November 4, 2011–January 22, 2012
1071 Fifth Avenue, at 88th Street
New York City, 212 423 3500

This Roundtable of artcritical regulars and guests took place via email over the weekend of November 19/20, 2011.  David Cohen moderated.

DAVID COHEN Maurizio Cattelan announced ahead of his Guggenheim retrospective that after it he intends to retire.  Do we believe him? And if so, are we heartbroken or relieved?

CARLA GANNIS I’m neither heartbroken nor relieved, because I know we haven’t heard the last from him. In interview he claims his retirement is another stage in his development, and that basically he doesn’t want to follow the widespread practices of “art stars” (40+ assistants, etc.)  Maybe he’ll pull a David Lynch move and start making art on the web, ie web”site” specific.

Visual art culture today feels very akin to the pop/rock music scene. Staying young & pithy – and edgy & countercultural – is hard to maintain post 40 when you’re bankrolled by every major art institution & your works sell for 2+ million.

Bruce Nauman moved to New Mexico and “retired” in a sense. Cattelan’s retreat (especially when he supports it with his not wanting to play the “art star” game) gives him more cred with younger artists.

Installation shot of Maurizio Cattelan: ALL at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011/12. Photo: Robin Siegel

DAVID CARRIER The pop music comparison is interesting. I don’t think that any of the classic groups (The Who, The Rolling Stones) were interesting beyond a certain point because that’s basically young boy music – my baby’s left me and I’m sad – and it’s hard for millionaire grandfathers to do. One might think, visual art’s different, but maybe today it isn’t.

Pop music involves selling lots of tickets or lots of music to individuals, visual art’s still tied to objects, even if here the museum plays into the game. My view: pop music is truly accessible, there are no experts; while visual art’s inherently different, there one has critics. That’s a very basic difference that hasn’t done away.

DAVID COHEN Hmm, lots to ponder here David.  (Everyone else, we’re gonna have to put friendliness aside and call David and me Carrier and Cohen henceforth). Years ago I interviewed David Bowie and his agent sent me a heap of reading materials so I could do my homework.  Boy is there pop music criticism!  The book deconstructing Bowie made Artforum seem like Hello Magazine by way of intellectual comparison.

DAVID CARRIER Ok, there is pop music criticism, but “Let’s spend the night together” doesn’t really demand commentary, whereas much here does: it’s this difference in attitude that interests me. It would be interesting to have figures- how many visit this show? I bet, any even C+ rock star would find the numbers pathetic. Artforum vs. Rolling Stone, very different.

ROBIN SIEGEL Funny that Cohen should mention Bowie. I could not help but think of him as I think of Cattelan re-inventing himself in the near to distant future, much as Bowie did, way before there was a Madonna or Gaga.

DAVID COHEN I suggest that formally Cattelan might be the equivalent of “lets spend the night” because there is not much aesthetic life independent of the message they are fabricated to convey, whereas, say, a sculpture by Medardo Rosso, or Brancusi, or Henry Moore is almost entirely such independence.

CARLA GANNIS “aesthetic life independent of the message they are fabricated to convey?” I’m sorry what does that mean? You seem to be implying that a Cattelan is a one-liner. A lot of more “formal” art (serious & earnest art) feels like one-liners to me. Elevated by our “faith” in it, more than what the object really gives to us. I’m sure to get hell for this response but really, Giacometti at times has felt like a one-liner to me (in form) and remove the “sublime” & “existential” from certain AbEx works, put a “layman” in front of them and there is very little but the surface!

DAVID CARRIER Everyone repeats, but Giacometti did not in 1939 envisage a large museum show, whereas Cattelan plays to this situation. A large difference.

ROBIN SIEGEL By comparing Brancusi to Cattelan we invoke the proverbial apples to oranges.

Installation shot of Maurizio Cattelan: ALL at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011/12. Photo: Robin Siegel

DAVID CARRIER The Guggenheim has an impossible space, by the way. I can think of only two artists who have used it (as opposed to using it as a place to awkwardly show): Daniel Buren, who emptied it out and Maurizio Cattelan. I admire Cattelan for doing that, I admire him for reaffirming what we all sort of know: in this noisy art world you have to speak with a VERY LOUD VOICE to be heard. I always resist moralizing about art. (Not, of course about politics.) So I refuse to complain since after exiting from the elevator at the top floor, I very much enjoyed my rather brisk walk, interrupted only to purchase the app. This is a circus, it’s the anti-Buren show, the opposite of empty. But I can’t imagine going back, unless one of us tells me something I don’t expect to hear. Seeing this show is like going to a carnival, it’s a fun moment that doesn’t inspire contemplation, it makes Times Square look, by comparison, like the NY Public Library.

MADDIE PHINNEY I agree with you that he used the gallery masterfully.  I too find it a totally bizarre and ineffective space in which to exhibit art and the installation was a really brilliant side-step.  Back to the question about Cattelan retiring, I don’t think we have any reason not to believe that Cattelan will indeed retire, but I’ve been a bit confused by this collective sigh of relief.  I feel like the reception of his work as merely a series of one-liners is a bit unfair, though I don’t quite know why I’m feeling so protective.  There is of course a degree, a large degree, of intended “shock” in his work, but I find he has some interesting things to say about art as an industry.  His piece “Torno Subito,” just a sign that reads “Be Right Back” which hung on the door handle of an Italian art gallery in the 80s and left the gallery closed for the duration of his “exhibition”—brilliant!  It goes to show that his most resonant pieces rely on their site specificity, and it seemed a bizarre choice to see his oeuvre represented as a series of art-objects in the show—almost an attempt to undermine his contributions.

BESSIE ZHU I think that Cattelan’s impending retirement is even a talking point says much about the pop sensibilities of Cattelan as an artist. Whether or not he actually retires seems largely irrelevant – the announcement reminds me of a Rolling Stones Farewell Tour.  It encourages us to stop and consider Cattelan’s oeuvre, helps with the market value of his work and is also a way for Cattelan to poke fun at the celebrity status artists like him enjoy. But it also points out the problem of being the art world’s token jokester—one never quite knows when to take him seriously. That said Cattelan’s humor comes from an informed point-of-view that’s much lacking in contemporary art. He makes work that relies on and engages in political/cultural discourse, and it remains accessible enough to stay relevant.

I totally agree with Maddie about the site-specificity of his works—can a work even be specific to a site anymore what with the internet and apps constantly displacing it? Cattelan seems to acknowledge the post-specific moment and as such his retirement seems aptly timed.

ROBIN SIEGEL It’s hard to imagine that Cattelan would retire from the art world, in the purest sense of the word. Most probably he will focus his efforts more on his curatorial and publishing interests. Given his invaluable backing from and ties to the fiscally potent collector Dakis Joannou, who is in bed with the New Museum, to just name one institution, I would not be the least bit surprised to see future Cattelan exhibitions in venues where Joannou has such connections.

Artists don’t retire. They renounce, recharge, repose, and ultimately come back with renewed vim and vigor. This is Cattelan’s life, and his art is inseparable from it and intrinsically linked to it. As Cattelan would state: Is There Life Before Death?

DAVID CARRIER Perhaps there is a relationship between his retirement and site-specificity. We might discuss Duchamp as a model and precedent, both for the suitcase containing all of his art and also, of course, for retirement.

DAVID COHEN His retirement is like so much else he does, totally Duchamp derivative.

CARLA GANNIS So he’s like Lady Gaga to Madonna? (smile)

DAVID COHEN I guess if he going gaga he has to retire.

BESSIE ZHU In response to Carrier’s query about retirement and site-specificity: There is something which certain modes of viewing preclude (such as a retrospective or an iPhone app or disambiguated images on the web) and if Cattelan’s works have to rally against that impetus towards universal viewing, what’s the point of making work if it is  weakened through that decontextualization? Not to suggest that’s his thinking entirely but I think the connection exists.

Installation shot of Maurizio Cattelan: ALL at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011/12. Photo: Robin Siegel

MADDIE PHINNEY That’s an interesting relationship.  I was only bringing up his emphasis on site to speak to the validity of his practice and political motivations.  I think Bessie’s comment about the displacement of his pieces through the app is really interesting, though I don’t know that his retirement has anything to do with the obsolescence of his practice, that is to say I don’t think that technology that displaces artwork makes pieces that rely on site entirely obsolete.

Going back to the show’s installation.  I was walking by a tour group when I saw the exhibition and the guide was saying something about how the installation wasn’t visually designed to be pouring downwards bit instead it was supposed to evoke an ascension up.  I didn’t quite buy it.

DAVID COHEN Totally don’t buy into that either Maddie.  There are so many hanging corpses: ascension and lynching don’t mix.  Whether the viewer is going up or down, the spectacle has a pronounced downward gravity.  What I’d say about the installation is that even when they are bending over backwards to be anti-artists, Italians can’t help being brilliant designers.  It is one of several recent interventions that makes sense of an exquisite, art unfriendly exhibition space: Jenny Holzer and Tino Seghal also come to mind, and Holzer falls into a tradition of Guggenheim installation already established by Dan Flavin.  But the massed mobile makes as much sense of the professed retirement as of the space: “This was it, one statement, done” it says to me.  Maddie, you objected to the characterization of Cattelan pieces as one-liners, but Cattelan is surely acknowledging that about his pieces by eschewing (or pointedly limiting) the possibility of seeing each piece on its own terms again and finding something new in each.  It is only by aggregation that a new statement has been possible with these ingredients.  Ezra Pound’s distinction that symbols age whereas signs renew themselves comes to mind: his pieces are one dimensional and get flatter and flatter with each reviewing.  Their facture is fairly irrelevant to their power of communication and therefore can’t convey possible new meanings.

CARLA GANNIS Ascending. Descending. (The ropes, instead of invisible wire, take away aspects of levitation or falling honestly). It feels more like a cacophony, and he is purposefully trying to deflate the notion of any individual work having an “aura” or autonomous significance. I think the “pouring down of his works” seems to speak of the way we access images and information today. It feels matrix-like.

BESSIE ZHU I think the installation is more “suspension” than a movement towards any direction.

MADDIE PHINNEY Oh, I like that.  There was something on the wall text about how the works were deliberately “disrespected” by their mode of presentation.  It’s interesting I think this sort of goes back to Carla’s comment about staying young—and maybe hip—in  the art world.  I never read Cattelan’s work as so “punk rock” or even subversive.  I think it’s operating within a dialogue on the art industry IN the art industry, how much “cred” are we willing to offer him.

CARLA GANNIS Yes, I never really saw Cattelan as punk rock. Subversive though. He’s stirred up a bit of trouble with the crucified woman and Pope piece…

MADDIE PHINNEY I read an article a year ago—of course I can’t find the source now—and  the whole thing was about art in bad taste.  I don’t have any moral objections to Cattelan’s work but I’m fascinated by this question of artistic responsibility.  Have we just moved past that moment when political correctness was paramount?  I think this is a big part of what I appreciate about the work—yes, there’s “shock” but there’s also naughtiness and cheekiness and fun.  Incidentally when I was looking up the article I found this fabulous Diana Vreeland quote, that “We all need a splash of bad taste; no taste is what I am against.

CARLA GANNIS Love that Cattelan’s work flies in the face of political correctness with its after scent of over-earnestness and didacticism.

Installation shot of Maurizio Cattelan: ALL at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011/12. Photo: Robin Siegel

DAVID CARRIER In a gallery, one normally sees works in sequence. So there’s some implied narrative or, at least, a sense of focus on individual pieces. Even Damien Hirst at Gagosian, which had to my mind a similar ‘circus’ effect, did involve such an order. Whereas here, one walks down the ramp, sees some familiar pieces, ok, but this isn’t a situation to inspire focus. It’s the extreme opposite of another Italian show long ago at the Guggenheim: Morandi. Imagine Morandis floating in this way!

I think that there are two audiences: those who know Cattelan’s art, and so recognize some pieces; and the larger public, I am guessing the larger group, who see the ensemble of works. It’s hard to make distinctions, and again, the app doesn’t encourage that. This is a total work of art, for better or worse.

MADDIE PHINNEY I think this is really well put.  I hadn’t thought much about the general public who may be wholly unfamiliar with Cattelan’s work.  I love the idea of the installation as the work in itself, with the cacophony as the intended effect—perhaps then the installation was more artful than we give him credit?

Does Cohen feel like Cattelan’s work is ineffective, or just unoriginal?

DAVID COHEN Originality is certainly not his forte.  His first piece, the “back soon” placard, is lock stock and barrel within the tradition of Cage’s 4’33″.  Like Cage’s gesture, Cattelan’s generates meanings and observations beyond itself that constitute its originality; in this sense, originality is gifted to the viewer to gauge through personal experience rather than a chronicler to determine in relation to precedents.  I wasn’t there in Italy to experience it in person, nor have I heard a live or recorded version of 4’33″ but I’m willing to court the accusation of philistinism and say that I think I “get” enough from both pieces through the reporting of it, or seeing a souvenir of it, to savor its implications in my mind.  As to effective, they work very nicely as one-line jokes.  Sometimes they are very clever one-line jokes that make different people laugh for different reasons and maybe on a repeat visit you can have a different kind of experience from your first visit. You might therefore be able to retool the joke. If you have an alarm clock that goes off every ten minutes the first time you walk by it you will get a jolt.  The second time you will simply know that ten minutes has elapsed, so you could use the clock as a ten minute warning. That’s what I mean by retooling. But regarding Cattelan’s being original or effective, I’d say that you won’t get more from looking harder.  (Though I’d love to hear experiences from you all that contradict that.) And you are unlikely to cry by the way, unless you really like squirrels.

BESSIE ZHU I don’t know that originality is necessary for a work to be effective. What’s original with Cattelan is that he is in a really privileged position as an artist–people pay attention to him, he’s widely collected, exhibited and discussed. His works are provocative because they are so audaciously derivative. I think we are taking for granted that a work like “Him” (2001) (the child-sized Hitler) is not an easy piece to persuade your museum’s board of directors/major patrons to be supportive of; it’s a subject not many institutions like to make a joke of. For us rather open-minded individuals it may be an easy target but in the history of art and in the short span of contemporary art it’s a remarkably effective, well-made one-liner. It’s difficult to make an easy idea look easy and few artists can manage irreverence and effectiveness as well as Cattelan does.

ROBIN SIEGEL How is his “one liner” work any different from any other artist who consistently researches or investigates recurrent themes such as Duchamp, Rodin, or de Kooning, for that matter?

Regarding the app, it is intended as a supplement to the show, not as a substitute. For anyone unable to attend the exhibition, or for those too lazy to attend, it’s better than nothing. Just like the news has become infotainment, this is art-o-tainment. Talking heads. John Waters as narrator? It’s a match made in heaven. Cohen, if Cattelan’s oeuvre was truly simply a series of one liners, he would have enjoyed neither the longevity nor critical attention his work has thus far received. His decision to clump all his work together and suspend it from the rotunda was brilliant and subversive, and consistent with his flipping the bird to the art establishment, as a whole. Also, I do not perceive his work as strictly comical: there is a pervasive undertone of tragedy throughout; it’s funny, but not really, alas.

DAVID COHEN His view of life is tragicomic:  he has a sense of humor in his nihilism than a nihilistic sense of humor, if that distinction helps.  As to the one liner/originality debate: a brilliant one liner that isn’t too original is certainly welcome to the mix that is art.  You could even say that being a one liner is a philosophical service in that it makes us think about why art shouldn’t indeed be a one liner.  But Rodin and de Kooning are not one-liners: their work constantly renews itself and generates multiple emotional responses.  A Cattelan has a singular meaning, or sometimes a binary one where the tragicomic element sets in and we can laugh while also resigning ourselves to the meaninglessness of existence.  But the meaninglessness doesn’t get deeper on repeated or extended viewings, and the laugh doesn’t get louder.

ROBIN SIEGEL Cattelan is original and unique. I did not find myself laughing at this show. Perverse, sad, subversive, tragic visually amusing, but not funny at all. His subjects all seem to lose at the game of life. Hung, trophi-fied (Stephanie Seymour as the “trophy” wife mounted on the wall), suspended in time, as well as space. Death. Not funny.

One might ask if he is embracing his European roots with this over-the-top borderline Rococo installation. He is simply using the Guggenheim’s space to show his work in a new and unexpected way, as we would expect him to do the unexpected. Is this a case of Dada meeting the Baroque?

DAVID CARRIER Robin, may I steal Dada meeting the Baroque? I love that, it’s very apt.

ROBIN SIEGEL Thanks, David. Feel free.

DAVID CARRIER I do admit, this discussion makes me want to see the show again, to my surprise. And that’s one reason I value artcritical: this is like The Review Panel.

Installation shot of Maurizio Cattelan: ALL at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011/12. Photo: Robin Siegel

ROBIN SIEGEL I’m intrigued by the fact that you started at the top of the installation, and viewed it with the app. I started at the “base” and initially was completely put off by the show, feeling extreme dislike and resistance, despite my appreciation for Cattelan and his work. It was such a visual mumbo jumbo and I thought to myself: How on earth will I ever be able to make sense of this tangled mess? As I advanced up the ramp it became more and more intriguing to me, and it began to feel like a Cattelan treasure hunt.

CARLA GANNIS Cattelan, playing the jester again, seems to want to de-historicize himself. Oh but not really, he knows he already got a foot in the canon.

ROBIN SIEGEL Time will tell regarding Cattelan’s place in the history of art. Certainly he has left an indelible mark thus far. Regarding the recontextualization of his work, of course ALL is not the first time his work has been installed in a different way. In 2010 there was an exhibition called Is There Life Before Death at the Menil Collection in Houston, curated by Franklin Sirmans, whereby Cattelan’s work was juxtaposed against work from wildly diverse time periods, ranging from the Oceanic to Pop art.

DAVID CARRIER With an historical show, at the Met say, one would want details of the individual paintings, what do they mean, what’s the subject. Here what we get are not just the celebrities, the dealer, the critical champions, but the conservator, the conservator’s assistant and so on. All fine, but that doesn’t take us to the art. To continue Cohen’s parallel, it would be as if we got Nirvana’s recording technician.

DAVID COHEN I think there is a basic absence of curatorial integrity in not even offering, at reasonable intervals, a schematic of the “hang” which identifies the title, year, medium etc of pieces viewable at that point in the display.

CARLA GANNIS I agree that it was frustrating, given that this was a retrospective, to not have more wall texts & descriptions of the work provided to give us context but maybe the “jangle,” the “chaos,” is really just part of Cattelan’s critique. The man is smart, and I think his one liners, like any really good comic will resonate and reverberate in the future in ways we cannot predict.

MADDIE PHINNEY I agree with Carla here.  Forgive me if I’m totally off but it seems that Cattelan is uninterested in participating in a debate on his work or even adding to the dialogue.  He seems happy enough that viewers take away what they will – that the one liner part, right?  The immediate punch of the visual impact?  I too wish there was more info on the individual works in the show, but I think that was part of the point.  It almost seemed more like a gallery exhibition than a major-museum retrospective.

ROBIN SIEGEL The work should speak for itself and you should not feel the need to read a bunch of gobbledygook in order to experience art. If you want to be more informed about the art, we can read the numerous books and catalogues surrounding Cattelan’s work.

BESSIE ZHU I disagree that the “work should speak for itself” Robin. It speaks to the cultural climate we inhabit, and like much art that isn’t decorative, it is in dialogue with current social/political discourse. That said the brilliance of Cattelan is that it speaks to everyone, albeit on different levels. I think anyone can appreciate a Cattelan, it may dig up uncomfortable subject matter but it isn’t alienating as more conceptual work would be. In that way I don’t read him as sardonic as much as I read him as democratic–he recognizes the importance of entertainment value and he delivers. Why should art do more than make us chuckle, even though it has the potential to? I love that a Cattelan could never move you to tears, the work plays to your intellect (which I think sense of humor is tied to) rather than to your emotions or any grand romanticism. I love that.

DAVID COHEN Cattelan’s decision to hang in such a way that militated against individual consideration was brilliant on two counts: the works, in aggregate, took on a new meaning- possibly the last they can; they do not bear individual consideration as crafted objects, as we’d get bored by them very quickly, and there isn’t progress in any traditional sense. But I don’t buy the idea of the museum being a passive medium for the artist to do his thing.  Museums have obligations to viewers and lenders.  The presentation was obviously the artist’s decision, and was the best thing about the show, but the label documentation was the responsibility of the museum.  What if the artist didn’t want red exit signs or lavatories for males as part of his artistic intervention?

ROBIN SIEGEL Actually, David, the idea of no exit or lavatories for males as artistic intervention is swell. Are you embracing your inner Cattelan? I would be curious, meanwhile, to learn how we compare/contrast Cattelan’s career trajectory to that of Urs Fischer, yet another European artist who crossed the Atlantic to make his name on our hallowed shores.

DAVID CARRIER Fischer is another artist who worked well in a problematic museum, an even worse one than the Guggenheim: the New Museum.  But he is another artist who specializes in making a sensation effect.  And that makes me think of Greenberg on Surrealism: shock value quickly wears off.  Stepping back, it is super obvious that any “mere painter” doesn’t have a chance in this kind of museum environment. Merlin James, forget it!

MADDIE PHINNEY I keep going back to the installation and the way in which the works themselves seemed deliberately disrespected.  I can’t imagine that they were presented merely as objects in order for the viewer to appreciate the craft – it was impossible to approach the pieces themselves.  Maybe this is the punk rock self-effacing Cattelan giving the finger to the Guggenheim and the viewer once more.

CARLA GANNIS I think the two Davids are asking if, once we get the joke and any other conceptual underpinnings (ie their being Duchamp mash ups), does the object really matter?  I admit my relationship with Cattelan’s work is more about the ideas and the dark humor (in his best works) than desiring (or loving) any of his objects. I have cried in front of a de Kooning. Cattelan’s work has never elicited that from me. That said, I hold within my heart and mind a place for both kinds of work.

ROBIN SIEGEL Quite frankly, I am more a fan of Cattelan’s conceptual/ performance acts, or gestures, than I am of his static installations: creating The Wrong Gallery, or actually taping his Milanese gallerist to the wall, to just name a choice two, or even his Permanent Food magazines, in the print milieu. While I have felt compelled to defend Cattelan’s oeuvre from harsh and dismissive criticism in our roundtable, I must concede that many of his taxidermied creatures and embalmed bodies are downright kitsch. One my favorite work in ALL is the two pigeons waiting in front of a set of elevator doors as they open and close. This is one of the few genuinely whimsical and funny works in show where flagrant morbidity is often palpable.

DAVID COHEN is publisher and editor of artcritical; DAVID CARRIER, contributing editor, is author of numerous books on art, philosophy and museum studies; artist CARLA GANNIS, represented by Pablo’s Birthday, New York, and other galleries, is assistant chair in the department of digital arts at Pratt Institute ; MADDIE PHINNEY, Assistant Editor at artcritical, is co-founder and editor at large of Continuum Magazine and exhibition assistant at the American Institute of Architects; ROBIN SIEGEL’s photograpahy is widely published in magazines including Trace, Vogue UK.com and artcritical; she teaches at Pratt Institute as well as at NYU’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications, and she recently launched cupcakeluxe.tumblr.com ; BESSIE ZHU is an independent arts writers based in Brooklyn.

Willem de Kooning, Painting, 1948. Enamel and oil on canvas, 42-5/8 x 56-1/8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

STEPHEN MAINE Thank you all for agreeing to share your thoughts on de Kooning: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. As I made my way through the exhibition, I was struck by the emphasis on drawing as a studio tool–drawing as visual thinking.

First of all, a generous sampling of actual drawings is on view, including a few “working” drawings and others of which the primary value is to illuminate this artist’s process. Then, in the very first gallery the 1940-41 pencil drawing Portrait of Elaine is presented as the gateway to the first Woman series, implying that through the activity of drawing de Kooning found this iconographic leitmotif. Also, a number of the wall texts describe or refer to de Kooning’s procedure of replicating and repositioning particular shapes within a composition using tracing paper–the evidence is especially noticeable beginning with Pink Angels (1945). Even the image MoMA uses to promote the show is a 1950 Rudy Burckhardt photo of de Kooning roughing out a large charcoal drawing for Woman I, a photo ARTnews used to illustrate Thomas Hess’s 1953 article, “de Kooning Paints a Picture.”

This emphasis on drawing as thinking, making, shaping, is a great way in to this work, don’t you think?

JENNIFER RILEY I believe that drawing is the initial separation of idea from self, and this exhibition is a goldmine for demonstrating that idea in the work of de Kooning, whose great contribution to painting retained, combined and  overtly exalted numerous drawing skills. The early figure drawings demonstrate his powers of observation, skill in rendering and a sense of touch whose delicacy was as keen on probing form and composition as it was on exploring spatial aspects of the page.  Line, which early on describes edge, space, depth, and perspective in the later work becomes the wide range of marks and strokes of paint transporting qualities and information.

DAVID COHEN With de Kooning, in Sickert’s phrase, “drawing is the thing”.  This despite the carnal painterliness that comes to mind as soon as we hear de Kooning’s name.  In that romantic-versus-classic trajectory that pits disegno against colorito, de Kooning squares off against Pollock along the lines of Rubens versus Poussin, Delacroix versus Ingres, Matisse versus Picasso—on the painterly side.  And yet, it is not only with incredible works on paper that this exhibition puts forward drawing as de Kooning’s probity but in an abundance of works where there is drawing within paintings.  And I don’t just mean drawing with a brush by that, but actual, linear, graphite pentimenti expressively animating pictorial surfaces, starting off the bat with those seated pink figures.

DAVID CARRIER I would not speak just of drawing, but of control of paint. The great deKooning, in my opinion was the artist who could deal with the medium in such various ways. The contrast with his contemporaries is startling

IVAN GASKELL In terms of technique and procedure, de Kooning was in certain respects as traditional as Morandi. Drawing was one means of exercising control, and perhaps to the extent that he adhered to its practice he managed to produce viable paintings. Where he succeeds in paint, he is extremely precise and economical, though often complex; where things get out of hand (perhaps owing to impatience, or false “inspiration”?), they go wrong.

Yet in Dutch practice (in which de Kooning was evidently steeped) drawing has always had an equivocal position. He presumably carefully studied works by his fellow countryman, who got to most places he tried to go (including the representation of vigorous women) three hundred years before him, Frans Hals. No drawing by Hals is known. He presumably worked directly in dead painting (underpainting). Seeing the relatively modest Hals exhibition at the Met after the de Kooning show was highly instructive. I can only think, poor de Kooning.

Willem de Kooning, Woman,1951. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 21-1/2 x 16 inches. Private collection © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JOAN WALTEMATH The drawings got me thinking about how deKooning rehearsed and executed the kind of gestures that constituted his painting. Painting is a very physical act and especially the scale of deKooning’s works demand physical acuity. Like any sport one learns, repeating a gesture over and over again allows the body (and mind) to develop the muscles necessary to preform that gesture without self-consciousness.  And then those muscles remember how they moved and can refine and vary that movement as the muscle develops.

In the show we see how the drawings move from a concern with representation, to the formulation of movement.

STEPHEN MAINE Ivan, Where do “things get out of hand”? I’m inclined to agree with you, except that while I love the drawings from the late 1960s/early 70s, I’ve always had trouble with those slack, sloppy paintings. Okay, The Visit (1966-67) is wonderful–the grinning, spread-legged figure always reminds me of a leaping frog–but in a lot of other paintings from that period he seems to lose his way. Two Figures in a Landscape (1967) is just awful. Montauk I (1969) is less arbitrary, but insipid next to the clarity and snap of the paintings from the mid-70s (e.g., Whose Name Was Writ in Water). In the drawings, though, de K’s highwire walk between structure and illegibility is convincing.

IVAN GASKELL I feel that the vaunted canvases of women are failures, in part because he didn’t exercise the physical control you see in some other works. I don’t care for these works because as David put it to me, de Kooning didn’t know when to stop. His paintings work when he exercises a fine control of the kind that Joan described the process of acquiring. I actually see this to an extent in some of the very late works, which many revile (I don’t). I see it (control and economy) in some of the early ‘50s landscapes, such as Merritt Parkway. He had an occasional facility that can impress, but I consider de Kooning a relatively minor talent in the grand scheme of things.

JENNIFER RILEY I find fewer failures in the selections on view,  however I can see why you might dismiss those canvases. Comparing the women canvases with Merritt Parkway whose figure-like shapes and large patches of tightly locked brilliant color  are downright restive verging on elegant, the women canvases we are speaking of are a riot of awkwardness. I happen to like the possibilities I see in the simultaneous control and lack of control.

It matters somewhat that you think de Kooning a minor talent. I am a painter with great respect for the forward push achieved by this artist for painting at that time.

JOAN WALTEMATH As I went through the installation I started to see deKooning’s work in terms of the limits he was setting for himself in order to open up an arena in which he could play.  As a strategy it seemed to bear out though these rooms.  It’s constructed as if to read:  he exhausted one arena and then his work evolved into something else. After we get through the first rooms where we see how he was riding the currents of his time and bringing those aspects formally into his realm, one of the problems I see that lingers with him is how is he going to deal with the break up of the picture plane.  He begins to fragment his figures: Elaine’s face and arm drifting up and off.  The studies for the large theatre back drop are a good example of this as well.

I feel him trying to come to terms here with the multifaceted nature of reality inherited from Cubism.  This may be the single most important problem he had to contend with in his era.  But deKooning was never going to work with planes; it wasn’t his language.  His was all wrapped up in and around the body.

STEPHEN MAINE In the skeletal quality of the late work, in which color is secondary to drawing (in the sense of graphical organization), there is a direct connection back through the decades to the late-1940s white-on-black paintings (pre-Excavation) and those wonderful black enamel drawings, possibly interiors–even in deKooning’s use of the knife to spread the enamel to a thin film.

In the catalogue, Lauren Mahoney connects these drawings to Matisse’s brush-and-ink drawings from about the same time. Both are materially sparse, but to scramble figure and ground clearly did not interest Matisse. For me, that figure/ground interpenetration is the end to which deKooning applied his draughsmanly means. He extended the implications of Cubism out of the café and into the world. A line is a contour, but is the form on one side of the contour and the void on the other, or the reverse? Space becomes solid, matter evanescent.

Richard Hamilton, The citizen, 1981-3. Oil on canvas, 207 x 210 cm. Tate Collection

IVAN GASKELL I could admire some of the work without especially liking it; I could actually like some of the work.

How are we to regard Richard Hamilton’s The Citizen of 1982-8 (Tate, London) in the light of de Kooning’s work? [It contains] the kind of “expressive” mark making with paint that we associate with de Kooning; but it is not merely paint itself, but a representation of something else in paint, and like paint: the Citizen’s own excrement that he has smeared on the walls of his cell as part of his protest against his confinement and its terms.

I’m tempted to see this as an indictment of solipsistic triviality on the part of artists such as de Kooning whose concern with personal expression and the figure-ground puzzle pales into utter insignificance when set beside the circumstances that Hamilton represents in his art. Hamilton asks his viewers to consider on what terms Abstract Expressionism and political imprisonment can exist in the same world.

STEPHEN MAINE No doubt Hamilton intends a critique of Abstract Expressionism in the Bobby Sands portrait, but note that the autographic mark (here, fecal smearing) is the badge of rebellion and assertion of the individual’s will in the face of the apparatus of the State. I have understood Abstract Expressionism (in its youth, before it became academic) in the context of the age of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, as an implicit protest against mass cultural conformity–not trivial, not insignificant.

IVAN GASKELL I’m not convinced that Hamilton’s critique implies a simple contrast between “trivial” Abstract Expressionism and “urgent” representational commitment. Rather, he seems to me to describe a world in which both exist in a vital dialectical relationship, each in some sense needing and depending on the other. To the extent that Abstract Expressionism could be thought of as an oppositional move as you–surely rightly–point out (however swiftly appropriated and suborned by those very men in gray flannel suits) I rather agree with you: but can the bite of either de Kooning or Hamilton, in their different ways, ever cause real pain? I like to think so, but…

JENNIFER RILEY Many cases like this, as we all know and have witnessed in perceived aesthetics, expose our own closed systems of expectations. What was de Kooning’s intent and what was the world’s reception of it then?  Why it makes sense in his time (in his world)  vs.  the world’s reception of it over time is, in my opinion, what Hamilton’s work may suggest. To address your last question, the terms for  political imprisonment and the terms of Abstract  Expressionism overlap as position or attitude. De Kooning’s attitude represented the ultimate in individual freedom—an escape from an oppressive history and demands of dogmatic imperatives.

DAVID COHEN Hamilton, the founder of Pop and a key figure in the rehabilitation of Duchamp, is totally knowing and deconstructive in his use of painterly tropes.  The artist acknowledged a “compulsion to defile” hallowed techniques which led the late Peter Fuller to write of “Hamilton’s crabbed little anal corner-shop imagination” years before the Citizen painting.  An excremental theme runs (no pun) through much of his Pop and conceptual work, from Sunset (1974), an image of two romantically entwined turds on a beach, through extended series of faux pastoral images of nymphs and Andrex toilet rolls, turds and flower pots, etc.  But I make a back-to-Willem plea.  The tension between representation and expressivity is deeply alive in all his work, and hardly therefore needs extraneous comparisons to put the issue on the agenda.

Ivan’s affection for the late work and his conviction that the authorially uncontested canon contains so many failures are of a piece.  If you like the late works best then you probably just don’t get de Kooning.  Do we really think he wanted to produce thin, repetitive, pretty pictures?  Do we think that in his vigorous prime he would have taken kindly to assistants choosing his palette and canvas size for him and telling him when the work is done?  The chronological hang could have finished a room earlier and the last room given over to some of the late-1960s masterpieces (the Montauk series, etc.) crammed along a long wall in the penultimate gallery.

JENNIFER RILEY Perhaps these sweeping retrospective installations could one day follow a more filmic structure where the ‘End’ of the story is presented first and we are shown sectional ‘flashbacks’ that end with the central achievement rather than the waning years… David, that said, it is hard not to peer into the late paintings and enjoy the fugue-like reprise of drawing and shape being arranged on the canvas.

IVAN GASKELL I don’t believe that The Citizen is shallow in the least; nor do I think Hamilton’s art can be reduced to anal fixation any more than de Kooning’s can be to some notion of expressivity, or pursuit of chimerical freedom. I may not “get” de Kooning in some canonical manner, but I see things to admire in some of his work. I have no patience with want of economy or control in art, which is why I admire both Poussin and Rubens (and, among de Kooning’s contemporaries, Rothko).

What puzzles me is [the] claim that De Kooning’s attitude represented the ultimate in freedom. I’m afraid I don’t really understand this, with the greatest will in the world! All I can infer is that operational notions of ultimate freedom are likely to be contingent, when they apply at all.

Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman on a Bench,1972.Bronze, 37-3/4 x 36 x 34-3/8 inches. Private collection © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JENNIFER RILEY What I mean  in terms of  ’ ultimate freedom’ is  de Kooning’s much written about desire to be free of order. Though he did speak about a higher order, I believe his notions of freedom were much more grounded in earthly, social sources: his assertion of individual sensibility, his extreme  concentration on the sensory rather than the political,   his ideas of fluidity, vitality, continuity as they pertain to his practice. He said, “Order, to me, is to be ordered about, and that is a limitation.”

Mikhail Bakhtin employs the term ‘unfinalizabilty’ as an all-purpose carrier of his conviction that the world is not  only a messy place,  but also an open place. It designates a complex of values: innovation, surprisingness, the genuinely new, openness, freedom, potentiality, and creativity. (From Creation of Prosaics)

JOAN WALTEMATH Freedom has always meant to me, the freedom to set your own limits and not to be subjected. It takes a lot of control to move all that goopy liquid around and end up with something anyone would want to ruminate over for any length of time. Pictorial issues, largely unconsidered in discourse since the anti-formal epoch, are complex and illogical. It’s what I look for and think about in relation to other painters work: how do they solve problems, what are the problems posed by the era, by the artist.  It’s an approach modeled on George Kubler.  It seems at times so far from an art historical dialogue, I wonder even that we are talking about the same subject.

In the black and white enamel pieces,  I see him transforming the cubist plane and its resulting multifaceted space into a vocabulary based on form and void relationships.  No one in history is more masterful at this than Tintoretto, hence the great adoration he receives from architects.  It is all about the body and the volume between bodies.

JENNIFER RILEY We see economy of means and technique [in the enamel drawings]. It seems deKooning laid down thin meandering lines [and with] a flat scraper, perhaps paper, and drew the ink from the line  thus creating the large ragged edged shapes.  Here is an instance where he didn’t revise nor could he erase and I find them remarkably complete.

JOAN WALTEMATH The form/void relationship emerges from those pieces in a way that fragments the space, beyond the kind of pictorial space that the cubists created. It’s a shallow space – no distant horizons – but you can enter and move around in these pieces.  That is how I’m reading the black and white paintings, you have to look at them for a few minutes to let the coordinates register in your mind, but then it comes clear. I see these as his breakthrough works, yet once he is successful he redefines the limits of his game.  One of the things that emerges out of these paintings is the loss of composition as a way of locating the subject.

STEPHEN MAINE Those are among the most exiting works in the show because of the irreversibility of that smudge or scrape, and because of the economy and ease with which they shuffle figure and ground. Also the scraped enamel is not black like the line but a dark gray, as just a bit of light filters through from the paper underneath. A triangulation of value: black/white/almost black.

It is as if de Kooning felt compelled somehow to qualify nearly every mark he made, to complicate it, to second-guess it, to mess it up. The mid-to-late-50′s landscape-based abstractions may be where he comes the closest to finding in the brush stroke the equivalent of a declarative statement, with no “and yet…” attached.

This kind of relentless qualifying of what is already on the page or canvas is what I love in de Kooning and thus, to my mind, the sculpture is an ancillary achievement.

IVAN GASKELL The sculpture may be generously described as an “ancillary achievement,” but what place does it play in de Kooning’s artmaking? Is this no more than dealer inspired flummery? Do people not care because of a persistence of the (modern) hierarchy of media and method that places painting at the pinnacle?

JENNIFER RILEY As a student in Boston I remember seeing the MFA’s de Kooning bronze for the first time and being disappointed that it felt not so far from Rodin, and I was also reminded of Bernini’s clay models for the Angels for Ponte Sant’Angelo. My second thought was that  he was a much better  as painter because there really was no one immediately jumping to my mind other than himself when I first encountered his painting. The sculptures which are not without achievement, but not so great,  because de Kooning’s most imaginative work is intrinsic to the picture plane.

STEPHEN MAINE Since the distinction between sculpture and painting becomes ever less important as those traditional disciplines blend, I can’t think many informed observers would see much of a hierarchy, let alone a pinnacle. Yet one trades primarily in actual space, and the other in the illusion of space. As Jennifer suggests, de K’s fundamental concern–and, in my view, his gift–has to do with the picture plane, the illusion of spatial articulation, which his sculpture does not engage.

IVAN GASKELL I’m afraid I see the sculptures as possibly—I stress possibly—an instance of “getting in on the act,” perhaps commercially inspired (i.e. not necessarily de Kooning’s idea) but prompted because such things were part of the repertory of older artists of a certain standing: Degas, who never knew any of the bronzes cast in his name; Matisse, who did; Rodin, for whose beneficiaries endless poor casts have been a goldmine; Picasso, who actually did something with sculpture; Giacometti, whose work must have been in certain respects a touchstone; and surely others. In other words, to join the club of the great and the good as an artist, you had to produce sculpture.

DAVID COHEN The issue of freedom in our discussion has been presented as somehow earned at the price of economy and control, [two] virtues we all hope to find in the art we admire.  But these are perennial qualities germane to great exemplars of any style, including styles where exuberance and exalted manifestations of freedom abound.  By a similar token, someone working in a minimalist idiom (a style that fetishizes economy and control) can actually be deficient in those qualities—can be uneconomic in the efforts at reduction and out of control in their denial of facture and improvisation.

IVAN GASKELL Ingenious, though I’m not sure quite how one would discern these wants in the things concerned. I fear we see here a transfer or projection of qualities proper to a person (such as “out of control”) to things made by that person. A painting cannot be out of control, though it might exhibit the results of its maker having been.

STEPHEN MAINE As to the exhibition itself,  my only quibble is the space wasted on the vitrine of very small sculpture in the Montauk room. I would love to see a selection of sketchbooks and/or other small-scale flat work, in the manner of the recent Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective at the Met. Of course, Serra works in sketchbooks incessantly when he is on site and I don’t know that de Kooning ever embraced this practice, but there are reams of drawings in existence. To all: your “most memorable moment” in viewing the retrospective?

Willem de Kooning, The Cat's Meow, 1987. Oil on canvas, 88 x 77 inches. Collection Jasper Johns © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DAVID COHEN At the risk of repeating myself, I already stated my major quibble with the installation which is that the late work is given too much wall space and, disastrously, the last word too. I proposed ending the chronological sweep early so that the last room can give generous space to genuinely summating masterpieces rather than last demented efforts.  Jen made a brilliant point that exhibitions could take a cue from cinema and experiment with chronological dislocations to great effect.  I felt that the Montauk and other big figure/landscape paintings needed more space and were the one spot where the hang felt crowded.  But Elderfield is a hanging genius, as his Puryear installation proved and the current show confirms.

JOAN WALTEMATH The honesty of those later paintings was very moving for me.  I felt him reaching back to the black enamel paintings we’ve all talked about, looking for a breakthrough again – wanting to again redefine his limits.  I kept thinking that if you put an image of those black and white early pieces on photoshop and hit inverse it would pretty much look like the later paintings.  It would be interesting to see how it doesn’t.  Here he picks up again a kind of form/void vocabulary to construct his pictorial dimension and uses only what memory remains in the body to create those flowing lines. Some of them are more coherent in this regard that others.  There is no point of reference for them in the outer world, only inside where the body holds memories of the movements we have made, knows them intimately.  The highlights for me are the two on the left side as you face the exit, spare and elegant they underscore how he has given up everything he invented, everything we want to use to identify him, and he still makes a painting. He challenges us to be able to let go of it, too!

IVAN GASKELL I was impressed by his relentless experimentation: he never got into a groove and became complacent, it seems. In this he resembles Poussin who also relentlessly reinvented his mode of art making again and again, though perhaps to greater moral purpose; that is, I emerged from the Poussin exhibition some years ago feeling that I have been given the opportunity, thanks to his art, to become a better person. I emerged from the de Kooning exhibition admiring, with certain reservations, and somewhat bemused.

For me, the thrill moment was turning away from the dreary row of Women in which so many people have invested so much, in a variety of senses, to find the late ‘50s-early ‘60s landscapes (or landscape abstractions). Merritt Parkway (Detroit Institute of Arts), which I have mentioned before, and its neighbors impressed me in a way that nothing else I saw did. This is scarcely a revelation, but in my mind lifted his overall achievement from also-ran to worthy of repeated attention.

DAVID CARRIER For me what’s most memorable were the mid-period landscapes, showing de Kooning’s control at its best. The woman I don’t have any political objections to, but my formal concern is his need to hang the paint on an outlined figure. In the end, deK comes from what feels a very distant world. When Sue Williams paints in something of his fashion, she has to be very different- ironical, political. It’s not a technical question. At least unless you are very senior and European.

JENNIFER RILEY Standing in the room with the luminous, lush, exuberant large format paintings c. 1975-1977 was one of the highlights of my experience of this wonderful exhibition. Until this sequence of paintings my viewing experience was located solidly between mind and body. Here, however, I felt a bit blown backwards. For example, the group of late 50′s early 60′s parkway paintings, including “Merritt Parkway”  and “Bolton Landing” are absent the vitality, luminosity, and warmth of the 70′s  abstract landscapes. There is a certain distance, dullness and cool in this group (not to mention some relatively unfortunate spatial  bloopers).  Are the 1975-77 landscapes,  which are also full of movement, landscape sensations and color and rich brushstrokes that embody the velocity of the paint effective because of the ambience of surroundings in which they were made? (They were made in the Springs [on the eastern, rural end of Long Island -ed.] whereas the earlier ones were derived from sketches, small notational responses he made of his trips on the parkway then painted back in NYC.)

Willem de Kooning, Montauk I, 1969. Oil on canvas, 88 x 77 inches. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

STEPHEN MAINE The wall of mid-70′s landscapes was a revelation. Something clicked for him, and he found a balance between allowing the paint to unravel and nudging it back into place. Also his color here is fantastic, never better before or after. I can’t explain the effect of light, Jennifer, but I do think he regained his touch. By that I mean a variety of touch–in contrast to the relentless slathering that I find so dispiriting in the paintings of a few years before. The catalogue has a good description of the methods de Kooning used to add substances to his paint–including water–to get unusual textures and other effects. The heightened tactility contributes greatly to the vitality of these paintings.

JOAN WALTEMATH He uses the materiality of paint and the means of moving it around to create a pictorial dimension that is neither classic  foreground, middle ground and background space nor an organically construed cubist space.  The push and pull method of Hoffmann lingers around here, you can feel that as an overall spatial configuration in some of the paintings.  It never comes across to me as if it was used with any specific intent, more of a default mode for some one trying to carve out what hadn’t really been figured out yet by anyone else.  Or perhaps so much in the air that it was one accepted formulation of what a non-objective pictorial dimension could be in the era where the flatness still counted.

DAVID CARRIER De Kooning took a while to open up; in earlier rooms he works on smaller scale. These are resolutely unfussy paintings. Maybe this sense of liberation reflects his move out of New York City. The light is really interesting. Are there earlier, equally bright, large Western paintings?

JENNIFER RILEY Church. Turner, Burchfield…

Maybe we should try a hang of these three, plus de Kooning and … ??

DAVID COHEN There is a common line of praise one hears from artists about old master exhibitions: it makes them want to go home and paint.  I have exactly that feeling – and I don’t paint! This urge to manipulate materials that comes over you as you look at his work is a direct response to the haptic, if not the carnal aspect within the work itself.

The body-consciousness in de Kooning isn’t just about the woman series or the “ab-flab” sculptures or the paint-as-flesh impasto and palette of works from various periods or the stray limbs and deconstructed musculature that animate works like Attic and Excavation. Rather, the relationships of paint to drawing and surface to structure each constitute pictorial equivalents of flesh on bone. De Kooning’s is an art of supreme embodiment.

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