July 7 to August 12, 2016
1 Rivington Street at Bowery
New York City,  info@onstellarrays.com

In Keegan Monaghan’s paintings city life is solid and luminous, forms are dreamy and rounded, and subjectivity is submerged into surfaces that sparkle with thick oil. On view during the heat wave of July and August, the artist’s debut commercial solo show at On Stellar Rays consisted of five canvases (all 2016) and one free-standing sculpture of painted wood, foam, and resin. Each work depicts a specific point-of-view: a movie theatre crowd; a police car at night; a stone façade framing a view into a domestic interior; a plate resting on a lap. A pleasurable structural integrity unites the series—all of the surfaces have a stuccolike quality and a dark violet atmosphere pops against touches of bright green, orangey pink, and rich indigo. The rectangle shape and scale of the work, roughly the dimensions of a subway station billboard, engage the viewer on a bodily level.

The paintings flash a vibrant density across a room, but as figurative scenes they are surprisingly complex. In Security grey monolithic stones frame a rusty-orange window that bears a resemblance to a picture frame. A metal grating over the window offers a bisected view into a pink living room. Monaghan might be suggesting a personal incarceration, but it is an appealingly goofy one—as if Peter Halley’s “cell paintings” of fluorescent grounds and hard-edged squares had been re-imagined with freshly optimistic eyes. The ubiquitous materials of the city, concrete and metal, are lovingly realized with bits of color built piecemeal like a 21^st pointillism. The smallest detail of Security is a painting on the wall of the room, rendered in a few daubs and strokes. Perhaps this painting-in-a-painting is the real “security” here, and art can exist as a protective center within these industrial blocks we inhabit.

Another ambiguous urban message is conveyed in The Sign Post, a portrait of a police car that has the presence of a mascot in this series. The chunky cruiser is all round edges, caught in the warped space of an intersection that makes it the center of the universe. The street is empty of people with the exception of a pant leg walking out of the frame. It’s a Sesame Street moment that comes up against the loaded symbolism of the car. The vehicle’s red and blue glowing lights are reminiscent of Jane Dickson’s Night Driving series of cars on the road. Painted with oil on Astroturf, Dickson’s cars convey an elegant pathos connected to an expansive narrative about loneliness and American highway culture. In Monaghan’s world the car is a more benevolent form, a factual character like the other paintings’ plush furniture and houseplants.

Art is on view as the feature presentation in Thriller, a work that depicts a movie theatre audience raptly watching a rectangle screen of a pointing Philip Guston paw-hand. A slight nostalgia comes through in the rendering of the red, velvet-curtained space. The crowd might be packed into an Art Deco cinema palace, a nod to a time when the collective experience of looking at moving images was a dramatic event in itself. The exhibit has its own burst of drama when the fourth wall is broken by a life size sculpture of a purple desk holding a fabricated green lamp, newspaper, coffee mug, and donut. The piece looks beamed-in from the film noir cartoon Who Framed Roger Rabbit and stands as a touching intermediary between our world and the space of the paintings.

This vision of urban life moves into the fuzzy space of lived experience with the most visually nuanced work on view, My Place. The painting seems borne directly from the artist’s head with two round holes cut out of puffy orange brain matter that look outward onto a well-appointed living room. But the “brain” has it’s own living room too, replete with furniture, rug, and art. Is there no escape from the rooms of the self, and would we want to escape them even if we could? This puzzling Russian doll syndrome is the human condition, and it’s thrilling to see a young painter address it with formal mastery and playfully knotted humor.

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The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, organized by Laura Hoptman and Margaret Ewing, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, December 14, 2014 to  April 5, 2015.

NORA GRIFFIN: My first response to “The Forever Now” was to separate the paintings from the show’s conceptual framework of atemporality and emphasis on the digital present, because to me this language seem too reductive and denies the embodied experience of looking at and making a painting. It seems unjust to paintings to try and make them illustrate and speak to these broad, intangible, and global phenomena. Painting begins with a specific subjectivity, that of its maker, and I come to a painting to have a communion with that subjectivity. I think this is the first essay I’ve read where Zombies and Cannibals are celebrated instead of feared. Where’s the human in all this? There was a pervasive “betterment through technology” refrain in Hoptman’s text that was troubling because I don’t think painters agree with this model. Painting has a ton of longing in it, the medium is a form of longing, and the burden (and joy) of history is not lightened by its digital accessibility. Laura Owens and Matt Connors were standouts to me in that they both seemed to push the medium forward with rigor, while keeping a human strangeness alive. And Amy Sillman’s work had the presence of humility and calibrated choices. I’m wondering where each of you locate subjectivity in this show?

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Does painting have a greater capacity for longing or for subjectivity than any other medium? I don’t think so. Surely a photograph, a video or an installation can embody as much (or as little) longing and subjectivity as a canvas. The properties specific to painting are, I think, of a different order (and, let me hasten to add, these specific properties encompass much more than allowed by the Greenbergian notion of “areas of competence”). My first response to this show’s contention that contemporary painters are “atemporal” because they can so easily access the art of all periods and styles was to think: Didn’t André Malraux make a similar observation in the late 1940s with his notion of the “museum without walls”? Inspired in part by Walter Benjamin, Malraux argued that photographic reproductions of artworks had made all periods equally available. It may be true that digital technology and the Internet have vastly expanded and accelerated our access to art history, but I don’t think that “atemporality” is such a novel idea.

BECKY BROWN: It is easy to undermine the premise of atemporality in any number of ways, most obviously for its not being as new or original as the show claims. Of course related ideas are at the heart of quintessentially Modern movements like Futurism and Cubism, not to mention Postmodernism, but I give the show credit for attempting to tackle something of what is undeniably unique about our current moment. Perhaps the word “atemporality” isn’t quite right, but the range and quantity of information that we have access to every minute — and perhaps even take for granted — needs to be addressed. Along with access, it is the form (or formlessness) of this information that distinguishes our moment from earlier ones — libraries and museums present organizational systems while the Internet allows each individual to create his/her own in a space where information is ubiquitous but completely dematerialized.

JASON STOPA: I agree that the conceptual framework was somewhat limiting, but it remains that these works were made during a specific time in Western history. No doubt the cultural environment they were produced under has had some effect, consciously or unconsciously. The idea of atemporality seems to have some merit insofar as there seems to be a struggle to attach an over-arching narrative to our moment. Lately, I feel there are nearly as many sub-narratives in art as there are individual subjectivities. This may be closer to our lived sense of reality, but it also makes it difficult to apply a wide-reaching criterion. For me, the artists that embodied subjective concerns were Michael Williams and Nicole Eisenman. Both painters exhibited a few strange, quasi-figurative paintings that were formally exciting. Their resulting images struck me as irreverent and a little spooky.

DENNIS KARDON: Nora, I would like to expand on that a little, because I think you have hit the most troubling aspect of the show, which is the general attitude of the Modern to painting. First, for me the pantheon of the subjectivity you suggest, would be Charline Von Heyl (though not her best work), Sillman (looking better, and more focused than in her retrospective), Mark Grotjahn who for me is amazing, and Eisenman (whose work was curatorially pigeonholed in a way calculated to ignore just how strongly it’s been animated by narrative). As a painter what fascinates me, looking at a painting, is parsing the huge number of decisions a painter continuously makes, builds on, revises. It is a perception-based process that directs, through those particularities of decision-making, the attention of a viewer. Those attention-directing decisions construct a consciousness that communicates with a viewer’s consciousness. It is why I can look at a painting again and again — because these decisions not only can take on new meaning as the cultural context changes, but also as new ones reveal themselves. The fact that Eisenman’s paintings were hung extremely high out of the range of intimate examination, and that Josh Smith’s were exhibited in a big grid, as though no particular one was interesting, or that Kerstin Brätsch’s huge paintings were stacked against the wall, or a bunch of Oscar Murillo canvases were piled on the floor to be “interacted with” by museum-goers, is indicative that to the curators at MoMA painting is just an idea, and not a physical communication of consciousness.

CARRIE MOYER: The notion of subjectivity has been changed by the Internet and digital culture in that we are now “curators” of our own influences. Therefore the Superfan is the normative, subject position from which to paint. (Just ask any art student who has had to map out their own artistic family tree.) Add this to the fact that contemporary painting continues to be self-reflexive — despite the long drubbing of Greenberg. In other words, information gathering (research) resulting in strategic positioning has become as big a part of one’s subjectivity as any other social marker or life event. Perhaps this is why Eisenman, one of the least hermetic artists in “The Forever Now,” and who very rarely speaks about her influences, gets a mere two paragraphs near the end of the Laura Hoptman’s catalog essay.

BROWN: I disagree that “unconventional” hangings and installations (Murillo, Brätsch, Smith, Connors, Eisenman, Joe Bradley) prevented individual communions with these works. I was happy to see painting open itself up to different modes of address. Certainly this is pretty common these days — as it should be — but I am hardly less likely to have a meaningful experience with a painting if it is propped rather than hung on a wall, as Brätsch and Connors made clear; or if it is hung in a group rather than by itself (as Bradley and Smith made clear). For me, there was an uncanny, maybe tongue-in-cheek picture of subjectivity in the theme of heads and faces, in different forms, throughout the show — physically present or notably absent. Eisenman’s faces/masks most obviously; the obscured faces that were supposedly starting points for Grotjahn’s sweeping compositions; the mask-like face that appears out of nowhere in Charline von Heyl’s Carlotta (2013); the floating faces that keep coming to the surface in Michael Williams’ paintings; and Michaela Eichwald’s frightening Louis XIV-like face whose small scale and high placement on the wall makes it jump out like a nightmare in a window. Since there is very little figuration in this show, it felt relevant to me that much of it seemed to take this often ghostly or disembodied shape.

GRIFFIN: Becky’s noting of the faces being the main figurative element represented in the show is really interesting. Were there any bodies? (And a side note, I agree with Dennis that I find Eisenman’s groups of people, her “Beer Drinkers” series, carries more weight and social meaning than these disembodied heads. There’s something definitely “spooky,” to use Jason’s word, about the heads, but also light and easily digestible.) I think the high hanging of many of the works made them unnecessarily monumental. Why do we have to see Bradley’s paintings hung like they are resplendent with meaning on the first wall of the exhibition, when their only saving grace might be in their off-hand childlike whimsy, and whatever pleasure I could’ve gleaned from the work was dampened by the accompanying wall text’s far-reaching references to Abstract Expressionism and Jungian imagery.

KARDON: It was the desire to privilege this “unconventionality” of presentation that annoyed me, especially when it seemed designed to diminish the actual work. The salon-style Bradley installation, emphasized the iconic aspects and played down the awkward qualities and large scale embodied by the “Schmagoo” label that the works possessed when originally exhibited serially, at ground level, at CANADA in 2008 (and not really representative of the rest of his work). I have seen grids of Smith paintings that made more sense, but not these, again with the intention not to have to engage with any one of them. When Brätsch had about five of those giant frames stacked against a wall one on top of the other, why should I look at any one of them? Why does painting need to open itself up to “different modes of address” if not to try to make the presentation usurp the actual painting? Why don’t we display books on the ceiling? Wouldn’t that make them more exciting?

STOPA: I think this discussion surrounding the presentation of painting is interesting and appropriate given the manifold ways in which we view artwork today. Hoptman makes this statement early in her essay: “What atemporal painters do not do is use a past style in an uninflected manner, in other words, as a readymade.” I would argue that this is actually what Murillo is up to, particularly in his choice to exhibit a work on the floor. In general, his work employs a set of all-too-familiar Neo-Expressionist mannerisms in a collage-like manner. Unfortunately for him, it produces diminishing returns. The issue in pulling from historical styles without understanding what that particular genre’s conceptual aim was, is that it runs the risk of being an image that is simply “all dressed up.” That is to say, it has the right look, but doesn’t attempt to get any deeper than its artistic ancestors (both formally or conceptually). It’s a surface-over-substance argument. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you don’t satisfy the latter, then you might be making paintings for the quick read of a computer screen, which raises the question: why is it an object at all if it is not going to announce its status as such? I am not particularly invested in Smith’s work, but I think the way he plays with presentation suggests a certain tongue-in-cheek humor.

RUBINSTEIN: As Jason notes, the show was thick with revivals of past manners. Grotjahn = Jean-Paul Riopelle; Rashid Johnson = Antoni Tàpies; Julie Mehretu = Cy Twombly; Murillo = Julian Schnabel. To my eye, only one of these four painters, Grotjahn, offers enough newness (of content, technique, forms) to escape looking derivative. But Hoptman would have it that to make such comparisons, to insist on originality, to want something “new” is to fall into nostalgia for a vanished era. My question is: are we really in a cultural moment when originality doesn’t matter? I would suggest that the old criteria are still operative. They certainly are for me. If Murillo seems to me the weakest artist in the show it is largely because his work doesn’t seem to have made something new out of its obvious influences, and if Owens seems to me one of the strongest, it is because her paintings don’t look like any I have seen before.

BROWN: I think we still desire originality in painting, despite its being supposedly passé. It is necessary not just as newness for its own sake, but because we want art that speaks specifically, and sincerely, to our time. Works that are not original cannot do this because whatever earlier ideas or styles they choose to rehash (or whatever variant on “re-” you want to employ, and Hoptman gives us a lot of options), cannot speak specifically to our time, unless the rehashing truly results in something new. I would agree about Owens’ work stands out in this respect. Its alien-quality comes from the fact that it provokes new ways of seeing and thinking about our world: how we conceive depth and dimensionality today (2D, 3D and virtual space); the scale and architecture of the Internet, operations of reading versus seeing and their total integration; the new spectrum of HD sharpness for images, Photoshop filters, the difference between blurry, pixelated, grainy, etc. as ways of being out of focus, and so on.

STOPA: I like Raphael’s comment here: “I would suggest that the old criteria [for originality] are still operative. They certainly are for me.” I have to agree. We might be living in a creative free-for-all moment, but I don’t believe that means that the search for originality and establishing criteria should be dismissed. This is a half-thought, so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe that what happens in the virtual realm is a kind of leveling. In the so-called democratic sphere of social media, where popular consensus equals good, and the good equals important/valuable, locating the important issues is tricky business for curators and critics to parse out.

MOYER: Our notion of subjectivity has to change as a result of how much time artists spend mining for data to support and/or differentiate their position and/or work. This occurred to me after I read this passage in the catalog essay: “Connors points to a genealogy of influences that includes artists from a large section of the postwar art-historical map: in addition to the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters whom he mentions generally, he cites Henri Matisse, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman, Paul Feeley, Kenneth Noland, Yves Klein, Daniel Buren, Martin Barré, Olivier Mosset, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel and Sigmar Polke. Looking at one of his highly saturated monochromes in the color of a Los Angeles sunset, one can only agree, that against the better judgment of our teleologically programed brains, all of the references are there.” Kippenberger? Really? What contemporary abstract painter hasn’t been influenced by Matisse? This list practically begs to be critiqued. There is no doubt that to become a really good painter, one must be catholic in the study of other painters. What makes Connors’ list unique to the Age of the Selfie, is how completely it de-contextualizes and flattens the individual artists cited (both obvious and obscure) and converts them into data points on a personal rhizome. The sheer sweep of influences cited by Connors renders each one so nonspecific as to be meaningless.

BROWN: I agree with Carrie’s point about the “flattening” of one’s influences and references in a way that completely drains them of meaning. Similarly disheartening were the “data points” listed on the wall texts next to the works of Johnson and Richard Aldrich. How exactly do these paintings have anything to do with the Berlin Conference, Black Orpheus, Franz Kline or Kanye West? This list provides insight into his “personal rhizome,” or his particular path through the Internet on a given afternoon, but has little relation to his own artistic output, which to me has little else to stand on. Works by von Heyl and Brätsch might be wise to put their references to Lucio Fontana and Polke aside for different reasons: their works speak strongly for themselves, and it’s hard to hear them with all that background noise.

RUBINSTEIN: Perhaps the really defining feature of “The Forever Now” is its eclecticism. Some people have observed that this is MoMA’s first survey of painting since Kynaston McShine’s “International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” in 1984. That, remember, was the show that provoked the creation of the Guerrilla Girls because of its near total exclusion of women artists. (That’s not a problem, thankfully, with “The Forever Now.”) What McShine’s show did was to track the reemergence of figuration, the “return” of painting, the moment of Neo-Expressionism. The scale was vast (195 works by 165 artists from 17 countries) in comparison to Hoptman’s show, but even with only a handful of artists Hoptman presents a contemporary landscape of various stylistic options, none of them dominant. I almost wish she had taken a polemical position, argued that one mode of painting was more worthy of attention than others. When I saw the wall of Bradley’s Schmagoo paintings I thought for a moment that she would do so, but the show turned out to be a sampling of contemporary painters. I know that no style dominates as Neo-Expressionism did in the 1980s, but isn’t there some alternative to eclecticism? I would argue, of course, that “provisionality” provided such an alternative taxonomy circa 2008. Is there another one now?

GRIFFIN: Raphael, I have similar longings when I encounter so much eclecticism in one show, much of it coming across as re-heated versions of earlier, more powerfully present modern art works. I think the rise of the curatorial voice in the past decades and the slow decay of art magazines as authorial voices, and the smaller percentage of artists who are also writers (this group notwithstanding!), contributes to more jargon-y approaches to discussing and framing art in terms of eclecticism. For a painting show that was meant to emphasize an “anxiety-free,” fluid approach to history, I felt art history like a weight, bearing down and not letting these paintings breathe. “The Forever Now” is the kind of show that makes me fantasize about walking into the “16 Americans” exhibit in 1959 and seeing a Frank Stella painting for the first time. The shock of the new is Modernism. And I would also argue it is intrinsically linked to painting. Not new as a gimmick, but new as a radical departure from the everyday world outside the museum. For me, newness is equated with strangeness: is this a painting I have never seen before? As Becky and Raphael noted, Owens looked strong here because of the “alien quality” of her paintings, they cannot be readily equated with another painter or style.

KARDON: What exactly is our time? We have been conditioned to think it has something to do with (as Becky puts it): “new ways of seeing and thinking about our world: how we conceive depth and dimensionality today (2D, 3D and virtual space); the scale and architecture of the Internet, operations of reading versus seeing and their total integration; the new spectrum of ‘sharpness’ for images.” But that leaves out a lot of life: all the relationships with other people, lovers, children, our relationship to growing old and dying, our fears, our sexuality and gender. If anything our time is about distraction, an inability to concentrate on anything for more than a short length of time. But despite the way our attention has been captured by the digital flattening, what stands out is what occurs in our experience of the physical world. We make our decisions of value and originality on what we experience physically, not digitally, which is why we all thought it was important to actually see this show rather than experience it on a screen. We might become aware of something digitally, but I don’t think we really make a value decision about physical works of art unless we can experience them in the flesh. And, is our present moment forever? I think not. That is the paradox of positing an eternal present as a zeitgeist: it can’t last forever.

GRIFFIN: I agree with Dennis about the human element missing from contemporary painting. This is what I was addressing in my first question about lack of a specific subjectivity in most work presented. But I would take a step to defend Owens’ paintings as being about all of the human things you list (love, death, sex, time, and space), but her magic is that she makes them invisibly tied to the material and pictorial elements of her work. I found her paintings sad, almost tragic, they’re not just a joyful celebration of the quirks of a computer screen and having fun with silkscreening; there is a pictorial content that comes from reading the words in the painting and meditating on the utter absurdity of an Internet ad for a bird feeder with a two-way mirror that allows people to spy on birds eating. A thick blob of dark brown paint on the canvas was like the last remnant of something “living” in the work, but it could also be a stand-in for bird shit. I’m not equating her with Philip Guston, but the myriad of emotions and visual splendor that characterizes his work does have contemporary counterparts, we just have to open our minds to finding them through sustained looking.

MOYER: It seems like one of the major anxieties of the past 20 years or so has been how painting will address, interact with, and/or avoid the digital. Computers have been ubiquitous in painters’ studios for a long time now (no matter how “handmade” the work looks), one important tool among many. This seems to come as a surprise to many critics and curators — I would point you to Roberta Smith’s review of Williams’ show at CANADA where the majority of the text concerns itself with which parts of the picture are hand painted, spray painted or simply printed canvas. So if digital anxiety (the underside of “anxiety-free,” fluid approach to history) is one of the subtexts of “The Forever Now,” one could parse out all 17 artists in terms of their relationship to technology. One has to applaud MoMA for setting up Modernist painting in a manner that “problematizes” it in a new way, the investigation is limited to ideas we already know about the computer, i.e. a tool for graphic design and production (Owens), drawing (Williams, Sillman), and research (everybody else). The density of the installation attempts a cursory stab at how computers change the way we see paintings; even the jpegs of the installation look very similar to a screen of thumbnail images. The sight lines are set up on a grid as multiple windows that seem to slide in and out of view while moving through the space.

STOPA: One would hope that the first survey of contemporary painting at MoMA in 30 years would have been executed differently. The anxiety of the digital has been a topic of conversation ever since the computer came into the painter’s studio. Ignoring it is not an option, but responses can and must be varied. Despite the technological condition that we live in, painters are still making objects. The project of museums, and I would argue of painting in general, is to set up conditions for sustained looking. Behind this, is the idea that the formal and conceptual content of a work reveals itself over time. And then there’s the issue of space and place. The paintings in “The Forever Now,” be they interesting or not, were so closely packed together that you could see everything and nothing at once. This sounds much like the arena of the Internet, where multiple browsers and images compete for quick attention spans. Doesn’t this installation undermine everyone involved? It compromises the notion that the audiences’ sustained looking will reward them with an affect of emotional or intellectual import.

BROWN: When I first walked around the show I felt energized by the range of possibilities and the vitality it seemed to put forth for the medium. However, on reflection, the work actually felt more the same than different. What it seems to share, in addition to this fuzzy notion of atemporality, is a position of being anti-language, anti-narrative and anti-history, in the sense that, as Hoptman proudly explains, these artists sample history without taking any position or any real responsibility. I would put forth Mike Cloud and R.H. Quaytman as two painters who both make sincere attempts to use language to communicate, tell stories and address history through research and understanding rather than name- (or image-) dropping. “The Forever Now” offers a lot of disembodied heads, empty masks and nonsense scribbles (the I-look-like-writing-but-I’m-not-saying-anything approach of Murillo and Mehretu) as an approach to dealing with a uniquely present past. I am left wondering if there might be more productive ways for artists to take advantage of the incredible, albeit terrifying digital archive at our disposal.

KARDON: It has been an amazing 33 years since Thomas Lawson published “Last Exit: Painting” in Artforum. The text is an exhaustive cataloguing of all the strategies that comprised (in 1981!) the scope of art making, and this is well before the digital era, and my question now, is has the situation really changed? In his text Lawson addresses the problem of “originality” in painting: “Whatever their sources, these artists want to make paintings that look fresh, but not too alienating, so they take recognizable styles and make them over, on a larger scale, with brighter color and more pizzazz. Their work may look brash and simple, but it is meant to, and it is altogether too calculated to be as anarchistic as they pretend.” These words could be applied to many of the artists on view in “The Forever Now.” In our discussion, as in all the reviews I have read, I intuit that we all feel there must be something better than this exhibition to represent the possibilities of painting to portray how it feels to be alive right now.

MOYER: I keep coming back to our daily interactions with the computer. If the jpeg is now the new normal for seeing, understanding and interacting with painting, what effect does it have in the studio? Should we be trying to make paintings that are flatter, more graphic, and look great rendered in only 256 colors? Facebook’s “5-day Art Challenge” (where an artist is asked to post three new images of unseen work for five consecutive days) is an interesting case study because most of the work posted has not been widely (if ever) reproduced, so there’s no assumption of prior familiarity. After watching the endless flow of images over the past few months, the biggest takeaway is that the jpeg is its own entity, a kind fuzzy approximation of specific information that reveals very little. Perhaps this is why artists feel the need to stake out their own personal rhizome of associations, as a means of filling in the physical, optical, emotional, intellectual information needed to understand what they have a stake. Of course, the problem with this solution is that it treats the studio as an “autonomous zone” free of critical context, where self-selected affiliations are often not inherent to the work per se and depend instead on sloppy material and/or formal equivalencies or mangled histories. In other words: I pour paint. So did Morris Louis. Therefore my work concerns itself with the history of Color Field painting. Back to those checked boxes…

GRIFFIN: Is it still possible to frame a group of painters under a single rubric? Raphael’s naming of “Provisional Painting” in his 2009 essay in Art in America gave us a chance to examine a group of contemporary painters within a historical context and described a phenomenon, “major painting masquerading as minor painting,” that is open enough to include a range of painting styles and conceptual intents. Terms can be useful because we can argue for or against them; they allow artists to talk about something other then their own personal universe, to see themselves as a group, collective, cohort, whatever you want to call it. The singularity of the artist in the digital age is maybe one of the more disquieting aspects of “The Forever Now.” Not to revert to nostalgia (a distinctly bad word in Hoptman’s essay), but we have to acknowledge that artists do not mix and mingle in the same way that they did in a pre-Internet world. The proof is in the pudding right here, with this email-based discussion!

RUBINSTEIN: Thanks, Nora, for the shout-out. It suddenly occurs to me that maybe the real problem with this show is that it is a show of paintings! If, as Hoptman contends, we really do live in an “atemporal” moment, shouldn’t this condition be evident in other mediums besides painting? Why wouldn’t people who make sculptures, for instance, be equally subject to “this new economy of surplus historical references”? Although I have often been guilty of mono-medium grouping myself (writing articles about painting, curating shows with only paintings in them), I worry that every painting show risks reinforcing the notion that painting is a special case, a privileged medium, an activity that is constantly turning back in on itself. Maybe painting shows that are primarily about “painting,” whether they come to celebrate it or to problematize it, help foster this exclusionary approach.

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Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 is on view at MoMA until August 3, 2014

NORA GRIFFIN: Since this exhibition is so vast and far-reaching, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the major polarities embodied in Polke’s work: the personal and the political; the sacred and profane; and the mystic and the materialist. Do others agree with this idea of Polke (which I believe the museum was successful in presenting) — as powerfully doubled in all he does?  I thought the atrium provided a kind of “best of” Polke — from the intimate watercolor/drawings of the 60s to the gigantic, beautifully lush abstract fabric painting Season’s Hottest Trends (2003). But two works in this room really stood out for me as book-ends to his practice. Starry Heavens Cloth (1968), a tactile cotton, cardboard “painting” that functions like a cosmological self-portrait of the artist, and The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Quaeda (2002), a massive digital print on vinyl that looks like an industrial army map or poster.  Are there other pairings of works (or bodies of work) in the exhibition that open up his practice?

SUZANNE JOELSON: The other pairing for me is between the private and the performative. The small journal drawings which are signed way after the fact, often without dates, were a way to think as opposed to the paintings that were clearly made for an audience. I often feel left out of his intimate work because they were not necessarily made to be seen. The bulk of his film projects were not made to be seen either, but there I am an engaged voyeur.

SAUL OSTROW: Funny – beside the weird decisions like the drawings – unlike the Brooklyn Museum show of some years ago where he was presented in an “orderly” manner, I thought the MOMA installation was more in keeping with Polke and his work – the chaos – the scale  – the sense of compression seemed very connected.

JOELSON: While this show might have seemed chaotic it provided a narrative order to Polke’s output that was not in the Brooklyn Museum show. Although there are no wall texts one gets the opening atrium space, then the student work, then the early career. His dots are so much more playful and visually delirious than that programmatic method tends to be. The explosion of the Afghan room and then the settling into a studio practice as a way to travel. A final coming home to alienation as process. What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful. The crankiness of his stance, his refusal to maintain a look, is part of what is important in the work. I came to feel in this show that his alienation was where he knew himself. When he got comfortable in West Germany he had to travel for that sense of horror. Eventually he set up unpredictable situations in his processes to keep the sense of alienation alive at home. That is what we, who like to label, might call his “mature work.”

ERIC GELBER: I have no qualms with the avoidance of strict chronology. It is the lack of depth I mind. But this is a beef with curatorial practice. I wish they had given a large wall strictly to his works on paper. The huge show that the MoMA had in the 1990s of his works on paper was the first and best encounter I had with Polke’s work. The work in that show, almost all of which is missing here, was busy, frantic, truly eye and mind opening from a formal perspective. We also shouldn’t forget the backdrop of Nazism, which haunted almost all of Polke’s work. Not only was Polke anti-capitalist he was also anti-art to a certain extent, always undermining any painterliness by generating and canceling out compositional elements. I wish there were more works from the 70s, busy paintings with stickers and other added material. That is when his anti-capitalist spirit was truly inspired, in my opinion. Talking about dualities, the profane/mystical might be helpful in terms of iconography, but as ideas I think it is kind of silly to crucify his work on those particular crosses. Not unlike Kiefer, he had a morbid fascination with Germany’s Nazi past: the swastika was seared into his consciousness.

OSTROW: I’m not sure if it’s alienation – he reflects a very particular German experience – his work reflects post-war Germany – the period of de-Nazification, the division of East and West, the rapid rebuilding of West Germany, the tension of the Cold War – etc. and then there is also the German tradition of the artist as magician and fool – as such he makes this work against a very different background then his counterparts in the States. One needs to remember that all of Warhol’s celebs are tragic figures – I think that the idea that he is enthralled with is the public role that Warhol plays – likewise I ‘m not sure that Polke is such an outsider – when I lived in Cologne you would see him and his entourage – he was very public – the notion of the magnus is probably more applicable than that of the mystic – peyote, LSD, opium, and mescaline get one to the otherside without necessarily having anything to do with transcendence – therefore I tend to see Polke as trying to produce a type of social realism of the psyche

JOELSON: I am thinking not only of personal alienation associated with his move to West Germany at the age of 12 when most of us feel alienated from our bodies anyway, but of Brechtian alienation, innate in the engagement and denial in the work. Yes, and re: “social realism of the psyche” would you say then, getting back to Nora’s initial dualities- psychic realism and capitalist realism?

OSTROW: Perhaps what we are seeing in the Polke show is what it means to be a Stateless artist – whereas Gerhard Richter is the work of a refugee who in order to fit in becomes more patriotic than a native born citizen. Polke is like an alien who continues to identify with the old country – though if he goes back he no longer recognizes anyone and all of the places he’s familiar with are gone.

DREW LOWENSTEIN: Polke’s historical and cultural negotiation is more open to play, and wonderment than that of Kiefer or Richter.  Like Kiefer, he experiments with materials and comes to believe in a traditional form of the total artwork.  Pagannini, The Illusionist, and Mrs Autumn and her Two Daughters are examples.  But unlike Kiefer, Polke rejects Beuysian shamanism and does not peddle the idea of recovery or regeneration from the German Nazi past.  Additionally, the painting Constructivist (1968), points out  Polke’s suspicion of adopting international modernist idioms to mask the past and  also reflects a distrust of the art culture market. He is resistant and like Suzanne suggests alienated. His resistance and playfulness is his pathway to creative struggle and freedom. I think it’s important to remember that he doesn’t find this resistance antithetical to historical painting.  He is quoted on the first page of the catalogue as saying, “even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I am following an academic path.  I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures.  It’s a way of understanding what is largely determined by tradition.”

GRIFFIN: Just to take up the thread of commerce and Pop art as seen in Polke’s work in the early 60s. I kept ruminating on the idea of an “abject” Pop art. Chocolate Painting and Biscuits (both 1964) seem so innocent, almost naively painted, with the gloss and definition of sign painting. The “abstract” paintings from the same era Jewelry,Beans,Silver Break, and Snowdrops seem edgily contemporary to me, perhaps this has to do with the paintings’ surface: colored, or patterned fabric, a recurring material for Polke. Suzanne says: “What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Rauschenberg, Ginsberg Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful.” I agree here, that his images of marketable “things” are always highly personalized and never about glorifying the objects. The restraint and paint handling reminds me of John Wesley a bit. Especially the seriality of the enamel painting Socks (1963).

GELBER: Polke saying whether or not he feels alienated doesn’t help us get into the work. What artist is allowed to be anything but alienated from the history and politics of their native country? I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by. Supermarkets (1976), Paganini (1981-83) and the “Color Experiments” from (1982-86) were highlights for me. John Wesley is a good call but I think Polke was more interested in the subversive qualities of the comics he stole from rather than their aesthetic qualities. He liked black outlining, like Max Beckmann did, and Polke turned towards allegory in his late work. I find Polke to be a stronger draftsman than a painter. He worked on cloth because it lent itself to collage and staining rather than nuanced layering of tones. The “Color Experiments” series are probably the most purely painterly stuff in the exhibition. In Supermarkets he is mocking consumerism, but clearly he loves the imagery he puts to use as an ideological bludgeon.

OSTROW: Polke’s work can be seen to be discursive in the sense that it is a series of dialogues with and about the very Law he has decided not to partake in – in a manner he stands beside the very traditions that would subsume him and in doing so deploys them as he wishes. I was struck by how Polke seems to engage the notion of the return not only of the repressed but of the desired – he does this by projecting one onto another – his imagery  tends to be metonymic rather than metaphorical. If painting is to be about opticality – he literally paints distortion, if it is to be about process he paints process, if it is about the impossibility of narrative – he paints narratives of self-cancellation, etc. In this way he is literal without being illustrative. I’ve been reading the new translation of Kafka’s The Trial and find a parallel between Kafka’s writing and Polke’s painting in the sense that everything is always itself and its own other. If I understand it, Suzanne’s reference was to Brechtian alienation which is performative – it is a way to engage the audience in such a manner that the illusion of the theater is itself made explicit – they are distanced so that they might watch themselves being manipulated. In this sense the artist Polke may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy, self-doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.

JOELSON: Regarding Eric’s statement, “I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by.”  As much as I resist seeing “default” or “expect all” in a sentence about art, I do agree. Is this because as a culture we are fixated on adolescence, a time of emergent sexuality and change? This is reflected in our taste for unfinished paintings from Cézanne and Manet to current work which conveys potential rather than certainty.I think it was Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books who said that the fascination with emigré writing is because anyone who has gone through adolescence knows what it is to be alienated from your childhood. Something about “best offerings” is anathema to enthusiasts of Polke’s high wire act. We are more interested in his near misses. When I saw one watchtower painting 20 years ago I thought it the worst Polke ever because it was didactic and humorless and bound to its over potent image. In this show, seeing six of them I was moved. They evoke Auschwitz but also the idea of purposeful directed looking and the anxiety of being watched. Many towers in a room seem inescapable as opposed to a lone dismissible picture in an art show, or it might be the change in times and a recent predilection toward content. I wanted to see them in a circle.

GELBER: This is a great idea – it would turn the viewer into the viewed in a literal sense. You would become self-conscious in the act of looking by becoming the surrounded object. I know that Polke wanted to conjure up feelings of foreboding with this series. The colors are dark, dreary, anti-humanist. And I did spend a lot of time in this room with them, but I found myself thinking things like, “Oh is that a shower curtain he stuck on there?” I wanted to be moved by them more than I was. I think the way we see has been changed by the computer monitor and handheld device screen. I am not convinced that this will radically alter the painting and drawing process, with regards to how viewers take them in. Certainly painters have been impacted by pixelated imagery, webpage layout, Photoshop filters, etc. Polke’s struggle with pictorial space is one of the most interesting characteristics of his work. If an artist is going to work with traditional formats how can they make something that is genuinely contemporary, or is pastiche or mimicry the only options at this point?

JOELSON: Another Polke polarity is between the barest gesture, the incidental image and the magnum opus. This was also the case in the drawing show years back. A stick of butter on one wall and the whole acid trip covering another. The underwhelming aspect of so much work invites the viewer to complete the picture, to meet it halfway. In “our moment here” everything is going on. There are a lot of little umbrellas outside and within the big tent of the art market. From artists who have to work full time to cover their rent and then have little time in the studio, to artists who imagine extensive labor will fill-in where inspiration ended, from “bring it on” to enough is enough. Ezra Pound’s modernist adage to “make it new” has been replaced by “make it extreme.” Is that a reflection of our national economy? One thing about Germany is they still have an effective middle class and they build things (cars, appliances). How does this affect art in Germany now? I loved how the sausages are simple flat foot food, and yet essentialist in form. I think we have an internally informed, biological response to that linkage.

GRIFFIN: Saul made this comparison of Polke to Johns which I find illuminating: “In this sense the artist he may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy – self doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.”  Of the many personas and alibis that were presented for the artist in the show, the one I was most moved by was the figure of Polke as a painter, confined to the rectangle, pigment, and fabric. The compactness and formalism of his paintings is breathtaking and really (to me) makes the performances, film footages, photographs, and even the drawings, seem lightweight and inconsequential. I understand that the show was presenting a full-blown portrait of Polke as an artist here, but I did yearn for a show that just displayed the paintings so we might focus on the most masterful aspect of his work. Llyn Foulkes, Chris Martin, and Paul Thek are three American artists I couldn’t stop thinking about as I went through the rooms. The high and low aspects of the sex and drug culture of the 60s and 70s meets the sacred temple of Modernist painting. The urge to bring painting into space itself, to have a painting transcend its physical limits, whether by alchemy (with silver nitrate crystals and meteorite resin), sheer silliness (like the Alice in Wonderland painting), or the horror of history (the watchtower series), seems to be a noble even heroic venture that few artists are involved with today.

OSTROW: Seemingly Polke offers us an alternative to pastiche or mimicry – what he offers us in place of pictures of things is an assemblage (in which each part retains its own identity while offering some aspect of itself to the whole). The effect of this is to force our minds to wander – or to multi-task – in this sense these works emphasize painting as an analog – a means to present information not only  through  its ability to depict things but also by means of  its physical quantities.  Polke demonstrates how the media continuously affects our reading of that information.  There is also a persistent effort by Polke to use a single signifier to reference multiple signified – as such his images exist in a shifting “framework.” These shifts are not a function of the viewer (ie, associations) but the work’s materiality or lack of it – in this we might think of Polke’s work as functioning under the sign of Hermes – whose name is the root for hermeneutics.

LOWENSTEIN: I was not moved by the watchtower paintings. I don’t think Polke does gravitas. Suddenly Germany was thrust into an absurdist geopolitical “role” that created a new narrative that obscured German atrocities.  Germany became a buffer for freedom and commerce against Soviet tyranny.  It’s a mind-blowing free pass.  Soviet/US tension is a gift that fell into Germany’s lap. No wonder the German public was shocked when Polke, Kiefer and others touched on the Holocaust years later.  Polke’s split sense of self manifests in his acute awareness of his “role” as an Adenauer-generation artist.  In a sense, he and his peers were stepping onto the world’s cultural stage as Germany’s representatives in the aftermath of German atrocities. Is the artist’s “role” one of action, escape, cynicism or dreaded consensus?  Polke’s dancing between the raindrops as he plays the role of the art prankster, philosopher, and magician-escapist. This is reflected in the ambiguity, possibility, and cancellation we sense in the work. The split self, the doubling, just spills out.  But he finds a new pictorial space to work in. He discovers an expanded space of transparency when he works both sides of the support and opens up a space for more light by using plastic in the late period lenticular paintings.

OSTROW: We haven’t even touched on Polke’s approach to self-referentiality in the sense of his use of analogy rather than metaphor, for instance the notion of the watch tower is not only a question of the Holocaust, but also that of guarding of borders (the east west divide)- it is also  a platform from which to observe – it represents the vertical view – the overview – which is a view that unlike the horizontal view is disengaged.

GELBER: I believe this was touched on earlier by Suzanne, the act of viewing and being viewed by the watchtowers. She had in mind a Panopticon, the go-to historical reference, thanks to Foucault. I think you are absolutely right about how the vertical orientation makes the watchtowers even more object-like, mimicking the real, in the way a real watchtower sticks out on the horizon in order to assume a position of power over those standing below it. There is a black ominous doorway shape in the painting Paganini that mimics a real doorway, as if we are invited to step into the painting.

JOELSON: I always like paintings of sailboats because there is a built vessel, a soft sail and the linear structure of the rigging. Polke’s watchtowers have that formal appeal as well as much else that has been said. They engage his antagonism to modern visuality as well as to seeing and being seen. It is not just the “gravitas” of the subject but its readiness for interpretation that weights this group. They emerge indelible, an intangible memory or the defining liminal image, a jewel that won’t melt away. The various means lets them flicker in and out of the material of this world. Their appearance as memory is innate to the stencil process. Eric, beside the fact that I think you and I are switching positions, I am confused, do you think Polke was always more accessible than Rauschenberg? Rauschenberg is my first great love. A decade later when I saw Polke he seemed like a shabby dissonant response to Rauschenberg’s innate enthusiasm and harmony with the world. But I came around,  just as after years of John Coltrane I came to love Ornette Coleman.

OSTROW: Another subject that I think needs to be taken up is the photograph and its reproduction. Polke comes back to the Ben-Day dots pattern over and over through his long career, like Warhol he wishes to render photography transparent and mutable.

GELBER: I think Polke’s (and Richter’s and Kiefer’s) need to break down the barriers between photography and painting/drawing goes hand-in-hand with Polke’s breaking down the barrier between drawing and painting in many works. The breaking down of compositional elements, combining different types of media, the flattening out collage effect, things discovered during Braque’s and Picasso’s analytical cubist phase, are deeply explored by Polke.

LOWENSTEIN: I think it’s a given that Polke and his peers were displaced from the Western narrative of how Modernism unfolded. Polke fell in love with Dada and Surrealism and stayed in love unconditionally. Sure, he misunderstood Pop, and merged it with Modernist-utopian ideas of art as agitation for change. But happily, dislocation and misunderstanding turned into the mother of invention and we get this wonderful art. It reminds me of a story about how the Marx Brothers were trying to steal a look at a baseball game but from their vantage point outside the stadium, they could only see action in a slice of left field. From that bit of information, they speculated and filled in the plays that they missed. Needless to say it was a more interesting version than what occurred on the field.

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Before you catch Magritte at the Museum of Modern Art this month, take a look at the contemporary version of Surrealist painting: Gladys Nilsson and Julia Benjamin. Gladys Nilsson (born 1940) has long been associated with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, a moniker that belies the utter goofy-strangeness of her work, and that of her husband, Jim Nutt. Her watercolor and gouaches introduce a cast of characters from a pre-modern village, embedded within densely-realized landscapes of preening trees and tottering flowers. The gooey-lyrical abstract oil paintings of Julia Benjamin (born 1984) share Nilsson’s obsession with figures in space. In Benjamin’s case, strokes and dabs of color people the canvas and oddly mirror Nilsson’s skewered compositional style. Installed side-by-side, the paintings speak to each other as two-sides of the same story.

Gladys Nilsson / Julia Benjamin is on view until October 20, 2013 at the National Exemplar. The gallery is located at 381 Broadway at White Street, 2nd Floor, and is open Thursday to Sunday, 2 to 7 PM. Contact: thenationalexemplar@gmail.com

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It’s always a call for celebration when painter Ron Gorchov’s watercolors are the sole subject of an exhibition. A show of new works on paper, cunningly titled “Curated by Watercolors,” will open Sunday, September 8 at Lesley Heller Workspace. Gorchov’s titles suggest a personal world informed  by Greek mythology, lyric poetry, and ’30s big band music. The attention to surface as a unique support is as evident here as it is in his majestic, saddle-shaped canvases. His technique of mounting the paper so it is not flush with the wall allows each watercolor a curling life of its own. Gorchov’s choice of color is at once hot, dark, and mysterious; lemon yellow, forest green, neon green, and deep cobalt blue are the fruits of hard won victories. Many of the watercolors, like the oil paintings, flirt with the pictorial, describing a twins in space motif, a dance between two parts that once were whole.  Keep dancing, Ron.

Ron Gorchov: Curated by Watercolors at Lesley Heller Worskspace will be on view till October 13, 2013. Lesley Heller is located at 54 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 11 AM to 6PM, and on Sunday from 12 to 6PM. Telephone: 212-410-6120

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June 27 to August 30, 2013
547 West 25th Street
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, a ruggedly alive exhibition organized by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, presents fifteen artists who were in their prime during that decade. By focusing on the physical reality of the artworks, and the social reality of this specific group of artists, the exhibition escapes the trap of misty-eyed nostalgia or explicit revisionism. In his catalog essay, Rubinstein discusses the show as a way to disengage the story of abstract painting from the bottom-line narratives that are seen as the “official account” of the decade, in particular the advent of celebrity-styled painters, and the dominance of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, two labels that had more to do with marketing than with painted content. Instead, he offers the phrase “impure abstraction,” a hybrid mode of working between abstraction and figuration, to flesh out a portrait of a painting culture that was not as beholden to the one-critic model of analysis that effected the previous generation in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.

Reinventing Abstraction is more concerned with the transition of painting cultures and the accruing of historical knowledge than it is with the particulars of the decadent decade itself. The back-story to the 1980s begins with the social radicalism of the 1960s, when the majority of the exhibition’s included artists were in school, and continues through the 1970s when they were fully experimenting with their practice in an art world that had largely turned away from painting in favor of the dematerialization of the art object. The off-the-stretcher abstraction being made in the ‘60s and ‘70s had its own moment in the sun with High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, an exhibition organized by Katie Siegel and David Reed, which Rubinstein acknowledges as a guiding spirit for his own show.

A feeling of disengagement from the immediate past manifests itself visually in many of the works on view. It is as if an invisible pane of glass were mounted on top of the canvas to emotionally cool off the fast and loose painted gesture. Jonathan Lasker’s Double Play (1987), a painting in elegant quotation marks, has all its ingredients diagrammed to perfection: a rich brown backdrop, radiating pink bars, and an area of gooey cross-hatched “painting” splashed up against the surface. David Reed’s No. 230 (For Beccafumi) (1985-6) is a vertical monument to the paint stroke, showing off a translucent-matte finish that is as sharp and slick as a silkscreen. In both works these artists are making visible the idea of painting as a compositional force sans the hot-headedness of late night studio labor. Similarly, Mary Heilmann’s exuberant Rio Nido (1987) is a play between foreground and background, between the painting as whole and the painting as parts. Blue, magenta, red, green, and yellow marks set against black are read as shot holes dripping paint, a remnant of an action, and the painting exists as the evidence.

Carroll Dunham’s Horizontal Bands (1982-83), is a Surrealism-inflected painting on pine board composed of alternating stripes of graphically rendered root vegetables, allowing one to see his trademark phalluses just over the horizon. The tentative nature of this early painting reads more as a private sketch than as a full-blown work, a proposition of fresh beginnings that charges many of the paintings on view. Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980-81), a dimensional portrait of a star-like figure, is thickly celestial, like a corner blow-up of a Van Gogh. Gary Stephan’s unromantically titled Untitled (#45418) (1988) is the most overtly mysterious work in the gallery, an image of a dusk-lit landscape divided in half by a biomorphic form that eclipses day into night.

What’s striking about several of the paintings in Reinventing Abstraction is their wall-dominating size. It’s a scale that brings to mind 18th-century history painting as easily as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), and speaks of financial resources and passion to burn. The lavish variety of surface textures and oil paint mixed with other media makes today’s abstract paintings seem especially anemic when it comes to materials and scale. Even the smallest work in the show, Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (630) (1988), radiates a deeply felt engagement with the largess of history and psychic space.

In comparison to the work on view in High Times Hard Times, the majority of artists in Reinventing Abstraction make their radical choices within the framed space of the traditional rectangle, putting an exquisite pressure on the pictorial possibilities of abstraction. A notable exception is Elizabeth Murray’s Sentimental Education (1982), a painting of conjoined parts whose scale and rapturous energy speak to the colossal task of painting as both action and object. For all its obvious labor of construction, the work epitomizes the fun aspects of high Modernism.  Her oil on canvas appears as malleable as a Play-Doh construction of cobalt colors and finely drawn zig-zags. In this painting, and indeed her entire body of work, Murray epitomizes the transcendent grace of the art student as grand master.

The paintings in Reinventing Abstractions are all un-mistakenly the work of grown-up artists coming to terms with inherited values while finding new rhythms with which to move abstraction forward. In this sense, the art could be seen as a visual complement to Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a portrait of the decade in which commercial entertainment culture solidified its hold on American society, while also letting in the dreamy, fluent potential of Postmodernism as a way to break free from Modernism’s flight of progress. As a citizen of a tightly sealed, pluralist art world it can be easy to long for this not too distant past. It is important to fight this backward glance, and instead to ask, what does remain? I can think of a few things: the factuality of paint, the presence of art history and mentors, and the still shocking ability of a new abstract painting to dismantle the fiction of linear time, if only for a minute or two.

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June 28 to August 17, 2013
36 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal
New York City, 212-995-1774
(Summer hours: Tues – Sat, 11 AM – 6:30 PM, or by appointment)

An art object has no clearly defined purpose beyond the recognition of itself as art. The un-nameable complexity of what art is can be reinforced by its material proximity to objects that are industrial, entertaining, or fragmented beyond recognition–all of which are qualities that art can hold as well. The seven artists included in Conspicuous Unusable at Miguel Abreu Gallery make work that highlights this definition of art in relation to utility and refuse-like materials. The show’s title draws on a line from Heidegger in which he states that objects that are no longer used for their assigned role (for example, a broken clock) do not “vanish simply” but instead, take a “farewell in the conspicuousness of the unusable.” This philosophical framework opens up a space for reverent (but thankfully not overly high-minded) contemplation of visual art’s relationship to its other: the purposeful object. The exhibition explores these questions with a tense and interesting collection of works that evoke the intellectual spirit of classic Minimalism but with a more quiet mindfulness of the limitations of the grand gesture.

Dorothea Rockburne’s contribution is Study for Scalar (1970), a wall piece series that skirts the line between painting and installation in which six sheets of crude oil-stained paper, nailed to equally stained chipboards are arranged in three perfectly aligned pairs on a wall. The opulent, aged residue of the oil on the surface of both paper and board, a rugged evidence of action taken, is thrown into a strange relief by the cleanly economic use of nails to adhere paper to board and board to wall. The seriality of Rockburne’s work seems more like a musical variation than a ratio for linear time; there is no limit to the affinities one can keep discovering between paper, board, oil, and wall placement. Another use of layers to evoke transformation is proposed in Olof Inger’s Do You Remember? (2013), a diaphanous wall hanging made from a delicate design of pale yellow, rectangle-cut plastic trash bags. In their new incarnation as art, the plastic sheets suggest an almost-too-polite academic study of what happens when industrial materials are formally repurposed with an eye for harmonious design.

Several works in the show have the more distinct appearance of discarded industrial fragments from the streets of the Lower East Side. Jean-Luc Moulène’s Chrome (1999), a small, steel cage-like sculpture and Cameron Rowland’s U66 (2013), a thin strip of lacquered steel, are modestly understated. These are objects that do not seem to need people, and there is an almost unnerving resistance to visual excess and flamboyance. The two crushed soda cans caught between the marble slabs of Gabriel Kuri’s Two nudes two points (2013) are the most explicit evidence of the messiness of human life.

A palpable sense of elegy is most apparent in the work that literally points to what is missing from the room. In Untergerät (2013), Rey Akdogan discretely activates each of her fellow-exhibitors’ art objects with her removal of the gallery’s white floor tiles to reveal concrete underneath, leaving a thin framed tile edge on two sides of the room’s surface and along the inside of the front door. This is an intervention along similar lines to the artist’s 2012 exhibition at Miguel Abreu, night curtain, in which Akdogan kept the gallery open into the nighttime hours, turning the darkened room, lit by ambient neon light outside, into a three-dimensional magic lantern theater with an overhead fan and a slide carousel. There is something intriguingly old fashioned about both of these minimalist defacements that hide a loving respect for the formalities and barriers of a white cube gallery space. Likewise, much of the work in Conspicuous Unusable is infused with a similar, traditional restraint, an absorbed knowledge of the historical precedent for such art.

The artist who perhaps most thoroughly embodies the dialectic between use value and material fact is Charlotte Posenenske (1930-1985), a German minimalist sculptor and staunch conceptualist who abandoned art-making for the field of sociology in 1968. Her work in the show, Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes) (1967/2009), are modular, fabricated steel structures (resembling ventilation pipes) that can be installed in an infinite variety of ways. In their current incarnation they climb up the wall of the gallery, hugging the ceiling in a slightly organic manner. Posenenske’s removal of authorial intention places even greater emphasis on the theatrical effect of installation. The Square Tubes have a life of their own, whether installed in front of a bus stop, in a collector’s home, or as part of a gallery exhibition. In line with Akdogan and Rockburne, here is a work that benefits immensely from its unclear limits. It returns the sovereignty of strangeness back to the material object at hand, which is all that any artwork can hope to achieve.

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April 5 to June 2, 2013
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street
New York City,  (212) 219-2166

A lightbulb, a heart, a bed. The first three recognizable images in the Italian artist Giosetta Fioroni’s mini retrospective at the Drawing Center exude simplicity and lightness. Rendered in silver aluminum paint and graphite pencil, her paintings on paper are like evocative cover songs in which a new personality is encoded onto a popular tune. In contrast to Jasper Johns’ bronze Light Bulb I (1958), Jim Dine’s 1960s heart paintings or Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), Fioroni suspends her images within expansive space, creating a context for them that feels emotional and quiet. Like much of the work on view, these paintings, made in 1959-60, have a diagrammatic quality, like theater props or designs for a larger, unseen ensemble.

The Drawing Center has become the go-to venue for re-contextualizing artists within a historical continuum of Modernism and cross-media experimentation. (Remarkable exhibitions of Frederick Kiesler, Ree Morton, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn fit this bill). L’Argento is notable for being Fioroni’s first solo exhibition in the United States, which is surprising for an artist who achieved a high level of critical attention in her native country in the 1960s. Giosetta Fioroni, born in Rome in 1932 to artist parents, was the only woman member of the Piazza del Popolo group of Roman artists that included Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, and Cesare Tacchi, artists who were, in Fioroni’s words, “interested in pictorial reality after ‘Art’ Informel.” The group was also closely aligned with the eurocentric, cerebral version of abstract expressionism practiced by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly (a close friend of Fioroni’s), who were both highly visible in Rome in the late ‘50s. The earliest work in the show, a series of untitled drawings from her Parisian Journal (1958-62), made in “a tiny room that Tristan Tzara offered me” are a storyboard of abstract thoughts. They provide a glimpse into a young artist’s private world, her preoccupations with language, automatic writing, childhood, and theater that would provide the basis for her mature body of work.

Silver, commonly associated with Andy Warhol’s factory and the silver clouds and studio décor of high Pop, is for Fioroni a craftsman’s substance, a way to imprint memory in space.  Her three all-over silver canvases suggest a pile-up of celluloid. In Lagoon (1960) and The Secret in Action (1959-60), there is an opulence and variety to the marks; the stenciled word “LAGUNA,” appears underneath a graphite rectangle shape. Fioroni is effectively naming the painting within the painting, framing space for the art object in a similar manner to Jasper Johns’ Tennyson (1958). The paintings are nearly monochrome, but they read more as open-ended experiments than the contemporaneous blue paintings of Yves Klein. Here silver does not embody a jewel-like commodity (recently evidenced in Jacob Kassay’s highly prized silver-oxidized canvases), but signifies what Fioroni describes as a “non-color,” an emulsion layer that can absorb and reflect light.

Fioroni’s paintings of archetypal ‘60s models’ faces, unsmiling and vague, framed by the semi-oval of a camera lens, dominate the show. Double Liberty and Liberty (both 1965) feature an image of the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli’s blankly staring face. The two-toned reductive image has a strong graphic quality that resembles silkscreen. The multiple borders, edges, drips and scratchy note-like pencil marks around the faces are the personalized touch that stops the work from being read as either pure idolatry or cultural critique. Less overtly dated as “Pop” painting and more purely imaginative are Lone Child (1967-68) and Self-portrait at Seven (1971-72), figures of children seen from behind and gazing into space. They carry the patina of time that the decades have bestowed on them with greater assurance than contemporaneous works; the browning edges of the cream paper and canvas come across as purposeful and true, mimicking the old photographs that the paintings themselves are presumably based on.

The conceptual and visual aspect of Fioroni’s art is further reduced in the 1970 Laguna series of silver paint and pencil drawings of the villas and vistas of Venice’s Grand Canal. In one drawing the stenciled words “San Marco” at the bottom of an empty trapezoidal shape are the only indication of the famed piazza. The potential of photography to contain all information about a given place, especially a postcard-perfect location, is inverted in this work. In conversation with the critic Alberto Boatto (in conjunction with a 1990 monograph on her work) Fioroni draws a connection between her imagery of landscapes, ruins, and solitary figures and a “sweet, rural Italy that no longer exists, replaced nowadays by a telegenic one.” Mixed in with this sentiment, however, is the spectral presence of war and politics: A painting from 1969, Obedience shows a woman giving the fascist salute, and The Mountain Tomb (1971) depicts a mountain in the Alps that was the infamous site of a battle between Italian and Austrian troops in the first world war.

Fioroni’s art is that tricky to define thing: tasteful radicalism.  Her 1960s paintings of “It girls” and lost children could as easily adorn the living rooms of Italian intellectuals as Morandi paintings did in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1963). I can see how her art’s meaning could expand through its proximity to the culture of a household, a city, or a country. Politely installed in the institutional cool of the freshly renovated Drawing Center it becomes a challenge to grasp the work’s full spectrum of content, the host of political and social implications that a contemporary Italian viewer would have picked up in Fioroni’s subject matter. What does come across is a devotion to theatre as the silver lining of all visual experience—from her early drawings of costumes, to the doll’s house sized sculpture, Home: Domestic Interior (1969), to the illustrated script for Countryside Spirits (early 1970s), a play loosely based on the village she lived in. Giosetta Fioroni’s work from the 1960s resonates today as an artifact of singular affection and ambivalence towards her country’s (and indeed the western world’s) new culture of spectatorship with its mediated relationship to personal and historical images.

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Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation
20 Jay Street, Suite 720, Brooklyn, NY, 11201
(718) 858-2244

The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program has been going strong since 1991. Each year 16 artists (ranging from emerging to more established) are selected for one year of free studio space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. 2013 marks the 5th anniversary of the Space Program’s relocation across the river to Brooklyn – for 17 years the studios were housed in Tribeca. This year is no exception to the eclectic mix of painters, sculptors, video, and performance artists. The artists participating in the 2012-13 Space Program are: Lisa Beck, Pam Butler, Kris Chatterson, N. Dash, Amy Feldman, Robert Green, Vit Horejs, Gilbert Hsiao, Liz Magic Laser, Beverly McIver, Sam Messer, Douglas Melini, Jennifer Nuss, Erika Ranee, Hadieh Shafie, David Simons, Didier William, and Randy Wray.

N. Dash, Amy Feldman, and Douglas Melini are three Sharpe artists working at the limits of abstraction and the painted image. All three were included in the Abrons Art Center exhibition Decenter, a contemporary valentine to the radical spirit of the 1913 Armory Show. Dash is a formal maverick who moves between mediums with precision and wit; she works with photography, homemade dyes, graphite, linen, jute, and found objects. Her spartan minimalism and mystical/scientific approach to materials is reminiscent of the early 1970s work of Dorothea Rockburne. Recent group shows include Zach Feuer, Room East, and Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, and she will participate in Painting in Place, opening May 22 at the Famers and Merchants Bank in Los Angeles.

Feldman is also a devotee of the reduced palette – her sizable paintings are at once goofy and sturdy, like signs for an alien city glimpsed in passing on the highway. There is a rorschach test quality to her forms and muted grayscale; anything can appear if you look hard enough. Feldman’s new work will be on view with Blackston gallery at NADA NYC, May 10-12. Melini pursues a personal geometry that is both decorative and mandala-like. A self-described “hard-edge” painter, there is nonetheless a lot of soft fun to be had in his hypnotic blend of rich color and tight lines. All three, in their own language, are pursuing an approach to the two-dimensional surface that is  open-ended and very receptive to the viewer’s visual meditation.

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The Nahmad family, a fixture at auction houses and New York society gatherings, are estimated by Forbes to have a total net worth of more than $3 billion. The quietly elegant exhibitions that the gallery mounted, most recently Soutine/Bacon, and Alexander Calder: the Painter, evoke tasteful privilege and old-world money, but nevertheless also communicate an underlying fixation on the art object as supreme luxury investment. The current crisis is not their first brush with the law. Earlier this year it was reported that the family was being sued for the return of a Modigliani painting, Seated Man on a Chair (1918) that had been reportedly stolen by the Nazis from its original owner. The Nahmads’ found a legal loophole to keep possession of the painting by claiming that the work was in fact owned by the International Art Center—a company that the painting’s original owners claim is an off-shore holding site for the Nahmads’ vast collection.

Reached in London, David Nahmad expressed surprise and disbelief over the current claims leveled against his son’s gallery, calling the FBI’s allegation of a close-knit relationship between his family business and the Russian mob “totally stupid.” The federal investigation of the Nahmad Gallery is ongoing, and is an important link in a sweeping, $100+ million money-laundering case against gambling dens. Other arrests include a cadre of colorfully named characters: Molly (“Poker Princess”) Bloom; Joseph (“Joe the Hammer”) Mancuso; Stan (“Slava”) Greenberg; and Noah (“The Oracle”) Siegel. On Friday, April 19 thirty-odd individuals, including Helly Nahmad, were arraigned in a Manhattan court. All suspects took the same plea: “not guilty.”

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