For me, MoMA is the art museum. The Frick may have the near perfect historical collection. Certainly, the Met has everything, which is why I love getting lost there. And the Guggenheim and Whitney are always worth visiting, as, sometimes, is the New Museum. But MoMA is our place, it’s the museum that formed and forms the canon in modernism and whatever comes next. That’s why I trace my own Bildungsroman by remembering the changing arrangements of the permanent collection, and recalling conversations I had about them: I once met up with the late Linda Nochlin there, who told a funny story about Willem de Kooning’s female nudes. And I met T.J. Clark in the exhibition comparing the paintings Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.  I suspect that I’m not the only person who responds to the museum like this, with ample happy personal memories.

Just as only someone you care deeply about inspires the most passionate complaints, so this museum inspires deeply personal critical responses. I am aware, then, that its relationship to Abstract Expressionism, now well represented in the permanent collection, was for a long time problematic. And I am old enough to remember when it looked like there would be endless Frank Stella retrospectives. But when I recall such great shows as “Inventing Abstraction, 1920-1925” (2013) or “Adrian Piper A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016” (2018), that turned my head around. Simularly, when I recollect the amazingly ambitious rehang just before the closing last year, the first draft of a revolutionary contemporary world art history, all my complaints fade away. The museum is often uncomfortably overcrowded. I can recall when you could be nearly alone with Guernica. But those present crowds are a measure of the success of we educators.

The problem right now facing MoMA is what Hegelian Marxists call a contradiction. Our leftist art world depends upon a support system provided by the super rich, many of them Republicans, who name galleries and donate masterpieces. In practice sometimes the art world closes its eyes, and takes the money but not the politics. So far as I know, no one is picketing the Frick, though how Henry Clay Frick earned his money is dismaying to the moralist. And we may regret some actions of the Rockefellers. It would be worthwhile, I think, to chart the sources of the wealth of all the MoMA trustees. But institutions often accept old money whilst having problems with the new money of a Leon Black or a Steve Cohen. The grandfather made the money, and so the children could become philanthropists: Henry James and Louis Auchincloss have told that story. If you care about posthumous opinion, a magnificent art collection looks better than a yacht or country estate. Nowadays, however, no doubt the grand collectors also have yachts and estates.

Like the duc de Saint Simon, who, as Marcel Proust explains, had a snobbish preference for the old nobility rather than those ennobled only under Louis XII, many think that old money is better than new wealth. And yet, people who call for reparations for slavery or for Native Americans, are not satisfied to be told that those moral miscarriages took place long ago. And a realist might argue that since we’re stuck with the rich, let’s at least get some benefit from their money by asking up their offers to support our museums. At any rate, in the present division of labor, the function of the trustees is to raise the money while scholars do the theorizing. (And the staff does the work.) This is  why neither Meyer Schapiro nor Clement Greenberg were trustees of MoMA.

How would this museum finance itself if it had to do without the uber rich? It would be admirable to display more female, Black , and Asian-American artists. But that’s already starting to happen, at least in part. Could MoMA be seriously downscaled, perhaps, like the New Museum when it was on Broadway before it constructed its expensive building on the Bowery? Once I asked a MidWestern museum director if he wanted to have free admissions.. A good idea he said, but here’s what I need, and he quoted the exact grant required. Change is requires a serious chunk of change.

Twenty years ago as a Getty Scholar, I started to write my book on the art museum, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006). Thanks to J. Paul Getty’s oil dealings in Saudi Arabia, whose fierce theology prohibits graven images, the last new grand museum devoted to the European figurative tradition can now sit high on a hill above Los Angeles. We could view the automobile traffic stretching out far beyond the airport as we worked. But even literally aloof scholars are unavoidably inside the system, which isn’t to say that we have to approve of its dealings, or that we should fail to protest. It’s easy to be critical about other people, but harder to be self-critical about your own role. That’s why I am genuinely unsure about how to judge the actions of my colleagues and friends who protest at MoMA. Spectacular injustices and inequalities make our art world possible. But I am deeply uncertain about what change is likely. In 1974 I read one of the great publications of that era, Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. His conclusion coveys a feeling for the leftist world of that era, to which I am still attached:

“Long live the Revolution!”
“Yes! In spite of everything!”

These are Courbet’s instructions to the connoisseur, and Baudelaire’s to himself in 1865. They don’t seem to me to have dated.

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March 31 to July 22, 2018
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York City, moma.org

The intuition in Adrian Piper’s work is evident everywhere. The curators had good reasons for titling this grand, inclusive retrospective of her art A Synthesis of Intuitions.

But which way do you want to take that word? In ordinary English it refers to immediate thought, what comes out of you without preparation as if because it has always been in there. Emerson speaking of the human instinct, as opposed to what schools provide, says, “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.”

On the other hand Kant, whom this title phrase alludes to directly (and who was one of the subjects of Piper’s Ph.D. thesis at Harvard), pictures intuitions as the raw material of experience. The understanding brings formless sensory input together, using concepts to construct what we call experience in the act of synthesis. “Concepts without intuitions are empty,” Kant says, as if intuition filled our thinking, as if from outside. So the exhibition’s title is telling us that we’ll be looking at Adrian Piper’s efforts to organize what had come upon her from outer sources and shape it into her art – unless (because we can’t just forget the ordinary meaning of the word) it describes the synthesis that is this show at MoMA, organizing the various outpourings of Piper’s instincts.

It’s a good confusion to start with, between the wellspring of inner life and its independently grasped truths and what comes to that inwardness in the rush of experience, uncontrolled and often unwanted. As this survey ranges from minimalism and concept to political observation and comment, with news from the frontlines as well as from the artist’s backstory, it shows her persistently negotiating the interplay between what we know as inner and outer. Everyone thinks about what elements of their experience originate in their own minds as opposed to entering from elsewhere; but artists especially, and in another way especially philosophers. This exhibition, highly conscious of Piper as someone trained and practiced in both philosophy and art, keeps your mind on her meditations on mind.

The richly documented early work, when Piper was studying at the School for Visual Arts and then at City College, shows both Sol LeWitt’s influence and her own first inquiries into consciousness. At twenty, and in her early twenties, Piper worked at minimalist constructions, stringent observations of experience, and a range of performances, including the alter ego she called “The Mythic Being.” The “Situation” pieces map what is external or given in an incident (a walk down the stairs and to the grocery store around Hester and Forsythe Streets), to imply the inarticulable additional element that is the self to whom these experiences are given. To map the space in which an experience comes to be is to legitimate, without having captured and reduced, the consciousness that experiences in that space. “Reality adds to mind inductively; mind adds to reality deductively,” as one of her early writings says.

Not only the physical world is outside, because outside is also where you find the social world with all its expectations. The Mythic Being dances to music that no one else hears or speaks phrases whose context and justification are known only to that being. The mental, previously knowing itself afloat within time and space, now increasingly strategizes the grounds for its integrity among surrounding mentalities. Alongside the problem of the external world we have the problem of other minds.

So what is it that other minds see or know when the engagement takes place amid differences in race, sex, and class? Then the very general social expectations that the Mythic Being faces take a pointed and violent form. A recurring panel in the “Decide What You Are” triptychs (1992) overwhelms its human figure, the photograph of a black girl, with repeating texts of language that denies her understanding of things, from the bland initial sentences “It’s fine” and “I didn’t notice anything wrong” into the territory of “You’re the one with the problem,” “You’re being irrational.” For the girl to learn to speak, when this is the language around her, is to acquire proficiency at doubting her own experience. In another context Kant calls the loss of trust in empirical knowledge “the scandal of philosophy.” “Decide What You Are” imagines the concrete loss of trust in one’s own knowledge, not the fate of all rational minds but the path followed by a few insofar as they are barred from the status of rational minds; call this the scandal of social existence.

The expectations of a social world become the beliefs of the art’s audience when the black man on the video screens in “What It’s Like, What It Is” (1991) has to say in every direction of the compass, to everyone seated around that minimalist amphitheater: “I’m not lazy. I’m not horny. I’m not vulgar.” Just to appear to the audience that is a theatricalizing society, he has to identify and disavow, preemptively, the adjectives that that audience comes prepared to attribute to him. The situation allows for only a compromised liberation, given that every sentence out of the man’s mouth has to be negative, not “what it is” despite the piece’s title but what he isn’t. The final burden of entering a conversation about you that has already settled on the words to be used is that you can only join in the conversation by disrupting it, or refusing to go on with the dialogue.

I ran into versions of the same stumbling block with other pieces from the late 1980s and 1990s. Piper expands her attention from the lone subjectivity seeking to know its own integrity, to the beliefs and behaviors of the surrounding audience. She often posits or declares what the audience is thinking, her spiritual exercises having become exorcisms of the watching others who come to her art.

Second-guessing the audience hits home in a piece like “Cornered” (1988). It is a well-known monologue by Piper, the video of her behind a table on a screen that has appropriately been backed into a corner. What does she say she is: black or white? She imagines the objections to either answer, then asks the white people watching why they don’t call themselves black too. Does black culture put them off? Would they rather not know about their African ancestry?

The premise (that one chooses racial identity) might sound dated thirty years later. The provocation is not. Racial identification has cornered Piper, and she’s showing her non-black audience what it might feel like to inhabit a corner. Consider the possibility that you will blunder and contradict yourself when explaining why you call yourself white. Consider whiteness as racial identification not a self-evident fact.

Viewers may deny having the motivations that Piper ascribes to them. But even then the denial of those motives engages the viewers in the act of thinking through identity that Piper invites her audience to join her in. If you come up with different reasons for your position on identity you will still be coming up with some reasons; and now racial identification has come in for newfound thinking.

An essay of Piper’s, “Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness,” uses a similar technique on its readers. There Piper itemizes the “mechanisms” by which people escape self-examination. To read that essay is to enter a fitting room of rationalizations, putting on one after another in order to figure out exactly how you’re putting yourself on.

Elsewhere Piper’s effort to get the jump on her audience works against her. I commented on the limitation to “What It’s Like, What It Is” built into the speaker’s script, as it were, having been generated by an audience antecedently configured as biased. Another difficult case, “Safe #1-4” (1990), displays four photographs of black people in groups with text that says “We are among you”; “We are around you”; “We are within you”; “You are safe.” The captions almost fit the paintings. It is more accurate to say that they offer one reading of the photographs they caption – for example that an image of a family around the dinner table, almost a stereotype of wholesome tradition when the family is white, in this instance invites interpretations about cultural encroachment.

Meanwhile however what sounds like Piper’s voice speaks from above criticizing the installation (“too militant”; “too explicit”). The critical voice contradicts itself, unsure whether to condemn the installation for being obvious or for being indirect. What follows from the criticism’s self-defeat? That this installation can demonstrate its own value by refuting all negative judgments about it? That if it leaves you unmoved you must subscribe to everything this particular hostile voice is saying? One might worry that pre-empting actual voices from outside with a constructed outside voice is unfair to critics; but the unfairness doesn’t even matter as much as the sight of an anxiety behind this process, of a sort that does not usually take over Piper’s work. I don’t say that she should trust her audience. But in such moments, uncharacteristically, she gives the impression of fearing it. The putative external voice seems less to destabilize the viewing experience than to over-stabilize it, allowing the work to play to its own ears.

That Piper can recreate a distinct subjectivity without projecting words onto other people ought to go without saying. Her parents’ smoking habits and deaths provide the subject for one tender and affecting example, “Ashes to Ashes” (1995). She lets Rodney King and George H. W. Bush speak in “Black Box/White Box” (1992) without adding a comment. Descended in their different ways from Piper’s early “Situation” works, these presentations dwell on fact letting her audience’s mind add to the reality deductively.

In one of the last series in this retrospective, the “Everything” pieces of 2010-2013, Piper moves beyond thoughts of her audience and their judgments. “Everything will be taken away.” The sentence appears on photographs or by itself. In one room, four blackboards show the sentence written in chalk, 25 times per blackboard, and increasingly erased away as one advances from the first to the fourth board. Do children in school still have to write something on the board a hundred times? I can’t think of a more economical depiction of a life-lesson: Stoicism on the wall. Heroes are killed, possessions decay, health is soon gone. Then the admonitory words themselves begin to fade. Standing in that room, I couldn’t decide, and I was glad not to be able to decide, whether the fading of the words meant that people go through their lives forgetting that essential Stoic maxim, denying its truth; or that what you might think you still have after all the anguishing experiences of loss, namely the consciousness with integrity that remains and knows the essential nature of loss – that too will go. Even the strategy of reminding yourself of life’s difficulties is a temporary and half-effective strategy. Sorry about that.

Suppose you imagined yourself bringing chalk to those boards to rewrite what has been erased. You make it a full one hundred sentences. Did you just make things better (restoring the intuition’s outward articulation) or worse (insisting on the unwanted news pressing inward with its moral)? These were the kinds of questions that I found the “Everything” series provoking me to ask, even while asserting nothing and promising only Nothing. Down to the end, which is the present, the retrospective sustains its restlessness of thought, the synthesis work still never done, regardless of where you want to locate the origins of its intuitions.

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July 30, 2016 to February 12, 2017
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In a small, square room that branches diagonally from MoMA’s second-floor hallway, Teiji Furuhashi’s 1994 installation, Lovers, projects mutely dancing figures as dusky light onto gallery walls. Glistening like ice or the slick sterility of hospital vinyl floors, a white expanse of Marley unfurls across the gallery to meet black walls. Eyes adjusting to the low illumination, the glossy surface’s glare dominates vision, creating a sense of strange suspension. In the room’s center, the apertures of seven projectors, stacked in a spine-like tower, trace beams of light across the room’s varied contours. The hum of these machines is background and breath to the chirping pulse of the installation’s accompanying audio.

With steps that drag over the resistant surface, my motions are a material echo to the pale shadows that sidle over the surrounding walls. Starched white by the projectors’ thin lights, the dancers of Dumb Type — the artist collective that Teiji helped found in 1984 — patrol the room’s perimeter, moving along the screen-like walls. The nude figures of men and women move in synchronicity or lethargic pursuit of each other through the room’s corners and planes. One man dashes with long, dramatic strides through the rectangular frames of the walls, trailing a woman who, like Daphne to this young Apollo, is ever just beyond reach. Her short hair alive with the staccato of hurried steps, she moves counter-clockwise through the encircling walls to fade out, eroded by the harsher light of the exit. Following and overtaking the nude figures, vertical lines inscribed “limit” and “fear” rove the space, mapping the geographies of bodies and walls alike as though scanning barcodes.

As the room grows close with people, these specters move through their choreographies on a stage of flesh, illuminating viewers in a fluid projection whose bare feet are just visible through the legs of onlookers.  This shifting crowd dances with the flickering lights, which hurry the periphery to catch intimate movements even as the audience reciprocally turns to trace their gleaming paths. To enter the space is to join in the motions of the work. A man exits the room and a luminous dancer hastens to follow. I am looking down at my notebook when a figure passes over me and through me.

The installation’s austere design recalls an early ‘90s vision of futurity, imagined by one who would never get to see it; Teiji passed from AIDS-related illness in the month following the work’s original installation at MoMA in 1995. The barren simplicity of the installation hosts cruel contrasts: alive with motion and sound, but grave-like in darkness and intimacy, playing across viewers’ bodies, but aloof in the hollowness of its engagement. There is a sense of having entered someone, only to be confronted by the loneliness of fear, vulnerability, and unrequited desire. A man and woman are projected to overlap, bending towards one another, arms cradling air. The Venn diagram of their intersecting bodies is a thin, elongated silhouette, a symbolic convergence that only approximates union.

In spite of the title and the dancers’ nudity, Lovers does not emphasize romance or physical closeness, but rather the uncomfortable coupling of loving and dying, the intoxicating terror of the “little death.” Tracing their movements like memories repeated over and again, the dancers pass through the installation without leaving impressions, ghosts as ineffectual as they are impotent. Do their fleeting pursuits seek the comfort of touch or flee the realization of solitude? However, the desolate fear of abandonment is overshadowed by hints of a more final end; in prone bodies and flat horizontals, reminiscent of the flat line of a cardiograph gone flat, is the recognition not of losing but of being lost. Musing on the hope of forever that is implicit in the creative act, Lovers asks what our gestures — in life and in love — amount to when all is said and done? Despite, and perhaps because of, these grim indications of mortality, Teiji dances on in this cyclical video work, a dream ever in danger of obsolescence. We see him moving alongside his fellow dancers. Flickering into sight, he stands crucified with arms outstretched at the crosshairs of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. Wavering in and out of focus, he hesitates before falling away with the grace and control of a diver, passing into nothingness beyond museum walls.

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“A surd is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained.” – Lewis Carroll

One exciting thing about the creative act (in the parlance of Marcel Duchamp) is its way of bringing about, for actor and viewer, things that haven’t been experienced before. At least not in the same context. Some of what’s been made by the Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers is a good example of this, and in a way that also allows the viewer to creatively complete the picture by way of imagining new meanings of what’s being shown. With this I’d like to bring up nonsense, or better another sense, which is what to my mind what Broodthaers was engaged in. In My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (Siglio, 2016), he tries on Lewis Carroll’s shoes and explores the partitions of reality and make-believe. In one edition of texts and images spanning a little more than a decade, the book collects three short works. The first of three parts, Mon livre d’ogre (My Ogre Book, 1957), is a tableau in a series of poems — with Midnight (1960) in similar fashion, and then the all-image collection Shadow Theater (1973-1974) between the two, made from one of Broodthaers’ Projection series.

Like in Carroll, the why of Broodthaers needn’t be put into words. The tale that Broodthaers weaves is often a fragmented one that is at times homely and always bewildering. These things are what make his poetry congenial, seeming from the wellsprings of consciousness. Consciousness, after all, as writer Harry Mathews has said, “does not produce a particular meaning — it produces no conclusions.” That seems a pretty apt description of this collection: Broodthaers isn’t concluding anything, and with that he makes an adventurer of his reader. For children first, this nonsense has always been a secret means of access to a more vibrant, harlequin world — one I’ve come to find belongs to poetry, in all of its guises.

When the first of the three books came out, it was 1957, a post-war world. The first US edition of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat appeared, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was printed in England and seized by customs officials that year. What is the significance of this? Maybe nothing. To liken Broodthaers’ writing to Carroll is, by the way, in no way to call it anachronistic — a word I’ll look askance at, not abiding by the notion that styles “belong” to specific eras. At the start of My Ogre Book, through the “present day mirror,” morning becomes a world unto itself, reminding one of Alice holding to her orange. Broodthaers also, while courting a familiar style, brings to the poems motifs and highly unusual turns all his own. There is otherworldly music where donkeys play the drums, and the bells of Easter Island, well, remain silent. Elsewhere goats knock on doors, fairies grind coffee, paper flowers fill with dew, and all the while everyday, clearly explained things happen too, making some of this fantasy material even more interesting. “The wind allies itself with the fire/ the rafts burn in the night” is one such line so lucid you can almost smell the smoke, and “The key is under the doormat” as ever.

In his writing and in the images within Shadow Theater, Broodthaers was able to summon the chance-originated play, conundrums, or (un)concerns that his later visual artworks hinge on physically. I’m thinking of Broodthaers’ La Pluie, a 1969 film wherein the artist tries to write as “rain” falls on him, washing away text even as he continues to write. A simple, strange tableau on astronomical situations, human effort and circumstance, all of Broodthaers’ work seems to engage the processes of being in the world and making things. But in his writings, the poet plays with meaning with an almost wholesale disregard for ordinary sense — no net as far as the game of reasoning and logic goes, he creates extra significances that endlessly drift in and out of new senses. In Midnight, surprising things take place: rain falls from the sun, a straw man guards the sea, a black cat constellation is made, centuries get lined up in a matchbox, and stars are turned to salt. This memorable nonsense impresses me just about as much as the regular phenomena it parodies.

Calling it an artist’s book is no stretch — at just over 150 pages, its layout has the look of a children’s book juxtaposed with the simple aesthetic appeal of Raymond Roussel and the artist Zo’s collaboration from 1929, New Impressions of Africa, where images and cantos are informed by one another throughout. The images in this book lie between the two short collections of poems but have no text on their pages.

Thumbing to Shadow Theater (Ombres chinoises) (1973-74) — a series of 80 slides of images taken from comic strips, books, and a photography manual, all of which were projected somewhere sometime — Broodthaers tells another story, again a provisionary one that unravels and winds up again by turns. A visual lexicon involving ordinary or comic incidents, objects, and figures, is reimagined in new juxtapositions that make the familiar baffling. In Shadow Theater, celestial bodies career through outer space and transform to erupting volcanoes, exploding perhaps through a kitchen window, to maybe cause the seasons to tear a man from limb-to-limb. Volcanoes, shadow puppets, and solid black rectangles are a few of this book’s recurrent motifs.

Broodthaers explained the effect of his work in 1965, saying, “The preference for eternity and the natural had ended up producing academicism, as we know. Its replacement by a preference for the ephemeral, for the artificial, for all that is false, aroused my enthusiasm as much as my poetic loyalty.” In Broodthaers, assumed logic is, for a moment, set aside or transmogrified. Be the truth “interstitial,” as Broodthaers calls it, or mere traces in the mind of the artist, the person experiencing the objects will always come away with something new when the imagination has a say.

Broodthaers, Marcel. My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (New York: Siglio, 2016). Trans. by Elizabeth Zuba with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers. ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-8. 160 pages. Edition of 1,000. $39.95

The post Ad Absurdum: A Collection of Poems by Marcel Broodthaers appeared first on artcritical.

March 19 to September 5, 2016
11 West 53rd Street (between 6th and 7th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In 2000, a miracle occurred in the blue-collar town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. On a window of Ramona and Marcelino Collado’s second floor apartment at 103 Washington Street, the Virgin Mary appeared. As news of her advent spread through the neighborhood, scores of the Catholic faithful lined up outside the little house with peeling vinyl siding in order to troop up the stairs and pay homage. At the time, artist Rachel Harrison caught wind of the event and traveled to Perth Amboy with her camera to document the worshippers. Seeing is believing.

The photographs resulting from this pilgrimage currently line the walls of the Museum of Modern Art’s second-floor Dunn Gallery, a component of Harrison’s larger installation Perth Amboy (2001), marking the first time MoMA has displayed the work since acquiring it in 2011. Large sheets of corrugated cardboard form a winding labyrinth throughout the room, and a guard controls entry to the gallery. (To have such a respite from MoMA’s infamous crowds is reason alone to spend time with the work. The relative quiet fosters meditation and augments the contemplative quality of Perth Amboy.) Because freestanding cardboard is intrinsically precarious, the viewer is especially aware of her body as she moves through the space, taking extra care not to accidentally brush up against the boards, lest one tips and sends the whole thing toppling like dominoes. Rounding the corner of a cardboard sheet she might be surprised by another body on the opposite side. The installation choreographs these chance encounters, where a stranger is obliged, even if fleetingly, to regard another.

“People see what they want to see,” Harrison has said of her own work, and here, it’s the act of looking itself that is being plumbed. In a neat metaphysical sleight of hand, Harrison sets up moments throughout the installation where the very action the viewer performs is also what she is challenged to consider. Upon carefully placed pedestals interspersed within the maze are coupled objects: in each case one half of the pair is distinctly figurative while the other represents a “work of art.” On one pedestal, a “Becky, Friend of Barbie” doll, sitting in a wheelchair and with a camera around her neck, gazes upon a chromogenic print tacked up on the wall before her. Elsewhere, situated on a mirrored base that reflects the lower half of a viewer’s body, a cheap figurine family of Dalmatian dogs stares up collectively at a common cardboard mailer, which has been bent so that it stands upright. A plaster bust of Marilyn Monroe — plunked into a Stor-All box and perched on a small, wheeled platform that has been shoved into a cardboard corner of the labyrinth — is unexpectedly moving. The objects themselves are garish and sometimes tawdry but in each instance Harrison investigates the visceral experience of looking at something, really stopping to consider it. This “something” might be anything: a work of art, celebrity culture, the Divine. Suddenly the kitschy objects are suffused with a more profound resonance—like Marilyn, the classic icon of fashion and Hollywood who epitomizes what it is to be seen, slung low to the ground and sliding towards the informe on a warehouse dolly.

And then there are the photographs. Taken from a vantage point somewhere across the street from the Collado family’s anointed window, most of the images capture believers who have come to witness the Blessed Virgin. Depending on the angle of light, their faces are not always visible through the glass; most often we see only hands pressed against the pane. The images evoke another biblical reference: the tale of Doubting Thomas. According to the story, after Jesus rose from the dead, he appeared to all the disciples but Thomas. When the others informed him of Christ’s return, Thomas replied he couldn’t believe it until he saw for himself. It’s from this story that the common idiom “seeing is believing” originally derives, and which proves especially prescient to Perth Amboy.

Non-believers may scoff at Virgin Mary sightings in unusual places, and the gullibility of those who are certain of their truth. But Harrison’s unexpectedly beautiful photographs reveal the poignancy of religious pareidolia, and the believers who are heartened by the perceived emanation. Faith is an intense, sometimes overwhelming emotion, and the sense of sight is often its most powerful incubator, regardless of whether the idol is religious, political, celebrity, aesthetic, or something else entirely. With Perth Amboy Harrison interrogates the unequivocal, and in so doing challenges viewers to examine their own dogmatic beliefs whatever they might be. What aspects of our own convictions might only be mirages on a pane of glass?

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Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

The post “This is how it’s done”: David Salle Curates Recent Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture at Michael Werner Gallery
January 28 to March 26, 2016
4 E 77th Street (between Madison and 5th avenues)
New York, 212 988 1623

Marcel Broodthaers at Paul Kasmin Gallery
March 3 to April 23, 2016
515 W 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a Voyage at Alden Projects
March 5 to May 8, 2016
34 Orchard Street (between Hester and Canal)
New York, 212 229 2453

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) was a late starter, only becoming a visual artist when he was 40, having spent 20 years trying to make a living as a poet. And he died relatively young, on his 52nd birthday. But as demonstrated by three concurrent shows — at Paul Kasmin, Michael Werner, and the Museum of Modern Art — he was highly productive during a short period. An additional show at Alden Projects displays exhibition invitations, posters, letters, and other similar materials.

There are 200 works, on view at his MoMA survey, including books of poetry and photographs, works made before Broodthaers formally entered the visual arts. His transition can also be seen there, when he turned the unsold copies of his last volume of poetry into the sculpture Pense-Bête (“Memory aid,” 1964), his first artwork, for his first solo exhibition. Once he turned to making art, he created a number of sculptures, which recycle mussels and eggshells, his signature materials. They are ordinary, used-up organic forms. Mussels are often served in Belgian restaurants and he thought of them as poetic. Mussel shells, he wrote, are hulls, two conjoined complete forms. And eggs, of course, are symbols of life and fecundity.

He put eggshells on furniture in Armoire blanche et table blanche (“White cabinet and white table,” 1965), on painted canvas in Untitled (Triptych) (1965-66), and in a box labeled as containing exhibition invitations, in Je retrouve à la matière, je retrouve la tradition des primitifs, peinture à l’oeuf, peinture à l’oeuf (“I return to matter, I rediscover the tradition of the primitives, painting with egg, painting with egg,” 1966). Cooked mussels are found piled in a pot in Grande casserole de moules (“Large casserole of mussels,” 1966) and displayed in crates in Parc à moules (“Tray of mussels,” 1966).

In 1968, announcing that he was no longer an artist, Broodthaers appointed himself director of his own museum: Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (“Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles”), an installation project that began in his home and was later restaged at documenta and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. MoMA displays documentation — announcements, films, slide shows and also objects — generated by that career. One finds postcards of paintings, maps of the museum, photographs of the exhibitions, slide shows and display cases. Untitled (General with cigar) (1970), features a found thrift-shop painting of General Philippe Pétain (treasonous Chief of State in Vichy France) with a cigar stuck in his mouth, part of Broodthaers’s recurring interest in smoking and its prohibition as poetic and bureaucratic propositions.

Four years later, in 1972, Broodthaers announced that he again was an artist, and hired a sign painter to print words on canvas, and on the walls and ceiling of a gallery. He made Série en language française (Series de neuf peintures sur un sujet littéraire) (“Series in the French language, Series of nine paintings on a literary subject,” 1972), which includes “Andre Gide smoking,” “Paul Valery smoking,” and so on. And, written in English, he produced nine painted canvases, Série anglaise (“English series,” 1972): a set of prints featuring the names and birth and death dates of English luminaries such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and others.

Starting in 1974, he recycled his earlier work, employing old-fashioned displays with palm trees, carpets and 19th-century display cases, in exhibitions that he documented on film, calling them “Décors,” which can be translated as “installations” as well as “film sets.”

The gallery shows provide a valuable supplement to the MoMA exhibition. Uptown, “Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture,” at Michael Werner, focuses on his writing, one of his major concerns, and includes collages, drawings, films, collage, sculptures and one of his décors, Dites Partout Que Je L’Ai Dit (“Say Everywhere What I Have Said,” 1974). In Chelsea, Paul Kasmin presents paintings on plastic and Broodthaers’s books, along with the reconstruction of another décor, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas it- Le Perroquet (“Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So — The Parrot,” 1974), a recording of him reciting his poem “Moi Je Dis Mois Je Dis Je…“

Starting with Hegel, and extended by Marx and, more recently, by any number of Marxist critics, the idea that history (and art) proceeds by critical negation has become received opinion among many leftists. This is how T. J. Clark understands Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, and how Theodor W. Adorno described Modernist music. And it is how Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who contributes to a catalogue produced for the MoMA retrospective, understands Broodthaers.

By now, however, it should be apparent that art-as-critique has become a ritual, just another artistic tradition. Our museums (and art galleries) embrace their most distinguished critics. Just as the once-feared “death of painting” has yielded an ongoing tradition of painting, so the deconstructive art of Broodthaers has become part-and-parcel of both the gallery system and the public art museum, though he certainly aimed to upend this dialectical narrative by such acts as the destruction and/or reuse of his own previous work. Duchamp showed that any banal artifact might become a readymade; Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons demonstrated that a replica of a commercial product might become art. Hans Haacke made commercial art critiquing the commercial gallery system, and Broodthaers (among others) revealed that anti-art might itself be the subject of display and commerce.

I suspect that some leftists are frustrated by this situation. I’m fascinated with the ways that our culture honors and supports its critics. The narrative of the Hegelian dialectic, which is the conceptual basis for this process of negation, has come to a standstill, which isn’t to say that the history of art has ended, as Hegel feared-and-hoped, but only that the seemingly radical pursuit of negating gestures, having become an end in itself, is a source of objects which are as aesthetically delectable as any Modernist masterpieces. Broodthaers critiques the art world from within, and so leaves its practice, to which he contributed, more firmly in place. In his catalogue essay, Buchloh argues that Broodthaers disputes “the false and preposterous claims that artistic practices could engender radical political or cultural transformations.” That, I think, is not quite correct. In fact, the present apotheosis of Broodthaers as an artist is a radical cultural transformation, just not the liberatory one that people of the arts so often talk of in vague and longing terms. Indeed, in a marvelous posthumous revelation of the reach of Broodthaers’s idea, MoMA is publishing a limited-edition facsimile of his book Atlas (1975). The deluxe version, which contains a supplement, the uncut press sheet included by Broodthaers in the original publication, is sold exclusively at MoMA stores.

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WILLIAM CORBETT: It’s 1954. He’d been an abstract painter for six or seven years, with a number of successful shows. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar, where he spoke in that Kline-ese that Frank O’Hara caught so beautifully in “Franz Kline Talking” (1958). He’d moved around, possibly rivaling Hokusai’s 734 addresses. When you see photographs of his homes, you see why Kline once said, “Bohemia is a place where a dog would go to die.”

This is a pretty big painting, at this time, but he was to paint bigger pictures. He was dead in 1962, but now he’s in his late 40s, maybe at the top of his game, though the money hadn’t yet come to him.

Let me go back: I said coming up here that one of my interests in Kline is extra-aesthetic. My early childhood was in East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which isn’t far from Lehighton, where Kline grew up. I was 12 in 1954 and didn’t know anything about him. But when I learned about him and saw his work in the early 1960s, I immediately recognized the landscape elements. I responded to those as if I’d come home in a way. Here you can find the train tracks he saw up and down the Lehigh River. I’m not saying he was trying to abstractly paint a landscape. I’m saying those things were so deep within him that they naturally came out when he picked up a brush.

This has associations with buildings, with timber and with scaffolding. A number of his pictures can be read that way. But I’m now seeing something I haven’t seen before: he has a number of paintings, such as Wotan (1950), where there’s an off or wobbly square. It’s starting to emerge here, and that will be a central image. He’ll clean this up in many cases, all that wonderful stuff, all that ideogrammatic stuff. He always said, “I don’t know anything about ideograms”; he liked to disassociate himself with that. And I believe him.

There’s also another quality that I associate with New York: the billboard size that he was moving toward, just like most of his contemporaries. Those guys went to the movies. They began to get a sense of scale. We know he worked from small things and blew them up with a Bell-Opticon projector. Imagine that he’s starting with intimate drawings — covering his studio floor, drawn on telephone book pages. And he’s blowing them up.

I think he was after the dream of the abstract painters, which was to make drawing and painting one. For these guys — for him, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning — it was to get the immediacy of drawing, to locate the viewer in that immediacy, and then to make it happen in paint. A work like this, it seems to me, is absolutely recognizable, because it’s a clear, firsthand apprehension of a reality. That communicates to me.

These men, and the few women, liked to remind you that they were at work; you see the uncleaned drips. For Harold Rosenberg this was Action Painting. Alright, I get that, and I think that’s probably right. With Kline it’s a little bit different, because when you know the Bell-Opticon, the action’s over! But he’s doing something else. I think it’s like when I would first go to openings, in the early 1960s, the painters would come in with their clothes and their shoes all paint-stained. And, man, it always looked so hip.

It sends a message.

But I think there’s more: he wants to show that the work he put into this is part of his aesthetic. Not that he’s going to be praised as, “Oh, Franz, what a hard worker,” but for his notion of what could come at the end of a brush. It could be a splatter, or incomplete lines where the paint has run out of the brush. He also, I think, wanted to give a sense of the moment, make you feel present. As you pointed out, he used house paint and the image is now getting lost: it’s cracking, yellowing, it’s a conservator’s nightmare. In a way, I think it’s too bad that conservators feel compelled to restore this painting to what it was.

How’s that?

Well, just like de Kooning, he used house paint because he couldn’t then afford fine paint. But it means this painting is for the here and now. And I think that in the back of his mind he may have had the idea that it would change and move into a new here and now.

I think of Auden going back to his poems and second-guessing them, even famous ones like “September 1, 1939” (1939), changing lines because he thought better of them. I’m ambivalent about that. Did he think there would be a perfect poem? What about the poem in its moment? Didn’t it have the right to be there? I think we lose something by taking Kline’s paintings away from that original impulse. But I wrote a sequence of poems about Kline, and when I opened it again recently, and began to read again, I did an Audening and made a few corrections.

I remember these paintings fresh and new, and I’ve watched them age over time. I can hold that all in my mind. But if you think of the bohemian guy, living the life he did, painting in one studio after another, using house paint, it seems to be part of his aesthetic. It would age, absolutely — needing a kind of footnoting. Those footnotes would be a little like restoring this.

I think that about a lot: it’s hard to pull the former context up with you, and it’s hard to pull the present back into the past.

Absolutely, and it’s going to be hard. That’s part of the great pleasure of looking at art. Does it take us back there? This certainly takes me back to what was, after all, a black-and-white world: the photographs, the movies. You can imagine this being an aerial shot of the city in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It has the life of that moment.

I’m curious about the painting’s development, because some marks (such as the drips) reveal that it was turned upside down. Do you have any thoughts about why that is, or how that works in the image itself?

Well, I wonder where this was in his studio. As soon as you said that, I thought, OK, he didn’t frame this. This is probably by Robert Kulicke, as you can see by the small gap you see all around the edge. It’s modest, and it certainly puts the painting forward.

This looks like color in the center, some gray, which is unusual for him at this time. He didn’t come back to color until very late. And some of those paintings I find the least compelling. Or I’m torn. I can’t tell: is it because he didn’t know how to use color? Or is it because I’m so used to the moves he makes and want to see them in new combinations and permutations?

Now that we’re being more formal, I’m thinking that this is a spur-of-the-moment picture; but he got to an underpinning. That’s why the Opticon is so important. I think many people imagine that Kline pulled out the canvas and the brush and just whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! But you don’t see much under this, which is where the Bell-Opticon is. The casualness, the spontaneity, isn’t mocked, it’s not parodied, but he sees it as a start with a different ending. It’s not like de Kooning, where the approach is first to get it right and then fuck it up.

He also talked about the whites being as important and the blacks, which you can see in how they’re laid on with the white dripping out over the black at the top, or vice versa along the left edge. There’re also formal echoes between the white fields and black marks in places.

It’s the blacks that I always remember, but I wouldn’t see them without the whites, so they’re at least as important in that way. Form’s gotta have a ground. He’s right. We can’t ignore the great things he did on phone book pages. It’s obviously an issue of not having any money and using the materials at hand. And it’s black on shitty paper and over phone numbers. It’s a little bit like those monotypes that show up on de Koonings, like Easter Monday (1955-56), where the pictures on the newspaper are transferred into the paint. It’s another aspect of him that de Kooning influenced, and that touched everybody. De Kooning caught all that was going on in New York so profoundly that it was hard to look at it. People were drawn to those painters. I can’t think of too many painters that came out of Kline.

Well, Brice Marden perhaps, Christopher Wool, Jonathan Lasker — painters who work at that synthesis of painting and drawing you talked about earlier. I think you could describe them as being indebted to Kline.

Yes, indebted, but indebted for what? What kind of effect did these have? I think that part of the reason why they didn’t follow him is that he takes care of all the possibilities he opens for the viewer. What you’re inspired to with this painting is that, Jesus Christ, if he can do that then I’ll do exactly what I can do. I’ll feel free. Because, again, in a world of color, he’s reminding us that black and white are colors. In a world of Action Painting, he’s putting the word “action” in quotes. This is more radical in some ways. And radical art, of course, can spawn any number of minions.

And think of the one-of-a-kind things he did: no one’s gonna come up with a phone book page after Kline, unless you’re using it ironically, or you’re doing it in such a way that it becomes part of the work.

Right, that it’s for Kline or it’s quoting him very directly.

We’ve touched on this a little already, but I wonder if you could talk about how this space affects the painting or how you feel the painting affects the surrounding space.

I’m aware of the room. I’ve been coming to the Modern since about 1959. I was young and knew very little, and I got educated here. I believed the story, and then I began to discover that it’s just a story. Maybe it’s a necessary narrative. Walking in it now is like picking up the books of poets I’ve loved: I’ve read them so much, but at times I’m a little tired of them. Other times I want that pang, want to be back there. And every once in awhile something knocks me out.

I usually don’t look at them as long as I’m looking at this. And this painting, as so often, is growing on me. This is across from a Barnett Newman and you have Helen Frankenthaler here, and near Mark Rothko, de Kooning — all people he knew. Rather than being frozen, this is part of a bigger story.

I wonder what this looked like in Kline’s studio, or in a home, what it first looked like in a gallery. Now it’s ensconced. Has it lost something because of that? Inevitably. I’m sure it affects you. But that’s what a museum does. And in this case I’m standing with this at my left and the Newman at my right; that might not happen in another place.

I wonder how his art — or this painting in particular — finds its way into the work that you do.

I wrote that sequence of poems about Kline and I know a lot about him. I have the background of Lehighton. The paintings are in my head, and I like writing documentary poems. It was fun. There were so many words that kept coming up: suave, and the black of the tuxedo’s lapel. I also wrote a suite, around the same time, to de Kooning. I keep on wondering if I’ll get another one out of somebody. Joan Mitchell keeps coming up. So first of all, there’s the viewer literally inspired by an attempt to get some of that from it. For me, as somebody who loves paintings without knowing why he loves them, and still loves them and the study of them, and wants to know more about the artist, it’s their example, in every way.

One of the things I always like to know, and is a dream for me, is how you get the compositional elements — all that flurry and hurry and bustle — into something that can come up just in the sound of words or the juxtaposition of images. Words seem to insist upon a kind of linear meaning, especially if that poetry comes through the ear as well as the eye. As I wrote about Kline and his work, it often came through finding something that got me writing about art in the beginning. James Schuyler very modestly said, “I just wanted to know what it was like to use words to describe things.” I want that, too. And this gives us new possibilities. We thought of the railroad tracks, the city aspects, the calligraphy, the scaffolding. Those become words, and it’s not just what’s there, it’s what’s here, inside you. For the reader, it’s something to give them the sense of standing here now, the delight I feel in talking about it at this minute. But it also opens it up, so that they could internalize that.

I guess that there’s something else, too. I’ve certainly spent more hours seeing movies, and now television, than I have looking at paintings. What’s the difference? Well, there is a hand involved in this and I’m always aware of it. We’re aware of it from the drips. I can see a person here; I can imaging those studios.

You can see the motion of the hand and the gestures it’s making.

Absolutely. There’s also something here that’s generational, I guess: the first painting I saw that really said to me “This could be yours” was an abstract picture. It pissed my parents off, just like listening to jazz did. It certainly separated me from the world I grew up in. But it turned me on in ways I couldn’t figure out. There are things that choose you just as much as you choose them.

As a poet and an art writer, you hope it’s still out there, and that you don’t get to bottom of it. The stuff you get to the bottom of never finds its way into your work. And if it does, you’ve gotta get over it and get out of it.

One of the things I miss in this picture and that I really love is his signature. Kline had one of the great signatures, that blocky, stick-fingered print. It always moves me. I wonder why he didn’t sign it…

The post Tell Me: with Bill Corbett appeared first on artcritical.

March 8 through June 7, 2015
11 West 53 St (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400|

Stephanie Buhmann: So here we are, two longtime Björk fans, who went to MoMA with our 16-month-old daughter in tow, hoping for an incredible event. What were your first impressions after leaving the museum?

Todd Simmons: I was a little confused about what exactly the curator, Klaus Biesenbach, was hoping to accomplish with this presentation of Björk’s extraordinary audio and visual work. What kind of an expectation did you have about what a visual retrospective of her work would be?

SB: I was skeptical from the get-go, doubting that a retrospective of a musician, no matter how innovative and groundbreaking, could be pulled off by a visually focused museum. Björk certainly is an exceptionally gifted artist in her medium — which is primarily music but also extends toward digital innovation. She is, of course, famous for her costumes and makeup, but there isn’t much there in terms of sculptural objects, drawings or anything else traditionally considered fine art, even in a loose sense. I was curious to see how MoMA was going to pull that off. I was also curious whether Björk had a traditional visual oeuvre (drawings, photographs, collages, etc.) in private, something many musicians do. That doesn’t appear to be the case. I walked away thinking that this show was an artificially constructed installation of minor visual objects, failing to truly celebrate — or enlighten us about — the non-material work that makes Björk the incredible artist she is.

Some of the most interesting objects on view were largely ignored: the pipe organs, for example, were installed in the downstairs lobby. They are fantastic instruments and unusual objects so why are they not part of the main exhibit?

TS: And they were only heard intermittently and it’s very easy to miss both the objects and their sound if you enter the museum at the wrong moment. I was there for three hours that day and only heard the instruments played briefly. The Tesla coil mounted on the foyer ceiling roared so abruptly that I saw a group of people jump out of their skins. That’s actually the kind of visceral experience I’d hoped for; only it never happened again that I noticed. I wanted to walk in off the street and be immediately captivated by the dynamic sound of Björk. But I had to fight my way into a cramped wooden structure to do so. She should have been given much more space for her thrilling music to soar in. Not merely a claustrophobic fort. For the show’s subject to have her sound get lost in the overall museum chatter is a significant problem.

SB: That name of the show sounded to me like a reference to Australian Aboriginal culture. In the Aboriginal belief system, a “songline” defines a path across the land. By singing songs in the appropriate sequence, Aborigines could navigate vast distances through the desert. It’s a way to navigate and to remember and pass on history, a concept that must resonate with Björk. The fact is that we learned too little. When it presents a pop-cultural icon, the museum promises two things: to enlighten us about the work of this artist and to convey a sense of the person, the mind behind it. This show is an empty promise; neither of these tasks were accomplished.

So what’s the original intent of this show? Is it trying to get us closer and more familiar with the artist or veil her further into mystery?

TS: There were partial attempts towards the personal, by including scattered diary entries, for example.

SB: Right, but although interesting on a personal level, the diaries and notebooks are not really visually engaging.

There are some interesting things to discover, like the wall of sheet music underneath several flat screens showing her performing on stage, but this is used as a mere backdrop in the waiting area. These musical notations, which reveal how elaborately layered and carefully arranged Björk’s music is, are in themselves beautiful abstract drawings — so why are they cast to the side at MoMA?

TS: It’s a mistake to have them displayed in a corridor when you’re queuing up to get into a room where the promise of a unique experience awaits. You can’t help but feel the push of the crowd and the promise that a “real” experience is going to be around the corner. It’s a fleeting flirtation, which is frustrating when you’d like to savor these details, but you’re being pressured to advance to the next station. You couldn’t feel good about lingering because you’d be holding up the line. It made me wonder: is it ill-advised to dub this bottleneck “Songlines,” in a city as crowded and impatient as New York is, and in a museum designed to process throngs of humanity every hour?

SB: I know what MoMA can get out of this exhibit. I don’t know what Björk is gaining from the experience, as it has not been pulled off well.

TS: A deeper level of credibility or acclaim that she already has? No. She’s arguably one of the most experimental pop stars of her generation. She’s not an artist that you would think is in it for the exposure. One can only speculate what her motivation was to do this. As Biesenbach has said, the museum asked her to do something as long ago as 2000 and she declined. Then in 2012, according to him, Björk decided that she was in a place where a mid-career retrospective was more appropriate. But there’s no explanation why such a show is more justified now than in 2000 or 2030.

SB: Beyond being a let down for fans like myself, I think MoMA missed the opportunity to show a significant artist with respect to her craft and Björk’s work wasn’t able to help MoMA succeed in branching out towards new media. Björk’s work might not be your taste, but I think she is one of the first and few artists who have successfully used computer technology to talk about how human we are. This exhibition doesn’t reveal this at all. I would have liked to see an entire floor in the museum be dedicated to dark rooms and only sound.

TS: It just didn’t have a specific character to it and there were strange spaces in between the objects and galleries, such as a corridor that didn’t lead anywhere. I constantly wondered if I missed sections of the exhibit and reexamined the program to investigate. But I hadn’t. It felt both claustrophobic in the rotunda and scattered in the other parts, including the display of instruments from Biophilia, which is also the first app in MoMA’s collection. You might have noticed the instruments if they happened to be playing when you walked by, but if not, you could have easily missed them.

The show is supposed to be a “cutting edge, audio experience.” MoMA staff greeted us at the beginning of the exhibit, effectively explaining the audio device we wore on our ears and hanging around our necks. The advanced technology tracks you and senses where you are in the exhibit and triggers the audio, obviating the need to look down to device and fumble with it, which is smart.

SB: The concept sounds incredible, but in reality I found that songs and storylines were switching up too fast and unpredictably. As soon as I was getting into a song and turned, the next track started and pulled me out of the moment. It didn’t flow organically.

TS: I was confused by the narrative, which I assumed as I walked through was a story of Björk’s life as a child emerging into womanhood, only to find out later that it was actually a made up narrative made up by an Icelandic writer, one of her friends. It was simply fiction posing as an autobiography and what confuses me about that is some of the early stages in the exhibit had personal photographs, journals and writing, which made it very easy to assume that the narrative was equally autobiographical. I felt deceived afterwards. Why do we have to make up a narrative and if we have to, why don’t we take it even further? Björk’s songs always push boundaries.

But I think of Björk also as a visual artist — nearly as much a pioneer in her visual presentation as she has been in music. She has an incredible daring in her experimentation with video and certainly in her fashion sense and costuming. there is always collaboration in her projects — with Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Alexander McQueen, etc. — however, she is a visual vessel.

SB: She’s a great sourcer and channeler. She taps into a certain kind of zeitgeist and then finds very interesting collaborators to create something unique. In a way her albums can be considered curated exhibitions, not just in terms how the music unfolds from song to song, but how she goes about developing the accompanying imagery.

TS: You would never want to start one of her songs in the middle for example. You want to drop the needle at the beginning and play it all the way through. But “Songlines” only gives sporadic snippets of her music, partially drowned out by an invented narrative in voiceover, written by somebody else. And, as we were talking about earlier, there’s no complementary focus on objects. Those on display serve as mere props to her art. There’s the infamous, ridiculed swan dress she wore to the 2001 Oscars — but is that’s not what she’s really about. Things like that feel quaint. Why show her swan dress, when showing the process of creating Dancer in the Dark (2000) would be so much more enlightening?

SB: I wanted the installation to reflect what Björk is about, but also to capture some of the unique sense of spectacle she creates.

TS: It seems a jarring contrast that this inadequate presentation of her work would coincide with the release of her ninth solo record, Vulnicura (2015) which resonates with an almost painful depth of catharsis and courageous personal exploration. We understand that one of the album’s songs, “Black Lake,” is essentially an expression of the dissolution of her union with Matthew Barney and the fracturing of her family. That’s pretty much the most blatantly autobiographical Björk has ever gotten in her work. And one can only imagine the impact of the live experience of this album in concert. But the contrast between the album and “Black Lake” in particular and this cramped cluster of exhibit rooms was jarring. Two different leagues entirely.

SB: I think that “Black Lake” is incredibly moving and shows Björk at her best: A beautiful song about a heartrending story, framed by a stunningly desolate Nordic landscape, and yet with a glimpse of optimism at the end.

TS: No question in my mind that the video for “Black Lake” was the highpoint of the show, because it was an uninterrupted experience with dynamic, masterful sound design by Marco Perry, who uses 49 loudspeakers divided into groups around the room. It’s the one instance of this show utterly nailing something. Sitting through it on the floor, taking in the video amid a mind-blowing sound system, took my breath away. It was sensational. A totally immersive experience. Perry told me that the objective for him and Björk in that space was to create “a rarefied atmosphere, like walking onto the moon and hearing the sound of the stars.” Something tells me the entire exhibition would have been electric if the rest of it had honored that objective.

SB: I think that it was the only successful collaboration between Björk and MoMA. The museum commissioned it and stuck to her natural medium: music with a narrative video. I was moved by the rawness of emotion you find in the lyrics and her voice, as well as on film. In it, we see Björk age: she portrays a middle-aged woman now finds herself left vulnerable and alone, lamenting the death of her family, as she knew it. This is not a young girl or a vain attempt to cling to youth. It’s an incredibly gutsy project for that fact alone. Some people might say that some of the scenes seem melodramatic or lean towards kitsch, but those who’ve experienced a similar emotion at some time in their lives will know better. It’s a pretty sober portrayal by Björk’s standards and that was probably the most surprising discovery of the show for me.

TS: “Black Lake” succeeds on many levels. It offers a magnificent experience. We got a sustained piece of music. The sound in the room was truly immersive and powerful and detailed. They did a phenomenal job of bringing the potency of her music to vivid life without it being uncomfortably loud. Perry explained to me that it was as elaborate of a sound set-up as was possible for a room that size. The sound is literally all around you in a way that I have never experienced before.

SB: I experienced the sound very physically. It was almost as if it pulsated in my veins, as is if it infiltrated my body.

TS: Absolutely. It was such a potent sound design that even outside of the room you could still feel that whole section of the museum vibrate from the low frequency components. It rumbles the glass balcony and lends an inadvertent excitement to other sections of the exhibition without you knowing where it’s coming from.

SB: The use of two-channel projection worked well, too. You have to choose which one of the synchronized screens to watch, but the effect is that you always have a light source behind you. You are sandwiched between the content of “Black Lake,” which is inescapable.

TS: That’s a good point. It all feels very exposed. You watch an intimate scene you might rather not be witnessing, but you can’t pull yourself away from it either. It reminds me of Fassbinder or Cassavetes‘s anguished scenes of human emotional breakdown; but you also see her striving to avoid being crushed completely. For Björk to allow herself to be exposed like that is brave.

SB: And this sense of raw exposure is also reflected in the fact that her upcoming New York concerts are all being held during the day. It’s an unusually sober hour for rock n’ roll shows.

TS: Yes, one of the seven concerts is going to be at noon at Carnegie Hall, for example. You have breakfast, walk into the concert in broad daylight, and exit into daylight. That’s very unusual in rock. Her new album Vulnicura is heavily electronic and it was produced by two young London-based musicians: the Haxan Cloak and the Venezuela-born DJ Arca. It will be interesting to see if they will join Björk in concert or if these performances will reflect the stripped and raw quality we find in “Black Lake.”

SB: I wanted to see more of this raw quality at MoMA. Maybe the problem was that the bureaucracy that comes with the realization of a major museum exhibition proved stifling to Björk, for whom MoMA is not the ultimate temple for her particular craft. Maybe the problem was that MoMA mainly aimed for a blockbuster, weighing the success of David Bowie’s retrospect at the Victoria & Albert, Alexander McQueen at the Met and Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” at MoMA, along with Björk’s internationally famous name.

TS: I’m sure that this retrospective couldn’t have had Björk’s full attention. It felt like in some ways she had a hand in it, but in other ways she let them lead, and because of that it felt somewhat half-baked. The collapse of her family and the construction of a new album that documented that very painful chapter in her life must have taken up most of her attention and energy during a time when this show was coming together as well. Albums as detailed and elaborate and passionate as hers do not happen over night and it must have taken her attention away from focusing on her art museum debut and retrospective, which seems to belong more to Matthew Barney’s world than hers. It’s a strange dichotomy to present what feels like a fairly frivolous retrospective in conjunction with Björk’s most personal and gutsy album, Vulnicura. Presumably, her music will transcend MoMA’s squandered opportunity.

The post Björk at MoMA: A Conversation with Todd Simmons appeared first on artcritical.

JEANNE WILKINSON: Are you concerned about your place in the current art world? 

PETER MALONE: It matters a lot to me that I’m seen in the context of what everyone else is doing, especially because I’m doing these conservative-looking portraits. I hate the idea of being shunted aside in a group of representational painters. I’m in the early stages of organizing an exhibition of portraiture that will focus on a contemporary painting, but will make no special reference to the edginess that often accompanies exhibitions of this type.

What do you mean by the word conservative?

Conservative is an extremely abused word. In the context of my painting it means not trying to be edgy, trying hard to avoid edginess and other contemporary art clichés. These paintings are as simple as a portrait can get. One of the few rules I set up for myself during this project was to insist that my sitters look directly at the viewer, so that a person coming into the gallery is confronted with someone looking right at them. I find when sitters turn away, they become a figure, an art school model. I dislike that insularity — that sense that the entire exercise is about being inside the art world. I want to portray people as they appear to us in our conversations with one another, without making it look as if they’re sitting on a pedestal in an artificial studio setting.

Another danger is the look of a photograph, so I try to stay away from the more obvious conventions of portrait photography, like frontal lighting.

You mean like a flash?

Yes, a flash right in a person’s face, or the way talking heads are lit for television. I work very hard to get the lighting spread unevenly. I don’t want a full tenebrism, but as rich a range of contrast as possible without killing the color of the darker side. I prefer to play warm against cool. I find the people who teach and paint in more traditional (conservative) modes tend toward tonal painting with very dark gray shadows, and I try to avoid that. The whole project has been a learning process. There are a lot of formal things I’ve had to teach myself.

Craft is a word that has long been disparaged, but what you’re talking about is the craft of painting.

Yeah. I still like the idea of matching what you do to what you see. A person who knows nothing about painting can see that these are convincing images of people’s faces, and if they know nothing else about painting they won’t get much out of it beyond that; but it is a starting point. There are other concerns. Craft isn’t everything. You can be a very competent painter and a very dull artist.

So craft is a vehicle.

It’s an important vehicle because otherwise you’re just left with evidentiary narcissism. A painting should be more than proof that the painter had an experience that was personally meaningful to them. The result of their work should be meaningful to the viewer as well. Maybe not in the same way as it was to the painter, but meaningful in some shared human way. 

Do you have an ideal viewer of your work?

I suppose an attentive viewer, certainly an educated one. Portraits are universal. Try to avoid looking at your fellow travelers across the aisle of a subway car. We are fascinated by each other’s faces. The viewer I imagine is a viewer that I can’t completely separate from my own habits as a viewer. I no longer believe painters should paint entirely for themselves. You step back eight feet from the canvas — a routine aspect of the painting process — and the scale gets thrown off and the contrast disappears and all sorts of problems arise. That is because eight feet away from your work you’ve entered public space. How the work is going to be seen by viewers is a public concern. And a concern with the public aspect of art is what separates a professional artist from an amateur.

It certainly affects my choices of what to leave in and what to remove or change, whether to push the painting in one direction or another. One of my favorite books is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983); his description of a gift economy, which freed me from obsessing over selling work, helped me to re-assess this idea that artists only paint for themselves. I like the idea that I am creating something that is to be given to someone, the viewer, the public, via an exhibition. And I try to address that responsibility while I paint.

My first written review — which proved too long for the editors but it’s on my website — was a comparison of a Barnett Newman and a Cy Twombly. They each had a piece at Sotheby’s and I thought I’d compare them. The conclusion I came to was that Newman was generous while Twombly was stingy. Newman is a visual painter who applies a shared cultural sense of color and geometry with his audience, whereas Twombly looks like he is hiding what he’s doing. All you get from him are indecipherable clues. People I respect find Twombly poetic. I don’t. I find his work irritating. It’s a very common perception that artists have to be lost in an introspective world. Introspection is of course essential, but not enough to provide meaning to a viewer, unless that viewer is willing to surrender to the artist’s self-regard.

The idea of the artist’s responsibility toward the viewer has changed dramatically in the last century.

The role of the artist prior to the 20^th century was to be a servant more or less to their patron, whether an individual or an institution. There was a literal contractual arrangement between the two. Later the focus became what the artist felt and the patron could choose from what the artist made available.

If indeed there was a patron.

True. But I find too much insularity a hindrance to strong painting. On the one hand we have absolute service to a patron, like the old social realism of Soviet art, and on the other hand we have the extreme of Cy Twombly’s notes to himself. I believe an artist is a participant in a conversation with the public. That’s what I mean by generosity. An artist ought to step back and consider where and how they are leading an audience that will put their trust in them. I think James Joyce succeeded in Ulysses (1922) but completely overshot the mark in Finnegans Wake (1939). It’s a fantastic piece of work, but impossible to read, if the word “reading” still means anything.

So it’s important to you that people understand your work?

Well, no, if the question implies that there is a right and a wrong meaning to each painting. I’m simply trying to get back to a kind of painting that doesn’t need a written explanation — that doesn’t need a statement on the wall next to it. I want people to talk about my work. Understanding is up to them. I don’t like explaining. I think there’s more than enough room inside a rectangle to share the world with another person. I want painting to work in its simplest form.

Its simplest form?

A single rectangle is actually quite a rich invention. You set aside this geometric patch on the wall and it’s different from the rest of the wall; that’s complicated enough. It’s a kind of window but you’re aware also that it’s a surface.

I saw some of your earlier work and it was very painterly abstraction.

In art school I had been a strict Minimalist, but afterwards I threw myself into Abstract Expressionism because it just felt good to let go. During that process I found myself painting things I was thinking of, like trees and hills, and I decided why not just paint trees and hills? I was trying to get the light, and once you’re trying to get the light in abstract painting things can get a little too artificial, a little too cute, so I decided it would be better to go straight toward representational art. I initially brought a Minimalist sensibility to my paintings. I would have, say, a single tree in the middle of an empty landscape. They were not unlike the portraits, which are also pared down and somewhat minimal. I’d now like to introduce environments — like how I handled still life a few years ago, with a large swath of light coming through a window.

I didn’t start painting portraits until 2011 and I think doing so fits into the contemporary art world pretty well if you think of what’s going on in alternative spaces and commercial galleries. But in terms of the museums — the Whitney, the Modern, and the New Museum — my work is as foreign as you can get. They’ve gotten very narrow in their focus.

They’ve gotten away from painting altogether.

Yes. Like this crazy show up at MoMA right now — “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” — where they’ve built a review of contemporary painting on an irrational science fiction idea about time. It’s an appealing idea for them because they’re stuck in time. By insisting on promoting a very edgy avant-garde, the major museums have hit a brick wall. They don’t know what else to do. So they keep reiterating edgy ideas, like Oscar Murillo’s unstretched canvas on the floor of “Forever Now.” It’s got nothing to do with painting, it’s just another tired old reiteration of installation art. MoMA has had recent shows by painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothea Rockburne, Sigmar Polke. But with “Forever Now,” they seem to be asserting an extremely narrow view of art, let alone painting.

Do you think the curators don’t understand or aren’t educated about painting?

Well, they’ve dismissed it… I think it has a lot to do with the university getting hard wired to the art world in a way that it hadn’t been before. In the 1940s Meyer Shapiro suggested to a young Robert Motherwell that he ought to leave Columbia in order to become a painter. Now to be an artist you first have to get an academic degree. The academic mindset has taken over much of the contemporary art world. Artists are taught their art has to exemplify accepted theories. You go through the wing of the Modern where they show work from the past 20 years and you find no color in anything; it’s mostly charts, wires, tubes and diagrams. They’ve lost interest in vision, color, nuance — in a word, painting.

I watch everything. I’m interested in everything, but as a critic I prefer to just write about painting. I think painting needs to be promoted. It’s a rich visual medium because it reminds us how perception is so fleeting. It cannot die. Neither can coherent writing, expressive dance, acting.

Yes, painting is dead, then it’s back, then it’s dead again. I’ve also heard of the idea of “de-skilling.”

It’s amazing isn’t it — people actually painting badly on purpose. Not for the old Freudian goal of reaching the unconscious, or striving for a culturally “primitive” look, but as a way of joining intent with novelty; coming up with something that looks new.

Yes, because apparently to be skilled is to basically be a hack.

Or to re-tread old ideas. To be fair, I think that’s how they genuinely feel about it. That’s why I purposely set out to teach myself to paint in a way that’s convincing and comparable to the portrait as it looked in the early 20th century — when painters were loosening up and experimenting, but had been trained in their craft.

I like making pictures, I like painting and I like looking at people, so what am I supposed to do with my life? I have to do something. I don’t think the portraits I’ve made so far are particularly groundbreaking, but they’re certainly competent, and from this point I’d like to see what I can do next. I want to see if I can make something of it without getting lost in preconceived ideas. 

Or coming up with a gimmick of some sort.

If only Modern art were studied more carefully. All these gimmicks have been tried. The Abstract Expressionists were trying to reinvent painting from scratch. Newman was proud of his skill as a painter. The AbEx artists never saw themselves as de-skilling.

Nor did the Impressionists.

No, they just wanted to be truer to what they saw; to loosen up a little bit. What we need now is more cross-pollination. That’s why I think those who paint the way I do should be showing their work with those who consider themselves edgy. Because in its own way my work is edgy; the fact that it’s so not edgy makes it edgy.

Jeanne Wilkinson is a writer and artist living and working in New York. Her short story “In the End Was the Word: a (Dis)missive from God” will be published in April in Catch and Release, an online magazine by Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts. Her essays have been featured on The Leonard Lopate Show and on NPR’s Living on Earth. An exhibition of her recent artwork is on view at the Yonkers Art Gallery until the end of February.

The post “Portraits are universal”: Peter Malone in Conversation with Jeanne Wilkinson appeared first on artcritical.