September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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July 1 to August 8, 2015
106 N 1st Street (at Berry Street)
Brooklyn, 718 218 7148

It may be true that God is dead. We find ourselves in a time and place where we’ve been freed from contextual restraints in our expression. As Friedrich Nietzsche described the nature of morality, rejecting an objective truth in favor of the subjective decision to determine what is good, evil, and everything in between, the god figure, or master, has become obsolete, the power of ateliers is faded, and overarching movements have become unrecognizable. Although the task of creating art may be daunting when facing the abyss of ever-developing ideas and technologies, it is not at all impossible to generate meaning. And that is what “Freedom Culture,” curated by Graham Collins, is about. Featuring the work of nearly 40 artists, this exhibition, held at Williamsburg’s Journal Gallery, ties together an array of styles, media, and ideas, which result in an equivocal yet solid statement about present culture.

It raises the question of how we navigate the ambiguity of freedom in our decision making process without an objective aesthetic-moral-contextual-etc. compass to guide the way. Collins tackles this issue by blurring the line between many categories: literal and figurative, painting and sculpture, as well as object and illusion. Brent Holland Baker’s text painting, Untitled (2015) — with the words “SMALL PARADISE AND BIG BIG HELL” arranged from top to bottom on a textured, alizarin crimson ground — offers an explicit statement with an open-ended meaning encapsulated by a specific aesthetic experience. It is hung next to an Ida Ekblad piece, Not Titled (2015), in which collaged drawings allude to an abstract world where plasticity and flatness interact with each other. In another room, Elizabeth Murray’s playful, colorful shaped-canvas painting, Truth, Justice, and Comics #1 (1990), finds a foil in Elizabeth Jaeger’s handsome and serious sculptures made of steel, ceramic, maple, and granite.

The seemingly incongruous set of ideas present in this grouping speaks to the nature of finding meaning. Without over-determined meanings, the individual is solely responsible for her own experience and interpretation of the work at hand. Oftentimes, the process of coming to a decision isn’t so simple as landing on one side of a dichotomy, making freedom a little frustrating or even frighteningly unknown. Collins doesn’t just want you to wonder if whether Baker’s piece is a painting or mere text; by placing it next Ekblad’s collage, in a room separated from Murray and Jaeger’s work, we see that freedom is a subjective, metastatic interpretation.

There is no formula, but somehow every work in the show communicates with the space as a whole, while maintaining its autonomy. Inadvertently, this addresses the cultural obsession with individuality and the pervasive need to assert one’s uniqueness. We do all sorts of things to maintain such distinction: hair dye, brand-name fashions, customized sneakers and phones. The collection of unique entities in this show can be read as a metaphor for the variety show we participate in every day. Simply choosing to assert ourselves is what makes life unique and meaningful.

Collins has created a matrix of two-dimensional work and sculpture for the viewer to navigate on their own terms. The entire gallery is activated so that one cannot consume any single piece without sensing another in the periphery. A stark conceptual piece living in the front of the gallery, Oyster Split (pets and cops) (2015), by Andy Meerow, consists of the words “pets” and “cops” printed, respectively, on two white canvases. Its austere presence pushes the viewer to the mysterious photographs — containing ephemeral, in some cases dark imagery, Such as Sam Moyer’s Willie III, (2009) which portrays an obscured figure bathed in complete darkness — hanging in the back room, before being pulled back into the center of the gallery where most of the action is. A viewer can go from thinking about politics, to aesthetics, to philosophy, to what was for lunch as she wanders among the work. Like an ant, the viewer’s physical and mental path resembles the show’s five untitled drawings by David Adamo, which look like they were made by following the path of a tiny insect, becoming nests of indecipherable text.

In this space we sense our small, unique presence in an endless network of happenings. Though our freedom to go one way or another may be arbitrary, the way we communicate with each other in the process can be as meaningful as we make it.

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June 27 to August 30, 2013
547 West 25th Street
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, a ruggedly alive exhibition organized by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, presents fifteen artists who were in their prime during that decade. By focusing on the physical reality of the artworks, and the social reality of this specific group of artists, the exhibition escapes the trap of misty-eyed nostalgia or explicit revisionism. In his catalog essay, Rubinstein discusses the show as a way to disengage the story of abstract painting from the bottom-line narratives that are seen as the “official account” of the decade, in particular the advent of celebrity-styled painters, and the dominance of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, two labels that had more to do with marketing than with painted content. Instead, he offers the phrase “impure abstraction,” a hybrid mode of working between abstraction and figuration, to flesh out a portrait of a painting culture that was not as beholden to the one-critic model of analysis that effected the previous generation in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.

Reinventing Abstraction is more concerned with the transition of painting cultures and the accruing of historical knowledge than it is with the particulars of the decadent decade itself. The back-story to the 1980s begins with the social radicalism of the 1960s, when the majority of the exhibition’s included artists were in school, and continues through the 1970s when they were fully experimenting with their practice in an art world that had largely turned away from painting in favor of the dematerialization of the art object. The off-the-stretcher abstraction being made in the ‘60s and ‘70s had its own moment in the sun with High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, an exhibition organized by Katie Siegel and David Reed, which Rubinstein acknowledges as a guiding spirit for his own show.

A feeling of disengagement from the immediate past manifests itself visually in many of the works on view. It is as if an invisible pane of glass were mounted on top of the canvas to emotionally cool off the fast and loose painted gesture. Jonathan Lasker’s Double Play (1987), a painting in elegant quotation marks, has all its ingredients diagrammed to perfection: a rich brown backdrop, radiating pink bars, and an area of gooey cross-hatched “painting” splashed up against the surface. David Reed’s No. 230 (For Beccafumi) (1985-6) is a vertical monument to the paint stroke, showing off a translucent-matte finish that is as sharp and slick as a silkscreen. In both works these artists are making visible the idea of painting as a compositional force sans the hot-headedness of late night studio labor. Similarly, Mary Heilmann’s exuberant Rio Nido (1987) is a play between foreground and background, between the painting as whole and the painting as parts. Blue, magenta, red, green, and yellow marks set against black are read as shot holes dripping paint, a remnant of an action, and the painting exists as the evidence.

Carroll Dunham’s Horizontal Bands (1982-83), is a Surrealism-inflected painting on pine board composed of alternating stripes of graphically rendered root vegetables, allowing one to see his trademark phalluses just over the horizon. The tentative nature of this early painting reads more as a private sketch than as a full-blown work, a proposition of fresh beginnings that charges many of the paintings on view. Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980-81), a dimensional portrait of a star-like figure, is thickly celestial, like a corner blow-up of a Van Gogh. Gary Stephan’s unromantically titled Untitled (#45418) (1988) is the most overtly mysterious work in the gallery, an image of a dusk-lit landscape divided in half by a biomorphic form that eclipses day into night.

What’s striking about several of the paintings in Reinventing Abstraction is their wall-dominating size. It’s a scale that brings to mind 18th-century history painting as easily as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), and speaks of financial resources and passion to burn. The lavish variety of surface textures and oil paint mixed with other media makes today’s abstract paintings seem especially anemic when it comes to materials and scale. Even the smallest work in the show, Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (630) (1988), radiates a deeply felt engagement with the largess of history and psychic space.

In comparison to the work on view in High Times Hard Times, the majority of artists in Reinventing Abstraction make their radical choices within the framed space of the traditional rectangle, putting an exquisite pressure on the pictorial possibilities of abstraction. A notable exception is Elizabeth Murray’s Sentimental Education (1982), a painting of conjoined parts whose scale and rapturous energy speak to the colossal task of painting as both action and object. For all its obvious labor of construction, the work epitomizes the fun aspects of high Modernism.  Her oil on canvas appears as malleable as a Play-Doh construction of cobalt colors and finely drawn zig-zags. In this painting, and indeed her entire body of work, Murray epitomizes the transcendent grace of the art student as grand master.

The paintings in Reinventing Abstractions are all un-mistakenly the work of grown-up artists coming to terms with inherited values while finding new rhythms with which to move abstraction forward. In this sense, the art could be seen as a visual complement to Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a portrait of the decade in which commercial entertainment culture solidified its hold on American society, while also letting in the dreamy, fluent potential of Postmodernism as a way to break free from Modernism’s flight of progress. As a citizen of a tightly sealed, pluralist art world it can be easy to long for this not too distant past. It is important to fight this backward glance, and instead to ask, what does remain? I can think of a few things: the factuality of paint, the presence of art history and mentors, and the still shocking ability of a new abstract painting to dismantle the fiction of linear time, if only for a minute or two.

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David Brody: I find myself drawn to Steve Wheeler’s work with reliable fascination, purely on visual terms. But the backstory is interesting. First, there’s his problematic identification as one of the Indian Space Painters (ISP), an association he sometimes rejected –– even asserting his independence from the group with fisticuffs late in life; by this time he seems to have descended into a bitter alcoholic hermitage, and at the opening of an ISP show in which he had been included against his will he caused a ruckus.

Indian Space Painters, by the way, is a great band name; as the name for an art movement, though, it’s almost too descriptive, or proscriptive, which is presumably why Wheeler scorned it.  But also, he had been hanging with the big boys at the Cedar Tavern, and he may have wished to be seen as part of that crowd, many of whom had shared Wheeler’s interest in biomorphic tribal exotica and mystical archetypes.  But legitimately, while Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, et al., went beyond the literalism of that early interest, Wheeler’s superdense, hyperdimensional substrate never fully relinquishes Tlingit eagles and Aztec glyphs.

Putting aside the issue of Wheeler’s imagery for now, his paintings were retardetaire on grounds of technique alone.  He eschews drips and tornadoes of gestural fury; instead, he designs impregnable fortresses of interlocking color planes from careful preparatory drawings.  Philip Guston cited Paolo Uccello as an influence, which is apparent in his ‘40s friezes of warplay, but Wheeler’s work is much closer in technique, and maybe spirit, to the space-packing battles of Uccello.

In any case, he missed the art history boat; while his old Cedar Tavern friends were ascending the mountaintop, Wheeler was dying in splenetic obscurity.   He always had fans –– the work’s sheer persistent quality keeps it alive.  As the wheel of poetic injustice turns, Wheeler now begins to seem, to many contemporary artists, more directly relevant than the canonical New York School artists.  Art history pinches back on itself all the time –– particularly American art history, in which, for example, the dogged conservatism of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Burchfield, or Edward Hopper becomes avant-garde in retrospect. So was Wheeler just ahead of his time?  Certainly he must have believed that, or he couldn’t have packed so much heat into the paintings.  They just burn and burn as you look at them.

Drew Lowenstein: Yeah David, there is, as you say, alotta heat in Wheeler’s paintings.  Given how well these paintings grab and hold our attention, it’s easy to understand why he was thrust into the position of front-man for the Indian Space Painting group.  He seems to have been a true believer in the extraordinary and in his capacity to harness and merge it into his own art. Moving from the Mayan to Kwakiutl to Modernist sources, he was no intellectual slouch either. The work pulses. It’s evident how informed he was.  He put what interested him through a sieve.  Although he achieved a synthesis of these complex pictorial languages, did he ever move past these influences, and does that matter anymore, and if not, why?

In Wheeler’s hands, such material is symbolic, psychological, ecstatic, perhaps even religious.  The passion behind his multi-pronged approach, and the single-minded obsession to get it down on paper or canvas elevates the work to the level of a document of belief.  This may be why he continued to mine this abandoned and rarefied area while the Abstract Expressionists moved on and sucked up all the oxygen in the room. In today’s culture, Wheeler’s small-scale, eccentric, tightly wound paintings aren’t retardataire anymore, but instead may appear as agreeably quirky.

DB: Let’s talk about Steve Wheeler: The Oracle Visiting the 21st Century, the show we saw together in January at David Findlay Jr. Gallery, which hangs a selection of his paintings and drawings alongside some work by ISP artists and also a number of contemporary artists who, it is claimed, have affinities, such as Tom Burckhardt and the late Elizabeth Murray.  Even if one doesn’t agree with every choice, I applaud the acknowledgment of Wheeler’s relationship with the present.  Some of the selected artists, like Burckhardt and Luke Gray, have been directly impacted by Wheeler –– as you and I have been, along with Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, James Siena and many others I’ve talked to.  I think Wheeler particularly appeals to those who seek a kind of psychedelic intensity that is obsessively under control.

DL: This show is a lively mix.  The curators have made inclusions, such as Keith Haring, that broaden the interpretation of Wheeler’s aesthetic.  Luke Gray, whose work I’m seeing for the first time, and Tom Burckhardt look particularly good here.  The paintings of Wheeler’s contemporaries Robert Barrell and Peter Busa also stand out. I agree there is an intergenerational affinity in the Findlay show, and it’s great that some people feel that they have been impacted. It’s worth noting that Luke Gray exhibited at Gary Snyder gallery when they were showing Wheeler’s paintings, so in that case there is a clear connection. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I do think sometimes it’s hard to determine direct impact versus rapport. I feel like my interest in dense composition came from Wheeler’s contemporary, Maurice Golubov, whose retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1981 affected me so strongly that I contacted him directly. I was surprised and appreciative when I first saw Wheeler’s paintings at Gary Synder’s gallery in the early ‘90s. And perhaps Bruce Pearson feels differently, but my recollection is that we schlepped to the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in1997 to see the Wheeler retrospective because we developed through related aesthetics, liked his eccentric compositions, and were interested in his marginal status.

I wonder why some recent American abstraction has recoiled into tight, early modernist formations?  Some of it often resembles what George L.K. Morris or John Ferren were doing in the ‘40s when they were playing catch-up with Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee. The contemporary version is usually small scale, with a labor-intensive commitment – a kind of industrious Protestant work ethic that says this is serious busywork. Perhaps this is part of the psychedelic intensity wrought from obsessive control that you mentioned earlier. Tripped out and buttoned up – a strange mix, no?  Isn’t the psychedelic experience also about losing control and being subsumed, or are we currently really locked into the age of Adderall as we recycle Stuart Davis?  I think in some ways Howard Hodgkin can be psychedelic and Fred Tomaselli may not be. The psychedelia-in-art-is-cool consensus can also be troubling.

DB: Well, what is truly “psychedelic” is an interesting question. Though for the record, I’m a fan of Tomaselli and indifferent to Hodgkin.  And you’re right, there’s a fashionability/marketing factor attaching to the term, which can be annoying and juvenile; it often has nothing to do with the kind of uncanny visual alertness combined with an experience of sublimity –– of the terrifyingly beautiful –– that I think of as psychedelic.  All good art is psychedelic, in a sense.  And losing control can be psychedelic too, as you point out, but in my view only if the chaos leads to hallucination, as with a Victor Hugo ink spill that becomes a castle in the air –– only when loss of control is allied with extreme precision. Chance is still very active in American abstraction, but maybe more for its Duchamp/Cage lineage than for its let-it-all-hang-out expressionism –– a drip is not enough, it has to be a “drip.” Wheeler’s Montclair show got featured sympathetically in the New York Times, and became a must–see art event.  Having to make a pilgrimage across the Hudson may have contributed to the impact, but what I saw immediately was that Wheeler doesn’t rely on pattern, symmetry, and repetition for his psychedelic intensity; there are no algorithms, no grids, no top-down organizing rules.  Thus your eye is on its own trying to sort things out, but you don’t mind at all because the color is plain gorgeous –– impeccable really –– and the shapes are never wimpy; yes, rather like Stuart Davis.  But while Davis is always cool and in balance, however angular, like ‘40s Bop, Wheeler makes me think, jazzwise, of an eccentric novelty act perfectionist like Raymond Scott.

DL: David, that’s a great point about Raymond Scott, who I just listened to on your prompt. The Wheeler/Davis contrast is a useful one.  In a sense Wheeler stands on Davis’s shoulders, enabling him to bypass Henri Matisse and Neo-Plasticism so he can plumb deeper depths.  Of course Wheeler is twenty years younger.  Putting his considerable formal talent aside, is Wheeler’s resonance also due to a drive to express his belief in the universal mind? Or dare we ask, does a bit of content that he found contain some kind of “truth” that resonates, no matter how much we try to push past that paradigm? Working in the mines of Pennsylvania, below the surface, must have left Wheeler partial to ideas about interiority, mapping and psychological theories of the sub/unconscious mind. He also helped to point out that Northwest Native American art can be as powerful a source for Modern artists as African Art.

In some of the more open and decorative pieces, such as Portrait (1941), and Julius Mayer Sonia (1950), I can’t help wondering how aware Wheeler was of the Transcendentalist Painting Group in Taos, New Mexico, during the ‘30s and ‘40s, particularly the paintings of Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson, who also held mystical beliefs.  And although I’m excited to see Inventing Abstraction at MoMA, I also wish they would do a show of American Abstraction from 1925-50 that included Indian Space Painting, Transcendental Painting Group, American Abstract Artists, etc.  A couple of shows at the Whitney lately have nibbled around the edges of this period, so that’s good. Fortunately, Findlay and D. Wigmore Fine Art each exhibit this neglected yet essential chapter of our history regularly.

DB: Yes, these old-school galleries do a great job of keeping the work on view, and seem better informed about the interstices of American abstraction than museums.  In general, well-constructed, earnestly transcendent abstractions, including the kind that were made in Taos  ––  Thunderbird meets Kandinsky –– have been relegated to the historically tangential.  Perhaps they get associated with western-themed landscapists of an earlier generation like Ernest L. Blumenschein, an excellent painter who few take seriously due to a certain touristy quality –– a credulous skin-deepness.  I’ll venture that the better done these Taos paintings are, figurative or abstract, the less they have tended to resonate.  Georgia O’Keeffe’s reputation sometimes seems to rise above, sometimes sink below, her widespread popularity.  She remains a feminist icon, a fearless perfectionist, a visionary, yet gets tarred by this same brush of the literal, the romanticized, the too-conventionally polished.  On the other hand, Marsden Hartley passed through Taos, and his early abstractions, and in most cases his expressionist landscapes as well, remain a touchstone for every serious American painter I know.

Another interesting case linking both sides of the landscape/abstraction divide is that of Lawren Harris, the biting poet of the frozen North, a Canadian landscapist worthy of comparison with the best of Hartley and Rockwell Kent; he got hypnotized by Theosophy, left his proper Protestant family in Toronto and spent the years 1937-40 in New Mexico, where he embarked on some pretty far-out planar abstractions –– awful really, and hard to understand without the naïve earnestness of the Transcendentalist milieu.

Artists like Harris, Bisttram and Jonson or the non-Wheeler ISPs do seem too well-behaved for contemporary taste (and I’ll note here that Harris proudly declared his “marriage” with his Theosophist lover –– they had absconded to the States one step ahead of bigamy charges –– to be spiritual, and entirely celibate).  But I’m pretty sure the same taste would go gaga over these paintings’ trippy visual pyrotechnics were they known to be in service to maniacal partying, à la Haring or Kenny Scharf; or outsider mysticism à la Alex Grey; or the resplendent punk-sacred à la Tomaselli.  If these Taos artists were taking peyote with D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge, in other words, dancing naked around the bonfire, presumably this would make the work cool again, right?

DL: Ha! Sure, spectacle is a hot marketing device, so throwing some nakedness or drugs into the story always provides a hook. We all agree that the sacred has impacted images throughout history. Back in the ‘40s, it’s likely that Gordon Onslow-Ford, a painter also interested in the visionary, was aware of the impact of hallucinogens. Originally from England, Onslow-Ford came to New York and wound up in Mexico for seven years. Wheeler might have attended Ford’s lectures at the New School in Manhattan; a lot of artists did.  Ford eventually headed to northern California, where his associates were Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican (the artist Matt Mulican’s father), also brilliant, original abstractionists investigating energetic imagery.  As a whole, they are a tremendously interesting group too.

As you point out, there is something of the well-behaved in Jonson and Bisttram.  I’m partial to Jonson anyway, despite the fact that he never loses sight of decorative design values.  Perhaps this is why these painters are often overlooked or even lumped in, as you suggest, with landscapists like Harris who used exaggeration to simplify and visually heighten form.  This stuff must have been everywhere. I was watching Cover Girl (1944), with Rita Hayworth, the other day and noticed that the set design for her dance scene was one of these symbolic/abstract landscapes, complete with the misty cloud via fog machine.  The simplify-and-exaggerate formula used by these landscape painters may also have been the fine art version that the designers, stylists and animators of Disney films like Snow White (1937) favored – a romantic, brooding, central European illustration sensibility that still pops up today in Hallmark cards, or even Inka Essenhigh paintings. Strangely, though Mickey Mouse culture has been bashed for its conservative values, Disney’s romantic themes, animistic nature worship and visual splendor sensitized many children to idealism and counter-cultural issues like environmental conservation and even class inequity.  And then there was the stoned-out vibe at revival houses in the mid ‘70s when Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) would re-run. No little kids at those shows.

 DB: A weirdly self-conscious compendium of styles, Fantasia still amazes stone cold sober. The “Rite of Spring” section, in my book, is great cinema, and convincingly painterly at that, even though it makes hash of Stravinsky.  On the other hand, Fantasia makes a farce of the high idealism of abstract Visual Music in the opening Bach Toccata and Fugue section –– I find the experience fascinating yet excruciating.  For either extreme, I look at classic animation backgrounds all the time.  There’s a lot to unpack in the way fairy tales, fantasy, and sci-fi preserved western art traditions below the radar of modernism, including, as you point out, certain “improving” moral values.  Though Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley put those moral values pretty thoroughly in their place.

Maybe you are suggesting that Wheeler’s approach, as with cartooning, begins to seem more and more contemporary.  Some of his titles support this view: Wheeler’s street-savvy Woman Eating a Hot Dog (1950) or his Introducing Miss America (1945) vs. Willem de Kooning’s categorical Woman IV (1952) and Pollock’s mythic Pasiphaë (1943).  Wheeler doesn’t fling paint around in search of a subject.

DL: Regardless of Wheeler’s contemporary appeal, for me he stands out because he resists polish and sometimes pushes composition to the edge of comprehension.  Unlike the Transcendental Group in Taos, or the modernists in New York who floated politely assembled geometries, Wheeler’s compositions seem to build volcanic pressure internally. Though he made preparatory drawings, when we look at Wheeler’s paintings he seems to be wrestling with energetic forces that he can barely keep a lid on.  He willingly stepped into treacherous territory.  I guess this is also why we like him, he really means it…he is a believer.

DB: He packs signs into a resolute, atomic-age aesthetic crush, then works the variables of color and linear hierarchy into critical mass.  A plurality of contemporary painters have used a similar strategy, for example Pearson, Burckhardt, and Murray; they get to abstraction by submitting found objects, or found fragments of style, to enormous pressure.  This additive, sign-saturated version of abstraction, not invented by Wheeler but pushed to a limit case by him, allows many contemporary painters to manifest, like Wheeler, a quality of true belief in painting, above and beyond artistic ideology.  Yes, we respond to Wheeler because he is a believer, and more than that –– something close to a prophet.

DL: High praise indeed.

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Although, at sixty-six, Elizabeth Murray – basking still in the glory of last year’s MoMA retrospective – is surely one of the old masters of the contemporary scene, her recent work doesn’t have any of the characteristics of seniority.

The eighteen pieces on display at PaceWildenstein,dating from 2003-06, include ten of her trademark painted constructions where oil on canvas is stretched on sculpturally shaped wooden supports.  These images have as much youthful, boiterous spunk as anything she has produced in an already visually raucous career.

“Old age” style has usually to do with looseness, both in terms of medium application and the definition of forms.  But these works stand out within her oeuvre thanks to sharp focus, crisp chroma and clarity of line.  “Flight of the Bumble Bee” (2003) for instance is an arrangement of discrete sculptural entities attached, abutting or overlapping one another, each in its own, distinct color range, observing different gravities and perspectives.  Some of these forms are common objects like a pink bowler hat or a couple of dog bones, in red and blue.  Even where the forms are obstinately abstract, or else, in the case of a skewed light blue square with a yellow frame and a darker blue cross-bar, can be read as variously as a kite, flag or window, the color and application are tight and specific.  There is an avoidance of the formal ambiguities and murky tonal mixes that once characterized her work. [118]

It is no secret that the artist has battled cancer for some while.  This only makes the virile humor and graphic punch of her compositions the more striking.  “The Sun and the Moon” (2005), one of the pieces on which the MoMA show signed off, can be called an orderly depiction of chaos.  The pink skeletal figure recalls something out of the Mexican Day of the Dead, but like everything else in this brightly colored, cartoon-inspired carnival, it exudes a defiant spirit of affirmation.

Another work from MoMA’s exhibition given a second outing here is “Do the Dance” (2005), now in that museum’s collection.  That it recalls the board game, Chutes and Ladders, is an apt metaphor for a sensibility that bounces us around recklessly from high to low, with references both to classic modernism and raucous pop and folk culture.  As much as the jumble of red sticks at the top center of this image recalls Russian Constructivism, the contour lines and linear accents put us in mind of Keith Haring (the similarity is more overt in “The New World” from 2006). The eye feels like it is on a wild journey through Ms. Murray’s work, liable at any moment to be wisked off towards exhileration or shoved unceremoniously into absurdity.

In whichever state, there is no question that Ms. Murray is – in the best sense of the term – a vulgarian.  Her art fuses ribald humor and linguistic experiment in a way that itself constitutes a high-low collision.  But then her ability to play abstraction and figuration simultaneously, to deal with life in all its impurities and yet speculate within the higher realms of “pure” shape and color, recalls many classic forebears within the modernist canon, Picasso or Miró for instance, making her a natural for MoMA, a living exemplar of modernism.  That these two artistic forebears hail from the same country might not be a coincidence: Ms. Murray was born in Chicago, and although she has made her career in New York, a goofey, Rabelasian life inclusiveness links Chicago art, across several generations, to Spain’s mix of the earthy and the metaphysical.

Another of the dichotomies alive within Ms. Murray’s art is between depth and flatness.  Flatness is served by her penchant for isolated instances of solid color, and for graphic devices that although depicting volume and depth are nonetheless obviously from the language of cartoons and illustration, that is to say from the printed page. The cutout shapes on which she works stand proud of the wall, emphasizing the artificiality of the support, further defeating illusions of depth.  But then, color and shape are still able to work their trompe l’oeil magic, as in “Baby Snakes” (2006), with its knowing disparites of scale, its optical sensations of protrusion and recession, in the way artfully compressed grids lead the eye around corners and into distances.  And her painterly touch, for all its newfound Stuart Davis-like precionism, still has a lushness, an involvement in subtle tonal shifts, that slows down the gaze, militating against the work’s graphic immediacy.  Shifts in speed might actually be the wildest game Ms. Murray plays.

An Elizabeth Murray has something for all the family: child-like innocence sits comfortably with artworld sophistication in a way that recalls such protean American pranksters as Alexander Calder and Red Grooms.

Mr. Groom’s sometime assistant [35 words, but reword next sentence] Tom Burckhardt, who is having his third solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy, taps a similar mix of art and life, the earthy and ethereal, abstraction and illustration, earnestness and horsing around.  And, again like Ms. Murray, his latest work has a crisp sense of clarity.

Typically of this artist, there is both thematic and formal unity to his show of ink drawings on paper.  The leitmotifs are a cutout photograph of artist himself inserted, almost seamlessly, as a collage element within the painted image, and pristine canvases.  There aren’t the beligerently disparate scale and touch that have characterized previous work.  The images are strongly reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints—not the classics of the Ukiyo-e period so much as twentieth-century descendants of that tradition.  Depicting the artist and his canvases coping with crises – whether ecological, domestic or existential – the scenes exude dark humor.

“Studio Fire” (all 2006) depicts the interior of a wrecked wooden barn, the surrounding walls in cinders with brooding sky and pine trees beyond, but in the middle is a pristine canvas on an unblemished easel.  The scene could be read in banal literal terms: the defiant artist has set up shop again, unfazed by the fire.  But it also suggests an allegory of art versus life, recalling Magritte’s countless images of easels oddly indifferent to surrounding realities. [78]

In “Vortex” a churning sea sucks canvases in a spiral towards its center, the artist feeding the maelstrom with more and more of them.  In “Icarus Launch” the artist flies off a cliff with canvases as wings, faring rather well.  In other images he fends off freezing winds with a bonfire of canvases, or survives a shipwreck with a raft and sail made of them.  One almost expects sardonic understatement captions with these diffidently ironic images in the style of the absurdist illustrator Glen Baxter and his hapless cowboys.

But despite intentional deadpan, Mr. Burckardt transcends the cartoon idiom to achieve an odd, personal balance of the silly and the poignant.  “Conflagration,” a huge work of 80 by 144 inches, melds together illustration and decoration with rare elan.  A huge circle of canvases in a barren landscape is doused by the arsonist artist, creating a fireball which, in the heavens, turns into an exquisite patchwork of Stephen Mueller and Al Held-like abstract swirls and shapes. That an iconoclastic act, rendered with nerdish realism, results inthis apotheosis of abstraction comes across as an allegory of style.  If the artist himself believes it, his next show will have less irony and more abstraction.

Murray until November 11 (534 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 929 7000)

Burckhardt until November 11 (724 Fifth Avenue at 57 Street, 212.262.5050)

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun,  October 19, 2006 under the title “Gallery Going:  An ‘old master’ defiantly at work “

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

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