Walter Richard Sickert, High Steppers, 1938-39. Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland

It’s the usual story: New Yorkers are spoilt for choice. All the goodies are lined up before them and they don’t know where to settle their seats, let alone their gazes.

Just like the ogling audience of the Plaza Tiller Girls (London’s equivalent of the Rockettes) in Walter Richard Sickert’s High Steppers, 1938-39. Sickert is the subject of a panel discussion at the New York Studio School, moderated by Deborah Rosenthal with artists Simon Carr and Mari Lyons, and artcritical.com editor David Cohen. Rosenthal included the anthology of Sickert’s writings put together by Osbert Sitwell, A Free House, in a series of reissues of classic artists’ writings in the Arcade imprint that she edits. The panel promises to address issues of Sickert’s controversial oeuvre such as the relative quality of his late work and the literary nature of his work.

But over at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Hrag Vartanian, editor of Hyperallergic, is the moderator of a panel put together by students of the MA in Art Market studies. The students’ chosen theme: Size Matters. Is spectacular art the new “ism” is the question put to dealer Gavin Brown, critic Roberta Smith, and artists Peter Halley and KAWS.

please circulate this flyer

Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012. Still. Nine channel HD video projection, 64 minutes

The shows to be reviewed at The Review Panel on March 1 include Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, 2012, a nine channel HD video projection of 64 minutes duration, on view at Luhring Augustine through March 16.

Robert Storr, Double Negative 1989. Oil on canvas. The Artist

As New York welcomes the College Art Association to town for its 2013 annual convention, taking place February 13 to 16 at its usual New York location of the Hilton Hotel, a panel discussion at the New York Studio School on the eve of the meeting brings together distinguished art historians and critics to share their experiences and insights into the often vexed dual processes of writing about art and making it.

The panel, taking place in conjunction with the exhibition, The Eye is Part of the Mind: Drawings from Life and Art by Leo Steinberg, features art historians Svetlana Alpers and David Rosand, professors emerita/emeritus respectively of UC Berkeley and Columbia, and critic, curator and Dean of Yale’s School of Art Robert Storr.  The moderator is art critic, artcritical editor and self-confessed Sunday draftsman David Cohen.

Alpers, author of landmark studies of Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez and others, collaborated in 2007 with James Hyde and Barney Kulok on a photographic project titled Painting Then For Now that gathered fragments from a painting by G.B. Tiepolo in the Metropolitan Museum.  Several pieces from the series are now represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the series was reviewed at artcritical by David Carrier.

Rosand, author of major scholarly works on Venetian art, including several monographs on Titian, as well as a definitive study of Robert Motherwell’s works on paper, trained both as a studio artist and art historian.  And Storr, who served as a MoMA curator from 1990-2002 and subsequently taught art history at NYU’s  Institute of Fine Arts, trained first as a painter (at Swarthmore and the Art Institute of Chicago) and has always maintained a studio practice.

Cohen will be quizzing his distinguished guests on all the issues surrounding making versus writing: when and why did the professions part ways?Which good art writers, historically, kept a “hand in” and which kept their hands clean. In a post-studio and conceptual era, is it not increasingly difficult to separate theory and practice anyway? What does making art do for your own writing about it? And what does writing about art do for studio practice?

The exhibition of Steinberg’s drawings, meanwhile, also on view at the Studio School on the evening of the panel, is up through March 9.

click to enlarge

February 6, 2013: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: Bobbi Booker, Judith Stein and Christian Viveros-Faune join David Cohen to review shows or installations of work by Daniel Arsham at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Judy Gelles at Pentimenti, Sean Scully at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Bill Viola at The Pennsylvania Academy itself.

Diana Cooper, Turf, 2012-13 at Postmasters Gallery

Flyer for The Review Panel, February 2013. Please share

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

… towards meaning in a plural painting world

Panel discussion moderated by Katy Siegel,
Friday, January 11 at 7.30pm.
Hunter MFA building, Second floor
450 West 41st Street, between Dyer and 10th avenues

Merlin James, House and Tree, 200. Acrylic on canvas, 25-7/8 x 26 inches. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co

The panelists are Blake Gopnik, Jane Harris and Christian Viveros-Faune.  Pre-Sandy, there were so many current shows from which to choose, but then, in droves, came news that likely choices were canceled, flooded, postponed.  In the end it felt fairer to stick with museum fare, especially with the coincidence of major shows exploring art since the 1960s.

please circulate this flyer

Meanwhile, the shows and panelists have also been announced for The Review Panel Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Barry Schwabsky and David Cohen travel from New York to join local critics Andrea Kirsh and K. Malcolm Richards to discuss five shows, details in the flyer below.

please circulate this flyer

Installation shot of Ann Agee’s work at Lock Gallery, one of the shows to be discussed at The Review Panel Philadelphia

The Review Panel’s first franchise launches this week, on Wednesday, October 17 at 6 PM at the nation’s oldest art school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, aka PAFA. Moderator David Cohen is joined by three distinguished critics, City of Brotherly Love-residents Edith Newhall and Edward Epstein, and New Yorker/Review Panel veteran Lilly Wei. The shows under review are Ann Agee at Locks Gallery, Jeanne Jaffe: Four Quartets at Marginal Utility, Valerio Spada: Gomorrah Girl at Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Rose Wylie at the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery. The Review Panel Philadelphia is set to meet at PAFA four times a year and future panelists include Barry Schwabsky, Christian Viveros-Faune, Katherine Rochester and Robert Storr. PAFA is at 118 North Broad Street and admission is free.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch
The shows to be considered at the National Academy October 26 at 6.30 PM by Cohen and his guests Nora Griffin, Phoebe Hoban and Donald B. Kuspit have been announced. They are Louise Fishman, at Cheim & Read (547 West 25 Street, 212 242 7727); Casey Jex Smith: Fiend In The Void, Based On The Romney Campaign, at Allegra LaViola Gallery (179 East Broadway, 917 463 3901); Michelle Stuart: Palimpsests, at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 535 West 22 Street, 6th Floor, 212 255 8450 and Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus, a project organized by the Public Art Fund, at Columbus Circle (8th Avenue/Broadway/West 59 Street, 212 980 4575). To view Discovering Columbus online reservation is required at publicartfund.org. The National Academy is at 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. Admission is $12 ($7 for students and seniors, free for National Academicians and students of the NA Schools.)

Kid gloves burnt: September podcast posted

A detail of a work by Diana Al-Hadid from her show, The Vanishing Point, discussed by The Review Panel, September 2012. Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery

Deliberations: left to right, Roberta Smith, David Cohen, Ariella Budick, Marjorie Welish. Photo: M. Brandon MacInnis

Correction: PAFA is an acronym for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. An earlier post of this article referred to that institution as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. Thank you to Emily Wang for the correction.

January 27–April 8, 2012
Rubin Lobby and Beaux-Arts Court, 1st and 3rd Floors
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000

Shura Chernozatonskaya installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy of the Artist

Shura Chernozatonskaya is the third Brooklyn-based artist to feature in the Brooklyn Museum’s yearlong Raw/Cooked series selected by an advisory board of well-known Brooklynites, including Ron Gorchov and Amy Sillman, and curated by Eugenie Tsai. The idea is mutually beneficial: the emerging artists get the chance to show their art in a major institution, and the Museum gets the work of five artists who have agreed to produce site-specific work that takes the museum space and collection into account. Russian-born, Red Hook-based Chernozatonskaya’s work featured in the Rubin Lobby and in the opulent Beaux-Arts Court.

The installation on the wall above the admissions desk consists of thirty-three rectangular canvases painted in primary colors and hung together in a line resembling that of a subway map.  Each canvas has three circles painted-in like traffic lights.  The line of the piece prompts connections with road signs but more literally a directory, appropriate to a location where visitors are handed tickets and a map.  Not unlike the layout of the museum, or the carrel one stands in to wait for tickets, the line snakes around the wall in hard angles.

Shura Chernozatonskaya, Art, 2011. Oil on canvas,100 x 65 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

The installation continues on the third floor in the European Paintings Collection where Chernozatonskaya playfully mirrors different thematic sections, paying sharp attention to visual and cultural cues.  Her graphic sensibility, with simplified geometric shapes and washy and opaque paint applications, connects with the sythnetic approach of Max Weber, for instance, in the section featuring Russian immigrants who helped to shape early New York modernism. “Art and Devotion,” which pays tribute to icons of the Christian tradition, sees the introduction of the hand print into Chernozatonskaya’s work, a symbol familiar in cave paintings and also linking with paintings in the exhibition where we frequently see a centralized figure.  The circles by now familiar to her pictorial language turn themselves here into halos and a gold crown in this context.  They create a kind of pictogram to echo the Madonna and Christ figures in the icons.

In a section titled “Painting Land and Sea” Chernozatonskaya’s evaporating forms reflect the dissipating color and light in landscapes depicting the break of day and bodies of water.   But her intentions, like her forms, seem somewhat blurry.

In Land, red and yellow circles spring from a white circle, each surrounded by coronas of blue and black smears, suggesting, perhaps, the division between night and day. In Sea this same image is smeared even further into amorphous fluidity. But in the company of Manet and Cézanne, who they face like mirrors, what can such superficial appropriations reflect?

Her intervention in the “Tracing the Figure” section, on the other hand, with paintings that appropriate contemporary signs and symbols of male and female from walk signals or public bathrooms, is direct and precise.  Placing Woman directly across from Picasso’s Woman in Grey (1942) is an obvious play upon historical abstraction of the female form. It suggests that, in our present period, both realistic figuration and pure abstraction have given way to investigation of iconography and representation itself as the primary motive in painting.

Brett Bachman and Anthony Palocci, Jr. are students of David Cohen’s in the writing program at Pratt Institute.  Classmates Kara Fowler and Chris Ifould also contributed editorially to this review.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Dan Cameron: “Rebuilding a City Through Art” at the New York Studio School, 8 West 8 Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, Wednesday, November 16 at 6.30 PM

Carla Gannis: “We’re friends on… and I’m following you” organized by NURTUREart at Karen Marston’s Studio, 229 Leonard Street, Brooklyn NY, Wednesday, November 16 at 7 PM

Peter Schjeldahl: “The Critic as Artist in 2011: Updating Oscar Wilde” at The New School/Tishman Auditorium, Thursday, November 17 at 6.30 PM

Dan Cameron in New Orleans during the Prospect New Orleans Biennial. Photo: Hakan Topal

Lectures in New York are kind of  like buses but kind of not: Like them, in that two or three come along at once; unlike because you never have to wait very long for one.

Case in point, Wednesday night (November 16): Dan Cameron speaking at the Studio School in their prestigious series of talks, and Carla Gannis at Nurture Art’s Muse series that takes place in the Williamsburg studio of the organization’s director, Karen Marston.

It almost seems symbolic that these two anticipated talks should clash, as they both deal with art as an agency for building community, one in a real city (New Orleans) and the other in the virtual realm of social networking.

We are not aware of symbolic clashes next Thursday, luckily, when Peter Schjeldahl delivers the Association of Art Critic’s annual lecture at the New School.  Entrance is a hefty $8 to hear the New Yorker critic, though its free if you are a member of the association.  He better be as good as movie!

Carla Gannis, click to enlarge

Haim Steinbach, wild things, 2011. Plastic laminated wood shelf, plastic Massimo Giacon “Mr. Cold” soap dispenser, vinyl “Mega Munny”, vinyl Bull “Where the Wild Things Are” figure, rubber dog chew, 40 1/2 x 72 3/4 x 19 Inches, Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The line-up of shows to be discussed by The Review Panel October 28, 2011 at the National Academy has been announced.  Regular panelist Peter Plagens, making his third appearance in the series, joined by novices Patricia Milder and James Panero will tackle shows by Amy Cutler, Michelle Lopez, Melissa Meyer and Nicola Tyson.

Meanwhile, the podcast of September’s season opener is now posted at artcritical.  Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson and Ken Johnson had joined Cohen on that occasion to review shows by Leandro Erlich, Antony Goicela, Alex Katz, and Haim Steinbach.

please distribute

click to enlarge