Bruce:  May 11 to September 1, 2019
1 Museum Drive
Greenwich, Connecticut,  brucemuseum.org

Blum & Poe  June 27 to September 14. 2019
19 East 66th Street
New York, blumandpoe.com

Our love affair with Milton Avery’s work began in 1967 when Donald Morris and his wife Florence introduced us to his paintings in their gallery in Northwest Detroit.  Today, after seeing more than two dozen exhibitions of his work over these fifty plus years, our attachment remains strong.   So we lost no time in driving to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut (less than an hour from New York City,) to see this unusual show that brings together a dozen paintings each and numerous sketches by three members of the Avery family: Milton, his wife Sally Michel, and their daughter March.   This triple treat was curated by Kenneth Silver with Stephanie Guyet.

The Averys spent virtually all of their summers together in favored locations in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire as well as in more distant destinations in Mexico, Canada, and Europe.  In each place they sketched the mountains and the seas, the forests and the beaches as well as family members and friends.   Often, they were able to complete watercolors of those scenes while still on vacation.  They would then take their drawings back to New York where Milton would develop many of his into oil paintings during the winter months. Why this show is so significant is that it provides an opportunity to appreciate what Robert Hobbs has called “the Avery style”, common to the three artists.

First and foremost, Milton, Sally and March are outstanding colorists.  Milton was called, early on, “the American Matisse” because of his use of extremely vivid, often unnamable colors.  Whether subtle and serene like Sea Gazers (1956) from the Whitney Museum or agitated and restless like Breaking Wave (1959) from the Neuberger Museum, Milton’s colors range from strikingly vivid to peacefully harmonious.  Other characteristics of this family’s style are the flat picture plane, often interlocking simple shapes and over time, greater simplicity of forms.  The Avery Style was far more than charming.  As Milton grew older and more frail, one could see in his solitary figures or animals his acceptance of isolation and his recognition of impending death.  But then, each of the artists seemed comfortable with painting figures who did not communicate with each other.

On the occasion of Milton Avery’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1982, Hilton Kramer suggested that Avery was slow to receive his deserved reputation partly because his work was “Too realistic for the avant-garde during his lifetime and too abstract for the realists.”   Milton came as close to total abstraction as possible, but never wanted his paintings to depart from nature.  He left it to his friends, Adolf Gottlieb and Mark Rothko to make the complete break.

Milton grew up near Hartford, Connecticut and in 1920, at the age of 35, he spent the first of several summers in Gloucester in order to be able to sketch from nature.   Four years later, while there, he met Sally Michel, an aspiring painter and illustrator who was almost 20 years his junior, and followed her to New York City in 1925.  They married the next year and Milton  painted every weekday for close to forty years, reserving their weekends for galleries, museums and trips to friends.  Seeing Matisse and Picasso opened up new options for Milton in color and form and he continued to experiment with flattened surfaces, interlocking forms and both bold and muted colors throughout his career.   Taciturn by nature, Milton’s sketches and his paintings often provided an outlet for his wit and humor.  Milton belonged to no art movement or art school and continually forged his own path, a trait greatly admired by Gottlieb and Rothko.

MILTON  AVERY

The fourteen paintings and multiple sketches in this exhibition provide a mini-retrospective of Milton’s career.  The earliest three paintings have cruder figures with more literal and defined facial features.  The first mature painting,  Gaspé Landscape (1942), with its spacious open feeling features a graceful line of foam encircling an agitated blue sea along with several carefully placed tiny houses and grazing animals under a dark restless sky.  Swimmers and Bathers (1945) is a more serene painting that features a strong horizontal format with four well defined areas.  At the bottom is the lilac beach with two female figures sitting on a towel and beach blanket that interlock with the sand.  Their backs are toward the viewer as they gaze at the dark grey sea.  A highly abstracted and whimsical orange swimmer has just swum past them. Beyond the water is a horizontal line of light blue and white boulders and above that at the top of the painting, is a dark olive-green abstracted forest.   As in Gaspé Landscape, the various elements in Swimmers and Bathers appear to be harmoniously coordinated, another Avery trait.

Two other outstanding paintings by Milton are Woman and Palm Tree (1951) that incorporates the more vivid colors that he began using in the mid-1940s and Dunes and Sea II, 1960, owned by the Whitney Museum.  This late seascape is his largest painting in the exhibition at 52 by 72 inches –  a simplified masterpiece with a light purple foreground and a strong diagonal sand dune set against a restless blue and black sea under an animated cloudy grey sky.  Avery spent considerable time over the years in the company of Gottlieb and Rothko, and he acknowledged that in Provincetown in the summers of the late 1950s, he wanted to paint large like “the abstract  boys”.  Toward this end, while there, he completed a series of major oil paintings. Rothko said of Avery’s great canvases that they “have always a gripping lyricism and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.”

SALLY MICHEL

There are 15 paintings and multiple drawings by Sally Michel in this exhibition, all   done between 1946 and 1988.  Unfortunately, with no paintings by Milton from their 1946 summer in Mexico, the only two paintings from their six weeks in San Miguel de Allende were done by Sally.  Also included are two of Sally’s lyrical and poignant sketches of Milton: Artist as Ease (1949) and Striped Napper (1959).  Her painting, Man and Wife (c1950s) best depicts “the Avery style” with its highly abstracted figures, flattened forms, and vivid colors.  But, the exhibition equally enables us to appreciate the differences between Milton and Sally’s work.  In Spring 1956, with its rich blue, green and yellow foliage, we see the much greater detail that Sally incorporated at a point in time when Milton’s work was already highly streamlined.

It is hard to imagine what Milton’s career might have been like without Sally Michel. Sally recognized Milton’s potential when she married him and did everything she could to allow him to develop both his craft and his style.  She served as his model, his constant companion, his provider, and the hostess of their frequent dinner gatherings.  Restricting her own painting to summer vacations with the family, she sublimated her talents as a painter to the pursuit of a career as an illustrator, becoming the breadwinner of the family.  In this context, it is illuminating to view her keen-eyed illustration for the New York Times, The Care and Handling of Parties.  Sally’s efforts enabled Milton to paint almost every day, sometimes completing as many as four paintings before supper.

It is just as hard to imagine what Sally’s career would have been like without Milton.  She and Milton shared similar views about painting when they first met and, over the years, her work was influenced by his.  Sally learned much from Milton, such as it is sometimes the artist’s last gesture that turns a good paining into a great one.  Because Sally believed that Milton was the superior painter, she always shone the spotlight on her husband’s work when artists, critics and collectors came to visit.  It is, therefore not surprising that while she participated in some group shows, including those of the Avery family, Sally did not have a solo show of her own until 1973, eight years after Milton’s death.  Sally continued to paint for more than another decade and enjoyed several exhibitions of her work until she died in 2003 at age 100.

MARCH  AVERY

As March was growing up, absolutely everyone she knew, and not just her parents, was an artist.  She explains in a lengthy catalogue interview that she thought that making art was the only thing people did.  And so, from an early age, each summer modeling her parents’ behavior, she sketched and painted alongside them without paying attention to the content of their work.  Aware that “the most important thing was my father’s painting”, March served as his model.  Milton exhibited many of these paintings in a 1947 show entitled My Daughter March.

Today, at age 87, March  is still painting six days a week.  Twelve of her paintings and numerous drawings from 1967 to 2017 are included at the Bruce.    Her work, like Sally’s, reflected many of the characteristics of an Avery style while also showing her unique vision.  The Dead Sea (2009) contains a reductive seascape of vivid and unusual color combinations emanating from the light purple sea, the aqua sky and the deep gold beach.  As in many of her parents’ works, the sea is thinly painted with several white areas of blank canvas visible, perhaps in this case representing salt.   However, the mix of both abstracted and more defined black mud-clad figures, demonstrates the particularity of her own vision.   Whereas the segmented uppermost floating figure is as abstract as the orange swimmer in Milton’s Swimmers and Bathers, the two more realistic lowermost figures entering and leaving the water appear to have been captured with a stop-action camera.  In fact, March acknowledged that in addition to using sketches like her parents , she departs from them in both using a camera to help her remember scenes she might like to paint and sometimes even working from her imagination.

Luckily, March is the subject of a concurrent show in New York at the Blum & Poe Gallery with more than two dozen paintings done between 1963 and 2018.  It provides several examples of the mature Avery style in her domestic scenes, still lives and landscapes.  Several reveal the simple interlocking shapes and bold colors of Milton’s advanced paintings such as her Family Tea (1965), Ruth in a Sling Chair (1985), and Card Players (1983), but they are clearly her own.  For example, Family Tea (1965) is perfectly balanced with a series of subtly combined colors in the mother’s jacket, lap, and seat.  But, the facial features of both the mother and the older child as well as the pitcher and tea set are more realistically drawn.

Since Milton Avery’s death at the age of 80 in 1965 his reputation has continued to grow.  His decision to hold onto reality is no longer seen as a drawback and his simple forms and quirky and imaginative use of color have been a source of inspiration to many beyond Sally and March.

At Avery’s Memorial Service, Rothko described him as “a great poet ….  His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.   This alone took great courage in a generation which felt that it could be heard only through clamor, force, and a show of power.  But, Avery had that inner power in which gentleness and silence proved more audible and poignant.”

The post ”The Poetry of Sheer Loveliness”: Milton Avery, Sally Michel and March Avery appeared first on artcritical.

November 14, 2016 to April 16, 2017

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, between Fairfax and Curson

Los Angeles, California, lacma.org

John McLaughlin: Marvelous Void at Van Doren Waxter

November 2, 2016 to January 7, 2017

23 East 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues

New York City, vandorenwaxter.com

The recent presence in New York City of the purist abstraction of artists such as Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Carmen Herrera, Joseph Albers, not to mention the artists of the Paths to the Absolute exhibition at Di Donna (Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Newman, Pollock, Rothko, Still) suggests that the zeitgeist is ripe for a full examination of the work of John McLaughlin, too. McLaughlin (1898-1976) sought, both in his paintings and writings, to provide a rationale for abstract art that eschewed the specificity of objects in the world. Indeed, he went so far as to criticize Mondrian for failing to achieve a freedom from representational sources in his work, such as “Broadway Boogie Woogie”.

“Asian painters made me wonder who I was. Western painters, on the other hand, tried to tell me who they were,” McLaughlin said. He sought a purer basis for abstraction in the Zen concept of the “marvelous void”. Using empty spaces between rectangular forms to imply absence, McLaughlin sought to draw the viewer into a meditative state in which the noise of everyday life is shut out or at least deferred. He intentionally used neutral geometric forms that had no counterparts in nature in order to give his viewers complete freedom to find their own meaning in his paintings. This objective is well captured by McLaughlin’s suggestion that his paintings are best viewed in bedrooms—silent and enigmatic, yet full of intimacy.

Nevertheless, seeing a John McLaughlin exhibition is stimulating as well as meditative. Initially, the paintings have a calming effect brought about by their strong sense of balance and harmony. Being in their presence for a while begins to reveal some unexpected tensions and visual surprises, however, that set one’s eyes and thoughts in motion. This is paradoxical, as meditation and visual stimulation are typically considered to be mutually exclusive or at the very least, incompatible.   It is McLaughlin’s ability to harness this paradox that helps to explain what makes his work so satisfying and significant.

Exposed to Japanese prints while growing up in Boston, McLaughlin spent close to three years living in Japan and traveling in China, beginning in 1935. In Japan he was surrounded with rectangular structures in the narrow hanging ribbon ties and horizontally placed images on vertical scroll paintings as well as the movable screens common to Japanese domestic design. He was especially captivated by the large open spaces, “the marvelous voids” in the paintings of Sesshū Tōyō and other 15th and 16th century Japanese artists. Some Western artists also resonated with McLaughlin, including Malevich, who eliminated the object, and Mondrian, who used rectangles as neutral forms. By using the rectangle in concert with relatively large “empty” areas, he strove to make the viewer part of the organization of the painting, free to see and contemplate without the interference of objects. Throughout his career, McLaughlin never abandoned the rectangle. As his work matured, he sought to create new combinations of structures and colors that maintained his commitment to pure abstraction in ways that were visually challenging. Because some of these works provided visual puzzles, it was not surprising that McLaughlin was included in William Seitz’s 1965 “Responsive Eye” show at MoMA.

Edward Albee picked up on the paradoxical aspect of McLaughlin when he described “a cold burning purity” in his paintings. We find it helpful to use the principle from physics of complementarity (with which McLaughlin may or may not have been familiar) to help understand this paradox. Niels Bohr conceived of this principle in 1927 using as an exemplar the finding that an electron could be seen both as a wave and a particle—but not at the same time. The existence of these two mutually exclusive entities depended on the conditions of their observation. In the same way, McLaughlin’s work can be seen as both meditative and visually energetic, but (again) not at the same time.

The well-selected and revelatory retrospective at LACMA contains 52 paintings and 9 works on paper, some of which are collages that served as McLaughlin’s maquettes and demonstrate his precise planning and placement of forms before beginning a painting. To provide opportunities for contemplation and slower viewing, LACMA commissioned the creation of 12 highly geometric McLaughlin-inspired slat-back wooden chairs by the artist Roy McMakin.

Untitled (1955), included in a large room of close to a dozen asymmetrical works from the 1950s, has an overall calming effect. At first glance, it appears to be balanced and harmonious with several contiguous rectangles in soft grayish earth tones near its center and large white areas on each side. With continued looking, one’s eyes begin to jump around, noticing the two narrow black bands or the two narrow white ones jutting out from the white side sections and piercing the earthy middle sections. One may wonder why the two vertical white areas surrounding the middle bands are not the same size, or why the narrow white bands on the right and left appear to thrust themselves into the center of the painting. Surprisingly, the painting manages to maintain both its original harmonious calmness and its visual challenges—in sequence, but not simultaneously.

In the next room, there is a majestic symmetrical painting, #14 (1959) featuring two large void-like rectangles in light blue and deep black to offer a place of contemplation for the viewer. It soon becomes apparent that whichever large form one focuses upon is the one that appears to move closer to the viewer. But before long, the quiet contemplation shifts to more active problem solving as the horizontal blue rectangle at the bottom edge of the painting appears to cause the larger forms to rise.

Painting #1 (1968), which might have been a perfect choice for MoMA’s Responsive Eye show, is dominated by large and intensely red rectangles. These are inviting as voids, but are then interrupted by black and white areas. Are the three vertical black areas meant to serve as frames for the red areas or to pair up with the three white vertical bars immediately to their left, leaving the white bar on the extreme right with no companion? At some point, the white strips at the top and bottom of the painting come into view, so that the red and black forms are then seen as resting on a large white background. This combination of contemplation and visual excitement is the magical complementarily of McLaughlin.

A film just outside one entrance to the exhibition features the painter Tony Berlant and several other established Los Angeles artists discussing the contributions of John McLaughlin. From this video, it is indisputable that he was a strong influence on several generations of artists, particularly on the West Coast. In addition to Tony Berlant, the painters and sculptors who were likely to have known McLaughlin and his work include Joe Goode, Ed Moses, Sam Francis, Ed Ruscha, James Haywood, Tony Delap, Billy Al Bengston, Ron Davis, David Novros, Marcia Hafif, Edith Baumann, John McCracken, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos. A slightly later cohort inspired by McLaughlin includes Scot Heywood, Alan Wayne, David Reed, and Don Voisine, among others. Furthermore, McLaughlin is widely acknowledged to be a forerunner of the Light and Space movement of the late 1960s and 1970s because of his importance to Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, James Turrell, Mary Corse, Peter Alexander and Craig Kaufmann, who further dematerialized their art and provided slowly revealing immersive works that challenged the perceptions of their viewers.

Therefore, we were disappointed to learn that this thoughtfully curated show of major works, many of which have not been seen before, will not travel, despite its having been offered to more than thirty museums nationally. People not able to get to Los Angeles will have to be satisfied with the scholarly and beautifully illustrated catalogue with insightful and well-documented essays and chronologies edited by the co-curators, Stephanie Barron and Lauren Bergman.

Fortunately, all was not completely lost for New Yorkers. Van Doren Waxter, which represents the John McLaughlin estate, commissioned Robert C. Morgan to help organize a pocket-retrospective of six McLaughlin paintings, representing each decade of the artist’s career, along with two Japanese scrolls. Morgan, using his deep knowledge of Oriental art, has written an informative essay about the “marvelous void” both in Chan and Zen aesthetics and McLaughlin’s abstraction.

The largest in the New York exhibition, #4 (1965), captures the apparent simplicity and predominance of the void in many of McLaughlin’s late paintings. At first, its bright yellow color dominates. Almost immediately, however, the two white rectangular columns that run from top to bottom near the left and right of the painting become salient. On closer inspection, the white columns appear to be the same size as the yellow areas closest to the edges of the painting, creating a visual pair at each edge. The different perceptions of this painting fluctuate depending on one’s focal point, emphasizing either the large yellow void in the center or the two white columns near the sides.

The complexity inherent in McLaughlin’s works, evident in both these exhibitions, continually challenges perceptual and cognitive capacities. Psychologists have long recognized that unresolved problems exert a tension that keeps them alive in memory. McLaughlin’s shifting geometries visually exemplify this principle.

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Had Eva Hesse lived, she would now be 80. In Marcie Begleiter’s new documentary profile we are treated to the story of her life and a textured portrait of the New York art world in the 1960s. It was Hesse’s good fortune to be part of a supportive art community that included Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Robert and Sylvia Mangold among others. Their focus was on art as self-discovery, rather than on art as commodity.

In order to tell Hesse’s story, the film moves back and forth among her past, present, and future. The film opens and closes with artists, critics, curators, and museum directors talking about her legacy and the widespread appeal of her poignant work. This contribution is evident at a recent opening of Hesse’s work in London at the Lisson Gallery where young artists were particularly drawn to the relevance of her accomplishment, which changed the landscape of what we mean by art, and, which continues to open up new options. Regrettably, Hesse could not exploit these options due to her premature death at the age of 34.

There is no omniscient narrator in the film.   Using a series of videotaped segments, we hear poignant stories about Eva’s struggles and successes from her closest friends, Rosie Goldman, Gioia Timpanelli and Sol Lewitt. We also learn how some of her masterpieces, conceptualized and designed by Hesse, were realized with the help of Doug Johns, a plastics expert, who was her assistant in the final two years of her life. Helen Hesse Charash, Eva’s sister, provides valuable insights on how Eva’s life was plagued by feelings of abandonment and how she courageously faced death in her last months.

The three key figures who are no longer alive—Eva, her father, and Sol Lewitt—speak to us through the voices of unseen actors against the backdrops of hundreds of photographs and silent video segments.   The script is entirely from primary sources, i.e., diaries, letters, and interviews.   These multiple vantage points allow us to observe the trajectory of Hesse’s development and gain insight into the intricacies of the generative art-world that surrounded her.

Begleiter and Shapiro faced two significant challenges in crafting this film: how to avoid making Eva’s life into a soap opera and how to introduce a mass audience to a body of work which eschews beauty while exploring a powerful but often twisted path to aesthetic truth. They successfully walk these tightropes by showing scores of Eva’s works, evolving from expressionist painting to quasi-minimalist sculpture to non-art which “let it all hang out.”

Particularly well handled is Eva’s visit to Germany, the place from which she fled in 1938 and to which she returned in 1964 for 15 months with her husband, Tom Doyle, who accepted an all expenses-paid residency to work on his sculpture. These segments effectively trace how the shadow of the Holocaust penetrated every phase of Hesse’s life and aesthetic practice. Faced with nightmares and her inability to work, she was inspired by the encouraging letters of Sol Lewitt who told her to “Just DO!” Heeding his advice, Hesse, during the next months, made a crucial switch from being a painter to being a proto-sculptor, by exploiting the discarded materials around her.   Eva’s correspondence with Sol Lewitt provided some of the most tender and personal aspects of the film. The close relationship between these two artists is movingly portrayed beyond Germany. Friends expressed their disappointment when Sol’s romantic feelings for Eva were not reciprocated.

In the film, several artists described how Eva liked to use unusual materials such as polyester resin, latex, fiberglass and rope as well as industrial materials like metal washers and shell casings. She often played with them for long periods before deciding what form they wanted to take. In one of Hesse’s greatest works, Rope Piece, order comports with disorder, as was true in her own life. Using the force of gravity, Eva lets the wet sections of rope determine their own structure. In the film, Elizabeth Sussman suggests that there is no one right way to hang this rope piece. Such openness was a trademark of the new genre Hesse was creating, one in which her sculpture vacillated between comic tragedies and tragic comedies.

Finally, it is hard not to be moved by Hesse’s tragic death, due to a series of brain tumors, which cut short her relentless desire to keep producing great art. The film is at its best when it allows us to see how her aesthetic accomplishment and her fearlessness in the face of death were interwoven. Hesse’s life and art are embodied in the aphorism of Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist humor Hesse readily acknowledged: “I can’t go on; I will go on”.

Eva Hesse (Dir. Marcie Begleiter, 2016; a Zeitgest Films release) at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, (212) 727-8110. Screenings at 12:30  2:45  5:10  7:30  9:50

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Before detailing the manifold seductions of Art Basel/Miami Beach as the site of a virtual festival of the arts, it should be noted that the anchor fair was in good form. In fact, we thought that this year’s fair featured better examples and greater diversity than those of the past few years. The highly selected 267 galleries representing 32 countries brought to Miami Beach many of the popular blue-chip artists we read about in well-advertised one-person shows and contemporary art auctions. For those far from the Whitney Museum Frank Stella retrospective, many galleries displayed his paintings, providing a mini-Stella exhibition. There were also outrageous works like a 7-foot tall pair of blue and white polar bears by Paola PIVI made of foam, plastic and feathers at Galerie Perrotin and ingenious works like the wooden stools by John Preus at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery made from materials salvaged from recently closed Chicago Public Schools and selling for $800.00. Disturbingly, this year’s fair even included an actual stabbing event that was misinterpreted by some fair goers as performance art and others as an act of terrorism. We also sampled several of the close to twenty satellite fairs spread throughout Miami and Miami Beach and found the quality generally high.

There was a time just fourteen years ago when Art Basel/Miami Beach was a singular event of excellence that was accompanied by a handful of satellite fairs for those priced out of the main event or in search of emerging artists. While it is still a top-notch fair, its role has changed. Now, for art lovers internationally and for the Miami area, it gradually has taken on the role of a catalyst that sets in motion a veritable festival of the arts—in the spirit of Black Mountain College where many art forms collided and interacted. Indeed, one of the most Black Mountain-like events involved a collaboration between Silas Riener, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, and Martha Friedman, a Brooklyn-based creator of seductive soft sculptures that morphed into dance costumes at the Pore exhibition at Locust Projects.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, provided a powerful dialogue between the great Holocaust poet, Paul Celan and the Holocaust-drenched sculpture and painting of Anselm Kiefer at the top of his angst-filled game. In Geheimnis der Farne, weighing 50,000 lbs and set in a 2,500 square-foot room built especially for it, the common theme shared by the poet and the sculptor was a focus on ferns, a powerful metaphor for time, given their status as the ancestors of all plants. Along with two other major sculptures and several paintings and drawings occupying 18,000 square feet, this group of seven works is the largest exhibition of Kiefer’s work in the United States to date. In a neighboring room at Margulies’ Warehouse is another compelling dialogue — an immersive sound installation by the Turner-prize winner, Susan Phillipsz, dedicated to the Oscar-winning Austrian composer, Hanns Eisler. Using 12 speakers and 12 canvases, she depicts the struggles of this talented composer who went into exile and emigrated to New York in 1938 after the Nazis banned his work. Ten years later, after writing numerous movie scores in Los Angeles, he was investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, blacklisted, and finally deported. Each speaker plays one violin note that collectively combine to form somber tones accompanying the canvases that reveal Eisler’s handwritten and notated archival scores, under the typewritten reports from his FBI file with their own handwriting and deletions. Together with Magulies’ permanent collection of sculpture and photographs, the Warehouse is an essential destination for any serious art lover.

An additional collaboration occurred outside on the terrace of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in a newly commissioned, three hour multimedia extravaganza spread across eight stages. Each featured a dancer choreographed by the popular visual and performance artist Ryan McNamara and an accompanying musician or vocalist performing a new composition written by the British music sensation, Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange). Each duo, bathed in a different colored light, performed a unique routine that encouraged a kind of “movable feast”. Inside PAMM was an outstanding exhibition of nine West Australian Aboriginal artists from the Miami-based collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl. Among the standouts were works by Warlimpirringa Tjapaljarri whose recent exhibition of swirling lines of small dots at Salon 94 in New York City was mesmerizing in its gentle opticality.

Another powerful strand of this festival of the arts was the presence of two well-selected surveys of Los Angeles Light and Space Art.   At the Surf Club in Miami Beach, Joachim Pissarro, in consultation with Terence Riley and John Keenan, curated LAX – MIA: Light + Space, which included both vintage and new sculptures as well as recent paintings by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, John McCracken, Laddie John Dill, Helen Pashgian, and DeWain Valentine. Set in an airy glass-encased building by Richard Meier right off the ocean, it provided an East Coast simulation of the Light and Space that so inspired the West Coast artists represented here. The curators of this show, who used this exhibition to launch their consulting group, Parallel LLC, exemplified another theme of this year’s art week, namely, new attempts to combine art, architecture and design. This was also in evidence at the Design Miami Fair where the interdisciplinary collaborative, Revolution, introduced Volu, (a prefabricated dining pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher), which also included the participation of the designer, Marcel Wanders on a panel held inside the new structure.

The other Light and Space exhibition occurred at Miami’s MANA in Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection. Among the approximately 100 exhibited works chosen from Weisman’s trove of more than 1300 paintings and sculptures made in the Golden State since the 1950s was a dimly lit chapel-like room.   It featured a striking Corner Lamp by Larry Bell and an exquisite white disc by Robert Irwin with its classic four overlapping shadows.

Beyond these two Light and Space surveys was, in effect, a mini-retrospective of Larry Bell, the emperor of chemically-coated glass, a technique that created lyrical and ambiguous qualities in his sculptures. In addition to his iconic cubes on display in at least three different galleries at the fairs, another unusual standout was Bell’s island of thirty-six specially treated six-foot square sheets of standing grey, clear, and partially-coated glass panels.   First exhibited at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, it is now presented at the White Cube’s space in Miami’s Design District. This compelling standing wall installation changes dramatically as one moves through and around the glass panes and as they absorb, reflect and transmit the different amounts of daylight.

Given our recently re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba, it is not surprising that Cuban art was very much in evidence in the fairs, galleries, and museums. A standout was the first U.S. exhibition of Gustavo Pérez Monzón at CIFO. The 70 drawings and installations were completed between 1979 and the late 1980s at the height of his prominence in the Cuban art community. Combining aspects of Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, he used Tarot cards, numerological concepts and a variety of fragile and mixed media on board to represent abstract systems which are simultaneously quasi-logical and emotionally evocative. For this exhibition, he also re-created a complex room-size spider-web-like installation using the elastic threads from socks along with stones and wire.

Our six days in the Miami area left us with our heads spinning. For this year, at least, there is simply nothing on the North American art calendar like the broad array of high-level aesthetic choices available during the week of Art Basel/Miami Beach. We left wanting to see more, but comforted in knowing that we’ll have another chance next December.

Also discussed in this Report 

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings, Sculpture, Installation, and Susan Phillipsz: Innovative Sound Installation, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, October 29, 2015 to April 30, 2016

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting at Pérez Art Museum Miami, September 17, 2015 to January 3, 2016

LAX – MIA: Light + Space, Curated by Parallel LLC, The Surf Club’s Richard Meier Pavilion, Miami, December 2 to December 12, 2015

Volu Dining Pavilion: Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher for Revolution at Design Miami, December 2 to December 6, 2015

Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection at MANA, Wynwood, December 3 to December 6, 2015

Larry Bell 6 x 6: An Improvisation at White Cube, 3930 NE Second Avenue, Melin Building, December 2, 2015 to January 9, 2016

Gustavo Pérez Monzón: Tramas, Selected Works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection at CIFO Art Space , Miami, December 2, 2015 to May 1, 2016

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Art Miami, the oldest of the Miami fairs, is an excellent complement to the now more dominant Art Basel/Miami Beach. There is an international mix of galleries and a healthy cross-section of established, mid-career, and emerging artists. Although there is only a sampling of superstars (Picasso, Malevich are stand outs) the fair includes nationally recognized and significant masters such as Frank Stella, Milton Avery and John McLaughlin. Overall, there is a consistency in the quality of the works presented that sometimes rivals Art Basel/Miami Beach and certainly exceeds all of the other satellite fairs.

The first gallery we visited was one of the best in the fair. The De Buck gallery from Antwerp and New York featured five artists from the Zero Group, the German abstract/technologically oriented movement from the 1960s now the subject of a major survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. They were also seen extensively at Art Basel/Miami Beach. De Buck also featured artists from other countries aligned to the Zero group. Their Lucio Fontana painting from 1959 in three shades of green and beige showed how closely his early work could resemble landscape painting. The slashes in this work also reminded us of the rods in Walter de Maria’s Lightning Fields. Turi Simeti’s meditative, white, shaped canvases of 1968 are reminiscent in structure of the American artist, Charles Hinman, active in the same period. Other fine examples of the Zero Group were found at the Tresart Gallery from Coral Gables and at Jerome Zodo from Milan.

A publicized focus of this year’s fair was art from Germany. Across from De Buck was Lausberg Contemporary from Düsseldorf, featuring small fluorescent acrylic glass cubes by Regine Schumann, who was also had an installation at Galerie Renate Bender, Berlin. For us, these little gems, such as her Color Mirror Hohenzollern (2013), at Lausberg, could be seen to demonstrate the far-reaching effect of the Los Angeles Light and Space movement of the 1960s, a theme picked up at Peter Blake Gallery from Laguna Beach, CA with their first-rate painting by John McLaughlin, along with works we liked by artists who extend his aesthetic: John M. Miller, Scot Heywood and New Yorker Don Voisine.

Galerie Renate Bender from Munich shows both German and American artists, amongst them the Op artist Ludwig Wilding, and some exceptionally strong works by U.S. artists including thick tactile paintings by Robert Sagerman, shiny gold wall reliefs by Bill Thompson, and biomorphic and edgy floor pieces by Jeremy Thomas. A mainstay of this booth is Peter Weber who works mainly in folded felt in a variety of colors. This year, he exhibited a small cotton folded white work called System & Zufall to effectively and viscerally represent the two poles of order and chaos. Directly in front of this work were two folded white floor pieces that people were encouraged to walk on with their dirty shoes. After the fair, this piece will be unfolded to reveal an abstract design of clean and dirty areas created by the Fair’s participants–another example of Weber’s ability to synthesize order and chaos.

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September 16, 2012 to January 6, 2013
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California, (323) 857-6000

February 9 to May 12, 2013
Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas,  (214) 242-5100

June 18 to September 22, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York City, (212) 535-7710

Upon entering this visually stunning retrospective of Ken Price’s ceramic sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) visitors were captivated by a profusion of colors beckoning one into Price’s surreal world of quirky shapes, forms, and surfaces. (Following a three-month stay at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, the exhibition completes its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening June 18.)  Frank Gehry, a long-time friend of Price, created a sensitive exhibition design that transformed the cavernous museum space into intimate areas.  It is easy to see why Gehry, in his catalogue essay, speculates how difficult it would be for him to live without works of such enigmatic beauty. The first object one encounters is Zizi (2011), a seductively iridescent turquoise clay sculpture existing on the border between figuration and abstraction. On closer inspection, the work’s apparently monochromatic surface dissolves into green-centered islands of different shapes surrounded by successive rings of yellow, red and purple, a visual experience reminiscent of 19th century Pointillism or a Chuck Close portrait.

By both beginning and ending with Price’s last works and moving backward in time in the middle galleries, the exhibition’s installation enables us to appreciate Price’s remarkable allegiance to dualities in form and sensibility: A shifting back and forth between the architectural and the biomorphic, the geometric and the sensual, the majestic and the humble, the tiny and the grand, the humorous and the serious. There’s a corresponding variety in Price’s surfaces, alternating between the smooth and the rough, the flat and the ridged, the straight edged and the craggy, the glazed and the painted.  In crafting these unpredictable combinations of form, color and surface, Price sought to motivate us to examine more closely the manifold worlds around us.

Price’s work offers as many challenges as pleasures.  While, as an individual, he did not explicitly follow Zen practices, his search for beauty in dissonance and imperfection is consistent with a Zen sensibility. The sculptures offer a rough beauty that defies facile labeling, an aesthetic that seems rooted at a pre-verbal level, where the emotional outweighs the conceptual.  Another aspect of Price’s rough beauty is its “primordial freshness,” a term coined by the poet John Crowe Ransom in 1938.  Price’s engagement with the primal informs his persistent and evolving exploration of the void—those openings that live between the inside and the outside. The “Eggs and Specimens” series from the early 1960s, such as L. Blue (1961), are interrupted by slits and voids that reveal a variety of primitive shapes such as slithering worm-like creatures, phallic protrusions, and gooey globs.

Price’s forms become increasingly architectural in the early 1980s. The void-like openings now function as portals or windows evoking, in their uncanny simplicity, the architecture of ancient cliff dwellings and the spirit of minimalist design, as in Hawaiian (1980).  Beginning with the so-called “Rocks” series of the late ‘80s, there is greater complexity at a number of levels.  In works like Big Load (1988), the enigmatic void is in the form of a black cube that is set against a smoothly painted yellow slice that appears to be cut out of a solid orb with a veiny blue surface.  Price’s illusionistic cubes, while reminiscent of James Turrell’s corner installations of projected light, are even more mysterious.  Whereas the ambiguity in Turrell’s projected cubes can be resolved visually, with Price’s three-dimensional voids, it is not possible to determine solely by looking whether it is an extruded cube or a deep hole.  You want to put your finger into it to find out, an impulse not present in a Turrell.  In the next group of works from the 1990s, the voids become more explicitly sensual, with a touch of violence.  The erotic white Arctic (1998) exhibits a painted-red vaginal-like opening or deep wound.

In 2000 Price’s quest for a rough beauty takes on a new focus.  The voids disappear, the forms become larger and more intertwined, and surface color becomes his main concern.  What occurred in Zizi holds true for the majority of these late works.  Upon close viewing, seemingly uniform surfaces morph into innumerable brilliantly colored paisley patterns with dozens of nested color combinations.  Price achieved these effects by way of a multi-part technique. Following his shaping and firing of the clay, he would apply up to a hundred thin layers of acrylic paint on the sculpted form before using sandpaper to painstakingly remove some of the layers, differentially exposing the colors underneath.  In these last works, Price is the consummate painter, transforming fired clay surfaces into dense, yet delicate fields of color.

There’s a Thoreau-like sensitivity to nature in Price’s most successful late work. The structures of the natural world—with its mountains, deserts, tide-pools, beehives, snake skins, etc. — are the touchstones for his non-literal fusion of color, surface, and shape.  As Price’s work matured, color changed from a substance to be applied ‘top down’ to a more organic process that appears to evolve ‘bottom up’ to satisfy the needs of form. That is, Price’s ability to map certain colors onto certain forms (as opposed to others) projects a certain inevitability that simulates nature’s functional imperatives, as when the feather color of a Blue Jay or a peacock is determined by natural selection to improve mating capability. Price’s structures embody a Zen orientation to nature that values aging and its concomitant limitations.  Certain Price forms can be interpreted as capturing the ravages of time.  One can perceive the frailty and vulnerability of the human condition in his early “Eggs and Specimens” series and especially in the veiny surfaces of his later works like Big Load (1988).  Price’s empathy for the human condition can also be experienced in his slumping, teetering, and sometimes wounded forms, as well as in some of his last more anthropomorphic sculptures that resemble strange, sometimes vulnerable creatures lying on their backs with their limbs flailing in the air or sitting upright to beckon you.  These works harbor a pathos and poignancy that sneaks up on you.

From the perspective of recent art history, Ken Price has turned on its head Donald Judd’s argument that specific objects should replace painting.  In creating paintings that are essentially three-dimensional fields of color, Price re-invigorates the exploration of color as an aesthetic force across mediums.  In effect, not only did Price blur the boundary between craft and sculpture, but also, in contradistinction to Clement Greenberg’s theory of the singular medium, he blurred the boundary between painting and sculpture.  For his first forty years, Price made painted sculptures, and for the last twelve, until his death in 2012, he made sculpted paintings—all the while defying art historical categories in the name of a visual pleasure principle leavened by an essential humanity.

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March 22 to May 5, 2012
529 West 20th Street, 2nd floor
New York City, 212-366-6939

The three installations in bitform’s Beryl Korot mini-survey, incorporating no fewer than six different media formats to capture our attention, exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated dictum that “the medium is the message.”  One of Korot’s original motives, over thirty years ago, was to get us out of our homes, away from our TV sets and into a public space for viewing multichannel video work of intriguing complexity.  In this age of instant messaging and Twitter, it is refreshing to encounter a video artist whose labor-intensive use of the computer as an extension of her hand slows us down so that we can more carefully observe what is before us.

The show begins with Korot’s signature installation, Text and Commentary (1976-77), first shown the year it was made at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In this multi-modal piece she first prepared a handloom and then made a series of geometric weavings, simultaneously videotaping this rhythmic process.   The installation includes five delicate black, grey, and beige weavings hung vertically from the ceiling across from video screens that document their making.  On one wall at the entrance to the gallery are soft-edge geometric pencil drawings on graph paper of the central portions of the weavings.  The pictographic notations on another wall are used by Korot to choreograph the minute-by-minute coordination of the five different yet related 30-minute videos.  Some of the pictographs resemble a blend of computer bar codes and American Indian petroglyphs.   While these weavings and the drawings are finished works in their own right, at a deeper level they correspond to César Paternosto’s insight, proposed in The Stone and the Thread (1989/1996), that the Pre-Columbian Andean textile patterns are not merely decorative but served as a carrier of coded information in the absence of a written alphabet.  Quite literally, the medium was also the message.

Through her use of weaving as a medium, Korot links information processing and communications systems both past and future. She recognized how the Jacquard loom, which made modern weaving possible through the use of punch cards to guide the hooks and harness for the weave’s design, was a kind of proto-computer.  Focusing on the importance of line as the organizer of information across time, Korot has observed how “we read line by line, weavers create their patterns line by line, (and) electronic cameras read an image at 30 frames per second”.  This can be extended to computers, which use lines of data to perform their operations.  Korot stimulates us to see how an object—the weaving—can both encode the history of a culture and reflect the personal mark of the artist, something she herself accomplishes even in technologically based work.

Yellow Water Taxi (2003, 2 minutes) is a visual treat of video mastery. We watch a ballet of bright yellow water taxis pass us by at different speeds.   At one point, the taxis stop and park on the right and left edges of the small screen.  But the water continues to move with the five blue bands of water becoming fewer as some of them are overtaken by white ones. Although devoid of a specific narrative, the variety of visual elements is more than sufficient to sustain our interest as it massages our sensory-motor system.   The video has a hand-made feel.  The backdrop is a piece of woven canvas whose texture is plainly seen and felt.  Learning later that Korot conceived of this work while taking a walk along the Esplanade where the Twin Towers had recently stood and watching the taxis ferrying people back and forth from New York to New Jersey added a layer of poignancy.

The final video, Florence (2008, 10 ½ minutes) is concrete poetry with a definite narrative structure.  The backdrop is another weaving, although this time without the threads. There is a black and white grid of snowstorms, waterfalls, and boiling water stitched together on the computer.  Superimposed over the visual grid and the sound track of driving rain is a visual display of actual words of Florence Nightingale, creating a haunting sensory experience.  The words enter the large screen at the top and move vertically downward at different speeds and in different sizes, pooling at the bottom.  The viewer is swept up by the challenges faced by Nightingale in caring for wounded men on the battlefield with no medical provisions. The power of Nightingale’s words bombarding us against a backdrop of darkness and rain is so compelling that we also empathize with her suffering.   Nightingale used her religious belief to overcome the doubts experienced as a woman to achieve a certain degree of power and autonomy in the male-dominated medical establishment.  Korot’s magisterial video conveys this struggle in a way that is far more powerful than would be possible from a straight reading of her diaries.  The complex combination of cascading words against a stormy background makes the viewer a more active participant in grasping Nightingale’s message.

The three works in this show each view art and mind as a palimpsest as Korot creates layers of organization that must be peeled back as part of an embodied search for meaning.  The result is a high-tech version of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  As with Dickinson, one sometimes has to strain to hear the artist’s voice hovering just below the surface.  But connection, once made, vindicates the effort.

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Mary Corse: New Work
February 2 – March 10, 2012, Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West. 26th Street, New York City, 212-255-2923

The concurrent exhibitions of Doug Wheeler’s environmental light installation at David Zwirner Gallery and Mary Corse’s light-infused paintings at Lehmann Maupin Gallery provide us with an exceptional opportunity to understand how L. A. Light and Space art can sensitize us to the subtleties of the world around us.  These two artists rely on fields of white, intense lighting and a mobile observer to provide some exhilarating surprises.  While both Wheeler and Corse privilege direct perception over thinking, there are also some significant differences in the ways in which their art creates heightened sensory awareness.

Over thirty years ago, the psychologist William Ittelson drew a critical distinction between environment and object perception.  In object perception, one surrounds the object; in environment perception, one is surrounded by it.  One observes an object; one explores an environment using many sensory modalities.  Ittelson noted that with environment perception “the very distinction between self and nonself breaks down: the environment surrounds, enfolds, engulfs….”  What makes the work of Wheeler and Corse so innovative is that it causes us to alternate between object and environment perception.   This is consistent with Venturi’s preference in Complexity and Contradiction for both-and over either-or.   As we will see, these two L.A. artists accomplish this balancing act in different ways.

Your adventure in Wheeler’s Infinity Environment begins in the antechamber where you appear to be facing a luminous translucent wall that makes you hesitant to move forward.  So you approach it very slowly.  Your initial surprise when you reach the “wall” is that it is not solid, but rather an opening into a space filled with what appears to be thick fog. The morphing of a diaphonous wall into a vaporous fog creates a shift from perceiving an object to perceiving an environment.  Once inside the space, you can’t see its perimeter, so you can’t figure out its shape without extended exploration.  As you reach out your hands in front of you, you can see your fingers clearly but your don’t know how much further the space extends.  So again you walk slowly.  The next surprise is that your feet provide you with some critical information.  Suddenly, the floor begins to curve upward and outward in front of you but your outstretched arms do not hit the wall.  Are you inside a giant egg?

The effects Wheeler creates are most dramatic and thrilling if you inhabit the space alone, but this has generally not been possible due to the popularity of this exhibition.  Indeed, your entire experience is radically altered by the presence of other people who appear to be crystal clear, almost hyper-real.  By observing the positions of the other people, you can see how far the floor extends in each direction. In this space, “you feel with your eyes” (Turrell) and see with your body.  The sensations created by this Infinity Space range from disorienting to frightening to exhilarating, often alternating within an individual.   And to heighten the experience, Wheeler gradually modifies the ambience by shifting the lighting from dawn to dusk and back again over some thirty minutes.  This extreme environment attunes our sensory-motor system to differentiate things it never noticed before, a major goal of the Light and Space artists.

Mary Corse’s wall paintings are essentially two-dimensional.  One would, therefore, expect them to function as objects and not environments.  But, almost magically, the tiny glass microspheres embedded in Corse’s five large white paintings invite you to treat them as environments to be explored.   You notice immediately that each painting changes dramatically as you cross in front of it so what you experience is not one painting, but multiple different paintings.  For example, the large work, Untitled 4 Inner Bands shifts from an absorbent matte cream-colored monochrome with barely perceptible vertical bands to a stark white mirror-like surface that glistens and reflects your head and body movements.  As you move back and forth in front of the painting, you see anywhere between two and five vertical bands which reverse their colors as you move, the darker ones becoming light and the lighter ones becoming dark.  From certain vantage points you can detect some horizontal brush strokes that first appear as ghostly vapors and then become eight defined horizontal bands that weave across the vertical ones to form a grid.   Careful looking and continual movement combine to provide an uncanny experience that simulates key aspects of environment perception.  The ambiguity of the overall encounter resembles a reversible-figure task used in Gestalt psychology research in which the  perceived image shifts dramatically from a vase to two figures or from a duck to a rabbit.  This effect results from the limitations of our perceptual apparatus that allow us to see only one of these images at a time.

Wheeler and Corse create different kinds of ambiguity to achieve their effects.  The ambiguity of Wheeler’s void is one of a homogeneous field in which you seek to discover its boundaries, so as to both find your place and try to locomote effectively.  With Corse, the problem is not lack of structure but competing structures.  Monochromatic surfaces, minimal geometric bars, and abstract expressionist brushstrokes inhabit the same canvas and alternate taking center stage.  However, in both Wheeler and Corse, what turns looking into seeing is the coordination between looking and doing.  What we do affects what we see; what we see affects what we do.

Finally, each artist takes you on a journey that explores the relationship between order and disorder in different ways.  In Corse, if conditions are right, one’s movements can control the fluctuation between order and disorder in a back and forth dance that can be highly pleasurable.  In Wheeler, there is a more entropic experience that, at least momentarily, is more frightening and disorienting.  Control is neither possible nor desirable for Wheeler.  In his “whiteout” environment a lack of control is central to the participant’s experience of boundlessness. Despite these differences, Wheeler and Corse provide something that is very atypical for the New York lifestyle: there is a slowing down of our internal clock.   We are able to surrender ourselves to a kind of stillness that sets the stage for retuning our sensory-motor system.  This sensory learning increases our ability to differentiate the essential from the unessential in the course of exploring realms where objects morph into environments and environments morph into objects.

The post See First, Think Later: The Art of Doug Wheeler and Mary Corse appeared first on artcritical.

November 30 to December 4, 2011
at the Art Miami Pavilion, Wynwood, Miami, Florida

Once again, in our opinion, Art Miami proved the strongest satellite fair this year. Now in its twenty-second year and Miami’s longest running art fair, Art Miami attracted some 50,000 visitors to over 110 galleries (22 first time) from 18 countries in Europe, Latin America, India, the Middle East and the United States.  With works that ranged from Titian to Pop to cutting edge contemporary, Art Miami offered many surprises and unexpected pleasures.

A real Titian at Art Miami?  His St. Sebastian, dated to 1530, at Edelman Arts (NYC) was the centerpiece of a smart thematic show of more than a dozen painters and sculptors, including Red Grooms and Carlos Betancourt who used images of the androgynous saint in their work.  Further proof that powerful portrait painting thrives came in the form of Captain, by David Bates, at Arthur Roger Gallery (New Orleans).

Among the strong examples of familiar American artists was a quintessential Milton Avery painting at Lewallyn Gallery (Santa Fe), Chinese Checkers (March Avery with Vincenzo Spagna), circa 1941, with his characteristic muted colors and quirky rendering of figures that bordered on folk art.  At Antoine Helwaser Gallery (NYC), an impressive early Olitski with a large red orb and a small green one was one of many Olitskis and Kenneth Nolands at this fair, as at Art Basel/Miami Beach, suggesting a resurgence of interest in Color Field painting.  Helwaser also displayed several Abstract Expressionist works including a red and black Adolf Gottlieb sunburst painting and a Robert Motherwell collage painting.  His reclining nude painting by Tom Wesselman was one of many Pop artists in evidence at the fair with a suite of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns at Arcature Fine Art (Palm Beach, FL), a brawny Alan D’Arcangelo highway painting from 1964 at Mark Borghi (NYC), and several Robert Indiana sculptures, including Hope and its Hebrew counterpart, Tikvah, both at Rosenbaum Contemporary (Boca Raton, FL). There were artists who bridged a number of styles including the still underappreciated Jack Tworkov who was represented by a second-generation Abstract Expressionist work from his Barrier Series (1963) at Mark Borghi (NYC) and a geometric work from his Knight series (1976) at Hollis Taggart (NYC).  Other artists’ artists from the 1950s and 1960s who do not fall easily into a single style included Perle Fine at Spanierman Modern (NYC) and Ward Jackson at David Richard Contemporary (Santa Fe, NM).  It was also a treat to see an uncharacteristic one-foot square monochrome painting from 1960 in by the sculptor, John Chamberlain using automobile lacquer and a square metal template.

Several examples of Los Angeles artists currently featured in Pacific Standard Time, the Getty Museum’s initiative of more than 60 museums between Santa Barbara and San Diego (read our review here) were also in evidence at Art Miami.  Scott White (La Jolla) brought numerous examples of De Wain Valentine’s light and space sculpture including two knockouts–the massive Column Mauve from 1968 and the exquisite Circle Blue-Magenta Flow from 1970.  Charlotte Jackson (Santa Fe) exhibited some recent Ron Davis two-tone red paintings, David Richards Contemporary (Santa Fe) displayed a lively geometric abstract painting, Apertures-Eyesights from 2000 by Roland Reiss and Leslie Sacks Contemporary (Santa Monica, CA), featured two crisp red and black striped acrylic paintings (2011) by Charles Christopher Hill.

Not surprisingly, there were several first-rate examples of Latin American art including Jesus de Soto’s geometric optical constructions at Leon Tovar (NYC) and Victor Lugo’s figurative paintings at the Ginocchio Gallery (Mexico City) including a smart diptych with a landscape painting that appeared to be cut from its frame alongside a trompe l’oeil painting of the frame and stretcher supports from which it had been cut.

A new art medium that emerged this year at the fair is the use of fiber optics in tapestry. The Catherine Clark Gallery (San Francisco, CA) displayed 50 Different Minds by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese that used hand-woven fiber-optic thread, custom electronics and software, and RGB full-spectrum LED lights.   Connected to the Internet, the colors in the nine squares of the weaving changed continuously according to the real-time content of Twitter messages. There were two other notable examples of woven fiber-optic art in Miami Beach—one by Daniel Buren, Two Rectangles of Electric Light: white and blue situated work, 2011 using LED at the Lisson Gallery (London) at AB/MB and the other at Design Miami at Galerie Maria Wettergren (Paris) who showcased the seductive floor to ceiling fiber-optic textile draperies of Astrid Krogh of Denmark that continuously changed color.

There was a lot of buzz around a relatively small Gerhard Richter painting, Abtraktus Bild, 2001 at the Michael Schultz Gallery (Berlin, Seoul, Beijing) when it was reported sold for $1.6m. Seeing the new intimate documentary film, Gerhard Richter Painting by filmmaker Corinna Belz at Art Basel gave us a deeper appreciation for the arduous and self-critical process Richter uses in making one of these paintings.  Another German booth, Galerie Renate Bender (Munich) was particularly appealing with intricately folded felt sculptures by Peter Weber, new monochromatic abstract paintings by Matt McClune, and ambitious amoeboid wall sculptures by Bill Thompson, reminiscent of L.A. Finish Fetish sculptures. Also compelling at John Roger Gallery was Dawn DeDeaux’s plank leaning against the wall (reminiscent of John McCracken). Entitled 8 Feet of Water, it recorded the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a digital transparency mounted on a tall narrow acrylic support.

Chul Hyun Ahn’s work presented by the C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD) was a showstopper. Using lights and mirrors, his works appear to recede indefinitely despite the fact that they are less than six inches deep.  His 2011 Visual Echo Experiment placed in one of the large fair crosswalks was particularly arresting as was Forked, 2003 in the C. Grimaldis Gallery booth.  An interesting complement to this western art of illusion was a refreshing variety of optical aboriginal painting from Australia at the Leslie Smith Gallery (Amsterdam).

Thanks to Julia Draganovic, the fair’s curator of six videos in the Persol Art Video and New Media Lounge, “ZOOOM! Decoding Common Practice”, we were treated to a trip along Beijing’s major east-west artery in Ai Weiwei’s 10-hour, 13 minute video, Chang’an Boulevard. All strata of the city’s society are depicted in riveting fashion in fixed, one-minute long segments, taken at intervals of 50 meters (approximately 164 feet).

The Richard Levy Gallery (Albuquerque, NM) exhibited Constance deJong’s intriguing bronze and wood wall sculpture, Section, 1991 highlighting an important aspect of this and the other satellite fairs—the opportunity to see regionally well-known artists receive the broader exposure they merit.

As we were leaving the fair, we spotted a vertical work at the Persol display by Chiara Moreschi and Rodger Stevens whose message took us a minute or so to decode but seemed very appropriate: “Beauty is never useless”.

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If ever there was a moment to reassess the 1960s Light and Space artists of Los Angeles, that moment is now.  At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a recently reinstalled permanent gallery places three works from L.A. Light and Space art in critical dialogue with four works of New York Minimalism, which also had it defining years in the middle 1960s.  Simultaneously, a representative sampling of the Light and Space movement is presently on view at more than a dozen museums and gallery exhibits throughout Southern California participating in the Getty Foundation’s omnibus initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.  The pivotal survey, Phenomenal California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through January 22, seen together with more focused shows at the other venues, listed at the end of this dispatch, allows us to grasp the fundamental characteristics of the Light and Space tradition that differentiates it from the Minimalism that was being practiced in New York by the likes of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Frank Stella et al.

At a meta-level, the L.A. aesthetic may be characterized as “truth equals beauty” as distinguished from the “truth to materials” aesthetic prevailing in N.Y.  The N.Y. aesthetic embraced impermeable industrial materials and downplayed shadows and reflections in favor of the concreteness and stability of the specific object.  In contrast, L.A. artists, especially the Finish Fetish group, rejected concreteness and turned instead to newly available translucent and transparent materials—polyester resin, Plexiglas, fiberglass, coated glass, and plastics of all kinds.  These materials reflected, refracted, and filtered light, thus opening up new options for sculpture.  They were particularly well suited to capturing and transforming the ephemeral luminosity of the ocean and the smog-besmirched sky, as well as the high gloss brilliance of surfboards and autos that were primary everyday experiences for these artists.  In this context, the L.A. artists turned Stella’s reductive, “what you see is what you see” inside out by appending a question mark.

Indeed, these L.A. works could be Michael Fried’s worst nightmare—their theatricality is an integral part of their aesthetic DNA.  They make us keenly aware that what you do affects what you see, and what you see affects what you do.  The properties of an effective resin piece don’t belong to the work alone.  Their color, shape, and surface effects are contingent on the spatial/temporal positions of observers as they move across, walk around, or enter the piece.  The spheres of Helen Pashgian and some of the boxes of Larry Bell change dramatically depending on the trajectory of the observer’s movements.  Certain works also depend upon the presence or absence of other people to bring out their complexity.  This occurs with Robert Irwin’s acrylic column and Bell’s five large coated glass panels, both installed strategically in busy and visually noisy locations on the Museum’s first floor.   These are socially contingent works that reach their potential when the movements of other people are reflected and refracted.

Light and Space artists play the role of Shamans.   They have the uncanny ability to make the immaterial material and the material immaterial. They take liquid resin and make of it solid forms (Peter Alexander, Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine) or use light (James Turrell) or scrim (Irwin) to create the illusion of solid forms.  In doing so, strange things happen.  The observer is forced to confront objects and spaces that have hallucinatory properties not unlike the drooping watches in Dali’s Persistence of Memory (1931).  These works challenge our assumptions about ordinary reality to a point where, using our perceptual, sensory-motor apparatus, we try to disambiguate forms as they appear to morph before our eyes. We feel compelled to walk up to and look behind a “floating” Irwin disc to see if it is attached to the wall or we stop short and gaze intently as soon as we detect an Irwin scrim that resizes a room by appearing to be a wall.  We feel compelled to check out whether the top portion of a tall Alexander Wedge is really still there when the bottom is deep orange and the color gradually fades to clear near the top;  to walk around Valentine’s Diamond Column to see how it is possible for people passing behind it to first appear, then disappear, and then return as three simultaneous images facing in different directions;  to walk up to Irwin’s dot painting and Pashgian’s white disc to explore how they are able to hover and pulsate;  to walk right up to the front of a Mary Corse painting with reflective glass microspheres after walking across it and seeing how it changes dramatically from matte to shiny and from totally uniform to containing grids or columns.  And we feel compelled to approach the wall works of Pashgian, Corse, Ron Cooper and Doug Wheeler, to see if there are lights embedded within them.  In all of these explorations, labeling is futile.  We have no choice but to trust our senses.

Several Light and Space artists are particularly good at making color diffuse into space.  Wheeler’s 35 foot-square room installation with one wall completely outlined in white neon UV lights suffuses the entire space in an ethereal atmosphere of blue air.  Other effects are achieved by introducing a temporal dimension to heighten color intensity.  Turrell’s installation (Wedgework V, 1975) requires several minutes of adjustment time in an initially pitch black space before a red wall begins to appear and then intensifies to a fiery glow.  Bruce Nauman’s narrow tunnel with two parallel walls one foot apart and forty feet long lit with green lights seduces us to inch slowly through it sideways.  When we exit this disorienting light tunnel into a wider space, everything appears purple for several seconds— the people, the walls, and the Pacific Ocean seen through an immense glass window.

The other museums and galleries showing Light and Space work (listed below) give us an appreciation of the career trajectories and new options being opened by several of the artists already mentioned (e.g., Alexander, Irwin, Pashgian, Valentine).  In particular, their new work, by utilizing the wall, reinvigorates a dialogue between painting and sculpture, begun earlier by John McCracken and Craig Kauffman.   These shows also introduce us to established but less well known artists like Tom Eatherton at Pomona College who has created an intensely blue space that creates the illusion that you are walking into the middle of a room-size painting.  And, thanks to storefront spaces like Ice Gallery, we can see emerging artists like Michael James Armstrong who is advancing the use of scrims in new and exciting directions.

After seeing these works in many different settings, we were left with three concluding observations. First, the Light and Space artists were determined to make us reexamine how we perceive the world—what is illusory and what is real.  Second, these artists shamelessly court beauty, an aesthetic questioned by postmodern art but openly embraced in the design aesthetic of Steve Jobs and in the reflective surfaces of Frank Gehry’s signature architecture—two iconic Californians who may be seen as heirs to the Light and Space culture.  Third, the relationship between Minimalism and the Light and Space tradition is a complex one, as can be seen, in the MOMA reinstallation, in the atmospheric effects of Dan Flavin’s light sculpture and the exquisite use of colored Plexiglas by Donald Judd. The fruitfulness of this exchange calls out for further study.  The next step?  We suggest a comprehensive exhibition combining Light and Space and East Coast Minimalism that would be seen on both coasts.  Such an exhibition would enable us to appreciate more fully the unique and shared strategies that animate those aspects of Minimalism that dare to flirt with beauty.

Los Angeles Light and Space Works on View in Southern California, Fall, 2011

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
September 25, 2011 to January 22, 2012
700 Prospect Street, La Jolla, CA and 1100 & 1101 Kettner Boulevard, San Diego, CA, between Broadway and B Street. (858) 454-3541 (Catalogue available)

and

Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.  October 1, 2011 to February 5, 2012.  Light and Space art is a subset of the exhibition. (Catalogue)

From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Grey Column at Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.  September 13, 2011 to March 11, 2012. (Catalogue)

California Art: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation at Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. August 27 to December 2, 2011.  Light and Space art is a subset of the exhibition. (Catalogue)

It Happened at Pomona at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969—1973; Part I Hal Glicksman at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, 333 N. College Way, Claremont. August 30 to November 6, 2011.   (Catalogue)

James Turrell’s Dividing the Light (2007) at Draper Courtyard of the Lincoln & Edmonds Buildings, corner of 6^th Street and College Way, Pomona College, Claremont.  Permanent.

Mary Corse Recent Paintings at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through October, 2011.

Robert Irwin Column (1970) at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through October 18, 2011.

Helen Pashgian Columns and Walls at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through November, 2011.

De Wain Valentine Early Resins 1968-1972 and New Work at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through November, 2011.

James Turrell Present Tense at Kayne, Griffen, Corcoran, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica. September 15 to December 17, 2011.

Larry Bell Early Work at Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, B5B, Santa Monica. October 22 to November 26, 2011.

Fred Eversley: Four Decades—1970-2010 at William Turner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, E1, Santa Monica.  September 24 to October 30, 2011.

Robert Irwin Way Out West at L & M Gallery, 660 Venice Boulevard, Venice. September 17 to October 22, 2011.

Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, New Out West at Quint Gallery, 7547 Girard Ave., La Jolla. September 23 to November 12, 2011.

Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, De Wain Valentine, Eric Johnson: Shift. Space. Slick at Scott White Contemporary Art, 939 W. Kalmia, San Diego. September 9 to October 8, 2011.

Michael James Armstrong: A Study in Transparency at Ice Gallery, 3417 30^th Street, San Diego. September 18 to October 9, 2011.

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