Art Dealers Association of America The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory

February 27 to March 4, 2018

Don’t wait until next week to get into fair mood: This year, for venue scheduling reasons, The Art Show, the ADAA’s annual outing at the Park Avenue Armory, precedes the onslaught on the piers—the other Armory. And, like years past, it’s proving to be the place for aesthetic delectation.

I simply don’t know where to begin, there are so many fabulous exhibitions packed under this drill hall, so I may as well begin at the beginning: Cheim and Read’s solo display of new sculpture by the redoubtable Lynda Benglis that greets you at the entrance. Turn left, as supermarkets have discovered most of us do, and you get a revelatory display of landscape sketches by Myron Stout at Washburn Gallery, along with one of his trademark black and white painted iconic shapes: the nervously breezy, feather-stroked perceptual landscapes done in Provincetown, Mass. in black Conté send you back to the hard-edged abstraction with renewed intensity.

Brian Washburn told me they discovered a box of these drawings when they moved downtown recently hidden in plain sight in a painting rack. A metaphor, in a way, for The Art Show experience, where in one box after another (the booths) treasures from the past reveal themselves. Just over the aisle, Peter Freeman, Inc. have Mel Bochner paintings from the early 1980s that, if you are more familiar with his word pieces, will come as a surprise: Shaped canvases bursting with geometric forms dispatched with neo-expressionist gusto. Bochner first painted these images on regular shaped canvas, the sales assistant told me, and then determined the right irregular shape from the resulting form. Their surfaces reminded me of his contemporary, Terry Winters, represented elsewhere at the fair in a group show at Matthew Marks.

Hirschl and Adler, nestled in the corner, are in an appropriately intimate, almost closeted space for their show, Americans 1943: Realism and Magic Realism. This marks the 75th anniversary of a show of that title at MoMA. Sunday communist Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi delivers an allegory of corruption and resistance in The American Dream, 1935, that suggests that only the settings have changed in the interim. All the same issues are in place: horny CEOs, marginalized minorities, put upon protesters and an unloved statue.

Speaking of minorities, African American artists feature prominently amongst stand out solo booths in this year’s fair, including some historic rediscoveries. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery celebrates the achievements of abstract painter William T. Williams, while Galerie Lelong & Co showcase the lyrical gestalts of southern painter Mildred Thompson with Magnetic Fields, a series from her last decade. “Years ago, I had a dream about an event in space” she wrote in a 1992 statement. “Feeling fortunate to see this event, I stayed to look at it in detail.”

Detail is the essence of the experience of Harmony Hammond’s riveting textured grids in the Weave Paintings at Alexander Gray Associates. Not that one is seeking to survey the fair in identity categories, but another openly queer artist, Nicole Eisenman, makes play with a two-person display with Andy Warhol at Anton Kern Gallery. Their brochure quotes Andy Warhol as saying “If only one day my work could be shown in an art fair booth alongside the work of a radical lesbian”, which ambition Eisenman has obliged in a display where master and acolyte are not always easy to tell apart.

Intensity of detail and exquisiteness in finish are also determining factors in appreciation of Lynn Herhmann Leeson’s early work at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Dotty Attie’s works at P.P.O.W. and new drawings by Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow. The balance of aesthetic and mechanical precision in Thomas Chimes 1970s metal box constructions are aptly contextualized at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery display with Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell. But the last and abiding delectations in the final aisle were of a more rough-hewn nature: Milton Avery at Yares Art, sumptuous and fulsome collages by Biala at Pavel Zoubok, and the take home dream of this visitor, the ravishing quietude of James Bishop with San Antonio, Tx. gallerist Lawrence Markey, where color and space seem to be breathed onto the page.

ADDENDUM: Posted as a featured item from THE LIST on Sunday, March 4

So natural is the tendency of commercial galleries to hedge bets and pack their stands with variety that many art fairs have color coded sections put aside for solo spots. Not so ADAA’s The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, now in its 30th year, which through natural selection, it would seem, affords a hearty mix of group and solo presentations. Two standout stands that eluded my round up earlier this week exemplify these respective models. Jill Newhouse, whose gallery specializes in historic works on paper as well as contemporary works in different mediums, showcased a fine selection of drawings by Pierre Bonnard along with a tightly hung, intriguingly diverse group of living artists working in the Bonnardian spirit. The six living painters – curated by Karen Wilkin – included Larry Poons, Graham Nickson and Rachel Rickert. Danese Corey, meanwhile, opted for audacious singularity in presenting just one massive eight-foot high bronze sculpture by William Tucker, Meru, 2015-2017. The intricacies and folds of Tucker’s massed modeling and the demands of this complex form to be seen, fully, in the round could detain the discerning visitor as long as the salon hung massed ranks of intimate works at other stands. It is just not quite so easy to take it home.

The post Drill Hall Delectations: The Art Show at the Armory appeared first on artcritical.

Cowboys Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys football team, officially opened on June 6, 2009. Jerry and Gene Jones, owners of the Dallas Cowboys, funded the majority of the 1.2 billion dollar project. The 3-million–square-foot structure of glass and steel is full of architectural superlatives: the world’s largest retractable glass doors, the world’s largest HDTV video board, and arched trusses that span 1290 feet. The space is so vast that, according to the catalogue, you could fit the Statue of Liberty comfortably on the 50-yard line and it would not touch the roof.

But those are not the facts that initially astounded me. In an unexpected marriage of art and sport, the Joneses hired Mary Zlot to serve as art consultant, and she quickly assembled an art panel of distinguished curators and collectors to help choose artists to exhibit in the stadium. As a result, the stadium is home to 21 museum-worthy contemporary art pieces by 19 internationally renowned artists: Olafur Eliasson, Ricci Albenda, Franz Ackermann, Lawrence Weiner, Jim Isermann, Dave Muller, Matthew Ritchie, Doug Aitken, Terry Haggerty, Gary Simmons, Mel Bochner, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Daniel Buren, Annette Lawrence, Teresita Fernández, Wayne Gonzales, Jacqueline Humphries, Eva Rothschild and Garth Weiser. The Joneses privately funded the art collection beyond the 1.2 billion dollar building cost. In Gene’s words, “a great building needs great art.”

Upon hearing about the art in the stadium, I was intrigued and apprehensive. I was concerned that the artwork would be exhibited in limited-access areas to enhance the cultural cachet of the Cowboys brand without allowing the art to interact with the public. And, if the work were prominently visible in the public area, had the art committee suggested “appropriate themes” or did the artist retain control?

Mel Bochner has a text painting prominently located on the wall facing the Monumental Staircase. The painted blue box contains the black text of exclamatory words and phrases in capital letters, starting with “Win!” Bochner?s signature style delivers complexity through language. (The words seem aggressive, lighthearted, out-of-fashion, and silly all at once.) I asked Bochner if there was any pressure to change his design. Bochner explained that initially the owners suggested some changes to some of his phrases. So he set the stage for the relationship, explaining that artwork is: “an all-or-nothing situation. The language was not negotiable. [The Joneses] accepted those conditions and, I must say, [they] have been extremely enthusiastic ever since.” The relationship was one of trust, Gene Jones told me, and “of course, the artist was right.”

As for accessibility, the higher-priced suites and club levels have some wonderful works that are not visible to the general ticket holder (unless you purchase an art tour through the Dallas Museum of Art). But the main entrances, the concession areas, and the Monumental Staircase all have art, so every fan will see at least 3 or 4 artworks on any given path.

And these main stairways and entrances hold some of the most transformative pieces. The show stealer is the wall-wrapping painting from Franz Ackermann. It’s not only the enormous scale but also the brightly colored imagery based on architectural forms and memory of place that create an energetic and intimate escalator ride. For those walking the large pedestrian ramps, they will be ascending and descending next to an odd and powerful grid of striped mounds set in brightly colored flowers—the kaleidoscopic world of Trenton Doyle Hancock. Even above the concessions counter, which in my opinion is the most difficult spot, the Terry Haggerty has a captivating rhythm of red and white stripes, with an op-art, hypnotic wave. The A/C vents take on a humorous role, punctuating the bottom of this striped form.

The 19 artists are all heavyweights, but the works that interact specifically with their installation site are the most effective. In a calculated risk, Eliasson relies on light for thematic unity.  The sunlight streaming in from the entrance windows gives his clunky, mobile-like celestial shapes the lightness that his materials contradict. Through reflection and refraction, these discreet metal and glass objects, in their suspended pull from the ceiling, become connected to each other and to the walls of the passageway.

Though many of the chosen artists had completed permanent installations prior to the stadium project, some had not yet had the chance. Such was the case for Annette Lawrence, creator of “Coin Toss,” a muscular yet elegant work of opposing tension made of stranded cable attached in a c-shape on each opposing wall. Normally, Lawrence works with string and tape, creating delicate and impermanent installations. I asked her if the new installation was a conceptual challenge. She replied that the impermanence was not a philosophical stance, but rather a reaction to the functioning of the space. “I just didn’t have the opportunity before. […] In a gallery or alternative exhibition space, exhibits are temporary situations.  The luxury of space made these pieces possible.”

The Dallas Museum of Art is holding a concurrent exhibit with many of the same artists, entitled Big New Field, which runs through February 20, 2011. On one hand, this dialogue between the stadium and the museum can be seen as an effort to capitalize on the tourism associated with the Super Bowl, but it’s also a study in context.

For those interested in the cultural future of the museum, this dialogue is important. Charlie Wylie, a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art and part of the art panel that chose the artists for Cowboys Stadium described the experience of seeing artwork there as: “exhilarating […] more spontaneous and direct than in a museum where you specifically go to encounter works of art. A big reason we organized the Big New Field exhibition was to provide visitors with the chance to compare the experience of seeing art in both the stadium and the DMA, and I hope they realize both venues have their own unique qualities and will come back to both often.”

Art is an ongoing education. I asked Gene Jones, herself a collector of Norman Rockwell, which of the artworks surprised her the most once she saw it realized. Her original conception of the stadium’s interior was sleek and subtle, a palette of neutral tones. Franz Ackermann’s piece was assigned a multi-storied wall in the southwest area of the Monumental Staircase and his proposal was bold, bright, and saturated—oranges, pinks and blues! She was apprehensive about this vivid color and large-scale palette switch, but it would be her greatest surprise—when she saw the Ackermann on the wall, she “fell in love with it.” In many ways, her stadium experience has shifted her prior understanding of art. She has now embraced contemporary art, and recently collected her first piece for the Joneses‘ private residence in Dallas.

In a 2001 critique of the sculptural-spectacle architecture of Frank Gehry at Bilbao, Hal Foster complained that the architecture “trumps the art.” Prior to seeing Cowboy Stadium, I was concerned that the interior functioning of the building—the signage, the scale, the volume, the throngs of activity—would “trump the art.” But in the best pieces, those feared distractions are integrated as tension, movement, and energy. If the artist can counter the moment of Brand marketing, and make a piece that connects to the mystery of individual awareness, then the artist has “trumped the frenzy.” And in this stadium the artists were given the space and the freedom to do just that.

The post Heavy Hitters: The Art of Football, Dallas-Style appeared first on artcritical.

The year 1969, subject of a current exhibition spanning the entire second floor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, provides a compelling starting point for examining artistic production and contemplation, then versus now. With every work dating from the year in question, minus a few select contemporary works by younger, emerging artists, the show serves as a kind of thermometer for the vast range of avant-garde thought and practice emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly every work comes straight from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, of which P.S.1 is an affiliate, revealing patterns of acquisition that mark an institution both ahead of its time and flawed.  The show was organized by Neville Wakefield, P.S.1 Senior Curatorial Advisor; Michelle Elligott, MoMA Archivist; and Eva Respini, MoMA Associate Curator of Photography

1969 counters the surface, buoyant stance on artistic practice exemplified in the Whitney’s 2008 ‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.’ The tone of 1969 is of a darker, more restrained hue, reflecting not just the instability and turmoil of that year, but the marked change in what was considered avant-garde—absence of color, de-materialization of the art object, an ever-closer merging of art and life. Throughout the show we are taken on a journey through the predominant narrative of 1960s art history, as told by the institution that has dictated modern art as we know it. As a result, it is unsurprising that female and black artists are under-represented—particularly absent are Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, and the late Nancy Spero.

Much of the work grapples with the then still-dominant narrative of minimal art—a Carl Andre floor piece and a Judd brass and plexiglas box are among the logical choices that open the exhibition. Richard Serra’s “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure” illustrates the increasing significance of process, spreading the artist’s signature mediums of lead, wood, stone, and steel in raw form out on the floor. The late 1960s also witnessed the radical realization that art can be something quite apart from object, utilizing everything from the body to the earth as site. Performance, photography, and video emerged and increased in prominence, rapidly becoming the preeminent form of avant-garde expression. Several seminal video works by Bruce Nauman are represented, such as the inverted film Pacing Upside Down (all works 1969), in which the artist paces rapidly around the perimeter of a room with a square drawn in the center of the floor. Other video works, including Walter De Maria’s stunning Hardcore, shot in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, attest to the experimental and enthusiastic approach to video by artists who were primarily painters or sculptors.

1969 examines MoMA’s collecting history at a critical moment in the museum’s own history, a period fraught with the tension between institutional responsibility and the revolutionary, leftist politics embraced by many of the artists it engaged with. The curators have included seminal works like the Art Workers Coalition poster “Q: And Babies? A: And Babies,” which exemplifies the controversial and revealing fact that museums like MoMA are indeed ideological spaces, hardly removed from political, social, or economic issues. Archival documentation from the Guerilla Art Action Group, which removed Malevich’s “White on White” from MoMA’s walls and replaced it with a revolutionary manifesto, is included in a glass case nearby, as if to strangely pacify and domesticate the radical iconoclasm represented in these sheets of paper. Such actions show the engagement of artists such as Jon Hendricks (now, ironically, working closely with MoMA on the recent acquisition of Fluxus material) with institutional critique and the breaking down of barriers between art and politics. Additionally, the curators provide archival images and original exhibition catalogues from various groundbreaking exhibitions of the time, proving that 1969 was a historical moment for many other institutions of art worldwide—Harald Szeeman’s “When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head” at the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Whitney’s “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” are among those catalogues displayed.

Mel Bochner’s thought-provoking “Theory of Painting,” in its debut at P.S.1/MoMA, is an installation of wall text, spray paint, and newspaper that conflates past and present, painting and installation. It both negates and depends on material specificity, while employing the “instructional” text often found in Conceptual art. Directly opposite to this train of thought are the environmental and spatially-motivated SoCal artists like Bob Irwin, who are represented in the gallery-within-a-gallery installation “Five Recent Acquisitions” with original text by MoMA curator Kynaston McShine. Besides getting a refreshing idea for what the museum was actually collecting in 1969, we are treated to these artists’ sensuous, luminous play with color and illusion.

The work of black and white photographers like Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz represent one of the most visually compelling and culturally resonant sections of the show. The selected photographs apply a sober, coolly removed perspective and an exquisite formal sensibility to a pivotal moment of cultural change in this country. Their influence was not just on subsequent photographers, but, on painters and Conceptual artists who would see American terrain and portraiture in a new light, from Ruscha and the Bechers, to Richter and Gursky.

1969 provides us with important reminders of how things evolved to the present moment. So many of the artists represented here have become textbook figures, to the point that we often forget how radical they were in their historic context. It was productive that P.S.1 commissioned several contemporary artists to interpret and engage with this context, although the results are mixed. Hank Willis Thomas’s boldly-colored window screens provide one of the sole references to African American culture and civil rights, yet they fade into the background in the presence of important 1960s work. The brilliant, if chaotic, collective Bruce High Quality Foundation offers “portable museums” placed intermittently around the galleries, commenting on the agendas hidden behind museum walls that have persisted since far before 1969. The exhibition succeeds in jumpstarting a renewed reverence for the 1960s avant-garde, but there needs to be more at stake here. 2009, and now 2010, are different years, in a different century, and no less fraught in many ways. Some sense of urgency seems nonetheless to leak from this exhibition, whether intended by the curators or not, and the contemporary art world should take note.

The post 1969 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center appeared first on artcritical.

Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

The post High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975 appeared first on artcritical.