I have been terrible about keeping up my blog lately, but am still doing lots of writing. I published several reviews this fall of shows in Chicago. I decided to write about each of these artists because their work either utilized everyday objects in a new way (see Stephanie Syjuco and Alberto Aguilar), or because I was amazed by their intensive process (see Anthony Pearson and Zach Mory), or because their two-dimensional work created a different type of experience for me in the gallery. I am interested in two-dimensional work that engages the gallery, not as installation, but using the relationship between the drawings/paintings and the gallery (both as a literal space and conceptual framework) to expand certain ideas in the work (see Deb Sokolow and Hilary Wilder). These themes just evolved over the course of a few months as I continued writing. Here is the list and links. Enjoy!
"Deb Sokolow at Western Exhibitions," Newcity, December 2010.
"Hilary Wilder's Ornament and Crime at The Suburban Gallery," Art Lies, Fall/Winter 2010. (In print only).
"Light and Air at The Coalition Gallery" (Robin Dluzen, Zach Mory and Connie Wolfe), Newcity, November 2010.
"Things to be next to . . . at Three Walls" (Alberto Aguilar, Peter Fagundo, Warren Rosser and James Woodfill), Newcity, November 2010.
"Anthony Pearson at Shane Campbell Gallery," Newcity, October 2010.
"Stephanie Syjuco's Particulate Matter at Gallery 400," Newcity, September 2010.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Summer Studios Temporary Installation
In the end of July and early August, I assisted Adia Millet in the building of three installations for the Summer Studios project at Threewalls and the Sullivan Galleries at the Art Institute. For a week I was an interloper at the Sullivan Galleries after Adia invited me to fill one of the spaces she had been allocated with an installation that responded to her adjacent installation, "Blood, Sweat & Tears." For more information about this piece you can read Adia's entry about the Summer Studios on the Studio Chicago blog.
While working in the studio, our conversation kept returning to the issue of indeterminacy: what you can't see but know is there, and the limits of what you can ever really know, understand, or identify. There is a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, potential that lingers in Adia's installation in which an old wooden chest sits beneath floating, irregularly shaped circular forms. A single light casts shadows against the gray walls multiplying these forms and making it nearly impossible to tell whether the rings are coming or going, filling the chest or emptying out. In an adjacent installation, I addressed similar ideas in different materials: a granite rock (not from Plymouth, but close) is tightly wrapped in paper ribbons opposite a pile of sand from Cape Cod that buries an unfurling cream-colored bow. These two objects have a reciprocal relationship in that the rock will eventually dissolve into sand and the sand will someday be compressed into stone. Casting shadows on the rock and the sand is a web of pearl-organ-blobs cut from plastic sheeting. Together they created a strange landscape of plastic, stone and paper that I plan to keep working with. Thanks to all who made this improvised project possible.
Monday, August 09, 2010
Residency at the Harvard Forest
Just recently completed an artist residency at the Harvard Forest near the Quabbin Reservoir in Western Mass. The residency was a time to talk with biologists and ecologists at the Harvard Forest about their research, understanding and view (quite literally how they see the forest). It was also an opportunity to look at the photographs in their archive of the damage that the 1938 Hurricane caused in the forest. I was interested in how scientists photograph the forest versus artists, are they looking for or looking at different aspects of the woods? Are scientists as interested in making a whole, unified image of the forest as a landscape photographer would be? As conversations evolved, the questions shifted more to how does the perception of the forest as ordered or disordered, balanced or imbalanced impact the images that artists or scientists make of the woods?
I was joined on this residency by Jeremy Lundquist, we collaborated on an installation in Fisher Museum at the Harvard Forest. The museum describes the changes that have taken place in the forests of New England over time through dioramas, photographs, and graphs. We worked with the documents that were already on display in the museum and within the conventions of display that existed in this natural history museum. Images of the project will be compiled into a book and posted on our website: http://www.drawnlots.com/
Monday, May 17, 2010
Chicago Art Excursion no. 1: U of C
On my first weekend in Chicago, I took a bus to a train to a bus down to Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. I made the trek for a symposium on the films of Marcel Broodthaers, but also to see "The Seductiveness of the Interval" at the Renaissance Society and to delve into the bowels of the Seminary Bookstore. The "Seductiveness of the Interval" is a series of low, small, interconnected rooms with different types of seating: from the seats on a bus, to the wooden seats in a school auditorium. The chairs all face a screen on which is projected a video. The exhibition includes work by three artists: Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Muresan. While their strategy for inserting videos inside an installation in a very minimalistic way seems important in advancing the dialogue about medium-specificity v. installation art, I did not find the videos compelling enough to want to sit through, perhaps because I had been blown away by Broodthaers' films. The most interesting piece in the show was the garden on the roof of the structure, which you reached only after climbing steep steps that raised you up above the gallery lighting. Although reminiscent of Francis Alys' lofted space in 2008, what I like about seeing shows at the Renaissance Society is that the work always gets you experience the space in a new way.
It is hard for me, just days later, to gauge the impact of seeing so many of Broodthaers' films together, a rare occurrence. While I like Broodthaers' work, I primarily went to the conference to hear Benjamin Buchloh and Bruce Jenkins speak about his work. I was therefore unprepared to be totally charmed by Broodthaers' films. I had no idea how funny they were. Broodthaers, I learned, was influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, borrowing strategies from silent film to poke fun at the bourgeoisie, as well as himself. I must admit that most of my knowledge of Broodthaers' work comes from Krauss' book, "A Voyage on the North Sea" and my research into Tacita Dean's work (see my post on the The Artist's Studio at the MCA). While I can't rehearse Buchloh's lecture here, in his talk he re-examined the connection between Broodthaers' work and Benjamin, by linking Broodthaers' more closely to Guy Debord, and describes his films as a critique of "The Spectacle". With films like Le Bataille de Waterloo (1975) this connection seemed quite clear to me, less so with his earlier works like La Pipe Satire (1970). While I know this is quite a leap, after spending time last week researching the Yes Men for another article, I couldn't help but think they share the same dead pan humor directed, perhaps, at the similar targets. Broodthaers' films also reminded me of early works by Frances Alys such as Paradox of Praxis, where Alys pushes a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City. In this work, like Broodthaers' film, Eau de Cologne in which he sits on a folding chair in front of a cathedral holding a potted plant as it blows wildly in the wind, there is a mixture of the poetic and the absurd, as each artist incorporates their own bodies into a kind of physical comedy.
Broodthaers reading the newspaper through glasses dipped in whipped cream in Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (1970).
And lastly, the amazing book I found in the catacombs of the Seminary Book Co-op, a history of Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison published by Zone Books.
It is hard for me, just days later, to gauge the impact of seeing so many of Broodthaers' films together, a rare occurrence. While I like Broodthaers' work, I primarily went to the conference to hear Benjamin Buchloh and Bruce Jenkins speak about his work. I was therefore unprepared to be totally charmed by Broodthaers' films. I had no idea how funny they were. Broodthaers, I learned, was influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, borrowing strategies from silent film to poke fun at the bourgeoisie, as well as himself. I must admit that most of my knowledge of Broodthaers' work comes from Krauss' book, "A Voyage on the North Sea" and my research into Tacita Dean's work (see my post on the The Artist's Studio at the MCA). While I can't rehearse Buchloh's lecture here, in his talk he re-examined the connection between Broodthaers' work and Benjamin, by linking Broodthaers' more closely to Guy Debord, and describes his films as a critique of "The Spectacle". With films like Le Bataille de Waterloo (1975) this connection seemed quite clear to me, less so with his earlier works like La Pipe Satire (1970). While I know this is quite a leap, after spending time last week researching the Yes Men for another article, I couldn't help but think they share the same dead pan humor directed, perhaps, at the similar targets. Broodthaers' films also reminded me of early works by Frances Alys such as Paradox of Praxis, where Alys pushes a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City. In this work, like Broodthaers' film, Eau de Cologne in which he sits on a folding chair in front of a cathedral holding a potted plant as it blows wildly in the wind, there is a mixture of the poetic and the absurd, as each artist incorporates their own bodies into a kind of physical comedy.
Broodthaers reading the newspaper through glasses dipped in whipped cream in Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (1970).
And lastly, the amazing book I found in the catacombs of the Seminary Book Co-op, a history of Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison published by Zone Books.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Eggleston in Texas and Chicago
Since my arrival in Houston in September, one artist has more influenced my thinking than any other—William Eggleston. I have encountered his work several times this year, and each time its importance multiplies. Eggleston's photographs tell you something about Texas that you just can't understand until you have lived here awhile. I can only describe this something as the way that time seems to lingers here, ceasing almost to move forward until it lapses itself.
This passage of time is told through Eggleston's photographs individually and in series. Much of Eggleston's entire body of work is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition, The Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 (until May 23rd). Although Eggleston's printing techniques have changed from dye-transfer to digital and the scale of his photographs has shifted from 8 x 10 inches to 20 x 30 inches, his subject matter and his approach to it remain unchanged. Eggleston articulates this approach in an interview from 1988, as he describes driving through Mississippi, pulling over, getting out of his car with his camera and looking out at a dried up field. Even though, as he says, "it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there," he made one anyway. Eggleston describes this decision as a choice to photograph "democratically."
In this interview and in the series The Democratic Forest, Eggleston confronts one of the oddest experiences in photography—that moment when you look around and find nothing visually compelling enough to photograph, but you make an image anyway. This moment is uncomfortable, even depressing, as you stand bluntly looking out at a space where absolutely nothing lends itself to becoming an image. There is something strangely subversive about making a picture of "nothing," of "no place," or of that which is non-descript to the point of failing to cohere into an image. In photographing "democratically," Eggleston's images run counter to the idea that a photograph should narrate an event; nonetheless, Eggleston's images also avoid becoming sublime images of nothing. These are not spectacular images of voids, as many recent photographers like Trevor Paglen and Hiroshi Sugimoto have delved into. Eggleston's "democratic" approach to photography leads to images of "nothing" that are often boring and mundane, but for this reason they are remarkably, and also uncomfortably, familiar.
One could argue that Eggleston's consistent approach to the same subject matter appears staid over time, yet through this process Eggleston reveals what has remained the same in the Southern United States since the 1960s: beneath the ordinariness of daily life and cleanliness of domestic spaces lies a sense of uncertainty about the future. Singularly his sparse compositions appear easy to read, but upon viewing the images as a series you begin to realize that this simplicity belies confusion. This tension is heightened when Eggleston photographs the space around whatever should be at the center of the scene. The center could be the owner of the home in Greenville, Mississippi who never appears in the photograph that Eggleston took there on a sunny afternoon; all we see is an empty seat on the sofa beside a window. Without this center, Eggleston's image instead becomes a document of all of the forces that shape our identity as individuals and as a nation.
From this image of a quiet parlor in Mississippi are hurtled questions about how we define prosperity, happiness, safety and convenience. Above all, once we have settled upon these definitions we must then ask, what of this is sustainable? Despite the urgency of these questions, the viewer never feels as if they are looking at the crux of the problem, but somehow seeing it from the side, which makes it more approachable. Eggleston's approach, oddly enough, reminds me of Kara Walker's decision to use silhouettes as a way of allowing her and her audience to confront fantasies of race and gender that would otherwise be too "ugly" to depict (this is her word, from the Art:21 interview, "Insurrection!" from 2003). While Eggleston certainly is not as critical in his work of the fantasies of race and gender that Walker seeks to expose in her silhouettes, he does, to an extent, allow us to confront our own expectations about life in America by showing us the periphery rather than the center.
This passage of time is told through Eggleston's photographs individually and in series. Much of Eggleston's entire body of work is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition, The Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 (until May 23rd). Although Eggleston's printing techniques have changed from dye-transfer to digital and the scale of his photographs has shifted from 8 x 10 inches to 20 x 30 inches, his subject matter and his approach to it remain unchanged. Eggleston articulates this approach in an interview from 1988, as he describes driving through Mississippi, pulling over, getting out of his car with his camera and looking out at a dried up field. Even though, as he says, "it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there," he made one anyway. Eggleston describes this decision as a choice to photograph "democratically."
In this interview and in the series The Democratic Forest, Eggleston confronts one of the oddest experiences in photography—that moment when you look around and find nothing visually compelling enough to photograph, but you make an image anyway. This moment is uncomfortable, even depressing, as you stand bluntly looking out at a space where absolutely nothing lends itself to becoming an image. There is something strangely subversive about making a picture of "nothing," of "no place," or of that which is non-descript to the point of failing to cohere into an image. In photographing "democratically," Eggleston's images run counter to the idea that a photograph should narrate an event; nonetheless, Eggleston's images also avoid becoming sublime images of nothing. These are not spectacular images of voids, as many recent photographers like Trevor Paglen and Hiroshi Sugimoto have delved into. Eggleston's "democratic" approach to photography leads to images of "nothing" that are often boring and mundane, but for this reason they are remarkably, and also uncomfortably, familiar.
One could argue that Eggleston's consistent approach to the same subject matter appears staid over time, yet through this process Eggleston reveals what has remained the same in the Southern United States since the 1960s: beneath the ordinariness of daily life and cleanliness of domestic spaces lies a sense of uncertainty about the future. Singularly his sparse compositions appear easy to read, but upon viewing the images as a series you begin to realize that this simplicity belies confusion. This tension is heightened when Eggleston photographs the space around whatever should be at the center of the scene. The center could be the owner of the home in Greenville, Mississippi who never appears in the photograph that Eggleston took there on a sunny afternoon; all we see is an empty seat on the sofa beside a window. Without this center, Eggleston's image instead becomes a document of all of the forces that shape our identity as individuals and as a nation.
From this image of a quiet parlor in Mississippi are hurtled questions about how we define prosperity, happiness, safety and convenience. Above all, once we have settled upon these definitions we must then ask, what of this is sustainable? Despite the urgency of these questions, the viewer never feels as if they are looking at the crux of the problem, but somehow seeing it from the side, which makes it more approachable. Eggleston's approach, oddly enough, reminds me of Kara Walker's decision to use silhouettes as a way of allowing her and her audience to confront fantasies of race and gender that would otherwise be too "ugly" to depict (this is her word, from the Art:21 interview, "Insurrection!" from 2003). While Eggleston certainly is not as critical in his work of the fantasies of race and gender that Walker seeks to expose in her silhouettes, he does, to an extent, allow us to confront our own expectations about life in America by showing us the periphery rather than the center.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Houston Puddles
When it rains in Houston the whole city fills with water that has nowhere to go. The water seems to just hang around, until it eventually trickles down to the bayou or evaporates into the moist air. After a morning of reading about landscape photography, I decided it was time to get outside and make some images. The way that every pothole, nook, and cranny fills with water makes you feel as if the city is somehow turning itself inside out; all the trees and building are reflected in millions of little pools of water. The massive infrastructure of the city slowly worn away one puddle at a time. (I was thinking of Olafur Eliasson's photographs from his Cartographic Ceries when I assembled these images: http://www.olafureliasson.net/works/cartographic_III.html).
Friday, April 02, 2010
Orderly Disorder: Art and Science on Decay.
This week I have been thinking about the differences in how artists and scientists investigate and understand decay and disarray in nature. I started thinking about this topic after reading Mark Dion's interview on Art:21 and hearing a remarkable story about the formation of our solar system on NPR.
Dion's Neokom Herbarium is an enormous rotting Hemlock tree encased within a giant terrarium. In describing his work as an artist, Dion says that he is not interested in nature, but in ideas about nature (Art:21 Interview). By removing the tree from the forest and allowing it to decay within the museum, Dion works to "enhance the uncanniness of nature" in order to motivate viewers to consider their relationship to nature by exposing "the sense of the marvelous" in this fallen tree that continues to spawn new life everyday (Art:21 Interview). Dion's piece reminds me of Surrealism's fascination with the Praying Mantis that can even "play dead" a short time after it is actually dead. Is it fair to say then, that contemporary artists are undermining the idea of nature as orderly, while scientists seek to make visible the order within nature?
On Wednesday I heard this story by Robert Krulwich about the unusual structure of our galaxy. Krulwich begins by saying that twenty years ago "we thought there were rules about building solar systems," but that new research has completely upended these rules. (Talk about uncanny, check out the double gas explosion created by the explosion of the star, Eta Carinae taken at the European Southern Observatory).
Krulwich asks Mike Brown, an Astronomy professor at Cal Tech, when we look at how galaxies form what is normal or in other words, the predominant order of events? Brown replies that currently,"we have no idea[. . .]I have no idea what to expect." While certainly Astronomers have not stopped looking for patterns in the formation of solar systems, its just that Brown, for instance, no longer assumes that he will find them. Perhaps what artists and scientists share when they look out at the natural world is not a sense of certainty in knowing how the world works, but instead, actually a great deal of uncertainty. We just cannot know or anticipate all the ways that the Hemlock or Eta Carinae will change as they decay.
Dion's Neokom Herbarium is an enormous rotting Hemlock tree encased within a giant terrarium. In describing his work as an artist, Dion says that he is not interested in nature, but in ideas about nature (Art:21 Interview). By removing the tree from the forest and allowing it to decay within the museum, Dion works to "enhance the uncanniness of nature" in order to motivate viewers to consider their relationship to nature by exposing "the sense of the marvelous" in this fallen tree that continues to spawn new life everyday (Art:21 Interview). Dion's piece reminds me of Surrealism's fascination with the Praying Mantis that can even "play dead" a short time after it is actually dead. Is it fair to say then, that contemporary artists are undermining the idea of nature as orderly, while scientists seek to make visible the order within nature?
On Wednesday I heard this story by Robert Krulwich about the unusual structure of our galaxy. Krulwich begins by saying that twenty years ago "we thought there were rules about building solar systems," but that new research has completely upended these rules. (Talk about uncanny, check out the double gas explosion created by the explosion of the star, Eta Carinae taken at the European Southern Observatory).
Krulwich asks Mike Brown, an Astronomy professor at Cal Tech, when we look at how galaxies form what is normal or in other words, the predominant order of events? Brown replies that currently,"we have no idea[. . .]I have no idea what to expect." While certainly Astronomers have not stopped looking for patterns in the formation of solar systems, its just that Brown, for instance, no longer assumes that he will find them. Perhaps what artists and scientists share when they look out at the natural world is not a sense of certainty in knowing how the world works, but instead, actually a great deal of uncertainty. We just cannot know or anticipate all the ways that the Hemlock or Eta Carinae will change as they decay.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Romancing the Artist's Studio: A love affair diverted.
The exhibition "Production Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out" on the first level of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was easy for me to like, but that ease also made me a bit uneasy. I was initially exuberant about the show, but also slightly repulsed by the twinge of nostalgia that I detected in the show's premise, a nostalgia for the days when artists toiled away in their studio. This feeling was exacerbated by the layout of the exhibition in which each artist had their own partitioned area of the gallery, as if they had their own studio space within the museum. This twinge (only a twinge) stuck with me, but so did this sense of joy that I attribute to the earnestness with which the artists in this show addressed the meaning and importance of the studio.
As evident in this conflicted opening, this show nearly caused me to develop a split-personality: the artist side of me loved it, the critic side of me was suspicious of my love for it. As an artist, I enjoy being in the studio. I enjoy imagining and building things in a space apart that somehow also feels as if it is at the very center of everything. This show reminded me of how important my first studio was. I had just returned home after finishing college and my whole world seemed to be turned upside down, but things started to right themselves when I found a studio only blocks away from the neighborhood where I grew up. More than a place to make work, the studio produced a feeling of authority, in the sense that I felt the studio gave me permission to be an author. I rarely feel this way in the studio anymore, but when I was just starting off as an artist, this sense of authority that I felt when I entered the studio was incredibly important.
Some of the works in this exhibition, particularly the pieces by William Kentridge and Deb Sokolow, describe a similar sense of the studio as the locus of a certain "groundedness", not in a repressive way, but as a ground against which endless experimentation and inventiveness can take place. As a critic, however, beneath all of this romance, there was a staid quality to some of the works in the show that made them difficult to connect to this idea of the artist's studio as a production site when everything seemed so perfectly poised and placed. For instance, Andrea Zittel's work was displayed in much the same way as her show at Andrea Rosen Gallery. Neither the works themselves, nor their installation, gave much away about her studio practice. Ryan Gander's piece plays on this idea, and the installation itself seems to question what, if anything, the artist can reveal about their studio process in the gallery. In Gander's work, sheets of paper falling to the floor appear caught and held within glass bubbles, pointing to the impossibility of capturing the process of change and transformation that occurs at the studio inside the museum. Tacita Dean's film, Section Cinema(Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)from 2002 shows the remnants of Marcel Broodthaers' studio and also refuses to depict the "workings" of an artist's studio. Instead Dean projects the image of a studio out of work, the artist's process again held still, preserved, but lodged in the past. In contrast, Gander's piece titled A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor (2008) alludes to the floating sheets of paper as so many new ideas or potential artworks. Dean's piece reminds the viewer that there will be no new works made by the artist in this studio, except for her film, of course.
The most interesting aspect of this show, which at first glance appears as a celebration of the artist's studio, is that, in fact, it is pervaded by some skepticism, and perhaps even some confusion about the studio as a place for contemporary artists to work any longer. It is notable that Kentridge, who in part makes Charcoal drawings on paper, created the only space in which an unabashed enthusiasm for the studio is detectable. Kentridge's space was painted a deep blue-gray with multiple black and white projections filling the whole room. The projections include animated drawings that are changing and being reworked. Other projections showed Kentridge at work as he climbs up and down ladders while positioning and re-positioning pieces of paper. These transforming images imparted the feeling that, for Kentridge at least, the studio still holds some magic as a space of constant, epic invention.
As evident in this conflicted opening, this show nearly caused me to develop a split-personality: the artist side of me loved it, the critic side of me was suspicious of my love for it. As an artist, I enjoy being in the studio. I enjoy imagining and building things in a space apart that somehow also feels as if it is at the very center of everything. This show reminded me of how important my first studio was. I had just returned home after finishing college and my whole world seemed to be turned upside down, but things started to right themselves when I found a studio only blocks away from the neighborhood where I grew up. More than a place to make work, the studio produced a feeling of authority, in the sense that I felt the studio gave me permission to be an author. I rarely feel this way in the studio anymore, but when I was just starting off as an artist, this sense of authority that I felt when I entered the studio was incredibly important.
Some of the works in this exhibition, particularly the pieces by William Kentridge and Deb Sokolow, describe a similar sense of the studio as the locus of a certain "groundedness", not in a repressive way, but as a ground against which endless experimentation and inventiveness can take place. As a critic, however, beneath all of this romance, there was a staid quality to some of the works in the show that made them difficult to connect to this idea of the artist's studio as a production site when everything seemed so perfectly poised and placed. For instance, Andrea Zittel's work was displayed in much the same way as her show at Andrea Rosen Gallery. Neither the works themselves, nor their installation, gave much away about her studio practice. Ryan Gander's piece plays on this idea, and the installation itself seems to question what, if anything, the artist can reveal about their studio process in the gallery. In Gander's work, sheets of paper falling to the floor appear caught and held within glass bubbles, pointing to the impossibility of capturing the process of change and transformation that occurs at the studio inside the museum. Tacita Dean's film, Section Cinema(Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)from 2002 shows the remnants of Marcel Broodthaers' studio and also refuses to depict the "workings" of an artist's studio. Instead Dean projects the image of a studio out of work, the artist's process again held still, preserved, but lodged in the past. In contrast, Gander's piece titled A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor (2008) alludes to the floating sheets of paper as so many new ideas or potential artworks. Dean's piece reminds the viewer that there will be no new works made by the artist in this studio, except for her film, of course.
The most interesting aspect of this show, which at first glance appears as a celebration of the artist's studio, is that, in fact, it is pervaded by some skepticism, and perhaps even some confusion about the studio as a place for contemporary artists to work any longer. It is notable that Kentridge, who in part makes Charcoal drawings on paper, created the only space in which an unabashed enthusiasm for the studio is detectable. Kentridge's space was painted a deep blue-gray with multiple black and white projections filling the whole room. The projections include animated drawings that are changing and being reworked. Other projections showed Kentridge at work as he climbs up and down ladders while positioning and re-positioning pieces of paper. These transforming images imparted the feeling that, for Kentridge at least, the studio still holds some magic as a space of constant, epic invention.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Searching for Stella through Binoculars
Last October at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), I stumbled upon a vivid landscape painting tucked in a secluded hallway by Frederick Church, titled Cotopaxi (1855). The painting was quite alluring—deep green trees along the edge of a volcano in Ecuador—but as an avid "birder" I was even more intrigued by a pair small gold binoculars or "opera glasses" dangling from a silver chain next to the image. Peering through the binoculars at the painting, I felt completely immersed in Church's lusciously painted green, leafy forest in front of a pinky sunset. Church frequently invited guests to his studio to view his landscape paintings through opera glasses because, as I experienced, it makes you feel as if you are inside the landscape, completely surrounded by the trees and hills of Ecuador.
Months later, I was once again standing in a museum peering at art through a pair of binoculars, but this time, I was looking at a painting by Frank Stella in the "Benches & Binoculars" exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The painting, Stretch Variation (1968), is from the "Damascus Gate" series and approximately 5 feet long. Viewing Church's painting through the "binos" produced the sense of immersion in the illusionary space of the painted landscape: in contrast, the abstract patterns in Stella's painting seemed to retreat from view through the binoculars. Stella's painting is a sequence of semi-circular forms painted in pastel colors with thin bands of bright yellow between each shape. In addition to Stella's work, there are over 75 paintings in the exhibition. The paintings are hung "salon-style" next to and over one another filling the entire gallery from floor to ceiling. Many of the paintings in the show, including Stella's, were created after the "salon-style" display was abandoned by art museums that preferred to hang paintings in a line.
Before I return to the experience of looking at Stella's painting through the "binos" at the Walker, there is one more twist in this story: when I returned to the MFAH this week, I walked into the main gallery and immediately saw an enormous painting by none other than, Frank Stella. Also from the "Damascus Gate" series, Stella's Stretch Variation III (1970) is 50 feet long. The vibrant colors in the painting—hot pink next deep teal—make pinwheel patterns across the canvas. The swooping curves of the shaped sides of the canvas mirror the architectural curves of the gallery. To make way for this large painting, the artworks that typically hang on the opposing walls of the gallery have been removed. Their absence makes Stella's painting appear even more massive and monumental, as if the painting itself had expelled all of the other artwork from the room. Its independence is striking. Seeing Stella's painting dominate the main gallery at the MFAH brought back the awkwardness of viewing the Stella at the Walker through binoculars.
My frustration viewing Stella's painting at the Walker stemmed from not being able to view the entire painting at one time through the binoculars. Although much smaller than his painting at the MFAH, Stella's painting at the Walker is still quite large—5 feet long and much bigger than many of the other works in the exhibition. With the scale and the large patterning in the painting, I could only view one or two colors at a time, which undermined what I find most compelling in Stella's "Damascus Gate" series—the unusual combinations of color that are sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Quite the opposite when viewing Church's painting in the binoculars: even though only small parts of Church's painting could be viewed at one time, I felt immersed in the landscape. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars, I was "kept out" of the painting. My experience of the work was limited by what was visible through the binoculars, but also the conventions of spectatorship embedded in the binoculars.
Viewing Stella's painting through the "binos" also makes Cartesian perspective the dominant mode of viewing the work. The binoculars as a tool for enhancing and focusing the sense of sight reflect some aspects of Cartesian perspective (defined as the combination of the Cartesian rational subject and the tools of rendering linear perspective, for a complete and eloquent description see in Martin Jay's "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, ed.). For instance, the binoculars harness "natural vision" with both eyes into a monocular viewpoint. In Cartesian perspective, the frame of the artist's gaze has a similar effect of transforming natural vision through both eyes to a singular vantage point. This fixed "window onto the world" of the artist's gaze makes the tools for rendering perspective work. Without a fixed and singular position as a viewer, the objects in the image would appear at two slightly different vantage points, and the illusion of depth would not be conveyed. The tools of Cartesian perspective were introduced during the Renaissance to create the illusion of space on flat surfaces used in painting and drawing. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars makes it difficult for the work to challenge the conventions of spectatorship rooted in Cartesian perspective.
It is this mode of spectatorship that Stella's paintings react to—the ability to project one's self into the image is limited by his exposure of the flatness of the painting's surface. In Stella's two paintings from the "Damascus Gate" series, there are no luscious landscapes to imagine moving through, or even thick brush strokes to create a physical space on the canvas. Although entirely flat, Stella's paintings are very much about space. The space he creates when a pale pink line leaps out in front of deep blue hue. The space he makes evident when the painting in its intense color and curving forms reaches out from the wall towards the viewer. As the architecture critic, Paul Goldberger writes:
And for all the extraordinary power Stella's art has had as an exploration of color, line, and form in two dimensions, it is hard not to look at this paintings and feel that what has most intrigued him, all along, has been space: the space between lines, the space left out of the canvas, the space you imagine as you look at his shapes, and the real space that exists between the painting and the viewer. (Paul Goldberger, Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007).
In Goldberger's analysis, Stella's paintings are above all about the creation and control of space (Goldberger 31). Stella's painting certainly "controls" the gallery at the MFAH: yet, in the salon-style exhibition at the Walker, Stella's painting instead seemed struggle to control the viewer's experience of the space within the structure of the exhibition.
Stella's earlier paintings are described by art critic Phillip Leider as examples of Literalism because their abstract patterns reveal the inherent objectness of painting (Phillip Leider, "Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella's Retrospective at the Modern," Artforum, vol. 8, no.8, April 1970). Although the "Damascus Gate" series perhaps move away from Literalism, Stella's paintings in this series still make evident the blunt objectness of paintings. It is their physicality as objects that enable the individual in the gallery to be reminded of the "real" space of the gallery and their own physical presence in it. It is the objectness of the painting that the binoculars remove.
Viewing Stella's painting at the Walker through the binoculars is to transform an object into an image. As a result, my encounter with the work focused on sight as opposed to a "whole-body" experience. Without the binoculars, the scale and vivacity of Stella's paintings affect my body in the gallery. I find the intensity of the color dizzying: sometimes nauseating, sometimes jarring, and often difficult to look at. The scale of the painting is larger than my own body and the curves on both ends of the canvas produce the sense that the painting is expanding to envelop me. The introduction of the binoculars diminished the effect of Stella's painting on my body, because the binoculars changed my sense of the limits of my body in relationship to the limits of the painting. Certainly the binoculars improve my sense of sight, I can see greater detail farther away, but this amplified vision means that my attention is on what I am seeing and my other senses are dimmed. This is a wonderful feature of binoculars, when I am trying to spot a tiny Blue-grey Gnatcatcher bird in a dense forest. Looking at artwork in the gallery through binoculars, however, produced a similar effect, I was less aware of my body in the space and about my body's relationship to Stella's painting. The binos did not diminish my experience of Church's work because this painting already primarily engages the viewer's sense of sight above the other senses. It is through the sense of sight that I project myself into the scene—a landscape created by Church's use of Cartesian perspective to produce the illusion of space on the flat surface of the canvas. The ability of Stella's painting at the Walker to engage the body of the viewer in space was also challenged by the "salon-style" hanging of the show. The painting was hemmed in on all sides by other images, and so did not relate to the architecture of the gallery or impart the feeling of surrounding the viewer.
So as my friend asked after reading this essay, "why are you foaming at the mouth over a show that is just supposed to be fun?!" So a bit of a disclaimer here, I like this show, it is fun, but I also think it is important to talk about how the curating of an exhibition can profoundly shape our experience of a work of art. It is not that I don't understand the reasons for the "Benches & Binoculars" show (i.e.the history of the T.B. Walker collection, making the work more accessible to a broad audience), or that I am convinced the curators of the exhibition did not discuss the same issues I have just described relative to Stella's painting, or similar works in the show. It is just that it seems like such a dramatic change to the experience of Stella's painting that I found it startling and worth unraveling.
Months later, I was once again standing in a museum peering at art through a pair of binoculars, but this time, I was looking at a painting by Frank Stella in the "Benches & Binoculars" exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The painting, Stretch Variation (1968), is from the "Damascus Gate" series and approximately 5 feet long. Viewing Church's painting through the "binos" produced the sense of immersion in the illusionary space of the painted landscape: in contrast, the abstract patterns in Stella's painting seemed to retreat from view through the binoculars. Stella's painting is a sequence of semi-circular forms painted in pastel colors with thin bands of bright yellow between each shape. In addition to Stella's work, there are over 75 paintings in the exhibition. The paintings are hung "salon-style" next to and over one another filling the entire gallery from floor to ceiling. Many of the paintings in the show, including Stella's, were created after the "salon-style" display was abandoned by art museums that preferred to hang paintings in a line.
Before I return to the experience of looking at Stella's painting through the "binos" at the Walker, there is one more twist in this story: when I returned to the MFAH this week, I walked into the main gallery and immediately saw an enormous painting by none other than, Frank Stella. Also from the "Damascus Gate" series, Stella's Stretch Variation III (1970) is 50 feet long. The vibrant colors in the painting—hot pink next deep teal—make pinwheel patterns across the canvas. The swooping curves of the shaped sides of the canvas mirror the architectural curves of the gallery. To make way for this large painting, the artworks that typically hang on the opposing walls of the gallery have been removed. Their absence makes Stella's painting appear even more massive and monumental, as if the painting itself had expelled all of the other artwork from the room. Its independence is striking. Seeing Stella's painting dominate the main gallery at the MFAH brought back the awkwardness of viewing the Stella at the Walker through binoculars.
My frustration viewing Stella's painting at the Walker stemmed from not being able to view the entire painting at one time through the binoculars. Although much smaller than his painting at the MFAH, Stella's painting at the Walker is still quite large—5 feet long and much bigger than many of the other works in the exhibition. With the scale and the large patterning in the painting, I could only view one or two colors at a time, which undermined what I find most compelling in Stella's "Damascus Gate" series—the unusual combinations of color that are sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Quite the opposite when viewing Church's painting in the binoculars: even though only small parts of Church's painting could be viewed at one time, I felt immersed in the landscape. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars, I was "kept out" of the painting. My experience of the work was limited by what was visible through the binoculars, but also the conventions of spectatorship embedded in the binoculars.
Viewing Stella's painting through the "binos" also makes Cartesian perspective the dominant mode of viewing the work. The binoculars as a tool for enhancing and focusing the sense of sight reflect some aspects of Cartesian perspective (defined as the combination of the Cartesian rational subject and the tools of rendering linear perspective, for a complete and eloquent description see in Martin Jay's "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, ed.). For instance, the binoculars harness "natural vision" with both eyes into a monocular viewpoint. In Cartesian perspective, the frame of the artist's gaze has a similar effect of transforming natural vision through both eyes to a singular vantage point. This fixed "window onto the world" of the artist's gaze makes the tools for rendering perspective work. Without a fixed and singular position as a viewer, the objects in the image would appear at two slightly different vantage points, and the illusion of depth would not be conveyed. The tools of Cartesian perspective were introduced during the Renaissance to create the illusion of space on flat surfaces used in painting and drawing. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars makes it difficult for the work to challenge the conventions of spectatorship rooted in Cartesian perspective.
It is this mode of spectatorship that Stella's paintings react to—the ability to project one's self into the image is limited by his exposure of the flatness of the painting's surface. In Stella's two paintings from the "Damascus Gate" series, there are no luscious landscapes to imagine moving through, or even thick brush strokes to create a physical space on the canvas. Although entirely flat, Stella's paintings are very much about space. The space he creates when a pale pink line leaps out in front of deep blue hue. The space he makes evident when the painting in its intense color and curving forms reaches out from the wall towards the viewer. As the architecture critic, Paul Goldberger writes:
And for all the extraordinary power Stella's art has had as an exploration of color, line, and form in two dimensions, it is hard not to look at this paintings and feel that what has most intrigued him, all along, has been space: the space between lines, the space left out of the canvas, the space you imagine as you look at his shapes, and the real space that exists between the painting and the viewer. (Paul Goldberger, Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007).
In Goldberger's analysis, Stella's paintings are above all about the creation and control of space (Goldberger 31). Stella's painting certainly "controls" the gallery at the MFAH: yet, in the salon-style exhibition at the Walker, Stella's painting instead seemed struggle to control the viewer's experience of the space within the structure of the exhibition.
Stella's earlier paintings are described by art critic Phillip Leider as examples of Literalism because their abstract patterns reveal the inherent objectness of painting (Phillip Leider, "Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella's Retrospective at the Modern," Artforum, vol. 8, no.8, April 1970). Although the "Damascus Gate" series perhaps move away from Literalism, Stella's paintings in this series still make evident the blunt objectness of paintings. It is their physicality as objects that enable the individual in the gallery to be reminded of the "real" space of the gallery and their own physical presence in it. It is the objectness of the painting that the binoculars remove.
Viewing Stella's painting at the Walker through the binoculars is to transform an object into an image. As a result, my encounter with the work focused on sight as opposed to a "whole-body" experience. Without the binoculars, the scale and vivacity of Stella's paintings affect my body in the gallery. I find the intensity of the color dizzying: sometimes nauseating, sometimes jarring, and often difficult to look at. The scale of the painting is larger than my own body and the curves on both ends of the canvas produce the sense that the painting is expanding to envelop me. The introduction of the binoculars diminished the effect of Stella's painting on my body, because the binoculars changed my sense of the limits of my body in relationship to the limits of the painting. Certainly the binoculars improve my sense of sight, I can see greater detail farther away, but this amplified vision means that my attention is on what I am seeing and my other senses are dimmed. This is a wonderful feature of binoculars, when I am trying to spot a tiny Blue-grey Gnatcatcher bird in a dense forest. Looking at artwork in the gallery through binoculars, however, produced a similar effect, I was less aware of my body in the space and about my body's relationship to Stella's painting. The binos did not diminish my experience of Church's work because this painting already primarily engages the viewer's sense of sight above the other senses. It is through the sense of sight that I project myself into the scene—a landscape created by Church's use of Cartesian perspective to produce the illusion of space on the flat surface of the canvas. The ability of Stella's painting at the Walker to engage the body of the viewer in space was also challenged by the "salon-style" hanging of the show. The painting was hemmed in on all sides by other images, and so did not relate to the architecture of the gallery or impart the feeling of surrounding the viewer.
So as my friend asked after reading this essay, "why are you foaming at the mouth over a show that is just supposed to be fun?!" So a bit of a disclaimer here, I like this show, it is fun, but I also think it is important to talk about how the curating of an exhibition can profoundly shape our experience of a work of art. It is not that I don't understand the reasons for the "Benches & Binoculars" show (i.e.the history of the T.B. Walker collection, making the work more accessible to a broad audience), or that I am convinced the curators of the exhibition did not discuss the same issues I have just described relative to Stella's painting, or similar works in the show. It is just that it seems like such a dramatic change to the experience of Stella's painting that I found it startling and worth unraveling.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Found in LACMA's Reading Room
LACMA just opened an online reading room of artist books and exhibition catalogs, looks like this is an excellent tool and resource. I came across this catalog for the exhibition, "The Museum as Site." Produced in the early 80s, the exhibition provides a strange snapshot of a moment when installation art, institutional interventions, and Minimalist sculpture could all be included in one exhibition! Artists included in the exhibition range from Chris Burden and Michael Asher to Robert Irwin. Very nice! Check it out:http://www.lacma.org/art/collections.aspx
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Noriko Furunishi at Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The MIA has just started a new exhibition space--new pictures--devoted to contemporary photography, this show is only the second that they have had in this odd little space. The work of Noriko Furunishi is large photographs mostly in California, made with a 4 x 5 camera and then photoshopped until, they become "seamless" landscapes. Furunishi layers twisting, turning pathways through the landscapes on top of one another until the perspective of the space becomes multifaceted. These works are important in this museum since the MIA has a truly excellent collection of ink scroll paintings of Japanese landscapes on silk, my favorite is Hidaka Tetsuo's Floating Mist on Distant Peaks (1858). While viewers seemed to stroll past the monumental scroll paintings (some as large at 50 inches long), in the gallery with Furunishi's photographs I noticed people standing for several minutes tracing the pathways that weave through the photographs, much as I imagine people would have done at one time through the scroll paintings. Rather than simply staring at the photographs, there was lots of discussion about which ways the paths went in the landscape depicted in the photograph. I had the strange sense that Furunishi's work perhaps revitalized a dialogue that I would have heard around the scrolls at one time. Furunishi'photographs, like Tetsuo's painting, engages the spectator in a different way of looking at a landscape.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Why Photography?
I came across this quote last night reading and falling asleep, this morning when I woke-up I was still thinking it over, so here it is. From "Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity" written by Hollis Frampton, first published in Artforum in October, 1974:
"As I sit writing this text, on one of the days of the only life I shall live, a fine April afternoon is passing outside my window. Like a novelist, or a painter, I have walled myself into a room, away from the passage of time. Photography, uniquely among the visual arts, allows us to have our cake and eat it too: if I were making images today, I could be outside, within that day, converting its appearances to the requirements of ecstasy. Instead I am enmeshed in very these words. But I can't find the words to tell you what it is like to be writing them."
"As I sit writing this text, on one of the days of the only life I shall live, a fine April afternoon is passing outside my window. Like a novelist, or a painter, I have walled myself into a room, away from the passage of time. Photography, uniquely among the visual arts, allows us to have our cake and eat it too: if I were making images today, I could be outside, within that day, converting its appearances to the requirements of ecstasy. Instead I am enmeshed in very these words. But I can't find the words to tell you what it is like to be writing them."
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