June 24 to August 26, 2016
12 Berkeley Street (between Stratton Street and Mayfair Place)
London W1J 8DT, +44 20 7491 0100

The distinguishing feature of Bas Jan Ader is the way he brings personal feeling and its hinterland of autobiography into a conceptual practice. That’s what makes him a “Romantic,” topped off by the mysterious manner of his death. Add the counter-intuitive combination of Modernist art history (with Piet Mondrian as focal point) and slapstick à la Buster Keaton, and you have much of Ader’s context. That dovetails with both his Dutch origins and his American residence from 1963, including the final five years which yielded his oeuvre. That consists of just 35 mature works, so it’s unsurprising that Simon Lee has not unearthed the previously overlooked — indeed, the content here is close to Camden Arts Centre’s 2006 retrospective — but the gallery does make an exemplary presentation of seminal pieces, supported by still photographs which acted as studies towards the films.

The most potent biographical interpretation takes us back to the Nazi execution of Ader’s father, who harbored Jews. I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1970–71), the film in which Ader cries, gains from the possibility — but not necessity — that he might be recalling that event and what it says about humanity. Here, the silent black-and-white image is presented on 16mm through a clattering projector with the artist’s head projected to triple life size — factors which undercut the immediacy of the emotion. We’re reminded of the gap between art and life.

Ader’s famous “falling” films are presented as a continuous loop, again on the original 16mm, allowing their similarities and differences to come to the fore. Five times a fall occurs, and in each case the artist disappears from view as a result: in Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), he tumbles from a chair on an LA roof and into the garden’s bushes; Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) sees him vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal; in Broken fall (geometric) (1971), he ends up in a ditch at the side of the road following the failure of what look far from determined efforts to remain upright. Broken fall (organic) (1971), opens with Ader hanging to a tree, until he loses his grip — like a leaf in autumn — and again vanishes into a canal beneath. Nightfall (1971), not only introduces a pun but applies the process to an object, a stone which Ader drops onto the scene’s lighting, so plunging him into the invisibility of darkness. Ader is often seen as relinquishing control to gravity in these films, but his agency is clear enough in the action of Nightfall, and arguably in Broken Fall (geometric) as well. Moreover, he has set up the effects of gravity in the other three films. The more consistent themes in this set of works are absurdity (again emphasising the gap between art and life) and, given the final vanishing enacted in each, the implication of death. That makes it equally feasible to read them as versions of the fall of Ader’s father, shot in the woods; as plays on the biblical fall from grace; or as existentialist commentaries inspired by Ader’s favourite author, Albert Camus, and in particular his Amsterdam-set novel The Fall (1956).

Broken Fall (geometric) also reflects on Mondrian: the road, we can see, leads to a windmill which features in several of his early paintings. And Ader’s thin form, dressed in black, makes the vertical line Mondrian would have approved — before Ader falls into the diagonal apostolically introduced by Theo van Doesberg. And Mondrian takes centre stage in the remaining works. On the road to a new Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) also shows Ader before “Mondrian’s windmill,” but this time imitating the structure of his classic abstract compositions as he lies— playing dead, perhaps — on a blanket on the ground. In the film Primary Time (1971), we see the black-clothed Ader successively rearrange a multi-colored vase of flowers by adding and removing blooms so that exclusively red, yellow and blue bouquets remain. This, too, is somewhat absurd, and a potentially Sisyphean task is implied. Primary Time could be regarded as a painting reversed into its constituent colors to underline the clichés in the traditions of Dutch floral art, or as a claim that nature can provide a purer outcome than Mondrian’s more artificial reductions.

This grouping of work brings Beckett to mind as much as Camus: Ader performs pointless tasks and sets himself up for failure. Yet the sense is that attempting the apparently pointless is better than giving up, and when he cedes control it comes across as a strategic decision, not a lack of engagement. In his last act, he ceded considerable control to the elements by taking on the Atlantic crossing in a smaller boat than had anyone before him — not fatefully, the rest of his work suggests to me, but experimentally.

All of which is to say: Ader remains poignant and relevant. And if this show fitted a little too well with the air of gloom which descended on London following the decision to leave the European Union, perhaps Ader’s embrace of the ridiculous could be read a message of hope.

The post The Fall: Bas Jan Ader at Simon Lee, London appeared first on artcritical.

July 3 to 21, 2015
216a Main Street
Amagansett, NY, 631 905 9894

“Vice Versa,” Eric Brown’s exhibition in Amagansett, initially made me think of crisply pressed and elegantly embellished men’s shirts that cry out to be unfolded. Brightly illuminated against the whitewashed walls of the gallery, the shimmying plaids and high-keyed, off-kilter stripes of these paintings have the pulsating energy of Scandinavian or African textiles. While their sources and influences are deep and varied, they strike me as having a relationship to fabrics, music, and architecture as well as the history of abstract painting through the lineage of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Myron Stout, and Alice Trumbull Mason. Bridget Riley, though spoiling the alliteration, should also be included in this lineup. Despite these various affinities, Brown’s intimately scaled paintings have a self-containment and reserved exuberance that is taut and refreshing, if sometimes overly modest.

Playful strategies in the game of figure/ground are at work in a trifecta of paintings on the gallery’s southwest wall. In Red and Blue Rectangles (2014), Red Envelope (2015), and The Red Oval (2015), you think you know where one geometric shape begins and another ends, but on closer inspection such assumptions are up-ended. Electric cherry red and traffic cone orange fields are kept in check by black, cobalt blue, and grey discs, quarter-rounds, and triangles. Here, we see Brown’s effort at wrangling color, contour, and proportion as a means of articulating the space of the painting and generating sensations of openness and enclosure, depth and projection. Several paintings include shapes that wrap around the sides of the stretcher, a device that visually links the work to the wall. I am usually not a fan of paint that intentionally travels around edges (it becomes too much like sculpture). Rather, I wish that the construction of the corner folds had been razor-sharp right angles to reinforce the staccato movements on the front surfaces, although this is truly difficult to accomplish when stretching cloth over wood. Framing may achieve that level of precision, but then you lose the painted edges. I think the paintings would stand up just fine without the edge embellishments.

Ups and Downs (2014-2015) offers a horizontally undergirded stack of persimmon and black half-rounds that toggle spatially. Such graduated arrangements of color and reversing patterns evoke for me the rhythms of sprechstimme, the expressive vocal style that combines singing and speech, as used, for instance, in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. In his score for that piece Schoenberg instructs the performer to become “acutely aware of the difference between singing tone and speaking tone: singing tone unalterably stays on the pitch, whereas speaking tone gives the pitch but immediately leaves it again by falling or rising.” Color, in a way, is the painter’s equivalent of timbre, and it is hard not to think that Brown had music in mind when he placed 12 truncated quarter notes up and down a five-bar staff.

Disassemble and Shift (both 2015) have, in my view, a resounding relationship to the formal principles of Bauhaus and Black Mountain textiles, particularly the works of Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers. In their experiments with multi-layered weave constructions that utilized linens, silks and newly invented synthetic fibers, these artist/designers elevated geometric abstraction to a high art, even as they reflected the dissenting social and political precepts of Weimar Germany. I see an aesthetic kinship here, in Brown’s management of the dual identity of his colors, in the way they stand independently while attaining dynamic interaction with their neighbors. Brown also makes visible the fine weave (think Black Mountain designer Don Page) of the linen support through his deft handling of multiple, turpentine-thinned layers of pigment.

Like other artists who have supported themselves for years doing other things — while steadily and quietly developing their own oeuvre — Brown has worked (in his role as a principal at Tibor de Nagy Gallery) to support a number of eminent American artists, and these associations have undoubtedly permeated his thinking and his independent commitment to painting. Friendships with poets and painters including John Ashbery and the late Jane Freilicher have certainly imbued Brown’s sensitivity to texture, light, and language and we are, in turn, the beneficiaries of those exchanges. In “Vice Versa,” Brown continues to fold his knowledge of their accomplishments into his own distinct vision.

The post Playful Strategies: Eric Brown in Amagansett appeared first on artcritical.