Curated by Barry Blinderman
January 23 to March 12, 2016
1916 Race Street (at N 20th Street)
Philadelphia, 215 965 4000

These are images that we have seen before: paintings of desire, fear, and pain, or even dreams. A perfectly presented entree, concocted in a corporate culinary laboratory, packed and frozen, to offer quantified flavor with glossy convenience. Or, perhaps, a fastidiously folded flannel shirt, with one sleeve arranged to emphasize the pattern. These are images that, in one way or another, sell: beauty, leisure, vitality, and freedom, all available at cost. Walter Robinson has painted many of the things we want to buy, over the course of several decades, expropriating both the Panglossian ideal of commercial product photography as well as the roughly hewn yearnings captured from the illustrated covers of pulp novels. Since the dissolution of Artnet magazine, where he served as editor 16 years, Robinson has been able to fully devote himself to painting once more, some of the recent results of which are on display in his first traveling retrospective, organized by Barry Blinderman, former gallerist and director of the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, the first venue of the show.

Robinson’s paintings, more often than not, make use of commercial illustrations as source material, while also deriving a great deal of their meaning from them. Over the years, Robinson has spoke of the advertising circulars and mail-order catalogs he often employs as “wanting to be art,” and while his physical re-representations in effect complete this goal, a larger debt is owed to the surreptitious art historical referentiality that laces through our culture. This is a canonical appropriation in which classic forms appear and reappear over various iterations, even as the referent is lost. Robinson plays with these brushes with history and the cultural affectations they have given rise to, while questioning the stability of such representations. There is much to draw on in the calculated Never Never Land of advertising; Robinson enters this world not in search of a barometer of the times, or even the means of their unraveling, but rather to observe, report, and allow viewers to come to their own conclusions.

Recent paintings after Lands’ End catalogs capture the innocuous fashion of inconspicuous clothing — the arrangement of tasteful pastel moccasins (Shoes, 2014) or models reduced to bodies, faces removed to direct attention solely to the swimsuit for sale (Sun, Surf, and Style: the Swim Tee, Ride the Wave, 2014). The space of snug familiarity offered by the mail-order catalog is one that has been nearly displaced by the more immediately gratifying Internet; the catalog is in part a fast-fading lexicon of desire, a place for dreams to be bought, or at least coveted. Seen through this cornerstone of old media, the somewhat dowdy styles offered by Lands’ End can seem nostalgic, a middlebrow vision of predictability and contentment, an unchanging standard confounding a world in constant flux.

The comfort of one’s own home, and the food products one can prepare in it, has provided Robinson with another rich source of raw material since the 1990s: the resplendent surfaces of food photography. In Oriental Beef (1994), sauce congeals in autumnal hues with preternatural fluidity, coating the rice below; the plate is tightly cropped, betraying the boxed origin of the source photograph. In another recent series, Robinson has created a taxonomy of burgers, portraying both the home reconstituted and the take-out. The components of Amy’s Veggie Burger (2012), are elegantly fanned out like a hand of cards, the layers carefully displayed in adamant renunciation of its processed origins, while the earlier Big Mac (2008) is a solitary caloric monolith, the undulating surface of the crowning bun turned into a sesame-seeded lunar surface.

In Robinson’s consumer product still-lifes, branding is both emphasized and deliberately obscured, while subjects are returned to sometimes decades later and re-composed. Honey (2014) is beautifully illegible while the Budweiser logo of Three Beers (1987) fades in and out like a memory of the brand. Johnny Walker bottles merger into liquid reds and golds while Vicks Vapor Rub remains sharp with trademarked clarity. These products remain more than their constituent ingredients, even surpassing intended uses; like the ineffable yet instantly identifiable red of Coca-Cola, these are brands as identities, woven into national myth until the seams become indistinguishable, part and parcel to a corporatized American experience that we are all compelled to enter.

The work that proved name-making for Robinson in the early 1980s, adapted pulp novel covers, is likely the most difficult for the uninitiated to enter into. Each painting is a simplified reworking of an original paperback illustration, with titles taken from the novels themselves. At times, these interpretations appear self-explanatory. In Something of Value (1986), a woman grasps a man for support who is armed for a confrontation, evidently near as he defiantly looks over the horizon toward unseen menacing forces. Society Nurse (2011) remains cryptic, with the presumably titular nurse carrying a tray of surgical instruments with a far off look in her eyes. Robinson begins with images projected directly on his canvases, working in the dark, and his paintings are completed with loose, nearly impressionistic brushwork, never losing detail. These paintings archive images that just as easily could be lost to time, reveling in the melodrama of desire that simmered between the original book’s thin covers, outlasting the armature of the stories themselves, now faded away and left to obscurity.

All is archived in Robinson’s work, in one way or another. The present often has a way of becoming tomorrow’s curiosity, and as a compendium of advertising — some of the most fleeting of images created — it serves as an absorbing document, one that continues to grow. There is a certain Postmodern slickness to the transformation that’s affected, an image shifting from one form to another. But unlike many of his fellow appropriators, Robinson is not attempting to splinter the tropes that both propel and stymie culture; the conversion of one commodity into another is presented succinctly and without great fanfare, belying the potential ennoblement that encompasses such a transaction. Hinted at in this work is a romance latent in all images, the cause and course of representation that dwells in our subconscious. Advertising offers solutions, and in his abstractions of our wants, Robinson counters with questions.

The post “Wanting to be Art”: Buy, Sell and Desire in the Paintings of Walter Robinson appeared first on artcritical.

Primetime commercials, glossy print promotions: both flourish through their deployment of the coincidental and the strangely juxtaposed. While satellite up-links long ago collapsed broadcast time, allowing the world to be witnessed in all of its multifarious beauty 24 hours a day, this never-ending present comes with a price. We accept that the voice of a media outlet is so often colored by its corporate owners, but it is the often more-collusive presence of advertising that slips under the radar. Whether it is a preponderance of sponsored editorial content, or a simple overt endorsement, something is presumably being sold to us in some form or another.

Over the course of his long working and teaching life, Robert Heinecken attempted to expose the intrinsic hypocrisies of thinly veiled sexuality that forms so much advertising, while disassembling the latent commerce of images. Heinecken, through an extraordinary array of materials and processes, explored the physical and conceptual limits of photography, often describing himself as a “para-photographer,” as his work typically eluded traditional definitions of the medium. Though a decades-long examination into the foundations of commercial images, Heinecken proved himself to be more attuned to the swiftly shifting slipstream of visual media than many of his arguably better-known contemporaries. Through exceptional manipulation of appropriated photographs and video footage, Heinecken was able to pinpoint the locus of image-mediated attention, while taking aim at our more corrosive manifestations of culture and its pernicious repercussions, felt every time we tune in to our favorite shows.

“Robert Heinecken: Object Matter” is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist since his death in 2006, allowing for work scarcely seen before to be placed within a career that spanned decades and mediums. The exhibition recently closed at the Museum of Modern Art and has now traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Eva Respini, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Photography, assembled examples from Heinecken’s multiple intersecting bodies of work, allowing the full scope of his evolution as an artist to be seen, and demonstrating the surprising vitality still present in his output, which the passing years have scarcely dulled. The images Heinecken produced have an uncanny prescience, often appearing as examinations of the effects of our present world of multimedia, years before such a notion was conceived of.

Although the products and celebrities featured in Heinecken’s work indelibly link it to the age that bore them, the fickleness of fashion hasn’t voided the assessments they offer. More often than not, the focus of Heinecken’s early work is the media-driven distortions wrought upon women’s bodies. As seen through these appropriated images, women are contorted, reformed and altered again for mass-market consumption. Heinecken followed this universal, ravenous appetite for flesh over the course of his working life, closely following its chic permutations, while always torquing the popular for critical ends.

“Are You Rea” (1964-68), Heinecken’s series of black-and-white photograms, while iconic, still serves to provide a thorough introduction to his mode and method of working. The relatively simple construction of each print yields unusually complex images; unlike the early photograms of Man Ray and other Modernist photographers, Heinecken dispensed with three-dimensional objects and instead used the pages of popular magazines, contact-printing them directly on photographic paper. The thin paper allowed for both sides of each page to be seen at once, creating layers of images out of each ad layout and collapsing photographic space, melding the models and products into a seamless amalgam of commerce. “Are You Rea” is a title that both questions and begs for resolution. “Real” or “Ready,” each applies as the ideal woman stands, frozen in the midst of undressing. The positive and negative exist at once in these images, the standard tonality and formula of advertising, image and copy, broken and reformed into something entirely unimagined. With the commercial signifiers removed, the languid gaze and blithe sensuality so woven into the performance of retail becomes the product itself: sex selling sex.

Much of Heinecken’s early work consists of photographic objects, images incorporated into sculptural forms with varying degrees of success. Several sculptural works, many presented for the first time in this retrospective, are interactive, such as Transitional Figure Sculpture (1965), a tower of stacked sections of photographs, each able to be spun independently, but only ever partially resolving themselves into images of solarized nudes. These works are unique for their often-complex geometric formalism, as well as their participatory aspect. “Are You Rea” marked a distinct shift into the full appropriation of images; Heinecken’s later bodies of work would rarely include original photography.

Concurrent with “Are You Rea,” Heinecken began an extensive series of manipulated (he dubbed them “compromised”) magazines — cutting, overprinting, and recombining issues of various publications, both destroying the original while tearing apart the inherent fictions of advertising. In these new magazines, fresh narratives are built out of old ones, with many, many familiar characters inserted into unfamiliar roles. Periodical #5 (1971), made from clippings taken from an issue of Living Now, is unaltered save for the addition of a beaming Cambodian solider posing with two severed heads. Taken from an infamous photograph published in Time Magazine, the solider is overprinted on the pages in varying intensities throughout the issue, fading in and out of the original compositions and juxtaposed with pairs of beautiful girls, air conditioner ads, and interior decorating articles. A version of this approach, 150 Years of Photojournalism (1989-90), an altered issue of Time, is a standout; a special edition commemorating the titular milestone, this issue was sponsored solely by Kodak, which is, consequently, the only advertiser featured. The singular, cheery, deep yellow of the Kodak logo bleeds through the pages, further highlighted by Heinecken’s excisions, blending in, merging with the images, endowing the triumphs and tragedies of the century with corporate sponsorship.

Around 1980, Heinecken began working with video, specifically by photographing television screens and manipulating the results. Begun at a time when images were starting the transition away from materiality and into the subspaces of the screen (particularly in the realm of news, with the concurrent launch of CNN), Heinecken’s television-derived work seized upon this moment, transmuting the moving image to print. These works magnify, distort, and above all, play with our relationship to television, mocking and examining celebrity culture while quite seriously investigating the nature of our collective fascination with the medium.

In his early video-centric series, “Inaugural Excerpt Videograms” (1981), Heinecken captured stills from Ronald Reagan’s inauguration speech, writing below each resulting image randomly chosen fragments of either the speech itself or the selected commentary of pundits. To create the photographs, Heinecken utilized the now discontinued Cibachrome positive printing process to print directly off of the CRT screen, holding each sheet of paper onto the glass to expose it, yielding a videogram. The videogram is perhaps the perfect fusion of photography and video, reflecting the dense mediation of not only broadcast television, but also contemporary politics. Heinecken abstracted the production of the work, employing an assistant to make the actual videograms, directing the process over the telephone. This abstraction of production hints at the larger televised theater of the inauguration itself, from the speechwriters and aides engaged to craft the tone of the event, to the carefully orchestrated direction of broadcast. The images that emerge in the videograms are televisual ghosts, seeming to materialize from a fog that, while an artifact of the printing process, upends the careful production, rendering such familiar figures nearly unrecognizable.

While the “Inaugural” videograms highlight the innate complications of televised representation, much of Heinecken’s later video works consider the uniquely contrived nature of the medium itself. Surrealism on TV (1986) consists of three slide projectors, each randomly filled with images directly photographed from the TV screen, divided into rough categories: explosions, aerobic exercises, animals, newscasters, and evangelists. The work is sequenced, one projector advancing at a time, and each presentation is unique, resulting in a classically formulated surrealist narrative. At times, the projected images form strange visual equations, in one iteration, news anchors, always smiling and impeccably coiffed, are paired with a violent static-streaked explosion; later, aerobics demonstrations might bookend a dog, grabbed from a pet food commercial, caught in mid-bark. While the title of the piece makes the broadcast origins of the images clear, its construction — from the durational viewing it demands to the subtle reflections from the glass of the TV screen often captured — serves as a reminder to more cautiously consider the implications of our own passive viewing of television.

To those unfamiliar with Heinecken’s body of work, the most immediate reaction might be to its thoroughly analog nature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Heinecken never embraced the more-computerized aspects of the media revolution he was simultaneously documenting and critiquing. At the time that he turned his attention to video as the source for his work, many other artists were seeking to reconcile past formulations of photography and image making with the increasingly pervasive role that mass media takes in our day-to-day life. Drawing upon similar concerns, Gretchen Bender created complexly staged video performance pieces that appropriated the visual vocabulary of commercial television production, and Jack Goldstein painted algorithmically determined views from radio telescopes, taking the very conception of photography to its perceptible limits. The liminal state that photography existed in towards the end of Heinecken’s life did not seem to necessarily hold his interest, but in reviewing his work, it is tempting to ask what he might have made of the never-ending stream of images and videos now uploaded every day to Tumblr and YouTube. This is a conspicuous oversight in an otherwise thorough survey, however when considering work that, despite having little in it to visually connect with the world that we now inhabit, has retained a remarkable currency, the lack of such speculation is more forgivable. There is, at the core of Heinecken’s work, a desire to expand the limits of the image, and to question the relevance of traditional boundaries imposed upon photography. Now as never before, we produce photographs and videos: the micro and macro, the bite-sized and feature length, an endless document that shadows each of our lives. When reflecting upon our world, so enamored with its own representations, we might ask as Heinecken did, Where do our images go?

The post Photo Presence, Video Fantasy: The Life and Work of Robert Heinecken appeared first on artcritical.

English-born artist Rupert Goldsworthy has followed an eclectic path over the past two decades. Living mostly in Berlin or — as at present — New York, he’s spread his energies across writing, researching and curating, as well as his own art, and has run project spaces in both cities. There are clear continuities across all those activities, though: the history of political activism and AIDS; an interest in how different communities interrelate; and an ongoing investigation into how images are reused and what they stand for. His book, CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof (2010), for example, traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (the West German terror group) and their logo. His last exhibition at Ritter/Zamet, in 2012, used image sources as diverse as medicine packaging, stickers from street art, and his own photographs of signs and monuments to juxtapose the old and new communities in the Neukölln area of Berlin.

Everything in Goldsworthy’s current show was made onsite during a month’s residency at the gallery. The floor dominates: it was undisguisedly hand-painted with typically North African tile-like patterns. Combined with the natural light filtering through the small gallery’s roof, Mosque Floor generates the atmosphere of a courtyard and makes for an environment that — true to his interdisciplinary form — provides the platform for events with guest artists, musicians and writers.

The images around the courtyard are predictably varied. The most striking and conventionally painted is Clone Moustache, a looming close-up of part of a face with bushy hair completely covering the mouth. That suggests secrecy or a failure of communication, as well as membership of the 1970’s Castro-clone scene, a culture driven by extreme promiscuity. Both aspects fit the text paintings Mineshaft Dress Code and The Coleherne, which adopt a painterly photographic halftone dot format, similar to Sigmar Polke’s, to depict a crowd outside a notorious 1970s London leather club. The text is a word-for-word enamel reproduction of the club’s amateurishly hand-written dress code notice, which Goldsworthy has blown up to the scale of a man’s body. New York’s Mineshaft was among the first sex clubs to be closed by the city during the AIDS crisis, and according to Goldsworthy, its dress rules were well known in gay lore. The list is fascinating, featuring as it does both what can be worn (biker leathers, western gear, uniforms) and what can’t (suits, rugby shirts, disco drag and, surprisingly, cologne or perfume).

If those three paintings suggest nostalgia for the pre-AIDS freedoms of the ‘70s, albeit tinged by what came later, then Anita and Brian takes us back a little further: in a red and black graphic style that imitates a printing process, we see Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones in Nazi uniforms. That puts us in 1969, just before Jones was found dead in

his swimming pool. Finally, Bull appropriates an early 20th century cartoon about the plight of Armenians, then adds a painterly splatter of bloody color. Several copiously moustached men strive to push a bull off a cliff: impending disaster is now visibly present.

The overall effect is more allusive than systematic, but we might think not just about AIDS, but more generally about how one culture imitates or opposes another, or how visual representations help form cultural identities, or whether the various patterns of collapse referenced — not just the end of the pre-AIDS sex scenes, but the dissolution of Ottoman Turkey, the fall of the Third Reich, and the endpoint of Western colonialism suggested by the floor’s expansion of Islamic influence — have any commonalities.

All that makes for a fascinating and emotional installation. London is very different now, and as an ex-pat visiting his hometown this year after three decades abroad, Goldsworthy talks of finding a sad irony in the double erasure of its recent history: first the decimation of his generation by AIDS, and then gentrification. You do, though, need the background provided by Goldsworthy to pick that up, else all you get is disparate work with an aura of potential linkage. Other artists — de Chirico and Rauch, for example — make a virtue of frustrating our desire to make logical connections, but integrate their choices in a distinctive painterly language. Goldsworthy is a chameleon painter, choosing styles to match his sources. That may be thematically appropriate, but it does sacrifice that sense of the artist’s own visually coded world, which makes for more immediate appreciation.

The post Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: The Histories of Rupert Goldsworthy appeared first on artcritical.

Martial Raysse: Rétrospective 1960-2012 at the Centre Georges Pompidou
May 14 through September 22, 2014
Place Georges-Pompidou
Paris, +33 1 44 78 12 33

Martial Raysse’s career falls into two phases. One stars the precocious Pop artist who exhibited in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and pioneered the use of neon and video, envisioning an art culture extending from North Africa to Japan. The other features the hermetic figure who abandoned the commercial art scene for a commune, made shamanistic assemblages, and emerged from the political and cultural turmoil of 1968 to reincarnate, under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life.” The more than 200 works in this 50-year retrospective, multi-faceted and leavened with art-historical references, trace an unconventional artistic trajectory.

Raysse, now 78, was shaped early on by art in the South of France. Raised in Vallauris, where his parents were ceramicists, he encountered Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso and became friendly with artists in Nice, including Yves Klein and Arman. Responsive to post-war popular culture, the so-called School of Nice offered an upbeat alternative to the angst-driven legacy of war, Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism. Affiliated with Nouvelle Realisme, in the 1950s Raysse explored sculpture and became known for his vitrines displaying objects from the French supermarket Prisunic.

These objects open the exhibition, followed by works from the 1960s that envelop the viewer in sunny, Pop nostalgia: Raysse Plage, an installation featuring sand, beach toys, life-size pin-ups, a neon sign and a jukebox was created for the famous 1962 “Dylaby” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Raysse is perhaps most identified with his riffs on Ingres’ odalisques, some of which form part of “Made in Japan,” a series based on postcard reproductions of Western masterpieces. Alluding to the French Impressionists’ interest in Japanese prints, they also recall Man Ray’s altered photograph, Le Violin d’Ingres (1924).

Raysse draws less on the industrialized reproduction of Andy Warhol than on Duchamp’s art of ironic appropriation and hermetic imagery. Duchamp introduced readymades in America, and Raysse’s stays in New York and California extended this trans-Atlantic dialogue. He rejected the tormented individualism of abstract painting and shared Duchamp’s ambivalence towards “wet paint.” L’appel des cimes: Tableau horrible (1965) — its neon mountain crest a Pop allusion to the Sublime — makes ironic reference to American landscape painting and to the material density of Abstract Expressionism. Raysse responded to the new intellectual currents of Structuralism and semiotics with ever more simplification and refinement. To free signs from their material context, he reduced his iconic odalisques to cut-out silhouettes and he eventually projected them, along with other symbols, on the inner surface of a desert tent.

That installation, Oued Laou (1971), inspired by a trip to Morocco, also grew from Raysse’s interest in film-making. While TV commercials inspired the satiric humor of his Jésus-Cola (1966), American independent films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), with its use of appropriated footage and occult images, stimulated Raysse to more-incisive investigations of dreams and myths, of the underlying psychology of media culture. The political failure of the 1968 strikes reinforced this inward turn, inspiring a feature-length film, Le Grand Départ (1972). Chronicling a guru leading his deluded followers on a quest for a better world, it resonates with the improvisation of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1969) but features characters inspired by the comics of R. Crumb. Using color negatives and exaggerated contrast, Raysse simultaneously invokes and deconstructs paintings like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), blending a dystopian political vision with evocations of childhood innocence.

Childhood merges with psychedelic culture in his subsequent papier-mâché mushrooms, colorful hand-made sculptures and fetishistic assemblages. Raysse went on to pursue hermetic visions in painting, using automatic writing and mixed techniques on paper. Moving to bucolic surroundings in the Dordogne, he extended his references to the ancient Mediterranean, including Bacchus and Carnival, cultivating a broader vision of Pop. Developing an ideal of liberation informed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw in Carnival a reversal of established order, celebration of the body, and visions of universal participation, Raysse took on broader social themes in large-scale painting and sculpture, and he’s created public projects that encourage civil reflection.

The public ambition of his work provides the context for his embrace of painting, which takes on a theatrical character, like the multimedia provocations of his Pop period. While the cinematic mash-ups of Delacroix and Géricault in Le Grand Départ use gestural camera movements and solarized shapes to suggest the Dionysian immersion of Abstract Expressionism, a vision of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque body,” Raysse emerges from his psychedelic phase with irony intact, along with Duchamp’s ambivalence towards paint. There’s dystopian darkness in Carnival à Périgueux (1992), with its harsh illumination and bursts of neon-inflected color. Utilizing the frieze as an organizing device, with figures isolated against a flat backdrop, Carnival recalls David’s Neo-Classicism, but also the artifice of Berthold Brecht’s anti-illusionist theater. Favoring acrylics and the unconventional medium of distemper, associated with theatrical and commercial painting, Raysse distances himself from oils, from the full-bodied figural tradition of Balthus or Gérard Garouste. His numerous portraits, often recalling movie headshots, seem more fully painted, but the collaged face in Miss Bagdad (2003) suggests that, for him, paint is more like a decorative veneer, applied like make-up.

The retrospective culminates with a 30-foot-long panoramic painting, Ici plage, comme ici-bas (2012), another frieze, in which the transgressive and utopian impulses of the 1960s combine with contemporary social commentary. The image depicts crowds of provocative young girls mingling with men of doubtful character, with bloody rituals in the background. It inspires comparison to Breughel and Bosch, but the awkward, illustrative rendering of the figures and faces, along with the cartoon-like color, place it more in the graphic tradition of German artists like Otto Dix, or, indeed, of Constantin Guys, the Parisian illustrator who inspired Baudelaire’s famous essay. But if the technique is illustrative, it’s worthy of note that Raysse does craft these images himself, unlike other post-Duchampian painters.

Raysse’s ambivalent embrace of popular culture works best in the playful self-interrogation of his films, in which he’s more accessible and his irony less severe. In Mon petit coeur (1995), the lush radiance of Pop persists in a magic-lantern glow, even if the veneer of glamour, enriched by old age and history, renders its images as poignantly remote as the cryptic projections of Oued Laou. But by sustaining the glow of his early works they affirm an urge for transcendence, a luminous vision of pleasure and social participation that supports what Raysse soberly calls his “reasoned optimism.”

The post Hippie Pop: Martial Raysse at the Pompidou appeared first on artcritical.

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 is on view at MoMA until August 3, 2014

NORA GRIFFIN: Since this exhibition is so vast and far-reaching, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the major polarities embodied in Polke’s work: the personal and the political; the sacred and profane; and the mystic and the materialist. Do others agree with this idea of Polke (which I believe the museum was successful in presenting) — as powerfully doubled in all he does?  I thought the atrium provided a kind of “best of” Polke — from the intimate watercolor/drawings of the 60s to the gigantic, beautifully lush abstract fabric painting Season’s Hottest Trends (2003). But two works in this room really stood out for me as book-ends to his practice. Starry Heavens Cloth (1968), a tactile cotton, cardboard “painting” that functions like a cosmological self-portrait of the artist, and The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Quaeda (2002), a massive digital print on vinyl that looks like an industrial army map or poster.  Are there other pairings of works (or bodies of work) in the exhibition that open up his practice?

SUZANNE JOELSON: The other pairing for me is between the private and the performative. The small journal drawings which are signed way after the fact, often without dates, were a way to think as opposed to the paintings that were clearly made for an audience. I often feel left out of his intimate work because they were not necessarily made to be seen. The bulk of his film projects were not made to be seen either, but there I am an engaged voyeur.

SAUL OSTROW: Funny – beside the weird decisions like the drawings – unlike the Brooklyn Museum show of some years ago where he was presented in an “orderly” manner, I thought the MOMA installation was more in keeping with Polke and his work – the chaos – the scale  – the sense of compression seemed very connected.

JOELSON: While this show might have seemed chaotic it provided a narrative order to Polke’s output that was not in the Brooklyn Museum show. Although there are no wall texts one gets the opening atrium space, then the student work, then the early career. His dots are so much more playful and visually delirious than that programmatic method tends to be. The explosion of the Afghan room and then the settling into a studio practice as a way to travel. A final coming home to alienation as process. What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful. The crankiness of his stance, his refusal to maintain a look, is part of what is important in the work. I came to feel in this show that his alienation was where he knew himself. When he got comfortable in West Germany he had to travel for that sense of horror. Eventually he set up unpredictable situations in his processes to keep the sense of alienation alive at home. That is what we, who like to label, might call his “mature work.”

ERIC GELBER: I have no qualms with the avoidance of strict chronology. It is the lack of depth I mind. But this is a beef with curatorial practice. I wish they had given a large wall strictly to his works on paper. The huge show that the MoMA had in the 1990s of his works on paper was the first and best encounter I had with Polke’s work. The work in that show, almost all of which is missing here, was busy, frantic, truly eye and mind opening from a formal perspective. We also shouldn’t forget the backdrop of Nazism, which haunted almost all of Polke’s work. Not only was Polke anti-capitalist he was also anti-art to a certain extent, always undermining any painterliness by generating and canceling out compositional elements. I wish there were more works from the 70s, busy paintings with stickers and other added material. That is when his anti-capitalist spirit was truly inspired, in my opinion. Talking about dualities, the profane/mystical might be helpful in terms of iconography, but as ideas I think it is kind of silly to crucify his work on those particular crosses. Not unlike Kiefer, he had a morbid fascination with Germany’s Nazi past: the swastika was seared into his consciousness.

OSTROW: I’m not sure if it’s alienation – he reflects a very particular German experience – his work reflects post-war Germany – the period of de-Nazification, the division of East and West, the rapid rebuilding of West Germany, the tension of the Cold War – etc. and then there is also the German tradition of the artist as magician and fool – as such he makes this work against a very different background then his counterparts in the States. One needs to remember that all of Warhol’s celebs are tragic figures – I think that the idea that he is enthralled with is the public role that Warhol plays – likewise I ‘m not sure that Polke is such an outsider – when I lived in Cologne you would see him and his entourage – he was very public – the notion of the magnus is probably more applicable than that of the mystic – peyote, LSD, opium, and mescaline get one to the otherside without necessarily having anything to do with transcendence – therefore I tend to see Polke as trying to produce a type of social realism of the psyche

JOELSON: I am thinking not only of personal alienation associated with his move to West Germany at the age of 12 when most of us feel alienated from our bodies anyway, but of Brechtian alienation, innate in the engagement and denial in the work. Yes, and re: “social realism of the psyche” would you say then, getting back to Nora’s initial dualities- psychic realism and capitalist realism?

OSTROW: Perhaps what we are seeing in the Polke show is what it means to be a Stateless artist – whereas Gerhard Richter is the work of a refugee who in order to fit in becomes more patriotic than a native born citizen. Polke is like an alien who continues to identify with the old country – though if he goes back he no longer recognizes anyone and all of the places he’s familiar with are gone.

DREW LOWENSTEIN: Polke’s historical and cultural negotiation is more open to play, and wonderment than that of Kiefer or Richter.  Like Kiefer, he experiments with materials and comes to believe in a traditional form of the total artwork.  Pagannini, The Illusionist, and Mrs Autumn and her Two Daughters are examples.  But unlike Kiefer, Polke rejects Beuysian shamanism and does not peddle the idea of recovery or regeneration from the German Nazi past.  Additionally, the painting Constructivist (1968), points out  Polke’s suspicion of adopting international modernist idioms to mask the past and  also reflects a distrust of the art culture market. He is resistant and like Suzanne suggests alienated. His resistance and playfulness is his pathway to creative struggle and freedom. I think it’s important to remember that he doesn’t find this resistance antithetical to historical painting.  He is quoted on the first page of the catalogue as saying, “even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I am following an academic path.  I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures.  It’s a way of understanding what is largely determined by tradition.”

GRIFFIN: Just to take up the thread of commerce and Pop art as seen in Polke’s work in the early 60s. I kept ruminating on the idea of an “abject” Pop art. Chocolate Painting and Biscuits (both 1964) seem so innocent, almost naively painted, with the gloss and definition of sign painting. The “abstract” paintings from the same era Jewelry,Beans,Silver Break, and Snowdrops seem edgily contemporary to me, perhaps this has to do with the paintings’ surface: colored, or patterned fabric, a recurring material for Polke. Suzanne says: “What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Rauschenberg, Ginsberg Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful.” I agree here, that his images of marketable “things” are always highly personalized and never about glorifying the objects. The restraint and paint handling reminds me of John Wesley a bit. Especially the seriality of the enamel painting Socks (1963).

GELBER: Polke saying whether or not he feels alienated doesn’t help us get into the work. What artist is allowed to be anything but alienated from the history and politics of their native country? I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by. Supermarkets (1976), Paganini (1981-83) and the “Color Experiments” from (1982-86) were highlights for me. John Wesley is a good call but I think Polke was more interested in the subversive qualities of the comics he stole from rather than their aesthetic qualities. He liked black outlining, like Max Beckmann did, and Polke turned towards allegory in his late work. I find Polke to be a stronger draftsman than a painter. He worked on cloth because it lent itself to collage and staining rather than nuanced layering of tones. The “Color Experiments” series are probably the most purely painterly stuff in the exhibition. In Supermarkets he is mocking consumerism, but clearly he loves the imagery he puts to use as an ideological bludgeon.

OSTROW: Polke’s work can be seen to be discursive in the sense that it is a series of dialogues with and about the very Law he has decided not to partake in – in a manner he stands beside the very traditions that would subsume him and in doing so deploys them as he wishes. I was struck by how Polke seems to engage the notion of the return not only of the repressed but of the desired – he does this by projecting one onto another – his imagery  tends to be metonymic rather than metaphorical. If painting is to be about opticality – he literally paints distortion, if it is to be about process he paints process, if it is about the impossibility of narrative – he paints narratives of self-cancellation, etc. In this way he is literal without being illustrative. I’ve been reading the new translation of Kafka’s The Trial and find a parallel between Kafka’s writing and Polke’s painting in the sense that everything is always itself and its own other. If I understand it, Suzanne’s reference was to Brechtian alienation which is performative – it is a way to engage the audience in such a manner that the illusion of the theater is itself made explicit – they are distanced so that they might watch themselves being manipulated. In this sense the artist Polke may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy, self-doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.

JOELSON: Regarding Eric’s statement, “I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by.”  As much as I resist seeing “default” or “expect all” in a sentence about art, I do agree. Is this because as a culture we are fixated on adolescence, a time of emergent sexuality and change? This is reflected in our taste for unfinished paintings from Cézanne and Manet to current work which conveys potential rather than certainty.I think it was Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books who said that the fascination with emigré writing is because anyone who has gone through adolescence knows what it is to be alienated from your childhood. Something about “best offerings” is anathema to enthusiasts of Polke’s high wire act. We are more interested in his near misses. When I saw one watchtower painting 20 years ago I thought it the worst Polke ever because it was didactic and humorless and bound to its over potent image. In this show, seeing six of them I was moved. They evoke Auschwitz but also the idea of purposeful directed looking and the anxiety of being watched. Many towers in a room seem inescapable as opposed to a lone dismissible picture in an art show, or it might be the change in times and a recent predilection toward content. I wanted to see them in a circle.

GELBER: This is a great idea – it would turn the viewer into the viewed in a literal sense. You would become self-conscious in the act of looking by becoming the surrounded object. I know that Polke wanted to conjure up feelings of foreboding with this series. The colors are dark, dreary, anti-humanist. And I did spend a lot of time in this room with them, but I found myself thinking things like, “Oh is that a shower curtain he stuck on there?” I wanted to be moved by them more than I was. I think the way we see has been changed by the computer monitor and handheld device screen. I am not convinced that this will radically alter the painting and drawing process, with regards to how viewers take them in. Certainly painters have been impacted by pixelated imagery, webpage layout, Photoshop filters, etc. Polke’s struggle with pictorial space is one of the most interesting characteristics of his work. If an artist is going to work with traditional formats how can they make something that is genuinely contemporary, or is pastiche or mimicry the only options at this point?

JOELSON: Another Polke polarity is between the barest gesture, the incidental image and the magnum opus. This was also the case in the drawing show years back. A stick of butter on one wall and the whole acid trip covering another. The underwhelming aspect of so much work invites the viewer to complete the picture, to meet it halfway. In “our moment here” everything is going on. There are a lot of little umbrellas outside and within the big tent of the art market. From artists who have to work full time to cover their rent and then have little time in the studio, to artists who imagine extensive labor will fill-in where inspiration ended, from “bring it on” to enough is enough. Ezra Pound’s modernist adage to “make it new” has been replaced by “make it extreme.” Is that a reflection of our national economy? One thing about Germany is they still have an effective middle class and they build things (cars, appliances). How does this affect art in Germany now? I loved how the sausages are simple flat foot food, and yet essentialist in form. I think we have an internally informed, biological response to that linkage.

GRIFFIN: Saul made this comparison of Polke to Johns which I find illuminating: “In this sense the artist he may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy – self doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.”  Of the many personas and alibis that were presented for the artist in the show, the one I was most moved by was the figure of Polke as a painter, confined to the rectangle, pigment, and fabric. The compactness and formalism of his paintings is breathtaking and really (to me) makes the performances, film footages, photographs, and even the drawings, seem lightweight and inconsequential. I understand that the show was presenting a full-blown portrait of Polke as an artist here, but I did yearn for a show that just displayed the paintings so we might focus on the most masterful aspect of his work. Llyn Foulkes, Chris Martin, and Paul Thek are three American artists I couldn’t stop thinking about as I went through the rooms. The high and low aspects of the sex and drug culture of the 60s and 70s meets the sacred temple of Modernist painting. The urge to bring painting into space itself, to have a painting transcend its physical limits, whether by alchemy (with silver nitrate crystals and meteorite resin), sheer silliness (like the Alice in Wonderland painting), or the horror of history (the watchtower series), seems to be a noble even heroic venture that few artists are involved with today.

OSTROW: Seemingly Polke offers us an alternative to pastiche or mimicry – what he offers us in place of pictures of things is an assemblage (in which each part retains its own identity while offering some aspect of itself to the whole). The effect of this is to force our minds to wander – or to multi-task – in this sense these works emphasize painting as an analog – a means to present information not only  through  its ability to depict things but also by means of  its physical quantities.  Polke demonstrates how the media continuously affects our reading of that information.  There is also a persistent effort by Polke to use a single signifier to reference multiple signified – as such his images exist in a shifting “framework.” These shifts are not a function of the viewer (ie, associations) but the work’s materiality or lack of it – in this we might think of Polke’s work as functioning under the sign of Hermes – whose name is the root for hermeneutics.

LOWENSTEIN: I was not moved by the watchtower paintings. I don’t think Polke does gravitas. Suddenly Germany was thrust into an absurdist geopolitical “role” that created a new narrative that obscured German atrocities.  Germany became a buffer for freedom and commerce against Soviet tyranny.  It’s a mind-blowing free pass.  Soviet/US tension is a gift that fell into Germany’s lap. No wonder the German public was shocked when Polke, Kiefer and others touched on the Holocaust years later.  Polke’s split sense of self manifests in his acute awareness of his “role” as an Adenauer-generation artist.  In a sense, he and his peers were stepping onto the world’s cultural stage as Germany’s representatives in the aftermath of German atrocities. Is the artist’s “role” one of action, escape, cynicism or dreaded consensus?  Polke’s dancing between the raindrops as he plays the role of the art prankster, philosopher, and magician-escapist. This is reflected in the ambiguity, possibility, and cancellation we sense in the work. The split self, the doubling, just spills out.  But he finds a new pictorial space to work in. He discovers an expanded space of transparency when he works both sides of the support and opens up a space for more light by using plastic in the late period lenticular paintings.

OSTROW: We haven’t even touched on Polke’s approach to self-referentiality in the sense of his use of analogy rather than metaphor, for instance the notion of the watch tower is not only a question of the Holocaust, but also that of guarding of borders (the east west divide)- it is also  a platform from which to observe – it represents the vertical view – the overview – which is a view that unlike the horizontal view is disengaged.

GELBER: I believe this was touched on earlier by Suzanne, the act of viewing and being viewed by the watchtowers. She had in mind a Panopticon, the go-to historical reference, thanks to Foucault. I think you are absolutely right about how the vertical orientation makes the watchtowers even more object-like, mimicking the real, in the way a real watchtower sticks out on the horizon in order to assume a position of power over those standing below it. There is a black ominous doorway shape in the painting Paganini that mimics a real doorway, as if we are invited to step into the painting.

JOELSON: I always like paintings of sailboats because there is a built vessel, a soft sail and the linear structure of the rigging. Polke’s watchtowers have that formal appeal as well as much else that has been said. They engage his antagonism to modern visuality as well as to seeing and being seen. It is not just the “gravitas” of the subject but its readiness for interpretation that weights this group. They emerge indelible, an intangible memory or the defining liminal image, a jewel that won’t melt away. The various means lets them flicker in and out of the material of this world. Their appearance as memory is innate to the stencil process. Eric, beside the fact that I think you and I are switching positions, I am confused, do you think Polke was always more accessible than Rauschenberg? Rauschenberg is my first great love. A decade later when I saw Polke he seemed like a shabby dissonant response to Rauschenberg’s innate enthusiasm and harmony with the world. But I came around,  just as after years of John Coltrane I came to love Ornette Coleman.

OSTROW: Another subject that I think needs to be taken up is the photograph and its reproduction. Polke comes back to the Ben-Day dots pattern over and over through his long career, like Warhol he wishes to render photography transparent and mutable.

GELBER: I think Polke’s (and Richter’s and Kiefer’s) need to break down the barriers between photography and painting/drawing goes hand-in-hand with Polke’s breaking down the barrier between drawing and painting in many works. The breaking down of compositional elements, combining different types of media, the flattening out collage effect, things discovered during Braque’s and Picasso’s analytical cubist phase, are deeply explored by Polke.

LOWENSTEIN: I think it’s a given that Polke and his peers were displaced from the Western narrative of how Modernism unfolded. Polke fell in love with Dada and Surrealism and stayed in love unconditionally. Sure, he misunderstood Pop, and merged it with Modernist-utopian ideas of art as agitation for change. But happily, dislocation and misunderstanding turned into the mother of invention and we get this wonderful art. It reminds me of a story about how the Marx Brothers were trying to steal a look at a baseball game but from their vantage point outside the stadium, they could only see action in a slice of left field. From that bit of information, they speculated and filled in the plays that they missed. Needless to say it was a more interesting version than what occurred on the field.

The post A Critics’ Roundtable on Sigmar Polke at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

In May 2013 the app publishing company Art Intelligence released Art Intelligence: Keith Haring, a decidedly comprehensive and dynamic app designed exclusively for iPad 2.  The program’s introduction screen, in an essay entitled The Politics of Dancing, notes that Haring was a follower of the Warholian tenents of mass-production. This was first evidenced in the early 1980s in ephemeral chalk drawings in New York City subways in which he employed the black paper used to cover old advertisements as canvases for his iconic visual vocabulary.  Today the wide availability of Haring watches, coffee mugs, and even cleaning supplies speaks to this same interest—perhaps then to be able to download a piece of Keith Haring is the logical next step.  Haring opened his Pop Shop in 1986 making his iconography available to the denizens of downtown Manhattan, but now not even geography can preclude the digital consumer from getting a piece of Keith.

The app’s “curator” Bridget L. Goodbody describes Art Intelligence: Keith Haring as a “visual Wikipedia on steroids,” and she has a point: the energy of the 1980s art scene is reanimated through a virtual library of photography, video, and artwork that the user is invited to explore.  The app successful skirts the line between accessibility and political and art historical investment; clearly designed for adults, the descriptions are often wordy and sometimes academic, though younger users could appreciate the app equally for its incredibly comprehensive catalog of artworks and archival photos.  In this way, the app mimics the accessibility of the artist’s own work—Haring created a collaborative mural project with public schools in Chicago in 1989, and his famous 1986 “Crack is Wack” mural was designed for children, painted on a Harlem handball court.  His later focus on socio-political themes such as AIDS prevention and Apartheid in Africa birthed (sometimes pornographic) works obviously designed for adults, but his cartoonish visual vocabulary has always lent itself to young fans.

A virtual gallery of Keith Haring’s art is presented through detailed high-resolution reproductions.  Organized chronologically, the user is invited to browse a massive selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and murals.  These works are then searchable via the “Timeline” tab, which is divided into the broad categories of “life,” “art,” and “world” providing a social and historical context for the artist’s work. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how Haring and his art were at the forefront of public consciousness, each artistic milestone can be clicked on for more information. For instance, in 1985 Brooke Shields posed nude for photographer Richard Avedon with a Haring-painted pink heart.  The caption for the image reads: “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Keith.”  Haring was at the forefront of a scene that dominated downtown Manhattan, and his ties to major players in fashion and music, in relation to his cartoonish subway drawings, created an instantly recognizable visual iconography.  Also in 1985, Haring produced his Free South Africa poster for the concert where Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Hall and Oates sang “We Are the World;” a video of the performance is available via YouTube on the app.

The “Connections” tab is organized by themes such as “art,” “birth,” “Africa” or “AIDS.”  The user can maximize each image to see a short blurb: I stumbled upon a 1987 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show entitled “Lets Talk about AIDS.”  The “Resources” tab includes links to a selection of film, music, and literature that the creators feel is somehow relevant to Haring’s work.  Toni Morrison’s Beloved is listed for purchase alongside Paris is Burning, a 1990 documentary about ‘80s drag ball culture in New York City, and Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio.  These choices are thoughtful, and while many address a historical relationship, a work such as Beloved (set 100 years before Haring’s birth at the end of the American Civil War) speaks instead to the artist’s commitment to visual representation of marginalized groups, a trope which is often schematized in Haring’s early work, which shows dogs, human figures and aliens in the same scene.  Perhaps the least useful portion of the program, at least currently, is the “Conversations” tab, which touts itself as “a forum to express your ideas to fellow art geeks.”  In this early iteration there are few conversations to be had, though in our era of digital anonymity and polemical web boards the prospect of sparking debates and sharing experiences is encouraging.  Fittingly, Art Intelligence: Keith Haring has a feeling of dynamism that recalls Haring’s own playfulness, as well as his simultaneous emphasis on stylistic consistency alongside innovation.

The post Capturing Keith Haring’s Dynamism for $5.99 appeared first on artcritical.

March 7 to April 27, 2013
Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-744-2313

This exhibition, which occupies three floors of Gagosian’s sprawling Upper East Side gallery, has four parts. On the sixth, top floor are eleven of Neil Jenney’s paintings; and immediately outside, some of his recent Statement Series are displayed. The paintings include American Aquatica (2006–07), which shows a pristine landscape set inside a massive black frame; North America Acidified (1982–13), which adopts a long horizontal format; and The Modern Era (1971–72). Had the Pre-Raphaelities painted close up countryside views, they would have made something like these photorealist scenes, which Jenney calls “good paintings.” By contrast, his banal silkscreened statements, “Idealism is Unavoidable,” “Art is Nature Adjusted” (both 2000), and so on lack the political punch of Jenny Holtzer’s truisms or the bizarreness of Richard Prince’s jokes.

These two parts of the show constitute a straightforward revival exhibition, making the case for Jenney, who some decades ago dropped out of the art world. We see his minor classics, the works that in the 1970s made his reputation, and his recent development. But what makes Works of the Jenney Archive elusive are the two other parts of this exhibition: A two hour video of his 1985 interview of Robert Scull, which presents the collector’s life in exhaustingly close detail; and, on the fourth and fifth floors a selection of works, a few by Jenney himself, but most from his collection. In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition of the private collection of Edgar Degas which revealed his taste and, also, some of his visual inspirations.  Jenney, too, has created an archive. His own sculptures from the 1960s, like his humorous drawings such as Rejected Mets Uniform by Neil Jenney (1984-85) and his early painting-and-sculpture What You Got a Problem With Wood? (1971) show a sly sense of humor. But then as admirable as are the sculptures of John Duff; the abstract paintings of Gary Stephan and Thornton Willis; the caricatures of Peter Bramley, and the painting of Kay Millison, their inclusion alongside Jenney’s work begged the question: Why on earth are they on display here?

The everyday working assumption of an art writer is that everything in a show is somehow related, and so can be interpreted. Accustomed to difficult exhibitions, we believe that we can interpret anything. When recently, for example, with no advance notice I encountered Tilda Swinton sleeping in the glass case at MoMA, it took me only a few seconds to realize that I was seeing a performance. Works of the Jenney Archive is more difficult to interpret. What, exactly, is the relationship of all of this extraneous visual material to Jenney’s own art? Could it be that the artist or his dealer—and perhaps they are in cahoots—are pulling our leg? When I left the gallery, I was amused to realize that two lengthy visits barely left me time to focus on Jenney’s own “good paintings.”

The post The Artist and the Archive: Neil Jenney at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.