March 15 to September 1, 2014
The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries, Third Floor
11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City

With the exception of a series of monotypes of the numbers 0-9 done during the same time frame as the rest of the work on view here, and superfluous in this context except for the fact that they remind viewers of the stuff in the history books, all of the ink and pencil drawings, watercolor and oil paintings, and aquatints in this exhibition were inspired by a photograph of a famous painter, Lucian Freud, commissioned by an even more famous painter, Francis Bacon. Along with this, it is also important to know that Johns used a custom made rubber stamp that reads “Regrets, Jasper Johns” in many of these works. This stamp was allegedly used by the artist on occasion to decline unwanted invitations rather than replying to them in more time consuming ways, even though it is hard to imagine that he took the time to ink up a rubber stamp and place it firmly against an unwanted invite rather than simply ignore it.

One has to wonder how the recalcitrant octogenarian, who has rejected critical analysis of his art throughout his career (The Critic Sees, 1964, and many statements made by the artist through the years attest to this), would feel about the curator’s pre-packaged analysis of his works.

The other thing that stands out about this exhibition is that a portion of it consists of copper plates and the earlier states of the final aquatints on display. This tells us that the curators believe that the art going public, the hundreds of thousands of people who will traffic this exhibition before it closes, will want to know all about Johns’ working practice and to see unfinished works of art, as if they provide some insight into the final product, which is a dubious claim. Beyond the wonder and joy we experience while beholden to the targets and flag in the museum’s permanent collection and on display consistently for decades, which is something that is true for an extremely small group of works of art, all of us should want to know how Johns gets there, how he climbs that mountain, regardless of how good the outcome is. Which is another way of saying that all that Johns touches is gold, not only with regards to the market value of his work, but also with regards to the quality of it. The fatal flaw of this exhibition is the notion that Johns can do no wrong, based solely on decades old work that has been neatly and tightly fitted into the mainstream art historical narrative.

Visually speaking, the works on view here that are the loosest and most interesting to look at are the ink on plastic paintings, because the medium used, the pooling of the ink, the controlled drips, the subtle and deftly created gradations separating one section of the fragmented compositions from another, hold our interest thanks to their variety, fragility and luminosity. Art historically speaking, along with Rauschenberg, Johns is known as Abstract Expressionism’s assassin, the cool-headed conceptualist who changed the way artists approach subject matter and their emotional involvement in the art making process. But looking at what still matters to Johns at this point in his life, what stands out are the affinities he has with classic Modernism rather than the differences. If anything holds these recent works, executed in 2012-13, together, it is the artist’s love of subtlety, nuanced handling of materials, creating textures and dense layering and piecing together of disparate gestures and concepts of pictorial space, all of which were part of the Modernist approach to painting. The four specific ink on plastic paintings I am referring to, each measuring 27-1/2 inches by 36 inches, celebrate the fact that the interplay of control and accident could only be the result of many years of doing. Like other works in the show, the figure/ground relationship clearly defined in the photograph that allegedly inspired a host of other works, all but disappears and is replaced by a complicated framework where everything becomes disparate parts, one no more subject matter than the other, and all held together by a unifying technique. In other words, it is the doing that takes precedent rather than the showing. Also, Johns makes abstract imagery in these ink drawings that becomes something new and never seen before, a photograph of a figure in an interior becomes a dense landscape where allegiance to verisimilitude is replaced by the will of the artist, in that intuitive patterning and balancing of compositional elements such as line and tone trump the original inspiration.

The largest work in this exhibition, an oil painting, measuring 67 inches by 96 inches, is particularly static, with a crisply divided foreground and background, one dark, one lighter, with no interplay between the two except a simplistic shifting of what comes before what. It is big, it’s an oil painting, and it’s painted by Jasper johns, but lets be honest—it’s mediocre.

Johns uses doubling, mirroring or reversing, as the wall text notes, and elevates negative empty spaces to a central visual theme by recontextualizing the missing or torn away portion of the original photograph that inspired him, making it the central shape or form in many of these images. The missing piece of the photograph is copied or doubled: the floor in the photograph and the missing portion of photograph become a weird foreground plane. Unfortunately these reversals, doublings, etc., do not necessarily lead to successful compositions. It is handy material for curators and critics to bandy about, but what do they mean if they don’t lead to successful works of art?

A skull, meanwhile, appears in several of the oil paintings and aquatints, resting atop this doubled form, which becomes a tombstone shape. Of course this convenient memento mori fits in nicely with an exhibit of any artist’s late period work. Johns must be thinking of you know what, right?

Overall, this exhibition seems like an exercise in shoring up an artist’s reputation, a way for the museum to convince us that they are right to memorialize Johns’ earlier works in a very codified timeline. Johns use of photographic imagery is also nothing special in that he doesn’t take advantage of photographic effects or things unique to the medium to enhance the drawing, printing, or painting process. Yes, the particular photograph he uses easily provides fodder for writers, including the authors of wall text and reviews, because its provenance is steeped in art history, but otherwise it is thin visual gruel, not interesting in and of itself and hardly worth multiple visitations as a source of inspiration. Johns successfully undermines any narrative or emotional aspects of the photograph, but the inert and monotonous compositions we are left with are nothing much to look at, regardless of the bigger than life icon, forever memorialized in the art history books, they were made by.

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Jane Fine’s Battlefield IV, (2004) is one of several striking works currently on view in MELT, at Skidmore’s Tang Art Museum, in Saratoga Springs, New York (Bernard Cohen, Salvador Dali, Mary Frank, Rico Lebrun, Charles Long, Alexander Ross, Dieter Roth, Frances Simches, Davor Vrankic, and Kevin Wolff are the other artists on view, some represented by prints in the museum’s permanent collection.)  This group exhibition, organized by Tang Associate Curator Rachel Seligman, is based on a somewhat dubious thematic premise, however, as it gathers works loosely characterized by ambiguity rather than the transformation from solid to liquid suggested by its title.

Fine’s painting, for instance, is made up of swathes of flatly applied acrylic paint, grays, pink, and various greens and blues that interlock and form an abstract landscape that avoids associations with the natural world, while maintaining a certain organic asymmetry. This backdrop to the imaginative ink drawn forms is equally reminiscent of a map such that the difference between a specific terrain and a symbolic representation of one is often blurred. The drawing motifs covering the painted segments, in blue, black, and red inks, include abstract phallic shapes, cartoon like renderings of bullets or missiles being fired, barbed wire that resembles orthodontic braces, bricks, a prominent target shape, and globular forms. All of these symbols interact in a mysterious way. We have no idea what is going on between these alien shapes or where they are located, but they suggest violence and willfulness, albeit with a dash of humor.

The exhibition remains on view through September 18, 2011 at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway?Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

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Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users often modify. The text is usually chatty and has an insider feel to it. Long time users appear to have developed genuine friendships. However, as long as you can keep up and communicate something using the visual grammar and syntax that lies behind the at times seemingly random flow of images you can join the fun. It’s easy to save any of the still images or animated gifs that appear in any given thread, allowing users to easily modify them. Users can also click on an image and drag its URL into the submission box, making it that much easier to build on some theme or joke or commentary, to use juxtaposition and modification to make something new.

Dump.fm is a unified field in the sense that there are a number of things going on at once and they all tend to flow by seamlessly. The description I have given above might give some flavor of the site, but to try and define exactly what the dynamic on dump.fm is by looking at one facet of it would be like examining one neuronal firing to discover the origin of consciousness. Users post images found on the Internet and re-contextualize them, celebrating in a devil may care fashion what Duncan Alexander calls “remix culture”, where authorship becomes meaningless, and composition takes precedence. Images and animated gifs can be used in place of words, and they can represent a complex notion. There is a lot of recycling on dump.fm. Images that have been around for a long time have been radically transformed, lovingly modified, again and again.

The very act of posting on dump.fm calls into question the burdensome concept of the unique object. One and all welcome borrowing/stealing and celebrate the creative impulse in a fairly pure form. Taking someone else’s post and making something of it is the ultimate compliment. Long time users could probably point out the origins of some image that has been turned into an evolving meme through time, but new users will have no idea where or when or even how the animated gifs and collaged and tweaked digital images were made. But the creators of dump.fm are not trying to baffle or mystify the public and the fact that there is a pull down menu on the top of the homepage that allows users to go to the online programs that enable a person to create many of the effects that are on display in every thread on dump.fm, emphasizes the egalitarian ethos of dump.fm.

There is an unabashed celebration of popular culture and an awareness of current events present as well. In fact, the timeliness of the image play on dump.fm is unmatched in the world of visual arts, as is the love of archiving and sharing images. The image is truly ascendant and isn’t just a vessel for ill-formed postmodern ideology. There is a strange combination of frivolity and complexity present and in terms of authorship, there is a strange combination of anonymity and camaraderie as well as a cult of personality on display in the often modified and tongue in cheek webcam photos users post. These webcam images then get brought into the mix, get trimmed and cropped and pasted into a new context.

Users criticize the dregs of American culture while endearing themselves to it in some way, avoiding the political correctness and self righteousness one sees on display in the art galleries. Unapologetic images of the celebrity flavors of the month get posted, along with knowing winks at current events in the world of politics. Emotional sentiment swings from mockery to adoration very quickly in a thread. Very few subject matters are taboo. The blending of a weird cyber-transcendentalism, expressed through psychedelic and trance-inducing animated gifs, whose looped movements are efficient at capturing the gaze, along with a enthusiastic courtship with  the obscene materialism of our capitalist culture, celebrated with coded, blinged-out reveries, often leads to frank personal discussions filled with drug references, complaints about financial woes and crumby jobs, and straightforward yearning for basic necessities, and more importantly, sex. Users are surprisingly welcoming to outsiders or newbies who don’t know the language of dump.fm, and you are not allowed to block anyone.

There is something refreshingly and unpretentiously utopian about dump.fm. No one is selling the content they post, and in one important sense everyone is treated like an artist. If you come up with the goods it gets acknowledged. And although a lot of the visual and text-based discourse on dump.fm is humorous and frivolous — when was the last time a work of visual art actually made you laugh out loud? — some of the images and animations posted are genuinely disturbing and thought provoking, with an unforced element of social critique

Each posting has the potential to be a number of different things. It could be part of a conversation, someone posting an image or animated gif that they worked on and wanted to share with the community, and something the user had in their voluminous archive of images that they built up through time and wanted to share with people who would critique or appreciate it, and more importantly use it to make something new, based on its composition and value as an image. Finally, an image or animation could be the beginning or part of an exploration of a visual theme. Thematic threads can be on any topic.

Mentally combing and sifting through the billions of images available online can generate a sense of discovery. Every user loves to experience stumbling upon something that they know will generate activity in the community or even better become part of the vocabulary. Appropriating the right image, one that has a strong visual appeal and is funny or disturbing, takes a certain skill set.

Some of the animated gifs posted on dump.fm are comparable to the many religious rituals that incorporate repetitious movements to induce trance states. Loops are stuck in time, take viewers out of linear time. Animated gifs consist of fragments of Youtube videos, usually of Hollywood movies or music videos or archival TV footage, or they are original designs, usually of a geometric nature, but not always. Watching one, you slowly become aware of the start and end points of the loop. In the animated gifs made from appropriated images, there is usually some sort of epiphany, a certain action or facial expression that gets repeated, that is pulled out of context, and becomes a symbol or the epitome of a mood, feeling, or state of mind. The animated gif is the perfect combination of movement and form. It lies outside any narrative structure and is not static. It is related to the avant-garde short films of Peter Kubelka in its use of repetition. The strategies art critics use again and again to enlighten readers about an exhibition of paintings don’t apply when it comes to animated gifs. They exist in time. They contain specific movements/transitions/transformations, of forms, lines, and colors. So change is inherent to the meaning.

The Internet has had a profound impact on human consciousness. The qualities unique to the Internet, a girth of free digital content and software and the ability to hyperlink and work with all types of media simultaneously using only one machine, provide many rich tools for talented and intelligent artists to use. Until the value of works of art is freed from their status as coveted, unique objects whose value is further determined and inflated by a highly specialized discourse, the extraordinary and innovatory art being made with and for computers, will remain outside existing market structures.

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YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video, the Guggenheim Museum’s laughably belated celebration of YouTube wound down on October 21, when a panel of cultural celebrities from the worlds of film, music, and visual/performing arts, including Douglas Gordon, Laurie Anderson, and Darren Aronofsky, chose the cream of the crop, or 20 videos, from a shortlist of 125 videos culled from 23,000 global submissions. The quality of the videos on the shortlist varies, but not greatly. The range goes from boring/unoriginal/pretentious/predictable, to amusing/cute/watchable but instantly forgettable.

One gets the feeling that the Biennial of Creative Video was really just an excuse for the Guggenheim to show off video projection technology that made it possible to project separate video feeds on each ringed layer of the exterior of the museum. In fact, if one visits the site, it is made clear that the projection technology is the real star of the show. Added on top of this, the dire-sounding band OK Go, who marketed themselves quite successfully through their use of YouTube years ago, performed on acoustic guitars while perched on tall orange ladders in the center of the floor of the museum during the culminating event on October 21. One supposes that performing on the floor wouldn’t have been artistic enough, and would not have allowed the person who was filming the event to place the museum’s projection technology, which was constantly flashing on every surface of the architecture above everyone’s heads in nearly every frame, in the spotlight. Forget about trying to figure out what video was playing and what was happening in each video. Just enjoy the projection technology!

It’s truly difficult to pick a favorite among the entries because one is overwhelmed by the ultra-thin artistic veneer covering all of them. If you made a checklist of artistic pretensions you would fill it up quickly. Black and white and grainy footage of African Americans living in the projects with rap music playing in the background, check. Surreal anime-inspired animation that verges on pedophilia and focuses on the female character’s vagina, check. Plenty of high art references that remind the viewer more of ancient MTV programming, when they actually showed music videos 24 hours a day, more than anything else, check. A bland form of feminism and social critique that includes many close ups of the actor’s deadpan face, check. 8-bit animation-inspired scribbles and barely legible narratives, check. Music videos starring actor or rock-rap star wannabe artists, check. Unfortunately, the clichés just go on and on.

The entry, “999 Days: Russell Higgs URBAN BARBARIAN” consists of 999 still images of the artist wearing silly headgear and covering parts of his face with – or sticking in his mouth – various common objects. The artist’s description of his work is snicker-inducing. According to him it is about “Being and Time” and “how we look and how we are looked at”. Well dude, this video consists of you wearing a bunch of stupid shit on your face and head. Not unlike every other entry in this strange contest, this video is tasteful, carefully put together, seamlessly constructed. It has art-appropriate editing and composition, all backed by a moody Brian Eno-esque artsy-fartsy soundtrack. These formal qualities are diametrically opposed to the true YouTube aesthetic. And to top it all off, the entries are rampant with professionalism: many of them have been winners of, or shortlisted for prestigious film and video awards. All of which completely undermines what the greatness of YouTube is all about.

YouTube videos have aesthetic value primarily because they exist outside any institutions and they are 100% unprofessional, if they are not archival footage. The artistry and profundity consists entirely of happy accidents, the oddities and quirks of amateur composition. Watching YouTube videos on your home or work computer and coming upon accidents and surprise juxtapositions, and jukebox-like videos that feature one still image and a song playing in the background, can truly be an exciting and surprise-filled experience. One can wade through videos or old television commercials or shows and satisfy nostalgic impulses, or come upon live footage of bands that do not exist in any other context. There is bizarre material aplenty and it is indeed quite difficult not to find something that relates to your interests in some way. Homogenizing the experience and presenting it as High Art in the museum context not only falsifies what the millions of computer users who visit and enjoy YouTube everyday get out of it, it also presents social and cultural history in a completely false and ahistorical manner.

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The beta version of the new subdirectory of the PBS.org website, announced with the fanfare of a media release, is not, alas, particularly user friendly. When the homepage loads we see the title “Ruin & Revival”, and collection of video shorts that focus on post-Katrina New Orleans. The clips are supposed to be a part of something called “Craft in America”, and since I wasn’t sure what that was I clicked on the phrase. I was taken to an “unable to locate” screen. Among these clips was a fragment of a Tavis Smiley interview with Branford Marsalis in what is billed as a “curated” exhibition. But we are not sure who the curator is or whether the web designers really needed to use the verb “to curate”, so wildly overused of late. Is there a thesis behind this collection of video clips? Obviously they all have to do with post-Katrina New Orleans, but beyond that there really is no rhyme or reason to them except that they all have to do with art in some way. There really is nothing much else to the homepage except for these video clips which are smack dab in the middle. There are some menu items, in small white font on a black background at the top of the page and towards the bottom of the page there is yet another row of the same video clips covering the top of the same page. The rest of the website is an archive of sorts.

The top menu includes the following items: PROGRAMS A-Z, TV SCHEDULES, SUPPORT PBS, SHOP PBS. The lower menu items are all arts related: DANCE, THEATER, VISUAL ART, FILM, MUSIC. I clicked on VISUAL ART to see where it would take me. There were three rows of six hyperlinked images that take the visitor to slide shows of images taken from different episodes of Art in the Twenty First Century (Art:21). Annoyingly, there were no links to the actual full episodes the stills are taken from. Visitors have to back track and search anew to try and discover the link to the full episodes.

I went back to the homepage and gave PROGRAMS A-Z a try. A quick search box and a number of hyperlinked icons for a number of popular PBS shows came up, but only three out of the eight shows had anything to do with the arts. Further down the page there was an alphabetical listing of many different PBS shows. The ones in the list that related to the ARTS were not singled out in any way. This was frustrating to say the least. Since there is no indication whether or not the links take you to text, images, or a video clip I decided to randomly click on one that I thought related to the arts. I clicked on “Thomas Eakins: Scenes from Modern Life” and I was taken to what was essentially an overview and advertisement for the film. So there was no real content there. Then I clicked “Power of Art” and I got the annoying 403 Forbidden screen. I was determined to find substantial content. I clicked on “Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist” and I was taken to another advertisement and overview of a film that was not available for me to watch but I that I could purchase.

Finally I clicked on “Art in the Twenty-First Century” and after clicking through a few pages I was able to access Seasons 1-5 of the show. Clumsy website notwithstanding, it should be stated that this show will teach the general public more about how artists work than anything that has or likely will appear on Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”.

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July 22 to August 15 2010
362½ Warren Street
Hudson, New York 12534
518 828 5907

This exhibition of oil paintings from the last two decades makes the discerning viewer long for a proper retrospective of Brenda Goodman’s oeuvre. The Detroit-born artist uses events, often painful and psychologically scarring, from her personal life, such as the tragic death of her partner’s son, the loss of a beloved pet, childhood ostracization and lifelong health issues, to influence her abstract inventions. Her combination of figuration and abstraction works seamlessly on conceptual and formal levels, and even when she focuses a specific composition on one or the other, the two stylistic approaches are never separate. The abstractness of the work is cohesive and consistent even in her more figural works and you will find surrogates for the human figure in all of the wholly abstract paintings in this exhibition. When Goodman is making paintings that have easily discernible forms in them, such as the artist sitting or standing naked in her studio studying and absorbed in the act of looking at her own paintings, as in her Self Portrait series, or the figures and weirdly illuminated environments found in her Singing series, we always feel as if the artist’s subjectivity is present in her layered and dense colors, carefully and subtly worked surfaces, and the distortions of space, perspective and form she utilizes.

Goodman creates imagery that is archetypal in the classic Jungian sense, without any literary pretensions or irony. Although her paintings are filled with specific references they are in no way obscure, uncommunicative or a form of therapy. The core experiences of all of our lives are still worth making art about, without resorting to ahistorical pastiche. Goodman’s art proves that if we excavate our emotional experiences by making a serious attempt to master tools and materials of one form or another through time, art works will emerge that will resonate with meaning for a wide swathe of viewers.

Goodman’s paintings are testament to the fact that all space, time, and events in paintings are virtual, that they exist in the mind and in imagination. The abstract forms and masses of lines she invents always suggest a figure or a head, and these appear to be resigned to whatever state of being they are in, be it sad or happy, or experiencing some transformation or tumultuous emotional upheaval. In her Troubled Waters series, for instance, an abstract blobby rock-cloud shape is a surrogate for the artist and other important people in her life, with disturbing stitches in the place of mouth or orifice to denote a face. Goodman’s work is a strong and individual member of a long line of paintings and sculptures that include anthropomorphized abstract shapes. Artists that Goodman has a kinship with include Arshile Gorky, Adolf Gottlieb, and Henry Moore.

Four large, wonderful paintings from 2009-10 included here, Crossing Over, Burial, Loss, and Hard Choice, are abstract environments which could read either as interiors or exteriors. They are maps of painful emotions. In three of them, a large and dark looming shape commands the viewer’s attention, but the small figures, whether cat and human, which are positioned atop, beneath, or within them, are the driving forces of the images. The figures in these battered but not hopeless landscapes must contend with events and forces beyond their control. The subjectivity of the artist is mediated and not necessarily in charge. Accident and a lack of preliminary sketches on the part of the artist allow the process of painting itself to reveal things. But the triumph of expression is always clear in the sense that the humanoid forms have a dignity to them. There is no narrative element in these paintings, but the artist confronts herself again and again, and through the details of her life she reveals the struggles of human consciousness.

The light-filled and layered surfaces of her paintings make apparent how deeply the craft foundations of painting matter to Goodman. She loves to use a variety of traditional and non-traditional tools to achieve the perpetually revealing painterly terrains in which to immerse our eyes. She uses ice picks, Q-tips, metal spatulas, brushes and palette knives, and cake decorating tubes, as well as admixtures of wood ash of varying coarseness and oil paint to make the final images mysterious. The interplay of translucent washes and opaque smears leaves the viewer wondering how the paintings were made.

Goodman manages to create profound and moving worlds that touch on the core themes of death, loss, pain and longing, joy and celebration, self exploration and self discovery. Her depictions of ritualistic events, as found in paintings like Troubled Waters 4, 2009, often include processions of invented beings. Without being pretentiously philosophical or heavy-handedly literary, and avoiding clichés through sheer inventiveness, Goodman’s compositions tap into a collective consciousness that all of us can relate to. And it isn’t only the abstract forms in her paintings that appear animated or alive; each brushstroke and scrape and drip is infused with an animistic energy.

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On the occasion of his show of small paintings at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, N.Y. [in 2010] I took the opportunity to pay Roberto Juarez a studio visit in nearby Canaan.  This found him at work on a design for a domed wind tunnel for the University of Michigan School of Engineering. Juarez, who has been exhibiting in New York City since the early eighties, was represented by the Robert Miller Gallery for over twenty years, parting with them once Robert Miller himself had left the gallery, and then had two solo exhibitions at the Charles Cowles Gallery, only for Mr. Cowles to retire and shut up shop. He has been active with public commissions, meanwhile, since 1990. Public commissions, for Juarez, “are a way to continue to develop ideas that differ from my studio work such as nature based imagery that I used in the eighties”. They also “keep him going” when gains made through gallery representation are thin.

Michigan owns works by Juarez, which led to the commission. The artist plans on using the actual surface of the dome to create his design, which will include alternating bands of special high gloss and non-gloss paints and his trademark bisected circle forms.  The circles, he points out, actually relate to the symbology used by engineers when measuring wind currents. Juarez exudes excitement about the project.

His show at Davis of small oils on cardboard and canvas was a welcomed opportunity to exhibit more intimately scaled works. New York City galleries typically want big work for exhibitions, making this the first opportunity to show small works, which he has made since childhood. “I think that’s why I’m an artist, because I really love painting. It something I experienced very young as a child. At the Art Institute of Chicago I remember going and seeing a Van Gogh exhibition during my very first visit to the museum and buying a book of the Sunflower paintings. Taking that home was just unbelievable. I remember thinking that this was what I really care about. Not even knowing what that meant, but knowing that everything else that was going on in my life wasn’t as important as that experience I had in front of those paintings.”

Juarez arrived in New York City over three decades ago from Paris, where he completed his thesis for UCLA and decided to not return to L.A. “It was the end of the seventies. My first show there was in 1981. I had been aware of what was going on in New York when studying filmmaking at UCLA as a graduate student. There was a resurgence of painting in the early eighties because of things that were happening in Europe and the response by American artists such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle. It was fun to be in New York in that period when all of a sudden people were looking at, and appreciating, painting, because the kind of painting I was doing was very lively, very expressionistic. It was not neo-expressionist. I think it was actual expressionism. I wasn’t trying to be ironic.”

Juarez began using tree and flower imagery in his work around then. He was trying to engage subject matter that he felt was stereotypical for a Hispanic and homosexual artist, adding lightness and humor to the mix. “There was a cultural aspect involved with using certain subject matter. I thought that because I was Hispanic to do tropical imagery was kind of funny. It was expected in a way even though it had nothing to do with what my culture was at that time, because I grew up in Chicago. It had nothing to do with this lush tropical experience. It was not what I knew about.

Juarez used this organic imagery because of its formal qualities. He wanted to discover a new way to paint abstractly. “People said you must study flowers; spend a lot of time looking at flowers. But I didn’t. I went to books. I was drawn to older books that had faded images of flowers. It was more about the form than the realism of the flower. There was a kind of humor that I enjoyed in going towards something that I thought was cliché–ethnic cliché. And that came from being a student in San Francisco and going to the Galería de la Raza, which was a Mexican/American gallery in the Mission District of San Francisco. There were certain prescribed things that were of the moment. And I remember showing my work, which consisted of drawings and paintings of televisions at the time, and they were like, Well! This isn’t Hispanic Art. I was using culture in a humorous way. I think it was a continuation of trying to understand what my place was in culture and to take the obvious and to use it to say something different, to say something about formal abstract issues that I really cared about. So I was working with the idea of expectations and also having fun with not fulfilling those expectations even though it seemed like I was setting it up as that.”

His interest in trees and flowers, which he explored throughout the eighties and nineties stemmed primarily from the formal qualities of these things, the branching forms. “When I did put in a branch it was as much about the diagonal or the line that the branch made and the connection it made in this kind of visual network, which has now kind of been stripped bare to just the network becoming this geometry of circles and overlapping forms.” His goal was to explore abstraction and form by focusing on these shapes and he was not interested in making representational or descriptive art even when he used recognizable imagery in his work. He was seduced by the beauty of the wildflower illustrations of Homer. D. House, which he used as a catalyst for his own explorations of space and form for a while.

Over the years Juarez’s imagery pared down. Although he does return to tree and flower forms on occasion, he now more typically works with networks of geometric forms: triangles, rectangles, circles. These invented compositions are filled with light and color, but they all suggest weightlessness and movement. All but one of the paintings in his Davis show included bisected circles. “They are intimate in scale. I was interested in showing my thinking process through oil sketches on cardboard instead of completed paintings. The purpose of the circles is to integrate and dissect the multilayered compositions. The color, due to the oil paint, is much more saturated and liquid in appearance, where it used to be dry. The casual format also allows for a new level of invigorated brushwork.”

Juarez noticed that he is once again playing with expectations about gender and sexuality in these small paintings, by using a lot of bright pinks and oranges. They have a sketchy quality to them, with bold brushwork that resists describing specific surfaces. In the bisected circle shapes Juarez traces various tubular forms, playing the crisp edged circles against the scratchy, hatched brushwork found in the back- and middle-ground planes. Many of the bisected circles are transparent allowing this brushwork to show through undermining the viewer’s ability to decide what goes in front of what, maintaining a constant state of motion and state of emergence and reconfiguration.

Juarez’s abstraction defies categorization as it is neither landscape, portrait, nor still-life. He says that his successful paintings, which exude a sense of elemental force, are “filled with wind”. They also suggest microscopic life forms, planets and astronomical imagery. So the wind in these paintings can be either terrestrial breezes or solar winds. Juarez has created spaces that allow him to experiment with shapes, colors, and lines in new ways over and over again. But his abstraction is not abstruse in any way, because it comes so persuasively from the artist’s direct experiences. His abstraction never feels noumenal, but is clearly the product, in each painting, of sensory perceptions.

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February 6th to June 6th 2010
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
815 North Broadway
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-1632

October 8, 2010 to January 2, 2011
The Brooklyn Museum
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 5th Floor
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000

In the late 1960s Alan Watts, the British philosopher and writer who introduced many Westerners to the tenets of Eastern Philosophy, experimented with psychedelic drugs. He noted the four main characteristics of his experiences ingesting cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), and one of them stood out when I was looking at Fred Tomaselli’s work. What Watts calls an “awareness of relativity” is present throughout the paintings/collages in this exhibition. Tomaselli does not deal with individual entities in his work. He deals with the chain of being. Single figures are constructed out of a multiplicity of body parts, and repetitions of various types of organic life and manufactured chemical substances cohere into imaginary shapes and lines of energy. Microscopic and celestial forms commingle and the outside and inside of the human body is depicted simultaneously. For Tomaselli there are no boundaries between interiority and exteriority.

The inclusion of real objects such as hemp leaves, a large variety of pills and capsules, magic mushrooms, saccharine tablets, and carefully trimmed photographic material, injects an element of the real into these two dimensional images, and for those viewers who have used any of the illicit drugs Tomaselli includes in his work, the drug taking experience, which includes the transformation or deformation of the senses, is recalled in an intense way. Like all great art should do, drugs like cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin, can make us see things differently in a permanent sense. In Tomaselli’s painting Expulsion (2000), which includes direct references to Masaccio’s fresco, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Tomaselli imagines the godhead as a magic mushroom cap. In the painting psilocybin is the creator of worlds, or taxonomies. We see a magic mushroom/sun/god shape with linear beams shooting out of it in all directions. The energy or light beams consist of a wild assortment of human body parts, pills, flora and fauna, insects, leaves, and birds. Tomaselli, like in much of his work, seamlessly blends human anatomy and nature as well as the products of industrial processes. Small individual units coalesce into an abstract energy or entity. This transformation of individual units into larger gestalts is a good metaphor for the painting process.

Whether or not Tomaselli still smokes pot or takes ‘shrooms is irrelevant. His paintings are about the transformation of reality through the imagination, and the imagination relies on the orderly and rational process of creating taxonomies and the intuitive process of discovering ideas and forms through the working process. So these paintings are not designs, or planned beforehand. They all include the backdrop of the void or death or entropy, depending on your world view. This is manifested in the ever present black backgrounds. These are reminders that the energy of the universe fluctuates, flickers, is reborn and snuffed out over and over again.

Life as multiplicity, or the blending of all into one, is dramatically portrayed in paintings such asFungi and Flowers (2002) and Field Guides (2003). The human figures in these paintings consist of profuse and varied body parts, insects, and floral forms. Body parts are interchangeable; a heel of a foot is really a clenched hand. There are multiple versions of every body part. So the individual literally contains multitudes. In Tomaselli’s map paintings, such as Desert Bloom (2000), we have a bird’s eye view of an imaginary terrain. Recognizable architectural forms are spread throughout the composition, barns, churches, homes, but the surface of these familiar objects are placed on is fractal like, psychedelically colored, or spider web like. Tomaselli is juxtaposing the familiar with the visionary in a seamless fashion, utilizing the omniscient bird’s eye view. The contrasting perspectival views used in these map paintings, the architectural forms are depicted as if the viewer was seeing them on the ground plane and the abstract landscape they are placed on is flat and portrayed in bird’s eye view, is disorienting. Tomaselli’s work celebrates the creative aspects of being disoriented.

Tomaselli’s linear abstractions are quintessential Maximalist paintings. They combine human and nature, and they are incredibly busy. In paintings such as Echo, Wow, and Flutter (2000), swirling, overlapping lines, consisting of an assortment of eyes and hands and leaves, various pharmaceuticals, flowers, insects, and painted images of bugs and butterflies and shapes that mimic pill and capsule shapes turn in on one another in endless repetitions of elliptical movements. The lines and the shapes they form and contain suggest events that take place beyond the visible spectrum. Like all of Tomaselli’s work they engage the viewer’s eyes and brain in different ways when they are looked at up close and from a distance.

His painting technique is very tight and detailed. It is all in the wrist. There are no large gestures or expressionist brushwork. It relates just as much to the art of pin-striping as it does to the meticulous brushwork found in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The painterly passages that get embedded in between layers of resin are fragmented and spread across the painting surface in an asymmetrical way. Tomaselli intentionally tries to confuse our perceptions of painted and collage forms, and this underscores the notion that perceptions can be deceiving. But instead of just pointing out the subjectivity of our sense perceptions he celebrates the generative powers of looking.

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Elia Alba’s busts consist of photo transfers of people’s faces and upper torsos, clothed and naked, printed on fabric that is wrapped around metal armatures and held together by laced pieces of large and visible thread. The color of the fabric, fleshy with a grey/tan pallor, adds a morbid twist to an age-old genre. Shrouding the armature with photo-tattooed fabric tilts two-dimensional surfaces towards the third dimension, but the busts never sit comfortably in the round. There is constant flickering or vacillation between the two kinds of space. The photographic imagery would be flat if the fabric was not wrapped, creating odd illusions; because it is not revealed all at once, as it would be if the fabric was flattened out, the imagery is animated and feels holographic even though it is not.

Formally speaking, Alba’s work relates more to the busts of Matisse and Picasso than classic Roman busts, in the sense that it is impossible to take in the personas portrayed by the artist in one glance. The confident sense of self captured by classic Roman busts is missing here; instead of achieving a state of vulnerability and individuality, the viewer is tripped up by gimmicky technique. The neatly cut segments of fabric are dented, creased and stretched by the supporting armatures as well as the artist’s hand. No face is entirely visible when the bust is viewed from one position. These surface irregularities distort the images of the faces.

The fabric manages to be simultaneously suggestive of flayed skin and brown grocery bags. In some of the busts the models are wearing tops and in others they are bare-chested. So the fabric is a metaphorical stand-in for flesh and clothing. The use of the same construction technique for each work leads to a sense of monotony that contradicts the artist’s desire to make unique and idiosyncratic portraits. The colors in the photo transfers themselves are washed out, the lips becoming the most colorful parts of the faces, so one wonders what the artist wanted to achieve with this limited use of color. We are able to distinguish the race and gender of the subjects, but there is no subtlety or richness of tone. These busts exist on an uncomfortable middle ground, somewhere between photograph and sculpture, but the repetitive gestalts make them weak sculptures, and the identification the viewer might have with the photographed subjects is undermined by a repetitive technique that leaves little room for surprise, beyond the initial piquing of the viewer’s interest.

In James & Rocio, (2009) an image of a big ear is placed on the back of a male bust that in turn is connected to a female bust. This odd placement disrupts the not necessarily desirous sense of continuity the viewer experiences when viewing all of these busts in one go, and brings to mind the serial killer Ed Gein (inspiration for “Psycho,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Silence of the Lambs”) who performed weird rituals wearing the skin and body parts of people he murdered or dug up at the local cemetery. The surprising appearance of this ear, all the more powerful because it is an exception to Alba’s formula, hints at mysterious undercurrents of the human psyche, transcending the merely informational. It suggests that were the artist to probe a sense of psychological interiority it would force her to be more adventurous with the formal qualities of her work.

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Joseph Nechvatal was ahead of the curve. In 1986 he was using computers and computer robotics to make paintings and from 1991-1993 he experimented with computer viruses. Nechvatal co-founded Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine in 1983, and makes audio art to this very day, using computer viruses to influence the compositional process. Nechvatal firmly believes that new technologies change the way we think and the way our senses connect to the environment. He believes that new technologies–virtual reality and computer networking, among others– expand our cognitive processes, providing us with new opportunities to explore the self.

Nechvatal invented the terms viractual and viractualism, and not surprisingly they mean the coming together of virtual space and corporeal space, the blending of technology and biology. These open-ended concepts provide artists with an ambiguous framework to approach the merging of art and technology. Nechvatal is an optimist and two essays included in this collection, “Computer Cynicism” and “Jean Baudrillard and Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess,” describe how our immersion in virtual reality and cyberspace permanently contaminates reality and creates a “potential for escape”, through excess. Unlike Baudrillard, Nechvatal does not find contemporary art and the mass media to be void of all content and meaning, perpetual rehashings of simulations, and imitative through and through. Nechvatal does not believe that the mass media neutralizes reality without our consent.  He acknowledges the value of the closed system of Baudrillard’s simulations but he does think there is a way out. Borrowing from the writer/artist Georges Bataille, Nechvatal believes that the closed system of our simulation filled culture and media, can be broken free from through excess, or a process of dissolution. How would this come about?

In the essay, “Austin Osman Spare,” Nechvatal explores the potential and relevance of automatism, the practice of drawing in a trance-like state in order to tap repressed or unconscious impulses and desires. Nechvatal compares automatism to “self-initiated work with reflexive feedback loops”, which he considers “the basis of cybernetics”. In “Francis Picabia’s Singulier Idéal” Nechvatal writes about Picabia’s Dada mechanomorphic period, in which the artist made paintings of overlapping and intertwining fragments of machinery and the human body . “Jean Baudrillard and Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess” is an analysis of the Abside (Apse) of the prehistoric Lascaux caves, a heavily overpainted surface filled with various layers of animal imagery, with each layer drawn as concisely as all the rest, so much so that Nechvatal refers to it as a “seductive sfumato”. Nechvatal believes that the heavy, cloud-like layering of imagery “…represents a thrusting off of optic and mental boundaries and thus is a complex mirroring of our own fleeting impressions which constitute the movement of our consciousness.” The palimpsest goes beyond the boundaries and rigid codes of realism or simulations, and generates new symbols and new concepts. By “overloading ideological representation” and creating images that border on complete dissolution, an artist can avoid the dangers of ironic Pop art. Immersive art allows the artist to go beyond an imitative art focused on simulations, one that attempts criticality but ends up wallowing in complicity. In accordance with Nechvatal’s somewhat utopian views of technology, we can enter the new world of the “meta-symbol” by exploring how our consciousness works within the realm of the virtual.

Joseph Nechvatal, Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality 1993-2006. New York Edgewise Press, 2009, 96 pp. $10 (ISBN: 1-893207-24-2)

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