Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock at the Institute of Contemporary Art
April 29 to August 14, 2016
118 South 36th Street (at Sansom Street)
Philadelphia, 215 898 7108

Entering “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, feels like balancing on a raft that is inadequate to cross the ocean it is floating on. The exhibition, organized by chief curator Helaine Posner, comprises more than 50 paintings and drawings created between 1968 and the present, and demonstrates the achievement of an artist whose work has invigorated the language of abstract painting. A concurrent exhibition, “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, offers an instructive companion to this long-overdue survey. That show, curated by Ingrid Shaffner, explores a selection of small sculptures, leporellos (folded artist’s books), and five large paintings that reveal the breadth and scale of Fishman’s oeuvre.

My respect for Fishman’s work did not come automatically, as I initially perceived a bluntness in the work; it resisted entry. Over time, and with experience in the thicket of artmaking, her paintings have worked me over, and the Neuberger retrospective’s tight selection facilitates this effort. Posner’s mindful arrangement within the museum’s galleries gives Fishman’s work plenty of room to breathe, explicating the artist’s conceptual and spiritual concerns and revealing her creative trajectory. Smaller works on paper, arranged on freestanding walls in the center of the main gallery are less effectively supported. In the cavernous space of this gallery, they may have resonated more powerfully if positioned in tighter clusters. Seen in its entirety, however, the retrospective inspires a sense of awe, and finally, situates Louise Fishman within the tradition of American painting rooted in Abstract Expressionism and furthered through her singular vision and endeavor.

The earliest work in the exhibition, In and Out (1968), contains four wing-like shapes, flatly painted in pinks and black that open in an irregular symmetry from an implied vertical line at the canvas’s center. Graphite lines visible through the white ground reveal subtle adjustments to the hard-edged shapes as color creates a strong spatial pulse. To my eye, the painting speaks to the central core imagery that was being developed by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, though Fishman attributes it more directly a response to Al Held’s black-and-white abstractions of 1967–69.

During the 1970s, in the crucible of New York’s emerging feminist movement, Fishman became acutely aware of gender discrimination and acknowledged her own isolation as a lesbian. As if to destroy the influence of the male-artist power structure, Fishman cut apart her canvases, reworking them into small sculptures oriented along a grid. Confronting her disdain for traditionally feminine work, she employed stitching, dying, and weaving. Untitled (1971), reminiscent of an abacus, is made of rubber, graphite, string, and staples on tracing paper. Transversed by a twisted thread, the amber hue of the rubber resembles skin knitting itself together or the ruled lines of an illuminated manuscript, influenced by Fishman’s childhood exposure to Hebrew texts. Fishman knew Eva Hesse, but her encounter with the 1971 memorial exhibition of Hesse’s work at the School of Visual Arts was the catalyst for her decision to work with that material.

The Angry Paintings of 1973 came out of Fishman’s deepening self-awareness in the consciousness-raising gatherings she attended. Her pain and rage were unleashed in a series of 30 text-based paintings identifying the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Djuna Barnes were among those whose names were inscribed in bold letters obscured by slashes and drips. While they are the least formally interesting of Fishman’s works to me, these protestations are nevertheless unique documents of the living history of feminism, even today, when women who express anger still risk stigma.

Life has been drained from the tempered grays, ashen blacks, and steel blues of Fishman’s Remembrance and Renewal series. Inspired by a 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín, Fishman made a group of paintings that were given Hebrew titles from Passover. Into her colors, Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz, creating the granular surface of Haggadah (1988). Dybbuk (1990) comprises a reddish-black grid, like prison bars enclosing a sequence of dimly lit windows — the result of swiping brushstrokes dragged through the oily pigments. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the earthbound soul of someone who has died, unable to be released. These elegiac works reflect Fishman’s concern with painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of imprisonment, just as they became a medium for transforming her grief upon witnessing the Holocaust sites.

Seven monochromatic paintings from the early 1990s represent an exponential leap in subject matter, scale, and surging physical gesture. Iron Sharpens Iron (1993) contains three charcoal-black bands on a white ground that stretch 10 feet up the canvas, then diverge. Fishman’s use of drywall knives and trowels yields a textural vocabulary of scraped and crusted surfaces, absorbing and reflecting light like hammered or rusted metal. The title, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, means that through interaction and conflict we sharpen one another. Her history as a competitive athlete is also embedded within the aesthetic concerns of this work. Fishman relates her command of the boundaries of the canvas, gestural velocity, and physical confidence to pitching hardball and playing basketball as a teenager.

For There She Was is a magnificent, darkly luminous painting of 1998, whose title is appropriated from the last sentence in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color is turning into another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet and black shot through with cadmium red-orange and burnt sienna, Fishman has created a vibrating field that reminds me of a Chinese garden at dusk. A collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, Fishman also acknowledges that the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse upstate, as well as the practice of Buddhism has given her the ability to better understand her work as an artist.

Using paint’s viscosity as a metaphor for the power of water to buoy, submerge, and destroy, Fishman’s arm makes rapid swipes, cuts, and scrapes throughout her Raft of the Medusa (2011) and The Salty-Wavy Tumult (2012). J.M.W. Turner’s gory whaling pictures, with their allover facture, were not far from the artist’s mind as she smeared and twisted her reds around spumes of white in Margate (2015). Kreisleriana, (2015), divides the canvas into vertical bands of fiery yellows, reds, and blues that suggest the emotional contrasts of Robert Schumann’s work for solo piano. Because music is the most abstract art form, paintings in response to it can often be lame (illustrative) equivalents. That doesn’t happen here.

I see Fishman’s paintings in this domain as a reflection of her deep intellect and nuanced understanding of spatial and rhythmic structure. They are influenced by the focus and attention of a deep listener, but they are independent objects. At the top of her game, Louise Fishman translates aural, physical, and visual experiences into radiant and muscular works of art whose tension is maintained by the grid that anchors her fierce gesture. Her hard-won joie de vivre, born of new travels, immersion in music, and a contented relationship, underscore this substantive, if belated retrospective.

The post Fully Fathoming Louise Fishman: Two Surveys of Her Work appeared first on artcritical.

While there are only eight objects on display in “Irving Sandler: Out of Tenth Street and Into the 1960s” at Loretta Howard Gallery, the spare installation amplifies the presence and power of each of them. Together they form a sacra conversazione of high modernism. A large-scale Ronald Bladen and a small, two-part George Sugarman share a visual sensibility but differ wholly in attitude. Phillip Pearlstein and Al Held meet along two adjacent walls and trade ideas about how to use large shapes to divide the rectangle. Paintings by Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, and Alice Neel discuss their commonalities in figuration, while a faintly figurative Mark di Suvero sculpture holds itself aloof.

At the center of this conversation is Irving Sandler, who witnessed the labors of these artists as they set down their individual paths in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. With figures such as de Kooning and Pollock having established themselves as giants, there was enormous interest in – and heated arguments about – what younger artists were to do in their wake. On the eve of the show I spoke with Sandler in his Greenwich Village apartment not far from where it all happened a half-century ago.

Franklin Einspruch: The exhibition at Loretta Howard Gallery represents a fascinating time, in which some of the most important developments in modern art are taking place around a tiny cluster of cooperative galleries on Tenth Street. Ambitious artists with big personalities are lending their elbow grease to make it all work.

Irving Sandler: Tanager Gallery started in 1952 and moved up to Tenth Street in ‘54. I worked there from ‘56 until around ‘59. The artists in Tanager, I grew up with them — Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd. Mostly Phillip and Alex. Across the street you had Brata Gallery, which had George Sugarman, Ronald Bladen, and Al Held. They became very close friends, all three. They were my closest friends on Tenth Street except for Mark di Suvero, who was next door from Brata, at the March Gallery. So these were my guys, this show I put together. I thought I chose pretty terrific artists to be best friends with.

Of course, Alice Neel was older and pretty mean. She constantly needled me for not writing about her. But I wanted her in the show to indicate that Tenth Street was not one thing. Clement Greenberg identified something called the Tenth Street Touch, which he meant as the School of de Kooning, or action or gesture painting, but it wasn’t all like that. There were 200 artists showing there. Art was very much all over the place. Although there was a dominant style and that was gestural painting.

By the time Greenberg was referring to the Tenth Street Touch, he meant it as a pejorative.

Definitely. We all considered it a pejorative. People began to regard gestural painting as having run its course by ‘58. Greenberg of course was promoting — I use that word “promoting” deliberately — color field abstraction. Here in the apartment we have one artist who probably did it first in ‘52, Ben Isquith, now all but forgotten.

But by 1958, certain artists, particularly the guys in the Loretta Howard show, felt that gestural abstraction was used up. Katz and Pearlstein thought that figuration was in crisis, and that they had to move it towards literalism, fact, and specificity. For Ronnie Bladen and George Sugarman, welded construction didn’t offer any new possibilities and they began to do other things. There was no consensus, but they felt for personal reasons that they wanted to do something new.

Of course there was Robert Chamberlain working in kind of an action or abstract-expressionist mode. There was also di Suvero. But they were thinking of people like David Hare and Ibram Lassaw. These were leading sculptors of the ‘50s, now forgotten. Theodore Roszack and Seymour Lipton have had major shows of their work. Hare not yet, Lassaw not yet.

You’ve seen contemporary art history operating for long enough to have witnessed some artists getting taken into the institutions and preserved, while other artists are forgotten. Is that process historical and thus in some way fair, or is it more political and arbitrary?

It’s hard to say. My next book will be about that, why styles change. There’s an audience that wants for reasons of its own to see new pictures. It’s these reasons I’m trying at this point to figure out. Of the group who became the so-called New Realists, Katz has become the most prominent. Do I think it was justified? Absolutely. Phillip too in an entirely different way.

How about the people who have been forgotten?

I don’t think that’s at all justified, it just happens. Some of these people are very fine artists. There are older abstract expressionists, artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, who’s wonderful, or James Brooks, or William Baziotes, who in their time were considered major figures. But it seems that art history has a way of constantly narrowing the field, and wonderful artists end up languishing in doctoral dissertations. But they can be rehabilitated.

Does that winnowing process happen in the same way as it used to?

I don’t know. We are in a time of such total pluralism, it’s hard to know why lightning strikes where it does. In my day, in the days of high modernism, things developed rather more regularly and we could see a kind of progression. That didn’t mean that we liked it, and that didn’t mean that we didn’t go out and really hammer it, because it was competition. I think of my response to Frank Stella, for example, which was: if that’s art, then anything I stand for is something else, and vice versa. But we very quickly saw why it was happening, and the necessity for it.

But after 1970 it becomes very difficult to understand. The modernist era splays open. I wrote that at one point it looked like a mainstream, and now it looks like a delta. It’s all over the place. There’s nothing wrong with that, it makes artists freer than ever before. The problem is, how do you get attention? My students put that up as the major problem of their careers, to get somebody to look at their work.

It’s hard to comprehend how much larger the art world is now than it was in 1958.

In 1959, when I counted, the entire New York school consisted of, at tops, 250 artists, probably closer to 200. You could know everybody. I knew everybody. There were twenty galleries worth seeing, and you could visit them all in an afternoon. There are what, 600 galleries now? In Bushwick, upwards of fifty! We didn’t have to look past Manhattan. And we had a community, a real community. These 200 people had The Club, which I ran from 1956 to 1962. We had our bar, the Cedar Tavern. There were the openings, and there were constant studio visits. We were geographically concentrated in a very small neighborhood.

Today it’s all over the place. That’s why I said that past the 1970s, I followed developments closely, but I can’t think of it in the same way as I did before. It’s very difficult for artists to come up with anything new in the modern sense. They can make wonderful art, and there’s a great deal of wonderful art around. But you go to Chelsea today and you have to move fast, there’s so much to see. Your whole way of looking has changed. You can’t stop too long.

If you visit twenty galleries, you’ll see nineteen shows that are okay, maybe. A lot of them are bad, and the rest are nothing to change your life. From this you can conclude that American art is in the pits, that nineteen out of twenty shows didn’t move you, or you can say, “Hey, wow, that one show!” Take your choice, it’s the donut or the hole.

Which way do you lean, the donut or the hole?

Oh, I definitely lean to the donut. I cannot believe, many of my former best friends notwithstanding, that art suddenly stopped short. There’s more of it, and much of it is really very good.

How important is community to the advancement of art? You could look at the show at Loretta Howard and theorize that you need the likes of Dodd and Katz and Pearlstein together, that caliber of character and intensity of connection, in order to make art go forward.

You see, you’re talking about a modernist idea. I’m not sure whether art goes forward. At one time we thought it should go forward, and there was an avant-garde, and we were embattled, and among ourselves we fought bitterly. But I don’t think art goes forward. It’s either interesting or not, moving or not.

Is it possible that art was moving forward in 1959, but after 1970 it stopped?

I think so, or it moved in different directions, and you could see a kind of progression, but only in retrospect.

If you were an advocate of abstract expressionism as I was, and then in 1959 you were suddenly confronted with the black paintings of Frank Stella, that was another world. If you were committed to art, you were shaken up. The same thing with Warhol and Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, particularly Warhol in 1962. Even artists who weren’t quite that radical but in their own way using common objects like Oldenberg and Dine, that stuff looked unprecedented. Our idea was that high art and low art just didn’t meet. Read early Greenberg and early Rosenberg on that — they called it kitsch.

Doesn’t Alex Katz’s work touch on that overlap? It must have been a bit of a shock at first to see him doing those aluminum constructions like the one at Loretta Howard.

Katz is an artist who is absolutely attuned to what he sees around him. He notices billboards and widescreen movies. He understands fashion, and how fashion changes. He is aware of being contemporary, Baudelaire’s idea of the dandy. Not that he’s a dandy, but he has the attitude of the flâneur.

Whereas Phillip Pearlstein is looking backward.

I see what you mean. Phillip looked back to the history of the nude and tried to figure out what had to be done. That turned out to be of interest to Pop artists and the hard-edge people, in that he had taken the painterly image like those of Elaine de Kooning and he made it specific.

There were all these arguments going on among the artists and the critics, and of course that’s part of the fun. But my suspicion is that people find that they have more and more in common as time goes on.

I don’t think they think so, but I think so. Al Held and Phillip Pearlstein, who were close friends, were aesthetic enemies. Pearlstein stood for realism, Al stood for hard edge abstraction, and they were at one another’s throats. They wouldn’t show together, but I showed them together at Cunningham Gallery because I was interested in the affinities.

Both you and Phillip Pearlstein were in the military. How long did you serve?

Three and a half years, in the Second World War. I enlisted in ‘43 and got out in ‘46. I was supposed to do the invasion of Japan, and was supposed to be killed, which had we landed would have happened in fifteen seconds. But Phillip was in Italy. I don’t think he saw combat, I certainly didn’t. After sixty or seventy years I still carry this.

For the record, I’m looking at Irving Sandler’s United States Marine Corps Certificate of Satisfactory Service. He is ranked as a lieutenant and identified by his thumbprint.

It’s called a Good Conduct Discharge. It happened so long ago they hadn’t even invented photography. Being a Marine changed my life, but that’s another world, and my memoir doesn’t go into any of it.

Was your going into the art world a reaction against your military experience?

Absolutely not. I enlisted when I was 17. When I was commissioned I was probably the youngest officer in the Marine Corps. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I loved the Marine Corps. Because they brainwash you, a lot of that love remains. I remember during the Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf punched the First and Second Marines through the Iraqi lines. The Second Marines was my marines. What an upsurge of pride! So those feelings are still there.

And yet the intellectual atmosphere around your artistic milieu was communist. There was a burgeoning interest in Marxism.

Well, that would have been earlier on, in the ‘30s and ‘40s into the ‘50s. In the ‘60s everything changed, and it became political, in a countercultural way.

But we could do something back on Tenth Street that you can’t do anymore. We could live on nothing, and have the so-called Bohemian life. My rent was $17 a month. You could get a good studio for $30 a month. At a dollar an hour you could pay your rent in seventeen hours. You were free! We could just look, do what we wanted, and try to find what it was that we wanted to do. And I found art.

Is the art world more political than it used to be?

Oh yeah. As a matter of fact, because of the hangover of social realism, the art world as I knew it tended to be relatively apolitical. Politics were not discussed at The Club. There was a kind of indifference to it. We talked about art, not politics.

What were the circumstances of your coming into Tanager?

I decided to enter the art world after an epiphany in front of Franz Klein’s “Chief” at the Museum of Modern Art. I didn’t know quite how to do it, but I knew I wanted to know more about it, and as I said I was free to figure it out.

After that a lot of accidents happened. I went up to Provincetown with a girlfriend. We were supposed to camp out on the dunes. One night of that and we got a place in town, and I got a job as a dishwasher at Moors, a very fine Portuguese restaurant. One of the waiters was Angelo Ippolito, who a member at Tanager Gallery. We became friends. When we came down to New York he got me a job at the Tanager. They needed a sitter. So I worked there, and was really well paid — $20 a week. This was when my rent was $17 a month.

I went to the Cedar Street Tavern every night, and nursed one 15-cent beer the whole evening. Even after I got married in ‘58 I still went. I got to know artists and listened to them, and got invited to galleries. But working at the Tanager was my real entry.

Anything that had to be done in the art world that nobody wanted to do, I did. So when The Club was on its last legs in 1955, there was a meeting to disband it. Elaine de Kooning said, “This has been going on since 1949. It would be wonderful if we could keep it going, if only someone would volunteer.” Silence. Then I said, “I’ll do it.” So not only was I running Tanager, I was running The Club, and soon after I was writing for Art News.

What was the attitude about criticism at the time?

We critics were sort of mildly inferior people. However, people like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were major intellectuals, and public intellectuals. They would be treated differently than someone like myself who was a kid on the scene. But the artists also liked admirers, and they liked whipping boys, and we fulfilled both functions quite well. Though Tom Hess, him you didn’t mess with because he was very smart and very fast and he ran Art News.

There was an interesting mixture of condescension and awe.

More condescension than awe. If you wrote a bad review, you made an enemy for life. If you wrote a good review, it was just assumed the artist deserved it. You couldn’t win either way. But that was okay because at one point I decided to write a history of abstract expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting, and for that I needed these guys. The information had to come directly from the artists. If I got condescended to, okay. Luckily I’m the kind of person who never knew when he was being condescended to, a quality which infuriates my wife. It never bothered me.

In contrast with other writers we associate with that era, you have a communitarian spirit. It’s almost as if you regard artists as family.

Yes. Criticism can be a lot of things. At Art News I could assume that the audience was sophisticated, and I only had to write reviews of a hundred to 300 words. But when I became the critic for the New York Post, my function as I saw it was to educate. I really didn’t care about what was good and what was bad. I wanted to know what the art was and present it to the public. The judgment came in when I chose what to write about. If I didn’t like an artist’s work I just didn’t write about it. Unless he was a big gun, and then I’d run after him. If I thought the reputation was unmerited he was fair game.

That’s the situation we’re in now in criticism, with so many artists working. The decision to write about one of them is the first and main act of judgment.

Art critics have been sidelined by the market. In the 1950s, when there was really no audience outside of our own group, taste was made by artists. De Kooning was considered one of the great artists because artists thought he was a great artist. In the ‘60s, art critics, particularly the younger art critics in debt to Greenberg and writing for Artforum, became arbiters of taste. And then in the late ‘60s the collectors and the dealers became the tastemakers. Now a handful of billionaires are determining taste by commanding attention.

Did you feel at some point that you had to deliberately cultivate a voice? Did you look at other writers to emulate or not emulate?

I personally didn’t. I think the critic-poets in the ‘50s like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara probably did. Frank became a model for younger critics like Bill Berkson. No, I had another process. I had no sense of style. I still don’t. I figured the only thing I could do was make my writing as clear as I could, and that’s what I did. No jargon, no bullshit, just make it clear. It was a terrible struggle to put down what I wanted to say in words that other people would understand.

The simple process of turning a visual experience into a verbal experience is difficult. Jargon can sneak in. Bullshit can sneak in. You get to talking about spirituality or God or all sorts of other nonsense. Although that’s what you’re really trying to say!

Did that put you at odds with what the artists wanted you to write about them? Bladen, I know, had a spiritual streak.

In Bladen’s case he did all sorts of specific things I could point to and say, “Hey, that looks spiritual.” You could know what I meant. Hans Hofmann said that when you put two colors together they create a sense of the third. That third color isn’t there, so it has to be spiritual, right? So you can do that.

What are the takeaway lessons for the contemporary art world in the exhibition up at Loretta Howard Gallery?

That’s a very interesting question. One of the things I was interested in was how fresh and terrific the work looked. In terms of the contemporary experience, I really don’t know. This is my history, and it’s the artists’ history. A few of the artists in the show no longer have the kinds of reputations they had in the past, and I like the idea of rehabilitating them. Even Bladen. Sugarman, possibly more. Of course neither Katz nor di Suvero need it, they remain very much in the public’s eye. Lois, who’s got a slowly building reputation, I would like to see more of her work. She is really very good. As a person she is about as modest as they come. She doesn’t say much, but she paints beautiful paintings.

It’s much harder today than it was back then because there were relatively so few artists. But I think that would be my main idea, to bring these guys up and say, “Hey, take another look.”

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David Rhodes: Schwarzwälde at Hionas Gallery

September 8 to October 13, 2013
124 Forsyth Street, south of Delancey Street
New York City, 646-559-5906

The range of effects and the nuances of affect presented by the paintings of David Rhodes would be remarkable enough in an artist who set himself few restraints.  And yet – initially at least – the defining characteristic of this New York debut exhibition of the Berlin-based British painter is the stringency and starkness of its pictorial system.

On raw canvases that follow the same tripartite division, in a deadpan application of one acrylic black, Rhodes arranges three sets of parallel stripes.  These vary considerably in thickness but – in the painting process – the black is clearly worked against strips of masking tape of maybe just two or three widths.  And as (rather like a woodcut) it is the exposed raw canvas rather than the acrylic strokes that registers as the signifying stripe, the variables are like those of barcodes—at once infinite and uniform.

The gestalt in each image resulting from this ubiquitous strategy somewhat resembles a corporate logo of the 1970s: reading from left to right, the three sets go top left to bottom right, back to top right, down to bottom right.  In one or two paintings of sparse population and thin exposed stripe we can almost read “VA” allowing for the absence of the A’s crossbar and the doubling of its and the V’s shared inner diagonal.  But generally his hieroglyph eludes the Latin alphabet, while seeming alphabet-like – a kind of semiotic reverse, in this respect, of Al Held’s Alphabet series, seen last spring at Cheim & Read.  To those of Rhodes’ and this author’s age and upbringing the closest association might be the London Weekend Television logo that, tellingly, incorporated its initials and a map of the River Thames in animation.  These paintings imply movement within insistent stasis.

Art historically the most striking resemblance is to Frank Stella of the period of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor although, again topically, the early grid works of Sean Scully (on view at the Drawing Center) are another apt point of reference.  Rhodes actually occupies expressive territory closer to the later works of both those artists while retaining the formal rigor of their earlier efforts.  Thinking about him this way helps us locate his “minimalism” as proto, or post, in the sense that the restraints of his system serve emotional rather than purely cerebral ends.  His art is one of economy rather than reduction per se (is modernist not minimalist as some might put it).

There is unmistakable warmth to the paintings, despite their pared-down qualities.  This results from what could be dismissed as studio contingencies and yet feels intentional, possibly even integral.  Tolerated rub and burr lend surfaces the feel of (again) woodcut despite the undisguised materiality of canvas and absented tape. But even if Rhodes were able to program a Roxy Paine-like robot to dispatch his paintings for him, several ensuing perceptual phenomena would continue to enrich – to mitigate and complicate – his streamlined modus operandi.

There is the effect, for instance, of proximate bands of black triggering retinal sensations of other colors so that in one painting there might seem to be alternating black and blue.  Then there are the disconcerting twists and tapers, in multiple possibilities, where one set of diagonals jar with another in what New Yorkers might want to call the Flatiron effect.  The differing canvas sizes seen in the close quarters of Hionas’s Lower East Side gallery and the inclusion in the back room of a couple of works on paper bring home the crucial variables of scale and support in determining the impact of this reduced vocabulary.  There is a lot that can be said within strict adherence to a format.

It’s instructive to compare Rhodes with fellow Brit Ian Davenport whose current show of sumptuous stripes at Paul Kasmin is itself fortuitously timed with Ameringer McEnery Yohe’s overview of the perennially scintillating Gene Davis.  Davenport juxtaposes skillfully held-in-check chromatic brilliance with the flourish of exuberantly unpredictable puddles in what nonetheless seem like exquisitely orchestrated marbling as the paint oozes out of his pipes of color.  Returning to Rhodes, after this over the top pop, is rather like listening to Bach violin sonatas after a Baroque opera.  But as with Bach, you soon hear as many voices and as much emotion.

Gallery hours: 1 to 6 pm, Wednesday to Sunday 

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March 22 to April 21, 2013,
177 North 9th Street, between Bedford and Driggs avenues
Brooklyn, 718.599.2144

Sarah Walker’s art is like visual quicksand. From a distance, these pulsating, energized paintings with their alluringly complex, multi-patterned surfaces seem rationally concrete and firmly structured. But upon closer investigation, subtle incongruities quickly leave us unmoored.

Colors that appeared transparent reveal themselves to be opaque, and lines that seemed to float on the surface turn out to be artifacts from earlier layers. Metaphors mutate from the cosmic to the subatomic. A form collapses into a hole, and patterns cohere into gateways to other dimensions. Each painting is a labyrinth: trying to deconstruct how these works are made could lead to madness. Nothing is ever what it initially appeared to be. Surrendering one’s mind to Walker’s twisted relational structures is to become a mental fly caught in a sticky web of visual contradictions.

Planet X, Walker’s title for her fourth show at Pierogi, is neither about the solar system nor X-rated, although her work can feel, both cosmological and orgasmic. There are nine small acrylic paintings on reverse-beveled wood panels, and a constellation of works on paper from a series called Near Earth Objects. The paintings are abstract, but not in a conventional sense. Though they do not represent figures, still-lifes or landscapes, the language used to describe them is resolutely pictorial. Allusions to quantum fields and cellular processes spring inescapably to mind, even though no actual scientific principles are illustrated.

Volatile Compound (2012) – a painting that is easy to overlook, exiled over Pierogi’s flat files in the gallery’s outer vestibule – is a vital bridge between the other panel paintings, with their allusions to subatomic energy fields, and the Near Earth Object series on paper which seem to depict “floating objects” —— “objects” which don’t float so much as emerge from fogged over fields like a detail from a forgotten memory.

Initially, Volatile Compound, at 20 by 22 inches, presents itself as a planet-like form occluded by clouds. But like some crazy Rorschach blot, the form continuously morphs from a flat patterned ellipse to an ovoid, to paired fetuses, to fungus-engulfed egg, to an aperture through which can be seen some kind of electromagnetic field. And the “clouds” which, too, change from misty to flat and textured, seem to reveal a “sky” that looks like a ‘50’s textile. But the variable ultramarine shapes are actually painted on top of both the clouds and the form, and upon this perception, they become fin-like appendages to the ellipsoid.

Layering is the obvious key to Walker’s transformations. The advantage of Walker’s paint of choice, acrylic, lies in its ability to be quickly applied in translucent layers. Building up her image, the artist is combination surgical scrub nurse and tattoo artist, continuously mopping up puddles of half dried paint that she has randomly poured and tilted to form drips, and then carefully filling in the dried edge of a spill with a different colored puddle. Walker employs layers not only physically, but metaphorically, too.  The pleasure in viewing her work lies in the constant perceptual shift induced by competing interpretive fantasies.

Walker challenges abstraction’s canonical values of flatness, simplicity, and suspicion of control. She evokes an alternative historical lineage for herself which, in contrast to that of many of her peers, starts with cubism and references important artists that have also rejected status quo painting, such as Al Held.

Walker has adopted many of Held’s abstract pictorial strategies, such as creating space by recognizing that diagonal lines, trapezoids, and ellipses can have a dual pictorial identity—–these lines and shapes can be both flat and spatial simultaneously. And also that negative space can be transparent or opaque depending on what it reveals or conceals.

Walker also shares with Held a similar reference to classical architecture as evinced by an etching of the Pantheon she keeps on her studio wall. But though Walker’s paintings are as complex as Held’s, her work is intimate both in scale and feeling.  But unlike Held, her universe is discontinuous and hints at a disturbing irrationality at its core.

With Walker, the most contentious painterly issue is control. She vacillates between wanting the paint to behave in a natural, fluid way and dominating the hell out of it——alternating painting personas of Cinderella and her evil stepmother. Part of this results from her desire to preserve elements of every successive layer she uses, which she has amusingly attributed to her upbringing in the households of hoarders.

The resulting visually complex surface invariably strikes an anxious note for many viewers. But managing information overload has become our contemporary condition and Walker masterfully structures these paintings both physically and metaphorically to accommodate fickle attentions spans. But whenever complexity threatens to overtake her painting she fogs over the offending areas with her painterly equivalents of Klonopin, so we can relax and prepare to be sucked in once more.

The post Quantum Fields and Cellular Processes: Sarah Walker at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.

February 20 to April 20, 2013
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 242-7727

The titles of abstract paintings can be important. When Frank Stella named his protractor-based Tahkt-i-Sulayman (1967) after an ancient shrine in Iran, he encouraged very different style of interpretation than did Daniel Buren, who titled one early picture Manifestation 1 – Peinture acrylique sur tissu rayé (1967). Stella, it seemed, wanted to associate his art with Islamic decoration. By contrast, Buren presented a much more literal minded way of thinking about his stripes.

Al Held, who started out making classic Abstract Expressionist pictures, in his later career created marvelously elaborate perspectival constructions. In between, in the 1960s, he did geometric paintings, many of them based upon fragments of alphabet letters. The Big A (1962) is a truncated black ‘A’ with a yellow and blue insert; The Big D (1964), a leftward facing ‘D’ with a black center; and The Yellow X (1965) is a yellow ‘x’, with triangles peeking in on the top, bottom and sides. And sometimes he did constructions whose titles refer to their geometry — Circle and Triangle (1964) is a good example. Held wanted to associate his large geometric abstractions with the most rudimentary general culture- the letters of the alphabet; geometric forms or shapes, Maltese Cross (1964) for example; and cultural figures known to everyone—Siegfried (1966), Mao (1967).

The meaning of abstract painting has always been up for grabs. It can be associated with mystical ‘higher experience’— as Kandinsky and Mondrian wanted; with nature, as for Pollock or Thomas Nozkowski; or with materialism—Malevich and Robert Mangold do this. Held, so his titles reveal, was a surprisingly straightforward, even literal-minded visual thinker. He wasn’t interested in Stella’s art historical references, in Buren’s visual materialism or in allusions to nature; but neither was he a materialist. He wanted to create large, relatively simple, simplified, slightly illusionistic images whose meaning was visually almost self-evident. The letters of the alphabet and Held’s other subjects have no intrinsic scale. And so the danger then, as I see it, is that paintings with these subjects become inert, turning into quasi-minimalist compositions. That’s why their size is very important. In reproduction, these pictures look handsome.  But they hold up on the high-walled galleries of Cheim & Reid perfectly—they have a self-sufficient presence. The Big N (1964-66), almost a monochrome, depends critically upon the small notches of black at the top and bottom of the field of white. Untitled (1965) uses four such inserts at top, bottom and the sides to turn the red field into a floating plane. And Upside Down Triangle (1966)—which is more than four meters wide—seems to twist around the small triangle cut into the center.

Without working in series, or ever repeating, and using simplified means, Held created an astonishing array of varied effects. You feel that he is reinventing the art of painting as he goes.

The post Visually Self-Evident: Al Held’s Alphabet Paintings at Cheim & Read appeared first on artcritical.

For a long time, drugs have been played a role in the social life of the art world. Charles Baudelaire wrote about them. If you do not possess a Delacroix, he said, the next best thing is to be high. But he was opposed to drug use, a weak person’s way of achieving aesthetic experience. In the 1960s, when use of marijuana and LSD became commonplace amongst the American middle-classes, drugs certainly influenced how visual art was made and seen. Many believed that getting high was the best way to see through the political subterfuges of the establishment. And yet social historians of art hesitate to introduce this history—in which many of them must, I expect, have participated—into their narratives. Thomas Crow’s great The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, for instance, focuses instead on the civil rights movement, the consumer economy, and the Vietnam War. The same is true of the grand history of modernism by the writers associated with Rosalind Krauss’s October.

Are You Experienced? is a dazzling, extraordinarily radical revisionist history. For since taking drugs changes perception, they surely must affect how art is made and seen. Everyone sees that 1960s head shop art shows the direct influence of psychedelics, but what is the connection, exactly, between the promiscuous use of drugs and art world art? Ken Johnson, who came of age in this period, offers a highly personal account of it. His book is very good at explaining how drugs were linked to seductive ideals of political liberation; to contemporary films; and to a great variety of art from the past half-century. He describes how R. Crumb was inspired by his acid trips; how James Rosenquist’s F-111 deals with the endless flow of information, which especially fascinated people who were high; and he connects the writing of Robert Smithson, and the art of Chris Burden and Richard Tuttle, with the experience of being stoned. His aim, Johnson explains, is not to link individual artists or works of art with drugs, but to point to the ways that the drug culture influenced how a great deal of art was made and seen, whatever the personal concerns of the artists. In the 1960s “some kind of awakening took place in art. . . and the creative and intellectual energies that were brought to life are still feeding the imaginations of artists today” (p. 220-1).

Johnson himself certainly is not nostalgic, and has a critical perspective on the era of his youth. Being high, he rightly notes, didn’t make you a better person, or saner. Nor did it make you an original artist. But you cannot understand much recent art without knowing this history. “The psychedelic culture of the ‘6os involved most of the same aspirations that contemporary art has, and it became for me a hub where all roads intersected” (p. 225). Part of the fascination of Johnson’s account lies in its very fast movement and the variety of paintings and sculptures discussed. “If todays art is about altering consciousness and doing so broadly,” he writes, ‘what better medium to achieve that than computers and the Internet, which can reach millions?” (p. 101). When he pulls such different artists into the analysis as Ed Ruscha, Sigmar Polke, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Lucas Samaras  then we see how diverse the drug-fuelled experiences of art have been. Jeff Koons’ erotic scenes, Tino Sehgal’s performances and Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living all pose the question: “In a real, shark-infested world, can art be a means to attain broad-minded, transcendental consciousness?” (p. 199). I cannot think of a better one-sentence statement describing the present state of our art world.

After you read this book, lots of familiar art will look different—as if you, too, have momentarily become high. Strange enough to be a masterpiece, its quick movement and far reaching analysis is a reminder of how slow moving, by comparison, is almost all scholarly writing about modernism and contemporary art. We are accustomed to make a distinction between art history, which is frankly academic and art criticism, which provides a lively perspective on the immediate present. Are You Experienced? gives reason to question that distinction. Unless an artist can sketch a man throwing himself from the fourth floor before he hits the ground, Baudelaire quotes Delacroix to say, he “will never be capable of producing great machines.” Of course, Baudelaire also describes himself, for a gifted art critic, too, must be capable of responding very quickly.  Always suggestive, always readable and very often highly original, Johnson is as supple as anyone writing art history today.

Ken Johnson, Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art. (Prestel, 2011, ISBN 3791344986, $49.95)

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Al Held, known for his mural-scale geometric abstractions, once assigned a student at Yale to look at Vermeer – to learn, Held said, “how the wall meets the floor”.  Vermeer, known for his intimate details, is one of the last artists one might associate with Held, but Held’s appreciation of the Dutch master underscores his respect for the solid construction that much abstract and representational art have in common. However torqued or idiosyncratic the structures he invents, Held deals with gravity and mass, in convincingly rendered volumes and spaces.

These concerns assume special importance in the period covered by this show, 1979-1985, which includes Held’s residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1981. That stay inspired an involvement with Italian art and Italy that shaped the final phase of his work, up until his death at his residence in Todi in 2005. The earliest work in here, S-E (1979), exemplifies the transition to work in color that ushered in this phase, after over a decade of paintings in black and white. Its vocabulary of circular and rectilinear forms extends his previous work in “hard-edge” abstraction, a style defined by the use of masking tape and acrylics to generate large, flat color planes with clean edges. Compared to later paintings, though, it seems lighter in weight, its thin screens of color relatively close to the picture’s surface, stretched on geometric armatures woven together in a Cubist space.

This surface play is progressively displaced by the fuller development of interior spaces and suggestions of infinite depth in the works to follow. In Roberta’s Trip (1985) entrance is provided via a sort of diving platform into a sequence of spaces governed by at least three rectilinear grids that interlace with two sets of circles, all dominated by one zigzagging network that angles in from above. The interplay of colors and contrasting directions endows the open spaces with their own specific movements. The entire composition is cropped cinematically to add implied drama to what can only be called a scene.

Some of this development may have been inherent in the exploration of new possibilities afforded by color, yet the experience of Italy no doubt played an important part. Renaissance art showed how intense color could combine with geometry to create substantial forms, as did early Roman wall paintings, with their nested architectural illusions; the period represented here could be seen as Held’s linking abstraction to a rich historical tradition, building connections while lending literal substance to his forms. But the Renaissance rediscovery of spatial depiction no doubt also aroused Held’s own ambitions to envision a 20th century hyperspace. Most important, perhaps, was the sheer cosmopolitanism of Rome – the interplay of ancient and modern granting him positive support to explore forms, as he always had, somewhat outside the limits of New York’s aesthetic debates.

While he reacted against Abstract Expressionism, Held resisted the impersonal, systematic geometry of “non-relational” painters like Frank Stella.  His work is characterized throughout by inner tension between antagonistic spatial orders.

His idiosyncratic geometries, constructed over lengthy processes of revision, leave us with the sense that much more than formal relationships are at stake. One critic has seen in spherical volumes references to the mind, and titles sometimes offer provocative hints, but if there is a subject to these efforts to endow visionary architecture with a sense of inner logic, it’s to be found in the way glimpses of the infinite emerge through the struggle of competing structures: Held leaves us poised between abstract transcendence and the hands-on human constructions that art contributes to civic life.

The post Al Held: Paintings, 1979-1985 at Paul Kasmin Gallery appeared first on artcritical.