Weatherford: April 16 to  September 5, 2021, Curated by Bill Arning and Ian Berry
Stevens: March 26 to June 9, 2021, Curated by Brandee Caoba and Lucy Lippard
1606 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe NM 87505
sitesantafe.org 

Two exhibitions at this year’s Site Santa Fe present, respectively, an extensive, career retrospective of Mary Weatherford and, in the new side gallery, (SITELab 14,) a two-room glimpse at the career of May Stevens, a local resident for the last twenty years of her life. John Elderfield, speaking on a video at the Gagosian website on Weatherford, who is represented by that gallery, cautions against succumbing to the tyranny of stylistic influence: “as these stylistic things get absorbed, in a way it doesn’t matter…where they come from, all art comes from something.” This mildly disingenuous statement suggesting we check our modernist or post-modernist critical attitudes at the door, is nonetheless something I found helpful in viewing the early careers of each artist. It’s more problematic, however, with their mature works.

A couple of early Weatherford “target” paintings, while accomplished on their own terms, are very much par for the course with this genre, making attempts by the show’s co-curator Ian Berry in a press walk through at Site Santa Fe to suggest temporal and arboreal associations feel belated. Much more convincing for me, in this show of large, amply spaced canvases, is the group of works starting in the 1990s that incorporates imagery, often silkscreened, on the same canvas as a quasi-color-field background.  Of this type, Her Insomnia (1991) and 5:00 a.m. (1992) form a night and day pairing at the far ends of a long gallery. Both feature the vertical, thorny stalks of silkscreened plant photographs and there is a gentle beauty to each reminiscent of effects achieved in Gerhard Richter, Jules Olitski or Donald Sultan.  In the same room hangs Night and Day, (1996) one of several paintings executed on jute, at a distance a dead ringer for Munch’s woodcuts and lithographs of embracing or hand-holding couples. There is even Munch’s obligatory full moon albeit minus the phallic reflection.

Moving deeper into the exhibition we encounter what are generally considered Weatherford’s ground-breaking works and a shift to figuration in a series of paintings of rocks and then caves done when Weatherford returned to art school for her MFA at Bard College. This surely entailed a commendable degree of humility on the part of an artist who at this stage in her career (2006) was carving out prestigious solo exhibitions with clockwork regularity. I get the sense that these paintings afforded Weatherford a new formal syntax, redolent of Cézanne –she never seems to directly utilize Cubist architectonics and sleights of hand – that comes with working from direct observation.

What has really catapulted her to international acclaim and the attention of Gagosian, is surely her series of “stained“ gestural abstract paintings. These typically include slender custom-made neon tubes that traverse the surface of canvases in loose harmony with their attendant electrical wires, both partners typically meeting at floor level to slink along the baseboards to their origins in a white transmitter box decorously aligned off one corner of the canvas. These began in 2012, the result of several visits that made up a teaching residency at CSU Bakersfield in which Weatherford underwent an epiphany of sorts inspired by the prevalence of neon decorating the facades of restaurants and factories. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on an artist whose “Bakersfield Project’ yielded sublime paintings from a locale, that inhabitants of the San Joaquin Valley – I was one myself for twenty-five years – considered a byword for car theft and industrial scale agricultural blight! Thus a question posed by the presence of neon  in this recent instantiation, is whether it functions as it might in a Rauschenberg “combine”, transforming the quotidian into something, that by virtue of mimicking painterly signs or marks, achieves a putative sublimity, and is thus subsumed into a larger creative vision; or whether a more deliberate contrast is sought between the mundaneness of neon and the lyrical ferment displayed on canvas after canvas with appreciative side-glances at Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

I’m uncertain on what level to absorb these paintings, a confusion which Elderfield might be keen to absolve me from. I share his ennui with over-conceptualization of art, and the constant search for the next youthful font of true originality — generally now emblazoned with signs that the artist is up on the latest in digital gizmos or the newest fad in emojis — a search which seemed to have largely petered out sometime in the mid-1980s. Might it not be possible to replough the under-tilled pastures of earlier exemplars, who opened up alluring new territories –Picasso was, in this regard at least, supremely generous – and explore their potential in the patient afterglow of their timeliness, a luxury that Cézanne, Kandinsky, or Jackson Pollock did not afford themselves? And yet I worry that gestural abstraction, color field variations included, has perhaps become too much of a monoculture to yield a lot in this regard.  I am ready to be proved mistaken and Weatherford seems well positioned to do that.

Site Santa Fe inherited this exhibit from the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and has perhaps not landed the cream of Weatherford’s fresh crop, like her recent series of “Railyard” paintings that really do seem to stop us in our tracks. I also think it’s inevitable that an artist who works intuitively, canvas on the floor, should produce an uneven output.  There is much to admire in that; freshness at a premium, working from an authentic core of fallibility, no pat formulae, etc. Munch might be the exemplar in this. In Lovely Day, the artist seems in earnest about the title, inviting narrative association and, beyond the fresh major key chromatic triads can be glimpsed the suggestion of an outdoor gathering of at least three seated or reclining women forming a broken carmine triangle near the picture’s center. These forms are interspliced with ultramarine angular animal or male figures who pay a kind of frolicsome attendance. My question remains whether the tenuous links provided by canvas or exhibition titles and the neon add-ons give us enough to work with, open-endedness notwithstanding, so that gestural abstraction can occupy territory normally reserved for monumental narrative painting, but without the attendant representational slog.

These are accomplished, nuanced paintings, where the skein of paint hangs tantalizingly between a state of floating upon – or immersion within – the raised linen or jute weave that receives it.  The relationship between controlled color saturations and the physical saturation of pigment into the woven surface is something to behold.  Nonetheless the naivety implied in attaching neon strips to gestural color field paintings seems a tad disingenuous. When interviewed, Weatherford generously acknowledges her forbears in the use of neon, but she has perhaps not paid sufficient painterly dues on the canvas, where it counts. Dan Flavin is the first who jumps to mind, but Weatherford’s electric affinities are closer to Arte Povera and the poetry wrested from neon by Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Lucio Fontana. It is almost as if the generosity of interpretation granted the viewer has been afforded too much license in Weatherford’s case, as if the Maenadic wave of energy that yields the painterly saturations, instead of suspending, somewhat blurs her critical sense.

May Stevens, arguably in her heyday in the mid-1970s which saw her involvement with the feminist “Heresies” magazine, featured in a documentary at an adjoining room at Site, produced her best-known paintings, those depicting “Big Daddy”, during that period. It is hard to escape the notion that this level of notoriety remined elusive for the remainder of her long and productive career. Did she crest too early? Exempting her responses to the death of Rosa Luxemburg lasting from 1976-1990, a topic previously addressed by Kathe Kollwitz and R.B. Kitaj, and represented here by Death Squad, (1986) her work since the mid-1980s is her most refined and expressive. The proviso being that works with weighty political and historical subjects are not preferred over those with more elusive content.

Green Field, (1988) is a triumph. The central ghostly figure of May’s mother reconciles the skein of painterly marks which hover deftly between doing their own painterly thing and describing a landscape field at an inclined plane to that of the picture surface. Sea of Words, (2004) a title taken from a canvas not on display, gives the central metaphor for a group of giant acrylic canvases that were Stevens’ focus through the early 1990s. The pictorial dynamics again fuse color field elegance with gently inclined perspectives. We view ghostly boatwomen afloat upon and enmeshed within a slippery veneer of elegantly cursive words that also function as the lit crests of rivulets and runnels. As the century ends these canvases deepen in color and subtlety with the vertical accretion of drips reasserting painterly prerogatives over gentle descriptive imperatives. Her Boats, (1996-7) Galisteo (Creek, New Mexico), (2001) and This Is Not a Landscape, (2004) are exemplary. The museum guard was eager to inform me that “Galisteo” depicts the creek where Stevens cast the ashes of her husband. The words/ripples are now tiny, the drips suggest rain, seepage from the creek and just paint drips. The canvas displays a negotiation of close hues and values that evoke the sublimity of sustained, enduring grief. Indeed, the horizontal blaze of the river that gleams out of the penumbral warmth reminds of the neon strips in some of Mary Weatherford’s paintings. This is a long way indeed from the overt satire of the “Big Daddy” canvas that begins Stevens’ show.

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Comedian Louis CK points out, with his characteristic ethical generosity and pragmatism, “A lot of people wonder what happens after you die. Lots of things happen after you die — just none of them include you.” The recent death of On Kawara ends the brief but significant line of a life and of an exceptionally powerful artistic contribution. Human life is a rarer accomplishment than most of us, living day-to-day, sometimes remember. Most of the world is uninhabitable. Probably far greater than 99% of the entire Universe is completely inhospitable to life. Figuring out how to organize the mind and the body into some kind of harmonious, eudaimonic state is an ongoing struggle. Just getting up each day can feel like a victory. And, after any life extends for its short span, it ends. Thereafter everything else continues in its absence. That someone lives and is known at all, is momentous.

Kawara was 81 years old. Born in Japan in the midst of the 20th Century’s great upheavals, he moved to New York in 1965 where he remained until his death last month. Early in his career he showed figurative paintings, but moved toward conceptual art by the early 1960s. He exhibited his work regularly at Paula Cooper in New York, Yvon Lambert in Paris, and other galleries from the late 1960s onward and was included in one of the first large surveys of conceptual art, “Information,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. There’s a permanent installation of his work at Dia:Beacon and a large retrospective to be exhibited at the Guggenheim early next year. His New York gallery, David Zwirner, announced his death on Thursday.

Kawara had a group of friends and colleagues, but he was known for being retiring. He emerged alongside conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, a close friend. Kawara shared their interest in language and its ability to frame or shape human perception, to describe and to conceal. Only bits and pieces of his life are available, recounted by those who knew him and as documented in works such as his postcards and telegrams. It is likely that he was influenced by American and Japanese fluxus artists who helped develop and formalize (if that’s the right word) mail art in the 1950s and ‘60s. Correspondence evinces his familiarity with John Baldessari, John Evans, Sol LeWitt, Michael Sesteer, numerous curators and dealers in Minimalist and conceptual art of his era, and collectors. But such connections connote only a very hazy portrait of Kawara.

In his best-known series, Today, he documented every day of his life from January 4, 1966 (two days after his 33^rd birthday) until, perhaps, very recently. This project highlights the impossibility of notating one’s life adequately. Even as recording technology has improved and expanded the personal and professional archives of those living in the developed world, when a person dies that’s essentially it. Kawara never published any statements about his work, didn’t grant interviews, never gave speeches, never sat on public panel discussions, wasn’t photographed. And yet with the Today series he recorded his existence by making one painting for every day, consisting solely of a complete date, rendered in white on a monochromatic background. It’s a simple act that gets straight to the heart of a lot of complicated stuff about our existence, experience and finitude. The sum of his archive is paltry in comparison to any person’s life, to Kawara’s life indeed, with a minimum of context provided for each date: a newspaper clipping stored with the painting and a record in a diaristic calendar. But it’s a rich testimony. It was as fleetingly temporal as anything, though it remains.

A parallel to the Today series, Kawara’s One Million Years (1969) is comprised of a 20-volume book that lists the million years that preceded the work’s inception, as well as the million years that are in the process of succeeding 1996 A.D. The subtitle for the first set of volumes reads “For all those who have lived and died.” This is a small addition to the annals of billions of people, long lines of humanity stretching over horizons of space and time, the known and the unknown. And barely overlapping those two dates lays an infinitesimally small span of time — the life of Kawara himself. It was carefully cordoned off and diligently recorded, until it’s not there anymore.

In another series, Kawara sent telegrams to friends and acquaintances, simply proclaiming, “I AM STILL ALIVE.” That affirmation, in the face of the difficulty of being a person, both ontologically and just physically, is deeply affecting. They are messages filled with love and tenderness, a recognition that something mundane and approaching the miraculous has happened, again. Finitude, and our resistance to it at each moment, is something that Kawara noted with exceptional concision and dignity. That is now finished. His death marks both the succinctness of his work, and serves as its ultimate frame. It was the only trajectory the work could have ever taken, but that doesn’t make its sting any less acute. He was alive. That’s important. The world preceded him and time continues. We (other people) continue — an equally valuable recognition. But he will be missed.

The post On Kawara: January 2, 1933 – June 27, 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

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Blake Gopnik, Jane Harris and Christian Viveros-Faune joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Regarding Warhol at the Met, Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art  at the Brooklyn Museum, and The Times Square Show Revisited at Hunter College.

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