March 9 – April 16, 2011
45 East 78th Street
New York City, (212) 861-0020

Günther Uecker is a significant and complex artist who has built a career out of interweaving nails and light in ways that often require the active participation of the viewer.  His art is not, in terms of Matisse’s famous aphorism, “art for a tired businessman”.  Indeed, one of the major targets of Uecker’s aesthetic mission is not to allow our hypothetical tired businessman even a chair to sit on.  Instead, we are presented with a chair (Chair II, 1963) that has its sitability undermined by an infestation of nails.  This chair represents Uecker’s attempt to create an art that “invades the everyday world in which we live” (to quote the exhibition catalogue) in order to subvert the slick consumerism of his day. In this work and others, nails appear to function simultaneously as a source of protection and as an icon of suffering.

Indeed, Uecker’s moral complexity undermines the very movement that he was initially associated with—the Zero Group—as its third founding member with Otto Piene and Heinz Mack.  While Uecker shares with this group an interest in kinetic art and the use of machines to play with light and shadow, he is not merely reacting against the subjectivity of the dominant aesthetic legacy of his time, Abstract Expressionism.  Aspects of Uecker’s work are a reaction against the “zero hour” in Post-war Germany that allowed people to begin anew without coming to terms with their complicit role in the Holocaust.  Like other children of the perpetrator generation, including Anselm Kiefer, he acknowledges the past but seeks to do better—to transcend “the silence of the elders” as Uecker indicated in the sensitive catalogue interview with Hans Obrist.

What has emerged is an art in which time plays a significant role.  This dynamic strategy is well illustrated in Sand Mill (1970), a ten-foot round “earthwork” taken indoors that celebrates the work of the farmer laboring with a plow.  Installed by the artist, using an electric motor, wood and a cord to drag stones around a low mound of rocky earth, Sand Mill cyclically creates and erases concentric furrows, powerfully depicting destruction and renewal. The circular format of this work is anticipated by a wall work like Spiral, 1958, in which Uecker used a nail to laboriously create a target-like structure.

Another major kinetic work is Five Light Disks, Cosmic Vision, 1961-1981, a configuration of five disks with nailed surfaces that expose us to Uecker’s rough beauty.  Like Sand Mill, there is a concern with time, but here time slows down, producing a new reality for these nailed surfaces, which both reflect light and partition it.  They are Uecker’s Impressionist paintings of the cosmos.  Varying the colors of the five disks and their rates of movement serve to counteract the aggressive aura that some of his nail structures create.  Further, they require the observer to participate in completing the work by moving up to and across the disks that span more than 23 feet.  In so doing, one can notice that two of the disks move almost imperceptibly, one has a red floor pedal that requires the observer to power the pulley, and one does not move all but appears to do so because it is the only one in which the black nails are of different diameters and lengths.  This work demonstrates that what we see affects what we do and what we do affects what we see – a basic tenet of J.J. Gibson’s model of perception.

Other works border on the figural but ultimately focus less on the object and more on our encounter with it.  Perhaps the most powerful example is New York Dancer I, 1965, which is a human-scaled vertical cloth structure covered with nails that stands on the floor and rotates feverishly and noisily when you press a foot pedal.  While it was in motion, we backed away, afraid that a nail might escape.   This piece has the visual impact of many African fetish figures that are invested with powers ranging from protection to revenge.  But Uecker is an artist of many moods.  There is a more lyrical five-foot square wall piece that is composed of white nails and uses multiple shadows to create the sensation that a spectral bird-like figure is levitating off the canvas (White Bird, 1964).

Taken together, this exhibition is like Benjamin’s “angel of history” where we are driven simultaneously to look backward and forward.  The blend of geometry and expressionism is Post-Minimal at a time when Minimalism itself was largely nascent.  Moreover, it appears that Uecker’s generativity has opened up options for several artists over the past forty-five years, as seen in Eva Hesse’s breast-like wall pieces and cubes with black rubber protuberances, Tara Donovan’s recent pin ensembles at PACE last month that created fields of movement, and Mona Hatoum’s, Plus and Minus sand installation at MOMA in 2007 that created cycles of creation and destruction.

Kudos to L & M Arts for mounting this show with loans from museums and private collections.  Whereas Uecker’s work has been well known and appreciated in Europe for more than five decades, it has received little attention in New York.   This eye- and mind-stretching exhibition of his early paintings, sculptures, and installations should have gone some way toward rectifying this omission.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 21, 2005

Eighteen months ago, on these pages, I treated the latest paintings of Julian Schnabel to severe deprecation. In regretting any absence of resistance to the hubris of his own indulgent markmaking I invoked the memory of his classic, 1980s “plate” paintings, which notoriously integrated smashed crockery into the fabric of their support.

C&M offers a rare, and I must say, welcome opportunity to examine vintage Schnabels in depth. They offer a reminder of what made him such a novelty after the uptight, minimalist-conceptualist 1970s, lending new meaning to the phrase, “bull in a china shop.” The cumulative charge of these robust works, holding up nicely for their age, have a sometime skeptical critic hankering for another look at the perhaps too hastily dismissed recent efforts.

That said, even a no-holds barred “Maximalist,” as catalogue essayist Robert Pincus-Witten describes Mr. Schnabel, benefits from a good editor. Both floors of the tony uptown gallery are packed with paintings. Packed is also the word for the individual works, with their trademark excess of imagery and material, both in quantity and type. But there is energetic variety in pace and a clear sense that choice examples have been found which give this show sparkle. A narrative of restless curiousity and protean inventiveness comes across in this overview of the 1980s, with just a few hints of future directions, which is denied in presentations of new works (at PaceWildenstein in 2003 and Gagosian in 2001).

The smashed plates retain a sense of loutish outlandishness. In some works, like “The Patients and the Doctors,” (1978) and “Divan,” (1979), the actual, rather cheap crockery retains its color and pattern, and there is a sense of it as a happening—the actual crash is occuring in real time, which is the viewer’s. Their decorative elan recalls Gaudi’s Parc Gruell, their immediate inspiration, while the implicit theatricality reminds of Mr. Schnabel’s long years of employment in commercial kitchens. In works of a couple of years later, like “Aborigine Painting,” (1980) there’s a contrast to the appropriationist emphasis of the first plate pictures, as the plates, submerged in color, sink into the wood support.

Even so, of course, they retain their plateness, not to mention their chutzpah. The pictures are invariably made up of separate panels, often in different support materials, that take away from any sense of the conventional easel picture, which the scale and surface would unlikely admit anyhow. That said, by the critical standards of the time it was painting per se rather than the unconventionality of the approach which made waves. To the institutional avantgarde these seemed reactionary with their expressionism, their novocento imagery, and their gaudy excess, while to more classically-minded connoisseurs their intentional badness made them seem like just another assault from the iconoclasts’ endless armory. The evocation of Francis Picabia’s “transparencies” was enough to suggest Dadaist intentions.

Mr. Schnabel was “maximalist” in the sense of giving to painting not so much “everything but” as everything “in” the kitchen sink: It wasn’t only smashed crockery that he threw into his pictures but slices of animal hide, Mexican and Greek souvenir pottery, a magesterially weathered log found on the beach. Supports include at once luxurious and rubbishy materials like tarpaulin, velvet, found doors. It was as if he were offering himself up as a one-man Baroque to complement the arte povera renaissance of the previous decade, with its emphasis on humble materials and dreary absences of color. A secular Jew, Mr. Schnabel even threw in an opulently Catholic iconography to match his forms and textures: “Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets Malcolm Lowry” is the title of a 1984 paintings using grafitti-writer’s aerosol, wax and moulding plate on ecclesiastically purple velvet.

Of course, it could be argued that Mr. Schnabel traded in a stereotype of Catholicism as all emotional physicality and pietist excess. But however oafish and insolent his use of pictorial languages and his appropriations of Catholic motifs, the impulse seems borne of a genuine, and expressively desparate, nostalgia for a lost order in which images could generate veneration.

At a certain level, however, his imagery set out to shock. “Ethnic Types #15 and #72” throws an Indian and an African face into an exotic mix of animal hide cutouts, with picture-book Romanesque chalicies and crudely painted animal motifs to keep them company. Like his contemporaries, Eric Fischl and David Salle, Mr. Schnabel’s racial imagery seemed to swing with the pendulum against the political correctness of the 1970s artworld.

“Ritu Quadrupedis,” (1987) can literally be read as a manifesto painting: made up of the words of its title drawn in big white block letters, except for the first two “Us” which are brown, with an appropriated religious banner covering the “U” of “Ritu”, the letters fill a cruciform (Greek cross) tarpaulin support, over which yellow paint is then splattered and besmirched, at times suggestive of footprints. In its hubristic ambiguity the image is typical of Mr. Schnabel: The phrase comes from religious literature; St. Teresa, for instance, was said to have walked around her convent “ritu quadrupedis,” on four legs, as a sign of humility. But that is not a virtue that springs to mind with Mr. Schnabel, who instead stresses animal passion and brute indifference to received conventions.

This certainly tallies with the mystique of the artist as presented by the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Photographs have the bear-like Mr. Schnabel standing outside his Hampton’s house in pyjamas, wearing sunglasses like a Blues Brother. Or seated in a theatrically humungus studio, again in pyjamas. Like his painting style and iconography, this studiously nonchalent sartorial choice seems publicly private.

A note in the catalogue by C&M chairman, Robert Mnuchin, recounts the experience of viewing works hanging on the fence of the artist’s Hamptons tennis court. This might seem a trifling anecdote but at a certain level it suggests itself as a mixed metaphor (brash and courtly, sporting and aspirant, alienated and at home) of this at once complex and rather simple modern painter.

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through December 5, 2003

Al Taylor: Wire Instruments, 1989-90
Lawrence Markey
42 East 76th Street New York NY 10021-2711
Tel 212 517 9892 Fax 212 517 9894

November 13 to December 20, 2003

The classical world is continually being addressed anew in art and literature. Recently, in Anne Carson’s new translation of Sappho’s verse “If Not, Winter” Carson combines the verbal and visual by utilizing the whiteness of the page, magnifying the absence surrounding Sappho’s work. The poems, extant as scraps of text, appear on the page as bare fragments, surrounded by blankness. This is how this ancient world appears to us, in bleached, isolated shards that seem to hold traces of an ideal world of beauty and wisdom that we somehow hope can inform the present.

C&M Arts has assembled examples of Picasso’s work which addresses this world of long ago, realized after a sojourn in Rome and Pompeii. Here on display are some of his most serene works. Baigneuse a la Serviette de Bain, for example, depicts a standing female nude; her waving hair and towel picking up a wind as she walks away from the sea. The entire image, assembled with delicate flutters of gray brushstrokes, seems to float on the large sheet of handmade paper. There are also a number of Greek and Roman sculptures borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complementing Picasso’s paintings and drawings of classical heads, drapery and bodies rendered to express a sculptural solidity.

A few streets away at Lawrence Markey gallery is an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by the late Al Taylor, his “Wire Instruments” as he called them, also seem to address the classical age. Here we are dealing with works that are quite literally lyrical; they resemble partially abstracted lyres that the ancient poets used accompany them as they sung their verses. Taylor’s sculptures are made from wood found on the street and are delicately assembled with wire. They resemble Picasso’s sculpture “Cubist Guitar” but in their elongation and the whitewashed atmosphere of the painted wood, they are also reminiscent of Greek or Roman temple architecture. One can imagine a few lines from Sappho accompanied by plucks from one of Taylor’s shakily heroic instruments.

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Gregory Amenoff: Paintings, at Salander-O’Reilly
20 E 79th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-879-6606, through October 25

Peter Heinemann: Flamingo Heaven, at Gallery Schlesinger
24 E 73, 2nd floor, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-734-3600, through October 30

The story of Picasso’s protean struggles with style is fraught with contradictions, and never more so than when it came to classicism. This was the moment (roughly 1917 through the mid-1920s) when the greatest innovator in 20th-century art suddenly seemed to lead its rear guard as well.

“Picasso: The Classical Period” is a sumptuous exhibition of two dozen works at C&M Arts accompanied by a catalogue by the redoubtable Picasso biographer, John Richardson.

Picasso’s classicism is seen as his answer to a general “call to order” among the avant-garde in the wake of World War I. After all that carnage, cubism, whose antics implied anarchy and fragmentation, cut too close to the bone. Other artists who followed this call, tempering their earlier modernist excesses with new restraint, harmony, and wholeness, included Leger, Derain, Cocteau, and Stravinsky.

But art is always more complicated than this. In Picasso, in particular, competing tendencies perplexingly overlap. The serene finesse of his Ingres-inspired portraits of his haughty new Russian ballerina wife, Olga, cohabits in his oeuvre with ongoing variations on synthetic cubism – the colorful “cheat” cubism with which he subverted his own analytical principles.

In 1917 Picasso visited Rome in the company of Cocteau and the choreographer Léonide Massine to work on the ballet Parade for Diaghilev. He also took a couple of excursions to Naples and was blown away by Pompeii and by the colossi in the Museo Nazionale’s Farnese galleries. The gigantism that would characterize his stocky classical nudes, including what Mr. Richardson calls the “bananization” of limbs, apparently had its inspiration here, though the contemporary example of Aristide Maillol must also have played a role. These influences took just three years to gestate, and a flowering of neo-classicism occurred in 1920.

This fabulously selected (or fortuitously eclectic) show reveals how, within this one specific style, there is a range of tendencies as diverse as the competing styles in the career at large: The microcosm compresses the diversity of the bigger mix. Some pictures here throw together different kinds of representation almost as boldly as the “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” even as they adhere to the kind of compositional unity the earlier masterpiece eschewed.

The show celebrates the 10th anniversary of C&M Arts, the most tony of uptown galleries. Flexing some muscle, they have secured loans from the Met, the Modern (the seminal “Three Women at the Spring,” 1921), and other named collections. Choice examples of Greco-Roman statuary are interspersed throughout the show. In a way, though, the real gems here are the drawings and oil sketches, in which Picasso frequently betrays more than he does in the big machines.

The pastels, in particular, have a tough awkwardness that recalls the tortuous early romanticism of Cézanne, and is a far cry from the poise and tenderness of the conte crayon “Portrait in 3/4 Profile” (1923) or the almost Rococo finesse of “Conversation” (also 1923). A small (32″ long) “Bathers” recalls, in its central figure, Cézanne’s grand Bather of 1895. Whatever revolutions or counter-revolutions occurred in Picasso’s crazy career, Cézanne remained the unchallenged constitutional monarch.

Picasso sometimes looked to the ancients with a freshness that belies any sense of the “retardaire”; at other times, he filtered the classics through 18th- and 19th-century revivals. But even as he played games with language, he pushed that language forward. The enigma of Picasso is that, even as a pasticheur, he retained the energy and drive of a pioneer.

***

Gregory Amenoff came of age as a painter in another period of bombastic revivals: the early 1980s, an age of plate-smashing neo-expressionism and camp classicism. His neo-romantic landscapes, with their mystical overtones and old masterly touch, may have seemed a counter to such excesses, but he shared many characteristics of the period, too. He was no stranger, for instance, to the stragegic dislocations of scale and language.

Mr. Amenoff’s works have often been complicated, in a wild-man sense, throwing the eye around with a bewildering array of effects. The ambitious, highly wrought landscapes in his current show at Salander-O’Reilly are similarly dense, and as intriguing as any he has made. What is new is a convincing harmony that suggests maturity of vision. Complication is seen growing into complexity.

Mr. Amenoff’s language hovers between the perceptual and the metaphysical, between groundedness and mysticism, detail and the grand view. “Eastertide” (2003), a 10’wide panorama, has the viewer peer over jagged foreground rocks at a long highland view. The contrast between the zig-zagging, flattened-out rocks and the soft greens of the landscape behind recalls the geometric-organic contrast in Miró’s early Catalan landscapes, not to mention Giovanni Bellini’s “Agony in the Garden.” To my eye, the most likeable painting in the show is the much smaller “Ecco Pool II” (2003), which has the compacted glow of a Marsden Hartley or an Albert Pinkham Ryder.

***

Peter Heinemann’s compact, eccentric exhibition at Gallery Schlesinger should not be missed. It consists of an 8′ x 12′ diptych, “Flamingo Heaven” (2003); three supporting drawings; and an early, Beckmann-esque self-portrait. For many years, Mr. Heinemann has led a weekly drawing workshop at the School of Visual Arts, and the interchange here between his empirical life drawing and the stylized figuration of his mural is quite fascinating. His charcoal drawings consist of myriad quick studies arranged on two large pages, and often heap figures on top of one another in darkening clusters that contrast with spares expanses of empty page, in a way that brings to mind Botticelli’s Dante illustrations.

The outlined figures in the mural, meanwhile, bring more decadent forebears to mind, from Beardsley to the newly fashionable outsider Henry Darger. In the drastic economy of his figuration there is even a hint of SVA’s most famous alumnnus, Keith Haring, although Mr. Heinemann is incapable of Haring’s degree of banality. Mr. Heinemann depicts a Garden of Earthly Delights in which, after a bacchanal (Puvis de Chavannes set to the Beatles), everyone is turned into a flamingo. There is music-making, jousting, and flirting by a cast of cartoon characters of diverse size, scale, and style. There are Native American Kachina heads, Mohican hairdos, characters of different generations and epochs, even (by the look of it) Martians. Stock characters dance, do the splits, or loll about post-coitally. Mr. Heinemann’s heaven is blessed with a miraculous interplay of flatness and depth, density and openness, overlap and individuality.

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