In early 2013, Liam Gillick gave a series of four lectures at Columbia University entitled “Creative Disruption in the Age of Soft Revolutions,” part of the school’s Bampton in America series. These lectures and other writings, released in different publications in the last seven years (including several essays originally published in the online periodical e-flux), constitute a new book by Gillick, called Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820, recently published by Columbia University Press.

While it goes unsaid, the book’s subject is the revolutionary potential of art, but this takes some unpacking. As he twists his way through the text, loosely bringing readers through a history of contemporaneity, Gillick muses recurrently on myriad topics, from the impact of cultural relativism on art, to what he refers to as “the discursive” but you might know as relational aesthetics, politics and economics, and many other digressions in many different directions. Generally, the book is Gillick’s opinion on what contemporary art is. To uncover more specifics we need to look at whom this book is for and why they might read it.

The book is intended for very serious artists with an intellectual bent. It also is important to be an artist who has made art for a while and spent much of that time considering the point and place of their work in our world. It takes a great deal of specialized knowledge to enjoy, like a car repair manual or theoretical astrobiology seminar; criticizing its limited audience would be like criticizing the astrobiologist for not attempting to communicate with mechanics. Gillick is not addressing a popular audience for his lectures: he was speaking to one of the most elite, exclusive graduate art programs in the world. His fundamental allegiance is to art and artists, and while he might fancy himself a writer, academic, and theorist, he reads best as none of the above.

Gillick starts the book with his attempt to define and frame the art of our time. He examines the trend of “super subjectivity,” art that focuses myopically on the artist who is making the work. This retreat to the self, he asserts, comes from cultural relativism, the prevalent idea that all values and prerogatives are relative, no one better than another, and the effective banishment of hierarchy. Thus, Gillick concludes, artists can only solipsistically focus their art making on themselves, in such a cultural climate, for fear of being wrong or imposing on others. This is one facet of what Gillick would like to start calling “current” art, instead of “contemporary” art. But he chronically refuses to make limpid, by providing any concrete examples, his descriptions of what he calls “current” art. He likely does this because giving examples and defining terms has come to be seen as totalizing and limiting, a tool of the powerful to maintain an advantageous status quo. It turns the book into a gymnastic exercise in obfuscation, and because it sacrifices readability is much like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But if the reader is willing, they might allow that they are the example he is talking about but not naming. This passage might describe, quite accurately, you or a contemporary artist you know:

[Contemporary artists are] marked by a displayed self-knowledge, a degree of social awareness, some tolerance, and a little bit of irony […] The attempt to work is the work itself […] In this case no single work is everything you would want to do […] Hierarchy is dysfunctional and evaded in the contemporary and, therefore, key political questions […] are supplemented by irony and coy relations to notions of quality.

This author found his descriptions (while dated in some ways) uncannily self-applicable, and if you don’t, or find the sentiment dull, you might consider sitting this book out.

The writing can be bad at times, and it seems like some of the lectures were not thoroughly enough translated into the written word. The book is riddled with paragraphs composed solely of subordinate clauses separated by periods, adjectives almost randomly used as nouns, a meandering, luxated argumentative structure, and an absence of metaphor or analogy. Warren Buffett is able to spin enlightening and evocative metaphors about the complexities of finance; the same should be possible for art. (Interestingly, these two disciplines share a similarity: they both have a lot of people who use endless wads of jargon merely to disguise their own lack of intelligence and to disenfranchise the uninitiated. Which is rude–but not entirely the case with Gillick.)

What this means is that to read and enjoy this book, one should have a casual familiarity with the writings and coded language of Marxism and Continental philosophy. An example of code it is very helpful to know: in the chapter “Projection and Parallelism,” he mentions that the labor battles of the “last 150 years saw the victory of speculation over planning” which refers indirectly to conflicts of capitalism and socialism. But, of course, because Gillick is well read and observant he tells us the reason for all this coded academic language: “by 1963 [education] was a locus for struggle […] This coincided with an emerging sense that artists should be part of an educational process through the production of objects that required understanding: art as an extension of advanced reading.” Maybe the book needs a disclaimer: ADVANCED READING REQUIRED.

But one purpose of advanced reading is to attempt to imagine and describe new and completely different modes of thinking, unconstrained by the pernicious rules of our contemporary world. This has to do with his most worthwhile concern: the revolutionary potential of art. Deep down, Gillick’s aim is to empower those who can understand what he is talking about and hope to, if even unknowingly, define the better tomorrow.

Artists often forget that there is a higher burden of proof for one’s speculations elsewhere in the university and routinely wander into the academy saying whatever comes to their mind, without challenge, much as they do in their practice. If in academia there is both “hard” science and “soft” science, most good art is neither, often unable to find conclusive citation outside of itself. But it is an important role for art to play, as a complement to the more rational seeming aspects of the Western world, articulating murkier realms of the humanity. I’m not being pejorative or crass when I say Gillick gets to a descriptive truth of our world by being opaque. While there are many barriers to entry, as his intended audience I found myself having real moments of revelation and identification with the book, Gillick giving form to something I had seen and felt on many occasions but never had the ability to articulate. In his prescient way he says, “The contemporary is always an internal thing expressed only partially in the external.” His writing is much the same: a rich internal thought process only partially expressed externally.

Gillick, Liam. Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0231170208. 208 pages, $35

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 30 to June 5, 2011 (Attie closes May 30)
258 Main Street
Ridgefield, Connecticut 06877 (203)-438-4519

Putting into play a new curatorial strategy that has been in the works for over a year, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut recently opened six thematically linked solo exhibitions. “Portraiture at The Aldrich” marshals new and recent work by Jenny Dubnau, James Esber, Hope Gangloff, Thilo Hoffmann, Timothy White (all on view through June 5) and Shimon Attie (through May 30). While a bold concept, in practice the new scheme is off to a shaky start. Under one roof but not clearly orchestrated, the selection of artists ironically feels even more arbitrary than previously at the Aldrich, when visitors had to assess for themselves whether and how exhibitions interrelated. Of uneven interest, the current shows collectively constitute a portrait of an institution in transition.

The high point is “Head On,” seven oversized portrait busts in oil on canvas by Queens-based painter Jenny Dubnau. The artist works squarely in the realist tradition, eliciting a sense of the subject’s unvarnished presence through deft rendering of the glow of skin, the sheen of hair, the glint of an eye. Her compositions are a bit off-kilter, as in M.K., Pale Ground (all works 2010), in which the sitter’s elegant, oval face is mostly below the painting’s midline. The upper half of the canvas contains little but her forehead and that expansive, neutral ground—a silvery gray—which mirrors her inscrutable, unflappable expression.

Other paintings capture their sitter with an unflattering, impossible-to-hold expression, making it clear that photography is essential to Dubnau. With arched eyebrows and pursed lips, the subject of M.B. in Midsentence appears to wince as he makes some unknown rhetorical point; T.H., Glancing Sideways looks downright shifty-eyed, stealing a peek at the camera from his profile position. Self-portrait with Earrings is a monument to social anxiety. Flushed, her eyes bugging a bit, the artist lists to her left while licking her lips as if about to speak, spit, or whistle up some moxie.

The prolonged contact the portrait painter traditionally has with the sitter is in Dubnau’s practice replaced by a photo shoot; her considerable descriptive skills are focused not on skin and bones but on a layer of photographic emulsion. Dubnau asks if those awkward moments when our guard is down are more real, more true, than our poised, composed selves allow. The only one of her subjects who seems unaware of the camera is a bemused-looking fellow with a goatee and a prominent left ear, depicted in J.E. Looking to the Side.

That would be James Esber, whose exhibition, “Your Name Here,” is just down the corridor from Dubnau’s. Implicit in “Head On,” the subtheme of collaboration is overt in Esber’s ongoing “this is not a portrait“ series, of which over 100 examples are on view. Using a photocopy of the Brooklyn artist’s 2005 brush-and-ink drawing of Osama Bin Laden as a template, participants in the series have been briefed to “remake” the drawing according to instructions that stress line quality: “They should have whatever character is natural to your way of making marks.”

It is thus inevitable that some aspects of the original would be amplified and others supressed, but the range of variations on Esber’s distorted, spectral caricature goes well beyond matters of touch. In one (artist David Sandlin’s—though there’s no indication of the collaborators other than their signatures), a web of wrinkles on Bin Laden’s left cheek morphs into a pair of jet airliners. To hers, the painter Ann Pibal imparts volume and spatial clarity that is lacking in the others, including even Esber’s; painter Tom Burckhardt’s attention to shape over line resembles a photographic negative. Some look a mess; assuming an autographical presence exists in the trace of anyone’s “hand,” and allowing that each drawing is “by” both Esber and the collaborator, are those several in which the image is almost impossible to discern significantly less Esber’s? Here, collaboration is not a 50/50 proposition, but a sliding scale.

Interspersed with six barely-legible portraits of the fleetingly famous (e.g., pilot Sully Sullenberger; disowned adoptee Artyom Savelyev) fabricated directly on the gallery walls in colored plasticine, the drawing installation extends in a broken grid toward the gallery’s double-height ceiling. Regrettably, many are hung far too high for proper viewing. Intended, I suppose, to suggest the internet’s near-instantaneous proliferation of sensationalistic images (“viral” in fashionable parlance) and the voracious 24-hour news cycle, this treatment of the work privileges conceptual over material values in a self-defeating exhibition expedient. Bad idea.

Speaking of bad ideas, photographer Thilo Hoffmann takes his cues from the teenagers whose candids he shoots, using a large-format camera. His “High School Portraits” includes fourteen 45-by-32-inch color prints (all dated 2010) in which the subjects dictate the location, pose, props—all the creative input. Hoffmann enables the work by supplying the technical means, and squeezing the shutter.

The kids are at that phase when the imperatives of identity and self-image take hold on the psyche like the jaws of a bear trap, and daily behavior takes on a performative dimension. Some display the attributes of their professional ambitions by locating themselves at a piano or on Broadway; in an aggressively decorated bedroom or dockside by a placid lake, others contextualize themselves with indicators of leisure. Their self-absorption seems authentic; the problem is that there is little about the the photographs that is particularly distinctive. A video attests to the collaborative nature of the shoots, but it does not improve their results.

Katy Grannan has used a similar device to searing effect, but most of these “High Scool Portraits” are bland. One striking image transcends Hoffmann’s cumbersome conceptual apparatus: One More Year, Sophia Stoop/Katonah, NY in which an antsy young woman with kooky hair and a black portfolio, having positioned herself on a suburban train platform, scouts the tracks for the train that will whisk her to The City. Shot from a low angle, she is framed against a blue morning sky as clear and intense as her determined expression. Like Mary Richards in the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” you know she’s gonna make it after all. In assuming a role—that is, acting—Ms. Stoop lets Hoffmann (and the viewer) closer than do her contemporaries to the real self.

As with Hoffmann’s high schoolers, the inner lives of Hope Gangloff’s young professionals are revealed through their activities and accoutrements rather than a seismic reading of the subtleties of physiognomy. The nineteen paintings and drawings in “Love Letters” demonstrate this artist’s penchant for bold composition, local color, consistency of touch and anecdotal narrative detail—the hallmarks of illustration.

As a painter, Gangloff is in dialogue with Matisse and Schiele in her interest in combining retina-pleasing pattern and keyed-up color with the supple contours of the  human form. In an attitude of regal repose, the sleek dressmaker in E. Starbuck (60 by 108 inches, all works 2010) pauses among bolts of parti-colored fabrics; to a wall parallel to the picture plane her sketches are affixed, with bits of red-orange tape. A gooseneck lamp mimicks her boney physique, a bit too obviously. Sara VanDerBeek in Her Bath Closet is an odd painting. A stylish brunette gently contorts herself while focused on the task of painting her toenails; her foot is bigger than her head, the unfurling toilet paper sticks to her leg, and the mirror’s reflection is an inscrutable, dashed-off abstraction. But the contrast between the buzzy pattern of her kimono and the muted greenish grid of bathroom tiles is so overstated as to steal the scene.

In no hurry to dress, the sitter seems both languid and poised. In fact all Gangloff’s subjects preen a bit. The appearance of smugness is amusing in small doses but, like the pervasive doe-eyed ennui in Elizabeth Peyton’s oeuvre, this quirk has become a tic and, in “Love Letters” at least, a liability.

Once you read the brochure, it’s hard not to admire the intentions behind “MetroPAL.IS,” Shimon Attie’s 12-minute video installation in which a fry cook, a transit worker, a skate punk, a cross-dresser and other stereotypical urbanites are seen full-length on eight screens arranged in an inward-facing circle, declaiming fragments of official-sounding language like amateur thespians and gesturing obscurely. That text, it turns out, is a blend of the Palestinian and Israeli declarations of sovereignty—separated in time by forty years—and the players are immigrants to New York City from those communities abroad.

The stilted performances are meant to introduce elements of Classical Greek theater and sculpture, in a nod to the origins of Western democracy. But the speakers appear brainwashed, as if they memorized nationalistic boilerplate like poetry. Creatively ambitious, technically masterful, the work is admirably open-ended. Does Attie assert that a real “conversation” about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, even those who have gained distance from it, is forever precluded by exigencies of statehood? Who knows. The experience of standing among those policy-intoning wraiths is overwhelmingly claustrophobic—which might also be the point.

The consciousness reflected in Attie’s work is global, in marked contrast to Timothy White’s “Portraits.” About evenly divided between black-and-white and color, these thirty-seven immaculate giclée prints are supremely accomplished examples of the celebrity photographer’s craft, but functionally indistinguishable from commercial advertising and helpless to expand anyone’s understanding of the world. Each subject’s practiced control of his or her persona sucks the air out of most of them. An angular, angsty Nicolas Cage mugs mock-threateningly for the camera (Nicolas Cage, San Francisco, CA, 1998); Bruce Springsteen slumps in the dirt, romancing his Fender (Bruce Springsteen, Malibu, CA, 1991); James Gandolfini, very much in character as Tony Soprano, stares icily from the far end of a smoldering cigar as if considering whether the viewer is worth the trouble of whacking (James Gandolfini, New York City, 2006)

A shot of a still-girlish Shirley MacLaine would melt a heart of glass (Shirley MacLaine, Los Angeles, CA, 1991). A trouper, she smiles wanly in her dressing room mirror, slightly crinkly but still devastatingly pretty. Her tightly framed face is all that is in focus. And even while tooling around Central Park on a comically undersized motorbike, Paul Newman reflexively offers the camera a three-quarter view of his singular jawline (Paul Newman, New York City, 1988). No doubt White’s work appeals to a broad audience, and one understands the desire of any museum to draw visitors. But a worthwhile exhibition somehow challenges the viewer’s sensibilities or preconceptions, and it is difficult to imagine a less challenging exhibition than this.

Four years ago I had the honor of curating an exhibition at the Aldrich, so I write with some insight into the pressures and challenges that it and institutions like it routinely encounter. A group show, mine would be inconsistent with the Aldrich’s new programming paradigm, but the trouble I find with the exhibitions now on view is rooted more deeply—in the museum’s effort to ensure that the work it presents is accessible to a broad audience. Plenty of recent shows there—by the likes of Elana Herzog, Tom Burckhardt and Ted Victoria—have demonstrated that accessibility is not inconsistent with a deeply personal vision, compellingly expressed. While I’ve no doubt that the Aldrich will regain its footing, missteps currently delay the way forward.

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