January 15 to March 7, 2021
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, theodoreart.com 

Because I’ve known Sharon Butler, her work and her blog, “Two Coats of Paint” (to which I occasionally contribute) for a very long time, I am not the person to write about her new paintings disinterestedly. What I can do, however, is offer some thoughts about her work informed by many conversations with her about painting in general and her paintings in particular, and by an understanding of her approach to making art enriched by reading many of her essays and reviews.

In her widely read article, “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists,” in The Brooklyn Rail, 2011, Butler expanded on Raphael Rubenstein’s ideas, laid out in “Provisional Painting” in Art in America, 2009.  Butler described “casualism” as an open-ended, aleatory process that many painters were now using.  Their aim was to steer clear of abstract painting’s tired tropes (like using wide gestural brush strokes as a sign of emotion) by adopting a “calculated tentativeness” and accepting “awkwardness.” She argued that this casualist approach led to paintings that were almost beside the point, or that manifested a “passive-aggressive incompleteness.” While Butler didn’t out-and-out proselytize for casualism, her enthusiasm for “enervated casualism”—for an engagement with accident, uncertainty, imperfection and  incompleteness—was palpable.

Butler’s current exhibition of fifteen paintings from 2017-2020, however, suggests that casualism’s grip on her work has loosened. True, the foundation for each of her new paintings still seems like the stuff of that 2011 essay—in her case, a starting point for her paintings of quick, improvisational digital drawings made on her phone that are, in her own words, “toss-offs”—but the realized paintings that grow out of these drawings are decidedly not beside the point. They’re well-planned, well-executed, peculiarly—and purposefully—beautiful pictures.

Butler’s phone drawings, loosely based on imprecise geometric forms that she immediately posts on Instagram, are part of an ongoing series she calls, “The Good Morning Drawings.” Butler’s social media savvy makes her keenly alert to the way an offhand drawing posted on a social media platform instantaneously changes from something private and confined to the studio into a public “work of art” to which an audience responds with clicks. Given the plethora of drawings she’s made, searching out the “best” or “worst” drawings is a futile enterprise. The point is, once posted, they all take on an air of importance—almost as if made by an alleged art influencer such as Benny Or or Banksy.

Two paintings from 2019, each only two feet square—Most Popular (October 2, 2018) and Most Popular (November 23, 2018)—and which include colored circles and half-circles sitting atop scumbled surfaces, were based on Instagram drawings that had received the most “likes”–an absurd if intriguing starting point for a painting. (Dates within titles refer to Butler’s original Instagram posts.) At other times, Butler selects a drawing to turn into a painting simply because she has a hunch it will make a good painting. Consider Mueller Report (January 11, 2017), a stunning larger painting (52 x 45 inches, finished in 2019) in which three parallel, vertical forms lie on a lovely pastel ground; each is made up of three attached triangles or diamonds suggesting harlequin patterns, with colors hinting at something military. Their dark values play back and forth effectively with the brushy pastel negative spaces.

Although Butler’s iPhone drawings have the benefit of both immediacy and quirkiness, they’re missing what’s missing in all electronic screen art: Materiality, a sense of scale, and touch—factors that, if not the be-all and end-all of painting, at least most often give it life. Paintings-in-the-flesh solve this problem. This isn’t to say that every painter who approaches painting this way lands on something beautiful. Only because of Butler’s sophisticated and sensitive brushwork and individualized color (something that continues to come out of her casualist approach) do her compositions end up strong rather than flaccid. The paintings feel slightly off-balance, but not so much that they’re ugly. They’re actually just right: off-balance only enough to avoid cliché.

The problem for abstract painters like Butler (and me) is that if paintings as beautiful and grittily compelling as Butler’s can grow out of toss-off phone doodles, why should any of us fret over our compositions? Isn’t it enough to just develop our touch and a sense of color? For me, the scariest thought of all is that composition might just be an anachronism of the 20th Century, and the future of abstraction will be owned by those who accept a post-compositional approach to their paintings. Right now, Sharon Butler has the best of both worlds.  

The post Accidental on Purpose: Sharon Butler at Theodore:Art appeared first on artcritical.

David Cohen
Here are two memories of Thomas Nozkowski, picked at random from so many that remain vivid of this larger than life yet eminently down to earth man, epitomizing what exhilarating fun he made it to share for a moment in his aesthetic adventures. In 2003, I curated a retrospective of his drawings at the New York Studio School, the first in New York. I say curated, but as I went off to Europe in the preceding summer, after instigating the project, I returned to find that Tom had, impatiently, made a final selection of his own accord. I was, however, given carte blanche in the installation. Conscious of the age and delicacy of some of these works, I researched just how many lumens we could allow in the gallery. The only direction on the hang, besides a judicious last-minute exclusion, was to turn the lights up full blast. The eager-beaver curator tried to explain what he knew of the science, but Tom insisted the only thing that mattered was that they looked good to those who came to see them. “Let ‘em fry!” he exclaimed.

Years later, when I was selecting a show at a commercial gallery inspired by cinema, Tom enthusiastically – but with a promise of discretion – shared his ongoing catalogue of art in movies. With a reach and perspective that would have impressed any iconologist in its multifacetedness, Tom compiled extensive lists of artists as characters, preexisting artworks by known artists that make screen appearances, artworks made for films, and many other permutations. I begged him to allow me to publish it, but he couldn’t let it go to press so long as the research was ongoing—a lifelong pursuit.

Editing these tributes and reminiscences from a cross-section of artists, scholars and friends – again, a sampling – has the humbling effect of making clear that everyone else privileged to come into his orbit felt uniquely special, a confidant of his avuncular bonhomie and encyclopedic knowledge, and of the candor and curiosity he felt about his own artistic inquiries. His wit was kind and merciless in a single instance. He was democratic in that anyone could be included in the conversation and hierarchical in really caring about what was best, what was dispensable. Indifferent towards established canons of high and low, he was fastidious in the sense of quality.

For me, he was a paramount example of an artist who could go against the grain, but do so without rancor, and indeed be an exemplar of community even with a mainstream he might reject. This is what he was as a person and an artist—a maverick who was also a mensch.

Karen Wilkin
I knew Thomas Nozkowski’s work before I knew Tom. I was fascinated by those mysterious, small but commanding works that seemed to be about something very specific but impossible to pin down. I loved the range of paint applications, the delicacy of the incidents, and the surprising color. I’m still haunted by a work from the first Nozkowski exhibition I saw – at Max Protech Gallery about 1990. A wavy edged white shape, like a saddle made of curly sheepskin, hovered against a pale brushy ground. The image was odd, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. It was also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. When I got to know the author of this oddball image, I discovered that he shared many of the painting’s qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like the painting, he could seem deceptively off hand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn’t take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like “Why two, if one will do?” and something about oil paint’s being “the queen” of materials.

It was clear that Tom’s elusive works were simultaneously discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience. The sense of discovery made repeated motifs seem fresh and newly invented each time. There were loose family resemblances among groups of paintings – shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns – but color was always arresting and every configuration seemed unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. I discovered that the underlying experience that, at some level, provoked the image could range from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more. Tom made powerful images “about” arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder those enigmatic paintings seemed so specific and at the same time, unnameable. They were specific, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall Tom’s saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.)

A few years ago, I invited Tom and Joyce to be visiting critics at Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an intense program of art making and discussion for international artists, held that summer in upstate New York, within striking distance but still a healthy drive from the Nozkowski-Robins home in High Falls. The pair generously spent the day with 20 or so artists from about half a dozen countries – a high point of the session, the artists said – and joined the gang for a fairly raucous dinner. We had offered Tom and Joyce accommodations after their strenuous day in the studios, but they insisted on returning home that night, as I knew they often did after New York openings. “We like driving,” Tom said. If those long nocturnal trips stimulated paintings, we are all the beneficiaries of his stamina behind the wheel.

Many students have told me how much they admired Tom’s work, but few seem to have responded to it directly. They’re wise not to try. Tom’s astonishing images could only have been made by someone with a mind as well-furnished as his, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint. Of great mathematics, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “There is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” That’s a perfect description of Thomas Nozkowski’s art.

Marjorie Welish
A rare artisanal talent, Thomas Nozkowski developed an image, an image in the true sense of that word. What emerged in canvas after canvas, time after time, was no mere thing but rather entirely more strenuously inventive, as the object became a lapidary form through metamorphosis, in a practice spanning a half century. Very few artists can match that imaginative embodiment.

Robert Storr
Thomas Nozkowski was a wickedly intelligent man and an unrivaled painterly lyricist. The intelligence was natural and unpretentious. He read a lot and developed an astonishingly broad albeit usually understated frame of reference, which made it a delight to match wits with him when everyone else around seemed bent on showing off their readymade erudition. And in a period when many of his peers – though when it came to art itself he had precious few – favored arcane discourses with all their labored jargon he trusted in the American vernacular, a preference doubtless enriched by his consumption of detective stories and films noirs, passions we shared.

As a painter he was the ultimate come-from-behind kid, the day-job-wife-and-family man who paid for all his time in the studio by being his own patron. That job, which consisted of being a layout artist for Mad magazine, made him wary lest the art world ascribe his fanciful caprices for an extension of the house aesthetic. Or so I inferred. Nevertheless, I recall walking across town from MoMA to meet him at his office for lunch and it struck me as entirely natural that those two institutions should exist at the same urban latitude – you know, Low and High – with Tom alert and at home in both. In any event, he need not have feared that the discursive arabesques of his own painting and drawing would be explained away as “mere” cartooning, and worse as a stylistic off-shoot of the perpetually smart-aleck Mad manner: they were nothing of the kind.

Slow, steady maturation of an incrementally improvised, manifestly unprogramatic image was their essence. Working on smallish panels of several standard proportions, and frequently starting with nothing more than an ambiguous ground tone and an amorphous shape, Tom followed the organic growth and mutation of his intricate patterns, eccentric configurations and, by turns, exquisitely subtle and surprisingly bold polychromatic palette. The consistency of his method opened out to stunningly various pictorial vistas contained within irresistibly intimate formats. Looking at his paintings slows the clock and sharpens the eye and mind while massaging, tickling and pinching the haptic synapses. In the old days one might have called Nozkowski a “little master” but his scope was wide, his view long and his faith in his own ultimately immodest gifts was that huge: in short that of a master – period. Of how many contemporary artists can it be said that he or she never bored me or took my engagement for granted? Not many, but Tom was certainly one.

Joseph Masheck
As editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late ‘70s, I was pushing for painting, especially abstract painting, despite the political incorrectness of that. I also hated the art-commerce developing as philistine businessmen discovered art as a new continent for unregulated insider trading, so it was great to discover Tom’s work in shows at the artists’ coop 55 Mercer Street. In the ‘80s I wrote articles in three art magazines on Nozkowski, and curated a show of early drawings at Nature Morte (1983).

The essays were agonizing to write because, I now see, they reflect the kind of freewheeling conversations we had that depended on analogy: how one topic turned by analogy into another. That was all the more exciting because our respective analogies came from different stocks of experience as well as reading. There could be hearty disagreement, too, though Tom was not a dialectical kind of guy. His wide reading is legendary; but politically, his shockingly normal, art-world liberal line might have come out of The Whig Interpretation of History. Once he said that the greatest philosopher was Thomas Paine. Come on, Tom! No wonder why in one of my articles he reminded me of Santayana on Emerson: “There was a great catholicity in his reading . . . But he read transcendentally, not historically, to find what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him” (Artforum, May 1981).

Now I have to think: maybe being so undialectical—stubborn!—kept the big bear calm and jolly. (Tom, I knew you would like a little roast, like an Irish wake. Oh, Tom . . .)

Jonathan Lasker
I don’t know what brought me to 55 Mercer Street Gallery in the Fall of 1979, but upon entering the gallery I felt that I had stumbled upon a wonderland of everything which I was hoping to see in painting, at that time. I remember increasing delight as I went from one picture to another. Upon leaving the gallery, I muttered to the guy sitting at the front desk that I thought this was a really great show. Of course, I was speaking to none other than Tom himself, who took my compliment for his exhibition with boyish delight. After that Tom and I traded studio visits and a long friendship began. Nonetheless, with each ensuing show by Tom, that feeling of being in a painting wonderland was always there. The feeling of “how did he think this up” and what will the next picture be like. It is very sad that Tom can no longer provide us with this expectation of wonder. Rest well Tom.

Merlin James
I tracked Tom down as soon as I got to New York. He’d stood for something, in my mind, since I was a student in London in the early ‘80s. A British painter, Garth Lewis, had introduced me to the work, via thin catalogues, a few slides and black and white reproductions. Somehow I ‘got it’, perhaps all the more intensely because of the sparseness of information. I got how this apparent modesty – of scale, productivity, pictorial proposition – was a Trojan horse for the greatest possible artistic ambition. I loved visiting Tom and Joyce at the ex-synagogue on Hester Street, eating and talking, listening to music, always aware of Tom’s easel standing a few yards away. Sometimes he’d take me over to look at the current painting. For me, Tom was among a very select band who at any one time keep painting alive.

James Hyde
I first met Tom at the artist cooperative gallery 55 Mercer. It was in the early eighties—the time of big heavy abstract work by the likes of Brice Marden and Richard Serra, as well as the bombast of Neo-Expressionism. While I really enjoyed meeting Tom and Joyce Robins, his paintings merely intrigued. Tom has made a point about the size of his paintings being a political choice. Small paintings, he argued, allowed people to have them in their homes and didn’t require support from big collectors and institutions. There’s an additional, subtle ethical point as well: Since small works don’t force, they at first must interest, then persuade.  Patience and observation are their essential values. Over the subsequent years Tom’s paintings persuaded and rewarded whenever I had the opportunity to see them.  So much so that when a painting from the year of the 55 Mercer show came up at auction, I stretched the budget and now have the pleasure of seeing it daily. Its cryptic shapes provide a Rubik’s Cube of associations, and with the colors alternating between murk and glow, the painting keeps surprising.

Coming out of concrete abstraction I‘ve considered the painting panel to be as evocative as what gets painted of the surface. Some years ago, I was explaining to a group of people that my paintings weren’t sculptural so much as “panel intensive”. Tom, who was there, didn’t miss a beat—“does that mean the paintings are surface-challenged?” It was classic Nozkowski – perfect timing, off kilter and a brilliant turn of phrase. And it was damn funny—funny enough to stick. I took Tom’s offhand remark as an imperative to up my surface game.

I have plenty of company in my enthusiasm for Tom’s paintings. He is legend in art schools and a touchstone for painters. Abstract paintings look different today than in the early eighties. While some are larger, splashier and flashier than Tom’s, it’s hard to find an abstract painting today that doesn’t bear some trace of Thomas Nozkowski’s painting DNA.

Raphael Rubinstein
That a painting is modest in size does not mean that it is modest in ambition—this is one of the many valuable things that Thomas Nozkowski had to tell us. In fact, Tom’s decision at the end of the 1970s to scale down his paintings may count as the most radical and influential aspect of his work, which offered a quiet but firm reproach to ego-driven or market-driven gigantism, and asserted intimacy as a supreme virtue. His downsizing was fundamentally ethical: he wanted to make paintings, as he said, that could never end up in bank lobbies.

The importance of scale in Tom’s work became clear to me in 2013 when I was curating an exhibition for Cheim & Read Gallery (“Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”). Tom was among the 15 artists I included in the show, each of whom would be represented by a single painting. I was happy to find that Tom’s New York gallery had several great 1980s paintings that could be borrowed for the show. Two in particular interested me. In my discussions with the gallery, the director encouraged me to take both paintings, and for a while that was my plan. After all, I thought, having two paintings instead of one would convey a fuller sense of Tom’s work, and since they were the smallest works in the show—which included a number of very large canvases—it seemed only fair to give the artist a little more wall space.  It was only late in the process, as I was planning out the installation, that it came to me: there must be only one Nozkowski painting in the show! It was crucial that I treat Tom exactly the way I was approaching the other artists; one work per artist, regardless of size. I understood that to include two of his paintings would be a betrayal of his work, an insult to his decades of insistence that a 16-by-20-inch painting could be just as great, just as important, as one measuring 16 by 20 feet.  In an era when the cost of over-consumption is becoming tragically clear, when spectacle continues its prolonged, asphyxiating stranglehold on our culture, we need to listen more than ever Tom Nozkowski’s plea for the beauty and power of small things.

Valerie Jaudon
Thomas Nozkowski was a key artist in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991, and a prescient figure for today’s abstract painting. Tom’s insistence on working at an easel painting scale created a deliberative arena for his extraordinary art making process. With his uncommonly prolific visual vocabulary and acute historical memory he was able to work freely and consciously, with a sense of contemplative and well-ordered spontaneity. Although his drawing and painting method had much in common with surrealist automatic writing, he was able to direct that spontaneity with considered invention, and to work instinctively and surely without the burden of the abstract expressionists’ often heavy-handed autographic gesture. Tom was a model for contemporary abstraction, but paradoxically one who could not really be imitated.

Catherine Murphy
I’m always puzzled when Thomas Nozskowski is referred to as a modest painter. From my first introduction to his work, his ambition and radical aspirations made me pay the utmost attention. The paintings are intentionally not huge. I’ve always thought that they were brain size, taken directly into the brain. His argument, was, for one thing, that the size was political: They are to be contemplated, put in a house, lived with. Early on, Tom put his neck on the block and when few dared, said paintings should be about the experience of living: Looking, thinking, remembering, learning. plans and games, things we love and things we hate. His work is a joyful complication, a life examined and translated into beautiful painting, food for my aching psyche.

Jennifer Riley
I teach visual studies to graduate students in architecture. Introducing them to abstraction, I guide them through some of the usual suspects of early modernism, up to Ellsworth Kelly, where it’s possible to show one way to arrive at an abstracted reality. Then I expose them to Tom’s work, among others. To my mind, Thomas Nozkowski represents one of the most approachable examples of a contemporary artist working from found forms, shapes or patterns, culled from myriad sources of nature and culture alike, which he morphed and transformed into images with his deft use of color, light, line, and atmosphere. These evocative paintings are at once deliberate and effortless, joyful and serious, specific and open-ended.

In my own practice when I’m chewing on a problem, I look at artworks to tune into a mindset of possibility. I will miss seeing Tom’s new works, as it had become routine to look at Tom’s work that reminds me not to be too serious, but to be deeply serious. To pay attention to the world, but to keep things utterly personal and yet avoid sentimentality. To unquestionably use the richness of any painterly approach or convention and then perhaps when necessary- simply subvert them.

I am not alone in feeling the gravity of this loss to our painting culture. Thankfully, there is John Yau’s very fine, recent monograph from Lund Humphries. With typical generosity, Tom inscribed my copy with words of ‘painterly’ solidarity and optimism along with a witty line drawing. A gesture, I’m sure, to which many fellow painters and friends were treated.

Sally Saul
The first time Peter [Saul] and I visited Tom and Joyce’s home in High Falls, there was a sumptuous Indian meal spread buffet style on the dining table, and a lively grouping of artists and writers clustered around the table and adjoining rooms, as well as art new to us that demanded the viewer’s attention, books and interesting objects. We were so surprised and grateful to realize our life on the other side of the river was not so isolated and remote as we thought. Tom’s openness, generosity, curiosity, and easy sharing of his knowledge and interests always generated conversation, a give and take. He recommended books, and art shows, movies and music. One time he gave Peter a disc of Jim Leonard playing the Super Saw which is still one of his favorites, the whistling sound floats through the studio. We will miss him greatly.\

Suzanne Joelson
Tom counted. His book of daily expenses and conversations was a record James Comey might admire. He knew the names of things, and their histories. One day the artist Mike Metz stopped by after a meeting at Chess records and repeated one of Marshall Chess’ stories about the early days in Chicago. Tom disputed it and found documentation to justify his version.

Tom played favorites. An evening could be spent debating a list of favorite visual artists, or filmmakers, Howard Hawk/John Ford, musicians, architects. He wondered “why Plecnik wasn’t in Moma’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia?” and then showed me favorite details from their four Plecnik monographs. His information seemed endless. What he did not know, Joyce did. And we – that is Gary Stephan and I—would invariably leave their house with a book and a list of new things to buy, research, remember.

When we hiked Tom knew the history, the legal disputes and former uses of the land. He could find the remnants of berry shacks and stone cellars, where discarded vehicles interrupted the reclaimed territory. He went on to map many of the lesser known trails which were published in the “Friends of the Shawangunks” newsletter.

At the end of one of our first day long hikes, Tom stunned me by asking, “What was your favorite part?” I had imagined the experience as a narrative, a layering of sensations and ideas, and had no answer.

Tom devoured information. In his paintings, those ways of knowing rubbed up against each other until the friction ignited an aberration. Maybe his paintings were a respite from counting and naming.  With brush or pencil in hand he could loosen his grip on how he knew the world. In the studio, he suspended judgment. Edges tangled, categories lapped, and a different discernment entered.

Then we gather at a Nozkowski opening. Each rectangle is a different subjective map and instead of my usual ways of considering art, I ask friends, “Which is your favorite?”

Harry Roseman
Thomas Nozkowski was a painter, a wonderful painter. My relationship with Tom spanned decades. It was during the last two and a half years, that, to me, something had shifted. I felt he was letting us all know that he wanted to live his life when possible, as usual, and that he wanted to be as productive as he could. If he referred to how he felt it was mentioned almost as a slight inconvenience. It was somewhere between a stiff upper lip and a particular pleasure in situations and in the people he was sharing this time with. I also know it became difficult for him to work as much as he would have liked. It was a privilege to see such courage as well as heartbreaking to see such a love of living. One thing I wasn’t expecting was seeing some of the paintings he did during this time. They are spectacular. Tom squeezed every last bit of life that was possible to have as it became available in smaller and smaller portions. Shorter, I should say, not smaller.

John Yau
All during the time that I was writing my monograph on him, Tom never complained about what he was going through. A few days before he died, he sent me an email telling me there had been a “glitch in his treatment,” and that he had spent the weekend in the hospital getting blood transfusions, but that there was nothing to worry about, and then thanked me for the DVD of Kaili Blues (2016), directed by Bi Gan, that I had sent to him and Joyce. The rest of the email was about where I could download the films of Mikio Naruse for free, and other related stuff. Tom wore his enthusiasm on his sleeve right up to the end. He spent part of one dinner recounting to John Ashbery, who was no slouch when it came to film, the plots of little-known movies directed by Gregory La Cava and later sent John DVDs of La Cava films that he had not seen. Tom seemed to have seen every film he ever talked about at least twice.  I have piles of books, DVDs, and lists of films he sent me. He was always excitedly pointing me towards something to read or see. I cannot imagine that I will ever go a day without remembering something he said to me.

David Goerk
In 2015, Thomas Nozkowski and I visited Ruth Root’s exhibition of new paintings at Andrew Kreps gallery. Tom was familiar with the artist’s work and obviously intrigued by the new paintings. He signed the guest book as he always did and picked up a catalogue of her artist-in-residence exhibition from the previous year. Tom flipped through the publication, studying each page, and as we were leaving the gallery he mentioned that he liked the new work. After a pause, he asked me if I had ever seen her smoking paintings. I hadn’t. Tom took a certain delight in explaining how Root’s smoking paintings appeared to be taking a much-needed cigarette break, as if being a painting was a difficult job and hanging on a gallery wall all day required some downtime. Tom was truly amused by this notion, he related and really loved the idea.

Whenever Tom visited the city to see exhibitions, he had a checklist in his pocket of exhibitions he wanted to see. He studied the list and proceeded to see as many of the shows as the day allowed. When I had time, I joined him on these gallery outings, appreciating his company and insights – every chance I had to look at art with Tom was special. Sometimes he pointed out a particular moment within an artwork or walked over to see what I was drawn to, other times he slowly circumnavigated the gallery on his own. As we finished up at one gallery and moved on to our next destination, we always discussed a story or observation connected to what we had just seen.

When Tom and I spoke, which was often, he never failed to ask me how I was doing before we discussed the business of the day. The sound of his voice, familiar and reassuring, was that of a teacher. His excitement and enthusiasm inspired, no matter the subject. I had the tremendous pleasure and honor of working with Tom for many years and have never known anyone as generous, genuine or knowledgeable.
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Goerk, a painter, was a director at Pace Gallery assigned to look after Thomas Nozkowski.

Alain Kirili
Tom was a dear friend to me and Ariane, and we were able to see many of his shows, including one of his last, at Art Omi in Gent, NY, last year. Despite his great and encyclopedic love of music, including jazz, Tom was not especially familiar with Free Improvisation, the genre of jazz that for many years my wife and I have featured in presentations in our Tribeca loft. But when I ask him to lend a painting to dialogue with a musical duo, he immediately accepted and had his gallery, Pace, deliver and install the piece. I knew that it would work beautifully. The duo was Michael Attias, saxophone and Mary Halvorson, guitar, and the whole thing was superb! What worked so well was the size of the painting with the two musicians: Tom was such a master at working small and creating dissonances within that restricted size, a combination of skills he shared with the duo. Chamber music, a duo, was a perfect fit with the aesthetic of Thomas Nozkowski! I will never forget that night: He was enchanted and so was our audience. There was a standing ovation. The music and the painting will stay with all of us forever. Merci, Tom.

Peter Saul
I first met Thomas Nozkowski ten years ago when we were both inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a famous artist with a reputation for stubbornly refusing to let any of his pictures be larger than a certain small size. Then, we both served on a jury charged with giving money to young artists and I got to know Tom better. He was so logical and unprejudiced in wanting to reward artists of different styles. Tom stands as an example of how to behave on an art jury: To be fair, give money to the one whose pictures are best, forget the career stuff. I regret very much not getting to know Tom better.

Elizabeth Hazan
For painters who find imagery as we work, Thomas Nozkowski was a master. His forms sing with reminders of pleasure and possibility. Tom had an endless ability to resolve his paintings in new ways. Yet he told me once he had some he put away for as long as ten years until he could figure out how to make them work. At times that’s been an enormous help to keep in mind. Like de Kooning, Nozkowski had a high batting average for words that resonate in artists’ studios.

It might be surprising to know that Tom felt a strong affinity with the late still life paintings of my mother, Jane Freilicher, and he wrote perceptively about her.  Once you see the connections it gives new insight into both artists’ work: her shapes in front of a cityscape evoke how he saw his own figure/ground relationships. Much of what he wrote about her integrity as an artist applies to his own life and work. Tom was asked to give the tribute for her at the American Academy when she died.  He noted that she apparently never wrote an artist’s statement, which he’d been searching for while writing his remarks.  At the dinner afterwards, he leaned over and said, “I think it’s terrific that Jane got as far she did without writing one of those fucking things.”

Peter Schjeldahl
Tom got along more than well with just about everybody, even me. Our tastes differed, as did our politics and, really, whole worldviews. I revered, and still do, his art; but he amiably shrugged off compliments. Our friendship could seem a sort of dance, amazingly pleasurable, through a minefield. Only once that I recall, at the tail end of a tired and emotional summer evening, was there a blowup; and it was over in what, 30 seconds? Less than a minute, capped by one of Tom’s wry little philosophical smiles that as much as said, “The way things are includes wishes that they were otherwise. But hey, we’re alive.” You don’t hear much these days about strength of character, but Tom had that, with kindness backed by confidence. As well, he was free and brave: a dissenting but platonic American. Maybe because I couldn’t make it to the funeral, he isn’t gone for me yet but as if withdrawn for a spell in the studio, actualizing surprises. I won’t say I “loved” him, because I love him still.

Richard Kalina
I, like many others, knew Tom Nozkowski for many years and liked him immensely. How could you not? He was good company, sure of himself but properly modest, low-keyed, generous, kind, smart, hardworking, and of course talented and endlessly inventive. He was also a very droll fellow and, in many ways, that was key to his art. Tom was bemused rather than ironic – intuitively aware of the inherent skew of the world, a master of mining the inherent, subtle, and inevitable discontinuities of form and intent that present themselves to those attuned to them.  As we know, he preferred to work on an intimate scale – the better I believe to inhabit his paintings rather than address them. His drollness enabled him to keep a quizzical distance from the visual pleasures that he was so adept at providing. He worked through a painting rather than at it, on the continual lookout for the animating and sudden loss of traction that sends a work of art skidding to a desired but completely unexpected place. Looking at a Thomas Nozkowski painting elicits an almost neural jolt of surprise and recognition, and I am sure that will be as true 50 years from now as it is today.

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One of the striking aspects of the controversy around Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Saint Louis Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) is how many important issues it raises, including, obviously, the perilous state of race relations in the country; the dilemmas that arise when one person’s freedom of speech is perceived by someone else as hate speech; whether white artists, or writers, musicians, etc. can tackle the subject of black experience without engaging in cultural appropriation; and the extent to which social media may now put pressure on museums and other public institutions to bring more transparency to their curatorial process (many protestors want to know who decided to show Walker’s work and why).

All these topics urgently require discussion, but there is another one, perhaps less linked to social problems, that I would like to examine: Whether artists are under any obligation to explain themselves or their work? This issue is relevant to the St. Louis Debate because it was Walker’s (and the show’s curator Jeffrey Uslip’s) unresponsiveness to public questioning during a September 17th artist’s talk that really galvanized the protests rather than the work itself. In reading accounts of the event and subsequent reactions to it, I have the impression that if Walker had made a cogent argument for his art, if he had been able to openly share his intentions, if he had offered a counterargument to the accusation that his work was racist, there would have been far fewer expressions of anger and outrage, and the CAM would probably not have felt it necessary to erect walls and post trigger warnings around Black Star Press and Schema. (Unfortunately, the video of the artist’s talk has remained unavailable since it was live-streamed, so it’s hard to know exactly what questions were asked or just how Walker and Uslip avoided them.)

I firmly believe that artists are under no obligation to explain themselves or their work. If an artist chooses not to reveal anything about his or her intentions, so be it. The making of art, great or atrocious, is the only thing required of the artist qua artist—everything else is optional. And yet there is a common expectation that artists can and should provide accounts and interpretations of their work to viewers. In fact, there seems to be an unwritten social contract between artist and audience stipulating that its part of the artist’s role to discuss his or her work and to respond helpfully to questions about it.

Of course, not every artist adheres to this contract. Indeed, two of the most influential artists of recent decades—Sigmar Polke and David Hammons—are famous for their elusiveness and the paucity of their public statements. With both of these artists, viewers are on their own, challenged to figure out what the work is about, to makes guesses about the creators’ intentions. As a critic, I actually prefer writing about this kind of artist even though it’s harder – nothing to go on except your own perceptions – and scarier – you might get it totally wrong. At the other extreme are artists who write extensively about their work, who give long interviews, who make themselves available. Think, for instance, of Polke’s erstwhile friend Gerhard Richter whose collected writings and interviews run some 500 pages or the late Mike Kelley, as unconventional and influential as Hammons, whose published writings comprise two large volumes.

Although few artists are as prolific in writing as Richter and Kelley, it is rare to come across any as reticent as Polke and Hammons. Most artists are more than happy to grant interviews, and the vast majority of them write statements that turn up as gallery handouts of exhibition catalogue texts. Just look, for instance, at Social Medium: Artists Writings 2000-2015, a 544-page anthology recently published by Paper Monument. It is, in part, the ubiquity of such discourse that rendered Walker’s reticence unacceptable, though clearly his frustrated questioners were keenly aware of the proximity of the CAM to Ferguson, where the 2014 death of Michael Brown sparked the ongoing Black Lives Matter protest movement.

The prevalence of the self-explaining artist has much to do with how artists are trained. Anyone who has spent time in an MFA program (or read Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University) will be familiar with the emphasis on teaching students how to offer interpretations of their work, whether via verbal presentations or in written form. One factor driving this trend is the pressure on MFA programs within a university setting to match other disciplines and professions in academic rigor. The demand for self-interpretation is also driven by the persistent emphasis on critical theory in MFA seminars, which has been a feature of art education since the 1980s, and, to cite an even longer-term trend, how artists have more and more become their own spokespersons, a task once fulfilled by critics. (As evidence of this one need, look no further than Art21, the popular PBS series on contemporary art that features only the voices of artists, and never critics or scholars.)

Of course, artists have been talking about their work for a long time. What’s different about the current protocols of discourse is the assumption that the artist will be forthcoming, always happy to elucidate and explain. New York artists in the 1950s, for instance, were probably more voluble than today’s artists, but the circumstances, content and tone of their discourse (arguments among themselves at places like The Club, defiant manifestoes in obscure magazines) were very different from the generally polite realm of artist talks, slide lectures, public “conversations,” and extensive interviews. There’s much to celebrate in the shift from the embattled artist of the 1940s and1950s to the university trained media-savvy, user-friendly figure of today. Despite persistent hostility toward contemporary art on the part of many elected officials, the artist is far less of an outsider in 21st century America, and enjoys, even when exploring extremes of experiment and transgression, a degree of social recognition and economic reward that would have been unthinkable to midcentury avant-gardes. As always, privileges are accompanied by responsibilities and obligations, and for the professionalized artist, one of these is the artist’s talk, a de rigueur ritual that I suspect every American artist (apart, perhaps, from Hammons) who is given a museum show is asked and expected to deliver.

Kelley Walker could have declined the invitation to give an artist’s talk, but he didn’t. And while I believe that artists don’t owe us any explanation, I also believe that once an artist agrees to appear in public, as Walker did in St. Louis, he or she is under an obligation to be forthcoming and responsive. You don’t agree to do a Q&A if you’re not willing to provide some substantial “A”s. So, what went wrong? Why did what should have been simply another instance of “This is why I made my art” and “This is what I was trying to say” turn into a storm of “How dare you” and “Those are not acceptable answers”? From the accounts I have read, it seems as if Walker, Uslip and the institution were in some kind of bubble that insulated them from—or simply prevented them from imagining the existence of—dissenting voices. Among the voices that apparently didn’t penetrate this bubble were those of three museum staff members who in an open letter described how they and other employees, especially people of color and women, had expressed “great discomfort and disdain on numerous occasions” about the work prior to the opening.

As I suspect other people did after hearing of the CAM controversy, I looked for writings – by the artist and others – about the works in question. I didn’t find much, although in a September 22 letter of apology, Walker insisted that he had spoken about the works “in depth in prior artist talks and interviews.” One article I came across did stand out, in part because it seems to speak to the very issue that is at play now, Glenn Ligon’s “Kelley Walker’s Negro Problem,” which was published in Parkett in 2010. In it, Ligon notes “the profound silence in the critical writing on Walker’s work (and in the art world more generally) about how race operates.” Approving of Walker’s work, Ligon argues that the silence is troubling “because Walker is quite aware of the intractability of the ’problem’ of his racial identity in relationship to images of black people, and part of the impact of his work is that it calls attention to very difficult and still unsettled questions about the politics of representation” and laments the fact that critical writing on his work tends to sidestep the issue of race “by quickly mentioning race only to move on to yet another discussion of Warhol and appropriation.”

It’s strange that six years after Ligon wrote about the glossing over of race in favor of discussing safe aesthetic topics, artist and curator seemed willing to prolong that “profound silence.” Without hearing more from Walker and Uslip, it’s impossible to know precisely why they didn’t adequately answer the questions being asked of them, but I would like to propose a theory: it was because they were confronted with the emergence of an audience whose voice had never been heard before. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that black activists and artist have criticized how African Americans are depicted in art, but this may have been the first public occasion for such discourse since the anger and empowerment that has arisen in the wake of Ferguson. Walker and Uslip didn’t know how to respond because they were hearing inconceivable things being said, inconceivable from within the privileged, and still deeply segregated, realm of the contemporary art world. The extreme discrepancy between how Walker’s work was perceived within the art world and how it was seen by St. Louis’s African-American art community is not, as some might conclude, the result of philistine ignorance of avant-garde practices—it was the consequence of two incompatible languages confronting each other. And in the unpoliced discursive space that opened up around these incompatible languages, the artist and the institution sponsoring him lost control of the work’s meaning, which is precisely what most statements and texts by artists seek to avoid.

Thoughtful artists know that it’s ultimately impossible to control how art is received and interpreted (although that doesn’t mean that they are wrong to try to have the work understood in the way they intend). As literary studies long ago proved, the intentions behind a work of art are in no way determinant of its meaning, and in any case they are nearly impossible to establish. What this means for the St. Louis situation is that Walker’s statements, past or future, about Black Star Press and Schema can never erase the perception that his works are complicit with racism. Ultimately, as history, and the field of Reception Theory, teach us, it will be the audience who decides on the meaning of the work, not the artist. Should we take into account whatever an artist has said about his or her work? Of course we should. Do artists sometimes achieve things in their work that were nowhere in their intentions? Yes, thankfully, for otherwise art would be merely a technical exercise. If the controversy in St. Louis tells us anything, it is that meaning is always up for grabs, a fact too often forgotten in the face of contemporary art’s smoothly running interpretative apparatus (of which I, too, am a part).

Another lesson is to beware of every kind of bubble: media bubbles filled with like-minded partisans, class bubbles filled with socio-economic equals, linguistic bubbles filled with single-language speakers, and culture bubbles devoid of those who might look at things from an entirely different perspective. All of us—not least a white, male New York art critic—are ensconced within our respective spherical domains. I doubt that I would be any better prepared than Kelley Walker to respond to one of them being burst by an unanticipated question. I only hope that the next time something like that happens I will be ready to listen. And yet I also hope that explanations will never become compulsory, especially for artists who prefer to stay inside the best bubble of them all, the studio bubble.

Kelley Walker: Schema and Kelley Walker: Direct Drive remain on view at CAM through December 31, 2016. 3750 Washington Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108, camstl.org

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You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-Imagination imagined by Kafka before the Internet.

I wonder about the Internet. Does it in fact exist? Or does it prove an alternate universe? If you sit there surfing long enough it starts to pour right into your head. I’m in the middle of writing or editing something, and for some inexplicable or at least forgettable reason, I’m lead elsewhere and halfway down a rabbit hole to read a joke about some cartoon bears. So, like anyone, I bookmark it as distraction for later. I bring a plum out of my bag, but Allison Cobb won’t let me eat it:

“I know, like Subway low, like bread puffed up

with yoga mat chemicals. Yes I did

steal everyone’s detournement”

Am I now looking at a desert mountain range, a gorge, a rattler’s skin, sand designs left by a Mojave sidewinder, a natural Mandala, the mouth of a deep sea creature, or a series of close-ups of a person’s eye? I can rarely stay on one of these pages long enough to reach its end. All the subsequent descriptions and associations lead in 100,000 directions; exploring the Internet is more divergent than a Raymond Roussel stanza, more plentiful than The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Appealing to my at best curious intentions, as much as distraction and forgetfulness, artcritical’s Bookmarked feature seems a fun idea for anyone willing to share their abandoned to-dos and tabs for inspiration, or for any readily charmable reader. (I’m pressed in this moment to express just why this is. Voyeurism, compulsion, affinity, or just plain curiosity?) Sometimes I fear I won’t find my way back to the new thing I’ve discovered, as if associations won’t work without some kind of guide. Years ago, taking notes while receiving instructions from someone of my grandparents’ generation, I was admonished that excessive notation beguiles memory, which in turn can cause its loss. I think this is true.

My fits and starts on the Internet are, like anyone, a daily occurrence. Everything’s in here, and its access is seemingly ubiquitous. It’s no surprise that the saved tabs the folder of URL shortcuts are ones that I can scarcely remember any reason for having saved. As I continuing to flip through read-later tabs, I’m at a sudden rapt to the ticking of a bedside clock, followed by a soothing French voice that nevertheless sounds as if it’s awoken from a long night beside an ashtray. A sideburned fop pours hot water into a bowl in black and white. It’s Un Homme Qui Dort (1974) Full movie with subs! What is it? Why is it there? I have no recollection, but I love it.

It’s a dream. Wonderful, terrifying, stupid, very ordinary. Researching wildlife online (again, why? because we can), I half-expect a gazelle to leap out of the liquid crystal screen, still baffled by the endless deluge that is the Internet — in the way an early motion-picture crowd feared the train arriving at its station in L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) might burst right through the screen and into the cinema to overtake them. They ran to the back of the room, then returned to their seats for more.

Here I’m totally distracted by a singularly interesting, eccentric guy. I was a bellhop and John was in town from NYC, needing respite from some unpleasant associations, situations he’d describe to me at the front door on successive nights and mornings. He was cool and a great conversationalist. Told me his brain is swelling and that I ought to get the rich guests to buy all his paintings. He also once commanded, upon my delivery of the Wall Street Journal, that I return to the front desk to have it burned at once. In his underwear, no less. More on this in another essay, but I will add that John is generous, no-bullshit, very funny, and every bit of the creative spirit evinced by his many musical, on-screen, and visual-art works. In his After Dark Episode 1, you’ll catch the above-mentioned attributes straightaway.

Now I remember what I was supposed to do: read an essay by Raphael Rubinstein.

Have you heard of Sue Tompkins? This remains in my read-later tab, and though I’ve heard it many times I don’t think I ever reached the end. Being “heat-faint,” in ecstasy, longing for islands or “24 hours on my favorite planet alone” (my favorite of her hypnotic refrains here), irritation for standing by, wondering “if you feel like I feel.” How about Carla Harryman’s Memory Play? Mile’s Champion’s How to Laugh? Every different emotional state represented outside avatars to distract you. Avert your eyes awhile, you’ll come back soon. Fog everywhere. Sun whenever. Festooned in little pics of food, or all the cute pets your landlord won’t let you house. Years ago, they even foreshortened your audible laughing. What a rotten, wondrous place.

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At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

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The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, organized by Laura Hoptman and Margaret Ewing, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, December 14, 2014 to  April 5, 2015.

NORA GRIFFIN: My first response to “The Forever Now” was to separate the paintings from the show’s conceptual framework of atemporality and emphasis on the digital present, because to me this language seem too reductive and denies the embodied experience of looking at and making a painting. It seems unjust to paintings to try and make them illustrate and speak to these broad, intangible, and global phenomena. Painting begins with a specific subjectivity, that of its maker, and I come to a painting to have a communion with that subjectivity. I think this is the first essay I’ve read where Zombies and Cannibals are celebrated instead of feared. Where’s the human in all this? There was a pervasive “betterment through technology” refrain in Hoptman’s text that was troubling because I don’t think painters agree with this model. Painting has a ton of longing in it, the medium is a form of longing, and the burden (and joy) of history is not lightened by its digital accessibility. Laura Owens and Matt Connors were standouts to me in that they both seemed to push the medium forward with rigor, while keeping a human strangeness alive. And Amy Sillman’s work had the presence of humility and calibrated choices. I’m wondering where each of you locate subjectivity in this show?

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Does painting have a greater capacity for longing or for subjectivity than any other medium? I don’t think so. Surely a photograph, a video or an installation can embody as much (or as little) longing and subjectivity as a canvas. The properties specific to painting are, I think, of a different order (and, let me hasten to add, these specific properties encompass much more than allowed by the Greenbergian notion of “areas of competence”). My first response to this show’s contention that contemporary painters are “atemporal” because they can so easily access the art of all periods and styles was to think: Didn’t André Malraux make a similar observation in the late 1940s with his notion of the “museum without walls”? Inspired in part by Walter Benjamin, Malraux argued that photographic reproductions of artworks had made all periods equally available. It may be true that digital technology and the Internet have vastly expanded and accelerated our access to art history, but I don’t think that “atemporality” is such a novel idea.

BECKY BROWN: It is easy to undermine the premise of atemporality in any number of ways, most obviously for its not being as new or original as the show claims. Of course related ideas are at the heart of quintessentially Modern movements like Futurism and Cubism, not to mention Postmodernism, but I give the show credit for attempting to tackle something of what is undeniably unique about our current moment. Perhaps the word “atemporality” isn’t quite right, but the range and quantity of information that we have access to every minute — and perhaps even take for granted — needs to be addressed. Along with access, it is the form (or formlessness) of this information that distinguishes our moment from earlier ones — libraries and museums present organizational systems while the Internet allows each individual to create his/her own in a space where information is ubiquitous but completely dematerialized.

JASON STOPA: I agree that the conceptual framework was somewhat limiting, but it remains that these works were made during a specific time in Western history. No doubt the cultural environment they were produced under has had some effect, consciously or unconsciously. The idea of atemporality seems to have some merit insofar as there seems to be a struggle to attach an over-arching narrative to our moment. Lately, I feel there are nearly as many sub-narratives in art as there are individual subjectivities. This may be closer to our lived sense of reality, but it also makes it difficult to apply a wide-reaching criterion. For me, the artists that embodied subjective concerns were Michael Williams and Nicole Eisenman. Both painters exhibited a few strange, quasi-figurative paintings that were formally exciting. Their resulting images struck me as irreverent and a little spooky.

DENNIS KARDON: Nora, I would like to expand on that a little, because I think you have hit the most troubling aspect of the show, which is the general attitude of the Modern to painting. First, for me the pantheon of the subjectivity you suggest, would be Charline Von Heyl (though not her best work), Sillman (looking better, and more focused than in her retrospective), Mark Grotjahn who for me is amazing, and Eisenman (whose work was curatorially pigeonholed in a way calculated to ignore just how strongly it’s been animated by narrative). As a painter what fascinates me, looking at a painting, is parsing the huge number of decisions a painter continuously makes, builds on, revises. It is a perception-based process that directs, through those particularities of decision-making, the attention of a viewer. Those attention-directing decisions construct a consciousness that communicates with a viewer’s consciousness. It is why I can look at a painting again and again — because these decisions not only can take on new meaning as the cultural context changes, but also as new ones reveal themselves. The fact that Eisenman’s paintings were hung extremely high out of the range of intimate examination, and that Josh Smith’s were exhibited in a big grid, as though no particular one was interesting, or that Kerstin Brätsch’s huge paintings were stacked against the wall, or a bunch of Oscar Murillo canvases were piled on the floor to be “interacted with” by museum-goers, is indicative that to the curators at MoMA painting is just an idea, and not a physical communication of consciousness.

CARRIE MOYER: The notion of subjectivity has been changed by the Internet and digital culture in that we are now “curators” of our own influences. Therefore the Superfan is the normative, subject position from which to paint. (Just ask any art student who has had to map out their own artistic family tree.) Add this to the fact that contemporary painting continues to be self-reflexive — despite the long drubbing of Greenberg. In other words, information gathering (research) resulting in strategic positioning has become as big a part of one’s subjectivity as any other social marker or life event. Perhaps this is why Eisenman, one of the least hermetic artists in “The Forever Now,” and who very rarely speaks about her influences, gets a mere two paragraphs near the end of the Laura Hoptman’s catalog essay.

BROWN: I disagree that “unconventional” hangings and installations (Murillo, Brätsch, Smith, Connors, Eisenman, Joe Bradley) prevented individual communions with these works. I was happy to see painting open itself up to different modes of address. Certainly this is pretty common these days — as it should be — but I am hardly less likely to have a meaningful experience with a painting if it is propped rather than hung on a wall, as Brätsch and Connors made clear; or if it is hung in a group rather than by itself (as Bradley and Smith made clear). For me, there was an uncanny, maybe tongue-in-cheek picture of subjectivity in the theme of heads and faces, in different forms, throughout the show — physically present or notably absent. Eisenman’s faces/masks most obviously; the obscured faces that were supposedly starting points for Grotjahn’s sweeping compositions; the mask-like face that appears out of nowhere in Charline von Heyl’s Carlotta (2013); the floating faces that keep coming to the surface in Michael Williams’ paintings; and Michaela Eichwald’s frightening Louis XIV-like face whose small scale and high placement on the wall makes it jump out like a nightmare in a window. Since there is very little figuration in this show, it felt relevant to me that much of it seemed to take this often ghostly or disembodied shape.

GRIFFIN: Becky’s noting of the faces being the main figurative element represented in the show is really interesting. Were there any bodies? (And a side note, I agree with Dennis that I find Eisenman’s groups of people, her “Beer Drinkers” series, carries more weight and social meaning than these disembodied heads. There’s something definitely “spooky,” to use Jason’s word, about the heads, but also light and easily digestible.) I think the high hanging of many of the works made them unnecessarily monumental. Why do we have to see Bradley’s paintings hung like they are resplendent with meaning on the first wall of the exhibition, when their only saving grace might be in their off-hand childlike whimsy, and whatever pleasure I could’ve gleaned from the work was dampened by the accompanying wall text’s far-reaching references to Abstract Expressionism and Jungian imagery.

KARDON: It was the desire to privilege this “unconventionality” of presentation that annoyed me, especially when it seemed designed to diminish the actual work. The salon-style Bradley installation, emphasized the iconic aspects and played down the awkward qualities and large scale embodied by the “Schmagoo” label that the works possessed when originally exhibited serially, at ground level, at CANADA in 2008 (and not really representative of the rest of his work). I have seen grids of Smith paintings that made more sense, but not these, again with the intention not to have to engage with any one of them. When Brätsch had about five of those giant frames stacked against a wall one on top of the other, why should I look at any one of them? Why does painting need to open itself up to “different modes of address” if not to try to make the presentation usurp the actual painting? Why don’t we display books on the ceiling? Wouldn’t that make them more exciting?

STOPA: I think this discussion surrounding the presentation of painting is interesting and appropriate given the manifold ways in which we view artwork today. Hoptman makes this statement early in her essay: “What atemporal painters do not do is use a past style in an uninflected manner, in other words, as a readymade.” I would argue that this is actually what Murillo is up to, particularly in his choice to exhibit a work on the floor. In general, his work employs a set of all-too-familiar Neo-Expressionist mannerisms in a collage-like manner. Unfortunately for him, it produces diminishing returns. The issue in pulling from historical styles without understanding what that particular genre’s conceptual aim was, is that it runs the risk of being an image that is simply “all dressed up.” That is to say, it has the right look, but doesn’t attempt to get any deeper than its artistic ancestors (both formally or conceptually). It’s a surface-over-substance argument. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you don’t satisfy the latter, then you might be making paintings for the quick read of a computer screen, which raises the question: why is it an object at all if it is not going to announce its status as such? I am not particularly invested in Smith’s work, but I think the way he plays with presentation suggests a certain tongue-in-cheek humor.

RUBINSTEIN: As Jason notes, the show was thick with revivals of past manners. Grotjahn = Jean-Paul Riopelle; Rashid Johnson = Antoni Tàpies; Julie Mehretu = Cy Twombly; Murillo = Julian Schnabel. To my eye, only one of these four painters, Grotjahn, offers enough newness (of content, technique, forms) to escape looking derivative. But Hoptman would have it that to make such comparisons, to insist on originality, to want something “new” is to fall into nostalgia for a vanished era. My question is: are we really in a cultural moment when originality doesn’t matter? I would suggest that the old criteria are still operative. They certainly are for me. If Murillo seems to me the weakest artist in the show it is largely because his work doesn’t seem to have made something new out of its obvious influences, and if Owens seems to me one of the strongest, it is because her paintings don’t look like any I have seen before.

BROWN: I think we still desire originality in painting, despite its being supposedly passé. It is necessary not just as newness for its own sake, but because we want art that speaks specifically, and sincerely, to our time. Works that are not original cannot do this because whatever earlier ideas or styles they choose to rehash (or whatever variant on “re-” you want to employ, and Hoptman gives us a lot of options), cannot speak specifically to our time, unless the rehashing truly results in something new. I would agree about Owens’ work stands out in this respect. Its alien-quality comes from the fact that it provokes new ways of seeing and thinking about our world: how we conceive depth and dimensionality today (2D, 3D and virtual space); the scale and architecture of the Internet, operations of reading versus seeing and their total integration; the new spectrum of HD sharpness for images, Photoshop filters, the difference between blurry, pixelated, grainy, etc. as ways of being out of focus, and so on.

STOPA: I like Raphael’s comment here: “I would suggest that the old criteria [for originality] are still operative. They certainly are for me.” I have to agree. We might be living in a creative free-for-all moment, but I don’t believe that means that the search for originality and establishing criteria should be dismissed. This is a half-thought, so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe that what happens in the virtual realm is a kind of leveling. In the so-called democratic sphere of social media, where popular consensus equals good, and the good equals important/valuable, locating the important issues is tricky business for curators and critics to parse out.

MOYER: Our notion of subjectivity has to change as a result of how much time artists spend mining for data to support and/or differentiate their position and/or work. This occurred to me after I read this passage in the catalog essay: “Connors points to a genealogy of influences that includes artists from a large section of the postwar art-historical map: in addition to the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters whom he mentions generally, he cites Henri Matisse, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman, Paul Feeley, Kenneth Noland, Yves Klein, Daniel Buren, Martin Barré, Olivier Mosset, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel and Sigmar Polke. Looking at one of his highly saturated monochromes in the color of a Los Angeles sunset, one can only agree, that against the better judgment of our teleologically programed brains, all of the references are there.” Kippenberger? Really? What contemporary abstract painter hasn’t been influenced by Matisse? This list practically begs to be critiqued. There is no doubt that to become a really good painter, one must be catholic in the study of other painters. What makes Connors’ list unique to the Age of the Selfie, is how completely it de-contextualizes and flattens the individual artists cited (both obvious and obscure) and converts them into data points on a personal rhizome. The sheer sweep of influences cited by Connors renders each one so nonspecific as to be meaningless.

BROWN: I agree with Carrie’s point about the “flattening” of one’s influences and references in a way that completely drains them of meaning. Similarly disheartening were the “data points” listed on the wall texts next to the works of Johnson and Richard Aldrich. How exactly do these paintings have anything to do with the Berlin Conference, Black Orpheus, Franz Kline or Kanye West? This list provides insight into his “personal rhizome,” or his particular path through the Internet on a given afternoon, but has little relation to his own artistic output, which to me has little else to stand on. Works by von Heyl and Brätsch might be wise to put their references to Lucio Fontana and Polke aside for different reasons: their works speak strongly for themselves, and it’s hard to hear them with all that background noise.

RUBINSTEIN: Perhaps the really defining feature of “The Forever Now” is its eclecticism. Some people have observed that this is MoMA’s first survey of painting since Kynaston McShine’s “International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” in 1984. That, remember, was the show that provoked the creation of the Guerrilla Girls because of its near total exclusion of women artists. (That’s not a problem, thankfully, with “The Forever Now.”) What McShine’s show did was to track the reemergence of figuration, the “return” of painting, the moment of Neo-Expressionism. The scale was vast (195 works by 165 artists from 17 countries) in comparison to Hoptman’s show, but even with only a handful of artists Hoptman presents a contemporary landscape of various stylistic options, none of them dominant. I almost wish she had taken a polemical position, argued that one mode of painting was more worthy of attention than others. When I saw the wall of Bradley’s Schmagoo paintings I thought for a moment that she would do so, but the show turned out to be a sampling of contemporary painters. I know that no style dominates as Neo-Expressionism did in the 1980s, but isn’t there some alternative to eclecticism? I would argue, of course, that “provisionality” provided such an alternative taxonomy circa 2008. Is there another one now?

GRIFFIN: Raphael, I have similar longings when I encounter so much eclecticism in one show, much of it coming across as re-heated versions of earlier, more powerfully present modern art works. I think the rise of the curatorial voice in the past decades and the slow decay of art magazines as authorial voices, and the smaller percentage of artists who are also writers (this group notwithstanding!), contributes to more jargon-y approaches to discussing and framing art in terms of eclecticism. For a painting show that was meant to emphasize an “anxiety-free,” fluid approach to history, I felt art history like a weight, bearing down and not letting these paintings breathe. “The Forever Now” is the kind of show that makes me fantasize about walking into the “16 Americans” exhibit in 1959 and seeing a Frank Stella painting for the first time. The shock of the new is Modernism. And I would also argue it is intrinsically linked to painting. Not new as a gimmick, but new as a radical departure from the everyday world outside the museum. For me, newness is equated with strangeness: is this a painting I have never seen before? As Becky and Raphael noted, Owens looked strong here because of the “alien quality” of her paintings, they cannot be readily equated with another painter or style.

KARDON: What exactly is our time? We have been conditioned to think it has something to do with (as Becky puts it): “new ways of seeing and thinking about our world: how we conceive depth and dimensionality today (2D, 3D and virtual space); the scale and architecture of the Internet, operations of reading versus seeing and their total integration; the new spectrum of ‘sharpness’ for images.” But that leaves out a lot of life: all the relationships with other people, lovers, children, our relationship to growing old and dying, our fears, our sexuality and gender. If anything our time is about distraction, an inability to concentrate on anything for more than a short length of time. But despite the way our attention has been captured by the digital flattening, what stands out is what occurs in our experience of the physical world. We make our decisions of value and originality on what we experience physically, not digitally, which is why we all thought it was important to actually see this show rather than experience it on a screen. We might become aware of something digitally, but I don’t think we really make a value decision about physical works of art unless we can experience them in the flesh. And, is our present moment forever? I think not. That is the paradox of positing an eternal present as a zeitgeist: it can’t last forever.

GRIFFIN: I agree with Dennis about the human element missing from contemporary painting. This is what I was addressing in my first question about lack of a specific subjectivity in most work presented. But I would take a step to defend Owens’ paintings as being about all of the human things you list (love, death, sex, time, and space), but her magic is that she makes them invisibly tied to the material and pictorial elements of her work. I found her paintings sad, almost tragic, they’re not just a joyful celebration of the quirks of a computer screen and having fun with silkscreening; there is a pictorial content that comes from reading the words in the painting and meditating on the utter absurdity of an Internet ad for a bird feeder with a two-way mirror that allows people to spy on birds eating. A thick blob of dark brown paint on the canvas was like the last remnant of something “living” in the work, but it could also be a stand-in for bird shit. I’m not equating her with Philip Guston, but the myriad of emotions and visual splendor that characterizes his work does have contemporary counterparts, we just have to open our minds to finding them through sustained looking.

MOYER: It seems like one of the major anxieties of the past 20 years or so has been how painting will address, interact with, and/or avoid the digital. Computers have been ubiquitous in painters’ studios for a long time now (no matter how “handmade” the work looks), one important tool among many. This seems to come as a surprise to many critics and curators — I would point you to Roberta Smith’s review of Williams’ show at CANADA where the majority of the text concerns itself with which parts of the picture are hand painted, spray painted or simply printed canvas. So if digital anxiety (the underside of “anxiety-free,” fluid approach to history) is one of the subtexts of “The Forever Now,” one could parse out all 17 artists in terms of their relationship to technology. One has to applaud MoMA for setting up Modernist painting in a manner that “problematizes” it in a new way, the investigation is limited to ideas we already know about the computer, i.e. a tool for graphic design and production (Owens), drawing (Williams, Sillman), and research (everybody else). The density of the installation attempts a cursory stab at how computers change the way we see paintings; even the jpegs of the installation look very similar to a screen of thumbnail images. The sight lines are set up on a grid as multiple windows that seem to slide in and out of view while moving through the space.

STOPA: One would hope that the first survey of contemporary painting at MoMA in 30 years would have been executed differently. The anxiety of the digital has been a topic of conversation ever since the computer came into the painter’s studio. Ignoring it is not an option, but responses can and must be varied. Despite the technological condition that we live in, painters are still making objects. The project of museums, and I would argue of painting in general, is to set up conditions for sustained looking. Behind this, is the idea that the formal and conceptual content of a work reveals itself over time. And then there’s the issue of space and place. The paintings in “The Forever Now,” be they interesting or not, were so closely packed together that you could see everything and nothing at once. This sounds much like the arena of the Internet, where multiple browsers and images compete for quick attention spans. Doesn’t this installation undermine everyone involved? It compromises the notion that the audiences’ sustained looking will reward them with an affect of emotional or intellectual import.

BROWN: When I first walked around the show I felt energized by the range of possibilities and the vitality it seemed to put forth for the medium. However, on reflection, the work actually felt more the same than different. What it seems to share, in addition to this fuzzy notion of atemporality, is a position of being anti-language, anti-narrative and anti-history, in the sense that, as Hoptman proudly explains, these artists sample history without taking any position or any real responsibility. I would put forth Mike Cloud and R.H. Quaytman as two painters who both make sincere attempts to use language to communicate, tell stories and address history through research and understanding rather than name- (or image-) dropping. “The Forever Now” offers a lot of disembodied heads, empty masks and nonsense scribbles (the I-look-like-writing-but-I’m-not-saying-anything approach of Murillo and Mehretu) as an approach to dealing with a uniquely present past. I am left wondering if there might be more productive ways for artists to take advantage of the incredible, albeit terrifying digital archive at our disposal.

KARDON: It has been an amazing 33 years since Thomas Lawson published “Last Exit: Painting” in Artforum. The text is an exhaustive cataloguing of all the strategies that comprised (in 1981!) the scope of art making, and this is well before the digital era, and my question now, is has the situation really changed? In his text Lawson addresses the problem of “originality” in painting: “Whatever their sources, these artists want to make paintings that look fresh, but not too alienating, so they take recognizable styles and make them over, on a larger scale, with brighter color and more pizzazz. Their work may look brash and simple, but it is meant to, and it is altogether too calculated to be as anarchistic as they pretend.” These words could be applied to many of the artists on view in “The Forever Now.” In our discussion, as in all the reviews I have read, I intuit that we all feel there must be something better than this exhibition to represent the possibilities of painting to portray how it feels to be alive right now.

MOYER: I keep coming back to our daily interactions with the computer. If the jpeg is now the new normal for seeing, understanding and interacting with painting, what effect does it have in the studio? Should we be trying to make paintings that are flatter, more graphic, and look great rendered in only 256 colors? Facebook’s “5-day Art Challenge” (where an artist is asked to post three new images of unseen work for five consecutive days) is an interesting case study because most of the work posted has not been widely (if ever) reproduced, so there’s no assumption of prior familiarity. After watching the endless flow of images over the past few months, the biggest takeaway is that the jpeg is its own entity, a kind fuzzy approximation of specific information that reveals very little. Perhaps this is why artists feel the need to stake out their own personal rhizome of associations, as a means of filling in the physical, optical, emotional, intellectual information needed to understand what they have a stake. Of course, the problem with this solution is that it treats the studio as an “autonomous zone” free of critical context, where self-selected affiliations are often not inherent to the work per se and depend instead on sloppy material and/or formal equivalencies or mangled histories. In other words: I pour paint. So did Morris Louis. Therefore my work concerns itself with the history of Color Field painting. Back to those checked boxes…

GRIFFIN: Is it still possible to frame a group of painters under a single rubric? Raphael’s naming of “Provisional Painting” in his 2009 essay in Art in America gave us a chance to examine a group of contemporary painters within a historical context and described a phenomenon, “major painting masquerading as minor painting,” that is open enough to include a range of painting styles and conceptual intents. Terms can be useful because we can argue for or against them; they allow artists to talk about something other then their own personal universe, to see themselves as a group, collective, cohort, whatever you want to call it. The singularity of the artist in the digital age is maybe one of the more disquieting aspects of “The Forever Now.” Not to revert to nostalgia (a distinctly bad word in Hoptman’s essay), but we have to acknowledge that artists do not mix and mingle in the same way that they did in a pre-Internet world. The proof is in the pudding right here, with this email-based discussion!

RUBINSTEIN: Thanks, Nora, for the shout-out. It suddenly occurs to me that maybe the real problem with this show is that it is a show of paintings! If, as Hoptman contends, we really do live in an “atemporal” moment, shouldn’t this condition be evident in other mediums besides painting? Why wouldn’t people who make sculptures, for instance, be equally subject to “this new economy of surplus historical references”? Although I have often been guilty of mono-medium grouping myself (writing articles about painting, curating shows with only paintings in them), I worry that every painting show risks reinforcing the notion that painting is a special case, a privileged medium, an activity that is constantly turning back in on itself. Maybe painting shows that are primarily about “painting,” whether they come to celebrate it or to problematize it, help foster this exclusionary approach.

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White Columns will host a launch party on Friday, October 3rd from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.  20 West 13th Street, between Hudson Street and West 4th Street, New York City.

Once an artist becomes “a name,” the very fact of his or her fame can obscure a clear-sighted view of actual works, past or present. This isn’t necessarily a problem, since an acclaimed artist’s renown itself contributes to the context in which an emerging body of work will be seen and considered. And, of course, it is often productive to assess an artist’s new efforts in light of previous accomplishments. But the fantasy of the innocent eye is compelling because, in our information-glut age, becoming over-informed is always just a few clicks away.

In The Miraculous, published by Paper Monument, poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein describes 50 artworks realized in the last few decades. The texts in this beautiful little book range from a sentence or two to a couple of pages. Many of the works in question — which are often conceptual and/or performative in nature — were in some way creative watersheds: they located the artist’s voice, pointed the way forward, raised the stakes of the ongoing imaginative investigation or (in one case) brought it to an end. And with each description, the name of the artist is nowhere to be found.

In its entirety, one of the shorter entries runs:

A successful German painter who enjoys provoking outrage buys an out-of-the-way service station in Brazil and renames it in honor of a notorious Nazi long rumored to have escaped to South America. Soon, photographs begin to circulate of a forlorn building on the façade of which have been emblazoned the words “Tankstelle Martin Bormann” (Martin Bormann Gas Station).

An index reveals all the artists’ identities; some of their stories are quite familiar, others not so much. But withholding names in this manner drives home the point: our perception of a work is distorted when we know who made it, whether that person is celebrated or obscure. Uninformed of authorship, the reader of The Miraculous confronts (through Rubinstein’s pellucid prose) the works themselves in all their wondrous weirdness, far from both the blinding glare of acclaim and the shadows of the market and its machinations.

Rubinstein describes his blog, The Silo, as “a personal, revisionist ‘dictionary’ of contemporary art.” His approach to art in The Miraculous is wholly in that spirit; disregarding received ideas about the artists’ alleged influence, significance or professional standing, the author drills down to the bedrock of all art discourse, namely, the creative activity of artists.

And that sole case of closure? Rubinstein writes: “An artist in his mid-30s decides that his next work will consist of sailing solo across the Atlantic Ocean.” The project ends badly: the tiny craft eventually disintegrated, and the artist was lost. The piece, titled In Search of the Miraculous, is probably this artist’s best-known work, yet Rubinstein’s economical account of it brings out the psychological complexities of its enactment.

Paper Monument is published by the journal n+1 and has produced a few other books, including the delightful Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment, edited in-house. The Miraculous is touted as the first of a series of single-author books, and as such is another auspicious beginning.

Raphael Rubinstein, The Miraculous.  New York: Paper Monument, 2014. ISBN 978-0-9797575-7-0, 72 Pages, $16.00

The post In All Their Wondrous Weirdness: Raphael Rubinstein’s Personal Revisionist Dictionary of Art appeared first on artcritical.

Supports/Surfaces
Canada
June 7 to July 20, 2014
333 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie)
New York City, 212 925 4631

Right now there is a great deal of interest within the New York art world in looking backward, seeking visual inspiration in modernism. Two current group shows are exemplary models of this revisionist historical thinking. Starting in the 1960s, many otherwise varied artists in Europe and New York employed shaped canvases. Inspired by the 1964 Guggenheim Museum exhibition “The Shaped Canvas,” Luxembourg & Dayan, housed on three floors of a majestic, very narrow Upper East Side townhouse, has organized an exhibition of 28 paintings employing this device. Starting around 1966, a group of Frenchmen of the Supports/Surfaces movement developed a remarkable synthesis of deconstructive philosophy, the political ideas of Mao and the decorative pure color found in Matisse’s late cutouts. Canada, a downtown gallery, has assembled a show of 22 paintings by these artists, in collaboration with the Parisian Galerie Bernard Ceysson.

Harvey Quaytman, Elizabeth Murray and Kenneth Noland painted abstractions on shaped frames; Claes Oldenberg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann used them to present figurative subjects. Some painters, such as Ron Gorchov, used the shaped canvas as a way to structure their pictures. Richard Prince, whose 1994 Untitled (Protest Painting) contains the outlined shape of a sloganless protest sign, is exemplary of artists who set shaped structures within a pictorial rectangle. In presenting a marvelous variety of shaped canvases, Luxembourg & Dayan generates some surprising, unexpected juxtapositions: Pino Pascali’s Coda di Delfino (1966), a jokey dolphin-shaped painting on wood, is set alongside Creede II (1961), a copper-colored, shaped work by Frank Stella. Jeremy De Prez’s Untitled (2014), which presents a seemingly rumpled plaid design, is hung next to John Armleder’s Lotta di gladiatori — The Best (2014). The exhibition ends with two marvelously funny pictures, Steven Parrino’s very orderly The Chaotic Painting (2006), a triangle shape, and Jacob Kassay’s Partial Credit (2014), a not-quite-rectangular canvas with the title printed on the right edge of the frame.

The Supports/Surfaces painters were a loosely organized movement centered in the South of France, linked together, at least initially, by their fascination with bookish philosophizing. Searching for an alternative to the practice of Clement Greenberg’s color field painters, these artists freely appropriated ideas from Michael Fried’s formalism and the Marxism of Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, writers associated with the Parisian journal Tel Quel. Jean-Michel Meurice created strips of intense color like Vinyle (1976); Claude Viallat presented repeated patterns on dyed fabric or rope lattices hung directly on the wall, as in 1972/F14 (1972); Louis Cane employed repetitive rubber-stamping — Toile tamponnée (1967) is an example.

Artists who otherwise had no connection with one another have employed the shaped canvas. Using a shaped canvas doesn’t require any high-powered theorizing. And so it’s unsurprising that this pictorial format has been adapted by such a motley assortment of figures as Lucio Fontana, Mary Heilmann and Damien Hirst, on view at Luxembourg & Dayan. By contrast, although the Supports/Surfaces works can be seen as deconstructed paintings, what remains of that art form when you remove the stretcher and display the unstretched canvas or, conversely, present just the frame, sans canvas? This style of art making was parasitic upon what now seem like dated critical, cultural, and aesthetic theories. French writers drew an equivalence between what in the catalogue Joe Fyfe calls “the fabric of society” and the structures of bourgeois painting, making a link between the “radical social engagement” of French Maoists and deconstructive visual practice. If you remove the unstable supporting synthesis of formalist interpretation and political analysis, all that remains of Supports/Surfaces art is good looking decorative constructions. That perhaps explains why these artists haven’t had much impact within the American art world. When the New York artists looked to Europe for inspiration, it looked to Germany. As yet these Frenchmen don’t belong in the post-modernist canon. The show at Canada was handsomely hung, but by presenting this art with too little reference to its original context, the catalogue did not adequately support what could have been an important revisionist exhibition.

Note:

My account of Supports/Surfaces borrows from Raphael Rubinstein, “The Painting Undone: Supports/Surfaces” at https://www.artcritical.com/2004/02/01/the-painting-undone-supportssurfaces. The quotation from Joe Fyfe comes from the foreword of Surface/Support (New York and Paris: Canada Gallery with Galerie Bernard Ceysson, 2014).

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Please also join us for the next panel, on January 24, with Hrag Vartanian, Christina Kee and Christian Viveros-Faune.

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Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

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