Editorial Note: Today (Monday, May 13) is the last day of Frieze, and yesterday tickets and transportation sold out: the fair recommends online booking to avoid disappointment.
Some images with this article are awaiting their correct permission and caption details

It’s somehow fitting that this year’s installment of the Frieze Art Fair takes place during the same weekend as the opening of Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann’s movie has been criticized for its emphasis on excess, its literally in-your-face materialism. But, in the final analysis, under those unnecessary trappings, the story is really pretty damn good.

Frieze, in its second year at Randall’s Island, also tells a great story, even if you sometimes have to look beneath the bloat (and pay a $42 entrance fee) in order to discover it. With over 180 galleries (about half of them from Europe) spread over territory the size of three football fields, it is easy to come down with a case of art fatigue. But the nice thing about Frieze is that it balances excess with the sort of refinement that allows the fairgoer to forget, at just the right moments, that the whole thing is founded on crass commercialism.

For starters, there is the whole middle section of the fair, which features the Frame and Focus selections, the Frieze designation for participating galleries founded less than six years ago (Frame) or in or after 2002 (Focus), each showcasing a single artist whose work has not previously been seen in an art fair context (Frame) or a curated project specifically proposed for the fair. These are the fair’s cool kids, its bathroom smokers: they strike just the right mix of not caring at all and caring a lot, of posturing and earnestness. There is, in many of the Frame booths, a kind of compelling, contagious energy, as if the people involved have not yet had the chance to become jaded, to lose faith, and the results are a little rough around the edges in a really nice way. These aren’t underdogs exactly—one of the Frame artists, Stewart Uoo, showing at New York’s 47 Canal, has a small show at the Whitney, which opened the same day as Frieze, and features his former art school classmate, Jana Euler, who happens to be part of the Focus display at dépendence—but they also have not yet grown complacently satiated by success.

One of the Frame standouts is Julia Rommel at the consistently excellent New York gallery, Bureau. Rommel’s understated monochromes have a stunning simplicity, and they serve in the manner of a sorbet palate cleanser during a multi-course meal: a necessary corrective, a chance to remember why you are there in the first place.

Rommel’s work speaks to a truism oft forgotten in this era of blockbuster museum shows and auction extravaganzas: less is usually a whole lot more. In fact, over and over again, it is the most restrained exhibitors that strike the sharpest at Frieze. One excellent example of this is Cheim & Read’s booth, which includes Pat Steir’s beautiful Birthday Painting. For whatever reason—experience? national disposition? royal decree?—London galleries are especially apt at this. At Maureen Paley, Paul P’s small-scale portraits, suggesting a terrifically depressed Elizabeth Peyton, are wonderful, as is Maaike Schoorel’s painting, Vanitas. And there is something playfully innocent about Birgit Jürgenssen’s Polaroids at Alison Jacques Gallery. An  exception to good London taste is White Cube, highlighting Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Tracey Emin’s neons in a rehash of last year’s offerings.

Still, there is at least one point when the axiom invoked above fails to hold up or simply disintegrates in the face of insistent spectacle. At the fair’s North entrance stands Paul McCarthy’s Balloon Dog, courtesy of Hauser and Wirth. Giant and vibrantly red, it suggests an unabashed delight at taking the whole shebang in stride. On Friday afternoon, the sun lighting up the Frieze tent, Balloon Dog practically signaled the coming of spring and renewal.

The post Cool Kids and Bathroom Smokers: The View from the Middle of Frieze appeared first on artcritical.

It’s always extremely instructive to see a mid-career artist momentarily give up her signature style. Here, assisted by New York Studio School students and other volunteers (including some associated with Sol LeWitt) Pat Steir has recreated an installation done at the New Museum, 1987, and then at other venues in Canada and Europe. On the walls, which are stained blue with gold chalk grids, are larger than life size drawings after old masters: Albrecht Dürer, Odoardo Fialetti, some baroque figures who worked with Guercino and Agostino Carracci, and Alexander Cozens. In the first room her Dürers show bodies of men, women and children; then in the second gallery, the other artists present ears, eyes and mouths. Finally, on the last wall running counterclockwise is a signature style Steir waterfall, drawn by her, with reds flowing down to the floor. This show transforms totally (but temporarily) a very familiar exhibition space. Knowing that these exquisite images are physically vulnerable, you need to keep your distance from the walls. Recognizing that come December 20 these images will be effaced, you want to look closely at the finely drawn details.

LeWitt’s wall drawings are his typical works of art, while Pat Steir is famous for painting majestic abstract waterfalls, post-historical versions of Morris Louis’s stained color fields. In what sense, then, is this magnificent installation, whose old master images have no obvious connection with Steir’s usual paintings, a self-portrait? Asked how to understand repetition in her art, Steir replied: “I, like many other artists, make certain marks, which are typical—like a signature.” The idea of continuity, she added, “is the idea of history.” These many body parts are “all parts of one, single Self” because, she believes, everything she has seen and experienced “becomes my own Self. All the experience of the world become(s) part of me.” Steir was inspired by a highly personal view of psycho-analysis, but a more accessible version of this way of thinking appears in Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, a book that illustrates many of the schemata found in this exhibition. In the history of  illusionistic art, in what he calls making and matching, each artist takes up and extends tradition, finding her own identity by employing the creations of her predecessors.  By learning how to draw bodies, ears, eyes and mouths an artist prepares to make  original compositions. By revising radically this very traditional way of thinking, Self-Portrait defines Steir’s place in a post-Gombrichian history of art.

Taking subjects from the raw materials for old master art, Steir transforms them in accord with her very contemporary sensibility. For the old masters, schemata were the basis for art. For her, however, this assemblage of vastly enlarged fragments constitute her subject, for the whole body seen from outside has been replaced by an array of depicted body-parts. As she says: “When you entered Self-Portrait you were inside a body if not many bodies, looking out from within.” One reason that this installation is fascinating is that it is visually exhilarating. Another, that it provides an unexpected interpretation of Steir’s familiar abstract paintings. Seeing how she understands a Self-Portrait, we learn about her conception of the place of her waterfalls within art’s history. According to Gombrich, abstractions like Jackson Pollock’s are a form of decoration, what develop after the real history of art is ended. And so Steir is only a belated figure in that post-figurative tradition. Steir offers a plausible, totally different interpretation of her paintings, showing, as she says, “the reality already within you, but one you haven’t yet perceived.” By placing herself within the ongoing tradition of abstraction she shows how much a Self-Portrait can reveal about her paintings.

The post Pat Steir: Self-Portrait: Reprise 1987-2009 at the New York Studio School appeared first on artcritical.

Cry Stall Gaze, poetry by Anne Waldman and artwork by Pat Steir, will be published by The Judith K. and David J. Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The poem and artwork take the form of a scroll, or more properly, two scrolls. The poem is printed on translucent paper through which the image by Pat Steir registers as a palimpsest. The printed image, meanwhile, can also be viewed independently of the poem. Translating this project from this intended printed format (it is not yet published) to the web has presented the challenge of finding an equivalent to the intimacy of image and text in the coupled scrolls. Our solution has been to offer two views, in their entirety, of these scrolls: one in which the image is viewed alone, the other in which the obscured image and superimposed poem are viewed together. To read the poem, the viewer needs to click on the relevant segment of text, within the second scroll, to be taken to a blow-up of that segment in which the words are legible. From there the viewer can return to the scroll, or move on to the next segment of text.

Poet Anne Waldman is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, (Penguin, 1994), Marriage: A Sentence, (Penguin, 2000), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin, 2004), and the poetic text: Outrider (La Alameda Press, 2006) which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009) is Waldman’s most recent book. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2011. She is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats, Col. which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director for a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club and Issue Project Room in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace.

Pat Steir is an artist internationally renowned for works that lyrically and dramatically exploit chance effects to evoke such natural phenomena as waterfalls, works that she views in the tradition of Zen painting.  Born in Newark, New Jersey and based in New York City, she has lived and worked in Italy, Holland, and California.  She studied at Pratt Institute, where she now holds an honorary doctorate, and at Boston University, and has taught at the California Institute of Arts, Parsons School of Design, Princeton University and Hunter College. Steir has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Los Angeles County Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, as well as museums in Dublin, Lyon, Geneva, Berlin, Rome, and Reykavik. She is represented by Cheim & Read, New York, and has also shown at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Harley Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.  Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London; Steir was a founding board member of Printed Matter bookshop and of Heresies magazine, and has served on the editorial board of Semiotext.  Steir achieved renown in the 1980s for her wall drawing installations, one of which was remade in November 2009 at the New York Studio School.

The post Cry Stall Gaze: A Collaboration with Pat Steir appeared first on artcritical.

Karin Davie
until June 25
Mary Boone
541 W. 24th Street
between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues

Karin Davie paints endless loops in more ways than meet the eye. In the best sense of the word, she is a formalist — the plastic fact of what she paints represents a conundrum of painting itself. Her joyfully dumb, intriguingly mesmerizing squiggles fill Mary Boone with visual music.

Ms. Davie’s motif is a thick, confident, lyrical, sausagelike line that changes color with consummate ease and curls up and around itself with voluptuous, serpentine physicality. At first they seem like effortless nursery doodles, until you realize some remarkable technical features.

For one thing, there’s no ground. Without allowing the line to diminish in scale, there is implied recession into deep space; the squiggle disappears to a distant vanishing point. The pace — both that of application and that at which the viewer is meant to look at the lines — is very hard to determine: The whiplash lines are bravura, but at the same time exude luxuriant ease, somewhere between allegro and andante.

Then there is the freshness and verve of her color. You can tell she is painting wet in wet, with wildly different hues keeping company on the same brush. Yet for all her promiscuity with pigment, she doesn’t end up in a mush. On the contrary, there are exhilarating flashes of illumination — a sense, in fact, of brilliant light pouring out of or onto selected passages within the composition.

In the mid-1990s the Canadian-born painter came to prominence as part of a wave of artists who looked with retro nostalgia to the implicit or explicit psychedelia of Op Art, Color Field painting, and 1950s and 1960s interior décor. She was part of a four-person project room display at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998 with Udomsak Krisanamis, Bruce Pearson, and Fred Tomaselli — all artists who could be said to get high on ornament. She was included in group shows with such indicative titles as “Post-Hypnotic,” “Ultra Buzz,” “Hypermental,” and “Ecstasy Shop.”

Her painting is still on cloud nine, but it has gotten used to its own druggy pop referentiality, insisting in its maturity on inherent painterly concerns essentially unchanged since the heady days of (sic) high Modernist abstraction. You could say that her work occupies a kind of aesthetic loop, scrolling back and forth between pop and purity.

This certainly comes across in her “drawings,” which are in the back room. These papardelle-like protruding reliefs are ingeniously torn from single sheets of paper, colored on the reverse with zippers sewn into the exposed edges. Intertwined are shiny sheets of aluminum-like Mylar. Like the paintings, and more so, they are at once tricky and simple essays in critical décor.

***

Pat Steir
Moons and a River until May 7
Chiem & Read
547 W. 25th Street
between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues
212-242-7727

For a telling generational comparison with Ms. Davie (b.1965) and her pop-abstract attitude, check out Pat Steir (b.1940), whose “Moons and a River” exhibition ends this weekend at Cheim & Read. They have obvious things in common: Both favor angst-free lyrical abstraction, are open to chance, are unafraid of the decorative, embracing its problematics in a vaguely feminist way, and are sumptuous and sensual. But Ms. Steir is an earnest romantic to the degree that Ms. Davie is a sassy deconstructionist.

In her 26-foot-long “ Blue River ” (2005), Ms. Steir recalls the Color Field stain painter Morris Louis . Yet her palette is at once more naturalist and shrill: The curtain-like “unfurled” forms are bright red and silvery white, bookending the blue “veil” washes to the point, almost, of producing a tricoleur banner. At the same time, her washy, drippy effects are phenomenological to an almost literal extent that would be impossible in Jackson Pollock.

Pollock’s drips, painted on the floor, implied ethereal spatiality; Ms. Steir’s drips evoke rain corroding a surface. Like Degas in front of Monet, we want to turn up our collar. It turns out, though, to be a light shower: “Summer Moon,” (2005) is shamelessly decadent in its Orientalist appeal and lustrous palette of greens and golds, feeling like it wants to decorate the home of a latter-day Freer.

***

Pamela Crimmins
Dreamhouse until May 26
Littlejohn Contemporary
41 E. 57th Street
Madison Avenue
212- 980-2323

The calendar, if not the weather, tells us it’s time to dig those swimsuits out of the closet. As if in anticipation, the galleries are awash with images of pools. Exhibitions run a gamut, in their response to aqueous movement, from the photorealist paintings of Eric Zener, closing this weekend at Gallery Henoch, to David Hockney’s pool prints of the 1970s, exploring the ripple in all its permutations, opening next week at Mary Ryan. Keeping these latter, perennial classics company on 57th Street is a remarkable group of photographs by Pamela Crimmins at Littlejohn Contemporary.

In contrast to Mr. Zener, who paints as if he were offering a photograph but primly rations precisely the perceptual quirks the lense would offer up as disturbed water impacts his water-treading supermodel types, Ms. Crimmins offers a kind of painterly photograph, in which the quirks of medium and subject, of perception and reproduction, constantly run into one another in complex cross-currents. From within a pool she photographs the people, furniture, and buildings around its perimeter, enlisting the body of water between herself and her motif as a secondary lens. Sometimes she agitates the water with her flipper to further fragment the field of vision, accenting the edges of her ripples with scorching prisms.

The press release calls her result surreal, and as a modus operandi it does indeed recall André Kertesz’s distortion photographs; her uppercrust Connecticut houses, captured in meltdown, also bring to mind the expressionistic wobble of Soutine, Schiele, and Friedensreich Hundertwasse. But the historical movement that makes more sense is Cubism: Strange perspectives that seem at first like puzzles ultimately follow their own system for seeing the world. Ms. Crimmins’s Archimedesian realization — in, of all places, a suburban swimming pool — is that we are from the water, after all.

The post Karin Davie at Mary Boone, Pat Steir at Chiem & Read and Pamela Crimmins at Littlejohn Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.