October 3 to 28, 2018
131 Chrystie Street, between Broome and Delancey streets
New York City, sfaprojects.com

Benjamin Pritchard’s strikingly abrupt compositions remind me of a David Salle interview in which that artist explained how he used to try to pack a lot into his paintings until he realized that he just wanted them to say Yes or No. Initial impact is something that Pritchard evidently takes seriously, too.

But “Wayfarer”, his first solo show at SFA projects, reveals the elusive nature of contemporary abstraction. The modest sized paintings are hung in groups, each meant to explore a different organizing motif: parallel lines, blocks, circles, swirls, horizontal divisions, zig-zags, red. The simple geometry of these provisionally painted pictures makes them feel like signs directing viewers through the exhibition.

While most abstract painting begs the rhetorical question of whether a familiar form represents something, the language in which Pritchard paints is so distilled that my curiosity is drawn, instead, towards his initial impetus, the process by which he arrives at his legible shapes. For example, the first painting we see is a black canvas with white stripes, Zebra. The swirling ribbons of white on black could be read as a limited view of a zebra and perhaps they reference Victor Vaserely’s painting of the same title. Yet further viewing reveals a void-like space in the black behind the stripes. Perhaps this is generated by the nuance of the strokes themselves, or it could be created by the drips of white on the right side of the canvas. Perhaps this is a gritty rendering of the interior of the Guggenheim Museum.

Then there’s a grouping of four very dark paintings each comprised of blocks and columns with narrow tonal ranges and indecipherable colors. Viewing them is like peering over a dark cliff at night with ambient light playing tricks on the eyes. In my favorite painting, coincidentally titled Nighttime, the seemingly random swirls of complementary colors mimic an oil slick on asphalt.

The painting Dos Equis is a heavily built up painting that resembles two overlapping boomerangs. As is typical for Pritchard, layers range inventively from thin veils of paint to thick impasto strokes. This kind of playfulness with material recalls the painter Chris Martin, though I more closely associate his work with that of Forrest Bess for the psychological space he generates.

Fire, an explosion of gestural strokes of red with flickering accents of green in the underlying layers is another poignant painting. The buildup and tearing down of each layer is a Sisyphean feat not always obvious but coded, nonetheless, on the sides of the canvas. Rather than being about fire per se, this intense red painting is a metaphor for some kind of internal drama.

“Wayfarer” exhibits strong command of abstraction as well as an awareness of what a painting can and cannot be. It contributes to a current trend in painting that Paul Gagner calls “abstract art with quotation marks”, where materiality, symbolism, illusionistic space, and other tricks of the trade are treated as artifice to serve a greater statement. Pritchard happens to be coy with his statements so that he treats the act of painting as an act of theater. When looking at Pritchard’s work the directness of the compositions and the simplicity of the forms are a performance by which he is able to convey something deeper.

The post Initial Impact: Benjamin Pritchard and the Art of Legible Shapes appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

The post “This is how it’s done”: David Salle Curates Recent Painting appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/257350170″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

you can now also see The Review Panel with video posted to YouTube by the Brooklyn Public Library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ_pbRMm5Yk&feature=youtu.be

The post March 2016, with Svetlana Alpers, Laurie Fendrich and David Salle appeared first on artcritical.

“Did you really call Roberta Smith a Dalek last night?” painter Kyle Staver, who was in the audience for the first night of The Review Panel at Brooklyn Public Library, asked moderator David Cohen on Facebook Wednesday morning. She was referring to the formidable New York Times critic and thus doubting her memory.  It was standing room only in the 220-seat Dweck Cultural Center on February 9, and by the end of the presentation the crowd was still animate with ideas as debate spilled out into a frigid Eastern Parkway.

What occasioned the strange pop cultural remark had nothing to do with the Doctor Who robots’ infamous “Exterminate, Exterminate” – although that might be some people’s misconception of the role of art criticism. What occasioned the remark instead was the on-stage seating arrangement. At the library artcritical ditched the “Politburo-style” set up, as Cohen called it, with speakers lined up behind a table, the format familiar in the panel’s first decade at the National Academy, Instead, speakers were given snazzy swiveling office chairs that made it easier to sweep around and watch the videos for the shows under review – Glenn Ligon at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Charles Harlan at Pioneer Works in Redhook, and Katherine Bradford and Elisabeth Kley at CANADA on the Lower East Side. The seating was good for chemistry, that brew of consensus and dissent that is The Review Panel. Cohen’s other guests were novelist and nonfiction writer Siri Hustvedt and artist Alexi Worth. But as the evening wore on, the Times co-chief critic progressively rolled into a private corner, occasioning Cohen’s irreverent remark.

Judgements defied expectations, according to another Brooklyn artist, Brenda Zlamany, who attended a welcoming party in honor of artcritical at the Gallery at 1GAP over the street from the library. She had fully expected a love-in for studio neighbor Bradford, an artist with almost cult status in the Williamsburg scene, and was more worried for old college friend Ligon, who in his exhibition was venturing into split screen video for the first time. But there was equivocation from some towards Bradford’s largest canvases to date whereas speakers fell over each other in praise of Ligon’s subtle, novel take of a Richard Pryor performance. And there were as many remarks about Pryor as Ligon from a much exercised audience during the half-time open mic.  The podcast, due soon, will reveal all.

Up next in the series, March 8, are renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers joined, in their series debuts, by painter-critics Laurie Fendrich and longtime Brooklyn resident David Salle. They will be tackling Amy Sillman, Karen Kilimnik, Cameron Rowland and Mika Tajimo (for show titles and venue details, see the flyer below). The best way to ensure a seat in what will be an extra-crowded event during Armory week is to use the library’s ticketing service: brownpapertickets

The post Hot Gossip: Brooklyn and The Review Panel are Apparently an Item appeared first on artcritical.

ERIC SUTPHIN: How does collaboration function in relation to Modernism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the artist?

EMILIA AND ILYA KABAKOV: This is a very interesting question, especially considering that there are more and more artists working in pairs. Obviously there are reasons why in some cases a collaborative process can be better than those made in a solitary process. We can say that the personality of each artist, working in collaboration with the other reveals much more than when he/she works by his or herself.

One of your aims has been to restore painting’s tension, or its potential for rupture. One strategy for you is figuration, in particular, looking back to Baroque painting. What is it about figurative painting that contains the possibility for difficulty or conflict?

The return to painting and a Baroque approach has two sides: there are some elements that are working on rupture and others which are uniting everything on the canvas.

The first is a collage of all the elements of the painting, the fragmentary nature. This is the special technique that we use for such paintings in order to unite these elements. The elements of collage can consist of images from different times, but the wholeness is created by using one artistic approach for these elements stemming from different eras, in our case the style of Pierre Bonnard.

It seems that the increasing scale and ambition of your work — in particular the evolution from the 1995 Pompidou exhibition to the 2014 Monumenta presentation — has a direct correlation to an ever-expanding global art market. How has increasing globalization and decentralization of the “art world” affected your practice?

We come from a country where the art market did not exist and it is very easy to continue to disregard it. If this is about the art market, this is already such a covered territory that we are afraid to even start such a discussion. The same goes for globalization. In some aspects it does work very well, but in others it creates a catastrophe for artists, especially younger ones.

The scale of our work increases depending on the ideas and concepts and has nothing to do with the market, globalization or decentralization. The scale of the installation at the Pompidou in 1995 was in consideration of the idea we presented and the space that was available to us, the same as the project in 2014 at Monumenta.

How has the role of institutions affected the scope and scale of your projects?

That was the main factor of influence on our projects, both in museums and other art institutions. We do make a distinction between an exhibition at a museum and an exhibition at a gallery. A gallery can limit your scale and imagination, and in many cases takes an already existing work with the intention to sell. The museum, kunsthalle, kunstverein, or public space has a very specific aura and atmosphere. This stimulates your imagination and fantasy, giving you the freedom that comes with space. Unfortunately the only limit is the budget.

What scope do you hope to reach and how does ambition and scale relate to your notion of the art world as a utopian fantasy?

The most ideal result of what we are trying reach and achieve is our last exhibition at The Grand Palais for the 2014 Monumenta presentation. The Grand Palais was a utopian project, a glass palace from the end of the 19^th century. For us the possibility to realize a utopian, grandiose project in this superb space was and is the best, ideal project in the art world.

Do you see your work as nostalgic for a time when recognizable imagery had more currency than it may hold today?

The interest in painting is definitely a nostalgic interest, but at the same time there is always a hidden hope that the life of your paintings will belong to the future.

Can you discuss the ways in which representational painting functions as a conceptual, rather than purely narrative, device within your practice.

EMILIA: All the paintings are done on a project basis, as a concept as well as a narrative. Even if the narrative is used, there is a concept. But we should say that Russian conceptualism is built on narrative.

ILYA: All of my paintings are conceptual works. This means that those paintings are not only a method of explaining and representing myself as a traditional artist and painter who spends all his life working in one medium or one “visual corridor,” but rather presenting different projects which come to mind all the time. These appear not rationally, like any self-respecting artist would do, but spontaneously — one after another, or simultaneously.

Who are some artists who have been important to you?

ILYA: In the 1960s through the 1980s I did belong to a group of Moscow Conceptual artists and because of the complete isolation of the Soviet art world, I had very little knowledge of what was going on in the Western art world. In our circle the art works were always connected to a specific project. I did paintings or objects that were connected to either a Soviet bureaucratic design, a parody of official Soviet artworks, or paintings that appeared to be done by different artistic personae including characters such as the “untalented artist.”

The paintings now on view at Pace belong to the same kind of design but with a different context that we are interested in now. The concept of these paintings is to presume that there is now movement or new developments in contemporary art. As in the time of the Renaissance, we have to look back and start using the achievements of the past, remembering that the Renaissance artists used the achievements of the ancient Greeks.

So which model from the past can contemporary artists today use as an example? We are thankful that such an example from the past can be the Baroque movement. The strange combination of Baroque art and contemporary can be what we need in order to solve the problems in contemporary painting. If we are wrong, well, we will just move on to the next concept.

The post A Concept and a Narrative: Emilia and Ilya Kabakov Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

November 8 – December 21, 2013
20 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212.737.2060

Walking into Salle’s Ghost Painting show late last year, one might have expected to see Salle’s multi-layered, lateral dislocations of image and subject played out across the surface.  Instead, one was transfixed by beautiful color, translucence and internal depth. There is also directness, singularity, and an emphasis on centrality in this series from the early 1990s. The tough simplicity of the Ghost Paintings is a clear pivot from Salle’s better-known work.

I immediately thought of a comment the painter and critic Sidney Tillim had made to me twenty years ago. Tillim had stated with certitude that David Salle is an exceptionally fine colorist.  I hadn’t thought of Salle in these terms before, but Sidney’s comment stuck with me.  I have always considered Salle’s main achievement to be his inventive use of inserts and filigrees in energetic compositions.  Initially informed by John Baldessari at Cal Arts in the early seventies, Salle’s probing imagination eventually found common cause with the flurried compositions of Francis Picabia, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist toward the end of that decade. But Salle’s longstanding, unwavering ability to communicate how much he loves the act of painting was a thorny proposition for an artist who ascended with “Pictures Generation.” Salle’s signature trajectory, an imagistic slot-machine surrealism, barrels on, as recently evidenced in New York solo exhibitions at Lever House and Mary Boone gallery in 2012 and 2011 respectively.

So much is captivating here.  Bold simplicity reigns as big fields of color dominate these large paintings. The color schemes range from melancholic to a brightness that is reminiscent of Warhol’s swan song Daimler-Benz car series.  And if you’ve ever wondered what single representation Salle would settle on if he had to downshift from his effusive progression of racing representations, here it is – a photo image staged by Salle himself, of a mysterious shrouded figure, drapery cascading that is timeless and elegiac.  Anonymous yet theatrical, the figure’s absence of identity actually increases its presence. It’s as if Salle is asking, if I cover it over, does it really have less impact? It is an act of negation that begets pictorial possibilities.

The presence of a shrouded figure, eerie and beautiful, carries centuries of history.   When Salle elects not to use color, as in Ghost 12, associations of grisaille painting, haunting fragments of classical sculpture, and the gloomy tonalities of early photography spill forth.  Salle’s drapery configurations bear resemblance to the backdrops in Victorian photos of children, a portrait style in which mothers actually hid under fabric drapery while supporting their toddlers for the camera.  That Salle has titled his series Ghost Paintings underscores the images’ spectral, shape-shifting quality, which also echoes turn-of-the-century interest in spiritualism and supernal apparitions.  And Salle’s softly contoured drapery can also suggest feminine interiority. The florals of Ghost 9 and Ghost 11 recall Fragonard’s young women swathed in pinks, yellows and blues.

Salle’s rolling concavities of cloth and color also recall the paintings of Andrea Del Sarto, as in Ghost 10, for instance, where architectonic drapery reinforces compositional centrality, leading us deeper into the psychic space of the scene.   When Salle amplifies the color, in half of the works on display, his neon combinations revisit the fully mannered color displays of Del Sarto’s younger colleagues, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.  Both Salle’s Ghost 6 and his Ghost 14, which reveals the tilted face of his female model, have characteristics of the swooning madonnas in Pontormo’s Deposition and Fiorentino’s Lamentation.  When the suggestive folds of drapery are plied to enhance mourning or passion, the sacred and profane often spring from the same source.

Salle’s solitary shrouded figures conjure a compendium of associations.  Ghost 1 seems like a mountain, while Ghost 5 looks like one of Zubaran’s monks or Guston’s Klansmen.  The photo image in Ghost 3, (shrunk and recycled by Salle in Picture Builder one year later), now seems prescient.  With a discernibly forlorn posture and outstretched arms, the figure is now disturbingly familiar in the form of the infamous, harrowing image of a shrouded Iraqi prisoner under torture.

Focusing on one large-scale image per work, Salle taxed the image with successive acts of negation and dissociation.  He cut it, visibly re-stitched it, and inked it.  The image was horizontally trisected on photosensitive linen, and rejoined with two visibly sewn seams.  Here, Salle looked past the variations of the modernist grid relied upon by fellow postmodernists. Instead, he proportioned his images classically, into approximate thirds.  The narrative-driven formats used by Salle’s Picture Generation peers promoted sequential arrangements that mimicked authoritarian modes of instruction and control.  Ideally suited to enshrine critique, ideology, and promote a return to the aesthetics of puritan severity, such formats lacked the flexibility to accommodate Salle’s less orthodox visual interests.  In contrast, Salle’s single image doesn’t settle into a read. However, in a tacit nod to Minimalist iconoclasm, each horizontal section in the Ghost Paintings is identified with a distinct color, giving each painting the look of a tri-colored flag.  But Salle adroitly inks the surfaces with intense hues that increase depth of field, light, and illusion. The effect is not dissimilar to David Reed’s drapery-inspired abstractions of the period.  Employing a breezy imperfect haste, Salle’s occasional traces of wide brushstrokes reveal how the thin translucent veils of color were pushed around. Both the color applications and the photo images have been treated nonchalantly.  Spots, scratches and other photo imperfections appear like eye floaters, baring all against the draped figure. Absorbing these stresses, the shrouded figure gains poetic strength while the Rothko-esque proportions and emphasis on color field allow the viewer to hang back and bask in sensation.

The post Shape Shifters: David Salle Ghost Paintings appeared first on artcritical.

October 25th, 2012 to January 25th, 2013
390 Park Avenue, New York City

Even when the galleries and museums close for the day, there are paintings to be seen in Manhattan. At the Citicorp Center, for instance, on Lexington Avenue at 53rdStreet, you can look through the high windows at Frank Stella’s Salto Nel Mio Sacco (1985). And a block west on Park Avenue there was an installation of six very large recent paintings by David Salle. The glass-walled lobby of Lever House, a private space none the less visually accessible to the public, is effectively open 24/7. Salle’s allegorical scenes are based upon 17th- and 18th-century Flemish tapestries.

Supported by scrims and hung on panels, they are overlaid with his signature-style inset images topped off by brightly colored male and female silhouettes reminiscent of Yves Klein’s nude rubbings.  Standoff faces the street; The River is close to the inner lobby window; and Campaign and the three other paintings are set back further within the building and only partly visible from outside.  On a gray winter day, the high-pitched colors are dazzling, even before you get close enough to identify the subjects. Salle has always been famous for creating visual conundrums, but on this occasion his installation really ups the ante.

In a marvelously imaginative interpretative leap the curator Richard Marshall relates this setting to Philip Johnson’s display of Poussin’s Burial of Phocian (1648) within his classic Glass House (1949). Johnson’s collection of modernist paintings and sculptures (including both Stellas and Salles) is installed underground in other, nearby buildings on his estate, but this one old master painting is visible from outside the house. Salle’s Lever House installation mimics and modifies that effect. Looking through the walls of Glass House you see Funeral of Phocion, which depicts a landscape, set within Johnson’s carefully manicured landscape. Salle’s paintings are also set behind glass, but Tapestries/Battles/Allegories is in the city.

To understand its site you need to step back. Lever House (1952) was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, an American follower of Mies van der Rohe, whose masterpiece Seagram Building (1958), done in collaboration with Johnson, is directly across Park Avenue.  Just as Johnson struggled with his architect-rivals, so too Salle has battled with his painter-frennemies. Trained as a modernist, Johnson became notorious for his postmodern eclecticism. Salle, who became famous in the heyday of postmodernism, uses his site to subtly allude to Johnson’s style of visual thinking. Stella’s Salto Nel Mio Sacco, a marvelous late modernist abstraction, is not hard to understand. Interpreting Salle’s Tapestries/Battles/Allegories is more challenging.

The post David Salle 24/7: A Show at Lever House appeared first on artcritical.

To see the names Prose and Cotton in this monograph almost seems an incongruous riposte to the poetic license and silken surfaces of the paintings reproduced.  Cotton inhabits a unique niche in contemporary painting with his Bouguereau-meets-Haagen-Dazs sexed-up saccharine pop-fantasty realism.  His paintings see Americanized Alexandre Cabanel-style nudes supine on billowing clouds of candyfloss, beautiful young women in cupcake tiaras, and melting landscapes of icing and toffee.  “Like Giotto’s heaven,” writes Prose, “Will Cotton’s is populated by attractive angels—in this case, nude girls who, as they say, aren’t as dumb as they look.  In fact, these girls are smart enough to function simultaneously as a representation of desire, a joke about desire, and a sly commentary on the commoditization of desire.”  But not necessarily, it seems, a joke about representation: the book is strong on the artist’s drawings, and these hint at an earnest engagement with the language of form that transcends what is otherwise a parade of faux-oldmasterliness in their conventional gestures.  The monograph concludes with an extensive conversation with Toby Kamps (and no, that’s not a pun on “to be camp”: Mr Kamps is the new modern and contemporary curator at the Menil Foundation.)

Werk! The Armitage Gone Variety Show, reaches its final night at the Abrons Arts Center tonight, Saturday May 5, with performances at 7.30 and 10 pm.  The other artists who collaborate with Armitage on Rave, a new work, are Doug Fitch, Kalup Linzy, Richard Phillips, Aïda Ruilova and William Wegman.  Armitage has a long history of collaboration with visual artists dating back to the ex-Merce Cunningham dancer’s first works with David Salle in the 1980s.

Will Cotton: Paintings and Works on Paper. Text by Francine Prose, Interview by Toby Kamps.  New York: Rizzoli, 2011. 172 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8478-3667-3. $60.00

Will Cotton at Mary Boone Gallery, May 3 to June 30, 2012. 745 Fifth Avenue, between 57th and 58th streets, New York City, 212.752.2929

The post Triple Threat! Will Cotton: the Book, the Show, the Ballet appeared first on artcritical.

Soft-spoken, reticent-seeming eighties art star David Salle has two speaking engagements in New York this season.  He is the second speaker in the American Federation of Arts 2010/11 series at Christie’s, following Will Cotton who opened the series last month.  The event takes place at the auctioneers’ Rockefeller Center premises at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, from 6.30-8.00 pm.  Tickets are $15 ($10 students) and reservations are required at arttalks@afaweb.org.  Salle is also a panelist at a discussion about the work of Roy Lichtenstein in conjunction with the show, Roy Lichtenstein Reflections, with the Pop master’s widow Dorothy Lichtenstein and art historian Graham Bader at the Chelsea branch of Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 534 West 26th Street, on Saturday, October 16 at 4pm. This one is free but reservations are requested at alina@miandn.com.

Another historic figure subject to round-table reassesment is dealer Leo Castelli whose legacy is to be discussed at the Jewish Museum in their books in focus series by biographer Annie Cohen-Solal, who recently published Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, who will be joined by scholars Robert Pincus-Witten and Barbara Jakobson, at the museum, on Thursday, October 7 at 6:30 pm.  For tickets, reserve here

The New York Institute for the Humanities and the Gallatin School at NYU are presenting three lectures this October by the 85 year old polymath and cultural commentaror Harry Berger, Jr.  On Tuesday, October 5 his topic is “Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo’s Cve: Vasari and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship,” at 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, at 6 pm, with a response from Patricia Rubin, director of New York University’s Insitute of Fine Arts.  The following Tuesday, on October 12 at 6pm. his topic is “Caterpillage,” which delves the topic of 17th-century Dutch floral still lifes.  That talk, with a response from art historian John Walsh, takes place at the Casa Italiana at 24 West 12th Street.  And finally, back at Cooper Square on Wednesday, October 27, at 6pm, Berger addresses his Shakespearean interests in a talk titled “The Mercifixion of Shylock”.  The respondent on that occasion will be Barry Edelstein, director of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare Initiative.  For more information on these three talks, which are free, contact nyih.info@nyu.edu

The post David Salle sallies forth, round table on Leo Castelli, and troika from polymath Harry Berger, Jr. appeared first on artcritical.

I give up! I’m tired of not liking David Salle. In marked contrast, on the evidence of his latest show at Gagosian, which continues to March 3, the artist himself never tires of being David Salle, exhausting though it must be. For sure, however, there’s still plenty not to like about this perennial Bad Boy of painting, the same things, indeed, that have always irked earnest art lovers: his trickiness and repetitiveness and suspected cynicism

My repulsion started right at the outset of my career, before even learning that he was one of the ’80s artists one was supposed to despise. I was in Toronto, writing my first foreign review (of the renovated Henry Moore wing at the Art Gallery of Ontario) and I was overwhelmed by a visceral disgust at the bombast and sameness of their huge, clearly premature Salle retrospective. And I remember, quite clearly, that it wasn’t the vaguely nasty subjects that appalled me, but the deathly, enervating form. Right up to his last show at Gagosian’s old SoHo space, with those teddy bears and Alex Katz quotations, my antipathy held out. And by then I wanted to start liking him. He was sufficiently out of fashion to warrant admiration for his doggedness, plus I had met him at a panel and found him to be totally charming, plus my whole attitude towards authenticity and appropriation had swung around in my first decade of artwriting. But the paintings just seemed puny and inadequate.

And yet now I find myself ravished (an appropriate term for images with pastoral frolic as its central, repeated motif) and, well you know what Cicero said about frolicing. There is indeed a kind of post-coital guilt and confusion when you realise you have been seduced by an artist you thought a turn-off. Will I now have a revised view of the earlier work? Will I soon have the old doubts about this newest work? Has it changed or have I? Forget Cicero, it’s Heraclitus I need to worry about (as in “You can never step into the river twice”

And now, of course, with these shifting emotions and distorted memories, I don’t have neatly stored within my brain the right memories and responses to do justice to the subject here, to be able to answer the question empirically enough about Salle’s shifts and mine. Just why is it that this new series seems strong and fresh and vigorous when earlier efforts from the same hand, employing similar strategies and in pursuit indubitably of a consisitent agenda, fell so short?

I have a hunch. There has been a subtle shift of nonetheless seismic consequence in the balance of power between image and surface treatment. Before, despite the po-mo overload and deconstructive disregard of the intended meanings of his appropriated sources, power was with the image. The means of putting the image down was subservient to its emotional tenor, even when this tenor was counter-intuitive to the image, – for example, cold treatment for erotic subjects. Now, and it is significant that the central image is of innocents fishing in a rococo landscape, touch and tone seem to determine choices of image or artist to appropriate or quote. One feels, say, that that Derain harlequin came in because the brush demanded it. It is actually better for Salle to tune in to a Jasper Johns pattern than an Alex Katz figure because – for all his eclecticism and layering – it is texture not context that his painting were crying out for

It is extraordinary, really, how diverse Salle can be in his painterly effects without ever quite capitulating and becoming painterly per se. He is still more relaxed, more intuitive, more form-conscious, with imagery than he is with shape, gesture, color. It is as if imagery is the stuff on his palette and paint some fabulous discovery or invention. What an odd fellow! But his adventures with paint are invigorating. Like the happy peasant in his serial stencil he has caught something impressive. The juxtaposition of linen and canvas, the optical collisions of oil and acrylic, are as constructive as they are deconstructive. Of course, these tricks all serve to keep any kind of expressiveness in steel enforced quotation marks. But that’s okay. This is David Salle. These paintings have the chilly dryness of a strong martini, if not the purity.

David Salle: Pastoral continues at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, to March 3, 2001

The post A Frolic with David Salle appeared first on artcritical.