Looking at the magnificent Proscenium the other day at the Neuberger Museum made me think of a building, or perhaps more accurately, a monument that had been taken apart, its components lighted like all monuments are, especially monumental ruins. In fact, it looked like a Greek temple to me. Not just because Stephen was Greek but also because I have, as many of us have, our own romance with Greek temples, with ruins, with the thought that such remnants are what remains of once vital civilizations. I thought of this as a ruin—a rune?—of sorts, albeit a lively, brilliantly colored one that Stephen had evoked through a spare, signature lexicon of architectural elements, the basics from which structures could be constructed, destructed and constructed again as parables of eternal returns.

In its layout, I thought about how architectural his inclinations were, how sensitive he was to space, and how he constructed surfaces, but also rooms and chapels with light, with neon, with color, and with an array of simple but universal geometric shapes, inclining toward architecture because it is so tangible—and to light because it is not.

The joy of making is always evident in his work—and there is no mistaking the purity of that joy—which might in part consist of putting something out there that wasn’t there before, of drawing lines in space that transform into the dimensional, trailing a kind of aura.

His light was quotidian light and spiritual light. And it was historical light. It was the light of the present and future. It was both phenomenological and metaphoric. He treated it differently from other light artists of his generation and I believe he was the first to use neon extensively as an art material.

I remember the times he would show us his beautifully made models of chapels on display in his West Broadway studio—a project room, an installation in itself. He made over 30 of them but only one was realized as a completed structure—at least to date. That was the Chapel of the Heavenly Ladder, for the Venice Biennale in 1997, when he represented Greece. I remember how excited he was to show them to us (hard to think of that in the past tense), how wonderfully, infectiously excited he usually was to show us what he had recently made, what he had recently been thinking about, what he had recently discovered.

In Proscenium’s dynamism, as its forms and light pull you and your gaze around the vast Philip Johnson gallery of the Neuberger, it seems as if one component activates the next as a kind of relay—you can almost hear the sizzle at the points of transition—as a spark, a quickening, a kindling which made me think of human inventiveness, resilience, and aspirations.

Stephen knew something about old and new; it was part of his heritage, part of what he was, situated, like many of us who came here from older countries, between a more ancient heritage and one that was relatively new, and perhaps partially because of that, he was entirely at ease looking back while also looking ahead.

I have selected four architectural images more or less arbitrarily (the theater at Priene the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Bernini’s Colonnade in Rome, and Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican—one of the most utopian spaces in the history of western painting) as examples that relate in a general way to Stephen’s work, starting with the circle, the half-circle, the incomplete circle and the line that becomes the column, that becomes a square, a rectangle that becomes a temple, a theater, a church, a chapel, a room. There is also the kinship of their great serenity and their embodiment of an idealized space and place.

I think Stephen liked the notion of taking neon – that had associations with the garish, the carnival, the carnal, the commercial – and changing it into something elegant, serene, immaculate, at times even holy. It tickled his fancy, his sense of mischief, I would think, but also his sense of completeness to equate temples and theaters. The temple lends its architecture to the theater which began as a more sacred space for rituals and the enactment of mysteries, before becoming secularized as venues for entertainment. But both are portals, stages, he reminds us, the proscenium signaling a plunge into imaginative, intangible realms, separating it from the realities of the mundane.

He was always challenging conventional boundaries in art, in what an artist could make and how he could make it and with what. His impulse was multidisciplinary and synthesizing and he was prescient, in advance of the kinds of practices without borders that are so prevalent today. He strove to open his practice up, to keep it open, to always let more in, to let viewers in, to let the world in, to open up what was possible with the vocabulary that he had chosen, that was necessary for him.

It was curiosity that always led him on. Naomi Antonakos, his wife, says that Stephen never knew when he started where he would end up—he just wanted to see what might happen. And so he did.

The post “Sizzling at the Points of Transition”: Lilly Wei on Stephen Antonakos appeared first on artcritical.

Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock at the Institute of Contemporary Art
April 29 to August 14, 2016
118 South 36th Street (at Sansom Street)
Philadelphia, 215 898 7108

Entering “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, feels like balancing on a raft that is inadequate to cross the ocean it is floating on. The exhibition, organized by chief curator Helaine Posner, comprises more than 50 paintings and drawings created between 1968 and the present, and demonstrates the achievement of an artist whose work has invigorated the language of abstract painting. A concurrent exhibition, “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, offers an instructive companion to this long-overdue survey. That show, curated by Ingrid Shaffner, explores a selection of small sculptures, leporellos (folded artist’s books), and five large paintings that reveal the breadth and scale of Fishman’s oeuvre.

My respect for Fishman’s work did not come automatically, as I initially perceived a bluntness in the work; it resisted entry. Over time, and with experience in the thicket of artmaking, her paintings have worked me over, and the Neuberger retrospective’s tight selection facilitates this effort. Posner’s mindful arrangement within the museum’s galleries gives Fishman’s work plenty of room to breathe, explicating the artist’s conceptual and spiritual concerns and revealing her creative trajectory. Smaller works on paper, arranged on freestanding walls in the center of the main gallery are less effectively supported. In the cavernous space of this gallery, they may have resonated more powerfully if positioned in tighter clusters. Seen in its entirety, however, the retrospective inspires a sense of awe, and finally, situates Louise Fishman within the tradition of American painting rooted in Abstract Expressionism and furthered through her singular vision and endeavor.

The earliest work in the exhibition, In and Out (1968), contains four wing-like shapes, flatly painted in pinks and black that open in an irregular symmetry from an implied vertical line at the canvas’s center. Graphite lines visible through the white ground reveal subtle adjustments to the hard-edged shapes as color creates a strong spatial pulse. To my eye, the painting speaks to the central core imagery that was being developed by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, though Fishman attributes it more directly a response to Al Held’s black-and-white abstractions of 1967–69.

During the 1970s, in the crucible of New York’s emerging feminist movement, Fishman became acutely aware of gender discrimination and acknowledged her own isolation as a lesbian. As if to destroy the influence of the male-artist power structure, Fishman cut apart her canvases, reworking them into small sculptures oriented along a grid. Confronting her disdain for traditionally feminine work, she employed stitching, dying, and weaving. Untitled (1971), reminiscent of an abacus, is made of rubber, graphite, string, and staples on tracing paper. Transversed by a twisted thread, the amber hue of the rubber resembles skin knitting itself together or the ruled lines of an illuminated manuscript, influenced by Fishman’s childhood exposure to Hebrew texts. Fishman knew Eva Hesse, but her encounter with the 1971 memorial exhibition of Hesse’s work at the School of Visual Arts was the catalyst for her decision to work with that material.

The Angry Paintings of 1973 came out of Fishman’s deepening self-awareness in the consciousness-raising gatherings she attended. Her pain and rage were unleashed in a series of 30 text-based paintings identifying the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Djuna Barnes were among those whose names were inscribed in bold letters obscured by slashes and drips. While they are the least formally interesting of Fishman’s works to me, these protestations are nevertheless unique documents of the living history of feminism, even today, when women who express anger still risk stigma.

Life has been drained from the tempered grays, ashen blacks, and steel blues of Fishman’s Remembrance and Renewal series. Inspired by a 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín, Fishman made a group of paintings that were given Hebrew titles from Passover. Into her colors, Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz, creating the granular surface of Haggadah (1988). Dybbuk (1990) comprises a reddish-black grid, like prison bars enclosing a sequence of dimly lit windows — the result of swiping brushstrokes dragged through the oily pigments. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the earthbound soul of someone who has died, unable to be released. These elegiac works reflect Fishman’s concern with painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of imprisonment, just as they became a medium for transforming her grief upon witnessing the Holocaust sites.

Seven monochromatic paintings from the early 1990s represent an exponential leap in subject matter, scale, and surging physical gesture. Iron Sharpens Iron (1993) contains three charcoal-black bands on a white ground that stretch 10 feet up the canvas, then diverge. Fishman’s use of drywall knives and trowels yields a textural vocabulary of scraped and crusted surfaces, absorbing and reflecting light like hammered or rusted metal. The title, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, means that through interaction and conflict we sharpen one another. Her history as a competitive athlete is also embedded within the aesthetic concerns of this work. Fishman relates her command of the boundaries of the canvas, gestural velocity, and physical confidence to pitching hardball and playing basketball as a teenager.

For There She Was is a magnificent, darkly luminous painting of 1998, whose title is appropriated from the last sentence in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color is turning into another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet and black shot through with cadmium red-orange and burnt sienna, Fishman has created a vibrating field that reminds me of a Chinese garden at dusk. A collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, Fishman also acknowledges that the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse upstate, as well as the practice of Buddhism has given her the ability to better understand her work as an artist.

Using paint’s viscosity as a metaphor for the power of water to buoy, submerge, and destroy, Fishman’s arm makes rapid swipes, cuts, and scrapes throughout her Raft of the Medusa (2011) and The Salty-Wavy Tumult (2012). J.M.W. Turner’s gory whaling pictures, with their allover facture, were not far from the artist’s mind as she smeared and twisted her reds around spumes of white in Margate (2015). Kreisleriana, (2015), divides the canvas into vertical bands of fiery yellows, reds, and blues that suggest the emotional contrasts of Robert Schumann’s work for solo piano. Because music is the most abstract art form, paintings in response to it can often be lame (illustrative) equivalents. That doesn’t happen here.

I see Fishman’s paintings in this domain as a reflection of her deep intellect and nuanced understanding of spatial and rhythmic structure. They are influenced by the focus and attention of a deep listener, but they are independent objects. At the top of her game, Louise Fishman translates aural, physical, and visual experiences into radiant and muscular works of art whose tension is maintained by the grid that anchors her fierce gesture. Her hard-won joie de vivre, born of new travels, immersion in music, and a contented relationship, underscore this substantive, if belated retrospective.

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