September 6 to October 6, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, dcmooregallery.com

In a 2013 interview with Robert Kushner, Barbara Takenaga relayed her process in nautical terms: “I feel like I am on this really giant ocean liner, and I’ve got this little tiny steering wheel, and I’m turning and turning and turning it.” In this analogy, she describes the shifting directions and momentum through both individual paintings and her entire body of work. She’s also talking about navigating between control and the changes she courts to explore new territory.

This image was on my mind viewing Takenaga’s new show, “Outset,” at DC Moore, her fifth with the gallery. The ship seems straightened now, leaner, and many familiar motifs appear to be thrown overboard. The tarmacs of Nebraska are long behind her, horizon lines have all but disappeared, and with them allusions to her home state skies, suburban hallucinatory wonder, and a certain kind of intentional goofiness. Ahead is somewhere unknown, and acceleration is palpable.

As with earlier work, we are flying, floating, or dreaming through hyperconsciousness, o maybe all of these at once. References to explosions, ecstasy, space travel, aerial views of drifting land masses, and microbiology are well established elements of Takenaga’s vocabulary, as is her ability to deliver this iconography with masterful, exquisite clarity. The surface of the painting is a statement in itself– her signature palette of steel blue-gray delivered in taut flawless satin, a sheet touched and frosted everywhere with iridescence, sometimes in fuschia.

Takenaga plays through octaves of weight. Tiny brushstrokes, hairlines, and rendered dots of white are made with the lightest touch, skittering across a heavy lava flow of poured and puddled acrylic. She knows her chemistry. Untold hours of attention, focus and devotion to her craft are haptically present, the paintings suggest strenuous concentration and, like mediation, allow the viewer to escape the pressures of time and distraction. Takenaga has practiced and honed these qualities through decades, and now she thoroughly owns them.

As Takenaga has recently been categorized as a “mature” artist, like the battered ship and stormy skies of Thomas Cole’s allegorical “The Voyage of Life: Manhood,” she seems to be veering into deep and confrontational turbulence, ready to relinquish some control, take more chances and partner with chaos. The “black holes” of Aeaea (all works, 2018) and Hello rip into the center of her compositions and in this body of work she not only allows them to stay, she cultivates them into the strongest figure-ground relationships in her work to date. Black centered pours cover a third of these two canvases, and the backgrounds have the least amount of pattern. Takenaga embellishes the pour in Hello outlining the shape with thin white and yellow lines, a kind of halo. While working on Aeaea she noticed a long accidental drip along the right side—an outlier of iridescent insect-leaf green—which she incorporated it into the composition. The black shape stretches from left to right, and pulls to all four directions, vaguely figurative and certainly muscular. Delicate Japanese patterns spring forth to inhabit its wildness with waves of fish scales or mountains, a net of pattern that gently tames and lands the form into the blue-gray ground. Her boldness is confirmed in Manifold 5, a sprawling five-paneled painting suggestive of rupture and emotional separation. An immense phallic ellipse divides a pitch black void. Takenaga is unabashedly poetic here and invites, or rather incites, the viewer’s imagination to follow hers. She riffs wonderfully on associations between Japanese screens and patterns, candles floating on the Ganges, submarines, and Whistler’s nocturnes.

As a young artist Takenaga found inspiration in Japanese prints, patterns, Indian painting and mandalas, as well as the work of Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, and Yayoi Kusama. It’s interesting to note that while Takenaga was a student at the University of Colorado, Boulder during the mid 1970s, the pattern focused Criss-Cross artists’ collective was still very active. In an interview with Leslie Wayne for “Two Coats of Paint,” Takenaga lets us in on a personal dimension embedded in her use of patterns: “References to my grandmother were coded into mountain shapes … Lots of hiding and coding. The whole series of dot mandalas from 2001-2009 were about my mother, sliding away into space.” In her new show, paintings like Serrulata spell it out for us in rhythmic, ebullient language. Sumi ink-like splotches on a shell pink ground make a koan of cherry blossoms and time, and like the work of another great student of Japanese art, Roland Flexner, the painting coalesenses before our eyes. Taking a cue from the vision of time revealed to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Takenaga has seen her universe blow open, and she’s taking action.

The post Sliding Away Into Space: Barbara Takenaga at DC Moore appeared first on artcritical.

If numbers alone indicate success, Robert Miller is probably one of the greatest art dealers who ever lived. But there’s another assay of greatness among art dealers, and it has more to do with having an eye for the outlier, a talent for selecting the unlikely but strangely right work, the ability to simply recognize vision, but above all, to be a Connector. If you happened to monetize these factors, all the better, your gallery’s doors stayed open.

But art history, and art gallery history, is more than a matter of who cashed in. There are those who truly mediate culture — in today’s scene Matthew Higgs and Lia Gangitano come to mind as prime examples — who cudgel creativity and platform things we’ve not seen before. These figures are Connectors, and theirs is a subtle and alchemical art. Swirl together an essence of Barnum, an ounce of Ezra Pound (for this job description a degree of insanity is not a liability), a soupçon of David Ogilvy, and the visionary who-says-we-can’t? style of a Sergey Brin, and you begin to see the skill-set required. One of the hallmarks of these wizards is that they’re almost always impecunious, and seeking backers.

Their gift is having an eye, and an ear, that sees and hears what others don’t. Their contribution rests in being there at key cultural moments, and having whatever combination of spark and grit that is required to reveal something truly new.

Meet Richard “Dick” Bellamy. Director and founder of the Green Gallery, who, in 1960, landed in the eye in a hurricane: the seismic upheavals called Pop and Minimalism. The odds were against Bellamy because unlike most founders of New York art galleries, he had little if any family backing, little if any formal art education, and pretty much zero business acumen. Growing up in the Midwest, he briefly studied at the University of Cincinnati, and later Columbia, but spent more time in Manhattan’s cheap bars than in classroom lectures. Desultory wandering in a Beat fashion, by the late ‘50s he decamped to Mexico and Provincetown, places where a lack of ambition and a talent for bohemian blather were perfectly OK.

Exactly what made him stop spinning his wheels is not exactly known, and it is just one of a long list of undiscoverables that stand out in Judith Stein’s new biography of Bellamy, Eye Of The Sixties, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One thing is clear: Bellamy took pains to cover his tracks, stay a shadowy figure, operate on the margins of society. Showing what he accomplished, and the lives he helped, and hurt, is wonderfully documented here. But as a portrait of a man, the book falls short. It is likely that the real Richard Bellamy is and will remain unknowable.

Stein’s biography stunningly fills in several yawning gaps of art history circa the early 1960s. We meet, up close and personal, artists such as Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, James Rosenquist, Yayoi Kusama — artists who would certainly have found an audience eventually, though Mr. Bellamy brought them out into the light. More thrilling still are smell-the-smoke-and-sweat reports of Lee Lozano, James Lee Byars, Jo Baer, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Ronald Bladen. They may lack the epoch-making stature of Bellamy’s big guns, but there is still a lot to be discovered about each. Stein’s research reveals many avenues for further scholarship, and future writers will follow the trails she blazes here.

Each page contains nuggets of original research that are pure gold. The problem is that there are great artist-biographies, and this book, despite its absolutely fascinating and voluminous cavalcade of facts, is not in that company. Stein allows herself here and there to speculate, which leaves the reader slightly distrusting of the whole. What is to be made of an observation like “Dick must have read Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese, poems Lydia (his Chinese mother) would have praised for their delicacy and economy”? What is such a string of assertions based on? in other places, sweeping generalizations needed further edits.

Bellamy’s business practices were a slow motion cliff-dive, and on this subject Stein is at her best. Though he managed to find an angel investor to support the gallery, taxi-magnate Robert Scull, it became apparent in short order that the business aspects of running a gallery bored him — which led to a fast-approaching expiration date. He could often be found rubber-legged drunk in the early afternoon, hiding away in the back office but still open for business. We see him stoned or buzzed, lying full-length on the gallery floor; what affluent Midtown gallery visitors made of this leave little to the imagination. Sometimes he would simply abandon the premises, and head to a bar, leaving the gallery doors wide open.

Bellamy blithely made his own rules and followed his own code of ethics; his record keeping was spotty, he sometimes paid artists haphazardly, and he was known to enrage them, even retitling works as he saw fit. Is it any wonder that Oldenburg jumped over to Sidney Janis after a year?

Simultaneously, Dick Bellamy’s son Miles has put together a personal selection of his father’s letters, which document the dissolution of a life — “bludgeoned by alcoholism” is how he self-describes — while inviting us into a world more exciting than most of us will ever know. And it’s a beautiful, strange, sad and arcane little book. Now in his mid-50s, Miles was his father’s gallery assistant for the final five years of Dick’s life. As a boy, Miles lived mostly with his mother, and knew his father on a weekends and vacations basis. The letters from father to son are some of the most revealing; one winces at a letter written to the eight-year-old Miles, which includes this lovely line, “I love you sweet baby Miles no good louse scum.” Dick should have known that irony and sarcasm as humor are lost on a child. Doubtless he was off on his own chemical planet when he composed that cringe-worthy missive. That Miles struggled with (and overcame) his own substance-abuse issues comes as no surprise; the fallout from drugs and alcohol is a theme that permeates both Bellamys’ life stories.

Like the letters of Jack Kerouac (another victim of the hard-drinking artist’s lifestyle) these documents both shed light on and cast enigmatic shadows over their author. While Miles has provided helpful endnotes, these letters would have benefitted from close annotation. For example, in a letter to a Peter Young, dated 1970, Dick refers to “Dan painting well.” Later in the letter he says “I thought Mike’s show at Marlborough in May-June good. […] Saw Rolf a few weeks ago […] he was visiting Mickey Ruskin.” I happen to know that Mickey Ruskin was the owner of Max’s Kansas City, New York’s iconic artists’ bar in 1960s and ‘70s; who the hell these other folks are I haven’t a clue. This book is keyed to art-world insiders only, those with access to the inside of the inside.

It is, however, worth the price of admission for a 1996 letter to Barbara Rose, the seminal historian of modern art, who was, apparently, a close friend of Dick. It begins “Dear Barbara, Long time no see or hear. I hope you are still fucking. I am unable to. I wish I had been able to do it better when I could.”

Stein, Judith E. Eye Of The Sixties: Richard Bellamy And The Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0374151324. 384 pages, $28

Bellamy, Richard. Serious Bidness: The Letters of Richard Bellamy. Miles Bellamy (ed.) (Brooklyn, NY: Near Fine Press; Printed by Small Editions, Red Hook, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0-692-51867-0. 72 pages, $40

The post Serious Eye: Two New Books About Richard Bellamy appeared first on artcritical.