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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

Article in Frieze

Read an excellent article that provides an overview of "Nature v. nature" in recent film and literature, with a focus on Nature as ruthless and unfeeling, quite the opposite of the mother earth model, and perhaps more true? (ekk)..."Nature and Anti-Nature" by Mark Fisher.

Looking at Ends

As I was searching for images by Zoe Leonard this afternoon I was reminded of this exhibition from May 2008 "Eminent Domain" assembled by and from the collection of the New York Public Library. There is an excellent website long after the show, and I was really struck by the work of Bettina Johae that documents the edges of each borough. The site that the library made for this series is worth visiting, although the images are (as expected) mostly mundane. I couldn't help but think of this work in relationship to Willie Doherty's photographs of abandoned border markers in Northern Ireland that was recently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art. Both artists' works have me rethinking/returning to a series of photographs, "I looked at the Blocked Views" which I took at the Walker Art Center while under construction for the new Herzog&deMeuron addition in 2007.

Conversation Before a Landscape

by Regan Golden & Jeremy Lundquist, 2009, video from Ludlow, Mass. from Summer 2007.

September shows in Chicago: To sum it up. . . photo and video have a firm grip on the Chicago art scene right now, and rightfully so, I saw several shows of paintings and works on paper and while they were aesthetically pleasing the work did not have much to say. One exception was the exhibition, "as we live and breathe" at Carrie Secrist Gallery with paintings by Megan Greene and David Lefkowitz; yet, the most intriguing works in this show were Kim Keever's large scale photographs of wilderness dioramas made from plastic models and painted backdrops inside of a giant fishtank filled with water to give the images this strange light.

Melanie Schiff's photographs at Kavi Gupta, are all images of tunnels--some organic and overgrown others the smooth and industrial. The title of the show is "The Mirror" one wonders how these holes act as a mirror for Schiff. The heavy duty metal frames on these works make the photographs look almost like light boxes and don't allow the viewer to fall into these tunnel spaces because the images are thrust so far out from the wall. Totally alluring nonetheless.

Selina Trepp's exhibition at Andrew Rafacz Gallery explores what happens after the mirror (of identity, of subjectivity?) is fragmented. Of all the work that I saw this weekend, the one work that I keep coming back to is Selina Trepp's "Appear to Disappear" (2009). At first this work seems altogether too blunt--a character in the video tosses broken shards of glass into a bucket while the actual bucket and broken glass dangle in the gallery space opposite the video. What is compelling about this piece is the gap that we experience as viewers between seeing a material and at the same time seeing it being used in the video. The display of the video piece was also very different from anything that I have seen before using mirrors and tape Trepp allows the figures to kind of float on the wall and they seem to become part of the same space of the viewer because they are unbound by a frame. It is more like a memory or a hallucination of a gesture, rather than a picture or a film of an action.

Michael Ruglio-Misurell's show "Project #12" at Gallery 400 is totally exuberant with colors, textures spiraling almost out of control--I love the ecstasy (jouissance?) of this in the work, but the more time I spent in the space there was this sadness that lingered in the work as well. One of the things I must enjoyed about this exhibition was the way that it dealt with issues of sexuality in a robust material form, such as the two urinals joined together. What troubles me about the discourse around this show is that it does not include this aspect of the work which is a missed opportunity to add another layer of meaning to a show that could easily be categorized as simply art about the spectacle of destruction. For a very complete review of entire show go to Bad at Sports.

Jason Lazarus' small installation Recordings ("Big Storm" January 30, 1967, Mom) at the Art Institute displays the backs of found photographs with lovely hand written phrases like "while we were visiting. . ." or blunt notations like "1959". The installation offers viewers the experience of imagining the image on the opposite side, but frustrates the viewer with the inability to turn the image around. This piece also nicely contrasts the experiences of reading and looking and how they are similar or different. I also thought the variation in the color of the photographs from dingy browns to creamy whites, they stood in stack contrast to the white of the gallery.

Two works I was so blown out by that I can't yet formulate a comment: Cy Twombly's painting "The Roses" (2007) lush sparkling blacks against the a lime green backdrop, dripping with magenta--sometimes a painting can be so right. Finally, Zarina Bhimji's "Out of Blue" made in 16mm film and transferred to digital the images are so beautiful and terrifying that I could barely watch and I could barely leave the gallery. Still from the video below:

Sweeping Up Installation at WPCA

In the 1700's American women living on the shores of Massachusetts drew patterns on their wood floors in sand. As the family walked over the sand the patterns shifted, but the wood floors were cleaned.

Ely to Ely

View from hotel window in Ely, Iowa. August 8th, 5:40 am, 85 degrees.



View from middle of Snowbank Lake in Ely, Minnesota. August 8th, 11:05 pm, 65 degrees.

The reason for a picture. . .

After returning from two weeks in a cabin at the Blacklock Nature sanctuary where I struggled to take the pictures of the forest that I was supposed to be taking (or had proposed to be there taking, I got suckered into taking this photograph after resisting for several days by the outright beauty of the whole scene. This was at the end of week one and freed me up to spend the other week glutinously taking pictures after picture of the woods sparkling in the sunlight. I left both happy and defeated. More images from this new series--"the reason for a picture" are posted on mnartists.org

May Art(s) Round-Up

When spring finally arrived in the end of May, I was so stunned by the quality of the work I was seeing everywhere that I just had to write about it.

The Next Fair -- Chicago, Sunny, 52 degrees:
Two works stood out to me in the way that they engaged the space and refused to hang blithely on the wall (as my own work did!)--Jeff Carter's "Catalog Floor" and the collaborative installation of particle board, folded bathtowels, and drawings at Scott Projects . Also beautiful and strange prints by Dutes & Stan printed at Spudnik press, imagining two men spawning from of their lengthy, intertwining beards.

Museum of Contemporary Art -- Chicago, Rain, 60 degrees:
A floor to ceiling wall of moss by Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago--what got to me--the scent, the itchy (teary!) eyes, the pale green color of the reindeer moss, the enormous scale, its half living, half dying piquedness.


(Above: Karel Funk, 2006, Untitled #21, Acrylic on panel)

Rochester Art Center--MN, Rain, Flood Warnings, 45 degrees:
Karel Funk's paintings (yes-paintings!) are based on digital photographs that he painstakingly reproduces. These hooded, bundled figures appear aloof, but are made more intimate through Funk's careful painting--every stitch in the hem of a coat can be seen. I have to admit it is rare and refreshing to see a show of paintings that is equally about representation and technique and the gallery--about the viewers moving through the space situating themselves among and between the paintings. The layout of the show built upon a unique type of interactivity that is hidden and unexpected in this very quiet work.


(Above: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Detail)

Mass. Museum of Contemporary Art--North Adams, Sunny, 65 degrees:
NO SHOW ON EARTH could have prepared me for the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings at Mass MOCA. This show is entirely phenomenal, totaling three floors--each floor half the size of a football field. The physical experience of color is incredibly intense--the gut churning orange with green stripes, the eye boggling grey on grey on grey. I went with a group of art professors and we all wished that our students could see this show, not only for the use of color, but because if anyone dares to say they have "done enough" after seeing this show they will understand immediately that they have not. Also at Mass MOCA was "These Days: Elegies for Modern Times," an intense little show about life after the apocalypse that included one of my favorite works of contemporary art--"A little bit of Death" by Sam Taylor Wood.

One of things that struck me about Mass MOCA is that this is museum gives itself up to the artists. There is such a sharp contrast between this museum and spaces like the Guggenheim or Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum where the work conforms (or interacts-depending upon the artwork) to this space.

Walker Art Center--Sunny, blissful 70 degrees.
The Quick and the Dead lives up to the word on the street that this is one of the best shows of 2009. I had a very strong response to the show as an artist--wanting to resist the dematerialization of art, but also relishing the cleverness of many of the works like a drawing by Joseph Beuys--a simple line on a page with the caption--the future starts here. It certainly invoked the stillness of something reaching the end of its time, but the connections between the works are so rich that it would take much more than a blog entry to unravel.

(Below: Beuys at Mass MOCA)



Heaven Gallery--partial sun, 55 degrees.
A lovely little show, I just saw in passing, also addresses this post-apocalypse, life after death theme that is circulating--really captured in the title of the show, "In that gold land." It was all about looking to the future and rebuilding.

Let's begin again!

Next month: "Frontier Preachers" at the Soap Factory and "THE Modern Wing".

Two Variations on a Shoe Shine

This year I have witnessed two very revealing works about a seemingly ordinary, uneventful act- shining shoes. Francis Alys' "Bolero" (1996) at the Renaissance Society is a lovely and meticulous animation that includes 511 drawings on translucent paper. Simple, but visually breathtaking, Alys' piece describes how labor and repetitive gestures are integral to our lives. As alluring as this installation/animation was I forced to radically rethink this piece this week after I stopped into the INOVA Gallery at the UW-Milwaukee to see Jefferson Pinder's video installation, "Show Shine Variations" (2007). In Pinder's "shoe shine" a young black man shines a young, aloof white man's shoe so hard that the whole shoe rips apart. Pinder's piece immediately brought back to mind what was missing in Alys' work, the inequity of the relationship between the two individuals--that the types of labor we perform in society are never far from issues of race, class and gender. I had a similar nagging feeling when watching the making of Alys' "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002). The gesture in both of Alys' works are so compelling, I want to believe in their innocence, but Pinder's work has me rethinking the dynamics of a shoe shine. Jefferson Pinder's show "Anthology" is up through May 10 at INOVA.

Before and After

For the first time we were able to get some before and after shots of the land as it was being developed. We now wish that we had more carefully marked the spots that we were photographing from on previous trips to the woods because there is something really compelling about having a before and after image. One of the things we found most challenging was to photograph the parts of the mountain that had been dynamited and cleared without making spectacular images. There were many images in which the destroyed part of the hill looked phenomenal, almost more grandiose than the forest. This was in some ways, an unexpected part of the project, and somewhat troubling. Although it is a different subject matter, I couldn't help but think of Coco Fusco's piece "Better yet when dead" (1997). Even blown apart the mountain side looks monumental. It is really only once the houses and roads appear that the physical qualities of the landscape that make it identifiable as a "mountain" disappear.

From MPLS to CHIC

From Chicago to Minneapolis-lots of art to see and think over. In Chicago at the Green Lantern Gallery is a sweet, impeccable, subtly disturbing show by Kari Percival and Greg Cook (ends Oct. 4). Of course, as an artist obsessed with Early American pattern, Greg Cook's work was lovely to see and is a good example of how to make something-- dare I say 'primitive'--and transforms it into contemporary art through color and installation. His use of simple line drawings depicting unfortunate events in American history can be seen on his website, in particular I would direct you to his, "Wonders of the Known World Flags". Cook lives and works in Gloucester, Mass and publishes a nice blog of his own, The New England Journal of Aesthetics which currently features some wild-flowery-sewn-silkscreened-wallprints by Karen Gelardi, also worth seeing.

Onto to Minneapolis. . .oh,oh, my beloved city. . . The Soap Factory--in a bold move--titled their most recent group show of local artists, Pay Attention: GREATER Minneapolis (ends Oct.26). . .inducing through this brave title a comparison to the P.S.1's Greater New York Show in 2005. As all of us who love Minneapolis know, we have all the things New Yorkers have--fantastic chef-owned restaurants, innovative museums, lovely parks designed by the same folks who brought you Central Park, and moreover, we have small-batch roasted coffee and the State Fair. However. . .the Greater New York show at P.S.1 in 2005 was an astounding slice of the artworld featuring emerging artists, tough to beat, but not impossible. While P.S. 1 as a rehabbed elementary school is an interesting and unusual space that many artists transformed in 2005, the Soap Factory as a structure is even more fascinating and exerts itself even more forcefully on the artworks that dare to go inside it. With many of the works in Pay Attention: Greater Minneapolis the space seemed to intrude on the artwork that was desperately trying to fend off the wonky wood floors and the rusted pulleys that dangle from the ceiling. In past shows, the art and the space just sing together in some kind of incredible duet that you feel privileged to see because you know these two elements will never come together this way ever again, such was the case with the show Gigantic that the Soap Factory also put on in 2005.



While this was not the case with most of the work in Pay Attention: Greater Minneapolis . . there were a few exceptions: two pieces by Chris Hill and the drawings, but particularly the cast object sculptures, by Megan Vossler. The works by Chris Hill are--a completely disassembled bicycle and arranged on the floor piece-by-piece from smallest to largest and a smashed china plate with the fragments all laid out in a pattern on the floor. These two works jumped out at me (literally they were shocking) because of their fragility and the efficacy of the execution of Hill's idea. I must admit I enjoy works where the artist's idea confronts you first and then your are rewarded with a beautiful object--the work presents itself as a solution to a problem you didn't know existed until you saw it solved just now. While this work references Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman on one extreme and Conceptual Artist Marcel Broodthaers on the other it is surprising to see these two divergent ideas brought together. The cast plater duffle bags scattered into the base of an old elevator by Megan Vossler and her drawings of Artic landscape were strangely unnerving in their use of white, that sharply contrasted the gritty, worn Soap Factory. Finally, this post on Minneapolis would not be complete without mentioning the work of Anthony Pearson (ends Oct. 25) at Midway Contemporary Art. This work is again very beautiful, and yet it puzzles me. I don't know how I feel about it but I think with this work that seems appropriate--aesthetically quite lovely and subdued.

Well, back to Chicago tomorrow for the opening of Francis Alys at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 4pm.