February 9 to April 6, 2019
522 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, matthewmarks.com

What do we expect from the late work of great painters? If you are a Romantic, your proof of greatness might be evinced by a final letting go——a pure abandonment to the id, a total acceptance of the painter’s deepest urges. No second guesses, no capitulation to analytical thinking, no recycling of past successes; just allowing the body, with its supposedly pure inner wisdom, to do what it needs to do. A Romantic might appreciate the arid grace of dementia-afflicted late de Kooning, or the brazen “blend of slapstick idiocy and gallantry,” as the painter Carroll Dunham once wrote of libidinous late Picasso. For a Romantic, this might seem the heroic response to the knowledge that one’s time is about up.

But are we getting something different from the late work of Jasper Johns? Johns has never been a Romantic. Don’t expect to find a “rage against the dying of the light.” Which is not to say there is no passion in these paintings, it’s just that his relentless denials have conditioned us to be circumspect about making any claims about them at all. So how do we react to Johns’s late work? Despite the startling complex simplicity of his initial paintings of flags and targets, he has gradually developed a quality of rigorous self-examination and reflection on the processes through which he has created his work.

Alexi Worth, in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, discusses what he terms as Johns’s “scrupulousness”: writes of how

Johns seems to be allergic to the nervous approximations that characterize much art talk — not to mention ordinary conversation. He would rather say nothing than assent to a banality; would rather deconstruct a question than accept a false premise. The more one talks with him, the more his scrupulousness seems distinctively extreme: not just a mannerism, but a deeply ingrained reservoir of feeling.

Looking at these latest works, Johns’ scrupulousness seems to have intensified rather than been left behind. You can almost hear him ask himself, “What am I doing today?” or “Now what happens if I do it this way?” As the artist approaches 90, these questions take on poignant urgency. Though each image might address a new subject, every piece here is filled with references to images, marks, and tropes from earlier work. Even without the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons that peak out of many of these works, it is almost impossible to look at them and not think that here is a person patiently and systematically facing the prospect of death: The completion of the content of his artistic life.

A whole series of work in this show centers on an image of grief. The words “Farley Breaks Down After Larry Burrows,” stenciled on each of the untitled canvases and drawings and prints in this group, refer to an image in a famous LIFE magazine photo essay by Larry Burrows of Farley, a mission leader during Vietnam. Johns has chosen the particular photo of Farley burying his sobbing face in his arms after a battle where comrades were killed and wounded. But curiously, the original title of the Burrows photo was “Farley Gives Way,” not breaks down. What we see in these paintings, drawings, and prints is a literal breaking down of the image’s surface; not just an emotional breakdown but an actual disintegration of the image into marks and puddles of paint, and sometimes, silkscreened cartoons and play money.

Understanding this photographic moment of grief is not only about the grief, but the effect of death on the living. Each image can be seen as a completed text which — like a life itself — is unified, but composed of many small, seemingly random experiences whose relationships to each other, upon examination, become infinitely complex.

Other references to his own earlier works abound: For instance, the vase/silhouettes figure/ground optical illusion image. Do you see two symmetrical facing profiles, or the vase that exists as the negative space between them? Johns favors optical illusions that, depending on one’s attention, flip between two images such as a vase or a pair of silhouettes, or a duck and a rabbit, or (but not here) a young woman and an old crone. In the context of these paintings, the conundrum of contemplating these dualities of image from a single point of view could be a metaphor for one’s inability to imagine the disintegration of one’s own consciousness. We can grieve for the dead, we can know that we will die, but we can’t imagine being dead. It’s reminiscent of the title of Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

Not only do we have this examination of a man burying his face in his arms in the “Farley Breaks Down” paintings (ironically, the photographer himself later died in a helicopter crash), but there is also a series of works based on John Deakin’s photograph of a young Lucian Freud on a bed, with his face held in his right hand. The photo, which had belonged to Francis Bacon, is paint-spattered, creased, folded and torn. Johns already used this photo for a series of paintings titled “Regrets” that were shown at MoMA a few years ago. In it are newspapers on the floor, and a diamond patterned quilt on the bed. You can see why it spoke to Johns——it has so many iconographic elements that he already uses. The folds, patterns, newsprint, and splotches create a very Johnsian, mark-abstracting surface. Curiously, the resulting images in both these series reminded me of the way Bonnard broke down his painting surfaces into a series of abstract shapes and marks, which adds the possibility of another layer of meaning, as Bonnard’s paintings, though in a different way, also explored quotidian daily life. By horizontally mirroring the image of the torn photo, Johns further abstracts it and turns a part of a white wall into a shape that becomes a skull.

The ideas of mirroring and reflection have occupied Johns’s process for a long time. In treating an area as a mirror, he turns the formal idea of flatness into a more sophisticated and useful concept that the surface of the canvas is a field, with properties that the painter assigns to it. Mirroring might have to do with his long involvement with printmaking but it is worth remarking upon because it seems to be another way of breaking down an image, making forms abstract, and destabilizing a single reading.

Despite flashes of mordant humor – a whole series of dancing skeletons, for instance – we don’t have the pleasure in this late work of the lush encaustic surfaces familiar in early Johns, or the startlingly opaque conundrum of a simple, ubiquitous pop image to offset the lugubrious tone. Some of these paintings even have dispiriting harsh acrylic texture, and if you didn’t know the photographic references some were based on, you might not have a clue of what you were looking at.

Deconstructing these images is an endless task,  and trying to find the Easter eggs of hidden references and relationships keeps a viewer in a submissive, student-like relationship to the artist. For instance, Johns constantly references Picasso. The double silhouettes could be Picasso profiles, or Johns’ own profile, or both. There is a series that uses a Picasso figure with a hand to its mouth. Is the point to identify his artistic stature as equal to that of Picasso, or does he have other motives?

In place of solipsistic questions like, “Do those ASL hand signs of letters stand for significant initials?” or “What image did those stick figures holding torches or brushes come from?” we are better off asking “What do I feel when looking at this and why am I feeling that way?”

Conversely, we could also use these paintings to consider the nature of grief and mortality. What is a life? What is regret?  What is it that we grieve? Perhaps the feelings we are left with mirror our struggles with our own mortality. The paintings are the intense crackling evidences of a lively mind, pushing and probing and asking uncomfortable questions about what it feels like to be alive and continue to relentlessly produce, after having lived so long.

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November 12, 2015 to March 6, 2016
144 W 125th Street (at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard)
New York, 212 864 4500

“A Constellation,” which recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, presented a series of works selected to juxtapose established artists’ work with newer work, disparate in media but engaged in similar themes. Differences between elements of the show reveal that opposing signs — rather than repeated signs — may be more effective in signifying an idea.

From Al Loving’s Variations on a Six Sided Object (1967), the eye bounces back to Cameron Rowland’s Pass-Thru (2013). The latter title conveys an idea of access or transfer of an object. Yet the plastic sculpture, a replica of mechanisms used at bodegas or liquor stores, seems more interested in refusing access. A transparent rectangular box sits on a Lazy Susan within a larger rectangular box. The nails used to construct each box visibly protrude and lend a sense of danger. More obviously, there is only one open side to the larger box, meaning there is no through. An object placed in the pass-thru would only go round and end up exiting the same side. This refusal of use value is reflected in Loving’s painting which, with its solid and dotted lines, is reminiscent of an origami pattern or instructions for constructing a cube. However, the distortion and extension of “sides” beyond the pictorial frame frustrate any attempt to imagine its construction. While Rowland is described as more explicitly interested in social relations, both artists negotiate the viewer’s access to space.

Moving into more specific sites than spaces, Sondra Perry and Nona Faustine ask where a black body has been/is now situated. This is an intentionally objectifying statement; Faustine’s photograph From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013) explicitly places a body (the artist’s own) at an intersection in the financial district, standing naked on a wooden box with shackled wrists, on display. The viewer is conscious of their gaze. The choice of site does not immediately carry meaning, as the sign for a Tumi store and AT&T kiosk indicate that this is a relatively contemporary scene in New York’s Financial District. We learn from the text that this is the site of a former slave market, where countless bodies would have been examined, objectified, and evaluated as property that could be transplanted into the white space of a stranger’s home. The evident comparison of black bodies across time is eerie, and the fact that the viewer is still in a position of examination is troubling. This perhaps is why Faustine chose to reveal the significance of the site only in the text: the distinct experience of realizing its meaning is important. Perry reconstructs the white space Faustine problematizes (the space of a stranger or white master) as one of torment with Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I (2013). Photoshopped (objectified and deconstructed) dancers move desperately, emphatically within the confines of a corner in a blank room. Few architectural details reveal the nature of the space, yet it is clear that these bodies are supposed to disappear within it. Instead of arms, legs, and torsos, the viewer sees a grey blur occasionally interrupted by the misplaced line of floor meeting wall. (Architectural space is displaced onto the body just as the body experiences displacement in space.) Our only indication of the identity of the dancers is in the signification of their race — their hair — which in turn becomes the reason that they must disappear, the reason they must move so frantically through space. The trauma of their confinement in this space parallels Faustine’s refusal to belong in a slave market.

Specific to the site of the gallery itself is Torkwase Dyson’s 2015 wall painting, Strange Fruit (Dignity in Hand), which relates to the geometry of Loving and Rowland but seems more interested in conveying meaning. Representations of demographic statistics first come to mind when taking in Torkwase’s grid of painted dots. Again, the viewer only understands its meaning through the exhibition text. We learn that the painting on the wall commemorates “a fraction of the nearly 4,000 lynchings recorded in American history.” Structure communicates the presence of a narrative, but the narrative only unfolds through text.

Narrative is again constructed with ruby onyinyechi amanze’s that low hanging kind of sun… (2015), where the spacing of mixed media elements relates to the layers of that narrative. Here, not even the text reveals what the drawing must contain for the artist. The exquisitely rendered face of a woman kisses the masked face of another body melting into a mermaid’s tail. Three motorcycles drift into the web of a flock of birds nestling into the charcoal hair of another woman, drawn diagonally opposite from the first.

More explicit in creating a narrative, Talwst’s jewelry boxes encouraged the viewer to hold contemporary memories of racial violence close. The miniature scale of depiction should not be confused with scarcity of detail or meaning. In Por Qué? (2014), the killing of Eric Garner is recreated in front of a white American flag, reminiscent of flags by Jasper Johns. Within our culture of wealth and privilege, jewelry and commitments, what cases of cultural violence do we snap shut and hide away?

A literary mind could draw proximate parallels between titles: Jack Whitten’s Psychic Intersection becomes Billie Zangewa’s Divine Intervention (2015), or Andy Robert’s After Mass (2015) transmutes into the aftermath of Talwst’s Por Qué?, and from there into the math of Perry’s Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I. A visual mind may find representational rhymes: a wooden sculpture, Mother and Child (1993) by Elizabeth Catlett, stands in front of a silk tapestry of another mother and child by Billie Zangewa. The arrangement of elements in Troy Michie’s STRAND, CABLE, TWINE (2015) seems tied to the spatial arrangement of drawings in amanze’s work. Money transfers invoked by Pass-Thru relate to David Hammons’s piggy bank, Too Obvious (1996). Adrian Piper’s thought-bubble portrait painting hangs near Tony Lewis’ speech bubble Make His Mouth Bigger, Angrier (2015). Melvin Edwards’s Working Thought (1985) concretizes the slave shackles depicted in Faustine’s photograph.

This is not to say that these works are unproductive in and of themselves. A constellation is about the larger picture, but the curation of the show focused too narrowly on connecting dots based on narrative and representation.

The post Drawing a Line: “A Constellation” at the Studio Museum in Harlem appeared first on artcritical.

October 27, 1915 to January 10, 2016
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, 215-763-8100

consists of objects that, whether artificial or natural, are subordinate to man as elements of use, manipulation and enjoyment; these objects are smaller than ourselves, within arm’s reach, and owe their presence and place to a human action, a purpose.

His definition nicely hints at why it is a distinctive product of modern mercantile cultures, societies that thus celebrate their ability to assemble supplies of such objects. Still life is an art of plenitude. Indeed it would be worthwhile making a comprehensive list of the artifacts represented in the still life works in this exhibition: biscuits; dead animals; eyeglasses; fine china; fish; foodstuffs; heaps of flowers, fruits, and vegetables; hunting horns; insects; letters, business cards and other written materials; live birds; living and dead plants; oysters and shellfish; piles of books; paper money; picture frames; violins and sheet music; and watch gears. I’ve rarely attended an exhibition with so many depicted things on display. Since the early 19th Century, on the evidence demonstrated here, the United States has been a prosperous manufacturing culture.

Still life painting poses compelling challenges for its commentators. Interpreting history painting involves identifying the story displayed. Analyzing landscapes typically requires knowledge of the site depicted, and discussion of portraits often demands information about their subject. But since the identity of many (though not all) objects in these American still lifes is visually obvious, what is the legitimate role of commentary? Some these 130 still lifes, I grant, show strange subjects. The exhibition opens with two by Raphaelle Peale, the founder of the American still life tradition: Catalogue Deception (after 1813), a small trompe l’oeil image of a worn exhibition catalogue; and Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (1822), in which a white cloth obstructs our view of the female nude. And it concludes with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) and Jasper Johns’ Painted Bronze (1960), a coffee can container of paintbrushes, which are cast in bronze. But most of the subjects shown here are not unfamiliar.

We learn a great deal about America from still lifes, the exhibition catalogue argues, because these banal things at hand express our social history, define our relationships and illustrate our dominating personal desires and fears. Thus the currency and stamps in John Haberle’s The Changes of Time (1888) illustrate American history; WiIliam Michael Harnett’s After the Hunt (1885) presents the implements of the huntsmen and some of their animals caught; and Kate Safe’s The Answer is No (1958), painted when she was going blind – by depicting a vast array of blank canvases – shows her grim future. But merely identifying the subjects of these pictures, as I (following Schapiro) have done, does not identify what is perhaps their most aesthetically significant feature, the ways in which the groupings of these objects are composed. Just as, when bringing flowers home from the florist, you display them in a pleasing arrangement, so successful still life artists arrange their objects with care, constructing what might be called a group portrait of these things. Consider, for example, William Michael Harnett’s Music (1886), in which you see a rare Cremona violin balanced on top of a pile of sheet music, with books, a vase and a fine carpet. As in most of these still lifes, the objects are depicted in fine-focus naturalistic detail. But how strikingly unnatural is this composition, in which the violin extends over the edge of the table, pressing towards the viewer like the saint in some baroque altarpiece. A similar analysis could be offered of many of the pictures—the presentation of these things thus reflecting our aesthetic interests. The Art of American Still Life is an important exhibition because of the quality and quantity of art displayed, because the catalogue presents a challenging and plausible thesis, and above all because the art is such fun to look at.

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The Broad is a commanding addition to Los Angeles’ downtown cultural artery along Grand Avenue, situated beside the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, and across from the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA). The Broad, nearly 10 years in the making, opened its doors to the public last month, presenting Edith and Eli’s massive collection of blue-chip artworks free of charge. Preceding the construction of their name-sake, the Broads had established historical ties to every major Los Angeles museum, including LA MOCA, the Hammer, and more recently the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) — a sizable gallery built on-site at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) in 2008. The permanent collection exhibited at Grand Avenue will be familiar to Angelenos from earlier presentations at LACMA’s Renzo Piano-designed BCAM wing.

In terms of the building itself, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro refer to the Broad’s unique design as a “veil-and-vault” structure, consisting of a fiber-reinforced concrete façade, or veil, that allows for controlled, natural light to permeate the gallery spaces surrounding the “vault” — a state of the art climate-controlled storage unit at the building’s core.

For the inaugural exhibition, Joanne Heyler, a 20-year Broad Foundation veteran and director of the nascent museum, has selected more than 250 works by some 60 artists in what she refers to as “a sweeping, chronological journey.” This presentation is indeed a journey, one that communicates the history of the international art market of the past 30 years, reified by these artists’ positions within such an axiomatically authoritative institution as the Broad. Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation further reinforces this point.

Ed Ruscha’s companion pieces, Old Tech Chem Building (2003) and Blue Collar Tech Chem (1992), open an exhibition of recently acquired works on the museum’s first floor. The works depict the 11-year transformation of a fictional “Tech Chem” facility into a space newly named “Fat Boy.” The 1992 work depicts a grey night sky, which in 2003 bleeds red. The phrase “Fat Boy” recalls the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 — nicknamed “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” respectively. These paintings serve as an intense opening to the show: while the present is foreboding, the future perhaps radioactive, Ruscha instructs us not to be nostalgic for the past. Tech Chem limns our present experience as a product of our dark origins.

Following Ruscha’s powerful introduction, I was disappointed that the curators failed to draw any relationship between Mark Grotjahn’s poignant formal studies and the more explicitly political works on display. Grotjahn’s 2007 Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) consists of a series of rotating mathematical grids — vertical lines become horizontal and vantage points slant and skew. The artist’s black geometric shapes flutter to life along the length of the series, creating optical impressions that change as the viewer moves in the space. The wall text reads that these shifting vantage points provide “room for many perceptions of and points of entry into the work.” It is precisely this awareness of the capacity of artworks to read multiply, for meaning to bend and shift, which could have successfully brought historically disparate works in dialogue with one another.

The museum’s main gallery upstairs opens with Jeff Koons’ monumental Tulips (1995-2004), surrounded on all sides by Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1990), a nine-panel installation in which the words “Run Dog Run” are stenciled in repetition using black enamel on aluminum. Wool breaks apart the words themselves, the R and U placed above the N, the D and O placed above the G. With the dismemberment of these three-letter words, Wool highlights their semiotic function, encouraging the viewer to understand them as formal signifiers divorced from their meaning within the phrase.

This relationship between signifiers and concepts was explored by American artist Jasper Johns 30 years prior with his masterpiece, Watchman. This 1964 assemblage highlights the artist’s radical refusal of any single identification: how exactly is his composition ordered? Which paints are laid down first? Which are stripped away? Do his colors prefigure their descriptions? Johns’ Watchman mirrors the scale of the human form — reinforced by the cast of a human leg in the upper register — and, as such, demands to be understood as contingent upon the viewer’s own physicality, identity and experience.

Glenn Ligon also works at this intersection of language and identity, as evidenced by his series Runaways from 1993. For these works, Ligon asked friends to draft descriptions of him as though they were reporting a missing person to the police, and was shocked to find that they recalled the 19^th-century runaway-slave ads he had researched for the series. The descriptions vary widely from piece to piece — different features are highlighted, others glossed over. While the exhibition privileges formal and historical relationships over conceptual ones, it would have been inspiring to examine Wool, Johns and Ligon’s work side-by-side, as a means of highlighting the discursive production of meaning in all three. Instead, Ligon’s installation is predictably flattened, reduced to what the curators call “the parallel senses of insider and outsider in us all.”

Mysteriously, the late activist-artist David Wojnarowicz shares one of the final galleries with art star Julian Schnabel, an odd juxtaposition that the wall text fails to engage with or defend. The Wojnarowicz works are striking and impassioned, in particular The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of The U.S.A., from 1986. Here, a crucified figure is undergirded by layers of painted-over newsprint with the phrases “10 years,” “life and death,” “in the womb” and “foul” left bare. Veins extend from the voodoo figure and wrap around images of mosquitos, cowboys, blood red steak and a hand literally covered in a blood. This is a work about AIDS, homophobia, fear of infection and government inaction resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Like other works in the exhibition, Wojnarowicz’ pulsing political message is tamped down by Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation that resists social-historical examination. The Broad falls victim to a universalizing narrative that presupposes that the meaning attached to these artworks is fixed, conveyed to a disembodied spectator that approaches the work in isolation, divorced from her own social experience. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “veil-and-vault” concept then serves as a poignant lens through which to understand The Broad’s political stakes. It’s all right there in the architecture — the museum’s surface appears porous, penetrable and malleable. However, this veil is merely a symbol of access that instead serves to reinforce the institutionally fixed, guarded and rich marrow within.

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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June 21 to July 31, 2015
299 Grand Street (between Eldridge and Allen streets)
New York, 212 510 7646

Marc Straus’s recently closed summer group show, “Gray Would Be the Color, If I Had a Heart,” showcased nearly 30 artists, spread through three galleries on two floors. Each artwork was rendered primarily in grayscale and the show went far beyond grisaille studies, including gelatin silver photographs, drawings, prints, and sculptures. That kind of excess is, although not ideal, pretty much to be expected with a lot of summer group shows. “Gray…” exceeded many similar exhibitions in its more-or-less consistent tone; and it basically achieved its aim of selecting works intended to be, as the press release puts it, “Not completely hopeless. Not utterly bleak. Not fully shrouded in darkness.” The maudlin grimness, which is supposed to be tinged with optimism, is excessive, too. But there were some really great artworks, silver lining or no.

Kind of surprisingly, few of them were monochromes. Although the show celebrates gray, it doesn’t remain there alone, and it recognizes that the color itself is broad: cool grays, warm ones, dark, light, tinted with pink, or blue, brown, orange, nothing at all, reflective, matte, symbolic or concrete, and so on.

There are contrasts from the start: near the gallery’s entrance is a photocollage diptych by VALIE EXPORT, showing a woman’s face towering over and observing a hypnagogic modernist cityscape, set next to two small assemblages by Kristjan Gudmundsson, made by adhering mechanical pencil leads in ordered rows on sheets of aluminum. In a nearby corner of the gallery, Rona Pondick’s man-headed dog sculpture, Fox (1998 – 99), recalls sci-fi horror from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Mars Attacks! It uses an image variously intended as horrific or absurd. One realizes that chimeras — aesthetic, biological, conceptual, whatever — are usually both.

Here also hangs a totemic punching bag by Jeffrey Gibson, a tight drawing by Joyce Pensato and Matt Ducklo’s South Parkway East Church (2011), a black-and-white photo of a small bus, used by a Memphis church, locked behind a chain-link pen in the middle of an empty parking lot at night. Like a lot of the work here, these simple, spare images are iconic and direct.

Upstairs, the show doesn’t hang quite so neatly together, or at least some of the works in it fall flat. Diana Shpungin’s A Failure of Memory (2015) suffers from a bland execution, as does Grayson Cox’s Vent (2015). The artists’ material choices are unclear: why is Shpungin’s wastebasket cut so loosely in half? Why are the shorn edges lined with plaster-cast material? Why is Cox’s painting framed in a large plywood casing? Why does the frame look so unfinished compared to the naturalism of the painting embedded within it at an angle?

Although Zlatan Vehabovic’s image of a large, dead whale, called Rock Bottom Riser (2014), is painted fussily, the image has deep roots in Dutch printmaking, and it’s a powerful one: a morbid leviathan. One reason that the icon is so common, besides its allegorical value, is because its one that recurs under human guidance. Whales have been threatened for centuries, first by large-scale hunting, and now by climactic catastrophe. Two works by Sam Trioli, hung side-by-side — Harry S. Truman (2014) and Untitled (Vibrations) from 2013 — show in photorealistic detail the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, and the man who ordered such weapons dropped on Japan 70 years ago. These, at least, are utterly bleak.

Also upstairs is a small and reserved etching by Jasper Johns: an image of one of his pewter-colored flashlight sculptures, titled Flashlight (1967 – 69). Johns was a gray eminence who sort of inspired the much-remarked on work of another of the color’s most famous painters, Brice Marden, whose early monochromes likely subsequently influence some of the other artists on view, such as Jessica Dickinson, Geoff Hippenstiel and Jim Lee. These artists are still exploring the marriage of surface, color and image. And for whatever reason (there are probably several that the artists would cite) gray is a good way to do that.

Finally, Dove Bradshaw’s 2013 painting, Contingency (Snow Tracks), shows a really concrete, absolute way to think about color’s use in art. Bradshaw made the painting by applying liver of sulfur to a silver-coated canvas (the former substance reacts to patinate the latter). Her technique here and in other works uses chance-based methods — developed by Johns’s friends Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage — in order to create images rooted in the precise relationship of one chemical to another. There’s nothing more factual than that. It’s not morose or bright, just true. Another fact is that this show had a lot of interesting work, a mélange. I don’t know about anyone else’s heart, but mine is there: it’s a gray fact.

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Though trompe-l’œil in its purest form is generally considered aesthetic froth, a stream of modern practices from Op Art to Arte Povera found new ways to exploit perceptual enigmas born of visual confusion. But it was Jasper Johns whose painting opened the neo-Duchampian era by combining a deft painterly touch with a more cerebral version of the same parlor trick. Depicting the already flat image of a map, or painting the word blue with red paint introduced philosophical inquiry under the auspices of a visual gag. But significantly, Johns remained a painter, meaning the self-depreciation implied in his paradoxes reveals a shared confusion between artist and viewer, reflective of both painting fluency as a medium and the human limitations of perception. Johns’s early work represents the watershed moment between the fall of self-discovery inherent in painting and the ascent of the assured and declarative, if not dogmatic tone of what became conceptual art.

What’s interesting about Paul Sietsema’s exhibition at Matthew Marks this month is how it begs comparison to Johns, as Sietsema, with similar confidence in painting as a visual medium, takes the viewer beyond visual gags to again provoke difficult questions pertaining to the meaning of a painted image. Where he differs from Johns is in his uneven use of painting as a method, which he applies brilliantly in some pieces and to almost no effect in others. The discrepancy has to do with Sietsema’s apparent wish to be both painter and pure conceptual artist. Consequently, he is divided against himself.

The gallery, in synch with the artist’s often-articulated purposes presents the work with typical speculative hyperbole as, “… address[ing] the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, and the systems in which these objects circulate” — a program meant to train the viewer’s focus on attendant associations accompanying images of telephones, coins, newspapers, and industrial labelling. However, like any artist, Sietsema’s technique best reflects his intuition and sensibility, and is apparently hands-on and informed by a painstaking construction of visually juxtaposed realities. Regrettably, these elaborate processes sometimes prove irrelevant to the efficacy of his final image. The result is that some pieces are far more compelling than others because their technical complexity provides the greater part of their visual and conceptual punch.

The more successful canvases — as Johns often were — pair common imagery with the viscous medium of thoughtfully applied color, yet with the significant difference that Sietsema’s paint is itself depicted by a trompe-l’œil manipulation of the medium. Where Johns used a leaden encaustic membrane to keep the paint layer foremost in the viewer’s mind, while allowing flat imagery to rest uncomfortably on the picture plane, Sietsema creates convincing illusions of paint puddles and painted objects that function as a layer in a peeling deconstruction of the picture plane itself, advancing beyond what Johns did 60 years ago.

White Painting (2014) joins the illusion of a floor or table surface with the linen surface of the painting, then places on this visually amalgamated plane the image of an old telephone, coated with the same white paint that forms the puddle in which it sits. The surface beyond the perimeter of the paint puddle is scumbled with a duller white, revealing a section of bare linen at the bottom of the frame. One’s grasp of the illusion is then challenged by the fact that the shadow of the phone halts at the edge of the puddle, leaving the remaining painted canvas as flat as one knows it to be. Its effect is truly bewildering.

Closer to Johns’s preference for flat imagery like maps and flags, Red Painting juxtaposes several small areas of exposed linen within what appears to be a physically disturbed puddle of dried red paint. Optical confusion ensues as the light, masterfully implied in the modelling of a disturbed paint surface, is contradicted by the texture of the actual linen, which appears to be bathed in the even light of the gallery. There are other canvases that play with coins slid through paint puddles and across newspaper fragments.

Ironically, by raising the bar with real and determined skill, he manages to make his other work shallower by comparison. The link in these other pieces between the medium used and the subject addressed is missing. What he refers to as drawings — paintings made with ink — do not transcend their obviously photographic source material. By a transfer technique inadequately described in the press release, Sietsema paints black and white photos of studio activity, reminiscent of late-1970s performance art; he uses halftone patterning, which has long been a cliché in both conceptual art and commercial design meant to mimic “serious” art. Wrapping the image around the frame, as Sietsema does, merely adds a conventional assertion of postmodern cheek.

Several paintings, apparently products of a similar method, depict the rutted surface of weathered stones carved with a single date, yet neither offer much more than the mystery behind the dates. Like On Karawa’s Today paintings, Sietsema’s use of paint as a medium for these images is void of any purpose specific to the medium of paint itself. The artist’s hand is all but invisible, leaving one with the reliable supposition that in spite of how many hours of brushwork it must have taken to complete the image, the viewer remains, in essence, confronted with a manipulated photograph. In similar fashion, several films in the exhibition fail to transcend their considerable technical dependency, leaving only their deadpan content. If anything, Sietsema’s few genuinely marvelous paintings suggest that painting cannot be used as just another visual medium for addressing preconceived ideas. Painting’s timeless relevance is inseparable from its contrary and uncooperative nature.

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March 15 to September 1, 2014
The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries, Third Floor
11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City

With the exception of a series of monotypes of the numbers 0-9 done during the same time frame as the rest of the work on view here, and superfluous in this context except for the fact that they remind viewers of the stuff in the history books, all of the ink and pencil drawings, watercolor and oil paintings, and aquatints in this exhibition were inspired by a photograph of a famous painter, Lucian Freud, commissioned by an even more famous painter, Francis Bacon. Along with this, it is also important to know that Johns used a custom made rubber stamp that reads “Regrets, Jasper Johns” in many of these works. This stamp was allegedly used by the artist on occasion to decline unwanted invitations rather than replying to them in more time consuming ways, even though it is hard to imagine that he took the time to ink up a rubber stamp and place it firmly against an unwanted invite rather than simply ignore it.

One has to wonder how the recalcitrant octogenarian, who has rejected critical analysis of his art throughout his career (The Critic Sees, 1964, and many statements made by the artist through the years attest to this), would feel about the curator’s pre-packaged analysis of his works.

The other thing that stands out about this exhibition is that a portion of it consists of copper plates and the earlier states of the final aquatints on display. This tells us that the curators believe that the art going public, the hundreds of thousands of people who will traffic this exhibition before it closes, will want to know all about Johns’ working practice and to see unfinished works of art, as if they provide some insight into the final product, which is a dubious claim. Beyond the wonder and joy we experience while beholden to the targets and flag in the museum’s permanent collection and on display consistently for decades, which is something that is true for an extremely small group of works of art, all of us should want to know how Johns gets there, how he climbs that mountain, regardless of how good the outcome is. Which is another way of saying that all that Johns touches is gold, not only with regards to the market value of his work, but also with regards to the quality of it. The fatal flaw of this exhibition is the notion that Johns can do no wrong, based solely on decades old work that has been neatly and tightly fitted into the mainstream art historical narrative.

Visually speaking, the works on view here that are the loosest and most interesting to look at are the ink on plastic paintings, because the medium used, the pooling of the ink, the controlled drips, the subtle and deftly created gradations separating one section of the fragmented compositions from another, hold our interest thanks to their variety, fragility and luminosity. Art historically speaking, along with Rauschenberg, Johns is known as Abstract Expressionism’s assassin, the cool-headed conceptualist who changed the way artists approach subject matter and their emotional involvement in the art making process. But looking at what still matters to Johns at this point in his life, what stands out are the affinities he has with classic Modernism rather than the differences. If anything holds these recent works, executed in 2012-13, together, it is the artist’s love of subtlety, nuanced handling of materials, creating textures and dense layering and piecing together of disparate gestures and concepts of pictorial space, all of which were part of the Modernist approach to painting. The four specific ink on plastic paintings I am referring to, each measuring 27-1/2 inches by 36 inches, celebrate the fact that the interplay of control and accident could only be the result of many years of doing. Like other works in the show, the figure/ground relationship clearly defined in the photograph that allegedly inspired a host of other works, all but disappears and is replaced by a complicated framework where everything becomes disparate parts, one no more subject matter than the other, and all held together by a unifying technique. In other words, it is the doing that takes precedent rather than the showing. Also, Johns makes abstract imagery in these ink drawings that becomes something new and never seen before, a photograph of a figure in an interior becomes a dense landscape where allegiance to verisimilitude is replaced by the will of the artist, in that intuitive patterning and balancing of compositional elements such as line and tone trump the original inspiration.

The largest work in this exhibition, an oil painting, measuring 67 inches by 96 inches, is particularly static, with a crisply divided foreground and background, one dark, one lighter, with no interplay between the two except a simplistic shifting of what comes before what. It is big, it’s an oil painting, and it’s painted by Jasper johns, but lets be honest—it’s mediocre.

Johns uses doubling, mirroring or reversing, as the wall text notes, and elevates negative empty spaces to a central visual theme by recontextualizing the missing or torn away portion of the original photograph that inspired him, making it the central shape or form in many of these images. The missing piece of the photograph is copied or doubled: the floor in the photograph and the missing portion of photograph become a weird foreground plane. Unfortunately these reversals, doublings, etc., do not necessarily lead to successful compositions. It is handy material for curators and critics to bandy about, but what do they mean if they don’t lead to successful works of art?

A skull, meanwhile, appears in several of the oil paintings and aquatints, resting atop this doubled form, which becomes a tombstone shape. Of course this convenient memento mori fits in nicely with an exhibit of any artist’s late period work. Johns must be thinking of you know what, right?

Overall, this exhibition seems like an exercise in shoring up an artist’s reputation, a way for the museum to convince us that they are right to memorialize Johns’ earlier works in a very codified timeline. Johns use of photographic imagery is also nothing special in that he doesn’t take advantage of photographic effects or things unique to the medium to enhance the drawing, printing, or painting process. Yes, the particular photograph he uses easily provides fodder for writers, including the authors of wall text and reviews, because its provenance is steeped in art history, but otherwise it is thin visual gruel, not interesting in and of itself and hardly worth multiple visitations as a source of inspiration. Johns successfully undermines any narrative or emotional aspects of the photograph, but the inert and monotonous compositions we are left with are nothing much to look at, regardless of the bigger than life icon, forever memorialized in the art history books, they were made by.

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November 3 to December 15, 2013

41 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-226-7108

Mike Yaniro’s debut solo show at Room East consists of eleven wall-mounted works, which exist in some cosmological place between drawing, painting, and sculpture. The pieces varyingly traffic in recognizable language, figurative images, and obscure, process-based forms. Ultimately, what keeps them from fitting easily into an established artistic category–especially that of drawing–is the same characteristic that could be said to unite them: a persistent and formally esoteric philosophical logic.

There are four identifiable series in the show. The upstairs gallery features two similarly-sized rectangular text-centric works installed in the center of adjoining walls, and between them, a pair of graphite drawings on paper which portray high-contrast renderings of what appear to be hands and fingers. On a third wall there are two framed works on stretched latex that each crudely depict eight line-drawn versions (or is it stages?) of a caricatured animal-like form. In the downstairs space, four unframed abstractions, also on latex, present a formal and thematic counterpoint to the latter.  In the center two-thirds of these large-sized hanging latex sheets, hazy clusters of rectangular grey impressions have been printed.

In contrast to the majority of word-based art, Yaniro’s pieces are not immediately “readable” on either a conceptual or a linguistic level. In the two examples upstairs and a third downstairs, flat monochrome fields of acrylic (red, beige, and grey) are interspersed with stenciled-out snippets of word-forms, numbers, and punctuation. These figures make little syntactical sense in any way one might try to read them; for instance “URAccato” runs into  “91/151/”, line break: “ADR/rid SPRAY.” Ultimately though, something emerges in their lack of lucidity. A few words or recognizable fragments of words, such as “Spray. “Local.” “Plate.” “Exhau,” seem to reference technical writing and industrial objects. The strangeness of this is complimented by something unorthodox in the facture of the objects; the substrate of the work is off-white PVC plastic sheeting commonly utilized in sign-making, and it shows through where the letter shapes have been masked off.

These pieces are almost commercial signage turned inwards, and an association is bridged between their non-communicativeness as artworks and the ubiquitous world the material and the language comes from. By and large, the works in the show seem to result from something similarly searching and analytical. Just as the red beige and grey pieces fixate on language, other equally abstract works can be said to linger over the dynamics of imagistic representation. The untitled hanging latex pieces downstairs, created through the transfer of xerox toner onto  rubber sheeting, at first glance resemble indefinite printerly accretions. In actuality, the impressions are formed from a mimetic practice in which Yaniro transfers specific images from his personal archive unto the surface of the latex. But this process is an operation that in technical terms doesn’t work; the selected images lose their content, and what we are left with is the distinctive knotty and textured amalgamations of their traces.

The work tests the communicative potential of the subject matter and processes at hand, and in the resulting deformations–in other words, all of the pieces–there is an inherent, latent psychology. This manifests distinctively in the two framed works that feature repetitive drawings of rabbit or snail-like forms, described in thick ink lines (Rickling 1 and Rickling 2, both 2013). The figures are derived from facsimiles of drawings found in a historical book detailing the outlawed practice of psychotherapy in Nazi Germany. Without knowing the charged images’ meaning or derivation, Yaniro has reproduced it in a manner that builds on its mysterious but purportedly therapeutic back-story.

It is not easy to delineate a single meaning or endpoint to the work.  Potential references and intimations of emotion cycle through it in spite of the austerity. But as is the case with the Rickling drawings, the art inhabits a crossing-place between culture, the objects found in the wider world, and an individual’s cogitation of symbols, images, and messages. This all stands somewhat in contrast to the seductive and purportedly meaningful surfaces that seems to dominate the work of many young artists. Yaniro uses language and images to conflate symbol with gesture in a way that palpably relates to Jasper Johns’ maps, flags, and cast faces. Another artist called to mind is Bruce Nauman, whose work seems also to prevalently break down communication, most often to the underlying human urgencies of internalizing and externalizing.

Yaniro’s work could also be said to advance a root awareness of the borders of a self. The most clearly defined figurative representations in the show can be understood as a coda to this idea. The drawings Caric 1 and Caric 2 (both 2013) depict close-ups of fingers and sharply defined fingernails in the midst of uncertain tasks or gestures.  Because of something strange and clinical in the perspective, what should be familiar and human appears foreign and uninhabited. The image is clear and isolated but the subject is deconstructed.

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Hiroko Ikegami
The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-262-01425-0
277 pp.

Jasper Johns: Drawing Over at Castelli Gallery
November 6 – December 18, 2010
18 East 77th St.
New York City 212 240 4470

Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are utilitarian artifacts–a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a urinal. Whatever his intentions, these objects now look like sleek early modernist sculptures. Joseph Cornell extended Duchamp’s way of thinking, collaging images, photographs and all sorts of antique memorabilia. Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway: The Life And Work Of Joseph Cornell reveals maybe too much about his unhappily repressed erotic life, which found perfect expression in his little worlds of exquisite objects set behind protective glass. Marvelous as they are, these works of art are precious. No truly great artist can hold the world at a distance, as Cornell did in his life and his art. Imagine Cornell collecting his collage elements not in Manhattan’s thrift stores, but abandoned on the street. Suppose, furthermore, that he took an aggressively populist interest in politics and public life. And imagine then that he discarded his confining boxes and, boldly set his collages on the floor or wall, working on the scale of classic Abstract Expressionism. Imagining Cornell so dramatically transformed is, I grant, a utopian exercise, for it would have required a personality transplant. But fortunately there is no need to do that, for we are lucky enough to have had Robert Rauschenberg. “I’m for ‘yes,’” Rauschenberg once said. “‘No’ excludes. I’m for inclusion.” (p.34)

An artist, we expect, is someone who creates something essentially new. This exhibition teaches us that we need to reject that well-established way of thinking. Rauschenberg creates by combining already existing things. Combining cardboard, wood branch, and lace curtain in Untitled (Venetian) (1973) – no problem. Juxtaposing cardboard, sand, Day-Glo paint, spoked wheels, pillow, and hose in Untitled (Early Egyptian) (1974) –why not?  He can make art out of almost nothing, as in Vow (Jammer) (1976) composed of sewn fabric and rattan pol. Nothing could be simpler than The White Paintings (1951), canvases painted with white latex house paint. But he can also do elaborate creations, like Palladian Xmas (Spread) (1980), which is made of solvent transfer, acrylic, and collage on wood panel. Following Surrealist tradition, Cornell sought to display elective affinities. Like lovers, previously unknown to one another, who discover on a crowded city street that they are predestined passionate partners, his juxtapositions of objects are poetic. Rauschenberg thinks about art making in different, more plausible way. He demonstrates that the world is far more aesthetically fascinating (but less visually mysterious) than we have imagined.

We think of an aesthete as focused on the here and now. But Rauschenberg, so John Richardson suggests in his catalogue essay, was too absorbed by the future to bother about the past. Maybe Untitled (Late Kabal American Zephyr) (1985), composed of rubber cycle wheels on metal structure with hand crank, is a joke about Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. But mostly Rauschenberg so radically transforms this tradition as to make any search for precedents irrelevant.  Academics have already devoted great deal of attention to his iconography. In fact, however, that is a problematic procedure, since for him, it seems, almost any things can be combined. “I avoid images that are fixed,” he said. “You get that and it is just illustration.” (p.31)

I have no idea what Rainbow Harp (Roci Tibet) (1984), fabric, metal rings, and wire on aluminum stand with animal skull and turquoise, means, but that doesn’t keep me from enjoying it.  I do ‘get’ Petrified Relic from the Gyro Clinic (Kabal American Zephyr) (1981), an assisted ready made consisting of metal table with metal wheel, rule, and duct. And Untitled (Kabal American Zephyr) (1983), composed of a metal chair with metal object and advertising thermometer also is easy to understand. So too is Watchdog (2007), rusted metal buckets on mirrored aluminum composite base, which is simple, and no doubt silly. But it works. Rauschenberg loves to include works from other artists within his art, as in Short Circuit (1955), in which the copy of a Jasper Johns’ Flag by Elaine Sturtevant and a painting by his wife Susan Weil compose a collage whose support is a rustic hinged wooden cabinet.  Art Box (Combine Painting) (1963), oil on wood crate and paper with enameled telephone sign, Plexiglas, and wing nuts, looks like an anticipation of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964). But how different it is!

It would be unfair to compare Castelli’s small uptown show Jasper Johns Drawing Over, a display of thirty drawings executed from the early 1960s to the present, against this massive exhibition.  Still, comparing them reveals much about these artists, whose personal relationship was important for both of them. Made in a variety of media – acrylic, watercolor, ink, gouache, pastel, etc. – Johns’s drawings are executed over prints. In this body of work, an image previously created by the artist has been reworked and transformed into something else. Thus Land’s End, Johns’ monochromatic intaglio from 1979, became a vibrant pastel at the artist’s hand, and a new work: Land’s End, 1979/1989.  In this show, as in his recent paintings, Johns obsessively reworks a small group of subjects, going over and over his themes, like Bach in his Goldberg Variations or Mendelssohn in Songs without Words. Johns thus turns inward, whilst Rauschenberg would embrace everything and everyone.

If Johns is our Mallarmé, Rauschenberg is our Walt Whitman. One of his few unfulfilled dreams, Richardson says, was to photograph the world in its entirety, big as life.  You would have to be seriously emotionally stingy not to respond to this irresistible show of our most open and winning artist. At a press conference in Japan during the 1980s, a member of the audience asked Rauschenberg to name his greatest fear. “That I might run out of world,” he replied. (p.11) That never happened. Some critics complain that Rauschenberg was not sufficiently self-critical. (He made more than six thousand works of art.) Gagosian’s exhibition shows that they are totally wrong. Like Andy Warhol, the most different artist imaginable, he was often great. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” Rauschenberg said when he was seventy-four. “Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” He never stopped screwing things up. I am in awe of his amazing generosity.

Our globalized art world, in which Gagosian has branches in Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, and Rome, and many artists travel between America, Asia and Europe, was created during Rauschenberg’s lifetime. There has been a great deal of discussion about the politics involved in the export of Abstract Expressionism.  Now Hiroko Ikegami extends that analysis. Her marvelous The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art reveals how supportive curators and dealers in Paris, Venice, Stockholm and Tokyo made it possible for Rauschenberg to become a superstar. Although she has very interesting, albeit brief remarks on how to read his allegories, she focuses on analyzing the system of collectors and curators who made possible his career. Early on Rauschenberg had important exhibitions in four cities, Paris, Venice, Stockholm, Tokyo—all part of the “Free World.” Ikegami discusses the role of Ileana Sonnabend in Paris; Alan Solomon in Venice; Pontus Hultén in Stockholm; and a number of artists and critics in Tokyo. Rauschenberg, Ikegami argues, was generally seen as a very American artist, which sometimes involved downplaying the politically critical and homoerotic dimensions of his art.  Her very tactful narrative, which is an amazing synthesis of materials in many languages, has the feeling of total reliability.

In Paris Rauschenberg suffered from rivalry with French artists, and in Venice his success was much resented both by some Italians and by jealous American rivals. Monogram, purchased for $15,000, now is a symbol for the Moderna Museet, but in Stockholm not everyone was pleased when Hultén paid serious attention to contemporary American art. And in Japan, Rauschenberg had French rivals.  His personal generosity, openness and tact played an important role in his success; he was generally gifted at avoiding unproductive conflicts. Some of the Abstract Expressionists traveled to Europe, and Sam Francis lived in Europe and Japan. But before Rauschenberg, no major painter exhibited and worked in so many countries. So far as I can see, however, these extensive travels didn’t decisively his art. He didn’t speak French, Italian, Swedish or Japanese, and never stayed anywhere very long.

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