[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/396612984″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Video One: Anthony McCall, Byron Kim

Video Two: Catherine Murphy, Jamian Juliano-Villani

The post The Review Panel from February 6th: Podcast appeared first on artcritical.

Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

The post From the archives: Eva Díaz in 2013, with Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti appeared first on artcritical.

I wanted out of my hometown of Baltimore, a city marked by racial unrest where, shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, there was looting, violence, and death. Despite its role at the forefront of the civil rights movement, Baltimore was burdened by a long history of segregation and racial polarity that still exists today. I wanted to get away and move to a place where racial tension could melt away. I wanted to do something where race was not an issue. I moved north to New York City where I studied and became a painter and a professor, beginning a life fully immersed in the liberal arena of fine art.

Recently, however, I am not sure that the place I sought actually exists. As I look around the art world, what I now see is a kind of racial tribalization that seems to trade on kinship-based organizations and reciprocal exchange. A social-club culture where exclusive membership comes with privileges: fashionable dinners, parties, entrée to certain galleries and collectors, etc. All are welcome at all events, but you must be enrolled as a member to benefit. In short, I see an art-world racial divide. I question the reasons for this divided structure and wonder if the art world now needs to rethink how black artists are included and promoted, allowing for a broadening of the visual dialog on race.

Back in the 1990’s, some New York curators began a movement to change the direction of museums by creating large exhibitions around ideas of racial and sexual identity. They fought for the right of minority groups to be seen and heard. They transformed the museum culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s, effecting big changes in institutions that seriously needed to be changed. Their work provided an opportunity for artists of color to have exhibitions in museums and galleries and to be included in major collections. Even though power inequalities continued to exist for minority groups, some progress was made by this formation of a group identity. Here racial difference became a uniting force, instrumentalizing art for a larger social engagement.

Despite those curatorial efforts, today all is not equal, and a divide remains. But the original intent of those who initiated a self-generated identity can become restricting when imposed by others. And I have begun to wonder: Is it still necessary for black curators to primarily curate identity-based shows? Aren’t these shows only serving to highlight perceived cultural differences while firming up the separations between groups? Can identity only be affirmed by pooling together sameness in a themed exhibition?

Just as the aspirations of the civil rights movement were reflected in the attitudes of black art and the art institutions of its time, perhaps the political climate of today is pointing us in a different direction – one that begins to transcend identity, albeit with some difficulty. Take a look at the circuitous discussion around whether Barack Obama is black enough. There is endless talk about how others want to identify him and how he self-identifies. No choice he could make would go without criticism. No choice would be without exclusion or acceptance of aspects of black identity. Similar issues of identification surround Hillary Clinton with the question of how “female” falls in line(or not) with the idea of the “feminine”. You can’t trust her if her feminine wiles are present. She can’t protect us if her maternal side is visible. We can’t be politically seduced if she is not seductive. For both Obama and Clinton, their attempts at a fluid self-representation keep them more firmly identified as individuals than as “club members”, unable and/or unwilling to take advantage of any membership.

For me, racial fluidity began not by choice but with my birth, and my skin color – my very light skin color. It grew with the neighborhoods I lived in and the education I received. I was neither instructed in, nor possessed of, a strong cultural or ethnic identity. I believe in and have sought a world where identity is so malleable that it is essentially obsolete. My friends and many of my friends’ friends are broad and varied in race, geographic roots, sex, sexual identity and religion. We eat, dance, talk, laugh, cry, work and play together. We liberals and artists do not subscribe to essentialist thinking – except somehow when it comes to the art career. Rarely do I attend an art exhibition, lecture, dinner, or party that possesses the diversity of my life outside of the art arena. Instead, what I am seeing are professional camps: a black art world and a white one, each with its own team of curators, art historians and collectors. And I ask myself: why does this divide exist? If you have chosen, as I have, not to participate in highlighting racial differences, where do you position yourself?

My black artist friends describe their MFA programs as being largely white. Having graduated, they attribute their successes mostly to black art-professionals and, with a certain ironic glibness, to affirmative action. Recently, I heard one black MFA student question why another black student had not yet spoken to him about how to succeed in the art world. I suppose at the heart of this student’s question is an impulse toward solidarity in support of becoming a visible artist. The assumption that this exclusive conversation increases inclusion is incorrect; in fact it is simply the beginning of affirming inequalities by highlighting differences that later become systematically sustained. This is not a “post-racial” attitude, but simply the beginnings of drawing lines of difference.

The commodification of race begins in graduate school, where questions of identity and personal subjectivity live. Here students work towards communicating an intelligible identity while fine-tuning a sense of personal differences. All of this work about the self is fine and good, but only if these self-representations can be directed to a collective public and not simply to a pre-selected, curated audience. When the work leaves the private space of art making and moves towards the public space of exhibiting, these visual self-expressions become mutated and manhandled for use in the promotional side of the business of art. The result is a complacency around the original intent to promote and honor diversity. Here, the foundation of identity politics shifts from political change to a tool of separation. The initial radical intent is emptied out: the art’s effect is diffused.

Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self – my black self – as an expression of self-determination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance. I do not believe this position is “post-racial” since I am not sure that that is possible. Yet the current system of how to include black artists in the mainstream seems to be stuck in tropes from the past. I do not want to negate discussions of race and racism in art, but I do want to open the conversation by detaching Blackness from a narrow racial term, allowing it to be more pliable. This will not cause current and historical racial differences to cease to exist, but it will enable artists who are not foregrounding Blackness in their work to become equally important members of the conversation. By rupturing accepted racial boundaries, subtlety and aesthetics will play a social role in the expansion of that conversation.

The art world needs to renew its ideas of racial inclusion. It needs to activate art spaces for a fuller discussion of racial issues, with more investment in complex representations and less reliance on didactic displays of racialized, reified art. It needs to value art that is driven through inspiration, not calculation, while incorporating the politics of identity with the versatility of creativity. It needs a way to avoid the lethargy of categorization, while allowing more fluidity in the physical spaces of the profession. It needs an eradication of the racial professional divide, by expanding the visual presence of race and avoiding a branded, static depiction. By moving away from essentialist exhibitions, perhaps there is a renewed opportunity for a transformation in perceiving, acknowledging, and representing the inherent complexity of race.

The post Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness appeared first on artcritical.

Noah Dillon, associate editor at artcritical.com, valiantly stood in for advertised panelist Sarah Nicole Prickett, who did not attend.

The post Latest Podcast of The Review Panel from September 20, 2016: appeared first on artcritical.

Dear Art Editor,

I was shocked to read the review of Michelle Grabner’s exhibition by Ken Johnson in last Friday’s NYT, in which he basically summarizes Grabner’s show as that of a bland and witless mom. Grabner has an extraordinary CV: besides being an artist, and as he noted, a Professor at a major art school, and one of the curators of the last Whitney Biennial, Grabner is also a regularly published critic, co-curator/director of two experimental art spaces, and the subject of a museum survey show last year. Yet the NYT apparently saw no problem in printing a piece of writing about her whose primary criticism is her seeming lifestyle, and in which the characterization of her is not only the somewhat demeaning category “mom,” but the further boiled-down, more dismissive category of “soccer mom.” Johnson doesn’t even get his facts right: for example, he omits entirely the information from the exhibition’s introductory video about Grabner’s study of math, science and philosophy. It’s simply lazy to overlook this, and to mis-state the work’s own terms. Johnson concludes that Grabner has no satire: the two art spaces that Grabner co-runs are called “the Suburban” and “Poor Farm.” Does Johnson really think that Grabner is so naïve that when she portrays herself making a pie, she is doing so without any self-consciousness about her position in the world as a Midwesterner and a mother, as well as artist/curator/professor? (And hasn’t he ever heard of “normcore”?) This kind of condescending writing is a pattern with Johnson. Major complaints of racism and sexism have been lodged before about his writing, most recently two years ago when he was called out widely in public for “irresponsible generalities” regarding women and black artists. Once again, Johnson hangs his so-called criticism on his subject personally, in terms that seem to both diagnose her and reduce her to a cliché of her demographic. That’s textbook sexism. Johnson has the right to say whatever he wants about the work, but the point is how and why. What does it mean that the NYT does not seem to care about the politics of his language? I’m not surprised by Johnson’s writing at this point, but I am surprised that this insulting review could pass muster with the Editor of the New York Times.

Amy Sillman

[Johnson’s response]

Taking Sillman’s points one by one:
1. I don’t think Grabner’s resume should place her above criticism. Sillman doesn’t mention, by the way, that Grabner curated her (Sillman’s) paintings into this year’s Whitney Biennial. She’s not exactly a disinterested observer.
2. I thought that in a short review, simply describing the works in the show would be enough for an informed reader to get the underlying conceptual/feminist dimension of Grabner’s project. Had I spelled it out, it still would not have changed what I felt was an irritating spirit of self-satisfaction and obliviousness to her own privileged social position in the exhibition. Normcore or not, I still think the works in the show are bland and not in an illuminating way. They certainly didn’t make me care about the math and science of paper weaving.
3. I may have underestimated the degree to which Grabner intended the show as self-satire. If so, I’d say the show wasn’t satirical enough. That would only slightly modify my basic criticism. If Grabner did intend self-satire, than why would Sillman object to my idea of satirizing what I characterize as “the comfortably middle-class, tenured professor soccer mom”? This seems to me contradictory on Sillman’s part and humorlessly so. (I once was a soccer dad married to a soccer mom who also was a tenured professor of art. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a soccer mom.)
4. Sillman’s charges of racism and sexism are slanderous and based on misreadings of two of the thousands of things I’ve written for the Times over the years. You would think that Sillman would be more sensitive about tossing around such accusations after Grabner was much criticized for including in the Whitney Biennial works by Joe Scanlan that were supposed to have been made by the fictional African American artist Donnelle Woolford and for not including more works by real black artists. It’s a serious thing to accuse someone of racism and sexism. If someone claims there’s a pattern of racism and sexism in what I’ve been writing over over the past 30 years, then that person should be obliged to prove it. I don’t think it’s provable in my case. I think it would be easier to prove the opposite.

The post The Ken Johnson Affair Continues: Ken Johnson and Amy Sillman appeared first on artcritical.

October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish joined moderator David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read, Peter Fend at Essex Street, David Hockney at Pace Gallery and John Walker at Alexandre Gallery.  The panel took place at the National Academy Museum.  Video by Anna Shukeylo.  Recording Engineer: Isaac Derfel.

The post October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

The post October 2014: The Review Panel Turns 10 appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by Phong Bui and Rail Curatorial Projects
October 10 to December 14, 2014
220 West 18th Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues
New York City

When reviewing contemporary art exhibitions, we critics normally adopt tunnel vision, occluding our awareness of the features of the gallery space to focus on works of art themselves. The art gallery, as Arthur Danto rightly observed, “is generally not itself a further object of aesthetic scrutiny or pleasure and, lest it distract from the objects it makes accessible, it aspires to a certain neutrality.” This is why the floors in Chelsea are typically concrete; the bare walls white; and the plain rooms brightly lit, sometimes with skylights. Recently, of course, some gallery shows have tampered with the conventions of this familiar white cube. But none so dramatically as “Spaced Out,” which violates all of our well-entrenched expectations. The ground floor is covered with Jim Lambie’s vividly multicolored vinyl tape installation, while downstairs wall-to-wall there is a fluffy pink cotton candy colored carpet. The ceiling is pink and the walls of Red Bull’s irregularly shaped galleries are bright pink, turquoise, and yellow. For some time, Darren Jones and I have been writing a book about the contemporary art gallery. We are interested in the history of these spaces, and in interpreting their aesthetic, political and sociological significance. And so we have been particularly concerned with locating galleries that in one way or another challenge our expectations. But none were remotely as challenging as “Spaced Out.”

In his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (2011), which I reviewed in these pages, Ken Johnson surveys a great variety of art made, or at least seen, under the spell of drug experiences. (A number of the artists he discusses — for example: Chris Martin, Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli — are also in “Spaced Out.”) But Johnson doesn’t analyze gallery spaces as such. When I reviewed the book, I was puzzled to understand how such very varied artists all could be influenced by drugs. Bui’s installation presses analysis into the roots of visual psychedelic experience, in a more revealing and, I think, a more satisfying way. In effect, it turns our normal perceptual experience of the gallery inside out, with the art accenting its gallery setting rather than the other way around. Rather than being objects placed in space, a container for aesthetic experience, that is what we see as if we were high. In that dramatic way, he achieves unity for this exhibition of very varied works of art.

There is a lot of strong work by well known artists in “Spaced Out” — Peter Saul’s Raccoons Paint a Picture (2011-2012), Deborah Kass’s Do You Wanna Funk with Me 1 (2006), and Lisa Yuskavage’s Given (2009) for example. But although none of these artists are shrinking violets, in this setting, the spacey effect of their individual works is reinforced by being presented in what becomes the stunning total visual work of art, the gallery site. Radicalizing the style of  “Bloodflames Revisited,” his recent curatorial adventure at Paul Kasmin, Bui here constructs a space, which foregrounds the gallery, setting the works of art in the background. Reading the description before I entered at this exhibition, I was sincerely puzzled about how to understand it. I wasn’t sure what the art by these very varied artists, as varied as the figures in Are You Experienced? would have in common. How, I wondered, could Robert Gober’s Untitled Candle (1991), Fred Tomaselli’s Diary (1990) and Will Ryman’s Infinity (2014), a mixed media installation, all be about psychedelic experience? But when I came into the gallery, that question was answered. The art here is about psychedelic experience — and so is the installation. And so your eye runs around the space, without ever finding a resting point, an effect that is exhilarating. At the opening, on a gray fall day, my vision was transformed. It is hard to imagine a better artistic commentary on psychedelic experience.

The post Total Work of Art: “Spaced Out” at Red Bull Studios appeared first on artcritical.

Maybe the Jeff Koons portrait of Louis XIV triggers the association, but Labor Day always reminds me of the Sun King: “après moi, le deluge.” We are certainly in the thick of back-to-school excitement in New York City.  The need for critical clarity and a roadmap are all the more acute. So, welcome to the new season from artcritical.com

With artist duo Allora & Calzadilla at Barbara Gladstone getting off to a singing start last weekend (literally, enlisting the service of boy choristers) all four shows selected for the season premiere of The Review Panel are now open for inspection. Newcomers to the program, Alexander Nagel and Dorothy Spears join veteran Review Panelist Rob Storr and myself September 26 at the National Academy Museum for an evening of critical debate.

The other shows under consideration are Angela Dufresne at Monya Rowe, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner and Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Can you believe it’s the tenth year of The Review Panel? It seems like no time has passed since Jerry Saltz and Ken Johnson locked horns that October night in 2004, with Walter Robinson and Alexi Worth heckling from the back row that we weren’t doing our job properly. The Review Panel now seems like an institution. The event also enters its fourth annual season in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy, next month. Details of all the dates, speakers and venues are at artcritical with links to a decade of podcasts.

Our other big news at artcritical is that we have a new Associate Editor: Noah Dillon. Noah, who is also an artist, is a graduate of the Art Criticism and Writing MFA program at SVA, and both he and that program’s director, David Levi Strauss, will appear on The Review Panel next Spring. Noah’s critical acumen and intellectual ambition have already made themselves felt in our pages over the summer. He replaces our first Associate Editor, Nora Griffin, who is now a contributing editor. To get a flavor of his mind, check out his contribution to BOODMARKED, the series where writers and artists show us the scope of their online reading.

David Cohen, Publisher and Editor

Selected articles posted recently: Irving Sandler in conversation with Franklin Einspruch, discussing the show he has curated at Loretta Howard Gallery; Alexandra Nicolaides brings a forensic eye to bear on media representations of the tragic shooting in Ferguson, MO; Lilly Wei remembers critic, curator and dandy Edward Leffingwell; Barry Schwabsky on Danielle Tegeder, in our Essay series of catalogue publications from significant solo exhibitions in public spaces outside New York.

And a few to look out for in the coming week: Hearne Pardee writing from Paris on Martial Raysse; David Carrier on Harry Roseman getting a haircut; Jessica Holmes on Monika Sosnowska’s Tower at Hauser & Wirth; David Cohen on Matthew Ritchie, and John Goodrich on Geoffrey Dorfman. To get the fastest scoop on postings, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post “Après moi, le deluge”: The Review Panel in Its Tenth Year appeared first on artcritical.

Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

The post June 2013: Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.