Swarthmore College presents Artists in Wartime: Bearing Witness / Shaping a Response,series of events consisting of two concurrent exhibitions, a symposium and poetry reading that explore the role of contemporary artists who focus on war and other crises of politics on Saturday, March 20.

The symposium, moderated by Janine Mileaf, Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College, brings together artists Daniel Heyman, Damian Cote, Juan Manual Echavarria, and Melissa Ho and documentary photographer Andrew Lichtenstein, to discuss the role of contemporary artists who address global welfare, related health issues and the effects of organized violence.  The symposium takes place at 10 am at the Lang Performing Art Center Cinema.

At 1 pm, poet Nick Flynn reads at the McCabe Library, where a group exhibition,Printmakers Go to War is also on view.  At the List Gallery, Daniel Heyman, a Visiting Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore and the inspiration for the symposium, presents his exhibition: Bearing Witness, Recent Works. Heyman’s moving portraits and recorded testemonials of former Iraqi detainees, gathered over a four year period, capture a sense of human dignity without passing judgment. 

All events are free and open to the public.  The gallery exhibitions open March 4 and continue until April 10 (List Gallery) and April 9 (McCabe Library).  Swarthmore College is located at 500 College Avenue in Swarthmore, PA.  For more information call 610 328 8488. or visit www.swarthmore.edu/Admin/cooper.

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23 January – 21 March

This expert survey of Jörg Immendorff’s career reassesses an artist whose period of notoriety in America lasted a relatively short time in the 1980’s. This was partly a matter of mistaken identity – he was too closely linked with the neo-expressionist and new image (?) bandwagon prevalent at the time. His connection to direct contemporaries who gained mega-celebrity status, Anselm Keifer and Gerhardt Richter, is also shown to be partly incidental. From this exhibition, Immendorff emerges more fully as an original artist of great complexity. This reevaluation also makes distinctions that remove him from convenient generalizations made about the “postmodern” Eighties, the Trans-Avant-Garde, and art generally, and it illustrates thoroughly the conceptual nature of his work.

Born in 1945, Immendorff was of the generation that experienced post-war disillusionment that politicized every waking moment. As a student in the 1960s, he faced the task of examining Germany’s tragic history and its fraught relationship with modernity. This forced him to devise a balancing act between eras.

Immendorff subsequently takes on the multiple roles of jester, storyteller and historian. He actively participates in a self-conscious continuum of twentieth-century German art while simultaneously throwing stones at the powers that be. After running the full gamut of conceptual work á la fluxus, his adoption of painting appears as a sort of purposeful and elaborate bluff. Although this suits his needs, it makes the connection to Ludwig Kirchner and the original German expressionist group die Brücke seem almost superfluous. What comes to the fore instead is a weaving together of political, social and personal myth making. It is the content that matters most, putting him more in line with the social, satirical and metaphorical intents of George Grosz and Max Beckmann respectively.

Immendorf’s early work from the sixties tells of the political upheavals of his days under the mentorship of Joseph Beuys. At that time, with the strong fluxus influence, there existed all sorts of manifestos, sloganizing and politicized minimal art. A petition to end the Vietnam war from 1965 (signed by Beuys and others) serves as a defining historic document here. This section of the show also conveys how Immendorff’s later shift to painting, in all it’s conventionality, is not so much an “about face” as it is a specific strategy-he goes on to combine his well-learned conceptual precepts and his inherent politics with his painterly methods.

The large “Café Deutschland” paintings (1978-83) feign expressionist representation and zeal and move towards a system of complex metaphor which is in some way novel. Although illustrative, viewing these so-called Picabian “bad paintings” is merely the first step one takes in deciphering their meanings. They must be read as “multiple texts” not just formally as paintings. The bars with wooden floors serve as meeting places of mythic characters where the artist and converses with Mao, Marx, Stalin, Beuys and Brecht. Whether conspicuously or not, Immendorff avidly adopts the mantle of Beuys and with it, the ability to fabricate and mix myths with facts.

Beuys’s image appears continuously in Immendorf’s work. A small painting, “Gertrude Stein,” includes a depiction of Beuys piloting his Stuka dive bomber with “Fluxus” written (in typical Immendorff fashion) across the wings. In the large painting, Sun Gate, a diagrammatical outline of his teacher becomes a Beuys’s museum.

Eventually, Beuys turns up in Immendorf’s theatrical productions of the 1990s. As the paintings progress, Immendorff both pays homage and mocks, cycling his own personal myths, those of East and West and those peculiar to the art world. This process reaches a natural culmination when Immendorff uses theater — for which he was originally trained — as his canvas. Immendorf’s video production of Stravinsky’s opera Rake’s Progress is ingenuously used as an unlikely channel for German art and society. Key figures appear-Beuys, Penke and Lüpertz -all playing different historical figures in the play. The artist Baselitz plays the Keeper of the Insane Asylum, while Lüpertz becomes Mick Shadow, Rakewell’s alter ego. With Immendorff as Tom Rakewell, one can see a fantastic interweaving of past and present, a confluence of Germanic art historical reference brought to life. Immendorf’s use of Hogarth’s morality tale shows his strange affinity with the English caricaturist and reinforces where Immendorff’s interests lie: in promoting an open-ended dialogue on culture. The fall of the Berlin Wall, so long at the center of his rationale, may have been the reason he went looking for alternative fertile ground to further extend his content and may partially explain his disappearance after his 1980s heyday.

Immendorff promulgates a watertight tautology that runs progressively through his ideas and delivery. His questions about the purpose of art and the conceptualization of the artist’s role are answered by the work itself and indeed, in retrospect, by Immendorff’s own life. His question, “What Can Art Do?” resonates particularly well now as art continues to develop an apolitical global/corporate mind set. This superbly researched show qualifies his unique contribution to art and ensures his enduring legacy.

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As the first in a projected series at the Woodmere Art Museum, the Triennial of Contemporary Photography is not only an attempt to showcase the diverse currents in photography in the Delaware Valley, but also a purposeful bid to update the museum. Due to a positive change in their financial circumstances, and with an impressive wing designed by Venturi, Scott-Brown soon to begin construction, the Triennial signals a new direction at the Woodmere. Spearheaded by Curator of Collections, Douglass Paschall, it is a sign that the museum wants to change it’s spots in the new century.

The 7 photographers chosen for this invitational were selected from an original pool of 150 and the quality is high. Adding to an already loose thematic, the museum presented by way of historical preface “The Legacy of Philadelphia Photography” as a mini-show in the foyer. This included rare and remarkable photographs from the Woodmere’s collection with some by Eakins and Muybridge. A gorgeous history lesson, the show was something of a distraction to a triennial already pushing the boundaries in its eclecticism.

Several generations of photographers were presented in a way that pitted an old guard against newcomers with a major gap in-between. In fact, the show runs the gamut from modernist work through American journalistic tradition to the contemporary. Larry Fink presents confident journalistic style and his paparazzi-like shot of George Plimpton sitting glum-faced at a table of party people is carefully placed to form the centerpiece in his section of the show. Ray K. Metzker follows in the footsteps of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans; his carefully captured plays of light are mostly street scenes from 1962 and they are delicate, meticulous and a perfect combination of craft and moodiness. Fink and Metzker form the backbone of the show and are worth seeing in their own right but they bring nothing “contemporary” to the table. Indeed, can pictures from 1962 really classify as contemporary?

Leif Skoogfor’s photojournalism from the early seventies is strong work in the Magnum tradition but it is not contemporary either. The great leap across generations to Amanda Tinker, Jessica Todd Harper and Trevor Dixon is abrupt and Charmaine Caire stands out as the only representative born in the fifties. Claire’s work has ironic content and use of the “set-ups” full of objects and toys from popular culture produced as digital prints. In the context of the show, her pictures indicate the departure from the classic “realism” to art photography. The remit here is not “documentation” but playing with the nature of truth in photographic images complicated further by digital manipulation.

Harper’s large family “snapshots” seem to comment on class, money and taste and channel portraiture of the landed gentry of the eighteenth century. It almost seems a red herring that she inserts extra figures digitally in the manner of Jeff Wall. This is part of the painterly aesthetic that photography sometimes mimics these days. Tinker’s and Dixon’s work seems to be the link connecting the “masters” and the early experimental work in the hallway to the present day. Playing with such formalities as focus and scale, Dixon’s pictures are intellectually engaging and strange: images of half-blurred churches and woods evoke the passing of time generally and photography’s past specifically. They also mark a formal difference between optical and photographic vision which is a truly contemporary concern.

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Victorian wallpaper was used as a status symbol along with other tasteful furnishings by the burgeoning bourgeoisie of the 19th century. Densely packed and richly colored, its heyday coincided with the apex of mechanical reproduction. Oddly enough, this “machine-made” quality is what English designers like William Morris were reacting against when they introduced a handcrafted process and designs that mimicked the gothic. Their work continues to form our view of “classic” decorative wallpaper. In the early 20th century, wallpaper design followed the arts loosely through many styles: art deco, modern-abstract and mock colonial; but by the mid century it had evolved into a debased variation created for suburban houses. These were cheaply made, inoffensive and made little statement apart from matching the avocado or beige color scheme. Now, after decades of white and off-white walls, we have begun to decorate again with Pottery Barn leading the way, selling us an ersatz “Arts and Crafts” movement. Though today’s domestic interiors have the emphasis on technology (have we begun to think of the “house” itself as an “appliance?), and are littered with computer gear, we want a little coziness,albeit in a post-modern sort of way. It is interesting, then, to see how contemporary artists deal with this quaint notion of wallpaper.

The exhibition, On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableau, at the Fabric Museum and Workshop In Philadelphia, updates our view of wallpaper in a major way. Including 33 artists and numerous historical pieces, the exhibition showcases excellent examples of contemporary art. (Of contemporary art or contemporary wallpaper? Or do you mean excellent examples of the ideas inherent in contemporary art.?) This is not an easy task since contemporary art envelops so many concerns normally not confined to walls. The usual axioms of race, gender and politics are to be expected, but when the artists grab onto some aspect of decoration and twist it -this is where the show really does make a statement about the relationship of contemporary art (wallpaper?)to its wallpaper (Victorian?) predecessor. This double intention gives the show an inherent contradiction that could have been emphasized; it deals with issues of art versus decoration by default while simultaneously dealing with artists’ usual concerns. Having said this, the show becomes more of a showcase for these concerns rather than attempting to make any larger cohesive statement about our wider relationship to the decorative arts.

Andy Warhol succeeded in using this medium and set a well-known precedent with his Cow Wallpaper from 1966. He was the first to make the connection between art and domestic (commercial?) products, and artists have been following his lead ever since. Virgil Marti’s Lotus Room nods to Warhol and forms the centerpiece of the show. This is a mixture of homage to a “tasteless” past and a formal exercise in reflective qualities of Mylar and stick-on flowers. This is a wonderful work, though I was disappointed in not finding a sofa, a large palm and a stereo playing Abba to complete the installation. His day-glow, black-lit Bully Wallpaper, which literally depicts people (bullies?) from his high school yearbook, does not have this contextual problem. Installed cleverly in the men’s room, it evokes the seventies so strongly it is scary. This is where the mix of materials and metaphors is most effective, a successful amalgam of style as (and?) content. Other witty works by artists Renee Green and Rodney Graham update the past effectively though they both needed to be more enclosed. These are pieces that could easily be pasted up in work places and homes. (explain what these look like) Notables like John Baldessari and Robert Gober were marginalized in glass cases, and Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays seem out of place perhaps because there is no nod to decoration (explain what they do have if not a nod to decoration.). This is where the contemporary “historical” aspects of the show didn’t work so well. Adam Cvijanovic’s hand painted removable mural wallpapers show a clever technical development on traditional wallpaper but his suburban scene doesn’t connect much with the method. (this last sentence should be moved up in sequence; the “doesn’t work so well” sentence should be your last to sum up the general feel of the exhibition.)

Organized by Judith Tannenbaum, Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum, the show began as a smaller version (on a smaller scale?) with a slightly different title: On the Wall, Wallpaper by Contemporary Artists. It has now been expanded by Marion Stroud, Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and includes more artists and tableau. This ambitious expansion perhaps included too many possibilities to explore. Curator Tannenbaum’s assertion concludes that artists subvert the everyday simply by adding content in the form of politics or sexual imagery to the so-called “background,” but this is simplistic. Although many works in the show do this, there is not enough tableau to contrast it nor enough “real” rooms to emphasize the inherent ironies. It is certainly the use-value of these decorative objects that is most interesting (regardless of the subject), but that can only truly be gauged outside the museum context. The wallpapers that worked best were the ones that indeed subverted our idea of decoration but they were, oddly enough, the prettiest to look at in the conventional sense. Nicole Eisenman’s amusing Dr Suess-like illustrations of life in a women’s prison are an effective example. That is the twist. Omitting that twist made the Jenny Holzer work fall “flat” and made the Bullies in the bathroom effectively creepy. Apparently film director Gus Van Zandt (My Own Private Idaho) has wallpapered his office with Virgil Marti’s “Bullies.” Now, that I’d like to see.

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Rohrer was a native of Pennsylvania; significantly a native of Lancaster County, where he was raised in a Mennonite farming community. He was supposed to become a minister and a farmer. The Mennonite community is a separatist Christian group which emigrated from Europe and settled in Pennsylvania in the early 1700’s. While not as extreme in eliminating all manifestations of modern culture as the Amish are, the Mennonites still do not exactly embrace modernity. And so it is ironic – but also a fact – that Rohrer’s connection to modernism came after seeing a show of Amish quilts at the Whitney, in 1972. Not only did that show recharge and guide the style of his painting, it also initiated a lifelong interest in quilt collecting. In a catalogue essay for a show of Pennsylvania quilts, he remarks on this moment of recognition:

After I left home and became a painter I didn’t think about quilts for a long time, until I happened upon the American Pieced Quilt Show… The impact of that exhibition was overwhelming; in particular several quilts stood out, simple in design, like “modern art,” and brooding in color like Rothko… My surprise was total…
[Pennsylvania Quilts: One Hundred Years, 1830-1930. Moore College of Art, 1978]

Along with his steady stitch work of brushstrokes, regular compositional framework, consistently square format, and modest palette, Rohrer’s paintings are frequently lean enough to reveal the weave of the canvas. All of these attributes make quilt work a good basis for understanding what Rohrer is working with for visual reference.

Quilts, however, do not in any way help the viewer to understand the vast spaces, the heavy air, the swirling precipitation, and the solid recognition of ground and landscape that Rohrer depicts. Quilts are for inside. Rohrer’s paintings are so much about a rooted understanding of his place in Lancaster County that it would almost be reasonable to argue that the paintings themselves belong out of doors. This work is unmistakably about landscape from all points of view, both actual and intuitive. Some paintings, for example, seem to depict landscape from the point of view of someone standing in a field. Others seem to depict the same, but from above. Others yet seem to be vertical cross-sections, revealing from top to bottom the heavens, the sky, the air hovering over the ground, and a cross section of the earth itself.

From 1961 to 1983, Rohrer and his family lived in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in a nineteenth-century farmhouse. The cow barn was converted into a studio, and it stood between a pond and an apple orchard. After the Whitney show of quilts, Rohrer began to depict – with the characteristic restraint and understatement of modernist simplicity – the countryside that surrounded him, paying homage to the traditions of working the land that he had known growing up. Regular parallel lines floating over lean backgrounds, and grids, underpinning tightly patterned surfaces, seem to be metaphors for farming. Rohrer’s understanding of how the land is worked became the nexus between the colorful tradition of representational European landscape painting and the conceptual and systematic character of modernism. His mode of painting appears to be derived poetically from the site of his studio. The demands of farming the land determine a rural order, matching Rohrer’s internal, aesthetic order and sense of contemporary abstraction.

Rohrer’s earliest canvases in this show have a bland, agrarian topography: rows of narrow, fatty marks create contoured planes floating on halftone atmospheres. These atmospheres are the result of a fully wiped-back ground. One would wish to look into the atmospheric interior, but the rows of marks intervene. The rhythmic marks are secular reminders of which way we are supposed to look. Indeed, these topical lines, Braille-like, lead the eyes from left to right. There are tricks involved in this blind trust: in “Pond 3” (1975), Rohrer’s fatty, narrow lines are segmented, rearranged, and one’s eyes dive down from a shifting flat plane into an unexpected depth (uncharted by lines), and then abruptly reemerge where this punctuated surface continues.

The paintings from the late 1970’s and 1980’s are devoted to a lovingly patterned study of luminosity in landscape. Rohrer does not wipe back the ground on these ‘mid-period’ paintings. The topical direction is still there, however, and when he is working with his brush full, the strokes proceed in a consecutive embroidery of surface direction. In these, the brushstrokes are measured, and the hair-textures, like feathers, optically devolve flat colors into sub-hues. The mechanically even brushstrokes stack up, and appear to mark micro-units of space, much the way Cezanne did with his pencil marks. Most of the canvases have a two- or three-color scheme, and from a distance appear to be blurry remembrances of moments in a place (Rohrer’s field). They are large baths of tasteful sunset, sunrise, night or fog colors – colors perhaps adapted from his study of quilts – which open roundly, like a convex lens view of a landscape. Brushstrokes stand out on the raw canvas edges: a visual reference to threadbare or patched fabric.

There are enigmatic points to Rohrer’s ingenuous simplicity: why does he not allow a free fall into his realms of illusory space? In “A Walnut Black, 1980” the frayed, frank brushstrokes emerging from the embroidery of a heavy night-blue are jarring and uncomfortable: at the edges of the canvas there are these secular reminders about the kind of space he is creating. It is almost as if he flays the paintings at their edges. An equally enigmatic note about these frayed borders is that the paintings almost always bleed off the right side. There is a distinct compositional flow out to the right. While we know that Rohrer began in the upper left of his canvases and worked diagonally downward, why would he choose to leave this kind of indication of his process? These apparent details become salient elements in the images, given his notorious systematic work and deliberate, simple presentation. These are not – cannot just be – beautiful color field paintings, can they?

The latest of Rohrer’s paintings in this exhibition are the ones he did 1993; he died in 1995. Toward the end of his life a “language” emerges from his landscapes: literal symbols, not particularly calligraphic but a curious ideographic set of stamped symbols, which fly around the compositions. In the case of “Field Language 9” (1991), a cross-sectional landscape showing earth and sky, red symbols are embedded in a layer of humus, while others float in the air above. “Field Language 10” (1991), has blue symbols buried in a tan earth as others erupt and evanesce, cloud like, over the horizon. Rohrer is supposed to have “regard[ed] the landscape as a language and himself as reader and translator” (program notes). What he does would appear to be more like transcribing, however, since the symbols are senseless without their Rosetta stone. The lexicon (again from the program notes) might have been his private sketchbook. For some reason Rohrer began to depict the messages that emerged out of his landscapes in the didactic of mortal symbols and would-be letters, instead of his more profound code of brushstrokes. He went from invoking meaning in his landscapes through Fibonacci sequenced structures, to flat transposition of mysterious linear symbols. This ideography is puzzling, especially in light of his self-directed questions. Again, from the quilt essay he says, “…How was it that [the quilts] were being shown and collected as art (and I consider some of them to be art) without their maker’s acquaintance with or reference to art? Is intention central to the making of art?” Were these ideograms meaningful: pieced together from drawings and photos he took on visits to Lancaster’s fields? Or are they much deeper, intuitive gestures, condensed from artistic observations? Are they the fossils left, under the weight of a lifetime of vision? What are they intended to say?

Warren Rohrer was a local painter, “a Philadelphia painter”, and an instructor at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1958 – 1972. He was on the faculty of the University of the Arts from 1974 – 1992. Practically everyone in the arts in Philadelphia knows about him, and many were taught by him. He made regular trips to the Art Museum with his students, and people know very well which were his favorite paintings in the collections. Rohrer is known for his steady attention to Lancaster’s fields and to one field there, in particular, which is named after him. He remarks on videotape that he internalizes and absorbs the landscape, then recreates them back in his studio. The enigmas which become salient in the simplicity of his work – the compositional pull to the right, and the ideograms – are especially puzzling because of his remarks about intentionality and art-making; his paintings are crafted, thought-out. Even the ideograms do not erupt from his intuition, but are printed like mono prints.

Next to one of his favorite paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rogier van der Weyden’s The Crucifixion (1460-64), these enigmas lose some of their tension. St. John the Evangelist’s robe, and Mary’s robe have structured folds that seem like pieces of the ideograms, and so perhaps does the stylized bone at the foot of the crucifixion. The painterly quality of the Gethsemane wall is reminiscent of Rohrer’s halftone atmosphere, and some of the colors rhyme with those in Rohrer’s palette. Most striking, however, is the way in which the diptych – and there are a few Rohrer diptychs shown in the exhibition – has a serial movement from left to right. Why would these natural comparisons matter? Rohrer absorbed every landscape around him; not just the fields of Lancaster and wherever else he traveled. It makes sense to imagine that the Art Museum also was a landscape which, after pilgrimages with his students and alone, he brought back to his studio. Perhaps even more importantly, Rohrer seems to have — in his own secular and systematic way — become a minister and a farmer anyway: by planting van der Weyden’s seeds in a modernist, utopian landscape.

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