January 9 – February 15, 2020
515 W 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, albertzbenda.com

In contrast to the figure based abstract paintings shown at Tsibi Geva’s first exhibition at Albertz Benda Gallery in late 2017, the current show presents an ensemble of pattern-based gestural abstractions. Titled Substrata, the recent work focuses entirely on what Geva believes is the ground structure of painting, the very foundation of what he sees while walking around that inspires him to paint, anything from the terrazzo tiles under his feet to the mesmeric glimpses of urban Mediterranean patterns on the buildings around him. There is little concern for going outside the parameters of materiality or concretizing the narrative scope of what surrounds him.  Over the years, Tsibi Geva’s paintings have persistently taken their own course. There is nothing explicitly formal about his surfaces. Nor do his paintings attempt to follow the direction of a style of pictorial nominalism. The artist prefers to remain conscious within the act of painting rather than insisting that the unconscious is the derivation of his aesthetic. Despite Geva’s fierce attention to the gesture, it is not possible to place him in the context of “action painting.” This is not the origin of what Geva is about. He is a thinking painter, not a romantic.

Born and raised on Kibbutz Ein Shemer close to sixty-nine years ago, Geva is a painter with a significant history, which needs to be taken into account. In the process of growing up with an architect father, the concern for seeing and understanding structure was a preeminent aspect of his education. Eventually, the artist’s acute awareness of structure discovered a counterpart that leaned inadvertently in the direction of decoration whereby the grid –influenced by the presence of Bauhaus buildings in Israel – would eventually give way to what Geva called “entropy.” He would soon designate “irregular patterns’ that included ornamentation as having expressive content as a complement to formal structure.

While growing up in relative proximity to a Palestinian village, Geva had indirect, though distant access to experiencing the vernacular architecture around him. This included various collaged improvisations he witnessed in Bedouin homes built on the high desert region near the border (that eventually changed after 1967). Even so, these innately organic structures offered the young artist an alternative way of perceiving form – in essence a type of form without form. This complementary relationship began to merge into his work as a painter. This became particularly evident in a series of paintings based on Keffiyeh scarf patterns, worn by Arab men, which appeared to some viewers of Geva’s paintings during the 1980s and 90s as a semi-radical motif.

The paintings currently on view at Albertz Benda open another door for Geva. It is a somewhat ironic door in that it returns to the notion that the concept of structure – whatever that might be –is no longer within the realm of isolation. Given that all the paintings in the show are untitled, and painted in acrylic on canvas (with one painted in acrylic and oil), and all executed in 2019, (except one from 2018), I will proceed according to measurement and description. The painting I wish to address is constructed with six panels of which three are rectangular and three are square. Together the six panels constitute a single large square painting on the rear wall of the back gallery.

The focus on structure, of course, has not gone away even as the gestural force of the painting lends its overwhelming presence. Emphasis is given to the quadrilateral shape, the scale, the relative isolation of each gesture, and to the color black. The painted backgrounds of the various canvases reveal light earth colors with sparingly applied touches of the three primaries, which are scarcely noticeable. Of the various works chosen for display in Substrata, this painting carries the most significant magnitude. The balance between the entropic gestural forms and the unique architectonic construction of the painting’s support appears to have found a profound match. Nothing is left hovering.

The paintings on view in Substrata are indeed “entropic gestural forms.”  But they also have a structure buried within them, a sense of geometry given over to floating particles in space, reminiscent of the torn paper works of Hans Arp or intensely applied gestural fields where the paint ruptures our ability to find a discreet form.

There is a distance between language and entropy in terms of how form is identified. But for Geva, the form becomes less important than the repetition.

There is no real narrative in these paintings, no exact timeline. There is another vertical rectangular painting where the hardedge sectioning has been obliterated and replaced by square black nets in with two nondescript banners in red and blue monitoring one another near the top. It is doubtful to suggest that the particulars have meaning in such paintings. Therefore, we turn to the allover process – to the unclear borders, the borders Geva knows so well – not only in the academic or political sense, but in the painting sense. Here we may grasp the sense of a painting, where in Geva’s case, everything is let loose, where the turbulence becomes amenable and striated, deceased and overturned, one layer upon another. The process assumes to be endless. However, once the structure is intact, and once we discover how and where it exists, the painting comes alive on its own terms. We have no further to go other than to acknowledge where we have been. Finally, we are able to open the door to the present.

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A Sony Picture Classics Release

It was hard to know what kind of cinematic experience was in store upon entering MoMA’s Titus Theater 1. My expectations were uncertain. The film’s relative connection to the renowned German painter Gerhard Richter was not entirely clear. Nor was I aware that the film was an extensive feature, partially fictional, yet based on actual historical events. During the introductory remarks made at this screening [the film is now in general release, presently showing at the Paris cinema in New York], I was curious to hear that the film is Germany’s Official Selection for the 2019 Academy Awards and that the Director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, had previously won an Oscar for The Lives of Others (2006). Indeed, Mr. Henckel von Donnersmarck’s intriguing, yet playful remarks were incisive and to the point. Rather than promote his career, he advocated the importance of keeping cinema as a social art form.

This somehow opened a door as to what Never Look Away might be and what indeed it may become. As the artist Thomas Demand has so eloquently put it: “I have never seen a film that depicts as plausibly as this one how art is created, and what it means.”

Historically, this film covers a crucial span of nearly thirty years beginning with the infamous Nazi-generated Entartete Kunst or “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937, which traveled throughout Germany to capacity crowds, while the concluding section focuses on the first solo exhibition of paintings by one Kurt Barnert in Dusseldorf, thus simulating Gerhard Richter’s important exhibition at the Galeria Schmela in 1964. Kurt Barnert is the fictitious stand-in, in other words, for Richter, deftly played by Tom Schilling.

It is curious how the two exhibitions are employed by the Director as “bookends” in the film. Whereas we see Barnert as a five-year-old child staring intently at works of “degenerate art,” questioning whether or not he wants to become a painter, the closing sequence is filmed during a press conference at a gallery revealing a thoughtful, provocative, and mature artist in his early thirties. Here Barnert’s confidence proves inexorable.

In either case, the principle overseer for doing the research and reproduction of these historical and contemporary paintings was Richter’s former student, Andreas Schon. His effects are what give precision to all aspects of these early expressionist works from Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter to the early “photo-realist” paintings of Richter. The attention to these details is largely what gives cinematic authority to Never Look Away.

The calamities of growing up are further played out in accord with the agonies of Richter. Kurt Barnert has grown from childhood into adolescence in Dresden during National Socialism. By the time of the post-war GDR period, he will have applied twice to the Dresden Art Academy before being admitted to the “free painting” department in 1952 at the age of twenty. Here we are given a series of glimpses as to Barnert’s frustration with what he is trying to do. Although a first-rate draughtsman, the artist feels limited as to how far his career will go under such circumstances.

But a larger story pervades the film from start to finish— a narrative in which personal tragedy intersects with the overwhelming historical one in which heinous crimes and incarcerations were perpetrated against Jews and various dissidents who refused the Nazi protocol. A key figure in the film is a Nazi-sympathizing gynecologist Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), who was responsible for unwarranted euthanasia and for sending innocent people to camps to be murdered in gas chambers. This included a beloved aunt of Barnert who cared for him as a child in Dresden and gave him the foundation for his desire to become an artist. (This clearly emits from a forceful memory instilled in Richter.)

During his years as a student in East Germany, Barnert meets a beautiful young woman, Elisabeth (Paula Beer). They fall in love, and unaware that Elisabeth is the gynecologist’s daughter, get married. Meanwhile as the culmination of WWII is slowly becoming imminent, a Russian military colleague warns Professor Seeband that he must leave East Germany and hide out in the West if he hopes to avoid being tried for murder. Inadvertently, Barnert discovers that Seeband is a Nazi-in-hiding, which more than likely accounts for previous incidents of intense hardship that have intervened in his marriage.

Never Look Away is a complex story, but also a griping one. We may question as Kurt walks through the hallways and studios at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf as to what possibilities will open for him there.  We may sense he is on the verge of doing something significant, but we also know he will go through many stages and passageways to get there. The character based on Joseph Beuys possibly had some role is guiding Barnert in the right direction, given that Beuys was hired by the Academy the same year Richter was admitted, 1961. But what finally stands out in this film is the commitment among the performers and participants in searching for what really makes an artist— that art is important because it is essential to the historical moment in which we live, and by which we learn to account for ourselves. There is no limit to the effort that needs to be made in order for this to happen.

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When art and money are suddenly thrown together, oppositional mayhem soon follows, even in a film like Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary, The Price of Everything, (currently at HBO) where the director’s position appears to be held in abeyance. Regardless of how the content is presented, the differences continue to escalate on an uncharted scale in a way that is provocative and tendentious. Though not discussed in the film, the reference point to most of what I heard and saw was the early 1980s when big money overtly entered the scene only to transform contemporary art into a full-fledged commodities industry.

Still, controversy either rages or lingers, depending on one’s point of view, as to how major promotional and investment strategies got so quickly involved with artists across the board – mostly emerging or blue chip, usually ignoring less known mid-career artists– to the extent that the terms of qualitative criticism formerly applied to works of contemporary art would soon become extinct.

The manner by which the film dealt with the variety of interviews is impressive. Whether artists, dealers, collectors, auctioneers, or critics, they did not appear edited in a way that ensured instant closure. Rather each interview held a certain openness that allowed for an indeterminate dialogue to proceed randomly throughout the film. For example, when the curator Paul Schimmel speaks near the opening of the film, one may eventually find his comments reflected in the words of Jeff Koons who appears later in the film, despite the fact they never appear on the screen together. The same could be said of the opposition between the words of Sotheby’s Executive Vice President Amy Cappellazzo and those of renegade painter Larry Poons. Although both are bound to disagree on the connection between money and art, they are still maintaining a dialogue—perhaps on the defensive, but a dialogue nonetheless. While clearly aware of his cinematic tactics, Kahn avoids making universal proclamations as to where art is going once it has gotten the attention of auction houses, curators, and collectors who might actively engage with all three, most likely on separate occasions. It seems important that the point of view of the director stays hidden.

The film offers no blame as to who is responsible for the mess that has come about in recent decades once investors began to discover the logic of creating a market for contemporary art. How could they not? Rather the film points us in the direction of a selected few whose words regarding investment in art take on a character of their own. Even so, we are given opinions more than researched points of view, which will tend to leave some viewers in considerable doubt as to how art got that way and what will happen as a result. More than a few viewers of The Price of Everything have made comments to me to the effect that they thought the content backing the film was substantial, but also depressing.

A kind of business-minded art language is spoken throughout The Price of Everything that often takes the form of banal rhetoric. This occurs between established art world figures (mostly painters) and those who directly or indirectly sponsor them. Listening to the bland, superficial, and predictable jargon of major auction house representatives is not so different from hearing one of the collectors in the film identify a kitsch assemblage in her parlor as a work of “conceptual art.” Or, for that matter, observing artists prance and paint in their gorgeous studios while describing the aesthetic pulse of blue glass spheres or telling us the reason why it was important to paint over one figure in order to keep the other. As participants in the film, they all reside on the same playing field. Yet one might further detect a festering boredom or listless cynicism in their speech. At these intervals, Kahn rarely misses the opportunity to entertain his finely tuned audience by allowing irony to surface, specifically when the painter Gerhard Richter complains that it is not good if one of his paintings is the same price as a house. On another note, we read irony in relation to the various professionals discussing deals that involve hundreds of millions of dollars motivated by the belief that their purchases will ensure art for generations to come. Here, one might pause briefly before raising the question: Who is kidding whom?

Nevertheless, the tale is told and the narration continues as it does between the wily “haves” (Jeff Koons) and the presumably overlooked “have nots” (Larry Poons). The resounding rhyme of these two names first presented themselves in the late eighties when then “postmodern” Jeff was showing in lower SoHo on Wooster Street directly across from an exhibition of new work by the rejuvenated “modernist” Lawrence. The change of Larry’s first name was apparently an act of promotion to clarify the fact that he was no longer painting dots but was extending his densely chromatic surfaces into heroically studded pours. Some of these works were alluded to as the subject of a forthcoming retrospective of paintings, shown in the artist’s studio in the early stages of preparation. This moment in Poons’ legacy was fortunately included by Kahn’s perceptive eye, which suggests the filmmaker’s rigor in coming to terms with the immanence of art as being more than an index of material fortune.

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May 4 to June 16, 2018
525 West 21st St, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, tinakimgallery.com

It is not uncommon among contemporary Korean artists to find the same title used repeatedly for different paintings, often over a period of several years. Although one might find a number sequence to differentiate one painting from the next, for the most part the repetition of the title is perennial.

This practice began with artists in the early 1970s associated with Dansaekhwa (monochrome). While Park Seo-Bo, Lee Ufan, Yun Hyung-Keun, and Ha Chong-Hyun never conceived themselves as a collective, each of them focused on the use of a single word-sign in their work that served as a kind of thematic structure. In Ha’s case, Conjunction was the signifier of choice. For the western viewer this might suggest a conceptual underpinning to the artist’s work, but, even if true, the idea of conceptually underpinning work has a Korean precedent that has nothing to do with Conceptual Art.

For those familiar with East Asian brush painting, the abstract (empty) mind always plays a formative role in relation to the brush and ink. Space exists primarily as an idea sublimated at the service of both. In this context, there is no such thing as material divorced from idea. Instead, they are inextricably bound together–in contrast, for example, to western Color Field painting where the formalist dictum determines more or less what happens on the surface. In the latter case, any idea beyond the visual construct is taken (for the most part) as a literary adjunct and therefore exists outside the concerns of what a painting should be or will become.  Among the Dansaekhwa painters, things are different.

Ha’s recent works at Tina Kim make for a beautiful show in much the way that works by Morris Louis or Sam Gilliam might be perceived as beautiful, but the terms of their respective beauty emerge from different cultural strata, where the painterly language – whether formalist or otherwise – plays a role in ways unique to those cultures. In relation to Ha, emphasis needs to be given to an Eastern point of view that carries its own history and  ideas related to color and form. For example, Ha’s paintings begin as verso before they become recto. Such works as the blue Conjunction (16-322) and the red Conjunction (17- 25) go back as early as the 17th Century to the Chosun Dynasty when painters began to push their mineral pigments through the weave of hemp cloth to the frontal side, giving the color density as it so. Ha applies blackened smoke to the surface before beginning to spread his monotones in separate units that connect obliquely to one another as a loose geometry.

In Conjunction 16-382, once the blackened smoke had tinted the surface, Ha began pulling white paint diagonally from the left side to the top edge and eventually from the bottom edge to the right side, completely enshrouding the surface with a dense linear construction of white lines.  In contrast, Conjunction 16-321, which is black, is done by way of vertical globs of thick paint that intensity the relief quality of the surface applying forms derived from Hangul, the Korean language system that also has its roots in the Chosun era.

In his work, Ha is not merely playing with the idea of monochrome variations. Rather he is intensely searching out ways and mannerisms in which his paintings can take him to the nth degree of his Korean identity.  The question that confronts Ha in each of his paintings is, essentially, Where – rather than what – is my identity? This was the tormented interior question that emerged among the Dansaekhwa painters, each according to their own means, in the 1970s. They were living through a period of military dictatorship in their country and had suddenly become strangers to themselves. Ha’s ruggedly refined paintings, the reductive surface plays an indefatigable role in relation to the artist’s stolen identity.

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April 28 to June 17, 2018
291 Grand Street, at Eldridge Street
New York City, jamescohan.com

This is the fourth exhibition by Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan Gallery and the first in their Grand Street location, in New York’s historic Chinatown. One could say, for this reason, that Ji’s recent ink paintings constitute a site-specific artwork given that they are being viewed not only by art world cognoscenti but by the local community as well. My guess is that the neighborhood Chinese will have a more in-depth understanding of these works than other viewers, less because of the academic context than the raw intuition these images will exert over people who remember the ghost stories, often combined with familiar folktales, they were told growing up in China, the subject of Ji’s magnetic new body of work.

Paintings like At Sundown and At Midnight (both 2017-2018) are essentially nightmares based on the dire conditions currently found in hundreds of rural villages in China today. In these ink and watercolor paintings on xuan paper viewers encounter ghosts and ghouls from a past world who have returned to these chaotic and impoverished villages and are milling about the inhabitants.

For Chinatown residents, Ji’s paintings may serve as an allegory of what is happening elsewhere; but for Chinese farmers and their families it is reality, one they are forced to confront as an everyday occurrence. In rural China today , extreme poverty has become a fact of life. This has much to do with the fields formerly used for growing crops that have been flooded to produce electrical power or polluted to the extent that farmers no longer have land to work and water to fish and drink, thus leaving their families in a desperate state constantly fighting for survival. Their fields are now dumping grounds for antiquated computer parts that poison the furrows they once tilled.

These harrowing conditions are at the source of what Ji paints and through the act of painting in a style reminiscent of the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127 – 1279), the artist reminds himself of the China that few urban residents have actually seen. Consequently, these ghouls and ghosts, first shown in a hand scroll, The Village and Its Ghosts (2014), and then again three years later in the chilling They Come Out Together, are indirectly focused on new-born refugees living an iterant life of poverty. As the artist has made clear in interviews, the urban centers are where the power exists that systematically contributes to the downgraded conditions that determine the chaos and perpetual tribulations found in countless nomadic peasant villages.

The emotionally distraught protagonists of Eight Neighbors (2017-2018) gather at a stopover camp amid the ghosts and debris to discuss their options in terms of where they will go next.. Before the Long Journey deals with a related subject in which bundles of clothing, sacks of rice, and cooking items, have been sparingly packed, based on extreme necessity. Meanwhile, the “neighbors” mill about as they prepare to depart from the campsite. Whereas traditional Chinese ink painting pays considerable attention to the facility of the brushwork involving closely scaled harmonies in subtle darks and lights, Ji’s watercolor and ink paintings, lay flat, relatively subdued, as they are absorbed by the xuan paper. The figures are painted in a semi-Western style, while the all-over perspective is closer to an obverse space where the distances between things are more uniform as opposed to radically separated from one another.

In Break Camp (2017-2018), the obverse perspective is more pronounced and possibly more obvious to the viewer. This and Family Bundles and Batches (2017-2018) deal directly with the underlying theme of economic migration. While the obverse perspective is clearly more pronounced in the former, it still lingers in the second more muted ink work, implying a disruptive psychology within the ensemble. In either case, the mood of these pictures suggests an anxiety and expectation of what might happen as these people walk interminably together as an itinerant village tribe presumably in search of a place to live.

As an exhibition of paintings Yun- Fei Ji’s haunting performance manages to throw another light on how the approach to ink painting remains closely bound to Chinese history. In doing so, Ji makes clear that which is most important to him draws intentionally and purposefully on the past as a means to exorcise the hidden realities of the present. Put another way, there is no overt political theme in these paintings other than the tension by which Ji’s brushwork is embedded within the representation of each figure, object, and landscape. In this sense, the brush becomes an indirect signifier of revolt.

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March 9 to April 14, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lissongallery.com

By the time of Ted Stamm’s premature passing in 1984, his Wooster paintings were becoming known in the New York art world, especially among younger aficionados in the SoHo art district (then the center of the avant-garde in New York). While Stamm rarely traveled outside the metropolitan New York area, the Wooster paintings were often seen in group and occasionally solo exhibitions, including Documenta 6 (1977), and were presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA – PS 1, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others. Thanks to the tireless advocacy of Danish New York-based curator Per Jensen, a stalwart against years of art world neglect, we have a show at Lisson Gallery that affords these works some interpretative clarity. Stamm was born and raised in New York. He was an avid conversationalist and a faithful correspondent. His manner of letter writing was always in longhand and seemed to follow a comparable direction to the Woosters. At the outset the paintings appeared more static, but as they developed after 1979, as in the Lo Woosters, they began to take on the appearance of speed. By comparison, his hand-written letters also began to extend laterally to three or four words stretched across one line on the page. In the process, the speed and intensity of the words took on a new meaning. A further example of his speed might be attributed to Stamm’s consistently dressing in black except for his glistening white tennis shoes. I have few recollections of Stamm sitting still, but many of his appearance standing in a conversation continually in a state of motion as if transporting words through the sudden movements of his body.

The Woosters employ an unusual rectangular theme that extends into a triangular hinge on the left side. These works were both drawn in graphite and painted in black and white (and, later in silver). At the outset (1978), it seemed that few observers were aware of Stamm’s discovery of this rather obtuse form. Given the analytical orientation of the times, many assumed it was based on some complex mathematical derivation; but, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Stamm, being a man of the streets, with bicycle in tow, discovered this abbreviated form one day on the sidewalk near his loft. The fact that he could not decipher its use or origin piqued his curiosity enough to accept it as what might be called an unknown readymade.

The exhibition catches both the artist’s consistency as well as his complex reprieve from an all-over spatial reduction, replacing it with a series of modular variations. Examples of this would include 78 W – 4 (Wooster) and 78 SW – 22 (Small Wooster) (both oil on canvas from 1978). The difference between the two is not only the shift in scale in relation to identical forms, but also the enclosure of the black band that moves around the edge of otherwise white paintings. In the first, larger version, the band descends from the upper side and follows along the upper diagonal slide of the triangle before it extends back along the bottom edge. The second, smaller form carries the exact same proportions except that the black band completely encloses the white surface, which makes the interior shape a smaller version of the larger one that extends outside the black frame.

Beyond these modular variations, Stamm began to move from stasis to kinesis. LW – 2H (Lo Wooster) and LW – 2A (Lo Wooster), both graphite on paper from 1979, are flattened versions of the rectangle and its adjacent triangle that optically incite leftward movement. In either case, this suggests they are studies that precede the large low-hanging oils mounted at the entrance that dominates the wall as one enters the Lisson Gallery.

The space within the Woosters was gradually evolving into space/time. By 1980, he had returned to the origin of the Woosters as he became conceptually involved in placing red stickers of his familiar sign, which he called “Wooster Designations,” on bumpers and license plates of parked cars with the intention of transmitting the message throughout New York in the directions in which they would drive.

Some two years later (1982), Stamm began sending out cards on which the message “Painting Advance 1990” was printed. In my reading of this, Stamm was saying that painting would move towards another level, a higher level of sensory cognition, in less than a decade. Sadly, Ted never reached 1990. But he showed the potential of painting to move beyond stasis and connect with urban time – not simply as a representation, but as bright new awareness of how we think and see and how we come together through painting.

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Ai Weiwei at Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art Center

June 6 to September 6, 2015
798 District, Beijing

It was clear that a distracted Ai Weiwei was in no mood for a formal interview. We met as scheduled at the Beijing East Hotel May 30th, which was to have been the opening day of his historic first solo gallery exhibition in Beijing. But given this date’s proximity to the 26th anniversary of Tiananmen Square on June 4th, the government had decided to reschedule the opening to June 6th^. This was intended to forestall the possibility of dissenters congregating in the 798 gallery district with his show as an unruly rallying point.

In spite of such tumultuous concerns, Ai was willing to talk informally for an hour. As conversation progressed his mood gradually lightened. He wanted to speak not only about the importance of the immediate exhibition, but about the direction of his art merging with architecture, including his clear-sighted view that, in the future, art will be shown in locations other than commercial art galleries. Wise, rational and open-minded, Ai’s delivery was filled with joie de vivre.

For more than two decades, Ai has invariably turned down invitations to participate in exhibitions of his work in China. Clearly, the artist’s decision constitutes a critical comment and a continuing standoff with the Chinese government, which now appears to have found a hiatus. On July 22, his passport was finally returned after being taken from him during his 2011incarceration. Taking the position of an artist/activist, Ai sees his art (and architecture) as being inseparable from everyday life – a life in which politics plays an incisive role. Since his return to Beijing in 1993, after more than twelve years in the United States, much of his practice has turned toward issues of free speech and civil rights. In addition to an ongoing struggle to promote the quality of life among ordinary people in China, he maintains a rigorous schedule in preparing major exhibitions being held outside China. These have included recent museum retrospectives in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as forthcoming exhibitions originating this September in Melbourne and London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

Even so, the artist’s desire to secure freedom with relative autonomy as a citizen was persistently thwarted, until recently, by the government. This came to worldwide attention in 2011 when he was detained by government officials, ostensibly on charges of tax evasion, and subsequently held in isolation for 81 days. During this period his whereabouts were unknown, even to his close family. This occurred on the aftermath of an incident involving police brutality from which he received a serious, nearly fatal concussion. According to statements sent from the artist’s blog (later shut down), the officer’s attack was incited because of Ai’s relentless, outspoken critique of government culpability in the Sichuan earthquake of 2009 in which buildings of inferior construction collapsed, costing the lives of thousands of people, including over 5000 children buried in the rubble of government-built grade schools.

In the New York art world of 1970s, where I first became aware of political art, there was a presumption that an artist denounce aesthetics to become “political” – that the message would be corrupted if one permitted beauty in the work. In refreshing contrast to such a position, Ai carefully examines and edits every object produced in his sprawling self-designed studio in the Caochangdi district of Beijing. He is closely involved with his studio staff, supervising exquisitely lacquered hard wood furnishings, glazed ceramics, tree-cut assemblages, and various assisted ready-mades, among other works. Even the carefully painted porcelain sunflower seeds, of which thousands were sent to the Turbine Hall at Tate London, were personally inspected. The precision and accuracy of these works are intended to empower the authority and to affect his message.

Having closely observed the rise and fall of trends in Chinese contemporary art in relation to the global market, the artist openly resents the coverage being given to his sales (one of which recently passed the $6M mark). As a result, Ai has been forced to confront the often insipid and superficial marketing of his art – a market that runs on an ulterior track where qualitative standards are utterly usurped by the tyranny of branding (not so far removed from where the New York art market has been moving in recent years). For Ai, names and prices are secondary, if not misleading in relation to the more vital and challenging ideas that his work is striving to put forth. As he said in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2011:

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.

On the occasion of his first official gallery exhibition in China, the artist was given two adjacent 798 district galleries , Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art Center. As a partial homage to his father, the famous poet Ai Qing, the artist visited the southeastern area of China, to Zhejiang and Jinhwa (his father’s town) in search of an Anhui-style building from the late Ming Dynasty. The building he found, the Wang Family Ancestral Hall, was originally from the neighboring Jianxi province. It had been destroyed during the previous century and was, in its current state, partially restored. This type of building was known in Chinese as a shitang, or community center, a kind of temple, which at one time had deep significance for Chinese people as a place to gather and converse. It took five large trucks to transport the 1500 wooden pieces of the building from Zhejiang to Beijing.

The reconstruction of the Anhui building within the interior spaces of the two adjacent galleries required the work of two teams of designers and several groups of experienced and specialized construction workers. In effect, the supporting wall between the two galleries was virtually destroyed in order to reconstruct this Ming Dynasty building intact and yet separated between  their respective spaces. This heroic endeavor recalls the monumental feats and aesthetic clarity that once characterized ancient Imperial building projects. Ai is careful to point out that all material aspects of the structure, from beams to joints, are entirely in wood. As the artist wants to show this shitang from the perspective of the present in relation to the past, he has painted decorative motifs in bright colors on various parts of the joinery. This immediately recalls Ai’s earlier painting of Neolithic vessels, which he dipped into large vats of enamel paint.

Although I had been invited to the original opening before leaving New York, my travel itinerary would not allow staying until the new opening date. Even so, the impression I gleaned of the frantic construction as to what was happening within and between the two galleries was extraordinary. The basic structure was elegantly pierced through the space from one gallery to the other. The foundational stones and beams were in place, but a lot of work still had to be done. Men were working around the clock; some took breaks, scattered amidst the construction detritus and remnants of materials, sleeping on canvas tarpaulins, uttering occasional exhausted moans.

Three days later, Ai’s shitang arose into prominence from the massive complexity of its construction. It was seen by hundreds of visitors, mostly younger Chinese, on opening day. The piece functions as a deeply potent symbol – a rite of passage one could say – lying at the core of Chinese culture today: how to exonerate the present from turmoil and pain associated with the previous century. The rebuilt edifice within a shared open space shines as a beacon of rejuvenation. It signals a new era caught in the throes of confronting the past while in pursuit of an optimistic, yet unknown future.

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@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz

September 27, 2014 to April 26, 2015
Alcatraz Island
Organized by For-Site Foundation: Art About Place

It was a rather bleak, chilly afternoon when I agreed to take the ferry to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. More than 50 years ago, this anti-oasis served as a federal penitentiary for hardened criminals, most of whom carried life sentences. Originally built as a military base during the Civil War, by 1934 it had become a legendary hard-core prison later celebrated in Hollywood films. In 1963, less than 30 years after opening, it was shut down due to costly operating expenses that nearly exhausted the penal budget in the State of California. During the relatively brief time of its existence, the penitentiary at Alcatraz had few indigenous resources. The entire water supply was contingent on a single rain tower that provided inmates with regulated rations of water for drinking and hygiene. All foodstuffs, along with cooking utensils, clothing, blankets, and medical supplies, were transported weekly by boat. Inadequate and unreliable, generators provided electricity for the entire prison complex. This was its sole source of energy. Internal heating was virtually non-existent.

The purpose of my visit there was to view a series of site-specific installations by Chinese artist, dissident, and polymath, Ai Weiwei. The venue for this exhibition was made possible through the efforts of independent curator Cheryl Haines, who worked directly with the artist in collaboration with the For-Site Foundation in San Francisco, which provided the sponsorship for the exhibition. In addition, Haines maintained close contact with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These two organizations were responsible for providing information on “prisoners of conscience” relative to a large installation, titled Trace, where portraits of 176 such prisoners were immortalized using 1.2 million plastic Lego bricks. Many of these were done outside China and outside the United States.

Alcatraz was accessioned as a national park in 1972, as Haines discovered, and is now operated within the public domain and therefore suggested the possibility of an exhibition space for Ai. Knowing the artist’s unrelenting concerns for human dignity and freedom of speech, she began a three-year project by setting forth the parameters whereby the artist could work on four interrelated installations. In that Ai is not permitted to travel outside of China because of his polemical position in opposition to what he believes are repressive policies instigated by his government, his persistent involvement with the exhibition occurred largely through telecommunication systems, including Skype. This was due to the fact that the artist has not been able to travel outside China since his incarceration for 81 days in 2011. He has no passport by which to travel.

While the exhibition was not a major work, it was an ambitious and moving one. It had its moments as in Trace and in the large fabric and bamboo Chinese dragon kite, With Winds. This was installed in the New Industries Building where Alcatraz prisoners once worked as they were scrutinized by armed guards. As one entered the downstairs corridor and walked the length of the “gun gallery,” one could view what many have conceded as the major work in this exhibition, given the English title Refraction. The work was an enormous assemblage in the shape of a bird’s wing constructed with recycled solar cookers used in Tibet, with accompanying cooking pots and kettles wedged between the panels. This suggested a possible solution — at very little cost — for ordinary people to live their lives without the burden of paying for electricity.

Walking from the New Industries Building (an ironic name given that it was built in the early 1940s largely for the purpose of making wartime accessories) down the slope away from where the actual prison cells were located, one got a glimpse of how this isolated island functioned in another era. The location offered an unusual but appropriate setting for Ai’s exhibition. The desire for freedom and the potential to live a qualitative life felt so utterly removed from these stark institutional premises.

Upon entering the port area, where the ferry loads visitors and tourists returning to San Francisco proper, the length of the sullen queues moved ever so slowly from the graffiti-ridden cement walls to an insipid barge. The mood was anything but euphoric. Later, I learned that there are seven times more prisoners incarcerated in the United States in comparison with any other country. This further incited the question as to how free Americans actually are, especially if they are not members of the white middle class.

This is the kind of question, I believe, that Ai’s “@Large” was seeking to raise on the grounds of Alcatraz in 2015.

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February 8 to May 8, 2013

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street at Lexington Avenue
New York City, 212-772-4991

This exchange took place well before the advent of the digital age, at a time when artists were still writing postcards, sending faxes, telegrams, and actually speaking on the phone. Open workalso makes clear the variety of ephemeral media being employed by Latin American artists, such as inexpensive chapbooks, Xeroxed papers, black and white video, documentary photographs, and diagrammatic drawings. Conceptual Art was proto-digital in that the ideas (software) for digital transmission were being disseminated before the hardware became available and the electronics became miniaturized. But herein lies an important caveat: that decade’s best work was much more complex and ambiguous than our contemporary digital reproductions and sound bites have led us believe. The fact is that many small publications and critical surveys on the subject, in one form or another, may not exist on-line, including out-of-print publications, carbon-copied essays, important letters, manifestos, symposia transcripts, audiotaped interviews, and videotaped panel discussions, events, and lectures. Just because Conceptual Art is about “ideas” does not mean that all the significant work exists in digital form, just as not everything digital even begins to approach the complexities of Conceptual Art.

Similar ground to this exhibition was covered in Global Conceptualism (1999) at the Queens Museum of Art, and Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited), edited by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Jose Miguel Cortes (Universidad Politechnica de Valencia, 1990), which proved an invaluable resource in Spanish for artists in Europe and the Americas.  Open Work also establishes an important connection with the Centro de Arte y Comunicacion in Buenos Aires, founded in 1968 by Jorge Glusberg, in which New York conceptualists were often invited to work in Latin America. Each of these events occurred outside the mainstream of activity in northern Europe and the United States, and thus, preceded the more recent interest in researching conceptualism in various regions of Latin America as seen in this exhibition.

The exhibition title’s Open Work is taken from a term first used by Umberto Eco in 1962, in which he identifies a revisionist aesthetic based on ambiguity, participation, and information in contrast to Benedetto Croce’s insistence on intuition and expression introduced in his book, Aesthetic (1908). The curator Harper Montgomery cites Eco as a source for the exhibition given the semiologist’s interest in allowing viewers, listeners, and readers to complete the work. Sometimes participation is an explicitly political component of the artwork. A good example would be Victor Grippo’s installation Analogia IV (1972), a modest table with two settings, separated in black and white, in which the viewer may presumably share a lunch with a peasant worker. The Brazilian artist Antonio Dias’s taped grid with open spaces on the floor is more concrete. Titled Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (1968), the grid designates a space without authority or control from the outside, obviously in reference to repressive political regimes in his country’s past.

Another Brazilian, Hélio Oiticica, presented his relaxation installation, Nests, at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970.  We learn, however, in Jeremiah W. McCarthy’s essay in the exhibition catalog for Open Work that this work was, in fact, a last minute replacement for another film projection installation that he called an “Intentional opened visual-spectator act.” According to the essayist, Oiticica’s proposal was rejected because “the medium possessed subversive potential,” less in relation to the content of the film than in the artist’s rejection of using Olivetti’s formidable Information Machine. In addition to the actions of Cildo Meireles and Rafael Ferrer who questioned the relationship of high modernist art to late capitalism, the graphic works of Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter also embodied a strong opposition to the restrictive entitlements and alienating effects of the New York art scene.

The influence of North American artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner, and Donald Burgy, is present in a manner that offers a kind of necessary tension, while contributing an important advance to some of the more indigenous aspects present in the work of their South American counterparts. Here I am thinking of the time pieces and performances of David Lamelas, Eduardo Costa, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujin, all fascinating artists. In the context of this relationship between artists working in the two Americas, Open Work makes virtually everything—no matter what the work’s original intention – a series of stains by Ed Ruscha, for example – appear as a political statement. This is most likely how the artists included in this provocative and curiously intimate exhibition understood their work at the time – forty years ago– that, indeed, context is what determines content.

Editor’s Note: Robert C. Morgan, who is a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of several significant studies in the area of global conceptual art, including Del Arte a La Idea: Ensayos sobre Arte Conceptual (Madrid: Akal, 2003); El Fin del Mundo del Arte y Otros Ensayos (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2000); and  El Artista en el Siglo XXI: La era de la Globalizacion (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2012).

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Sanford Wurmfeld is quite simply one of the most informed and articulate painters working with color today. It is not only a matter of what he knows and says, but of the chromatic clarity of his large-scale optical paintings. One of the most important, yet understated aspects of his unforgettable series of perennial grid-based patterns, currently on view at Hunter College Times Square Gallery, is their complex integration of primary and secondary hues and values. (Wurmfeld taught at Hunter from 1967 until his retirement in 2006, from 1978 as chair of the art department.) What Wurmfeld reveals is a sequential modulation of color that ultimately staggers the eye/brain mechanism—and let’s include the emotional charge as well. With color theories informed by such luminaries as Leo Hurvich, Josef Albers, and Dorothea Jameson, Wurmfeld has evolved his own profoundly investigative manner of working as one of our leading geometric abstract painters. His indefatigable visual articulation of color and light derives from a process of sheer focus and assiduity that inform numerous magnificently executed, large-scale paintings in this first-rate exhibition. Missing are the full-scale circular dioramas that embrace the viewer with a saturation of color on all sides. Three major installations of these have been executed and shown elsewhere, but they have yet to be seen in New York.

Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013, February 15 to April 20, 2013, Hunter College Times Square Gallery, 450 West 41st Street (between Dyer and 10th Avenue), New York City, 212-772-4000

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