Sesostris: March 8 to April 28, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

Drawings: March 8 to April 25, 2018
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com.

From the Iliad to Vietnam, Cy Twombly was fascinated by war. His epic, 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris (2000), is the singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, running concurrently with the same gallery’s landmark survey of drawings downtown. The legend of the conquering pharaoh, whose sanguine trails were recounted by Herodotus, is index linked by Twombly to the most elemental temporal cycle, the sun’s journey across the sky, as mythologized by the sun god Ra in his solar barge. Like Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, Twombly’s Coronation dashes through a landscape of emotional extremes and pounding cadences, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic and the majestic.

With almost puerile glee, the opening panel delivers a blazing sun in cadmium red crayon contoured in Twombly’s signature jittery nonchalance, grandly enclosing a chaotic entanglement of bouncing lines. He then installs the same solar shape onto a schematic chariot, bestowing upon it the spindly inscription “SOLAR BARGE OF SESOSTRIS.” The vessel seems to fly into an immediate barrage, in the next panel, of spermatic deluge on the now febrile effulgence of red and yellow orb. A slanted, knotty inscription, obscured and shadowed in this gravitational rage of aqueous white acrylic paint, cites Sappho in fragments: “Eros weaver (of myth)/ Eros sweet (bitter)/ Eros bringer (of pain).” Eros, son of Aphrodite and Ares, seems to be Twombly’s entry point into the tragic carnality of human violence, union as Eros is of the gods of love and war. Yet this brief orgiastic moment is urgently checked in the fourth panel, where a simmering sun retreats to a wax crayon circle amidst emaciated pencil spirals and diminutive runnels of yellow paint. This is a symphonic tactic, an interlude of momentary calm priming the viewer for the explosive event that will span the next three panels.

The barge, now sprouting stalactite-like oars, reappears in full baroque sensuality. Rapid knots of watery brushstroke, at once floral and bloody, form a gold and roseate cascade. As others have noted of Twombly, his dripping motions are simultaneously temporal and spatial. On the next panel, a Patricia Waters poem about the departure of the gods is cursively inscribed in red pencil, and shrouded in a crimson lace of arrested paint projectiles. Climax is reached in the seventh panel, where the white deluge, sublimely touched with gold, reappears and submerges the now multiplied barges, dismembering and devouring the foreground boat with flaming yellow while pushing its discarnate companions into atmospheric recession. Everything sizzles in the splendid opacity of embodied light. This moment quickly collapses in the next panel into the obscurity of frosty purple and foggy pallor, an almost comic deflation of the preceding grandeur. The barge then morphs back to its own schematic vestige. Finally, lines from Sappho reappear in renewed clarity above a dark, brooding shape.

Image and text in Twombly’s oeuvre are never subservient, one to the other, as mere flourish or illustration. But the viewer often encounters a disorienting, almost vertiginous split between modes of reading and of seeing. Verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint—the soaring barges’ dripping flames and Sappho’s lamentations—alternate in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance their tango. Text tunnels through materiality to treasure troves of cultural evocations, while paint hints beyond what can be verbalized. Perhaps Sappho’s words themselves provide a clue. According to poet Anne Carson, Sappho’s notion of the bittersweet (glukupikron) describes the “sensational crisis” of joy and pain coexisting. It reveals the essentially paradoxical nature of eros. Lack, the space between the actual and the possible, activates eros in the way voltage activates electric charge. And like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, Eros reach for his object but never consummates it: “Perfect desire is perfect impasse,” as Carson puts it. The lover’s vision is stereoscopic: reality and potentiality, self and other, what is and what is not, are all projected upon the same mental screen.

Comparably, in Twombly image and text can never have a proper, or literal, correspondence and can only be metaphoric translations of each other. Each medium reaches hopelessly towards what only the other has. The edge between them, like the pressurized contact of opposites in the word “bittersweet”, is pungently defined. The act of subsuming both upon the same picture plane creates a space of incongruence and paradox. Across this space, as Carson puts it, “a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight”. The electrified dance of allusion and sensation is an erotic one. In this light, what Clement Greenberg proposed in his 1940 Towards a Newer Laocoön, that painting should uphold its two-dimensional purity against contamination of other disciplines, reads like a call to chastity, evading the possibility that painting could be strengthened by interaction with another medium.

Strikingly, Twombly achieved the feat of using poetry to elevating painterly expressivity at a time when images were rendered secondary or diagrammatic by the stipulations of textual concepts (minimal art and pop art). This underlines the difficulty faced by Twombly’s innovative enterprise, and thus the importance of recognizing some seemingly instinctive or literary decisions as contemplated formal strategies. His choice of quotation is often painterly in nature, drawing from favored poets like Keats, Rilke, Sappho, Catullus and the haikuist Taigi. When citing these writers he often modifies or omits words. On the canvas or page, the territorial sovereignty of text is, furthermore, frequently violated by painterly marks—and undermined by his inimitable, barely legible handwriting. The Twombly scrawl is something he deliberately cultivated at the outset of his career when, during national service in the early 1950s, he took to drawing in the dark. Line probes with libidinal tremor realms of rhythm, psyche and temporality.

In abundant examples, Gagosian’s drawing exhibition demonstrates the ways in which Twombly’s very particular quality of line undergoes constant metamorphosis. The first career-spanning presentation of its kind, this show covers ground from 1951 to 2008. It is a journey that begins in the early 1950s with angst-ridden gestural line drawings heavily influenced by German Expressionism and bristling with primal forms. The 1960s witness both the somber, incessant, compulsive loops of the blackboard paintings and the first stirrings of mythopoeic imagery rich with quotations sourced from world literature. In the 1970s the sublimated landscapes, with their pastoral reminiscences and flower-lined splendor, an idiom that would come to dominate Twombly’s later years, make their first appearance.

In an untitled drawing from 1969, a swarm of looping white lines surge and plunge atop a uniformly dark-gray ground. The gentle upper-rightward drift of this cluster is typical of Twombly. In the center background, a tangle of translucent pentimenti insinuates itself into atmospheric distance. Gentle, slanting lines traverse the page, not with the calligraphic modulation of a brushstroke, but with the nervous energy of a drypoint needle: mobile rather than corporeal. Indeed, the jolts and swells evoke a disembodied psychic rhythm, one in which a smooth curve never travels far without being disrupted by an obstinate shudder. Somewhere between Surrealist automatism and Abstract Expressionist gesture, this quality of line manages to reconcile Joan Miró’s slick, smooth arabesques and Franz Kline’s muscular thrusts. An uneasy volatility recalls projectiles hitting friction that is distinct at each local point. It is intensely felt, “the sensation of its own realization” as Twombly declared in his 1957 manifesto, yet it’s a particular kind of cathexis realized through sensitized rhythm rather than carnal gesture. At moments when the frail loops close upon themselves, we catch ghostly glimpses of legibility: letters flash, “R,” “O,” “M,” “S”, illuminating a fugitive tunnel between word and drawing. Perhaps there’s another, implicit kind of literariness in Twombly’s art: poetry is about rhythm, a matter of stress and timing, just like the artist’s particular use of line.

White for Twombly is densely impregnated with symbolic meaning. He has a penchant for moments of white on off-white, or for laying white paint on evenly tinted paper. To quote his 1957 manifesto again: “Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance – or […] the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé”. And as Mary Jacobus has observed, white also evokes the sun-lit Mediterranean for Twombly,. It also embodies memory through the act of erasure, constitutes intervals and space for painterly marks, and annuls directionality by creating a decentered narrative. In the seven-part panel Untitled, 1981, a frail crayoned arc springs into a flower before a leaping, cresting wave takes over, which then proceeds to narrow out. The center panel with the wave exhibits at its full range Twombly’s masterful use of white. It is achieved by maneuvering the complementary red and green, the main colors of the forceful crayoned undertow. The peak of the wave is a creamy commingling of thick white impasto applied in staccato daubs and red pigment rubbed out from the crayon lines, in which a pink pudgy opacity results. In the middle right, we see the same situation with green, but the emerald twines break through the white paste, creating a partial palimpsest. At the bottom of the wave, the layer of white paint, spottily grayed by the mingling of red and green, clarifies in glassy sedimentation. A stylus then scores back into this diaphanous zone, exposing the crayon beneath in flashes of lucidity. Nietzsche’s statement about dreaming comes to mind: “Even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance”.

The Gagosian show is extensive enough to make clear that the apparent orgiastic chaos of Twombly’s work is buttressed by visual sophistication. In Untitled, 2001, in the culminating room of the exhibition, a furor of yellow and gold hurtles across the image. Large, blazing flowers, in lemon, sap green, purple and crimson—the paint slathered on and fingered to a velvety luster—bloom at the top of the composition. Paint dribbles down in vertical streaks forming a balustrade. Articulated local areas (the blossoms) with their vestiges of naturalism and strong geometric structures (the yellow diagonal passage and the dripping veil) rein in an otherwise sweeping anarchy.

Living for most of his life in different parts of Italy and immersing himself, furthermore, in various forms of classicism, one wonders how Twombly managed to remain conversant with American artistic culture in the second half of the 20th Century? His move to Europe and incorporation of literature into painting at a time when people were rejecting Abstract Expressionism in favor of Minimalism and Pop Art reads like an effort to revive the subjectivity and romanticism of the earlier movement while also extracting moral and emotional nuances from the literature from which he quoted. Untitled (To Sappho), 1976 shows this at play. The center of the picture is the purple stain. It lies above the last stanza of Sappho’s brief epithalathum (marriage song) Lament for a Maidenhead. The stain has itself a scent-like gauziness, and is partly obscured by a white flurry. The text is a pyramidal shape lapsing rightward like a sigh, each line written with larger and more spaced out letters. In Sappho’s poem, loss of virginity is compared to the violent crushing of a flower. Besides Sappho herself, this picture evokes another personage associated with queerness: Hyacinth, Apollo’s young lover and one of Twombly’s literary alter egos. Produced during Twombly’s pastoral period, the picture recalls Adorno’s remark that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism”. The first Gay Liberation March was held in New York City in 1970, but how engaged was Twombly, whose sexuality few now question, in 1970s’ sexual politics? The connection is a mere hint, but the eroticism of his allusions is more than a literary ploy.

The post Eros, Weaver of Myth: Image and Text in Cy Twombly appeared first on artcritical.

August 15 to 31, 2013
547 West 27th Street, Suite 529, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 946 1685

Darren Jones is a New York-based Scottish artist whose work encompasses text, installation, photography and drawing. His work is concerned with ephemerality, the misheard, the pun, and the fragile systems of nature.

For his most recent show, “Eden’s Remains” at Illuminated Metropolis Gallery, Jones focused his attention on Fire Island Pines, a beach community off the southern shore of Long Island, internationally known since the 1970s as a Mecca for “A-gays” – that is to say, gay men who make loads of money and/or go to the gym a lot.

It is a perfect subject for Jones as it encapsulates several of his key concerns.  An ecologically fragile spit of land, the island is reachable only by ferry and is prone to hurricanes and other ravages of nature. Added to which, the Pines community – renowned for its hyper-promiscuity in the 1970s and ‘80s – was decimated by AIDS. It remains a remarkably beautiful place and its current denizens are the top dog, hyper-functional, makers-and-shakers of the East Coast gay elite. It is like the Hamptons but with bigger muscles.

The show’s title, “Eden’s Remains,” refers to this paradisiacal location but also its mythic and sometime-tragic history. Jones presents seven small works arrayed around the gallery. They are quirky, poignant, precise in wit, and formally adroit. They are often presented on little Plexiglas shelves.

Several works are text-based.  A series called “Anagrams,” for instance, scrambles gay-beach-resort-related phrases into surprising and revealing linguistic reconfigurations. The word “Paradise” eerily recombines into the phrase “Aids Rape,” and “Muscle Daddy” uncannily morphs into “Cuddly Dames.” Jones’ word collages are illuminating, elusively poetic and playful, and they also allude to broader unspoken social worries. His playfulness belies a deeper moral texture, suggesting complex histories lurking beneath the surface.

In another language-related series, “Pumping Irony,” Jones shows photographs of a series of witty graffiti détournements he made on a midtown Manhattan gym’s motivational blackboard. Subverting the gung-ho rhetoric of NYC gym culture, Jones cheekily chalks up the phrase, “Giving Up is an Option.” Another gym user amends Jones’ sacrilegious message: “Giving Up is NOT an Option.” The anonymous back-and-forth between Jones’ Scots down-to-earth wit and the gym member’s corrective rejoinders gently probes gym culture’s “Think Positive,” “Don’t be a Loser” jingoism. Jones, with his knack for finding unsayable language, catches the fleetingly awkward intersects of the transatlantic cultural gap.

The cult of the “body beautiful” and the passing of time are central themes of the exhibition. Another work features a sand-filled hourglass slowly running out due to a crack in the back of the timepiece, while nearby a delicate sketch renders a labyrinthine, hand-drawn map of all the paths through the “Meat Rack,” Fire Island’s notorious cruising zone forest. These two works, seen in conjunction, allude to the temporality of this fascinating but claustrophobic landscape, legendarily inhabited by the ghostly presence of generations of youth-obsessed gym bunnies who have spent their time cruising the forest in search of sandy trysts.

Jones maps the Fire Island community deftly in these seven small works, never overstating his point, creating subtle, poetic, visual meditations on a complex, many-layered society. The A-list beach town is both a natural paradise and an intensely competitive cultural watering hole, a microcosm of the shifting mores and dreams of American life. These works metaphorically address gay culture’s desires, its obsession with health and vitality, and its struggles with decline and mortality.

This is a provocative show on a quintessentially New York subject, a diaristic record made by a European artist wryly observing, but never judging contemporary East Coast life at an endlessly metamorphosing beach resort. And Fire Island continues to change. Now the first gay kiddy strollers are beginning to roll onto the beaches of the Pines. Jones’ show prompts us to consider how each wave of inhabitants re-sketches its parameters.

The post Pumping Irony: Darren Jones on Fire Island appeared first on artcritical.

April 4 to July 7, 2012
26 Wooster Street, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, 212-431-2609

This fascinating, intelligently-conceived, at once astute  and celebratory exhibition, organized by Jonathan Weinberg and artist Darren Jones, documents, mostly through photographs, a moment of unique intersection between several histories: gay, art, industrial and New York. From 1971 to 1983 – post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, and at a time of social liberation and economic distress – the rapidly decaying wharfs and docks on the West Side below 14th Street were the site of unprecedented sexual and artistic experimentation.  As commercial shipping moved to Jersey and Brooklyn and a bankrupt city could not afford to police its abandoned industrial stock along the waterfront, artists and gays, for varying reasons, seized the day (and night).

In a heady fusion of hedonism and politics, the Stonewall riots of 1969 empowered new levels of public affection.  Docks and sailors held historic associations of gay adventure anyway, but the virtual police no-go piers proved an enticing playground for those who liked it rough. “Why do gays love ruins?” asks a character in Andrew Holleran’s novel, Nostalgia for the Mud, quoted by Weinberg as the epigraph to his accompanying essay.  “The Lower West Side, the docks.  Why do we love slums so much?”  “One can hardly suck cock on Madison Avenue, darling” comes the reply.  With the ocean liners gone, cruising began in earnest.

But the piers were also compelling for artists, regardless of their orientation.  The abandoned real estate proved a perfect canvas for Gordon Matta-Clark’s literally breakthrough environmental interventions, his “building cuts.”  The show is rich in photographs of Day’s End (Pier 52), his iconic cutout at the river’s end, steel wall of a mammoth shed, an Ellsworth Kelly-like sail-shaped puncture opening the dark interior to daylight.  Beside Matta-Clark’s own photographic diptych of his work there are images by urban photographers who documented the Piers scene such as Harry Shunk, Leonard Fink, Frank Hallam and Shelley Seccombe, who captures guys sunbathing along a jetty oblivious of the cut formed behind them in the name of art.  In contrast to literally and sexually cold nocturnal activities, the piers became a great place for mass gay sunbathing, and were soon dubbed “Manhattan Beach.”

For Vito Acconci, the dark, sinister, edgy quality of the wharfs made a suitable locus for Untitled Project for Pier 17 (1971). As announced in a printed statement posted at the John Gibson Gallery, the artist waited at a designated hour at the end of the pier and to anyone who came to see him there he would reveal “something that has not been exposed before and that would be disturbing for me to make public.”  Matta-Clark and Acconci were both made aware of the piers by ground-breaking curator Willoughby Sharp who anticipated the post-studio potential of the waterfront.

Artists and queers are by no means mutually exclusive groups, of course, but as cohabiters of the abandoned piers they were an odd couple.  Could this come down to the fact that for gays, whether there to cruise or sunbathe, the piers were perfect just as they were, a place in which life could improve, while for the artists, the piers were mere raw material, awaiting their magic touch?  The relations were active and passive: for gays, the piers were transformative whereas for artists the piers awaited transformation. Matta-Clark, as if anticipating a charge of vandalism of city property, defended himself in a rather prissy manifesto of 1975 in which he lamented the way the properties had been taken over by “a recently popularized sado-masochistic fringe,” arguing that his interventions would “transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascination and value.”  The city would ultimately do its own improvements, leveling the piers to create the running and cycling trails we have today.

Of course, both Matta-Clark’s macho hole busting and Acconci’s whispered secrets can be read as playing, with innuendo, upon the gayness of what was going on around them, a collision of sub and high culture.  But art in the piers was not all about cold cuts and furtive revelations: there was “gay abandon” aplenty.  At the end of the period covered by this show, in 1983, Mike Bidlo and David Wojnarowicz took over the Ward Line Pier which they made an extension of the then burgeoning East Village scene.  For artists they attracted like Luis Frangella and Judy Glantzman, the vacant industrial spaces were Sistine chapels awaiting their mural painting exuberance.  The Austrian street artist Tava (Gustav von Will) was already decorating the piers with stories high gay graphics of great skill and verve.

Sometimes, business and pleasure could be combined.  Colleagues Stanley Stellar and Peter Hujar ran into one another during a photo shoot at Pier 46 in 1981, as Weinberg recounts.  The photographers shot pictures of one another on Stellar’s camera.  And Hujar posed, getting a blow job, in the background of Stellar’s portrait of J.D. Slater as the celebrated porn-star leaned half-naked against a door jam with Keith Haring graffiti behind him, “a startling juxtaposition between an act of fellatio, a beautiful male body, and a signature Haring,” as Weinberg writes. This sumptuous photograph seems to be saying, in paraphrase of a chant made popular at the time: It’s a pier, we’re all here, get used to it.

The post Beyond the Studio & Out of the Closet: Art and Sex on the Waterfront, 1971-83 appeared first on artcritical.