Archive Page 49
May 13th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Being a painter generally means feeling like an object of curiosity or affectionate sympathy—I do admire his work, love the guy, but how does his wife put up with him? Sometimes I think I’m looked upon with vague suspicion, as if my street’s property values will immediately edge down if word gets out about what I do with my time. Making a painting doesn’t strike most people as work. It’s fundamentally irresponsible, usually requiring other sources of income, and is essentially a strenuously sedentary form of play. Like, say, high-stakes poker. No sweat is involved, but money can be made, though not very often and only by a few of the luckiest practitioners.
There are other problems. Those of us who devote long hours to the act of painting tend to hang together, forming little suspect coteries of marginality—grown men and women who want to make pictures, dress in age-inappropriate ways, or gender-inappropriate ways, or species-inappropriate ways, and usually earn less than enough to make ends meet. We look at one another and think, yep, she has the disease too, thank God, because it means I’m not alone. I see Richard Dreyfuss sculpting a mountain with his mashed potatoes at the dinner table in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as his children weep with the conviction that daddy has gone bonkers, and I say, Keep going, keep going, Roy, it will all make sense in the end! But I wonder. Will it? So I hang out with fellow artists and drink beer and talk about how badly other people handle their paint, or how amazing Richter is when you see his actual canvases, or how so-and-so is a clever sell-out—and in the end we go our separate ways and feel more energized, but just as alone. Because the solitude is essential, even if sometimes intolerable. You have to isolate yourself and work on self-imposed deadlines for a solo show where months or years of labor may go up and come down with only one or two sales, no reviews, and maybe much less praise than you’d hoped to get. And then, after these necessary bouts of doubt and loneliness, you rush to hang out with other artists again and talk your way toward 3 a.m., hoping that the friendships will support you, emotionally, until you arrive More
May 5th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Not sure what, or if anything, all those little figures mean–or how many Chinese workers it took to make them, probably–but this is just cool, even though that fed-up Ph.D., whose rant I liked a lot, in my previous post might question whether or not it’s worth anything as art. More Gormley work at http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/remarkable-geometric-human-figures and http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/antony-gormley-field.
May 4th, 2012 by dave dorsey
From “I’m Sick of Pretending. I Don’t Get Art.” from someone with a Ph.D. in art:
“You know what? I’m sick of pretending. I went to art school, wrote a dissertation called “The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi’s Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu’s Theories of Distinction”, have attended art openings at least once a month for the last five years, even fucking purchased pieces of it, but the other night, after attending the opening of the new Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I’m finally ready to come out and say it: I just don’t think I “get” art.”
Read the rest here: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/im-sick-of-pretending-i-dont-get-art
April 30th, 2012 by dave dorsey
A shipment of small, light aircraft arrived at my door yesterday in Pittsford: a dozen sheets of hand-made paper impregnated with wildflower seeds. I will fold them into airplanes and then “return them to flight” wherever I can find a place they might actually germinate. I know exactly where I’m going to set at least one of these birds free, maybe all of them—from a promontory in the Finger Lakes near Bristol—and I’m betting that nobody else is going to get the hang time I’ll get, if the wind is at my back anyway. (I’m a guy, so I think everything’s a competitive event, even if I’m totally alone . . .) But I also want to try for an urban area or two, maybe Central Park when I’m in New York in a few days, or Brooklyn.
Jennifer Wenker made the airplanes as an art project to complete her MFA at University of Cincinnati this year. She was inspired to create this campaign in response to a USDA program for poisoning “nuisance birds”: “Bye Bye Blackbird” in which, she says, 2 billion birds were poisoned in 2009. I met her on a swing through her school with Rush Whitacre on my way to Louisville recently. So now I have a stack of wonderfully pebbly sheets of paper, some with wildly random deckle edges, and my next step is to turn them into planes.
I love this project because I love birds, and planting things, and the unassuming childlike simplicity of the whole project. The image of the airplane, the concept behind the project—it’s all tremendously simple, yet loaded with poetic resonance. As Jennifer put it: “We’ve taken over so much of the landscape, it can be hard to find a place where seeds can More
April 24th, 2012 by dave dorsey
In a fine article in The Brooklyn Rail about pursuit of spectacle and the influence of money on art, Dore Ashton quotes Friedrich Nietzsche:
Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.
April 12th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Screen grab of Manet zoom
I’d forgotten the Google Art Project existed until I read Roberta Smith’s celebration of it in the NYTimes just now, on-line. It has expanded considerably since last year, and though I don’t think this is going to suck as many hours out of my life as Halo has, over the years, it could be a contender. It’s frustrating to read how resistant many museums and rights-holders continue to be, given the potential for total access this project could offer to nearly anything and everything ever painted–and what a gift that would be to nearly anyone interested in art. Painting is meant to be seen, not stored away in private rooms. The sad reality of art, in general, is that the public has access to only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Of work that’s been done over the centuries, the vast majority sits in vaults or in places only few can access–it’s as good as gone, a sea of unreachable, unknowable dark matter for most of us. Those rights-holders who continue to stand aloof from the Google project should bear in mind that there continues to be no substitute for actually standing a few feet away from a work of art: no reproduction can fully capture what you see by looking at the living, physical object. I spent years scratching my head over Bonnard’s critical standing until I turned a corner at MoMA and stood before one of his surfaces, astonished. And I’ve also felt deflated looking at work that thrilled me in books or on the web, only to see how clumsily the painter actually handled the medium. Yet if my quick sample of Google’s project is any indication of its potential, it could come pretty close to the experience of seeing the actual work, and this would be an enormous boon to both artists and scholars. When I went to this site this morning, I clicked on the first image that appeared, Manet’s In the Conservatory, and double-clicked to zoom a little closer. Then I did it again, expecting blur or those squiggles of photographic compression. Yet the image stayed crisp. Again, I clicked, with no loss of resolution. By the time I was done, I was as close as a kiss to this lovely model’s face. Nothing but her cheek and lips filled the screen–a pleasant prospect in and of itself, but it also showed me the actual surface of the canvas so distinctly I could make out how the thing had been rolled for storage. The diagonal cracks in the oil paint clearly showed that someone had removed it from the stretcher and rolled it, starting with the point of one corner and ending at the opposite one. I don’t especially need this information, but someone else might, and yet what I do want is to see the quality of his paint, the perfect, delicate skin tone, the evidence, yet again, of Manet’s seemingly cavalier brushwork, all the effortless mastery so clearly there in every square inch of his best work. So bring it on, Google. Get it all on-line. Everything. Picasso! Braque! Artists I’ve never heard of. Right now, I am Gary Oldman in The Professional, crazed and, well, frankly a little goofy with bloodlust, telling his henchman: Bring me everyone.
Whataya mean everyone?
Oldman roars: EVERYONE!
April 12th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Some observations that apply, some more than others, to painting as well.
From: A Lesser Photographer, Ten principles for Rediscovering What Matters, C.J. Chilvers
- Artists thrive on constraints
- Go amateur: be remarkable, not marketable.
- It’s about the image, not how you make it
- Tell stories: learn to write or collaborate with a writer
- What you keep returning to in your work is your visual home
- Don’t improve on what you see
- Show only your best work
- Control the way you show it
- Keep it legal (not so much for paintings; nota bene, Richard Prince)
- Be grateful: “While others let beauty pass them by, we recognize it, experience it and share it with the world.”
April 9th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Lifecycle IV, detail
This morning, the New York Times has a story on how, in the late 50s and 60s, the Ford Foundation became, essentially, a central patron of creative work for struggling artists in the U.S. The story quotes from letters James Baldwin wrote to the foundation, asking for funds to help him keep writing, and then goes on to explain that he used the money he was awarded to support work on Another Country:
It was 1959, six years before Congress created national endowments for the arts and humanities to support struggling artists and cultural institutions. For Baldwin, who was straining to finish a novel and pay personal debts, the place to turn for cash was neither the government nor any literary agent but to a relatively obscure foundation official named W. McNeil Lowry. Mr. Lowry had the last word in deciding which artists, writers and performers would receive grants from the Ford Foundation, the richest private source of cultural largess at the time. This month letters to and from Mr. Lowry . . . were opened to researchers at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.
There’s nothing unusual anymore about getting a grant to make art, but the focus on the personal, informal-sounding letters asking for a gift of money struck a chord, mostly because my friend Rush Whitacre, at artist in Brooklyn who plans to move home to Ohio soon, has been writing exactly the same kind of letters to unsuspecting potential patrons over the past few months. Currently, he’s writing to Jerry Bruckheimer, the movie mogul, asking Mr. Bruckheimer to please pay off Rush’s college debt in exchange for the gift of Rush’s best painting, an enormous canvas of sunflowers inspired by Van Gogh. (This letters project was also inspired by Van Gogh’s letters to his own patron, his brother Theo.) Most artists I know, like Rush, have little money to support their work, and—like Rush, who works as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—have other jobs to pay the bills, leaving little time left to actually create art. Rush has never met Mr. Bruckheimer, and undoubtedly never will, but this doesn’t stop him from writing a daily letter—as well as a poem—imploring the producer to dip into his exceedingly deep pockets and become Rush’s patron.
Rush’s audacity never fails to amuse me—especially because it’s almost More
April 5th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Gary Lee Cordray
I read an extremely funny book yesterday: Bad Ass Art. It was written and self-published a couple years ago by Gary Lee Cordray, as his thesis project for a degree in art at Ohio University. It lays out essentially how to become a Bad Ass Artist, a process that begins by rolling dice in order to determine all the elements you need for your work to add up to a score of either +6, +12, +18, or +24, in the Bad Ass Art-Making system. Or if you already have an idea for a work of art, you can calculate how all the work’s elements add up, and then modify your notion so that you get a score which is a multiple of 6 points. (You don’t need to understand this. I don’t. I don’t think Lee wants you to.) There are four levels you can attain, the lowest being Badass Art. Next up, Fine Art. Then, Badass Fine Art, and finally, at the highest level, High Art. A few examples of how to score your work by identifying Bad Ass elements: Big Watery Eyes, +1; Jars, Bottles or Urns, +1; Glowing, as if Magical or Divine, +1; Bar codes, pills, or price tags, +1; Realistic-looking or lifelike, +1; Part of a coherent series or body of work, +1; Big sharp teeth/fangs, +1; Reflections, +1; Add wings, +1, and so on. The list of elements runs to 80 elements in four categories: Dark, Weird, Sexy, and Artistic. To be Bad Ass, a work needs to draw elements from at least three categories. There is no justification for any of the scoring rules, of course, but as you thumb through it, the prose lulls you into nodding and adding up numbers from your own work, thinking, huh, OK, that canvas I finished last week, hm, three, four points, no, five. No! Only five! OMG. Fail!
The opening of the book has it’s most rewarding voice:
“Welcome to Bad Ass Art; a mode of art making that has set many artists free from thinking too hard More
April 3rd, 2012 by dave dorsey
From one of the most trustworthy critics, in the NYTimes, commenting on Morley Safer’s piece about the world of art on 60 Minutes:
“Have [the super-rich and speculators] ruined art? No, they’ve just created their own little art world that has less and less to do with a more real, less moneyed one where young dealers scrape by to show artists they believe in, most of whom are also scraping by. Mr. Safer should visit that one sometime, without the cameras, and try to see for himself, beyond the dollar signs. Either that or he should just come clean: He could not care less about the new or how it makes its way, or doesn’t, into the world and into history.”
–Roberta Smith
Arthur Danto might argue against “the new” and suggest that art history is over, but Smith is absolutely right about where someone ought to be looking for the real struggle, and how the artist’s old companion, despair, is a lot more prevalent than big money wherever that effort is taking place.
March 28th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Without elaborating much, this is a conversation I had via email with my cousin, a retired Washington D.C. attorney with an encyclopedic knowledge of film, and his friend from Kenyon College, Dave Roberts, who is an expert on math. We were trying to figure out whether or not there are random elements in great art, whether they matter, and then, eventually, whether or not art is fundamentally about “newness” or about something else. I also got sidetracked onto the subject of freedom and free will. Somehow all of this seems tied together, but I have a hard time connecting the dots. When Brian veered toward his distinction between “newness” and fundamental value, in creative work, he got close to what seems to matter quite a bit in the world of visual art right now, to the detriment of quality. Over the past century, the world of visual art has idolized the New, and Brian’s unabashedly ultra-conservative position on the world of film, in particular, is that this has done almost nothing but corrode the intrinsic value of the art form. Godard is something of a villain in Brian’s world. For him, substance is all that matters, and that substance—story and character, essentially—can be as old as the ocean. Newness is beside the point. Yet, the way I look at it, when you see great work, you have a sense that you’re seeing something for the first time, and that feeling of freshness, of seeing something anew—that’s a component of creative experience that’s essential to what art is. It means the work is alive, and you’re alive. Define that word “alive”, or that feeling of “new” for that matter, and you’ve unpacked all these issues and made them clearly understandable, but that’s a tough job. I’m just not sure how great art works, what it ultimately “means”, why it seems to be impossible to mechanize—and what all these questions we explore here actually mean in relation to human behavior and human experience. But I’m pretty sure the best art tries to manifest what it means to be alive and it involves all of these issues we were addressing.
Brian: I don’t read the comics as regularly as I once did, but last Sunday’s Dilbert caught my attention. In it, Dilbert espoused the following theory More
March 21st, 2012 by dave dorsey
Soren Kierkegaard
When I was in my mid-teens, one night, I was seized with the classic existentialist question: why is there something rather than nothing? It was a bit more complex, and the experience I had felt more like a frightening recognition than a question, but that was the heart of it: along with a sense of absolute certainty that there was no possible meaning to anything in life. It was as if I’d stepped out of our back door into the Void. Anyone who has been seized with this kind of questioning knows how overwhelming it can be. Those who haven’t been obsessed this way will probably scratch their heads and point out that the question itself hardly means anything. What possible answer is there? But that’s exactly the problem, when you are consumed by this overwhelming hunger to know “why” you are alive.
I was reminded of this recently when I came across a little meditation on anxiety in The New York Times, in which the writer quoted the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard:
Though he was a genius of the intellectual high wire, Kierkegaard was a philosopher who wrote from experience. And that experience included considerable acquaintance with the chronic, disquieting feeling that something not so good was about to happen. In one journal entry, he wrote, “All existence makes me anxious . . . the whole thing is inexplicable . . . “
I thought: that little sentence I’ve boldfaced pretty much nails it. That’s exactly what I went through. So for several years in my teens all of life seemed meaningless, pointless—but not depressing. I wasn’t depressed at all, not in any clinical sense. Good appetite, decent grades, went to the prom with Cindy Bethel. Got into college. But life seemed like Shakespeare’s tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing. I looked at everything, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, life and death, and I thought: what’s the point? Not because I was frustrated or disappointed. It was as if I’d been knocked completely out of all my ordinary frames of reference and was, in an anguished way, trying to remember what had once seemed so compelling about getting up in the morning. I had no urge to die, or otherwise escape this state of limbo, because I knew there was no escape. The escape would have been just as empty as what I was fleeing. It wasn’t that I was upset about injustice or America’s materialistic values or our involvement in a foreign war or how hard it was to make a left turn into the village Starbucks. (If there’d been a Starbucks back then.) Nothing made sense. Yet this is when I started getting serious about painting.
A year or so earlier, I’d found some small starter oil paints my father had More
March 18th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Four Plums
Four Plums is an oil-on-linen still life I’m going to show in the fall at Oxford Gallery, in a two-person show, the first I’ve had there. It’s the sort of thing I want to keep doing as I build a portfolio of work specifically for that show. I’m under the gun a bit, yet I’m changing the way I work as part of my effort to present the best work I can do. I’ve replaced some economy paint with a more expensive line, and I’ve noticed a real difference in the way the paint handles, but I’m still not sure if it’s the quality of the paint or simply the fact that it’s new. The other tubes were getting old, since I use fairly thin layers of oil and a tube can last me years–if it’s a color I don’t favor. If it’s several years old, it thickens and gets harder to use without some dicey thinning. Yet buying the new paint, using better materials, was only part of a larger commitment I’m making to this show in the fall. I’m also resigning myself to taking whatever more time than I might have devoted in the past to finishing a painting properly. What I’m finding is that when I surrender to the natural pace of a given painting, as a way of committing to the best possible outcome, the act of painting will flow the way it should, and I’ll feel more secure about the results as I paint—because I don’t move forward until I’m satisfied with the work I’m doing at the time. I might go back to that area again and again, but if I’m as careful and accurate with it as I can be, from the start, it sets me up for more effective finishing touches later on. I’m not saying I was doing rushed work in the past, but sometimes I would ignore frustration and plow ahead, forcing things, instead of listening to my reactions. I guess all I’m saying is that I’m working in a way that feels more natural to me, rather than trying to paint with a method some other painters I know are using.
There’s some deep connection between the tactile feel of applying paint, in a way where each brush stroke brings a little ping of satisfaction, partly because it’s so carefully considered, that conveys some hard-to-quantify freshness and life in the finished work. It doesn’t make much logical sense that the feel of the activity results in a more convincing look, but that’s what I keep discovering, over the years, and then repeatedly ignoring, when I’m under pressure or impatient to be done. I am putting myself under a self-imposed deadline here, which motivates me to work faster, because I’m hoping to contribute a couple dozen paintings to the show, which means, ideally, I’d like to create maybe eighteen new paintings. I’ve already finished a few, but I still have more than a dozen to paint between now and September. I can do the math and I know how much time I have for each one. Yet it seems that I need to forget the deadlines and try to do only what a good, careful pace requires, which threatens to slow me way down. Here’s the paradox, in the image I’m working on now, of a ceramic bowl, when I slow down and forget about how much of the image I want to finish on a given day—and just focus on getting every stroke done properly, every color applied after long consideration—I begin to see how what I’m doing in one area can be duplicated in another, I spot parallels between a color or value in one part of the object and other parts, and I find myself getting more done than I expected. By ignoring the clock, I discover efficiencies that actually save time. By slowing down, I speed the process. Not always, but I seem to remember a line from the band Genesis back in the 70s: you gotta get in to get out. Something like that seems to be operating in this surrender to the required pace of the work.
March 16th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Molly Crabapple with Great American Bubble Machine
Bob Cenedella would love this. Illustrator and fine artist Molly Crabapple is using Kickstarter to fund her political paintings. It’s a way of doing an end run around the galleries, the collectors, the whole apparatus of how the art world rolls forward. It’s a great idea, partly because she spins off from each project a line of small novelty items and even gives her lesser contributors artifacts of the process itself: old brushes, a used palette, preparatory sketches, or little tchotchkes adorned with little drawings. Or, if you can’t give much, you simply get access to what she’s up to at particular times. It’s a bit Warholian, a way of turning the process of making a painting into a business with investors, and yet it doesn’t reek of cynicism or greed. She wants to get the work done without being beholden to anyone or anything other than the idea that drives the work. Still not clear on who actually gets the one big painting that spawns all the other items, if anyone, but for her latest project she’s raised more than $50,000. Take that, Chelsea. This isn’t for everybody, or even most of us–does she have a staff of elves to make all this “merchandise” for investors? And it does seem to veer queasily close to the capitalist business model the movie industry uses to generate merchandise from a summer film. Yet it’s an interesting way to make a living doing good-hearted work. I like her attitude too. She’s serious but she keeps it unpretentious:
Is Shell Game dirty commie pinko propaganda?
Maybe a little. But you’ll find the same scampering fat cats, tentacles, and surreal details that are always in my work. So my fans who could care less about world affairs should still like it.
March 14th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Eric Fischl, Christie Sitting in Neil's Truck
The Eric Fishl show at Mary Boone is both repellent and wonderful, though not at the same time, and not in the same measure. You walk in to see a large interior with a man in a business suit bearing up a naked woman, reclined on his lap—as if he’s offering her to the viewer on a platter. It’s a masterful image, wonderfully painted, but it’s also routinely startling, in Fischl’s de rigeur way, with creepy and intriguing sexuality. I lingered there on the way out, I’ll admit it. As Ken Johnson put it in The New York Times:
A painting in the foyer of Ms. Boone’s Chelsea location is woefully emblematic. Based, like all his portraits, on a photograph and painted in Mr. Fischl’s signature, lushly sensuous style, it pictures the model, actress and artist Anh Duong lying naked across the lap of the elegantly dressed Simon de Pury, the auctioneer and co-star of Bravo’s reality television series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” A blasphemous Pietà, it flaunts a sophisticated but pointless decadence.
The painting is visually powerful, but is this sort of thing really shocking anymore? If he’s trying to remind us of Manet, he does, but he doesn’t fare well in the comparison here. This is Fishl’s familiar trope, sophisticated decadence, and it makes you wonder why he puts so much effort into such elitist imagery: until you see all the red dots at the front desk. Much of the show has a similar creepiness, but from a different direction: it’s as if he wants to show how blissfully oblivious the “one percent” still is, partying on the beach, clothed or otherwise–but these are his friends right, so are they supposed to see how superfluous they look in these pictures? Or else he’s showing how beautiful and cool our media celebrities still appear, in their private lives, even when they sit in an unforgiving shaft of sunlight. I mean, is he just trying to make us all feel even more miserable for having to struggle to make enough money to pay our bills?
Yet, if you hunt in the back room of the gallery, you’ll be rewarded at least once. I didn’t start writing this post to grumble, but to lavishly praise one painting I saw hidden back there: Christy Sitting in Neil’s Truck. It happens to be the first image you see at the Mary Boone page promoting the exhibition, so I may not be the only one who thinks its far superior to the rest of the work.
I loved it primarily for its loose brushwork, nothing overworked, nothing belabored, just a liquid pool of color that seems to eddy and flow into focus, without distorting the image much, showing you an ordinary-looking woman in a truck, gazing into the sunlight toward the camera. She’s probably another of Fischl’s important friends, but this scene doesn’t seem to expect or require you to know it. It captures the feel of the snapshot that served as its source, without slavishly reproducing the image, so the painting is full of life, and because of the way the vehicle creates blocks of color, the image’s abstract qualities strengthen its power. I stood there gazing at this painting wondering why Fischl doesn’t venture outside his economic strata more often and put his amazing skills to use capturing more scenes like this, letting his clear love of color evoke the kind of ordinary, mundane, but beautiful moments all of us experience: light filtering through trees, sunlight on a friendly face, the plaid pattern in a woman’s ordinary wool sweater, and the shimmer of a newly washed red truck. It doesn’t seem to depict someone laden with assets or fame. Been there, seen that, nothing extraordinary going on—and that’s what’s so wonderful about looking at such a moment, with fresh and attentive eyes, through the medium of paint.
March 13th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Zimoun: Volume
After most of my posts, my friend Walt, an amateur photographer who has a great eye, usually checks in to point out typos and grammatical offenses, and generally gives me some idea what he thinks of the post. Walt’s a college grad, an excellent writer and has a consistently funny take on most of the world. In other words, he’s a very sharp dude who appreciates art. After my latest post on the show at Zwirner, he pointed out some awkward sentence constructions and that was it. I could tell he wasn’t too charmed by the work nor persuaded by my writing about it. I didn’t pursue it, but in an email exchange today he brought it up again. The conversation circled around the issue of how broad the definition of art has gotten and how it so often creates work that communicates, if at all, with only a small group of people. It was in some ways an extension of a conversation I had while staying with Rush Whitacre and Lauren Purje and Krystal Floyd in Brooklyn, a week ago: after a tour of openings earlier in the evening, Rush and Lauren and I were debating the BS quotient in a lot of contemporary art, and Rush was defending the right of artists to do nearly anything to create a memorable experience, which was interesting because his BS alarm goes off quite often while walking through Chelsea, in my experience. Walt’s opinions came from the other end of the spectrum.
Walt: Finished watching Herb & Dorothy. Has a charm to it, as a portrait of this couple and I liked the look at the NYC art world. But as far as art goes, I have to admit I don’t get it. What they saw and what you write about is a mystery to me.
DD: Really? Everything I write about?
Walt: No, what I mean is when I have a sense of the art then your take on it is enlightening and makes sense More
March 9th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Jesus, in razor wire
There’s another week left to see Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, an installation involving various media—sculpture, drawing, video, and, well, taxidermy—at David Zwirner. It’s the latest from Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian artist, whose past work has aroused the wrath of animal activists. This show might irk them as well, though it’s not clear that he abused any living creatures in the process of putting it together. The installation is mostly about how we turn our own worst impulses into a trophy of victory, and it revolves around issues of the relationship between violence, power, entertainment, and the natural world. That’s a lot of ground to cover coherently, but coherence isn’t the goal here—instead you get an eerie and strangely serene impression of beauty as you move through the exhibit, which raises questions about how people condone and hide from the reality of violence. Abdessemed has created a series of horrific images, representing the worst aspects of how human beings inhabit their world, and yet has managed to invest them with a beguiling, if occasionally slick, sense of economy and formal perfection. The show is unfeeling, impersonal, cerebral, and yet gorgeous. If that series of adjectives doesn’t make you uneasy, then you aren’t paying attention to the show. How he achieves this kind of visual charm in, for example, an enormous assemblage of actual animal carcasses is a bit of a mystery, and that’s what’s disturbing and riveting. You don’t want to look away when you should be averting your eyes with disgust. Anyone familiar by now with something called the Internet shouldn’t be surprised to feel those opposing impulses at once.
As you walk in, you see a boat, found abandoned in the Florida Keys, that previously held refugee immigrants. He has filled it with stuffed garbage bags. (I hear an ironic take on: Bring me . . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.) Next, there’s a resin sculpture that depicts a head-butting incident at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, which seems to coalesce nearly all of the concerns of the More
March 9th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Armory Show, 2012
Some fun, big-picture reflections on the current Armory Show can be found today from the New York Times, starting with the idea that art is an intelligent virus that propogates itself through the work of artists, without any clear indication of why. That sounds just about right. And a nice passage on how the resurgence of painting hasn’t slowed down:
There is a ton of painting here, and it is all over the place in stylistic terms, from the postcard size, photorealist pictures of nondescript suburban homes, stores and roadside signs by Mike Bayne at Mulherin to the big, colorful, Pop-Expressionist canvases of Bjarne Melgaarde at Greene Naftali. Painting is far from dead; it just does not feel the need to progress linearly, and that is a good thing.
March 6th, 2012 by dave dorsey
Maira Kalman
From a blog by Lori Pickert, a question for Maira Kalman from her eight-year-old son:
(Jack’s Question:) What do you weigh? Just kidding! What is your secret for drawing?
My secret for drawing is not a secret. It is sitting down and drawing. I do the best I can which means I try not to do it right but just to do it as I feel and as I see.
Getting it right is not a good goal.
The biggest secret is perseverance. Just not stopping no matter what.
Though I do stop to run and play tennis so I won’t weigh too much.
But that is a whole other story.
I do everything I do because I love to do it, even when I worry or am confused or slightly in despair. Those feelings usually pass. And then the next day is there.
Always a good thing. The next day.
March 3rd, 2012 by dave dorsey
Blinded by the Light
If you want to see yet another way obsession gives birth to beauty, check out the work of Mary Wells at Viridian Artists, a show that runs through March 10. After a visit to Rome, where she discovered mosaico minuto, the art of glass mosaic—images constructed of tiny colored glass filaments—she came back home to Portland, Oregon and invented a way to do it with tiny fragments of paper. The resulting work is as intricate and luminous as a magnified photograph of the scales in a butterfly’s wing. What’s most amazing is how, working from her own photography, she’s able to evoke the light of different seasons. The work depicts scenes from two locations in Italy—the Villa Vignamaggio, ostensible Tuscan birthplace of Mona Lisa, and the cortile of the Ducal Palace in Mantua.
Working from her photographs of the Villa Vignamaggio during each of the seasons, offering a visual representation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Her pace allows her to complete no more than a square inch per hour, so the four panoramas, begun in 2008, were completed earlier this year. Each one contains 70,000 paper tiles. The smaller mosaics in the show offer smaller views of the same villa: gardens, flora, vistas and architecture. An additional triptych combines mosaic and painting, with a scene, rendered in cut paper, framed by a painted image of a window flanked by pillars. To complete the work in this show Wells relied on three residencies over the past two years at La Machina di San Cresci in Greve in Chianti, Italy.
I sat down with Wells at Viridian today for a conversation on her work:
DD: How did you learn this technique of assembling cut paper? More
