Mark Grotjahn: Untitled (Captain America) at Gagosian
January 19 to February 20, 2016
980 Madison Avenue (between 76th and 77th streets)
New York, 212 744 2313

The title of Mark Grotjahn’s show at Gagosian is “Captain America,” after the comic book character created in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of America’s involvement in World War II. In the comic, Captain America fought against the Axis powers, knocking out Nazis and Japanese soldiers in storylines that promoted extreme patriotic fervor. It’s a strange thing that this suite of 10 drawings is noted in the gallery’s press materials as “first shown in the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo,” as if embedded within Grotjahn’s works is a parallel heroic narrative.

For this series (it is only necessary here to describe one, as the other nine are essentially the same with slight variation) Grotjahn used the red, white and blue Captain America color scheme. The drawings distill motifs from his two major bodies of work: the “Butterfly” and “Face” paintings, seen in his oeuvre since the early 2000s. Each piece presents a “Butterfly”-like radial of alternating red and blue bands against a chalky white surface. The bands radiate from, or recede into, a central vanishing point. Over the image, hastily painted yellow eye shapes cover the surface at random. These “eyes” (a recurrent motif in Grotjahn’s “Face” paintings), though omnipresent across the series, are faint and barely register against the bold design of the main image. The vitality and ecstasy that are so primal in those earlier works has given way to bland seriality in the new series. While the title evokes a spirit of play, it also feels a bit sinister as it flags the artist as a hyper-masculine, self-proclaimed hero.

On Great Jones Street Grotjahn’s “Sign Exchange” project was presented at Karma, a gallery that often shows decidedly un-auspicious projects and DIY projects by artists of stature, including Brice Marden, Julian Schnabel, Rudolf Stingel, Stanley Whitney, Chris Martin. Between 1993 and 1998, Grotjahn, just out of UC Berkeley, began replicating liquor store and bodega signs from his neighborhood. He would then trade the shop owners his copies for their originals, which are on view. The result is an archive of signs and hand-painted advertisements resplendent in their low-budget glory. The tightly curated sampling of these signs (as well as several pastel painted flower stands) feels precious in a way that the then-25-year-old Grotjahn likely never intended. At the right of the entrance, a long line of multicolored index card-sized ads were hung end-to end in a kind of continuous banner of liquor brands, prices and keyed-up color; I was reminded of the nearly 10-foot-long line of paint chips that horizontally bisects Rauschenberg’s 1955 opus Rebus.

The “Sign Exchange” project is a relational aesthetics experiment wrapped in a post-Duchampian gesture: the signs register as Art because the artist dubs them as such. Ten years ago, as Grotjahn was hitting his stride, achieving critical and market success, the “Signs” project might have thrown institutions and collectors off of his scent. Grotjahn’s success is as a formalist painter; now, with his work firmly in the canon of aughts-abstraction, galleries and curators have more freedom to exhibit examples of his less conventional (i.e. less collectible) output. In 2014, Grotjahn’s painted bronze “Head” sculptures (originally conceived as studio experiments made with discarded beer boxes and toilet paper roles) were shown at the Nasher Museum in Dallas, concurrent with a survey of his “Butterfly” paintings at Blum + Poe’s Upper East Side outpost.

Grotjahn is the ideal artist for our time. He presents an image of authenticity: his work seems approachable enough — it’s AbEx without the heartache — and is systematic with the just the right inflection of happy accident to present an air of humanity. It was prescient that Grotjahn had, in the early to mid 1990s, become so interested in advertising and signage (their main function is to broadcast prices and sell goods). The work in the Gagosian show does the same thing, though its messaging is subtler. Advertising has long been free game for artists to use in their work but Grotjahn actually presents original ads in “Sign Exchange,” a gesture that seems all the more potent given his rapidly rising star. But the shadow side of Grotjahn’s success is seen in the redundant, conceptually thin uptown show at Gagosian (not to mention his self-consciously scrappy “Head” sculptures at Anton Kern on view just three months ago). For the last three years, Grotjhan has shown his work non-stop in museums and galleries (often with ambitious, concurrent exhibitions) and this frenzied exhibitionism seems to have culminated in his fatigue.

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ERIC SUTPHIN: How does collaboration function in relation to Modernism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the artist?

EMILIA AND ILYA KABAKOV: This is a very interesting question, especially considering that there are more and more artists working in pairs. Obviously there are reasons why in some cases a collaborative process can be better than those made in a solitary process. We can say that the personality of each artist, working in collaboration with the other reveals much more than when he/she works by his or herself.

One of your aims has been to restore painting’s tension, or its potential for rupture. One strategy for you is figuration, in particular, looking back to Baroque painting. What is it about figurative painting that contains the possibility for difficulty or conflict?

The return to painting and a Baroque approach has two sides: there are some elements that are working on rupture and others which are uniting everything on the canvas.

The first is a collage of all the elements of the painting, the fragmentary nature. This is the special technique that we use for such paintings in order to unite these elements. The elements of collage can consist of images from different times, but the wholeness is created by using one artistic approach for these elements stemming from different eras, in our case the style of Pierre Bonnard.

It seems that the increasing scale and ambition of your work — in particular the evolution from the 1995 Pompidou exhibition to the 2014 Monumenta presentation — has a direct correlation to an ever-expanding global art market. How has increasing globalization and decentralization of the “art world” affected your practice?

We come from a country where the art market did not exist and it is very easy to continue to disregard it. If this is about the art market, this is already such a covered territory that we are afraid to even start such a discussion. The same goes for globalization. In some aspects it does work very well, but in others it creates a catastrophe for artists, especially younger ones.

The scale of our work increases depending on the ideas and concepts and has nothing to do with the market, globalization or decentralization. The scale of the installation at the Pompidou in 1995 was in consideration of the idea we presented and the space that was available to us, the same as the project in 2014 at Monumenta.

How has the role of institutions affected the scope and scale of your projects?

That was the main factor of influence on our projects, both in museums and other art institutions. We do make a distinction between an exhibition at a museum and an exhibition at a gallery. A gallery can limit your scale and imagination, and in many cases takes an already existing work with the intention to sell. The museum, kunsthalle, kunstverein, or public space has a very specific aura and atmosphere. This stimulates your imagination and fantasy, giving you the freedom that comes with space. Unfortunately the only limit is the budget.

What scope do you hope to reach and how does ambition and scale relate to your notion of the art world as a utopian fantasy?

The most ideal result of what we are trying reach and achieve is our last exhibition at The Grand Palais for the 2014 Monumenta presentation. The Grand Palais was a utopian project, a glass palace from the end of the 19^th century. For us the possibility to realize a utopian, grandiose project in this superb space was and is the best, ideal project in the art world.

Do you see your work as nostalgic for a time when recognizable imagery had more currency than it may hold today?

The interest in painting is definitely a nostalgic interest, but at the same time there is always a hidden hope that the life of your paintings will belong to the future.

Can you discuss the ways in which representational painting functions as a conceptual, rather than purely narrative, device within your practice.

EMILIA: All the paintings are done on a project basis, as a concept as well as a narrative. Even if the narrative is used, there is a concept. But we should say that Russian conceptualism is built on narrative.

ILYA: All of my paintings are conceptual works. This means that those paintings are not only a method of explaining and representing myself as a traditional artist and painter who spends all his life working in one medium or one “visual corridor,” but rather presenting different projects which come to mind all the time. These appear not rationally, like any self-respecting artist would do, but spontaneously — one after another, or simultaneously.

Who are some artists who have been important to you?

ILYA: In the 1960s through the 1980s I did belong to a group of Moscow Conceptual artists and because of the complete isolation of the Soviet art world, I had very little knowledge of what was going on in the Western art world. In our circle the art works were always connected to a specific project. I did paintings or objects that were connected to either a Soviet bureaucratic design, a parody of official Soviet artworks, or paintings that appeared to be done by different artistic personae including characters such as the “untalented artist.”

The paintings now on view at Pace belong to the same kind of design but with a different context that we are interested in now. The concept of these paintings is to presume that there is now movement or new developments in contemporary art. As in the time of the Renaissance, we have to look back and start using the achievements of the past, remembering that the Renaissance artists used the achievements of the ancient Greeks.

So which model from the past can contemporary artists today use as an example? We are thankful that such an example from the past can be the Baroque movement. The strange combination of Baroque art and contemporary can be what we need in order to solve the problems in contemporary painting. If we are wrong, well, we will just move on to the next concept.

The post A Concept and a Narrative: Emilia and Ilya Kabakov Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

ERIC SUTPHIN: What’s the story with the banners?

BARBARA MADSEN: The banners are something I’ve been making for a long time. I made quite a few post-9/11 in Jersey City, Newark and in Washington DC. So when Arezoo asked me to do a show, I knew immediately that I wanted to put big images in the windows. But I also knew that I wanted to have an interaction with the city, so the banners had to be translucent. People use this room. I spent a lot of time sitting in here, observing people and how they use the space. If the natural light flooding in was blocked it would ruin the experience, and I did a lot of research looking for a material that is translucent, that can breath, change and let the light in.

They’re mysterious. We see them as large-scale photographic images and they might be mistaken for advertisements. Can you talk about their function as images within the city space?

MADSEN: They begin with something that’s very tiny, which I isolate and blow up. In that process they become iconographic and monumental. The objects I photograph are made from a vivid plastic, so you feel that they are advertisements for some kind of a product. When you look at the forms, there is a familiarity but the scale destabilizes your relationship to what the objects might be.

MOHSENI: They lack the text that is generally associated with ads. The banners also have a theatricality. When you see them at night from outside they are backlit and appear to glow.

And this location on Fifth Avenue is important. Fifth Avenue has a history as a sort of marketplace with big window displays showing off products. But while the objects on the banners appear familiar, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at. And that is what differentiates these banners from advertisements: an ad’s job is to be clear and sell you something, but Barb’s work tells us to look and to keep looking. Another function of the banners is that they invite us to look at the sculptures in the windows. Can you talk about the sculptures?

MADSEN: The sculptures are site specific and were made to respond directly to the library’s architecture. I wanted you to be able to see through them form both inside of the library and from the street. I didn’t want them to be closed forms; I wanted them to break down the relationship between image and object. I was thinking a lot about Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (1923 – 48). Each piece is modular so that when the installation is eventually taken down, each unit can function independently.

You mentioned that some of this imagery is taken from the video game Minecraft. This, coupled with the modularity, like Legos or building blocks, makes me think that play is an important aspect of your work.

MADSEN: I am interested in play and I have too much fun with this stuff! One sculpture has a periscope built into it, poking fun at the surveillance camera mounted directly above it. And inside that sculpture is a light, which flashes and twitches to imply that there’s a video playing inside. There’s no video, but it’s like a game of “Who’s watching whom?” There are a lot of visual puns in this piece. I invited the street artist Neanderthalogical to tag one of the pieces, which you can see from outside. I used photographs that I shot throughout the city so that when you’re looking at the sculpture, you’re also looking at the city, through the city through the sculpture.

MOHSENI: Is this the first time you’ve made freestanding sculptural work?

MADSEN: I’ve been using platforms or plinths as supports for my objects. The assemblages covered in photographic images are a first for me. I’ve been thinking about them conceptually, especially in relation to Schwitters, for quite a long time. With the Library installation, I finally had the right venue to make them happen.

MOHSENI: I see Barb’s work connected to a lineage of artists that includes Frank Stella and Nancy Graves. Both of those artists were investigating the disruption of three-dimensional space while also using intense color. The title of the show, “Plastic Age,” is important here. After World War II, plastic became essential in American industry.

But there’s also humor in the title, you’re playing off the historic “Ages” from the Stone to the Bronze and now into the Plastic Age. In two millennia we’ll be known as that weird civilization that left behind mountains of plastic.

MADSEN: When I was upstairs browsing the Pictures Collection I looked through the “Plastics” folder and I found these Monsanto ads from the 1950s showing the joys and possibilities of plastic. In the ‘50s, nobody thought twice about Monsanto. So there’s a conundrum with the love affair they created with plastic: it’s the container of our dreams but also the destruction of our dreams.

You’ve decided to use the vitrines and glass cabinets, tell me about what’s in those spaces.

MADSEN: The vitrines are dedicated to my collaboration with the Venezuelan poet Ely Rosa Zamora. I make images and she then responds with poetry. This particular book is called “The Unspecific Object” kind of making fun of Donald Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects.” Judd was against illusionary space, so I wanted to take back that illusionary space. I put out an open call on Tumblr to have people submit images of objects and upload them to the site. I then had two jurors: Arezoo and Jared Ash (a Special Collections librarian at the Metropolitan Museum), to whom I gave no set criteria, and together they chose 14 images. I asked the winners to send me the actual objects, which I photographed in black and white within architectural spaces I built. Then I printed the images as photogravures.

You’ve talked about your collaboration with Zamora and your interest in language; are there other literary references that shape the exhibition?

MADSEN: In terms of literature and its relationship to space I think about Flatland (1884), Edwin Abbott’s seminal novel about Albert Square, a two-dimensional figure who exists in a three-dimensional world. Square is persecuted and imprisoned for his belief in a third-dimension. The book talks about possibilities that we don’t understand and our limited aptitudes.

Can you talk about the photographs that are hung in the Pictures Collection?

MADSEN: The photographs conflate types of space — interior and exterior, for example — so what happens is a simultaneous implosion/explosion. I think of it as queering space and taking it as your own, transforming it into a place where “fits” and “misfits” can coexist. They’re psychological spaces that suggest possibility but also admit failure.

It’s funny, going back to the ways in which each of your pieces have this dialogue with each other… I’m standing in the Pictures Collection among aisle after aisle of picture files. So there’s a very direct tie to the function of this part of library and to what your work is doing. The sculptures in the window announce or anticipate what happens within the walls of the Pictures Collection. Did you take photos of the library while you were coming up with the idea for the installation?

MADSEN: I did take photos, but then I spent a lot of time going through the image folders in the Collection. This grid piece shows a selection of images that I think of as portraits, in which I try to make visible something that’s usually invisible.

In your case the idea of a portrait implies a relation to the objects you choose to photograph. You humanize or anthropomorphize the objects. You’ve talked about carrying your collection of objects around for over two decades moving with them, as part of a family unit. So it makes a lot of sense that you would document them as portraits.

MADSEN: It’s also a documentation of excess and hyper-consumption.

But I don’t feel you’re making a value judgment against accumulation or consumption.

MADSEN: Absolutely. I strongly believe that angry diatribe is a failed strategy. You can’t reach people by screaming at them. If you can engage people through looking closely, then you might have a chance at a conversation. But I did want to see just how far I could push the portraits without them becoming too baroque. There’s a Neo-Pop-Baroque aspect to them, they’re so excessive.

We’ll there’s a photogravure of a tiara downstairs!

[laughing]

MADSEN: That’s the queen in all of us.

The post Barbara Madsen and Arezoo Moseni in Conversation with Eric Sutphin appeared first on artcritical.

April 23 to May 24, 2015
327 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie Street)
New York, 212 375 8043

There is a tendency in contemporary art which conflates facts with content. Too often artists will point to this or that and shout “Hey! Look at this thing I know about, isn’t it clever?!” On their surface, Louise Despont’s drawings organize themselves loosely around Balinese rites and rituals. But Despont’s renderings are closer to fetishism than to ritual, less a sacrament to the unruly gods and more a testament to an artist’s own will to succeed. By way of control and precision, the artist converts those unfamiliar or “exotic” mannerisms she finds compelling into a set of data: linguistic, sonic and seismologic — enveloped in an air of the bespoke. The work’s immaculateness is hard to surmount, it begs to be prodded, poked at and taken apart.

Elegance in art is tricky. It can come to stand for good taste, which in turn suggests a classed position. Bali is Despont’s Tahiti. And from its verdant shores and pumice beaches she distills elegant images more Hermes than Noa Noa. In her fourth solo exhibition with Nicelle Beauchene, the artist demonstrates her pitch-perfect technical skills and impeccable design sensibility. Her vocabulary is rich but affected: she draws heavily from South Asian textile design as well as antique maps; the works are robust, though she approaches them with the delicacy of a miniature. Offering in Appeasement (all 2014) is the most luxurious drawing here.. It is a roughly symmetrical composition of tropical fronds, stylized vegetal forms and rosettes. Despont’s artworks owe something to Tropicalia but without its zeal and musicality. Her color is subtle: soft rose, silvery green, myriad grey and inflections of pale gold and blue unify in a constellation of shapes that recall a medieval tapestry’s threadbare surface. Despont is drawing upon the local tradition of making offerings to the gods and goddesses who preside over the geologically volatile Sunda Strait. This marine passage is situated between Java and Borneo and was the site of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa which killed more than 36,000 people. The eruption is cited as creating the loudest sound ever recorded in human history. The proliferation of lines which overlay Despont’s imagery correlate to the sonic activity of Krakatoa, or “the sound heard around the world.”

Though she utilizes stencils and hand-drawn grids, the work, over time, reveals unexpected buoyancy as a result of the artist’s uniformly light touch and muted palette. An image of two volcanoes drawn in shades of silver and grey appears in Anak Krakatau (or Child of Krakatau). The erupting volcanoes flank an island set within a stylized sea. At left, a text box reads: “anak krakatau, indonesia, sunda strait, emerged 1928.”

An entire constellation of narrative is embedded in Despont’s drawings: travel, ecological disaster, an interest in craftsmanship,colonialism and architecture. But the means by which she attempts to delve into the region’s multivalent history instead stylizes this very history into a kind of ornamentation. In this way, one might say that Despont is participating in an archetypal colonial narrative of mining an Eastern culture for its aesthetic and conceptual riches then dashing back to the West to capitalize. Two of the most successful works in the exhibition are Full Moons and Volcanic Centers. Both of these drawings show less literalism than the larger, more ambitious pieces. It seems that, in these, Despont has metabolized the ideas she is using and instead of illustrating events, she lets these events and ideas play out through the design and drawing. Another aspect here is that there is less filled-in space which lets the warm, rosy finish of the antique paper do its own work. Portions of frosty green and chalk white heighten the surface’s character.

The Sound Heard Around the World is a stylized depiction of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa rendered in shades of cool grey. Again, the event is flattened out and made decorative. Bands and cords radiate out from the volcano’s center, as if to illustrate the sonic aftershock of the eruption. Even the volcanoes she depicts are rendered like plumes — ebullient and decorative. It is evident when looking at these drawings that Despont gives care and attention, and this might be the work’s real subject.

The post Eruption: Louise Despont’s Colorful, Vivid Drawings appeared first on artcritical.

NOAH DILLON: So why did you choose this painting?

ERIC SUTPHIN: I chose it in part because it’s personal. When I was pretty young — before I ever had any kind of idea to be a critic or to write about art — I watched Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006), and he talked about this painting. He claimed that Manet had left this corner piece of sail completely bare and it was just raw canvas coming through, so that it was raw canvas doubling as the actual sail.

When I saw the painting in person I realized that’s not true — it’s painted. And that inaccuracy imprinted this painting in my mind. It made me suspicious that he never saw this painting in person, and that perhaps he was talking from a reproduction of the painting. It’s an interesting painting for a lot of reasons and it’s atypical of Impressionism. It’s actually one year after the Bouguereau painting I’d originally wanted to talk about.

I think it’s important that you chose this as a substitute, because even if you think this is atypical of Impressionism, that Bouguereau painting was his last before the Impressionists arrived and pushed him (and academic painting generally) aside in a big way.

Bouguereau was sort of the archetype of the enemy to the Impressionists. And almost 150 years later both artists are in the same museum. I felt a little embarrassed picking the Bouguereau, because there’s still a little baggage. Not that Boating feels particularly radical, but it shows how the field has expanded so that anything goes. And I can simultaneously get pleasure out of this and the other thing, but they’re so far out of context that both paintings mean something completely different from when they were done. And I think the Bouguereau is more complex than this painting, but I think that this painting, right now, has a lot of implications.

Standing here, looking at it, I realize there’s no horizon. That might not mean anything explicitly, but implicitly it must. I recently drafted a review of “The Forever Now” at MoMA, and I was easing my way into ideas introduced by Paul Virilio in Open Sky (2008), about the disappearance of the horizon and what that means. It’s complicated, but right now I’m realizing that this guy is, in a sense, backed into a corner. He has no privacy; a ubiquitous eye has invaded his personal space and he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the boat.

Or he could disappear into the amorphous, blue nothingness behind him.

The image is basically space-less, all foreground, with everything pushed to the front, on the surface. It’s completely immediate. There’s no pretense; there’s no allegory. That’s really the crux of the Impressionists’ objection to the academics and salon painters, was that it’s all allegory, and here there’s none of that.

In that regard, this upper right corner isn’t raw canvas, but it is just a grey space carved out there, which runs contrary to painting conventions. It’s an abstraction of the superficial framing of the image, along with the blue that you were talking about, which takes up most of the canvas. You’ve got the blue of the water, the blue of his hat, the blue of her dress — everything else is additional to that primacy. It also strikes me that, thinking about now, when everything is sort of up for grabs, in a similar way you’ve got this representational scene that these incidents of abstraction interrupt. They’re reflexive and disruptive, without appearing to call attention to themselves. That admixture of approaches has only become more open.

This is another reason I wanted to look at Boating: it’s a very severe painting. It’s all about the composition, about the negative shapes. And he’s framed it in such a way that every bit — even this little wedge of blue at the top right corner — becomes like a series of quadrilaterals. And then you see the portrait. That’s what the tension is — that the portrait is the center and you always come back to the guy’s face. But it’s ominous. He doesn’t want you looking at him; he’s tired of being looked at.

He’s responding to the painter. He’s not a sitter and he’s not someone in a scene, he’s got an indeterminate relationship to Manet.

And in the absence of allegory, you’re frozen there: the artist has stepped back, the painting’s finished, and it’s us. It’s uncanny in that sense that the face is so central to the painting, so we’re locked into a deadlock of looking at this person. His companion is almost there just for Manet to be playful when he paints her dress. I don’t know what that says about social relations between men and women in late 19th century painting, but it sounds like an opening to an uncomfortable issue. And while that’s important, it also seems tertiary to the composition and the sort of gridlock that the viewer gets into with the central figure. I think at first encounter there’s a sense of tranquility and you’re in this nebulous sea blue. But that slips away as you look at it, and you’re left with angles and the aggressive of his stare. And it becomes kind of uncomfortable.

There’s also the well-known affection the Impressionists had for Japanese prints but I think there are some compositional issues that are equally important here two things: it anticipates the camera view, the way Degas did, but also the disappearance of the horizon, which is maybe not so radical, but a fusion of eastern pictorial sense and with western developments in optical technology.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about this painting is that the rope was originally much farther left, buy was changed, leaving this pentimento. It’s a curiosity, to me, how that affects its appearance and how it’s read.

Well now it’s all I can see. The palimpsest of the movement of the rope is really weird, and the way that sort of imaginatively interacts with the scene. It becomes sort of like Cubist movement where you see two ropes simultaneously, like Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which inadvertently adds to the aggressiveness.

Is there a way in which this particular museum frames this painting for you? Or even where it is in the museum?

Well, in this room in particular it seems out of place, out of step with its time. It appears to belong to no time or era. Obviously it’s from a milieu and there’s a long tradition of these boat leisure scenes. But some of the other radical steps that Manet was making, pictorially, anticipate tactics that fully found their place 50 years later. It doesn’t really belong to its Impressionist counterparts, other than the handling of her dress and the fleeting quality of his brushstroke. But the rigidity of the composition feels very classical and it has this characteristic triangular golden ratio form. So in that sense it belongs to Bouguereau and the mannered history that preceded it.

How does this find itself in the writing you do and the art you’re attracted to? Or how does that relate to how or why you enjoy art?

I feel hopelessly pedestrian in choosing an Impressionist painting to talk about. So the question becomes how to talk about connecting this to contemporary concerns. I’ve been feeling depressed about a lot of contemporary art. But I’ve been looking at a lot of contemporary figurative work and I find it can be useful to think about that stuff in relation to strong figurative work such as this.

I’m always looking for a way to relate directly with a work of art: How does this work make me feel? What inside of me does the work incite? It connects to the things I’ve been thinking about with regard to contemporary vision. And these are all, for me, half-cooked ideas; I’m still working it out. This painting is not an end-all, be-all artwork for me. But it’s an important painting in a line of thinking I’m trying to explore with regard to how I take images, what I expect or what keeps me looking at something.

This painting feels rather stripped in a way, and I think our identification with some kind of subject, a human subject, is an important aspect of this painting. And it brings me into that by way of all of the vision games Manet’s playing. The Impressionists spent a lot of time, I think, considering vision. And sure it’s been explored, but I think it remains important. You brought that up when I was writing about “The Forever Now,” talking about light and surface, and you asked, “Isn’t that what the Impressionists were doing?” And that made me think, “You’re right, they were.” So maybe that’s what brought me back to this particular painting: the question of “What were they doing?” And I guess it comes back to the camera, which is just so… ugh.

[laughing]

But it’s interesting to see that problem as it was born and how it’s now complicated, in another way, by the prevalence of cameras and of photographic images.

When you spend a lot of time thinking about how contemporary vision is shifting as a result of the ubiquity of screens, lenses, cameras, all these things, it can feel a little scary, vertiginous. It’s a consolation to know that these guys were also at that same precipice. A significant difference between Bouguereau and Manet is the matter of vision and seeing. The two artists are representative of two types of seeing and a shift in the way that people perceive images. It’s not incidental: space like this becomes physiological, and by closing in on this scene Manet was both internalizing and depicting a new paradigm in perception.

That points back to the question of was Simon Schama looking at a photograph, or was he looking at the thing face to face?

I’ve looked at this painting at least 20 times, and the first time I saw it, I remembered the Schama video, which on the screen you could buy that it’s just raw canvas, and there was no way to verify or argue against it. It was there and I could see it, with an authority telling me that’s the case. That’s a fundamental issue for the authority the critic and their ethical responsibility. Somebody like Schama — who has television shows, who’s a populist and an entertainer — can make you see things: seeing is believing.

[laughing]

But I can go and look and see if they’ve done their due diligence. The disparity I experienced with the Schama video calls into question everything else I’ve ever seen. Do I have to see it in person before I buy it? I buy everything, I believe so much. I think we all do.

But so there’s this painting and in another room there’s another Manet painting: Lady with a Parrot (1866). It’s very gray and sort of claustrophobic, and it’s a little like two Manets: this is the Manet of the future, whereas that’s the Manet of the salon. So having this here you can see the work and corroborate it not only with its description, but with other works by the artist and by their contemporaries.
Eric Sutphin is a painter and writer based in New York City. Print and online publications include Art in America, artcritical.com, Painting is Dead, On Verge, American Artist Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He has been a visiting critic at the Delaware College of Art and Design and The School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include “Detlef Aderhold: Null Komma Null,” “Berliner Liste” and “Rosemarie Beck: Paintings from the 60’s” at the National Arts Club. He is currently writing a biography of post-war American painter Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003). Eric received a BFA from Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an MFA from The School of Visual arts in 2014.

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“Nothing is usually opposed to something; but the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something; and so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing.”
-G. F. W. Hegel

“Occasionally a painting calls out from beyond its surface and asks us for our attention. The asking is polite enough, like a meeting between two strangers.”
-Eric Sutphin

Hegel is not necessarily the kind of philosopher that comes to my mind when I look at or think about art, nor have I ever heard his arguments used as the subject of a conversation during an exhibition opening. However, at the opening of “Null Komma Null” — the German painter Detlef E. Aderhold’s first solo show in New York — the term “aesthetic” circled within the gallery space. When used in more common, quotidian sense, “aesthetic” usually applies to a statement that is “concerned with beauty, art and the understanding of beautiful things,” or describes something that is “made in an artistic way and beautiful to look at.”[1] The notion of “aesthetics” consequently connotes a positive perceptual judgment (as opposed to its negative sibling of “anesthetics”) and evaluates a surface, form or arrangement that our eyes can linger on. Aderhold’s colorful paintings — which merge figuration and abstraction, and display a rich, often quite ambiguous texture and tactility — are surely beautiful to look at, yet most of them speak through a quality that calls from beyond a linen surface stretched onto a frame. They are aesthetic not in a common, but rather natural sense of the term.

When Hegel presented his ”Lectures on Aesthetics” in Berlin between 1820 and 1829, he grounded his subject in “the wide realm of the beautiful,” which he restricted to fine art, and understood aesthetic not as a qualitative statement, but as the science of sensation and feeling; while art presented the means to portray the human essence, at first in a physical form, and later “a more spiritual form.”[2] In his view, art consequently reveals or embodies ideas — things intangible and abstract by their very nature. Independent from whether one agrees with Hegel or not (not to speak about whether one fully understands him) there is something genuine in both his notions of aesthetic and art, and therefore they closely relate to Adernold’s paintings and artistic practice, because Aderhold’s work seeks an encounter that is based on visceral and sensitive understanding — preceding judgment and preconceptions.

The exhibition’s title has its origin in a small square painting recalling a fragmented female face. A pair of bright red lips, slightly off-center and enticingly opened to reveal the tips of an upper row of teeth, is joined by a single, dislocated eyeball staring from the upper right of the canvas. There are no lids, not even a hint that could ease the viewer from this constant gaze. However disturbing this impression might be, it is simultaneously calmed (or distracted) by overlapping, translucent patterns that fill the painting’s remaining space. Washed out swathes of mint green, soft pink and lemon yellow are joined by cloudlike formations of black and grey. This well-orchestrated visual chaos, of seemingly no end or real beginning except from the boundaries of the canvas, can be understood as a metonym for what Adernold’s work touches upon — affects — and is further emphasized by the work’s title. Null Komma Null (2011) translates as “zero point zero” and emphasizes Adnerold’s conscious decision to deprive his viewers of any linguistic and therefore logical or intellectual point of reference.

A similar kind of felt, visual noise is present in two other artworks. City 2 (2008) and Makes My Eyes Rain (2014) are large paintings of geometric forms that recall cityscapes, fragmented maps, perhaps even ruins. Even if Makes My Eyes Rain is more figurative in its nature, both images depend on and are ultimately held together by their dripping, fluidly colored backgrounds. The layers, stains and marks dissect, highlight and conceal, and thereby allude to a state of precariousness like a fading or incomplete memory, or the residue of a dream. The Force Take series (2012) instead confronts the viewer with lines and layers of color deprived of any figurative symbolism or “objective” representation. According to Eric Sutphin, who curated the show, affective states are the unifying conceptual principle in Aderhold’s practice, materializing through the formal element of the stain. These stains are often made of coffee or thinned paint, that appears to be acrylic, watercolors and ink— they emerge like diffuse bodies and bubbles, obliterate and allow new (two-dimensional) connections to be drawn, or rather seen. A notion of the psyche resonates within these paintings and ties into Adernold’s background as a psychotherapist.

In fact, Aufriss (2007) is a large collage taken from charts, graphs, illustration and notes, each of which originally provided maps of the human mind by documenting studies on how memory changes or is affected by the experience of negative and positive life-changing events. Considering the work’s systematic arrangement of numeric and textual sequences, its grid-like structure, as well as its use of information as aesthetic material, Aufriss recalls the work of Hanne Darboven. However, this complex drawing fulfills a kind of key function, not only for the show, but also for Adernold’s practice: the signs, numbers and schemes ultimately display not unrelated forms, but affective states that are reduced to or are encoded within indices. The surface then becomes a fragile façade for indiscernible chains of information, for something that is held within, somewhere between the mind and the guts.

[1] http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/aesthetic_1

[2]Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), xiv, 3-4.

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Robert Janitz: Oriental Lumber at Meyer Riegger
September 17 through October 25, 2014
Friedrichstraße 235 (between Hedemannstraße and Rahel-Varnhagen Promenade)
Berlin, +49 30 31566567

For his first solo exhibition with Meyer Riegger, Robert Janitz shows a selection of his three favored forms: a plant sculpture made from cut sheet metal, a suite of portraits of the backs of heads and a selection of large format abstractions made from layered paint, wax and flour. Far from being disparate or eccentric modes, these three archetypal forms actually gather themselves around figuration as a unifying idea. Janitz work is indebted to de Kooning’s early black-and-white abstractions as well as the canvas-works of the Actionists from the 1960s. “Oriental Lumber” is an eccentric exhibition that shows an artist who flits back and forth between serious abstract painting, wordplay and dada-like witticism.

Janitz has cited his plant sculptures as a Duchampian gesture but in the context of this exhibition, Margiela Fontäna (all work 2014), seems more of an ironic commentary on glossy, “finish fetish” Minimalist sculpture. It is larger than an average human and placed casually in the middle of the gallery as a houseplant would be. Its sleek and polished surface makes it something of a decoration, though its slightly sagging silver fronds give it something of a comic, Oldenbergian character. The towering plant stands in for refined taste and a pristine sensibility, a possible counterpoint to the comparatively messy paintings.

On one wall of the main gallery, five paintings were hung close together, four of these were “portraits,” and the fifth was an abstraction the same size and format as the portraits. A messy grid of chalky white on black, Proprement Dit hung there among the portraits like an imposter, daring us to draw distinctions between it and its representational counterparts. The heads are amalgamations of coiled brush marks, calico surfaces and impasto patches. These link us to the abstractions by way of brushstroke — but far from being personifications, the portraits are empty signifiers. They are featureless, generalized and flattened. One possible reading is that they conjure the anonymity of urban life. In Berlin or New York, we leave our homes and studios and file into the conveyor belt of faceless heads: the back of the head is in effect a “blank canvas” or a space for projection. The anterior portions of the brain are the oldest and most primitive. Our basest necessities are addressed by the function of the hypothalamus, the brain stem (the brain’s houseplant?). In Audrey Hepburn as Dr. Double aka The Ornithologist Janitz clues us into the projection game that he is setting up. The two-shapes-and-a-background that comprise this small black and orange canvas could be a Hollywood icon, a cartoon character or a bespectacled bird-watcher (a surrogate for a compulsive gazer). Without access to an identity the surfaces become what they really are: combinations of shapes, textures and colors. Janitz puts the infrastructure of the portrait in place but it merely dangles over the paintings’ surface like a thin veil.

The remaining walls of the gallery showed Janitz large-scale abstract paintings. These works are physical insofar as they reveal both the action and the substance of their making. But theirs is a kind of physicality that is not seductive or rewarding. We can see that Janitz moves the viscous flour-wax-paint solution across a painted layer with a very wide house painter’s brush. But this is perhaps more of a commentary on utility (what good is a painting, anyway?) than it is about experiencing pleasure or delight in the painted surface. The surface of a painting such as Rhythmische Klangformen: Eine Studie ends up appearing more like an X-ray than an action painting. This association is aided along by the interplay between the jet-black painted ground and the yellowish paste-wash that is thinly applied in muscular vertical swathes. The cords of build-up that run up and down the painting’s surface in wide intervals creates a sequence of bone-like partitions in which blank, grey surfaces are carved out. These “empty” zones in the paintings are something like hollowed out reliquaries or porticos where one might insert an icon (think back to Audrey Hepburn’s cameo) or an image of a saint. At times, the striated towers that fill these surfaces appear like processions of solemn, hooded figures.

Janitz titled the show after the hardware store in Bushwick where he shops. He is interested in workmanlike materials, ungraceful products like glue and wax. These materials have become Janitz’s stock and trade and when he began to use them there was a sense of discovery and experimentation in his work. I get the impression that Janitz would like to move beyond these washy/pasty paintings into a form that combines his interests in craftsmanship, figuration and sculpture — but here he has settled to show three types of work that each make use of one or more of these elements. Anachronistically, the work here points us away from painting and into the realm of performance. This exhibition is Janitz’s first in his native Germany, so it makes sense that he would exhibit a cross section of these varied works. He flirts with relational aesthetics with his Oriental Lumber, a custom-designed pair of Nikes that he wears in the press image for the show. The sneakers are a fitting metaphor for a restless artist who seems to need to move around a lot.

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