Many of the actions, such as a piece where he sits in a kayak and is towed by a car on a dry road as the bottom of the kayak is scraped away, are recorded in short 8mm films. Or there are photographic series, or objects. Since his youth he has been interested in explosions. I asked him if he liked the smell of gunpowder, he said yes, and I mentioned the allure of the smell when I first experienced it as a small boy, he said, “Yes, elemental.” That was a word he liked to use in relation to his work. He took me to his workroom, which was in a large building attached behind his larger, bürgermeister-like house. He showed me a room full of sculptures, and said, “Well. This is all I have, it’s not very much, and much the work is out in exhibitions…”

In one corner of the long, low-ceilinged space was a collapsible mountain-climbers tent that was in tatters from an explosion.  This is a “Ruin” of an action, he explained. I told him that it made me think of the Romantic trope of the ruin in the landscape, and how being that a lot of his work takes place out of doors, it made oblique references to the Romantic tradition. There was something of a language barrier, and he said, “No. I am not a “land” artist, I just use the land as my workroom sometimes.” There was a beautiful piece on the floor with a long iron pipe that had triangular legs welded on it, that was used, when filled with gunpowder, to shoot a black umbrella through a black briefcase, which was placed in front of the pipe.

Then he would say, ‘Well, that’s all” and then would take me to another part of the building and show me something else. One windowless room had a bucket full of sand suspended over an umbrella that would spin and sift the sand evenly around its perimeter. Nearby, was an old-fashioned weight reduction machine with a belt one places around one’s waist. He used the machine in an action where he put the belt on and as the machine moved his hips he would try to hit a can placed across the room with a pistol. There were circles with numbers highlighting the bullet holes on either side of the bright metal can.

In another storeroom, near a workroom with a long table filled neatly placed tools, Signer showed me a deep freeze refrigerator, like the bottom half of a full-sized one. He tells me a story about when a few years ago he heard that a huge snowfall was coming. He brought the freezer outside, and lifted the lid and it snowed into the freezer. With the lid lifted, one peers down and sees the drifts of snow still preserved. He said that it was in a museum exhibition, a large refrigerator truck came to get the piece, that the temperature inside was -20 Centigrade, and it was quickly taken from the truck and plugged in to the gallery space. Then he said that the museum wanted to insure the sculpture for 20,000 Swiss francs, and Signer said, “That was very clever, but it cannot be replaced, it’s just snow.”

He showed me some of his catalogues that he had bound with metal bands and then placed an explosion cap inside. The eruption on the surface of the book, he said, was like a volcano. I asked him if he liked visiting volcanoes, and he named some that he had, including Stromboli and a number of others, including one in Japan. Then I asked him if he had read Susan Sontag’s novel, the “Volcano Lover” and we talked about what a good book it was and how surprising that it came from her.

Then he took me on the concrete deck above the studio that served as a large patio for the residential part of the house and showed me his “participant” piece, where two hoses filled with water were connected to a pair of rubber boots mounted on a metal stand. Signer stood on the two hoses about 10 feet away from the boots and lifted his feet on and off of the two hoses, causing the boots to swing back and forth in a walking motion. Long spurts of water came from the heels of the boots, propelling them forward. I was admiring the piece as I was also looking over at the cab of a ski lift set nearby a large boulder, and looked over to the buildings across the way that formed a kind of tall amphitheatre that looked onto his patio.

As he walked me downstairs, he stopped and said ‘Oh, I must show you where I keep my explosives.” And he opened a door and I looked at a five-foot high pea green safe with a no smoking sticker on it. As we went out onto the street there was a black Jaguar parked in front of the entrance. We talked a few more minutes. I mentioned something about not having the language and missing a lot of middle-European irony and he said, “It’s subtle.” Then, “This is not my car, I only have a bicycle; and I have one of those three-wheeled cars from Italy, do you know them?”

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Helmut Federle’s exhibition at Peter Blum encompasses the first five of a series of nine works done in early 2009. In a revealing interview in the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail, the artist states that the recent works are “God-related” and were made after a considerable period of time not painting.

Born in a mountainous community in Switzerland, near the Austrian border, Federle was not trained as a painter but studied sculpture, photography, architecture and typography in a school of the applied arts, a significant fact in the understanding of his work.  Another theme that emerges from the study of his career relates to his travels in Asia and elsewhere, as Federle’s predominantly abstract paintings are informed by an evocative visual language developed from other traditions and cultures. Boldly graphic, quietly brooding neo-plastic amalgams sometimes heavily, carefully rendered or marked with splotches, textured roller-marks and dragged brushstrokes began appearing internationally in the early 1980’s. Many were mural-sized, others diminutive, and could be construed as lone units, or often as part of a progressive series.

The present group evidences a lighter touch and perhaps involves the sustained variation of a quasi-illusionistic image for the first time. Each 23-5/8 x 19-5/8 inches (60 x 50 cm), they depict a variously illuminated five-sided figure that glows at various wattages from deep within an angular, chiaroscuro cave-like chamber.  The dusky, greenish-gray tonalities of most of the canvases are reminiscent of the dull patina of bronze sculptures. Color comes from the same basic palette that Federle has utilized for most of his forty-year painting career: white, black and yellow. Here, it has been sponged, swiped and brushed in dirty washes of acrylic or oil that has then been washed off in places and repainted. The thinly applied paint collects in furrows of the canvas weave, while in other spots, the raw canvas remerges as the paint is rubbed away in the revision process.

The precedent for this series can be found in a 50 x 60 cm work from 1985 titled “Innerlight”, a Turneresque depiction of a spiritual light breaking through darkness from a great distance. To anyone familiar with Federle’s work at the time, this painting appeared relatively anomalous, but here, twenty-five years later, the initial glimmering of a theme has been developed. It is significant that it has been installed in such a way that the paintings may be considered key elements of an architectural/conceptual continuum.

Each painting is progressively hung a greater distance from the previous one based on multiplication by two. There are three on the left wall, progressively further apart;one on the narrower back wall; and one around mid-point on the right hand, long wall. The hanging of the work is based on the Fibonacci sequence. This numerical progression is often found in nature, in the upward spiraling of stems on a plant or in the horizontally spiraled interior of a sunflower, for instance. The sequence was also the basis of many geometric-decorative patterns in Islamic art, where it was meant to evoke the creator, as imagery was prohibited.

The installation also reflects on some of Federle’s recent architectural projects, of which I have visited several. One is large relief on the side of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin, which molds cement into a familiar vertical /horizontal bar motif familiar from Federle’s geometric paintings.  Another, realized in the lower reception area of the Museum Rietberg Zürich, (specializing in art from Africa, Asia and Oceania) is a long, very deep concrete wall relief that museum patrons can slowly gilt by purchasing rectangles of gold leaf.

From this perspective, it appears that working in architecture in actual space has freed Federle from evoking the monumental, an aspect of his earlier, large paintings. It has also enabled a more fluid interaction among his triadic praxis: space, metaphor and measurement. The placement describes a spiral within and beyond the gallery space, as it magnifies the spiral movement within the individual works.

Federle’s attempt to create an atmosphere of spiritual mimesis makes this current installation a fairly unique event among what is currently being offered by abstract painting. One would have to go to the work of contemporary composers such as John Taverner or Arvo Pärt to find similarities to Federle’s current intentions.

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What kind of people love the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau? I think of them listening to Nick Drake and knowing every Alan Rudolph film. In fact, they are the present-day counterparts of the characters inhabiting Watteau’s paintings: young but already scuffed-up by life, dreamers of the exquisite woebegone. I don’t know how one can love Watteau without somehow making him one’s contemporary. For example, this premier painter of women’s necks seemed ever-present in the East Village of yore, with its hordes of women in nape-revealing punk haircuts. Watteau’s complex formula has a strong element of verité as it revels in artifice and seeps wistfulness. His sentiments, freshened by some readings on him, can seem eternally present.

From what has been handed down through scraps of half-reliable information, Watteau, the son of a rather disagreeable roofer, escaped from the Flemish hinterlands, and the gritty, striving narrowness that appeared to be his inheritance, to Paris as an apprentice decorative painter. After several masters, including the theatre painter, Gillot, he made his mark among the rich intelligentsia who were ultimately only of use to him as a springboard towards creating the imaginative concoction that established him, the fête galante, a discontinuous tableau of love, flirtation and posturing. In most works, playfully-costumed aristocrats pose as actors, musicians, or themselves in the foregrounds of private parks. An elusive, complicated character himself, Watteau moved from one friend’s house to the next, often pursued by avid collectors, and died at 36 of tuberculosis.

Anita Brookner describes him best in her book of essays, Soundings: “a drifter from Flanders…he fashioned a fairly melancholy world of high-class nomads, slightly overdressed, in settings visibly adopted from stage backdrops.” The current exhibition, “Watteau, Music and Theater” at the Met, brings together fifteen of Watteau’s paintings (but none of the large ones) and a number of drawings, and contextualizes Watteau’s overt themes historically.

It includes an example of a period guitar and bagpipe, or musette de cour, and engravings of theatres and costumed figures, as well as drawings and paintings by his teachers and followers. A small show, only taking up two rooms, it was ostensibly put together as one of the tributes to former director Philippe de Montebello. Watteau’s “Mezzetin” a depiction of a stocky balladeer in Commedia dell’arte garb, was one of de Montebello’s favorite museum holdings.

Most of his drawings here, like that of the head of man who is the model for Mezzetin, is done in white, red and black chalk on oatmeal-colored, textured paper. The drawings have to be some of the most beautiful ever made, and define what a drawing is, particularly in relation to painting. They simultaneously capture light and movement, describe what is being observed, and reorders the surface with a repertoire of decorative marks. Watteau kept his drawings in albums he took with him as he moved from place to place and worked up his figurative paintings from these studies. He is yet another artist who had his more salacious works on paper destroyed as he neared death.

Among the paintings, there is an early, stiff version of figures poised before the island of Cythera, the theme of which he created two later versions that are known as his summary masterpieces. As one can easily move in this show from earlier to later work, recurring features and developments crop up.  It occurs that the earlier paintings are fairly direct transcriptions of theatre scenes: Watteau summoned up the equivalent of footlights to distinguish figure from background in such paintings as “Love in the French Theater” where the foreground figures seem illuminated from a source just below the implied proscenium.  Later works, such as the Met’s “The French Comedians” seen nearby, are  effulgent, bathed in a silvery, Cézanne-like allover-ness.

Brookner also wrote a monograph on the artist. In it, she speculates that had Watteau lived longer, his paintings and the figures in them would have gotten larger, as they were beginning to, and that he may have gone on to different subjects.  The drawings seem to anticipate this also, as they are never crabbed, the way the figures in early paintings sometimes are or overly caught up in detail. This seems a fairer way to approach Watteau, to take his measure with the historical facts available and offer formal analysis, which is admittedly, the primary purpose of a monograph, than one of the other books I have been reading about Watteau, “Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and his World” by the art critic Jed Perl.

Perl’s book is personal and belletristic, and has a misleading title, because it is much more Perl’s acculturated, canonical world we get than than Watteau’s. Samuel Beckett, Henry James and Serge Diaghilev make appearances, but not one living artist is mentioned in the book. He feels it necessary to mention a bad one act play called Behind the Watteau Picture that was performed briefly in Greenwich Village in 1917 or tries to situate young Katherine Hepburn as a Watteau character but does not dare mention Karole Armitage’s punk ballet, “The Watteau Duets” that premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985.

Perl speculates that Watteau is the first painter to depict bohemians, and it made me consider that the most fitting comparison to Watteau among contemporary artists is Nan Goldin. In the mid-1980’s around the same time as the Watteau retrospective in Washington (Gersaint’s shop sign and the Voyage to Cythera came to Met for a month afterward) was the frequent occurrence in clubs of Nan Goldin and her photographic slideshow that became “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” with its most recent soundtrack of old and new pop music. Thinking back on these images of Goldin’s languorous, embracing and lollygagging consorts, all very visually self- aware, slyly exhibitionistic and doomed, the conceptual gap from Watteau to the present seems to once again narrow considerably.

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Showing at Anthology Film Archives, New York, through September 17

The film biography “The Painter Sam Francis” might be better called “What Happened to Sam Francis?” It reinforces all the standard cliché’s of the outsized artist’s life. His first ex-wife, Muriel Goodwin, comments on Sam Francis’ extraordinary vitality. Elaine Anderson, in her English accent, recounts, “Many women were his muses”. The artist, in semi-recline, refers to himself as a magician or as Merlin caught in the brambles. His cosmologies and his personal failings intertwine. The artist was interested in alchemy. He goes to a Jungian analyst. He utilizes his dreams in his work. He finds that fame makes you miserable. His daughter observes that he did not know how to be a father to his children.

Gentle avant-gardish music (played by the estimable composer Charles Curtis) rises up on the soundtrack when the camera scans Francis’ abstract paintings or shows him painting. Clips of water flowing, clouds, and hanging cherry blossoms are intercut with images of the paintings. When Francis was going through a troubling divorce, it is explained, the paintings got blacker. Here the background music becomes discordant.

He was clearly a hero to the author of the film. Jeffrey Perkins was dedicated enough to continue this project for forty years. Included is a breadth of film clips of Francis working in his studio (which are, as usual, misleading—they make it look easy) as well as a sustained interview with the author and a good number of art world luminaries, gallery professionals and family members. Though it seems a lost opportunity to look closely at the work, to be fair, there are elements of heroism in the life of Sam Francis, though they were subject to misinterpretation by the artist and others.

Francis was seriously injured while training to be an Air Force pilot during WWII. Subsequently, doctors discovered a rare form of TB. The Bay Area painter David Park encouraged Francis to make art, and he spent the next years in a hospital bed, painting. Francis worked with canvases spread below him as he lay on his stomach. Subsequently for much of his painting life he worked with his canvases and paper on the floor. He eventually healed and gave the credit to the healing powers of art.

Francis’ mature work was first seen in Paris, where he had been studying on the G.I. bill alongside a number of important American painters of his generation. Francis’ inordinately successful debut (he started making a lot of money right away and kept making it) came as he introduced the thinking of Abstract Expressionism to Europe. He became as immediately legendary as Pollock. According to Pontus Hulten, for a long time Francis was “the most expensive artist in the world.”

When he arrived in New York City Francis immediately rented a huge loft—his friend Alfred Leslie, who shared it with him, says it was “an unheard of luxury”—and the local painters met this with a degree of mistrust. But Dorothy Miller included him in the “Twelve Americans” show at the Museum of Modern Art, furthering a career that was already “red-hot” in Europe, according to Time magazine.

In 1957 he was invited to Tokyo to make a mural for a renowned flower-arranging school. His involvement with Japanese culture, for which the film claims he had an intuitive understanding, began at this time. He went on to become the favored artist of the Japanese oil-refining magnate Sazo Idemitsu (1885-1981) whose museum in Japan contains the largest collection of Francis’ work in the world.

Many of the interviewees provide narrative details, but few offer insight into the work. Walter Hopps generalizes about Francis’ engagement in nature and the universe and only focuses when he recounts the dramatic incident when Francis flew over Idemitsu ‘s house, and radioed below that he was prepared to crash into the compound, killing both of them, unless he relented and allowed him his daughters’ hand in marriage. Edward Ruscha, who was an early assistant, reflects that he liked being paid in cash from the large roll of bills that Francis carried around.

Only Al Held comments directly on Francis’ particular assets as a painter. He makes reference to his extraordinary touch. His work from the 1950’s that brought him first to attention possesses a thoughtful reticence. The pictures, constructed with delicately handled brushstrokes, have a degree of self-effacement that is at a distance from much of the ego-driven gestural work of other artists of this period. Francis let the careful placement of wet color dominate the picture plane. Clement Greenberg had called this quality Francis’ “liquefying touch.”

Francis’ searching, structurally oriented improvisations where the light solidifies within the white ground result from a tactic of testing, increment-by-increment, how little color can surround white areas of the composition without losing overall light. This culminates in his series called the “Blue Balls” done in a hospital in Bern, where he had been sequestered due to another bout with TB that enlarged one of his testicles. This particularly noteworthy series was accomplished while he was in great pain. Upon remission of the disease once again Francis became convinced he had healed himself through art.

A short episode devotes itself to an interview with James Turrell and a brief glimpse of the Rodin Crater Project as an introduction to Francis series’ of paintings that concentrated on the edges of the canvas and left the dominant area blank. Somewhere around this time the studious joy that was a chief characteristic of his output departed. Francis had no set program and could push a work through many stages before reaching satisfaction but the reflective aspect by then had begun to disappear, perhaps a byproduct of the constant demand for his work that he felt compelled to satisfy.

As he progresses into the 1970’s and beyond his attitude appears more disrespectful, impatient. He forces more and more pigment onto progressively larger canvases. What was once lyric has become bombast. One can only conclude that Francis lost his way due to his profound—and misplaced–belief in the circumstances surrounding his access to a degree of imaginative freedom. George Steiner, in his book, “The Grammars of Creation” calls the numerous instances where artists develop a train of thought or construct in order to explain why they have created works of art a form of rhetoric. “This rhetoric” Steiner continues, “may have absolutely legitimate psychological motives; it may arise from a valid strategy of empowering introspection. But it remains, at best, an apologetic flourish.”

All of this talk in the film by Francis and others about being “the shoe on God’s foot” and “humble servants of the muse” doesn’t ultimately seem to have been very good for the work. The again, maybe Francis just spent too much time in California, avoiding the pressure cooker of criticality that is still part of being a painter in New York.

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If there is a neo-reductivist revolution afoot in painting, Linda Daniels could be its Robespierre, so ruthlessly doctrinaire do her oil in linen squares seem. (A. M. Richards, 328 Berry Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, (917) 570-1476, through May 24- tomorrow.) But it has been so long since we’ve experienced painting as a site with ground rules that her strict discipline feels like a longed for release. Restraint is sexy here, with vibrant springtime color and geometric patterning that is decidedly floral, but cut with dangerously sharp blades.

This was an artcritical PIC in May 2009

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Pierrette Bloch’s first New York solo exhibition since 1951 is long overdue, to say the least. Bloch has had a quietly vigorous exhibition history in Europe, mainly in France, for sixty years. She has been seen as a progenitor of the Support/Surface group and was friendly with some of its members, but also kept her distance.  She is also a longtime admirer and friend of Pierre Soulages, the French painter who has made black paintings exclusively for most of his career.

Like Soulages, Bloch has only used black for many years, but unlike his predominantly oil on canvas works that often swell to the heroic scale of Abstract Expressionism, Bloch has shown a penchant for humble materials and more extrapolated formats.  Most frequently mounted directly on white gallery walls, simply but with great elegance, her  signature works consist of horizontally-oriented lines of bound and curled horse hair and a continuing series of strips of relatively inexpensive white paper dabbed or dotted with ink. These have been quite widespread in European museums recently.  In Summer 2007, for example, Le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris displayed three long ink drawings by Bloch, one per wall, that occupied a room in the permanent collection.

Her apparent transversals of standard categories have allowed Bloch to work in a more suggestive terrain, where, as is customary in much French contemporary abstraction, technique and material are foregrounded. The work often appears a lyrical species of notation or calligraphy or even the graphic equivalent of mime, which owes perhaps to her admiration of the work of Samuel Beckett. Recalling  that writer’s strained reports of event and monologue , Bloch’s spare, inky ruminations in black blotches populate sheets of paper like unreadable messages or obscure musical scores.

Her earliest work, once she abandoned student figuration, involved gray, white and black paint applied to found wrapping paper. By the late 1960s Bloch had begun using horsehair, wound in long strands or collected into rectangles, uniting the linear aspects of drawing with the physical reality of sculpture.  One hair sculpture,Sculpture de crin (no. BE7) 1988, in Haim Chanin’s exhibition, telegraphs a cross-associational response, from landscape horizontality, to a line of text, to early weaving.

Bloch has workspace in her studio apartment on an upper floor of an old building in Paris’ 15th arrondissement. All of her exhibitions are meticulously planned in advance. Bloch builds small models based on the proportions of the given environment, and using miniature replicas of all of her work, determines the placement. This was the case in the current exhibition as well. Bloch’s extreme care about how her work is seen overcomes the main drawback of this venue’s very limited space.

Still, there are a good two dozen works that represent the breadth of her output, and give a full yet episodic introduction. It is notable that earlier ink blotch drawings on rectangular paper are included, each with a very individual personality and presence, dating back as far as 1975.  I would pit any of them against any drawing by another artist of this period. They are comparatively terse, and betray a debt to Henri Michaux.  But where Michaux displays an organic continuity, Bloch’s drawings have tension that plays each individual mark off of its ensemble.  For example, Encre sur papier (no.555) 1999 consists of twenty-five very black slippery-seeming ink-marks and one apparently accidental ink droplet. The only row with more than four marks has one that might also be a droplet. In one case a mark runs into another in the row below it. The marks seem fairly orderly, but uncomfortable at their edges, trapped in their own skin as they distribute themselves across the page.

Bloch’s latest series on view are paintings executed on blocks of Isorel board, a kind of homosote, that covers its pulpy, brown surface with brushed black ink.  Once again, the works seem to examine the philosophic dimension of markmaking. Encre sur Isorel (no. 525) 2008, partially covers its ground with long, tilting vertical strokes that reminded me equally of counting off strokes and the way Van Gogh painted rain, as well as a defaced tablet.

The exhibition is a small testament to the efficacies of the late modernist project, and to a kind of reductionism that is not exclusionary in any way but in fact serves to expand metaphor towards a global and historical reach, while remaining communicatively personal and quite human.

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At 70, Louise Fishman continues to gather strength as a painter fueled by headlong passion and sheer nerve. Of the generation  that includes Mary Heilman, Bill Jensen and Brice Marden Fishman has not been as widely celebrated as these abstract peers; perhaps it is this slight underdog position that spurs her on.

In earlier decades, she investigated her identity as a painter in a number of formal, political, personal and historical-cultural directions. A work by her from around 1971, a fairly small, two-part gray canvas, chalk and rope construction—as chic as a pair of clutch purses—was one of the highlights of  the 2007 exhibition “High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” and revealed Fishman as a stylist, concerned already at that early date with method over message. Still, how to introduce particular subject matter into painting was her nominal concern into the 1990’s.

In her  “Angry” series of paintings on paper, for example, from around 1973, which literally named names that she blamed for her frustrations as an artist, the text portions of the works were surrounded by a stitching-and-patterning-cum-lyrical-abstraction painted border; the color is all muted blues, reds, greens and grays. There was a degree of taste along with discontent in works that aided her in politicizing her consciousness as a feminist lesbian.

Following this series she returned to using conventional stretched canvas supports and among works of various sizes up to about 2 x 2 feet, she produced a series of small, thickly applied oil-paint-on-canvas works from around 1980 with a palette-knifed spiral motif. Made at The MacDowell Colony, a palpable light of the forest shone within them. Fishman has always been intent on making scale changes, and the power of these diminutive works — some   were only around 6 x 8 inches — led to her ability to maintain an intricately articulated surface, as the paintings grew larger.

Then in 1988, after a trip to Auschwitz and other former concentration camps in Poland with a holocaust survivor couple Fishman executed an extensive series of works—darkly foggy, muffled crucibles—conceived as remembrances that embraced her Jewish inheritance. Fishman mixed in the paint with a small amount of soil from sites she had visited. Fishman had been asking very specific things of her chosen medium: how does one make it relevant to oneself and one’s history? How does one possess it? How do you filter your experiences through it?

It would seem that, for these past twenty years and with these questions answered, Fishman was relieved of any qualms about throwing herself wholeheartedly into gestural expressionism. This most recent exhibition is as much in conversation with other painters of this idiom, past and present, as it is with her own emotional response to her medium.  Two contemporary painters in particular came to mind at various moments, former and current gallery mates Dona Nelson, who generally makes larger paintings than Fishman, and Bill Jensen, who makes smaller ones.

There are number of works in acrylic in this show, a first for Fishman in many years. Arctic Sea (2007,) with its blobby skeins of foreground blacks, is reminiscent of Nelson’s pours. The blacks float before a shimmering illusionistic field largely made up of yellow and gray shiny chisel-like swipes that seem to hollow out an interior space. These had to be rendered with a brush, which is one of the main drawbacks of acrylic for this artist, as she can’t chip off chunks of dried oil paint, one of her signature moves. In a painting such as Cooked and Burnt (2007) small divots created with some small pick-like blade seem to return air to dried humus of built up emerald green pigment. Near it, a fragment of a painted cross, done in runny, wet light blue imposes itself over rust-colored underpainting. There is paint applied with a dry brush toward the middle section and cross wipes from a large trowel that spill from the lower left.

One of the more interesting developments is that Fishman’s paint has become denser and slower. Some of the fast liquidity of American abstract-expressionism is here but no more so than, say, School of London painting, evidenced by the fecal, dagger-like shapes in the large slashing dynamo, Embrace the Tiger (2009) and the tachisme of Nicolas De Stael in the impastoed patches in the diminutive, still-life-like Bottom (2009.)

In Telling (2007,) Fishman produces her version of what has become a Bill Jensen staple, the gestural monochrome. She increases the scale, and creates a dark indigo simulacrum of a freshly patted-down grave. After burying the surface in an endless network of fully loaded brushstrokes, it appears that fishman’s touch became lighter and lighter, so that an invisible scrim seems to bind together its seeping, runny facture.

Fugitive (2008,) my personal favorite in the show, is a very composed picture but seems as improvisational as the rest. It has an Ecole de Paris air of late Fautrier in its black ground and brown, white and grey marks, flirting with trompe l’oeil in the use of a serrated edge similar to Braque’s favorite wood graining tool, disrupting the foreground marks. Like all the works here, it didn’t seem to start within proscribed limits but ended there and reminds us that the primary content of serious painting is not performance but evidence of the means at arriving at an encompassing and complete statement.

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Colin Laverty is a Sydney doctor, who, along with his wife Elizabeth, has amassed one of the most singular collections of recent and contemporary aboriginal art in Australia. This book documents the collection, containing clear, color-accurate reproductions, photographs of the landscapes in which particular artists work and some portraits. There are informed essays throughout. The book memorializes the best painters Australia has ever produced, including Rover Thomas, Queenie Mackinzie, Prince of Wales, Jan Billycan, Nyuju Stumpy, John Mawurndjul and Paddy Bedford. They remind me of great jazz musicians: practitioners of a new idiom with very deep roots that is full of life; their works speak to many but are also somehow so individual as to be inimitable.  Until a long overdue survey show hits these shores, this volume appears the most definitive substitute.

My own awareness of the paintings of Australia’s indigenous artists, where the mythic currents of dreamtime are translated onto stretched canvas with acrylic paint, came about slowly and largely by happenstance. This diverse population (they speak over 200 distinct languages) unified by initial habitation of the world’s oldest continent, was the subject of Bruce Chatwin’s 1986 book on dreamtime journeys of the indigenous peoples of the Australian outback, “The Songlines”. A “dreaming” is a narrative of continual creation known by different tribes. It explains genesis, plants, people and animals and posits the land and customary rituals. The book also touches on the beginnings of when “Aboriginal art” gained international attention.

One of the final scenes in the book dramatizes an exchange between an indigenous Australian painter and his dealer (one of many redoubtable promulgators that are part of the story of this art) where the artist argues that he knows he is being lied to about his prices. Problems developed such as attribution and widely varying quality as well as exploitation by what are called “carpetbaggers” who cheated the artists and in some cases, forged paintings. By 2002, it was estimated in the Myer Report for the Visual Arts and Craft sector for the Commonwealth of Australia that Australian Aboriginal art was a $200 Million a year business of which only approximately $50 million makes it to the artists. The recently published, “Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World” by Benjamin Genoccio covers a lot of this story while it makes claims that aboriginal art is still a good investment.

Robert Hughes has called aboriginal art “the last great art movement of the 20th century” and it could be argued that this work is a distant parent of the recent “cosmology” genre characterized by painters such as Terry Winters, Matthew Ritchie, Mark Bradford and Julie Mehertu.

The last major museum exhibition of this work in New York City took place at the Asia Society in 1988. Robert Steele, an Australian, has a New York gallery specializing in paintings by Australian indigenous artists, but this painting has a relatively low profile in New York City. There are frequent exhibitions of this work in Europe, and, most notably, eight Australian indigenous artists collaborated with the architect Jean Nouvel on installations that form an integral part of the architectural structure of Nouvel’s Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

My interest was piqued several years ago when I spied a painterly oxblood-colored lattice-like pattern–the corner of a photographic reproduction of a painting–sticking up out of the used catalog bin in the Art section of Strand Bookstore. It was an oversize brochure that accompanied the Australian entries to the 1997 Venice Biennale. The work that had caught my eye was by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1916-1996). The creative imagination of the artist had transmitted its power through the merest retinal suggestion.

Paging through the partially foxed oversize pamphlet I beheld her earthy brushed hatchings. One could perceive through the paint markings that there was an acute intelligence that had access to some kind of new information. It was very familiar as abstract painting, and very not, too. I didn’t understand exactly why—and still don’t. One is vulnerable to accusations of asserting a universality of forms in any enthusiasm for work that, in fact, has very specific attributes to a particular culture, but one cannot deny that there is an expressiveness in her work that communicates to even the uninformed viewer. To me, Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a brilliant formalist inventor. I bought the slim pamphlet for $1.50 and it earned a pride of place among my art books.

This past summer I was in Tokyo concurrent with the National Art Center’s featuring:  “Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye” the artist’s first full retrospective outside of Australia. The exhibition reconfirmed what I had felt seeing the work in reproduction, that at least what was important for me had to do with what I was interested in in painting: a use of scale that informed the body as well as the eyes, an unmediated experience with the painting act, engagement in materiality and painterly improvisation.

There were few uneven moments in this very extensive exhibition. The catalog text that placed the work contextually within its mythic landscape and body decoration tradition but it had somewhat disappointing reproductions.

A few months later I visited Sydney Australia for the first time, and was introduced to the works of many more indigenous artists, in museums, galleries and collectors houses, as well as seeing the Laverty Collection. Most Sydney art collectors have the work of indigenous artists alongside whatever else they collect, European Australian artists, Americans, English painters, some Vietnamese painters, in one case, historical works done by figures from the country’s colonial period, and so on.

Even the short period of time I spent in Australia has allowed me to understand that the work is not easily translatable. There is the immense history of the people of these remote vicinities, their complex system of associational knowledge and its life in the particular landscapes.  One could say that the book, perhaps unwittingly, has thoroughly documented what is most likely the final period where the art of this populous is done by hand. Through an interest in painting and also as a way to make a living has spread through the interior there has been more involvement in contemporary art and social, political and global issues, and rightly so, plus an interest in new forms.

Colin and Elizabeth Laverty [editors] with contributions from Judith Ryan, Nick Waterlow, Will Owen, Howard Morphy and community art coordinators such as Apolline Kohen, Will Stubbs and Andrew Blake, Emily Rohr, Tony Oliver, Paul Sweeney and John Carty (and others): Beyond Sacred: Recent Paintings from Australia’s remote Aboriginal communities.
Hardie Grant Books: Prahran, Victoria, Australia, 2008, 352 pages.

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September 9 to October 11, 2008
37 West 57th Street, 3rd floor
New York City, 212 750 0949

Janet Malcolm, who is best known for her sober and incisive writerly persona, and who has had previous exhibitions of collages at Lori Bookstein and elsewhere, is currently showing a suite of photographs there of burdock leaves depicted in early stages of decay and decomposition. A book accompanies the exhibition. It reduces the images by around one half. There are no notations as to size, edition or photographic process and subsequently does not function like a catalogue so much as a picture book. An introductory essay about her work by the author also accompanies it.

Malcolm writes in the introduction that the photographic portraits of Richard Avedon particularly influenced her—which he “radically extended photography’s capacity for cruelty…the faces he photographed were mercilessly, sometimes gruesomely, recorded.” Malcolm chooses to photograph leaves of the burdock plant because of its lowly status in the plant world – as a common weed that grows “along roadsides…and around derelict buildings” – and because of its literary status. She notes that Chekhov and Hawthorne have referenced it in their fiction to denote “ruin and desolation” and explains that she prefers “older, flawed leaves to young, unblemished specimens — leaves to which something has happened.”

The Avedon portraits were largely of famous people, well known in the mass media. Like Malcolm’s statement about what the journalist does, Avedon, in some cases “preyed on their vanity.” The naïvely trusting Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for example, were reduced to pathos under Avedon’s lens, while more sophisticated sitters were willing collaborators in a new kind of celebrity portrait that exposed them in their ravaged glamour.

Avedon’s portrait photographs appeared at the very end of an era that saw photographic material as containing “truth”. Where we now understand that it is a kind of fiction. The photographer, Moyra Davey, in her recent, very exceptional book of writing on photography, “Long Life Cool White,” locates this moment of de-authenticity in 1981 when an essay appeared by Martha Rosler entitled “in, around and afterthoughts”. In the same essay in her book, Davey writes with great admiration for Malcolm, and discusses Malcolm on photography on a par with Sontag, Benjamin and Barthes.

Malcolm: “The camera’s bland inquisitiveness…[its] capacity for aimless vision…it is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

Davey also notes her appreciation for Malcolm’s odd personal revelations that crop up in her writing: “A small aside…will unexpectedly open up a window of emotional life onto what had otherwise been a fairly hermetic discursive field.” Any admiring reader of Malcolm brings a particular sense of expectation to the viewing of her photographs.

In the introductory essay Malcolm acknowledges how her leaf photographs have precedents in eighteenth and nineteenth century botanical illustration. She might also have mentioned leaf exposures performed by the nineteenth-century progenitors of the photographic medium.

All the leaves in the pictures have been popped up against a white wall with stem at bottom in a glass of water. Only one leaf picture in the exhibition, Burdock No. 24 (all 2005-07) exposes the neck of the water bottle, and only No. 12 does not maintain the entire image within its borders.

Most of the images are suspended in a slightly grainy atmosphere that is lost when reproduced in reduction in the book. The low luster of the paper stock in the book also robs the viewer of the Iris print quality which prints the image into the paper rather than suspending it in emulsion on top of it. The documented leaves all have individual personalities: No. 17 is “prim”, No. 21 is “busted”, and No. 18 is “plagued”. No. 4 is “like a tree”. No. 6, my favorite, contradicts the general run and is young, unfurling, like spring and forest blue green. No. 16 is broken in shreds and is a deep dark green. All the photographs have beautiful color and evidence high technical accomplishment.

An added aspect is their ability to trigger memory out of proportion to the apparent subject matter, which brings the viewer to their curious vacancy, that the leaves may be individuals but seem to be stock characters. My suspicion is that the exhibition might be best considered as an extended aria to the camera. Its “bland inquisitiveness” seems to hover in the room, a strange, delightful presence never isolated quite this way before.

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May 28 – July 28, 2008

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s exhibition of paintings at Tokyo’s latest art museum, the National Art Center, is the first retrospective of the this aboriginal artist outside of her native Australia. Emily (as she is called) moved from making batik to painting with acrylic polymer on canvas at the age of 78 and in the next eight years produced around three thousand paintings. Their impact, both as an emotionally communicative experience and in terms of a painting intelligence, is staggering.  One watches as styles are moved through quickly, going from a connected dot method that is somewhat reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama to later drawn lines that at moments might almost be Sean Scully on a less ponderous day. But Emily never knew of these artists and did not leave her ancestral homeland – which was her subject – called Alhalkere or “Utopia” in the central desert region of Australia’s Northern Territory.

As one enters the exhibition, the long wall is mounted with the “Alhalkere Suite” of 22 paintings that are described on the wall card as works that can be seen as aerial maps, which might depict “wildflowers after rain… spinifex bushes…wattles in blossom…desert oaks”. This work is from a middle period, earlier comes works where the dots are placed in a more orderly, and impressionistic fashion, but here Kngwarreye is in full command, modulating the surface by the same method that Howard Hodgkin often does of utilizing strings of splotches made by the heads of round-tip brushes, letting the paint gradually remove itself onto the canvas. Sometimes there is bunched-up color – muddied aqueous biscuits of paint – but the mixes maintain their clarity. The works are not traditionally pictorial in that there is no consciousness of paintings’ history of illusionistic space, but one is nonetheless afforded a complete painting experience: the works inform the eye and the body, both with a general and a specific tactility – they are exhilarating. Like any good painter, she will dare to place a new contrasting color smack over a carefully modulated area. This is not “mark-making” as an end in itself, but painting, in that its primary concern is with the whole.

“Big Yam” (1996) is a tall  (the painting is about twenty feet high) vertical four-panel work that entwines snaky brushstrokes in yellow ochre, plum and Venetian red, used either full strength or mixed with black or white on a black ground. As does all the works, it communicates a specific place. Emily will sometimes, here and elsewhere, begin wet and then paint until the brush is making dry strokes. Here she appears to use this method to exit a curving painted path by lifting it off, dissipating the line.

“Alwelye” (1991) painted on a semi-transparent earth-red ground, collects full and very wet royal blue, raspberry, cherry red and bright urine yellow dots among pathways of white lines. The painting’s calm, purposeful energy has a mysterious, cul-de-sac aspect.

As in traditional European landscape painting, some of Emily’s color is both symbolic and local. The green plants that the desert produced after the rains was a period of the year that Emily called “green time”. “Earth’s Creation” is a big painting, befitting its title, made up four continuous panels producing a total work of approximately 9 by 22 feet, using lush greens and yellows as well as her signature brownish reds, Emily evokes the land of utopia where she resides. Dark paint splotches, applied over lighter areas, bring a feeling of the surface of the floral desert erupting into being.

In “Alalgura V” Emily becomes the first painter I am aware of who uses bright electric pink without irony. Combined with yellows and reds, the color of wildflowers, the light source seems to come from without rather than within, as if the desert sun has bleached out the surface. Another notable intersection of tradition and abstraction is how the paintings collude with Emily’s history of body painting, which may have influenced her choice to often begin a painting with a dark red or brown ground, like skin color. (There is also photograph in the exhibition of Emily’s upper torso painted with stripes).

This apparently influenced the later, linear works – stacks or assemblages of painted stripes collected on canvas panels. The artist’s process seems to involve responding to the marks from stripe to stripe as the work progresses. They resemble an abstracted undulating dance, incorporating the dry patches of the brush into the overall composition.

In another room her fellow townspeople brought several large quasi-crystalline mineral deposits that clearly have some of the deserts’ red clay running through them. The townspeople’s statement about the rocks is that they are there “to show that the paintings have special stories”. What is most remarkable is how the work communicates the landscape through known tactile experience.  In a sense, the information that the hand receives is transferred to the canvas with the help of the eye, but what is unique here is a tactile history of an artist’s feet knowing the particular landscape as well. The paintings communicate what Alhalkere feels like when you walk across it barefoot as much as what it looks like. This is a very rare and pleasing thing.

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