January 12 – February 18, 2012
NEW YORK: 980 Madison Avenue, 555 West 24th Street, 522 West 21st Street
Beverly Hills, London, Rome, Paris, Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong
http://www.gagosian.com

Damien Hirst’s The Complete Spot Paintings is a show of some three hundred works that for the next month has been given the unprecedented, exclusive, simultaneous run of each of Larry Gagosian’s eleven galleries around the world: a big-budget extravaganza in which a mega dealer fetes his mega star. In the age of the Art Career, shows like this one galvanize fans and detractors in equal measure.  But throw in the simplicity of these paintings—colored polka dots painted at regular intervals over a flat ground—and the fact that Hirst has only painted a handful of them himself, and we’re left with an ideological battleground for those who worship at the altar of conceptualism and those who disdain it.

Hirst’s ascent to stardom was rapid. Having organized the Freeze art show in London in 1988 while still in his early 20s, he attracted the attention and benediction of celebrity collector Charles Saatchi. Anointed one of the stars of the future in Saatchi’s Young British Artists exhibition in 1992, Hirst went on to represent Britain in the next year’s Venice Biennale and won the coveted Turner Prize in 1995. He has been a fixture of the art world ever since, scoring a major coup in 2008 when he eschewed his dealers entirely by bringing hundreds of new works to market directly through Sotheby’s. The exhibition, titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, reported nearly $200,000,000 in sales.

Known for such works as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—the dead shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum—and For the Love of God (a human skull covered in more than 8,600 diamonds) Hirst’s approach to art making is a torpedoes-be-damned embrace of the literal. Early works like In and Out of Love and A Thousand Years, meditations on life and death, actually contained the entire life cycle. In the former, caterpillars hatched into butterflies, which flew into and died upon sugar-coated canvases. In the latter, maggots were introduced into one of Hirst’s signature glass cases that contained the severed head of a cow. Feeding on the cow until they become flies, they flew around before being zapped by the electric insect trap than hung overhead. Offering the public super-condensed confrontations with mortality that were not even the purview of the farmer or outdoorsman, such works aspired to the grand theme of life and death in nature.

Taking the stuff of the natural history museum and bringing it into the art museum, Hirst has made the audacious bet that the literal can stand shoulder to shoulder with the metaphorical. Given the fun-house atmosphere that now pervades many major art museums, this bet seems like a good one. In the past two years in New York alone, one could slide between the floors of one museum, play in a bamboo tree house on the roof of another, and see the entire output of an artist hang, mobile-like, from the atrium of a third. In such company, it is not unreasonable to think of Hirst’s stable of pickled animals as perfect emblems of the zeitgeist.

But if Hirst’s installations appeal in their directness, his paintings suffer from the same quality. For painting, like poetry, is an art dictated by metaphor. If Hirst’s innovation was to show the world that a dead shark has all the resonance and associative power of a dead shark, his failure has been the lack of recognition that painting can contain the resonance and associative power of so much more than paint. So, despite the many layers of celebrity, money and art world mega-wattage involved, the impact of the Gagosian show lies ultimately in one layer alone: that of the commercial house paint applied in perfect round circles by Hirst’s assistants.

Painted in high gloss against flat white grounds, variously colored polka dots decorate rectangular and circular canvases of all sizes. The dots vary in their colors and dimensions from painting to painting, ranging from one millimeter to five feet. One contains half a dot. Others have four. One has 25,781. The small ones, which bring to mind dot candy, are slightly more interesting than the large, which look like Twister game boards. Optically, one’s eyes tend to follow the darker dots, in a sort of futile attempt to find something to latch on to. While the futility of such a course is, apparently, part of the point, the lasting effect is akin to looking at a giant word search in which the letters don’t ultimately connect.

That these works contain none of the depths of meaning that we expect from serious painting is due entirely to the artist’s inability to work in the language of metaphor. This not-uncommon problem in contemporary painting is in its various guises evidenced by a misuse of the medium’s formal devices. In Hirst’s case it is pattern and color that have been employed as stylistic affectations without regard to meaning. Gagosian has touted the artist’s color sensibilities, and Hirst’s quote on color is offered as a sort of raison d’etre for the paintings:

I was always a colorist, I’ve always had phenomenal love of color . . . I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color.

But using color does not make one a colorist any more than banging on a piano makes one a composer, and if the spot paintings are a manifestation of Hirst’s love of color, it seems a chaste love indeed. Ultimately, the paintings miss out on the profound emotional resonance of the effective use of color as metaphor. Thus, despite his candied hues, his employment of color to do nothing situates Hirst far nearer the official salon painters of the 19th Century than the Fauves.

As for Hirst’s other big formal device, it was only a matter of time before pattern got the super-flat treatment. Like the nude, pattern is a subject to which painters of each generation return, perhaps because it provides a historical benchmark by which the painterly tradition is both linked and updated. Those contemporaries who have used pattern to some interesting effect—Sol LeWitt, Sean Scully, Mary Heilman—have employed it the way Picasso used African art, as a motif that strips painting bare of all but its most fundamental, powerful components. For such painters, pattern offers neutral ground on which their true preoccupations play out.

The repeating patterns across LeWitt’s wall drawings become petri dishes out of which grow remarkably startling confrontations with optical perception. Repetition in a Lewitt allows for a mathematical basis by which to judge perception, the way regularly spaced trees or furrowed fields provide similar benchmarks for our experience of scale, space, distance, and even color, in nature. Scully, too, takes the strict confines of pattern as the basis for work that transcends its constraints. His subject is no more the repeated rectangle than Cezanne’s is the dishcloth. The ways in which his rectangles push up against one another, with subtle modulations within their volumes and upon their edges, give tremendous variety to his work.

The little something that does happen when the eye takes in Hirst’s vast fields of colored dots is more akin to looking at a snowy TV screen than a LeWitt. Such effects are more common in Hirst’s round paintings, where the vagaries of trying to keep concentric circles of dots evenly spaced lead to irregularities. That the eye can, in such cases, believe that it is traveling along one path and be thrown unexpectedly off on a tangent is the one and only interesting optical experience of this work.

Time and again, Hirst has pushed at the boundaries of the art world and found them to be exceptionally flexible. His big gambit, that an actual presentation of life and death would hold its own with mere allusions, has made him rich and famous. If, as Saatchi has predicted, Hirst’s name will be mentioned alongside those of Pollock and Warhol in the history books of the next century, it will not, however, be on the strength of “The Complete Spot Paintings,” which misuse the formal devices, and miss out on the real powers, of the medium of painting.

The post Not Dotty About Damien: Hirst’s Spot Paintings Go Global appeared first on artcritical.

The abundance of self-anointed anti-establishment shows reminds us that nothing in the art world is sacred, least of all art history. We’ve been served notice; taboos will be busted, idols smashed and sacred cows slaughtered. Sculptors will challenge our outdated notions of painting, installation artists our outdated notions of sculpture, and performance artists our outdated notions of installation. In the noisy crescendo of art that screams at us to rethink things on its terms, one message rings loud and clear; the canon is under fire!

So what are we to make of this curious industry in which the path to success seems so heavily greased by its practitioners’ insistence that they are a challenge to its authority? What is the meaning of a world in which the very rejection of its values seems as clear a path to acceptance as any? Is there a parallel world in our society that mirrors that of the contemporary art world as seen through the eyes of Chelsea? Imagine a law firm vying for your business by claiming a particularly irreverent attitude toward the law, or a politician cultivating votes on a platform of autocratic rule. To be sure, questioning our value systems is one of the chief roles of an artist (if he or she, unbound by the directives of others, cannot speak the truth, who can?), but it seems that we’ve arrived at a point where the act of questioning has become the greatest currency of all. Cézanne’s re-examination of painterly perception was a game-changer with implications about how we see the world (as were the developments of the Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists), but much of contemporary art seems unconcerned with real world implications. Art that adopts a full-blown revisionist take on the art-historical canon invariably fails to resonate beyond gallery walls. Take for example the show of Fahamu Pecou’s paintings at Lyons Wier Gallery, which “questions the concepts of inclusion and exclusion within the historical constructs of fine art,” by “appropriating famous images from the twentieth century and reinterpreting them through his own self-portrait prism.” In a painting titled The Treachery of (media) Images: After Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the artist’s cursive phrase “Ceci n’est pas Fahamu,” accompanies his self-portrait. While the appropriation is obvious enough, the reinterpretation remains unclear.

It’s been a while since Duchamp displayed his urinal, Rauschenberg erased his de Kooning, Warhol made his ready-mades and John Baldessari commissioned sign painters to create work for him, sign their own names to it, and present it as his own. Kehinda Wiley’s reinterpretation of 18th- and 19th-century history painting has become so familiar that it is now more surprising to see Jacques Louis David’s white and sallow-cheeked Napoleon atop his war steed than Wiley’s African American stand-in.

These conceits all served in various ways to challenge notions of creativity, originality, and authenticity. Each was also interpreted, in its own way, as a sort of “joke on the art world,” the most recent iteration being the Banksy film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Here the street artist makes a documentary about his would-be documentarian Thierry Gueta, who in Banksy’s narrative is transformed from cameraman to street artist to art-world darling himself. The work produced by Gueta under his street name Mr. Brain Wash is pretty lousy by nearly everyone’s admission, but the fact that it sells well at a show in Los Angeles is presented in the film as the ultimate joke on the art world. But is it a joke? In a telling moment, Banksy’s dealer Steve Lazarides chuckles nervously, “I think the joke is on . . . I don’t know who the joke’s on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

If there is a joke it has little meaning. The film suffers from a sort of self-imposed impotence. The breadth of its meaning is a function of its scope, and in putting one over on the art world, it has few implications for the world beyond. The group show “Entertainment,” currently on view at Greene Naftali, offers a sort of litmus test of the resonance of art inspired solely by art world reference. Rachel Harrison’s piece Zombie Rothko, is a free standing block of sculpture splattered with vaguely Ab-Ex paint and topped by a doll’s head. From the press release: it “suggests an embodied version of painting (a kind of “walking dead”).”  Next to this is ITEA (International Trade and Enrichment Association), Michael Smith’s fake trade show booth “parodying the synergy of arts and business collaboration.” It works as parody, but nothing more. This is the affliction of the navel-gazing worldview: it’s a bite we’ve grown accustomed to.

Thankfully, we still have that second stack of press releases, those that make no claims to historical revisionism. Instead, they correspond to a different kind of show, where the work on display feels altogether more comfortable with itself. Rather than trading in art-world reference, this work opens itself up to reference the world at large.

Take two sublime shows of painting currently on 24th street, those of Lynne Woods Turner at Danese and Rudolf Stingel at Gagosian. Each artist creates work imbued with an emotional maturity that allows it to stand autonomously and remain open to interpretation. Woods Turner’s paintings rely on their own narrowly defined formal parameters to present a luminous world that remains accessible at its core. Stingel takes the self-assuredness a step further. Employing silver and gold (and what could be better fodder for a revisionist re-evaluation of our cultural mores?) as the primary materials for minimal paintings of maximal visual appeal, the lasting question Stingel poses to us is one that artists have asked for centuries: can you imagine anything more beautiful?

The post The Canon is Under Fire: What Press Releases Tell You, and What They Don’t appeared first on artcritical.

December 3, 2010 – January 6, 2011
643 Park Avenue at 66th Street
New York City, (212) 616-3930

If ever the art-going public needed a reminder of the wisdom of the dictum “show, don’t tell,” it needs look no further than Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, on view now at the Park Avenue Armory.

Greenaway, a filmmaker long fascinated with the visual arts, is well known for films (The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982; Nightwatching, 2007) in which artists and their creations are central figures. With his series “Nine Classical Paintings Revisited,” begun in 2006, Greenaway has gone directly to the source, selecting acknowledged masterpieces from the canon as the objects of a digital-age reappraisal. Greenaway’s vision is presented to us in three acts played out in two adjoining spaces that are set off by giant digital screens massive enough not to be dwarfed by the Amory’s cavernous unlit drill hall.

The first act sets the scene of Renaissance Italy through Greenaway’s awesome command of the technological landscape, like the opening orientation at the IMAX Theatre where all the audio/visual bells and whistles are explained so that one doesn’t faint midway through the show. Tremendously vivid digital and animated images are presented in 360-degrees on four massive screens surrounding the audience and a fifth screen on the floor (it can be walked on), all backed by a powerful, violin-fueled audio track. Act two includes a full-scale replica of the original chapel for which The Last Supper was commissioned in Milan. Here Greenaway presents his interpretation of Leonardo’s masterpiece, before returning to the first room for Act Three, an exploration of the Paolo Veronese’s painting The Wedding at Cana.

Greenaway uses his vast technological vocabulary to give a virtuosic audio-visual tour of these two great paintings as he re-imagines and re-presents them chiefly by altering lighting conditions to explore their space.

At one point in The Last Supper, the light emerges from Jesus’ figure alone, casting shadows over the entire tableaux as if it existed in the round. Later, a point of light dances through the space, leaving a vapor trail, that traces the path it has traveled.

Composition, too, is explored through the illumination of various aspects of the painting against a dark ground. The apostles’ heads alone are lit, then their feet. Their hands­—gesturing, pointing, clutching—are bathed in a warm light, a rhythm of abstract shapes playing across the surface of the painting. In this way Greenaway literally gives each aspect of the painting its moment in the sun.

In one compelling contrast, diagonal shafts of light emerge from the grid in the ceiling in the painting, filtering over Jesus and his apostles from behind and presenting them as solid sculptural masses. This is followed by a similar movement of light from a window in the chapel, which moves flatly over the painting, revealing it as a two-dimensional surface. Although the painted surface is flat, somehow for a moment one expects the figures again to be sculpted volumes. It is this kind of set-up that delights Greenaway. Look what can be done with light and space! In these moments the experience is truly magnificent.

To go from The Last Supper to The Wedding at Cana, as presented here, is to go from looking at a painting with a friend to looking through the eyes of a literal-minded museum docent. A didactic audio track picks apart the painting’s composition, effectively killing the mood. Not only is the delight of mutual discovery gone, the content of the lecture is a major disappointment. To hear Greenaway tell it, Veronese’s chief accomplishment as a painter is to put the figure of Jesus smack-dab in the middle of his composition.

The most magical moment of the entire experience is in the final scene. The 120-plus figures that make up the composition of Wedding at Cana are reduced to bright white contour lines against a black ground. For a moment they are held there, in their actual relationship on the surface of the painting. But then something marvelous happens, as we go from seeing this world head-on to seeing it from a partial bird’s-eye view, as if lifted twenty feet above the wedding party. Looking on from above, one can’t help but smile in wonder at the vast three-dimensional space Veronese compressed into his painting.

To levitate above a painting and for a moment to experience the world of that panting in three dimensions is Greenaway’s great gift to us. In showing us his exploration of light, space, volume and composition, Greenaway succeeds because he trusts us to make discoveries alongside him. It is only in the telling, when this essential process of discovery is undermined, that Greenaway’s vision fails.

At its best, Greenaway’s work remains a tremendous homage to painting. In all its technological wizardry, it never loses sight of the greatest wizardry of all: the painter’s depiction of a three-dimensional world on an unapologetically two-dimensional surface.

The post Leonardo on Park Avenue, Courtesy of Peter Greenaway appeared first on artcritical.