and was not  present during the summer of 1955.  Bios are included only for the most prominent artists, and poets are left out completely. Even Charles Olson, whose reputation at Black Mountain outstripped his 6’8” frame, isn’t featured. These problems need not detract from the abundance of historic materials, however, that make this a show not to be missed.

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RELATED EVENTS / PROGRAMS:

A Black Mountain Poetry Reading
featuring Francine du Plessix Gray, John Yau, Vincent Katz, Maureen Howard and others. Wednesday October 19, 6-8PM

An afternoon with independent curator Jason Andrew, as he discusses his recent exhibition and publication: JACK TWORKOV: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. Mr. Andrew will discuss Tworkov, his arrival at Black Moutain College and his relationship with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Fielding Dawson, Jorge Fick, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, during one of the most historic summers in the history of the Black Mountain College. Saturday, October 22, 4:00PM

JASON ANDREW is the manager, curator and archivist for the Estate of Jack Tworkov whose recent projects include the publication Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, his independent collaborative projects with artists and dancers and others are presented through the Norte Maar company. He is also the co-owner of Storefront, a gallery in Bushwick featuring young talent and revisiting the work of established artists. He can be followed on twitter: jandrewARTS

Julie Heffernan, Picking Up the Pieces, 2010. Oil on canvas, 72 x 54 inches. Courtesy of Catherine Clark Gallery

In Self-Portrait Picking Up the Pieces, his baggage is more cultural than natural. Visible through the interstices of a loosely meshed net are giant sculpted Buddha heads sporting hairstyles that could be mistaken for bunches of grapes, ripped untimely from the ceiling of a late renaissance palazzo. These are interspersed with oversized shell motifs and other quasi-architectural ornaments. Stranger still, many of the “objects”, upon close inspection, turn out to be vignettes from lost paintings that we almost recognize. Upon a distorted grid of metal pipes are mounted giant medallions displaying bizarre images of destruction that might have been purloined from the background of a Bosch painting. Some incongruously contain words, like “oops” or “hard place,” the latter humorously positioned next to a large rock

It would be arduous to itemize the dizzying range of appropriated objects and images that are packed into Heffernan’s paintings, which read as a Borgesian collection of which they form the animated inventory or catalogue, a kind of cultural and biological stocktaking. It is as if the artist is on a Messianic mission to collect examples of every period, culture and species prior to what one must only assume to be an impending apocalypse. This notion gains credence from “Self-Portrait as Burial Mound” where pairs of crazed animals are released from a pagoda-like structure. Noah is nowhere to be seen, but a sign says “OHNOAH” and others say “Almost done” and “Roar”.

But what to make of the abundant, almost ubiquitous, explosions of fertility that might suggest some hope that can be gleaned from the future, concretized in the Christmas ornament clutched by the “budding boy” Jack? His languid demeanor in many of these canvases evokes hints of the Pre-Raphaelites and their attempts to build a culture around medieval romance, so despite the cool and limpid light of spring, the frequent blossoming forth of flower, fruit and foliage, the youthful promise of the “budding boy”, for me, there is something disturbingly fin de siècle about these paintings. It is as if the plants and trees have been over-fertilized or genetically engineered, as if Julie Heffernan is inter-splicing the genes, not only of the flora and fauna that she depicts so lovingly but of the different cultural influences, whether they be derived from Jan Breughel, Remedios Varo, Sandro Botticelli, DG Rossetti or a wealth of other effortlessly evoked artists. Surely this might be the source for my unease in the presence of these superficially Arcadian scenes, which flatter to deceive. Nature and culture have been grafted together in ways that suggest the manhood of the main protagonist will be dogged by the hollow promises of a genetically engineered paradise. Societal consumption, the superabundance of artifacts and the ability through technology to remake the world according to man’s unfulfillable appetites are subtly satirized in Heffernan’s consumption and manipulation of other art and other artists’ styles. This might be seen, particularly with her recent incorporation of text labels, as a gentle but pointed critique of postmodernism.

The pervading mood is one of hope soured, but it is also more than this.  Heffernan has treated her canvases to a virtuosic painterly technique culled from the collected resources of European art, while focusing on the flamboyant trompe-d’oeil effects of Dutch and Spanish still lives. She has packed them with countless, carefully selected quotations and appropriations, from Adam Elsheimer to Arnold Böcklin to Max Ernst.  The entire edifice groans under the weight of these accumulated riches, however, which now read as so many obsolete jujus. It is as if she is pulling the rug out from underneath her own feet, and we find ourselves gasping, hoping upon hope that the human spirit can continue to shine through, despite the fact that all our aspirations seem to rest on Jack, the ‘budding boy’ who embodies the next generation. We have to hope that no more branches will be severed from his tree whose naked stumps are prettified by colors painted over their growth rings. We have to hope that we can build a culture from the over-taxed resources of the earth, from the late mannerist phase of postmodernism and the accumulated relics of the past. Whether this can be achieved through a savagely accelerated form of hybridization, à la Monsanto, seems in doubt. Thus the tragic but honest pessimism at the core of Heffernan’s endeavor.

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Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 5 x 5 inches. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman , and right, Alexander McQueen, ensemble from the Horn of Plenty collection, 2009-2010. Courtesy of Alexander McQueen

Nor does McQueen’s love of color and pattern and his sculptural use of fabric, hair, wood, leather, metal and other materials invite comparison to Woodman’s austere and almost exclusively black and white photographic medium.  More obviously, McQueen’s art involves the making of clothing, while the better part of Woodman’s self-portraiture shows her without any on.  Yet critical similarities link these two fascinating and disparate artists: apenchant for sumptuous texture, constant focus on the female body, performative self-expression, extravagant theatricality,and–in quiet contrast to their proclivity for shock–overriding, disciplined classicism.

Each of these commonalities is brought into play by a theme at the core of their highly personal work:  the transformation of the body, and thus the self.  Entirely magical, and yet reflecting our very real connection to the natural world, metamorphosis is a powerful metaphor for life, death, and all the dramatic and often frightening developments in between—none more miraculous than the changes a woman’s body undergoes in adolescence and pregnancy.  And if the body is the animated instrument of the self, then metamorphosis is a conceit par excellence for the expression of the (re)invention of the self and all its transformative desires, fears, dualities, and fantasies—about self and other, identity and gender, exposure and privacy, to name just a few.  While both Woodman and McQueen remained deeply respectful of the rigor of their respective crafts of photography and dressmaking, they nevertheless determinedly sought to stand out within those traditions.  This tension, which runs throughout both oeuvres, is distilled in their use of the echt classical trope of metamorphosis to represent the wish to create—and to be—something entirely new.

Spending her summers in the family’s farmhouse outside of Florence, and studying in Rome for a semester while at RISD, Woodman grew up steeped in art-historical tradition.  Many of her images juxtapose her body with natural elements—shells, eels, flowers, fruit, ferns, birch trees—mimicking metamorphic equivalence.  In one photograph, she stands in a field with her head drooping like the towering sunflowers that surround her.  In another (Untitled, New York, 1979-1980), she caresses a swan’s head, her body a gossamer column of white silk, as lustrous as the swan’s feathers.  Her arm extends the swan’s neck, fusing with it to form a strangely graceful chimera.  In much of her work, Woodman’s face is averted, draped, veiled, or, as it is here, cropped altogether, directing attention to her expressive body much the way a headless manikin defers to its clothes.  Also recalling the headless statues of antiquity, this image with its utterly elegant form twists the myth of Leda, seduced by Jove in the guise of a swan:  here, Woodman becomes Leda-as-swan, a woman made seductive—dangerously so—via dress. It is an image of power, countering her achingly vulnerable nude self-portraiture.

Clothing is a natural vehicle for meditations on metamorphosis: it is, after all, the main way that we alter our appearance.  Woodman first showed an interest in art when, as a child, she began to copy paintings of women in fancy dress. By the age of 14, she had begun to layer her body with sheer lace and disrobe in front of her camera. Tellingly, McQueen got his start on Savile Row, and then worked with theatrical costumiers. Imaginatively and impeccably tailored, his clothes impose structure on the body, typically emphasizing femininity by accentuating the hips and shoulders and corseting the waist.  Some of his most brilliant designs are subversive variations on the tailored jacket that morph its proverbial form in playful, often feminizing ways.  McQueen also exploited the power wrought by transformation more literally, incorporating many animal forms into his designs: vulture’sskulls form menacing epaulets, horns and antlers sprout from heads and shoulders, dresses are encrusted with shells and upholstered with feathers.  One exquisitely conceived example from the Horn of Plenty collection (2009-2010) makes explicit the relationship between the hourglass silhouette of Dior’s New Look and the mythical transformation of a woman into a different species altogether.  In his hands, this feathered garment gives birth to a plausibly new creature, neither woman nor bird.  In empathy, and possibly in identification with them, McQueen said that he ultimately wanted to make women feel powerful—to impact their “mentalities,” not just their bodies.  A woman clad in such magnificent armature becomes a formidable raptor, not too far off from Woodman’s silken seductivity.

Shaun Leane for Alexander McQueen, “Spine” Corset, aluminum and leather, from the Untitled collection, 1998. Courtesy of Alexander McQueen, and right, Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 5-3/4 x 5-3/4 inches. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman

McQueen found the back, arguably the most androgynous part of the body, and certainly one of the most vulnerable, especially erotic. One of McQueen’s more chilling pieces, the 1998 “Spine” corset, features an anatomically correct spinal column, complete with erect tail, suggesting a sort of metamorphic hermaphrodite.  Arming the female body with an inventive version of male virility, McQueen toys with gender while defending the back against predators. The corset is also a concrete elaboration of costume’s exhibition of the body, while at the same time covering it, sometimes revealing more than we care to know:  uncharted, unexplored identities—as alien, perhaps, as the weird chimeric forms in myth.  As Woodman wrote in her journal, “Real things don’t frighten me, just the ones in my mind”.

Woodman engages these very issues in an image in which she, too, superimposes a second spine—a fishbone—over her own (Untitled, New York, 1979-1980).  Its delicate filigree is repeated in the pattern of her superimposed dresses (peeled back as though filleted) and the herringbone scaffold exposed in the disintegrating plaster wall.  Woodman folds her body in the shape of a fish, with pointed head and fin.  This image is perhaps Woodman’s most powerful statement on the duality of inner and outer realities, and the ability of art—like dress—to expose hidden interiorities via metamorphic suggestion, while camouflaging them with mystery and ambiguity—to uncover, while covering up.  We look, we wonder,we want to know more.

Alexander McQueen, dress from the Sarabande collection, 2007. Courtesy of Alexander McQueen

In a gentler vein, McQueen invokes floral metamorphosis in a dress from the Sarabande collection (2007).  A shell of sheer silk organza, shaped with boning, is festooned with both real,–and embroidered silk–flowers.  Taking the cliché of the flowery dress as its point of departure, this work embodies various dualities—between the natural and the synthetic, between plush blossoms that cover the dress and its visible, skeletal trellis, and the fundamental duality between dying (and living) flowers and the living (and dying) body they adorn.  Flowers are a locus of desire, and a metaphor for the brevity of life.  In myths of metamorphosis, their beauty is a transformative foil for the cruelty of life’s passions and frustrations.  The dress may have functioned in a similar way for McQueen.  His use of the name Sarabande is not clear, but he may be alluding to Ingmar Bergman’s last film, Saraband (2003).  Its protagonist, a musician, attempts suicide after his daughter and protégé, a young cellist, eludes his dominating control and leaves him to study elsewhere.  In 2007, after having made serial serious suicide attempts, Isabella Blow, McQueen’s mentor and muse, finally succeeded.  “I used flowers because they die,” said McQueen.  Three years later, McQueen took his own life, nine days after his mother passed away.

Woodman herself makes frequent use of flowers in imagery that celebrates her blossoming female form.  In a diptych (Untitled, New York, 1979-1980) made in the last year of her life, Woodman layers her extended arms in diaphanous sheets of clear plastic pierced by spikes of foxgloves, as if growing into and through her, their tapered forms echoing her graceful fingers.  Dressed in a slip as fragile as the evanescent plastic—which is, like McQueen’s sheer organza, a ghostly intermediary material–Woodman is the elemental matrix which gives rise to flowers, their beauty as mute as an image.  More darkly, one can also see this four-armed goddess trapped or impaled by these seemingly innocuous blossoms (recalling how Woodman and her work has been devalued by virtue of their beauty).  On the left half of the diptych, Woodman looks down, the embodiment of a shy Pre-Raphaelite maiden in the garden. On the right half, we get a rare look into her heavy-lidded eyes—challenging, knowing, receding.  The divided image comments on the elusive, dual nature of this enchanting chimera, available but not available, slipping from one world into another.

Woodman’s final project, The Temple, is a photographic reconstruction of a Grecian temple in which she poses as its various caryatids:  a mortal body in an immortal image, a virtual metamorphosis into stone.  In Angels and Demons, his last, unfinished collection, McQueen presented sumptuous neo-Renaissance garments, including a breathtaking, close-fitting coat of gilded feathers.  Some pieces were fashioned from fabric digitally silkscreened with images from Breughel.  At the close of careers in which these two artists consistently situated their oeuvres within the context of art history, McQueen and Woodman literally incorporated art history into the heart of their art.  They each made a persuasive claim for their place within a glorious legacy, perhaps their metamorphosis was complete.

Alexander McQueen:  Savage Beauty was at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 4 – August 7, 2011

Francesca Woodman will appear at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 5, 2011 – February 20, 2012, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, March 16 – June 13, 2012

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 4 x 9-1/2 inches. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman

In March 2010, painters Joyce Kozloff and Robert Kushner sat at their computers to write an appreciation of Tony Robbin’s work and his participation in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In reviewing the P & D reunion exhibition at the Hudson River Museum, the critic Holland Cotter called the work of these artists “the last genuine art movement of the 20th century, which was also the first and only art movement of the post-modern era and may prove to be the last art movement ever” (New York Times, January 15, 2008). Kozloff, Kushner, Robbin, and the other artists identified with this group have gone on to distinguished individual careers, yet all of them retain the energy and imagery of their original enthusiasms.

Tony Robbin, Persian, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 140 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

The early 1970s was a period of intense exploration, on a societal as well as an individual level. The “anything goes, everything should be questioned” attitude of the 1960s was still in full force, not just the simple feel-good quality of Woodstock but, more importantly, a thoughtful analysis of every social system. The art world and the responsibility of the individual artist were no exception. RK

For me, it was the women’s movement, which exploded in my life in 1970. We questioned all our relationships, everything we had ever learned in school, and the very nature of art. Many of us cut our activist teeth in political groups; despite their moments of conflict, there was so much joy, optimism, energy, even utopianism. Tony Robbin was part of maverick curator Marcia Tucker’s improvisational theater group and a member of a men’s consciousness-raising group, before we formed the Pattern and Decoration movement. JK

For those who did not experience the art world of those years, it is nearly impossible to envision the monolithic acceptance of minimal and formalist thought. For gallery and museum acceptance, if the art was industrial-looking, rectangular, and gray, black, or white, it was shown. Grids, so long as they remained uninflected, were acceptable. Everything else (except color field painting, which today can be viewed as Technicolor minimalism) seemed to be marginalized. This simply did not fit many of our temperaments. Gray was boring. We wanted our art to be a lasting experience that took a great deal of time to decode fully. RK

But this dominant aesthetic was out of sync with the rush of pleasure emerging from the counter-culture and the sexual revolution. Adventurous artists were searching for role models in nontraditional arts, and gender boundaries were becoming porous. We were seeing films from all over the globe and listening to world music. The hermeticism and provincialism of the New York art world became painfully obvious. JK

Art that led out of the “art box,” away from a cold Minimalism, was essential as a reflection of our desire to create a rich, complex and encompassing art. We were even willing to accept that taboo word—decoration. Earlier, to say that a work was “decorative” signified a trivial intention. We all took on that burden and declared that the decorative was the only way to fully describe the kinds of sources we were looking at and incorporating into our art. RK

In the fall of 1974, there was a Pattern Painting panel chaired by Mario Yrisarry at the Artists Talk on Art series (public discussions that took place every week in Soho). Valerie Jaudon described it: “The other artists on the panel were grid, color, geometrical, or hard edge painters, so there was a lot of talk about systems, modules, and mathematics as we met several times that fall to discuss the panel agenda.” [Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner, and Joyce Kozloff, “Pattern and Decoration,” in Patterns: Monstring (Odense: Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, 2000), p. 72.]

Then, in early January 1975, a small group convened in Robert Zakanitch’s studio. He and Miriam Schapiro, who had been teaching in California and had recently returned to New York, were talking to one another about pattern and decoration, and that was invigorating their painting. Robert invited painter Tony Robbin and critic Amy Goldin, who was struggling to find a language to address and describe non-Western and decorative arts. Miriam brought me. Two weeks later, there was a second gathering, to which Amy invited Bob Kushner and Kim MacConnel. I remember that they brought pieces of fabric with them and had already developed a close dialogue. We each recall those days differently, but there were two powerful subjects that wove through our discussions: a rejection of current art modes and an excitement in the discovery of other forms. Some had early memories that resonated deeply (Zakanitch’s grandmother’s wallpaper, Schapiro’s yard sales, and trips up and down the escalators at Bloomingdale’s). Tony had spent his childhood in Japan and Okinawa, and he lived in Iran for several years as a teenager, because his father worked as a lawyer for the U.S. government abroad. JK

Both Japan and Iran are cultures that have evolved and valued their own decorative traditions over centuries. These experiences of a foreign land, where two-dimensional pattern fills such an important place, were not lost on Tony. There may not have been an agreed-upon definition for the decorative, but each of us, following our individual paths, had stumbled on a manner of art making that was full of information and reference to other cultures; and we had abstracted statements about the varying complexity that we liked to look at. Tony Robbin was right in the middle of this dialogue. RK

After a long exchange, we named ourselves “Pattern and Decoration,” an unwieldy mouthful, but one that encompassed our disparate passions. Soon the meeting was larger, with twice as many participants from both “pattern” clusters, but there was such a variety of aesthetics and points of view that it was harder to find a common discourse. JK

The dialogue in those early days was heady and exciting. Many of us approached the decorative as an extension of a strongly fought feminist agenda, a celebration of the anonymity and sometimes desperate escapism of what had been called women’s work. Many had traveled abroad and seen work that inspired us to go home and replicate the complexity of that Mesoamerican carving, weaving, or wall decoration in our own paintings. RK

The Islamic wing opened at the Metropolitan Museum in 1975, and in 1976 the Smithsonian launched its decorative arts museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, in New York. We would rush to the many important shows of world ornament and discuss them at length. Tony was profoundly affected by Indian Painting at the Asia Society in 1968; A King’s Book of Kings at the Met in 1972; A Flower from Every Meadow, Indian Paintings from American Collections at Asia Society in 1973; and Four Centuries of Fashion: Classical Kimono from the Kyoto National Museum at the Japan Society in 1977. In the early 1970s, Tony and his wife, Rena Kosersky, collected quilts, which were still affordable then: they especially liked a wedding-ring quilt and another with a fan pattern. More significantly, they traveled to Mexico in 1970, where he witnessed the ingeniously varied bands of geometric stone patterns on the temples at Mitla; on a longer excursion to Japan during the summer of 1972, they saw lots of kimono and obi, woodblock prints, and Nara decoration. JK

Members of the group participated in several public panel discussions at the Artists Talk on Art series and another session at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, where there were heated arguments with artists in the audience. Our ideas had become controversial and timely. We soon had champions and detractors in the art press (besides Goldin, the champions included Jeff Perrone, Carrie Rickey, Carter Ratcliff, April Kingsley, and John Perreault). The first show, 10 Approaches to the Decorative, was curated by Jane Kaufman at the Alessandra Gallery in 1976, and Jeff Perrone wrote a thoughtful article about it in Artforum. He argued that there was not much commonality in the way the work looked, as we each truly approached the decorative separately, but we were connected by a desire to adapt decorative impulses into a contemporary art practice. RK and JK

Tony Robbin, 2008-O-6, 2008. Oil on canvas, 56 x 70 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

From the beginning, Tony Robbin’s involvement with four-dimensional geometry was seen as a distinguishing feature. Perrone wrote: “This three-sectioned work is partially covered with a hexagon pattern filled in with sections of spotted spray paint. But the overall impression is of a deep, opaque, outer-space-like color range situated in the rust, dark and olive green range. It has outright illusionistic, receding geometric forms which are rendered in outline alone, and create ambiguous readings of the space. . . . .Robbin’s interest in illusion and ‘pleasure through visual complexity’ does not isolate him in this decoration show. For those artists using shiny materials, there is the illusion of light through reflection and the illusion of real jewels; there is the illusion of space defined by flat forms that are made ambiguous through segmentation; there is the illusion that is disguised allusion (original forms which look like traditional forms). . . .The illusion may occur in the eye, but it is neither manipulative, nor an end in itself.”JK [Jeff Perrone, “Approaching the Decorative,” Artforum (December 1976). P. 30]

A large, early survey of Pattern Painting at P.S. 1, curated by John Perreault in 1977, presented the full range of these strategies. A few of the braver gallerists showed our work. In those early years, Holly Solomon represented Robert Kushner, Robert Zakanitch, Valerie Jaudon, Ned Smyth, Kim MacConnel, and Brad Davis; Tibor de Nagy represented Richard Kalina and Joyce Kozloff and later Tony Robbin; Tony Alessandra represented Miriam Schapiro, Tony Robbin, and Jane Kaufman; and Pam Adler represented Cynthia Carlson and Barbara Zucker. JK and RK

Tony Robbin had come to those early meetings with a fully formed aesthetic, an infinitely expanding linear grid with three- and four-dimensional geometric references. His color sense, a series of jewel-like tones: amethyst, sapphire, turquoise accented with triangles and wedges of pure cadmium reds and yellows. The plane of his paintings glimmered and sparkled with textured areas of color. His aesthetic of more rather than less visual information fit right in with the general concerns of the entire group. While some of us talked about dollhouses, doilies, Islamic tessellation, and tribal weaving, Tony brought to the table his explorations in the cerebral world of fourth-dimensional mathematics. RK

Robbin’s interest in space dated back to his student years with Al Held, but he bent that macho aesthetic to incorporate flattened passages of tender, delicate pattern and orientalist undertones. He experimented with 3-D glasses and began to collaborate with engineers and scientists. The paintings expanded and pushed those shapes further and further, back and forth, and there was even a series in which wires extended out of them. In 1979 he wrote: “For two thousand years, over half of the globe, art has been pattern art. Pleasure of lyric color and calligraphy, whether expressed figuratively or geometrically, is intrinsic to the confidence gained in knowing the multiple, simultaneous structure. Omniattentive seeing—knowing space—may be a specific form of consciousness originating in a different and more powerful part of the brain than we usually use.”JK [Tony Robbin, “Patterned Space: The 2nd through the 4th Dimension,” exh. cat. (Jacksonville, FL: Art Sources Inc., 1979), inside front cover.]

We listened to each other, expanded our range of references, mildly disagreed at times, but the most important factor was that we were all on a quest: to change the art world, and perhaps the world at large for the better. RK

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