JULIE HEFFERNAN
Well as a painter I was respectfully floored by that piling up of paint, plus wiping, scraping, knowing when to stop and when to pile more on.  That’s not easy!  In her earlier work I knew exactly how she made those paintings, but this new work is so layered and the decisions about when to stop and when to keep going so seamlessly articulated – that’s amazing painting.  You try it!

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You admire her bravura technique, but what is the project at the service of which she puts it? To me, the equations she makes between different kinds of representation and different kinds of abstraction, as well as between different kinds of imagery, seem pretty flat and familiar.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s such a weird question, Barry, “what is the project at the service of which she puts it?” Put the question aside and approach them more visually. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had and for that might to enough.

DAVID COHEN
Pleasure is never enough.

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DAVID COHEN
Julie, on Facebook you described a painting by Jenny Saville on view in her show at Gagosian Gallery as “the most beautiful painting I’ve seen in a long time” and 150 friends liked or loved that post. In the comments section, Dennis Kardon wrote: “You and David Cohen are going to have an interesting discussion,” referencing no doubt my highly critical artcritical review of her last New York show. Dennis wrote enthusiastically about her work in 1999 (it was his first piece of published art criticism, and was edited by Walter Robinson.) What is it about her new show, Julie that, as you put it on Facebook, “knocked you out”?

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Up to this point I hadn’t been much of a fan of Jenny Saville’s. She’d cornered the market on paint-as-flesh, no doubt, but I never felt like she cared much about what was inside the figures she was painting, or showed us anything deeper than bloated, mottled and dejected skin. But several paintings in her latest Gagosian show blew those notions away and stopped me in my tracks. Her Fate paintings (Fate 1, Fate 2 and Fate 3) went somewhere I didn’t expect – melding abstraction and figuration in a way that furthered the scope of both, and bringing black bodies and white bodies together into new-fangled icons through muscular paint and sheer pictorial power. To my mind these paintings raised the bar on figuration, and that’s rare.

Painterly stylishness had limited Saville up until now, but in these Fate paintings I’m not as conscious of her style as much as her intelligent pictorial choices that give me the sense that she’s gone beyond realism (or expressionism) towards the iconic. Where before she would mask out areas in order to break up the integrity of the figure, and thereby sidestep realism, now she’s using those masked areas to complicate the figure’s integrity, suggest the mess inside, or alternatively provide it with extra appendages to increase its capacity to express multiplicities.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Maybe because of the peculiar emptiness the ugliness in earlier work seemed manipulative. Many of these new paintings stopped me in my tracks! The scale, color, content and play with abstraction are exciting and original. They refer to so many different things but they’re entirely their own.

This is the first show of hers, I should say, that I’ve had a positive response to. I’m a big fan of abject beauty: I taught myself to paint by viewing cadavers in the medical school and a boyfriend even moved out on me because of the pig’s head (and a few other specimens) in the freezer. I adore Soutine’s still life paintings, Rembrandt’s sides of beef and Lucian Freud’s paintings of Lee Bowery. While I was impressed by the scale, and of course the paint handling, her previous paintings for the most part have seemed ugly in a calculated or gratuitous way.

DENNIS KARDON
Almost twenty years ago I wrote:

Saville simply overwhelms the viewer with paint as flesh. The specificity of her subject matter raises issues about the nature of spontaneity and control in painting. And because these bodies are painted, and therefore inhabited by the artist…they don’t have the distanced quality of the photographic work of other artists who have dealt with body image and gender issues.

As her career progressed however, I became gradually disenchanted with what I perceived as strategic employment of painting conventions that started to feel a bit rote, and an increase in scale for the sake of filling up a mega space. David’s review, though a bit scathing, generally captured my feeling about what had occurred in her work.

My remark about the discussion was a reference to a chance encounter with David and Barry in Chelsea after first seeing the current show. My immediate reaction was that she had redeemed herself a lot, and I had taken a lot of detail shots of memorable moments. But David was so negative it made me reconsider, until at least, he compared her unfavorably to Tracey Emin at Frieze which I am pretty sure was an unmitigated waste of perfectly nice white walls.

WALTER ROBINSON
If it’s beauty, it’s beauty of an abject kind, which has always been her thing — heavy models, grossly presented. A rather ugly beauty, I would say. Lisa Yuskavage is a good pendant here. Beauty also lies in her mastery of an academic drawing style, which recalls a 19th-century formula in service to a classical ideal. Those are her avant-garde bona fides, the rehabilitation of an essentially conservative technique for subjects of contemporary relevance, notably the body and gender identity.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I’m the opposite of Julie and Brenda in that I’ve always been interested in Saville’s paintings, and sometimes like them quite a lot. People always used to compare her to Freud, and I understand why, but to me that was the wrong analogy. She was more like Anselm Kiefer—I mean the really good Kiefer, the one from the 1980s. The body was to her as the landscape to him. I didn’t find his wounded landscapes ugly, nor the tormented paint by which he depicted it, and I never found her abject bodies or her storms of paint ugly either—quite the opposite. But I didn’t care for these new paintings at all. I don’t like the self-evident “painting of collage” trope, and she seems to be drawing in a more conventional way as well as being more restrained in her paint handling.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
It’s interesting that you compare her earlier work to Kiefer. I agree, they are more Kiefer than Freud because her figures have little physiological content. They were all surface, same as Kiefer. And same as Kiefer, you think they’re about something else and then discover that they’re equally empty.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
It might be worthwhile to keep the discussion to the three Fate paintings since I agree with you all about the other works in the show, but thought those three Fates were of a different order altogether.

WALTER ROBINSON
A generous reading is a good thing. It reminds me of Richard Prince’s goofy brilliant combos of de Kooning and gay porn.

Julie is certainly right about the paint-as-flesh thing, but sections of these works were basically deft contour drawings filled in with even defter Ab-Ex-style brushwork. Interesting, but a bit silly?

I didn’t even notice the race thing, since I was only there a few minutes, and the overwhelming impression is pink. (An artist works for a year on a show; a critic walks in and after two minutes says “it sucks.”) But I’ll go right now to take another look. What about her pseudo-cubist figures? There’s a new move.

DAVID COHEN
I went back yesterday for a proper visit after coming to a comparable conclusion to Walter from two minutes at the opening reception, and I’m afraid that closer examination and doing my utmost to sit openly with the work has not led to epiphanies. I find these to be disingenuous academic machines. Look, there is no question that Jenny Saville has exceptional technical abilities and genuine intellectual ambition, but I suspect that the adulation that has followed from these rare qualities has been corrupting. Her early work married painting chops and youthful feminist indignation to produce startling, if shallow, results, but she has “matured” into a shameless crowd pleaser. I can’t believe such sensitive individuals as the artists here aren’t seeing the wood for the trees. Photos have been projected onto canvases and lines traced; paint has been slathered in gratuitous faux-expressivity to generate effects; images have been chopped up to connote visual deconstruction. But there’s no real drawing, painting or collage going on in these concoctions.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Well as a painter I was respectfully floored by that piling up of paint, plus wiping, scraping, knowing when to stop and when to pile more on.  That’s not easy!  In her earlier work I knew exactly how she made those paintings, but this new work is so layered and the decisions about when to stop and when to keep going so seamlessly articulated – that’s amazing painting.  You try it!

As for David’s contention that there is no real drawing going on – look at Fate 2  and the deft placement of that thick blue line forming a square right in the middle of the figure, and what it’s doing to cause the whole assortment of body parts to pivot around it. It’s doing so many things: It’s the thing that allows the icon to be both passive and active, asserting the power of that body to suggest a kind of centrifugal movement of becoming, while also exuding a marmoreal presence; it’s also reinforcing the presence of the left breast, now lost to scraping and turned into negative space. That one squiggly line comes totally out of the blue (as it were) but is doing so much to power up the form and reinforce this idea of multiplicities.

Regarding the black and white bodies: Yes, she pulled it off! She deftly insinuated a white body into (onto) a black body, and vice versa. In one, the white body is in the middle of black limbs, (all the heads are either of black women or, in the case of Fate 3, from an African sculpture of a woman) but not overwhelming them or dominating in any way—they’re both equally present in the form. In Fate 3 the “limbs” are more like weird appendages that take the form to places I’ve never seen Saville go. She’s forged an icon of a black and white Shiva-like woman with the many limbs. Glorious!

WALTER ROBINSON
I feel you David but is it really fair to presume success has gone to her head? Artists are always having things in their heads, and success breeds confidence and ambition, etc. And what is “real” painting, drawing and collage, and why privilege it? Collage is giving new energy to abstract painting at the moment, why not figuration?

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You admire her bravura technique, but what is the project at the service of which she puts it? To me, the equations she makes between different kinds of representation and different kinds of abstraction, as well as between different kinds of imagery, seem pretty flat and familiar.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s such a weird question, Barry, “what is the project at the service of which she puts it?” Put the question aside and approach them more visually. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had and for that might to enough.

DAVID COHEN
Pleasure is never enough.

Julie, I don’t doubt that the pyrotechnics here take bravura and acumen to pull off. But really, we at Gagosian Gallery looking at massive canvases by an international art star for sale at top dollar; it is the painterly equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster. If the movie sucks we don’t applaud the music and special effects.

Walter is right that one should indeed use any device that works if the result is a powerful image. But “real drawing” is where the lines are put down with purpose, where the energy is one of inquiry and/or assuredness. Her line is gimmicky. She generates false pentimenti to make the drawing look “old masterly”. Her paint slathering is like pushing a button in Photoshop marked “AbEx”; they don’t come out of the existential maelstrom of creativity. Her collage is saying, we are made up of this and that; real collage is about opening oneself up to the marvelous and the unknown.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
It’s interesting that you and I, David—the two non-practitioners here—are much less sympathetic to these paintings than the painters here. That’s something that makes me think I should reconsider my response— though I still don’t know how!

SUZY SPENCE
It’s interesting to me that in her piece dedicated to Linda Nochlin is sort of squirreled away in the back, when Nochlin’s ideas should operate as the catalyst for the entire show. Ancestors, yes, Saville seems obsessed with the problematic of “genius”, but rather than destroy that concept she’d rather run a race with every great man who made a mark in the Western canon to see how she measures up. She paints extraordinarily well, but that’s actually beside the point. Chapter (for Linda Nochlin) in charcoal on cotton duck canvas, recalls the particularly beautiful study by da Vinci, The Virgin and Christ with St. Anne. But Leonardo’s women are locked in high-minded, existential conversation and seem incredibly connected to one another whereas Saville’s women are piled on one another anonymously, beautifully drawn as forms with a fullness and accuracy. But I don’t understand who these women are, and why we should care about them.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I guess I should now take back what I just said about the critics vs. the painters.

SUZY SPENCE
And I agree with David about special effects. Nicole Eisenman steals more effectively and is just as nimble a virtuoso. By comparison I would say Saville is a mannerist, and less able to fully employ the styles she robs, at least not in this show.

DAVID COHEN
The thing that I found especially irritating about the piece Suzy is talking about, Chapter (For Linda Nochlin), is the way she spray painted trompe l’oeil extra sheets at various junctures in emulation of Frank Auerbach (another of her early mentors) who sticks extra paper on when he wants to extend an image or repair a support punctured by incessant correction. There’s no correction here; the image is totally calculated, along with its arsenal of effects.

SUZY SPENCE
Brenda, I never think beautiful paint is enough. Press releases in recent years try too hard to align her with a list of great (dead) white men, which must be some incredible weight for her to bear. I wish Saville would make an escape to the woods where she could return to the introspection she’d invested in earlier. She used to reach into her soul and hand it to us, but I’m not seeing that now.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
The so-called project she is serving in these three paintings seems to be of the utmost importance right now, post Dana Schutz and even vis a vis Kara Walker’s show where so many black bodies were made to look as foolish in places as the white bodies looked malign. These Fates are proud bodies and full of fluid possibilities.  I always thought the real reason Dana’s Emmett Till painting didn’t work ultimately was because it wasn’t painted well enough, with the kind of weird surprising paint and drawing that, for instance, her Michael Jackson painting had. We’re not here to go over Schutz again, but it was really interesting to see someone with such good intentions fail so miserably at trying to bridge the race gap, whereas here now with these Fate paintings no one is making any noise at all about a white artist’s right to depict a black body. That’s an important project, Barry

BRENDA ZLAMANY
The problem with Schutz’s Open Casket is that it was decorative to the point of insulting the viewer. I remember at the Whitney opening noticing the painting from the corner of my eye and registering it as an attractive painting but having no feeling for the subject whatsoever. There was nothing about it visually that hinted at the horror of the content. I don’t want to say it lacked empathy but to take a horrifying event and turn it into attractive paint is bad painting at best.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Making no noise is a great accomplishment? I don’t think so. When the conflict blew up over the Sam Durant sculpture at the Walker, I was surprised when I read that it been exhibited at Documenta, because I’d seen and written about that Documenta and didn’t remember the piece. I read back over what I’d written and confirmed that I hadn’t mentioned it. Then I got curious, and read all the other Documenta reviews I could find online. Not a single one mentioned Durant’s sculpture. That didn’t make me think it was harmless in Germany but volatile in Minnesota. It made me think that the piece was so mediocre no one felt obliged to think about it— until a different context focused a different kind of attention on it. I guess Saville, being British, won’t be included in the next Whitney Biennial, but if she were, there might be some interesting responses. Oh, and by the way, Dana’s Emmett Till painting is a very good work.

DAVID COHEN
Saville isn’t depicting a black body directly, but an African carving. The flesh montaged over the fetish is Caucasian, as best one can tell—or race is at any event not axiomatic. The incorporation of the carving recalls David Salle to me. These Fates are interesting images. But can we get past white-woman-painting-black-people silliness and just ask what it means, what it is really saying?

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Fate 3 and Fate 2 have heads of black women; they’re not carvings. And what they’re really saying is totally prosaic when put into words: “out of all these multiplicities we’re also one.” How boring is that when distilled down to mere words. But that’s where the art comes in – she’s created a medley of fluid bodies and I revel in it! I so appreciate when an artist takes on big themes, unwieldy problems, and does it unstintingly, and more importantly, without irony! And Barry, you cannot just claim the Schutz Open Casket is a good painting without saying why.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Suzy, I don’t think she was reaching into her soul in the earlier works and they were not beautiful. By putting aside the content of the previous work and focusing on the excitement of the paint, I think she has a chance of saying something less calculated and more authentic and in the end, more ambitious. I agree with David though, the drawing is a bit flat.

David Salle is a good comparison, and not just because of the African carving, but also because of the random layering of images. When I made etchings with David, we would print the plates, each with different images on them in various combinations until something happened. When they worked, they worked. But we were not asking what they were saying.

DAVID COHEN
Salle is a formalist to his fingertips; they “worked” because they clicked into something startling and satisfying in equal measure, no doubt. But Saville isn’t a formalist. She’s always been interested in themes. I take issue with the dismissal of her early work – the fat self-portrait in Propped and the liposuction paintings. They were totally authentic in the personal and political urgency of their issues and persuasive in marrying painterly marvel and bodily discomfort.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Thank you, David. I agree with what you say about Saville’s earlier work!

DAVID COHEN
Dennis assumes, incorrectly, that I must have been joking in finding Tracey Emin’s figuration more convincing than Saville’s. I think both artists, in their latest works, are dealing with the body through mark making. Both are mannerists, but Emin is served well by restricting herself to mannerisms of abstract expressionism. She was channeling Roger Hilton, an English abstract painter who struggled with – and exploited – alcohol addiction in his figurative experiments. There’s plenty to fault in Emin’s results but it is a kind of escape to the woods, in Suzy’s sense, that Saville isn’t up for.

SUZY SPENCE
Brenda, her early paintings seemed distinctly feminist to me and feminist artists are Man Repellers by nature. In her early work there was no willingness to please; she wanted to repel you with her fleshy body and suck you in with her painting technique at the same time. That tension no longer exists, and so the work is flat as Barry says.

WALTER ROBINSON
Julie’s mention of Schutz is apt since Dana especially activates the decorative quality of her paint strokes, which are little masterpieces in themselves. In the meantime, objections to these works because of an absence of “soul” is, well, retardataire and romantic. Postmodernism is about a human world without such constructions. Some viewers prefer the art without the mystification! Do we look for “soul” in Salle or Sherman, for instance?

SUZY SPENCE
Well then you should love this work Walter! It’s perfectly postmodern and cold.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Not cold enough by a long shot! The depiction of faces in particular seemed to invite empathy in a really blatant way. And how sentimental the use of the pietà idea!

DAVID COHEN
Yeah, especially that schlocky pietà of a guy coming out of a war zone with a sexed-up infant in his arms, pure pompier.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wish I hadn’t seen that one.

DAVID COHEN
To return to Walter’s question, Salle and Sherman spare us any quest for “soul” because of their knowingly constructed style. Their tropes arrive and function intact. Saville isn’t deconstructing anyone else’s technique at this stage, she is merely tapping into effects. I agree with Julie that they are free of irony. They are anything but art about art, which is why their mannerisms are all the more egregious.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Yes she has a lot of effects in this show but towards a more interesting end than in earlier shows she’s had. Would you consider the wings and appendages in Fate 3 to be mere “effects”? Because to me those are essential components of the structure of the work, acting boldly to move it in space, to suggest hybridity and composite bodies, all necessary for the bigger project at hand.

DAVID COHEN
By wings to you mean the smudged arcs over the left shoulder of the amalgamated figure? I am reading drawing on a wall in the studio (pace the baseboard behind the pedestal) that serves the functional purpose of saying that the figure is an artificial studio-bound creation.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
I mean the chair-like appendage (in Fate 3) attached to her shoulder to the right, and the lobster claw shape to the left — those are essential components to the icon’s whole structure. The smudges behind the form just reinforce the integrity of the overall monolithic shape she’s trying to create. Notice also how the big strokes of yellow paint within the big reddish brown shape to the bottom right reinforces the horizontal ankle attached to the foot, that is also another pedestal for the icon, as well as a pivot point for the whole structure above, and also causes the mars red shape to turn in space, and thereby shift the plane of that shape from horizontal to vertical, like a chair. So it’s a multiplicity of things – a chair-like thing, a cape-like thing, a drooping wing-like thing: super interesting!

WALTER ROBINSON (from the Gallery)
Standing in front of the paintings, my second look, I have to say they’re awesome. The sense of play is overwhelming — the artist in the studio, making pictures one at a time, doing this and that — a big hand expertly tendered here, some scratchy Twomblyesque marks there, a witty pose overall — amusing herself, pleasing herself — it’s just so good — artists have an alibi, all they really have to do is represent the individual subject, not be the World Shaper.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wow, great Walter! But what about the pietàs? Blue Pietà is icky in an Odd Nerdrum way.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I wish we could be having this discussion in front of the paintings.

But I want to go back to something said a little while back and register the fact that I don’t understand the idea of saying one artist is a formalist and another is something else. A combination that works for David Salle is one that conveys a certain feeling, I think. Why is that “formalism”? What made Saville’s earlier paintings work for me were formal aspects— these conveyed her themes in ways that worked for me. The themes without the forms wouldn’t have done that.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s an important point, Barry.

WALTER ROBINSON
Somehow, David, I don’t think they’re projected. If they are, she’s definitely unparalleled at it.

How a viewer sees these things is totally parti pris. They can seem kitsch or heartfelt. You know the head in the pieta is a kouros. And four-armed dead body carried from the ruins by the chap in Seventh Seal garb is too clean by half. Other works look like her friends posing nude together — warm and real, and a real subject. In the end, she’s an artist; she can do what she wants, and the hell with piffle from the critics!

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Hear! Hear!

DAVID COHEN
Hmm. Well, I certainly don’t like to project moral outrage at any means employed if the results are convincing.

WALTER ROBINSON
These people…

DAVID COHEN
OK, well let’s talk about that scribble in and underneath. What is it trying to say? Are these automata from Westworld and this is the machinery where their viscera should be? I don’t think so. Did she do some scribble underneath to get her juices flowing, and then started her beaux arts painting on top of that and then Gagosian came and whisked the picture off before she could finish it? No, this is effect. a way of saying this is a contemporary painting, not the academic, anachronistic figure painting it would otherwise look to be, because squiggles are modern. That’s mannerism at its worst to me. But if someone could offer me a reading of the use of this device that energizes their understanding of the image, I’m all ears.

SUZY SPENCE
Walter and David, I don’t think they are projected onto canvas. I imagine an athletic event that called for giant easels and enough space and light to study her subjects who she actually asked to recline on pedestals and chairs. I think she’s working from life; I imagine a string of models, most of whom appear in her studio the way actors come in for an audition. I sense she doesn’t know many of them, as there is such similarity of body type and age, like she’d advertised the project on Craig’s List. People in their late 30s, some black, mostly white. My favorite piece was Vis and Ramen I, who are both in recline like Manet’s Olympia. They sink deeper into their pedestal than her other subjects, their genitals almost touch, and I was fascinated by her decision not to establish that contact.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Suzy, I don’t think that’s true. In the 2003 press release from her Migrants show it mentions that she prefers to work from photographs rather than living models. “Saville calls herself a scavenger of images.” Her studio is a repository of images from old medical journals of bruises, scars, images of deformities and disease. In this sense her relationship with her subject matter is more Salle then Soutine or Freud and it’s evident in this newer work.

DENNIS KARDON (returning to the conversation)
Sorry to weigh in so late. I got sidetracked.

Although I am sure she couldn’t possibly be working from life, even twenty years ago I was unsure how she got from the photo to the canvas, though now it seems obvious computers are involved. Even then Saville seemed to challenge the improvisational constraints of either grid or projector. Both then and now the paint seemed spontaneously slapped on, but without the flatness of most paintings made from projected photographs. It is what makes them look so contemporary. They have all they dynamics of spontaneous paint handling, and the specific sureness without any of the uncertainty of where to put the paint. Something that Walter, can surely attest to. But though it would certainly indicate a super human talent if they were painted from life, I think it hardly matters conceptually how she manages to accomplish her paintings.

I think beauty, abject or otherwise, takes us nowhere productive.

Barry squarely solves the problem with his question about content, because this kind of analysis is the error that takes us away from what is actually happening in the paintings. This what has confused me. I will look at the paintings and be totally taken in, and even studying the details, I am amazed at the frisson between spontaneity and specificity. Then I get home and try to answer analytical questions about “to what end” and the project starts to fall apart. Walter had the perfect response, he was dismissive at first, in his critical self, but when his painter self went to study them again, was impressed.

I have to say when all is said and done, in all probability the details are stronger than the sum of their parts. They direct us to considerations of emotions that are constructed out of touch, rather than conception. I think David Salle is an apt referent, but because of the authenticity of the paint, they do not have the distance and irony of Salle, who does (a la David Cohen) see paint as a mere illustration of itself.

DAVID COHEN
Dennis and Walter prove that you can make better images by photographing bits of Jenny Saville than Jenny Saville can in a completed canvas.

DENNIS KARDON
This is where we disagree David, I don’t sense those “scribbles” are supposed to have meaning in the representation sense, but in the sense of trying to marry an arbitrary spontaneity with a mark making that is directed to represent stuff and break down the moment when one kind of gesture transitions into another. As Walter mentioned, Manet could do this flawlessly on all levels, no one has been able to attain that complexity since (except Matisse, but in a different way).

BRENDA ZLAMANY
In spite of the authenticity of the paint, I think one can still judge the work with the same criterion that one might apply to Salle, and they’re better that way. Besides, I never felt much emotion in her touch.

DENNIS KARDON
The emotion is not in the touch itself but the construction of what the touch conveys. Like the hand touching the leg. It’s in the economy of gesture, and specificity of the shape of the mark. Manet is what the ideal looks like, but again, old fashioned compared to contemporary issues of representation and scale:

DAVID COHEN
I wonder what’s contemporary about painting on a huge scale, considering the fact that we actually process images on small screens in this era, and outside of art galleries and museums have very few sacred and civic spaces in which we look at large oil paintings. Saville’s command of size is certainly impressive, but what value does blown up charcoal drawing convey, beyond the acrobatics of its delivery?

DENNIS KARDON
I have been concerned with your willingness to demean what Saville does by cavalierly referring to “acrobatics” or “blown up charcoal drawing” when what I, Walter, and others in the discussion have constantly pointed out is thought in action. The whole point of painting is confronting the physicality of an image in the world and its relationship to the body of the viewer. How it metamorphoses as it is approached, the scale of a mark to one’s own body as an image breaks apart upon close inspection. It is why the overall conception, as seen as a coherent image is so up in the air in this work. It is easy to use language to name and then devalue, but I think what is really good about Saville is that she seems to be constantly trying to go beyond any singular idea or conception.

WALTER ROBINSON
Many of our pros and cons show how easy it is to marshall any kind of argument against any kind of thing, especially with aesthetics. Why not praise Saville’s works for going counter to digital socialization, for instance?

You could also say that she graffitied her own work so the taggers won’t have to.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You’re right! and of course the opposite is true too, if you are good with words you can use them to make any old thing sound good or interesting. I would really like to be convinced to like these paintings but it’s not quite happening.

WALTER ROBINSON
This person — so nutty!

DAVID COHEN
Really? I don’t see the person as nutty at all. It is a very nice, respectable old-fashioned 19th-century painting done after a photograph of a woman over which the artist has inscribed some red dashes and black hatching. Half the students in the New York Academy of Art MFA show that opened last week could have knocked out that head, though none of them would have done the dashes on top

BARRY SCHWABSKY
That would be the first thing they’d try after leaving the Academy.

DENNIS KARDON
There is no NYAA grad student (or few painters anywhere really) that could accomplish what she has accomplished.

WALTER ROBINSON
Yeah, you overestimate the skills of the NYAA grads. And you object to the random marks? It’s all marks, at any rate, and they’re nutty in the way they’re deployed — since Manet painters have toyed with the codes of representation of facial features. But we all use the codes — Saville just keeps to the academic conventions more than most. Still, there’s play, and I think it works.

As for the rest of the chazerai, it’s functioning in several ways, as we all know. Animates the surface. Stands in for entrails. Enlivens the academic figuration. Represents the triumph of humanism over abstraction (as Donald Kuspit might argue).

My original reaction was that the marriage of academic and modernist elements was a failure. I like my quotations clean and unfussed with, generally. But then I decided I didn’t care.
BRENDA ZLAMANY
This one is much ‘nuttier’.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
As a detail, it does look pretty yummy. But is there a painting in the show that does that as a whole?

DAVID COHEN
Nuts being the operative word, Brenda. But isn’t this just the trope of unfinish? We are to read the (oilstick?) marks underneath as an armature, and then some figure bits are in grisaille, and the testes are then nicely worked up with shadows in place, behaving properly. The whole concoction is saying, I’m an old master, I’ve got the chops

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That might all be true, David. But as Barry says, it’s still ‘yummy’. And I think the red dashes are good in this passage. Why not just enjoy it? And I think the Fate paintings do it as a whole.

DAVID COHEN
Brenda: You misread Barry I think. He’s saying there are lots of corners of pictures that are appealing in their dispatch, but the overall images don’t convince. If you follow the curate’s way of eating eggs you’ll end up in the emergency ward.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Ha!

SUZY SPENCE
Much as I love her ambition, I really wish she’d find new artists with whom she’d like to be compared. The genius thing needs to go.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Like if she started channeling Florine Stettheimer? That would really throw an interesting money wrench into things.

SUZY SPENCE
Yes it would.

WALTER ROBINSON
What about the scarlet skewed halo? That’s new. Also, relative to the notion that this stuff is familiar and tired, don’t forget she totally owns this niche.

DAVID COHEN
I think she has some competition, actually: Odd Nerdrum, Adrian Ghenie, others whose names I didn’t feel a need to remember. There is a big market for this kind of thing, especially beyond the Urals.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Odd Nerdrum is almost completely detached from modern painting. But Ghenie and some of the other Romanians do have more in common with her—maybe also some of the Dresden school. But none of them have this fascination with the corporeal, which is what’s made Saville’s best work so compelling.

DAVID COHEN
Cecily Brown at her best marries paint and flesh more convincingly, though neither of them is Rubens

BRENDA ZLAMANY
I hate Rubens, except for the small studies.

DAVID COHEN
OK, enjoy Jenny Saville then.

By this stage, Julie Heffernan and Suzy Spence have signed off.

DENNIS KARDON
I need to interject another issue which seems new in this work. It seems she is taking a piece of sculptural representation and trying through paint to capture the living aspect of what the sculpture was originally trying to represent. The bringing of the visceral to the constructed has always been her territory, and she is now trying to expand on the ways signifiers of bodies moving and being represented in the world convey actual feeling. And she is really trying to break it down brushstroke by brushstroke so that it is totally appropriate to focus on the details of moments in her paintings where she is getting her hands dirty. I don’t even know if we can evaluate the total effect of these paintings yet. That’s their provocative moment. This whole discussion of how the micro becomes macro is not just a trendy concept. It is crucial to how we move and represent in the world, and the heatedness of the discussion reflects the divides she is trying to bridge. Anything that provokes this much disagreement must be elucidating something important.

DAVID COHEN
I think we are all agreed that the Fates series attempts and achieves something new and substantial, and is the highlight of the show (yummy details notwithstanding).

These composite images remind me strongly of early work by Richard Hamilton, which itself was a Pop extension of earlier Dada strategies. What stands out in Saville is that she is doing it all in paint, but ultimately, so what? A photomontage based on paintings, a painting based on computer-generated collage: it is just a technical distinction.

I don’t think one can play with issues as loaded and potent as racial identity, gender representation, the lived-in body etc. in large, resolved public images and not have a forceful message one is ready to stand behind, or that others who admire the results can express coherently. Saying that these images are provoking a debate and we can’t decide what they mean yet doesn’t cut it for me. We don’t have to have a definitive interpretation, but the onus is on defenders to offer a start.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I disagree about the Fates series. They are not as bad as the pietàs, but that’s it.

WALTER ROBINSON
I would want to cite the group of British artists who took illustrative techniques and tricked them out with painterly effects — R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, even Hockney, along with Hamilton.

DAVID COHEN
Yeah, she is totally a footnote to School of London painting, both the grubby existentialist end of the spectrum (Freud and Auerbach) and the Pop end (Hamilton and Kitaj). But she chickens out of the middle point, which is where she actually needs to concentrate her efforts if she wants to paint rivers of flesh: Francis Bacon.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Just back from a break. Did anyone mention George Condo?

DAVID COHEN
Someone should have done, with the African statue. This is what irony-free George Condo looks like, Julie. Pastiche minus irony equals kitsch.

DENNIS KARDON
One problem here seems to be that David sees what Saville does as merely facilely co-opting a kind of historical mark making. Yummy sticks in my throat as well. While I hate yummy, I don’t think Saville is that, nor do I think what she does is facile. In my experience of the paintings I have seen, it doesn’t seem like that. But it is the conflict of everyone’s own imagined histories, which for the painters in the group, is how we construct our own genealogies that make this discussion so confounding. I can easily see how David and Barry might find this work deficient, yet when I look at it, I don’t think so. On some level all painters at this point could be considered pastiche, and yet nevertheless, no one really, despite the many comparisons, looks like Saville. So to attack her for her method seems beside the point, and why authenticity reared its ugly head.

I think kitsch is becoming one of those words like beauty and soul, that people use to justify value or non-value, which pretend to be objectively agreed upon concepts but are really just an attempt to universalize an opinion. To me Bacon seems emotionally overblown kitsch, and yet he is immediately recognizable. I must, despite the condescending Nochlin groans, feel that a male painter would not come under so much negative scrutiny. I don’t believe Larry Rivers, who was genuinely facile, got this dismissal.

Asking the questions, “what is it really saying?” or “to what end?” sounds like critical thinking, but are not really applicable to artists or their work. They are questions viewers might ask of themselves but not of the artist. The ability of an artist or work of art to embrace ambiguity and not provide definitive answers to those kind of questions is a mark of quality to me. After her first show Saville faltered in this area for me, but seems to have regained her ambiguous footing in this one.

WALTER ROBINSON
Saville is also taking real people sitting in front of her and immersing them in a whirlpool of painterly effects on canvas. A pointed, literal definition of what her painting is, and an uncommon one.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
What Dennis said could start a whole new round. But rather than going there, I just want to point out that “to what end” (which I said) and “what is she saying” (which I would never say) are utterly different things. “Content is a glimpse,” said de Kooning; “to what end” means, What is that thing she’s got a glimpse of and that she is pursuing? It’s nothing to do with a verbally paraphrasable message (such as one that came up in this discussion, “We are all one,” I think it went). In the end, we can only agree to disagree, but the thing Saville seemed to glimpse before— I feel that she’s lost sight of it here.

DAVID COHEN
There’s a kind of sophistry in hitting on innocent phrases like “she is saying such and such”; we are all adults here, we know that intentions aren’t the final arbiter of anything, that artists at their best generate ambiguities of intention as much as form. But Saville very deliberately, pointedly, and publicly deploys rhetorics of style and method in ways that I find completely removed from any historically or psychologically informed understanding of their value.

Dennis, in your writings on artists you are hardly shy to interpret, including – rightly – ambiguous or unintended elements in the finished works. I was simply asking Saville’s defenders to take a stab at interpreting images in ways that make sense of her methods. I think only Julie began to do that in her reading of the Fates series.

DENNIS KARDON
All of my reviews are certainly about how the work speaks to me from my perspective of a painter and not an attempt to explain ultimate meaning. I do think Saville, in my interpretation, is trying to address the gap between representation and life. She starts with painting a lifeless statue, substituting real people using our criteria of realness, photography illuminated by paint, trying to turn stone to flesh, and then turning to a remake of cubism to address how that metamorphosis is unsuccessful. This may seem, in the ideas department, not original, but it has always been pertinent and comes out of her work. In Barry’s terms what she is “trying to reach for” is the connection of real humans to representations. She probably fails as this distance really cannot be bridged, but in her case her insufficiency is where her art lies. Which is why the details are important to me, as I think trying to capture the complexity of looking at her work through one reproduction of an entire work on our devices is bound to be reductive of the experience and demean the enterprise. Salle takes the impossibility as a given and the “irony” that everyone perceives is just trying to make those failures expressive. While I think Saville is frustrated by the failure.

I think we disagree about the stylization of the “pentimenti,” which to me are not pentimenti exactly, but underpainting. Since they do not seem like actual attempts to describe the final subject, it seems arrogant not to give her the benefit of the doubt about the why of their existence. They might be part of an unseen aspect of the image, or a change of mind about the image, but I feel she doesn’t use them to call attention to her mastery, but the artificiality of what is left on top. This is where I think you question her sincerity, and I simply won’t make that call. You may be totally correct and the whole thing is completely contrived. I don’t feel that is the case, but I couldn’t say.

WALTER ROBINSON
To Dennis I would say representations are reality, and to David I’d exclaim, “values? I don’t need no stinkin’ values!” That is, she puts plenty of intention in her paintings, not the least of which is libidinal play and, as yet another afterthought to our colloquium, a challenge to Hirst and Kapoor, her bloviating male colleagues on the new “British Rich List.”

Jenny Saville: Ancestors at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, gagosian.com, May 3 to June 16, 2018.

David Cohen is Publisher/Editor at artcritical.com. Julie Heffernan is a painter, represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York. Dennis Kardon is a painter who shows at Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York.Walter Robinson is a painter, represented by Jeffrey Deitch, New York.Barry Schwabsky is art critic of The Nation, a poet, and author of The Perpetual Guest and other works. Suzy Spence, Executive Publisher at artcritical.com, is a painter, represented by Sears Peyton Gallery, New York. Painter Brenda Zlamany’s most recent commission was unveiled in 2018 at Davenport College, Yale University, and her series of watercolor portraits, 100/100, will be shown at the JCC, New York, in the fall. 

The post Jenny Saville ROUNDTABLE: Julie Heffernan, Brenda Zlamany, Dennis Kardon, Walter Robinson, Barry Schwabsky, and Suzy Spence appeared first on artcritical.

INTRODUCTION BY DAVID COHEN
Public reaction to Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, to be seen (at the time of writing at least) in the Whitney Biennial, and responses to the vociferous protests of the painting – a letter to the Biennial curators that went so far as to call for the destruction of the painting – have been galvanizing. One never knows, in the heat of such excitement, whether controversy will blow over as suddenly as it appeared or continue to resonate for years to come, but it seems a fair gamble that Black-versus-Schutz might be the Whistler-versus-Ruskin of our moment. Many of the issues raised by this case — of artistic freedom and responsibility; the role of race in art and criticism; painting as, once again, a contested medium; the status of intentions and motivations — all make this affair indicative of deep tensions in our art culture.

And yet, as so often happens in culture wars, queasiness can overtake bystanders. For unlike, say, the battle between the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and the politics of Jesse Helms where most Americans felt imperative, almost tribal affinity for one side or the other, in this debate, if you find yourself veering in one direction half your heart might go out to the other side. Freedom of expression versus freedom from insensitivity is no duel the civilized should relish. And yet, you might wish a plague on both their houses where the choice is between a flawed and misconceived painting and a shrill, almost vicious demand for its destruction.

This scandal has already in three long days generated its own literature. While I have littered Facebook posts with a few comments, some heartfelt, some glib, I now find that, in having held back in the interests of gathering and editing this “enquête,” that two very fine statements pretty much say, for me, what needs most to be said. Kara Walker, with the poise of one of her own silhouettes, has made the case, exquisitely, for leaving a fellow artist the space to experiment, to fail, to learn. On her Instagram page, accompanying an image of Judith and Holofernes, and naming no names, she writes, with exhilarating humanism: “Painting…often lasts longer than the controversies that greet it. I say this as a shout [out] to every artist and artwork that gives rise to vocal outrage. Perhaps it too gives rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.” And Gary Indiana hits the nail on the head in a shrewd analysis that calls out the “cliché-riddled, race-baiting demagoguery” of Hannah Black’s literally destructive manifesto.

artcritical prides itself on its promotion of diverse opinion. In that spirit we invited a cross section of regular contributors, guests of The Review Panel, and artists whose opinions reached us on social media to contribute brief statements on whatever aspect of this affair –the painting or the protest – excites their passions or what they feel to be their most useful observations. In striving for inclusiveness I initially invited an equal number of writers who qualify as people of color and writers who don’t. If eventual balance had been a greater priority this “enquête” would have appeared later; instead we have who we have, and are deeply grateful to our writers for sharing considered thoughts on a tight deadline. They are presented in alphabetical order by last name. More may be added in due course.

SASCHA BEHRENDT
This painting is well meaning but in poor taste. It shows a lack of understanding of violence and trauma in the wake of slavery that black people still experience daily as an existential threat.

It is naive to imagine just being a mother and to paint is enough to bridge the huge chasm between Schutz’s reality and that of Mamie Tills.

Schutz could have chosen other subjects, but she didn’t – she chose this one, with all the history and context attached. Unfortunately, in this case there is a responsibility to meet the seriousness of the subject with all its accompanying contextual difficulties. Black bodies violated have appeared as ‘spectacle’ in many forms in the public realm, a focus for distanced, fascinated horror and pity, whether lynchings, Rodney King or recent shootings, that have been disseminated as images by photography, TV or iPhone.

Mamie Tills originally only wanted the black community to be able see her son in an open casket. There were reasons for this, one clearly being a distrust of some of the above. An exception to this was her allowing the circulation of images in Jet’, a black magazine.

This painting fails to deal with these important complexities and so unwittingly ends up acting as a self indulgent, limited, personal response. Without the title, we have no idea what this painting is about and when we do it repeats problematic relations between the public viewer and a black destroyed body. One could say that Schutz by the attempt has created a move forward by opening up a dialogue. However it actually displays a kind of lazy ignorance since she did not do her homework and consider the consequences of presenting this particular content in this way, or how hurtful it might be to experience as a black person.

Everyone is entitled to express him-or-herself, but in this case, in relation to the subject matter, this just was not good enough.

DAVID CARRIER
Almost all contemporary political art preaches to the choir. Ask yourself, when was the last time that a prominent gallery or museum exhibition challenged the beliefs of its prime audience?

This is why the controversy over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) is so challenging. For once political art inspires a genuine moral conflict. On one hand, it’s not hard to understand why Parker Bright, Hannah Black and the other protesting African-Americans were outraged by this painting. The history of artistic representations of black Americans is mortifying. And right now no non-black artist who makes such representations can avoid being a part of that tradition. But on the other hand, given the statement of her intentions by Dana Schutz, it’s superabundantly clear that she’s a person of good will. We believe that artists should be free to present their chosen images without censorship. But here that right conflicts with the claims announced by members of the black artistic community.

In New York, a city where whites are now a minority, the art world—for all of its rhetoric about inclusiveness— is surprisingly segregated. And so this debate is not surprising. In the larger context of present American politics, it may seem a petty disagreement. But if the art world cannot resolve its moral disputes, then what claim have we to critique conflicts in the larger culture?

As should be becoming clear, I have no way of resolving this conflict, which does justice to the competing claims. But I do feel a real, heartfelt debt to Parker, Bright and their colleagues for presenting this quandary. On the whole, we art world people tend to take an aesthetic distance on art—even on political art. What they teach is the limits of that way of thinking. And that, to speak personally, is a lesson I take to heart. I haven’t yet seen this exhibition. But I do not think that viewing the show or the painting would change this argument.

LISA CORINNE DAVIS
The question of who can tell whose stories is ripe at the moment, from discussions ranging from Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis to the notion of “sensitivity readers” in the literary world. Therefore, I am not surprised it has taken center stage in the conversation around the 2017 Whitney Biennial. In comparing the hysteria around Dana Schutz’s painting to the lack of outrage over the painting by Henry Taylor of Philandro Castile, or Jordan Wolfson’s extremely violent virtual reality film orchestrated by the sound of Chanukah blessings, I can only conclude the difference is due to a question of ownership of one’s own cultural and historical narratives. Of course artists and writers are free to tell the stories of others – but only if they are clear they are telling a story from their own very personal perspective and not simply appropriating another’s.

Schutz’s mistake was to confuse an image for a story. Schutz’s subject matter has often consisted of responses to observed moments around her. She conjures up the creation of rumpus narratives, their meaning lying in the story and not in static imagery. Unlike her previous works, the Till painting is based on a singular, iconic, historical image and therefore is pinned to a very specific, known story of a victimized person, a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement and unjust race relations. This leaves no room for Schutz to impose her personal relationship to that image. In this instance, her sense of wonder, her imagination and her narrative invention are held hostage to this iconic image. Material manipulation is limited to the image’s borders. Her response of empathy and grief to the original photograph is impossible to locate in the absence of some visual connection that would be provided by the mechanism of narrative. For a white person to use this image – by definition “a representation of the external form of a person or thing” – of a seminal figure of the civil rights movement, seems tone deaf at best and hurtful or insulting at worst.

As artists, we try to effect change in the world by opening up dialogs around difficult issues. But visual images, especially iconic ones, are fixed in their position and are capable of confining the conversation to previously known facts and issues, and therefore undermining their power.to engage with new meanings. Unfortunately, Schutz has stepped into these muddy waters.

ANNE HARRIS
Some questions:

Is the heart of the problem that Schutz’s painting just isn’t good enough? Does it rely on its source for its intensity, thus failing to do what painting does—to transform its material? Does the attempt at transformation overwhelm the source, reducing it to stylized paint?

Is this a subject Dana Schutz cannot touch? Is it impossible for her to succeed with this content? Is this the failure of a white woman to acknowledge that not all content is hers to use?

Or is this a painting failure? Should she try again? What would happen if she invented the painting whole cloth? What would happen if she aimed for another point of view—not the camera’s, not Emmett Till’s mother’s, but her own?

Some thoughts:

Painters who paint from photographs get into trouble when they assume that what’s inside a photograph (subject, content, emotion, power) will automatically translate into paint. But too often, the painting becomes about the painted interpretation—painterly style imposed on top of a preconceived image. If the photograph is highly charged and well known, the painting only functions as a painted reminder.

The painters who get beyond this—like Vija Celmins’s WWII bombers or Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series—do so by focusing on the translation of the surface plane of the photograph. Ironically, their work becomes more psychologically powerful when they aim at something else. Of course, Schutz is a different kind of painter. I’m guessing she’d do better bouncing off a photograph, rather than working directly from it.

Another issue: artists and viewers can confuse intent with meaning. The intent of the artist does matter, but if art fails to go beyond its intent it often falls flat, becoming an illustration of an idea. That’s another kind of transformational failure. Also, the evolution of meaning continues after the piece is made. Meaning is acquired through the interaction of art and audience. Much of the current debate is actually doing this—defining the meaning of Schutz’s painting. For better or worse.

Finally: Schutz’s stated intent was to paint empathy. But empathy is imagining that someone else’s pain is ours. If I, a white woman painter, want to paint the pain that Emmett Till’s mother felt, I need to paint my own son, mutilated and dead in that coffin.

SUSAN JENNINGS
I was discussing “Open Casket” with a dear friend and writer, when he asked,  “What sound do you hear when a bell rings?” “I hear “a bell,” obviously. But this friend is too smart to ask a simple question. Do people hear different things when a bell rings?

To all of those who have contributed to the discussion around Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, in particular to Dana Schutz herself, whose work I have long admired; and to Hannah Black, who I think is brave; and to Kara Walker whose work is undeniably powerful and who wrote profoundly on Instagram using Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” to make her case; I am grateful and full of respect.

I believe Schutz when she says the painting came about out of empathy and was not purposefully hurtful. And yet it has hit some as painfully tone deaf to the situation in which we have been living where innocent black adults and children are killed and their killers still go free. White empathy is certainly necessary and yet it is not enough.  We are all watching in horror as black brothers and sisters are murdered without indictments or reparations. This is the historical situation in which “Open Casket” lives, separated from the intentions of the artist. We are aghast, waiting for someone to do something.  That Emmet Till was brutally murdered because a white woman lied and now a white woman could repair something through art is possibly profound if she/we could figure it out. I believe entirely in the power of art. I believe in the possibility that art can create new paradigms. A bell has just rung for us all in the form of this painting.

I have a fantasy in which we all agree that Hannah Black’s letter and the protesters in the museum and all of the discussions and Dana Schutz choosing to heed the call to destroy her painting – all of this- becomes a new collaborative relational aesthetics work of art.  In my fantasy, Black and Schutz are Judith and the painting (along with all the nuanced and historical racism it engenders) is Holofernes.

In my dream we are together in the process of beheading the oppressor by creating this new art. Dana Schutz chooses to complete the art, begun by making and exhibiting “Open Casket,” by destroying her painting. There are no victims in my dream.  Dana Schutz heard the protests not as forcible demand or as coercion but as an opening to something new and she chose powerfully, for herself, to hear the bell of invitation and to collaborate with those who call for the paintings’ demise. The success of this new work of art is achieved through a performance in which the painting is destroyed and Dana speaks the language of strength, humility and grace in so doing.

If Dana Schutz could chose to allow her work to be “erased” in the spirit that de Kooning allowed Rauschenberg to erase his drawing, we would all be authors in her new so far unfamiliar art. My fantasy may be horrifying to some painters and artists, art appreciators and politicos and may smack of censorship. I have been told already that I am awful and terrible for giving voice to my dream. I am not advocating for censorship. Of course no art should ever be censored. And of course no art should ever be destroyed by anyone other than the artist.

I am reaching for something else, an artwork as of yet “unknown.”

There is another sound in this ringing bell. It is the sound of the magpie. She sounds wise and she recognizes herself in the mirror when it is shown to her.

KEN JOHNSON
Leaving aside the recommendation that Schutz’s painting be destroyed and the question who should administer said destruction, consider the substance of the protest: that white people should not make art that represents black people. Speaking as an old white man, I say the heck with that. I want to see MORE art by white people about black people. Also, more art by black people about white people; more art by Asian people about Native American people; more art by heterosexuals about homosexuals; more art by trans people about cis people; more art by Jews about the goyim; more art by theists about atheists; more art by short people about tall people; more art about identity group X by identity group Y.  Feelings may be hurt – so what? Are we not grownups?

No to sectarian prohibitionism! No to political bullying! No to opportunistic, self-appointed ayatollahs of righteousness! Yes to conversational promiscuity! Yes to creative imagination! Radical ecumenicism!

DENNIS KARDON
Does the controversy surrounding Open Casket automatically make it an important work of art? After reading at least four major articles, and volumes of compelling, complex intellectual argument on social media, what has become clear is this: what constitutes a work of art, and what role we expect art, and especially painting to play in our culture today is still hotly contested. Indeed who exactly belongs in our? Or does our even exist anymore except as a privileged code?

In the end, I find the opinions of people who think they have seen this painting, when what they have seen is a jpeg on their cellphone, to be the most problematic. To claim the irrelevance of having to see the actual painting when what is important are the situational dynamics of race and voice, devalues the very idea of a painting. After viewing Open Casket in person, the problems with a photo of the painting became immediately apparent when I tried to take one.

First, photos deny the physical relationship of your body to the painting in real space-time. The scale of Open Casket is larger than life-size, which means the image becomes more intimate as its scale enacts a closeness not afforded in digital representation.

Second, this painting becomes completely flattened by photography. Clearly, Open Casket is not at all a “rendering of a photograph.” It’s a complex re-invention in three dimensions, from black and white images, of the mutilated head of a child in an immaculate tuxedo and satin-lined coffin, as if at the funeral, looking down. I’ve read the only thing not visible in jpegs of Schutz’s painting is merely her “bravura paint handling,” a damning reduction to a generic phrase of nuanced physical movements. Only in person can one observe the enactment of the complex emotional involvement and invention by the painter as she tries to revivify in paint (scraping out, scooping to over an inch in places, slashing as well as madly brushing) a horrific image. Schutz interjects her perverse imagination into the situation, trying to rediscover what might have been lost from the original photographs, through the diminished detail of black and white, and the distanced formulation and familiarity produced from continued reproduction. Only after seeing the painting can one advance a real opinion as to whether risking that act of imagination was either brave or a clueless, foolhardy undertaking. Schutz seems well aware of the consequences of that risk and choosing to take it is what makes her an important painter.

LEE ANN NORMAN
Art can be a powerful tool to render the world and a range of human experiences, as many scholars and thinkers have concluded, and Schutz, known for colorful, humorous, gestural painting of fictional subjects has said[1] that she, too, chooses subject matter based on how she sees the world. In a statement[2] to The Guardian about the Open Casket controversy, Schutz noted that art can be “. . . a space of empathy,” where one can understand and share the feelings of another. She also stated that she may not know what it is like to be Black, but she could empathize with Mamie Till Bradley, one mother to another (although one who has not experienced the horror of racialized violence like a lynching).

Open Casket renders a version of Till in Schutz’s signature color palette of vomit-and shit-like pinks, reds, beiges and browns, further abstracting the image of his already disfigured face. When Mrs. Till Bradley decided to have an open casket funeral, she openly defied the Jim Crow rule that Black Americans stay quiet and know their place. And when she turned her private grief into a public matter, she broke yet another social taboo, despite knowing that her son’s image circulating around the world may have little consequence at home. In fact, the now-iconic black-and-white photos of Till’s disfigured corpse disseminated by The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine then picked up by news outlets worldwide did not positively influence the outcome of the murder trial. Defense counsel argued that since the boy’s body was so badly disfigured, the corpse may not be Emmett Till at all.

Open Casket and images of the painting now circulate much like viral videos of police shootings, shocking and traumatizing people every time they pop up in a search for Schutz, the Whitney Biennial, and now even Emmett Till. Had Schutz painted Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Williams standing at the bridge near the Tallahatchie River where they dumped his body, or Carolyn Bryant, who in a recently published 2008 interview, admitted that the testimony she gave implicating the teen was a lie, perhaps that would have been helpful, less harmful. We’ve all seen Emmett Till rendered a monster, his bloated body brutalized beyond recognition, yet the ones who are responsible for his horrific demise are still allowed to keep their humanity intact.

WALTER ROBINSON
I think Hannah Black is a Russian plant.

SEPH RODNEY
There is a way in which the controversy around “Open Casket” coerces us into taking authoritarian and reactionary positions, and more than objecting to the painting itself, I object to the ways the ensuing debate has compelled participants to take extreme perspectives.

For example, Christina Sharpe, in an interview with Siddartha Mitter amplifies her respect for Hannah Black’s call for the removal and destruction of the painting, explaining that it is now part of a circulation system in which black people’s suffering is distributed for enjoyment and profit. Sharpe argues that Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till Mobley decided to publish photographs (on which the painting is loosely based) of her son’s mutilated body in a black publication, Jet Magazine, for black people — not attempting to address mainstream white consciousness. Sharpe contends that the painting fails because it presumes an intimacy with the subject, Till, that is not earned, and the viewer is necessarily placed in that counterfeit intimacy, which is really rooted in spectacle. Thereby Sharpe makes an oblique argument that “there can be an ethical call to destroy something,” in this case the painting, because although Schutz has insisted she won’t sell the painting, according to Sharpe it might still be inherited and eradicating it “does stop the ability of the artist to profit from it in a certain way.”

The liberal response to this is to protect a notion of free speech, artistic license, and intellectual autonomy that seems threatened by these absolutist appeals to rid ourselves of offensive objects.

This debate impoverishes us. Arguments premised on the notion of black ownership of “black pain” essentially balkanize culture into discrete demesnes in which only certain members of the particular group are authorized to address issues intimately relevant to that group. I understand regarding culture as a possession—so much has been taken from black folks, repurposed and sold to mainstream audiences without acknowledgment that it seems aggressive policing of cultural goods is required. But this position presumes the logic of the marketplace, and I don’t want to live there. I believe in nurturing a civic space where the crucial notions that support a healthy life are collectively negotiated. I think we always need others: women helping to unpack masculinity, black people helping us understand whiteness, and poor people contributing to our comprehension of wealth. The painting may fail, but the subsequent dispute is moving us toward ugly dictatorial positions.

SUZY SPENCE
I believe Dana Schutz has the right to evolve, even if it’s painful to watch. The visceral rendering of the child’s head in “Open Casket”, handled with blurring and impasto, disturbs because it reanimates the historic image of Emmett Till with such physical proximity as to conjure the real, horrific mutilating events that took place. Schutz’s truly empathic piece is a testament to the enduring power of painting and its ability to stir strong emotion.

Schutz’s application of paint in this work is consistent with her distinctive manner of abstraction. Cubistic distortions of fleshy pink men and women showering, walking in the park, sneezing, are her usual subjects. She’s good at the daily life of white people doing just about nothing; on occasion she’ll approach violent themes, or birth and death, but she dips in briefly then on to something else.

The problem I have with Schutz, is that she failed to established her position on race in earlier works, and now she’s dropped a bomb. Her detractors are wrong to try to silence her, but they are right to mind the sudden, forceful injection of race as subject. Her choice of image, which has a unique place in African American history, is particularly problematic.

In reality Schutz’s work has always been about race (whiteness), but the art world has focused on her formal and narrative techniques. That is a privilege. Asking whether she ought to paint a historic image of a black man is beside the point, as she’s never been held accountable for the ways she’s depicted her own race. Others like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Alex Katz, and Will Cotton and company, also seem to paint about power and privilege unconsciously. Why critics and curators tend not to address this when considering them could be fear or laziness, or lack of vocabulary. I struggle with it too.

Philip Guston was remarkable in his ability to address whiteness, using a combination of color, symbolism, and caricature to get at the sorry state of things. Kerry James Marshall, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Laylah Ali come to mind as artists who employ the color black (or near black) for skin tone as a powerful formal device. They give flesh its own special key, they deal with it as a kind of monochrome, which then carries the painting forth. I wonder how it would reshape the conversation if Schutz found a better formal methodology for addressing race in the future. Maybe then her earnest, well intentioned voice would be better heard in the important dialog about race and representation.

PETER WILLIAMS
A fiction: Neo Negro, a ” — ” [old-school black], asks the question, What now is this thing called “whiteness”? How does it exist, in whose body does it reside? Not mine he thinks, but then again his pale features belie the family history. He thinks of his great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was kinda white, wasn’t he? Could pass for white, they said. Neo had that fine hair, lithe and straight. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had the good talk and was educated– could this be his, Neo’s, own whiteness? There was a picture of him made by a white painter at the time. But now some wanted it to remake it to fit their image of the past.

White people were gathering around trying to explain this to Neo. That he too was possessed not by ghosts (though there was that too), but by his own whiteness. But Neo knew it was a demon’s history that had much maligned the history of the nigga, the colored and negro, even the Black and now African-American. This history, white people said, once owned his body and they wanted to complete that possession through this image. Didn’t matter that this negro didn’t own anything. He didn’t own his past, maybe he did not own his future either, certainly his own people’s image was his, he thought.

Now Neo had a picture of his great great great great grandfather, a picture whose ownership was being debated. Why did whiteness want it too? It was valuable to Neo; it was his history. For white people, it was a valuable document that proved they owned Neo’s body and soul. Didn’t matter that Neo had original possession– the devil was in the details. Beside he knew white people often overlooked the truth to have their way, since they had long ago lost their own Soul. The fact was, he was still of the mind that the past was never really over, and whiteness (which was their religion) had a right to take ownership of Neo’s history. In effect it wasn’t so much the image they wanted. It wasn’t of great value to them, but to their legacy of whiteness. It was ownership that gave a kind of power to whiteness.

ALEXI WORTH
On “Open Casket”

My first thought was that the painting was, for Schutz, unusually quiet, modest, and static. There’s none of her usual crowding vertiginousness, except maybe in the very top band, where pale flowers– or perhaps the bunched satins of the casket interior?– lean out over Till’s shoulder. This quietness seemed like deference. Schutz must have felt constrained—who wouldn’t?– by the gravity of the famous photographs. Her painting is dominated by one simple shape: Till’s white shirtfront, bordered by the black of his jacket and pants. Together these make a wide flat arrow pointing to his face. Schutz doesn’t seem to have relied directly (ie., literally) on any of the photographs here. Instead she built up some kind of 3-D structure under the canvas, so that it juts out slightly toward the viewer, into our physical space. Over that projection, curving semi-abstract brushstrokes are roughly legible as physiognomy. The effect is something like a becalmed, softened version of one of Francis Bacon’s portraits. But unlike Bacon’s middle distance, the viewpoint here is uncomfortably close. As several observers have noted, the suggestion is unmistakable. We are visitor’s at Till’s wake.

Why paint that wake now? Even before Schutz’s explanatory statement, the connection to recent violence seemed obvious enough–arguably too obvious. It’s clear that Schutz was thinking about a kind of subject she hesitated to paint directly: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and other killings painfully fresh in American memories. Sensibly, cautiously, she chose an oblique route, not painting the news but going back to a canonical Civil Rights image, one taught in high schools. Whatever you think of her painting, its point was plain: to link the grim present to the grim past, and implicitly to remind us that the public sorrow, outrage and resolve that led from Till’s casket to the (incomplete) Civil Rights victories of the 1960s is needed all over again. It’s a plain painting with a plain message. Do many Americans already feel that outrage and sorrow, 24/7? Of course. Are still more reminders necessary? After the recent elections, in a country where Confederate flags still fly, who is to say not?

The post Open Casket: “Enquête” regarding the Dana Schutz affair, the painting, the protests appeared first on artcritical.

Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

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September 14, 2015–February 07, 2016
11 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, moma.org

In this edited exchange of emails, artcritical’s David Cohen expected — and received — multiple insights into MoMA’s unparalleled exhibition,  Picasso Sculpture. The three practioners on his panel, Alain Kirili, Michelle Segre and Rebecca Smith, are sculptors of markedly distinct aesthetic outlooks but one thing they share is that they work very directly in materials whose intrinsic qualities are integral to their final result. A maker’s perspective permeates the discussion that follows. At the time of this exchange last month, Segre was the subject of a solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery, Kirili was taking part in two-person exhibitions at Art Omi (with James Siena) and at Hionas Gallery (with Bobbie Oliver), and large-scale works by Smith and her father, David Smith, had recently been installed together in a year-long display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, in the museum’s atrium (through March 1, 2016).

DAVID COHEN
A wonderful thing about Picasso as a sculptor is that we are not looking at three-dimensional equivalents to images resolved already in what we take to be the master narrative, his paintings, but rather a viable, fully-fledged parallel career. If Picasso had only made sculptures, and predominantly those on view at MoMA, he would still be one of the giants of Modern Art.

At the very least, the sculptures hold their own to his painted and drawn imagery—even if his turns to sculpture are episodic. Regarding episodes, each process/material is like a new chapter, generating phases in his sculpture career analogous to the (arguably quaint, if not sexist) division of his oeuvre into “epochs” defined by his female partners! Of course, we might want to argue that divisions of the oeuvre by medium are moot: that any medium contains the DNA of the artist, and that his protean creativity is better divided by time than stuff, and that in a given moment he would express himself through whichever medium made sense and was to hand. But that is to miss a vital point in Picasso, the profound importance of the resistance of materials and processes, and not just their fluency.

The Surrealist writer André Breton famously dubbed Picasso a “creator of tragic toys for adults”. I don’t know if that characterization works especially well for his sculpture necessarily, but in the sculpture we definitely have a sense of serious play. We experience the artist at his most technically inventive, not just in terms of wizardry but also in the directness of his response to materials. Without implying indifference to the physicality of paint in his paintings, maybe a degree of novelty of, say, plaster or steel or ceramic brings out a child-like marvel and whimsicality in his sculptural inventions. Do you all agree?

REBECCA SMITH
Picasso was always inserting the story he wanted to tell regardless of the observable reality.  In two-dimensional works he showed the profile of the nose, the full mouth, and both ears, for instance, attempting to do in a flat medium what sculpture can do — that is, describing the head in the round.  But he goes further with sculpture, adding “distortions” that tell a story different from the real.  In the amazing Cat made during World War II he juts out a rib on one side, communicating motion by showing the form of the Cat turning to one side, though the predominant posture is straight, stepping ahead, perhaps stalking.  That’s how Picasso puts time into sculpture.  This happens also with the Death’s Head of the same period in which the facets of the skull reveal themselves seemingly at slightly different speeds and with different relationships to the description of the subject.  There is the full frontal effect of the face, but one side is thinner and bends in towards the profile view.  When it proceeds to the several rounded facets of the skull, they drop off from looking head-shaped and look more like an abstract form.  The skull was very convincing as a human remnant from the frontal view, but became less so from other views — perhaps the artist suggesting a rock that had never been animate — or possibly retreating from a grisly subject by mutating into an abstract form.   David mentioned the importance of working directly with materials; the agility and layered meaning in these sculptures happen by thinking with your hands and your head at the same time.

ALAIN KIRILI
Anne Umland and Ann Temkin have succeeded in a beautiful and rare installation for a sculpture exhibition: seeing all the sculpture in the round we can appreciate the circumvolution within each work. Truth be told, most curators are afraid of sculpture so they put them up against the wall, flattening them.

Picasso was protean and had a real love for diversity. It feels particularly present in his sculpture because he was free from dogmatic formalism and technical know how. At times, he could even create sculpture conceptually, employing the best craftsmen to execute the pieces for him.

MoMA’s show represents all the different materials Picasso used to amazing effect. But I would say that I regret that Head of Woman (1934) is over exposed in a way that flattens and whitens the concrete, with a loss of gravitas. I could feel this major sculpture much better in its original setting at the Musée Picasso of Antibes where interior lighting brings out contrast and density of material.

I was partly raised in the South of France and I did run into Picasso at Madoura in the 1960s. I also enjoyed seeing the sculpture Man with the Lamb on top of a base in the middle of Vallauris, at the market place where farmers would come and leave a cup of coffee or vegetables at the base of the sculpture as if it were an offering, part of a cult for life. Pierre Daix once wrote to me in a letter that Picasso would have liked to see this sculpture in a public setting “accessible to children and dogs”.

My wife, Ariane Lopez-Huici and I have one of Picasso’s bronze sculptures in Woman (1945) series in our collection. We keep it with prints from the Vollard Suite in our bedroom. It is one where he puts pressure with his thumb into clay to represent a head, something that I’m reminded of in the details in my own forged pieces. MoMA’s sculpture show really reveals in depth that Picasso is about solar incarnation, where Eros fights and wins against Thanatos: the way Ariane and I strive to be, consistently, in our art and life.

I would say that the success of the show owes a lot to the exceptionally generous loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris. This show reflects a very fruitful and great cooperation between these institutions. Before the creation of the Picasso Museum and the publication of Werner Spies’s volume, “Pablo Picasso: The Sculptures”, a large portion of Picasso’s work in sculpture was neglected by the general public. I always knew that Picasso as a sculptor was the best-kept secret in 20th century art!

REBECCA SMITH
I wanted to mention that while we all know that Picasso’s art was influenced by African sculpture, I hadn’t known that he saw African and Oceanic art during his earliest sculpture-making days and in fact collected it.  Matisse, Picasso and their generation of artists were perhaps the first to integrate African and Oceanic art into their sensibilities and practices — no one more so than Picasso.  Did any other European artist comprehend, appreciate and integrate the art of another culture into his practice so fully and at such an early date as Picasso?

Pcasso’s 1914 Guitar (ferrous sheet metal and wire) is for me his most important sculpture. It is tremendously compelling in several distinct ways.  It opens up a constructed object into its separate layers, splaying them out like turning pages in a book.  He pushes collage, recently invented by Braque, into the more three-dimensional manifestation of constructed sculpture. Apart from extending the forms of sculpture, this work addresses itself to the viewer in a unique way, phenomenologically.  One experiences the simultaneity of object recognition and its opposite — the abstract exploration of its forms.  It announces itself as a guitar then seduces you into the exploration of its busy surface, curves, shifting rectangular planes, and rivets you with a dark circle in its center.  Most of what you experience visually has nothing to do with a guitar.  The sheet metal and wire are so thin and fragile, the velvety surface almost tangible, that they almost belie their physicality.   Yet the presence of many deep shadows insist you are looking at an object.  This work opens the door to Jasper Johns’s green and orange American flag; David Smith’s burnished stainless steel surfaces; any art object that does one thing and “says” another.

The 1914 Guitar, the Absinthe edition, Guitar (Paris, 1924), the black-and-white painted Head (Paris, October, 1928) the late folded sheet-metal works are parts of a stream of assemblage works that played with illusionism in sculpture.  This is another aspect of Picasso’s extending the sculptural language by adding on what painting does.  Picasso opened up the space of reliefs into what for me is an extremely rich place that many artists work in today with an enormous range of expression.  Composition with Glove, 1930, is made up of a tableau of real objects attached to the back of a stretched canvas over a wooden frame.  The objects are unified with a coat of sand painted predominantly white with a little light blue.  The sandy surface recalls the presence of color (rust red in the case of Guitar) and both share an overall finely-textured surface.  And like that sculpture, Composition with Glove denies its apparent identity (as a painting) and declares itself something else —a sculptural assemblage.  It is the literalization of image-making in that it gives you the objects behind the flat, imaginary window of the painting plane.  Still within the frame of the picture, the tableau of real things exists as object and picture — most especially the hand of the artist (i.e., the glove).  There is a feeling of fullness, richness and integration about this artwork.  The real object co-exits with illusion and metaphor.  It overflows the shallow space of the stretched canvas — it comes in through the back door, so to speak.  It breaks the imaginary space of the stretched canvas painting and renders it a sculpture, stuffing it with real things.

MICHELLE SEGRE
This Picasso show really did feel like a rare treat.  It’s already unusual to see any major sculpture shows in museums, probably for the physical threat Alain mentions, which is ironic, since our human environment is so full of “objects” and “bodies,” and then the physicality and materiality of this show is like a welcome punch in the face.  Picasso’s ability to project a kind of hyper energy in his work can be quite thrilling and I think in his sculptures in particular there is a sense of freedom, and even joy, like someone working outside the constraints of a program.  The combination of his lack of formal training in sculpture, and his incredible resourcefulness at self-teaching and exploiting the knowledge and technical prowess of others, as well as literally seeming to devour materials and techniques to get his visions realized…all these things contribute to the power of the work.  I was struck by how often he went back and forth between skinny line and flat planes, and bulbous, fat blobs, mirroring the trajectory of his paintings.  But the kinds of distortions and flattening of space and form that he invented in his painting, when carried over into sculpture, have a different kind of relationship to the real world in that they are objects competing in an environment in the round– unlike the paintings, that set up a formal presentation of an illusion of an object, the sculptures are in fact objects that occupy their environment, so they have a kind of earth-bound connection that feels very organic, even as he is playing with pictorial issues.  Rebecca, you touched on this aspect of his work too…I like your description of experiencing the guitar piece.

DAVID COHEN
I’d like to say something more about the general issue of sculpture and what I call the expressive impulses: the graphic, the chromatic, the plastic. Picasso is a great gamesman, and also of course inveterately restless. I used to have a secret theory that – counter to his actual development or career path – he was first and foremost a sculptor, and that painting, for which he is of course best known and celebrated, is, in a renewed one-man paragone debate, the subservient medium. What this show is making me think about is the possibility that he is actually a constant subverter of medium: in painting he is often drawing or sculpting, and his painterliness – the visceral enjoyment of paint, the scumbling, the scatological aspect of smear – is essentially haptic; but then when he is actually sculpting there is so much that is actually painterly: the absinthe glasses, individually colored, essentially make of the edition a 3D print, but also the post-war flat steel pieces, sensationally displayed at the entrance to the show, become supports for graphic or painterly marks. Should we be thinking of him simply as an unbounded creator indifferent to the boundaries of medium, or as playing an active with (against) medium definitions and boundaries?

REBECCA SMITH
I would love to hear more about the skull.  It was done during World War II of course — and to have it cast in bronze was illegal because it was against the war effort — so there you have art sabotaging warfare!

I also thought the man with the lamb was about the war experience.  Picasso said it wasn’t the Lamb of God but I can’t believe that in a Catholic country in those days a work by a Catholic could use a lamb in this way and not having it to be about sacrifice and a symbol of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  Here is a man who is cradling a stricken symbol of peace, the animal is crying out, and he is stolidly standing there holding this burden — expressionless, almost faceless, and he has no penis.  I can imagine feeling impotent living during wartime in an occupied country.

ALAIN KIRILI
You are absolutely right about the illegal context of his creation and his status as a degenerate artist in that time. The sculpture, Death’s Head (1941) is a bomb. That’s the way it reads in Brassaï’s photograph. Picasso is a fighter, a terrorist in some very profound way. Robert Capa photographed Picasso with Death’s Head in his hand.

Death’s Head is much bigger than a human skull, and it had another purpose and meaning: to me, Death’s Head needs to be viewed as  extremely dangerous, like some sort of grenade. Spanish artists love skulls but with Picasso it is not melancholic but rather a weapon of massive destruction, which is heavy and solid. I am not an art historian, but what I can offer is personal testimony as an artist. The work of Picasso is deeply autobiographical and we feel it so well in this show. His different loves appear at each step of his life and his art, here in his sculptures Fernande, Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse, Sylvette.

But David, to pick up on your question: For me Picasso’s art and each sculpture are revealing signs of my own evolution through time, sexually, and emotionally. With Picasso sexual desire is present until the end of his life: he spoke about that matter with Brassaï in a New York Times interview in 1971: “we always think about it even if we don’t do it”. And elsewhere in the same interview: “Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to reach in my pocket to offer you a cigarette, even though I know very well that neither of us smoke any longer. Age has forced us to give up but the desire remains. It’s the same thing with making love. We don’t do it any more, but the desire for it is still with us.”

At the same time, Simone de Beauvoir was the first to write on the subject of old age as pariah in our western society in her book  “La Vieillesse”. Picasso treats that subject constantly with gusto and immense drive for creation, even when the old king turns into a voyeur. This is the trajectory from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of his youth to the bacchanals of the king/voyeur particularly focused on the female sex. On one of his white sheet metal sculptures, the female sex and its hair are drawn with the flame of a torch that cuts into the surface of metal.

His granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso wrote a fantastic book on the eroticism of her grandfather: “Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic” (2005). Picasso’s Boisgeloup period is so celebratory of sexuality. These monumental heads of Marie-Thérèse transform the nose and eyes into sexual attributes in a way that is just amazing! I remember when Beyeler and Reinhold Hold exhibited a show of 20th century sculptures in Riehen, Switzerland (the show included my own work), the Jeannette heads bronze series by Matisse were placed in confrontation with the Boisgeloup heads. What a great moment of art and of sculpture in that century.

The models of this sculpture are in the show and the enlargement is nearby in MOMA’s garden. It is a rare experience of a successful enlargement, which is rare in sculpture. We have to keep in mind another very successful enlargement and interpretation by the betograve concrete sculptor Carl Nesjar of the Bust of Sylvette in cement (at 36 feet high, it weighs in at 60 tons!). Nesjar produced 30 works of Picasso on a monumental scale, including the Head at Princeton University. It would have been a good idea, in my opinion, if MoMA had included as a suggested itinerary of the monumental sculptures for which they have maquettes in the show.

REBECCA SMITH
I wanted to respond to what David said about Picasso’s way of bringing in sculpture when he’s painting and vice versa.  You bring up the question of motivation; I don’t think Picasso is oblivious to the boundaries of medium, or even that he is deliberately “subverting”.  It seems to me that he is blending because these boundaries came down for him and why?  Is it because he absorbed African art so fully that it seemed natural to paint sculpture and add materials like sand fiber to paint?   That’s part of it but there is also the way technology was changing the world.  His blending of two and three dimensions is accomplished in a more realized way than traditional relief at the time of a technological revolution — the telegraph, photography, telephone, film.  Rosalind Krauss has written about Picasso’s work in relation to film.  Space was conquered by technology, spewing images everywhere.  This seems to me to be the underlying change that blurred the boundaries.

I feel that I have occupied a place that blends two and three dimensions for almost my whole art-making life.  Even when I purposely undertook the project of making three-dimensional sculpture — a body of work consisting of large, bulbous plaster sculptures built around globelike armatures — I added the pigment to the plaster and dripped it like thick paint.  It wound up being very painterly sculpture.   An early body of work was two-sided, painted reliefs that basically offered alternate views that were never either flat or in the round.  I have found different ways of manifesting that sense of art-making space ever since.  While constructed as an object or sculpture it also partakes of painting space, a metaphorical space, window, page of text, electronic screen.  We are looking in and looking at.

ALAIN KIRILI
What I find very successful in the show is the great selection of small sculptures. For instance, the whole group of small glazed earthenware from 1947, the terracotta Standing Woman (1945), and the tinted foundry plaster Standing Woman (also 1945) are great examples of the subtle distinction in materials that Picasso did appreciate. In addition, knowing that a number of those sculptures exist in bronze, I regret that we did not see any of the bronzes.

Of course, I am an admirer of the very linear work by Picasso and the nice series of studies for the monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, Figure (1928). It pleases me very much because we can see various ways to express the head or hands. But most of all I, of course, really like Figure (1931) in iron and iron wire, materials Picasso used very early on because he could work it “cold”, in other words by hand and without heavy equipment.

I would like to highlight the term Werner Spies coined as “The Encyclopedic Sculpture”, which are sculptures from the 50s that use a huge diversity of objects for an assemblage-sculpture: The she-goat in bronze is really beautiful, but the stage before in plaster is extraordinary and that is true for all the other sculptures by Picasso for that time. It would have been fantastic to have a number of them to fully appreciate how Picasso could go from a stage of heterogeneity of material to the unifying version in bronze.

But those remarks are in no way a critique of the show. On the contrary, it proves that the show is so exciting that we want to express all the possibilities to celebrate the most autobiographical and protean artist of our time.

MICHELLE SEGRE
The question of subversiveness is an interesting one in Picasso.  On one hand his work can be emotionally neutral and formally analytical.  The coolness (temperature) is very seductively off-set by the sensuality of the artist’s touch.  On the other hand, he has a psychologically heavy side to his work that uses distortion and caricature to bring in emotion in a frozen, theatrical display.  There’s often a comic, absurd aspect…I’m thinking of those crazy plaster heads, so proud and strong in their stature and yet profoundly ugly—mutated, spastic body parts with sexualized noses and butts for cheeks.  The welded pieces from the Julio Gonzales days also play with this kind of re-imagining of human form– the figure becomes a giant, mechanical insect with precariously balanced limbs and extensions.  This kind of dismantling of one’s expectations of what the human figure looks like feels so fresh and contemporary, it could have been made by a young artist working today.  Certainly this qualifies as subversive for its time in the sense that it is intentionally turning topsy-turvy any traditional, academic approach to the human form (or animal or plant, etc), and I can’t imagine that he didn’t know he was doing this!  The influence of African and Oceanic art is huge here and I think Picasso looked at this work and found a way to sublimate emotion into the destruction and re-arrangement of the figure.  At the same time this supposedly intentional subversion appears to be coming so naturally and unforced, like someone who is exploring every vision coming to their head in the mechanics of inventing.  This is part of Picasso’s appeal—that he seems to just do whatever the fuck he wants!

The post Picasso in 3-D: A Roundtable of Sculptors, with Alain Kirili, Michelle Segre and Rebecca Smith appeared first on artcritical.

At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

The post Enquette: Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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JOAN WALTEMATH: The Guggenheim provides special challenges to painting, but also provides unique opportunities, one of these being the ability to see the work from different angles and distances as you move up or down the ramp.  In Wool’s case I think it works to his advantage insofar as you can really see the surfaces of the paintings.  Photography gave us a standard that there should be no glare in a photograph of a painting, over time I think that has conditioned the way we see and think about surface.  Are these works lit to be photographed, or seen? There was one piece, untitled 2009 AIC gift where glare on black is lighter that the neighboring white enamel, and so from one angle that hot spot jumps forward and then shifts back again spatially as you continue to walk by.   For me all these kinds of formal acrobatics are really uninteresting unless you get the sense that they are tied to some train of thought or awareness on the part of the painter, so I’m always trying to find how to make an interpretation that ties the formal to the philosophical.  In Wool’s case I read all this shifting around as indicative of an interest in the transient world, its mutability.  I had the feeling with his various moves that Wool was trying to keep his work open and mutable in and of itself.

DAVID RHODES: The issue of reflection in Wool’s paintings is a direct result of his use of enamel paint. But he doesn’t ever, for example, employ a totally reflective surface. by using glass or a mirror as does Gerhard Richter. The effect of the reflection is to both enhance the surface as a physical presence whilst at the same time complicating the reception of the image because of the way lighting and the presence of other objects are manifest on the surface. This oddly encourages movement in front of the painting in order to ‘see’ the painting, not see it better as an image necessarily, but in order to respond to its physical properties. Perhaps this makes for a more kinetic and immediate experience as opposed to a meditative delayed experience.

WALTEMATH: As a result of this, David, I noticed how thick the stretcher bars were, and how in that specific dimension he was able to locate himself vis-à-vis other historical periods and concerns. Though we are talking about his painting’s material properties, we are not in the realm of painting as object, and for me the stretcher bar thickness was what made that clear.

NORA GRIFFIN: Surface was definitely at the top of my mind while looking at Wool’s paintings, and also in the theater of the Guggenheim, watching others look (or more often “pose” for iPhone photos with the work) around me. I have to say, I was repelled by much of the art with the possible exception of the rice paper drawings, which seemed like a perverse conflation of delicate and raw materials, and thus mildly interesting. David R, interesting what you say about the slick enamel surface encouraging a more “kinetic” experience of the viewer in front of the painting — I agree, and actually had trouble standing for more than a few seconds in front of each one, and only when I caught glimpses looking around the Guggenheim’s ramp did I really observe the paintings. But I think this is ultimately not work that is meant to be “seen”; it’s meant to be bought and sold, accruing value, and hung in palatial mansions and museums throughout the Western world. Certainly, it is work that can be thought about, as we are all doing here, but it is a kind of thought that is separated from an organic viewing experience, that I find distasteful and dehumanizing. Joan, I like that you bring up photography too. I definitely think these paintings are locked into a relationship with media that we can only begin to guess at. There’s a kind of proto-digital look to the early enamel paintings that I can imagine at the time of their first exhibition must have seemed new, and possibly exciting.

DAVID COHEN: Christopher Wool is a closed book to me: I have never been able to fathom how his work garners the critical attention and auction price tags that it does.  When I learned of the Guggenheim retrospective and that several of my regulars wanted to write about him I thought now would be the chance to see him in depth and in the company of astute commentators, that maybe the blinkers would drop and an “aha” experience would ensue: that the Wool would fall from my eyes. Well, seeing the show hasn’t done it for me.  On the contrary, I have to describe it as one of the most enervating and dispiriting museum exhibitions I’ve seen in a long while.  The text works have none of the humor or the indignation of, say, Richard Prince or Glenn Ligon, and I’m no Prince fan, believe me.  The near absence of color is not a reductive gesture in the mode of Reinhardt or Ryman, it seems to me, so much as just a stinginess of spirit, part and parcel of the nihilism that seems the only feasible explicator of his dreary, aimless, pedantic, pretentious and self-satisfied oeuvre.  Look at those photos he took traveling around Italy and Turkey etc.  To be in a room of Islamic carpets and bring back a desultory black and white snapshot that you’ve had printed from a crappy camera and then Xeroxed.

His most encouraging line, almost I guess his trademark, is his lethargic though insistently anti-lyrical loop paintings.   Alzheimer de Koonings denuded and bleached, they make one realize that his nihilism leaves forebears in the dust: Thinking of Rauschenberg as a formal and perhaps attitudinal forebear, Wool is too deskilled even to erase – smudge being his preferred MO.  Actually, they are not riffs on late de Kooning so much as early Charles Cajori who probably taught him at the Studio School (his resume usually cites Jack Tworkov – when the School isn’t omitted altogether). One lasts angry squeak, if I may: It says something about a contemporary abstract painter that their work actually makes Robert Motherwell look fresh and relevant.

RHODES: David, I think dismissing an artist on assumed intentions, as well as failing to address the qualities of individual works, is too easy. Humorous comments like “too deskilled to erase…smudge being his preferred MO” raises a laugh, but there isn’t anything to discuss.  It’s on the same level as saying “Cézanne was too lazy to paint up to the edges of his canvas.” Witty maybe, but an opinion to engage with, no. Try describing why none of the paintings have anything to do with line and space, he’s not “riffing” on de Kooning so much as using line as painting, to make and move space around, “Alzheimer de Koonings” as you call them, by the way are often tremendous. In my opinion, take a look at the paintings at Gagosian on Madison Avenue (don’t look at the price tags though.) As to your saying that he is nihilistic: Skeptical, angry, intellectual, lyrical, a lot of things, but nihilistic? There is way too much work and engagement for that. The photos of his studio after a fire, look for something redemptive in destruction, and they have a beauty, they look for something not entirely wasted in scenes of abjection.

COHEN: I think whatever the artist’s intentions, if you occupy the space of a certain kind of painting then you must stand comparison with the forebears or contemporaries that you evoke or to whom you bear striking formal resemblance.  Then of course there are outliers who don’t seem to connect to people to whom they stake some claim of connection – Cézanne and Poussin for instance – and time tells whether the connection seems valid. Wool is unquestionably in the same ballpark of intention as Albert Oehlen with whom he shares an ability to produce big, commanding decorations while somehow remaining fully committed to an anti-expressive attitude.  I’m perfectly open to a painting that eschews cohesion or compelling gestalt in favor of something more radically abstract, in the way that free improvisation departs from more traditional jazz.  But if the tropes and flourishes echo the jazz greats then it has to stand comparison to them. Yeah, like Motherwell, the problematic late de Kooning looks better – after Wool.  In a way, though, perhaps Wool is influencing late de Kooning, in the sense that de Kooning insisted that HE influenced the old masters.  The unwilled late works, with the scale and colors chosen by others, look more contemporary thanks to Wool and company.  I think that Wool is also an enabler to artists like Wade Guyton.

RHODES: David, when you say Wool and Oehlen are committed to anti-expression are you quoting their intentions or implying that you regard them as incapable of expression. Wool is a far more fluent painter than Motherwell though they both show their cubist roots in a collaging or piecing together of imported parts, take Motherwell’s Figure with Blots from 1943, also on view at the Guggenheim, it presents a collaged rectangle of paper with black blots that finds its space compositionally despite being such a relative foreign body in the painting.

WALTEMATH: The late ’70s and 1980s  in New York City were especially exhilarating years in many ways.  I lived through those times, and if I can ruminate a bit, perhaps I can shed some light on what I remember as conditions, concerns and the climate that made some of those decisions that seem desultory, remarkable. I found the photos from the ‘70s some of the most surprising and revealing works in the show.  The randomness inherent in the environment due to the absence of routine maintenance at that time, gives a unique chance to look at the aesthetics of decay, entropy.  This move towards chaos – how a thing hovers on its edge – was a concern of Smithson and other artists in the generation that came before Wool.  Barry Le Va for another example, examined the relation between determinant and indeterminate forms.  New York at this time was an incredible place to study the coming apart of things in that period before “development” filled in all the blanks.  So many of the shots focus on liquids moving, spilling, spilt and urine running out of corners which was a ubiquitous sight in those days.  A splatter on one brick wall is reminiscent of Richard Hambleton’s scary black shadow figures from the ‘80s, which was even grittier.

This was the time, too when body fluids began to be recognized in a new way for their deadly potential in carrying disease, so there is a deep undercurrent here in Wool’s preoccupation, that might seem on the surface like a fascination with messes or attraction toward demise as Peter Schjeldahl puts it.  The consistency of those photo compositions with the later paintings gave me to believe that there were genuine concerns that were being worked out in them. The darkness in these photos works much like the wipes in the later paintings.  One wire screened door glass that’s been wiped with a dirty rag gives a gauze to the stairwell beyond and reads like a pretty direct precursor to the later paintings in this context.

Loose Booty is a beauty and shows the edge between patterned repetition and an inflected over compositional structure.  One medium blob to the right makes this point. I maintain this is what he is interested in.  Everything in the earlier work points to an interest in abstraction devoid of expressive or emotive content, which is not to say one doesn’t feel things in looking at them, but that this is not how the intention behind them is framed. From across the room the patterned flowers take on a kind of all over character, loosing their more decorative aspects to the overriding gestalt.  That gestalt is consistent with the photos.  I think anyone living downtown at that time learned to see all that chaos and debris as extremely liberating and not abject as it reads today.  It was freedom and makes today feel like living in a straightjacket.

The painting called Rotation Collision was an important moment for me in this show in so far as it is a rare moment where Wool steps over the line and one could say over determines visually – he strives here which is surprising–Usually he strides a beautiful line between chance and intent, random and determined that calls into question the limits of making. If life is a negotiation between what happens and what you want to happen Wool provides the analogue, a deal, which gains clarity as you ascend the circular ramp of the museum.

COHEN: Joan’s historic context with its personal reminiscences is quite fascinating.  I saw the show with a group of students and a visiting artist from California all of whom seemed as depressed by the experience as myself.  One kid made an astute observation: that the graphics of punk, presented by the curators as the dominant cultural reference at his arrival in New York, entailed grainy black and white tabloid press headlines and reproductions relevant to Wool.  I tend to relate fine art to other fine art usually, a limitation and a result of my training I guess, so this observation was revelatory.   Unlike Vivienne Westwood there is no romanticism at the end of his punk tunnel.  The damaged studio shots, made for an insurance claim, as redemptive?  I’d love to see it that way with you but simply can’t. I guess I just come from a very different sensibility. We can open the book and still not be on the same page.

WALTEMATH: Right now it seems a long way off but during the 80s there was a tendency, when money started to pour into the art world, that people would set up a kind of historical raison d’être for their work.  By carving out a niche for oneself in relation to the grand art historical narrative, you set up something to bank on.  I see Wool’s approach as a product of this era, although now its not necessarily being seen in these terms. What interests me about Wool is how, at a time when painting was not on the map, he really did the nuts and bolt work to find a way to make it possible to get back into that grand narrative. The focus was on Pictures Generation, appropriation, Jenny Holzer, Art and Language.  The one thing the scene didn’t give permission for was a kind of formal language in painting. Wool mines the past and brings forward all these tropes, devices, ideas, anything that will work as part of his vocabulary and connect him into that narrative.  That is what I see in the installation of his work at the Guggenheim. On a formal level I think he’s trying to find a way to come to terms with the grid in these paintings and the importance of what minimalist aesthetics gave us.  He takes the readymade roller patterns and has a link to Duchamp, whose position truly dominated in the ‘80s when those stencil paintings were made.  I sense there’s a lot of anger about not being able to paint, I mean if you were a painter and you came to NY in those years, there were very limited means you could use and have a shot at having any kind of public voice.  I also remember those days being filled with a lot of confusion about the relation to the past.  It was often seen and/or talked about as the post-historical period and while there was a recognition that the avant guard was over, the desire for the new wasn’t. At the same time this historical filling in the blanks game was going on as artists jockeyed for positions.

Rosalind Krauss and the October crowd had pretty much damned the grid as stuck in modernism.  I think for a lot of painters at that time, there was a necessity of coming to terms with the grid in some way, shape or form.  What I see Wool going for initially as he moved out of the text paintings are these subtle inflections where the pattern of the grid moves off its raster. The paintings Loose Booty or Riot are example of what I am referring to — talking loudly and saying nothing.  So I think Wool’s decisions about what and how to paint were based in a historical necessity.  There was no chance in those days to create any kind of experiential space.  So in my view we cannot critique it on those terms.

COHEN: I’m sorry, Joan, but we must be living in parallel universes.  No painting in the ’80s, Wool heroically held out, Bleckner too but others had to go to Europe.  Hello?  The ’80s were awash with turpentine.   You have to be an in-crowd exclusionary critic to say of any period that there was no painting or no possibility for painting etc. when it is only in perhaps your own circle that these attitudes prevailed, or in the pages of the art magazines you allowed to gain hegemony that such a discourse prevailed. What’s interesting to me is not Wool as the lonely last painter, but that Wool actually isn’t in the master narrative that was being compiled at that time.  A pretty good indicator of who was really being talked about in the ‘80s is Irving Sandler, the man with his ear to the ground.  In his Art of the Postmodern Era, From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) there is no reference or footnote to Christopher Wool.  Now he has a retrospective at the Guggenheim and we are attending to his surfaces as if he is Reinhardt or Newman and boy is he not. A footnote regarding Pattern and Decoration: The curators tell us that Wool’s pattern paintings of the ’80s arose from observation of the forlorn semi-demolished buildings in the East Village; maybe, but he was looking at P&D obviously, too.  His works are contemporary with Donald Baechler too, right?  But for the curators only the likes of Duchamp and Pollock are worthy as referents and comparisons, and they leave out non-superstar sources and affinities, all part of the genius-packaging process that goes with museological apotheosis.

But here is something I would like to hear the aficionados address: scale.  Because wandering up and down the Guggenheim ramp I was very struck how essentially scaleless these works are.  They don’t reveal different kinds of gestalt at different distances – they mostly don’t have gestalt, indeed work hard not to have gestalt.  They kind of click at one distance and that’s about it.  He tries out different sizes as he does techniques and surfaces, all to keep busy and I guess fill the world with Wools.

GRIFFIN: Joan, I’m especially interested in your discussion of decaying and abandoned urban spaces in the ‘80s and how Wool pictured this in his photography and paintings. I grew up in the East Village in the 1980s, and remember that sense of openness in the city’s landscape, but also the grossness (trash piled high everywhere) and very real sense of danger and violence amid the decrepitness. For me Basquiat is the poet of the ’80s streets, and from an earlier era, Brice Marden’s oil and wax monochrome gray scale paintings from the 1960s speak to a kind of in-between space, where beauty registers amidst decay. Also Dorothea Rockburne’s crude oil on paper drawings. But perhaps I am just asserting my biases for work made before the 1980s art boom, and also letting in the idea of beauty felt amidst decay. Could it be that the lack of beauty and/or color (for me they are linked) is one of the bottom line problems that I have with Wool’s oeuvre?

I think its cutting Wool too much slack to have to try and imagine the conditions that produced these paintings in the 1980s. For those of us who did not live through that period (and that will one day be everyone) that becomes a kind of academic exercise separate from the viewing experience. Joan says: There was no chance in those days to create any kind of experiential space.  So in my view we cannot critique it on those terms.  But, not to be too much of a hot-blooded humanist, isn’t “experiential space” the only constant we have to critique and understand paintings? Shouldn’t a painting be able to speak on its on terms through any time period or millennia? I don’t understand Piero della Francesca’s frescos as the believers of his day saw them, but I do still *see* them and they speak to me about humans, space, and art.

RHODES: I’m interested in Joan’s point about emotion being stripped from the making of the gestural markings. It’s often the case that the making of a painting is not always visible in the viewed work. Think of Reinhardt. Silk screening, however basic and available as a technique, could be seen as a doubling endlessly of an original or as a means to transfer an element from one painting to the other, like de Kooning’s newspaper blottings. Drips within the context of painting are variously signs of process, playful pictorial devises, take Mary Heilmann, or simple acknowledgments of what paint does. Within the context of painting in general that includes house painting, and of course Wool uses decorative patterned rollers and enamel, the significance of drips could well include the German expression in wide use before 1945  “Jude Tropf” or Jew drip, which was applied to house paint that had been applied and accidentally dripped. In other words it was annoying. I don’t say this is actually part of Wools intention, but as we are “reading” the paintings, in more ways than one. I think Wool is working with the tradition of Ab-Ex, but also reaching back to Dada and Surrealism, automatism is central to his painting, particularly the later large scale oil on linen paintings. Surrealism and Dada have been understated as part of the Ab-Ex endeavor in favor of expressionism, expressionism being seen as more noble, and perhaps more known.

GRIFFIN: As I walked through the museum, I kept trying to imagine another context where this work might seem exciting to me. I remembered that growing up I would visit my friend whose father was an abstract painter, and on his studio wall was a poster of Wool’s Cats in Bag Bags in River (1990). It worked beautifully as a poster; was abject, shocking, funny (sort of), and also seemed very “cool” at the time as well. Perhaps the connections between Wool and the punk/rock poster aesthetic can be teased out some more. The thinness and industrial materials he uses already speak to me as paintings as “posters.” I love posters, live with posters, and think they are culturally significant, but they are not the same thing as paintings.

I found the word paintings the most compelling, perhaps because they felt like honest statements (and have the closest affinity to the babble of the “street”). Trouble (1989),Untitled (Sex and Luv) (1987) and Blue Fool (1990), would all shine on their own in a gallery or a group show with other work. I think the Guggenheim’s grandiosity and modernist pedigree really makes Wool’s work look like a joke is being had on us. Some paintings were not meant to be seen en masse in the Guggenheim because they don’t possess the right internal conditions to be seen in that kind of space.

WALTEMATH: I like that we are all coming at this work from so many different angles, it means there is something to sink our teeth into here. And in the end there is no need to concur about anything. The most interesting things embody all manner of contradictions. By experiential space, I meant that some paintings are made to construct a kind of experience that unfolds, and use that manner of unfolding to reveal what they are about and some paintings are using other means to communicate.  I think often abstraction works through enfolded experience, but not all abstraction.  Wool’s paintings are in some sense following a lineage of formalist abstraction, that is how I am reading them, and yet they use images – of pattern of flowers or words – as their main vehicle.

I’m reading them as taking a lineage of formalist abstraction because of how they take up and investigate problems of seriality, randomness, chaos that I see in the early investigations of Andre, Judd, Smithson, Barry Le Va to name a few.  So, no, I don’t see experiential space in Wool’s art- and in developing this term I’m drawing on Wilhem Worringer’s formulation in his book Abstraction and Empathy (1908) as the constant. Rothko might be a barometer for experiential space, and Wool is nowhere near that deep.  My point is you can’t evaluate Wool on terms set for painting by Rothko, you have to figure out his (Wool’s) terms.

And yes a painting should be able to speak on its own terms through any period, and if in using the details and circumstances of the time to discover the possible terms, you find that the work doesn’t really function outside that, then there is a clear cut critique and the nays have it. I found this was my only way into Wool’s art, to go into my experiences and memories of the time, and this is born out to a degree by the importance these black and white photographs play in the whole exhibition and how they and it are being received.  At the same time, none of these images was the least bit memorable, not that that is the point.  What they reveal is a certain compositional strategy on his part or a way of ordering things and that’s where I see the real meat of this show is – that is abstract.  So I look to the history of formalist abstraction for precedents.

RHODES: I don’t see any new problems that the architecture of the Guggenheim presents, that is different for Wool, as a classical modernist painter that goes beyond the curve walls and ascending ramp. Wool’s use of vernacular materials and words are consistent with experiments from the early years of the 20th century in France, Germany and Russia in particular, through to Jasper Johns and beyond. Sure, Wool reveled in some aspects of the openness of an unpolished low rent environment that was downtown New York in the ‘80s, but as paintings they don’t break with the challenge of producing vital engaging work, I don’t think the rawness of some of the paintings (imagine Courbet or impressionist painting when it was first seen if you are used to David and Ingres, or Piero?) or by the way in the rectangle format, that for some time has not been a given for painters, indicate bad boy or punk in art, but an affiliation with attitudes of renewal.

COHEN: Joan, I’m fascinated to hear Worringer’s dichotomy cited in relation to Wool – can you amplify that?  Wool presumably is the epitome of an urbanite so one would expect on Worringer’s terms an alienation from nature.  But his shapes and patterns are surely no less geometric than organic?

WALTEMATH: I referred to Worringer in relation to how one experiences a painting because of his concept of empathy, being the kind of ‘strahlung’ or emanation coming from a work that one feels, like one feels a large red expanse or the energy of certain kinds of brushstrokes, and that this is a way to interpret what the artist is saying -I call that experiential – versus images, which speak in their own way or concepts that are referred to, which are located outside the work, or compositional constructs dealing with form which is where I would locate Wool.

The point for me is whether to read these works as intending to insert themselves into an historical narrative or not. I think a lot of decisions Wool made in his work were about picking up the things from the past and trying to weave them together to get his painting located within a grand narrative. I don’t mean to imply that he was the only painter working in New York at that time. At any given time there are lots of artists working in similar and also very different veins.  From the point of view of an art historian I can see how what I wrote makes it seems like I’m trying to claim some primary role for him, but that was not on my mind. I’m not going to argue for Wool’s importance over other painters, or that he was the only one doing this.  Or that he “saved” painting or anything like that.  I’m just trying to figure out what is going on in these works so we can talk about them — what is Wool basing his decisions on, what’s he exploring.

Initially I think that what is going on in these works is kind of a mystery, because they give so little and are in some ways so self-involved.  I want to blow that up in order to get a glimpse of what they are about.  I can find a lot of stuff on a formal level that is interesting to me, as the nuts and bolts of formalist abstraction were being overhauled at that moment.  I think that is what Raphael Rubinstein was getting at in his show last summer at Cheim & Read.  He found 15 artists whose work he felt was making important contributions; he mentions in our interview in The Brooklyn Rail that there could have been many more.

COHEN: Worringer’s opposition usually applies to the maker as much as the viewer, from my recollection; the people who had a rapport with nature produced organic and naturalistic art of empathy whereas those whose outlook on nature was bleak retreated into geometry and abstract patterning.  But if that’s not the sense you were interested in we could just drop this point. It would certainly seem that if Wool’s intention were indeed to dialogue with the bigger narrative of abstract painting, or painting per se, then his career success plays nicely into that as once one occupies a position within the canon connoisseurs will look for, and likely find, connections between an accepted newcomer and the masters.  I just see more negative attitude towards the possibilities of paint than positive ones in Wool, as his impulses are primarily deconstructive and iconoclastic.  Almost anything he touches, regardless of its size or degree of workmanship, seems dismissive of big energy, the creative spirit, any sense of urgency or purpose.  And I think this accounts for his success because the system is still so heavily invested in an end-game mentality.  It is still an era that privileges Duchamp over Matisse (to use a very rudimentary short hand) at least in the top ends of patronage and scholarship.  To those looking for an extension of the Johns/Richter line Wool is perfect.  And I have no trouble, by the way, David R., in reconciling nihilism with productivity.

GRIFFIN: To me, Wool is not a “classical modernist painter,” as David R calls him, which is perhaps why it looks funny to see his paintings hanging like icons, suspended in air with no wall behind them as much of the work was in the Guggenheim. I completely agree with Joan that it’s reductive to pit Wool against the masters of modernist painting, and I too try to find out the “terms” that the artwork has set forth. I do like the idea of the image of the city as a device for abstract composition. But the fact that Wool’s photographs are so expressively abject, and visually mottled by their translation into grainy photocopies, makes them an almost too obvious counterpart to the paintings.

I do think there is more fluidity and movement in the post-2002 paintings, where color splashes and a mixture of media creates a slight sense of spatial depth and movement. But I would never call them “lyrical,” to me they start to work only when they can approximate the unintentional harmony of a graffitied wall.  To end on a positive note, I do think a painting such as Last Year Halloween Fell on a Weekend (2004), hot pink and black spray-painted snaking lines on a lushly grey wash background, is a kind of perfect little street image. If I saw it all on its own in a gallery, or better yet, If I came across it leaning against a dumpster on the Bowery I think it would start to command some real visual attention.

The post A Critics’ Roundtable on Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim appeared first on artcritical.

David Cohen was joined in an email exchange recently by six painters and a poet – all sometime or regular contributors at artcritical and/or The Review Panel – to discuss the exhibition, Balthus: Cats and Girls which remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 12, 2014.

DAVID COHEN  Balthus was something of an anomaly: A maverick amidst modernist friends who emulated old master technique; the self-taught painter who went on to direct the Villa de Medici (the French Academy in Rome) and who is thus, in a way, the heir of Poussin.  What strikes us most as we enter this show: his naïveté or his mastery? Maybe Balthus is proof of the degree to which those qualities are by now inextricably linked.

DUNCAN HANNAH  If one is as single-minded and precocious as Balthus, and having grown up in such an illustrious artistic atmosphere (Rilke, Matisse, Bonnard, Derain, Stravinsky, et al.) the fact that he was “un-trained” doesn’t count for much. When I entered the show I was overwhelmed by his mastery, not naiveté. It is as though he always confidently knew where he was going.

DENNIS KARDON  There is certainly a confidence about his paintings that is immediately striking, if that is what you mean by mastery. There is none of the uncertainty that you see in early Matisse for example. But what grabbed me fairly early was the sense of loneliness and isolation that pervades the paintings. I don’t think of them as old masterish in technique so much as not attempting a radical break with the past.

DAVID CARBONE  There are a number of myths surrounding Balthus, one of which is that he was self-taught. Ultimately, of course, every true artist does end up being self-taught if they come to possess a genuinely personal vision. Nevertheless, Balthus was home-schooled by parents who were painters.  Their social circle included Pierre Bonnard and Andre Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski, was also an art historian who wrote a major work on Daumier and illustrated a play for puppets, written by his close friend, the key champion of modern art, Julius Meier-Graefe. It was Balthus’s father who drew a parallel between Cézanne and Piero della Francesca as inventors of forms that exhibited strong tensions in the surface of the picture even as they kept their placed in a fictive space. This key bridge between modernism and the early Renaissance opened a unique path for the child artist. By the time he gets to visit San Sepolcro, after yearning to do so for several years, he is still only 17.

COHEN  He was obviously exposed, then, to better and more exclusive tutelage than students at any of the art schools of his day.  But he was, perhaps, relatively free of a beaux-arts syllabus or the pressures of avant-garde anti-academicism.

CHRISTINA KEE  Naïveté or mastery? I find myself feeling that the works possess neither.  It lacks the charm, or charge, of the first trait, and the interest associated with the latter. I have to say that, for me, Balthus is an artist smitten with the heady cultural innovations of his time, and with the “look” of traditional figurative painting, who spent his painting life well-satisfied with the resulting, and uneasy, pairing of dissonant form and content. I believe on his list of priorities the sexual life of girls-becoming-women wasn’t even that high, as I don’t even feel the finished paintings express sincere eroticism. The works instead seem to be the end result of a highly self-conscious desire to place a intentionally-intense subject matter within a tidy container. The two opposing forces cancel each other out.

CARBONE  If Balthus’s paintings have the “look” of the past for you, I suggest that you compare them, say to any 17th century realist and you may notice that past realists never sacrificed modeled forms to simplified planar shapes where a certain “non-finito” is always possible and in places, perhaps necessary. After all, these imagined rooms are also the work of memory not necessarily of specific events but of aspects of awareness. Balthus, as an anti-modern or post-modern, is necessarily one who has reshaped his language through modernism; his idiom is uniquely his own. As to your last comment, I feel that we live in a culture where dialectical thought is rarely found and in Balthus its use seems to express the anxiety of being.

KEE  Balthus is no Courbet. The difference between Courbet’s very visible, material, engagement with his subject matter and Balthus’s more, well, “utilitarian” use of his medium is the difference between participation and illustration.
.      Illustration isn’t necessarily a negative (it’s an impulse that is quite wonderful in Balthus’s early “Wuthering Heights” sketches, for example, which feel more true to me than other works) but it’s a mode in which the painter is somewhat removed from the immediate implications of each stroke.. I simply don’t feel Balthus’s way of making paintings includes the kind of subtle play of medium you are seeing in the work. Where you are seeing deliberate explorations between volume and plane I’m seeing a premeditated deployment of economic means towards an end. I have the same problem with John Currin’s work- the intentional distancing from the subject just doesn’t produce a charge for me.

VINCENT KATZ  If we consider mastery to be self-mastery, Balthus certainly knew who he was in a big way, and set that up clearly for the rest of his career.  In terms of technique — in one of those coincidental, or perhaps not so coincidental, juxtapositions that living in New York City provides as a matter of course — I found Balthus in this exhibition less technically adept than René Magritte, as evidenced in the current exhibition at MoMA that opened the same week.  Except for the amazing painting The Victim (1939-46): there I felt Balthus’s technique was in synch with his subject to haunting effect.

KARDON  I have to disagree with Vincent. As a painter, Magritte (at least in the MoMA exhibit) was merely a journeyman. That’s because he was more of an image-maker than a painter.

COHEN  I’ve got to say I always thought Magritte’s technique was intentionally dull – with the bland touch of a sign painter – compared to either the inventive lyricism of Miró or the virtuoso slickness of Dalí.  Balthus is that rarity, it seems to me, an artist who is totally authentic within a self-consciously outmoded painterly idiom.  He doesn’t seem to be intent on juggling several historic styles to make a contemporary one; nor on passing himself off as belonging to a specific past period; nor on playing the kind of stylistic games that were or would soon become current (Picasso, Derain, Picabia).  But intensely as he might be looking at Courbet, Piero et al. he isn’t occupying their respective period looks as if trying to pass himself off as a contemporary of one of them either.

KARDON  Magritte was only interested in pictorial ambiguity and not painterly ambiguity: he needed to paint only what was necessary to make the meaning for his image, but was not really interested in the painting process. Whereas Balthus was totally concerned with the ambiguities of paint in creating an image. Not only are you staring right up Thérèse’s crotch but – because the surface breaks to reveal the reddish brown under painting – it appears she has just gotten her period. This is missing in the earlier Art Institute painting and goes to my point about the ambiguous meaning from the substance of the paint rather than Magritte’s ambiguity from the image.  And note that this painting has been hung significantly higher here than when it is in the permanent collection, presumably to enhance the crotch point of view.

CARBONE  The flat-footedness of Magritte’s realism is an intentional take down of traditional academic painting that has to do with a Dadaist play of signs.  In a somewhat related way, Balthus uses a more complex realism in the 1930s and early 40s to evoke a Biedermeier style of 19th century northern painting that he then subverts with a severe simplicity taken from children’s picture books to which he adds a range of tonalities that evoke a claustrophobic and melancholy air.

HANNAH  I agree that Balthus’s unself-conscious techniques that appear to be from an earlier time. And, unlike Magritte, there is a great deal of interest in the paint, rarely covering his tracks, using a kind of classical shorthand. I find his surfaces gorgeous and economical, always in the service of the spell he is casting.

KATZ  I like David Cohen’s phrase “intentionally dull” for Magritte’s technique.  First of all, that it was intentional.  And second, dull in the sense of lack of flash.  We are conditioned, I believe, by the discourse, to look only at Magritte’s images.  If however, one takes the current MoMA exhibition as an opportunity to analyze technique in the service of imagery, one finds the technique not only proficient but actually fluid in a subtle way.  And in fact, David’s phrase, “authentic within a self-consciously outmoded painterly idiom,” could be applied to Magritte’s technique as much as to Balthus’.  However, in terms of imagery, I remain impressed by Balthus’s decisions and the clarity of his obsessions and prefer them to Magritte’s.  Indeed, that is where Balthus’s originality and lasting appeal lies.  He remains uneven, with some paintings being much more successful than others.  One of my favorites is Thérèse (1938), in which the girl leans back in an armchair with her face turned toward the viewer.  Her eyes travel even a little farther to the left, not focusing on the artist/viewer — or is it that she is slightly cross-eyed?  Her entire gesture is understated, and, instead of looking up her skirt, as per usual, we are able to see her arms and hands and legs as something ordinary, yet suddenly of heightened interest.  In other words, the point of view, in this painting, does not highlight the specifically sexual identity of the girl, but rather her sensuality.  It is a subtle distinction, but one I think worth making.  I also love the background of this painting — not only the Mondrian-esque bands of color that compose the far wall, but particularly the table and its wrinkled cover cloth, which reminds me of the work of Rodrigo Moynihan, who I feel is somehow relevant to a discussion of Balthus.

NORA GRIFFIN  I’m interested in this comparison between Balthus and Magritte, two painters who played with the dialectic between “painting” and “image,” in explicit fantasy-constructed painted worlds. David Cohen’s critique of Magritte (“the bland touch of a sign painter”) is precisely what to me, makes his painted images so powerfully democratic. It feels accessible the way pop songs used to be accessible to many strata of people, whereas Balthus’s paintings seem to me a kind of perverse delicacy for an almost comically dark European sensibility. Balthus’s stylized (agonizingly stylized, sometimes) figures also put me in mind of Max Beckmann without the saving grace of allegory, metaphor, or myth. These are truly myth-less paintings for an unenchanted, impossible, violent 20th century. I’m not sure what use they have in the 21st century, but that’s a whole other matter.
.      And by using the word “perverse,” I’m thinking not of Balthus’s notorious subject matter, but more of the way the paint is handled and the sheen of yellowish-bluish death pallor that permeates many of his surfaces and skin tones (The Victim, 1939, is the clearest example of this). I agree with Christina that the eroticism of his work is not apparent through his explicit subject matter of adolescents in subtly sexualized poses. Instead, for me, Balthus’s eroticism is expressed in the juxtaposition of bodies and furniture, how a bent child’s leg mimics the spindly table legs in The Blanchard Siblings and The Salon, and how ornamental details pop out, such as a silver sliver of knife embedded in a round loaf of bread in Still Life with a Figure. The bodily sense of containment emphasized by the repeated horizontal wallpaper featured in many of the paintings is also somewhat of an erotic device, far more than the motifs of candlestick or blazing fire.

KARDON  I sympathise with Christina and Nora’s inability to connect with these paintings, but for me, the connection has to do with the sense of isolation from the world that I come away with and not with any real eroticism, except the liminal representation that comes with being disconnected from actual sex. I think Balthus had a rather peculiar childhood with a highly sexualized and creative mother and a cuckolded father, and with a lover of his mother (whom most children would ordinarily have resented) who embodied a high cultural position and in fact encouraged his career, publishing the drawings he did at 11 which concerned the finding and loss of a feline companion. I think loss and the inability to connect to the world or hold on to the evanescence of passing life are the animating force of his paintings and a feeling that resonates strongly with me.

KATZ  I entirely agree with Nora’s take on Magritte and her analysis of his popular appeal versus Balthus as a taste for a particular elite.  But I don’t take that view of Balthus to be a negative one.  Regarding Balthus’s paintings’ lacking the saving grace of allegory, metaphor or myth, I am not so sure.  The Guitar Lesson seems to partake of all three, though they can’t necessarily be pinned down on a one-to-one basis.  But even his less functionally explicit paintings have something metaphorical about them, in my opinion.  I liked how you locate Balthus’s eroticism in the non-human elements in his images.  But do you feel that those elements support the main subjects of the paintings or work in contrast to them?

CARBONE  I’m very much in agreement with what Vincent says about Magritte and Balthus. Magritte’s metaphysical play remains the work of thought and by contrast Balthus’s the work of feeling. Vincent has also raised my curiosity by bringing up Rodrigo Moynihan. I see him as part of the  “new realism” of the 1960s and ‘70s, where one would find Philip Pearlstein and the early Gabriel Laderman, among others re-engaging with the nature of perception and the formulation of a post-abstract expressionist pictorial language.  For me, Moynihan’s still lives remain external description even as their spareness articulates an abstract structure in the painting’s surface. Consequently, I’m interested in how you relate to Balthus’s animated description of objects.

KATZ  I like your phrase “their spareness articulates an abstract structure” in relation to Moynihan.  I guess it is abstraction, in its widest sense that I am seeing in both Balthus and Moynihan.  True, the significant objects in a Balthus tend to have an almost spiritual animation, as you call it.  But the “less significant” elements of his pictures interest me too, and it is those I’ve tried to bring out — walls, floors, background, tables.  I’m interested in a history of interiors.  If we think of the modern interior, it is interesting to note how light-infused and porous are the genteel interiors of Bonnard and Vuillard, while Picasso and Braque seem to introduce the terse sense of interiors as places of contest and confrontation (even with oneself), significant as sites of intellectual (and possibly sexual) work.  Sex, when implied, becomes part of the intellectual’s work activity, as opposed to a leisure pursuit.  It is into this history of the interior that I believe Balthus and Moynihan both directly fit, albeit with definite differences.

CARBONE  As I entered the first room, it felt immediately clear that Sabine Rewald would have liked to have done a much smaller show of just the ten paintings of Thésèse Blanchard. It is a pity that she couldn’t obtain them all. Still, despite their varied virtues, only Thésèse Dreaming is a major work.  Balthus may not have been a card carrying Surrealist but here he has composed the depicted world to force the viewer to participate in the upending of the sentimental Victorian genre of children at play and rest.  Thésèse’s raised leg is the only way into the picture and forces the viewer to look up her skirt. As my eyes explored the picture, I became aware of how everything around Thésèse had been closed down in a manner that followed synthetic cubist thinking.  Is this naivité or sophisticated in a manner closer to Max Ernst’s collage novels or the early Magritte?

COHEN  I find the earlier girl paintings utterly captivating, as images and as painting, and both of course are guilty pleasures.  I wonder if there isn’t indeed some correlation between reworking pre-modern styles and gazing at under-age girls.  Post-1946 I see – occasionally, not always, there are still real gems – excessive stylization for which I’d be curious to know if there is some biographical or career explanation: just when you’d think he’d think he is “in” with his own style he seems to flatten and roughen the picture surface and almost biomorphize the figure (Nude in Front of a Mantel, 1955) as if to keep up with (or at least fractionally approach) the Jones’s of post-war Ecole de Paris.  Was he at all worried about the political associations of the prewar style?  That doesn’t seem in keeping with what one senses of his character.

CARBONE  I agree that the girls are captivating, but I don’t share David Cohen’s guilt, rather I am engaged with the specific moods Balthus is able to reveal in his portraits of Thérèse. As many of you may remember from your own childhood, it is rare for a youth to be seen and treated as a complex human being and that is what I experienced in the first room. There really is a change in ambition that occurs during the Chassy period but I don’t think it has anything to do with keeping up with the post war school of Paris. On the contrary, Balthus refuses to give up the memory of the past and recent past to explore automatism and the “facture” of Tashism with its entropic view of nature, like Wols, (an artist too rarely seen whom I also admire).  In the last room the later paintings that seem successful to me are the large Girl at the Window, of 1955, The Girl in White, from the same year, Nude in Front of a Mantel, also 1955, and finally The Moth from 1959. Le Reve 1, also of 1955, has always been spoiled for me by the spectre’s likeness to Lenor Fini’s special brand of surrealist kitsch. In that series, the Tate’s recent acquisition of The Golden Fruit is successful even though the spectre’s face isn’t.  While I suspect that there may be some idea of the figure’s faces dematerializing in order to stimulate a sense of escaping the self in dream or reverie, I find the idea mostly fails. For me these works are a rebuff to Social Realist painting in Russia, Italy, France and England, indeed to any populist role. Balthus isn’t for everybody, and I suspect he liked it that way.

COHEN  Not that I wish to become the standard bearer of puritanism but my mention of guilt is in relation to the age of consent rather than to eroticism per se, and I was teasing out some linkage – a state of joy uncorrupted – between pedophile imagery and a reversion to premodern painterliness.

HANNAH  The Thérèse room was indeed moving, from her initial forlorn 11 year old self, to a purposeful collaborator with Balthus at 14. That room was the most focused, but the following rooms engaged me just as much, (until the Chassy room, where he goes for a more generalized pastel reverie). The second room’s tableaus of childhood daydreams and indolence, with their very European props (pianos, slippers, couches, wallpapers, silver, rugs, etc.) were orchestrated with great skill. I find him to be one of the great odd colorists, along with Sickert and Gwen John. His tones are always spot-on. All of which adds up to his own world, hermetically sealed while World War II rages outside. To create a signature, identifiable world is no mean feat, all with a minimum of narrative. Bringing the past he loves into the mid-20th century.

KATZ  I still feel there are stronger and weaker paintings in each phase.  As I argued earlier, the painting Thérèse (1938) was the most effective one in that group for me.  I am struck by the wonderfully forceful effect of the cropping (having the subject’s feet go off frame for example) that pushes the figure and her angled chair practically into the viewer’s space.  This feels very modern to me (paradoxically perhaps, as it relies on illusionistic perspective, but this paradox is at the crux of what makes Balthus great) compared to more conventional compositions of Balthus’s, in which the figure is more clearly and remotely situated in an interior space.      As I mentioned earlier, I found The Victim to be one the strongest and most enigmatic pieces in the exhibition.  The Golden Days is another painting I find intriguing.  It was enlightening to be able to compare the study with the final painting and to examine Balthus’s choices and process for arriving at an image.  I found his choice to remove the cat highly effective.  By the way, what do people think of the whole cat thing?  It began to wear on me after a while, especially when they look more like people or birds.  I love how he invented the murky figure in the background of The Golden Days, tending to the fire, and I find the left side of the painting particularly effective, with again, modernist elements in the shapes of wall and furniture and the provocative cropping of table and basin.  As in Thérèse, Balthus uses the table top as a subtle indicator of spatial depth.
.      I find the idea of “guilty pleasures” intriguing.  First of all, do we find these paintings pleasurable, that is to say erotic?  If so, why not just call them “pleasures”?  I don’t think anyone would call them pornography.  If we do not find them erotic, then why not?  The Guitar Lesson is Balthus’s most Surrealist picture, in the sense that it can be rationalized as a psychological fixation.  I found the quote by one his models, Laurence Bataille, that in her sessions posing for Balthus, she “had to lift her dress a little more” each time perfectly captures his essence: it is about liminality and the artist’s attempt to find just that perfect borderline that evokes the obsession without tipping over into it.

CARBONE  Nora, does “perverse” as applied to Balthus’s use of green-purple-greys in “The Victim” mean that the correct and honest thing to do would be to paint their proper flesh tones? Isn’t this use of color a manifestation of felt metaphor you claim Balthus lacks? And hasn’t it been more than hinted at, not least by Jouve, that this painting was a lament for the war?
.      In the later Balthus there are certainly dialogues with Braque and with Vuillard as well as more remote, pre-renaissance traditions. For example, The Moth is a painting I find fascinating. Can we still say this is a young girl? Isn’t this what you might call one of his “agonizingly stylized” figures?  When you look at Balthus’s working drawings you see him constantly reshaping both gesture and form moving far from dogged description. If we are to find allegory and myth in Balthus, we have to look to the larger world art traditions that from the very beginning inspired him. In this case the Mosaics in Monreale, where Balthus has fused the proportions of both Adam and Eve into one figure.
.      Although I acknowledge the scrupulous research into Balthus’s life that Sabine Rewald has accomplished, her efforts have forced biography onto the paintings in such a way as to flatten all meaning into confession and this has obscured much of the pleasure to be found in the paintings as paintings with layered meanings and not just some vague idea of “formal research”. This is the Oprah Winfrey version of art history.

KARDON  Perversity is merely a deconstruction of acceptability. Perversity is at the heart of postmodernism and as an idea really became visible in the 1980’s with the rise of the AIDS epidemic and the difficult acceptance of homosexuality by the heterosexual world. Since it has to do its initial work in the closet, it is a quality that allows art to be subversive. Labeling something as perverse is an attempt to separate it from the discourse, to pretend that it isn’t a part of “normal” consciousness. If you think what suddenly became visible in the ’80s, especially in America, you not only have Balthus, but Otto Dix, Henry Darger, and Lucian Freud who really wasn’t known in America at the time unless one had been to the UK. And of course, Mapplethorpe, and Serrano, who really opened the door to visibility for the others. I believe ‘80‘s postmodernism brought Balthus back into the discourse and the reason we are discussing him now.

COHEN  An analogy that occurs to me in regards to my earlier thoughts about authentic utterance within a superseded mode of expression, is of writing poetry in a “dead” language (placed in quotes because as soon as you write a new poem in Latin, say, the language is by definition re-enlivened – assuming there is some life in your poetry.)

KATZ  I think maybe the analogy would be to a poet writing poems in a supposedly “dead” form — as the sonnet was considered not too long ago.  Not many poets I know could write a poem in Latin; only Latinists could, and few of them are poets.  Which is an interesting point.  How many painters could have achieved what Balthus did — technically and in term of social meaning?  On those terms, he really is unique, if maybe an acquired taste.

KEE This idea strikes a chord. My first thought was that that would be the sort of poet who would have to belong to some sort of club where his efforts would be appreciated. And I suppose that is my last thought on Balthus – he leaves me feeling that you are either in or you’re out. The most insight into his work definitely comes from those who are “in”, and I have been very moved by the exceptional comments from those among this roundtable who have a true and hard-earned understanding of Balthus’s work and contribution.

CARBONE  I think this analogy to writing poetry in a dead language is an answer to the continuing relevance of painting and by extension to Balthus and our time. Painting has been declared dead in every generation since the French revolution, or so it seems. Regardless, painting seems to remain the most elastic language/medium of all, allowing an unlimited range of expressive possibilities. Goggle Balthus images and flip back and forth between photographers who have restaged Balthus paintings, every one of them is pornographic, unlike their painted models. This to me is another proof of the intellectual “flatness” of discussing paintings only as images and subject matter and ignoring how paintings  reshape reality through the culture and sensibility, let alone skill, of an artist, and create affect.
.      For me, a great wall of works in this exhibition is in the third room centering on the magical The Room of 1947-48 flanked by The Week of Four Thursdays and Nude with a Cat, both of 1949. Like Balthus’s later great tenebrist work of 1952-54, The Room is in conversation with Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare in Detroit. The earlier painting in the Hirshhorn Museum seems to me to also be inspired by another work of Fuseli’s, a drawing titled “The Fireplace”, in a private English collection. It features a large woman in a chemise flanked by two smaller, almost fairy-like, servant girls.  The paint shears away the adult fetishism of Fuseli and presents us with a pulsing interior that exists beyond the laws of projective geometry. if one follows the spatial implications of the fireplace and the wall it is embedded in, one should find a sharp corner behind the standing girl. Instead, the the standing girl fills almost the whole height of the painting, and in conjuction with the close harmony of glowing warm tones, seems to both be around her and within her at once. This willed palpitation is confirmed by the ambiguous construction of her right breast which is and isn’t. Such a device sends a sign of Balthus’s use of non finite paint handling seen here in the hand. As we can tell from related pictures, the girl is not looking at us but into a large mirror, which is the painting. The pictorial palpitations signal the unnamable feelings she senses. We are invited to see ourselves as her, for we are on the other side of the looking glass. Somewhere Balthus has said “To a certain extent, you have to become what you paint or draw in order to express it better. Great Western art is not the art that represents things but the one that identifies with them.” In this Balthus echoes Dante.

KATZ  This elegant exegesis on Fuseli makes clear something we had not touched on earlier — the element of magic in Balthus.   By then, Balthus’s sense of interior (and importantly also of exterior, with the paintings of Frédérique looking out the window) changed drastically and become more modern, in the sense of being patterned, two-dimensional surfaces.

HANNAH  I love Carbone’s Balthus quote, “Great western art is not the art that represents things but the one that identifies with them”. Balthus certainly achieved this absorption into his work, giving him the “authenticity” that Cohen noted earlier on. I also love Carbone’s memory of seeing his first Balthus, and saying “I felt seen”
Much has been said about Balthus’s so-called perversity in these exchanges. I’ve always had the notion that the voyeuristic gaze in these paintings was that of another child, perhaps Balthus’s 12 year old self, not that of a predatory adult. It is the same atmosphere as Nabokov’s novel “ADA”, the unconsummated but hot-house passion between two cousins in a stately home. In fact, a couch plays a very vivid part in the book, as the two children watch a fire out the window.  I posited this theory to Ms. Rewald years ago at the Studio School, and she said I was very naive. Perhaps I am, but that is still the way that I read his paintings. Balthus is a guy who wished never to grow up, so he looks back to the golden days of his youth for the raw materiel of his subject matter. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes also parallels Balthus themes.
.      It’s unfortunate that his controversial subject matter is all that most people will see. To me, he was heroic in waving a tattered banner for an alternative route into  art history’s future, bucking against the conformity of the prevailing trends. sui generis. Each of his paintings is composed of hundreds of aesthetic decisions, which reveal as much as how he feels about painting, as they do about the content. The roughness of the paint gives me a satisfaction I never get from Magritte, who many have been discussing here. His open-endedness draws me in, whereas Magritte’s way of nailing it all down shuts me out. In that regard, Balthus is generous, allowing the viewer to make visual connections where something is only suggested (see the bench in Thérèse on a Bench). I am always surprised to see how chewy his surfaces are when seeing them in person, since they compress so neatly in reproduction. These are not illustrations. They are the work of an eccentric artist fully immersed in his task.

KARDON  I take back what I said about the show losing momentum after Thérèse, as the two Girl at a Window paintings as well as Golden Afternoon both give us sharp contrasts of the shallow space of the interior as contrasted with the bright expansive and beckoning landscapes seen out the window. But mainly it is his creation of a painting as mental companion into which he can fill with his own sense of emptiness, and escape loneliness by concentrating on the sensation of creating representation through the experience of transferring the goo of paint onto canvas from a hairy stick. He makes innovation seem beside the point. His first show at 26 where he hoped to engage the world through the intentional provocation of The Guitar Lesson was a bust (though the show could have used the inclusion if just to show how he moved away from that intentional perversity).

KARDON  Duncan pointed out to me the cat licking the saucer. The flash of tongue is accomplished by the slightest tonal flicker, and if there must be eros in this painting this moment is where it occurs. A very precise flash of movement in a painting that is existing in an eternal stillness. And yes, I will argue that it makes sense that the onset of menses breaks the spell of childhood the way the cat’s lapping breaks the spell of stillness in the painting. It is the way Balthus subverts theatricality through absorption and painterly invention that keeps these paintings from becoming distancing. The theatricality of the gestures is merely a subversive way of keeping the beholder in tension with the painting. Also observe the fire iron in Golden Days. Another of my details, it is a little dark phallic woman who mediates between the narcissistic girl on the couch and the man/boy stoking the fire of passion. The tension between the absorptive theatricality of the girl and the absorptive labor of the guy really provide quite an amazing tableau to explore. I am also surprised no one has mention Watteau, a major model for Manet in the 1860’s, whose presence first hit me in the Gilles like presence of the nude in the room. If you think about the vignettes of Watteau interiorized and pushed into the Freudian 20th Century, you will get my point.

GRIFFIN  Dennis, I’m glad you bring up Watteau and Manet. After leaving the Balthus exhibit I headed straight for Manet’s The Spanish Singer (1860) and Boy Carrying a Sword (1861). Besides the obvious references to Piero della Francesca’s geometrical faces/bodies, I also thought of Manet’s signature grayish-brown fade background that so many of his figures are embedded in, without the slightest hint of a real room or interior. This to me is pure theatricality in paint — a push/pull between the finely detailed and anonymous figure (friend/relative? actor? model?) and the 19th century equivalent of a green screen. I’m drawn to the Balthus works that push this tension the most, but I find that the inclusion of “story” however slight, into the picture plane leaves not enough room for me to dream as I enter the painting. For me there is more mystery, and hence more power, in the weird starkness of Manet’s portraits. They are deeply thoughtful, but are thankfully pre-“psychological” in the Freudian sense of the term.
I’m also surprised that the idea of the girl getting her period in Thérèse Dreaming from the way the paint is handled should elicit debate or discussion. It feels like searching for clues in tea leaves; sure you can do it, but why? and how does it open up the painting’s true content? The overall image is so much more powerful than these isolated moments. I guess this might be why, for me, Balthus is more interesting to look at in reproductions than in real life. A few years later and Francis Bacon was pushing the paint-blood relationship to shocking effect, demanding the full attention of a viewer the way a Balthus (to me) never demands.

KEE  From the conversation so far, it seems a given that the challenging issues raised by Balthus’s work, namely those associated with the desirability and sexuality of early adolescent women, are legitimate as subject matter for painting.
.      I think, however, I would be among those female viewers (of whom Sabine Rewald is subtly dismissive in her essay) who don’t connect to Balthus for a number of reasons. I don’t mind saying that the attitude towards sexuality it expresses is one of them. My distaste springs from the same point I fear I have belabored – that there is something detached and programmatic in Balthus, and hence something a shade insincere, and – i’ll say it- creepy in his claustrophobic scenarios. These rooms aren’t necessarily nice places for a woman to project herself into as a viewer.
.      I think a mostly unaddressed point might be worth following up on here as well, as I believe it was Vincent who asked, what’s up with the cats? The show title, an intentionally tawdry-sounding one I would presume, certainly isn’t shy about them. David Carbone emphasized how they suggest the existence of instinctive, “animalistic” aspects of human nature. And there is no lack of other “cat” associations at the ready: sly, stealthful, playful, coy, shadow-seeking. In Rewald’s essay she points out other associations cats have had in painting – as influences aligned with latent, dark, feminine sexuality, the corruption of innocence and even evil. In short – the cats in the paintings evoke the same clichéd caricature of feminine sexuality that women have been dealing with for years. And yes, they are also surely a stand in for the painter, who allows them to loll, lick and frolic in ways that make his desire explicit. I find their grinning depictions sort of sentimental, even silly.
.      There is of course the age question. Youth is beauty, and there isn’t anything inherently wrong with artists from Nabakov to Carroll to Courbet to Mann recognizing this, or even, – within the “safe” medium of art – in exploring the more dangerous question of the nature of sexuality before it is fulfilled in a mature sexual being. Balthus’s near single-mindedness in the choice of his models and subjects is troubling to me. I can’t help but feel that in his consistent choice of schoolgirl models, which I believe lasted pretty much his whole life, there is an implied dismissal of adult women, those perhaps his equal, as worthy subject matter. Balthus is a painter obsessed with a specific, fleeting moment of beauty, and his works are steeped in the anxiety of its passing.

KATZ  Thank you, Christina, for these detailed and personal responses — and I must say, for the bravery of them.  Your statement that “These aren’t nice places for a woman to project herself” was something that needed to be said.  And not just for women.  I have to say that Carroll’s images of Alice Liddell always seem to me to be filled with adoration as opposed to desire.  I’m not sure how, but he is able to project love onto his subject through the medium of photography.  (This is of course always apart from whatever may or may not have actually happened in real life between artist and subject).  Sally Mann is definitely someone we should consider in this context.  Her kids are sexual, sensual, beings looked at by her with a mix of awe, admiration, and surprise.  Your point about Balthus’s implied dismissal of adult women is very cogent; I hadn’t thought of it from that angle.  But your next sentence, “Balthus is a painter obsessed with a specific, fleeting moment of beauty, and his works are steeped in the anxiety of its passing,” which I think is marvelous, actually is an argument in his favor, in my opinion.  It brings out the tragic side to his work, which is little commented on in general.

CARBONE  I strongly agree with Vincent about Christina’s cogent summing up of Balthus’s obsession. And there certainly are other things Nora has mentioned that I would have liked to explore further. The fact that Balthus did paint both of  his wives makes me regret the absence of  the pictures based on Setsuko finished in 1976, after a ten year gestation.  Here are images of an adult woman in works that seem filled with a sense of fatality, that anxiety of being that underscores Christina’s acute comments for me. Finally, and more to the point of the show, I greatly miss the inclusion of Cat and Mirror #1, 1977-1980, a great picture that can stand alongside late Braque or Bonnard; its embodiment of the enchantment of a child’s world is set against its incandescent, ghostly colors that appear to retreat into the fresco-like surface, as sea foam sinks into sand.

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