STEPHEN MAINE: When I heard about the IABF, my first thought was: terrific! My second thought was… what a load of work it must be to launch a new art book fair. I’m wondering for how long you’ve been focused on developing the IABF. What were the circumstances of its genesis? How did the idea take shape?

KAREN SCHAUPETER: When I first conceived of the idea, I wanted to get it out the door around February 2016, during either the time of the LA Contemporary Art Fair, or Paramount Ranch — things that happen at the end of January — or alongside the LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) in the second week of February. But the timing was tight and the venue I wanted wasn’t available, so I went down to Mexico City and did an artist residency about two blocks from the Material Art Fair. They said “Come do this in Mexico City.” So I had Mexico City and LA developing before New York — those locations are essentially available when I get there. It felt like I was already getting off the ground in three different locations.

I first announced in May 2016 that I would do the fair, and the response was fantastic. I was expecting… well, you never know. I thought people might be protective of the PS1 event. But the responses were nothing but positive.

I created the IABF to include people from all over the world. This is the first fair, so we’ll see what happens. It’s all open to interpretation — I have certain expectations but I’m trying not to let my expectations overshadow whatever will actually happen, or the democratic spirit of the event.

Is IABF in any sense modeled after the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF)? Do you see IABF as a satellite fair, in the way that smaller-scale projects have proliferated around art fairs such as the Armory Show and Art Basel Miami?

I don’t know what word would best describe it. “Satellite” is kind of unavoidable, since IABF is the smaller of two fairs happening concurrently. But my goal is to make something a little more digestible, and more of a hybrid of an art fair and a book fair. We’re definitely not modeled after NYABF, though some other things have been inspiring, like the Index Art Book Fair in Mexico City. That venue is amazing, and the sellers are not overly pressured — it’s a relaxed environment. I’d like to see that at the IABF. And at the LAABF, I liked seeing the zines and the smaller publishers alongside the limited edition publishers. Seeing the high and the low together makes everyone appreciate what it is they’re looking at a little bit more.

We’re not competing with NYABF, because there’s been such an incredible rise in book publishing that they just don’t have the physical space for everyone who wants to do something. It’s great, and it’s definitely the “institution,” what everyone wants to be a part of, but there are boundaries and limitations. With all the newcomers making great things, there’s plenty of room for another fair.

Why is the IABF scheduled for the same weekend as NYABF?

It’s part of my effort to be efficient. Bookmakers from all over the world are in New York then, so why would I do IABF in, like, October? With all the fairs going on all over the world, you have to respect people’s time. I think it will alleviate some pressure at the NYABF — we’re one stop away on the East River Ferry, at the Greenpoint ferry stop.

Fairs are a function of capital as well as culture, of course, so I’m curious about IABF as a corporate entity. Who are the fair’s primary backers? Have you been pursuing corporate sponsorship?

There is no financial backing for this. I’m very DIY by nature. It’s completely operated by me, putting in time whenever I can. Our director, Kayla Fanelli, puts in a lot of time. There are a lot of other people volunteering, but in terms of administration, it’s Kayla and me.

IABF isn’t set up as a corporate entity at this point. I want to get through the fair first, then figure out the structure moving forward. We might decide it should be a nonprofit, or remain a sole proprietorship, fiscally sponsored by a group like NYFA or Fractured Atlas.

How has the IABF attracted exhibitors?

Mainly, I reached out to my email list, which includes about 700 publishers all around the world.

Can you give me an idea of who the exhibitors are? Will there be a concentration at the zine end of the spectrum, or of artist books/limited editions, or something else? And what price range can visitors expect to see?

We have over 60 exhibitors from the US and internationally. As to publications, there is quite a price range — from about $10 to $1,500. The mix is a little bit of everything, some of the zine-y/lowbrow/fetish material; the more crafty zines, using screenprint and woodcut techniques; and then higher-end publications and independent periodicals; a little queer culture; the independent gallery projects presenting one or more artists; and some larger academic things will be happening. Designers and Books will present their facsimile reproduction of an important avant-garde book, Depero Futurista, also known as the “bolted book.” The original dates from 1927, and it presages so much of where we’ve gone with graphic design over the past nearly 100 years. The new edition will be available for pre-order. It’s a great example of the book as a vehicle of communication, and of our effort to strike that delicate balance between art and commerce. 

You are a hybrid insofar as visitors can see original art also.

Yes. I wanted to open the door to smaller galleries, so they can present an artist’s work and not have to kill themselves financially. 

You’re keeping exhibitor costs affordable, then?

Exhibitors’ fees range from $250 to $2,500. I want to create a fair that’s more democratic and I hope to be able to keep a simply structured pricing arrangement. That way, gallery can get in for $2,500 and get 16 to 20 linear feet of exhibition area on two flat walls — and they can do whatever they want.

Nowadays, many if not most print publishers have some kind of online presence, but are any of your exhibitors involved solely in online publication?

No IABF exhibitor publishes online only, except for Tiny Atlas Quarterly. Tiny Atlas was started with the intention of making it a quarterly print magazine, but the Instagram handle took off, and the hashtag #mytinyatlas has something like 1.7 million photos attached to it. This is a project that is only about three years old. They have a huge community of people who embrace what they’re doing, and because they are a major part of the publishing community, it made sense for them to participate. It’s about the project, working with artists, and involvement with the community. Our lines are open.

Who is handling the exhibition design, and what is the concept regarding the look and feel of the visitor’s experience of the fair?

I am the creative force behind the exhibition design, much of which is rooted in being resourceful and democratic with materials and fees. Most of the contributions we have received have been in-kind with time, or majorly discounted flat rates. Kim Sutherland of Full Time-Part Time Design studio did our logo/brand element. I have help from interior architect Sarah T. Engelke, Faster Horse Designs, and countless others who are helping with poster layout, exhibitor catalog design, and printing: Nic Jamieson, Alexander Soiseth, C&B Printing and more. It’s really a grassroots project at this point. I think I have used up my friend favors for a while now!

How did you settle on the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse as a venue?

I’ve been in photo production for 17 years, and I’ve done a lot of location scouting. For IABF, I did quite a bit of legwork to find an appropriate place. A tip lead me to the Brooklyn Expo in Greenpoint, which wasn’t available, but the contact for that venue showed me a photo of their new space, the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, and I said, “Done! I want that space.” The vibe of this raw warehouse in Brooklyn is in some ways similar to the vibe of the fairs in Mexico City and LA.

Is any additional programming scheduled?

We have some help from a Brooklyn publisher called Perfect Wave, with performances daily from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, by Alice Cohen, The Vets, Sex Crystals, and Tropical Rock. There will be readings and panel discussions. Stephen Shore just started a new publication called Documentum, published by Fall Line Press, for which there will be an event. Hana Pesut, a photographer from Vancouver, will do portraits of couples who’ve switched their clothes, in the spirit of her book Switcheroo. It should be hilarious. We want to have some fun, and to keep a nice rhythm of something happening maybe every hour or two.

Of all the challenges this project undoubtedly presented, what was the biggest hurdle you had to clear?

Organizing during the summer was a huge challenge, because everyone is away. We were getting auto-replies from some people for the entire month of August. 

As a new venture, IABF has no financial track record as a baseline measure. By what criteria will you grade its success? Is exhibitor feedback important to you? I mean, in the event that exhibitors overall make money, gain contacts, get some publicity, etc. but the fair itself is not profitable, how will you proceed?

I’m determined, but I don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. I don’t measure success by what’s in the bank account, but I realize people need to sell their goods and make enough money that that they would do it again.

That’s a big part of the puzzle for a lot of the exhibitors, isn’t it?  

Well, maybe half-and-half. For some projects, it’s not important to make money. They have followings wanting to come see them, and we’re going to share in that. A publisher or gallery might go into it not expecting to be able to sell high-priced works. People have been managing their expectations in a healthy way. Everyone knows this is the first fair, and everyone — exhibitors and IABF crew — will be working hard to get people there. I think there’ll be a lot of interest just because it’s something new.

The bottom-line numbers are not the only measure of success. That will be based on the exhibitor experience and visitor experience: how exhibitors are taken care of, and how visitors feel about it while they’re there. Those are the most important things — without them, I don’t have a fair. I want it to feel roomy, with enough space to flow through and everyone getting proper attention, not lined up like trade show. The idea is for there to be movement, and a lot of people enjoying themselves. I think it will be like a breath of fresh air.

The Independent Art Book Fair runs at Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, 67 West Street, Brooklyn, September 16 to 18, 11:00-7:00. Admission is free of charge. For more information: www.independentartbookfair.com.

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April 15 to May 22, 2016
147 Roebling St, between Hope Street and Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, 718 782 2556

In his 1984 essay titled “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds,” an attack on the Modernist ideal of originality, Thomas McEvilley asserts that “post-Modern quoting is simply a process of bringing out into the open what all modes of expression do all the time anyway, but without usually bothering to acknowledge (or even realize) it.” Never mind that Modernist originality had always been something of a straw man; at a time when appropriation was a cutting-edge practice among artists — and a decade or so before the flood of imagery that washes over us via easy access to the Web — this pictorial strategy was ripe for theorizing. At the time, McEvilley could have had no idea how pervasive an activity quotation would become. Indeed, by now the adjective “original” has largely been shelved in favor of more modest claims, such as “fresh” or “idiosyncratic,” often awarded to works that recombine pre-existing sets of signifiers.

New York painter Amy Hill has developed a convincing, personal voice within this context of rampant quotation. Her current exhibition, “Young and Innocent,” features 16 modern-dress productions, in oil on canvas or wood, of those very stagey and stiff nineteenth-century American folk portraits in which children pose with various defining attributes of childhood, yet seem always to look so much older than their years. Funny and frightening, the show is a disconcerting delight.

Chief among Hill’s sources are itinerant portrait painters such as Joseph Goodhue Chandler, whose super weird Frederick Eugene Bennet (n.d) is, apparently, something of a touchstone for Hill. Absently tugging his long suffering dog’s ear, the little sister — still too young for pants — wears a crisp blue dress and dainty black shoes; he holds a pink lily (for the Victorians, a symbol of chastity) in his left hand, at precisely genital height.

Hill refers to this unsettling work in at least three paintings, including Girl with Lego Dog in which the painting’s main subject, now female, wears a skirt of a similar blue with an animé-emblazoned t-shirt, red Converse All Stars, a New Orleans Pelicans cap and a forearmful of temporary tattoos; the lily has become an iPod, and the pooch is made entirely of Lego bricks. Hill retains — in fact, she amplifies — the leafy shrub that frames the figure, the carpet-like lawn, the bizarrely discontinuous distant landscape comprising a verdant hillside on the right and a gleaming lake on the left, and, most conspicuously, the child’s disproportionately large head and affectless expression.

In Hill’s Two Boys a pair of tattooed youths dressed in leather jackets crouch behind the underbrush with an open laptop and a potted marijuana plant; in the background towers a glass-and-steel cityscape. They regard the viewer with vague suspicion and defiance. The overall composition, as well as boys’ poses, posture, spatial relationship, and facial expressions, reprise Brothers, an 1845 canvas by Susan Catherine Moore Waters, in which the key props are a big straw hat and a flowering wild rose; the vista, a bucolic pastureland. Hill captures the understated eagerness of Waters’ sitters to demonstrate that they are old enough to direct their self-presentation.

Hill is known for her witty reworkings of Flemish and Netherlandish portrait paintings, which are carried by her impeccable technique, mordant humor and deadpan delivery. Interestingly, many of the same compositional and narrative devices are often in play. Whether the early Americans were quoting Northern Renaissance painters is a question for a specialist, but it seems entirely possible in light of the period’s Renaissance Revival. (Or maybe the two contexts are merely homologous, and the common proclivity, for example, for three-quarter views of the head has no greater significance than the fact that it is a timeless challenge to paint an ear.)

Branding is significant even where it is sparse, as in Girl with Skooter. Against a backdrop of a riverside mill building (shades of old New England?) a young lady in red and her little charcoal-gray terrier pose before the girl’s two-wheeler; her eyes closed, she is transported to a purely sonic realm by means of her iPod. Her Minnie Mouse shoes, together with her dog’s Chanel collar tag, send an intentionally broad-based message having something favorably to do with the empowerment of women—Minnie was a flapper, after all, and Coco a self-made multibillionaire. Such is the semaphore system of conspicuous logo display.

In the same essay, McEvilley claims, “Quoting is an inevitable component in all acts of communication; it is what makes communication possible.” The precision of that message depends in part on mutual understanding of the material quoted, and Hill’s subjects are fluent in the nuanced language of the corporate identity, the public image, the mission statement, the celebrity endorsement. They know what’s cool, what used to be cool, what might next become cool. They define themselves by association therewith, through a hybridity of self-branding, as did their counterparts of an earlier era by means of a different but equally transparent vocabulary of symbols. By quoting the quoters, Hill views with a gimlet eye McEvilley’s “vast image bank of world culture” even as she signs on to it.

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February 18 to April 2, 2016
525 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

The work of New York painter David Row has been labeled “conceptual abstraction” but the unabashed physicality of his work—of which 15 choice examples are on view at Loretta Howard Gallery—suggests “calisthenic abstraction” as an equally apt designation. This exhibition’s checklist spans the promised 40 years, from 1976 to the present, and every painting is as much a material presence as it is a pictorial conundrum.

Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” is recognizably the source for the vertical, zigzagging motif in Koloph I (1986), implying that it might imaginatively extend beyond the top and bottom edges of the canvas. A pictorial field that seems too small to accommodate the figure—that is, in which the boundaries of the canvas or panel appear to crop the image—has long been crucial to Row’s compositional strategy. Variously reiterated, it yields all manner of spatial displacement and disjunctions. But this instability is carefully controlled, meticulously planned—another paradox that only deepens the pleasure this stunning show affords.

If the truncated figure/cropped ground is the exhibition’s through-line, the clearest evolution from Row’s early years to the 1990s is coloristic. Whereas Koloph I makes its point with just three hues—a brooding blue; a dense, cold gray; and black—the surface of Split Infinitive (1993) is scraped and repainted and scraped again, producing complex optical blending. Roughly approximating mustard yellow and blue-black from a distance (and in images), the surface is streaked and flecked with pale cadmium green, teal blue and a tamped-down alizarin crimson. The painting features concentric ellipses, a signature device that emerged in Row’s work of the early 1990s. The artist’s take on the ellipse—a foreshortened circle—is described by band of unvarying width, and thus both does and does not occupy illusionistic space.

At 7½ by 12 feet, Wind Cools Itself (1996) is still more chromatically complex, resonating in both major and minor keys. The wind in question is no balmy zephyr, but a gale that howls through the painting, rattling its shutters. Across a black ground smeared with white and green a great coiling band unspools through a scraped and squeegeed zone of underlying Popsicle orange, candy pink and lime green; qualifying its dominance is a vertical panel (more oranges and greens!) in which screened grids of tiny dots buzz. It is the most unhinged painting in the show, teetering on the edge of chaos. Row admires Indian painting; this work’s title might refer to a well-known Basohli gouache-on-paper work from 1730 in which a parti-colored cleft in the rocky Himalayas encloses a swarm of serpents, and trees with dot-filled green blobs for foliage. The deep space beyond—the heavens?

A grid of rather larger screen-printed dots is way up front in Here and There (2003), laid over an interlacing of flat brushstrokes that resembles a nightmare freeway interchange seen from high above. The grid reads as a pixelated scrim, with orange on the left half, green on the right. As in other works, bifurcation suggests two sides of the same coin; “Here” might be the picture plane, “There” the middle ground into which the brushy figure recedes.

The gallery’s walls feel crowded, but it is pointless to quibble over any specific inclusion; Row’s trajectory has been rich and varied, and the gallery is not enormous. Among the surprises is Omega (1991), in which concentric ellipses in charcoal and ink are distributed across the top sheets of three intact, contiguous watercolor blocks—an unconventional use of a traditional material. It echoes the three-canvas structure of the closely related Split Infinitive, which hangs nearby. Row’s work in fresco merits mention also, particularly Dean Street Special (1990), a somber study in brick red and olive green. The eccentrically rectilinear support’s chunky thickness almost—almost—eliminates the window-like illusionism of the picture’s face.

In recent years, the artist has worked on irregular polygons with (usually) six or seven sides, of which none is perpendicular or parallel to the edges of the framing wall. This family of shapes relates to the silhouettes of the artist’s smallish, cast-glass “Lighttraps” sculptures. But an understated horizontal/vertical axis, keyed to the painting’s center, anchors the work’s equilibrium—in Elektor (2013), it provides a spectral, yellow-orange ellipse another compositional structure to confront.

The familiar claustrophobic tension of ellipses expanding outward to press against a polygonal boundary is present also in Joule (2016), but its surface (it is oil on wood panel) feels significantly less worked-over; it is fresh, even lively. A smoldering red-orange peeks out from between the inner, blackish ellipse and its whitish surround; stirred up here and there, turning pink, are traces of this underpainting, which also resides in a diagonal incision slicing across the panel from top to bottom. The humming visual energy of Joule is quite unlike that of the strenuous Wind Cools Itself, or the workmanlike problem solving of Split Infinitive, or the radiance of Elektor. Each is unmistakably Row’s, and each reveals a different side of this artist’s restless intelligence.

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Cheshire, Connecticut is an affluent but unprepossessing town of 30,000 nestled in the rolling hills between Hartford and New Haven. “The Bedding Plant Capital of Connecticut” is home to a highly regarded prep school; the state’s tallest single-drop waterfall; Blackie’s Hotdog Stand (since 1928) and — up Route 10, just past the Cheshire Correctional Institution — the Barker Character, Comic and Cartoon Museum. It might seem an unlikely place for a ­­­­­­major art and cultural center, but that is precisely what artist and Cheshire native Kevin Daly and collaborators have undertaken to establish — and, in June of 2017, to open to the public — under the name of “Ball & Socket Arts.”

Daly’s co-founders in the venture are costume designer and Yale School of Drama faculty member Ilona Somogyi, and Jeffrey Guimond, who is with New York City Ballet. The trio envisions an enormous and multi-faceted nexus of visual, performing and culinary art located on West Main Street, just east of the center of town on Route 68. It will be housed in the old Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company, a linchpin of Cheshire’s industrial past which, early in its history, produced buttons and snap fasteners (of the ball-and-socket type) for use in Union Army uniforms.

The factory was in continuous operation until 1994, at which time the company folded and the property fell into disuse. The oldest extant building in the rambling, 65,000-square-foot complex dates from the 1890s. Over time, the facility expanded — in a haphazard, as-needed way — across a three-and-a-half-acre plot that abuts the once-busy (if short-lived) Farmington Canal.

Since 2011 a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity, Ball & Socket Arts, Inc. bought the property about a year ago for $750,000, assisted by a $1.689 million loan from Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development, tax breaks, and a deal with the Connecticut Light and Power Company. “I went to art school, and I teach high school art,” says Daly. “I’m like the least-suited person to be doing this.”

Be that as it may, the organization’s efforts got the site into the State Registry of Historic Places, opening up new funding sources for the buildings’ rehabilitation; federal recognition may soon follow. David Arai of Meier Group Architects, based in Ann Arbor, is overseeing the renovation project, which will retain much of the labyrinthine look and feel of the existing structures.

Daly hopes the project will become a shining example of “adaptive reuse” in the vein of MASS MoCA, the North Adams, Massachusetts institution launched in 1999 and widely viewed as a factor in that town’s economic revival. A walk-through of the abandoned complex suggests its enormous potential. The question now facing Ball & Socket Arts is, if you build a center for cultural producers will an audience of cultural consumers materialize?

According to Daly, “We’re seeing it not just as a big regional arts center, but also as a benefit to the local community,” with some of Ball & Socket’s exhibition programming reserved for artists who work nearby. Also included in the plans are artist and music instruction studios, a dance studio complete with a sprung floor, a cinema, and — in a performance space that can seat 150 — programming for the 60-year-old Cheshire Community Theater. The Cheshire Historical Society will present exhibitions here, as well.

The idea of a printmaking cooperative has been floated. An outdoor sculpture court (or two) seems likely. Also in the works are a bar, a food court, and a dining room served by a teaching kitchen with a chef-in-residence program. And beer! For the hulking, cavernous coal house that dominates the southern end of the property, various uses were considered before the current plan for a brewery emerged. Says Daly, “I liked the idea of indoor rock-climbing, but if we can’t have that, well… beer is good, too.” One expects that the Ball & Socket Ale label will contribute significantly to the organization’s goal of supporting itself financially within just a few years, enabling free admission. A retail concourse and office space rental will help, too.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of work to do. The buildings have been shuttered, but time has taken its toll on infrastructure. Environmental remediation of various kinds are needed to restore the interior to functionality; Daly targets the spring of 2016 for completion of that phase of the overhaul. “If the building falls down, someone has to clean it up,” he notes, so the $400,000 grant by the Town of Cheshire (money channeled from the DECD) is a wise use of municipal funds.

No stone is left unturned in the search for ways to integrate Ball & Socket Arts with the broader culture of the community: the old Farmington Canal — later, a railroad right-of-way — is now a bicycle trail and the spinal column of the Farmington Canal Linear Park, which is scheduled to be completed not long after Ball & Socket Arts opens its doors. At the rear of the new complex, just a few yards from the trail, a bike shop will be set up to service the needs of local cyclists.

Daly, a painter of hard-edged, color-savvy abstractions, has for several months organized lively group exhibitions — mainly of artists from New York and southern Connecticut — at the Art Garage, a tidy, white-walled exhibition space in a former automobile service station across the street from the factory. Having the Art Garage has been “huge,” says Daly; as well as providing enhanced visibility and a public face for Ball & Socket Arts, the gallery “revives the passion that was our original motivation” by embodying, albeit on a small scale, the concept of “placemaking” that he hopes will thrive in the bigger project. An art auction is planned for October 24 to benefit Ball & Socket’s capital campaign.

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June 3 to August 14, 2015
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 206 0220

A group exhibition may be tightly focused, like a beam of light that penetrates the artfog to reveal a previously obscure order. Or it may cast a more diffuse glow, allowing the assembled works to illuminate one another, and viewers to intuit an order as they may. The latter curatorial style is just as rigorous as the former; if anything, a less programmatic exhibition requires (and rewards) heightened alertness to unexpected affinities among diverse works. Such an exhibition is the lively, elegant “Space Between,” on view through August 14 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Curated by Louis Grachos, Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin, and FLAG Art Foundation Director Stephanie Roach, “Space Between” is ostensibly a consideration of objects in which the conventions of painting coexist with characteristics native to sculpture. This cross-generational exhibition of 33 works by 24 artists also reaches to photography to demonstrate the interplay of pictorial and physical space, exploring the fuzzy edges of this fruitfully gray area.

Of course, spatial ambiguity is not front-page news. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915 – 23) is but one illustrious 20th-century example, among many others. And then there is the ancient tradition of bas-relief, which transmutes ambient light into chiaroscuro. But “Space Between” doesn’t overplay this hand, as it touches also on the persistence of a certain shape-heavy, color-centric strain of abstraction and, by extension, urges viewers to think about art history in terms of continuity rather than wave upon wave of innovation, of radical newness.

Three relatively recent works by Ellsworth Kelly anchor the show. The most salient of these is Blue Relief Over Green (2004), two oil-on-canvas monochrome rectangles joined at a right angle and measuring about seven by six feet — plus, (the all-important third dimension) the two and three-quarters inches depth of the panels’ stretchers. The seemingly minor physical displacement of the picture plane interferes with the property of color — even Kelly’s full-throated hues — to appear to advance or recede in relation to one another. The visual tension is exquisite, and sets the tone for ”Space Between.”

Gazing down into Roni Horn’s Pink Around (B) (2008), a solid glass disk 40 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, the viewer is simultaneously impressed by its mass and beguiled by the blushing delicacy of its coloration. Sadie Benning’s compact wall pieces, such as Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (2011), embody color quite differently: on these small, plaster-covered panels, two distinct hues occupy the same physical plane while vying for illusionistic space. Meanwhile, the title divulges the object in Thomas Demand’s photographic triptych, Detail (Sportscar) (2005), in which extreme cropping renders unrecognizable these sleek orange forms.

In this context, attention to color doesn’t necessarily imply abundant chroma. The oldest work in the show is Mystry Man (1984) by Tony DeLap, a seven-foot-high wall construction made of canvas over an eccentrically shaped and beveled wood stretcher and painted a precise shade of gray. Nearby is Wyatt Kahn’s Untitled (2014), another painting/sculpture hybrid, in which the deadpan color of raw linen contrasts with the flat panels’ animated, undulating contours.

There are two corner pieces in the show. Untitled Still Life (2013) by Kaz Oshiro is a large, cherry-red, square canvas tipped 45 degrees, its left corner bent and crumpled where it meets the adjacent wall. It seems a bit reluctantly sculptural. Jim Hodges contributes Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink) (2014), in which two mirror-tiled panels — irregular polygons — reflect each other and complete themselves. It is dazzling, and makes you giddy.

Two adjoining galleries testify to the wide influence of Agnes Martin on the work of contemporary artists. One space houses Martin’s Peace and Happiness (2001), a wonderful 60-inch-square canvas comprising alternating horizontal bands of azure blue and dusty white, faintly delineated in pencil. The mirage-like effect is atmospheric one moment, concrete the next. In its proximity, Rebecca Ward’s clandestine (2015) — a five-foot-high work in which stitched sections of canvas, painted in pearly tones, are partially deconstructed to reveal the stretcher—shares this Martin’s split personality. The Sun, Chapter 1 [diagonal edge, horizontal stripe] (2001), a quiet stunner by R.H. Quaytman, also reflects on its own structure; the primary motif, a diagonal band, depicts in section the plywood panel on which it is painted. The interconnectedness of visuality and materiality is borne out in other splendid works in this gallery by Julia Rommel and Svenja Deininger.

A second Martin, the 12-inch-square Untitled #6 (1999), keeps company with a trippy, mirrored, space-confounding 2D work in glass, mirror and wood by Olafur Eliasson, Walk Through Wall (2005); a cast resin piece by Rachel Whiteread, titled A.M. (2011) — in homage to the Martin? — which seems to refer to a gridded windowpane; and two colored pencil drawings by Marc Grotjahn from his “butterfly” period of a decade or so ago. Rounding out the show are terrific works by Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Sérgio Sister, Andreas Gursky, Blair Thurman, and Douglas Coupland (yes, the novelist).

In the mid-to-late 1950s, Kelly and Martin worked in a loft building on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Contrary to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist autographic touch, improvisational composition and spatial flux, they concerned themselves with unbroken color and unambiguous, hard-edge shape. Decades of “isms” (and the neighborhood’s loft buildings) have fallen like dominoes since those days, but the deeper structures of contemporary art’s visual vocabulary remain intact and vital. As Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are lauded for eliding painting and sculpture in the neo-Dada 1950s, so too do the efforts of Kelly and Martin (and other Coenties Slip figures like Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman) echo today.

The post A Diffuse Glow: “Space Between” at the Flag Art Foundation appeared first on artcritical.

September 26, 2014 to January 25, 2015
225 Madison Avenue, between 35th and 36th streets
New York City, 212-685-0008

The testing of limitations is a recurring characteristic of modernist painting, notwithstanding the distracting idea of “medium specificity.” How, then, to express duration in a single still image, which sight and sense readily accept as manifesting simultaneity? Systems of musical notation have been developed to indicate (aural) events in time, and to the extent that a musical score is also a drawing, it suggests a solution to that problem.

On loan to The Morgan Library from the Menil Collection through January 25, Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) offers a different solution—one that is immersive, sensuous and pictorial. Roughly ten by 33 feet, it was painted in Rome in 1970 and features the reductive gray-and-white palette Twombly had by that time been working with for several years. Photographs of these paintings often accentuate the gray’s bluish undertone, making it appear denser than it is; the Menil canvas’s enormous expanse of translucent, brushy paint evokes not a chalkboard but thick smoke or deep shadow.

In white wax crayon, a loosely rectilinear diagram and accompanying semi-legible notations span the length of the canvas near its bottom edge. These convey a sense of intervals—of thresholds, shifts or transitions—along a left-to-right reading of the work.

The painting refers, we are told, to Le Voile d’Orphée (The Veil of Orpheus), a 1953 work by Pierre Henry,a pioneer of musique concrète. Composed for Pierre Schaeffer’s ballet Orphee 53, the cantata contains as a central motif the sound of tearing fabric, which apparently refers to the moment (found in some versions of the myth) when Orpheus, having led Eurydice from Hades, breaks the taboo imposed by Persephone by turning back to lift his bride’s veil of graveclothes, and gazing upon her. Considering that he is known as “the father of songs,” Orpheus’s timing here is pretty bad: the action would rend them forever asunder, as Hermes (who’s been tagging along)pulls Eurydice back into the Underworld, this time forever.

The first version of Treatise on the Veil dates from 1968, and hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. A photographic reproduction of it is collaged into one of twelve untitled drawings in the Morgan exhibition, which appear to be studies and are presented, with great success, as fully resolved works. Laced even more abundantly than the painting with Twombly’s distinctive, ad-hoc calligraphic scrawl, they incorporate scribbles, smudges, erasures and rubber-stampings, as well as multi-panel collage structures.

Seven drawings feature six panels; four have five. Clearly, Twombly was engaged with the ideas of seriality, modularity, and progression that so enchanted many artists of the 1960s (and not only the Minimalists). The cellophane and masking tapes affixing these vertical, parallel swatches of paper to the larger sheets are showing their age, but that discoloration contributes to the sense of orchestrated scrappiness.

A slightly later drawing, from 1972, pares the structure down to four modules or “stages,” as they are labeled. It reprises the four-panel structure of Twombly’s 1968 canvas Veil of Orpheus (not in this show). Twombly, of course, was hugely influenced by Classical antiquity, and references to Orpheus can be found elsewhere in his oeuvre. The 1972 drawing contributes to the project’s tissue of references a black-and-white photograph of a woman, seen full-figure in profile, resplendent in an elaborate, flowing bridal gown. A flurry of graphite markings nearly obscures her.

In “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” Rainer Maria Rilke describes the journey these three figures made from the Underworld, through

…that immense, gray, unreflecting pool
that hung above its so far distant bed
like a gray rainy sky above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,
like a long line of linen laid to bleach.

I don’t know if Twombly read these lines. But Rilke’s pathway is perhaps a kind of time line, which ends with the lifting of Eurydice’s veil; then time is reversed, as her rescue and thus the newlyweds’ fortunes are reversed.

The exhibition literature states that another source for the painting is by Eadweard Muybridge: a study of “the movements of a veiled bride walking in front of a train.” Though not visually supported in the exhibition, this tantalizing detail implies a photographic component to Twombly’s investigation of duration and the still image. Pictorial space can be elastic, of course, and the same might be true of pictorial time.

The post “Soft and Full of Patience”: Cy Twombly at the Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

October 19, 2014 to April 5, 2015
258 Main Street, Ridgefield,
CT 06877, Tel 203.438.4519

In its struggle for a share of the cultural marketplace, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has devised approaches to the exhibition format that have sometimes been illuminating, sometimes puzzling. Currently, an ambitious, cross-generational, two-part exhibition program titled “The Aldrich at 50” celebrates the ACAM’s half-century mark. Your intrepid correspondent is insufficiently intrepid to trek semiannually to Ridgefield, Connecticut, so he missed Part I (April 6 through September 21) and cannot offer comment. But Part II, on view through­­ April 5 of next year, includes standout performances by all involved, and is well worth the hour-plus trip from New York City.

“The Aldrich at 50” is co-curated by ACAM veteran Richard Klein and newcomer Amy Smith-Stewart, who has been at the Aldrich since May. The duo delivers a convincing clutch of exhibitions aimed at demonstrating the currency of the vision of ACAM founder Larry Aldrich. Mr. Aldrich’s collection was liquidated long ago in favor of a kunsthalle model, and for some time the Museum’s curatorial focus has been on accomplished, accessible artists whose efforts extend something of the adventuresome spirit of the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Mary Beth Edelson and Jackie Winsor, both of whom showed work at the Aldrich during its first decade, are represented by compact but compelling exhibitions spanning many years. Concurrently, “Standing in the Shadows of Love: The Aldrich Collection 1964-1974” includes one significant work by Richard Artschwager, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Richard Serra that “represent” Mr. Aldrich’s aesthetic interests (although the specific works may not have passed through his hands). These objects are interspersed among strong exhibitions, widely varying in scope, by Kate Gilmore, Ernesto Neto, David Scanavino and Cary Smith.

The strategy is in full effect in the Museum’s lobby atrium, which houses Neto’s The Body That Gravitates on Me (2006), as well as Yellow Piece (1966) by Kelly, a 75-by-75-inch, cadmium yellow monochrome painting of which the top right and bottom left extremities are emphatically rounded off: they are curves, not corners. The Neto dangles nearby; pallid in color, its limp, bulbous form resembles a hybrid of boxing gloves and jellyfish. Both works challenge geometry, yet their physical proximity underscores the conceptual distance between 1960s color-field and minimalist concerns, and the idiom of sculptural installation so prevalent now.

Scanavino is an innovative young artist of enormous range. His spectacular Imperial Texture (2014) is made mainly of VCT floor tiles in a wide range of colors, from which bits of pattern and even depiction begin to emerge. The piece is the size and shape of the gallery floor, only torqued about 30 degrees and dislocated off-center, so a differently-sized triangle of flooring climbs every wall. In an adjoining gallery stands Artschwager’s Pyramidal Object (1967). This Formica-clad piece of pseudo-furniture refers to the look of bland institutional functionality; it is as cool and aloof as the Scanavino is dizzying, and just as unsettling

Gilmore’s manner of working tweaks the conventions of rule-based art, and yields a video recording of the artist painstakingly enacting an utterly absurd task that usually requires considerable physical strength and stamina…all in a becoming dress and high heels. The sculptural artifact of A Roll in the Way is an expanse of wood logs, slathered in paint (red, black and/or white) and loaded on end onto a chest-high plywood platform. The video, projected on an adjacent wall, was shot from directly above; the edges of the screen coincide with the edges of the platform, revealing a pictorial dimension to the work. Serra’s Bent Pipe Roll (1968), an emphatically physical prop piece, includes a cylindrical element resembling Gilmore’s logs; beyond a mere visual pun, however, the two works manifestly share a devotion to labor per se.

Smith, an erstwhile New Yorker now living and working in Connecticut, is represented by no fewer than 25 paintings in oil on linen and 19 works on paper. Smith’s buoyant palette and self-evident delight in clean, hard-edged shapes are irresistible, providing an adrenaline rush in two dimensions. Unexpectedly, the exhibition layout and literature associate Smith’s work with a typically restrained painting by Martin, The Rose (1964), in which delicate, gridded striations in red and black pencil produce an atmospheric effect. The matchup seems a stretch but, in light of the many mediated methods now afoot of producing paintings, Martin’s procedural clarity might have a kindred spirit in Smith’s forthright approach to paint application.

“With and Within,” as the Winsor show is titled, includes smallish, mixed-media wall works from 1995 and 2000 that recombine squares, grids and insets in shallow relief. (Disclosure: both Winsor and Smith-Stewart are my colleagues in SVA’s graduate Fine Arts program.) The show centers, however, on Painted Piece (1979-80), from the explosive early period of this artist’s career. A 31-inch plywood cube with square slots penetrating each face, it is covered with 50 coats of acrylic paint (lastly blue-black), its corners bumped and blunted in a way that recalls the Kelly painting. A play between interior and exterior aligns it also with Hesse’s Accession II (1967), a 31-inch cube of steel mesh, left open at the top to reveal a stubbly, repulsive lining of thin vinyl tubing.

“Mary Beth Edelson: Six Story Gathering Boxes” summarizes a project that is nearly as long-lived as the Aldrich itself. Begun in 1972, when Edelson was nearly 40, it consists of a growing number of open wooden boxes stocked with wood or paper “tablets,” each about seven by five inches. At the Aldrich, six boxes are arranged on tables: two have wood tablets bearing images and text, themed Great Mother and New Myths/Old Myths; the other four contain stiff paper cards rubber-stamped with prompts (“Describe the future as you would like for it to be”; “The most inspiring stories you have heard about immigration”) to which the visitor may respond by writing on the card. Many such responses are thus preserved.

Edelson’s piece is positioned as an early example of art as “social practice,” the aim of which is to engage the viewer on levels beyond—or in addition to—the observational, and to facilitate “intersubjectivity.” As a mechanism for generating and recording a folk literature, the Story Gathering Boxes have undeniable value, and their presence in an otherwise object-centric roundup of recent art suggests an alternative paradigm of the collector’s activity: to archive not objects, but experiences.

The post The Aldrich at 50: Clutch of Exhibitions Demonstrate Currency of Founder’s Vision appeared first on artcritical.

October 18 to November 15, 2014 (Zoubok) and to December 20 (Howard)
531 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, Zoubok: 212 675 7490; Howard: 212 695 0164

Billed as a collaborative exhibition, this Judy Pfaff double-whammy at 531 West 26 Street reveals an understated bifurcation in Pfaff’s studio production: extroverted and introverted. It also leaves the viewer convinced that, given the opportunity, the artist could have hung new work on every wall in the entire building, and the neighboring addresses as well. She is unstoppable, having devised a working method that is capable of absorbing an enormous range of materials, processes and moods.

At Loretta Howard, Pfaff delivers her familiar but always engaging blend of elegance and ebullience in 14 works of widely varying size, all dated 2014. In smallish works dedicated to Larry Poons, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley and Jules Olitski, Pfaff tips her hat to movers in mid-20^th-century abstraction. In these pieces, shards of colored plastic, deformed by being melted, tangle with acrylic, resin, and pigmented expanded foam, and evoke the formal means of each honoree. The biggest of the tributes is Blue Note (for Al), in which Pfaff’s former teacher, Al Held, is celebrated — a 9-by-14-foot wall work featuring concentric circles of blue and orange Plexiglas, fluorescent lights and a meandering, steel-rod musical staff.

Even more convincing is the gallery’s second space, in which the visitor encounters the two largest works in the show. Pfaff’s use of foam in the (mostly) free-standing, three-part There is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) recalls Lynda Benglis’s innovative use of similar materials, but whereas Benglis’s roiling mounds of polyurethane feel volcanic, Pfaff’s oozing pools are more like quicksand — once you start to get sucked in, it’s difficult to extricate yourself.

In Alberta, another dimensions-variable work, there are echoes of Frank Stella’s late-1980s and early-90s wall works — those with the relatively restrained palette and the rippling, swirling, organic shapes between which you can see through to the wall. In this company, an untitled work dominated by green plastic is both compact and explosive. To achieve such balance of intimacy and theatricality requires that Pfaff nail the scale of the works relative to the room — and that she does.

The mood is darker at Pavel Zoubok, the work there less immediately ingratiating. Their materials feel clotted rather than clustered — not just layered, but laminated. The checklist runs to 73 items (nearly all from 2014 or 2013), of which many are small, individually framed works, many riffing on botanical and decorative motifs, in encaustic and collage on repurposed ledger paper from India and antique bills of lading from a New York paint company. Across tiled expanses of snapshots and postcards of flora, fauna and her own studio activity, these framed works are arrayed, underscoring the idea of inventory or archive. Wrapping around three walls in the gallery’s back space is one such environment, which includes 21 paper works and an untitled, tendrilly sculpture; the viewer might feel a bit lost in the underbrush. Even more than usual for Pfaff, this installation device risks inelegance for the sake of sheer abundance, as if to assert that the irreducible essence of her practice is proliferation itself.

Among the many sculptural works at Pavel Zoubok, of particular interest is Hydroza, nearly eight feet high and dated 1994-2014. A rough bundle of tar, resin and steel wire, enclosing a big bulb of greenish blown glass, dangles by steel-rod vines from a sort of boom mounted at a perpendicular to the wall. It looks like a nest. The gallery’s overgrown, jungly feeling owes much to the preponderance of materials that have been scavenged from the natural world: Hanging Judge, a walk-through sculpture just inside the entrance, makes effective use of several charred chunks of driftwood; in other works one finds tree branches, dried leaves, deer antlers and sections of honeycomb.

These are combined with repurposed manufactured objects such as paper Chinese lanterns, welded steel furniture, plastic flowers and (naturally) more expanded foam. Twenty-four feet long, Let Sixteen Cowboys Sing Me a Song is anchored by a stringy, undulating frieze of what appears to be seaweed encased in clear resin, an element that plays nicely against the other flotsam washed up in this piece: photographs of giant crustaceans; a translucent pool of pigmented resin, mounted to the wall at looking-glass height; roots, branches, leaves; pinwheeling globs of some unidentified polymer product; photographs of old color engravings of deep-sea fish. A rigid, right-angled, polished steel armature lends visual as much as structural cohesion to this sprawling work.

In the best sense of the term, Pfaff is an artist of the old school. She puts the stamp of her personality on whatever theme she takes up. She thoroughly reinvigorates a tired trope — the natural vs. the man-made — and in the process suggests that just about anything is open to being revisited, reinvented, rediscovered. Embracing a familiar idea and completely recasting it in her own idiom, she demonstrates an awe-inspiring tenacity. To rework an old joke: How do you get to have a two-gallery show in Chelsea? Practice, practice, practice.

The post Quicksand: Judy Pfaff at Loretta Howard and Pavel Zoubok appeared first on artcritical.

White Columns will host a launch party on Friday, October 3rd from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.  20 West 13th Street, between Hudson Street and West 4th Street, New York City.

Once an artist becomes “a name,” the very fact of his or her fame can obscure a clear-sighted view of actual works, past or present. This isn’t necessarily a problem, since an acclaimed artist’s renown itself contributes to the context in which an emerging body of work will be seen and considered. And, of course, it is often productive to assess an artist’s new efforts in light of previous accomplishments. But the fantasy of the innocent eye is compelling because, in our information-glut age, becoming over-informed is always just a few clicks away.

In The Miraculous, published by Paper Monument, poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein describes 50 artworks realized in the last few decades. The texts in this beautiful little book range from a sentence or two to a couple of pages. Many of the works in question — which are often conceptual and/or performative in nature — were in some way creative watersheds: they located the artist’s voice, pointed the way forward, raised the stakes of the ongoing imaginative investigation or (in one case) brought it to an end. And with each description, the name of the artist is nowhere to be found.

In its entirety, one of the shorter entries runs:

A successful German painter who enjoys provoking outrage buys an out-of-the-way service station in Brazil and renames it in honor of a notorious Nazi long rumored to have escaped to South America. Soon, photographs begin to circulate of a forlorn building on the façade of which have been emblazoned the words “Tankstelle Martin Bormann” (Martin Bormann Gas Station).

An index reveals all the artists’ identities; some of their stories are quite familiar, others not so much. But withholding names in this manner drives home the point: our perception of a work is distorted when we know who made it, whether that person is celebrated or obscure. Uninformed of authorship, the reader of The Miraculous confronts (through Rubinstein’s pellucid prose) the works themselves in all their wondrous weirdness, far from both the blinding glare of acclaim and the shadows of the market and its machinations.

Rubinstein describes his blog, The Silo, as “a personal, revisionist ‘dictionary’ of contemporary art.” His approach to art in The Miraculous is wholly in that spirit; disregarding received ideas about the artists’ alleged influence, significance or professional standing, the author drills down to the bedrock of all art discourse, namely, the creative activity of artists.

And that sole case of closure? Rubinstein writes: “An artist in his mid-30s decides that his next work will consist of sailing solo across the Atlantic Ocean.” The project ends badly: the tiny craft eventually disintegrated, and the artist was lost. The piece, titled In Search of the Miraculous, is probably this artist’s best-known work, yet Rubinstein’s economical account of it brings out the psychological complexities of its enactment.

Paper Monument is published by the journal n+1 and has produced a few other books, including the delightful Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment, edited in-house. The Miraculous is touted as the first of a series of single-author books, and as such is another auspicious beginning.

Raphael Rubinstein, The Miraculous.  New York: Paper Monument, 2014. ISBN 978-0-9797575-7-0, 72 Pages, $16.00

The post In All Their Wondrous Weirdness: Raphael Rubinstein’s Personal Revisionist Dictionary of Art appeared first on artcritical.

October 18 to December 1, 2013

Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410-6120

A New Yorker who relocated a decade ago to the Los Angeles area, Fran Siegel has a longstanding interest in the growth and form of urban centers. In the eight drawings in Plans and Interruptions, Siegel’s current exhibition at Lesley Heller Workspace, the artist reflects on how the history of population movements in and around a particular city determines its manifestation in geographical space and, in turn, the myriad ways that that predominantly horizontal spatial manifestation might lend itself to pictorial representation.In her drawings, Siegel works with familiar materials: pen, pencil, colored pencil, paint and pigment on paper and mylar. Her procedure involves a tremendous amount of collage, so that cut edges and the gaps between them—where the wall often is visible—are crucial compositional devices. In fact, it is useful to consider this work drawing as composition, since the way the pieces are knit together is fundamental to their significance.

Siegel has recently begun to use the cyanotype process, the distinctive blue of which, in a wide range of values, pervades the exhibition. The densest concentration of it is in the commanding Overland 16 (2013), which is 96 by 140 inches, one of an ongoing series of large drawings derived from aerial photographs of LA’s amorphous sprawl. Like its ostensible subject (and in keeping with the other drawings in this remarkable series), Overland 16 is an aggregation of bits and pieces, a collection of discrete parts that are stitched, stapled, glued and laced together, tab-and-slot fashion, to form a provisional, inarguable whole. There are glimpses of anonymous buildings, vacant lots, parking lots and, inevitably, the distant mountains. In the midst of this complex visual texture, a serpentine curve—representing a freeway, one supposes—makes its way from the bottom edge through the middle ground, fragmenting and disappearing as if into a hazy distance among the drawing’s many component shards and facets.

The press release declares that other drawings relate to the cities of Siena, Havana, Manta and Genoa; I surmise that the last is embodied in Navigation (2010-11) 116 x 116 x 4 inches. At the bottom center—like the trunk of a family tree—is a rendering of a Renaissance sailing ship under oar power, as it would be when leaving or entering a port. Elsewhere in Navigation, the graphical vocabulary alludes to diagrams, maps, flow charts and the like; but the informational value of such documents is subsumed in a whirl of overlaps, shadows, incomplete tracings, graftings, and translucent overlays.

 The viewer’s compulsion to decipher such clues is rewarded by Siegel’s assiduous encoding of them. A tangle of tendrils, possibly route maps or boundary markers, appears near the top of the cruciform Tre (2012), 132 x 132 inches; variations on a roughly circular shape (dome? amphitheater? caldera?) appear below, along with hundreds of other notations of equally elusive significance. What comes across beyond any doubt, however, is an idea—and a feeling—about the city as an organism made of interpenetrating systems of which the design, placement, function, and development continually, inexorably change. Siegel tells me that every graphical feature of these elaborate drawings, and the way those details are assembled, is informed by her research into the location. That is easy to believe, as the specifics feel textual—not whistled up out of thin air, not improvised, but rooted in history and arranged according to some kind of plan—more-or-less rational, always evolving, endlessly interrupted.

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