Wish I had seen this show: George Ault

To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, was at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from March 11 – September 5, 2011.

To Make a World captures a 1940s America that was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by a global conflict. Although much has been written about the glorious triumph of the Second World War, what has dimmed over time are memories of the anxious tenor of life on the home front, when the country was far distant from the battlefields and yet profoundly at risk. The exhibition brings viewers back into the world of the 1940s, drawing them in through the least likely of places and spaces: not grand actions, not cataclysmic events, not epoch-making personalities, posters, and headlines, but silent regions where some mystery seems always on the verge of being disclosed.

Fabulous quote from Peter Schjeldahl

In this week's New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl reviews a Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He also puts into words something that I have been struggling with for years-- the ability of art language and art writing to suck the life out of art. He starts off by quoting the wall text:

"Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography." The images do no such thing, of course. They hang on the walls. The pathetic fallacy of attributing conscious actions to art works is a standard dodge, which strategically de-peoples the pursuit of meaning. Such boilerplate language has trailed Sherman since her emergence, more than thirty years ago, in the "Pictures Generation" of media-savvy artists who tweaked conventions of high art and popular culture, sometimes in tandem with theory-bent, iconoclastic academics and critics. The association made for a rich episode in the history of ideas, and a spell of heady distraction in that of art. The intellectual vogue is long over, though the pedantry lingers, presuming that the mysteries of Sherman's art-- photographs that are like one frame movies, which she directs and acts in-- demand special explanation. (She is remarkably tolerant of interviewers who keep asking her what she means, as if, like any true artist, she hadn't already answered in the only way possible for her: in the work.)

The rest of the article is pretty great too.

Favorite art words used this week in spring midterms:

Parallax

Syntax

Relational Aesthetics

Agency

Dichotomy

Ethnographic

Effulgent

Indexical

Synthesis

Favorite art words used last semester:

Emphatic

Solipsistic

Axiom

Hegemony

Shibboleth

Reification

Pedagogy

Reflexive

Praxis

Materiality

Social Practice

Inchoate

Morass

Kurt Solmssen

There is a great interview with painter Kurt Solmssen on the painting perceptions blog:

http://paintingperceptions.com/landscape-painting/conversation-with-kurt-solmssen

He paints outside, from life. His paintings have wonderful, dark shadows and a mix of crisp and loose lines.

New Paintings- midterms

This is what I showed at midterms:

Gerhard Nordstrom

Admiring the beautiful paintings of Gerhard Nordstrom today. He's 87 years old and known for his anti-war paintings of the 70's. He is perhaps Sweden's most famous painter. His usually pleasant nature paintings often have dead bodies hidden in them.

Studio and Garden: At the Met: John F. Kensett, Minimalist

Reposted from: http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2012/02/at-met-john-f-kensett-minimalist.html

Studio and Garden: At the Met: John F. Kensett, Minimalist: Sometimes we are reawakened to an artist's work by seeing it in a new context, which scrubs our eyes clean and opens a space in our mind. This happened to me during my recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new American Wing. In a gallery devoted to 19th century landscape painters, one stood out for me in a startling way: John Frederick Kensett. It's as though I saw a completely new painter, one who looked at the world with a sense of its essential nature, and who left the extraneous behind. A painting: sea and sky, the light of sunset gently touching the waves, the only diagonals barely traced in the upper sky. A painting full of light, but not drama; an everyday glory.

Eaton's Neck, Long Island, 1872; oil on canvas, 18 x 36 in.

A curve of beach and hillock sweep into the space of sky and sea, each element in perfect balance.

Eaton's Neck, detail

Kensett's touch is restrained yet visible, alive in its descriptive power.

Twilight on the Sound, Darien Connecticut, 1872; oil on canvas, 11 1/2 x 24 1/2 in.

Another still sunset, with elements separated by treed masses, a human trace in the floating boat.

Passing Off of the Storm, 1872; oil on canvas, 11 3/8 x 24 1/2 in.

This painting is a marvel of light and air. Clouds are reflected in water of nearly the same hue, yet each is itself: the water transparent and reflective, the clouds indefinite masses. Three simple rectangles make up the composition: water, dark clouds, and the bright band above them.

Passing Off of the Storm, detail.

Small details of boats, a fisherman, a bird taking flight, are added with quick strokes of the brush; they seem to hardly be there at all, just brief touches on the landscape.

A Foggy Sky, 1872; oil on canvas, 30 1/2 x 45 3/4 in.

Salt Meadow in October, 1872; oil on canvas, 18 x 30 in.

I photographed the first four paintings above at the museum, then went to the Met's Kensett website page to see if I could find additional works that fit the feeling I had that day of a painter using minimal means to express a great deal. I found the two paintings above, which are not on view in the galleries, but in the study collection, so I will try to see them on my next trip. In preparation for writing this post, I pulled my Kensett book, John Frederick Kensett: An American Master, from my studio bookshelf. It wasn't until then that I realized that all the work I'd been so drawn to were part of what is known as Kensett's "Last Summer's Work", a group of 39 paintings that he completed during a three month period in 1872, mainly around his Darien, Connecticut studio on Contentment Island, an amazing achievement. Tragically, Kensett died a few months later, and in 1874 his brother gave this group of paintings to the Metropolitan Museum, many of which are still in the museum's collection. I can't help but wonder how his work would have developed if he had lived; would he have continued to be inspired by the spare landscape on the Long Island Sound, and emptied his paintings even more of incident? In his Last Summer's Work, Kensett has left us paintings which are quietly attentive to specifics of light and landscape, and through that very sensitive attention transcends them.

Emmett Kerrigan

Saw the beautiful paintings of Emmett Kerrigan at Linda Warren Gallery. They look so much better in person than in these images, very Wayne Thiebaud and very Chicago. He actually draws with with the paint, it's so thick.

Art Sinsabaugh

http://www.stephendaitergallery.com/dynamic/artwork_display.asp?ArtworkID=3442

I'm really enjoying the work of photographer Art Sinsabaugh. His long Chicago landscapes don't have the usual dimensions of photography or painting-- something I want to try to do in my own work.

New Paintings

Edward Bieberman

Conspiracy, 1955.

From the LACMA website:

Edward Biberman was born in Philadelphia in 1904; both he and his older brother Herbert, expected to join the family garment business, wound up pursuing careers in the arts (Herbert as a writer for stage and screen). Edward began his career in Paris in the late 1920s, and subsequently settled in New York where he was included in on of the first exhibitions at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art. In 1936 he moved to Los Angeles, where he increasingly incorporated social concerns into his paintings. He also began making mural paintings and taught at the Art Center School. His social and political consciousness was heightened by the Spanish Civil War and the international rise of fascism. Even his portrait subjects, including Lena Horne and Paul Robeson, reflected his political leanings.

Biberman’s career was put on hold for five months in the early 1950s when his brother Herbert, one of the Hollywood Ten, was imprisoned for his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The experience of living in Los Angeles during this politically charged period profoundly influenced Biberman, whose work of these years – including Conspiracy – clearly reflects the political realities of the day. Although he resigned from the Art Center School (in anticipation of dismissal for his political beliefs), he continued to teach throughout southern California. Biberman lived and worked in Los Angeles, known locally but largely ignored on the national art scene, until his death in 1986.

White Fire Escape, 1956.

The New Neurotic Realism

I checked out a book from the library today titled The New Neurotic Realism. It is a collection of images from a show in 1998 at the Saatchi Gallery in London. A lot of the work still holds up:

These pieces by Brian Cyril Griffiths are made out of cardboard boxes, office bins, bottle caps, and household objects like egg cups and tea strainers.

This chair by Andreas Schlaegel is made from kitchen sponges. Seems sort of related to the Brian Griffiths piece, but also like a modern day Fur Tea Cup:

Object in Fur, Meret Oppenheim 1936.

People are still making work like this painting by Dan Hays- paintings influenced by warped new and old digital images.

Dissolve, 1998.

These Michael Raedecker drawing-painting hybrids are a mix of painting and sewing. From 1998, but still super contemporary and exciting!

Room 2 and Room 5, 1997.

Perspective, 1997.

Frisson, 1997.

Beautiful paintings by Lois Dodd

An installation view of Lois Dodd's "New Panel Paintings"

An eighty-four-year-old woman paints a view of falling snow from a window. That’s Lois Dodd.

Dodd has her ninth solo exhibition, titled New Panel Paintings, at the Alexandre Gallery in midtown Manhattan. The 24 new were were done plein air. Each painting is completed in one sitting.

Dodd paints what she sees: a green scrap of grass leading to a cottage, a yellow field bathed in sunshine, a red flower in bloom. To view a Dodd painting is to contemplate a singular moment in time. There is not fuss, but delight. Pure and simple.

Source:

http://hyperallergic.com

I just discovered this clever Byron Kim painting today

Byron Kim
After Sun in an Empty Room, 2008
Oil and alkyd on canvas
31 x 132 inches









Which is referring to this Hopper painting:


Edward Hopper

Sun In an Empty Room, 1963

28 3/4 x 39 1/2 inches

oil on canvas

Who Owns the Color Red?

I will make my students read this!

From hyperallergic.com :

Who Owns the Color Red?:

Louboutin shoes (via christianlouboutinsau.com)

Can a person own a color? Yves Klein may say yes, but Yves Saint Laurent begs to differ. Over the course of the past year the luxury goods company has been tied up in legal proceedings against the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who believes his signature red-soled shoes are being ripped off by YSL. In my mind, this fashionable fighting has sparked speculation over the constant accusation of plagiarism that plagues creative fields.

In August a New York district court denied the preliminary injunction Louboutin requested against YSL’s ruby-bottomed pumps under the opinion of Judge Victor Marrero that a designer cannot have a monopoly on a color, nor did he believe consumers would be somehow tricked into thinking that the YSL shoes were Louboutins. Even though court will reconvene on January 24 because Louboutin just can’t give it up, I have to say the entire argument sounds petty and, to be blunt, a little selfish.

Now, even though I’ve been attempting for years to trademark the lovely shade of aubergine the circles under my sleep-deprived eyes are with little victory, this is not a personal vendetta against ownership of certain design elements. Tiffany, for example, has their turquoise (Pantone number and all) copyrighted, and the late Yves Klein patented his particular shade of blue. However, Klein’s patent on International Klein Blue had more to do with his chemical invention of the color, and Tiffany’s trademark applies only to competing brands because of the jewelry company’s long association with the specific color. Those are valid reasons to request protection, legally speaking, because they’re more or less aspects of brand identity that influence consumers. But most companies, as well as artists, seem to rapidly expect ownership and credit to any and all aspects of their creations, when in actual fact the color of a sole is no more grounds to sue than, say, a particular style of painting or sculpture.

Picasso's Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon (1907) (via moma.org) and an image of an African Fang Mask (via Wikipedia.org) (click to enlarge)

This constant quibbling over who owns what reminds me, inevitably, of the criticism (and lawsuits) constantly hurled at artist Shephard Fairey. Designer of the “Obama Hope” posters (which I’m hoping pop up again after the New Hampshire debates), Fairey’s signature style is one of appropriation and repurposing of images, much like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He may have a hard time admitting he actually appropriates images, but in my eyes the works he pulls from are altered in some way, though that isn’t enough for some people who continue to cite him as a plagiarist.

But aren’t we jumping the gun a bit to criticize an artist because he or she repurposes imagery and motifs? Japanese artists didn’t sue Matisse or van Gogh for copying their aesthetics, just as African artists didn’t sue Picasso. And yes, I’m aware the circumstances were a tad different, but my point remains that artists have utilized techniques and aesthetics from other sources forever, and today that historical practice is mostly lauded by art historians while reviled when turned to contemporary artists.

Besides, were talking about fashion here, people. You’d be hard-pressed to find one designer in history who has not in some way appropriated elements from his or her contemporaries or predecessors. Not a season goes by where someone magically reinvents the dress. They’re artists working under extremely limited and restrictive conditions and yet I have still not witnessed one major designer who completely copies someone else’s creation. Canal Street maybe, but never the runways of Paris.

This might come off as some armchair litigation, but I do believe that all artists should calm down a little bit before crying out “Plagiarism!” at every turn. Consumers associate red soles with Christian Louboutin just as museumgoers associate silkscreens with Andy Warhol, and they’ll realize that any similarities that appear in proceeding works owe a debt to their predecessors. But unless it’s a complete rip-off, I think artists should remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery before they call their lawyers.

Hüzün- shared melancholia

An interesting review of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City :

http://5cense.com/11/istanbul.htm

"It's a rather philosophical & personal (perhaps overly so) account of Istanbul, with an emphasis on the hüzün—«We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal, rather than private.

Pamuk keeps coming back to hüzün as the prevailing mood that binds Istanbullus, melancholia as a spiritual state, a glue, for Istanbullus living now in the seat of a ruined crossroads, struggling to be modern, yet to still retain the dignity of their past."

A fun read

http://hyperallergic.com/43796/the-best-north-brooklyn-street-art-of-2011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hyperallergic+%28Hyperallergic%29