Greg Lindquist: Industry
Elizabeth Harris

Landscape painting is usually a vehicle for observing the effects of weather, light, and space – in short, for thoroughly traditional goals that might seem sentimental in cutting-edge circles today. In a pair of Chelsea exhibitions, however, two contemporary painters, born 40 years apart, revitalize the venerable genre in completely different ways.

According to painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), his upbringing by actor parents cured him of any interest in theatrics, and the presumptuous claims made for abstract painting drove him towards representation. Drama of another kind, however, abounds in his intense, peculiarly non-picturesque scenes of urban and rural sites. Beneath his exacting technique lie original perceptions and ferociously focused thinking. His nearly 20 recent paintings at Betty Cuningham have a kind of straitened exuberance; they impress as radiant craft, but are moving, ultimately, for the independence and determination of his investigations.

Mr. Downes’ subjects tend be unbeautiful, overlooked scenes galvanized by their spatial extremes. The broad vistas of Texas scrublands stream across several canvases with very wide formats; elevated highways and bridges soar through others. Executed on site after numerous preparatory sketches, these paintings amount to portraits of spatial configurations rather then strictly of objects. Mr. Downs’ meticulous technique makes these marginal and forgotten sites seem elegant, almost crystalline in their detail, but their most compelling aspect lies in the way his “uncompromising empiricism,” as he calls it, leads to vertiginous renderings of space.

In the small painting “A Stop on the J Line (Alabama Avenue)” (2007), the sweep of an elevated subway line fills the breadth of the canvas, its curvature exaggerated as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. The naturalism of the midday illumination and the plethora of details – down to the rivets on some girders – vie with the extravagant proportions of the structure, which dwindles drastically towards either side of the canvas, slipping away from us like a rock falling down a sunlit well.

A similar drama animates the striking, nearly six-foot-wide “The Pulaski Skyway Crossing the Hackensack River” (2007). This painting, too, combines an Eakins-like fidelity of light and detail with vertiginous accelerations of space towards the sides. The elevated highway’s main span is not quite symmetrical on the canvas, giving rise to new intrigues: a shelf of land at the lower right corner edges towards the closer section of the span; a power plant, perched at the far shore of a shimmering plane of water, leans slightly as it reaches towards the bridge’s vast arc.

A photograph on the cover of the exhibition catalogue provides intriguing clues into the artist’s working methods. It depicts what must be the very same canvas, mounted on two French easels anchored side-by-side to the ground with guy-wires. (“Plein-air,” in this case, involves full-force wind.) Overhead arcs the Skyway, neck-twistingly high and close. Upon minute examination, every detail in the photograph – even a bent wire protruding through the foreground cement – reappears in the painting.

In his eloquent writings, Mr. Downes argues that such paintings are truthful records of perceived events. He has a point: Our eyes can focus on only one point at a time, and large portions of our brains are devoted to joining these separate perceptions into seamless, practical experiences. Linear perspective is, after all, a graphic convention, not a physical law, and it breaks down for wide-angle views. (To prove this, stand in the center of the gallery’s larger space, facing one of the long walls. Its horizontal top edge pitches downward as it approaches either corner – a pencil held horizontally at arm’s length demonstrates this – which means that a drawing of the entire wall must connect these opposing angles in a broad curve.)

Four very long paintings, 15 inches high and eight to ten feet long, depict a racetrack in the Texas scrub desert. There are no people in these dirt-blown scenes, but much evidence of human activity in the posts and railings dotting the barren vastness.

From about eight feet away, the paintings demand our physical engagement; we must turn our gaze to connect the multiple diagonals of tire tracks crossing the plain. At about four feet, we’re absorbed into an enveloping, shrub-by-shrub, plotting of the surface.

Like all of Mr. Downes paintings, they reflect a unique combination of aggressive conception and passive elaboration. Fervent perceptions of space enliven their broad outlines; details follow, filling in the story of each site exactly “as is;” colors add atmosphere and light. At various points in the exhibition, his colors provide something else: a compositional urgency of their own. In a 2007 painting of Atlantic Avenue, for instance, evanescent yellow-grays poignantly convey the sweeping, overhead weight of the AirTrain cement guideway. In a canvas from 2006, the tiny glimmer of flood lamp reflectors, and the escape to a pinkish sunlit wall through a doorway, vividly punctuate the somber hues of a huge artist’s studio. And in that painting of the Alabama Avenue subway station, masses of color dramatically build as the central knotting of girders perforated by notes of sky. Mr. Downes’ non-hierarchical compositions tend to preclude the interaction of drawing and color – with impulses of hue conditioning as well as responding to the forces of drawing – but at points his paintings hint at what Corot so wondrously achieved in his early studies of Roman aqueducts and Mount Soracte.

At Elizabeth Harris, nine paintings by Greg Lindquist (b. 1979) share this fascination with forlorn spaces. The desolation of his cityscapes, however, has a more romantic aspect – and, it’s soon apparent, an overarching political purpose. His distilled forms and subdued, almost mordant palette impart a wan massiveness to the crumbling hulks of abandoned factories and warehouses in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Red Hook sections. Most of the paintings describe the paler notes of the sky or the East River with metallic paint, which glimmers quietly over the sagging buildings and through skeletal structures. Plant life, such as it is, appears as stringy, khaki tufts at the edges of empty lots. Construction cranes, not humans, populate these worlds; in one painting they loom above a jagged wall like prison watch towers. Only the occasional corner of an apartment building or a splash of graffiti hints at living, human traffic.

The metallic paint, plus the 2-inch depth of the edges of the paintings, emphasizes the materiality of the work. The scenes feel ethereal rather than leaden, though, as if aerated by an otherworldly, radioactive wind. In “Decay of Industry, Industry of Decay” (2007), licks of metallic paint, showing through strokes of an unnamable gray, neatly sum up the effect of rippled water beneath building and vacant sky. In “The Similitudes of The Past and those of The Future” (2007), a broad streaking of yellowy gray – a forgettable note in any other context – convinces as the ground plane stretching tautly across the painting’s width.

As for those prolix titles: these add a political earnestness not immediately apparent in the brushstrokes themselves. They reveal how every work in fact involves an argument about urban development. The sardonically titled “Red Hook’s Residuum (New Products, New Ideas, New Designs)” 2007 depicts the soon-be-completed IKEA megastore with the same rawness as the decaying factories. “East River State Park (Endangered Site for Preservation, Nest Egg for Luxury)” (2007), a rendering of a Greenpoint construction site, makes clearer still the “green” message behind these grayed tones. The fervent political engagement vies intriguingly with the eerie desolation of the images, in which a new IKEA warehouse and abandoned sugar refinery can seem equally exotic.

Both Downes and Lindquist ply a route between the traditional and the postmodern. Neither has much use for the “composed” look of most art prior to 1960. Downes’ panoramas employ an all-over, all-encompassing space that may be his only borrowing from Abstract Expressionism. Lindquist’s strong suit is atmosphere and a social conscience. The two artists also share a decidedly non-postmodernist trait: a conviction about their goals.  Both aim unabashedly for something nobler than the elliptical irony of much of today’s art.

And in both artists’ paintings, sequences of colors sometimes impose their own character on simple events. My favorite moment of the two exhibitions occurs as a judge’s tower rises above the arid earth in one of Downes’ racetrack paintings. The humble structure – a welded steel armature topped by corrugated metal – faces us squarely across the parched landscape, its ridges caught in the raking light. This delicately striated square becomes the sole, resolute interruption of the relentless horizon. Nearby, three elements chatter: the roof of a spectator’s shelter, which hovers, a sliver of absorbent blue, above the raw tones of earth; its shadow, a even deeper, darker note beneath; and the purple-gray mass of hills miles away on the horizon, less regular in shape but equally anchored to the earth. The three pressures converse across a mysteriously vast distance, expanding its space more radically than the tire tracks plunging towards the horizon. What better evocation of the realities of color and line?

Downes until March 1 (541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-2772).

Lindquist until March 8 (529 W 20th St, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-9666).

This article was originally published as two separate reviews at the New York Sun in February 2008

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March 8 – April 15, 2006

As a painter, critic and an American, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) was keenly aware of the brief history of painting in the United States. Convinced that Americans knew little of the medium’s larger history, Porter set out to teach himself how to paint. Looking for inspiration in the European paintings of Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, as well as those of his friend Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, Porter sought to create a representational art that allowed oil paint to have its own material independence. He maintained that independence by holding to his ardent belief that, regardless of a painting’s imagery, the medium should have a life of its own.

A selection of Porter’s landscapes, interiors, and portraits is currently on display at the Betty Cuningham Gallery. Organized in conjunction with the South Hampton Parrish Art Museum and Hirschl & Adler Modern, the representatives of the artist’s estate, the exhibition showcases Porter’s highly individualist vision. There is a large amount of work on display: Porter’s paintings take up the main gallery and office. Additionally, there are drawings on view in the gallery’s back room.

Strictly speaking, Porter cannot be considered a realist. Though the pictures in the exhibition contain people and objects — his wife Anne, friends John Ashbery and James Schuyler, and locations in and around his homes in Maine and Southampton — the emphasis in these paintings is on their crafting. The way in which Porter made a painting was just as important, if not more, than what he painted.

The accompanying catalog includes a telling quote from Porter. “I have always had a feeling about shapes,” he wrote, “not that they resembled other ones, but that they had character.” Porter conveyed subject matter using sensations of light and color, as the Impressionists did with their retinal painting. His work exemplifies that before the mind identifies objects, these objects appear as undifferentiated shapes. Unlike the Impressionists, however, whose atmospheric light dissolved the physicality of paint, he was concerned with how light could be solidified into an internal structure of its own.

He transformed observed phenomenon into extraordinary flattened spaces and fractured areas of color and light. View Toward the Studio (1967) is a small vertical canvas dedicated to the specificity of winter light. Porter knew that snow is never purely white, but that it reflects the colors of its surrounding environs. In Porter’s painting, the snow takes on the dim warmth of a nearby building, vibrating with patchy shadows of ultramarine. The sky is rendered flatly, and pushes forward in fragments to the surface of the picture. Slivers of turquoise, used to define the backdrop of the image, advance as the trees in the middle ground recede.

Porter was keenly attuned to the notion that a motif’s character relates less to its recognizability or personality than to the qualities inherent in its form. While the true realist desires verisimilitude in an object’s depiction, Porter believed the object itself was no longer of primary concern. Objects became shapes; light fractured into forms; brushstrokes physically defined surfaces. He was, in many ways, an abstractionist masquerading as realist.

“Paint is as real as nature,” Porter once wrote, “and the means of painting can contain its ends.” The larger landscapes in the exhibition are more involved with interlocking passages of paint, wherein shapes register as flat fields of undulating color. A relatively high chroma painting, Amherst Campus No. 1 (1969), captures a heightened autumn light through abbreviated swaths of lime green, orange, pink and brown. When working on wood panels, Porter’s paint handling became even more emphatically physical. In Snow on South Maine Street (1974), a thin zig-zag of muddied snow is also an unabashed record of the sweeping path of the artist’s brush. Slab-like areas of light grey depict roofs poking through an array of thin branches. Rendered with a translucency not unlike watercolor, these billowing branches create a spindly, all-over effect. The eye becomes lost in successive layers of grey, brown and purple.

Fairfield Porter’s achievement is an unassuming, but significant, part of the history of Modernist art in this country. Porter’s belief that a painting’s life is independent of the must have undoubtedly influenced Alex Katz, of whose painting Porter once said in an essay, “the whole takes precedence and the detail may only be an area of color, in short, abstract.” It is not a stretch then to wonder about the debt contemporary representational painters such as Brian Alfred and others owe to Porter’s concept of character through shape and form. One can detect Porter’s influence in a range of contemporary representational painters’ practice of rendering subject through formal means.

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Joan Snyder: Women Make Lists
Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25 Street, 212-242-2772

A version of this article was first published at The New York SUN, November 18, 2004

If you were just a tyke in the 70s, you missed the Women’s Art Movement, its luxurious cant and mélange of no-styles. Now you can catch up at Joan Snyder’s latest exhibitions. There are two: Works on paper from the 70s to the present, uptown at Alexandre Gallery; recent paintings, downtown at Betty Cuningham Gallery.

Both shows illustrate the vulgarity of a movement that traded on the susceptibilities of its audience. Uptown, Ms. Snyder’s bleeding scribbles are being conjured into art history with a scholarly essay, one of those tricks of the bazaar that mesmerize a parvenu art crowd. Downtown, an ensemble of 20 canvases-entitled “Women Make Lists” and dedicated to the women of Iraq-celebrates the artist herself as the bearer of female benevolence.

Do [[ITALICS]] women make lists? You bet; I have one right here. Mine is a tally of the self-worshiping conceits trumpeted by a generation of women artists in their sortie against standards of achievement-dismissed by art historian Linda Nochlin as “the white male Western viewpoint.” Nochlin famously derided what she termed “the Lady’s Accomplishment” (“a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism”). In its place, scholarly fiat substituted Womanart and its own peculiar accomplishment: an immodest, not necessarily proficient, self-assertive level of amateurism that coincided handily with the assault of camp sensibility on public taste.

Ms. Snyder is the doyenne of Womanart. While camp advanced itself seriously, it expected to be taken lightly. Not so the Women’s Art Movement. In debunking the myth of the Great Artist, it hatched myths of its own. In dead earnest. Among these was the vanity that artmaking is just one of those things that women do naturally, like lactating. Instinct is art, sisters; we are the Earth.

Ms. Snyder’s instinctive, unspoiled mark-making is solemnly packaged at Alexandre Gallery. Between watercolor splotches of tongues and tits, gnomic scraps of handwriting present themselves as a strategy to “erase the boundary between the verbal and the visual.” And catch those “mamilla berries,” showcased with the reverence due sacred relics. Why not? An artist’s touch is a hallowed thing-to be honored under glass by the faithful, like Padre Pio’s bloody gloves.

Self-indulgent artlessness is perilously dependent on the quality of the artist’s hand. Ms. Snyder’s hand owes everything to academic rhetoric which has, indeed, confused the verbal and visual. One dazzling irony here is that esteem for the artist’s mark rests on the very recognition of greatness that the Movement sought to undermine. But the catalogue transcends this stumper by insinuating an association with big names: Hans Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollock, et alia.

Ever her own mythographer, Ms. Snyder lends herself to interpretation as a shaman, sibyl, priest, healer (those dried medicinal herbs stuck in the paint!) and a Miriam leading us to the Promised Land. That is where our inner goddess abolishes hierarchies, especially those of talent and taste; and reductive labial or mammary images are as good as a Duccio Madonna.

The game gets help, downtown, from sonorous Latin titles. “Perpetuo” (2004) submits a field of disembodied breasts with rivulets of paint flowing from erect nipples. “Antiquarum Lacrimae” (2004) approaches the lyricism of needlepoint maxims with “The Heart is a Lake” scrawled over blots.

From the downtown catalogue (yes, there’s another) we learn that Ms. Snyder’s single ambition after 9/11 was to make beautiful paintings; however, “her politics cut more deeply.” Just as well, really. These spills, shmears and drips clotted with glass beads, glitter, fabric, herbs-whatever- are strenuously unimpressive. But then so is the pretense to politics. She coyly omits mentioning whether her recent pity for Iraqi women and children was triggered by Saddam’s barbarities or the invasion that ended them. Viewers can project their own positions onto the ambiguity.

Politics, as used here, is a dodge for merchandising lacrimose fantasies of women as vessels of cosmic altruism: The Breast That Never Empties (“Mamilla Immortalis”). Still pitching the old zeal, she insists that “we need to send powerful female energy and imagery out into the universe ” to save the world from (male) violence. Even more implausible than Ms. Snyder’s painting is her adherence to a crumbling orthodoxy that denies women’s complicity in their own culprit cultures. Thirty years ago, her schtick about redemptive female energy was merely silly. Today, in the wake of female terrorists-and the sight of women dancing in Ramallah on 9/11- it is cynical. Or delusional.

Ms. Snyder is self-referential and sententious enough to be anointed the next Frida Kahlo. Promotional machinery is heating up. Current shows are preliminary to next year’s crowning event: a retrospective at the Jewish Museum and an Abrams monograph. An honest appraisal of the WAM-its achievment in breaking glass ceilings for women artists and the harm done by the means taken-would be helpful. Canonizing Joan Snyder only compounds the damage.

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