May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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June 8 to August 7, 2016
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th streets)
New York, 212 616 3930

Middlebrow culture has long been a contentious territory: it was critically viewed by Modernists as an ineffective attempt to water down and vulgarize innovative cultural endeavors, to produce a faux intellectual lifestyle that can be mass-produced for its status and entertainment value. Post-Modernists deemed the middlebrow edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive in its eclectic appropriation of the pretenses of a high culture, and their insertion into the everyday world of its audience. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed embraces middlebrow culture: his art is for those who want to be in on the joke. One painting is a joke about Jackson Pollock, a video refers to Piero Manzoni’s cans of the artist’s shit, stacked chairs and battered cardboard boxes nod to Sol LeWitt and Minimalism, his paintings in varied styles are about taste(less-ness).

“The Back Door,” now at the Park Avenue Armory, surveys work from Creed’s more than 20-year-long career. The exhibition’s title can be taken in any number of ways — servants, trades people and less than respectable visitors come to the back door. It also has some naughty sexual connotations as it refers to anal sex. While I’m sure that this title was meant to conjure up these associations, in this case it quite literally, refers to the actual rear door of the Armory, which Creed has motorized so that it continuously opens and closes. That piece is titled Shutters Opening and Closing (2016) and offers three events in one: the slow opening of the doors, the simultaneous dramatic shedding of light into the almost empty, cavernous interior of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and finally a glimpse of people walking by on Lexington Ave. This brought to my mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in that Creed implies that we, the audience, live in a shadow world and that without his reminder, we would not be aware that just outside, real living beings go on with their lives unconcerned with what is going on in the Armory.

There are four other pieces scattered throughout that employ the on/off, open/close theme; one is in the big corridor, where a massive set of curtains, usually decorously tied back, hang loose, endlessly opening and closing. In the elaborate Veterans Room, a white grand piano on an oriental rug, slowly opens only to immediately slam shut with a resounding bang. The other is the backdoor to the Parlor Room, called A Door Opening and Closing (1995), behind which, in the Parlor, The Lights Going On and Off (1996) is enacted by two rows of white, globular lights hanging from the ceiling. In combining these two works he has synchronized the so when the door is closed the lights are on and when the door is open the lights are off.

The only thing that occupies the Drill Hall is a large screen hung from the ceiling on which six videos are screened. These three-minute-long videos play alternately with the opening and closing of the rear door. The videos are of different women of various ages and in varied settings. The camera slowly zooms in on each woman’s mouth; when it arrives at its destination she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal half-eaten foods stuffs, then closes her mouth to swallow. The seemingly obvious reference for these benignly undignified videos are those porn films in which women showily take cum in their mouths and then swallow.

In a series of small rooms along one side of the Drill Hall, a retrospective of Creed’s videos has been installed, one to a room. In one, against an immaculate white ground, young Asian women squat to take a shit, in another video we are again given a clean, white space in which different women enter the frame to repeatedly induce vomiting so as to produce a Pollock-like “painting” on the floor. A third video gives a close-up of a single female breast as a disembodied/decontextualized sex object. As for videos of men, there is one in which a man angrily smashes bouquets of flowers against the floor and another, shot like a home movie, in which the artist in bathing trunks is shown at the beach, wiggling about striking various pin-up poses that allude to both male and female, soft-core porn. These videos, which are meant to represent Creed’s investigation into the basic tenets of human existence, though often pathetic and dehumanizing, actually verge on the banal.

Beyond the videos, Creed has painted the upper walls of the Armory’s grand corridor and staircase with a pattern of diagonal black bars, which break for the many portraits, architectural woodwork, display cases and his own paintings. In the rooms along this corridor, Creed has installed his paintings and sculptures. Subsequently, in the Colonel’s Reception Room he has installed Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space (2015). It promises to be a crowd pleaser, the room half-filled with large white balloons is a tight squeeze for visitors moving through it. The work is akin to an oversized ball pit, like those children play in at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. In other rooms, such as the Library and the Field and Staff Rooms, he has installed sculptures made by stacking battered cardboard boxes on top of one another in descending size. Others consist of likewise stacks of secondhand furniture. Other sculptures use stacking and repetition, as with an 8 foot high stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood, which is as high as the sheets are long. In the Library, he has placed numerous small objects, among them a progression of potted cacti (Work No. 2376, 2016), and a nod to the days of protest against the military and war, he has installed in a display densely packed with mostly silver trophies, two small clenched fists — one gold-plated, the other bronze — as such reminding us that context is everything.

Creed is part prankster, designer, dilettante and entertainer, and he’s completely serious about the sampling of borderline banal contrasts, ludicrous situations. So much of Creed’s work refers to easy art, and to easy, tchotchke-like “folk” forms — virtuosity is antithetical to his homemade mode. Staged as a non-spectacle, this survey of new and older works is intent on engaging and potentially provoking his audience to consider each work or encounter as an act of (perhaps bad) faith. All of this is so well balanced as to be indeterminable as to whether it is implicitly culturally critical in its silliness, or if the joke’s on us for thinking so. All of this brings me to the conclusion that Creed is clever in the ways he turns the challenging endeavors of his predecessors into something accessible and playfully minor. But, then again this is part of the definition of what it is to be middlebrow.

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Lee Mullican: The Fifties at Susan Inglett Gallery
April 28 to June 4, 2016
522 W. 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 9111

Undaunted by the challenge of the New York School, in the early 1950s on the West Coast there emerged an approach to abstract painting that did not participate in the conflicting vision of the Romantic (painterly) and Classicist (geometric) traditions. On the East Coast, this battle had led to the idea of an “abstract” art that was to represent nothing more than itself. The West Coast variant was instead rooted in a mystical tradition in which the task of the artist was to reveal the truth behind appearances. Using non-Western and Native American sources, Lee Mullican, and contemporaries such as Mark Tobey, was interested in the pictorial, and the imagistic power of abstraction, rather than the all-at-once-ness sought by their East Coast contemporaries. Two recent exhibitions of Mullican’s work, at Susan Inglett Gallery and James Cohan Gallery, show his development of abstraction on the West Coast. The Susan Inglett show deals with Mullican’s work of the 1950s, while James Cohan features work from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s.

Though there is a long history of transcendental abstract painting in the US, seldom is it as formally radical as Mullican’s. What differentiates his approach from that of his East Coast counterparts, such as Richard Pousette-Dart, is that Mullican, rather than trying to give representation to the non-objective realm, sought instead to stimulate the sensations of reality as perceived by the senses and the mind. To this end, Mullican employed the intense visual patterns associated with migraines, epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness — e.g. states that produce mind-numbing optical patterns and hallucinations.

Mullican didn’t differentiate between abstraction and figuration and as such was mainly an abstractionist who distorted the codes of representation for expressive ends. Though aware of the importance of form, he comes to the abstract via his ambition at producing visionary images through which one could aesthetically experience the power and force of the world of mind and energy. Mullican’s vision therefore, contrasted sharply with the existentialism of Barnett Newman, the Gothic vision of Clyfford Still, or the primordial imagery of Mark Rothko. All of these artists envisioned an external reality capable of overwhelming and dwarfing the viewer, an experience of the Sublime meant to remind viewers of the raw power of nature and human fragility. Mullican’s sublime is objectless: fields of color and sensation, and his paintings are therefore intended to deliver up a sensory overload that will induce in the viewer an awareness of still another realm.

In San Francisco, where he moved following World War II, Mullican met the British-born abstract-Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who is credited with making some of the first poured paintings in the late 1930s. Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen also had a significant effect on Mullican during this period. Mullican came to share these artists’ interest in Eastern and Native American mysticism. Bound together by a desire to make works that would tap into altered consciousness that could serve as a doorway to infinite possibilities, they formed the short-lived Dynaton Group. Its name was derived from Paalen’s influential journal called Dyn, published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944.

Mullican’s earliest works, shown at Susan Inglett Gallery, combine references to Aboriginal dream paintings, Native American iconography, and sci-fi-like cosmic explosions. Paintings such as The Age of the Desert (1957) are like colored drawings and consist of disjointed cosmic and landscape imagery, pictographs, as well as abstract patterns. Significantly, Mullican introduces into these works an aerial point of view, the source of which was his experience as a cartographer making maps from aerial photographs for the US military during World War II.

Formally more important than the ethnographic references, and the flattening effect of an aerial perspective, are the patterns of matchstick-like slivers of color Mullican began to use in the mid ‘50s. These short, raised lines of color — produced with the edge of the knife used by printers to ink rollers — were a distinctive feature of his work over the course of his career. Mullican distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of these colored striations across the surface of his paintings, forming a field of sensations that detached itself from the picture plane, creating a new dimension: an optical space that was divorced from the underlying imagery and abstract forms. At times, his striations lend themselves to creating tapestry-like effects that bring Gustav Klimt to mind. In works such as The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl (1963), shown at James Cohan Gallery, Mullican shows one can be fearless when it comes to the decorative, in that it need not become a liability. In this work the tapestry effect and the multiple erratic zigzag patterns, intense colors produce a hallucinatory optical effect. An earlier artwork, Transfigured Night (1962), with its tonal sonorities, harmonic reds and oranges, and pattern of pictographs, is tasteful and hip to the point one can image it as album cover for the cool jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz.

Only a handful of the works of the ‘60s and ‘70s are truly abstract and these, such as Mediation on the Vertical (1962), are predominantly monochromatic. Rather than creating spectral symbols or camouflaged figures, Mullican fills the plane with agitated and convoluted patterns, forming overall rhythmic fields of intense color and fluctuating densities. His signature matchsticks of color optically attach and detach themselves from the surface creating pathways, trajectories and patterns that float in the space between viewer and the painting’s surface. These works are no longer dependent on graphic imagery but on forms that are a result of color and the density of marks. The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl, with its aggressive field of jostling patterns and forms, and its greater spontaneity, is one of Mullican’s most accomplished works. Though not included in these two exhibitions, Mullican’s paintings from the same period — in which stylized ethnographic imagery dominates, rather than painterly effects — appear to verge on kitsch. Yet I wonder if this preference is a consequence of my viewing them with prejudiced eyes, schooled in the style and history of the New York School. Despite these limitations, Mullican’s works still resonate, and demonstrate that during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, AbEx and New York were not the only game in play.

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February 27 to April 10, 2016
205 Hudson Street (at Canal Street)
New York, 212 772 4991

“Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni,” an exhibition of work by the short-lived group BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni) now at Hunter College, is sparse. It consists of only four artworks and two vitrines of documentation, mainly in French. Yet, given its subject, it is complete, though also thoroughly lacking. The show in the main gallery consists of one painting by each of the group’s members; in this sense the exhibition is complete. As for the deficiency, the show’s smallness is in part compensated for by the exhibition “Critical Gestures & Contested Spaces: Art in France in the 1960s,” which documents the varied groups, artists and political practices that constituted the neo-Dadaist and high Modernist art scene of ‘60s France (mainly Paris). This exhibit recounts the context from which BMPT emerged. For some, this history and the artists and groups that participated in it may be fairly unfamiliar. The inclusion of this exhibition demonstrates that BMPT was not unique in their endgame strategy, its political endeavors, or, for that matter, were they the most radical.

In the main gallery, one painting consists of alternating vertical green stripes and bands of raw canvas. At each end, the stripes are hand-painted opaque white. The stripes are all of equal width. Another painting has a black circle with a pristine white dot at its core, which marks the center of the canvas. The stripe painting and the painting of the black circle are both on stretched square canvases of equal size. The third work, un-stretched canvas pinned to the wall, consists of five alternating horizontal bands of gray and white. The last white band, at the bottom of the canvas, is about a third of the width of the others. The fourth is a piece of oilcloth pinned to the wall and imprinted with uniformly spaced, brick red, marks made using a number 50 brush at 30-centimeter intervals. (It is important to note that all four paintings in this exhibition vary slightly in format, size, proportions and dates, yet are representative of each artist’s motif.)

BMPT’s works structurally consist of a horizontal, a vertical, a configuration, and mark-making, respectively. Buren paints vertical stripes, Parmentier horizontal ones, the black circle on a white ground is made by Mosset, and the uniform brush marks, repeated at 30-centimeter intervals, are Toroni’s. Each of these artists was committed to producing only their own motif, which serves as a logo. While these works are handmade and authored by different artists, they are stylistically anonymous. Together, these four paintings by BMPT represent an index of a type of abstract painting that is identified with the anti-relational, anti-compositional ethos of Minimalism in the States, and in Europe it would be understood to be derived from Art Concrete, or perhaps Zero.

Between January and December 1967, BMPT had the opportunity to manifest their critical stance in four highly public events. The nature of these events was influenced by the Situationist notion of intervention — a disruption of the norm. The documentation of these events is displayed in two vitrines, and they’re described in a supplement, which also supplies us with BMPT’s manifesto of January 1967 in which they conclude “We are not painters.”

In all four events their paintings serve as tropes; in the case of the 18^th Salon of Young Painters, they produced their works in public under a banner with their names. This was accompanied by an audio tape that advised their audience to be more intelligent. At day’s end, they took their works away, installing a second banner so that the two banners together stated “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni Do Not Exhibit.” In another, their paintings served as décor, the setting for a performance that never occurs: the audience sits waiting for 45 minutes, staring at their paintings. In their fourth and final manifestation, slide shows of traditional painting subjects — such as landscapes, nudes, etc. — were projected onto their works. These projections were also accompanied by an audio track that admonished their audience that “Art is an Illusion,” “Art is a Dream,” etc. With the fourth manifestation BMPT’s artistic and political experiment came to an end. Parmentier, in December of 1967, denounced Buren, Mosset, and Toroni for their willingness to deviate from the agreed upon formula; he proclaimed that by abandoning strict repetition they “situate themselves in a regressive manner with respect to this moral position.”

In each of their manifestations, BMPT reduced their works to mere props, and in doing so, sought to expose art’s commodification, the rendering of culture as spectacle under capitalism, as well as their own complicity (and that of everyone else). Problematically, with this exhibition, we are given a painting show: an exposition of trophies, emptied of their critical function. BMPT works have been captured, and tamed and are now loaded (down) with the aura of art — the very thing these works were meant to escape. Consequently, the critical nature of BMPT’s position is lost. They now signal some other message, one more aesthetic and formal than political. We are shown examples of the standard motifs agreed to in 1966, and even these diverge from BMPT’s standard model in that they do not adhere to their initial commitment to uniformity and repetition. In this, exhibition, BMPT’s radical proposition, meant to challenge notions of artistic authorship and originality, is also lost.

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David Carrier, 2014
Saul Ostrow, 2014
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Gagosian Gallery

Full index entry for “Koons” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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I’m Saul Ostrow’s first official guest in his new apartment, and he’s happy to be cooking for someone other than himself. Saul has just transplanted from New York to become Dean of Fine Arts and Chair of Painting for the Cleveland Institute of Arts. His wife, the painter Shirley Kaneda, helped him move in, having just started teaching herself at the Pratt Institute after moving back from L.A. The couple maintains a loft in New York, and he returns there every three weeks. As he labored over his northern Italian version of pasta rustica and bean salad, we talked about his ideas for revamping the Institute.

“I’m still trying to figure out my job. My predecessor emphasized abstract painting, but figurative styles are the stick at CIA.” Billed as America’s only five-year college of art and design, the school is known for its industrial design and medical arts programs. “Cleveland has real world programs that actually lead to gainful employment,” he says. His goal is to sustain the prestige the school has earned in that respect, but to bring it up to date by incorporating more cutting edge art theory and techniques to the studio practice. “We’re still trying to decide whether to call it visual arts or studio arts,” presumably to get away from the stuffiness of “fine arts.”

When asked why the CIA chose him, he responds quickly and confidently. “Because they know that studio art is informed by criticism and theory. That has been my focus, and they are serious about rethinking their program along those lines.” So why did he actually take the position? “I like to accrue titles. ‘Dean’ and ‘chair’ were two that I didn’t already have!”

Eventually, he says, “I want CIA students to be coveted by graduate schools. I want to turn out students who paint because they have made the decision to paint, not because they view other forms of contemporary art as inauthentic.” As chair of painting, he teaches the fifth-year painting class and an elective course that includes third- to fifth-year students. He says, rather surprised, “these are really bright kids, and they’re hungry. I’ve completely confused them though, I’ve ruined their lives because I’ve made them think.”

He knows there are differences in approach among the faculty, but his ambition is to keep that diversity. “We’ll all know who the best students are, but for different reasons.” A big challenge is introducing technology into painting, “letting the painters know that [technology] won’t replace the painter.” Sculpture will also be a big focus. “I have fifteen fifth-year painting students versus six sculpture students. I want to know why sculpture is not appealing.”

“There’s a tradition of fiefdoms,” he says. “I want them to refer to themselves as visual arts students instead of ‘painting students’ or ‘sculpture students.’ Whatever direction we feel our culture is going, that’s the reality. The lines between disciplines are blurring.”

He speaks most emphatically about revising the school’s approach to art history. “The liberal arts program at CIA is good, but it’s not geared toward the studio. The focus is more geared toward connoisseurship or genealogy, whereas I’m interested in how the studio has been conceived. It is not always pristine, the relationship of artist to studio to the world shifts. Artists don’t shroud themselves in their studio and then deliver their gifts to the world. That’s a mystique that started in the fifties that still exists, and that why changing the approach is important.”

As we carry our feast into the dining room and sit down to eat, our conversation turns to his other major projects: the book series for which he is editor, called “Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture” (Routledge Publishing of London) and an exhibition he is organizing for the Paine Webber Galleries in New York, scheduled to open in the fall of 2005.

For his next curatorial project, Ostrow is looking at what he describes as “those artists caught between Greenberg’s formalism and minimalism. People like Ann Truitt and Lyman Kipp, really early Olitski, Ray Parker. Artists who were working in more of a pictorial formalist style rather than color field.” He explains further that unlike their color field counterparts, these artists still held onto composition. “These artists all used a really weird palette. Most of them appear to have chosen their colors from an interior decorator’s manual. Weird beiges, muted cadmiums, avocado greens,” he says with a laugh. “These are artists who were working from about 1956-1974. I wonder what these artists look like now? These artists couldn’t create a dialogue of their own, so they fell back into what they were comfortable with.”

There’s a lesson in this for his students. “I want them to understand that the internal dialogue an artist has isn’t always linear. They have to take risks. Pollock’s drip paintings were risky, but they also weren’t the only paintings he made.” This is the other problem with teaching art history to studio students, he explains. “They can’t grasp the concept of change.”

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