represent

Art restorer needs money to buy wine

OK, I am curious, yellowists

Rothko Homage 2 Yellow

Remember when John Goodman, in The Big Lebowski, discovered he was facing philosophers when he thought they were only three dweebs who used ferrets as weapons and dressed like Dieter hosting Sprockets on Saturday Night Live? His reaction: Oh my god, not nihilists. We’re fucked. You best listen to Mr. Goodman if you’re deeply invested in the world of contemporary art. It would be a sensible reaction to Vladimir Umamet’s recent act of vandalism at the Tate Modern where he tagged one of Rothko’s Seagram’s paintings and thus, by his own philosophy, turned it into a painting about nothing but the color yellow. I find myself oddly amused and cheered by his act of Yellowism. I doubt that it’s going to knock anything off the rails in the art world in the short term, but it may help free up some individuals to start making art without trying so hard to consciously make it mean something. And it might get a few people out of the art game altogether. If you can be talked out of it (and you should be, trust me) you shouldn’t be doing anything as nutty as making art to begin with. Art should be like the Zen monastery where they chase you away fifty times and then finally let you in out of pity because they finally realize you just can’t help it.

Thanks to my Brooklyn friend Lauren, who is a bit of a yellowist herself, but is in denial about it (so far this evening anyway), I started reading up on Yellowism. The manifesto is an interesting, monotonous and nihilistic incantation that keeps asserting its authors’ right to reduce all art to nothing more than a symbol for the color yellow. Umamets and Marcin Lodyga—the founders of yellowism—amiably claim their “new context” for art nullifies everything in art so that all art means nothing but the color yellow. In the context of yellowism—in a yellowistic chamber, as they put it—all meanings, all diverse significance, all styles and shapes and mediums, signify nothing but yellow. By tagging the Rothko and then surrendering to police, Umamets was calling attention to his philosophy and also leaving behind a painting that didn’t feature much yellow but was about nothing but yellow. Rothko may have thought otherwise when he was hard at work on his subversive painting, commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant. He wanted it to be oppressive, part of a suite of paintings that would surround and envelope the restaurant’s patrons with Rothko’s especially unsunny weltschmerzen. I stood in that Rothko room last year at the Tate Modern, when I had a painting in a London pop-up exhibition, and I didn’t stay in that place for long. The whole museum felt like a prison: cold, imperious, and impersonal. Rothko did the paintings, now hanging in that room, right before he killed himself. By putting his mark on the work, Umamets was claiming to make the painting about nothing but the extremely sunny color yellow. (Though there’s nothing sunny or unsunny about yellowism itself. It’s the color of what should have been swirling at the base of Duchamp’s Fountain, for one thing and Umamets claims to be doing to Duchamp what Duchamp did to art: recontextualizing. If Duchamp can say a urinal is art, then Umamets can say any work of art is about nothing but yellow, simply by surrounding it with a new context. That’s the logic, and it’s cleverly seductive, a bit of a chess move, which is also Duchampian.)

Here’s the thing, as Alec Baldwin says way too often now. These nihilists are basically threatening to get yellow on your ass. The act of vandalism was small potatoes. The philosophy behind it is saying art itself has reached a point of exhaustion, a dead end, where meaning and purpose is so fungible that it doesn’t really exist anymore. Hey, tell me about it, Vlad. The tract about Yellowism is something to enjoy and even skim with a bit of wicked glee–it’s very funny in places and the Russian accent is perfect. As you do, think, along with me, it’s about time.  They’ve pushed postmodernism to a dead end, particularly postmodern criticism. What Yellowism leaves in its wake, if you recognize the absurdity of the kind of critical thought the yellowists are attempting to skewer and also to take to its ultimate extreme, is something only an individual artist can answer through the act of making art. A yellowist says all works of art can be reduced to nothing but metaphors for the color yellow and they can make art works mean yellow by simply placing them in a “yellowistic chamber.” (Of their monomaniacal critical thought.) It’s a quick and dirty deconstruction of art in the most simplistic way. In my view, whatever can be reduced to the color yellow in a work of art, when a yellowist gets done with it, was beside the point to begin with—what actually matters will always resist interpretation as content. The yellowists don’t go so far as to say this, but by taking all ostensible meaning in art and reducing it to the color yellow, they force you to realize that this is where postmodern criticism leads, the arbitrary domination of the critic over the work itself, as well as the tired dominion of the intellect over a mysterious, yet integral act of imagination.

More on this tomorrow.

Fleeting moments, hidden order

Sleeping Cat, Chris Baker

When I stopped in to pick up one of my paintings from the back room at Oxford Gallery yesterday, I couldn’t stop looking at Chris Baker’s new paintings. He’s one of three outstanding artists on view in Water Works. All three are exploring the power of a water-based medium with amazing skill. Chip Stevens’ assurance with watercolor reminds me of a Japanese or Chinese painter’s fearless, irrevocable brushwork and use of negative space. And Barbara Fox’s images obsessively and meticulously return to glass globes strewn across surfaces they absorb and reflect. They struck me as a visualization of a heightened state of mind where the boundary between self and other has dropped away—no small achievement for what are essentially highly realistic still lifes. So I’m not doing justice to the masterful work of his co-exhibitors by focusing on Baker, yet Baker’s work calls for celebration in a special way because I’m finally beginning to feel what he’s up to. I’ve always admired his prolific ability to evoke light and form as well as a more ethereal sense of time and place in his scenes, but often I’ve wanted MORE

It’s all about the light source

The latest group show at Viridian Artists, which came down a week ago, introduced me to an artist the gallery represents posthumously, someone whose work I’d glanced at in the past but hadn’t really seen. The show opened my eyes and heart to the subtle depth of Bruce Rosen’s work. His wife, Maxine, has been keeping her faith in his work alive by maintaining a long-standing membership at Viridian on his behalf. The Viridian website appears to be the only place you can get some idea of what he was doing in his quiet, philosophically sophisticated drawings in various media, mostly gouache and chalk on paper. What I’m having difficulty admitting is that this process of having my eyes opened has made me rethink, in some respects, my general philosophy of how art ought to operate on a viewer. This slightly puzzled admission is laden with paradoxes I’m not sure how to sort out—more on that in a bit. These new mental adjustments remind me of conversations I had earlier this year with A.P. Gorney in Buffalo. One of his personal tenets—art is not visual—stuck in my craw because for me painting needs to work subconsciously in an exclusively visual way, a peer-to-peer connection, as it were, right brain to right brain, leaving the left brain out of the conversation entirely. It’s my extreme response to the decades of conceptualism in art, which now seems to have MORE

Arachnophilia

German spider projections

Wish I’d thought of this.

Waking dreams

Hydra – Azur, 15 x 15 x 3,  sculpting epoxy, tacks, nails, washers, acrylic, wood and canvas

When you think of Hawaii, the first thing that comes to mind probably wouldn’t be Pulse, the new solo show of abstract constructions by Carol Brookes on view now at Viridian Artists. Yet that tropical island is where some of the most compelling pieces in this show, the Pulse Hydra group, originated. Her encounter with that lush yet volcanic landscape is what infused itself into her materials when she went back to work in her Chicago studio. The results are startlingly organic, full of shapes that evoke plant and animal forms, sometimes lips, eyelids, and labia. The Pulse Hydra pieces are wildly colorful, MORE

The Black Dress

Vernita N’Cognita’s The Black Dress at Soho20

Vernita N’Cognita offered a cool and subtle performance last week, The Black Dress, at Soho20, on 27^th St., a few floors down from Viridian Artists, where she presides as director. It was a departure for her, the work of a troupe, rather than a solo act, following on her successful partnership with another artist in Germany this summer for Trail of Sighs and Whispers. This time it was a simple and beautiful meditation on what is less an article of clothing and more a sort of sartorial best friend: the little black dress. (Guys have got the black t-shirt, so we kind of understand, but it isn’t the same.) The black dress is the ultimate way to both disguise and reveal the female form, something that gets called upon as a woman’s go-to apparel for a variety of situations, great and small, from cocktail parties to funerals. N’Cognita teamed up with DeeDee Maguire, Veronica Pena, Amanda Flowers, and Tania Sen for a performance backed by music from Charles Ditto—with a perfect, impromptu and More

Endless labor, sometimes a sale

John Lloyd putting up his new show

The better I get to know John Lloyd, the more I admire him. (True of his wife, Jane Talcott, as well, but John’s the one who keeps putting his work up in small solo shows non-stop, anywhere he can find space.) Last weekend, when I drove into the city, he’d recently taken down his work at Salon d’Art and was putting it up at a workspace in Tarrytown called W@tercooler. So on my drive into Manhattan last week, I detoured up across the Tappen Zee and into Tarrytown, which turned out to be a beautiful little village tucked into the hills just east of the Hudson River. I felt as if I were in Vermont, with school children wandering along the main drag and cars stopping for any pedestrian who wandered across Broadway, which was more or less the northern extension of the same thoroughfare that runs through Times Square.

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Quote of the day

“. . . there are shows so imbecilic that they cry out for some kind of intervention. Intentionally or not, they exist as affronts to the artistic community through self-seeking sensationalism or sheer empty-headedness, and play into the hands of those in the wider culture who would marginalize boundary-pushing visual expression even further than it already is.”

Nicely put about lousy art. Big problem though. Boundaries? There is no crying in baseball, and there are no boundaries in art. It’s all been done. All frontiers have been opened. Everything is permitted. There is no art God. When are people going to catch up to this, finally? It’s been this way for half a century now. That’s the problem. There’s nowhere else to go. Yet we keep going. Reality: There’s nowhere to go. Necessity: I must go! Oh Godot, as a friend of mine likes to sigh. As an artist, the only boundaries I recognize are graphite lines, and I try not to violate them.

Two-artist show

. . . and again.

New Dams in Winter, detail, Neil Welliver, 1982

I know it’s bullshit to do two Art I Loves in a row, but I’m busy painting for a show in October, so bite me.

Sorry about that. I’m under pressure. Ok, so instead of just posting an image, I’ll let Neil Welliver say some things I’ve never forgotten since I first read them, things I think about often when I paint, especially when I’m “going back over” which Welliver said he never did. I usually think of Welliver when the work I’m doing isn’t remotely like Welliver’s.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an interview in a book published 25 years ago, Realists at Work, by John Arthur, (Watson-Guptil Publications) which I bought probably 20 years ago. It’s fun listening to Welliver sound as if he’s patronizing Fairfield Porter, who seems more and more influential a quarter century hence, especially in a lot of work I’ve seen the past few years in New York City. Welliver and Porter’s work both seem to spring from similar imperatives about simplicity and transparency of execution, paint as an end in itself rather than just a means, and the abstract qualities of representational images. His sense of color is different from Porter’s, not nearly as warm nor as varied, but you still have the sense that both artists wanted you to see the paint on its own terms, paint as what it is you’re getting, even as you see through it into the scene. Both thought of themselves as painting the light between objects, light as a field of energy, rather than representing a set of objects. Some of the Q/A:

When Porter did a really top-notch painting, he was as good as one can get . .

I think that the Fairfield Porter paintings that are good are very, very good American paintings. God knows that they can never be dismissed. I can’t imagine that. But whether Fairfield’s a major painter or MORE

Art I love

A recent painting from Kurt Ketchum.

It beats saving civilization . . .

Churchill at his easel

”Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.” – Winston Churchill

From Wired.com: In between penning epic one-liners, drinking, and saving western civilization, Winston Churchill picked up oil painting as a hobby. Inspired by the work of John Singer Sargent and Walter Sickert, Churchill managed to finish over 500 paintings, when World Wars weren’t getting in the way. He focused on calm landscapes — relaxing fare to keep his mind off of military failures in his past and the Panzer battalions amassing on the other side of the English Channel.

His aim was contentment, not critical acclaim. He said ”Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.”

Though he didn’t pick up a paintbrush until his 40th birthday, by the end of his life Churchill was a knight, a Nobel Laureate, but also had his paintings honored by the Royal Society of the Art under the pseudonym “Mr. Winter.” Today his paintings are collected and sold at auction where one recently sold for over a million dollars.

(Click on the image of Churchill for a contrary opinion about the happiness of painters.)

Candid camera

Chuck and Andy

“Photographer Andy Freeberg as been fascinated with the gallery and museum worlds for a long time and often turns his camera on the dealers, gallery patrons, artists, museum guards, and their interplay with the works of art themselves. His project Guardians, about the women that guard the art in Russian museums, won Photolucida’s Critical Mass book award and was published in 2010. One of my favorite series, Sentry, takes a look at galleristas that stand guard at the reception desks in the world of Chelsea galleries in NYC.”

–Lensscratch

Homestuck strikes gold

Homestuck, a “a book/webcomic/Flash animation/videogame hybrid”

When I heard that a webcomic called Homestuck had raised three quarters of a million dollars on Kickstarter within 24 hours for a videogame version, I set out to research what it was. Three hours later, I was not much closer to understanding it.

Homestuck, and the rabid fandom of its millions of readers, is difficult to explain. Entire blogs have been started just to answer the question, “What is Homestuck?”

Here’s the best I can do: It’s a book/webcomic/Flash animation/videogame hybrid, all created by Andrew Hussie. When Hussie revealed a Kickstarter campaign to fund creation of a Homestuck adventure game on Tuesday, his fans helped him meet his $700,000 goal within just one day. He plans to release the game in 2014.

—Wired.com

Brooklyn Heights colorist

John Lloyd, Classic Brooklyn Townhouse, 2011

New York from Brooklyn to the High Line, Salon d’Art, until Oct. 2.

History’s over

From an essay in a forthcoming book of Martinez drawings:

Martinez isn’t afraid to make abstract expressionist paintings or cubist paintings or whatever. Movements and styles don’t have a sell by date. As long as artists can genuinely expand on a movement (I think groove is actually a better word) its completely valid. Dada and surrealism are as relevant today as ever, whatever they’re called. Eddie Martinez isn’t snowed by the notion of progress in art, as 99% of artists are. What makes his art really modern or contemporary is that it’s a powerful reflection of this moment, it vibrates with the rhythm of our microsecond saturated, overdubbed, post-logical era. This is an era that has outlasted art movements and hidden beauty away where the salesmen can’t readily find it. This is a moment where every artist is fighting a sketchbook war, informed and sustained by secret muses,against historians wired into suicide vests working for international banks. The artists might be making money, but they know it’s money with secret codes set to go off when least expected.

Glenn O’Brien

Best freelance contract in the history of the world

“Nobody cares about art”

David Cowan, beta version, with Matt Dorsey, Wolverine wannabe, far right

David Cowan paid a visit to Casa Dorsey a few days ago, since we missed him when we were doing our one annual vacation last month in Southern California where our son and daughter both work now. I’ve known David since he was about knee-high, one of my son’s lifelong friends who has moved to L.A. to seek his fortunes as a screenwriter. He was back in Rochester visiting family and friends and stopped in to catch up. He’s bearded now, wears cool shoes, and comes up with about 250 new ideas for movies in the course of a week. Talk to him for MORE

Anthem for artists