December 9, 2015 to July 29, 2016
545 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 989-5566

A long time ago, in the last century, Robert Ryman, now 85, was in the vanguard of artists exploring what were then thought to be the basic components of painting. Though a rigorous formal approach to painting of this kind no longer occupies the esteemed position it once did, there remains a church of true believers who maintain a steadfast devotion to this esoteric practice.

Recently Dia:Chelsea has mounted a show of 22 Robert Ryman paintings ranging from 1958 to 1984/2002. This provided the opportunity for an experiment. Is there anything of relevance to be gained in looking at this work today? Can we find a creative way to encounter it? What is new that can be seen and thought about when looking at a Ryman?

Peter Schjeldahl in his New Yorker review of this exhibition points to a dilemma:

Ryman’s reductions of painting to basic protocols are engaging only to the extent that you regard painting as an art that is both inherently important and circumstantially in crisis. You must buy into an old story, which bears on Ryman’s extreme, peculiarly sacramental standing in the history of taste.

But is that actually true? Do you really have to buy into that old story in order to appreciate his work? When I came to New York as a young painter in the mid 70s, this deconstructive approach to painting was not only compelling, it was the only game in a town that still saw itself as the center of the artistic universe. But the austerity of this examination struck me, even then, as too hermetic, and today this approach may seem the equivalent of taking apart a watch, getting rid of those confusing gears, reordering its face and case, and achieving something more sophisticated than its former time-telling function. Because critics also referred to it as ABC art, I more optimistically thought the evolution of this idea would be to make paintings that were sentences, paragraphs, and complex stories—while still assimilating the rigorous decision-making that defined this process.

So many different approaches to painting have been explored since then, and yet this does not lead to a peremptory dismissal of Ryman’s work. In front of the actual paintings, we find a strong gravitational pull into close inspection of these mysterious objects. The works, though united in such primary concerns as the idea of whiteness, of paint application or the nature of supports, vary pointedly and peculiarly from one another. It’s a shame they are not hung chronologically, as the focus of the work has evolved and changed.

For all of Schjeldahl’s “reduction … to painting’s basic protocols,” it is striking how easily we are diverted from Ryman’s announced project of only presenting the materials he has employed at their face value. Seven of the earliest paintings here, dating from 1958 to 1962, are involved with using white paint to cover over, paint out, obliterate or subtly reveal a prior painted surface. This is a complex, metaphoric activity. To paint a layer that will then be hidden isn’t exactly dispassionate, but conveys paradox, secrecy, or censoriousness in its act of concealment and cancellation. The performance of painting throughout this show almost always entails movement that feels spontaneous, improvised and expressive, hardly conforming to the mood of quiet meditation that has come to be associated with Ryman’s work.

Paintings are not what they first seem. Untitled #1003, 1960-61, has a scarred, mostly thickly painted white surface. The paint application varies from individual small, thick brushstrokes to large troweled-on areas, to marks incised in wet paint. This all appears to be covering over under-painting of mostly celadon with various other hues also bleeding through. But close examination reveals that some of the colored pigment is not in fact “bleeding through” at all but rather is painted on top of the white even though it appears to be an artifact of an earlier layer. Such stark dissembling struck me as a rather curious development for a painter celebrated for his anti-illusionistic “honesty.” So much for “what you see is what you get.” The gaze that is induced makes one feel like a skeptical detective questioning an unreliable witness. Suddenly this modest little painting is more devious than one supposed, and makes one scrutinize all the work with suspicion.

Upsetting the usual vertical wall attachment, there is one curious piece in particular, Pair Navigation, 1984/2002, which first appears as a white square levitating a foot from the floor and jutting out from the wall. Abutting a wall with other works whose 3-dimensional presence is emphasized, it is supported by aluminum rods at either corner, making it seem like an expensive coffee table. Looking closer it appears that the central white painted square has a mirrored margin. Ryman may think he has overcome illusion, but the floating effect is partly achieved by other, invisible, rods, which secure the end into the wall. The painted fiberglass surface itself is invisibly suspended on a recessed piece of wood above what we learn is a polished aluminum rather than mirrored surface. Incidentally, the entire underside (visible only if you get down on the floor and peer under it) is also a reflecting polished aluminum.

Metaphor and representational content in Ryman have been raised before, though apparently ignored. In an article in Art in America in January 1994, for instance, which covered a Ryman retrospective at MoMA, Christopher S. Wood referenced Jacques Derrida’s notion that “the white European replaced the ancient truths of story-telling and poetic transformation with pale and bloodless abstract philosophy—-a ‘white mythology.’”

It often looks like Ryman is doing just this. But in fact no paintings are less metaphysical, less anemic. A little close looking pumps them full of blood. All their yearning is filtered through a human gesture, a web of cracks, a film of dust, a workman’s thumbprint, and above all through the tracks of the hairy brush. Meaning never untangles itself from the physical phenomenon. And in the gestural traces especially, an old mythology—an earthy and sanguinary mythology—rises again to the surface.

And speaking of sanguinary, even the seemingly straightforward Arista from 1968 is not the simple piece of lightly painted linen stapled directly to the wall. It is impossible to avoid the sense of whispered narration and history contained in this piece. Given the number of unfilled staple holes that somewhat arbitrarily ring the canvas, it appears that it has been fixed to a wall many times before, and it is hard not to imagine that installation drama continuously re-enacted. Apparently the exhibition installers do not create new holes but reuse some (but not all) of the same existing ones.

But the narrative does not stop there. Somewhere about a third of the way down the right edge of the linen, exists an anomalous tiny yet noticeable dark red mark in the shape of a candle flame. Could it be a single drop of dried blood? How did it get there? Was a finger injured when a staple was removed? If a mere installation accident, a conservator could have easily fixed it, so its presence seems deliberate. In a work of art whose parameters are so reduced and specific, it becomes such a glaring moment that Ryman could have painted it there. A purportedly abstract, conceptual work of art comes to double as forensic evidence, with all the melodrama that implies.

Schjeldahl, generationally positioned between Ryman and myself, may not be able to transcend the insularity of aesthetics he has absorbed in appreciation of Ryman. But the rise of a style of abstract painting valued primarily for the emptiness of its visual structural content, labeled by Walter Robinson as Zombie Formalism, makes it imperative that we embrace a more complex reading of Ryman. His paintings really do reward close scrutiny, not with mere empirical information but with complex and contradictory thinking and feeling.

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July 1 to September 15, 2013

The occasion of my first visit to the Gramsci Monument was a three and a half hour “Art School” led by its creator, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. I had read his brief text introducing “Energy: Yes! Quality: No!” — the title and doctrine of the workshop — so I knew that each participant would present a work to be judged by this criteria. Skeptical, I stuffed a few loose drawings into a manila folder and set off. I located Forest Houses with the help of my smartphone’s GPS device, first mistakenly wandering around the adjacent McKinley development. I realized at this point that in my thirty years of nearly-continuous residence in New York City, I had walked hurriedly through housing projects only by accident. As I entered Forest Houses not scanning for the nearest exit but intending to stay, I experienced my first sensation that something brand new was happening. And in, of all places, the domain of contemporary art.

Taking my seat in a circle of plastic patio chairs scrawled with the words “Gramsci Monument” in Hirschhorn’s signature thick black Sharpie, I observed my surroundings: a group of mostly 25-35 year-old art types, like myself, and a handful of older folks. Three of the roughly 15 were residents of Forest Houses, and Hirschhorn addressed them familiarly because among the group, only they had participated in the Art School before. After releasing us for 45 minutes so that people who had not brought a work with them could generate one on-site, Hirschhorn began a critique more organized and truly democratic than any I endured while earning my MFA. A work was placed in the center of the circle, and each person answered “Yes” or “No” (with a few phrases of explanation) to the question of whether it contained Energy. By the end, I learned a number of things: 1. I am lot more generous in the assessment of Energy than Thomas Hirschhorn. 2. Judgment is always personal but a sum of judgments can approach the Universal (in other words, Democracy Works!). 3. The condition of Energy is complicated. 4. Judgment is always preceded by assumption. 5. Structural precision, when sustained, can be very productive.

In the following weeks, I attended a number of other events, activities and informal gatherings at the Gramsci Monument: three daily philosophy lectures (with Marcus Steinweg); three weekly Gramsci Seminars (visiting scholars speaking about his work and legacy); one Running Event with Jamar Foster; one Field Trip to Walter’s de Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer; and one Open Microphone. Events I was sad to miss: the weekly Gramsci Theater (local high school students performing an Absurdist script with philosophers as characters), Fields Trips to Dia: Beacon, Yankee Stadium, the United Nations and Socrates Sculpture Park; and the weekly Poetry Session (Reading and Workshop). To utilize this Monument in its entirety was impossible for any one individual.

Totality and (near) excess characterize the project in a number of aspects: presence, transparency, sincerity and documentation. There are copious photos archived on its extensive website (gramsci-monument.com) including every artwork presented in every Art School over 11 weeks and high-resolution images as part of a press kit downloadable by anyone. These gestures are in stark contrast with fellow Relational artist Tino Sehgal, who famously forbids the circulation of images of his work. Total presence is not just that of the artist, but of a large crew of staff and collaborators (residents and non-residents) whose activities seem to fluctuate between and around these roles. I never once visited the Monument and did not see Hirschhorn himself; Ambassador (and Dia curator) Yasmil Raymond, Art Workshop leader Lex Brown, emcee DJ Baby Dee, a young man relentlessly taking photos, at least one librarian, at least one cook, and various others assisting and/or participating. In addition, there were always residents, visitors, and children utilizing the facility in a range of ways (sometimes a crowd, sometimes a handful; depending on the day): listening to a lecture or performance, reading in the library, painting in the Art Workshop, using the Internet, having lunch, inspecting Gramsci’s slippers, exploring, chatting with friends, playing chess, climbing on jungle-gyms or running through sprinklers. The Monument was a truly multi-use space for a truly multilateral public.

Hirschhorn’s total transparency is manifest in his willingness to talk to whomever will listen about his values and goals in this Monument and beyond, and his wide release of texts which make explicit every aspect of the project’s origins, operations, conceptual framework and philosophical implications. Words that recur in these texts as values and aspirations include: Form, Equality, Resistance, Positiveness, Universality, Energy, Belief. Words that recur as adversaries: Quality, Culture, Tradition, Exclusivity, Identity, Particularism. As well as (surprise!): Collaboration and Participation. (These words, Hirschhorn writes, have a way of diffusing responsibility, which he, as an artist, wishes to fully assume.) His texts match classic manifestos of the 20th century avant-garde in their rhetoric, grandiosity, theatrics, redundancy and revolutionary zeal. He diverges from this tradition (pardon the word), and from most of contemporary art, in his total sincerity. While the classic manifesto is always hyperbolic for dramatic effect, even humorous (recall Hugo Ball performing the Dada Manifesto in his cardboard hat and cape), Hirschhorn, I believe, is dead serious. There is no sideways smirk — irony, satire — when he writes “I believe in Universality, and in the universal power of art to transform each human being.”

With its inevitable clashes of race, ethnicity, class and culture, the Gramsci Monument is a land mine of potential problems. But isn’t it better to confront these clashes, however difficult, than to pretend they don’t exist? The novelty and discomfort of visiting a housing project for many of the art- and philosophy-minded is proof that we live in “a tale of two cities,” the oft-repeated credo of likely mayor-to-be Bill de Blasio (who I saw in the audience with his son Dante at a Gramsci Monument lecture). Hirschhorn has written: “To address a ‘non-exclusive’ audience means to face reality, failure, unsuccessfulness, the cruelty of disinterest and the incommensurability of a complex situation.” He found a catalyst in his personal hero Antonio Gramsci, whose Marxist philosophy is worth reinvestigating as class divisions in New York City, and around the world, worsen.

Gramsci’s assertion that “All human beings are intellectuals,” a prominent slogan of the Monument, serves to introduce his theory of “organic intellectuals” — the kind not determined by class or profession, but through thought and activity in one’s own community. This is an empowering notion, but access to it (like most advanced philosophy and art) is usually gained through higher education, where the target audience will not likely be. While the Monument may not get every participant (resident or visitor) reading Gramsci, it does bring these ideas into a new kind of circulation — library books, banners, brochures, web and radio — in the unique context of a NYCHA development. Robert Smithson also extrapolates the Monument-form, albeit in a different direction. For him, it expands (or contracts) to include a barren sandbox and other such “ruins in reverse.” While Hirschhorn is a soldier of Energy (Yes!), Smithson celebrates entropy or “energy-drain” as reflected in the works of Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and the landscape of Passaic, New Jersey. Earning the title by ironic pronouncement, these “monuments” have very little to offer, and Smithson means to critique the systemic failures that created them. Hirschhorn takes the opposite approach: injecting the Monument with more giving-power than its ever had before.

I have seen and heard firsthand what this project has offered to Forest Houses. For me personally, benefits gained from the Gramsci Monument include: discovering the work of “Afro-Pessimist” scholar Frank Wilderson; bumping into all kinds of old friends; re-reading Gramsci for the first time since college; finding the perfect birthday gift for my boyfriend at a Conway department store on the advice of a Forest Houses resident; sitting beside my Dad at a lecture called “For the Love of Philosophy,” and many more. It made me proud to be an artist and a New Yorker — because this is what art can do, and it can still happen here. William H. Gass wrote, “The successful monument has offspring.” In the sense of ongoing activity, dialogue and friendship born of the Gramsci Monument, I have no doubt. In the sense of future projects that approach its monumental ambition — here’s hoping.

The post Not on the High Line: Scenes from the Gramsci Monument appeared first on artcritical.

Richard Serra’s initial reaction upon seeing Jo Baer’s orchid-inspired “Wraparound” paintings, Baer has recalled, was to ask, “How does it feel to do revolutionary work?” [quoted in Stein, see below]. Moreover, the first important art-world article on Baer’s work — a cover article by Carter Ratcliff in Art Forum (May, 1972) — focused on her wraparound paintings, two vertical and three horizontal, from her Orchid series. So why did the predominant critical reaction to her recent DIA exhibition strongly favor Baer’s earlier black band paintings over the wraparounds? Roberta Smith, in the New York Times, and Carol Diehl, in Art in America, both strongly praised the black band paintings while disparaging the wraparound paintings. (A notable exception was Jim Long’s review in the Brooklyn Rail, (Winter 2002) which strongly preferred the wraparound paintings exhibited in the third room at DIA.)

To fully appreciate these disparate claims, one needs to consider a range of historical, psychological, and conceptual issues. First, from a psychological point of view, there is likely to be a primacy effect-the black band paintings came first and were well received. The likelihood of a primacy effect is heightened by the fact that the wraparound Orchid paintings were so different from the black bands that Diehl describes them as looking as if they were done by a different artist. There are also art historical reasons why a favorable reaction to the band paintings might have occurred. The black band paintings appear to be a direct reaction to the claims of the prophets of Minimalism — Judd and Morris — that painting was dead. In effect, they are attempts to produce minimal works that are clean, cool and direct and yet retain a certain singularity peculiar to painting. It is as if the blinders were removed from Greenberg’s eyes and he could see that such paintings were nearer to specifying the unique properties of painting than had ever been achieved in the 1960’s by his favorite color field painters, Noland and Olitski.

Clearly then the black band paintings are historically important, but from another point of view they are more limited and less original than the wraparound Orchid paintings. Indeed, their optical glow appears somewhat reminiscent of certain of Flavin’s neon rectangles. On the other hand, if one assumes that an important antecedent of Baer’s paintings comes from her training in the psychology of perception, we can view her wraparound paintings as an attempt to explore more complex modalities of perception than she attempted in the black band paintings. In the words of James J. Gibson’s (1966) seminal work, Baer was in effect exploring “the senses considered as a perceptual system.” Viewed from this perspective, the wraparound works are a considerable advance over the black band paintings. Specifically, the black band paintings are disembodied-all the action is in the eye, giving in Carter Ratcliff’s (1972) prescient words, “a reduced version of seeing.”

Elaborating on Ratcliff’s observation, it may be claimed in contra-distinction to the black band paintings, the wraparound Orchid paintings entrain the body in terms of requiring various postural adjustments to solve the manifold perceptual puzzles posed by Baer. Such explorations supply kinesthetic feedback so that what the eye sees is augmented by information from other sensory modalities. Thus, it may be argued that these paintings draw upon an embodied view of perceiving-they compel us to repeatedly shift our bodily orientations if we want to detect Baer’s edgy messages which are never fully in view from a single point of observation. Such perceiving by doing fits J.J. Gibson’s (1966) concern with perceiving-acting cycles whereby what we do affects what we perceive and what we perceive affects what we do.

These paintings are embodied in a second sense-they make claims on architectural space. They teach us about how perception works in the real, cluttered architectural environment. Here, angles of vision are constantly cut off and/or obscured. Ordinary seeing involves sightings in between, over or under environmental structures. Viewed thusly, the wraparound paintings go beyond creating a visual pop based on retinal responses. Rather they bring us closer to how in Gins and Arakawa’s (2002) terms, we partition the world in the process of landing in it. Like the real world, they open us up to the inexhaustible information provided by the perceptual system when it is allowed to operate naturalistically. These paintings make perceiving a sited process involving our responses to line, color and space.

In these terms, Baer’s wraparound Orchid paintings prepare us for navigating the real world in its inexhaustible complexity rather than eyeballing a cool, beautiful object in a virtual world that is in the end an optical tease. Such navigations provide a multi-modal aesthetic experience that is deeper and longer lasting than “the cheap thrills” of the black band paintings.

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