November 15 – December 22, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, ppowgallery.com

In her second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W., “Will She Ever Shut Up?”, Betty Tompkins, ever the bold tinkerer and experimenter, finds ingenious new ways to speak her mind. The formal link between three rooms of stylistically diverse, modestly scaled artworks is Tompkins’ strategy of placing socially charged phrases – handwritten, stencil-lettered or directly painted – on top of a separate visual field. These pointed juxtapositions poke us to puzzle out the connections, to think through the implications.

In the first room Tompkins unfurls the latest chapter of “Women Words”, a series she began in 2002. These incorporate phrases by and about women the artist solicits from the public. Interspersed here are companion works derived from the #MeToo movement in a separate series she titles “Apologia,” directly quoting public statements made by prominent men accused of assaulting women. Both categories of text are cleverly applied onto book page reproductions of canonical images by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Gainsborough, Cassatt, Rembrandt, Ingres and Artemisia Gentileschi. For the acrylic paintings in the second gallery, all from this year, selected “Women Words” expressions and accounts overlay her signature monochrome airbrushed, gracefully cropped close ups of genitalia.

As a suffused, solemn backdrop for these timely new works, the third gallery presents her text-only paintings and drawings on paper from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Bringing to mind their on-going significance, Tompkins hand-copied fragments of our country’s founding legal documents painted in warm colonial hues over a subtle background grid of painted and penciled words. This group from the artist’s considerable archive is a reminder that her earliest, monumental paintings from 1969 through 1974, based on pornographic photographs her first husband had ordered illegally through the mail, were not shown for over 30 years. Since “discovered” in 2003, these and others Tompkins has since created have been shown virtually non-stop in museums and galleries around the world.

Perusing Tompkins’ word-image juxtaposition it is impossible not to think of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “L.H.O.O.Q,” (1919) created by doctoring a post-card reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. Duchamp’s sly pencil marks succinctly highlight gender ambiguity in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Likewise, Tompkins’ satiric defacement of historical masterworks allows us to scrutinize her repurposed works for lessons in identity formation and gender role definition. Her clustered expressions of scorn, praise, pride and contrition loosely hand lettered in opaque pink paint completely cover single figures in the reproductions of well-known paintings and photographs. The resulting frozen pastel silhouettes also call to mind another historic reference, the ancient catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. As with this end-of-days event, Tompkins’  verbal flows have seemingly stopped the solitary men and women in their tracks ensnaring them for our analysis. Notably, the artist reverses her formula in an outlier work installed on the gallery’s smaller foyer wall, Women Words (Anon #11) (2017). On this vintage photograph, rather than the figure it’s the rural background that is filled with hand painted crude expressions such as, “Bean flicker,” “flesh wallet,” “Hagia Sophia,” “Love Socket”, ”put a bag over her head and fuck her for old glory.”  The young woman is fully dressed but seated in a way that modestly displays her underclothing. Unlike the other 50 plus readymades in the show, this woman is fully visible. She appears protected from the insults by her self-esteem and safe within her self-knowledge—indeed, wearing a quiet Mona Lisa smile.

Naomi Wolf’s landmark book, “Vagina” (2012) explores the implications of new research on the neuroscience of women’s reproductive organs. We now know there are multiple direct nerve connections between these organs and the brain. Wolf discusses how the impact of physical and verbal abuse on women’s psyches can now be more precisely measured. She also presents important correlations between erotic pleasure and personal agency. Tompkins’ seven pale pink and blue-grey paintings in the second gallery combine two contrasting techniques. Her signature soft airbrushed compositions of the swooning folds and creases of a woman’s labia and clitoris are counterposed with hard-edged stencil letters that have been removed to reveal the artwork’s under painting. Despite having its origin in exploitative pornography, Tompkins’ gentle yet emphatically clinical presentation of women’s genitalia tells of the importance for women of having a full understanding of the workings of their own sexuality. Being aware of the profound positive power of full female sexual expression for both men and women is the best defense against the attitudes expressed in the crowd-sourced phrases and narratives “pressed” into the genitalia in Tompkins’ paintings. My ex’s favorite…(2018) perfectly portrays this dynamic by hypnotically balancing the work’s two compositional elements within its floating painted space.

Let me suggest one way to consider the show’s composite truth that listening to each other with mutual respect is vital to the survival of our country. Imagine a vocal performance based on all the artworks in this show, simultaneously read aloud by their original authors. Men’s and women’s voices would create a calibrated cacophony merging insults, confessions, revelations and apologies pertaining to the opposite sex. Next, the phrases from Tompkins’ history works with key fragments from our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be recited by male voices. In these works, there is an underlying grid of the single word, “law,” repeated in rows. This would become a chant demanding “Law, law, law, law…” performed in a long, slow crescendo by an all-female chorus in the tens of thousands echoing the recent women’s marches. This multilayered vocal performance would reply to the question in Tompkins’ title with a resounding and hope filled “No!”

The post Speaking Her Mind: Betty Tompkins at P.P.O.W. appeared first on artcritical.

May 31 to June 30, 2018
54 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, lesleyheller.com

Have you ever wanted to walk inside a painting, sit down and experience the work from the inside? Ship and Dock/Nights and Days or The Gazer is like a painting: you have to keep looking at what is before you so you know not only what you’re seeing but what you’re feeling as well. This mixed media assemblage, the primary work in this exhibition, takes up an entire room and carries psychological power.

Entering a darkened space through a floor-to-ceiling black curtain, you encounter a structure beyond which, in one direction, is a slowly, gradually changing sky beginning at the horizon line. The whole installation is miniaturized yet human-scale, like a great big, exploded-open Joseph Cornell box.

A bench is placed conveniently against a dark wall pierced with scattered holes that allow tiny and tinier lights to shine through. Sit down with the starry wall behind you and gaze at, and through, the structure. It’s mesmerizing and invites you to linger and contemplate the passage of time. The structure and the walls on either side and behind are dark with a greater depth than any empty black because this color is, in fact, a dark marine blue.

The structure is a dock with two sheds. One weather beaten shed, nearer the viewer, to the left on the dock, is clad in corrugated metal with authentic signs of aging: dings and scrapes. Its door has a weathered, cross-hatched safety-glass window through which a lit bulb exudes orangey-yellowish light with a brighter center, like the glow from a gas lamp, only the filament identifies this lamp as an industrial-type, if delicate electrical bulb. On entering the space with its many parts, darkness and this light, this lamp suggests a Bec Auer gas lamp of the type familiar from Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés. We look through something to see a view beyond, a light on the other side of the solid structure. Only there is no figure here except oneself and a haunting feeling of loneliness. Like Duchamp, Donna Dennis has controlled the conditions under which the viewer experiences the work. One must be part of the work to see it.

The piece changes, even though nothing moves but light. This is not a static sculpture. There is a subtle though constant state of change, augmented by the gentle sounds of water lapping up on a shore, swirls and eddies, droplets of water, tidal sounds. Waves pull back, rigging that is not tied fast quietly clatters, breezes funnel through the dock and over water. There’s an eerie cosmic whoosh that complements the surrounding darkness.

The other shed, further from the viewer and to the far right at the end of a walkway, stands on an elevated structure with a dark side facing the viewer and a light side facing left. This light side lends a surreal quality to the scene. The gravity and sharp contrasts of light and dark on the sides of this form suggest the melancholy of Giorgio de Chirico’s abandoned cityscapes and the relationships he creates between buildings in space.

The dock is set on what look like concrete pylons whose square footings suggest water underneath. The viewer may be walking on that water. The crossbeams, the gangplank and stairways ck create many geometric shapes, like erector sets or metal shelving: crisscrossing patterns and a variety of exes and rectangular framing. Drooping cables or fuel pipes connect into stanchions that resemble plumbing fixtures, rounded at the top, as if they have shut-off valves or switches for the flow of liquids or current running inside the sheathing. Or they are hawsers, , protected from the elements inside metal tubing where those strong cables penetrate the deck.

This is a durational work because beyond the dock the projection of sky above the horizon changes gradually from day to night to day, from painterly sky blues to dark night with brushstroked stars as a ship changes from white against the night sky to black against the daytime skies in the distance. Thus the elements of engineering and technology that exist here in a three-dimensional space, also includes the fourth dimension of time. And, though that horizon changes, it’s always night for the viewer with the stars shining behind us..

This scene may represent a vast lake in northern Minnesota where typically fish houses and small cabin structures can be seen from the shore. The scale of the work suggests that this may represent one of the Great Lakes because the ship, an ore ship carrying coal, is so small, so far in the distance. And what looks like a heap of rubble under the dock suggests piled up coal

The viewer is struck by the precision Donna Dennis employed in creating the overall construction, the sound and the lighting. This reflects the attention brought to bear on the locations where the artist made her beautiful gouache drawings that hang in a separate room, and the elaborate preparations to accomplish her installation, first constructed in the studio, then disassembled and recreated at Lesley Heller.

The post Passage: Donna Dennis at Lesley Heller appeared first on artcritical.

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)

The post Narrowing the Field: The Fate of Genius in the Age of the Readymade appeared first on artcritical.

“The elements of a new life should already be in formation among us — in the realm of culture — and it’s up to us to draw on them to liven up the debate.” – Asger Jorn

Is Rob Pruitt an artist or a salesman — and if the latter, what is it that he’s selling? A new book from Italian publisher Bruno, Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market: Year 1, describes itself as Pruitt’s “unconventional autobiography.” Beyond being a catalog of cultural detritus cum-artist’s-book, this strange paperback might make one wonder, What about this is Art? And why would the publisher waste time and money to make this thing? It looks pretty crappy (seemingly on purpose), as it’s literally nothing more than an eBay item inventory in print, enfolded by a glossy cover bearing a blurry, incidental image. But a good sleuth will always search through the trash. You can find out a lot about somebody by looking there; and a flea market can also be a good place to learn about someone’s life, based on maybe what it was once like.

With this in mind — and eBay often being a lot like a kind of digital bazaar — Pruitt is selling a kind of story, one that has also been staged as an actual flea market installation or performance all over the place. In fact, that’s how this all started. Pruitt began his flea markets as his own sort of Happenings way back in 1999 in NYC. They’ve been held art galleries, art fairs, museums, and sometimes businesses. He and his friends began by exhibiting and selling pretty much whatever they wanted, from art to the stuff they had laying around their apartments. No wonder. His book is a jumble of quotidian personal objects in the most perplexing of situations: a confluence of consumer products, some of which are considered fine art or pop culture relics in the space of an online flea market. Funnily enough, the images of each object for sale are set against a generic cloud backdrop, either that or, for items sold during the months of November or December, one of that and falling snowflakes — to evoke what any merchant of consumer goods would, you guessed it, The Holidays.

As an autobiography, the book is unconventional; it says almost nothing strictly personal about Pruitt. It’s at first glance a mishmash of nonessentials: a “POWER Brass Paperweight CROWN *Pop *Art *Sculpture” is listed as having “plenty of mass to hold down ALL of your papers!” It comes with the caveat “*Warning this paperweight can be used as Brass Knuckles if things get a little dicey.” The book goes from Valentine’s Day tchotchkes to a MoMA toilet brush in a page or two. Really, what the hell am I even looking at here?

I haven’t seen a book like this since having been introduced to the once impossible-to-find An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Atlas Arkhive, 1966), by Daniel Spoerri. That book essentially documents (ad absurdum) a moment in time and all the things on or in the author’s desk in that moment. Like Spoerri’s insane book, Pruitt’s is so absurd — so mind-blowingly packed with surprising objects, their juxtapositions and descriptions and the misfit spirit that’s still somehow hard to come by — it’s laugh-out-loud funny and worthy of any well-made book to be found in the catalogues of DAP. That is also to say, with a backhanded compliment, that the book is a piece of junk. The aforementioned cover image, one of a little old smiling, wooden, armless doll with a mustache, is blurry and set on the backdrop of cloudy heavens, and the pages, sans-pagination, are no different from what can be found on Pruitt’s actual eBay page, making the book essentially just here for posterity, proof of life, or at best a gag (my bet).

What I know of Pruitt’s art is that it’s all this surprising and unconventional; he seems uninterested in art trends and has a great sense of humor. “Is this guy French?” someone asked me, going on to comment that past inventive French artists and writers seem to have been bent on scatology — from François Rabelais to Alfred Jarry to Marcel Duchamp — of the same lineage. He’s not writing about crap per se, just presenting things — crap and some higher art stuff — with no discernable hierarchical importance at all. Pruitt seems to be along this lineage, though he perhaps doesn’t exactly belong to it. To me, Pruitt and his sense of abandon may be in a similar trajectory as a thinker, or better, a prankster, is more Marx Brothers than those artists. Pruitt takes some of what he’s doing just a little further, perhaps the way that Andy Warhol did, with art embracing and involving itself in consumer culture and materialism in order to motivate or further a different kind of thinking.

Duchamp, Warhol, or even Tony Smith all realized that art is happening in time immemorial and with all things, and what they made and talked about had this in mind. That’s how I think one can appreciate this book. To these people, and now to Pruitt, there’s “a reality there,” as Smith said, “which had not had any expression in art.” What’s art? Anything. Pruitt’s own pants, sold for $.99 this month online; maybe, as his book evinces, almost anything with a panda bear or a heart on it. Pruitt presents, of all things, fuchsine grapes, which are poisonous if eaten — and a fake apple that he gives the hilarious appellation “Magritte-esque”!

The unbelievable effect of this book is that in its utter pointlessness and overwhelming cacophony it becomes something like a digital arcade, such as those within which Walter Benjamin found reason to both protest and to admire the contemporary. Beyond how strange the book is describing it outside of art historical and theoretical terms is surprisingly difficult. “It’s a catalogue, very spare in often ironic or witty description, with no other literature or even an introduction, made up of all this guy’s eBay items.” This kind of thing usually begs the question of why, what for? Or else the statement, like it or not, “how dumb.” The former of which isn’t far off at all, in the best way possible.

Pruitt, Rob. Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market: Year 1. Tommaso Speretta (ed.) (Venice, Italy: bruno, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-8899058098. 296 pages, $32

The post Art Sales 2.0 IRL: A Book of Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market appeared first on artcritical.

“A surd is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained.” – Lewis Carroll

One exciting thing about the creative act (in the parlance of Marcel Duchamp) is its way of bringing about, for actor and viewer, things that haven’t been experienced before. At least not in the same context. Some of what’s been made by the Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers is a good example of this, and in a way that also allows the viewer to creatively complete the picture by way of imagining new meanings of what’s being shown. With this I’d like to bring up nonsense, or better another sense, which is what to my mind what Broodthaers was engaged in. In My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (Siglio, 2016), he tries on Lewis Carroll’s shoes and explores the partitions of reality and make-believe. In one edition of texts and images spanning a little more than a decade, the book collects three short works. The first of three parts, Mon livre d’ogre (My Ogre Book, 1957), is a tableau in a series of poems — with Midnight (1960) in similar fashion, and then the all-image collection Shadow Theater (1973-1974) between the two, made from one of Broodthaers’ Projection series.

Like in Carroll, the why of Broodthaers needn’t be put into words. The tale that Broodthaers weaves is often a fragmented one that is at times homely and always bewildering. These things are what make his poetry congenial, seeming from the wellsprings of consciousness. Consciousness, after all, as writer Harry Mathews has said, “does not produce a particular meaning — it produces no conclusions.” That seems a pretty apt description of this collection: Broodthaers isn’t concluding anything, and with that he makes an adventurer of his reader. For children first, this nonsense has always been a secret means of access to a more vibrant, harlequin world — one I’ve come to find belongs to poetry, in all of its guises.

When the first of the three books came out, it was 1957, a post-war world. The first US edition of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat appeared, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was printed in England and seized by customs officials that year. What is the significance of this? Maybe nothing. To liken Broodthaers’ writing to Carroll is, by the way, in no way to call it anachronistic — a word I’ll look askance at, not abiding by the notion that styles “belong” to specific eras. At the start of My Ogre Book, through the “present day mirror,” morning becomes a world unto itself, reminding one of Alice holding to her orange. Broodthaers also, while courting a familiar style, brings to the poems motifs and highly unusual turns all his own. There is otherworldly music where donkeys play the drums, and the bells of Easter Island, well, remain silent. Elsewhere goats knock on doors, fairies grind coffee, paper flowers fill with dew, and all the while everyday, clearly explained things happen too, making some of this fantasy material even more interesting. “The wind allies itself with the fire/ the rafts burn in the night” is one such line so lucid you can almost smell the smoke, and “The key is under the doormat” as ever.

In his writing and in the images within Shadow Theater, Broodthaers was able to summon the chance-originated play, conundrums, or (un)concerns that his later visual artworks hinge on physically. I’m thinking of Broodthaers’ La Pluie, a 1969 film wherein the artist tries to write as “rain” falls on him, washing away text even as he continues to write. A simple, strange tableau on astronomical situations, human effort and circumstance, all of Broodthaers’ work seems to engage the processes of being in the world and making things. But in his writings, the poet plays with meaning with an almost wholesale disregard for ordinary sense — no net as far as the game of reasoning and logic goes, he creates extra significances that endlessly drift in and out of new senses. In Midnight, surprising things take place: rain falls from the sun, a straw man guards the sea, a black cat constellation is made, centuries get lined up in a matchbox, and stars are turned to salt. This memorable nonsense impresses me just about as much as the regular phenomena it parodies.

Calling it an artist’s book is no stretch — at just over 150 pages, its layout has the look of a children’s book juxtaposed with the simple aesthetic appeal of Raymond Roussel and the artist Zo’s collaboration from 1929, New Impressions of Africa, where images and cantos are informed by one another throughout. The images in this book lie between the two short collections of poems but have no text on their pages.

Thumbing to Shadow Theater (Ombres chinoises) (1973-74) — a series of 80 slides of images taken from comic strips, books, and a photography manual, all of which were projected somewhere sometime — Broodthaers tells another story, again a provisionary one that unravels and winds up again by turns. A visual lexicon involving ordinary or comic incidents, objects, and figures, is reimagined in new juxtapositions that make the familiar baffling. In Shadow Theater, celestial bodies career through outer space and transform to erupting volcanoes, exploding perhaps through a kitchen window, to maybe cause the seasons to tear a man from limb-to-limb. Volcanoes, shadow puppets, and solid black rectangles are a few of this book’s recurrent motifs.

Broodthaers explained the effect of his work in 1965, saying, “The preference for eternity and the natural had ended up producing academicism, as we know. Its replacement by a preference for the ephemeral, for the artificial, for all that is false, aroused my enthusiasm as much as my poetic loyalty.” In Broodthaers, assumed logic is, for a moment, set aside or transmogrified. Be the truth “interstitial,” as Broodthaers calls it, or mere traces in the mind of the artist, the person experiencing the objects will always come away with something new when the imagination has a say.

Broodthaers, Marcel. My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (New York: Siglio, 2016). Trans. by Elizabeth Zuba with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers. ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-8. 160 pages. Edition of 1,000. $39.95

The post Ad Absurdum: A Collection of Poems by Marcel Broodthaers appeared first on artcritical.

The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

The post Northwest Notes: Dispatch from the Pacific appeared first on artcritical.

Richard Prince has recently attracted a fair amount of performative, high-decibel anger for his new work. In May, at the Frieze Fair, he showed several pieces from his Instagram series — unique pigment prints on canvas made from screenshots, taken by the artist, of other people’s pictures on the photo sharing app Instagram. They typically include a comment by Prince, typed in below the photo, as signature and alteration. Artcritical contributor Kurt Ralske wrote a really insightful essay about the work last fall, when it was shown at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location. A new exhibition of the series opened at Gagosian’s Davies Street location in London on June 12. A show called “Original” closed at the Madison Avenue location on June 20. Similar to his earlier paintings, such as Nurses or his Eden Rock series, these are the covers of pulp novels — illustrators’ original cover art framed with the book for which it was produced. They’ve attracted far less scrutiny and heat than his Instagram images.

Both new series, and much of the rest of Prince’s oeuvre, use a similar operation. He takes preexisting material, without permission, and reproduces it with his name attached. He often changes very little (if any) of the original matter. That maneuver has a very long lineage, as many art admirers will recognize, in Prince’s career, his contemporaries, and in the generations that preceded him: Sherrie Levine, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, the codified iconography of various cultures — and etc.^[1] It can often be difficult to distinguish between convention, appropriation, plagiarism, and homage. Repetition, reproduction, iteration, also at play here, have similarly long genealogies in Lucas Cranach, the Dadaists, Warhol again, Louise Lawler, Robert Gober, and so many others. Those are obviously histories of which Prince’s detractors are either unaware, or that don’t carry weight.

In recent weeks, media outlets fleetingly percolated at the commotion around Prince, including not only the fine-arts press, but also FOX News, the BBC, Bloomberg, Wired, blogs, etc.[2] A flood of angry Instagram and Twitter users has periodically swamped the comment threads of Prince’s online accounts. Many (if not all) of those complaining about Prince’s work also routinely use repurposed, appropriated, or otherwise copied images. A vitriolic audience has discovered Prince exactly when he may be most relevant, his discipline now woven into daily life, and they are not happy about it.

In response to images of Prince’s Instagram paintings posted to his social media accounts, viewers accused him of theft, called for lawsuits, encouraged suicide, or simply asserted that he sucks and that his work augers the death of creativity. Users complained that the images were stolen, that the original creator is entitled to compensation, that the works shouldn’t carry a $100,000 price tag, and even that it is wrong for any artist to receive any money for their work. These images have previously been called sexist, in an artnet article by Paddy Johnson, and by others. Unsurprisingly, those who have had their likeness appropriated have been called victims, a demonym often flogged by enraged interlopers, whether it’s warranted or not.^[3]

There are a lot of reasons why these complaints lack merit. To begin with, any image posted on Instagram is subject to the terms and conditions set by Instagram and agreed to by anyone who uses the app. The company exercises some control and can prohibit certain pictures that it deems offensive, or that violate copyright law. All this stuff is in the terms of use.[4] And Instagram is already making money with targeted advertising, leveraging user data and attention for product placements.^[5] So whether Prince makes paintings or not, someone else is being enriched by the labor and intellectual property of the app’s users. Instagram and other apps basically make a leisure activity of unpaid work, producing data.

Further, Prince’s paintings fall under fair use provisions of copyright law. The image on Prince’s canvas may include the poster’s original photo, but it is significantly different. For one thing, it’s pixilated and printed in large scale on canvas by Prince, rather than existing compactly on anyone’s smartphone.^[6] Moreover, it isn’t just the original photo, but the entire textual and iconographic layout, including the frame created by Instagram and comments added by other users. His commentary acts as both a kind of intervention, final authorial word, signature, and as a type of contextualization, not unlike the signature of “R. Mutt” on Duchamp’s Fountain (1917).

Even minimal alteration or change to the, like, aura of the work can be sufficient. In a 2009 lawsuit, Cariou v. Prince, photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince for infringement when his documentary photographs were reproduced with minor alterations. Cariou won, initially, and received a settlement, but the ruling was overturned on appeal. The appellate judge found that reasonable observers could distinguish Prince’s work from Cariou’s original. And likewise, we — viewers — can tell the difference between a digital photograph and a photograph printed on canvas with a lot of extra visual information.

Unlike even Cariou, it strains credibility to imagine that Prince is depriving Instagram users of income. It seems safe to presume that very few users post images for free and also expectation remuneration. Those who are interested in printing out their images (or screenshots of their images with the additional framing devices and comments, as Prince has done) are still free to do so and to sell them on an open market. Selena “Missy Suicide” Mooney, co-founder of the softcore erotica website SuicideGirls, did just this after one of her models found a Prince-appropriated image of herself for sale at Frieze. In a publicity stunt, Mooney sold exact replicas of Prince’s work for $90, one-one thousandth of the reported price of his originals. All proceeds from her sales were pledged to a charity.

Artcritical contributor David Carrier and I came to the same realization. Carrier explained that this situation is what the scholar and philosopher Arthur Danto called “indiscernables.” The original and the artist’s copies are related but dissimilar, and they’re not in competition with one another. Warhol’s Soup Cans don’t compete with Campbell’s Soup Company or its advertisements. Early in his career Prince also photographed advertisements, such as cowboys pictured in ads for Marlboro cigarettes. Prince and the ad photographer operated in separate markets, and in fact the ad photographer had already been paid (probably well) by the time Prince copied his or her work. So it also goes with Mooney’s models, and with many of the other celebrities pictured on his canvases.

Importantly, the artworks are valuable neither because they’re novel nor because they’re from a photo app, but because they’re being offered by Gagosian as artworks by Richard Prince.^[7] Here is one issue of sexism, which is different from the one proffered by Johnson and others. Johnson’s critique is that Prince’s Instagram paintings often reproduce objectifying images of women and his signatory commentary is interpreted as snide and silencing, which is probably true.^[8] There is, I think, a clearer and more essential issue of sexism here: although there are several male artists who could plausibly produce and sell this kind of work for very high prices, there are comparatively few women who could command these prices for this product — maybe Lawler, Levine, or Cindy Sherman. These perseverating structural inequities in the art world are sexist, whether or not Prince’s particular images are or not.

Ralske notes that Prince is essentially printing money, and this kind of split between the exorbitant amounts commanded by eminent artists, compared to the fractional prices achieved by everyone else in the long tail, is another kind of institutional inequality. The market’s stratification is matched (created) by the shrinking number of increasingly wealthy oligarchs able to compete with one another in a poorly regulated marketplace. It’s also a reflection of growing inequality generally, globally. This is art as commodity speculation. It seems unlikely that collectors are spending so much money strictly for the image posted by the quoted Instagram user. If they wanted these images, many of which are casual selfies, they could likely buy them directly from the user for almost nothing, or they can see them on Instagram for free — both on Prince’s account and on the accounts of those he copies.[9] They can print, download, or copy the images, and Prince himself has encouraged aggrieved users to do so. What he’s doing doesn’t have to be unique.

Nonetheless, many criticisms expect Prince to be unique, but only in the way some people imagine art should be.^[10] Complaints of unoriginality and deskilling or laziness here center on the fact that the images aren’t manually mimetic, that is: Prince hasn’t copied a likeness by his trained hand, that he cheated by using a tool. The anxiety of easy art has coursed through culture for a few hundred years, at least.^[11] The fear that art is a facile con job remains potent and perennial. Which is not to say that no lazy art exists; we’re awash with it, as no doubt we’ve always been. But bad art’s poverty rarely has to do with technical issues, since some of the worst artworks can be supremely executed, just as certainly as they can be craftless junk abstractions. Or they can be copied images from the Web.

Given the digital platform from which Prince’s Instagram paintings spring, one might call them “vernacular.” Non-attribution, anonymity, and copying are endemic to the Web, and there is little practical distinction between Prince’s paintings and a retweet, a circulating image macro, or the re-enactment of a viral video, such as 2013’s briefly popular Harlem Shake craze. Even beyond the Internet, copying and stealing are deeply embedded in culture generally and historically. In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme,” a term now often confused with image macros found all over the Internet.^[12] But what Dawkins meant by the word is far broader: it’s any information that spreads through culture, from Shakespeare’s neologisms to articulated human rights to miniskirts to a catchphrase. Lawrence Lessig, in his book Free Culture (Penguin, 2004), asserts that civilization absolutely depends on elaboration and copying to spread ideas and share information. Prince’s use of Instagram — a medium that explicitly encourages widespread reproduction — points to this engagement with culture, which is exactly what so many of the app’s users find engaging.

It’s worth asking, as Johnson indicates, how in an age of easy copies an artist can sell copies for such high prices. She writes, “Copy-paste culture is so ubiquitous now that appropriation remains relevant only to those who have piles of money invested in appropriation artists.” Peter Schjeldahl also touches on this, writing that the invention of Instagram art was nigh inevitable, but the appeal of Prince’s paintings is brief and that they don’t need to be seen in person to be understood.

However, many people engaged fully in copying and pasting, but only tangentially engaged with the art world (if at all), misunderstand them. Everything in this essay till now is probably a pedantic description of well-trod ground for art cognoscenti, but perhaps dubious to everyone else. So one big, obvious problem of Prince’s work is not even specific to him: the sharp division between the business of art and everything else.

How did it come to be that in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, artists such as Joseph Beuys and Duchamp made strong arguments that anyone can be an artist and that anything can be art, and yet that knowledge has remains locked in a domain of specialists and insiders? Has the domain been made smaller and smaller? As with complex financial tools used by bond traders on Wall Street, the growing amount of money spent on art appears to have cleaved a small echo chamber for knowledge reserved as arcane and valuable, whether it truly is or not. And as with financial markets, the disparities of pay are masked by more inane questions about whether artists should be paid at all, instead of looking at how a system works that rewards a few people greatly and the vast majority very little.

Is the dictum that anybody can be an artist resisted by those anybodies who still believe that only special, innately talented people make art? Although a pretty broad definition of art probably predominates, if you tell people that what they do can be art, they apparently reject the notion, or at least if it’s done for large sums of money by someone using what many lay people dispense freely, even compulsively, online. They don’t seem to want copying weighted by that significance, as if the process could be tarnished by (or could tarnish) a world that they’ve likely been told they don’t understand and can’t participate in, and where the financial stakes are alleged to be very high. Art is special, but the wide popularity of Instagram seems to designate the service as vulgar and, by transference, anything that exists on it. Consequently, Prince’s amateur critics implicitly (sometimes explicitly) urge that we should regard with suspicion a person who attempts to make it a space where art might occur, where it can become self-reflexive, critical, ambivalent, tricky — “It’s just Instagram,” as if that means activity there doesn’t matter.

Even if this is the dullest, worst art ever made, why banality should raise such visceral anger is inexplicable. At heart, beyond all the rhetoric of victimization and copyright and redundancy, this resistance seems to be the concern: art is culture and culture is serious. The subtext of “Your copies are taking away their photos,” sounds like “You’re taking away our fun.” The worry is not that Prince is copying, but perhaps that his copying impinges upon one’s own, and one’s control over rebuttal, deletion. And it does so with art-world forces that appear to expensive and separate the image from everything else. In which case, although the reactionary fury is dumbly vented, the underlying angst about the social role, monetary value, and intellectual boundaries of art is a real problem. Unlike art history and copyright and sexism and techne, the cause and the solution for that problem is much more difficult to resolve or even describe. One can hope that the wider audience and frothing attention paid to work like Prince’s might initiate that conversation.

^[1] I can only think of one ancient culture known for prizing ingenuity over tradition in its official artworks: Mayan scholars routinely invented new ways of writing their hieroglyphics, rather than hewing to any particular convention. Others might exist — I’m not sure. Originality and authorship just weren’t very big concerns for much of art’s history.

[2] In the remainder of this piece I describe Prince’s detractors, meaning his critics outside the professional arts. Later discussions of writing by critics who thoughtfully wrestle with and place Prince’s work in context, such as Paddy Johnson, Kurt Ralske, and Peter Schjeldahl, are exceptions and not the focus of this essay.

^[3] Conversely, some fans have begged him to use their images in his work.

[4] Users who don’t want such censorship can use another service with more amenable terms.

^[5] Additionally, in 2012 Instagram included language in a new Terms of Service agreement that appeared to provide them rights to all content on their servers, which could be sold to third parties without compensation to the user. After much outcry, Instagram removed the clause and stated unequivocally that it was not their intention to sell users’ images and data. But they retained language that prohibits users from bringing class action lawsuits against them, leading some business journalists to speculate that the company may be protecting itself from angry users should they revert to that policy again in the future. In short: Instagram may someday sell images and other data stored on their servers. Facebook (Instagram’s parent company), and other platforms, similarly claim rights over user content stored on their servers.

^[6] This might be part of the worry, since it makes the image no longer vaporous and passing, takes away the possibility of deletion, should its original author reconsider it in the future.

^[7] In this, too, one sees another real problem on the periphery of Prince’s work. Many of those angry at Prince (presumably art neophytes, but who knows) might object to the high price. A friend of mine, a professional artist, remarked that the $90,000 pricetags seemed surprisingly low. Those sums seem to both justify their status as art for the market, and cast doubt upon it for those ignorant of its operations.

^[8] Such assertions seem perhaps plausible, I don’t know. I’m not sure how earnest or spiteful Prince is. His comments are usually too cryptic for me to parse, though the flavor can be lecherous or juvenile. However, I assume I’ve got a blind spot in this regard.

[9] There’s not much of a market for self-portraits such as these, even including the outlier case of Kim Kardashian’s recent book of selfies, Selfish (Rizzoli, 2015)

^[10] While they complain about printed screenshots of amateurs and living celebrities, Prince’s scolds are seemingly indifferent to the artist posting images Burl Ives or Barbara Billingsley copied from movies, and his critics may do likewise on their own Instagram feeds.

^[11] Earlier in Western culture, Socrates worried conversely that the implementation of original writing would ruin culture by weakening memory and tradition. While once culture was feared corruptible by invention, it is now imagined to be corruptible by non-invention. And yet culture persists.

^[12] Image macros are the popular pictures with funny text appended in block letters, such as cats talking in a juvenile dialect.

The post What’s Not the Matter With Richard Prince appeared first on artcritical.

November 7 to December 31, 2014
600 Washington Square
Philadelphia, 215 629 1000

Thomas Chimes, long heralded for grand landscape paintings and canvases laden with Greek and Christian symbols, was shown to different effect in a focused exhibition at Lock Gallery late last year of mid-career, predominantly sculptural works. Alluding to an interior world of secrets, irony and obsession, these fastidiously constructed boxes, dating from 1965 to 1973, articulate the literary impulses and ontological states that animate his better-known later works.

After a decade of working in New York, in the 1950s and ‘60s, in a scene still bearing the imprint of Abstract Expressionism, Chimes retreated to his hometown of Philadelphia, slowly embracing a hermetic existence. It was in 1965 that Chimes decided to abandon his explorations as a colorist and began to craft work informed by his deep love of modernist and symbolist literature, his evolving affinity for Surrealism and the enigmatic philosophies and practices of Marcel Duchamp. And yet, the work in the exhibition reveals how much he also felt the need to remain relevant in a technologically driven world. An influential lecture by Marshall McLuhan at the University of Pennsylvania impacted his shift from painting to sculpture, according to art historian Michael Taylor, as well as his deepening personal association with Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Duchamp.

Bouts with depression may also have encouraged him to shun the limelight of New York. He found in the confines of Philadelphia a sense of familiarity and the isolation needed to discover who he was. In doing so he was following the edict of Duchamp, who advised young artists to go underground.

The metal boxes are an amalgam of divergent sources: Art Deco, Pop Art and Minimalism. In some instances, they look like mechanical devices that have specific functions: too large to be hand held they nonetheless feel intimate. At the forefront of modern design directives, Chimes’s boxes infused with sexual, electronic and mathematical motifs, are evidence of his “desire for structure and structuring desire.” In tune with the “Sexual Revolution” of his time, Chimes liberally laces his imagery with female and male genitalia, incorporating an eroticized sense of play into his symbolic lexicon. In elegantly structured works like Cathedra (1970) and Untitled (1969), the viewer can get lost in the fluidity of cut and collaged aluminum forms.

It is curious that Chimes segued so effortlessly from painting to metal construction. Yes (1965), a work that marks this transition, contains vestiges of earlier painterly impulses as well as Matisse-like cutout forms, and a configuration of Artaud’s alter ego, Mômo as a bird, are neatly contained within a composition of rectangular and square forms. This is a work that marked Chimes’s transition to constructions. Also during this year, he was commissioned to design the jacket cover for two books by Bettina L. Knapp on the work of Artaud. It is telling that his esteem of Artaud’s life and work predated his decision to move toward making mixed media metal boxes. Possibly Chimes felt that the box form itself served as a vessel/vehicle to sort through new symbols of mysticism and playfulness that emulated Artaud’s aesthetic.

Some of Chimes boxes open, while many are sealed shut with cut away areas, exposing layers of different materials and markings. Engaging in Pataphysics, the anti-theoretical philosophy coined by Alfred Jarry, Chimes throws together fragments of quasi-scientific elements and mathematical diagrams into a jumble that give mere hints to their origin in meaning. Chimes orders these chaotic insignia with humor and aplomb. Works like Exhibition Calculator (1969) evidence an ironic tone, one that pokes fun at the art world itself.

Chimes’s evolving aesthetic was certainly less than linear and not completely sequential. He appears to be driven by ideas and less by the tendency of the time to stick with a signature style. Maybe he was marking time and secretly coding his life traumas and inner secrets. This show ends with a selection of white paintings of moderate size, some of which were like palimpsests of unintelligible script. The hint of landscape behind the vast whiteness of Untitled Rose Landscape (1980), for instance, is indicative of the type of investigations that consumed Chimes until the end of his marriage in 1984 when he expressed his forlorn state in a poem “Winter is white/ Everything is cold/ Mutterings are distant now.”

In addition to landscapes, he revisits the visage of Albert Jarry, a reoccurring portrait within a whitened vapor, as well as the embossed helmeted head of Artaud. It is notable that between his construction series and white paintings from 1979 to the 1990s, Chimes spent nearly a decade devoted to his obsession with literary figures, by painting portraits of such literary illuminati as Jarry, Artaud, André Breton, James Joyce and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

The overarching themes in the esoteric works presented at Locks may sometimes seem to outweigh their delicate and precise execution. In spite of the rigid materials used, however, it is perhaps the appearance of fragility that Chimes intended to portray, alluding to the vulnerability of the human mind and the ephemeral quality of thoughts translated into plastic form.

The post Metal Boxes: A Hermetic Side of Thomas Chimes appeared first on artcritical.

October 11, 2014 to February 01, 2015
McCormick Hall
Princeton, NJ, 609 258 3788

This extraordinary exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum vividly updates our understandings of chanoyu, popularly called the “tea ceremony,” and in doing so illustrates not just the truism that every aesthetic is a construction, but raises provocative and timely questions about the very nature of art making. Originating early last year in a larger version at the Freer Sackler Gallery, Washington DC, the Princeton show runs through February 1.

At the core of this exhibition is a ceramic fairytale. The show illustrates how an ordinary brown storage jar made by a team of workers in southern China in the late 14^th century, was transformed through a complex process of seeing, naming, owning and displaying into one of Japan’s most revered tea objects. Chigusa, the jar in question, arrived in Japan along with many others just like it and managed to survive the shipping and use as a storage jar for about 200 years. That is until one day when a tea connoisseur discovered the jar, probably at a market, but possibly at a temple auction and saw in its brown glaze and strong sloping sides, the qualities much admired by tea masters and acquired it. Soon after the jar was named Chigusa, a poetic allusion meaning “myriad things,“ which immediately infused the jar with semantic power for with this naming, the jar referenced a revered medieval poem.

That moment of selection and naming would lead to a 4-lugged storage jar becoming a coveted work of art. By the end of the 16th century, Chigusa, traveled like a racehorse, accompanied by boxes of accumulated belongings – ornamental ropes and Chinese textiles to seasonally adorn it, documents of pedigree, ownership and admiration, as well as with Chinese scrolls. The jar was the Elvis Presley of medieval world of tea, one of the highest traditional arts forms in Japan. References to Chigusa appear in the diaries of the major tea chroniclers, who wrote of the awe they felt in having had the chance to view it. The military warlords who ruled Japan during the 16^th century vied to acquire one of the few recognized meibutsu (tea treasures) such as Chigusa; to own Chigusa was to possess some of the power and prestige of shoguns.

The creative act that turned a brown jar into Chigusa was an act of selection. If you are now thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and his famous 1917 prank Fountain, you are on the right path. At its core this show challenges us to think hard about the nature of art; not just about the ways in which art is a commodity, but as in the case of Duchamp’s readymades, the ways in which the creative act can shift from the making of an art object to the selection of an object to be classified as a work of art. The story of Chigusa is fascinating example of how an object accrues value as a work of art and the power of narrative to create our perceptions of what art is. As the show details, by the end of the 16^th century, references to Chigusa in tea diaries had so increased its value that eventually a letter written by the most famous tea master, the mythic Sen No Rikyu was included in the grouping of Chigusas many accessories, even though Rikyu had never seen the jar.

Walking into the show, which covers three small rooms, each of which is designed to look both into the next room and out into the larger collection of the American wing, one immediately encounters Chigusa, the simple brown jar at the heart of the story.

Captions surrounding the jar detail the qualities that made Chigusa superlative as a tea object, the flow of glaze, the urazame or quail feather pattern of the glaze, the slight grooves at the base of the neck created by being turned on the potter’s wheel. To the right is a replica of a 5 mat tatami room such as one that tea men would have used for preparing and serving matcha complete with a beautifully chosen array of tea utensils. To the left is a case holding Chigusa’s impressive Pawlonia wood nesting boxes. In the second room is one of the most surprising elements, a video of a tea master ritually “dressing” Chigusa in a complex process of adorning the pot with ceremonial blue ropes and a silk mouth cover.

Viewers unfamiliar with chanoyu will gain an excellent sense of the art of tea through the range of tea objects, each accompanied with captions that both provide context and challenge viewers to look anew at these historic objects. In a wonderful touch, the final room of the exhibition displays a scroll of the famed tea master, Sen No Rikyu, but when you view the scroll, you can also see over your left shoulder out into the larger American wing where a white marble statue of Diana and iconic landscape paintings such as Alfred Bierstadt’s Mt. Adams, Washington (1875), enable one to connect this exhibit with Western traditions of art making. In this context, the exhibition makes the art of tea seem less remote and exotic.

The post A Ceramic Fairytale: Chigusa and the Art of Tea in Japan appeared first on artcritical.

A ready-made sculpture has an essentially ambiguous, philosophically fascinating double identity: It is a work of art; it is a functional artifact, a tool. Neither Donatello nor Michelangelo could have made a ready-made; like abstract art, they are a distinctive product of modernist artistic culture, for only when there exist a plenitude of machine-made artifacts could ready-mades be created. All works of art, it might be said, have such an ambiguous identity—they are both physical things and art. Michelangelo’s David, for example is a piece of marble and a representation of Goliath’s killer. And, as Arthur Danto famously argued, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box is both a brillo box, a utilitarian artifact and, also, a work of art. But ready-mades complexify how we understand this familiar ambiguity because their nonartistic identity is so self-evident. Duchamp’s Fountain is a urinal—and his Bottle Rack is a bottle rack. How, then, can they also be works of art?

Because ready-mades literally consist of commonplace objects, understanding why the artist selected them, when—after all—there are so many artifacts available– provokes commentary. And because our styles of toolmaking have changed drastically, the history of the ready-made provides an historical perspective on our culture. Jeff Koons’ vacuum cleaners such as New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue Doubledecker (1981–87) and his basketballs, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) is a good example, consist of ready-mades plus containers vitrines for the vacuum cleaners; tanks for the basketballs. And as Larry Gagosian rightly notes, Koon’s very Duchampian public sculpture Split-Rocker (2000)  “really (is) a ready-made.” More exactly, it is a planter composed of two (vastly enlarged) halves of two entirely distinct originals, two different toy rockers, a pony belonging to his son and a dinosaur (“Dino”). Normally ready-mades by Duchamp and Koons are utilitarian objects and so the same size as their source. (This is true also of Brillo Box, which is the same size as a Brillo box.) The dramatic change in scale of the ready-made sources of Split-Rocker means that we become like children faced with a gigantic toy.

Just as Duchamp’s ready-mades inspired elaborate discussion of his erotic imagination, so Koons’ assisted ready-mades provoke discussion of race, gender-politics and economic inequality. Interpreters treat his art as a referendum on our political culture. A generation ago interpretation of Duchamp preoccupied scholars. Now, such is the pressure of historicism his ready-mades require reinterpretation. Urinals similar to Fountain are still used but the bottle rack, employed in Duchamp’s day, as Calvin Tomkins has observed, by “thrifty French families” to reuse “their wine bottles”, looks exotic nowadays to most Americans.

Also discussed in this capsule review: Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art , June 27-October 19, 2014; Marcel Duchamp at Gagosian Gallery, New York, June 26-August 29, 2014

The post Jeff Koons: Split-Rocker at Rockefeller Center appeared first on artcritical.