Few artists make work that both looks good and manages to make the world a better place, but Aubrey Roemer is one such artist. Her artistic career spans oceans and continents, from a strip club in Brooklyn to the sugarcane fields of Nicaragua, and from the islands of eastern Indonesia to the migrant camps of Greece. Everywhere she goes, she uses painting as a way to make genuine connections with people and foster awareness of social and environmental issues both locally and globally.

I first became acquainted with Roemer’s work in the spring of 2014 when she had just moved to Montauk to work on her “Leviathan” series, in which she attempted to paint 10 percent of the town population in the course of a summer. Painted in blue on domestic fabrics donated by the local community, the portraits were installed on the beach where they were free to flutter in the wind, their blue and white forms flickering between sea and sky. I’ve been consistently impressed since then by the way she builds rapport with her subjects and then installs her work with an aim of serving the community that inspired it. Her story illustrates how an artist can change the world, one painting at a time.

Though she’s been painting her whole life, Roemer’s practice of community engagement began in 2013 with the “Demimonde” exhibition at Pumps strip club in Brooklyn. She was invited by Pumps’ pinups director Laura McCarthy to do a solo show of paintings at the club, and the show was such a success that Roemer went on to curate three more exhibitions/burlesque nights there. The shows featured Roemer’s paintings of the dancers alongside work by Brooklyn-based artists such as the painter Jesse McCloskey, who has kept a studio around the corner from Pumps for the past 10 years. Roemer fostered collaboration between two communities that had hitherto coexisted side by side without interacting very much, and perhaps both groups discovered that they had more in common than they might have thought.

Hopping from residency to residency since then, her adventures have become increasingly fantastic and inspirational. With support from World Connect, Roemer traveled to Nicaragua in 2015 to do a project with La Isla Foundation, a non-governmental organization that fights the under-publicized epidemic of chronic kidney disease from unknown causes (CKDu), which is ravaging Central America and other equatorial regions around the globe. It is especially prevalent among agricultural laborers worked to death in hot climates—their kidneys fail, from overwork in extreme heat and possibly also as a result of the chemicals used in industrial monoculture. Because sugarcane is a major revenue stream for the national economy, La Isla Foundation gets far more pushback than support from the Nicaraguan government on the matter.

Roemer spent one month living in the Chichigalpa region, where she watched trucks full of sugarcane rumble past while painting portraits of deceased workers on discarded sugarcane sacks. She also painted protest banners, which have since been used by a local grassroots movement agitating for research on CKDu and compensation. As tensions heightened between La Isla Foundation and the government, she had to leave before the project was complete. Just last month Roemer returned to Nicaragua and displayed the completed works in the ruins of an abandoned church, and then gifted them to the community.

Her next project took her to Indonesia, where she set sail from the island of Lombok with a motley crew of artists on board a traditional wooden phinisi sailboat to explore the culture of the remote eastern islands. During this time Roemer completed another project, titled Maccini Sombala (“Seeing Sails”), in which she traced the hands of the people she met on the islands and printed them directly onto the sails of the boat. She used a range of greens that both reflected the lush environment of the islands and tipped a hat to the Islamic culture of Indonesia. This spring, Roemer will curate the next residency aboard the boat, called the Al Isra, proceeds from which will go towards the installation of a solar-powered trash collection wheel at the mouth of the nearby Mataram River, which it’s estimated will stop 10 tons of plastic from entering the Indian Ocean every day.

After returning to Long Island for the summer, Roemer and her boyfriend traveled to Greece to see how they could be of service to the flood of migrants washing up on the islands. Roemer embedded herself in a refugee shelter for migrant boys on the island of Lesvos. Titling the work Khamsa, she created 99 prayer flags using reclaimed fabric from deconstructed life preservers and emergency blankets. The “Khamsa” is a North African talisman of a hand with an eye in its palm, so she traced the hands of 66 women who she met there, and then added images of the women’s eyes to complete the works. The khamsas were also accompanied by 33 prayer flags upon which male migrants were invited to write prayers and protests. The number 99 was chosen to represent the number of beads on an Islamic prayer necklace, and the ratio of men to women was intended to counter the media narrative that portrays the migrant crisis as consisting primarily of men.

After traveling to China to exhibit Khamsa at 203 Gallery in Shanghai, Roemer followed the work back to Greece where it was installed at Athens’ IFAC Gallery, which gave Roemer an opportunity to show Yasamin, a girl she had met in a refugee camp and who had become her assistant for the project, their work installed in a professional setting (though only through Whatsapp, as Yasamin was still held in immigration custody on Lesvos). Reflecting on the project over Skype, Roemer told me “The most important form of contemporary art I could make, the most compelling thing I could possibly do, was to be standing by this young girl’s side and making art with her. It actually didn’t matter what it was at all, just the fact that I was standing next to her.” Proceeds from sales of the work go to Greek NGO Desmos, which is active on the frontlines of the refugee crisis.

In his 2006 book of collected essays, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight, the poet and critic Alan Gilbert suggests that art can serve as a means of “imaginative resistance” to the systemic problems that plague our world, through “tactics imaginatively employed on a daily, local, and global basis (with the knowledge that when the effects of globalization reside everywhere, local activities have global ramifications and vice versa).” This is what Aubrey Roemer is doing with her painting practice, through which she not only publicizes relevant issues affecting marginalized communities, but also directly empowers and uplifts the members of those communities with whom she works. This is contemporary art at its finest.

The post Aubrey Roemer: Helping the World, Painting by Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Landing at Gerald R. Ford International Airport, in Grand Rapids MI, you’ll be hard-pressed to pick anything that distinguishes it from other mid-sized cities almost anywhere along the Rust Belt. The drive-thru airport paired with the generic flatness of its highways, lined with roadside motels, strip malls, and chain restaurants, evoke an obligatory trip home to see the family for the holidays or a funeral, not a singular cultural event. For two and a half weeks every September, this Western Michigan city of fewer than 200,000 people swells at least twice, maybe three times over with guests, mainly from a 300-mile radius, who are there to attend and participate in ArtPrize, an annual arts festival and competition now in its eighth year. It is a fascinating anomaly because it is neither art fair nor biennial. It would perhaps also go wholly unnoticed beyond local news outlets were it not promoting the largest single cash award, worldwide, given exclusively to artists. Only the Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize ($300,000) and the MacArthur Fellowship are larger ($625,000 over a five-year period), but they nominate and award many eligible creative and technical fields beyond visual artists.

Launched in 2009, ArtPrize was founded by Rick DeVos, the 34-year-old scion of the ultra-conservative DeVos clan, the Alticor/Amway founding family, whose name dots several buildings in downtown Grand Rapids. Some critics are uncomfortable that the founding sponsor of the prize, the Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, has vigorously supported charter schools, free market think tanks like the Cato Institute, as well as anti-union, pro-Christian, anti-gay, and anti-same-sex marriage initiatives. To overlook the positive impact of ArtPrize while speculating on a sinister, ulterior motive ascribed to the younger DeVos’s efforts, however, leads to its own closed-minded approach. In the art world, neither the conservatism of an Emirati or Qatari sheikh(a), nor the questionable ethics of any Russian oligarch get so closely examined, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly didn’t refuse any of that Koch money. Without any evidence of wrongdoing, or becoming an apologist for their political activism, let’s sidestep this area of scrutiny. It’s a philosophy of taking the bad with the good that will come to feel pervasive there.

For its efforts, the city receives an enviable amount of cultural tourism that, according to the Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan and Illinois-based consulting firm, resulted in an estimated $22.2 million in economic impact in 2013. Yet, this is not a typical art-going or art-buying public either selecting the work, volunteering, or attending the event. Rapidians see themselves as part of a cultural dialog marked, for better or worse, by the 1969 installation of Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse in front of their city hall through the efforts of one indefatigable citizen, one of the first National Endowment for the Arts public art grants, and the help of then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford. Their civic pride led to the three-day Festival Grand Rapids in 1970 as a celebration of the landmark. ArtPrize has outdone, if not supplanted the Festival, along with other smaller art events, but it “wouldn’t work in another town without that volunteer spirit,” according to William Lamson, a New York artist participating in this year’s competition for the first time.

Since the inaugural edition, award figures have evolved into two parallel and eye-watering Grand Prizes of $200,000. One is selected by an invited three-person jury of experts that relies on the 20-project shortlist created by jurors of four subcategories: Two-dimensional, Three-dimensional, Installation, and Time-based art. The other award is determined by a public voting system, which began with the prize’s founding and which bills itself as “radically open.” Anyone 13 and over (lowered from 16 this year) can register to vote for their top choices in the four categories, either online or through an official app. Often referred to derisively, or at best quizzically, as the “American Idol of art,” ArtPrize engages the art world intelligentsia only minimally, in order to filter its presentation. It is primarily located within a three-square-mile perimeter downtown, where this year, 170 venues — as varied as City Hall, hotels, police stations, churches, banks, hospitals, restaurants, and cafes — have paired themselves with the 1,453 artists who submitted work in the lead up to the event. As an artist, the only eligibility requirements are that you must be at least 18 years old, and pay the $50 fee to enter, so there’s plenty of bad art to go around. This means that the populist and the professional sit uncomfortably side-by-side, with Grand Rapids-based artist Mandy Cano Villalobos noting, via email, that, “It’s like two separate ArtPrizes running concurrently.” It could easily devolve into an arts and crafts festival, if the local museums and college galleries weren’t also participating. The increased attendance must be welcome for them, but at the same time, a multitude of people trudging single-file through the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and elsewhere, made it difficult for a viewer to appreciate the better exhibitions. For example, three large-scale tapestries by Kiki Smith occupying a space near the second floor exit were impossible to reach and look at closely without battling against the flow of traffic. Dario Robleto’s work, Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens, shortlisted by Tina Rivers Ryan in the Two-Dimensional category, is a work already so subdued that it felt stifled by the crowd amassed to watch the popular video around the corner, Higher Ground by Hillerbrand+Magsamen, which made it to the public’s Final 20 in the Time-based category. At another venue, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Eric Dickson’s interactive sound piece, Wars and Rumors of Wars, shortlisted by Deana Haggag, hanging overhead in the gift shop, is missed easily amidst the quickly exiting throngs.

Although the voting process is open, only 10-15% of each year’s almost half-million visitors are engaged enough to decide the outcome, meaning an average of 42,000 registered voters lodge the entirety of the approximately 400,000 votes per year. This year, 37,433 visitors submitted the 380,119 votes (or 9.8%). It’s remarkable that Ditch Lily Drawing by Grand Rapids-based artist and composer Nathan Lareau at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park even made it onto the public’s Final 20. The rhythmic, fragile wall drawing, all twigs and intersecting shadows, communicates a common-sense, yet elegant lesson that the hidden beauty of the overlooked can be unlocked by the right hands. Located at the venue furthest from downtown, though, it was likely at a disadvantage in trying to garner the return visitors and votes to go further. It doesn’t exactly overturn the idea that a minority of people decides for the rest what is good art. In the past, the Public Vote has favored works with some combination of landscape, spectacle, virtuosity, and self-affirmation, rewarding artists who, if they weren’t outright pandering, were definitely easy to digest. Sweeping categories of ideas that have been awarded over the years include the Lake, the Forest, the Sea, Elephants, and Religion, which all seem to imply a collective desire to probe an expanse, but also indicate a concrete literalism, a failure to abstract, and a lack of nuance. It’s a reminder that when the temporary art carnival leaves town, there should be long-term efforts to engage and educate a greater portion of the public. Meijer Gardens, which is open to the public year-round (save three holidays), is a great site for that. With around 75 sculptures on display from a world-class collection of 200, it’s one of the things that truly sets Grand Rapids apart from all of those other midsized cities. The other is ArtPrize, and it’s clear that it gets all of the attention.

As an organization, ArtPrize still is evolving from its original free-for-all style, with Kevin Buist, Director of Exhibitions, working more directly in the development of new programming. These initiatives include the second year of the Fellowship for Emerging Curators, the first year of Featured Public Projects, and the third year of Seed Grants for artists, the latter two projects underwritten in part or entirely by the Frey Foundation, whose Chairman, David Frey, said in a speech that the jury “provides balance that the public program needs.” Cano Villalobos added that over the last eight years, ArtPrize has “beefed up their programming, providing funds for curatorial projects and artists, educational activities, lectures and panel discussions, renowned jurors, [which] I think that has greatly helped [it] gain credibility with the Grand Rapids art community, and effectively engage the non-art community.” As ArtPrize moves closer to its 10^th anniversary, the organizers should be unafraid of these incremental changes, which have had an immediate impact. Notably, the four curatorial projects supported by ArtPrize this year garnered five nominations on the jurors’ shortlist, and one of them, This Space is not Abandoned by the Cultura Collective at 912 Grandville Avenue, led by Steffanie Rosalez, went on to win the Installation Juried Award and half of the Outstanding Venue Award. The other Juried Awards, each worth $12,500, were announced the evening of October 7 and include Isaac Aoki’s les bêtes (Two-Dimensional), the only locally based artist, an amateur photographer and also ballet dancer at the Grand Rapids Ballet; William Lamson’s Excavations (Three-Dimensional); and Eric Souther’s Search Engine Vision “ISIS” (Time-based). The Public Vote awards went to Pettit Smith’s The Butterfly Effect (Installation); Joao Paulo Goncalves’s Portraits of Light and Shadow (Two-Dimensional); James Mellick’s Wounded Warrior Dogs (Three-Dimensional); and designer Maarten Baas’s Sweeper’s Clock (Time-based), the only piece to feature on both lists of finalists.

The first time the Grand Prizes reached parity, in 2014, the result surprised in that the Juried and Public Vote reflected an enlightened alignment of opinion about Intersections (2013) by Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha. In 2015, the jurors opted for the performative work of Kate Gilmore, and the public chose a photorealistic quilt by a group that included a previous Grand Prize winner — a stark divergence in medium and content. This year, another performance work and craftwork were chosen, but perhaps there’s a convergence of sorts to be found. The three jurors — Michelle Grabner, artist and professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Paul Ha, Director at the MIT List Visual Arts Center; and Eric Shiner, Senior Vice President at Sotheby’s — selected North Carolina artist Stacey Kirby’s Bureau of Personal Belonging, three participatory performances grouped in an installation made to look like a “60’s era bureaucratic office space.” It asked viewers to validate their gender and sexual identity, challenging laws and lawmakers that would fix those definitions. The Public Vote chose Ohio craftsman James Mellick’s Wounded Warrior Dogs, a series of seven wooden dog sculptures that exhibit the kinds of injuries soldiers return home with from war, which asks for consideration and support for veterans. You could say both projects are working with identity, aiming to raise awareness of urgent issues. Both go further and address the politics of bodies, pointing to the government’s failure to act or its willingness to overreact. Above all, they each engage in their own kind of political activism, which typically wouldn’t fall on the same side of the political spectrum. Yet somehow, they found a place and platform from which to explore them, and it seems that only at ArtPrize could they exist, however comfortably, side-by-side.

The post The People Speak: A Report from the 2016 ArtPrize appeared first on artcritical.

Lee Mullican: The Fifties at Susan Inglett Gallery
April 28 to June 4, 2016
522 W. 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 9111

Undaunted by the challenge of the New York School, in the early 1950s on the West Coast there emerged an approach to abstract painting that did not participate in the conflicting vision of the Romantic (painterly) and Classicist (geometric) traditions. On the East Coast, this battle had led to the idea of an “abstract” art that was to represent nothing more than itself. The West Coast variant was instead rooted in a mystical tradition in which the task of the artist was to reveal the truth behind appearances. Using non-Western and Native American sources, Lee Mullican, and contemporaries such as Mark Tobey, was interested in the pictorial, and the imagistic power of abstraction, rather than the all-at-once-ness sought by their East Coast contemporaries. Two recent exhibitions of Mullican’s work, at Susan Inglett Gallery and James Cohan Gallery, show his development of abstraction on the West Coast. The Susan Inglett show deals with Mullican’s work of the 1950s, while James Cohan features work from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s.

Though there is a long history of transcendental abstract painting in the US, seldom is it as formally radical as Mullican’s. What differentiates his approach from that of his East Coast counterparts, such as Richard Pousette-Dart, is that Mullican, rather than trying to give representation to the non-objective realm, sought instead to stimulate the sensations of reality as perceived by the senses and the mind. To this end, Mullican employed the intense visual patterns associated with migraines, epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness — e.g. states that produce mind-numbing optical patterns and hallucinations.

Mullican didn’t differentiate between abstraction and figuration and as such was mainly an abstractionist who distorted the codes of representation for expressive ends. Though aware of the importance of form, he comes to the abstract via his ambition at producing visionary images through which one could aesthetically experience the power and force of the world of mind and energy. Mullican’s vision therefore, contrasted sharply with the existentialism of Barnett Newman, the Gothic vision of Clyfford Still, or the primordial imagery of Mark Rothko. All of these artists envisioned an external reality capable of overwhelming and dwarfing the viewer, an experience of the Sublime meant to remind viewers of the raw power of nature and human fragility. Mullican’s sublime is objectless: fields of color and sensation, and his paintings are therefore intended to deliver up a sensory overload that will induce in the viewer an awareness of still another realm.

In San Francisco, where he moved following World War II, Mullican met the British-born abstract-Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who is credited with making some of the first poured paintings in the late 1930s. Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen also had a significant effect on Mullican during this period. Mullican came to share these artists’ interest in Eastern and Native American mysticism. Bound together by a desire to make works that would tap into altered consciousness that could serve as a doorway to infinite possibilities, they formed the short-lived Dynaton Group. Its name was derived from Paalen’s influential journal called Dyn, published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944.

Mullican’s earliest works, shown at Susan Inglett Gallery, combine references to Aboriginal dream paintings, Native American iconography, and sci-fi-like cosmic explosions. Paintings such as The Age of the Desert (1957) are like colored drawings and consist of disjointed cosmic and landscape imagery, pictographs, as well as abstract patterns. Significantly, Mullican introduces into these works an aerial point of view, the source of which was his experience as a cartographer making maps from aerial photographs for the US military during World War II.

Formally more important than the ethnographic references, and the flattening effect of an aerial perspective, are the patterns of matchstick-like slivers of color Mullican began to use in the mid ‘50s. These short, raised lines of color — produced with the edge of the knife used by printers to ink rollers — were a distinctive feature of his work over the course of his career. Mullican distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of these colored striations across the surface of his paintings, forming a field of sensations that detached itself from the picture plane, creating a new dimension: an optical space that was divorced from the underlying imagery and abstract forms. At times, his striations lend themselves to creating tapestry-like effects that bring Gustav Klimt to mind. In works such as The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl (1963), shown at James Cohan Gallery, Mullican shows one can be fearless when it comes to the decorative, in that it need not become a liability. In this work the tapestry effect and the multiple erratic zigzag patterns, intense colors produce a hallucinatory optical effect. An earlier artwork, Transfigured Night (1962), with its tonal sonorities, harmonic reds and oranges, and pattern of pictographs, is tasteful and hip to the point one can image it as album cover for the cool jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz.

Only a handful of the works of the ‘60s and ‘70s are truly abstract and these, such as Mediation on the Vertical (1962), are predominantly monochromatic. Rather than creating spectral symbols or camouflaged figures, Mullican fills the plane with agitated and convoluted patterns, forming overall rhythmic fields of intense color and fluctuating densities. His signature matchsticks of color optically attach and detach themselves from the surface creating pathways, trajectories and patterns that float in the space between viewer and the painting’s surface. These works are no longer dependent on graphic imagery but on forms that are a result of color and the density of marks. The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl, with its aggressive field of jostling patterns and forms, and its greater spontaneity, is one of Mullican’s most accomplished works. Though not included in these two exhibitions, Mullican’s paintings from the same period — in which stylized ethnographic imagery dominates, rather than painterly effects — appear to verge on kitsch. Yet I wonder if this preference is a consequence of my viewing them with prejudiced eyes, schooled in the style and history of the New York School. Despite these limitations, Mullican’s works still resonate, and demonstrate that during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, AbEx and New York were not the only game in play.

The post Western Culture: Lee Mullican’s Californian Abstraction appeared first on artcritical.

“Texts were invented in the second millennium BC in order to take the magic out of images, even if their inventor may not have been aware of this; the photograph, the first technical image, was invented in the nineteenth century in order to put texts back under a magic spell, even if its inventors may not have been aware of this. The invention of the photograph is a historical event as equally decisive as the invention of writing.” –Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983)

An impression: of the young woman staring with watchful eyes, lips pursed and short, tousled hair, a viewer is inclined to read circumspection and doubt, maybe distrust. This image of a young Diane Arbus, taken by her husband Allan around 1949, was projected onto an onstage screen through nearly the entire reading by Hilton Als of his new, unpublished essay “Diane Arbus in Manhattan” at the New Museum on September 15, as part of the annual Stuart Regen Visionaries Series. But as he read, his words constructed an alternative estimation of the legendary 20th century photographer, one that depicted her as open, inquisitive, skittish and all-embracing; in short, the consummate New Yorker. She lived her entire life in Manhattan, moving from apartment to apartment, sometimes uptown and sometimes downtown, on both the Eastside and the West. “You devoured the island of your birth and gave it back to itself,” Als read from the epistolary essay, “re-imagined but not reconfigured.”

Arbus did not fear what was different from herself, he argued, because New York was her small town, and the “freaks” (as her subjects were commonly referred to in mid-20th century parlance) that she photographed — drag queens, dwarves, the mentally disabled, interracial couples — were her neighbors, the people she lived among and with whom she not only empathized, but felt compassion for. “No artist worth their salt, pain, humor, steeliness, selfishness, generosity, love, ruthlessness, or plain interest in other people and things can turn away,” said Als, in what sounded like a direct rejoinder to Susan Sontag’s classic but truculent “Freak Show” (1973), an analysis of Arbus’s work in which she accused the photographer of giving nothing of herself in return for the portraits of vulnerability she regularly captured on film. But Als had a different tack. “You were in conversation with your sitters, a social exchange resulting in a kind of emotional documentary that became metaphysical as that terrible and beautiful alchemy took place; which is to say the sitter, you looking at the sitter, the cameras click, and sometimes flash.”

In many ways Arbus is a natural fit as a subject for Als’s writing. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker — he began publishing in the magazine in 1989, was made a staff writer in 1992, and has been the Chief Theater Critic for the past 13 years — Als has also published two ruminative books of essays, The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013) that are an audacious master class on the transcendence of race, gender, and physical difference. In both books, the classic profile narrative of one subject is most often turned on its head, becoming a mash-up of portrait, autobiography, gossip, and journalism. The writing is difficult: frequently opaque, occasionally navel-gazing, and once in a while outright caustic. But Als, like Arbus, tackles subjects that have either been marginalized, or else quite publicly “othered.” (Michael Jackson; Dorothy Dean, the doyenne of gay New York social life in the 1950s and 1960s; and Malcolm X’s mother have all been subjects of his scrutiny.)

A photograph is always subjective. Though the viewer might want for it to speak the truth, for it to be objective and documentary evidence, no photograph is ever absolutely honest. Decisions are always made by the one who presses the shutter button — what remains in the frame and what is omitted, what is brought into crisp focus, what is left to the shadows. “You weren’t treating the image as a kind of journalism but the record of a fantasy of magic ground through the glass of the real,” he said.  And so it goes with writing. “Diane Arbus in Manhattan” is Als’s textual photograph of the artist, an image of her that may not be empirical truth, but is perhaps even more genuine than the black-and-white photograph he addressed directly that evening. As he said, “Shaping metaphors out of the real is the work of an artist, or those artists who know there is something better on the other side of daydreaming.”

For those who missed Als’s talk, complete video of it can be seen here: http://livestream.com/newmuseum/events/4338723

The post Crisp Focus: Hilton Als Talks Diane Arbus at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

I’ve been visiting — with artists, writers, curators, dealers, and others in the art world — to look at one artwork of my guest’s choice. We have a one-on-one conversation about the artwork, what they find interesting in it and why it’s important to them. In this edition, painter Anne Sherwood Pundyk and I went to her studio in Mattituck, New York, to look at her ongoing painting project, The Revolution Will Be Painted.

Noah Dillon: So what are we looking at?

Anne Sherwood Pundyk: It’s a painting I made last fall called The Revolution Will Be Painted. It’s 15 feet wide by 11 feet high, on unstretched canvas. It was originally a drop cloth I had used on the floor of several different studios. You can see evidence of this along the unpainted edge. I used latex paint for the large indigo Rorschach shapes and the field of red. The multi-colored chevrons are in acrylic with colored pencil guidelines. Not all of it is visible because it’s folded under to fit the wall in my studio here in Mattituck. Since the piece was finished, it has been installed in four different locations. In all instances the painting has been partially hidden, subject to the constraints of the wall configuration and ceiling height of each space.

What’s the origin of this painting?

In the fall of 2012 I moved my studio to Bushwick and then TriBeCa; I got the tarp for these spaces. Around that time, the focus of my art writing evolved to an examination of a circle of radical feminist performance artists. Bianca Casady invited me to create with her the magazine Girls Against God (GAG), which is published by Capricious. This became an intensely collaborative time for me involving writing, editing and performance events. Consequently, some of what was going on with the work in my studio was being pulled out of its original concerns and constraints and apart from painting, into universes I felt an affinity with, but hadn’t engaged with so directly.

The drop cloth originally intended to protect the floor became the site of gatherings and group projects. (It has pollen, red wine and soy sauce stains to prove it!) By the spring of 2014 I knew I would be moving my studio here to Mattituck permanently. Simultaneously, I began co-curating an exhibition and performance series called “Milk and Night,” at Gallery Sensei on the Lower East Side. I’d wanted to paint one of the gallery’s walls for my own piece in the show, but it wasn’t permitted, so I opted to use my trusted studio tarp to create the monumental effect I wanted for what became The Revolution Will Be Painted.

How does this relate to some of the other art that you like, or what you like about art generally? This spans several disciplines, so in addition to painting in the specific it seems like it also means a lot to you with regard to art more broadly.

It has to do with Painting, with a capital P. I learned a lot from the activist performance artists and joined their ranks, and continue to be there. But there is amongst some members of this tribe, generally speaking, a lack of appreciation — maybe even disdain — for painting as a medium. As a painter, it felt like a significant misunderstanding. I began to realize that I was among people who maybe wouldn’t ever appreciate that about me.

Of course the role of painting — here, now, and historically — is highly contested, but also beloved. It’s a medium that’s simultaneously well understood and mysterious. And it’s who I am; I can’t separate it from how I picture the world. More to the point, I see painting as a revolutionary act that resides within the individual. Both painting and any personal revolution happens first inside one’s own consciousness before its can be expressed in the material world. The title represents how important I think painting is and that it’s as effective and stirring as performance, or any other art form or activist statement for that matter.

There’s also the reference to the performative poetry and jazz of Gil Scott-Heron, which invokes that context of activity and vocality.

Yeah. In the months after making “Milk and Night,” Nicole J. Caruth, at Art21 Magazine, invited me to write “The Revolution Will Be Painted.” I adapted Scott-Heron’s poem to express what I was talking about: that revolutionary acts are part of the process of painting and have to do with seeing, and the changeability and strength of subjectivity. And it’s a textual version of that same urge. I read through all the art books I have, collecting sentences that jumped out at me, describing work by everyone across the ages from Willem de Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Cecily Brown and Edouard Manet. There are about 40 footnotes. I fit those lines into Scott-Heron’s cadence, using excerpts where the writer hits on that flame you find in good painting.

And there’s the poetic relationship between the painting and the spell you wrote for GAG, right?

Yes, the chevron pattern in The Revolution Will Be Painted, developed from a piece I wrote for the second issue of GAG, which is all about witches past and present. I had researched spells and created a protective spell that a mother might cast over her children as they make their way in the world. I made a video to go with that piece and shot footage for it here in the countryside, and inside the house. At one point I turned around and saw my own shadow on a rug with a chevron pattern and had a sort of vision of the chevrons radiating out of my body. As a mother, I thought there was an appreciable power in that moment and all the things that go into that connection with your children, and I committed to using that shape as an assertive spiritual symbol in The Revolution Will Be Painted. That the different audiences for the work have been drawn to it based on its visual dynamic tells me it transcends my own personal experience of the forms.

Painting has a relationship to performance just by the fact that there is an action involved in making a mark. So you’re not just talking about the personal, interior performance, but also that you were engaging with these artists and ended up with work that is a palimpsest of the performative aspect of painting — a material manifestation of what transpired.

Right. When I was making this painting in August it was boiling and there was no air conditioning in my TriBeCa studio, only a pitiful fan. I had a sad ballad by Bruce Springsteen, “The Last Carnival,” on repeat while I was crawling on my hands and knees, painting, trying to cover this large red portion as I was running out of paint, and weeping to the song. Incidentally, the song is about the end of a season of a traveling circus and the dispersal of its performers. The line, “Where have you gone my handsome Billy?,” also conjured my father, Dirck Brown, who died in 2002, who like my performance friends was charming and intuitive.

Like literally blood, sweat, and tears, right? And the whole thing might feel like a total disaster until it works.

It subsumed me. But it was incredible. I had a very limited amount of time yet somehow I knew exactly what I needed to do — but as you said, utter failure was potentially lurking in the wings. I was trying to figure out what should go where and how the colors would read, which I think of as painting at its purist. I was also in some form of mourning, knowing that I’d already kind of left the sphere of that particular group of performance artists with whom I’d been enamored. I knew that the era was going to end and I would move out here and there was some new, really big chapter beginning. Consequently, this is a painting that, despite functioning very differently, connects deeply with my ongoing body of painting work.

One thing that I’m curious about is how an artwork’s environment affects someone’s relationship to it. You’ve shown this in different ways at different places. I wonder what you think about the painting’s relationship to the place it’s in right now and maybe in comparison to earlier iterations of it in other spaces.

It was interesting to bring it out to show you today: I had it all folded up and was thinking about how to install it here — whether it could be narrower or taller depending on which wall I chose. The way it reads is consistent throughout the different installations, which I attribute to the color, the scale, and the dynamic of the activity within oceans of neutral. It’s physical malleability feels to me a bit like a protective nomad’s tent with talismanic powers. It’s now on the cover of the London based magazine, HYSTERIA’s fifth issue. I’m hoping that we can find some space to show it at its full capacity related to the issue’s New York launch.

That’s funny, that you have this piece that you, its author, have only ever seen once in its entirety.

Many of the decisions I made in painting it were done just by visualizing it as a whole; and even if I couldn’t see certain portions, I could feel them viscerally.

Can you say, finally, why you wanted to talk about this piece? Why do you find this especially pertinent to your relationship to art and what you find in it?

I think because it’s been with me through this epic process of unearthing and ultimate return to painting. The necessity of the individual authorship of the painting is as subversive as anything else. The whole experience of getting to the point of making it involved many unplanned, unexpected challenges, and I think that’s part of art for me. It may not be a typical piece, but in terms of the aspects of my personality and ambition and commitment to color in a very pure way, it’s very characteristic of things that are important to me.

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NOAH DILLON: So why did you choose this painting?

ERIC SUTPHIN: I chose it in part because it’s personal. When I was pretty young — before I ever had any kind of idea to be a critic or to write about art — I watched Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006), and he talked about this painting. He claimed that Manet had left this corner piece of sail completely bare and it was just raw canvas coming through, so that it was raw canvas doubling as the actual sail.

When I saw the painting in person I realized that’s not true — it’s painted. And that inaccuracy imprinted this painting in my mind. It made me suspicious that he never saw this painting in person, and that perhaps he was talking from a reproduction of the painting. It’s an interesting painting for a lot of reasons and it’s atypical of Impressionism. It’s actually one year after the Bouguereau painting I’d originally wanted to talk about.

I think it’s important that you chose this as a substitute, because even if you think this is atypical of Impressionism, that Bouguereau painting was his last before the Impressionists arrived and pushed him (and academic painting generally) aside in a big way.

Bouguereau was sort of the archetype of the enemy to the Impressionists. And almost 150 years later both artists are in the same museum. I felt a little embarrassed picking the Bouguereau, because there’s still a little baggage. Not that Boating feels particularly radical, but it shows how the field has expanded so that anything goes. And I can simultaneously get pleasure out of this and the other thing, but they’re so far out of context that both paintings mean something completely different from when they were done. And I think the Bouguereau is more complex than this painting, but I think that this painting, right now, has a lot of implications.

Standing here, looking at it, I realize there’s no horizon. That might not mean anything explicitly, but implicitly it must. I recently drafted a review of “The Forever Now” at MoMA, and I was easing my way into ideas introduced by Paul Virilio in Open Sky (2008), about the disappearance of the horizon and what that means. It’s complicated, but right now I’m realizing that this guy is, in a sense, backed into a corner. He has no privacy; a ubiquitous eye has invaded his personal space and he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the boat.

Or he could disappear into the amorphous, blue nothingness behind him.

The image is basically space-less, all foreground, with everything pushed to the front, on the surface. It’s completely immediate. There’s no pretense; there’s no allegory. That’s really the crux of the Impressionists’ objection to the academics and salon painters, was that it’s all allegory, and here there’s none of that.

In that regard, this upper right corner isn’t raw canvas, but it is just a grey space carved out there, which runs contrary to painting conventions. It’s an abstraction of the superficial framing of the image, along with the blue that you were talking about, which takes up most of the canvas. You’ve got the blue of the water, the blue of his hat, the blue of her dress — everything else is additional to that primacy. It also strikes me that, thinking about now, when everything is sort of up for grabs, in a similar way you’ve got this representational scene that these incidents of abstraction interrupt. They’re reflexive and disruptive, without appearing to call attention to themselves. That admixture of approaches has only become more open.

This is another reason I wanted to look at Boating: it’s a very severe painting. It’s all about the composition, about the negative shapes. And he’s framed it in such a way that every bit — even this little wedge of blue at the top right corner — becomes like a series of quadrilaterals. And then you see the portrait. That’s what the tension is — that the portrait is the center and you always come back to the guy’s face. But it’s ominous. He doesn’t want you looking at him; he’s tired of being looked at.

He’s responding to the painter. He’s not a sitter and he’s not someone in a scene, he’s got an indeterminate relationship to Manet.

And in the absence of allegory, you’re frozen there: the artist has stepped back, the painting’s finished, and it’s us. It’s uncanny in that sense that the face is so central to the painting, so we’re locked into a deadlock of looking at this person. His companion is almost there just for Manet to be playful when he paints her dress. I don’t know what that says about social relations between men and women in late 19th century painting, but it sounds like an opening to an uncomfortable issue. And while that’s important, it also seems tertiary to the composition and the sort of gridlock that the viewer gets into with the central figure. I think at first encounter there’s a sense of tranquility and you’re in this nebulous sea blue. But that slips away as you look at it, and you’re left with angles and the aggressive of his stare. And it becomes kind of uncomfortable.

There’s also the well-known affection the Impressionists had for Japanese prints but I think there are some compositional issues that are equally important here two things: it anticipates the camera view, the way Degas did, but also the disappearance of the horizon, which is maybe not so radical, but a fusion of eastern pictorial sense and with western developments in optical technology.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about this painting is that the rope was originally much farther left, buy was changed, leaving this pentimento. It’s a curiosity, to me, how that affects its appearance and how it’s read.

Well now it’s all I can see. The palimpsest of the movement of the rope is really weird, and the way that sort of imaginatively interacts with the scene. It becomes sort of like Cubist movement where you see two ropes simultaneously, like Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which inadvertently adds to the aggressiveness.

Is there a way in which this particular museum frames this painting for you? Or even where it is in the museum?

Well, in this room in particular it seems out of place, out of step with its time. It appears to belong to no time or era. Obviously it’s from a milieu and there’s a long tradition of these boat leisure scenes. But some of the other radical steps that Manet was making, pictorially, anticipate tactics that fully found their place 50 years later. It doesn’t really belong to its Impressionist counterparts, other than the handling of her dress and the fleeting quality of his brushstroke. But the rigidity of the composition feels very classical and it has this characteristic triangular golden ratio form. So in that sense it belongs to Bouguereau and the mannered history that preceded it.

How does this find itself in the writing you do and the art you’re attracted to? Or how does that relate to how or why you enjoy art?

I feel hopelessly pedestrian in choosing an Impressionist painting to talk about. So the question becomes how to talk about connecting this to contemporary concerns. I’ve been feeling depressed about a lot of contemporary art. But I’ve been looking at a lot of contemporary figurative work and I find it can be useful to think about that stuff in relation to strong figurative work such as this.

I’m always looking for a way to relate directly with a work of art: How does this work make me feel? What inside of me does the work incite? It connects to the things I’ve been thinking about with regard to contemporary vision. And these are all, for me, half-cooked ideas; I’m still working it out. This painting is not an end-all, be-all artwork for me. But it’s an important painting in a line of thinking I’m trying to explore with regard to how I take images, what I expect or what keeps me looking at something.

This painting feels rather stripped in a way, and I think our identification with some kind of subject, a human subject, is an important aspect of this painting. And it brings me into that by way of all of the vision games Manet’s playing. The Impressionists spent a lot of time, I think, considering vision. And sure it’s been explored, but I think it remains important. You brought that up when I was writing about “The Forever Now,” talking about light and surface, and you asked, “Isn’t that what the Impressionists were doing?” And that made me think, “You’re right, they were.” So maybe that’s what brought me back to this particular painting: the question of “What were they doing?” And I guess it comes back to the camera, which is just so… ugh.

[laughing]

But it’s interesting to see that problem as it was born and how it’s now complicated, in another way, by the prevalence of cameras and of photographic images.

When you spend a lot of time thinking about how contemporary vision is shifting as a result of the ubiquity of screens, lenses, cameras, all these things, it can feel a little scary, vertiginous. It’s a consolation to know that these guys were also at that same precipice. A significant difference between Bouguereau and Manet is the matter of vision and seeing. The two artists are representative of two types of seeing and a shift in the way that people perceive images. It’s not incidental: space like this becomes physiological, and by closing in on this scene Manet was both internalizing and depicting a new paradigm in perception.

That points back to the question of was Simon Schama looking at a photograph, or was he looking at the thing face to face?

I’ve looked at this painting at least 20 times, and the first time I saw it, I remembered the Schama video, which on the screen you could buy that it’s just raw canvas, and there was no way to verify or argue against it. It was there and I could see it, with an authority telling me that’s the case. That’s a fundamental issue for the authority the critic and their ethical responsibility. Somebody like Schama — who has television shows, who’s a populist and an entertainer — can make you see things: seeing is believing.

[laughing]

But I can go and look and see if they’ve done their due diligence. The disparity I experienced with the Schama video calls into question everything else I’ve ever seen. Do I have to see it in person before I buy it? I buy everything, I believe so much. I think we all do.

But so there’s this painting and in another room there’s another Manet painting: Lady with a Parrot (1866). It’s very gray and sort of claustrophobic, and it’s a little like two Manets: this is the Manet of the future, whereas that’s the Manet of the salon. So having this here you can see the work and corroborate it not only with its description, but with other works by the artist and by their contemporaries.
Eric Sutphin is a painter and writer based in New York City. Print and online publications include Art in America, artcritical.com, Painting is Dead, On Verge, American Artist Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He has been a visiting critic at the Delaware College of Art and Design and The School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include “Detlef Aderhold: Null Komma Null,” “Berliner Liste” and “Rosemarie Beck: Paintings from the 60’s” at the National Arts Club. He is currently writing a biography of post-war American painter Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003). Eric received a BFA from Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an MFA from The School of Visual arts in 2014.

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