Strange Tools is a strange book. It is a self-described work of philosophy by Alva Noë, a UC Berkeley professor who is best known for his theories of perception and consciousness. For many, that description alone would deter the curious reader, since it suggests a footnote-laden, scholarly slog through prose understandable only to a narrow circle of initiates.

However, it is not that kind of philosophy book. Noë offers his ideas about the nature of art, technology, and philosophy in a spirited and highly personal series of reflections on his subject. While he does engage, glancingly, with other academic theories, Noë here seems to be reaching back to an older, pre-institutionalized form of philosophical writing, in which the author is not constrained by the pretenses of objectivity, formality, and dispassion. And yet Noë steers too far in the other direction, on the strength of his considerable authority, to offer a series of provocative assertions that rely more on personal hunches and breezy digressions than informed argumentation. The result does little justice to his subject or his reader. (This is particularly strange for a book that does not hesitate to point out when the other philosophers and neuroscientists whom he cites make assertions without a supporting argument.)

Noë rose to prominence with earlier works, such as Out of Our Heads, in which he argues that consciousness is not something we have or that happens to us, but rather something that we do. It is an activity rather than a condition. In Strange Tools, Noë makes a similar move with respect to art. Art, he says, is not a phenomenon that stands in need of explanation, but should be understood as a kind of technology. Noë recasts art as a tool, albeit a “strange” one, that we use in order to investigate the world and ourselves. He goes on to argue that this is also the case with philosophy: it does not do anything useful; it does not teach us new facts about the world that we can then apply in order to navigate it better. Rather, both philosophy and art have a kind of meta-cognitive value. Philosophy is a form of thinking turned onto itself: it is thinking about thinking. Art, too, is intrinsically self-critical, in so far as it is always engaged with the question of its own nature, limits, and possibilities. In both cases, this self-referential turn sheds light on the human condition itself. For example, he writes, “When a choreographer stages a dance, he is representing dancing. That is, he puts dancing itself on display. Choreography shows us dancing, and so, really, it displays us, we human beings, as dancers . . . Choreography puts the fact that we are organized by dancing on display.” But, in addition to the repetitive prose, there are two problems with this theory of art: first, it merely repeats a modernist theory of art that has been common currency for the past century; second, it ignores and excludes most of the art in human history. Some art, particularly contemporary art, may indeed serve as a kind of self-reflection, but that hardly captures the diversity of purposes that art serves. In the quote above, for example, Noë seems to be suggesting that other forms of dancing, such as social or ritual dances that are not staged by an artist-choreographer for the contemplation of an audience in a formal setting, are not art, at least not in this deeper sense of the term. And that is a profoundly problematic claim for a text that promises to tell us something about the essence of art and human nature generally.

Noë further makes the curious and unconvincing move of claiming that, because both philosophy and art are “useless” in this way, philosophy is art, and art is philosophy. But that latter claim, that X is Y and Y is X, simply does not follow from the observation that X and Y share some important similarity, Z. Such flimsy argumentation will not be lost on Noë’s readers, whether or not they possess a degree in philosophy.

In addition to these considerable problems, for me the fatal flaw of Strange Tools is the author’s own unrelenting self-referentiality. Reading the book feels a bit like being in a carnival fun-house: at every turn, one is confronted with another version of the author’s own reflection. Personal anecdotes from Noë’s life are woven throughout the book from opening preface to endnotes; we learn of his artist father, and his father’s many artist friends; we are told about Noë’s son’s piano recital, of Noë’s childhood trips to the museum, of his interest in blues music. Such digressions, when judiciously incorporated, can help to make a theoretical text more lively and accessible to a general audience, but here they often come across as gratuitous.

Indeed, in some cases, Noë’s focus on himself seems downright solipsistic. In his chapter on boredom, for example, the author observes that we experience a great deal of it in childhood, but that our workaday adult lives are woefully lacking in idle time. While that certainly seems true for Noë himself, and is probably the case for many of his readers, it is shortsighted to generalize from his experience to all of humanity. An internationally recognized public intellectual has a busy and fulfilling schedule, to be sure, but what about adults who are unemployed, underemployed, retired, or who have monotonous, unfulfilling jobs?

My point here is not to chide Noë for his insensitivity to his own privilege, but to point out that such sweeping generalizations from the author’s admittedly interesting and full life can be alienating to the reader, who starts to wonder whether the real subject of this book is not art, but Noë himself. Strange Tools is less a work of philosophy and more an autobiography describing the author’s experiences with art and the nature of his life, with some interesting digressions about the neuroscience of pictorial seeing, or the significance of pop music thrown in. Works of serious philosophy do not have to be impossibly difficult or unpleasant to read. But they do have to offer something more than the wishful thinking and unreasoned assertions that Noë provides us in his latest book.

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Hill and Wang, 2015). ISBN: 9780809089178 $28

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Out in the Midday Sun: Sir Anthony Caro on the Roof at the Met
Anthony Caro on the Roof at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

Originally posted at artcritical June 4, 2011

April 26 to October 30, 2011
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

This year’s summer exhibition on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 8,000 square-foot roof garden features five works by Sir Anthony Caro, the most influential British sculptor of his generation. Gently suspended above the verdant carpet of Central Park, and embraced by the New York skyline, the roof garden is not just a pleasant context for viewing art in general but, as it turns out, is uniquely suited to experiencing Caro’s art in particular as it prepares the viewer for the radical shift in perspective that his sculpture provides.

Still prolific at 87, Caro, , who lives in London, is best known for his innovations in modernist sculpture. He began to make abstract sculptures welded together from scrap metal in the early 1960s. He brought an investigation of pure form, line, and material to sculpture at the same time that his contemporaries Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella were accomplishing this in painting. The current show offers a representative sampling of Caro’s iconic, large-scale steel compositions from the past 50 years, beginning with Midday (1960), commonly regarded as his first masterpiece, and extending through the decades to a new work named, appropriately enough, End Up (2010).  With the exception of Odalisque (1984), which is in the Metropolitan’s collection, the works are on loan.

The Met’s roof garden provides a transformed view of one’s everyday surroundings:  rather than being immersed in the lush greenery of Central Park, one is suddenly able to look down on it and across it, from above.  The buildings that normally tower overhead, almost invisible from the street, now meet our level gaze.  This perspectival shift is exactly what Caro accomplished with his ground breaking welded steel sculptures of the 1960s:  they sat down and along the ground, beneath and before viewers, rather than above them.  By removing the pedestal and offering boldly physical, abstract forms that confront us in our own space, at our own scale, Caro inverts the traditional relationship of the beholder and object.  Rather than gazing up at a sculpture on a raised base or platform, we apprehend the works by looking down on them from above (as with After Summer and End Up) or confronting them at eye level (Midday, Odalisque, Blazon).  Our rooftop position—suspended above yet within the city—prepares us for a similar position vis-à-vis Caro’s remarkable forms.

The two strongest pieces in the show, After Summer and Midday, are also the pieces that most strongly embody this transformation in perspective.  After Summer (1968) consists of a pair of long parallel beams set on edge along the ground, with a series of curved pieces of steel made from quartered tank ends affixed to the beams like sails.  The symmetrical layering of the curved, pointed shapes, along with the creamy light-grey color, makes the work formally rigorous yet soft.  (Ken Johnson disapprovingly calls the piece “militaristic” in his recent New York Times review of the show, a description that caused me to wonder whether we had in fact seen the same work).  Because the piece is twenty-four feet long but only five feet tall, the sculpture sits just below eye level.  It unfurls slightly beneath and away from us along the ground as if we were gazing out at sea upon undulating waves.

Midday, on the other hand, is slightly taller and longer than we are.  It confronts us with a bold physicality—aided by the fresh intensity of its yellow color—that we relate to as if it were a living body, despite its consisting of I-beams, panels, and bolts.  Clement Greenberg, who was a close friend and supporter of Caro, wrote that in his sculptures we find “an emphasis on abstractness, on radical unlikeness to nature.” It is true that the tilted series of I-beams and welded steel panels that make up Midday do not immediately suggest organic forms.  Nevertheless, its mysterious power derives in part from the fact that its proportions and angles suggest a reclining figure.  (Let us not forget that Caro began his career as Henry Moore’s assistant.) On the other hand, the play of angular shapes that dance along its surface is complemented beautifully by the ribbon of New York City skyline just beyond it, reminding us of the everyday use for those steel beams and bolts.

Another sculpture whose visual impact is enhanced by its current setting is the bold red Blazon (1987-90).  Like two other sculptures in the exhibition, Odalisque and End Up, Blazon is much more dense and compressed as a form than After Summer and Midday.  Rather than looking through the work, we must look at, into, and around its complex layering of shapes.  The sculpture’s monumental height and weight are offset by the open railing set into one side, suggesting a balcony from which a viewer might gaze out (or be gazed at).  This touch of human scale brings balance to its imposing mass, which is further offset by the buildings in the background that echo its verticality.

Michael Fried has often praised Caro’s sculptures for their self-contained, fully present quality.  For Fried, Caro’s art is a strong counterpoint to what he famously decries, in his essay, “Art and Objecthood,” as the essentially theatrical aspect of Minimal art, which relies on both its viewer and surroundings to complete the work.  The fact that these five Caro sculptures happen to work so beautifully in their current, temporary location on the roof of the Metropolitan does not disprove Fried’s observation regarding their formal self-sufficiency.  Nevertheless, it shows the power that the right setting can have in releasing the full impact of these sculptures, and helps us to experience just what a master of perspective Caro can be.

The post Sir Anthony Caro: 1924-2013 appeared first on artcritical.

June 22 to September 8, 2012
270 Bowery south of East Houston Street
New York City, 212.966.3566

“Longhand” proves an apt title for Christopher Kurtz’s four-piece show at Tomlinson Kong Contemporary.  On a formal level, Kurtz’s sculptures suggest the lines and shapes of handwriting.  Two of the pieces, Litany and Act Together, resemble the baroque swirls of cursive script made three-dimensional.  The slender quills of the other two pieces, Palace and The Gloaming, suggest a different graphic sensibility:  neat and formal, yet still bearing the trace of the hand, these forms etch soft black lines in space to create volume and void.

And yet, ‘Longhand’ suggests not only formal associations of handwriting but the manual, painstaking process by which these sculptures were made.  Kurtz, who is also a furniture designer, is a master carpenter.  Each of the hand-carved pieces exemplifies some particular aspect of his technical prowess:  his ability to make wood curl and loop back around itself in improbable ways; to carve bass-wood into long, needle-thin spikes; to create invisible seams that join two pieces as if they had always been one. The sculptures in Longhand do not apologize for the evident labor and skill that they require, but nor  do they belabor the point. Carpentry is in service to Kurtz’s art, but this is not art about carpentry.

The centerpiece of the show, not only by virtue of its scale but because of its lyrical drama, is the life-sized Litany. Its form suggests a piece of calligraphy that has taken on a life of its own.  It is almost as if the words had rolled off a manuscript page and swollen into a life-sized reclining figure. By painting the surfaces with contrasting colors of soft black and white, Kurtz further underscores the association with written text, while at the same time enabling the viewer to see clearly the edges as they curve around themselves Möbius-strip manner. Amidst the play of curlicues, there are two moments where the lines join at right angles, serving as quiet counterpoints to the vine-like tangle of arcs and loops.

Litany embodies a dynamic play between the natural and the unnatural. On the one hand, the artist’s dramatic manipulation of the wood appears highly crafted; the shape is highly unnatural even as it mimics the organic lines of vines and tendrils.  At the same time, however, Kurtz has allowed some of the natural splits and cracks in the wood to remain visible. The uneven width of the cracks, as they swell and resolve into hairline fissures, is echoed by the lines of the larger form itself, which widens and then tapers into ends whose caliper shapes nearly touch.

In literal counterpoint to Litany’s soft prolixity of line, The Gloaming, which is suspended from the ceiling, plays upon the tension between nature and artifice  in a very different way.  At first glance it resembles a monstrous sea urchin whose long jutting spikes radiate from a central vertical spine.  A study of extremes, The Gloaming simultaneously suggests fragility and danger:  the thorn-like protrusions are positively lethal looking and yet the hand-carved bass wood sculpture has a delicate, weightless presence.  The matte black paint absorbs light to glow softly.

The other two pieces in the show are smaller but by no means mere afterthoughts. Palace, a variation on some of the ideas in The Gloaming is a small table piece whose elements are the size and shape of pick-up sticks. The rigidity of its rectilinear volume is offset by the organic feeling of thorn-like joints that swell at the intersections before tapering into spikes.

Act Together is the only sculpture of the four that makes explicit reference to its material origins: its base is a gnarled cedar root from which two carved branches arc up and outward before looping back on themselves. The rough cedar root blends imperceptibly into the artfully curved, carved tendrils whose manipulated shapes nevertheless echo natural twists in the root.  The simplest piece in the show, Act Together has an understated elegance compromised, unfortunately, in that its shape inexorably calls to mind a heart symbol.

In today’s artistic climate, virtuosic displays of technical skill can sometimes be viewed with suspicion if not derision. Hence it is a great pleasure to encounter the work of a sculptor like Kurtz, who refuses to pander to the artificial distinction between the ideas for his art and their material embodiment.  Viewed in this light, his hand-made wooden sculptures seem almost edgy, daring.  Thank goodness he took the time and the risk.

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Erick Johnson’s Parallelogram Paintings are a series of pictures in oil and gouache which offer small variations on a single basic idea.  When approaching these works, one first notices the parallelograms themselves:  each painting consists of stacked narrow bands of rightward-leaning, vibrantly colored rhomboids.  Because the title of the show sets our expectations, it takes considerably longer to realize that none of the parallelograms in Johnson’s paintings are true quadrilaterals:  in each case, one or both tips of the extreme corners are cut off by the edge of the picture, leaving us technically with stacks of 5- and 6-sided figures.  This shows how open we are to the power of suggestion, both by labels and by the shapes themselves.  The negative space surrounding the parallelograms along the right and left margins of each picture form two inward-pointing serrated edges.  These columns of triangles hint at the cut-off tips of the figures, which complete themselves just beyond the edges of the surface.

Beneath and behind each “parallelogram” peek out contrasting bands of color.  In the case of the oils, these have been formed through a laborious process of layering, abrading, and scraping.  The overall effect is something we might call soft-edge abstraction.  All of the detail and complexity seem concentrated in the margins and underlayers of the picture in a style that recalls Diebenkorn.  Other references include Noland and Stella, with the shared meditation on the rhythmic interplay of concentrated fields of color.  In some respects these paintings seem to be a direct descendant of Rothko, insofar as they offer stacked, hovering, soft-edged rectangles of color.  But in other respects Johnson’s paintings seem like only a distant cousin:  whereas Rothko’s pictures are brooding, tragic, and evocative, Johnson’s rightward-tilting, skinny, parallelograms suggest dynamism and forward movement—they threaten to scoot off the canvas.

Once the complexity of the paintings’ under-layers have revealed themselves, we are in a position to appreciate the way in which these paintings offer up to us a visual metaphor of their own making.  We can shift our point of view and see the parallelograms as a stack of floating rectangular planes, shown in deep, oblique perspective as if tilted 90 degrees perpendicular to the picture plane.  It is as if we were being shown the tissue-like layers of paint suspended, held aloft and apart from one another, before they sink down together and become fused into a two-dimensional work.  The titles of some of the paintings, such as “Chord Stack” and “Quartet” elaborate the metaphor.  Just as a musical chord is a layering of different notes, played simultaneously, we are being asked to see these paintings as a visual chord, in which different colors play with and against one another harmoniously.   It isn’t accidental that the term “tone” can denote both color and sound.

The post Erick Johnson Parallelogram Paintings at Heskin Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

October 8 to November 14
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 242 7727

Jack Pierson is a photographer and conceptual artist best known for his use of old signs to spell evocative words and phrases.  As the title of his current show, “Abstracts,” at Cheim & Read indicates, Pierson’s latest work quite literally refuses to be read.  The pieces of old signs and vintage lettering no longer combine to form words, but are appropriated and assembled into ostensibly abstract compositions.  Whereas in Pierson’s previous works the re-appropriated letters were used to spell different words, but still kept their linguistic function, here they are stripped of their former purpose, not only as commercial signage, but as signs, period.  The letters no longer form words, but instead become abstract shapes used to speak the visual language of formal composition.

The sense of nostalgia, tattered glamour, and loss that pervades Pierson’s work is heightened by this shift from word to image.  The signs are all the more emphatically and poignantly no longer what they once were, having once proudly declared the names of businesses on some formerly prosperous commercial strip.  Their transformation into line, form, and shape causes us to appreciate their latent visual qualities, but we are unable to forget that they once spoke.  We wonder what they used to say when they were part of something bigger—a word, a world.  Pierson’s work suggests that all we have left are tattered fragments of a formerly coherent whole.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to understand Pierson’s work simply to be about loss and the absence of signification, just as it is misleading to see these pieces simply as abstractions.  First, despite the use of broken and peeling signage, the compositions are playful, the colors bright and joyful.  Indeed, in some cases they begin to resemble high-end design more than high art.  For example, in the piece titled Her ancient solitary reign, a flock of multicolored O’s floats across a wall in an arrangement that is attractive but also unchallenging.  Conversely, Abstract #15 disburdens the letters of their alphabetic function only to reaffirm it again in a giant alphabetic calligram:  a collection of small blue o’s is reconfigured to form one giant O.   Here we have less a refusal of language than a whimsical form of tautology.

Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of Pierson’s compositions is that they often seem to suggest language or writing even though they do not spell anything.  Sometimes this is simply a shift from one kind of language into another, from the verbal to the visual.  In Abstract #10, the word from which the free-standing sculpture is formed is no longer recognizable, but the shape evokes a reclining figure.  Or the shift is from one alphabet system to another:  the pieces of Purest ray serene are arranged along a horizontal axis in a way that suggests Arabic script.  Abstract #11 looks like an exclamation point.  One of the lessons of Pierson’s show seems to be that a total refusal of language is an elusive enterprise:  even when words themselves fail, these compositions speak in other ways.

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Rebecca Warren’s show is mysteriously titled “Feelings.” Despite her calculated use of irony, I find the emotions invoked here to be both intense and conflicting.  Upon entering the gallery space one might think that this is a show of two different sculptors’ work:  abstract steel compositions sit quietly in dialogue with unfired clay figurative sculptures featuring comically exaggerated feminine curves.  This play of contrasts between the cool restraint of the dark steel and the provocative, caricatured figures hand-worked in white clay gives us an initial clue to the inner conflict that drives the work.  As it turns out, the main conflict is not between abstraction and figuration; this is just a surface manifestation of the deeper issue.  Rather, Warren seems to be asking how she, as a sculptor, can find a place of her own alongside the giants, and how she might make a new contribution while standing in their shadow.  This is a difficult and necessary question for any serious artist, but it is even more fraught when one is female.

One unifying feature of both the steel compositions and the clay figures is that they both quote heavily from older male predecessors.  The abstract steel pieces are direct descendants of Anthony Caro and Richard Serra.  The clay figures are a hybrid.  The imagery is based on R. Crumb, but the style evokes Picasso and Giacometti.  The wheeled platform beneath one of the sculptures is a nod to David Smith. What keeps Warren from being merely a mimic of these masters is the distance that she achieves through appropriation and irony.  Her clay figures are modeled with a great touch and sensitivity to weight and proportion.  The shapes themselves, however, are both whimsical and disturbing.  The female form is reduced to a collection of fetishes, of high-heeled feet, calves, thighs, buttocks, breasts, and pudenda.   The heads, when there are heads, are shrunken down so that they look phallic balanced on the figures’ long necks.  Warren pushes the artistic representation of the female body to its most absurd extreme and thereby takes on the larger issue of the female nude in art.  She seems to be simultaneously poking fun at the tradition and at the same time leveling a serious challenge against it, all the while acknowledging that she cannot simply reject her artistic heritage.

Warren enacts a similar distancing gesture with the steel compositions.  Upon close inspection of two of the pieces, one finds a small fuzzy pompom incongruously attached to the surface.  The ironic intention is obvious, although its aim is less clear.  Is she making fun of Serra and Caro, or is she making fun of herself for wanting to make work like them?  Whichever the meaning, the joke falls flat here.  The pompom itself, however, might well serve as a fitting emblem for the feelings behind the work.  It seems as though the underlying anxiety here is of being merely a cheerleader for the tradition:  an acolyte but never an actor.  Warren self-consciously appropriates for herself the emblems of the cheerleader with these works.  After all, cheerleaders are known for their exaggerated feminine curves, they hold pompoms, and they stay on the sidelines as showy but ineffectual mascots, relegated to supporting the men on the field.  Warren, of course, is a real player, but the question is whether she depends too much on the language of irony in reassure herself, and her audience, of that fact.

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