February 9 to April 6, 2019
522 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, matthewmarks.com

What do we expect from the late work of great painters? If you are a Romantic, your proof of greatness might be evinced by a final letting go——a pure abandonment to the id, a total acceptance of the painter’s deepest urges. No second guesses, no capitulation to analytical thinking, no recycling of past successes; just allowing the body, with its supposedly pure inner wisdom, to do what it needs to do. A Romantic might appreciate the arid grace of dementia-afflicted late de Kooning, or the brazen “blend of slapstick idiocy and gallantry,” as the painter Carroll Dunham once wrote of libidinous late Picasso. For a Romantic, this might seem the heroic response to the knowledge that one’s time is about up.

But are we getting something different from the late work of Jasper Johns? Johns has never been a Romantic. Don’t expect to find a “rage against the dying of the light.” Which is not to say there is no passion in these paintings, it’s just that his relentless denials have conditioned us to be circumspect about making any claims about them at all. So how do we react to Johns’s late work? Despite the startling complex simplicity of his initial paintings of flags and targets, he has gradually developed a quality of rigorous self-examination and reflection on the processes through which he has created his work.

Alexi Worth, in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, discusses what he terms as Johns’s “scrupulousness”: writes of how

Johns seems to be allergic to the nervous approximations that characterize much art talk — not to mention ordinary conversation. He would rather say nothing than assent to a banality; would rather deconstruct a question than accept a false premise. The more one talks with him, the more his scrupulousness seems distinctively extreme: not just a mannerism, but a deeply ingrained reservoir of feeling.

Looking at these latest works, Johns’ scrupulousness seems to have intensified rather than been left behind. You can almost hear him ask himself, “What am I doing today?” or “Now what happens if I do it this way?” As the artist approaches 90, these questions take on poignant urgency. Though each image might address a new subject, every piece here is filled with references to images, marks, and tropes from earlier work. Even without the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons that peak out of many of these works, it is almost impossible to look at them and not think that here is a person patiently and systematically facing the prospect of death: The completion of the content of his artistic life.

A whole series of work in this show centers on an image of grief. The words “Farley Breaks Down After Larry Burrows,” stenciled on each of the untitled canvases and drawings and prints in this group, refer to an image in a famous LIFE magazine photo essay by Larry Burrows of Farley, a mission leader during Vietnam. Johns has chosen the particular photo of Farley burying his sobbing face in his arms after a battle where comrades were killed and wounded. But curiously, the original title of the Burrows photo was “Farley Gives Way,” not breaks down. What we see in these paintings, drawings, and prints is a literal breaking down of the image’s surface; not just an emotional breakdown but an actual disintegration of the image into marks and puddles of paint, and sometimes, silkscreened cartoons and play money.

Understanding this photographic moment of grief is not only about the grief, but the effect of death on the living. Each image can be seen as a completed text which — like a life itself — is unified, but composed of many small, seemingly random experiences whose relationships to each other, upon examination, become infinitely complex.

Other references to his own earlier works abound: For instance, the vase/silhouettes figure/ground optical illusion image. Do you see two symmetrical facing profiles, or the vase that exists as the negative space between them? Johns favors optical illusions that, depending on one’s attention, flip between two images such as a vase or a pair of silhouettes, or a duck and a rabbit, or (but not here) a young woman and an old crone. In the context of these paintings, the conundrum of contemplating these dualities of image from a single point of view could be a metaphor for one’s inability to imagine the disintegration of one’s own consciousness. We can grieve for the dead, we can know that we will die, but we can’t imagine being dead. It’s reminiscent of the title of Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

Not only do we have this examination of a man burying his face in his arms in the “Farley Breaks Down” paintings (ironically, the photographer himself later died in a helicopter crash), but there is also a series of works based on John Deakin’s photograph of a young Lucian Freud on a bed, with his face held in his right hand. The photo, which had belonged to Francis Bacon, is paint-spattered, creased, folded and torn. Johns already used this photo for a series of paintings titled “Regrets” that were shown at MoMA a few years ago. In it are newspapers on the floor, and a diamond patterned quilt on the bed. You can see why it spoke to Johns——it has so many iconographic elements that he already uses. The folds, patterns, newsprint, and splotches create a very Johnsian, mark-abstracting surface. Curiously, the resulting images in both these series reminded me of the way Bonnard broke down his painting surfaces into a series of abstract shapes and marks, which adds the possibility of another layer of meaning, as Bonnard’s paintings, though in a different way, also explored quotidian daily life. By horizontally mirroring the image of the torn photo, Johns further abstracts it and turns a part of a white wall into a shape that becomes a skull.

The ideas of mirroring and reflection have occupied Johns’s process for a long time. In treating an area as a mirror, he turns the formal idea of flatness into a more sophisticated and useful concept that the surface of the canvas is a field, with properties that the painter assigns to it. Mirroring might have to do with his long involvement with printmaking but it is worth remarking upon because it seems to be another way of breaking down an image, making forms abstract, and destabilizing a single reading.

Despite flashes of mordant humor – a whole series of dancing skeletons, for instance – we don’t have the pleasure in this late work of the lush encaustic surfaces familiar in early Johns, or the startlingly opaque conundrum of a simple, ubiquitous pop image to offset the lugubrious tone. Some of these paintings even have dispiriting harsh acrylic texture, and if you didn’t know the photographic references some were based on, you might not have a clue of what you were looking at.

Deconstructing these images is an endless task,  and trying to find the Easter eggs of hidden references and relationships keeps a viewer in a submissive, student-like relationship to the artist. For instance, Johns constantly references Picasso. The double silhouettes could be Picasso profiles, or Johns’ own profile, or both. There is a series that uses a Picasso figure with a hand to its mouth. Is the point to identify his artistic stature as equal to that of Picasso, or does he have other motives?

In place of solipsistic questions like, “Do those ASL hand signs of letters stand for significant initials?” or “What image did those stick figures holding torches or brushes come from?” we are better off asking “What do I feel when looking at this and why am I feeling that way?”

Conversely, we could also use these paintings to consider the nature of grief and mortality. What is a life? What is regret?  What is it that we grieve? Perhaps the feelings we are left with mirror our struggles with our own mortality. The paintings are the intense crackling evidences of a lively mind, pushing and probing and asking uncomfortable questions about what it feels like to be alive and continue to relentlessly produce, after having lived so long.

The post Uncomfortable Questions: Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

February 28 to August 27, 2018
Millbank, London SW1
tate.org.uk

No matter how big the curator’s umbrella, some of the artists huddled under it in “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” seem destined to slip on London‘s rain-soaked pavement. In Tate Britain’s blockbuster summer show, which revolves around London-based painters, there’s an unruly range of representational imagery. So missteps are not surprising. What is surprising is how much power huddles beneath this exhibition‘s leaky umbrella.       

One huddler is a Swiss artist who never lived in Great Britain. Why is this show’s only sculpture even here? Granted, Giacometti inspired several key players in All Too Human, but so too did many other artists who are not included. Perhaps  Woman of Venice IX (1956), whose feet are almost ten times larger than her head, kicked and stomped her way in.

There’s a high voltage figure/ground sizzle jolting many of the paintings in this show. It runs from the group of complex compositions of R. B. Kitaj, an American expatriate who lived in London for almost forty years, to the turbulent canvases of Cecily Brown, a Londoner presently living in America. A more probable justification for including Woman of Venice IX, therefore, is that she melds place and person. Textured like tree bark, earth, and rocks, she is landscape incarnate. I never thought about a standing-straight-up figure so clearly in this way before — with an earthy surface, a faraway head, a middle ground body, and foreground feet.

Giacometti’s figure-ground “Woman” stirs the center of a gallery filled with portraits by Francis Bacon. Eyeing her, a prowling, ravenous Dog (1952) growls beneath its breath and saliva. Female as food. I couldn’t decide if the erect figure was scared stiff or impervious.

Mostly, Bacon’s cast of characters are “not only far from divine but all too human,” a phrase of  Friedrich Nietzsche’s that provides this exhibition with its title. Curator Elena Crippa’s choices are often grippingly rude and unpredictable, as are some of the nonhuman subjects included here, like Bacon’s dog and a bloodthirsty baboon.

While there are no feral animals in Brown’s Teenage Wildlife (2003), two youths – the male  dressed, the female naked – peek out amidst tangled flora. The zestful rhythms juicing the painting’s skin revel forward and back, as shapes and spaces pop and recede, a marked difference in speed and spirit from Bacon’s downbeat Portrait (1962), where a physiological figure/ground flip-flop prevails. Internal organs of Bacon’s sometime muse and lover, Peter Lacey — who once, in a fit of fury, flung the artist through a plate glass window — appear outside the man’s ripped-open body.

Emotional darkness colors Jenny Saville’s Reverse (2002-03). Saville literally overturns conventions of self-portraiture. The bruises and blood — even coating her teeth — make you want to look away. But her unblinking, glassy-eyed stare is riveting. After getting used to seeing this battered, in-your-face face in magazines and on computer screens, it was good to be reminded  how overwhelming this nearly eight-foot visage can be when viewed in person.

Celia Paul’s self-portrait, Painter and Model (2012), like Saville’s Reverse, breaks from traditional, male-gaze norms in respect to its gray, utterly unflattering portrayal. We sense blood and bruises beneath the skin rather than on it. Freud’s more comely portrait of her graces the front cover of the exhibition’s catalogue.

The psychological bruise of loss is the subject of Paul’s Family Group (1984-86), painted shortly after her father’s death. Highlighted in her checker-patterned skirt, the mother looks the same age as her daughters, and there are no younger or older sisters; this is time viewed through the prism of grief and gobs of pigment.

Family crowds a small bed. Survivors on a life raft, mom anchors the middle. Each remains in her isolated space, not sharing so much as a glance or word. Yet the group feels closely knit, drawing aid from its strength-in-numbers union.

Many of the artists in All Too Human were good friends. Some painted one another. Lucian Freud and Celia Paul were lovers. Others enjoyed a teacher/student relationship: Sickert taught Bomberg; Bomberg taught Auerbach and Kossoff; William Coldstream taught Paula Rego, Euan Uglow, and Michael Andrews; Freud taught Paul. It’s an impressive litany of begat-ing, biblical-sounding lineage. Yet, while friends like Auerbach and Kossoff are of like mind, brush, and chops, how they relate to the brilliant Sir Stanley Spencer and Walter Richard Sickert, or the lesser lights of F.N. Souza, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and the one photographer in the show, John Deakin, beats me.

I appreciate that Auerbach and Kossoff were inspired by (among many others) the Belarus-born Soutine, who lived his adult life in Paris — never in Great Britain. Was he Giacometti’s plus-one? Or vice versa? Neither RSVP’ed. Either way, for me, these great artists are welcome party-crashers.

This show boasts a trove of first-rate works by first-rate artists, Paula Rego and her multi-figure narrative compositions ranking high among them. They are overwhelming in scale, skill, and heart, her stories breathtaking, even as they keep us guessing.       

Despite the “figure painting” way All Too Human is being promoted, there are numerous still lifes, as well: Examples by William Coldstream and Euan Uglow stand out. So too do the landscapes and (rainy) cityscapes of painters who seem not only to have traded in their smocks for raincoats, but their brushes for shovels, slathering simple recognizability into scabrous mystery in the process.        

Accordingly, the subject of  much critical attention is what Freud said he wanted paint to work like: flesh. That’s where inside meets outside. Psychic skin. Where  figure and ground merge.

Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996) is a case in point. The artist seems smitten by his model’s nuanced skin colors. We’re seduced by the sensuousness of the encrusted pigments, as well as the savage scrutiny of the painter’s scientific eye.

The dozing Sue Tilley (or Big Sue as she is also known) and the huge canvas she commands are part of a delicate public/private blend playing out in a small chair. The model looks unfazed by the queens or kings of the jungle lounging behind her like kittens on a rug. (Or are they a pair of wild beasts poised to attack a pair of gazelles?) There’s a raw beauty of raw form here, dignity free of pretense. 

While Freud’s reclining, little-footed Big Sue and Giacometti’s standing, big-footed, skinny Venetian represent different visions and looks, they share as much as they don’t. Forty years apart, both are ephemeral and earthy at once. Making their way through the museum’s rooms, they nod at other artistic sisters like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Celia Paul, who display little family resemblance.

Grand and idiosyncratic, this show includes all too human inconsistencies. Yet, a slew of powerful, brave, and unruly umbrella huddlers sometimes rise to realms not far from divine.

The post A Big Umbrella: “All Too Human” at Tate Britain appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

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

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

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

DENNIS KARDON
Almost twenty years ago I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAVID COHEN
Pleasure is never enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wish I hadn’t seen that one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s an important point, Barry.

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

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

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Hear! Hear!

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

WALTER ROBINSON
These people…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WALTER ROBINSON
This person — so nutty!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Ha!

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

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

SUZY SPENCE
Yes it would.

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

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

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

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

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

DAVID COHEN
OK, enjoy Jenny Saville then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 12 to February 11, 2018
106 Forsyth Street, between Grand and Broome streets
New York City, lylesandking.com

Technological singularity—the point at which the velocity of advancement reaches infinity—is, some say, close at hand. The manner in which innovation accelerates, with new discoveries speeding up further progress, is similar, perhaps not coincidentally, to compound interest. Moore’s Law predicted a doubling of circuit transistor density every two years, a trend that—despite pesky limitations like the size of individual atoms—seems accurate for the foreseeable future. The human body, in comparison, naturally advances on an evolutionary timescale, measured by incremental changes over thousands or millions of years. How can humanity compete with this insane pace? Are we doomed to become slaves to our creations as in so many sci-fi dystopias? Rather than seeing this scenario as a conflict between man and machine, these advancements could be thought of as augmenting our humanity, as in transhumanism, or as an indistinguishable addition to the increasingly meaningless category of “the human” as in some lines of posthumanist thought. Chris Dorland’s work, on view at Lyles & King, seems to be in line with this latter interpretation. His Alumacore prints and video works, created using layers of images altered by digital glitches, merge human and digital actions into a single substance is neither one nor the other.

Openness to chance occurrences is hardly new in art: Building on Dada and Surrealist experimentation, Francis Bacon threw handfuls of paint at his canvases to disrupt his existing imagery while John Cage performed on prepared pianos designed to produce random sounds. A glitch isn’t simple randomness, however: it is the intersection and confusion of multiple processes, like a machine misinterpreting data meant for some other use, or a circuit that allows its signal to be altered by outside noise. In whatever way a specific glitch may have been cultivated, it represents the “will” of digital processes altering, if not overpowering, that of the humans who created such systems in the first place. Dorland’s broken and hacked machines are his co-creators, and while the artist ultimately has the final say on how each piece turns out, these decisions are influenced by their non-human digital labor.

Can Dorland’s human touch be visibly distinguished from the digital logic of a machine? Untitled (Overclock) (2017) features a woman’s eyeless face, seemingly lifted from a makeup ad, distorted in a manner indicating that it was moved around while being scanned. This is the only recognizable image in the piece: Everything else is abstract. and while it seems to follow a certain logic (such as the vertical division between fields of red and blue), any larger human meaning is lost in an inscrutable pile of digital artifacts. Untitled (Drone Psychic) (2017) practically forces an abstract reading of its imagery, lacking any clues to the sources of its densely-layered and distorted material. There are several painterly passages in which skeins of acidic color ooze and flow together, but what these “brushstrokes” may actually be must remain a mystery, with any identifying information having been corrupted or deleted in the piece’s creation.

Played on a TV leaning against the wall, Dorland’s video Untitled (memory cortex) (2017) is a montage of glitched imagery in motion. Snippets of occasionally legible text—computer code and Japanese message board comments—float above footage from a first-person shooter video game as its color palette jumps between the red, green, and blue channels of computer graphics output. Any details about the game’s narrative are hidden in a swirling mass of images and text overlaying the already distorted footage.

Dorland’s work can be appreciated as abstraction, but pieces of images hint at deeper processes behind their generation. Untitled (Drift Upload) (2017) has bits of racecars splayed across its surface, disrupted by red blocks and horizontal black lines. A spiderweb of shattered glass, like the cracked screen of a smartphone, breaks the picture’s upper-right corner. Most of the prints feature such fractures, reminders of the broken border between the two worlds we regularly inhabit. The world depicted through Dorland’s work isn’t a cyberpunk dystopia as popularized in sci-fi, but it isn’t the utopia-for-profit envisioned by Silicon Valley “tech bros” either. It is more akin to an atopia, a place without borders or boundaries, like a broken screen trying, and failing, to keep separate the “real” and the “digital.”

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David Plante will give a reading from Becoming A Londoner at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm.  

Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree. Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

– – –

We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.
Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos. As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . . And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train! Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

– – –

R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.
R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.
His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well. He can have a mad look.
There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyer and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back.

Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too. Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

Their understanding is: never with friends.

Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

– – –

While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist  painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, refl ective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

– – –

Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’ David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he fi nally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’ Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’ David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’

Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’

I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.   Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’ I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’

Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’

‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’

Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.

– – –

Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to fl oat. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!

– – –

I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:

For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.

– – –

A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.

I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.

When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.

But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?

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Two rare samples of rugs designed by Francis Bacon have turned up in the collection of an Iranian dealer, who bought them several years ago from an elderly lady who had them on the floor in her hallway. These rugs, which have the artists name worked into their designs, may have appeared in Francis Bacon’s first exhibition in 1929, according to the Authentication Committee of Francis Bacon. There are so few examples of Bacon’s rug designs that there has been no market price established for them. Bacon designed the rugs while he was living in a flat in West London, soon after he was thrown out of his family home.
(primary source: The Times of London)
3/2/2009

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