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you can now also see The Review Panel with video posted to YouTube by the Brooklyn Public Library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ_pbRMm5Yk&feature=youtu.be

The post March 2016, with Svetlana Alpers, Laurie Fendrich and David Salle appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Roundtable: “The Forever Now” at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

Dear Art Editor,

I was shocked to read the review of Michelle Grabner’s exhibition by Ken Johnson in last Friday’s NYT, in which he basically summarizes Grabner’s show as that of a bland and witless mom. Grabner has an extraordinary CV: besides being an artist, and as he noted, a Professor at a major art school, and one of the curators of the last Whitney Biennial, Grabner is also a regularly published critic, co-curator/director of two experimental art spaces, and the subject of a museum survey show last year. Yet the NYT apparently saw no problem in printing a piece of writing about her whose primary criticism is her seeming lifestyle, and in which the characterization of her is not only the somewhat demeaning category “mom,” but the further boiled-down, more dismissive category of “soccer mom.” Johnson doesn’t even get his facts right: for example, he omits entirely the information from the exhibition’s introductory video about Grabner’s study of math, science and philosophy. It’s simply lazy to overlook this, and to mis-state the work’s own terms. Johnson concludes that Grabner has no satire: the two art spaces that Grabner co-runs are called “the Suburban” and “Poor Farm.” Does Johnson really think that Grabner is so naïve that when she portrays herself making a pie, she is doing so without any self-consciousness about her position in the world as a Midwesterner and a mother, as well as artist/curator/professor? (And hasn’t he ever heard of “normcore”?) This kind of condescending writing is a pattern with Johnson. Major complaints of racism and sexism have been lodged before about his writing, most recently two years ago when he was called out widely in public for “irresponsible generalities” regarding women and black artists. Once again, Johnson hangs his so-called criticism on his subject personally, in terms that seem to both diagnose her and reduce her to a cliché of her demographic. That’s textbook sexism. Johnson has the right to say whatever he wants about the work, but the point is how and why. What does it mean that the NYT does not seem to care about the politics of his language? I’m not surprised by Johnson’s writing at this point, but I am surprised that this insulting review could pass muster with the Editor of the New York Times.

Amy Sillman

[Johnson’s response]

Taking Sillman’s points one by one:
1. I don’t think Grabner’s resume should place her above criticism. Sillman doesn’t mention, by the way, that Grabner curated her (Sillman’s) paintings into this year’s Whitney Biennial. She’s not exactly a disinterested observer.
2. I thought that in a short review, simply describing the works in the show would be enough for an informed reader to get the underlying conceptual/feminist dimension of Grabner’s project. Had I spelled it out, it still would not have changed what I felt was an irritating spirit of self-satisfaction and obliviousness to her own privileged social position in the exhibition. Normcore or not, I still think the works in the show are bland and not in an illuminating way. They certainly didn’t make me care about the math and science of paper weaving.
3. I may have underestimated the degree to which Grabner intended the show as self-satire. If so, I’d say the show wasn’t satirical enough. That would only slightly modify my basic criticism. If Grabner did intend self-satire, than why would Sillman object to my idea of satirizing what I characterize as “the comfortably middle-class, tenured professor soccer mom”? This seems to me contradictory on Sillman’s part and humorlessly so. (I once was a soccer dad married to a soccer mom who also was a tenured professor of art. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a soccer mom.)
4. Sillman’s charges of racism and sexism are slanderous and based on misreadings of two of the thousands of things I’ve written for the Times over the years. You would think that Sillman would be more sensitive about tossing around such accusations after Grabner was much criticized for including in the Whitney Biennial works by Joe Scanlan that were supposed to have been made by the fictional African American artist Donnelle Woolford and for not including more works by real black artists. It’s a serious thing to accuse someone of racism and sexism. If someone claims there’s a pattern of racism and sexism in what I’ve been writing over over the past 30 years, then that person should be obliged to prove it. I don’t think it’s provable in my case. I think it would be easier to prove the opposite.

The post The Ken Johnson Affair Continues: Ken Johnson and Amy Sillman appeared first on artcritical.

Wallspace
619 West 27 Street
New York City, 212 594 9478

Like the typographic code of a stenographer, Patricia Treib’s first solo show at Wallspace tempts and enchants with embedded information and a deceptively forthright vernacular. A series of nine oil paintings, two collages, and one pastel drawing exhibit a frugal array of repeating motifs, marks, and shapes. The paintings draw a clear synthesis between the color-as-shape sensibility of late Matisse and the action painting of Pollock, but also plunge right into the ring of contemporary abstraction as exemplified by Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, and Laura Owens.

In her paintings Treib focuses on banal details excised from unnamed historical paintings and unrecognizable close-ups of mechanical devices. The titles allude to time and vestment, reminding us of the performative, ritualistic aspect of painting. In the large canvas Accoutrements (2013), five motifs gambol and fill the space around a central ochre form that reappears in the two smaller collages in the show, The Mobile Sleeve (gray) (2013) and The Mobile Sleeve (green) (2013). This central shape recalls a torn open and flattened paper cup, and looks simultaneously like an opening, the profile of a face, and a fold. Another repeating composition is the enigmatic “glass clock.” In the small pastel Glass Clock (2012), quick lines and dashes flirt with reflective symmetry across a central lavender column. In the large painting Glass Clock (2012), this column is indicated only by a hint of transparency inside a paradoxically dominating beige rectangle that echoes the edges of the canvas, and acts as both foreground and background. As the works shift between transparent and opaque in media, composition, and effect, we feel the difference in their making and scale as we would feel watching a play develop from rehearsal, to opening night, to the last curtain call.

Treib’s marks read as simultaneously improvised and practiced. She works on the floor or a tabletop, and the paint, responsive between the surface of the canvas and the pressure of the brush, bleeds and blots slightly at the edges, recording with expressive exactitude the process of its making. The paint is thinned to the consistency of buttermilk, and her bright and pure colors become either faint or enlivened through their transparency to the off-white ground. Many of the works hover near the scale of a human body, which redoubles the sense that Treib is choreographing us alongside her. Using brushes that are unabashedly as large as a palm is wide, each of her gestures is made visible; gliding, then halting, the brushstrokes recount a hand eliding (and an arm sweeping) over the surface. Within the shapes and striped swaths, a lightning-bright line registers brief pauses and shifts, giving subtle dimensionality to what could be a flat shape. In some compositions such as Camera (II) (2013), Device (2013), and Cuff (2012), we confront a dark or black glyph, enhancing the flow of a measure, like musical notation, and redirecting the speed of our eye, like punctuation.

Treib’s compositions seldom exceed the edges of the canvas, so while the paintings are intrinsically painterly, they also resonate with the cropping and indexical characteristics of photography, and the close-up details of her source material. As our gaze follows the path of a brushstroke, we feel that we are seeing the afterimage of a long looking, like light streaks visible in an extended exposure. While the entire compositions and their parts are easy to grasp at a glance, each shape contains a detailed record of the timing and movement of its making.

It’s clear that Treib is composing with the hard-won ease of rigorous practice. Whether the weight of meaning lies in the act of looking or execution is a circular conversation. The painted forms, so discrete and specific as to be characters, shift in and out of legibility, and up and down on the register of “complete.” The repetition in compositional structure between works only increases our awareness of a language and grammar underlying the spontaneity, a visual vernacular in use and embodied, which, we too, could grasp—with long enough study—but never replicate, or translate, with such grace.

The post The Theater of Abstraction: Patricia Treib at Wallspace appeared first on artcritical.

In Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat, the title character, exemplar of the flameout credo of the East Village, is assisting an artist-installer at the Mary Boone Gallery.  This mediocrity, played by Willem Da Foe, attempts to counsel the hero about the benefits of a reliable day job.  Basquiat replies that someday he would show on those very walls.  He quits on the spot and never looks back.  Likely Schnabel was not intending that the viewer inquire further into the Da Foe character’s pitiable existence, but let me suggest that he took the L train home to his Williamsburg sweatshop loft, stoked the woodstove with 2×4 scraps, and painted obsessively into the night, biding his time.

After the crash of ’87 (a laughable blip, in retrospect) the briefly pumped-up East Village galleries either closed or moved up the ladder to Soho.  Artists who didn’t get mowed down by hard drugs or AIDS got decadently rich and left yuppies in their wake – the price of a vacant Alphabet City “studio,” not to say an actual studio, moving out of reach of Midwest college kids.  A bridge and tunnel away, however, a scattered army of Da Foes popped their heads out their windows and noticed each other.

Marcin Ramocki’s new documentary Brooklyn DIY, which premiered at MoMA on February 25th, is subtitled The History of the Williamsburg Art Scene 1987-2007. The video is the first straightforward, Sundance Channel-style attempt, and one hopes not the last, to document the brief, happy life of the Williamsburg Scene – begging the question, in the process, as to the degree to which Williamsburg really was, or perhaps even still is, a coherent scene; a dissident view advanced in the video is that it’s just a bit of geography where numerous artists happened to find a place to live and work, an insignificant smattering rising to wider prominence.

One must be grateful that Ramocki, rather than some slick cultural tourist, has been the first to tackle this contested history.  He knows firsthand the experimental tradition ably evoked by the 75-minute video, having founded, in 2003, the Williamsburg gallery vertexList in the vacated address of the relocated 4 Walls, the most venerable of Williamsburg artist-run clubhouses.  Ramocki knows enough of the right people to interview, he covers the best of the early venues and events, and he was given access to crucial archives (in particular that of dedicated video chronicler Carleton Bright, credited as Associate Producer.)

Insider Ramocki’s do-it-yourself, laptop-edited history is thus in some sense an extension of its subject.  But he has chosen to play it close to the vest, adopting a familiar format of talking heads and supplemental footage.  He pretends to no innovation as a videomaker, strenuously avoiding not only the Williamsburg ethos of oddball, low-key subversion but, for that matter, vertexList’s more aggressive program of digital intervention.  Brooklyn DIY is content to showcase more imaginative acts of wry self-conscience, such as Ward Shelley’sWilliamsburg Timeline, a 2004 print in which the artist has ventured a disarmingly earnest, intestinal diagram of the comings and goings of Williamsburg’s significant people, places, and events, and Matt Freedman’s live drawing lecture, in which, accompanied by Tim Spelios’s percussion, he cartoons with deadpan erudition the convergence of economic conditions which emptied acres of cheap loft space just a stop away from the burnt-out, priced-out East Village.  Freedman’s performance puts us in mind that if Williamsburg is only geography, well, so was St. Louis in 1800, sited at the confluence of two mighty rivers teeming with beaver pelts.

Had Brooklyn DIY trusted its subjects more in the manner of its unhurried perusal of Freedman’s lecture, or its occasional returns to Shelley’s Timeline for close-ups of the particular node of activity under discussion, the video might have been both more entertaining and informative.  That said, when the interviewees are on the ball, Freedman and Shelley among them, and we are treated to priceless, thoughtfully correlated Hi-8 tape and photos of the ancestral events in play, the formula works breezily well.  Alas, Ramocki has a weakness for chopped up, artificially manipulated exchanges, which, while sometimes lively, tend to simulate debate in an all too familiar sound bite vacuum, as with the following sequence in which the much admired painter Amy Sillman, an acerb skeptic about the Williamsburg Scene, and Ebon Fisher, who was among the dedicated instigators of mass warehouse events, seem to be at odds:

Fisher:  “We began to figure out what makes a warehouse party work.”

Sillman:  “…and they were run by people with a sense they were doing something very important for everybody.”

Fisher:  “Of course we all assumed it would be revolutionary.”

Sillman:  “If you came here in 84, you didn’t necessarily party with people who came in 89.”

Fisher:  “Manhattan was learning from Brookyln, an entire community and its surrounding ecosystem…”

Sillman:  “East Village Two, why do we need it again?”

Now, a little of this can be funny and to the point, as here perhaps, with Fisher’s utopian spin cut down to size – so the editing disposes – by Sillman’s curmudgeonly charm.  But pitting isolated interview subjects against one another by proxy, intercutting words from different contexts and temperaments as if they were on the same page, is mildly sensationalistic.  In fairness, we are shown glimpses during the “exchange” above of menacing, funky installations, whacked-out nudists, S&M stilt walkers and lab-coated pranksters from Organism, a 24-hour “webjam” in a disused mustard factory.  In venerable documentary tradition the viewer will judge whether such events deserve their own Ward Shelleyan nodule along the spaghetti which connects the Human Be-In and the Happening to the Rave on the master timeline of American counterculture.  But if Ramocki’s habit of interruption and juxtaposition can work well enough on occasion, it tends to get diminishing returns, as later when he elicits a montage of disagreements on the definition of “hipster” – an excruciating sequence with little redeeming schadenfreude.  Yes, hipsters are the new yuppies, as one youngish fashion photographer has it, and he ought to know.

The “hipster” episode is part of an attempt to tie Brooklyn DIY’s historical survey of the art scene to reflections about gentrification, an important topic to be sure, but one that deserves more than lip service to “the notion of [white artists’] privilege from the very moment they moved into this neighborhood,” as artist Freedman puts it.  This Solomonic admonition is unkindly dropped like a sandbag amid the usual war stories of the old days –shots  in the night, muggings, stripped cars set alight – stories that pioneers like to tell with a certain pride and glamour, despite being perfectly well aware that they were in far less danger of being shot than the 14 year old Dominican kid down the block.  If a documentary were serious about exploring the impact of artists on real estate values, we’d need to see interviews with artist-renovator winners and evicted loft dweller losers, as well as with Polish, Latino and Hassidic natives; statistics on development, rents, and incomes; and a wider survey of the mercantile hipster culture that came to fill every nook and cranny with professionally distressed lounges and pre-packaged trends.  The video goes into needless depth about one such latter-day party scene, shot gunned into brief vogue as “Electroclash” by a DJ named Larry T.  Mr. T’s mercenary, take-no-prisoners self-promotion does make for an amusing interview, and perhaps Ramocki means to illuminate, by contrast, the self-effacing sincerity of proprietors of projects like 4 Walls and Pierogi, which Joe Amrhein describes as “more like a social construct for an artwork” than a gallery.  If irony is meant, a little goes a long way.  But one has the feeling, instead, that Ramocki really means to suggest a continuum from the loosely anarchic DIY scene of clubs and events like El Sensorium, Keep Refrigerated, Cat’s Head and Organism to a more recent vintage of bridge and tunnel cattle pens where, as Larry T declares, “Everybody got laid!”  Let’s set the record straight, then: good times Electroclash stands in relation to the more diffident Williamsburg Scene as Studio 54 does to the Pyramid Club; the antagonism is stylistic and fundamental.

Not to say that self-promotion and battles over ownership were ever entirely absent from what Shelley denotes on his timeline as the Creative Golden Age.  Still, it’s substantially true that, in his words, “it was art for art’s sake, the artists were all pitching in, and they weren’t worried about the borders of what their work was.”  In Shelley’s mordant analysis, this foul-weather utopianism was inextricable from the fact that no one could get a show in Manhattan.  Things began to change as the art market expanded again, with opportunities for local artists to disentangle themselves not only across the river but also in their own backyard.  By then there were perhaps thousands of artists living and working in close proximity in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and environs, and a parallel world of galleries emerged to show them.  In an omniscient statistic Brooklyn DIY claims that 145 galleries have come and gone, but that number is generously inclusive.  Only a few have had true grit, laid-back but competent DIY style, and/or staying power.  And of these, a 75-minute survey can only cover a sampling, with significant players relegated to passing mention or, in some cases, insufficiently identified footage.  (A Roxy Paine periscope installation at Momenta, for example, in which the artist’s upstairs studio was surveiled goes uncredited.)  Seminal spaces like Brand Name Damages and Test Site get welcome remembrance (though oddly, the film never mentions that Test Site’s Annie Herron, Williamsburg’s matron saint, died tragically young in 2004) but when it comes to choosing gallerists to interview,Brooklyn DIY must resort to an attempt at cross-section: the old-time guerrilla (Aaron Namenwirth of Art Moving), the clubhouse impresario (Mike Ballou of 4 Walls), the for profit pioneer (Amrhein of Pierogi), the ambitious ship-jumper (Becky Smith of Bellwether), the bad boy Chelsea reject (Don Carroll of Jack The Pelican), and the persistent, if pragmatic idealist (Daniel Aycock of Front Room).  If a few of DIY’s choices seem marginal compared to other spaces that go unmentioned despite being on the leading edge or right at the center of the alternative gallery scene – such as, for the record, Flipside, Momenta, Arcadia, Sauce, Roebling Hall, Eyewash, Parker’s Box, and maybe also Sideshow, Plus Ultra and im n Il – one can forgive Ramocki his personal skew; at least he has troubled to get the bulk of it right, and we are amply referred to Shelley’s conscientious Timeline if we want to fill in some of the blanks.

With a lively exhibition scene, then, centered first and foremost around Pierogi since 1995, it’s inevitable that the completely fatuous question is going to be asked, is there a Williamsburg “look?”  Perhaps this sort of thing is an inherent folly of mental anatomy, like the tendency to map parents’ faces onto an adopted child’s.  The East Village or Downtown “look” is a historical grain of sand around which layer upon layer of commentary has accrued, a pearl of conventional wisdom.  But in fact, no obvious common factor denominates between Basquiat and Koons, Wojnarowicz and Holzer, Coe and Scharf, et al.  Without the fiction of revolutionary alignment, a fiction that was artificially inseminated into the media slipstream by narcissistic gallerists, artists, and writers with a chip on the shoulder (and two in the pot), the East Village would have been just a loose, vibrant locus of activity.  Against this Machiavellian fait accompli, poor, innocent Williamsburg is forever held to a double standard in which it fails to achieve EV-level scenedom because its “paradigm” – to borrow from the title of a prescient 1993 show in far-off Illinois curated by trend-spotter Jonathan Fineberg – is either too predictable or else not predictable enough.  BrooklynDIYperks up when, in its patchwork fashion, talking heads weigh in on the question of aesthetic alignment, yes or no, good or bad.

Mike Ballou: “One of the dangers is that it becomes a little incestuous.  It does become a clique and a club.”

Amy Sillman: “[…] If you said something bad about someone’s art, they’d hear about it and it would be awful and so you’d refrain. […]  The Williamsburg thing, at least its deep roots, I think it does not have any particular aesthetic position, nor was anyone going to really argue about it, and without that you can’t have any kind of strong aesthetic platform.”

Joe Amrhein:  “I don’t think Williamsburg has that regional look [as with Bay Area or Liepzig School art] and I like it that way.”

Becky Smith:  “My friend calls it the International Williamsburg Style, a certain kind of painting it looks like Joe would show, out of this certain time.”

Sillman:  “I don’t think my work has any kind of aesthetic relationship to Williamsburg at all.  It wasn’t really an aesthetic community, it was really a geographic community.”

I’ve heard Pierogi criticized for favoring dense, handmade, graphic imagism (disclosure: the present writer has shown there), but gallerist Smith’s cavil, given Bellweather’s heavy rotation of off-kilter academic realism, is a stone cast from a glass McMansion.  If ever there was a Williamsburg aesthetic it probably had more to do with the sort of electro-mechanical “bricolage” shown in footage from 1991’s multi-space show, Tweaking The Human and exemplified by hybrid instrument sculptor/musician Ken Butler, whose opinions and AK47-cello riffs are agreeably laced throughout Brooklyn DIY.  Pierogi, for that matter, has often showcased absurdist sci-fi spectacle, and has now rededicated its program to large constructions with its cavernous new Boiler space (an act of typical Williamsburg optimism so out of step with reality that it might single-handedly turn the economy around).

Where Smith sees tired parochialism, Sillman sees the opposite, the blobby incoherence that arises in a vacuum.  Can there be an aesthetics, she asks, without a bit of tough-minded dialectics?  Sillman picks at the wound of the larger question about Williamsburg: Was low-key, inclusive niceness a deliberate and characteristic virtue, or was it a symptom of artistic mediocrity?  If the former, street events, clubs, anonymous and borderless artworks should be taken seriously in appraising Williamsburg’s historical importance, andBrooklyn DIY makes a down payment on video-logging the wealth of crazy stuff that went on, from Gene Pool’s unicycling Can Man, to a panel at 4 Walls on jokes, to barely contained pyromania in the cavernous Mustard club.

But in Sillman’s terms Williamsburg would only matter if its islands of individual artistic achievement were connected underwater, as it were, by an “ecosystem.”  Critic Sarah Schmerler further articulates this rather pitiless view, asserting that Williamsburg art won’t make it into books aside from a few success stories – and here she names Sillman, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, and Roxy Paine.  (Interviews with the last three, by the way, would be essential to any comprehensive reckoning.)  “How many hands do we need?” Schmerler asks dismissively.

Quite a few, actually.  Here’s a very short additional list of internationally respected artists who can be said to have more than passed through – who lived, worked, curated, showed, partied and did it themselves in Williamsburg:  interviewees Amrhein, Ballou, and Shelley; Michael Ashkin, Francis Cape, Diana Cooper, Charles Currier, James Esber, Jane Fine, Su Friederich, Joe Fyfe, Rachel Harrison, Perry Hoberman, Byron Kim, Mark Lombardi, Chris Martin, David Opdike, Joyce Pensato, David Scher, James Siena, Mike Smith, Eve Sussman, Dan Zeller, and Brenda Zlamany.  Among these, a number have been in Biennials, had solo museum shows and, pace Schmerler, made it into art history books.  Dozens of impressive artists might be added to that list.  The real question is, how densely interwoven is the network that connects them?  Is it like loose seaweed floating among the waves, or more like a coral reef, anchored in place and bristling with exotic life?

Schmerler, to her credit, was the first mainstream critic to novelty-shop in the neighborhood, covering the Crest Hardware Show, a stealth art extravaganza, for Time Out as a harbinger of new energy.  And in Brooklyn DIY she extols the value of having artists still congregate within the precincts of New York, “like gold backing the dollar,” though this hardheaded choice of simile comes off as grudging.  She’s right that a sea of artists, writers, and musicians are required to buoy up the few celebrities, and maybe a materialistic headcount of the famous is the only objective way to judge the vitality of a scene, in toto.  Schmerler, however, draws the waterline so high as to make her verdict seem truculent, as if wishing to repudiate her early association with Williamsburg amateurism in order to avoid being tarred by the same brush.  But given the recent mid-career emergence of formidable forces such as Martin, Pensato, and Sussman I would suggest that it’s still too early for a final assessment, in any case, of what may turn out to have been a singularly slow-ripening phenomenon.  (Full disclosure: the present writer would like to think there is still room for a generation of under-known mid-career artists to emerge from local notoriety into the light of wider recognition.)

For all the hand wringing about gentrification (and the dark jokes about artists mixing paint on the marble countertops of abandoned luxury condos), what if, instead, the most salient characteristic of Williamsburg was its longevity?  Yes, things change fast in New York, but maybe a little more slowly in Brooklyn, and that opulence of time in many cases allowed for a different studio approach.  Could Martin, Pensato, and Sussman have matured in the pressure cooker of Avenue C in the ‘80s?  Maybe there’s a particular flavor to the Williamsburg Scene, a rare terroir that connects the DIY attitude to a kind of work that takes years to ferment.

In the end, what Brooklyn DIY does best is to resuscitate the energy of a time of underground events and wacky street theater that may have begun as a footnote to the East Village Scene but flourished on its own gleeful terms, innocent of the sort of fashion despotism and lust for fame and fortune that came to rule the EV.  Of that earlier scene Gary Indiana has written, “Many artists made no objects but did things that were art, like keeping dull people out of the Mudd Club.”  To be sure, Williamsburg was duller, partly because the scene was too small to afford to be exclusive, but also by design, in reaction to the psychic price of snobbery.  No guardians kept clueless artists from bringing their work to Crest or hanging it at the Salon of Mating Spiders.  Anyone was welcome to cobble together a pile of junk at Cat’s Head or read bad poetry at The Ship’s Mast or pontificate at 4 Walls, if they were thick skinned and shameless.  The only gatekeeping mechanism against dolts and poseurs, effective enough at low densities, was negative word-of-mouth.

Scenes come and go according to cyclic factors as dry as real estate values, as mysterious as the wheel of kharma.  A notable few persist in memory.  You have the feeling of needing to be alone, so as to give yourself over in deeper peace of mind to this ambiguous wink from nirvana; and at the same time, you need the presence of others, like gently-shifting relief figures on the plinth of your own throne.  Walter Benjamin was writing about hashish intoxication, but the sentiments might equally apply to the condition of making art within a community.  Time has begun to tell, and the Williamsburg paradigm, in which artists might explore the nirvana of solitude without loneliness, may someday turn out to have produced as much lasting art-market value as certain louder, more spectacular, and shorter-lived bubbles.  With a new age of stagnation upon us, such a combination of amateurism, communalism, and elbow room will take root again, whether in the looming forest of bankrupt waterfront condos planted in the asbestos of warehouse parties past; in Bushwick or Bed Stuy; or someplace neither yuppies nor hipsters nor Barbara Corcoran have yet heard of – someplace plain wrong, and thus exactly right.

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Johanna Burton, Sarah Valdez, and John Zinsser joined David Cohen to review Alex Bag at the Whitney, David Diao at Postmasters, Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin, Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins.

The post February 2009: Johanna Burton, Sarah Valdez, and John Zinsser with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.