Revenge of the Same, January 12 to February 18, 2013

625 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th Avenues
New York City, (212) 989-0156

Few artists have the opportunity to revise and expand upon a solo exhibition once it has opened to the public. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy this is what happened to Jackie Gendel in two recent, back-to-back solo shows at Jeff Bailey Gallery. Revenge of the Same might be viewed as a risk-taking and optimistic revision of her first show, Comedy of Manners, which was interrupted mid-run by the torrential flooding that hit the western corners of Chelsea. Although, luckily, Gendel’s work remained unscathed by the storm, the interruption offered a chance for Gendel to channel the reconstructive energies of the post-Sandy clean-up into a new series of paintings. At Gendel’s initiative, the second exhibition also included work installed in a new subterranean viewing room opened as a result of the renovations.

Witty, fixated reworking is integral to Gendel’s painting practice: in her second exhibition, for instance, she responded explicitly to the storm by stenciling waves over the lower halves of several paintings. Her paintings depict parades of human figures in a loose, gestural style that recalls the generalized outlines deployed as the initial layer in traditional fat-over-lean oil painting. Gendel subverts simple notions of “unfinished” and “finished” because what is usually the soon-to-be-painted-over underpainting is in her work the final layer.

The predominance of the drawn line conveys a sense of perpetual movement and alludes to an ever-relocating final destination. In this sense, Gendel’s work becomes more about the viewer’s memory associations with certain archetypal scenes from art history and is further complicated by the repetition of a single composition over the course of several paintings. For example, Archers I (2013) alludes to Wassily Kandinsky’s Picture with an Archer (1909), which in turn refers to Russian folk icons. In addition, while both Comedy of Manners (2012) and Twilight of the Idyll (2012) evoke the composition of Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the ripples of art history continue to widen. Manet based his painting on a composition by Raphael that was known to him through an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, but he changed the gender of the outward looking figure from male to female. Gendel’s paintings share Manet’s artistic liberty with the original image by presenting all the luncheon figures as female, or at least rendered with feminine characteristics.

Of course, one does not necessarily have to be well versed in art history to revel in Gendel’s visual world. Her paintings can also be readily appreciated for their abstract motifs and exuberant palette. In Comedy of Manners, three upright sitting women emerge from enmeshed outlines; a fourth, horizontally placed figure intervenes and appears unaware of the other three. In Twilight of the Idyll, the underlying pastel splatters and brushmarks describe a crepuscular scene atop which four female nudes are arranged. Gendel paints them loosely, incompletely and unselfconsciously.

The mixing and remixing of art historical styles and allusions is a productive model for Gendel. The painted overlay of her surfaces call to mind multiple application windows open on a computer desktop. Colleen Asper aptly characterizes Gendel’s preoccupation with visual simultaneity in her catalog essay by quoting a colleague who paraphrases a line from The Confessions of Saint Augustine in which he wishes that “all the words in a sentence could occur at the same time, and that’s, no doubt, how God thinks.” This statement is a fitting compliment to Gendel’s own meta-references to art history, and vague inclination towards a painterly sublime.

The motif of the figure in Gendel’s context-shifting work has drawn comparisons to such venerable (old and modern) masters as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, and Leonardo da Vinci. Her closest ally amongst this roster is perhaps Bonnard, who shares a willingness to allow painting to dictate continual revisions from careful observation. They both essentially consider and reconsider with paint, allowing the surface to accrue its own history of mark making. Not everyone is fan of this meandering, sensitive process, however: Bonnard’s work so irritated Picasso that the latter exclaimed, “That’s not painting, what he does… [It is] a potpourri of indecision.” This was, perhaps a fair assessment from an artist who personally defined painting as “a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.” Jackie Gendel, like Bonnard, opts for a loose approach to nature, one that values contemplation and revision. She also has her own ideas about power and gender, for that matter, and is especially responsive to the looping dialogue that connects the act of painting with each successive wave of art history.

The post Before and After the Flood: Two Shows of Jackie Gendel at Jeff Bailey Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

A compelling installation by Belgian artist Harold Ancart, of a charcoal dusting over one hundred square feet of sheetrock, at the booth of Bushwick’s Clearing Gallery, helped break up the monotony of the smaller booths. (Ancart also featured in a group show, “Royal Rumble at Waffle House,” organized by Clearing at the Miami studio of the late Robert Miller.)  Dona Nelson’s paintings, displayed on overturned milk crates, were the central feature at Thomas Urban Gallery’s booth. Nearby, at American Contemporary, was David Brooks’ standout piece, Still Life with Stampede and Guano. Made of concrete animal forms painted with wild seabird guano before being varnished, the piece was an Yves Klein-like prank, a commentary on the materials that constitute painting and natural processes.

Dave Miko and Tom Thayer at 11 Rivington blacked out a boxed room and projected psychedelic colors over paintings hung on the walls. Gabriele Hartley’s graphite wallpaper on top of which oil paintings were hung at Foxy Production was another memorable booth. I was later told that paintings had to be ferried out into daylight for collectors to be able to sense their color away from the graphite.

At NADA, as at other fairs, booths that create a singular spatial identity tend to be more memorable. Seeing countless individual works, presented uniformly at eye level, induces a kind of art amnesia. The intensity of seeing in compressed time, a constant looking up close to discern works and far away to navigate through the compartmentalized spaces causes lingering disorientation.  But fairs are worth enduring: the dense gathering of art, forcing us to look inside and outside, all the while expressing, announcing, listening, asserting, opining, connecting, hardly sleeping, and describing what we see, is in some basic sense not unlike the process of making art itself.

The post Still Life with Stampede: Perfect Title for a work at NADA appeared first on artcritical.

September 7 – October 16, 2011
54 Orchard St, between Hester and Grand
New York City, 212 410 6120

Loren Munk’s paintings constitute a borough-based history of art.  They are diagrammatic representations of New York neighborhoods that chart, plot and intermingle the locations of artists and galleries, past and present, giving equal company to those who had enjoyed conspicuous recognition and those who have been largely overlooked. These painting impress upon the viewer how little is known or preserved about the social, personal side of art history. Like historical or canonical accounts, no painting is truly, objectively comprehensive or definitive. Munk’s artistic, social and geographic networks reflect his own personal movements through the city, and his ongoing research into the New York-based contemporary art community and its history.

Applying heavy, brightly colored paint, Munk layers dense clusters of research culled from diverse sources, whether historical texts or his personal interactions in the current scene. Revising and editing on the canvas, he lists artist names and addresses, establishing loose and unexpected associations and a compressed sense of time—for example, oftentimes Munk places a well-known artist next to a lesser-known artist who lived generations apart. He decentralizes a singular institutional or art historical narrative, if one has existed. In What Manhattan Makes, Brooklyn Takes (2004-6), you observe that Dorothy Miller (MoMA’s first curator), Tom Wesselman and Lee Krasner all at one time lived within a three-block span on East 9th Street in Manhattan. Through the compression of conceptual and cartographical space, Thomas Nozkowski’s Hester Street and April Gornik and Eric Fischl’s Greene Street addresses appear adjacently, even though geographically separated by roughly one mile and two neighborhoods.

The more time I have spent with this selection of paintings, the more curious I am about the significance of repeated artists for Munk: Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Pat Passlof and April Gornik/Eric Fischl, to name a few, all caught my eye a few times across a suite of nine paintings. Based on conversations I’ve had with Munk— in his studio and at art openings)— Donald Judd is one artist in particular whose work, writing and life have influenced him. Like Judd who helped shape with his writings what became known as the Minimalist movement, Munk is melding in his paintings his personal aesthetic and art historical perspective , advocating both the present and the past.

Supporting the social and anthropological interests in Munk’s paintings are his unflagging YouTube reports on the art scene, presented under the pseudonym James Kalm.  For nearly a decade, again as Kalm, in his column “Brooklyn Dispatches” at The Brooklyn Rail, he has chronicled the coalescence (and recently self-declared dissolution) of the Williamsburg neighborhood renaissance of artists and galleries. Munk/Kalm’s kaleidoscopic dissection in multiple media call attention to ways in which arts communities are built, function, migrate and fall apart—and how they intertwine with social, political and economic agendas in their endemic communities.

Loren Munk’s paintings do not clinch or declare any final art historical pronouncements, but rather allow these associations, opportunity for modification, adjustment and reconsideration. I can imagine him easily adding more entries on these paintings at any time in the future. These additions would only enrich the paintings further, adding more layers of history and narrative until no more pictorial space remains because a painting by Loren Munk, like the record of history, is in constant state of revision.

The post The Map Man: Loren Munk at Lesley Heller appeared first on artcritical.

February 12 to May 15, 2011
1600 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
202-387-2151

Philip Guston: Roma features a selection of paintings the artist made during his residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1970-71. The residency was presented as a respite from critical reception of the breakthrough 1970 exhibition with its return to figuration.  The imagery is derived from both his American and Italian experiences, burrowing into an obtuse iconographic language of fragmented objects such as detached eyes, hands, shoes, paintbrushes and light bulbs. This exhibition provides a wealth of historical context but tends towards overly literal explanations of specific Italian influences.

We see Guston developing his visual vocabulary and palette, while intermingling bits of his Roman surroundings. He was also distilling lessons in overlapping form and space from his trips to Arezzo to see Piero della Francesca’s otherworldly frescos, which he perceived as structurally organized like comic strips. What is most fascinating about this body of work is how worlds of antiquity and the contemporary meld through Guston’s touch and organization of objects in space. Often, these ambiguous images feel at once like landscapes and still lives.

In Italy, Guston’s palette remained mostly monochromatic, faithful to his penchant for pinkish coral reds. Even gardens with Farnesian umbrella trees – curiously resembling his Klansman hoods in shape – such as Untitled (Wall) (1971) were depicted in this rosé palette. When asked why these colors, back in 1966, the artist had replied that “it took a couple of years to get the feeling of red, and particularly cad red medium, which I happen to love. I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why. I like cad red medium. It has a certain resonance to it.”

Guston often explained contradictory impulses in his work with such stream of consciousness associations. Was he saying that the color was inspired by pastrami, which happened to be a similar hue? Not exactly, but pastrami came to his mind when explaining the color choice. He might or might not have made similar connections between the peach color in a painting such as Ancient Rock, Osatia (1970) and the influence of Italian light.

When Klansman-like hoods show up in the Italian paintings, curator Peter Miller Benson traces these forms, in his catalog essay, directly to Giorgio de Chirico, G.B. Tiepolo, and Gaudenzio Ferrari, artists whom Guston admired and studied while in Italy. Benson’s scouring for Italian influences can go to idiosyncratic extremes: that the open cloak in Piero della Francesca’s Mother of Mercy inspired Guston’s hoods, the wood plank in Untitled (Wood and Wall) 1971 mimics the wood cross in Piero’s The Legend of the True Cross cycle, that Guston’s pared-down palette echoes the tones in Piero’s frescoes.

These are far-flung comparisons that represent a revisionist attempt to enforce a literal set of assumptions in disregard of the artist’s complex, layered intent. They also pose the question: Was Guston more interested in the hood’s form or what it signified? Considering the rich ambiguity of these shapes, which morph across this body of work from hoods into triangular trees into stone fragments of antiquity, Guston was primarily interested in these motifs because they could not effortlessly be decoded. Furthermore, Guston was more concerned with making deeply considered, sensuous paintings.

Benson briefly discusses Guston’s visit to the Scialoja collection in Rome where he was said to have seen Morandi and proceeds to connect a Morandi painting’s pink palette to Guston’s use of the same color, which he had long used prior to Rome. This is a stretch. The exhibition’s wall text is absent of any more detailed discussion of Morandi other than his name listed in the introductory text as visual stimuli Guston saw, perhaps because there is little evidence of Guston discussing his work. David McKee, who represents Guston’s estate, told me in an e-mail exchange, “I hesitate to elaborate on a point which others have always brought up but to which I cannot fully or reliably respond.  In all my conversations with Philip I don’t recall him ever praising or being interested in Morandi… his sole interest in going to Bologna was to EAT.  I can’t help but feel that at some time he must have visited Morandi’s studio, but there is no record.” Although in a more general sense, Guston shared a similar touch and scale to Morandi’s still life-landscape hybrids, there is little evidence that Guston looked beyond the Italian masters, at one time declaring “I am not interested in looking at Modern art.” In Pantheon (1973), after all, in which Guston lists his influences, only de Chirico is outside of a classical cannon.

What is compelling, however, is a 1960 photograph of Guston in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome standing near a colossal pointing marble finger the size of a man. That Untitled (Foot) (1971) resembles a smoothed, pyramidal-shaped Roman marble foot is hard to ignore. It is cases like this, requiring no back-up argument, of the obvious influence of Roman antiquity on Guston’s symbolic vocabulary that make this show an enlightening delight.

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You might have the momentary impression that Daniel Zweller and Ati Maier’s concurrent solo exhibitions, composed mostly of mid-sized works on paper, are quintessential Pierogi shows. It is no secret that many of the gallery’s artists adhere to a brand of obsessive, often intricately restrained, markmaking akin to that “Brooklyn aesthetic” once dubbed by David Cohen as “School of fuss and fiddle.” While Zweller’s show broods over a fanatical, labyrinthine precision, however, Maier’s paintings and drawings (both formats originate on paper but to different scales and densities) express meandering, pulsing meditations on the terrestrial and planetary, virtual and physical. While the paper works take a central axis, they orbit in a constellation of a wall installation and video animations.

Based in processes of chance and discovery, Maier works successive layers of airbrush, ink and wood stain into contracting and expanding spacescapes that accumulate scientific theory, satellite imagery, graphic advertising sensibilities and geological models. Visualizing these often virtually perceived territories, Maier’s imagined spaces recall the internet ether paintings of Benjamin Edwards or the wry architectural palimpsests of Julie Mehretu’s “Gray Area” paintings as recently seen at the Guggenheim.

While retaining an equally terrestrial and otherworldly character, Maier’s most recent work is denser than previous and more varied in its markmaking. The imagery is increasingly abstracted and acquiescent to less identifiable and circuitous patterning. Works such as Disappeared Time and The Great Dipper (both 2010) are interplanetary roller coasters for the eyes and the mind, as unclassified otherworldly visuals coalesce and collide with recognized sources.

Hovering clusters of laptop/turntable-sized framed works hang on the gallery’s longest wall. Painted in an enveloping black rectangle with rounded corners, the wall echoes the work’s paper edges and suggests an allover imbrecation of worlds.  There are various compositions of orbs within one another and others that are consolidated as a single aesthetic pictorial observatory. The rounded rectangular shapes have an ergonomic sleekness and design, recalling Maier’s 2003 plexiglass capsule frames and, although it may be a stretch, the lozenges of candy raver/DJ pill culture.

Nearly buried in this installation on an office wall near Maier’s exhibition are Maier’s video pieces “Space Rider” and “Event Horizon” (2009 and 2010 respectively). Subverting the white cube and occupying an ambiguous temporal space, “Event Horizon” was installed earlier this fall atop the ceiling of a grand staircase in a disused philharmonic building in the Lodz Biennial in Poland. A synthetic skylight, digital

planetarium, or android/dendroid-like organism, this video installation visualizes what one might imagine of her painting’s construction: a circular raveling and unraveling of lines from the center to edges, the endless accumulation of data and aesthetic happenstance. The pulsing of this digital creature is the interweaving and interlaying of three warped and transposed landscapes. Inspired by science and the eleven stringed dimensions of reality in the M theory, Maier brings her work contextually and conceptually into new realms.

Between the cluster of works on paper and of video animations, Maier’s work loiters on the fringes of an all-immersive installation. I can easily imagine double-sided drawings of various scales encapsulated in rounded plexiglass rectangles, suspended from the ceiling at different heights and angles. A video such as “Event Horizon” could occupy a concaved ceiling, as she originally intended for this animation.  This isn’t intended to be prescriptive; it’s simply clear that as Maier moves back and forth from three-dimensional to illusionistic space more freely, additional aesthetic, conceptual and contextual possibilities will continue to emerge.

The post Beyond Fuss and Fiddle: The universe according to Ati Maier appeared first on artcritical.

September 9 to October 16, 2010
537 West 24th Street
New York City, 212.627.5117

In Edward Burtynsky’s photographs both the natural and the human-altered landscape are engendered with a circumscribed notion of beauty and grandeur. He presents exacting and balanced compositions, heightened and saturated chroma, and vast yet often flattening scales in his photographs of quarries and strip mines. Most recently, his subject matter has expanded to include facets of oil production and consumption. I feel a misleading impulse to discuss Burtynsky’s work in terms of the Hudson River School with its optimism and its benevolent version of Manifest Destiny because his photographs speak to neither of these. While the glossy aesthetization of his images may inspire admiration and awe in their visual experience, the subjects they capture invoke fear and trepidation as they reveal our mistreatment of the earth. The photographs accomplish this awe through a Romantic sensibility in dramatic and atmospheric light, wide sweeping vistas (often from helicopters) and a general eye for abstraction in the landscape.

Burtynsky’s recent body of work at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery, where I first encountered this new body of work depicting the “life cycle” of oil  — oil fields, refineries, highways, recycling yards, car shows — left me feeling a disconnection between his aesthetics and his subject. The visual presentation of these images is seductive to a degree that leaves little depth possible for content. The tensions between his alluring imagery and the cruel realities from which it arises reached its height in an image of footprint-shaped puddles of oil in recycling yards juxtaposed by workers who stood knee-deep in used oil.

“Pentimento,” his current show at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, though, seems a detour from Burtynsky’s usual style. These black and white, craggy-frame Polaroid prints from his Bangladesh ship-breaking series at first glance seem to show Burtnysky loosening up, slacking on his usual reign of control over the commercial slickness of his images. There’s a satisfying relinquishing of fuss over the cropping of his images and an authentic embrace of chance in the smudges, imprints and blemishing of the images. This rawness feels contiguous with the brutal task of the workers who are ripping hulking ships with little aid of machinery or technology. They strangely evoke, in their mysterious emptiness and sometimes posed figures, the otherworldly appearance of many photographs documenting the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

But, as the exhibition’s title suggests (pentimenti are traces of earlier layers in a painting), Burtynsky is ultimately more interested in artifice.  There’s no building of layers in these photographs or revisions, just the illusion or suggestion of prior processes. The photograph, as a singular image derived from a negative, remains an indexical mark. The work, like the title, is more about a facile sensibility than any kind of conceptual or ethical gravity.

A few of Burtnysky’s Gulf Oil Spill photographs are concurrently on display in the gallery’s office. They show him up to his old tricks, which a friend of mine aptly described as “beautiful images of a disaster, like the scene of an accident that you can’t stop watching.” A few of the images depict at a distance ships extinguishing oil fires that trivialize their emotional impact in their remoteness, appearing cinematic and digitally spawned.

Like oil, Burtynsky’s photography practice is a lucrative industry. Judging from the dozens of shows he has each year (many concurrent and including the same photographic series), and from the luxury of donating the sales of his “Pentimento” series to the acquisitions budget of a Toronto photography gallery, Burtynsky’s studio has reaped no small fortune. I don’t think that’s a problem in itself, but his photographs don’t offer a deeper understanding of the complexities of his subject matter. They rest on simple summations of problems, without offering solutions, and often appear to be a strain of cultural imperialism. If he is feeling philanthropic, one can’t help wonder whether the money should go back from where it’s extracted by donating to an oil spill clean up effort or the economies of the ship-breakers’ Bangladesh? To this end, rather than perpetuating an industry, Burtynsky would be taking economic and conceptual risks outside of the picture plane and beyond the lens of the commercial camera.

The post Clicking while the Gulf Burns: Edward Burtynsky’s photography appeared first on artcritical.

One of the most obvious reasons for this lies within the format of reality television itself: editing. Twenty-four to 48 hours of time and footage comprises each 45 minutes episode. The compression involves the omission of a large amount of back story, detail and dialog. What is cut too often appears to be a deeper, fuller explanation (although, it could be rambling) by artists or judges about the work itself. As an artist, I am curious about whether these contestants are aware of when their work uncannily resembles other contemporary artists’ works: When Jacyln made a tank filled with water that vaguely resembled her former employer Jeff Koons’ early equilibrium pieces, did she, rather than her peer Trong, acknowledge this likeness? And what about Miles’s “shocking” drawing of cartoon genitalia that strongly evoked Sue Williams’ similar paintings?

This editing may be more extreme than the producers want us to easily know. A friend of mine advising a contestant’s participation was disturbed to find in the contract very draconian stipulations. In addition to creating severe environments for the contestants through deprivations of sleep and food sans alcohol (is this what we artists consider ideal working conditions?), Work of Art reserves the right to manipulate dialog, in fact to completely rearrange and transpose conversations. The example the contract gave is that if a contestant answered “yes” to question number one and “no” to question number two, in post-production, the contestant can be presented as answering no to question one and yes to question two. The “reality” of the show entails a significant degree of artifice.

Maybe these insider details are all too obvious revelations for those in the entertainment industry. While the episodes’ selections of winners and losers have seemed reasonable, I noticed that the weaker personalities tended to be the first to go. This led me to wonder: do the “art world judges” only deliberate amongst themselves? After examining the show’s closing credits in paused increments, I found some phrasings flashing across the screen in a time too brief to read: “Winning and elimination decisions were made by the judges in consultation with the producers.” So, when the loser’s dismissal is recited, “Your work of art didn’t work for us,” what the host neglects to say is neither your art nor your personality any longer works for the show.

When I watch this show, I am reminded of numerous projects from art school. In the real art world, however, artists don’t compete for exhibitions through assignments like “Make a work of art based on your drive through a city in an Audi” or “Design a cover for this Penguin classic novel.” In cases like these, beyond unabashed commercial advertising, the show becomes more about adaptability of creative approach than about deeply developing concepts or visual languages. Furthermore, it demonstrates that artists who do have distinctive, engrained stylistic approaches have difficulty working outside these modes, such as Judith’s abstract hand painting and Ryan’s self-portraiture.

Ultimately, I am curious about the winner’s prize: not the $100,000 cash “grant” (is the MacArthur Genius the only other grant of a larger amount?), but the solo show at the “world reknown” Brooklyn Museum. How will this show be presented and what will it do for the winner’s career? And more importantly, will the work stand alone on its own merits, or require the explanation, “that art reality show winner?”

The post The Next Great Reality TV Winner: Bravo’s Work of Art appeared first on artcritical.

Shaved Brussel sprout and toasted walnut salad

Half pound brussel sprouts shaved finely on mandoline slicer
Half cup walnuts, chopped and toasted
One cup olive oil, zest and juice of one lemon) whisked in bowl
One quarter cup grated parmesan cheese

Pan seared sweet potato gnocchi with pecans and sage

Sweet potato gnocchi (home made if possible, enough for two portions)
Fresh sage (about 10 leaves, to taste)
¼ cup pecans
2 cups fresh spinach
2 teaspoons truffle oil
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Boil gnocchi in plenty of salted boiling water until they rise to the surface (about 3 minutes for fresh gnocchi, 5 for frozen)

Meanwhile, add the olive oil to a pan on medium high heat. As the oil is heating up, add the whole fresh sage leaves.

Drain gnocchi and add to a hot pan with the olive oil and sage.  Allow them to sit in the pan until slightly crisp on one side (3-5 minutes) Turn them, and add pecans, crushing them just slightly with your hand as you drop them into the pan. Add salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste.

Turn heat down and sauté for a few more minutes, until pecans begin to toast. Add fresh spinach and toss until just wilted.

Serve on plates and sprinkle each portion with a teaspoon of truffle oil (or to taste, but a little goes a long way)

Greg Lindquist: How does your interest in cooking relate to your sculpting and installation?

Suzanne Stroebe: In my studio, I’ve been working with live plants and food in my installations, sculptures, drawings and performances, both as objects and through photographs. Art is an extension of life, right?

GL: Or is art an extension of life, in the sense that your practice is informed by such rituals as eating or growth in the natural world?

SS: I believe artists experience the world through the lens of their creativity, which extends to cooking, gardening, writing, etc. The best cooks are creative in that they experiment freely with new ingredients and methods, and allow for “happy accidents.” The work I make in my studio is the purest form of my creativity, because art is non- functional. However inspiration for my work often comes when I’m engaged in another creative practice, outside of the studio.

GL: And what about our rooftop garden, which really started in my studio, amongst my art making practices?

SS: In retrospect, we began gardening in your studio around the same time when you became more experimental in your practice (i.e. last summer right before you made your first outdoor sculptural installation at Art Omi). More recently, you have become interested in earth art and as the garden as become part of our daily lives, you have begun incorporating potting soil into your sculptures.

GL: Very true. We were talking earlier about whether entertaining was part of our interactions with other artists and the art world. When I suggested that it had little to do with the art world, you reminded me the majority of our visitors were people connected through our profession. Why do you think that is? For me, it creates an intimate setting, but also it’s that idea illustrated by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, that you can learn something about a person by his or her preferences, by how a living space is arranged and activities are performed: Does cooking reveal sociological, economic and politic preferences?

SS: Cooking can certainly reveal political and social preferences, but more importantly I think there can be an instant bond with other people we meet who are vegetarians, locavores, etc., or those who are also passionate about cooking. Social interactions with those in the art world can become more casual and friendly when we discover other mutual interests. It is also a natural way to invite someone into your home, which is automatically more intimate.  After spending an evening over good food and drink with someone in their home or in ours, there is a feeling of real friendship—not so after an evening at an opening, or other professional social setting. People tend to relax and become more themselves while eating a good, home cooked meal.

SS: Do you consider cooking/mixology/gardening to be an expression of creativity?

GL: Sure and it’s an expression of creativity that I think is largely driven by curiosity, experimentation and tastes. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at identifying the tastes of specific herbs in foods and perhaps that’s a little like developing an eye for color mixing.

SS: Do you see a connection between cooking and other culinary experiments and your studio practice? Have they ever overlapped or influenced each other?

GL: I think there’s a sense of alchemy in making herbal infusions in liquors. There is an excitement too for how it’s going to turn out. For example, I was amazed by watching the coffee beans float in the vodka and then, as they became saturated, sink to the bottom of the container and release their dark oils into the clear liquid. Maybe it’s something like in the studio when you have an assortment of objects and materials and even though you can imagine what happens when you put them together, it’s always different when you do it. Cooking or infusing/mixology can be a kind of experimental outlet for art making, perhaps being a place to play when I’m feeling stuck in the studio.

The post Two from artist-couple Greg Lindquist and Suzanne Stroebe, and a snatch of conversation appeared first on artcritical.

May 8 – June 19, 2010
525 West 22nd Street
New York City, 212 352 9460

A placard advises visitors to Heather Rowe’s installation to “Please be aware of your surroundings as you move through the space.” It seemed at first glance like a practical request considering the narrow, winding passages of the sculptural modules.  The mirrors’ dizzying and duplicating effects invoke disorientation. But unlike the delicate sculptures in Anne Truitt’s exhibition across 22nd Street, the advisory was less for the safety of Rowe’s robust work than that of its viewers. This is where I read the statement as ironic because Rowe’s installation invites the opposite experience—an intense dislocation of surroundings and place, blurring interior and exterior space. It is impossible to experience the installation without negotiating its narrow passages, where you confront your reflection (with all associated visual and psychological baggage) among steel planks that simultaneously frame other visitors’ craniums—or more disturbingly suggest their decapitation.

Initially, the structure, made up of modules of skeletal scaffolding, resembles uniform floating pieces of furniture such as bookshelves or desks. An eye-level shelf becomes the perceptual locus, containing rhomboid-shaped mirror pieces and fragments of decorative moldings. This installation is less architectural than Rowe’s previous works though still fused to the architecture’s space.

While Rowe’s current exhibition characteristically incorporates sculpture, installation and architecture as an experience, it attempts to grow farther from her well-noted influences. Although the disorientation of surroundings (Dan Graham’s perceptual pavilions), displacement of space and material (Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts) and temporal and perceptual dislocation (Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements) are all still elementally present, they’re less apparent in the material language of the work than the sum interaction of the piece.

Rowe’s choice of materials (wood, steel, plexiglass, drywall, wallpaper, carpet, molding, paint) are not as apparent as components and, as a whole, unlike Matta-Clark’s building chunks, are overly refined and suggest aggregation of material rather than their disassembly. The mirrors, like a miniature Kurt Schwitters Merzbau, generate a framing of static/cinematic views as well as a more domestic sense of self-reflection, like looking at yourself in a vanity set. The mirrors also displace views inside and outside the gallery, suggesting an interpretation of Smithson’s dialectic of site/non-site.

But by reducing architectural space to component, fragmented, almost Minimalist parts, what does Rowe say about the interior? Do the mirrors and curvaceous decorative moldings allude to a commentary on domesticity? In Rowe’s world, because these details are sequestered within the gray matter of the installation, inviting one to burrow deeply into the micro-spatiality of her piece, these ideas are often difficult to access or account for.

Rowe has always been one to revel in material details: the unbalanced plexiglass footings in this installation, for instance, or the decorative moldings and carpets, are visually enticing, yet they also point to a sense that her work is beginning to be too carefully considered, even though these particulars also reveal palimpsests—pencil marks, rough cuts and elements of process. The higher the refinement in Rowe, the less risks seem to have been taken.  She is at her strongest when she allows a looseness that breathes with your experience of her work.

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Milton Avery (1885-1965) is celebrated primarily for reductive landscapes of flattened, simplified space and elements, coming into his signature style in the late 1940s. Less attention has been given to his early career, which the recent exhibition at Knoedler and Company focused on Avery’s industrial scenes of the 1930s.

If nature was his springboard, as Avery once famously declared, then in this body of work nature is also the lens through which he experienced the city. His treatment of the machine age is paradoxical in many of these paintings. Architecture and bridges suggest organic structures and appendages for what is clearly humanmade and mechanically assembled. The Blue Bridge (ca. 1930), for example, twists and twitches in ways that, severally, recall a root system, insect limbs or bulbous stems; the bridge morphed into these suggestive forms from a more realistic gouache study.

Going against the Precisionist grain of Léger, Scheeler and Demuth who in various ways found mimetic equivalents of the technology they depicted, Avery wistfully and almost mournfully placed nature and the natural order as supreme, a theme that anticipates his later development. These pictures exude a foreboding, deeply gloomy atmosphere in a dismal reaction to industrialization. In the brooding Country Railyards (ca. 1930s) Avery ironically depicts these booming rail intersections under a veil of darkness and absent of people and trains. These depopulated scenes also recall Giorgio de Chirico’s mysterious desolation and solitude. The drab palette in New England Industry (ca. 1930s) suggests a consciousness of imminent environmental damage.

Although the work in this show is not as flat or minimal as his characteristic later work, such as his oceanscapes, the editing of detail and flattening of planes as well as the compressions and distortions of space are all there already. The wavering and overlapping buildings in works like Tugboats in Harbor (ca.1930) and City Harbor (ca. 1930) strikingly anticipate Philip Guston’s late paintings (especially in the muddled pink palette of City Harbor). Remarkable similarities between Avery and Guston are further evident in Drawbridge (1932) in which the tugboats have an anthropomorphic, cartoon-like quality. In this sense, one may also trace Avery’s animate urban landscapes through the individualistic animism of Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings.

“Industrial Revelations” presents not only Avery’s lesser known work but also a perspective on the city that stands in contrast to prevalent views such as the Precisionist’s celebration of the machine and Edward Hopper’s romantic elevation of the everyday. These cityscapes are intensely personal and historical records, yet they also ring true in relation to current New York urban planning. As warehouses are swallowed by residential development and the trucking industry has all but replaced the railroads, Avery’s scenes become meditations for the loss of industry on American soil.

Greg Lindquist is a painter and contributing editor at artcritical.com. He received the Sally and Milton Avery Foundation grant to attend Art Omi International Residency last summer.

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