November 6 to December 19, 2015
530 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7606

Standing in Gladstone’s 21^st Street gallery, Jean Tinguely’s sculptures might run the risk of appearing jokey and dumb. Some do, but being jokey and dumb doesn’t preclude being serious and intellectually engaging, which Tinguely’s work is. Negotiating presumed contradictions is usually difficult, but they’re often not true binaries, and those qualities that are considered dichotomous turn out to have a complicated relationship. Dumb and smart, at least in some art, in Tinguely’s work, are interdependent.

In a 1975 review of Brice Marden’s work, Mel Ramsden wrote that he didn’t think it’s stupid, but that it’s dumb. There’s a big difference. In some ways, this is studio shorthand: as Ramsden notes, Marden himself, that same year, said, “A painter’s just this odd weird person who has to do this dumb thing called painting.”[1] One important distinction is that while “stupid” implies a moral judgment, “dumb” typically doesn’t. It’s not pejorative. Dumb is big, blunt, crude, juvenile, corporeal, synonymous with mute. As an aesthetic strategy, dumb can smuggle a lot of complex information. Tinguely’s dada lineage is visible in the absurdity of his artworks, but there’s something more in being dumb. Beyond an artwork addressing the viewer as an invitation to play, it invites the viewer to grapple. One might consider the work of Richard Serra, Roxy Paine, Tim Hawkinson, or John O’Connor.[2] The same goes for other media — dumb video, dumb performance, dumb sculpture, etc. It needn’t be confined to kinetic art or sculpture.

The Tinguely exhibition features work made between 1954 and 1991, and its dumb may be harder to detect now. Some of this invisibility can be accounted in time and canonization, the hermetic seal of their historicity. Art is often expected to be erudite and sophisticated, savvy even in irreverence. Tinguely opens his hands and offers: Here is a thing made of garbage and it might disintegrate. In addition to the multicolored lights and spinning feathers, twirling poodles, that adorn his sculptures, Gladstone underscores the comic tone with large red buttons, which viewers step on to activate their kinetic features.[3]

The onanistic and spasmodic pieces rumble and screech and shake, powered by old motors. They smell, look, and sound decrepit. Trüffelsau (1984) sharpens the metaphor, with a boar’s skull blindly chewing air, foraging nothing. Its jaw is forced open by a rotating, motorized piece of driftwood attached at the left side, connected to the mandible by a jerking, twisted metal armature. Another, Untitled (1990), mounts an antelope skull on a rocking pendulum, powered by a motor and a rotted tire. A slat of sheet metal appears to have been torqued and worn into a wavering ribbon by the repetitive motion of being mindlessly rammed by the mechanical pendulum. In many pieces it’s unclear what purpose certain parts serve, or if they do at all.

A recent book by designer, artist, and amateur ethnographer Ernesto Oroza, entitled Rikimbili (2008), depicts constructions reminiscent of Tinguely, found in Cuba and made by common people trying to create machines to fill technological gaps with handmade antennae, repurposed motors, improvised battery chargers, motor bikes, and other devices. As Oroza explains, gadgets often come with a set of manufacturer-proscribed allusions that limit their possible uses, whereas these backyard inventors “liberate” objects from such strictures, repurposing and re-organizing components into novel, unsophisticated tools — a discipline he calls “technological disobedience.” They highlight the dysfunction of centrally planned consumer goods, assist in black market trade, and also serve as a model contrary to capitalist production. Like Tinguely’s assemblages, they strip existing information from devices (brands, patents, target markets, functionality, the timeline of planned obsolescence, international supply chains) and make curious, unexpected mutants.

And, similarly, Tinguely’s rude robot functionaries can be read against capitalist labor relations just as easily and effectively as they could be used to flog any of its historical alternatives — the headlessness of Marxism’s obsession with production, class, and technological development. Tinguely’s dumb can be critical, as in Oroza’s technological disobedience, and so, too, in its refusal of articulation. It pushes viewers in broad directions, but needs them to close finer hermeneutic gaps.

Tinguely’s work has been analogized with Rube Goldberg contraptions,[4] whose complex mechanisms achieve small tasks. But that’s wrong since, even less than Goldberg, his machines actually do nothing. They shudder and groan, perform spastic fits. Raichle Nr. 1 (1974) presents ski boots holding up large shears with a rusty armature. Press the button and the blades begin cutting, with blind and fearsome violence. The mechanical age is supposed to be surpassed by the digital, the information. The motorized, headless relics here are fun and frightening.

[1] Emphasis added

[2] It’s unclear whether or not this is largely a male phenomenon.

[3] This is, apparently, SOP for contemporary curations of Tinguely’s work.

[4] As by Alfred Barr in a press release for Tinguely’s 1960 Homage to New York performance at the Museum of Modern Art.

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April 21 to June 23, 2012
502 and 526 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-243-0200

Brice Marden, first famous for accomplished monochromatic works from the heysday of minimal art, later made interesting, but also to some extent naive, cultural appropriations of Chinese painting. Searching for a tradition through which he could find a way out of the reductivism of Western thinking, Marden based paintings on Chinese calligraphy and ink works. His calligraphic canvases and works on paper are certainly beautiful, but when one takes into consideration that the art he was inspired by comes from such a different place, it proves hard to envision his paintings solely as graceful meditations on Chinese painterly art. It is particularly dangerous, I think, when someone reaches so far across cultures and epochs for imagistic support. I am not suggesting that Marden is a dilettante—he is far too accomplished to be given that label—but it is relatively easy to see the body of work as an act of borrowing, undermined by the attempt to take on too much.

So it was with a certain degree of wariness, even pessimism, that I made my way to Matthew Marks’s two gallery spaces on 22nd Street to see his latest, and again Chinese-inspired shows. But I found much that was stunning. At Number 502 there was a fragment of Ru ware, a Chinese ceramic marked by a slate blue color, that served as a measure of hue for the nine smallish panels—Ru Ware Project (2007-12)—done by Marden after he had seen a show of the ceramics in Taiwan, where he had gone on a trip in 2007 (following a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). The press materials indicate that he painted the colors of the 11th-century ceramic glaze from memory; nine canvases, each 24 by 18 inches, make up the piece. Lined up across the wall, the colors are mostly blue, with the exception of the fourth panel from the right, which is a dark tan. These monochromatic panels effectively join Marden’s interest in historical Chinese culture with his minimalist work done two generations earlier. The painting exquisitely makes use of colors that come from a thousand years ago, in ways that dazzle through subtlety. And because the work refers both to a specific Chinese cultural production and to Marden’s earlier efforts, we fully understand the motivation behind the piece.

Then, at 526 West 22nd Street, there is a group of new works done on marble, which inevitably refer to the six-year period, 1981 through 1987, during which he painted on marble and bridged the minimalist paintings with the calligraphic ones. In the new group of paintings, it is possible to see how inventive the artist is; First Square (2011) looks like a transformation from the ancient to the very new. Two bands of color, first blue then white, sit atop a yellow triangle whose lowest side is met by a triangle of two stripes, one white and one green. A dark smudge (the graphite in the piece) cuts across the middle of the painting, rising up on the right-hand side. The work is particularly successful for the way Marden paints the idiosyncratic surfaces of the marble. We see much the same happen in Joined (2011), a narrow, vertically aligned slab of marble marked by pigment and graphite. The top two-thirds of the marble is painted a light green, while graphite is randomly applied, filling in hollows and creating abstract patterns of their own. Here we see Marden’s remarkable versatility adapting itself to the materials at hand, and creating lovely, subtle paintings on the stone. The results are so successful it makes one rethink the calligraphic paintings, which admittedly can be seen as a late revision of abstract expressionism. But little matter the past, for Marden has created a fine body of work now, in the present.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 26, 2006 under the title “A non-linear path”

However much Brice Marden was a child of Minimalism, the true character of his work is something superficially similar to but distinct from reduction— namely, simplicity.

Minimal art was about eschewing excresences, asserting primary, linguistic structures, constantly questioning the definition of art.  What comes across in Mr. Marden’s lyrical, sumptuous paintings and works on paper is something quite opposite—an epicurean principle, an art born of rich aesthetic memories, of manifest pleasures in making.

His MoMA retrospective, curated by Gary Garrels, launches with stark, sleek monochromatic canvases of the mid-1960s, made in New York after he graduated from Yale and returned from a year in Paris.  Several rooms later there is an abrupt shift in style, as wayward linearity takes over from sheer planes as his principle means of expression.  But there’s consistency, too, as pared down means, depersonalized markmaking, and restricted palette continue to prevail.

In whatever period of his work, or medium, however, what comes across is a honing of sensual forces, not their denial. He is a subtle lyricist, which gives sustained energy to a remarkably satisfying display that progresses through various shifts in mood and mode.

His images are hand made and hard won: An early source of inspiration, Cézanne, remained his touchstone.  However easy on the eye, his work isn’t shy to let us know that they are the results of intense, accumulated labor.

Take the early monochromes, for instance.  They might initially perplex in their blandness—or have invited a cheer from a 1960s iconoclast, eager to cheer on the “death of painting.”  But they invite closer reading, which soon reveals surfaces that are alive and kicking.  It is frequently apparent that the final, defining color — the foggy green of “Nebraska” (1966) or the midnight gray of “The Dylan Painting” (1966/1986) —harbor underlying hues, accomplices, so to speak, in their arrival.  These early pictures often have a strip at the base that offer clues of the multilayeredness of the flat plane above, almost like bar codes of effort.

And then there is the kind of color he goes for, which is about tone rather than chroma—which means it is the kind of color that is earned rather than elected.  His surfaces were worked obsessively—brushstrokes would be fastidiously erased with a spatula. He mixed molten beeswax into his turpentine to achieve a particularly muted, matt quality—while his color sings, various strategies ensure they do so sotto voce.

In 1964 he had worked as a custodian at the Jewish Museum during Jasper Johns  first retrospective, and this artist’s strategy of worrying surfaces into minute grades of differentiation clearly rubbed off on Mr. Marden. “Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns” (1970) a belated homage, a polyptych of three panels in warmer and cooler grays, is a tour de force in the way it sustains a tension between sensuality and retraint.

From single, monochrome canvases with lots of barely repressed life under their surfaces, Mr. Marden progressed, by the end of the 1960s, to multipanelled compositions where singly colored canvases extend and contrast with their neighbors.  Frequently, the titles would refer to life, or art, experiences—his family, or great paintings that inspired him, like a Goya in the Louvre in “D’après la Marquise de la Solana” (1969).  The mauve panel to the right fuses, perhaps, the light pink chemise and salmon pink hair ribbon of Goya’s noble sitter.

In itself, Mr. Marden’s attitude towards the past singles him out as an artist of accretion rather than elimination, although sometimes his minimal approach leaves ambiguity.  The “Homage to Art” series from the early 1970s, for instance,  included in the galleries of drawing on the museum’s third floor, place multiples of postcards (Goya, Fra Angelico) in grids worked up to near blackness in graphite and beeswax, somehow managing simultaneously to threaten and venerate.

Increasingly, however, his art reveals layers of influence from the past, with Chinese calligraphy and poetry and Greek civilization (he purchased property in Hydra in 1973) joining old master painting as his sources.  At two moments in his career his work references the muses—indirectly, in a series of planar polyptyches called the Groves Group of 1972-73, taking their olive colors from the sacred grove where the muses dwelt, from which our word “museum” derives, and explicitly in an all-over linear work, “Study for the Muses (Hydra Version) (1991-95/1997)—acknowledging a sense of memory and multilayeredness, if not indeed a classicism, at odds with a prevailing disdain for tradition in the artworld of the day.

The polyptyches of the 1970s got increasingly complex in their arrangements, taking his work in a confounding direction.  “Thira: (1979-80) has a complex architecture—in three equal parts, the composition is actually made up of eighteen panels, with an almost theatrical sense of dramatic spaces, with stark, bright color contrasts and competing horizontals and verticals.  This is more the territory of other artists (Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly come to mind) and feels like a cul de sac in Mr. Marden’s development.  Indeed, it is from this place that his art makes its dramatic turn, shedding plane for line.

The way the show is installed, you literally turn a sharp corner into this new direction, slipping into a back gallery for what feels like an illicit indulgence rather than a new chapter.  The only transitional work between “Thira” and its attendant multi-panel monochromes and the gesturally expressive compositions that mark his work from the mid-1980s of awkwardly painted, open linear structures set against rough, spatially ambiguous grounds are a few odd paintings on shards of marble.

But if you look at the catalogue, which mixes drawings and paintings in strict chronological order, rather than in hanging order, a different narrative emerges.  The real transition occurs with drawings that, although still tight with the grid, admit deviation in the form of dripped ink and gouache, as in the “Melia Group” (1980-81), or with a sense of deep space implied by overlapping types of line of different color and scale, as in “4 and 3 Drawing” (1979-81).

The linear Mardens might seem more complex than the planar ones in terms of gesture and expression, but arguably they restore simplicity in the way they reconnect with intuition and bodily presence.  But if the new work looked more like Jackson Pollock and less like Barnett Newman, there is no sense of Mr. Marden suddenly becoming an action painter.  He still found ways to distance overtly personal touch from his work.  He would attach his brushes to long sticks, for instance, which had twin effects—making the calligraphy intentionally awkward, thus eschewing his own handwriting; and establishing a distance for the artist from his pictorial surface that kept it in focus while he worked.  This meant he didn’t separate making from seeing.

Chinese art became his new touchstone.  His “Cold Mountain” series from 1989-91 is undoubtedly a high point in his career, and paid homage to the mythic Tang Dynasty poet Han Shan.  Nine-foot-by-twelve-foot canvases present  continuous loops of sometimes fluent, sometimes stilted line.  Often, as they change direction, they get drippy; othertimes they seem to run out of juice, just like the brush of a master calligrapher.  The grounds are white, or steely gray, and while there might be an underlying web of pale blue, the top layer in black, marking these pictures as chromatically abstemious.  Like calligraphy, they are apparently inscribed top to bottom, right to left, and also like their oriental source, the artist encourages readings in multiple directions.

While initially these linear structures might bring nets or webs to mind, the fluctuations in intensity and abrupt changes in direction inevitably has one reading figures into the mass—in some works more overtly than others.  This sense of an identity parade of totems or personages, prevalent in the paintings and drawings of the early 1990s, might have something to do with the vertical modus operandi.

Figural misreadings recede, however, as Mr. Marden’s line gradually thickens and his pace of application slows up, as frenetic spindle gives way to gracious loop.  Again, according to the artist, focus was the cause for a change of scale.  But if we view his painting career as a totality, in the way Mr. Garrels encourages, with the monochromes of the first twenty years as the thesis, and the calligraphic linear webs as the antithesis, then his most recent work is a synthesis of line and plane.

The last room is a blaze of hot colors and muscular rythmns.  The lush turns and sinous kinks in “6 Red Rock 1” (2000-2002) has an almost Art Nouveau sense of organic deliberateness.  Two examples from a series of six-panelled friezes, “somewhat pretentiously” titled (according to the artist himself) “The Propitious Garden of Plane Image,” orchestrates color sequences of overlapping lines in a ludic spectral sequence.

But, as I’ve intimated already, neat sequences and dramatic turns alike are undermined by consideration of Mr. Marden’s drawing.  While there are a few key works on paper in the grand sixth floor galleries, drawings are mostly confined to an intimate display on the third floor (and printmaking, alas, is entirely excluded).  Drawing tells a different tale—parallel rather than contradictory.  It seems more about risk, intensity, and experiment than the paintings, which even at their most calligraphic are always characterized by even-tempered finesse.  Where his drawings are about discovery, his paintings are about distillation—and at MoMA we are all modernists, hungry for discovery.

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