September 12 to October 21, 2017
537 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

Perception is a function of rods and cones adjusting in the retina. Waking in the middle of the night, everything is black at first and only slowly more colors begin to emerge. It takes patience and acute attention to make sense of the new reality.

To see Ad Reinhardt’s paintings one must slow down the pace of everyday life. In the Blue Paintings gathered recently at David Zwirner Gallery, dating for the most part from 1950 to 1953, so much medium has been removed from the paint as to provide the opportunity to perceive color directly. These are among the most matte surfaces to be experienced in canvases emanating from the Abstract Expressionist circle in which the artist moved: there is no gloss, there is no reflection on the surface. The paint qualities associated with AbEx are almost entirely lacking in Reinhardt. His use of color is so subtle that it is on the very threshold of perception.

Reinhardt was an oppositional figure: he believed one could find as much meaning in what painters refused to do as in what they actually did do. In relation to the viewer, his void-like canvases inspire trust in the invisible through a viewer’s relationship to their own experiences.. .

Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt, born in Buffalo, New York in 1913, to an immigrant family, attended Columbia University to study art history in 1931. His tastes shifted towards European movements like Cubism and Constructivism. The historical avant garde created new qualifications first of convention and then of institution, through such specific symbolic acts,as when the Russian Constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko presented three monochrome canvases in red, blue, and yellow. In this gesture, he proclaimed the logical conclusion of painting Reinhardt went through several singular color periods in his career, and yet his fidelity to the primaries and, most famously black, actually represents a rejection to Rodchenko’s declaration. Paintings in this exhibition force the eye to slow down and see that there are actually several different hues of blue or green in each work. These elegantly considered paintings act as Rorschach tests for the brain. These somber monochromes — highly considered grids — reward the patient viewer with a site of peaceful contemplation. In a deep negotiation with ourselves, we are seeing rather than looking at art in a gallery transformed into a space of meditation. Experiences that might transcend the normal bounds of what we know through voids, monochromes, and windows could be perhaps paralleled with the revelation and exaltation of a deep spiritual experience. Perhaps this is why such artists as Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, James Turrell and Anish Kapoor have artworks that double as spaces of spiritual or religious pilgrimage.

Ad Reinhardt was very interested in such spiritual qualities: he sought to purify art and the way we experience it. He also had a desire to keep art and business separate, and while this body of work is hardly a critique of capitalism, he took great pleasure in the fact that these paintings were almost impossible to reproduce photographically. As with most avant-garde art, we must recalibrate our idea of value and redistribute who holds the keys and who does the work. Reinhardt challenges his audience to do more work than the artist, investing forms with their own feelings rather than discovering those of the artist. In this respect, Ad Reinhardt walks alongside Yves Klein as an early instigator of conceptual art. Defying conventions of their times, each produced a kind of determinism for new artistic sensibilities.

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March 30 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, (212) 563-7821

In an early episode in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the novella’s quixotic antihero, Frenhofer, is adding masterful corrective touches to a painting by Porbus for the benefit of the narrator, the young Poussin. “Look my boy, it is only the last stroke of the brush that counts; no one will thank us for what is underneath.” The history of modern art, it could be argued, is a riposte to such certitude. Abstraction, while often making the contradictory assertion that what you see is what you get — that the surface, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, is to be penetrated at peril — actually trades quite aggressively in the values that have been circumscribed. Heroics of elimination and purification might be intimated physically in the form of pentimenti; or else, in works that achieve non plus ultra reductivism, they are conceptually implicit.

Beguiling, enticing even, as the paintings of Nathlie Provosty are, it took this viewer three visits to be convinced by the totality of the artist’s vision. On the first visit, a troika of large, dark canvases, each seven feet high, dominated this sumptuously austere gallery space: West, Gilles and Twice Six (all works cited, 2016). Their declarative restraint established pictorial subtleties with such calm authority that the scattered smaller canvases seemed like intrusive souvenirs or afterthoughts. On a second visit, however, taking on trust the monumental severity of the big three, the eye could adjust to the busier, tightly knotted smaller compositions. These seemed to apply the lessons of their larger counterparts — or, one could equally say, anticipated the breakthroughs, for why assume that less always follows more? Inevitably, the fuller lexicon of colors and textures in the smaller works eclipsed what might seem like neat contained solutions in the bigger ones. But the experience of both visits yielded such satisfactions as to demand a third, which in turn rewarded this devotee with a sense of synthesis. Degrees of reduction or addition seemed determined in each canvas by particularities of emotional ambition rather than mere strategies dictated by size.

The three larger paintings each present a U-shaped black form in glossy application against a matt ground of similar hue. As befits paintings that glide effortlessly over the retina yet draw the viewer back again, the shapes variously resemble a boomerang and a magnet. If the initial impression, from a distance, of black shape against black ground, might recall the reductive late paintings of Alberto Burri in Celotex, that was belied, on closer inspection, by Provosty’s subtleties of texture and composition. Process in these “black” paintings hovers between deletion and accretion. The eye quickly becomes attuned to the survival of obscured, subcutaneous shapes and zones, and indeed colors, without compromising the surface’s serenely achieved sheerness. In this respect, the enigmatic black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, with their cruciform substructures, inevitably come to mind, as do the contingent emerging complexity of Suzan Frecon’s irregular geometries. In Provosty’s case, in counterpoint to the play of glossy bent shape against allover matt ground, an off-kilter vertical axis serves to further destabilize monochrome finality, adding uneven slivers of exposed canvas to outer edges of the rectangle to give resulting shape to what would otherwise have been merely accepted as a given, a field. These are complicatedly simple pictures.

The smaller paintings could equally be viewed, therefore, as models or as elaborations; as studies or as clarifications. Their titles intimate states of contrast in relationship to each other: “Assonance,” “Dissonance,” “Consonance,” “Resonance.” The dislodging of the bisected rectangle (now on both axes) and the misregistration of its segments is more explicit — perhaps, indeed, axiomatic — than in the three big paintings. The coloring of different shapes, and more crucially the contrasts in tone of shapes of the same color caught in axial division, offer clues about what lies beneath that tarmac-like top coat in the “black” trio, or what could result from the evisceration of that surface. Tight busyness results, paradoxically, in greater legibility, although that can be questioned if what the viewer ends up reading was unintentional. In Consonance II, for instance, tapering shapes that could signify shading add the illusion of pictorial depth to an upside-down magnet shape; in Assonance, the fractionally dislocated curves assume a marching limb schematic (bringing to mind Don Voisine and the prints of Willard Boepple).

Ultimately, it is hard to say which body of work is richer. The smaller works are more traditional in their density and the larger ones more modernist in their singularity — they seem, respectively, to evoke avant-garde (pre-war) and institutional (post-war) phases in the history of abstraction. If so, it is the dynamic of the relationship of the two that makes this striking exhibition feel relevant in a moment where Provosty’s peers amongst younger abstract painters are too often driven towards the extremes of rhetorical neo-formalist statement and intentionally irresolvable open-endedness.

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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

The post “I Was Free To Do As I Pleased”: Regina Bogat on her Life as an Artist appeared first on artcritical.

March 18 to April 18, 2015
530 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 924 2178

The majority of what I know about art is owed to two things. The first is making a lot of paintings and drawings. The second is conversations with Walter Darby Bannard.

Bannard is a third-generation Abstract Expressionist who came to prominence in the mid-1960s along with his friends Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. Clement Greenberg was close with all of them. Though Stella’s reputation held, Bannard’s fell along with Greenberg’s over the course of the 1980s, which concluded with Darby leaving New York and taking over as chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Whatever this meant for Darby’s career, it was immensely good fortune for me, as I was able to work with him as a graduate student.

Darby possesses a rare combination of taste, intellect, and verbal acumen. His writings, an archive of which I have edited, contain some of the most astute observations about art I’ve run across outside of Greenberg’s. Indeed, Darby could and would argue with Greenberg to their mutual pleasure.

Having quietly nurtured talent at UM since then, the silence around his legacy broke on the evening of March 19 of this year, when an exhibition of his reductive paintings from the late 1950s and early ‘60s opened at Berry Campbell. At one point, hardly another body could have fit in the gallery. Darby stood at the front desk, greeting well-wishers (and a few ill-wishers, too) with his customary jocularity. I spoke with him the following morning.

Franklin Einspruch: Did you have an initial “aha” moment about abstraction? How did you know that it was something that you wanted to be involved in?

Walter Darby Bannard: It just seemed more exciting, that’s all. It’s kind of like food, you discover that something tastes good and you want more. At Princeton in the mid-’50s I had an instructor who was an abstract painter, Bill Seitz, who later became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He did the “Responsive Eye” exhibition, which was an Op Art show. The people I was friends with liked abstract painting. Then Frank [Stella] came along, a couple of classes behind me, and he was an abstract painter. Mike Fried was there, and a guy named Dave Comey, who loved autos and killed himself in a car crash unfortunately. We all just loved abstract painting and went to New York and looked at abstract painting.

Abstraction bewilders a lot of people when they first see it. It did me. You didn’t experience that.

I was brought up in an atmosphere with a lot of music in it, which is an analogous interest. When I was seven years old we lived in the country, at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a black church. I was a kid in the country and I would wander around. One Sunday I was next to this black church. I heard this music coming out of it. I was – what’s the cliche? – riveted. I’d never heard anything like it. I actually went during the week and broke into the church to look at the pump organ and stuff they had there and pushed it and wondered at it. I thought these machines were making the music. I was only seven years old.

That’s how it is with abstract painting, it just takes you over. I remember looking at one of these little intellectual magazines when I was sixteen and I saw a de Kooning painting, and thought, wow, that’s really cool.

When I was eleven I saw a picture in the rotogravure, the color section of the Sunday paper. This magazine had a page that said, “which kind of art do you like?” On one side there was a picture of a painting of a clown, and on the other side was a painting by Ben Nicholson. I said to myself, well, I sure know what I like. In fact I’m going to cut it out and put it in my wallet. I loved this Ben Nicholson so much and before I had no idea that there was any such thing as that. It’s like falling in love. I had no idea that there were any social consequences to this. The magazine only did it to get people upset, presuming that everyone is going to like the clown, and I didn’t even know that, I just thought the Nicholson was a beautiful painting. It was in a rotogravure that had all the quality of comic strips, but I just loved it.

Do you remember the frame of mind that you brought to this work in the Berry Campbell exhibition, the impulse to make a painting as simple as possible?

My professor at Princeton told Frank, David, and me that we should go look at Rothko. So we went to look at Rothko, and we thought it was idiotic. It was just a lot of yellow – this show happened to be a bunch of yellow squares. But it affected me mightily and pretty soon I was painting Rothkos in our little studio. I was interested in all kinds of painting. I was very interested in Pop Art, for instance. Rauschenberg in particular turned me on. And I did lots and lots of Pop Art things. I did “event”-type art. We were all anti-de Kooning, who for us represented sensitivity, and we had decided that we were not going to be sensitive. I got the idea that it would be really cool to get a big balloon and shape it as a de Kooning woman, fill it with hydrogen, let it up in the sky right before dawn, and when the sun came up, to fire tracer bullets at it so that the whole thing would explode like the Hindenberg.

The Beat poets, Corso and Kerouac and Ginsberg and a few others, came down to Princeton to give a reading. So I had decided that I was going to make a big hit with these guys by telling them my Blow Up de Kooning idea. They were nice, quiet, polite people. They weren’t wild at all. I told the whole room, which turned utterly silent. LeRoi Jones, who later became Amiri Baraka, turned to me and said, “Man, you really are crazy.” I was so hurt and abashed. They just thought I was nuts.

Before I was making Pop Art stuff and doing drawings of figures floating in the sky. I had an obsession with that for some reason. Then I saw a Clyfford Still in Art News in 1958, and I was fascinated. It was a full-page red painting, a really good one. So I went right to my studio and did Clyfford Stills for a while. I was also interested in centrality and simplicity and this idea of presentation. I had this painting with a red circle and some Clyfford Still-y stuff on top and some Clifford Still-y stuff on the bottom. Frank said, you don’t need the thing on the top, and Mike Fried said, you don’t need the thing on the bottom, so I had a circle. I said, holy shit, that’s really all I need to make a total, in-your-face presentation. I thought that was just wonderful.

Then I went to see the Barnett Newman show at French & Co. I saw that there was another person doing the same thing, only with a line instead of a circle. That told me that I had permission to do what I was doing. Back then if you did a painting like that people wouldn’t even take it as a painting. The closest they could come was to call it Bauhaus, which was not only out of fashion but didn’t interest us at all. That was an absolutely different motivation altogether.

So you made these paintings before you saw Ad Reinhardt.

I did see Reinhardt, but I didn’t like it. I saw one of the black paintings in the Modern, and all the black paintings have this faint, slightly different value and design on them. But this one had wrinkles, and the light from the window was making the wrinkles the strongest component on the painting. All you saw was light wrinkles and blackness. I said, “That sucks, that’s a cop-out, I hate that.” In my journal I wrote, “NO REINHARDT!!!” But Reinhardt was one of the people doing this presentational work.

And by presentation you’re talking about..?

Simplicity that’s not Cubist-derived. Mondrian is Cubist-derived, and Bauhaus is Cubist-derived, and Malevich and all the Russian constructivists all came out of Cubism. It was taking cubism to an extreme. Me and Frank and Frank’s buddies, Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, didn’t have any interest in Cubist-derived simplicity. Ellsworth Kelly was doing it and Rauschenberg was doing it in a way with his early, simple stuff. Gottlieb was doing it. There was this impulse to put a simple thing right in the middle of the picture and it wasn’t Cubist simplicity, it was presentational simplicity. Something was staring right back at you like it was another person. That idea just fascinated me. I thought, this is the best way to present color – make it into a painting, but just barely.

Did anyone push back on the idea that that was painting? Did you encounter resistance?

I didn’t encounter resistance because nobody had any idea what I was doing. I was painting in my basement and didn’t have any interest or exposure until ‘64, which is about five years after I started doing it. My first exposure was at Tibor de Nagy in 1965. Of course, there were people who looked at the paintings and said, “This is awful, this is stupid, this is not even painting,” but not the art world, because the art world didn’t know who the hell I was. When I got started with this it was just a matter of developing color combinations so I was happy as a clam for four or five years, painting these things. But nobody really cared except for people like Frank and Mike.

Why did you stop making them?

Boredom. It was laborious to make these paintings. They required layer after layer after layer of paint. Otherwise you wouldn’t get the simplicity and the lack of brushstrokes. It was like Chinese lacquer, you needed the layers to make it work. And then I saw Olitski’s paintings, and I was knocked out. I had a crisis in the mid-Sixties, and I decided I had to do something new. The problem with abstraction is that when you have a crisis in painting you have to start from scratch. Everybody thinks it’s easy but when you begin something new you have to get yourself a whole new set of conventions and methods.

I’ve been telling students for years that being an artist and feeling bored with your work is like being a doctor and killing your patient. You’ve gone into a fundamentally incorrect place with regard to your work.

It’s an element of seriousness about your art. If you’re getting bored with your art and you recognize it, I think you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise you’re just churning out stuff forever. That would make me go nuts.

Clem came out to my house where I had all my circles and squares, and he pulled out some older paintings that were more painterly and said, “This is what you’re going to be doing in ten years, this other stuff is temporary.” I thought, this guy’s full of shit. Those circles and squares, he liked them all right, but he didn’t think there were long-lasting. And he was right.

When did you first meet Greenberg?

At the Gauss lectures at Princeton in 1958. Mike Fried was very interested in these lectures so Frank and I went with him. I didn’t understand a thing that he was saying, which wasn’t his fault, but I got to talk to him later at the after party.

I was working in a gallery that was also a frame shop and a print shop, and my boss was a huge admirer of Clem. My boss was already getting impatient with me because I would paint and I would work as little as I could. This guy was in the front of the gallery, I was in the back, and Clem walked in and this guy was absolutely beside himself with pleasure. And Clem said, “Where’s Darby?” He came in the back because he was interested in talking to me. He liked what I said about Gottlieb at that initial meeting, I remember. He said, “You understand Gottlieb better than anybody I know. That’s great.” He sought me out at the store and that was a huge ego boost for me and the opposite for the guy who owned the gallery. I thought that was really cool. So I kept up that relationship. We used to sit and argue and talk all the time. It was wonderful to have that kind of brain to work with.

We disagreed about a lot but not the fundamentals. He underrated American artists, oddly enough. Winslow Homer, Milton Avery, Edward Hopper he didn’t think much of, and I thought and still think they’re wonderful. I thought he had a little too much appreciation for the newness of the mechanical operations behind Pollock’s drip paintings. A lot of his admiration for Olitski was the same kind of thing. There were a lot of artists he liked that I thought were second-rate. He underrated [Giorgio] Morandi and he overrated [Georges] Matthieu. Horacio Torres was an interesting artist but that whole business of cutting off the head and the legs is such a corny thing. Torres was okay but Clem just went wild about him.

Clem liked the old masters better than the abstract artists. If we were at a museum he’d say, “Let’s go see the old masters.” I’d say, “Oh, come on, Clem, I don’t want to see the old masters, I’m tired of them. They’re all brown. Let’s go see if there’s anything modern.” I always liked modern artists better than the old masters unless we’re talking about someone like Rembrandt, who’s a goddamn jumping genius. Most of them really are just brown and dark and gloomy.

Something I’ve come to appreciate in Clement Greenberg’s writings is that after a while he not only knew that he was going to be misunderstood, he knew the manner in which he was going to be misunderstood. So he started to try to preempt the misunderstanding, then finally gave up on the prospect of ever being correctly read.

Yes, he said several times in his writing something like, “Of course what I’m saying won’t be understood.” Even last night at the opening there were people who wanted to make big points to me about Greenberg. They absolutely detest him and completely misunderstand him. This thing is still going on, even now, with people claiming that he found artists who were cooperative and told them what moves to make, and that they became his little clique. I said to one of these people last night that I used ask Clem all the time what I should do in my studio. I’d say, “Tell me what to do!” And he’d say, “No! I’m not going to do that. All I’m going to tell you is that I like this and don’t like that.” And that’s all he ever did. He never had any suggestions like, “There’s too much red over there.” But nobody wants to believe that.

Why do you think that is?

That’s a very interesting question. What Greenberg did infuriated the art world. It had something to do with the authority and the quality of his writing. I can’t say forcefulness of his writing because it wasn’t forceful writing.

He admitted to its being declarative, as he put it.

It was declarative but that derived from his eye, and his certainty about the rightness of his eye, his ability to see what was good and not so good. He wrote so clearly and so transparently that it just got people enraged.

If you don’t have commitment to good art as such, and you don’t believe the idea that there’s very little good art, you’re on the defense against anyone who does believe it. And if that person has power and influence he becomes the villain. If you’re in the art world, and you’re on the side of crappy art, which 99% of the art world is, it’s an automatically inimical thing to have a voice like that around. Anybody who embodies this is an enemy. That attitude is killing the messenger because that’s basically what Greenberg was. This is the guy who said that Jackson Pollock was one of the strongest painters of our generation back in the 1940s. And lo and behold, it turned out to be true. This pisses people off. I had a friend who went around saying that Jackson Pollock couldn’t be a good painter because he didn’t use a brush. So if Jackson Pollock becomes a million-dollar painter and everyone says he’s great, you were wrong, you’re a jerk. People don’t like that.

Your motives for making art have stayed constant from almost the beginning, it seems.

Following my eye and impulses, that’s all. Everybody’s gone off on other tangents, but to me that’s the most interesting thing. Painting survives because of its restrictions. I like to compare it to games. If you go out and play a football game and people get a bat and say, “let’s use this instead,” you’re going to have an audience that says, “I don’t like this.” They want something that has conventions and supports those conventions.

The first panel I was ever on was “Painting Is Dead” in 1966 at New York University. I was sitting next to Robert Rauschenberg, and the moderator, Barbara Rose, was in between us and Donald Judd and Larry Poons on the other side of the table. Of course, I was all for painting, Poons was all for painting, Judd said that painting was completely abolished, and Rauschenberg didn’t give a damn. We went through the whole thing, the question of whether painting was dead, and of course we didn’t decide anything, but we had a good time.

Everybody was very sincere back then. They asked for questions after the panel discussion and people would get up and make speeches. This one guy got up and began making a statement. Rauschenberg yawned and he started sinking down in his seat. So I started sinking down in my seat too. We were both looking at each other and sinking in our seats until our faces were at the level of the table. The audience was looking at us and howling with laughter, and this guy thought that he was being funny, so he got into it and thought he was a comedian, that everybody was laughing at what he said. It just turned into chaos. The point is that 1966 is fifty years ago and painting isn’t dead. So there you go.

The third-generation abstractionists were not hostile to Pop Art. You yourself were making Pop-inspired paintings for a time. The stereotype is that the circle of Greenberg recoiled at the very sight of Pop, but it wasn’t that way at all.

Even Clem, he thought Robert Indiana was okay, and Jim Dine a little bit. He thought that Lichtenstein was a good designer. He would always give everybody their due. He just didn’t think that Pop Art amounted to very much. Clem was much more generous in his taste than people give him credit for. He used to tell a story about himself that when he juried an exhibition – and he was asked to jury a lot back then – he was always susceptible to giving out too many prizes and being too inclusive, to the point of putting the little old lady flower paintings in the show. He wasn’t black and white about things at all. There was more of that spirit back then, that Pop was just another development, and the same for minimalism when it came along. There were all these happenings, like the ones with [Claes] Oldenberg and Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainier. I thought they were really very interesting.

It hardens up when somebody gets successful. When Pop Art got successful it seemed to be overvalued. Nobody liked that very much. The idea gets around that a few people are getting too much of the pie. It’s human nature. We need a social scientist to write about this dispassionately and give us a real cultural history, somebody who looks at us as specimens, the way Margaret Mead looked at the South Sea Islanders.

These things don’t get worked out in the short term, and the short term is fifty years. Look at Andy Warhol. People are paying millions of dollars for his work. I keep wondering, When are people going to get tired of this guy’s paintings? They’ve turned into the ultra-tchotchke. If you have a Warhol you’re a hotshot collector. The quality of the thing, whether it’s good art or not, is absolutely beside the point. So there’s no selection being made on that basis. Things actually change very slowly now in the art world. People think that it’s very fast, and it is fast in the sense that it’s so big and there’s churning on the edges, but meanwhile most of it stays the way it is.

But things are beginning to separate. There’s a whole underground of abstract painting that doesn’t get any publicity. With everyone going in so many different directions, it’s getting to the point that you can choose your own genre, and the genres will be able to split off into their own tribes. The enlargement of the art world means, I think, that the pie is getting bigger for everyone. The abstract painters ought to recognize that they have their own art world, and should have their own magazines and have their own critics and all that so they don’t have to reconcile what they’re doing with everyone else. If that could come about you could get a Renaissance of abstract painters competing against each other, not giving a damn about the other stuff, and you could start getting abstraction to take advantage of all the things that got cut off back in the early sixties when Pop Art and Minimalism took over the market. There are a lot of people not in the market who understand good painting and can recognize it. They’re all over the place and they just need their own family.

If that tribe of abstractionists comes together, what are the possibilities that were cut off that they could work on?

Well, color is one. Nobody really gets into the mechanics of color. Even very good painters never got into the mechanics of color. Abstract painters shunted it aside because they considered it unimportant. As a consequence they used colors out of the jar. And they used color for area identification rather than coloristic effect.

Even someone like Kenneth Noland?

Oh, Noland would be a supreme example of someone to follow. He was influenced by Paul Klee, another one who did very interesting things with color. Noland was able to do just magical stuff putting colors together. I envy him endlessly. It’s like Matisse, you can’t point at what’s good about it, it just hits you, bam, right in the eye. Why his colors worked, how he used shapes and symmetricality to make his colors effective, all that could be explored further.

There’s also the idea of using open space to make paintings, like in [Mark] Rothko and [Morris] Louis. There are a lot of things that [Hans] Hofmann did that nobody was able to follow up on. It seems like there’s no end to the possibilities of hard edge combinations. Another thing would be the sophisticated use of new mediums, materials that weren’t even around in the Sixties. There are so many things you can do that haven’t been done because it doesn’t have the support.

Innovation has collapsed into weirdness that doesn’t have any lasting quality to it. Innovation in abstraction used to be recognized. That’s what happened in the Forties. Everyone knew how good de Kooning was. We have to build our own art world in which people recognize when something is good and new. The example I always use is Rex Stewart. According to a friend of mine, when Stewart heard Louis Armstrong he said he was never going to play his horn again. He just sat there at the table and cried. It took three seconds for him to recognize how good Louis Armstrong was because of the cultural structure around the conventions. That’s what does it. Without that you have nothing. You need a tribe and a big family and art teachers and writers. Get smart people together who can create something worthwhile.

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Dominique Lévy supplies the back story to French-born Polish artist Roman Opalka with a show of works from 1959 to 1963 that precede his breakthrough to the series for which he is best known, 1 – ∞, also presented here: the precisely painted horizontal rows of numbers in white on a gray ground. Upstairs from the display of Infinity canvases are seven works on paper titled Etude sur le mouvement and two works titled Chronome, 1963. The Etudes are typical of European gestural abstract painting of that period in that Opalka is engaged in filling the surface of the paper with improvised black ink scrawls, marks and squiggles. The resulting compositions are irregular masses floating on the empty page. By the end of this period Opalka’s marks have become less and less expressionistic as he covers the entire canvas with small dots, resulting in black monochromes. He then abandons this approach, but not entirely, as he will continue to be concerned with filling the painting’s surface with marks for the rest of his life. The principle difference is that his marks are less subjective and more logical once they are numbers, which define their own structure and order as well as being both abstract and representational.

The infinity series was the result of Opalka deciding in 1965 to count to infinity and in turn, paint each number in sequence. By the time of his death in 2011 he had filled 233 canvases. they are all the same size and all inscribed with numbers drawn with near machine-like consistency. The count begins in the upper right corner and ends lower left. Each painting contains 20-30,000 consecutive numbers. Each numeral that makes up these numbers is slightly lighter then the previous one. The fade is a result of the diminishing amount of paint on the brush as he moves from one numeral to the next. The density of white signals the beginning of the next number.

At a distance the numbers’ differing densities form optical patterns as a result of which the works initially resemble blotchy monochromes. Opalka considered each painting to be a detail, a fragment of a continuum punctuated by small indifferent incidents. The earliest paintings were of white numerals on a black ground, but over the course of the years Opalka began to add one percent of white to the background color. By 2008 he was painting white numbers onto white grounds. According to gallery notes, Opalka recorded himself saying each number as he worked.

Accompanying the paintings, though much less interesting than them, are Opalka’s self-portraits in which at the end of each work session he would take a passport style photograph of himself. Subsequently, we have a history of his aging appearance.

Like Samuel Beckett, Opalka found incredibly economic solutions to making works that are seemingly about everything and nothing at all. Opalka’s paintings are at once formal, process oriented, personal, conceptual, optical, autographic, ethical, aesthetic, concerned with phenomena of repetition, variation, etc., and yet are not about anything more than filling the canvas, duration and persistence (obsession or compulsion) notwithstanding. The works are hermetic in that they tell us nothing about process, time, numbers, mathematics, art, or for that matter about their maker — excepting his resolute commitment to the singular nature of his project.

If parallels are to be drawn with other artists of the 1960s, the two that most immediately come to mind are Ad Reinhardt and On Kawara, both of whom were also committed to rigorous programs of repetition and variation — although each artist arrived at this everything-in-nothing position by very different routes and to differing ends. All three strip painting of subjectivity as much as they can, nearly reducing it to pure information. Reinhardt’s so-called “black” paintings are all squares divided into nine smaller squares and are uniformly painted in differing shades of black. Kawara’s paintings, also begun in the ’60s, conform to one of eight standard sizes, ranging from 8 by 10 inches to 61 by 89 inches and all horizontal in orientation. The dates are hand-painted and are always centered on the canvas and painted white, though the background colors variy. The front page of a newspaper, which corresponds to the day and place the painting was made, accompanies each painting.

Despite their aesthetic differences, however, beyond the repetitive format, each of them has taken as their subject a different aspect of time. For Kawara, time is punctuated by events; for Opalka it is a continuum; and with Reinhardt time is duration marking the transition from one state to another. Each artist seeks to use painting to generate that key existentialist concerns with “being” in time — that is of being present and encountering the real. Opalka uses interval as his means to index our relationship to Newtonian time as something measurable within which events take place and are experienced.

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&Model
Crossing Lines
January 22 to February 22, 2014

Henry Moore Institute
Dennis Oppenheim: Thought Collision Factories
November 21 to February 16, 2014

The cultural center of the city of Leeds can be found in a pair of museums located on the Headrow, a prominent avenue adjacent to the majestic Victorian City Hall: the Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute. Around the corner is &Model, a rough-and-ready raw space gallery started by a group of art professors from the Leeds Metropolitan University, including the collaborative team Nathaniel Mellors and Chris Bloor, and James Chinneck and Derek Horton. Liam Gillick has in the past expressed his pet theory that Yorkshire has been singled out in the UK to produce the nation’s most notable visual artists: Damien Hirst, David Hockney and Henry Moore are all from the Leeds-Bradford region. Gillick’s theory is that each of these artists has a plain-talk approach to art that allows them to be more accessible to a British public that has always been a bit cagey about contemporary art. Despite Gillick’s assertion, the three venues above present a combination of conceptually challenging exhibitions, or cast shows involving traditional genres that don’t really play to a public merely comfortable with the status quo.

Nocturne at the Leeds Art Gallery (through April 2014) is much more than its simple premise suggests. A direct statement of an exhibition, it presents the work of John Atkinson Grimshaw, George Shaw, Jack Yeats, George Sauter and Walter Greaves. Set in a single room, the canvasses form a round-table discussion on the hazy boundary between night and day—the idolization of “verdurous glooms.” The conversation lies mostly between Grimshaw, the Leeds based Victorian painter who lends a gothic sensibility to his renderings of what were contemporary scenes, and George Shaw, a 2011 Turner Prize nominee whose images of desolate suburban ruins have a similar lyrical melancholy, sans the Victorian saccharine historicism. Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay Park, Leeds (1872) is reminiscent of René Magritte’s series The Empire of Light (1950-54), in its surreal combination of brightly articulated shadows on a park path, against a twilit sky. Grimshaw uses the conceit of the Nocturne to play capriciously with light sources in his claustrophobic canvas. Meanwhile, Shaw presents a return to nature in his work The End of Time (2008-9). The nemesis of the nocturne, artificial light, has been rendered null and void with the demolition of a small suburban home, whose foundations now sit in the semi-darkness that was ubiquitous before Edison.

Curators Patrick Morissey and Clive Hanz Hancock presented a more polemical framework in the exhibition Crossing Lines at &Model. The curators have declared a general renewed interest in “the non-objective” in the 21st century, the exhibit feature sixteen British painters who work in this mode of abstraction. Artists such as Andy Wicks, Giulia Ricci, Frixos Papantoniou, Alex Dipple and Marion Piper take a multifaceted approach to image and object making, exploring pattern, line, edge and texture. The show is quite encyclopedic in its explorations of form, but most of the works resonate harmoniously; Ricci’s delicate, and ethereal honeycomb patterns provide a soft response to Papantoniou’s incisively colored sleek hard edge compositions. Add to this the injection of another fifteen artists in the form of a show reel of digital video and sound work in Parallel Lines that complements the visual mode of representation with extended forms encompassing extra sensorial interaction. Parallel Lines features the work of Anthony Braxton, Rebecca Hart, Jamshed Miah, Laura Eglington and Ad Reinhardt’s ironic manifestos, The Twelve Technical Rules (or How to achieve the Twelve Things to Avoid).

Two machines designed to embody idea production inhabit the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute. An exhibition of the American conceptual sculptor, Dennis Oppenheim, titled Thought Collision Factories presented the artist’s Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. Utilizing flares, fireworks and a cotton candy machine, these pieces are fascinating, even delightful to look at, but at the same time it is difficult to share/comprehend Oppenheim’s Cold War enthusiasm for archaic aluminum slides, gears, gaskets and wheels when every woman, man and child has access to all human knowledge in a pair of glasses or a wristwatch and can at the very least set up a basic operating platform on any computer. His interest in fireworks and flare-based outdoor installations is a different matter. The documentation of his various pyrotechnic projects, large scale ephemeral incendiary displays featuring pithy phrases such as “Go Further With Fiction” (1974) or “Mind Twist” (1975)—meant to be viewed from afar and integrate text into the landscape, exemplify the exhibition’s main goal of presenting Oppenheim as an artist whose practice inhabited and served as a nexus between sculpture, conceptual art and language. The exhibition is wonderfully thorough—sketches, maps, photographs and measured presentation drawings of the mechanical pieces and related works line the walls. The videos Machine-Gun Fire (1974) and Echo (1973) and the sound Piece Ratta-callity (1974) provide a simpler and more poignant representation of the artist’s process and his contribution to contemporary discourse than the oddly dated dinosaurs in the main rooms.

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