Richard Rezac at Luhring Augustine Chelsea

531 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, luhringaugustine.com

A drawing in a project room of Richard Rezac’s solo exhibition this summer at Luhring Augustine was at once plan and elevation, as elegant as it was documentary—but of what, the viewer might ask? Provisionally it be called a thingmabob.

On consideration, one can discover a legitimate way of naming these works, as Rezac’s catalogue essayist Graham Bader does, as the entwining object and image. This set of terms is more than merely felicitous. “Object” and “image” are not mere words chosen at random but key terms in the history of ideas through which significant aesthetic ideologies have fought for creative co-existence. (Put differently: not all things are art; criteria matter.) When Donald Judd speaks of objects, what gives his reductive modernism force is that Constructivist engineering has informed his thinking, a certain narrative by which sculpture is non-trivial. Or, when André Breton and Aimé Césaire speak of an image, they are wielding the instrumentality of Surrealism to get at psychological and political resistance and revolt. No mere juxtaposition will do: under the rule of metamorphosis, sense becomes other: a kind of signifying non-sense, or otherwise, an annealing synthesis.

The relevance of object-image to Rezac’s works is spot-on. What should be frivolous in his art is not, because the object’s physical properties forge a connection through strong antinomies. The image comes into sharp enigmatic focus through an unapologetic assertion of difference.Take  Soliloquy (2019) for example. In some parallel universe, a carpenter’s workbench and underground grain vaults cohabit, and the resulting tool plays a practical role.  Another work, Untitled (19-05) (2019) consists of a table atop of which is some sort of dune. If this artifact coheres it is owing to an unsaid force whereby heavy rectilinear gravity is tipped toward image by an unshapely shape atop it. Of the considerable inventiveness typical of Rezac, perhaps the least effective is the most apparently inventive: the suspended piece, Chigi, Pamphili, (2019), an assemblage with three elements that remain unassimilated and, hence, rather twee.

Relief assumes the orientation of painting yet with the rights and privileges of sculpture. Through the binding of painting with sculpture comes a certain gravitas, as with the cast bronze Untitled (18-06) (2018). The causes are clear. Small as most of this sculptor’s works are, the size of this piece is not diminutive as it falls within the viewer’s normal sight lines. And even so, smaller than most paintings typically are, this relief and almost all others, draws the view close, enlarging the subtly calibrated craft for engaged  perception. Rezac’s choice of scale, then, brings material and technique into view as a constructed intensity embedded in planarity. Relief is sculptural compression. Here lies the force of its construct. Tension between technologies is a content of that construct, a kind of agon despite the patterning —Indeed, because of it, given that Rezac flaunts ornamentally and structurally extremes in the same .   Untitled (19-11) (2019) .Why can its overt decoration of the diaper pattern seem engaged between clamps? Think of the suction cups for footpads of a gecko on a tree branch.

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Ewelina Bochenska was the winner of the artcritical prize at this year’s alumni exhibition at the New York Studio School. She was selected for the award by jurors Julie Heffernan and Jennifer Samet. This is the second year the prize has been offered at the School; last year it was won by Clintel Steed. An artcritical prize is also offered at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, by faculty vote, for the graduating class of the MFA program. At both institutions, the prize consists of an interview in our pages, of which this article is the realization. NATALIE SANDSTROM was a writing intern at artcritical this summer.

“Liminal” is the word that best sums up the work of Ewelina Bochenska. Neither strictly painting nor fiber work nor sculpture, her objects encompass elements of all three. They are intimately sized, wrapped with yarn, painted, layered with wooden objects or leather or lace, and painted again. The range of textures and breadth of palette imbues each work with unique, almost undefinable, energy which Ewalina herself describes as an “alien substance” with “otherworldly” characteristics.

Similar qualities are to be found in the artist herself – a globetrotter who draws influence from sources as diverse as folk art and music from her native Poland, to the indigenous Aymara people of the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. As Ewelina describes it, for these people “time flows backwards, front to back,” and in her own work the artist often moves between as many as 10 projects at once, listening for them to invite more work or demand to be left alone. She seems to thrill in occupying these thresholds of time and material, acting as the sorcerer for her “alchemical” objects: “I manage to freeze a moment of awkwardness of materials and color and shape and that maybe is when the work is ready – until I break it up again.” She intermittently pauses, listens, adding a new layer, perhaps, to an older piece, playing with their sense of time in creation. She even calls them “artifacts from the future” (artifact, she said, is one of her favorite words).

On the day that I visited Ewelina at M. David Studios in Brooklyn, she was preparing for a group exhibition to be titled “A Montage of Heck” (it was on view from October 12 to November 4th). Little canvases and paper works that she had recently brought from Poland were strewn around the floor, and as we talked about them and her process she began to lift them, one by one. I was surprised to see that the artworks were crafted all the way through – by which I mean that not only do they involve layers on top of the substrate, but that the base material (be it canvas or found thrift shop picture frame) is often covered on its sides and even back. She talked about the looping of yarn and the carving of wooden bits hidden beneath layers of paint – visible only in faint relief when you look closely – and manipulated her work to show me examples of these multitudinous processes. With every new piece handled the works became more sensual and bodily – I was entrapped in Ewelina’s hourglass, my own experience of her work seeming to slow down the pace of the outside world and transport us both away from the noise of neighboring gallery spaces. She continued to turn the objects over – revealing some with secret undersides: lace, embroidery, weaving, a bold signature. “I always want the work to surprise me,” she said, recognizing her process of reworking as well as the experience of others who discover the surprise side to the work, “but it can be subtle, like a whisper.”

She let me handle the objects as well, and I was shocked at their heft. Though some of them were no larger than a sheet of paper, their intricate layering gave them unexpected weight. I found myself holding one work close to my chest, cradling it almost as one would an infant. As I looked around at the abstracted forms – some resembling landscapes, others with sensual curvature that actually seemed bodily – I again thought of their ethereal liminality. Meanwhile, Ewelina talked about color: “The way I experience color – the way I paint – I kind of hear the color or the quality of the material, I kind of feel it, rather than through my other senses, rather than through just sight. So in a sense the color and the texture and all, they become, for me, another dimension.”

This synesthesia was something that I experienced when I first encountered Ewelina’s work at the New York Studio School alumni exhibition this summer, “X Marks the Spot.” Her contribution to this all-female show – a small painting of bright pinks and blues over a maroon carpet, bordered by yellow woven yarn – exemplifies the warm intimacy of Ewelina’s work. The red background implied heat, and the near-neon colored paint strokes drew the eye in a circular motion. I almost felt as though I were watching the Northern Lights from a comfortable old chair, forgetting the white walls of the gallery space in Manhattan.

When I asked about the development of her work, and where she might be going next, she talked about her history: first studying business, living in Ireland and then London, and eventually satisfying her lifelong fascination with art by pursuing a career as an artist. She stressed the word courage – a trait which not only comes through biographically, but also in her  uninhibited play with materials. She said that she has found herself in a moment of transition, and was thinking of heading somewhere in South America for rest and a new spark of inspiration. “I am using the energy of change to catapult myself.”

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“What is he going to do now?” has been the response of most people I have spoken to about Michael Landy since Break Down, his performance-cum-installation earlier this year at the old C&A building, the recently closed-down department store in the heart of London’s shopping district. This question works on two levels: the artistic one – how will he top this? And the practical one – how will he live now?

In the last few years the work of 37-year old British artist Michael Landy has centered around issues of consumerism and waste. Break Down, a project organized by the innovative commissioning body Artangel, took this exploration to its logical conclusion. Landy has destroyed all his possessions. However, this has not been done with nihilistic rage, or random destructiveness, but in an extremely measured, organized, one could even say bureaucratic way. Every one of the 7227 things that he owned – from his car to a single postage stamp – was categorized, entered onto a database, labelled, and bagged.

The final, and public, part of this three year project took place over two weeks at C&A. Assisted by a team of helpers dressed in matching blue overalls, Landy set about reducing everything to its component materials and then crushing or granulating these beyond recognition. In the same spirit of rigor as the cataloguing exercise, this destruction involved assembly-line efficiency. Individual items in bags travelled round a conveyor belt in yellow plastic trays, periodically being removed, broken-down by the blue-overalled workers and replaced on the trays for Landy to select for further destruction. The amount of care taken seemed out of all proportion with the concept of throwing things away.  The insulation was stripped from wires, with the copper core going in one tray and the plastic in another. Large shredding and grinding machines were periodically started up to reduce these component parts of Landy’s possessions even further. Henry Ford would have been impressed by the differentiation of tasks, the ergonomic layout and the industry of the set-up. Landy’s anti-consumerist point was well-made simply in showing how difficult it is to get rid of things properly.

However, the installation seemed to work better on a more personal level, and I don’t mean by that the exploration of Landy’s personality. Seeing all his possessions traveling around in front of us seemed to say virtually nothing about him, except that he had the same sort of stuff that other people had. Some of his things obviously meant more to him than others, and there was a suggestion that he was a little peeved by the thoroughness with which operatives despatched his family photographs – scribbling on the faces
before tearing them up. But his possessions did not provide any sort of window into telling me what sort of a person Michael Landy is.

Until fifteen minutes before the end, his stereo system was used to provide a musical accompaniment, and presumably to allow him a last listen to his records, tapes and CDs before they were crushed. The last music played before his stereo was consumed was a David Bowie compilation. If there is any significance to the choice of this, then it is not obvious, but I will never again be able to hear those songs without thinking of Michael Landy, and I have considered buying the CD for just that purpose. This is what I mean about the personal impact of Break Down. In the time I spent looking at this installation – probably over four hours in total on two visits – I periodically wanted to rescue (for which read ‘have for myself’) some of his things, or to take a little bit of shredded paper or a knife blade as a souvenir. From time to time I wanted to add an item, or to provide him with a replacement copy of a book I saw about to be shredded. Some people seemed actually offended by his decision to dispose of everything, suggesting that giving it to charity would be more appropriate. Others seemed hurt by his inclusion of works of art given to him by other artists (the reviewer in Time Out magazine seemed especially miffed by the destruction of a Chris Ofili print that Landy had won in a competition in the magazine). Landy had got us to think about how we feel ownership for other people’s possessions, and how it’s possible to think we have rights over stuff that we really don’t have. He had also got us to want to interfere.

There was another aspect to this. As time was running out (and there was a nice, barbed comment here on the house/ garden/life make-over programs which now dominate British TV, and which work to a fixed budget and timescale for transformation of room, garden or personality) the destruction became a little more hurried and a bit more frantic. With this haste, odd little bits of possession got missed, or weren’t destroyed as carefully as they could have been. The most striking example of this was a fist-sized piece of fluff, that had once been part of Landy’s father’s sheepskin jacket (the possession seized on by the media as the symbol of the whole exercise). After being shredded separately from the waste, the coat was kept carefully on one side (to be exhibited later perhaps), but this fist-sized bit of fluff was missed. In many onlookers, this omission seemed to cause a certain resentment, as if the project was somehow invalidated by not being perfect. The ability of what is billed as a work of art to engender such a desire for control, and for perfection (in what, after all, was meant to be a destructive process) was fascinating.

Strangely, by destroying all his possessions in a methodical way, he made us think about our own desire for control, our wishes to interfere in the business of others and our own feelings of ownership over other people and their things. I think this is quite an achievement. I can’t say Break Down particularly changed my consumerist tendencies (though the time spent watching probably  stopped me spending some money) but it did make me think about my attitudes to possessions, especially other peoples’. I don’t really know anything more about Michael Landy having spent four hours with him, except that he has nothing now, and that he will be dogged by people wanting to know what he’s going to make, or destroy next, or for that matter do with his acquisitions.

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The unique work of Regina Bogat came to my attention at Zürcher Gallery’s Frieze New York booth presentation in 2015, and later, through a solo exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in autumn of that year. I was already impressed by what I saw before seeing the dates of the works. It is one thing to innovate retrospectively, but quite another to do it contemporaneously in response to the moment. The works seemed, so much, both of their time and of the present. They not only resonate with young artists now; they represent, given their quality and originality, what arguably should have been an acknowledged achievement in the 1960s and ‘70s.  

DAVID RHODES: You are a New York artist, how did you come to live in New Jersey?

REGINA BOGAT: I moved here from Manhattan in 1972 with my husband, Alfred Jensen, and our two young children. Our Division Street loft was slated for demolition to make way for Confucius Plaza. We found this artist’s house; it was purpose-built in 1906 by a German artist and his French wife. The top floor is a studio with large north-facing skylights. It was with reluctance that I left New York. Even though it is only twenty-five minutes away from the city by train, at the time I felt isolated and cut-off from my prior life.

Today artists and galleries are dispersed across the boroughs in a way that is totally other to the concentrated, intimate associations of the New York art scene in previous decades, especially the 1940s, when you began participating in this world. When you arrived, what were your impressions of the New York art world?

As a young student, the New York art world was exciting. Many galleries were opening showing avant-garde art, artists were opening coops and collectors were buying contemporary American art. American art came to the forefront of the art scene, which had previously been led by Europe. America was shaking-up the art world and New York was playing a central role.

You are fortunate to have experienced such an exciting time in American art history and I am fortunate to be speaking with you, a primary source! Did the New York art world seem diverse or was it established entirely around the Abstract Expressionists? I imagine there were different camps.

There was diversity even though the Abstract Expressionists were receiving the most attention. I went to many openings for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Al Leslie, Nicholas Krushenick and Grace Hartigan. The first generation Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack, Bill de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, were selling well and entering major collections. Articles about Abstract Expressionism dominated magazines, journals and the art sections of newspapers. I was most aware of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists’ competition with the first generation who already had fame and money from their work.

Some artists resisted action and gestural painting sticking to representational painting with regional themes and there were also those who continued emulating French Fauvism and Cubism. There were midtown galleries devoted to regional art like that of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper. At the Art Students League, Will Barnet was still doing derivations of Picasso. Some artists dismissed the abstractionists. I overheard Wolf Kahn refer to Abstract Expressionism as “spaghetti painting.”

The idea of various “groups” seemed to exist via the influential art writers of the period rather than being formed by the artists themselves. People were either for Clement Greenberg, who was doctrinaire, or for Tom Hess (of Art News) and Harold Rosenberg who were both more open to differing views about art.

The influx of European artists escaping WWII added to the diversity in New York. Did they influence your work?

Surrealists made a brief impact on my earliest work. I learned the technique of collage from studying Max Ernst. Although not an émigré, Giorgio de Chirico’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and concrete forms influenced me.

Neo-Plasticism was in the mix, led by Mondrian. He had his studio in Manhattan but passed away before I left College. At Brooklyn College, I heard a lot about him because the art department there was influenced by Bauhaus principles and its head, Harry Holtzman, was the executor of Mondrian’s estate. Perhaps I was unconsciously impacted by Mondrian. Bernard Zürcher, who is an art historian, has pointed out similarities in my geometric abstractions.

Duchamp, who later played an important role in New York, was playing chess on Fourteenth Street. I found his art amusing. This might have contributed to the playful dialogue I have with my work as it is made.

Did galleries have a strong role in differentiating various aesthetic tendencies?

Galleries that encouraged avant-garde art promulgated that aesthetic (at that time Abstract Expressionism). The traditional galleries showed conservative art espousing the representational aesthetics. Other galleries specializing in modern art represented aesthetics that were recently avant-garde.

There were two different art worlds vis-á-vis the galleries in New York. The galleries on 57th Street were commercial, while the galleries on 10th Street and the East Village coops were mostly artist-run. Neither world was exclusive to an aesthetic.

The art world became very complicated as more and more money was involved: the galleries looked towards the museums for advice on what artists to show; the museums looked to the galleries to see the latest developments; the collectors looked to both galleries and museums to determine the best work for investments. The critics stepped in to name the art movement of the day. The auction houses were there but they didn’t have the power that they have today.

Were the well-known artists accessible to you and supportive?

I had several wonderful friends in the art world. Some of them were well known. I went to openings, introduced myself to people and wrote for a journal called East. At first, I was in awe of the success of well-known artists. In time, I became friends with several who were accessible and supportive. Many of the well-known artists were erudite but never stodgy.

Was Elaine de Kooning one of these?

Elaine de Kooning welcomed me as part of her family as well as a fellow artist. She invited me to go along with her to visit artists’ studios and compare notes on the visits. She was free with her ideas about painting. She permitted me to stay in her studio while she was painting, something most artists forbid. She was communicative and supportive. She threw wonderful parties to which I was invited. This was invaluable because it was a place to network. Networking was very important as it still is today.

How about Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko?

I met Reinhardt at openings. He was friendly and attentive. I learned a lot about how to construct a painting from Ad. He was learned but not pedantic. Ad was using oil paint but wanted the paint to be completely matte; he drained all the oil from the paint. This made his work hard to conserve later. He revealed a lot about his painting techniques.

Rothko had his studio across the hall from mine at 222 Bowery and we became close friends. Mark taught me a lot about the art world: he taught me about galleries; he told me how to avoid shady dealers; he taught me how to prepare for a show; and, he showed me ways to care for and store art. I assisted him in his studio by repairing the edges of his paintings for his show at the Modern. He told off-color jokes which kept us laughing. Mark is often presented as off-putting; however, he really was quite warm, nurturing and could be very funny.

My husband, Al Jensen, was supportive and showed me the world of antiquities. For a young New Yorker, who had not traveled much, a six-month trip to Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Egypt was mind-boggling. He showed me that what we see as ornament was based on ancient symbolism. He shared his fascination with numbers, science and ancient cultures. My work was deeply influenced by these new experiences.

You mentioned you were writing about art for the journal East at one point. Elaine de Kooning was also writing. Were artists’ opinions the benchmark for each other over what critics were saying? Did artists’ writings contribute to the contemporary art dialogue by championing the less known, or by arguing for what was most important? These days, it seems the market bypasses the opinions of artists and critics while the collectors hold sway.

I have always admired John Ruskin, the result of whose brilliant support of Turner continues to amaze me. It’s hard to go from Ruskin to Saatchi; but, today’s art market was developed by collectors like Saatchi in his championing of Damien Hirst and the YBAs (Young British Artists). Nerve and money overtook quality and connoisseurship. Even so, some gallerists do a great job of supporting less well-known artists; Zürcher Gallery, Paris/New York, is one of them.

I was in London during the 1980s and 1990s when the YBA phenomena and Saatchi’s collecting was taking place; it’s only part of the story as you can imagine. What about New York artists’ writings of the 1940s and 1950s?

In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning’s art writings were deep, expansive and important. She wrote for Art News extensively. Her observations were sharp. She went into detail about an artist’s life and contribution whereas most reviews were overviews of exhibitions.

In the 1970s, when feminism really started, more women wrote. Feminist writers were celebrated. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan were musts. These feminist writers stirred and empowered women artists.

Artists are eager for attention and especially want to hear what people think of their work. Artists value studio visits: when Swiss painter Max Bill saw one of my geometric abstractions from the 1960s, he said that he “always tried to put red and blue together but here you have achieved it in your painting”; when, in 1982, curator and critic John Caldwell wrote in The New York Times about my show at Douglas College, I was tickled pink by “quirky” and “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Throughout your oeuvre, your work reflects the time in which it was made and has connections to other artists’ work of that time; yet, it is different. Since the 1960s, your use of materials other than paint, thread for example, extends the painting from its pictorial function; as in Eva Hesse’s work, these unorthodox materials breach the painting sculpture divide. Since my student days, I’ve been very interested in Hesse. Your use of strong color together with this three dimensional aspect is an approach that young artists are engaging now. The difference is you didn’t know where it might lead. How did other artists react to your use of materials at the time these works were actually made?

The best thing about being largely ignored in the 1960s and ‘70s, was that I was free to do as I pleased. There was no pressure to comply with particular expectations or “-isms.” My use of unusual materials was mostly intuitive and unconscious. I can’t explain it without returning to childhood recollections of household trimmings and the needlework children were taught. Justification came later when I read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (play is culture). Some of my contemporaries were also expanding into mixed media, painting with sculptural projection. My friend, Eva Hesse, pursued this extensively. Around the same time, Lucas Samaras also used unorthodox materials such as rainbow-colored wool.

In the early 1970s, I was chosen by a panel of women artists to participate in “Women Choose Women” with a painting, constructed in 1971, of dowels and rope. This was an affirmative reaction in action as a limited number of participants were chosen from many applicants.

Although collectors purchased my pieces shortly after they were completed, I don’t recall any artists’ reactions to the materials I was using during the 1960s-1970s when I first began using mixed media. Interestingly, now, the younger artists appreciate my work from that period very much. They are surprised to learn that I did the work in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it resonates with their work today. They like the threads, cords, wooden sticks and dowels. They are enthusiastic.

That doesn’t surprise me at all! Your works from the 1960s and 1970s are not only innovative and apposite to their time they are also prescient of some work being made today. This only happens with artists who have ability, vision, and of course it’s important to say, the courage, to do what they need to do, and remain undeterred if others don’t get it at the time. How did the various elements (dowels, sticks, threads, cord and so on) function for you?

The various unorthodox materials in my work function as the structure of the painting; they are never superficial ornaments. For example, in the untitled 1971 painting, shown at “Women Choose Women,” the dowels are my brushstrokes. In other paintings, the wooden sticks I have used function as lines. Artist and writer, Steven Westfall, pointed out that the sticks in my paintings create a chromatic haze. In my Cord Paintings, the cords are tactile, they add a sense of touch to the work. Although they shouldn’t be touched, people can’t keep their hands off them! All these materials are the structure of my paintings. They are not something I just attach to my work but rather they are the substance of my work.

Al Jensen based a lot of his work on a grid structure. I learned that the grid was a great organizing element and employed it in many of my works. It serves as the underlying format beneath much of the materials I use.

Let’s discuss your new work; what are you working on currently?

Beginning in 2013, I felt the state of the world was becoming so oppressive I could hardly breathe. My paintings took on a smoky, violent and sinister feel. I used a lot of red, black and black cord. Where my work of 2000-2010 was largely open and atmospheric, employing many colorful, transparent layers, in 2014 I began positioning an opaque board onto my work. The board was an emotional element, a closed door or the anxiety-provoking image of the little window to a solitary confinement cell. This work culminated in the Palmyra series of 2015, my response to the destruction of antiquities in Syria. I had never used painting to comment on a contemporary problem before, but the destruction of Palmyra and Aleppo alarmed me. The paintings suggest the vulnerability of the archeological site as they progress through stages of sadness and despair ending in final darkness. Invoking Zenobia, the third century warrior queen of Palmyra, who fought the Romans, is something else I had not done before in painting. The series will be on view at Zürcher Gallery along with the sculptures of Wang Keping through April 29, 2016.

My impression of the new works is that, on a metaphoric level, the qualities that you describe are certainly present, as we can now see in your Palmyra series with Wang Keping’s sculptures at Zürcher Gallery. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Regina.

“Face to Face: Regina Bogat, Wang Keping” continues at Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, through April 29

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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.

cover image, 2018: Thomas Nozkowski, “Untitled (7-10),” 1992. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Pace Gallery

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).

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JOHN ASHBERY; COLLAGES
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
September 4- until October 4, 2008
724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets New York, NY 212 262 5050

Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets like Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography—arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit. Among the Dadaists and Surrealists, there were no union demarcation lines between painter and poet preventing wordsmiths from picking up their scissors: The poets of those supremely literary movements made collages and “found” objects, just as many of the visual artists wrote — in the 1930s, during his close association with Surrealism, Picasso devoted much energy to verse.

Is there something intrinsic to the appeal of collage to writers — to moving bits of paper around in startling, revelatory juxtapositions? The coincidence of two shows of collages by writers of markedly different ilk – a sometime poet laureate and a member of the third estate – begs the question. John Ashbery is the subject of a display of collages made from his undergraduate days at Harvard in the late 1940s to a series from 2008 that use chutes and ladders boards as their support. Mario Naves, who is perhaps better known as art critic for the New York Observer, has his fourth solo exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery since 2001.

The coincidence, and the connection with writing, intensifies around the identification of both men with the postcard. Mr. Ashbery is a consummate collector of postcards, and receiver and sender of them, too. Many of the collages in this show use a postcard as the support; they are framed to allow sight of the recto text, appropriately for objects as likely to be collected for their literary as artistic interest — and with Mr. Ashbery, as we are dealing with images and impulses, the distinction between the two is refreshingly fuzzy. Friendship plays a profound role in his collage activities: the 2008 chutes and ladders collages use source materials gifted to him by the late Joe Brainard and are unquestionably an homage to that poetry world artist.

Mr. Naves, who in this show returns to a welcome intimacy of scale, calls his collages “Postcards from Florida,” as they date from his brief tenure as Professor of Drawing at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota.

The types of collage Messrs. Ashbery and Naves favor occupy different ends of the spectrum in relation to the key issue with this medium: the legibility and relevance of the source material. In Mr. Ashbery’s images, the sources are virtually pristine. There are figures and objects cut from historic engravings or old magazine advertisements and then placed in equally intact though incongruous, dreamlike scenes and settings. In “Diffusion of Knowledge” (1972), for instance, a pair of comic strip action heros flex their muscles on a postcard of the Smithsonian Institution. There is a strange misregistering of the buildings in the background, as the familiar tower seems shadowed by a stenciled doppelganger in bright orange. But there is no confusion about the sources, only the encounter.

In Mr. Naves, by contrast, the imagery is entirely abstract, and the source material, which consists of painted tears of crumpled papers, is fabricated for collage purposes by the artist himself. Where Mr. Ashbery comes from the collage tradition of Max Ernst and Braque, Mr. Naves looks more to Henri Matisse’s late great cutouts and Jean Arp. The emphasis is on shapes created rather than figures isolated; it is more an aesthetic of unity than incongruity, and is less subversive.

Paradoxically, it could be argued, each writer tends to the opposite extreme in their visual and verbal work. Complicating this idea is the fact that besides his poetry, Mr. Ashbery writes clear, precise, accessible prose commentary on art and literature, but the work for which he is best known and admired is deeply, notoriously difficult. His collages, on the other hand, are formally bright and transparent, tending towards immediately accessible story lines and inherently attractive source materials.

Mr. Naves, by contrast, a journalist whose opinions are as bright and punchy as any editor could wish for, makes jolie-laid abstract art that is rough at the edges, scruffy, almost nonchalant in its casual disregard for any sense of a central organizing principle. The historic collagist he most closely resembles is the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (whose example also enthused the Harvard undergrad according to Mr. Ashbery) in drawing upon detritus whose desuetude survives the alchemy of its artistic transmogrification.

True, Mr. Naves’s “crap” consists of studio stuff, as opposed to bus tickets and candy wrappings from metropolitan streets, and it was originated by the artist for intended transformation. But the result constantly stresses distress and arbitrariness — papers are crumpled as if underfoot; there is never “pure” color but instead the contingency of splodges and brushstrokes are always manifest. The initial impression of the scarred, battered surfaces of Mr. Naves’s collages is of a segment of billboard where layers of old posters have been stripped and scraped away — a form already made into art by the Italian pop artist Mimmo Rotella.

So, two highly accomplished visual artists who just happen also to be writers? That seems too easy a conclusion. Mr. Naves – in contrast to public perception of him – is an artist who also writes, whereas with Mr. Ashbery, self and public perception coincide around the fact that he is a poet who makes collages, in the Clausewitzian sense as poetry pursued by other means. Mr. Ashbery’s collages, in contrast to his verse, is eminently likeable and legible. Even his coy hints at pederasty are sweetly whimsical. Mr. Naves, by contrast, makes tough, itchy, irksome collages which are strictly for aficionados of abstraction.

It could be said that these are “difficult” writers in very different senses. Mr. Naves is a maverick dissenter as reviled by the art world establishment as Mr. Ashbery is beloved of the poetry world’s. The one is difficult in the sense of being a nuisance, the other in the sense of being brilliantly obscure and impenetrable. Collage presents a means of intensifying his efforts to the one, and of providing gentle relief from them for the other.

Tevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of Mr. Ashbery’s collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally eschewing its touch. His paintings are seamless, sealed-in, and automobile-like in their glossy finesse. But his vocabulary is intimately informed by the aesthetic of collage, bringing together both commonplace and esoteric objects in startling and suggestive juxtapositions. He could be called a conceptual collagist, cutting and pasting within the mind’s eye.

Mr. Winkfield is a natural double act with Mr. Ashbery as, since 1988, works by this expatriate Yorkshireman have habitually graced the covers of the poet’s new publications and reissues. His style is unmistakable: high contrast, high chroma arrangement of forms that are radically contrastive in scale and source executed with the clean precision of a graphic designer. He has associated closely with the poetry world, and twice instigated small but influential journals for poetry: Juilliard, in the late 1960s, and Sienese Shredder, since 2007.

Mr. Winkfield’s aesthetic is essentially heraldic: objects are flattened to the extent that they are not allowed to threaten the two-dimensional picture surface, even as they busily overlay one another. “At the Gates,” (2004) is a triptych that sees areas of pink, yellow, rust, and grays and blue occupy distinct but interconnected zones, with objects as diverse as a metronome, a fan surmounting fluted columns, and a shattered vase holding court in each.

While flatness of overall design is strictly policed, the shadows of individual forms are almost scientifically rendered. Also undermining heraldry is the non-hierarchical nature of his compositions, the all-overness of his spreads recalling abstract, color field painting as much as any historic source.

His artistic origins are actually firmly rooted in a European pop sensibility, and are thus at once formal and literary. He trained at London’s Royal College of Art where students a few years ahead of him included Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield, whose precisionist advertising style set the scene for British pop art. Eduardo Paolozzi, Valerio Adami, and the American Richard Lindner are also points of reference.

In a way, Mr. Winkfield suffers from the fact that his work reproduces too well. He draws on graphic design, and provides graphic design solutions for book covers. But the experience of his paintings in the flesh underlines the richness of his saturated color and the vitality of his paint application, neat for sure but by no means mechanical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 4, 2008 under the headings “Gallery Going:  Bits and Pieces Brought Together” and “Art in Brief: Trevor Winkfield”

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Who got to decide that musicians play and painters work? Instrumentalists have to practice alone for hours, and then perform under nerve-racking scrutiny, slaves to the beat. We can all picture the perspiring face of a rock guitarist or classical pianist screwed up in paroxysms of concentration. Painters, on the other hand, can take their time in the serenity of their studios, perfecting what they want us to see. And even when angst or indecision is their expressive mode, these choices are “performed” at leisure—recollected in tranquility, as the poet puts it.

Lois Dickson makes us think a lot about time and space, work and play. Her compositions are rich, dense and busy. Form and color work double-time to denote depth while exuding no-sweat exuberance, the brush dancing on the plane. This summer [2016] saw the culmination of a sustained trajectory in her painting journey from which no less than two solo exhibitions were to be selected, opening in as many months, first at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY and then at the Painting Center in New York City. A woman in her 80s whose paintings routinely stretch to six feet or more in a given direction, the sheer physicality of her output is prodigious. But adding to this, and what truly inspires awe, is the sense of progress—a striving for clarity while maintaining complexity—that characterizes her oeuvre.

A ludic morphology lies at the heart of Dickson’s endeavor. Elaborations of shape and excavations of depth animate her pictorial intelligence in ways that are at once playful and earnest. Intelligence is the operative word here, for Dickson always presents us with both a plethora of information and persuasive principles regarding its organization. Singularity and multiplicity cohabit in scenes imagined and observed. Her brushstrokes are at once measured and fresh. Surfaces are lively but form has definitiveness and weight.

When, earlier this fall, I had the chance to examine an extensive group of recent paintings in her Columbia County studio something that became very clear was the particular nature of development in her work, whether within a given canvas or from picture to picture or across this segment of her mature oeuvre. Work and play are equally and powerfully in operation. Unprogrammed improvisation is the dominant vibe, and yet the progress within and between canvases suggests its own logic. You can read the story of her thoughts in a body of canvases; stop that narrative at any given picture and formal and thematic teleologies thread their way through its immediate predecessors. But jump from the first to the last within a sequence, and even though recurring motifs are unmistakably Dicksonian and each picture carries the DNA of her touch and palette, an aesthetic gulf opens up, suggestive of fearless experimentation, of unbound formal curiosity, of an artist who refuses the straightjacket of a “trademark” style.

What struck me quite forcibly was the modernity of Dickson’s progress—modernity, that is, as opposed to postmodernity. OK, there’s a leading role for the Pixar/Disney fish character Nemo in her almost George Condo-like painting of that title from 2016, and a jocular sense of Mike Kelley run amok within the pictorial space of Las Meninas in Procession (2015). But the accumulating jumble of Dickson’s imagery is irony free. She lets forms and feelings dictate a scene, and yet there is always direction. It seems, therefore, not a coincidence that – contemporary references inferred above notwithstanding – the formal touchstones for Dickson’s style are firmly rooted in the canon of early and mid-20th century modernism. The plasticity of her facture can recall Marsden Hartley, George Beckmann, or Philip Guston in Tough Guy (2016), What Happened (2016) and Over Easy (2015) respectively, or the smooth impasto of phases in the 1930s paintings of Arshile Gorky, de Kooning or Stuart Davis in cleaner surfaced pictures like Glimpse or Citrus Pull (both 2016). In a singingly crisp, almost hard-edged canvas like the admittedly unfinished Pas de Deux (2016) the Orphism of the Delaunays or the Suprematist phase of Liubov Popova come to mind. And, of course, Matisse, Picasso and Bonnard are frequent associates of her brush.

All this is not just, to my mind, a question of taste, of her sensibility gravitating to this lush extended revel in the art history of painterly experimentation. Rather, it suggests that her painting agenda is motored by modernist purposiveness. Think of the number of images in Dickson where it almost literally seems like a machine is driving the forms in some kind of vortex or oscillation. Roundabout (2016), a delicious little painting of 10 x 10 inches, has a Futurist feel in the frenzied spin of wayward blades. In Over Easy it seems like engine parts are extruded from rotating giant screws chugging away in the center of the composition. But I’m not suggesting Dickson as some kind of neo-Futurist: the mechanical is always offset by the organic in her shape vocabulary, recalling the primary role of plein air landscape and surreally improvised but botanically exact explorations of plant life in her evolution as a painter. In fact, a dialectics of the organic and the geometric is itself an active current within modernism, one that allows an artist of the next century (ours) to continue the great experiment, in earnest, without recourse to irony.

In the spirit of this dialectic, I see the quarry of Dickson’s quest as a kind of biomorphic cubism. Biomorphic in that shapes follow internal laws of growth in their abstraction and reinvention. Cubist in that time and space are facetted in multiplicities of perspective, in that forms are seen from different directions simultaneously, in that deep pockets of space cohabit with insistent formal flatness. Another smaller canvas, Gallery, is almost a dramatization of this kind of play. A Prussian blue form is seen in duplicate on what almost reads like an Expressionist stage set with intimations of mirroring or a receding back stage space hidden behind flaps. The shape can read variously as an extending hand and forearm or a fetal form. This is one of those “clue” paintings that empowers the viewer to find similar instances of pockets and facets in more ambitiously abstracted and complex larger compositions—and they abound. The triumphs in Dickson come in moments of “push-pull” in Hans Hofmann’s famous phrase, in which credible, emotionally resonant depths are struck within the necessary-seeming literal flattening of the picture surface, in which illusion and actuality arrive at a state of détente in their perennial struggle—a playpen within a battlefield.

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Ali Banisadr: Motherboard at Sperone Westwater

March 1 to April 19, 2014
257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets,
New York City,  212.999.7337

If you have any trouble imagining what a cross between Pieter Brueghel the elder, André Masson, Wilfredo Lam, Gerhard Richter (in his abstract idiom), Walt Disney, San Francisco-style graffiti and a Mughal miniature looks like, don’t worry, Ali Banisadr can put you in the picture in a New York minute. This painter of rich-hued, busy, noisy tableau fills three floors of Sperone Westwater, in his first solo show with the Lower East Side powerhouse, with luridly raucous action dramas.

Iranian-born, California-raised, New York-educated and Brooklyn-based, Banisadr comes with a cv as cosmopolitan as his painterly influences.  Ali grew up against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war before leaving Tehran with his family, immigrating via Turkey to the States at age 12.

The adolescent refugee soaked up the energy of 1990s graffiti in its golden age under the aegis of Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen, although the vibe that survives in his own handwriting is less the elaborate figuration of the Bay Area street artists as a more calligraphic tagging, again perhaps tapping his ancestry.

In New York, as Jeffrey Deitch observes in his catalogue essay for the present show, Banisadr maximized his time at the School of Visual Arts and then the New York Academy in the acquisition of manual skills; at SVA, for instance, he enrolled in illustration classes, while clearly reveling in the beaux-arts pedagogy of the Academy.  The debut of this wondrously dexterous artist took place in 2008 at Leslie Tonkonow, where he showed again in 2011, and he has had solo shows in Europe, too.

Our Hieronymus Bosch of graffiti typically delivers his loud crowds in a massed cluster at the base of a tripartite composition.  Despite the all-over energizing of his canvases, Banisadr achieves a strong sense of pictorial depth, with fore, middle and long distances, a clear horizon between sky and ground.  There is an added sense of depth in the variety of scale amongst his heaving horde.  They are a bestiary of varyingly gruesome, comical, menacing and preposterous personages formed in an equally fulsome array of gestures – artful smudges and splatters, striations and strokes, virtuoso flicks of wrist and bravura sleights of hand.

This throng forms a writhing gestalt that itself becomes a singular monster agitating the picture, sometimes sending shock waves of conflict into the anyway rarely very peaceful heavens.  In Motherboard (2013) for example, the title piece of the show, a sharp, vertical band of red streaks out between the scrum below and the sliver of turbulent sky above reading like some barcode of blood.  Or in Ran (2014), the triptych that dominates the ground floor of the gallery, the sky witnesses a strange mottled grid of red impasto that reads like a cross between Richter squeegee and fragments of long-lost cuneiform script. Banisadr’s combatants recall great renaissance depictions of conflict like Leonardo’s now-lost “Battle of Anghiari” (1505), known from presumed copies, and Michelangelo’s “Battle of Cascina,” also lost, except in the place of the naked, idealized combatants supplied by the Italians, Banisadr betrays a more northern penchant for caricature along with his pronouncedly eastern (as well as West Coast) palette in a modern-medieval sensibility.  But what he has in common with the high renaissance masters is a way of enlisting the mass into a singularity while retaining an energetic thrust.

Despite the figuration and the action, and the traditional heaven-and-earth, figure-ground compositional structures, these are essentially abstract paintings.  They are about all-overness, balance, movement, harmony and dissonance, detail and whole.  Their cartoonish gestures — the schematic swishes of air current left in the wake of bodies darting to and fro – adds a kitsch element as do the knowingly vulgar color schemes but the sheer skill and vibrancy with which he marshals technique has us forgive these as surely as we do or ought to do in his surrealist or populist mentors.  In some ways he is a flatter, cleaner version of Cecily Brown, replacing sex with war.  He looks to Matta where she looks to de Kooning, which is to say that his skills are more linear and spatial and less fleshly or voluptuous.

And like Matta, Banisadr has a disconcerting ability to combine a fast read with meticulous, painstaking execution.  It is this disconnection between execution and effect that surely accounts for a slickness some will find worrisome.   It is not that he is postmodern even, so much as unmodern.  This may be why, despite their galvanizing turmoil and breathtaking technique and at once abrasive and retina-soaking chroma, these are ultimately very distant images, emotionally strained and cold.

Banisadr has one stated ambition that he achieves with uncanny force: to generate visual noise.  Somehow, his sheer velocity gives off audible sound.  It is as if, caught up in the excitement, the beholder can’t help but supply, if not a soundtrack at least rather noisy sound effects.

And if you do find the drama does deserve a score, it is up to you whether to bring along heavy metal or a Berlioz symphony.

The post A Topical Pick from the Archives: Ali Banisadr at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

“What?”, he replies, incredulously. Mr. Kitaj has battled deafness for many years, but even so would have had difficulty comprehending this question.

The lady gestures towards the paintings and drawings on display. Many feature a voluptuous young woman, usually nude, often in the company of an older bearded man. On first impression, they do indeed seem to represent a cast of women, with different features and hair colors, rather than a single protagonist.

When finally the penny drops, Mr. Kitaj fixes his bewildered interlocutor a defiant stare: “She’s dead!”

An exhibition of new paintings by R.B. Kitaj is a rare event. For years, his slow output has been a matter of notoreity. Since his controversial retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1994, which traveled to the Metropolitian Museum, New York, and the LA County Museum, he has gone even more reclusive than had been his norm. The Tate show had been the occasion of a barrage of vituperative criticism. Mr. Kitaj, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, had lived in England since the 1950s.

In the “Tate War”, as he calls it, he lashed out at detractors, countering their cat-calls of “existentialist bullshit,” “namedropper” and “pseudo-intellectual” with his own charges, calling them “antisemitic, anti-foreign, anti-American, anti-intellectual.”

Amidst this furor, his much younger wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, also an American abroad, suddenly died of an aneurism. Sandra is the “beautiful women [sic]” of his “Los Angeles Pictures”, the group of works on display at LA Louver. He says that he doesn’t try to depict her exactly, but makes her up, from memory, as he goes along. In 1997, Mr. Kitaj returned to America, choosing as his base the city where he had met Sandra, where he had once taught at UCLA, and where his son by an earlier marriage, the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and his grandsons live.

He took with him Max, his son by Sandra, who he has raised singlehandedly since the boy was ten. Both his sons were at the opening, along with their sister, Dominie, a decorated servicewoman just back from Iraq. David Hockney, one of Mr. Kitaj’s closest friends, was also in attendance.

I was in LA for the opening of his show and the last week of his friend Lucian Freud’s retrospective. During his period of mourning (arguably ongoing) Mr. Kitaj had sat for Mr. Freud, although neither of the portraits begun was completed. I was also in town to work on an exhibition of Sandra Fisher and her circle, for the New York Studio School in a couple of years. Sandra was a personal friend, and it was unnerving, the next day, at Mr. Kitaj’s new house, to see portraits she had made of me ten years earlier. Mr. Kitaj included a selection of Sandra’s work in a back room at Louver. She painted in an unpretentious, fresh, naturalistic style, favoring a cheery, fauve palette. Her subjects were portraits of friends and nudes of both sexes.

Mr. Kitaj now lives in Westwood. His house, formerly Peter Lorre’s, is overtaken by books. There are no easy chairs, “to discourage visitors from staying too long”, he tells me. I’m honored to be invited at lunchtime; a man of very strict habits, Mr. Kitaj habitually receives only at 4pm.

Rooms are given over to particular subjects. In one, he has created a shrine to Cézanne, for instance. He has all the prints (he prefers the uncolored version of the famous bathers lithograph) and an impressive array of first editions. Another room is his Judaica library. Volumes are organized according to an eclectic, personal logic. Looking at one particularly odd juxtaposition, Kitaj remarked: “My friend Leon Wieseltier was visiting, and he remarked that this is probably the only library in the world where you will find a set of Proust next to the works of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”

Raised in an agnostic, leftist household, Kitaj surprised friends in the mid-1970s when, just around the same time this some-time “Pop” appropriationist rediscovered drawing from life and the single figure, he also reconnected with his Jewish heritage. For sure, it was a secular Jewishness, having more to do with a spiritual identification with mid-twentieth century intellectuals, especially mid-Europeans whose lives were shattered or disrupted by the Holocaust, than with religion. (The name Kitaj belonged to his step-father, a refugee from Vienna.) He has come to be fascinated, however, by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs.

He is living proof of some traits his critic enemies picked up on: a promiscuous lover of big ideas, an inveterate historical namedropper. But he has always been aware of that. An early critic complained that his work was “littered with ideas”, and he has often quoted the remark with pride. What friends and foes alike often overlook in Mr. Kitaj is the ambiguity, irony and self-depracating humor that invariably go along for the ride with his grand theorizing and bombast.

In a corner of his Judaica library is a back copy of the Burlington Magazine with his 1980 pastel portrait of Degas on the cover. Degas has had to share with Ezra Pound, yet another hero, the typically Kitajesque epitaph, “my favorite antisemite.”

He explains to me how different antisemitism is in every country and situation. Degas’s anti-Dreyfusard stance, he feels, can be explained, even vaguely sympathised with, in the context of the national disaster of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Kitaj is both incensed and bemused by people’s reaction to his charge of the “low octane” antisemitism he feels he encountered in the British press. “Antisemitism runs the whole gamut from ignorant gossip in an English pub to the death camps, with infinite degrees and nuances along the way”, he explains, reaching as he speaks for a press clipping recently sent to him by a London friend. It is a diatribe by a tabloid critic who had given him a particular drubbing, this time against the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, a champion of Kitaj’s, and a Jew. “Time to be rid of this Trotsky of art”, ran the headline. “You see,” Mr. Kitaj exclaims, nodding sagely. “Trotsky! Not Stalin or Hitler, but Trotsky!”

To those who knew Sandra Fisher it can be disconcerting to witness her transmutation into a motif. She was blessed with a preternaturally sunny disposition, a Californian optimism to counter her husband’s studied pessimism. Kitaj dedicated his book, “First Diasporist Manifesto”, “For Sandra, who puts me down when I complain, replying she’d rather live in these times (as a woman and artist) than any other.”

Since her death, Mr. Kitaj has very publicly transformed her into a personal symbol of renewal and resistance. Mr. Kitaj is a great collector and reader of little magazines, and in emulation of them, he has launched “Sandra”, as a periodical manqué. Various projects, be they exhibition catalogues or installations, have appeared under a “Sandra” rubric, featuring the same beaming photograph from her youthful prime.

The first instalment of “Sandra” was a strange set-up at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in London, his farewell to the city. Surrounded by a personal selection of his “School of London” friends (he had coined the term himself in the 1970s), including Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney, was his own transcription of Manet’s Execution of Maximillian, in which he cast himself and Manet among the firing squad, returning fire at the dreaded critics. The LA Louver catalogue is “Sandra Eight: Los Angeles Pictures”.

In “The Los Angeles Pictures”, “Sandra and I became Lovers again”, he writes in a catalogue note. “I could make love to my angel with my paintbrush, fondle her again, caress her contours.” Some paintings are very graphic, as the couple make love in the bath, for instance. Others keep up Mr. Kitaj’s famous habit of referencing old master paintings, sometimes in composite, taking not just forms but the aura and association of the older work. Their two faces overlapping in a kiss (recalling Brancusi) actually borrows its format from a detail of Giotto’s Scrovegni fresco at Padua depicting the meeting of Joachim and Anna, Christ’s grandparents. “I detected Barnet Newman’s Zip in the line running between the profiles, so I emphasized it in the profiles of Sandra and me.”

He sees his pictures as “love stories”. “The Man-Woman Story has become quite rare in painting since the death of Picasso. Earlier, many painters had shown the woman and man in a love situation- such as Picasso, Munch, Schiele, Chagall, even Matisse.” But then the subject became rare. He puts this down to fact that many of the best painters recently have been gay or abstract. Even straight artists, however, have veered towards the isolated, individual figure, he says, citing his “School of London” friends. Sandra Fisher, he points out, was an exception, often painting nude men and women embracing.

An aspect of Mr. Kitaj’s Tate show which irked critics was his announcement that he had entered his “old age style”. They saw in this an impertinence, as it is not for an artist but for connoisseurs to decide when this had happened. Again, there was a failure to savor the intended irony, the heavy quote marks that surrounded such a stance. In earlier work, whether the tightly constructed fragmentary collage-influenced paintings of his “Pop” period of the 1960s, which first catapulted him to attention, or the more naturalistic pastels of the following decade, Mr. Kitaj was noted for his draughtsmanly finesse. Robert Hughes had famously said of him in the pages of Time that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive.” But in his self-consciously “old-age” style he opted for a loose, wobbly, tentative, unfinished look, and this carries over in his Los Angeles Pictures.

This doesn’t stop him from teasing me with a big assertion, typically one that raises a provocative thought about culture at large beyond its overt egotistical posture: “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived”.

This article originally appeared in the New York Sun, Monday June 30, 2003

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As a stunning show of new work by Arlene Schechet opens at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea, we offer this review of last year’s retrospective at Boston’s ICA as a TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES

June 10 to September 7, 2015
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210

Working within a notoriously hierarchical art world where ceramics have often been marginalized, Arlene Shechet prefers to describe herself as an installation artist who makes objects, rather than, say, a ceramicist or a sculptor. It is an intelligent way of holding ground. Her beautifully paced survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, “All At Once,” gathers together two decades of deft, imaginative and fearless work.

Her art is by turn, humorous, poignant and playfully strange. From the outset, we find her in conversation with those West Coast artists who, from the late 1950s and ‘60s onwards, were determined to push the boundaries of clay. Breaking with craft tradition, they redefined ceramics enabling it to be both painting and sculpture at once. The deconstructive element of some of Shechet’s clay works dialogue with Peter Voulka’s 1990s series “Stacks,” for instance, energetic, rough re-assemblages in clay that were confident and masterful in their abstraction. Likewise, Shechet’s bold command of color nods to Voulkas’s student Ken Price’s bright acrylics and dense sensuous forms as well as the delicious pop palette of painter and former ceramicist Mary Heilmann. Bucking trends towards theory-driven work, on the one hand, and monumentality, on the other, whether in the sculptures of Jeff Koons who with Italian artisans reproduced rococo porcelain pieces, but of pop icon Michael Jackson, or the new German photographers with their dizzying digital possibilities, Shechet has maintained her artistic integrity by steadily working through the most elemental of materials, undeterred by its limitations of scale.

All At Once displays chronologically and with choreographic flair how Shechet explores formal complexities across diverse materials, whether paper, glass, porcelain or, particularly in the last decade, clay. Evolving through her highly skilled works is the repeated use of splicing, stacking, and vessel as symbolic form.

Opening the show is a series of heads and figures, roughly approximated Buddhas slathered in colors, daubs and drips of plaster. Though in sharp contrast to the classical Buddha image of burnished gold perfection, these off-beat Buddha forms are nevertheless presented in the round, encouraging one to walk around them in a circular fashion as if visiting a Buddhist temple. Madras Buddha (1997), is patterned in a cheerful plaid of red, pink, orange and lime, whereas Raga (1999), has blooming splotches of blue, dashes of black and snaky grays. Buddha heads with wry titles such as Collective Head, Head on Head, or Head that Happened, sit atop concrete pedestals dribbled with plaster-like candlewax, resembling her seated Buddhas in their semi-formless, paper maché appearance.

Shechet furthers her interest in Asia in her series, Once Removed (1998), casting Abacá paper onto molds using blueprints referencing real locations. Twinned vessels are stacked and re-imagined as stupas, the top with lush ink patterns recalling blue and white porcelain, its companion a white plaster blank.

Target (Gyantse and Diamond Mandalas) (1997), a two-dimensional paper work reminiscent of mandalas, and stupa floor plans, has lines delicately bleeding cobalt blue that are both radiant and dense at once. Other works are of indigo or inky blue flooded paper in reverse, allowing the white areas and lines to emerge and glow.

In Building (2003), titled as a verb and noun, Shechet splices and re-stacks varying vessels, again inspired by stupas. Presented high like a skyline, dark, smoky glazed vessels at either end fade to pure white biscuit porcelain at center. This austere installation, a personal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evokes a quiet despair. More buoyant is a 2004 series of large crystal vessels of pearly luminescence including Bubble Up, Drip Drop, and Cushion, in which cleverly inverted curvilinear shapes are stacked or doubled inside one another to a point of delicate balance. They exhibit a dynamic tension between crystalline perfection and fluidity of form.

At times Shechet’s ceramics can seem like creatures dredged up from the darkness of deep ocean floors. What I Heard, 2007 has two symbiotic bulbous forms glazed matt gray, the amorphous surface and velvety finish interrupted by orange aorta-like vents and pockets of shimmering bronze. Using as support a steel stool, Shechet continues her stacking theme, the base integral aesthetically and conceptually to the whole. Her use in these works of raw or painted wood plinths, steel frames, concrete slabs and kiln bricks demonstrates complexities by juxtapositions of color, texture, and form. In Sleepless Color (2009-10), Shechet shifts her attention to coiled clay, manipulating it into a state of unruly leaning. With its multi-colored kiln brick base and cracked wood pedestal, the piece reaches a point of ungainly, yet unforeseen grace. Now Playing (2015), shows a skinny white metal frame beneath a hunk of white painted hardwood with missing angled chunks, topped by a precarious pile up of softly bent ceramic bricks in a bubbling white glaze. The whole effect is complex, contradictory yet formally satisfying, Shechet displaying her relish for materials and her penchant for brinkmanship.

Shechet was able to explore a delicate side of her sensibility in her 2012-13 residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany which saw works of surreal tender moments underpinned by a fascination with the industrial processes of porcelain production. Deliberately inverting expectations, she favored molds as finished forms, or experimented with splicing and re-assembling traditional house designs. Redefining notions of the historically revered material referred to as “white gold,” Shechet included dribbled and stained glazes, vases with buttery, finger-like indentations, and the use of extruder blocks made from porcelain waste as worthy forms. We see this in the wonderfully titled Gangsta Girl on the Block (2012), a headless, armless figurine in a beautifully patterned dress, leaning alert on white gridded stacks that stand aloft like stereo speakers at a reggae block party. After the Flood (2012), is a pile up of carefully calibrated porcelain presented as if it were detritus: bases of vases, handles, fluting and, unexpectedly, a tiny cut off classical foot, atop a plain upended factory mold bowl. Elsewhere, manic laughing 18th and 19th century Buddhas sit near gently crumpled vases and a glitter disco ball.

Shechet inventively weaves alongside her own works historical Meissen figurines and tableware, creating a lively conversation between periods. Characters such as Dr. Bolardo (ca. 1738), with rakish hat and mustache, unnerving red lips and pink lined cape, seems to dance on thirteen plates, while a female figurine lies in a dessert stand with an upside down teacup and a blissful smile on her face. A Head of Vitellius ca.1715 in red stoneware, looks sideways and impassively at the room as if unfazed to find himself there. By the entrance is a silent film on a loop, Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory (ca. 1912-14) with costumed actors and fluffy greyhound playing traditional figurine tableaux. As a link between the far past and Shechet’s work, it acts as a charming welcome, and on the way out, farewell to the show.

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