Sesostris: March 8 to April 28, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

Drawings: March 8 to April 25, 2018
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com.

From the Iliad to Vietnam, Cy Twombly was fascinated by war. His epic, 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris (2000), is the singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, running concurrently with the same gallery’s landmark survey of drawings downtown. The legend of the conquering pharaoh, whose sanguine trails were recounted by Herodotus, is index linked by Twombly to the most elemental temporal cycle, the sun’s journey across the sky, as mythologized by the sun god Ra in his solar barge. Like Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, Twombly’s Coronation dashes through a landscape of emotional extremes and pounding cadences, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic and the majestic.

With almost puerile glee, the opening panel delivers a blazing sun in cadmium red crayon contoured in Twombly’s signature jittery nonchalance, grandly enclosing a chaotic entanglement of bouncing lines. He then installs the same solar shape onto a schematic chariot, bestowing upon it the spindly inscription “SOLAR BARGE OF SESOSTRIS.” The vessel seems to fly into an immediate barrage, in the next panel, of spermatic deluge on the now febrile effulgence of red and yellow orb. A slanted, knotty inscription, obscured and shadowed in this gravitational rage of aqueous white acrylic paint, cites Sappho in fragments: “Eros weaver (of myth)/ Eros sweet (bitter)/ Eros bringer (of pain).” Eros, son of Aphrodite and Ares, seems to be Twombly’s entry point into the tragic carnality of human violence, union as Eros is of the gods of love and war. Yet this brief orgiastic moment is urgently checked in the fourth panel, where a simmering sun retreats to a wax crayon circle amidst emaciated pencil spirals and diminutive runnels of yellow paint. This is a symphonic tactic, an interlude of momentary calm priming the viewer for the explosive event that will span the next three panels.

The barge, now sprouting stalactite-like oars, reappears in full baroque sensuality. Rapid knots of watery brushstroke, at once floral and bloody, form a gold and roseate cascade. As others have noted of Twombly, his dripping motions are simultaneously temporal and spatial. On the next panel, a Patricia Waters poem about the departure of the gods is cursively inscribed in red pencil, and shrouded in a crimson lace of arrested paint projectiles. Climax is reached in the seventh panel, where the white deluge, sublimely touched with gold, reappears and submerges the now multiplied barges, dismembering and devouring the foreground boat with flaming yellow while pushing its discarnate companions into atmospheric recession. Everything sizzles in the splendid opacity of embodied light. This moment quickly collapses in the next panel into the obscurity of frosty purple and foggy pallor, an almost comic deflation of the preceding grandeur. The barge then morphs back to its own schematic vestige. Finally, lines from Sappho reappear in renewed clarity above a dark, brooding shape.

Image and text in Twombly’s oeuvre are never subservient, one to the other, as mere flourish or illustration. But the viewer often encounters a disorienting, almost vertiginous split between modes of reading and of seeing. Verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint—the soaring barges’ dripping flames and Sappho’s lamentations—alternate in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance their tango. Text tunnels through materiality to treasure troves of cultural evocations, while paint hints beyond what can be verbalized. Perhaps Sappho’s words themselves provide a clue. According to poet Anne Carson, Sappho’s notion of the bittersweet (glukupikron) describes the “sensational crisis” of joy and pain coexisting. It reveals the essentially paradoxical nature of eros. Lack, the space between the actual and the possible, activates eros in the way voltage activates electric charge. And like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, Eros reach for his object but never consummates it: “Perfect desire is perfect impasse,” as Carson puts it. The lover’s vision is stereoscopic: reality and potentiality, self and other, what is and what is not, are all projected upon the same mental screen.

Comparably, in Twombly image and text can never have a proper, or literal, correspondence and can only be metaphoric translations of each other. Each medium reaches hopelessly towards what only the other has. The edge between them, like the pressurized contact of opposites in the word “bittersweet”, is pungently defined. The act of subsuming both upon the same picture plane creates a space of incongruence and paradox. Across this space, as Carson puts it, “a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight”. The electrified dance of allusion and sensation is an erotic one. In this light, what Clement Greenberg proposed in his 1940 Towards a Newer Laocoön, that painting should uphold its two-dimensional purity against contamination of other disciplines, reads like a call to chastity, evading the possibility that painting could be strengthened by interaction with another medium.

Strikingly, Twombly achieved the feat of using poetry to elevating painterly expressivity at a time when images were rendered secondary or diagrammatic by the stipulations of textual concepts (minimal art and pop art). This underlines the difficulty faced by Twombly’s innovative enterprise, and thus the importance of recognizing some seemingly instinctive or literary decisions as contemplated formal strategies. His choice of quotation is often painterly in nature, drawing from favored poets like Keats, Rilke, Sappho, Catullus and the haikuist Taigi. When citing these writers he often modifies or omits words. On the canvas or page, the territorial sovereignty of text is, furthermore, frequently violated by painterly marks—and undermined by his inimitable, barely legible handwriting. The Twombly scrawl is something he deliberately cultivated at the outset of his career when, during national service in the early 1950s, he took to drawing in the dark. Line probes with libidinal tremor realms of rhythm, psyche and temporality.

In abundant examples, Gagosian’s drawing exhibition demonstrates the ways in which Twombly’s very particular quality of line undergoes constant metamorphosis. The first career-spanning presentation of its kind, this show covers ground from 1951 to 2008. It is a journey that begins in the early 1950s with angst-ridden gestural line drawings heavily influenced by German Expressionism and bristling with primal forms. The 1960s witness both the somber, incessant, compulsive loops of the blackboard paintings and the first stirrings of mythopoeic imagery rich with quotations sourced from world literature. In the 1970s the sublimated landscapes, with their pastoral reminiscences and flower-lined splendor, an idiom that would come to dominate Twombly’s later years, make their first appearance.

In an untitled drawing from 1969, a swarm of looping white lines surge and plunge atop a uniformly dark-gray ground. The gentle upper-rightward drift of this cluster is typical of Twombly. In the center background, a tangle of translucent pentimenti insinuates itself into atmospheric distance. Gentle, slanting lines traverse the page, not with the calligraphic modulation of a brushstroke, but with the nervous energy of a drypoint needle: mobile rather than corporeal. Indeed, the jolts and swells evoke a disembodied psychic rhythm, one in which a smooth curve never travels far without being disrupted by an obstinate shudder. Somewhere between Surrealist automatism and Abstract Expressionist gesture, this quality of line manages to reconcile Joan Miró’s slick, smooth arabesques and Franz Kline’s muscular thrusts. An uneasy volatility recalls projectiles hitting friction that is distinct at each local point. It is intensely felt, “the sensation of its own realization” as Twombly declared in his 1957 manifesto, yet it’s a particular kind of cathexis realized through sensitized rhythm rather than carnal gesture. At moments when the frail loops close upon themselves, we catch ghostly glimpses of legibility: letters flash, “R,” “O,” “M,” “S”, illuminating a fugitive tunnel between word and drawing. Perhaps there’s another, implicit kind of literariness in Twombly’s art: poetry is about rhythm, a matter of stress and timing, just like the artist’s particular use of line.

White for Twombly is densely impregnated with symbolic meaning. He has a penchant for moments of white on off-white, or for laying white paint on evenly tinted paper. To quote his 1957 manifesto again: “Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance – or […] the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé”. And as Mary Jacobus has observed, white also evokes the sun-lit Mediterranean for Twombly,. It also embodies memory through the act of erasure, constitutes intervals and space for painterly marks, and annuls directionality by creating a decentered narrative. In the seven-part panel Untitled, 1981, a frail crayoned arc springs into a flower before a leaping, cresting wave takes over, which then proceeds to narrow out. The center panel with the wave exhibits at its full range Twombly’s masterful use of white. It is achieved by maneuvering the complementary red and green, the main colors of the forceful crayoned undertow. The peak of the wave is a creamy commingling of thick white impasto applied in staccato daubs and red pigment rubbed out from the crayon lines, in which a pink pudgy opacity results. In the middle right, we see the same situation with green, but the emerald twines break through the white paste, creating a partial palimpsest. At the bottom of the wave, the layer of white paint, spottily grayed by the mingling of red and green, clarifies in glassy sedimentation. A stylus then scores back into this diaphanous zone, exposing the crayon beneath in flashes of lucidity. Nietzsche’s statement about dreaming comes to mind: “Even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance”.

The Gagosian show is extensive enough to make clear that the apparent orgiastic chaos of Twombly’s work is buttressed by visual sophistication. In Untitled, 2001, in the culminating room of the exhibition, a furor of yellow and gold hurtles across the image. Large, blazing flowers, in lemon, sap green, purple and crimson—the paint slathered on and fingered to a velvety luster—bloom at the top of the composition. Paint dribbles down in vertical streaks forming a balustrade. Articulated local areas (the blossoms) with their vestiges of naturalism and strong geometric structures (the yellow diagonal passage and the dripping veil) rein in an otherwise sweeping anarchy.

Living for most of his life in different parts of Italy and immersing himself, furthermore, in various forms of classicism, one wonders how Twombly managed to remain conversant with American artistic culture in the second half of the 20th Century? His move to Europe and incorporation of literature into painting at a time when people were rejecting Abstract Expressionism in favor of Minimalism and Pop Art reads like an effort to revive the subjectivity and romanticism of the earlier movement while also extracting moral and emotional nuances from the literature from which he quoted. Untitled (To Sappho), 1976 shows this at play. The center of the picture is the purple stain. It lies above the last stanza of Sappho’s brief epithalathum (marriage song) Lament for a Maidenhead. The stain has itself a scent-like gauziness, and is partly obscured by a white flurry. The text is a pyramidal shape lapsing rightward like a sigh, each line written with larger and more spaced out letters. In Sappho’s poem, loss of virginity is compared to the violent crushing of a flower. Besides Sappho herself, this picture evokes another personage associated with queerness: Hyacinth, Apollo’s young lover and one of Twombly’s literary alter egos. Produced during Twombly’s pastoral period, the picture recalls Adorno’s remark that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism”. The first Gay Liberation March was held in New York City in 1970, but how engaged was Twombly, whose sexuality few now question, in 1970s’ sexual politics? The connection is a mere hint, but the eroticism of his allusions is more than a literary ploy.

The post Eros, Weaver of Myth: Image and Text in Cy Twombly appeared first on artcritical.

Spence: January 11 to February 17, 2018
210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 802, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City, searspeyton.com

Morgan: January 5 to 28, 2018
56 Bogart St, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, davidandschweitzer.com

A major element of early feminist art criticism came down to detective work. Outing the male gaze in paintings of female subjects was akin to using black light to reveal traces of blood at a crime scene. Form, facture and viewpoint served as evidence in a forensic process – manifestations of objectification, voyeurism and idealization were exposed.

Nowadays, the crime scene is complicated, especially where female authorship is concerned. In paintings of women by women, thanks to a sense of intimate self-knowledge, what has begun to emerge are emphatic – indeed, empathetic – attempts to maneuver the inherent theatricality of being subjected to the gazed. The subject can become complicit and resigned to being a displayed object, or lay out an elaborate performative trap in which the unaware spectator devours the bait. Two current shows present different but equally intriguing examples of such maneuvering: Suzy Spence’s A Night Among the Horses, ongoing at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea, and Heather Morgan’s Heavenly Creatures, at David Schweitzer Gallery, last month, in Bushwick.

In Spence’s fox hunting scenes, equestriennes, clad in flamboyant yet intricate riding apparel, nonchalantly show off their lissome figures. Erotic availability is both sealed and fueled by the apparent practicality and purposefulness of this attire, rendered all the more thorny by the lingering traces of gender and class dynamics that informed the evolution of riding costumes, historically. Spence, who studied under feminist artists like Mira Schor and Maureen Connor, explores fertile conceptual ground with painterly vigor. While some works in the show present intense action, in most of her portraits the women seem caught in a moment of respite, either confronting the gaze directly or microscopically turning to the side in seductive evasion. Complexions range from rude joviality to ghostly pallor, hinting at the simple inscrutability of the characters’ thoughts and desires. In Untitled (Rider),  [above] the thick strokes of black paint writhe around the rider’s sinuous, partly-dishabille body, the commanding painterly bravura delivering her as the archetypal, objectified “feast for the eye”–she, rather than the fox, becomes the quarry.

In Carriage (I), by contrast, the characters show a lugubrious gravitas that seems to acknowledge implicit distress or even lurking fear beneath the immaculately polished grace of the hunt, which is itself a precarious performance of wealth and class. Spence’s painterly execution is consistently nebulous: supple, broad strokes are lushly handled within the relatively constrained area of her typically small compositions. The viewer of Carriage (I) can experience simultaneously the visceral grip of the magnetic gaze of the equestrienne on the left of the composition and the deconstructive awareness that her face is a conglomerate of cogently defined individual marks. Such handling allows the painting to maintain a certain level of ambiguity. When working in conjunction with the potent themes of the foxhunting motif, such ambiguity is able to provoke questions about power discourses that demand deliberation. However, the enigmatic quality can also be at the expense of vulnerability and authenticity. In Carriage (II), the pair of faces juxtaposed with one another on either side of the cuddled fox, one with chiseled clarity and the other obscured in lyrical pentimenti, seem to symbolize a recurring oscillation between concrete affection and insouciant panache.

Spence’s masterful handling of media, which in this show includes Flashe, oil paint and acrylic, sometimes serves an expressive purpose beyond the tough luxuriance of her mark making. The diaphanous mottled quality that describes the riding veils worn in many portraits constitutes a terrifying presence: beyond the functionality and decorativeness of the accessory itself, it transforms into a symbolic form in which femininity is a veiled, mystical presence and the theatricality of seduction is complex and disguised. Inquiries into gender and class are, like the gaze piercing through those veils, a haunting queasiness beneath the forceful hush. But such concealment is self-imposed, the veils voluntarily worn. In Heavenly Creatures, Heather Morgan offers another theater of femininity. Her sensuous portraits of women deliver unfettered and unclouded erotic shockwaves. Some of these figures are self-portraits, others Morgan’s friends. In either case, they emanate the glare of intimate disclosure. Her brush marks register bravura, but compared to Spence’s graceful jetés they are generally more angular, staccato, and filled with rapid, nervous energy. The female figure is often accentuated by an array of items: clothing, makeup, tattoos, jewelry, cigarettes. Instead of serving as socio-cultural signifiers, as in Spence, Morgan’s costumes are entryways into an individual’s personality and predicament, their symbolic associations woven into a backdrop to each character’s emotional state.

In Heavenly Creature, the title painting of the show, the naked upper body thrusts forcefully forward, rhyming with the curve of the assertively raised arm. The all-knowing intransigence of the complexion, anchored at the painfully scarlet lips, reads more like a challenge than an invitation. Most works in this show follow a similar construction: singular, sexually strong female figures in pulsating spaces. In a way that, tellingly, recalls Michael Fried’s description of Gericault, a problematic veneer of theatricality in these paintings is simply shattered at first contact by the monstrous proportions of overt, inundating sensual energy. Such energy finds another, even more tactile outlet in Morgan’s drawings. These relatively small pieces, skin-like (they are executed on Yupo paper), recall Klimt’s nude drawings with their highly sexualized posture and melodic, flowing lines. The nuanced tonal washes congeal into corals and fire (in the top part of Lay, for example). The drawings seem to almost tremble under the intense private pleasure they are obliged to bear. The headstrong vulnerability embedded in all this sensationalized sexuality, which can at times verge on vulgarity, evokes a sense of authentic emotional connection in the viewer. But the intense personal nature of these emotionally repetitive “illicit” depictions might actually prevent her work from taking part in wider discussions of gender and sexuality. Indeed, the unabashed pursuit of “sexiness” has resulted in criticism for Morgan in the past, as it alludes – so the argument goes – to auto-sexualization and anti-feminism. In a dialogue with Jennifer Samet that took place on the closing day of this exhibition, Morgan asserted that she doesn’t identify as a feminist painter. There is, however, a curious side effect of this apparently apolitical stance. For in these paintings of luscious revelry and exquisite vulnerability, largely guided by the painter’s emotional instinct and searching sense of conviction, Morgan achieves a concreteness of female experience that is possibly stronger and more complete than a labyrinth constructed with intellectual tenets. The voyeuristic gaze is given the opportunity to transform itself into a vicarious one.

It is clear that Spence and Morgan have taken remarkably different routes in scripting a theatrical habitat for their subjects. A large part of this difference springs from a peculiar contemporary division between the provocative and the empathetic as painting attaches itself to an exterior cause (in this case feminism). The enigmatic urgency in Spence situates the viewer at a probing distance, in a spectatorial role, luxuriating in social glamour and drama when all of a sudden confronted by the characters’ haunting gaze and demand for a fair hearing. In Morgan, visceral torrents of solitary emotion forcefully absorbs the viewer who is then obliged to decide how to handle this gratuitous entry into an intensely private world.

In either event, theatricality is today more than ever implicated in paintings of women by women as both the gazed upon and the spectator have become equally active players. The multiplicity and subtlety of treatments, of which we had a glimpse through these two shows, sparkles hopeful excitement for the continual evolution of painting’s capacity to give voice to a muted presentness: to comply, to masquerade, to entice, or to attack.

The post Hunters and Hustlers: Feminism and Theatricality in Suzy Spence and Heather Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

Partaking in the discourse of new queer abstraction, Second Date is a rarity among contemporary art trailblazers: in addition to its conceptual richness, it employs the poetic and visceral in its main mode of address. In comparison to the much-explored approach of queer archaeology, where abstraction serves to excavate visual references from queer cultural history, Britton looks to the future and explores abstraction as a medium for shared vulnerability. The artist is now based in Berlin, Germany; we were able to sit down during their brief sojourn in New York.

Loren Britton: Second Date, curated by Jacob Rhodes, is on view at Field Projects through December 16th, 2017. 526 W 26th Street, #807, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, fieldprojectsgallery.com

WEN TAO: In the press release there’s a letter from you to “Dawn” that is tender, charming and almost troubadourish. It sets the attitudinal undertone of the show. Who is Dawn and why this gesture?

LOREN BRITTON: The reference comes from the first issue of Transvestia, a transgender lifestyle magazine in the 1960s. Dawn wrote an ad seeking friendship and romance and signed “Love, Dawn”. It’s such a surprisingly open gesture given the impersonal nature of an ad, which made me want to respond “Love, Loren.” I’m interested in such gestures of open vulnerability. It’s how I envision the relationship between artworks and viewers.

Are there particular reasons for this strategy of non-aggressiveness, of eliciting care and exchanging vulnerability?

I used to work in a way that’s a lot more bombastic and uses taking up space as mode of address. In that it was more about holding the viewer by physically immersing them. Now I’m more interested in how that can happen psychologically. It’s more about the viewer’s reading mind, about communicating short and honest sentiments. It suits this show as my main goal is to do justice to Dawn. I think about the distance between me as a young trans person in 2017 and what it must have been for a trans person in 1960. I want to have a reparative relationship to that distance.

In abstraction there’s the notion of a visual element being able to elicit a psycho-physical response without referencing reality.

When you put a mark on a blank surface I don’t think there’s inherently a meaning in it. The meaning is imbued through how you contextualize it and the lineage you participate in. It’s the way you use colors to quote and reference the culture context you come from. The question of reading and misreading, visibility and invisibility through color is a strategy of queer abstraction because colors reference experiences and feelings. There’s an underlying code to the work.

How do your formal choices reflect your political sensibility?

The state of mind that viewers have in this show is one of being visually aware and understanding how your body feels. It’s a psycho physical experience. In a space like that, people are in a state of shared vulnerability, boundary dissolution, and shared empathy. I think categorization, or “us” against “them”, is a useful political strategy but in a context like this we can forgo it temporarily. I want to explore how we can actually treat each other really well, from a micro level like this, and relate it to a global scale.

Abstraction affords a bodily experience. But figuration is a different strategy. In queer figurative art now, there seems to be an implicit responsibility to be celebratory towards the queer body, to render it positive and beautiful.

I think each artist’s identity inevitably shifts our position. I’m not personally interested in figuration as a mode to explore shared vulnerability. I think artists like Louis Fratino and Doron Langberg approach empathy from the opposite direction, meaning they are interested in figuration as a mode towards inspiring empathy with a viewer via the figures in the frame of their work. I’m more naturally inclined to abstraction. I’m fascinated by space, color, and language.

You talk about many influences outside of the visual arts. Maybe those are influences more on a strategic or attitudinal level. What is your relationship to poetry?

Very much so. I have a strong relationship to poetry! I curated a show with Rocket Caleshu at Eastside International, Los Angeles, last spring called Appetitive Torque with 3 artists painters and four poets. I think I learned a lot from the publication we put together for this show because it paired writers and artists thinking and writing about taste and how it is made and shifted. The poems in that text with the artwork in the show suggested different strategies for thinking about desire operating on both on a textual and visual level.

Right after the election last year I had a stressed-based reaction and I started making these big loud paintings. Someone came and said to me you are really a poet. That was really helpful because I realized what I was doing at that moment was really reactionary, the loud and bombastic urge to take up space was antithetical to who I am as an artist. I’m really not that kind of artist. I work on a more subtle level.

How do you choose the words to put into your works? And why do you use cursive script?

I’m interested in the cursive because it’s a way of learning language. There’s something very drawing-like about it. Also cursive is not being taught anymore and I’m interested in excavating that problem. The words come from conversations, poems I read and letters to friends.

The mode of communication afforded by a letter is almost extinct now. In a letter there’s the unconcealable charm of mere sincerity when someone talks and talks to the same person without response.

Yes that’s similar to how I ask people to take time to invest in the work because of its necessary multiplicity. I’m interested in slowing down and inviting people to be in the present. We have continual fragmentation of attention. Although that’s interesting, I’m more interested in a slower presentness, in getting in and committing to a longer conversation.

Why paper pulp?

I’m interested in the history of collectivity of the material. I’m concerned with what it means to be working in the contemporary art world on a budget, or as a person from a lower class. In the Disclaimer Gallery show, my dad and my grandfather helped me to make the table with floorboards of my dad’s old basement. That was an incredible process of collaboration. I’m not interested in trying to pass as something that I’m not. I’m interested in the politics of middle class living. I think about material conditions of the present moment as it exists for me and don’t try to participate in something that’s not true to that experience.

I’m also interested in language as material for both the work and its idea. I don’t think that everything has to exist in one artwork. I want to create a practice for myself where I can continue to shift my opinions and continue to ask questions. I want to stay with the messiness of the answers. Maybe there are no answers and I should stay with the questions.

There’s a really wonderful slowness in the show. It allows people to focus on the present and not to be constantly obsessed about things improving in the future. Do you have any thoughts about utopianism?

My ideas about utopia were shaped by José Esteban Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia. He talks about how the idea of utopia is “not yet here”. Being a queer person in a hetero-normative structure, there’s no reproductive future. I’m interested in the failure of queerness as it relates to this idea. Utopia that’s not yet here and will never be here. Utopia is more like a state that you can reach by being really present with where you are now.

That’s very Buddhist.

Yeah. I think it can happen in small moments.

The post Justice to Dawn: Loren Britton in conversation with Wen Tao appeared first on artcritical.