April 9 to December 3, 2017
The Pinault Collection
Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice

“Yes” is hard to find. At times it requires one clamber up a ladder and look through a magnifying glass at a teeny-tiny printed word; as in Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting) (1966). In Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Damien Hirst fabricates an elaborate and absurd mythology that leads us back two hazy millennia, to the bottom of the sea and up to the top again, in order to find Yes: an ultimately exalted demesne of the human spirit populated by unicorns, lions, bears, Mickey, Goofy, attractive naked people, the entire history of art, plus colossal demons and other fearsome horrors for good measure. Hirst’s quest has two parts: as he picks and chooses his mythological and archeological all-star team he underscores again and again that all of this is found and his for the taking. This is explicit in the narrative of the expedition to find the works, as well as the accreted coral, barnacles and shells which have “grown” over the works, signifying their ultimate decontextualization from the world of human culture. The artist is collector and adventurer, but not necessarily the creator, more the fabricator-in-chief. Hirst has always embraced the found object as source of inspiration, and he has always been willing to go out on a limb to push the boundaries of what found means, from the mortal remains of sharks, butterflies, cows sheep and pigs, to the pills in your medicine cabinet and realms to which they can take you. In this massive Venetian undertaking, the artist pillages art history via pages ripped from H.W. Hanson.

Frank Zappa recorded an album called “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar” (1981) in which he restrained his juvenile sense of humor that was expressed through his lyrics, and simply played his instrument—to great effect. The seriousness of Hirst’s enterprise in “The Unbelievable” is tripped up by similarly nerdy, teen-age boy silliness. Mostly this involves inserting himself into the exhibition, as in The Collector with a Friend, a full-size replica of the iconic Blaine Gibson piece “Partners” (1993) depicting Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey Mouse, in this case Hirst standing in for Walt. The other weak point is a previously unprovenanced “genre” of sculpture, purportedly Greek, which offers extremely accurate representations of mostly naked women: The Diver is a particularly porny depiction of a headless woman’s body. Hirst expends so much mileage convincing the viewer that he can play with the concept of aesthetic and historic styles, at least via costume and context, that these astylistic examples, clearly generated using body casting techniques or seeming to, lack the foreignness that comes with the idiosyncrasies of mannerism. It is this historical and national diversity that is the basis of the whole project. The initial videos of scuba divers retrieving the sculptures, followed by the galleries of coins, ingots, jewels and amphorae go a long way in reinforcing the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Aten a faux-Egyptian sculpture in red marble using Rihanna as inspiration falls within the parameters of almost being Egyptian, and The Warrior and the Bear depicting a scimitar-wielding gamin in a bikini bottom astride a giant bear is so absurd as to constitute a new hybrid style of Anime-crossed-with-Dungeons-and-Dragons. Unfortunately, most of the other hyper-realistic pieces depicting solely human subjects without monsters or costumes are unconvincing.

Can a fatalistically cheery outlook on the history of human creativity be wrenched from an ultimately reductionist Duchamp-ian approach to that creativity? Hirst is counting on the fundamental sentimentality that exists at the root of most human mythology and spirituality to make possible his broad generalized anthropological connections. He is largely successful. He equates the Gods of Hinduism, Ancient Egypt and the Aztecs with Walt Disney, contemporary celebrities Rihanna and Yolandi Visser, and fantasy novel/sci-fi imagery. It may be insulting, but one gets the impression that while Hirst’s avoidance of Judeo-Islamic-Christian imagery might be aesthetic colonialism, it’s more likely bred of the opposite: he finds those familiar traditions far too played-out and boring in terms of visual culture. Western culture’s contribution is Disney and porn, not Jesus and Mary, and through the eyes of his collector/slave alter ego Cif Amotan II, he has assembled what he thinks are all the meaningful characters, tropes, situations and motives from the history of world art and culture.

Depending on where you start your voyage on Hirst’s magic swirling ship, and I would recommend the Palazzo Grassi followed by the Punta Della Dogana, you begin with a sixty-foot tall headless demon and end in a tower ringed by unicorn skulls. The inclusion of curios as well as sculptures introduces another of Hirst’s favorite themes, the question of what constitutes a work of art. By pushing the momento mori/still-life to its absolute maximum in his works utilizing animal corpses in the past, Hirst forced a literal definition of the genre, removing all pretense and metaphor. In The Unbelievable, his frame is the museum itself, and his inclusion of reproduced natural objects such as Nautilus and giant clam shells, mineral specimens, gorgon heads and mammoths skulls in this very wide purview confers a legitimacy on all the objects, real or imagined. It is a wonderful make-believe narrative of art similar to what one finds in other singular presentations of esoteric collections like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

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“Have you seen it yet?… It’s so amazing…we’ve been twice.”

The most debated and detested exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale has nothing to do with it—namely, of course, Damien Hirst’s double-bill blockbuster. What makes this interesting is that the Hirst-Pinault machine has deliberately snubbed and subverted the venerable Biennale with a series of lavish gala parties just weeks before the official event and not a single celebration during its opening week. This has a genuine significance beyond PR micro-politics: the suggestion that Hirst’s work is no longer dependent upon the blessings of the self-assumed “powers that be,” and that all art can, theoretically, liberate itself from this reigning apparatus of curatorial approval. For this is the first Biennale in which one can sense an actual aesthetic argument or “counter-argument” indicative of a larger shift within contemporary art.

There have long been two distinct parallel art worlds: those of the “fair” and the “biennale”—the former largely supported by the market and the latter by institutions and foundations, one “commercial,” the other “serious.” (I remember Jeffrey Deitch explaining this to me with pitch-perfect discernment, which made it all the more shocking to spot him this year on a humble vaporetto, rather than his usual private speedboat.) But though the 2017 Biennale (directed by Christine Macel) puts up a valiant defense, it is starting to look as if the battle has been won elsewhere. The very “fairest” of fair art—including the outrageously figurative, openly decorative, and scandalously kitsch—is taking over, leaving the highbrow conceptualists stranded very dry indeed. This Biennale may herald the first serious cracks in the established system, the beginning of an “eternal return” to what might be termed traditional art making: final throes of that long announced death of the avant-garde.

In this respect, the most significant show in Venice after Hirst is that put together by Wolfgang Scheppe to celebrate the founding of the Internationale Situationniste sixty years ago. Contrasting Hirst’s extravaganza, this is a private initiative, resolutely closed to the public and accessible only by invitation as the summa of clandestine chic. Scheppe, an academic, writer, and curator long based in Venice, has been responsible for some outstanding projects. But the aim of this exhibition, largely drawn from his own collection, is none less than to herald the end of art itself, to celebrate the Situationists as the final avant-garde movement, one that did away with such notions along with everything else. Entitled “Tous contre le spectacle,” one of Debord’s war cries, it condemns every sort of diversionary cultural entertainment, both the official Biennale and Hirst.

The Return of the Figurative

No, of course art did not end with the Situationists. This necessary cleansing led to a generational break, for the official last year of the IS, 1972, was precisely the same year most consider the official birthdate of “Postmodernism.” This was the year of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate, and the first inklings of a return to figuration in painting.

Indeed, one of the most lauded exhibitions in Venice, Philip Guston and the Poets at the Accademia, emphasizes precisely such work from just this period, the most important paintings from the first flush of his figurative comeback of 1970 until 1975. Despite some beautiful abstractions, including Untitled (1958) and The Tale (1961), the main theme is his varied approach to realism and art historical lineage. This included early drawings and even a direct comparison between a Bellini “Madonna” and his 1944 Young Mother, an unflattering double-hang in which Guston comes out the loser. Guston’s wise wall text seems a prescient herald: “I don’t want to die with the past, but to me the past isn’t the past. Signorelli could be working downtown.”

The return of the figurative, the traditional, and historical can be seen all over Venice, that city which has never really let them die, despite codes of contemporary practice. Their alibis are the allegorical and literary, smuggling in such representational content in guise of archive. This can be seen in Stephen Chambers’s rich paintings of the Court of Redonda at Ca’Dandolo, portraits of the imaginary aristocracy of an invented island kingdom—one which writer Javier Marías has long claimed as his own. Likewise, La Kermesse Héroïque (2017) by Lucy McKenzie at Fondazione Bevilacqua suggests an eccentric historicism akin to Marías’s own writings, a sort of neo-postmodernism suggesting ancient artifact without moral or aesthetic judgement. McKenzie gets away with every sort of technique, even trompe l’oeil, due to an emphasis on research and re-creation: these only happen to look like attractive decorative devices. Equally interesting was a conversation with artist Markus Proschek, whose interest in the aesthetics of Third Reich sculpture and painting provoke questions of ideology.

And such ideological issues are at the fore of Space Force Construction, the exemplary first exhibition at the Russian V-A-C Foundation on the Zattere. As smartly curated by Matthew Witkovsky of the Art Institute of Chicago, this brings together archival material and contemporary installations, with an emphasis on revelatory photography and ephemera. Here we can marvel again at when abstraction was synonymous with social revolution, when the avant-garde were indispensable as the Red Guard. On show are Soviet Constructivists whose practices questioned bourgeois artistic rubrics of illusionism and authorship such as Popova and Rodchenko.

Craft, Kitsch, and Cultural Politics

Extremely interesting in this context is Isasthenai, a new work by Tania Bruguera featuring rapid clay portrait busts, done from life and described as “traditional statuary technique.” Here the crucial fact was that Bruguera, a hugely successful international artist, could not create these sculptures herself but was obliged to employ another artist, Ekaterina Kovalenko.

Issues of authorship, and indeed of “Russian taste,” are central to the whole furor around Hirst. For whilst Hirst makes no pretense to have crafted these sculptures and antiquities himself—au contraire his charming pretense is that they have been brought up from an actual shipwreck—connoisseurs claim to be able to recognize whether they had been hewn in China, Russia, or Italy, to identify such anonymous national craftsmanship. And these works, which have apparently enjoyed great commercial success, are dismissed as being for Russian or Asian collectors—for the old-fashioned goût of precisely the same sort of people who have created them, suggesting the paradoxical redemption of practical skills by such emergent markets. There is also the amusing contrast of the Grenada Pavilion’s exhibition of the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, the artist who provided direct inspiration for Hirst’s current work (an example of Hirst’s brilliant, longtime implementation of Picasso’s maxim about “great artists stealing.” And more power to him.)

Sculptures with echoes of Hirst are to be found everywhere: Lorenzo Quinn’s Support (2017), giant hands holding up Ca’Sagredo hotel, or Shezad Dawood’s Where do we go now? (2017), a shiny resin 3D rendering. Likewise, the white horse in the Argentine Pavilion by Claudia Fontes and the axe-man panorama by Liliana Porter immediately recall their fellow countryman Adrián Villar Rojas on the roof of the Met. Within the official Biennale there is, as expected, a persistence of old-guard conceptualism, and a relative resistance to any younger, fresher movement towards every form of figuration. However, cracks can be detected, not least among Chinese artists, who have often embraced the continuum connecting contemporary artists, such as Hao Liang, with ancient traditions. In fact, among non-Western artists, various types of figuration appear more frequently—for instance, New Zealand artists Francis Upritchard and Lisa Reihana, whose work riffs on a marvelous 1805 Joseph Dufour et Cie woodblock wallpaper (pleasingly “purchased from admission charges” by the National Gallery Australia). Particularly interesting are artists like Peruvian Juan Javier Salazar or Philippines-born Manuel Ocampo, who are overtly political about the Western suppression of other figurative traditions: abstraction as imperialism.

The gigantic installation by Roberto Cuoghi which takes up much of the Italian Pavilion is as crucial to the argument of a new emerging traditionalism as Hirst’s Venetian magnum opus. Like Hirst, Cuoghi is a major star who is unafraid to deal with the most fundamental of figurative themes—in this case, sculptures of Christ himself, Imitazione di Cristo (2017), produced by teams of skilled artisans in a hellish assembly line. Religious iconography is here another way into a certain “image-regime,” a side door, a way of entering the historical continuum, as with Hirst’s appropriation of every sort of mythology, from Medusa to Disney. As such, Cuoghi’s serial versions of Christ can be rewardingly compared to Paul Benney’s Speaking in Tongues (2017) at the Chiesa di San Gallo. This installation, featuring a single large painting with special lighting and audio effects, conjures a richly dramatic environment portraying some sort of contemporary spiritual visitation worthy of Titian’s Descent of the Holy Ghost (circa 1545) at Santa Maria della Salute. The central panel of Benney’s work is flanked by his “Reliquary” series of paintings, stuttering candles in airless bell jars, staking a convincing claim for not only what he terms “the rigors of representational art,” but also an example of religious (Christian) art practice.

Virtual Versus “Real”

This Benney-Cuoghi aesthetic reaches its absolute apotheosis over at the Faurschou Foundation with one of the most shocking works to be seen in Venice, Christian Lemmerz’s virtual reality piece, La Apparizione (2017). This terrifying representation of the crucifixion pushes Christian iconography to the outer limits of kitsch horror, and may be the one work that Hirst wishes he had thought of first. In fact, virtual reality may well prove, at last, to be sufficiently workable to be the next frontier in contemporary art, as demonstrated by the other VR work at the Faurschou: a truly troubling, extreme scenario dreamt up by Paul McCarthy.

The other advantage of VR is that you have to pay attention. You have no choice. By contrast, the smartphone wreaks the most delicious revenge on those boring video makers who made us suffer in silence in previous decades; now as soon as anyone sits down in front of a video, they immediately get to work texting, turning the whole room into a sea of bobbing white blobs, like cigarette lighters at a concert.

The glorious idea that “real” art might eventually be allowed to return, overcoming all current orthodoxies and assumptions, can be smelled in the air this year in Venice: a sharp tang, a salty brine to refresh the soul. As the artist known as Andy Hope 1930 quotes Franco Berardi: “The future is no more.” There is still some work to be done—after all, it is still only really acceptable to employ others to make your traditional sculptures or realist paintings. But that may be changing. At Mark Bradford’s excellent American Pavilion, there has been much stress on the handmade quality, to quote the pavillion’s brochure, how the “artist and his mother worked side by side for decades,” and the “paper that the artist bleached, soaked and molded with his hands.” Just as abstract art proved to be merely a hundred-year blip, that admittedly attractive fad of the “long” twentieth century, so “biennale” art may prove to have an even shorter shelf life, and we may all too soon be bingo back to Bouguereau—albeit in state of the art Sensurround virtual reality.

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A peculiar characteristic of contemporary art is that it is accompanied by an enormous amount of talk from artists, curators, and academics about its distinctive features, both what they are and what they should be. A widely shared assumption of such talk is that contemporary art is marked by the acceptance of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade as an art-making strategy. A readymade is not so much made as chosen: the artist starts with an idea or concept, and then chooses some object to which the idea is attached. The artist’s creative activity is focused on articulating the idea and scanning the world for a suitable vehicle. How, then, could such a narrow conception of artistic activity give rise to the great range of practices in contemporary art?

In Art in the Making, Glen Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the readymade is the fundamental model in contemporary art. However, recent developments, particularly the widespread acceptance of collective art-making, have stressed the model to a near breaking-point. Much prominent contemporary art is ‘fabricated:’ one or more artists detail how the work should be made, and artisans and fabricators make the artifacts that comprise the material dimension of the work. Why should such collective authorship stress the model of the readymade? Adams and Bryan-Wilson point to conceptual and social factors that undermine its intelligibility. First, the acceptance of the readymade implies that ‘anybody is/can be an artist’, for after all who can’t point at an object and say ‘I hereby declare thee a work of art’? The problem with this, the authors suggest, is that the readymade is a late outgrowth of the Romantic-modern conception of the artist as a ‘genius’. The social function of the genius model is to secure the conception of the artist as the primary source of a work’s meaning, value, and significance. The social factor is that contemporary works of art are now part of what Rosalind Krauss termed an ‘expanded field’, which the authors also alternatively refer to as ‘the broader environment’ (p.73) or ‘wider cultural matters’ (p.94).

In order to indicate the scope of artistic making in contemporary art, the authors introduce the term ‘production’. For them the term is extraordinarily capacious; it comprises what is traditionally called the ‘creative process’ (a phrase that does not occur in the book) of conceiving, designing, and fabricating a work, as well as any relevant social processes, such as seeking funding. The authors cite Karl Marx’s early characterization of production as “weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking” to show the level at which basic activities of ‘production’ occur, and to signal explicitly their “commitment to materialist approaches” (p.16). Most of the book is devoted to short descriptions of and reflections upon recent art works. The ten chapters range from ‘Painting’ through ‘Performance’ to the most recently emergent topics of ‘Digitizing’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’. The authors regularly note the points at which a work responds to the contemporary ‘expanded’ condition of the arts. For example, they claim that a characteristic of performance is ‘support’, the ways in which any isolated action of a single agent actually relies upon broad intersecting social networks (p.95).

The authors seem to have in mind such ‘material’ networks and practices as food production and distribution, cleaning, maintenance, and transportation. Once artworks are made in ways that acknowledge the contemporary ‘expanded’ condition, unnoticed or marginalized aspects of the work’s making can and sometimes do enter into the work’s content. The authors claim that there is a broad “problematic relationship between art and value” (p.15). Three kinds of value are explicitly noted. First, there is ‘material value’, the buying and selling price of the materials incorporated into a work. Material value has arisen as an issue due to the recent use of spectacularly expensive materials, most notoriously in Damien Hirst’s diamond-blanketed skull. Second there is the market price of the finished work, a value ultimately determined by the degree of social recognition of the artist’s alleged genius (p.141). The first two kinds of value are simply aspects of price, and so are conceptually distinct from a third kind that would usually be referred to as ‘artistic value’ (a phrase that does not occur in the book). The authors’ reference to this third kind are so brief and obscure that it’s unclear what conception of artistic value they hold, but some indications are given: it’s what gives a painting its potential to subvert the practice of painting conceived in terms of medium-specificity (p.34); it makes some works ‘compelling’ (p.208); when it is embodied in a work, the work becomes ‘potent’ (p.217).

The argument of the book, then, seems to be this: Contemporary art is constituted in part by the broad acceptance of the strategy of the readymade as the core model of art-making. This model is bound to the continued acceptance of the artist as genius, that it is social recognition of the imaginative powers of a particular individual that gives that individual’s works whatever meaning, value, and significance they have. The recent and growing prominence of multiple authorship, fabrication, and crowdsourcing serves to undermine the appeal to individual genius. So artistic value in contemporary art is uncertain, at least in orienting our understanding of multiply authored works and those that are seemingly individually authored (since individual authorship is in any case an illusion).

This summary of the argument is distant from the experience of reading the book which is dominated, as noted above, by brief discussions of individual works. Since the authors aim to present “the full spectrum of sites of production” in contemporary art, these discussions of particular works are necessarily so brief (usually a couple of paragraphs, and rarely more than three or four) that the accounts seem arbitrary. For example, in the two short paragraphs on the work of Josephine Meckseper, they note that some critics have characterized her works as “mind-numbingly obvious”. They immediately counter with the suggestion that “the mind-numbing effects of hyper-commodification are precisely what concern her.” No further evidence or argument is given in support of their interpretation other than noting that she does indeed recycle “the cliché [sic] tropes of luxury display” and that this somehow “strikes right at the heart of artistic authorship” (p.148). Perhaps the nadir of the book is their discussion of Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’. They ignore the volumes of literature on the piece, as well as Smithson’s own conceptualization of the work, to simply assert that despite the work’s great complexity, it “was at the most basic level a deployment of equipment normally used to clear a lot and lay a foundation” (p.74) It would be tedious to clarify the various conceptual obscurities here. The occasional citations of authors ranging from Karl Marx (p.16) to the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell (p.37) to the contemporary art historian Rosalind Krauss (p.12) are wholly perfunctory and at best play no role in the larger argument. This is particularly frustrating with regard to Gell, who had advanced a sophisticated and controversial anthropological account of art involving the consideration of networks of makers and users in his book Art and Agency (1998). In their concluding chapter the authors suddenly claim that the subject of ‘distributed authorship’ has been present throughout their book, and that this condition is pervasive in contemporary art (p.223); but, though they have earlier cited Gell, they do not so much as mention his attempt to demonstrate that this subject is also pervasive in, among other things, the arts of the Trobriand Islanders kula, famously studied by Bronislaw Malinowski. Is this condition, then, only pervasive in contemporary art?

Aside from hoping to gain a superficial familiarity with a broad range of recent art, one might read the book as a stimulus for reflection on the remaining force, if any, of the Duchampian model of the readymade in contemporary art. It seems to me, though, that the authors bungle this possibility because they lack any articulate conception of what one might call ‘the appreciative focus’, or what artists are offering for participation, perception, and/or reflection. A distinction of contemporary ‘visual’ art could be that the focus of appreciation is given less through a viewer’s visual perception and more through participation in tasks set by artists. Perhaps contemporary visual art is connecting with ‘wider cultural frames’ by becoming integrated or re-integrated with architecture, dance, and participatory spectacles.

Lacking anything equivalent to the notion of an appreciative focus, the authors cannot resolve the issues they set forth. A particularly damaging consequence of this is their inability to say what the content of a work is. Since on their account it is a consequence of the model of the readymade that the ‘pre-artistic’ processes out of which the artifact arises are part of the content of the work, they have no principled reason for not including in a painting the making of its frame, the cutting of the tree, the making of the saw to cut the tree, and so on infinitely. Put bluntly, the authors need to go back to school to learn the relevant basic conceptual points. But since they themselves are among the most sophisticated writers on contemporary art, and one is a prominent and high-level academic, who shall educate these educators?

Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson: Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from Studio to Crowdsourcing. (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2016. 256 pp. ISBN 9780500239339. $39.95)

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&Model
Crossing Lines
January 22 to February 22, 2014

Henry Moore Institute
Dennis Oppenheim: Thought Collision Factories
November 21 to February 16, 2014

The cultural center of the city of Leeds can be found in a pair of museums located on the Headrow, a prominent avenue adjacent to the majestic Victorian City Hall: the Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute. Around the corner is &Model, a rough-and-ready raw space gallery started by a group of art professors from the Leeds Metropolitan University, including the collaborative team Nathaniel Mellors and Chris Bloor, and James Chinneck and Derek Horton. Liam Gillick has in the past expressed his pet theory that Yorkshire has been singled out in the UK to produce the nation’s most notable visual artists: Damien Hirst, David Hockney and Henry Moore are all from the Leeds-Bradford region. Gillick’s theory is that each of these artists has a plain-talk approach to art that allows them to be more accessible to a British public that has always been a bit cagey about contemporary art. Despite Gillick’s assertion, the three venues above present a combination of conceptually challenging exhibitions, or cast shows involving traditional genres that don’t really play to a public merely comfortable with the status quo.

Nocturne at the Leeds Art Gallery (through April 2014) is much more than its simple premise suggests. A direct statement of an exhibition, it presents the work of John Atkinson Grimshaw, George Shaw, Jack Yeats, George Sauter and Walter Greaves. Set in a single room, the canvasses form a round-table discussion on the hazy boundary between night and day—the idolization of “verdurous glooms.” The conversation lies mostly between Grimshaw, the Leeds based Victorian painter who lends a gothic sensibility to his renderings of what were contemporary scenes, and George Shaw, a 2011 Turner Prize nominee whose images of desolate suburban ruins have a similar lyrical melancholy, sans the Victorian saccharine historicism. Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay Park, Leeds (1872) is reminiscent of René Magritte’s series The Empire of Light (1950-54), in its surreal combination of brightly articulated shadows on a park path, against a twilit sky. Grimshaw uses the conceit of the Nocturne to play capriciously with light sources in his claustrophobic canvas. Meanwhile, Shaw presents a return to nature in his work The End of Time (2008-9). The nemesis of the nocturne, artificial light, has been rendered null and void with the demolition of a small suburban home, whose foundations now sit in the semi-darkness that was ubiquitous before Edison.

Curators Patrick Morissey and Clive Hanz Hancock presented a more polemical framework in the exhibition Crossing Lines at &Model. The curators have declared a general renewed interest in “the non-objective” in the 21st century, the exhibit feature sixteen British painters who work in this mode of abstraction. Artists such as Andy Wicks, Giulia Ricci, Frixos Papantoniou, Alex Dipple and Marion Piper take a multifaceted approach to image and object making, exploring pattern, line, edge and texture. The show is quite encyclopedic in its explorations of form, but most of the works resonate harmoniously; Ricci’s delicate, and ethereal honeycomb patterns provide a soft response to Papantoniou’s incisively colored sleek hard edge compositions. Add to this the injection of another fifteen artists in the form of a show reel of digital video and sound work in Parallel Lines that complements the visual mode of representation with extended forms encompassing extra sensorial interaction. Parallel Lines features the work of Anthony Braxton, Rebecca Hart, Jamshed Miah, Laura Eglington and Ad Reinhardt’s ironic manifestos, The Twelve Technical Rules (or How to achieve the Twelve Things to Avoid).

Two machines designed to embody idea production inhabit the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute. An exhibition of the American conceptual sculptor, Dennis Oppenheim, titled Thought Collision Factories presented the artist’s Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. Utilizing flares, fireworks and a cotton candy machine, these pieces are fascinating, even delightful to look at, but at the same time it is difficult to share/comprehend Oppenheim’s Cold War enthusiasm for archaic aluminum slides, gears, gaskets and wheels when every woman, man and child has access to all human knowledge in a pair of glasses or a wristwatch and can at the very least set up a basic operating platform on any computer. His interest in fireworks and flare-based outdoor installations is a different matter. The documentation of his various pyrotechnic projects, large scale ephemeral incendiary displays featuring pithy phrases such as “Go Further With Fiction” (1974) or “Mind Twist” (1975)—meant to be viewed from afar and integrate text into the landscape, exemplify the exhibition’s main goal of presenting Oppenheim as an artist whose practice inhabited and served as a nexus between sculpture, conceptual art and language. The exhibition is wonderfully thorough—sketches, maps, photographs and measured presentation drawings of the mechanical pieces and related works line the walls. The videos Machine-Gun Fire (1974) and Echo (1973) and the sound Piece Ratta-callity (1974) provide a simpler and more poignant representation of the artist’s process and his contribution to contemporary discourse than the oddly dated dinosaurs in the main rooms.

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Joyfully Precarious: Ivor Abrahams (Posted June 7, 1999)

Ivor Abrahams is a sculptor of protean creativity, a pioneer since the 1960s of the use of wacky materials, a prolific and inventive printmaker. A distinctive presence on the British scene, his closest peer among Americans would probably be Jim Dine: they have both played in a Pop kind of way with Greco-Roman statuary. Abrahams has a much more idiosyncratic touch, though, which is fiddly, playful, at his best quite goofy. He is a grand master of the tacky sublime.

Another American who springs to mind, just to establish bearings, is Richard Artschwager: they share a career trajectory from artisan to fine artist, timed in each case to coincide with the emergence of Pop. Abrahams originally followed his father into the window dresser’s trade, and there is often an elegant wit to his proscenium-framed improvisations, but he is equally the scion of a high academic tradition.

He studied with German classicist Carel Vogel at the Camberwell School, London, and was apprenticed at the Fiorini bronze foundry. An energetic tension between artifice and finesse and a dichotomy of nonchalance and composure both point to this mixed background, this transgressing of boundaries between high and low.

In the late 1960s and ’70s he got hooked on the theme of gardens, making sculptures, installations and prints in resins, latex and — his favorite exquisitely gruesome material — flock. With humor and poignancy, these works explore the British obsession with gardens, especially as it manifests lower down on the class ladder. His art reveled in the contradictions of the proletarian backyard, in the way a once aristocratic language of ornamentation got mangled in the social transition. His vision, however, never has the harshness of social satire; it’s exercised by a sense of bathos, more than critique or ridicule. This gives the work an aura of mystery, of participation in the ambivalence and artifice it explores.

Personal circumstances led him away from his earlier explorations and back to the figure — real figures, that is, not the mere statuary he had been involved with. Teaching life drawing to a patron activated a fascination with the figure in motion, while chronic asthma forced him to banish flock and resins from the studio. He was highly successful with his bronze nymphs and naiads, which weren’t offered tongue-in-cheek as earlier admirers would have expected.

That was in the ’80s. With some startling results, he now seems to be synthesizing his earlier preoccupation with space, texture and ornamentation with what he has learned of the body.

Abrahams’ newest works are cutouts in laminated card, which show the artist at his awkward, quirky, inventive best. In the “Head of the Stairs” series, the card is montaged with his own vertiginous photos of stairwells. The card is then carved and constructed into vaguely anthropomorphic shapes, mostly heads and shoulders. The viewer’s gaze is sucked into a receding vortex of the images, while the juxtaposition of planes pushes the gaze back again. There is something joyfully precarious about these pieces, poised as they are between the ephemeral and the monumental.

Abrahams has been the subject recently of three simultaneous exhibitions in London. A small print retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts is nicely timed (with its garden theme) to coincide with their Monet blockbuster. The Mayor Gallery presented a packed display of new sculptures and maquettes, and Ian Mackenzie is showing Abrahams’ giclé Isis prints.

Eye Vibes: Bruce Pearson (Posted June 8, 1998)

The view from the sixth floor exercise studio where I work out at Broadway at 72nd Street is filled to the bursting with Beaux-Arts sumptuousness. Excluding sky and ground and receding at an angle to the ubiquitous city grid, this fabulous tableau is a gaudy, dense overload of brick, masonry, ironwork, statuary. To the gymnastic viewer, suspended upside down in some Francis Bacon-like frame contraption (the studio follows the Pilates system) and gyrating back and forth, the architectural details mush together, disengaged from any established decorative order, forming an abstracted all-overness. Nestled between two apartment buildings, however, is an advertising slogan, interjecting bright, crystalline meaning to this jungle of effects: “Depression is a flaw of chemistry not character,” it announces, giving a phone number with the implicit offer of pharmaceutical release.

This strange mixture of facade and relief, decoration and semiotics, the inversion of order, is all good preparation for the work of Bruce Pearson, who is included in the current group show in the Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art. I thought of my private “ready-made” landscape when I first saw Pearson’s weird psychedelic reliefs in his Williamsburg studio back in the fall. His pieces actually use wacky lines and slogans appropriated from the mass media which in turn serve as his titles, but my little “flaw of chemistry” number is unlikely to cut much of a figure to a man who goes in for the likes of “Something that seems to symbolize in quotes reality” and “Another nail in the coffin of objectivity,” not to mention “Violence and profanity supernatural strangeness and graphically rendered sexual situations.” These are all titles of pieces in the MoMA show. Curated by Lilian Tone and Anne Umland, this cogent and sexy little exhibition also includes Karin Davie, Udomsak Krisanamis and Fred Tomaselli.

Unlike the ad in my West Side cityscape, the semiotic in a Pearson is organically wedded to its defining form. One has to be told it, but his compositions are made from fantastically contorted renderings of a given phrase. The letters are stretched beyond legibility and — in some works — the sentences are mirrored vertically and horizontally like a folded cut-out paper doily. Text is then given texture when the linguistic motif is carved into Styrofoam. Actually, what I observed on my studio visit is a mind-bogglingly meticulous process whereby each letter is separately cut (with a hot wire) and built up in layers like the strata of a geologist’s contour model. The final stage of production is the painting, as fiddly and concentrated, it would seem, as the plotting and carving had been in their turn. It was appropriate that the Projects Room show partially overlapped with the Chuck Close retrospective at the same museum for Pearson’s enterprise is close to Closean in its mind-numbing labor intensity.

For “Closean” it was tempting to have said “Sisyphean,” only in Pearson’s case (if not Close’s) that would be too judgmental. Nonetheless, skill — as in dexterity concentrated in time and degree — is a problem for contemporary art appreciation. It has taken us a long painful century to get used to the idea that economy counts for more than effort, that dash takes priority over muscle, to believe, sincerely, that less is indeed more. What are we supposed to do, then, when an artist presents us with the fruit of his or her own, personal, persnickety, craftsy fingerwork? Frankly, we shudder with a certain embarrassment. For our delectation an artist — no less — has done all THIS? It’s as if an honored dinner guest has washed the dishes.

There is a difference, however, between the skill quotient in Pearson and Close. In Close, the photographically derived image is immediate and omnipotent; the fiddly handmade fact of its facture is only gradually realized, and once established merely a cause for prying wonderment. In Pearson, by contrast, the facture meets with some correspondence of slowed-down effort on the part of the viewer. The surfaces, gooey and gaudy though they are, offer the prospect of reward for leisurely regard. Which is a longwinded way of saying that Pearsons might actually be beautiful as well as interesting.

Actually, the first association a Pearson triggered in my mind was with the kind of mindless modernist wall relief that was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, usually knocked out in concrete by the architect rather than any named artist, to lend warmth (as — modernist taboo — an afterthought) to an otherwise soulless entrance way or public interior. But then I began to discern some semblance of hierarchy; it wasn’t gratuitous texture, there was method in the madness. Before I was told about the texts I began trying to “read” the images, but I saw them rather as maps, as circuit boards, even, with fanciful empathy, as the aerial view of some futuristic organic city. It was then that crescents and H-blocks started to make sense as letters, and I was on the way to Pearson literacy. Funnily enough, during my pre-signifiers phase, when I was still enjoying form for form’s sake, I was reminded of Torres-Garcia and early Adolph Gottlieb and their primitive tabulations of pictographs.

Once I was initiated into the secret of Pearson’s encoded messages I quickly regressed. I didn’t see the point in straining my eyes to decode banal sentences which were there for me, anyway, with a friendly word from the artist (or, at the Modern, from the label). But this didn’t — and doesn’t — inhibit my pleasure in his work. I was able to go back to my primitive fantasies, in some ways actually enriching those fantasies with my new knowledge. The experience of willfully not-reading while, in my own way, reading, of picking up the vibes of meaning without the meaning per se, can be compared to looking at an image from some culture whose iconography is a closed book to me — say Tibetan — without bothering to read long and bewildering explanations or wading through a gazetteer of deities.

A lot of contemporary art has a complicated story behind its facture. The way things are made, and the reason they are made that way, are integral to the work, and the supposed experience of it. There is a “get it” factor. A click in the brain and you move on. Much rarer, and of course more satisfying, is when the conceptual element doesn’t circumvent the visual experience but instead conditions it. Of course, the link between facture and effect has to be manifest, otherwise how and why the artist went about making the work is of no more relevance than what he had for breakfast. There is a great moment in Balzac’s story, The Unknown Masterpiece, in which the master extols the final stroke which brings an image to life. “No one will thank us for what is underneath,” Frenhofer tells the young Poussin as he corrects the work of their mutual friend, Porbus.

In our postmodern culture that hardly pertains; where everything is at once surface and symbol — and remember, Wilde warned us, its equally perilous to remain on the surface as it is to penetrate it — art is equally what you get and the manifest evidence of how it arrived. Of course, as an art form painted relief is a wonderful tease, sending the eye into oscillation between surface and depth, neither of which yields. Pearson surely knows this. It is with similar acuteness that he sets up oscillations between detail and whole, legibility and texture, image and idea. His art is a kind of simultaneous equation in which the tension between process and result on his part forms an equivalent to these forced oscillations on the viewer’s. He keeps the eye busy.

“Projects 63: Karin Davie, Udomsak Krisanamis, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli,” May 14-June 30, 1998, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Bruce Pearson is also included in “Wall Paper,” June 2-July 2, 1998, an exhibition of works on paper curated by Lisa Jacobs at the Nicholas Davies Gallery, 23 Commerce Street, New York, N.Y. 10014.

Letter from London (Posted September 21, 1998)

Damien Hirst’s infatuation with the medical profession is as unceasing as the journalistic profession’s is with him. Hardly a day goes by that there isn’t some press reference to the master of the specimen-in-formaldehyde, the medicine cabinet, the pill-like colored spot.

This summer the medics became interested in him as well. The artist-entrepreneur’s designer eatery in trendy Notting Hill Gate came under the scrutiny of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. The group objected to the name — Pharmacy — on the grounds that the public could be misled. Imagine rushing in with a Prozac prescription to find a crowded bar with waiters milling around in surgical aprons, and floor-to-ceiling cabinets of decorative, but empty, packets of drugs.

At Hirst’s Pharmacy there are plenty of alcohol solutions and tonics available, but not the kind that doctor had in mind. Upstairs, in the dining room, exquisite wallpaper sports a pill motif, Hirst’s fin-de-siecle answer to William Morris, while the canvases on the wall are his ultra-stylish arrangements of dead butterflies on monochrome grounds.

While we’re on the furnishings and fittings, the masterpiece here — and probably the best Hirst I’ve seen anywhere — is an Arman-inspired men’s-room vitrine including heaps of used medical detritus behind a wall of thick glass.

The Royal Society’s objections were of course ridiculous, and were probably as much a gambit to advertise itself in the national media as anything else. To oblige, Pharmacy rearranged the letters on its minimal white exterior into the anagram “achy ramp,” although the restaurant employees still say “Pharmacy” if you phone for a reservation, which you need to do weeks in advance if you want a table at a civilized hour. The food’s rather good, as it happens, less oppressively carnivore than Hirst’s other “joint,” the revamped Quo Vadis in (London’s) Soho, where the upstairs bar is decked with pickled relatives of that which is on the menu.

It’s funny that Hirst’s sculptures, unpalatable in art galleries, look so at home in chic eateries. A contrast with Rothko’s Seagram murals, which were bequeathed to the Tate Gallery in 1969 when the artist decided they were just too god-damned spiritual for a restaurant.

The post Pre-History: Artnet Articles from the 1990s on Bruce Pearson, Ivor Abrahams and Damien Hirst appeared first on artcritical.

January 12 – February 18, 2012
NEW YORK: 980 Madison Avenue, 555 West 24th Street, 522 West 21st Street
Beverly Hills, London, Rome, Paris, Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong
http://www.gagosian.com

Damien Hirst’s The Complete Spot Paintings is a show of some three hundred works that for the next month has been given the unprecedented, exclusive, simultaneous run of each of Larry Gagosian’s eleven galleries around the world: a big-budget extravaganza in which a mega dealer fetes his mega star. In the age of the Art Career, shows like this one galvanize fans and detractors in equal measure.  But throw in the simplicity of these paintings—colored polka dots painted at regular intervals over a flat ground—and the fact that Hirst has only painted a handful of them himself, and we’re left with an ideological battleground for those who worship at the altar of conceptualism and those who disdain it.

Hirst’s ascent to stardom was rapid. Having organized the Freeze art show in London in 1988 while still in his early 20s, he attracted the attention and benediction of celebrity collector Charles Saatchi. Anointed one of the stars of the future in Saatchi’s Young British Artists exhibition in 1992, Hirst went on to represent Britain in the next year’s Venice Biennale and won the coveted Turner Prize in 1995. He has been a fixture of the art world ever since, scoring a major coup in 2008 when he eschewed his dealers entirely by bringing hundreds of new works to market directly through Sotheby’s. The exhibition, titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, reported nearly $200,000,000 in sales.

Known for such works as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—the dead shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum—and For the Love of God (a human skull covered in more than 8,600 diamonds) Hirst’s approach to art making is a torpedoes-be-damned embrace of the literal. Early works like In and Out of Love and A Thousand Years, meditations on life and death, actually contained the entire life cycle. In the former, caterpillars hatched into butterflies, which flew into and died upon sugar-coated canvases. In the latter, maggots were introduced into one of Hirst’s signature glass cases that contained the severed head of a cow. Feeding on the cow until they become flies, they flew around before being zapped by the electric insect trap than hung overhead. Offering the public super-condensed confrontations with mortality that were not even the purview of the farmer or outdoorsman, such works aspired to the grand theme of life and death in nature.

Taking the stuff of the natural history museum and bringing it into the art museum, Hirst has made the audacious bet that the literal can stand shoulder to shoulder with the metaphorical. Given the fun-house atmosphere that now pervades many major art museums, this bet seems like a good one. In the past two years in New York alone, one could slide between the floors of one museum, play in a bamboo tree house on the roof of another, and see the entire output of an artist hang, mobile-like, from the atrium of a third. In such company, it is not unreasonable to think of Hirst’s stable of pickled animals as perfect emblems of the zeitgeist.

But if Hirst’s installations appeal in their directness, his paintings suffer from the same quality. For painting, like poetry, is an art dictated by metaphor. If Hirst’s innovation was to show the world that a dead shark has all the resonance and associative power of a dead shark, his failure has been the lack of recognition that painting can contain the resonance and associative power of so much more than paint. So, despite the many layers of celebrity, money and art world mega-wattage involved, the impact of the Gagosian show lies ultimately in one layer alone: that of the commercial house paint applied in perfect round circles by Hirst’s assistants.

Painted in high gloss against flat white grounds, variously colored polka dots decorate rectangular and circular canvases of all sizes. The dots vary in their colors and dimensions from painting to painting, ranging from one millimeter to five feet. One contains half a dot. Others have four. One has 25,781. The small ones, which bring to mind dot candy, are slightly more interesting than the large, which look like Twister game boards. Optically, one’s eyes tend to follow the darker dots, in a sort of futile attempt to find something to latch on to. While the futility of such a course is, apparently, part of the point, the lasting effect is akin to looking at a giant word search in which the letters don’t ultimately connect.

That these works contain none of the depths of meaning that we expect from serious painting is due entirely to the artist’s inability to work in the language of metaphor. This not-uncommon problem in contemporary painting is in its various guises evidenced by a misuse of the medium’s formal devices. In Hirst’s case it is pattern and color that have been employed as stylistic affectations without regard to meaning. Gagosian has touted the artist’s color sensibilities, and Hirst’s quote on color is offered as a sort of raison d’etre for the paintings:

I was always a colorist, I’ve always had phenomenal love of color . . . I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color.

But using color does not make one a colorist any more than banging on a piano makes one a composer, and if the spot paintings are a manifestation of Hirst’s love of color, it seems a chaste love indeed. Ultimately, the paintings miss out on the profound emotional resonance of the effective use of color as metaphor. Thus, despite his candied hues, his employment of color to do nothing situates Hirst far nearer the official salon painters of the 19th Century than the Fauves.

As for Hirst’s other big formal device, it was only a matter of time before pattern got the super-flat treatment. Like the nude, pattern is a subject to which painters of each generation return, perhaps because it provides a historical benchmark by which the painterly tradition is both linked and updated. Those contemporaries who have used pattern to some interesting effect—Sol LeWitt, Sean Scully, Mary Heilman—have employed it the way Picasso used African art, as a motif that strips painting bare of all but its most fundamental, powerful components. For such painters, pattern offers neutral ground on which their true preoccupations play out.

The repeating patterns across LeWitt’s wall drawings become petri dishes out of which grow remarkably startling confrontations with optical perception. Repetition in a Lewitt allows for a mathematical basis by which to judge perception, the way regularly spaced trees or furrowed fields provide similar benchmarks for our experience of scale, space, distance, and even color, in nature. Scully, too, takes the strict confines of pattern as the basis for work that transcends its constraints. His subject is no more the repeated rectangle than Cezanne’s is the dishcloth. The ways in which his rectangles push up against one another, with subtle modulations within their volumes and upon their edges, give tremendous variety to his work.

The little something that does happen when the eye takes in Hirst’s vast fields of colored dots is more akin to looking at a snowy TV screen than a LeWitt. Such effects are more common in Hirst’s round paintings, where the vagaries of trying to keep concentric circles of dots evenly spaced lead to irregularities. That the eye can, in such cases, believe that it is traveling along one path and be thrown unexpectedly off on a tangent is the one and only interesting optical experience of this work.

Time and again, Hirst has pushed at the boundaries of the art world and found them to be exceptionally flexible. His big gambit, that an actual presentation of life and death would hold its own with mere allusions, has made him rich and famous. If, as Saatchi has predicted, Hirst’s name will be mentioned alongside those of Pollock and Warhol in the history books of the next century, it will not, however, be on the strength of “The Complete Spot Paintings,” which misuse the formal devices, and miss out on the real powers, of the medium of painting.

The post Not Dotty About Damien: Hirst’s Spot Paintings Go Global appeared first on artcritical.

SHARON MA What is your methodology for making an artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I like to highlight incongruity, juxtapose ideas that seem mutually exclusive. I think a lot about medium and scale and display and audience. Usually I start off with an object or a design that I find unique, it just turns me on, and I want to understand it more, so I reproduce it or I hybridize it in some way. That unlocks its mystery for me.

SHARON MA What drives you to make the work that you do?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I can never paint something that doesn’t hypnotize me. My heart isn’t in it. When I make films or perform, it’s usually similar. A fascinating object or document starts me off. Maybe just a scrap in the street on a lamp-post or a line from a song, something ephemeral, something that has a beauty, a history, a poetry, a sadness to it– something elusive that I want to spotlight and commemorate.

SHARON MA You are always doing something or going somewhere. How do you manage multiple projects in different countries?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I come from London, and have lived between NYC and Berlin since the late 1980s. All three cities have thriving art scenes. So I have slowly done a lot of projects between those places. I have family and work and friends there and I can earn a living in all three.

I only ever do one project at a time and I don’t juggle things. Patience is key.

SHARON MA Who are the contemporary artists you identify with, either through their personalities or artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I admire the mavericks and the succinct. I identify with the grassroots East Village artist-run galleries or early Soho artists more than this current moment.

Félix González-Torres was a brilliant, funny person to be around and studying with him remains inspiring. Warhol I never met but the work is great, plus he built a circle of people around him, he nurtured a scene, and created an open system, not a hierarchy. He didn’t seem a snob.

I find it hard to separate the personality from the work. The handling of the career is often as interesting to me as the work itself.  I’m interested in the idea of retaining one’s integrity both socially and artistically.

I like the subject matter of Bruce LaBruce and Johan Grimonprez and I know them personally a bit. I admire painters like Inka Essenhigh and Marilyn Minter.

I always think about the work of Hans Haacke and Art & Language because what they did remains better than what most people later have achieved in that field.

SHARON MA I read that you are also a curator, how do you come up with a theme for an exhibition?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY You have to find a topic that’s hot, a bit edgy, but also that you personally love and know a huge amount about. You have to extend the dialog.

SHARON MA What do you look for when choosing works to show?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Because I began as an artist myself, I only like to show artists who can do something that I can’t do, usually technically or conceptually. That’s part of the exchange for me. I show their work because I am a fan. If I know I could make the work easily myself, I don’t want to show it.

SHARON MA What do you put out that is related to the exhibition, and how do you show it?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY These days I list in magazines and on facebook and make online PDF catalogs. I also write press releases and sometimes make printed catalogs.

SHARON MA I remember how you said that we should keep an eye on galleries that show works similar to our own, how does one approach a gallery, if at all?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I would never suggest approaching a dealer cold, it’s better to dialog with an artist you meet who shows at the gallery and whose work you like.  Then follow up and ask them if they think their dealer or a curator might like it. I think if you are doing something good, people will find you. Artists define things: they are always the first to see a new good artist. Your peers create a critical mass.

SHARON MA As a working artist, what do you stress as key elements to being successful in the art world?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Being generous and open to dialog and making yourself aware of what a lot of other emerging artists are doing. Also understanding marketing clearly.

Success in the art world is really about being a success on your own terms– being a compassionate person and acting with great personal integrity. Some of the best artists are great teachers, great community activists and/or doing amazing stuff that is not centered on any commercial/institutional-success paradigm. Being in the Whitney Biennial is clearly not the central thing, because that fame can be very fleeting. It’s more important that you make great work and really parent it into the world in a cool and ethical way.

The post A Success on His Own Terms: A Studio Visit with Rupert Goldsworthy appeared first on artcritical.

The Print Fair opens November 3 at the Park Avenue Armory.  Organized by the International Fine Print Dealers association, the IFPDA, this is the fair’s 21st annual incarnation in New York.  Ninety galleries or independent dealers from around the world offer high-end impressions from across historic and stylistic spectrums, with old master prints of Rembrandt or Dürer rubbing shoulders – or embossments at least – with Ukiyoe prints from Edo, Hoppers and Beckmanns, and contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith, Jasper Johns and John Baldessari. (The fair runs from noon to 8pm through Saturday, and noon to 6pm through Sunday.  The Armory is at Park Avenue between 66 and 67th Streets.)

Contemporary printmaking and multiples have a fair of their own, however, with the Editions and Artists Books Fair down in Chelsea. Running the same dates, E/AB 2011 is staged at the old Dia Center on 22nd Street.  This fair was founded in 1998 and is free in a bid to forge new audiences for contemporary multiples.  They recoup their generosity, however, in the limited edition catalogue, sporting a cover by Fred Tomaselli, offered at $200. (548 West 22nd Street, between 10th & 11th avenues,  11 to 7pm through Saturday, and 11 to 4pm on Sunday.)

And as with art fairs around the world, New York’s November fairs see a veritable print week with a slew of satellite fairs and with galleries focusing events and programming upon the frenzy for multiples.  Art International Fairs, for instance, present their second annual Fine Print & Drawing Fair, opening Thursday night, at the Lighthouse International Conference Center.  Describing itself as a “boutique event,” the fair has a dozen or so exhibitors, mostly from around the United States.  (111 East 59th Street, between Lexington and Park avenues, Friday and Saturday, 10-7pm, Sunday 10-5pm.)

The International Print Center, New York, opens their fortieth presentation of their New Prints Program Thursday night, running through January 7, 2012.  This juried exhibition includes new works by several dozen artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Whitfield Lovell, Ed Ruscha and Jessica Stockholder. (508 West 26th Street, Room 5A, betweeen 10th and 11th avenues, regular gallery hours.)

And in Bushwick, recession-friendly for the budget-conscious collectors, The Cannonball Press presents Prints Gone Wild, in which everything is under $50 .  (389 Melrose Street, between Flushing and Knickerbocker avenues, Friday, 6pm to midnight, and Saturday, noon to 6pm.)

The post All the Art That’s Fit to Print appeared first on artcritical.

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Carly Berwick, Michèle C. Cone, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review El Anatsui at Jack Shainman, Damien Hirst at Gagosian, Yvonne Jacquette at DC Moore, and Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim.

The post February 2010: Carly Berwick, Michèle C. Cone, and Mario Naves with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Armory, First Day Weigh-In

What’s the best way to cope with a Recession–if you’re in the artworld? Expand. And how must you behave? With utter nonchalance, of course.

Hence the Armory–not content simply to be the behemoth fair of contemporary, primary-market work, now has added many mre thousand square feet of secondary-market work (“Modern” and “historically significant” are the official terms). All installed at Pier 92.

Think of this as the ADAA Fair for the ADD set. I, for one, found it much harder to concentrate on a sweet little Vuillard and a sort-of-fierce Jean-Michel Basquiat (both hanging in Boulakia of Paris’ booth) knowing the hooplah of Pier 94 beckoned nearby. For this critic, the splendor of the Armory on Park Ave (not to mention the classier air of Sanford Smith’s house management!) makes all the difference. That said, let me feed you a little “footage” from the artcritical Armory-Cam, as it does a 360-degree pan from the aisle: a Louise Nevelson on the wall of Locks of Philadelphia’s booth; a Sean Scully hard by at Hackett-Freedman of San Francisco; an (always-welcome) Philip Guston (from his later Woodstock years, of course) at James Goodman. No, our camera doesn’t exist; but if it had X-ray vision, you could also include a Wesselman or two, no doubt.
No big surprises.

Still, a nifty video installation from the Starn Twins at Stockholm’s Wetterling Gallery did delight. In it, you’ll watch a massive bamboo structure get built, then climbed-over–only to be dismantled from behind; all the better for the structure as a whole to expand forward, without taking up too much material. A good metaphor, that.

But, ahh, Pier 94 is full of buzz. And indeed, if there is a market bust, the work looks better than in recent years. White Cube of London’s booth bristles with the sort of high-end-ware-energy you want from the Armory Experience: a Damien Hirst dot painting; a Sarah Morris abstraction (which never does much for me, sorry); a Sam Taylor-Wood photo. Latin-American artist Doris Salcedo’s stainless steel chair is crumpled has no back; Antony Gormley’s metal lounge/bench is tortuously poked through with spiky holes. Ouch. Well, collectors are feeling a certain discomfort these days. Best to put it out in a cathartic way, and see if they can make themselves at home. Call it furniture for our uncertain times.

Thanks to Mexico City dealer Patricia Ortiz Monasterio for speaking with us so candidly in her (impressive) OMR gallery’s booth. “I’m not fooling myself,” she said of her expectations for sales. As for her wares, Peruvian-born artist and editor Aldo Chaparro’s text sculptures said what was on our mind. “Chaos” reads one; “Vertigo” another. The former, made of carpet, was colorless and somehow calming. Unrest is underfoot for sure; but there are shades of grey to every situation.

postscript: a couple of snaps each at Pulse and Volta

The post The Armory Show 2009 appeared first on artcritical.