Harriet Korman: Permeable/Resistant
Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Fourth Floor, New York

Phyllida Barlow: tilt
Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, New York

Penelope Umbrico: Monument
BRIC, 647 Fulton Street, enter on Rockwell Place, Brooklyn

Glenn Goldberg: Beach and Quiet (a rest stop)
Studio 10, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn

Timings: Introductions and Barlow discussion followed by Umbrico at 30mins; audience responses to the first two shows at 47mins; Korman at 1h; and Goldberg at 1h23mins, followed by second round of audience responses.

Next panel: February 13, 2019

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Thank you, dear Holland, for bringing some civilization to New Amsterdam. The European Fine Art Fair is familiar to collectors and trade as Maastricht, the southern Dutch border town that has hosted the fair, on and off, since 1988. TEFAF has now joined the global franchising trend that gives us Basel in Miami and Hong Kong and other geographical marketing wonders. The fair had reportedly been looking for a big enough US venue – Maastricht takes place in cavernous fair grounds – for some time. In settling upon the unique charms and strategic location of the Park Avenue Armory they have come up a cropper.

If you think you are familiar with the Armory from the countless fairs staged there, the transformation of the landmarked drill hall will take your breath away. TEFAF are beneficiaries of the top notch restorations of the Armory that have been taking place recently, but they have brought their own style sensibility to bear on the Victorian interiors. By compressing the entrance lobby they have carved out new exhibitor spaces on the first and second floors. Whiting out the regimental paraphernalia behind semi-opaque cloths was a super classy move. The galleries lucky – or tony – enough to secure these eccentric spaces have been able to exploit the sheer theatricality of these backdrops to spectacular effect: Di Donna, for instance, with what they bill as a Surrealist banquet, in which such later visual-edibles as a Wayne Thiebaud rubbed salon-hang shoulders with canonical Surrealist treasures. The Palazzo Fortuny in Venice came to mind for the way modern and antique treasures were offset with at once sumptuous and raw décor in this and other rooms, Hauser & Wirth’s for instance.

The median quality of materials on view at TEFAF was pretty staggering, but consistently there was the pleasurable frisson of antique and modern juxtaposed, of blue chip taking its chances with a given new discovery or revival. Some stands were cabinets of curiosity, some haute bourgeois living rooms, some museum quality white cubes, and the back and forth between these various experiences added to the sense of a well-ordered visual feast. Black African, pre-Cycladic and modern furniture were first amongst equals amidst the eclectic mix on offer.

Stand outs for this visitor: a louche, mannerist portrait by Otto Dix at Richard Nagy of London, standing guard to a packed display of Klimt and Schiele drawings; a spare, elegant pairing of Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley at another London dealers, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert; mouthwatering Egyptian carvings and trinkets at Charles Ede; a powerfully focused selection of Carmen Herrera from around 1950 at Lisson; fascinating Russian and Ukrainian works from the late Tsarist and early revolutionary period, 1890-1934 (a to-die-for early Kandinsky on incised wood) at James Butterwick; a wall-mounted bureau by Jean Prouvé from his Villa Saint Clair, with Laffanour Galerie Downtown from Paris. Quite the coup was to be found at Bernard Goldberg, presenting three Thomas Hart Benton mural-sized canvases from a suite (the remainder of which are now in the Nelson Atkins and Terra museums) painted early in his career to show prospective clients, scholars propose, that he had the chops to handle mural commissions. Another really memorable booth was Hidde van Seggelen’s where early works by Dutch neo-conceptualist Pieter Laurens Mol were to be savored. (An ’80s star, he was a discovery for me.) At once learned, thoughtful, playful and exquisitely crafted, Mol felt perfect as a solo presentation at this truly connoisseurial fair.

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Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

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Composed of industrial-grade, black-painted steel, Polish artist Monika Sosnowska’s mammoth Tower (2014) sprawls across the gallery floor at Hauser & Wirth on 18^th Street in New York like the shed skin of an enormous snake. The gallery itself is cavernous but even so, the 105-foot-long, horizontal span of the sculpture commands the space. Sosnowska is known for tremendous works that investigate the intersection between sculpture and architecture. She represented her native country at the 52nd Venice Biennale, where her work 1:1 (2007) was exhibited at the Polish Pavilion. That work took over the space where it was installed, but at Hauser & Wirth the viewer has room to walk freely around the entire structure, which makes for a different experience, and a different kind of sculpture.

Here, Sosnowska grapples with the International Style of architecture, first conceived of by Mies van der Rohe. Drawing inspiration from van der Rohe’s iconic Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago, Sosnowska has replicated the façade of those two towers in steel, minus the glass windows. But the steel has been further manipulated. Twisted and crumpled, cracking apart at its seams, Tower stands not vertically, but stretches out horizontally across the gallery floor, a tremendous helix that nearly renders the International Style illegible.

Tower is the result of an artist’s labor-intensive process. Sosnowska first creates a maquette of her projected work and then, with the assistance of engineers and skilled technicians, the maquette is enlarged in 1:1 scale. (Unfortunately, the maquette for Tower is not on display at Hauser & Wirth. It would have been valuable to see it alongside the final version, in order to get a clearer sense of both Sosnowska’s working process, and the sheer magnitude of her undertaking.) After it was fabricated as a complete entity, Tower was subsequently broken into more than fifty parts in order to facilitate its transportation to New York. The deliberate breaking of the work contributes to the poignant quintessence Tower embodies.

There is a formal beauty to the mangled steel. A viewer standing at the wider, open mouth on one end, which peters out into a lip, is afforded a view of a winding, industrial road. From this vantage point, the smaller opening at the opposite end of the room is obscured by the sculpture’s own steel ribs. When engaging with architecture, one typically experiences the building as it was meant to stand — that is, vertically. The structure mimics an erect body. But Sosnowska has not situated Tower as one expects, and a full circumnavigation around the work affords the viewer a unique, corporeal experience. It’s possible to understand, in a more intimate way, the true massiveness of a building, and what it means when it is destroyed.

It is difficult to engage with Tower without also thinking about the towers that were razed in New York 13 years ago. Sosnowska makes no specific reference to the World Trade Center, but it seems prescient that the work had its debut in New York in the week leading up to the anniversary of that horrific day. The Trade Center towers were also of the late International Style (sometimes called International Style II), a somewhat watered-down version of Mies’s original vision, which was popular through much of the 20th Century, particularly for commercial architecture. Comparing an image of the Lakeshore Drive towers alongside one of the World Trade Center, one can easily see the influence of the former on the latter. Tower unsettles, for it looks eerily like images of the twisted steel skeletons the world saw replayed and reprinted on television, in newspapers, and online for weeks, months, and years after September 11, 2001. However, an image cannot compare to the experience of being in proximity to hunks of architectural wreckage. Standing alongside Tower at Hauser & Wirth, one has a bodily sense of how terribly awe-inspiring it was for those two structures to come crashing completely into ruin, in one fell swoop.

Sosnowska is a resident of Warsaw, a city whose own, long history of mass destruction far exceeds that of New York’s. The city is still suffused with effects of Hitler’s attempt at its total annihilation during World War II, as well as the grim Soviet rebuilding and expansion efforts that followed during the Cold War. The artist has noted that she often walks around her hometown, documenting demolished, abandoned, and otherwise overlooked sites which nonetheless contain essential, elemental truths of its embattled past. In a way, Tower serves as a connector between the two cities, one with a very old notion of violent destruction, and one much more recent. However, Tower also, curiously, awakens in its viewer a sense of uplift. Standing at the smaller opening, gazing up through the great steel ribs bathed in sunlight, the pathway through Tower is clear, and seems to offer hope.

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discussing exhibitions of  David Adamo and James Castle at Peter Freeman, Inc; David Adamo at Untitled Gallery; Anna Betbeze at Kate Werble;  Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth; and Nan Swid at Margaret Thatcher Projects.

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International powerhouse gallery Hauser & Wirth opened a second New York venue this week, dramatically their footprint in the city with a grand, 24,000-square foot industrial space on Chelsea’s 18th Street.  Replete with original wooden ceiling, rooftop skyline, and sweeping entry ramp, the column-free expanse, designed by Annabelle Selloff respects the former stable that also once served asthe legendary 1970s roller rink disco, the Roxy.  Vice President and director of the New York galleries, Mark Payot said, “The idea in New York is that while we have the classical townhouse space on 69th Street, some of our artists need more of an industrial setting. We looked for a long time, searching for two years until we found this and it’s been one year in the works. We are convinced this space will be important for our expansion, and will create more possibilities for our artists.”

The inaugural show is of the late Dieter Roth.  The show includes reconstructed works by the Swiss-German artist’s son, Björn, with whom Dieter collaborated for over 20 years, now in turn assisted by his own two sons, Oddur and Einar.  Revered as “a performance artist in all the mediums he touched,” Roth was an early exponent of collaborative art, and the 100 works in this show encompass video, installation, prints, and paintings.  Signature pieces like the chocolate towers and colored sugar towers have been re-assembled in the gallery kitchen, using four basic figurative molds. In 1994, the original Sugar Tower collapsed; Roth later advised Björn to use the broken busts to construct the new tower.  Roth collaborated with many artists in the course of his career, including Richard Hamilton, Dorothy Iannone, Hermann Nitsch and Emmett Williams.  Major works like Large Table Ruin and the Kleiderbilder paintings created from the artist’s own clothes are also on show here.  Organized with the cooperation of the Dieter Roth Foundation in Hamburg, the show features several pieces never before seen in the United States.

“No other artist is closer to our gallery identity,” Payot explained. “Dieter Roth is a father figure of our program, with his emphasis upon not just the finished project. His work has been very undervalued in the American market, and Bjorn and his sons have been here since mid-December to create this work.”

Visitors can stop in for a drink at the “Roth New York Bar,” created especially for the exhibition but which destined to remain as a permanent liquor and coffee bar at the gallery.  Upcoming shows are by Roni Horn, Paul McCarthy and Matthew Day Jackson, all of who have acknowledged the shamanic inspiration of Dieter Roth.

Dieter Roth. Björn Roth, January 23 to April 18, 2013, at 511 West 18th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 790 3900

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November 5 to December 22, 2012
32 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212.794.4970

British artist Phyllida Barlow is something of a speed freak: her site specific projects thrive on tight deadlines and a sense of immediacy. Taking her cue from Arte Povera, she works with humble materials readily available in city streets and construction sites. She focuses more on process than final product, and has a history of cannibalizing supposedly finished works to create new ones. At their best, her outsized objects and unstable arrangements intentionally overwhelm and clutter their exhibition spaces. The body-consciousness they elicit induces a deeply felt maneuvering through often awkward, occasionally menacing, and ever-protean urban environments.

As soon as you walk in the door of Hauser & Wirth’s relatively modest Upper East Side townhouse you are confronted with one of Barlow’s teetering hulks sliding off a clumsy stack of shipping palettes. Notions of monumentality, permanence, and ownership are clearly and comically at stake. Tiled haphazardly with what seem like shoddy monochrome paintings, this tooty fruity tower reaches from floor to ceiling and almost wall to wall. Visitors have to squeeze by one another to get past it. Navigation is further complicated by what appears to be a slab of cement (it’s not, I gave it a tap) bisecting the body of the piece and jutting out about head height. Made of the same material, a zigzag shape suggests a staircase to nowhere on the opposite side. Called untitled: upturnedhouse, this piece immediately brought to mind Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1933), Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts from the 1970s, and House (1993) by Rachel Whiteread, who was one of Barlow’s many students during her forty-year teaching career.

Emerging in the 1970s, much has been made of Barlow’s slow cook time (as defined by our youth-obsessed culture) in terms of high-profile exhibition success. New York audiences may have encountered her work for the first time just this past summer in her New Museum show, siege. Born in 1944, Barlow is old enough to have experienced post-war London with its lingering piles of rubble. Looking at images from that period, I can see how impressions of devastation and recoveryled Barlow to embrace a provisional aesthetic and “crap materials,” as she calls them—as well, early on, as financial necessity. Now, Barlow’s work is a timely reflection of our many recent challenges—pace Hurricane Sandy—as well as the cyclical nature of things.

Consequently, it’s little wonder the rest of the gallery’s ground floor feels like a staging area; whether things are being built up or torn down is unclear. After passing a thick, wall-mounted stack of what looks like burnt wall slats, a series of Barlow’s chunky “lumps” and a tubular “block” hang from rubber umbilical cords like pockmarked planets. Here, the ghost of Eva Hesse looms large. Standing beneath these heaving meteors feels like a bad idea, like walking beneath a suspended piano or a wrecking ball. Adding to the sense of menace, because it impedes access to the gallery’s staircase, is a lumpen sewage pipe-like form sitting heavily on a loose pile of floor-bound lumber. Reminiscent of “outsider” artist Judith Scott, Barlow obsessively wrapped individual planks with colorful, bandage-like strips of fabric make this one of the more anthropomorphic pieces in the show.  (Another is a torso-like lump upstairs called untitled:holedwall). It’s clear to me where Angela de la Cruz, another of Barlow’s students, found inspiration in such deliberate distress.

As for Barlow’s surfaces, they are mostly crud-encrusted, looking ancient and unearthed. The layers are built up from things like polystyrene, expanding foam, wire netting, paint, cement, and fabric. Like Jacques Villeglé’s ripped and peeled accretions, they act as a temporal record, reflecting an interest in the urban patina produced by smog, grime, pigeon poop, and rapid turnover—use, hasty repair, and reuse.

On the whole, the exhibition is less successful when the work doesn’t take up enough space, when it doesn’t get in the way or threaten. This is the case with the three ten-foot tall columns of foam, felt, cardboard, etc.—many more of them were needed—and with the three stand-alone objects in the gallery’s front room. More powerful was a row of densely packed “awnings.” These gray, visor-like roofs draped festively in layers of colored fabric, with threads hanging from ripped edges, invite visitors to duck beneath their partial protection.

The way these pieces are made from a patchwork of monochromatic wood scraps is reminiscent of a Rachel Harrison sculpture. Like Harrison, Barlow also has fun with a convention of sculpture: the display pedestal. In a separate room upstairs, she created a maze of wonky, taller than average pedestals brushed with an energetic, scatological stucco of paint, sand, and cement. Among the lumps and coils—signifying art—precariously perched atop these intentionally irregular plinths are a few cartoony, somewhat recognizable objects from the generic artist’s/worker’s studio such as anvil, chainsaw, projector. Barlow literally places making (or process) on a pedestal giving it equal footing with what’s made. These sloppy objects could also easily be at home in Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961). So is this a touch of commodity or institutional critique? Is this a questioning of artistic authorship? Maybe. Suddenly, Barlows are in demand, which must feel strange for an artist accustomed to breaking things down for what comes next.

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September 12 to October 27, 2012
32 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212-794-4970

In the early 1950s, a group of Japanese artists saw Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock at work and, also, some of his paintings. The members of the Gutai Art Association were inspired to produce a marvelous variety of abstractions. But when in 1958, when they showed in New York, Americans were too much under the spell of the still-unfolding achievements of the Abstract Expressionists to look sympathetically at their paintings. And so this ambitious exhibition of twenty-seven works of art, many of them large, is a revelation. It includes Shozo Shimamoto’s arrows, which resemble Adolf Gottlieb’s geometric compositions; Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Work (1956-57), oddly akin to an intense Helen Frankenthaler; Sadamasa Motonaga’s Sakuhin (No. 54) (1958), a vertically oriented abstraction not unlike Robert Motherwell’s classic paintings; and Shuji Mukai’s Work (1963), which puts me in mind of Alfred Jensen’s gridded pictures.

A branch of history writing is devoted to alternate histories. What if Winston Churchill had died in the traffic accident in New York, 1931, when he was seriously injured? Or what if the plot on Hitler’s life in 1939 had been successful? World history might have been very different. Imagine, in the same spirit, that in 1956, just after Pollock died, that some catastrophe had killed Gottlieb, Frankenthaler, Motherwell and Jensen. The Gutai, I think, might have developed exactly as they in fact did, for once they understood how to use Pollock’s techniques to do painterly abstractions, they would have developed basically the same options as their American near-contemporaries. The famous survey text art since 1900 by the editors of October describes the Gutai’s response to Pollock as “one of the most interesting . . . ‘creative misreadings’ of twentieth-century art.” Judging just by this exhibition, that judgment is absolutely mistaken. In fact, the Gutai independently identified something like the same options as their American peers. Even Jiro Yoshibara’s Work (1967), a black circle on a white field the odd man out in this exhibition, fits into this plan. For just as in response to Pollock’s gestural technique, some Americans became proto-minimalists, so also in Japan a similar development occurred. I certainly don’t want to overdo this parallel between American and Japanese painting. Although Yasuo Sumi’s Work (1955-56) resembles Morris Louis’s pictures of that date, it seems to embody a different sensibility. And I find Norio Imai’s challenging White Ceremony-F/G/E (1966-2012) hard to place in relation to American art.

Nowadays any history of contemporary art has to be a worldwide history, looking at the contributions from every culture. It’s astonishing to look back forty-some years and find serious commentators like Michael Fried writing as if the future of painting depended just upon a few New York artists. This exhibition is a salutary reminder that historians of modernism need to expand their range of examples. Thanks to Pollock’s inspiration, the Gutai worked out quite independently in their own country something like the developments of abstraction, which took place in New York. Maybe, then, the laws of art historical development are (relatively) universal. And so, once a novel style of painting is created, perhaps artists any and everywhere can develop it. This exhilarating exhibition thus suggests a far- reaching vision about how to develop our thinking, about modernism, which deserves further attention.

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May 1 to June 16, 2012
32 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212 794 4970

If you don’t already know about it, Pinterest is a website acting as virtual pinboard where users can compile and share inspirational images. The compelling group show, Science on the Back End, is artist Matthew Day Jackson’s Pinterest page writ large. This is not the first time the five artists he selected have been brought together. While each artist’s work inhabits a separate room of Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space, the eclectic forms in various media share the easy dialogue of a one-generational family reunion. The discussions are about poetic gestures, engaging experimentally with materials, seeing things with fresh eyes, the provisional, the quotidian, and how we intersect with the history of just about everything.

Much of the work here is consciously indebted to Arte Povera and related historic moments none more than the altered classical statues of Nick van Woert. Dissect (2012), a sliced statue, is filled with a urethane and garbage filler much like the sliced detritus of Jedediah Caesar (coincidentally currently showing at D’Amelio Terras). Van Woert’s other statue Disappear (2012), having had translucent urethane dripped on it while face down, looks like a mishap in the Met’s classical wing with a Lynda Benglis paint pour. Haunted by Arman’s accumulations of everyday objects, History (2012) is a circular sampler of tools that could be weapons and vice versa. However, these are not readymade, mass-produced hammers, hooks, and chisels from Home Depot. Reaching way back to the dawn of human ingenuity, they are artisanal sand castings flawed by the renegade run-off of poured white bronze.

Other ur-moments can be found in Rosy Keyser’s slapdash, shanty-town, string-and-burlap abstract paintings, Marc Ganzglass’s galvanized steel Wheel (2011), and Larry Bamburg’s precariously stacked animal bones. Bamburg’s works are particularly well situated in the only room in the gallery with a white marble floor and skylight, both of which cast mausoleum sanctity on his resuscitory efforts. In Bamburg’s most complex piece, Bone Stack #31 Shown in at 60in center, Frozen (2012), the natural history museum, the supermarket freezer case, and Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-65) come together in a monolith glistening with moisture, a monument to cycles of life.

Ganzglass offers the most reductive gestures, especially in his metonymic Shear Pin (2010), a cast of an actual shear pin the artist found on train tracks in Brooklyn. Used to connect train cars and designed to break in the event of an accident, this homely little object speaks to sacrifice in general, small losses preventing greater ones. And if you look very closely at the black fabric of his Wiper (#1) (2010), another poignant encounter with a found object, you can see the ghostly imprint of dollar bills, a Shroud of Turin of our current god.

Erin Shirreff really digs into the nitty-gritty of vision in a deceptively simple video, Lake (2012). Depending upon when you walk in on the silent loop, the projected image of a picturesque landscape can appear to be a realistic painting or a postcard reproduction. It is in fact a found snapshot from the artist’s family archive which she manipulates in real time with lights, shadows, and colored gels; that’s right, no Photoshop. Playing with assumptions that everything today is digitally manipulated, Shirreff conjures an array of moods: sepia tone nostalgia, spiritual bursts of light, somber overcast skies. Slowing things down with very gradual shifts, sustained looking is richly rewarded by action taking on new meaning and associations running the gamut from prehistoric glaciers to family outings.

Bringing things full circle, Jackson even included a work of his own in response to the show, a high-polish stainless steel ruler hanging on the wall titled Nothing More Than the Cumulative Sum of My Experience (2012). The piece reflects both his attitude toward art in general and a sliver of anyone standing before it. Jackson’s reminder that an artist’s vision can extend to satisfying curatorial efforts recalls Robert Gober’s presentation of Forrest Bess at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

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