May 13 – September 25, 2011
Invalidenstraße 50-51,
10557 Berlin, Germany

Ademeit, who passed away last July, spent most of his life in Cologne and Düsseldorf. He first trained as a house painter.  Following a brief period of working in textile design, he became a student of Joseph Beuys in 1970. Beuys’ belief in art as an omnipresent part of life that was accessible and could be practiced by all significantly informed Ademeit’s outlook. He also turned his focus on the immediately available: everyday objects, news, and confinements. In addition, Ademeit’s work entails the more obscure attempt to register what he referred to as “cold rays” and invisible radiation. But how to document a notion or fear of something ungraspable? In Ademeit’s case, the solution meant to combine visuals with intellectual content.

In fact, all of Ademeit’s photographs are obscured by the application of handwritten notations. This mesmerizing assemblage of data was painstakingly gathered from electricity meters, thermometers, compasses, clocks, and other measuring devices. But Ademeit’s observations were not limited to the factual. He also recorded sensual impressions and thoughts. His notes on smells, sounds, atmospheric characteristics, and moods, provide a glimpse of the artist’s emotional reality.

Ademeit’s works are visual but also contextual records of specific places as the artist experienced them at a distinct moment in time. Despite the accounting of neutral information, they are also personal musings, a fact that is enhanced by Ademeit’s focus on the familiar. Throughout his career, his preferred subjects remained his apartment building, its basement and yard. It was only after the excessive study of his most immediate environment that he extended his interest to the neighborhood at large, including construction sites, parked automobiles, bicycles, and garbage piles. In “o.T.” (an abbreviation for “ohne Titel” or “Untitled”), Ademeit investigates two bikes with the incredulous eye of a detective. He notes that the second bike was parked at 9.58 PM, that handcuffs are hanging from the frame and that it has been chained to the fence. In Ademeit’s world, nothing was trivial. Mystique and conspiracy were constant companions

This exhibition reveals that Ademeit only slowly expanded his world. In 1990 however, he made a major adjustment. He shifted from photographing objects and interiors to printed media. Each day, he set up measuring instruments and a compass on his newspaper and photographed the still life. In the end, this series involved 6006 works. “5805” is a typical example of this body of work. It shows two opened pages of the Bild Zeitung, a daily German newspaper notorious for its sensationalist reportage. Like the New York Post, the Bild signifies a media outlet that draws its readership’s attention by means of shocking headlines. Ademeit contrasts this superficial gathering of information with his personal, highly detailed notes. Fused together into one picture plane, his observations and the newspaper’s heavily illustrated subjects transform into a vivid and highly detailed index card of the day at hand: September 24, 2003.

When viewed as a large group, Ademeit’s photographs manifest as an elaborate archive of everyday information. Within this complex system, each work reveals the artist’s ambition to thoroughly decipher his place and time. They tell the story of an individual in emotional turmoil, who was seeking to establish a sense of order in a seemingly chaotic world.

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In 1967 Michel Foucault obtained a contract for a book on Manet, tentatively titled La Noir et la Surface. There’s no evidence to suggest that Foucault got far in the writing of the book, but something of its most general intended features is suggested by the contract and some remarks from Foucault’s writings in the 1960s.  Analogously to the treatment of ‘regimes’ of knowledge in his previous book Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things in English), Foucault would have treated European painting as a series of discrete regimes, where a regime is characterized by certain dominant rules: of the depiction of space; of light; of meaning; and of significance. Masaccio founded the ‘classical’ regime, which held sway until Manet. In his work on Magritte, Foucault was to write that the classical regime was governed by two principles: the unbridgeable distance between linguistic and pictorial representation; and the treatment of visual resemblance between items, say, between a visual work and a thing, as a representation, wherein the resembling mark represented, or failed to represent, the resembled thing. Contemporaneously, in a much quoted passage, Foucault claimed that Manet had done for painting what Flaubert had done for literature: where Flaubert’s work depended for its meaningfulness and semantic density upon libraries, Manet’s depended upon museums. It was not Manet’s particular references to Giorgione, Velásquez, and Goya as much as the sheer coexistence of their work in a single building that created the possibility of modern meanings.

One remnant of this project is now in English. The thin volume Manet and the Object of Painting is a translation of a lecture on Manet Foucault gave in Tunis in 1971. In it he argued that Manet made possible the painting of the twentieth century with the invention of the ‘picture-object’ (p. 31), or ‘painting-object’ (p. 79). Conceived and practiced as a painting-object, a painting is made and viewed “as materiality,” “as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves.” (p. 31)

The conception of the painting-object has three major dimensions: the treatments of space, and of light, and the place of the viewer. Manet’s treatment of these, while opening new possibilities of painting, also rejects the different classical treatments.  Whereas, with the use of linear perspective, Masaccio forged a well-ordered pictorial space, illuminated by a single, intelligible source of light, and depicted as if from a single viewing point, Manet blocked spatial recession and emphasized verticals and horizontals echoing the actual shape of the canvas, introduced multiple sources of light (including the actual light illuminating the painting itself ) and created multiple viewpoints. Manet’s picture-object thus has a kind of internal heterogeneity unavailable to classical European painting. It also induces in the viewer a new kind of mobility and responsiveness: “The picture appears like a space in front of which and by rapport with which one can move around.” (p. 78)

Foucault offers brief analyses of thirteen works of Manet in explication of this claim. The works treated under ‘Space’ highlight a newly shallow depth traversed by horizontals and verticals: the larger lines of trees and stiff figures internally echo the edge of the support; the smaller axes, such as the filigree of distant crossing ships’ masts, are magnifications of the weave of the canvas. This yields brutally truncated accounts of the “Music in the Tuileries” and “The Execution of Maximilian.” Even briefer but more intriguing are Foucault’s remarks about the “Saint-Lazare Station”; after noting the “same tricks” of the horizontals and verticals, he suggests that the gaze of the girl into the painting and the governess outward are a play with the recto and verso of the canvas. The viewer can neither meet their gazes nor share in the objects of their looks. Foucault calls this a “game of invisibility” that Manet is playing, and here and throughout the lecture, in a strange irruption of language reminiscent of Georges Bataille, Foucault characterizes this game as “vicious, malicious, and cruel” (p. 55; see also pp. 49, 68, 79). ‘Light’ gives brief accounts of three works, with Foucault stressing Manet’s use of multiple sources of light, in particular one seemingly coming from the place of the viewing, depriving Victorine Meurent’s body of modeling in “Luncheon on the Grass” and “Olympia.” And finally in the “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” Foucault notes that these subversions of the Classical and characteristics of the painting-object result in a work that excludes “every stable and defined place where we locate the viewer.” This explains “the enchantment and malaise that one feels in looking at it.” Only here does Foucault integrate the different aspects of the modern regime. An analysis of “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” would likely have been the virtuoso culminating explication of the book, as it was to be a decade later for T. J. Clark in The Painter of Modern Life.

So Foucault presents Manet as the founder of the modern system of painting, a system that remained inchoate through the nineteenth century but regulates twentieth-century painting. Manet inaugurates, then the next century practices the conception of an artistic picture as a ‘painting-object’. It is surprising that neither Foucault’s thoughts about Manet and museums, nor the claim about the two founding principles of classical painting, are mentioned in the lecture. The conception of the painting-object bears some similarity with Richard Wollheim’s nearly contemporaneous lecture “The Work of Art as Object,” in which Wollheim claimed that the dominant conception of a modern artwork is as a material object. But whereas Wollheim thought that this conception allowed a new kind of modern psychology to be expressed in visual art, Foucault ruthlessly treats the modern work as lacking any psychology. The painting-object conception, according to Foucault, later develops into abstraction, which he seems to understand wholly implausibly as a kind of non-representational play with materiality. But there’s a hint in the lecture of a different trajectory for this conception; when Manet is described as “amus(ing) himself” (p. 54) by playing with conventions, the foreshadowing of Duchamp is unmistakable.

An inevitable question for a contemporary reader is whether Foucault adds some perspective and associated insight to recent accounts of Manet. Michael Fried’s account is so involved and idiosyncratic as to disallow quick comparisons, but Foucault roughly agrees with Clark in finding a major source of the enduring fascination with Manet’s major works in their calculated incoherence.  For Clark this incoherence is in the service of presenting and reflecting on modern life as unintelligible. For Foucault this unintelligibility is, so to speak, a structural feature, generated out of the need to negate individually the convergent treatments of space, light, and the viewer in classical painting. Foucault of course rejected the idea that there was some ‘purpose’ structuring a regime; though founded by events named ‘Masaccio’ or ‘Manet’, an artistic regime is not some consciousness writ large, but rather an anonymous set of models and constraints governing what can show up in public space and be taken seriously. Nonetheless, in an unfortunate analogy with the end of The Order of Things’ prediction of the coming end of ‘man’, Foucault here ends with the fantasy that the painting-object will be “the fundamental condition” (p. 79) of the end of representation itself. The insight into the structural heterogeneity of twentieth-century painting disappears into a failed prophecy. And given his concern to in a single lecture to analyze Manet’s work as founding a new regime, there’s very little detail or subtle observation to savor.

Later Foucault developed his genealogical method, which subordinated the earlier so-called archeological method to the orientation to more piecemeal changes in practices and towards the end of his life he became interested in the question of how people might shape their own lives as if they were, or could be, works of art. As part of this last concern Foucault returned to Baudelaire’s account of modern life, which Clark among others was to make central to the understanding of Manet. The turns in Foucault’s thought were always surprising, but it would have been no great surprise if he had returned in late life to Manet, and offered a very different account.

Michel Foucault, Nicolas Bourriaud (Introduction), Matthew Barr (Translator), Manet and the Object of Painting. (London: Tate Publishing, 2010.  First published, 2005. ISBN1854378457. 80pp. $29.95)

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June 1-June 30, 2011
905 Madison Avenue
New York City, (212) 628-2224

“Barbaric splendor” suggests the gold and precious stones found in Scythian jewelry, royal Celtic shields, or early medieval Bible covers. The abstractions of Roy Lerner can also be described by that term, richly colored as they are with the brilliance of their many, often shiny, sometimes iridescent paints, boldly worked together with gel and glitter into vigorous whorls and wavy rivulets that appear to have been applied with some huge, primitive comb. Still, anybody who thinks that Lerner’s pictures are the handiwork of a semi-civilized craftsman can only be one of those innocents who also thinks that painting like Jackson Pollock is so easy that even a four-year-old can do it. Lerner’s more studied understanding of Pollock has led him to a technique that utilizes some of that master’s methods, yet also incorporates others.

Pollock laid his canvases on the floor, and swirled paint on them with a stick. Lerner most notably applies his paints with palette knives of many sizes.  The use of gel has only become widespread in the decades since Pollock. Despite its thickness, Lerner still finds it easier to move mixtures of paint and gel around while the canvas is horizontal (on the floor, or a platform held up by sawhorses). However, he also wants to stand back, to see how the painting is progressing. This requires placing it vertically against the wall.  With each painting, Lerner may go back and forth, from horizontal to vertical, many times. Composition with him is neither accidental nor determined prior to painting. Rather, it is gradually arrived at, through essentially intuitive choices and modulations.  .

Another aspect of Pollock’s  practice was working on unstretched canvas, mounting pictures on stretchers after they were painted, but Lerner can’t bend the thick mixtures of paint and gel around his stretchers without the mixtures cracking, so he works on canvases already stretched. This means that he can’t crop the picture (as he used to), should he feel that it would look better in a different size or shape. To get around this, he may cut a canvas out of its stretcher, marouflé it (using a special glue) onto a larger piece of canvas, and stretch that in turn.  For the last step he decides which side of the painting should be on top. Some paintings have one orientation; with others, it depends on the context in which they are hung.

Despite all this effort, the show looks spontaneous: the semi-circular motion of the paint strokes conveys energy, muscular vehemence. A prime example is Lady Luck (2010), which can be hung vertically but looks especially strong as a horizontal.  Its riffled blue-and-white strokes suggest an ornate, sidewise question mark, embellished with only a few dabs of magenta. Another winner is Little Red Riding Hood (2006), a cheerful vertical with broad, lively arcs of red at the bottom, rising to a strip of glittering green shell shapes across the top. Some of the best paintings are the most tranquil. An outstanding example is Intertwine (2011), a smaller canvas dominated by short, opaque curved sweeps of pale blue, highlighted with touches of pale orange and pale green.  The shortness and regularity of the sweeps creates a restrained, harmonious pattern.

The show is a bit uneven, primarily because Lerner, like any fine painter, continues to experiment.  Paintings dominated by black or with areas of bare canvas don’t always come off, but one is unusually interesting. Pathway to the Shoals (2011) is a long horizontal with a broad band of bare, watery canvas cutting horizontally across its middle, and multicolored paint above and below: blues, reds, iridescent greens and gold.  Even for the viewer unacquainted with its title, the nautical impression is inescapable. This painting suggests a 15th-century map or aerial view of the Grand Canal in Venice, with Renaissance and medieval architecture above and below.

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