The year 1969, subject of a current exhibition spanning the entire second floor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, provides a compelling starting point for examining artistic production and contemplation, then versus now. With every work dating from the year in question, minus a few select contemporary works by younger, emerging artists, the show serves as a kind of thermometer for the vast range of avant-garde thought and practice emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly every work comes straight from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, of which P.S.1 is an affiliate, revealing patterns of acquisition that mark an institution both ahead of its time and flawed.  The show was organized by Neville Wakefield, P.S.1 Senior Curatorial Advisor; Michelle Elligott, MoMA Archivist; and Eva Respini, MoMA Associate Curator of Photography

1969 counters the surface, buoyant stance on artistic practice exemplified in the Whitney’s 2008 ‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.’ The tone of 1969 is of a darker, more restrained hue, reflecting not just the instability and turmoil of that year, but the marked change in what was considered avant-garde—absence of color, de-materialization of the art object, an ever-closer merging of art and life. Throughout the show we are taken on a journey through the predominant narrative of 1960s art history, as told by the institution that has dictated modern art as we know it. As a result, it is unsurprising that female and black artists are under-represented—particularly absent are Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, and the late Nancy Spero.

Much of the work grapples with the then still-dominant narrative of minimal art—a Carl Andre floor piece and a Judd brass and plexiglas box are among the logical choices that open the exhibition. Richard Serra’s “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure” illustrates the increasing significance of process, spreading the artist’s signature mediums of lead, wood, stone, and steel in raw form out on the floor. The late 1960s also witnessed the radical realization that art can be something quite apart from object, utilizing everything from the body to the earth as site. Performance, photography, and video emerged and increased in prominence, rapidly becoming the preeminent form of avant-garde expression. Several seminal video works by Bruce Nauman are represented, such as the inverted film Pacing Upside Down (all works 1969), in which the artist paces rapidly around the perimeter of a room with a square drawn in the center of the floor. Other video works, including Walter De Maria’s stunning Hardcore, shot in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, attest to the experimental and enthusiastic approach to video by artists who were primarily painters or sculptors.

1969 examines MoMA’s collecting history at a critical moment in the museum’s own history, a period fraught with the tension between institutional responsibility and the revolutionary, leftist politics embraced by many of the artists it engaged with. The curators have included seminal works like the Art Workers Coalition poster “Q: And Babies? A: And Babies,” which exemplifies the controversial and revealing fact that museums like MoMA are indeed ideological spaces, hardly removed from political, social, or economic issues. Archival documentation from the Guerilla Art Action Group, which removed Malevich’s “White on White” from MoMA’s walls and replaced it with a revolutionary manifesto, is included in a glass case nearby, as if to strangely pacify and domesticate the radical iconoclasm represented in these sheets of paper. Such actions show the engagement of artists such as Jon Hendricks (now, ironically, working closely with MoMA on the recent acquisition of Fluxus material) with institutional critique and the breaking down of barriers between art and politics. Additionally, the curators provide archival images and original exhibition catalogues from various groundbreaking exhibitions of the time, proving that 1969 was a historical moment for many other institutions of art worldwide—Harald Szeeman’s “When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head” at the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Whitney’s “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” are among those catalogues displayed.

Mel Bochner’s thought-provoking “Theory of Painting,” in its debut at P.S.1/MoMA, is an installation of wall text, spray paint, and newspaper that conflates past and present, painting and installation. It both negates and depends on material specificity, while employing the “instructional” text often found in Conceptual art. Directly opposite to this train of thought are the environmental and spatially-motivated SoCal artists like Bob Irwin, who are represented in the gallery-within-a-gallery installation “Five Recent Acquisitions” with original text by MoMA curator Kynaston McShine. Besides getting a refreshing idea for what the museum was actually collecting in 1969, we are treated to these artists’ sensuous, luminous play with color and illusion.

The work of black and white photographers like Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz represent one of the most visually compelling and culturally resonant sections of the show. The selected photographs apply a sober, coolly removed perspective and an exquisite formal sensibility to a pivotal moment of cultural change in this country. Their influence was not just on subsequent photographers, but, on painters and Conceptual artists who would see American terrain and portraiture in a new light, from Ruscha and the Bechers, to Richter and Gursky.

1969 provides us with important reminders of how things evolved to the present moment. So many of the artists represented here have become textbook figures, to the point that we often forget how radical they were in their historic context. It was productive that P.S.1 commissioned several contemporary artists to interpret and engage with this context, although the results are mixed. Hank Willis Thomas’s boldly-colored window screens provide one of the sole references to African American culture and civil rights, yet they fade into the background in the presence of important 1960s work. The brilliant, if chaotic, collective Bruce High Quality Foundation offers “portable museums” placed intermittently around the galleries, commenting on the agendas hidden behind museum walls that have persisted since far before 1969. The exhibition succeeds in jumpstarting a renewed reverence for the 1960s avant-garde, but there needs to be more at stake here. 2009, and now 2010, are different years, in a different century, and no less fraught in many ways. Some sense of urgency seems nonetheless to leak from this exhibition, whether intended by the curators or not, and the contemporary art world should take note.

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April 20–June 30, 2008

It is the spring and it will be the summer of Olafur Eliasson in New York City.  A freshly opened mid-career survey hosted by the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 and  four upcoming public waterfall projects in the East River will establish Eliasson as a household name, beyond art world parameters.

Though only in his early forties, Eliasson has had numerous international gallery and museum exhibitions and in 2003, he represented his native Denmark in the 50th Venice Biennial. He was born in Copenhagen in 1967, lived in Iceland for many years and is currently living in Berlin, where he has a studio employing  roughly forty assistants. In little more than a decade, the former graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen has  become a force. This accomplishment is even more stunning since Eliasson’s work is neither commercial nor mainstream. Instead  his approach  is reminiscent of that of a shrewd jazz musician working in a realm laden with cheesy pop starlets; an  equally poetic and intellectual alternative to a culture addicted to reality TV and splashy drama. Contrary to latest fashions, Eliasson’s work simplifies and can even be minimal.  Its mission is far reaching,  aiming to re-instate the experience of art as something personal if not sacrosanct.

Along these lines, Eliasson creates environments that allow individuals to have deeply reflective experiences and to share these in the company of others.  And though many of Eliasson’s works employ technology, his installations and sculptures are surprisingly easy to grasp.   In a recent panel, entitled The Colors of the Brain,” hosted by MoMA as the first of three such programs focused on Eliasson’s work, the artist spoke of his ambition to create perceptual spaces that can be physically entered and how he wants his audience to experience the work from the effect to the cause. It is  through  this experience that the works, which have no distinct beginning or end, begin to exist. Though these environments are embracive,? Eliasson seeks much more dramatic reactions from his audience than passive immersion. To initiate these responses, he plays with our sensory receptors and nerve system, or  he points out in his book entitled “Your Engagement has Consequences.”

One of his key concerns is color and light. He often works with projections and reflections of light, whether by means of mirrors, water, or state of the art technical equipment Much has been said about Eliasson’s scientific approach to color and his studio is often referred to as a laboratory. He creates the optical illusion of a world painted in monochromes, for example by installing mono-frequency lamps, which emit light at such a narrow frequency that colors other than yellow and black are invisible. At MoMA, the work that involves this technique is called “Room for one color” (1997) and it is installed in the hallway that leads from the third floor escalators into the exhibition galleries. It is the grand entrance to “Take your Time” and considering the exhibition’s title, it indeed feels like a gesture of great suspense. Reaching the other end of the hallway, one feels as if one  has stepped in and out of a sepia-toned black and white film and experiences a strong urge to feast on natural colors. And that is exactly what Eliasson has in store for us. “360º room for all colors” (2002) features a circular enclosure, in which the full color spectrum unfolds  endlessly  and rhythmically with the help of a curved screen, fluorescent lights and a timer. The work evokes 19th Century panorama paintings, in which the audience was able to indulge in the illusion of entering faraway landscapes or historic events.

. The fact that his work often pushes the divide between architecture and sculpture has encouraged many scholars to focus on the theoretical conception of Eliasson’s work rather than on his artistic influences, concerning which he points to sources ranging from Heidegger and Gordon Matta-Clark to the obvious, James Turrell.  More important is that however post-modern, post-conceptual and post-minimal, Olafur Eliasson’s work is, it is rooted in Romanticism. In fact it easily ties in with the works of 19th Century Northern European Romantics, such as Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857), as well as with the color theory developed by Philip Otto Runge (1777-1810). The Romantics believed in seeking the sublime in nature. Friedrich’s otherworldly and deeply saturated skyscapes, sunsets, and rock formations, for example, were meant as a direct glimpse of the sublime and a key to illumination. Eliasson might have scratched the overt religious content found in these works, but in his way he is also searching for the sublime and finding it in nature. The difference is that Eliasson distills key elements of nature, such as rain, fog, or color and translates them into man-made scenarios. “Your strange certainty still kept” (1996) slows time. It consists of a curtain of water droplets in a dark room, which is only illuminated by strobe lights. Each light flash catches an array of single drops of water, crystallizing the beauty of a small element within the larger motion and hence, paying homage to the individuality of that element by spotlighting it inside the mass. It is not magic, it is magical.The sensation is similar to the awe that a close up look at a leaf’s spidery veins can elicit. The same is true of “Ventilator” (1997), which is installed in the atrium. It features a regular electric fan,  suspended from the ceiling, swinging through the larger open space with the energy and air currents it initiates. Reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary “Fireflies on the Water” (2002), which was exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Eliasson’s “Space reversal” (2007) examines the idea of infinity. As in Kusama’s work, it is with the help of an enclosed space and strategically placed mirrors that Eliasson creates the illusion of infinite reflections of the self that recede  further into the distance the closer we try to get.

P.S. 1 houses some of the exhibition’s most potent works, such as “Reversed Waterfall” (1998) and “Beauty” (1993), a curtain of mist, which through the help of a spotlight is transformed into a mirage of dancing flames, and it also serves as a quasi behind the scenes look at Eliasson’s process. Copper, wood, and paper models, as well as sequences of photographs depicting Iceland’s glaciers and textured landscapes, explain much about Eliasson’s vocabulary and sources of inspiration. He pays attention to detail and  it is in the sequencing of his subjects that he finds his analysis. It becomes clear that in Eliasson, it is the concentration on the miniscule   that enables larger truths to unfold.

Elevated to monumental scale, Eliasson’s upcoming waterfall projects, which will captivate the city from mid-July to mid-October, will pursue the same qualities. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the monumental waterfalls will be installed at the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, between Piers 4 and 5 in Brooklyn, in Lower Manhattan at Pier 35 and on the north shore of Governors Island. It is a project that again will draw attention to  the fact that the masses of water that connect this archipelago of a city are as characteristic of it as the masses of man-made buildings that make up its iconic skyline. The waterfalls will be impressive and quite the sensation, but they will also reveal Eliasson’s main strength – the skill to turn a generous gesture into a subjective experience, which even in a city of millions can be as personal as it will be communal.

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June 25 to November 20, 2006
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46 Avenue, Queens, 718-784-2084

Ron Gorchov can lay claim to a rare achievement: He has created a distinctive form without becoming formulaic. Eleven of the 27 works in his show on the top floor of P.S.1 are painted on a similarly shaped, immediately recognizable idiosyncratic support, and within a close-knit family of motifs. The remainder are smaller canvases painted with vertical stripes.  Yet far from coming across as repetitive, the show is charged and sprightly.

“Double Trouble” brings together works from the 1970s and from the last five years in Mr. Gorchov’s trademark idiom: oil paint on linen, crudely stapled to a curved wooden stretcher. Organised by P.S.1’s founder and director, Alanna Heiss, the show is something of a homecoming for Mr. Gorchov: He was included in the museum’s inaugural 1976 exhibition, “Rooms,” when Ms. Heiss brought her Institute of Art and Urban Resources to the disused Queens public school building that is now a MoMA affiliate. The artist also had a solo show there in 1979.

“Double Trouble” is a title that, like Mr. Gorchov’s work, operates from different angles. On one level, his work operates both on sculptural and painterly terms, rather like Elizabeth Murray’s expressively shaped supports. More specifically, the Gorchov shape, which has been compared variously to a saddle, a mask, and a shield, curves in such a way as to be both concave and convex, as it is bent twice, top to bottom and side to side, rather like the plywood seat of an Eames chair. And his pared-down vocabulary is very fond of forms in pairs — without his quite being a dualist. In this context, double trouble is an addiction that an aesthete is only too proud to admit to, like girl trouble.

Mr. Gorchov had been off the scene for a long time — the show leapfrogs the 1980s and ’90s — when was brought back to art-world attention last year with a show organized in a temporary downtown space by the young impresario Vito Schnabel. His main room at P.S.1, like the office space Mr. Schnabel found for him, has a rugged, no-nonsense feel — a soaring ceiling and a décor lacking in finesse  —that is theatrically appropriate to the heraldic, almost martial quality of the work. What with the armor-like shape of his canvases, you are put in mind of the great hall of a medieval castle.

Mr. Gorchov’s paint handling is robust but unfussy. His typical work places simple shapes of one color against a ground of another. These can be mirror image, geometric shapes, like the double pair of relatively neat yellow ovals against a sloppy, expressive green ground in the 9-foot-tall “5th One” (2006); or discrete, irregular shapes like the pair of contrastive green forms in “Palais Jamais (Who’s Afraid of Purple and Green)” (2005), which seem to slip toward the sloping edges of their support. Despite their distinctiveness, the shapes in “Palais Jamais” resist categorization as either organic or hieroglyphic.  In other works, like “Veronique” and “Mariana’s Room” (both 2006) amoeba-forms recalling Arp have a fluid sense of evolving growth.

Other motifs have figural connations. “Amphora” (1975) resembles a pair of bowed legs. “Ausonian” (2006) suggests footprints, and “Hazard” (2005) hints at handprints.

Sometimes the shapes have a hard, slow, sculptural sense, like the flint or menhir-like pair in “Rejiv” (2005), where nervous, drawn pentimenti increase the sense of forms carved out of the pictorial ground. Other times, as in “Gigue” (2000) there is a gestural sensibility — forms whose calligraphic speed suggest fluency and immediacy.

These contrasts of form language, speed, and depictive phenomena keep the show lively, diverse, and energized. Far from being specific to one mood or message, Mr. Gorchov’s idiom turns out to have the flexibility of a sonnet, conveying a whole range of emotions and values.

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February 26, 2006 – May 29, 2006

Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at PS1, entitled Freedom From The Known, features a new series of large scale abstract photographs. Some are unique while others are based on the artist’s previous imagery. This is the first museum show in the US for Tillmans, a German-born, London-based artist whose work came to international prominence during the 1990s. Freedom From The Known is consistent with Tillmans’s oeuvre in the sense that it was conceived as an installation, and there’s a lot to see. However, this show departs from his previous gallery presentations wherein photographs were directly taped or clipped to the wall with deliberate informality. Images displayed at PS1 are framed behind glass or encased in plexiglass boxes.

The major new works develop a theme of abstraction that has run parallel to Tillmans’s better known iconographic images since the beginning of his career. They are up to ten feet high. To achieve them, Tillmans manipulated enormous sheets of chromogenic C print paper with light in the darkroom. Such images are typically described as camera-less, meaning that no negative was used. One huge C print entitled “it’s only love give it away” featured crisp black lines suggestive of eyelashes or feathery magnetic forces swaying above soft purple tones. Others conveyed quite different romantic yet industrial moods through their use of unpredictable colors, compositions, and titles. Titles play a strong role in Tillmans’s work and should never be overlooked.

Meanwhile, as if to apply an opposite principle to balance the impact of these big C prints, Tillmans juxtaposed some small photocopies of his own images and a xeroxed newspaper article. Viewers unfamiliar with Tillmans’s oeuvre will be quickly clued in to its heterodox, destratified approach to image making and image output when confronted with such extreme contrasts of image content, size, and media in one gallery. This artist’s longstanding interest in the sources and materiality of pictures, as well as the variety of meanings that can be set in motion when iconography and abstraction interplay, are much in evidence throughout the show.

On display in another room, in yet another mode, a large C print entitled “Empire (Punk)” looks like a very large fax. Indeed it was a fax, once upon a time. The much degraded imagery of a young man began as a portrait taken by Tillmans, who faxed this portrait to create a new version of the image as a fax – following a logic  akin to that of Warhol’s photo-silkscreen prints. Then in 2005, Tillmans reworked the faxed image again, scanning it at high resolution in order to make a large C print. This print became part of a new series entitled Empire. (Other images from the Empire series include a crouching soldier handling a gun, the silhouette shadow of a man’s head, and an extreme close up of bearded skin.) Whereas the camera-less photographs are unique prints, the Empire series employs iconography and magnifies low-grade photographic reproduction technologies, such as faxed imagery, into the realm of  high tech, high art, and pure data.

In Freedom From The Known, Tillmans presents viewers with a surfeit of information that parallels the complexity of the world we move through and decipher everyday. As in his previous exhibitions, the diversity of photographic technologies becomes a subject in itself, one that plays a crucial role in the construction of disjunctive meanings and associations prompted by Tillmans’s unusual framing of people, places, and things. In this show, where iconography is less prevalent, Tillmans’s analytical process is much more evident. He has said that his approach to abstraction is rooted in an adolescent fascination with astronomy, a tantalizing insight into the mind of an artist who has always emphasized the sociopolitical dimension of his humanist sensibility. Freedom From The Known reveals that a fortuitous collision of empirical science and emotional sensitivity may be part of what fuels the burning energy beneath Tillmans’s investigation of photography, and life itself.

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March 13 to September 26, 2005

“Greater New York” is a survey exhibition mounted periodically by PS1 to give an overview of exciting work done recently in or near New York by artists who are not household names.  Selected by curators from PS1 and MoMA, of which PS1 is an affiliate, the show is an almost overwhelmingly large assembly of works by 160 artists.  “Greater New York” has established itself as the antidote to Whitney Biennial, generally showing younger and more experimental artists In the current version of “Greater New York,” the old and the new clash with unexpected results.

Tactics that were popular in the 1990s, such as interventions, installations, and simultaneous work in various media look clichéd and lacking in inspiration, rather than showing a spark of rebellious genius.  Valerie Hegarty’s tree trunk, for instance, made of paste and cardboard and appearing to burst through the wall and floor of the museum, seems very safe, not at all disturbing to one’s perception of the museum space or subversively humorous.  David Opdyke’s “USS Mall,” a scale model of an aircraft carrier, whose top surface is composed of the details of a suburban mall and parking lot, functions only as a weak visual pun.  It lacks the sophistication to make any social critique and go beyond being a joke.  Another attempt at social comment, Elif Uras’ painting “He got Game,” depicts a culture obsessed with the possession and use of firearms.  In each case, these pieces are merely lazy ideas unsupported by technical skill, as uninteresting to look at as they are to think about.

There are “computer-aided” pictures, which is another way of saying pictures that have attempted to avoid the unavoidable need to know how to make something with one’s own hands in order to create an object that can bear more than several seconds’ observation.  Finally, there are several artists who believe that by working in diverse and what they consider to be unconventional media they are breaking from the traditional mold of the artist.  Of course this gambit (which has often been used to subvert the use of the art object as a market tool) is at least as old as Duchamp’s early work.  Here, it often has the result that perfectly respectable work in one medium is degraded by its random association with much weaker work in another medium.  Hope Atherton’s contribution is diminished when her ambitious painting The Watcher (acrylic on linen, 87 x 66 inches) is paired with a limp wall sculpture of a rabbit/unicorn.  Guy Benner takes up a whole gallery with a video of performers in ostrich suits, accompanied by the suits themselves, which add nothing.  Christian Holstad’s collages combine product logos in compositions whose inspiration goes beyond Pop mannerism, but this effect is undercut by his decision also to include a generic-looking floor installation.

Countering these  weaknesses there is a strong representation of work being done in the traditional mediums of painting, sculpture, film, photography, and (we now need to add) installation. Several installations reflect a thoughtful approach, as opposed to one that is mechanical or overly conceptual.  Wangechi Mutu’s piece combines collage with non-art elements in a harmonious ensemble.  Bozidar Brazda has two site-specific pieces.  One creates an image of a man camped out on a ledge outside a window, while the other, just beside the entrance to PS1’s large courtyard, is a real Jaguar XJ6, filled with books and straw.  The references these two pieces make are various.  One possibility is the museum director’s car, and in fact walking around the museum, not far away, one may find a single car, a BMW, parked inside the museum’s gates.  But the most evocative work of installation in the exhibition is Marc Swanson’s “Killing Moon 3 (Self portrait as Yeti in his lair),” which some viewers (though not those already familiar with PS1) might miss, as it is located in the basement, at the far end of the former boiler room.  Using the location to maximum effect, Swanson made a tableau that was poetic, and not at all ironic, despite the mythical figure central to its impact.  This white-haired being, also known as the Abominable Snowman, is seated on the floor, looking like a homeless person, surrounded by his scavenged belongings, or like someone who does not come from our planet (literally) and does not share our values.

In photography, Tanyth Berkeley’s portraits seem to have a new kind of light, and Gil Blank’s images of a man floating in water and of fireworks are simultaneously hip and serene.  Sue de Beer, who also has an exhibition currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Altrea Gallery on 42nd Street, creates installations in which to project her films.  What is really captivating is her mastery of conventional film language — her use of framing and narrative.  Rather than bringing conventional film language into fine art — as many artists have done — her work seems to yearn to break free of its self-imposed art world confines and simply exist in its natural habitat, the world of television and movies.  Film and video more firmly set in the art mode include  xurban_collective’s evocative stationary view of a city skyline at sunset, Abbey Williams’ effective coupling of footage of New York subway passengers with a rock soundtrack featuring sexy female vocals, and Pawel Woytasik’s enigmatic images of industrial systems that could be processing waste.

The real achievements in “Greater New York” are left to the most traditional media.  Adam McEwen’s huge piece uses a photograph of Mussolini and his girlfriend, Claretta Petacci, strung up in a square in Milan, after having been executed and beaten by a crowd on April 28, 1945.  The found photograph is merely the starting point for this remarkable work, in which McEwen inverts the photo, greatly enlarges it and mounts and frames it in such a way that the final image is an imposing one that mixes a horrible melancholy with the inexplicable levity of seeing these mutilated figures that appear to be gaily dancing and singing.  Sculpture makes a strong showing in various modes.  Will Ryman shows his plaintive papier mâché figures, famous by now on the New York scene, and Tobias Putrih has an effective installation of gradation of sheets of cardboard. Nathan Carter uses mundane materials — acrylic and enamel paint on cut plywood — to make a structure  at once suggestive of the observable world (it looks like a mountain ski village with pine trees) and insistent on its nature as built and painted sculptural relief.  Interesting forays into material are undertaken by Ryan Johnson, who uses cut paper and acrylic paint to make three-dimensional figures, Mickalene Thomas, who uses rhinestones with acrylic and enamel paint to make a reclining figure, and Taylor McKimens, whose small  mixed-media television set has a refreshing home-made quality to it.

The most significant achievements in recent New York art, as presented by “Greater New York,”  are in the area of painting.  There are few examples of paintings that simply illustrate an idea (and many of these can be seen around New York on a regular basis); instead, one finds a generous sampling of painters who seem involved with the implications of the paint medium and the seemingly limitless variety of ways to use it.  The first work one sees in the lobby is the large-scale tour-de-force effort Perfume II (Feb. 2003) (114 x 180 inches) by Cheyney Thompson, which depicts, in loving detail, a typical New York magazine and candy stand.  The unpainted canvas surrounding the image underscores the reality that this work is about the painting, not the idea of a newsstand as cultural artifact, let alone the role of commerce in contemporary life.  The stand is simply a fact anyone can observe in New York, and its detail is carefully rendered by Thompson without ever becoming precious.  Kristin Baker and Garth Weiser contribute powerful large-scale treatments — she in acrylic, relying on a scraping technique, he in oils whose paint is pushed or allowed to accumulate in waves that become an idea of form.  Angela Dufresne, Kurt Lightner, Kamrooz Aram, and Anna Conway, in different ways, exhibit inventive approaches to imagery and technique.

The two most successful painters in the exhibition, who really show a way to travel with the tradition of oil painting, are Dana Schutz and Ena Swansea.  While Swansea has only one painting, it is a doozy.  Entitled “devil on the road” (oil on graphite on linen, 56 x 56 inches), it depicts a bright red devil wearing glasses in a crouched position, as if about to pounce.  The paint is laid on in precise, meaningful strokes, and the color is blended expressively, while the figure’s shadow is effected by the lack of tan paint on the ground.  What does it mean to say a stroke of paint is meaningful?  It means that its fact of being exactly where and how it is resonates in the viewer the realization that this stroke really has to be, it should be, where it is.  Contrast this to the plethora of easily-made and easily-encountered meaningless brush strokes, which, by contrast, command no sense at all of having to be where and how they are, but instead give the feeling of having randomly landed where they are (in a setting where randomness is not prized).  Schutz’s strokes, likes Swansea’s, command the recognition of meaningfulness, yet they are quite different.  Swansea’s marks, though readily apparent, are subsumed into a larger pictorial narrative of the painting and image as a whole, while Schutz’s marks are expressionistic, in that each individual mark has a life of its own and often a color value of its own, distinguishing it from other nearby marks.  Schutz has a small painting, “Poisoned Man,” and a large tableau, “Presentation,” a picture of a huge corpse, laid out in front of a crowd of onlookers, who could also double as participants in a medical class.  The scale of her imagery is impressive.

“Greater New York” is successful partly because of its ambition and scope, but mainly because of the acuity of its curatorial eye.  It lets visitors to PS1 be aware that the newest things happening in the New York art world today are happening in the oldest mediums.

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September 23, 2004 to January 10, 2005

Manny Farber grew bored with non-objective painting (“I was just repeating myself”). Perhaps he grew tired of suppressing or transforming signs of empirical reality. It is certainly not obvious to strangers standing before the early work what Farber wants us to see in these colorful and expansive surfaces. Farber’s abstractions from the 1970s are not as intense as his later work because at first glance they appear to be products of chance. Careful mark making is disguised as accident or pure gesture and the building up of dense textured surfaces is inevitably self effacing. The collage elements make the spatial relationships more interesting and they are carefully assembled, but the application of color is too reminiscent of tie-dye or marbling and the linear forms are pallid reminders of Twombly. The trippiness is charming, but they inevitably become monotonous. Very few pure abstractions are able to generate and maintain an intense aura for very long. Something that appears throughout Farber’s oeuvre is present in these early works however. There is a tension between his urge to disperse and his urge to bring together the compositional elements. This tension is never resolved. So to a certain extent these works successfully lead our gaze from one area of interest to another, but the later paintings do this much more successfully.

A typical Farber painting consists of a background made up of divided fields of color and various organic and non-organic objects, all painted with equal focus and intensity, scattered across the foreground plane. The all-overness is reminiscent of Polke’s work, but Farber is not so interested in decals and cartoon imagery. In his mature work the colors and use of shadows unify the whole while the realistically rendered isolated objects placed in mysterious spaces force the viewer’s gaze to zero in on different areas, according to each viewer’s own inclinations. It is easy to lose track of the whole but somehow Farber manages to bring everything together again and again, no matter from what angle you approach the work. The backgrounds are complex because sometimes they come across as tangible surfaces that the objects rest on, and at other times they are floating fields of texture and color. Each object is rendered with the same amount of detail and intensity so that one gets lost in the details. The same thing occurs when you stand before a Bosch painting. They are painted so seductively that we want to examine them close up. It is very important to Farber that he captures the nuances of contour. He does rely on visual shorthand but he never cheats. Every line supports the overall form and reinforces the verisimilitude of each object.

These paintings convince us that the history of painting is the story of the individual’s love of the organic and non-organic object. Painters dedicate themselves to the close study of organic or inorganic objects and present their discoveries to the viewer, or they try to invent “new” objects, in order to suggest a different world order. Painting is dedication to the object, the act of grasping furtively and intuitively or patiently and rationally the objects the artist lives with, or the objects that haunt or inspire her/his imagination. They see the landscape or human body as an object of worship. The objects in Farber’s paintings mean a lot to him and we are convinced of this by his handling of the paint and the exacting, nuanced, yet expressive brushwork. This prevents the work from becoming self-referential navel gazing although we should not underestimate the feelings he has for these things. The recognizable subject matter helps insure that the viewer won’t be alienated by the diaristic quality of the work. There is no heavy handed or simplistic symbolism in these works, and the fact that Farber refers to movies or directors, contrary to the opinions of most art critics, does not mean much. These are references, an element of subject matter, but are really planted clues, because we might think they give away the secret of the entire work but are merely lures for the eyes. First and foremost Farber wants to seduce our eyes and have us examine the forms, in order to determine what, if anything, they mean to us.

The objects in Farber’s paintings, different types of toys and candy, plants, vegetables torn from the ground, freshly picked flowers, pages from sketchbooks, post-it pads, art reproduction books, film stills, rebars, garden and artist tools, toy-train tracks, strips of film, silos of Quaker Oats, bottles of liquid paper, cards from children flash card sets, never become subordinate to symbolic transformation. Farber maintains a high level of verisimilitude in order to suck the viewer’s gaze into the staccato maze of his paintings, but the brushwork is just loose enough to allow us to marvel at the careful stitching together of each form. It is difficult for the non-painter to appreciate the level of concentration needed to render objects and their delicate and complex contours and surface detail so clearly. Humans for the most part don’t stare at tangible forms for extended periods of time and try to figure out how to emulate them using the coded language of line and color. We watch movies and TV for hours on end but we do not actively examine objects and try to understand their exterior forms by reconstructing them two dimensionally. The way these objects are all placed on the foreground plane in a semi-deadpan fashion undercuts the seriousness of Farber’s goals. A cigar might just be a cigar, but the artist’s mind travels great distances while analyzing and rendering the subject matter. These paintings are about this complex mental journey, which encompasses the spectrum of human feeling.

Farber loves to render handwriting. He is masterful at capturing the way handwriting appears on a flat surface. He is committed to representing this phenomenon as accurately as possible. He carefully replicates words and images created with a pencil, pen and ink. The sometimes mocking and ironic, sometimes serious comments on the art world and the dilemma of being a visual artist in the twenty-first century, the carefully chosen and placed painted images of pages from coffee-table art books and the artist’s own sketchbooks are the best Farber, and perhaps any contemporary painter can do, to combat the self consciousness visual artists feel. Farber is trying to short circuit, or beat to the punch, the critical apparatus surrounding the visual arts, but at the same time, he takes pleasure in partaking in the discourse. He is aware of the fact that “the culture we live in constantly codes and frames our visible world,” as J. Dudley Andrew reminds us.

There is an inherent contradiction in his work. Farber tries to convince us of the tangibility of his objects but the backgrounds are very ambiguous, even when they are broken up into fifths, quarters, halves or concentric circles. Also, he paints anonymous objects like post-it pads, yellow legal pads and index cards, but then paints quirky and highly personal statements written in hand across them. It is important that the viewer identifies with these objects in some way, even though the viewer will never know what the written words mean to the artist. The deceptive plainness of the subject matter and the fragmentary bits of painted handwriting both support and undermine the personal quality of the work.

In “Thinking About History Lessons” from 1979, there is a manic and dizzying exchange between horizontal and vertical planes. You simultaneously look at objects lying flat on a fractured or divided surface, standing perfectly upright and seen in three-quarter view from overhead. A number of different views are shown at the same time, and the backgrounds are not simply flat modernist backdrops. They suggest spaces of various depths and textured surfaces made from manufactured or organic materials. There is also a strong dialectic in Farber’s work between manufactured and organic objects. The same can be said of David Salle but the difference between the two painters is that Farber is not ashamed of genuine object worship, whereas Salle always has his tongue in his proverbial conceptual cheek. Farber also plays with scale. Since there is no clear distinction between indoors and outdoors in his work, the objects hover in a mental force field, and this emphasizes the emotional connection between artist and object. Farber’s work eventually became more and more filled with organic forms. His wife, who is also an artist, is a serious gardener and this has impacted the content of his work, as has everything stored in his memory. The image of a rodent caught in a trap appears in “Lure” from 1989 and a number of other paintings. Gardeners are familiar with this sort of thing, and Farber wants us to experience it removed from the context of his daily life. He succeeds in re-contextualizing the ordinary through the power of his vision, but remains non-committal about whether or not the image should be perceived as a symbol of some concept. What else can the painter do but try to convince us that stuff matters, that the environment we are immersed in, either real or virtual, is important enough to look at very closely?

Farber’s most recent work appears to be a microscopic or close-up view of the painterly universe he has built. The pictures are less busy and the backgrounds are less ambiguous. Perhaps this reduction of busyness and settling into a more orderly place has to do with the conservatism brought about by the aging process. The colors are incredibly lush in these late works and the level of passion on display can be unsettling.

Farber convinces us that he loves the things he paints, and this celebration of recognizable forms balances the quixotic symbolism, secret codes and hidden messages. Like Cezanne and most trompe l’ oeil painters, Farber believes in the relevance and importance of domestic life and the objects that influence or determine our daily routines during all phases of our lives.

The post Manny Farber: About Face appeared first on artcritical.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave
Long Island City, Queens

March 12-June 7, 2004

Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a Jack of all trades, master of none. He is known as the artist who “not only erased the line between art and life but also pulverized the two into a single process.” But was art ever separate from life? This false dichotomy has propped up the dubious practices of many artists. Roth named volumes of his poetry and drawings Shit, More Shit, Complete Shit, Damned Shit, and Damned Complete Crap. This suggests that he considered the creative process to be no different from a bodily function. At the same time he had the hubris to think that his daily routines, eating, sleeping, reading, and the objects that surrounded him, were interesting enough to be art. The by-products of this so-called blending of art and life needed to be packaged in a clever way in order for the intelligentsia to consider them art.

According to his friend Richard Hamilton, “He had set out on a mission to destroy the art market.” However iconoclastic he was, Roth couldn’t escape navel gazing and the belief in the Midas touch of the artist. Successful artists can’t escape the petrifaction of their work. The two large scale exhibits currently on view at MoMA and P.S. 1 make it clear that Roth’s fear of museums and galleries was well founded. The display of his work behind sheets of glass and in display cases undermines it in many ways.

Dieter Roth wanted to go beyond the purely visual. In the beginning of his career he experimented with Op-Art, the goal of which is to directly impact human physiology and go beyond illusionism. His Literature Sausages consist of chopped up pages from a book pressed into sausage casing. What would Hegel’s oeuvre taste like? This dadaist gesture encapsulates the visual artist’s contempt for the written word. But it also supports the idea that Roth was bitter about his failure as a poet. None of his books of concrete poetry are in print and the literary world never took notice of them.

Many of the drawings in this exhibit look like blind contour drawings and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. “Tibidabo,” (1978) is made up of pre-recorded sounds of dogs barking in a dog pound in Monte Tibidabo, Barcelona, hundreds of photographs of the dogs taken by Roth and his sons, and 1600 playful “speedy drawings” of sausage like dogs. Supposedly Roth got depressed while making these recordings, but I guess he felt we would get more out of them. The combination of lamentful dog sounds, photographs, and playful drawings is disjointed but not provocative. Without resorting to video or film, Roth combined image and sound and assemblages and sound, but the sum and substance of these disparate elements fails to be emotive. The multiple stimulants are distracting. Just because the art stimulates more than one sense doesn’t mean the viewer has a deeper experience.

Roth was not able to completely circumvent the artist’s need to synthesize. The ugly and monotonous assemblages which take up the last few rooms of the MoMA exhibit are made from studio detritus and cassette players playing random sounds or snippets of music. None of these assemblages really hold together and the music doesn’t add to the objects, and vice versa. Paint is half-heartedly slathered on them, and the assemblages made of articles of clothing have gobs of glue poured on them. The purpose of the glue and paint is to unify the whole. Unification of a surface is an age old task performed by painters and sculptors alike, and Roth could not escape it. Just because you are sloppy about it or use off-beat materials doesn’t mean the goal is any different.

Roth was obsessed with his own image and the biodegradable materials he used might be a stand in for his own decaying physicality. His use of food and other biodegradable materials is nothing new. Check out the African art section of the Met when you get a chance. Most of the works made from biodegradable materials are behind glass. This cancels the impact the works have on the olfactory system. The glass and wood containers or frames which hold the art made of spices and rotting stuff overpower the art. With some of these objects, the glass covering them is foggy in spots and often the work is little more than a muddy indiscernible mess pressed behind glass. Some of these pieces are easy to make out and we view them as paintings. We can appreciate the discoloration, the mottled surfaces. No matter how off-beat the materials are, we still focus on formal qualities of the work. The impact of the chocolate lions and self portraits is not amplified by the repetition of forms. They do give off a pleasant subtle odor but they are ugly lumps. “Portrait of the Artist as Birdseed Bust,” (1970), has an interesting patina.

The oil paintings Roth did in the early seventies, fragmented rebuses floating in front of anonymous horizon lines (“Self Portrait as Volcano,” (1973)), aren’t very good. These kitschy images prove that Roth wasn’t much of a colorist.

“Flat Waste,” (1975-1976/1992) is a faux archive of common objects that are small enough to fit into plastic sleeves and 623 office binders. Roth put cigarette butts, bottle caps, soiled napkins and tissue paper, and magazines into the sleeves. Roth plays the archivist, neatly packaging and presenting personal/impersonal objects. Typically, an archive will include a finding aid, guide or inventory, which helps users find their way through the collection, and an introduction to the collection which briefly describes the contents. The classification of objects is done in a very systematic way. Everything is broken up into groups and sub-groups. Nothing is haphazard about this process. This conceptual art piece toys with the idea of the archive, creates a semblance of order. A major flaw of much conceptual art is that it borrows from the sciences, solemnly or mockingly emulates them, but lacks their vigor. The conceptual artist plays dress up. This is a boring record of his existence, and like other works in this exhibit it is a tautology.

“Solo Scenes,” (1997-98) is diaristic. On 128 monitors we see Roth puttering around his living quarters naked, robed, and fully dressed. He is awake, asleep, defecating, reading and writing, making art, chatting on the phone or with visitors, and eating and drinking. Roth tried to deflate the mythic image of the artist but failed to do so. These actions are being viewed by us because they are being done by an important artist. This installation gives us the illusion of omnipotence. If we add it all up do we have the sum total of a life? In a strange way this installation reinforces the psychological opaqueness of the artist and his life and works.

More obsessive/compulsive energy is on display in the “Reykjavik Slides,” (1973-75/1990-1993). 30,000 continuously projected slides of all of the houses or dwellings in Reykjavik, Iceland are meant to impress through the sheer uselessness of the task the artist set before himself. You have to wonder what the point of the monotony is. The images of house exteriors and the lack of interior shots emphasize the alienated or misanthropic feelings of the photographer. But again, we are impressed more by quantity than quality.

“Floor,” (1975-92) is the wooden floor which was in Roth’s Iceland studio. Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of P.S. 1 tells us that, “[A] studio floor is just as much a work of art as the works it supports.” Not really. The context the floor appears in forces us to consider it as art. Once again, we are supposed to believe in the magical powers of the artist who can turn anything into art. The sheer size of the floor and the way it is precariously propped up against the wall is impressive, but why should we take interest in it, except for the fact that it is the studio floor of the famous artist Dieter Roth.

“Garden Sculpture,” (1968-96) relates to another anemic genre perhaps initiated by Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, from 1961. This 60′ long mass of stuff includes household items, plants, jars full of icky liquids, and video monitors showing footage of the installation being made. To include information about the making of the object in the object itself is a tiresome gesture that has been repeated by way too many artists. Seen as sculpture this is a mess. Common objects are elevated to the lofty realm of art without any transformation taking place. It is like wandering around the basement of a suburban house but not as mysterious. The display of the different tools that were used to make “Garden Sculpture” in the adjoining room is really pointless and didn’t enhance the experience of seeing the work in progress. Once again we are supposed to be overwhelmed by the size of the installation. The fact that this installation is ongoing or never complete is supposed to add to its meaning, but this just makes it pretentious.

Roth’s art didn’t develop. He started over and over again. He was a dabbler. There is something disingenuous about much of this exhibit. Roth’s boredom with visual art is palpable. His use of off-beat materials and his monotonous conceptual art did not disrupt the art market, but will probably keep art conservationists busy for years.

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January 22 – May 1, 2004

I went to see the Lee Lozano show at P.S. 1 with a friend of mine who used to be her pot dealer and (briefly) her lover. In the reception area there is a painting done in Lozano’s expressionist style that depicts a hammer with three heads. Broad, straw-like brushstrokes and a deceptively understated palette infuse the hammer image with an organic vitality. It fills the rectangle like a restless, mythical beast. In the exhibition rooms where the majority of Lozano’s works are displayed there are more paintings of tools: hammers, wrenches and clamps.

The objects are pictured much larger than life size. Standing in front of one of these images allows one to feel like they are climbable, like the limbs of trees. The tools coil in on themselves, tucked under in a cramped, interior space. The paintings seem to be about imagining what it must feel like to be alongside a growing penis stuck inside trousers. They have a murmuring, heroic air about them, like awakening animals. Lozano’s tools are more personal then those in Claes Oldenburg’s repertoire of “object pornography” and infinitely more bracing than Jim Dine’s coy little tool drawings. Lozano makes the reference specific in a drawing of a man’s lower torso with a wrench handle bulge in his pants and the adjustable wrench head sticking out of the pants fly. Lozano was fascinated by sex and would discuss her sexual experiences and those of her friends with great specificity.

The rooms also exhibit her slightly better known drawing and painting style, an obsessive bundling of subtly toned curves and directed force lines. In a number of works on paper Lozano makes various conceptual proposals concerning society and observes the behavior that surrounds her drug-taking. Here is evidence of the drug influence on the post-minimalist generation of artists. The lettered grid paper evokes the lofts and bleak streets of lower Manhattan in the late sixties and early seventies: (I’m quoting from memory):”Well, you can’t go over to La Monte and Marians without smoking a lot of hash” she writes. Or, “Alan Saret just got a pound”. The public and private, the visionary and the anecdotal converge in these candid, irascible graph paper notes.

In the further rooms on the first floor there are the more freehand drawings. I first saw many of these at the Philadelphia house of art collectors Helen and Milton Brutten in 1976. These works, on sheets about 16 x 20in., feel executed on the run. They are also are filled with penis and tool imagery but continue into depictions of crayons, flashlights and many other disparate objects amid pronounced textual rantings. Lozano conflated advertising catch phrases with street talk. One page combines a crayoned mouth with heavy graphite letters that scream “I got my Blow Job through the NY Times!”

By the early seventies, Lozano had stopped making art except (perhaps) for some of these drawings. “This is now the age of information” she told my friend, “the most important work that will happen in the future will be the exchange of information between people; I see no real future for studio art”. She got money by selling work from her collection of drawings by Judd and Andre. Lozano was taking a lot of LSD. When she was seen around SoHo she had the faraway look. When I met the Bruttens a few years after that time, they were selling her drawings for her and would send her the money. They told me that she was mostly living on the street.

I remember I wanted to buy a Lozano drawing with some boiler and pipe imagery and the phrase ‘I got fucked in the G^ass by Con Ed!” at the time for $250 and had to pass on it because I needed the money to move to New York City. Lozano’s drawings moved me and inspired me like nothing else at that moment. I had just finished art school and the only thing that interested me was the nascent punk movement. Lunatic rage seemed the only appropriate expression and I was looking for the visual equivalent to what I had been listening to. When I moved to New York, I would be asked what artists interested me and I said “Lee Lozano.” Either she hadn’t been heard of or there were vague rumors that she was a “shopping bag lady”.

Within a few years many younger artists had found the visual equivalent to punk music in neo-expressionism. It wasn’t until seeing this work of Lee Lozano’s again that I understood why I found neo-expressionism so contrived. Amid the expressionist assault, there’s a depth and complexity–something wavy in the lines, soft in the edges–it’s neither piercing nor brittle beneath the first look. A good artist’s attention during execution has the ability to twist and counterpoint one’s impressions of a work.

Like punk music, her drawings have a way of conflating aggressiveness, ridiculousness and vulnerability. Years after their brief recording life, the Sex Pistols album reveals a musicality and spaciousness that was not apparent at the time they were performing. All the other bands of that era have fallen away. In the same way, I’m a little amazed at the resonance of Lozano’s work. The full-throated sexuality and profound irritation of the work is tempered with an unusual tenderness and clarity. How rare to see work so unguarded, so strange and refreshing.

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