GABRIELE EVERTZ: EXALTATION
Minus Space, 16 Main Street, Suite A, DUMBO, minusspace.com

SUSAN ROTHENBERG
Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, Lower East Side, speronewestwater.com

MICHAEL ST. JOHN: DEMOCRACY PORTRAITS
team (gallery, inc.), 83 Grand Street, Soho, teamgal.com
ASHES/ASHES 56 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, ashesonashes.com

DAN WALSH
Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, Chelsea, paulacoopergallery.com

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November 9 to December 23, 2017
83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster streets
New York City, teamgal.com

In a cliché of the desire for art objects, sometimes found in the critical literature, the beholder wants to touch or caress or lick the work, especially if it is a painting. This lust is often mentioned with erotic fervor (or its pretense) as if describing some profound, taboo-breaking magnetism. After all, contact with artworks is prohibited: they are too sacred or fragile for such casual molestation or frottage, even by a, like, serious admirer. We police ourselves against such fantasies, desires, but that physical and moral defacement of the image also seems to be the greatest compliment that can be given. At Team, the recent exhibition of paintings by London-based artist Dawn Mellor confuses these responses.

Called “Sirens,” the show is Mellor’s first solo with the gallery since 2008, and consists of 20 oil paintings, all made in 2016, each 32 x 24 inches and depicting a policewoman from a British TV series, such as Gillian Anderson playing Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson on The Fall (2013 – 16). Almost all of them are named for the character they depict, with the actor noted parenthetically. (Two are simply called Unnamed Extra.) Consequently, the exhibition’s title cleverly refers to both the bleating of alarms and the dangerously seductive allure of Mellor’s subjects. She is also working on an artist’s book by the same name.

Mellor’s painting moves between delicate and crude, depending on her need. In places, her affection for these characters is fraught. Their images are defaced—erotically, absurdly. Mellor’s career has included a lot of juvenilia, such as drawings made of the Jacksons when she was a teenager, and stiff paintings of celebrities that have been zealously roughed up with smeared paint and obscene personal notes. The paintings in this show follow a few patterns of disfigurement: each character reduced to a bust immersed in something resembling an apocalyptic flood, brightly colored lingerie-like coverings stretched over her head. The paint is candy-ish, often bright and smirking. The veils in Police Constable Donna Windsor (Verity Rushworth) and Detective Superintendent Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) both echo the subjects’ high-visibility safety-yellow jackets. Police Constable Ruby Buxton (Nicola Alexis) has its heroine with pink fishnet over her head, purple lipstick, and similar colors reflecting, sunset-like, in the deluge around her.

The protagonist is nearly untouched in Police Constable Jamilla Blake (Lolita Chakrabarti), leaning hard against a blue brick wall as icy water rises against her. Her face is a little reddened, but otherwise she is untouched by the growths, injuries, hallucinations, and other violations to the fantasy world Mellor uses.

These characters don’t menace. Cops are embodiments of abstract state authority still sometimes referred to with the colloquial metonym “The Man.” Mellor’s policewomen are pretty acutely objects of desire, whatever their demeanor in the original shows. Here, with a deluge rising, icicles forming, bodies defaced by scribbles and scrawls and suggestions of bondage, they’re threatened, vulnerable. They invite TV spectation’s secret thrill in watching the attractive and imperiled heroine skillfully turn the tables, a recurring trope of many police dramas, giving an audience all sorts of satisfaction in seeing archetypal fantasies play out: of female empowerment, female endangerment, of good’s triumph over evil only after struggle, of the rhetorical power/authority of truth and justice over chaos and irrational violence.

A queer woman, Mellor’s relationship with her subjects assumes suggestive valence, a desirous gaze. But it’s a conflicted one, as well: In this era when the social gap between the police and the policed is so visibly vast, expressing desire for a cop is a loaded act. For Mellor it has always been, not only for the erotics. She has described ways that police and military recruiters would trawl working class schools in Manchester during her youth. “Often it was those who did not expect high level academic achievements who would abandon study for job security, a pension and a civil service role,” Mellor says. It was a good job with benefits for working people.

“People in the police, though,” she continues, “would often hide the fact they were police officers from neighbors and, for example, not go home in uniform, because other working class people also condemned police.” And now her work arrives at a time well suited to be seen, as police, and the sexual dynamics of those with power and those without, and racism have all come under intense scrutiny, and the public is hot to have some real and/or symbolic comeuppance, and maybe some role reversal, too, on the way to greater parity.

“Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, bringing out their inherent magic,” writes Michael Taussig, in the introduction to his book Defacement (1999). It flatters the subject by paying regard with violation, as Mellor does by her adoring vandalism, or her vandalism of adored subjects. It emphasizes both terrifying power and absurdity, earnestly recognizing authority by trying to negate that authority, or to cast it out. It attempts to drive the cop out of one’s head, or into one’s arms and mouth.

The post The Policewoman Inside Our Heads: Dawn Mellor at Team appeared first on artcritical.

June 23 to August 5, 2016
83 Grand Street (between Wooster and Greene streets)
New York, 212 279 9219

The same day “Golden Eggs” opened at Team Gallery, the UK voted for the economic insanity of leaving the European Union, following on another economic insanity of austerity, privatization, and cheerful steroidal encouragement of the financial sector. The vote to leave was, in part, a severely misguided reaction against wealth concentration and the technocratic institutions of Brussels, Frankfurt and London, which have for decades segregated citizens and underserved them, or even put a boot to their neck. “Golden Eggs,” with work by 10 artists organized by Alissa Bennett, performs a similar kind of disaffection as those referendum voters, though framed by the analytic reflectivity of Marxism (probably at least a little sardonically) instead of the reactionary know-nothing populism that just made a basket case of Britain, that has threatened other European nations for almost a decade, and which is threatening the US election.

Bennett described the show to me as a kind of answer to Art Basel, which had concluded five days earlier. That fair was, this year, seen as something of a test of the market’s continuing hypertrophy, coming on the heels of an apparently lackluster run of auctions. And the outlook was judged to be good. Wasn’t everyone very glad that the party is likely to continue?

A large red-and-white painting by Gardar Eide Einarsson, The Next Recession and Where to Hide (2016), summed up the mood of the show succinctly: a giant arrow hurtling toward the lower right corner, imitating a graph of a crashing global market. It’s a brusque, cool image that invites both terror and dispassionate admiration. It’s appropriated from a January 2016 cover of Time Magazine, headlined with the painting’s title in fearful, capitalized letters. Einarsson’s painting excludes the original text, which had also ominously crowed about China and boasted a clever report from Davos, meaning the World Economic Forum, another Swiss confab for market makers, then congregating leaders and representatives of the most powerful businesses and nations on Earth to discuss economic policy, as they’ve done for 45 years. Although the meeting intends to help guide capitalism toward the benefit of all, it has prevented neither the greatest worldwide consolidation of wealth in almost 100 years, nor the costly, global, economic supercatastrophe that’s been playing out since 2007. In fact, it’s probably done a great deal to enable those twin phenomena. Einarsson’s bolting arrow isn’t predicted by or aimed at Davos, but is cast by Davos; it’s everyone else trying to find where to hide.

The people at Basel and Davos can be seen as the market’s invisible hands, though perhaps “occluded hands” would be a better name, since although many of the participants at each conference are certainly recognizable, there’s almost zero transparency in what they do. Hans Haacke’s kinetic sculpture, The Invisible Hand of The Market (2009), anoints the whole show, hanging high on one wall. It’s a large box, with the title written out like a billboard. In the center, a large, open hand tilts from side to side, its innards ticking metronomically. The disembodied hand greets, waves, grabs, swats, remains out of reach, and dominates. It quotes Adam Smith, capitalism’s godfather, and his proposition that the private vices of individuals can, in their self-interest, invisibly, almost magically, develop into public benefits. However, Smith was speculating about the disembodied power of crowds, not the secret pillaging of oligarchs. And what is the social benefit of a global art-as-investment frenzy remains unclear, even more so when vast quantities of artworks bought in Switzerland remain there, sealed in indefinite storage at the Geneva Freeport, constructed to sequester collections and avoid taxes, and maybe trade and deal and hide. Given bad incentives — such as those that reward opacity in the art market, or that repay, with taxpayer money, dumb, massively over-leveraged financial bets — private vices may instead yield results which are simply vicious, yield a market whose aims and procedures are warped to favor wealth accumulation rather than innovative cultural production or social good. Karl Marx asserts that this is capitalism’s inevitable trajectory, not merely an accidental flaw.

Alex Bag, in Coven Services (2004), shows what such market forces look like as products for ordinary consumers (not citizens). Her video strings together several ad parodies, with interludes consisting of segments from a published sex tape starring the heiress Paris Hilton, shot in infrared, so that she and her paramour are rendered in green and black. This is riffed on by Bag, in clips where she plays PFC Jessica Lynch in green Army fatigues, selling Halliburton; a green witch named Eli Lilly dosing nubile children with Prozac and Satanism; and by a guy in a night-vision segment pimping the “warm, sticky infojaculate” pumped to consumers by AOL-Time Warner. She weaves a narrative of the interconnectedness (read: “collusion”) of the military, politics, capital, and entertainment in the construction of a totalizing ideology of consumption and obeisance.

Three text-based works — by Barbara Kruger, Jessica Diamond and Bjarne Melgaard — sneer at the developed world’s socioeconomic turmoil, bringing to the surface a primary contradiction. Diamond’s wall drawing declares “I HATE BUSINESS,” which is the product of her own business. Two prints by Kruger, wonder, respectively, about the relationship between being successful and feeling “FAKE,” and “IS BLIND IDEALISM REACTIONARY?” Melgaard snipes, “THE WORLD iS FULL OF RiCH CORRUPT CUNTS.” But his oeuvre is known for its ostentatious kind of cuntiness and opulence, and here is also included one of his sculptures, mounted with beauty products and a Brioni jacket. Embroidery over the interior breast pocket, conspicuously visible, indicates that it was made specially for Melgaard; I have no clue what a bespoke coat costs, but suffice to say its retail price is at least several thousand dollars. None of these artists would be considered rich from the vantage of patrons in the transnational capitalist class who fund so much of the art market. But, looking upward, they seem rich, and it can feel really impossible for emerging artists to gain purchase among such established figures. The art market, like other markets for other labors, is built in such a way as to suppress or exclude the emergent and retain the privileges of the already established, even the blasphemous establishment.

It’s tempting (and probably necessary) to extend this kind of critique, but it also smacks of the same myopia that always infects dogmatic demands for ideological rigor, or at least for the appearance of absolutism. In 2011, during the Occupy protests, TV personalities jeered at the protesters for leaving rallies to withdraw cash from Bank of America ATMs for lunch or whatever, as if the protesters’ coerced interaction with corporate behemoths was in some way hypocritical to that movement’s purpose. Einarsson, Haacke, Bag, Melgaard, Kruger, Diamond, and other artists here, as well as Bennett, have a license to criticize money and power. The meaning of their work, as pointed as it may be, is often secondary to its value for collectors. If the insults lobbed at capitalism provide good return on investment, then the market will reward its hecklers. These artists didn’t choose this, but they are illustrative. They’re collected at Basel by the kinds of people meeting at Davos, and they make a living. But Davos and Basel have true power, not them.

Marx, elaborated by ideologists such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, wrote of sharpening contradictions as a propulsion towards the collapse of capitalism (a longtime fantasy not likely to be realized anytime soon). As can be expected, those forces and contradictions play themselves out in every aspect of culture, from factories to studios. The depredation of middle and working class nest eggs, combined with the distribution of golden parachutes to speculators who were supposed to lose under the economic laws they had championed, has driven the contradictions to extremes. Will they crack? What happens then?

The post Encompassing Hostility: “Golden Eggs” at Team Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

January 14 to February 28, 2016
47 Wooster Street (between Broome and Grand streets)
New York, 212 279 9219

A lot of time and many outraged words have been expended for the indignities of Stefan Simchowitz, the LA-based art dealer, hypeman, and cultural entrepreneur. Simchowitz has promoted himself as an innovator who opens and connects new segments of the laity with future art market stars, challenging gallery orthodoxy. It’s been pointed out — by Jerry Saltz, Christopher Glazek, Dan Duray, Marion Maneker, etc. — that those assertions are nonsense. The fretting he provokes is unbelievable; it’s plain that he’s a fairly typical private dealer whose main distinction is his flamboyant narcissism. But that doesn’t stop him from being portrayed as demonic. He’s a bit of a scapegoat who could easily be substituted with any number of hucksters and jingoists whose misdeeds raise less fury in the arts: various dealers, advisors, auction houses, fairs.

This whole zeitgeist comes under scrutiny in Alex Bag’s video The Van (Redux)* (2015), now showing as her first solo exhibition at Team Gallery.^[1] The video is a sequel to Bag’s The Van (2001) and features the reprise of Leroy LeLoup, a shady art world pitchman played by Bag’s brother Damien in a buffoonish wig and a weasly New Jersey accent. LeLoup has arrived at Miami’s Institute for Contemporary Art (where the video was filmed and first shown), delivering Bag’s original eponymous van to be exhibited there. Killing many small birds with a single obscene stone and a lot of grubby advantage taking, LeLoup has three very young children with him and has installed them within the museum as unauthorized artists in residence, promoting them as emerging stars. He’s followed by a documentary crew as they record his dissimulating, his appropriation of museum storage spaces to nap and screw escorts, and his drive to steal, steal, steal: food from an ICA employee fridge, packing materials, intellectual property, a case of Tito’s Vodka, Cartier gift bags, and even silverware from event caterers.^[2]

Along with some Miami-type dance music, the whole thing is backed with excerpts from the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which is apt, as the mindless cutthroat LeLoup wanders ICA’s hallways, bathes in a sink, and solicits art students. He often looks feral, as if the institution is inducing madness. LeLoup’s a dark character, and has, apparently, led a very sordid life in the period between the original video and this new episode, serving time in prison for a variety of offenses. He’s cagey about the specifics of his crimes, though after watching him for half an hour, it’s pretty certain he’s capable of serious moral atrocities.

Still, it’s all really, really funny. The kids are goofy, the editing and timing are tight, the absurdist humor is titillating, Damien Bag is disgustingly farcical. Asked if he sees himself as a father figure to the children in his neglectful custody, he replies earnestly, “I like to think of myself more as a majority shareholder in each of them,” and he’s literally got liens to prove it. LeLoup, in fact, goes out of his way to remind the children, often, “I’m not your dad,” as he coerces them to make art for him to sell, sometimes threatening them, sometimes plying them with promises of trips to Disney World, sometimes coercively stuffing them with sugar. LeLoup gives one kid a printout of several paintings by Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, and others, and instructs him to copy them onto a square canvas, described as “the perfect size for Instagram.”

The barely disguised references might not be appreciable to people who are totally uninterested in venal art world scuttlebutt, but they’re basically all barbs aimed at Simchowitz, who is known for targeting young artists — including Murillo and Smith — and has been accused of taking advantage of them, manipulating their work, and treating them as junk bonds rather than people.^[3] Simchowitz promotes art, his fashions and reading lists, and his family on Instagram, and he’s built a brand admired by a lot of people, including novice collectors and various art dilettantes. In The Van, LeLoup was a much more broadly drawn figure: an art-dealing grifter with a dubious gallery, taking his engenues to the Armory. He was an everyman of the dangers posed by art’s sales force. So the precise comparison to Simchowitz might arrest LeLoup in a mythos that lays all the anxieties of art workers in the lap of one person, and lets a whole lot of better-veiled people off the hook. One has to wonder why Simchowitz catches so much flack from critics and artists, while equivalent abuses (or worse) by other institutions typically receive little outcry.

The video isn’t about Simchowitz per se. He serves as a synecdoche for art dealers as vampiric specters. Although his business is similar to other art world hustlers, Simchowitz seems to be criticized largely for his visibility, which many apparently to find completely obnoxious. (And for his accomplishment, too, at having ridden a profitable trend in the desirability of dull, repetitious painting, though show me a successful dealer who hasn’t.) Much of the carping looks like policing of the art market’s self presentation. One big difference between Simchowitz and others in his class is his narcissistic public affect. In addition to his own online publicity, he’s done a lot of press and he lists his personal contact information on his website. He responded when I solicited him for a reaction to Bag’s video. Few other art dealers, gallerists or advisors do stuff like that.^[4]

Simchowitz offered first that he has the utmost respect for Team and that he’s done a lot of business with them. He was by turns both frank and mythologizing: he said he isn’t doing anything much different from other dealers, but that he is challenging powerful institutions and pressing for radical changes in the way they operate. (What those changes are seems unclear.) He would have preferred it if Bag had contacted him directly, I suppose wanting her to hear him talk rather than make an artwork. Unsurprisingly, he thinks very little of the video. He finds it “Insulting […] a dumb and greedy caricature.” And he thought the comparison between himself (a fashionable, fit guy from South Africa and the UK) to LeLoup (an American grotesquerie) was kind of monstrous.

The lecherous dealer stereotype is an old complaint, and has been satirized especially well, I think, by performance and video artists in the televisual era.^[5] All of these share the same wretched comedy of manners ethos of the contemptible-but-essential intrusion of the market on the creator, of the way its avarice seeks abjection and warps both parties. Often, the most detestable characters are those who respond eagerly, such as LeLoup and his abased art starlets in The Van.^[6]

In some ways, LeLoup could be nearly as much a parody of Saltz: performer, booster, star of reality TV and avid user of Instagram. Again, Simchowitz is likely a much easier target by sheer dint of his availability, wealth and visibility — a scandalizer of magazine and newspaper lifestyle sections. And as Dan Duray tellingly notes, New York Magazine, in the issue with Saltz’s essay on Simchowitz, rated the dealer in its weekly Approval Matrix as more despicable than the mock execution of a governor, Dick Cheyney’s continued warmongering, CIA torture revelations, and new Saudi statutes used to crack down on political dissidents.^[7] Is this myopia or what?

There are really nasty things that go on in the unregulated Wild West of the art market. There are conspiracies, forgeries, auction manipulations, studio meddling, fraud, information opacity, theft of all sorts, and distasteful behavior on the parts of a variety of people, including artists, galleries, auction houses, and museum administrators. The list goes on. And it’s not like these things go unreported, though it’s probable that much more happens without being reported at all, since few legal protections exist in the business.

It’s also not as though Simchowitz is a charmer. He’s kind of gross. He compares promoting and selling art to mineral extraction, like culture is a gulf that needs deep-water drilling, or a mountain that has to get its top removed. That attitude is an obscenity of its own. And both Elizabeth Dee (alluded to in the video) and Team’s Jose Freire, like many galleries, have bad reputations among gossip mills, including accusations of greed, sexism, cradle-robbing, and non-payment.^[8] Stephanie Cash, in a 2011 Art in America profile of Freire, noted his preference for young male artists succinctly, writing, “He steadily [built] his roster with star players like Cory Arcangel, Banks Violette and Ryan McGinley, often snatched up right out of art school.” If you check the now-defunct rant blog How’s My Dealing, you’ll find anonymous complaints of all kinds about probably every gallery listed, enumerating all the bad behaviors being lampooned by Bag.

At base is the lack of legal and financial protection for artists against dealers of all kinds — public and private.^[9] Artists are often stuck with whatever jerk is willing to give them a slimy hand up, risking kind of a lot in the hope it will pay off. So while The Van (Redux)* is smart and cutting and, you know, a great entertaining work of art, it’s also important not to overlook real villains in the art world when a mere ass like Simchowitz is found.

^[1] Simchowitz isn’t named explicitly, but the press release and the video’s close both feature a portrait of Simchowitz from Glazek’s 2014 profile for the New York Times, titled “The Art World’s Patron Satan,” which captures the maven dressed immodestly in underwear and socks, on the phone, surrounded by several pretty young female coworkers.

^[2] For that matter, the van itself might be stolen, as LeLoup begins his stay by ripping out a seat marked “ELIZABETH DEE” (Bag’s former gallery), dumping it in a trash bin several blocks from the museum, a gag that might be a shot at Dee.

^[3] He’s not the only person supporting these artists, sometimes derisively called “Zombie Formalists.” Some of them have been granted institutional legitimacy, such as Murillo, whose paintings were included in “The Forever Now,” MoMA’s ire-inviting 2014-15 survey of contemporary painting. And some of them have distanced themselves from Simchowitz after finding better opportunities.

^[4] Which isn’t really an argument one way or the other about whether they should or not.

^[5] Thanks to artcritical’s Instagram followers for some of these suggestions and others: Paul McCarthy parodied market emasculation in Painter (1995). Maurizio Cattelan abused several gallerists in performances between 1993 and ’99. There was Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), in which she had Friedrich Petzel arrange for a collector to fuck her in a hotel room, later exhibiting footage of the encounter. Plus there’s Guy Richard Smit’s Grossmalerman (2014) and Jim Kempner’s flat Madness of Art (2010-present) webseries. And there are probably a lot of others, including, I think, Sleazy P. Martini, the fictional manager of parody metal band/theater troupe GWAR.

^[6] What does it say that in the 14-year interim between Bag’s original video and this new one, the three artists have become even more infantile and vulnerable? Simchowitz avers, defensively perhaps, that both artists and dealers are complicit in these arrangements, though dealers are the ones with money and power, whereas artists are almost exclusively not. And the amount of money in the art world has literally grown exponentially in that time.

^[7] Forget about more than 7 million displaced and dead Iraqis and Syrians. They don’t even rate.

^[8] So does Bag’s critique extend past Simchowitz to cover her own new dealer, or not?

^[9] For that matter, one could draw the analogy out even farther to the larger economy. It’s not a far leap from Simchowitz-as-metonym to Martin Shkreli or Jack Abramoff as similar whipping boys in systems where at least some of their misdeeds are actually insidiously commonplace.

The post Zombies and Vampires: Alex Bag’s New Scary Movie at Team appeared first on artcritical.

Born in Germany in 1962, Janitz moved to New York in 2009 after more than a decade living and showing in Paris. He is a true cosmopolitan with a love of dance, poetry, language, fashion, and food. I met up with him at his Bushwick studio to discuss his career thus far, his approach to work, and the differences between Europe and the US.

NOAH DILLON I’m curious about the work you did in Europe and whether you think being in New York has affected what you’re doing now.

ROBERT JANITZ I was starting to get a sense of New York in 2004, when I was at a Cooper Union summer residency and had been coming to New York on-and-off. But I only felt I was really connecting to anything in 2009, when I moved here.

What prompted your move?

You know, Paris is a very nice place but it’s very claustrophobic and they hate painting. Not that I was considering myself a painter…

What does that mean?

Because I was working with paint on a canvas I was a painter. And because I was a painter I was outside the Duchampian dialogue. I was a foreigner in a side wing of the dominant French discourse. There was a glass ceiling. I thought that the time the culture would take to open itself to me is longer than the time I have at my disposal. So I had to leave. And I felt if you looked anyplace else there was much more interest in painting.

The other thing was I think the French deal very differently with their emotion. I don’t want it to be reductive, but I felt a heart connection with New York, much more than just a cerebral connection. In France the culture was like a corset, allowing only certain behaviors. It was fun learning to fit in, but you begin to feel the shell doesn’t allow movements that you want to do. And the scene here was more grungy, and in a way also dirtier, and less done. In Paris everything is so thought through and carved out and refined with very little room left over.

The first time I saw your work was the “To Fallow” show at CLEARING Gallery, in 2011. The paintings were deeply textural, grungy, dirty—looked like they’d been buried for months.

Here I got a larger hand on the notion of putting paint on a surface, whereas I had been more confined by the medium before. I was dealing with negation; each painting’s layers negated the layers below. I felt it was a psychological projection of what I was doing: I was refusing, but painting the refusal, which I hadn’t really been able to do in France.

And I acquired more freedom in the way the brush and paint are at my disposal. I can venture out in things like the portraits, which I couldn’t have done in Paris because I didn’t feel entitled. The portraits approach deeper, classic issues that touch the drama of humankind in a more encompassing way.

And part of the work that they do, differently from your abstractions, is aiming at suggesting those issues or suggesting some thing: a personality, a person, a moment…

Yeah. They’re very specific. And as I make them it’s clear to me at some point, somehow, suddenly a certain person’s there. I sometimes like to think of the correlation of those large, window-washing paintings and the portraits: the large ones would be a tune where you’re playing scores, but with the portraits it’s like a tune you improvise. Those are like literary studies, but as painting, and I need to channel some kind of character in them. So maybe those people are part of some kind of novel, but I don’t know what they’re saying or what they’re doing.

Can you talk a little about the way you deal with paint as material?

I’m still tackling how to deal with paint. For some of the earlier works I was using a blowtorch to blister the paint layers or scraping layers off. It was an aging process that takes the work a little bit out of my hands or out of a painted universe. The ones I’m making now, their translucent waxiness starts becoming opaque during the first couple of days. The rest comes in very slow. That slow solidification is archaeological in a way.

Fifty-year-old paintings don’t look the same as when they first came out of the studio; they settle into a state of patina and age that’s a bit unpredictable, and it seems like you’re helping your work into that development.

I look at them like that, certainly. At some point I thought why don’t I put flour in it? I was into mayonnaise, and why not just get into pancake dough as a possible approach to paint? As if my paintings were coming out of the food universe. Maybe they’ll come out of a different universe later on. I mean we were talking about that earlier, how you can unfold the work in a larger sense. Now it’s still in the food process.

The marks function in a way that local colors interact and force themselves. It’s all very toned down, but it comes to the forefront. Their thickness and texture appear like casts. They’re archaeological things. It looks like they’re carved out, rather than building from the inside out. In a way, that silly, stupid vertical gesture becomes ancient.

In the portraits you’re employing a completely different, varied vocabulary of marks.

I use very workmanlike brushes. They’re cheap and have a certain bristleness to them, so I can get relieved marks. That can go very well with hair. The way it’s painted, it immediately becomes these other things. The abstractions don’t become anything—they just stay painted.

One thing I think you said to me once is that the portraits absorb the viewer in some way.

I used to be obsessed with the idea that the paintings only show you their backside, as if the real painting’s on the other side. And with the portraits, you only see the back because, sorry, the real painting is on the other side of the wall, you can’t see it. So you’re in this kind of disenfranchised room where everybody turns their back on you.

Sometimes you don’t know what came first. When you do something for a while and you get this imprint in your mind and then you see it outside. Then you see it everywhere. I think at some point I recognized those back portraits in a fleeting moment on the bridge when the J train rushes by and everyone’s sitting with their back to you. But before your camera is out the situation’s gone, so you have it only in your mind.

Can you talk about the sculptures?

I had used an actual plant in a show in Brussels. In the back of my mind was the idea of adding a sculptural element that would relate to the paintings. So, planning my exhibition at Shoot the Lobster, I thought I’d include a plant. I made a model, but the model plant looked so good I decided I would just do that instead. I had been looking for a parallel practice to the painting, which would use a similar approach in a completely different medium. They were sketches of ideas.

In Paris I was interested in fountains. They were one of my few external inspirations. I would take slow walks at night to the pretty, public fountains and I got interested in that shape. Later on the idea of the plant showed up again. I’m basically only interested in plants that look like fountains: simple, tropical plants—like palm trees—that grow up from one stalk and then throw themselves into being without branching. I think also somehow those blades have something to do with the gesture of the painted lines.

I thought about calling these The Margiela Plants, like the fashion designer, Martin Margiela. It’s a joke a little bit on their use of white as well as the craftiness with which it’s made.

That’s interesting. Can you talk about how the titles function with regard to making context for the viewer?

I used to use number sequences and kind of abstract titles. Now that I do title them, I’ve moved into giving the paintings a context—one that relates more to my interest in language and poetry. I look for titles that relate to the work without being narrative. I’m not trying to illustrate elements in the painting.

I use phrases out of books that I like. I spend quite some time trying to weigh the words; I want each word to be as far away from the others as possible. For the show I was thinking about an actual stick and shiftingness, and “Heaven” was meant to be far away from those. It’s a kind of geometric process, the way the words occupy my mind, as shapes. Some of them are French. I like Raymond Roussel, who developed this strange method of double entendres, which he layered as a storytelling technique. I was also interested in a pornographic novel by Apollinaire, and I used the opening line of that for titling a piece. But now that titles are part of the work, the title and the painting come together as a whole.

Is it a jumping off point for you and not so much for the viewer?

If it feels good and I think it’s good then I can put that out and the viewer can connect to it. But what that is I don’t know, it’s just an allusion to something.

Robert Janitz: Stick Shift Heaven was at Team, February 23 to March 23, 2014

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April 11 – May 12, 2013
83 Grand Street
New York City, 212 279 9219

Stanley Whitney has over five decades painting behind him.  The seven large luscious paintings currently on view at Team Gallery constitute his 28th solo exhibition, so it is maybe little wonder that, at this point, his technique appears effortless.   Indeed, the work displays a beguiling simplicity. There are sixteen or twenty rectangles in each square painting and they are, more or less, evenly apportioned four down and four, or five, across – not by ruled measurement but an equally exact though ineffable idea of rightness. These are formal paintings, grids of quadrilaterals, but casual and unpretentious, like a conversation one might have about the checkered tablecloths at your favorite trattoria.  The same sense of ease holds true for the paint application, and for a few moments one might get an impression that the brushwork is almost careless.  This is, however, a manifestly false reading and it quickly transmutes into an awareness of acute fastidiousness.

Take the largest work, for instance, the eight-foot square Bodyheat, (2012).  Hanging solo in the rear gallery, where it can enjoy the most controlled lighting, it dominates the small room with a quiet authority and grace.  The rectangles, arrayed in this particular piece five across and four down, are topped and separated on the horizontal by thick stripes that simultaneously delineate and activate the grid.  For the most part the colors directly abut, shoulder to shoulder, but in a few cases an additional fat stroke puts in extra duty.  In the top row a slash of salmon keeps the orange square from combining with the orange line just below, while in the second row from the top, a scumble of slightly darker blue achieves the same end between the blue rectangle and all but identically-colored line below.

Conversely, the unusual blended stroke dividing the yellow from the green serves to modulate and mellow what would otherwise be a potentially harsh juxtaposition. And in the same vein, a wash of blue at the top of the pale yellow/green square in the bottom row eases the dialogue between it and the dark blue stripe above it.  Meanwhile, in the bottom right corner the paint in the lower half of the black square dissolves in drips, a permanent history of its interaction with the wet medium.

The cumulative effect of these additional strokes and wet drips is to highlight their outlier nature: there is not a single unintentional mark in any of these paintings.  Echoing this low key but firm control are the colors themselves: blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown, black and white.  Such a simple list brings to mind the basic box of 8 Crayola Crayons.  As elsewhere, sustained looking quickly alters this perception, each mottled or extenuated color being an overlay of another, the palette expanding to six variations of green, five of red, and so forth.  We are made aware that individual colors mean naught, while the syntax and syncopation of the colors are everything.

Whitney nonchalantly weaves together nearly invisible yet precise technique, lightly imposed yet persistent structure, and a simple yet sophisticated use of color. The resulting works are as playful as they are powerful as they flutter and wave against the cool white walls whose flatness they eviscerate with hardly a sigh.

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Michèle C. Cone,  Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Ai Weiwei, Slater Bradley, Sarah Sze, and Lola Montes Schnabel.

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Carol Diehl, Blake Gopnik, and Elizabeth Kley joined David Cohen to discuss Brice Dellsperger at team (gallery, inc.), Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at Alexander Gray Associates, Tracey Moffatt at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, and Cornelia Parker at D’Amelio Terras.

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Mario Naves, Joan Waltemath, and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss Frances Barth at Sundaram Tagore, Marlo Pascual at Casey Kaplan, Susannah Philips at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, and Stanley Whitney at Team.

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The Surrealist writer André Breton once declared that beauty would have to become convulsive, otherwise it would cease to be. As if in late vindication of this injunction, the paintings of Dawn Mellor set off a chain reaction of anger and lyricism. She is an artist driven by both sociopolitical protest and ambiguous, personal longings, which makes the link with Surrealism particularly pertinent in her case. Her paintings are at the dual service of Eros and Thanatos, awash equally with alienation and empathy, desire and indignation.

Her vulgarity and iconoclasm are truly prodigious, even within the context of a popular culture that is permeated by brash assaults on traditional values. Her latest show, “A Curse on Your Walls,” has two themes, or perhaps, more appropriately in her case, targets. The first is Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz,” shown in six mammoth canvases, engaged in bizarre, macabre activities. The second involves a salon-style hang of 71 of Ms. Mellor’s sadistically satirical easel portraits of contemporary and historical celebrities — an ongoing series she titles “Vile Affections” — culled from cultures high and low.

An extremity of attitude comes across in both her paint handling and a visual imagination that is at once vivid and vicious. But through it all is a love of the sheer dynamics of translating mediated images into paint, of handling space, of describing details while keeping up an appearance of frenzy and desperation. She is that rare, wondrous thing: a “bad” painter who really knows how to paint.

At the younger end of the Young British Artist movement lead by Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, Ms. Mellor came to attention at the same time as Cecily Brown, who could be described as a cooler version of Ms. Mellor’s “bad girl” update of Philip Guston. Closer to her particular fusion of the erotic and the political is American painter Nicole Eisenman, whose imagery, like Ms. Mellor’s, has a love-hate relationship with media constructions of girlhood.

The shifts in scale between the Dorothy paintings and the “Vile Affections” is galvanizing. The Oz pictures are up to 10-by-12-feet; the anti-portraits are generally 2 or 3 feet tall. Both brim with a Gothic humor that is richly disturbing. In her journey through the dark corridors of Ms. Mellor’s imagination, Dorothy survives more than the Wicked Witch of the West would have concocted for her, although certainly the West, in the geopolitical sense, has much to blame for her travails. In “Yellow Bricks Dorothy” (2007-08), for instance, the heroine triplicates into a row of slave workers schlepping bricks in wheelbarrows. In one of these manifestations, Dorothy’s head transmogrifies into a skull of harrowing beauty, another into a brick itself. In “Death Army Dorothy” (2008), she stands amidst a bombed-out city at the head of a possy of 10 gold-skinned robots, redolent of the James Bond movie “Goldfinger.” Each of the robots has a white skull for a head, a pretty blue bow in the its “hair,” and Renaissance armor on its left shoulder. In “Partisan Dorothy” (2007-08), she has become a terrorist with a bloodcurdling gaze, wielding a submachine gun.

Ms. Mellor’s handling of paint is often at its most subtle and tender when her politicizing is at its most blatant and brutal. “Giant Dorothy” (2007-08) has Dorothy kneeling before a soap-bubble globe containing her longed-for Kansas homestead, floating above a blasted heath. But in a gesture that cripples the innocence of the image, she has spouted an erect penis (in the same blue gingham of her dress) that penetrates the bubble. Her face duplicates as it turns its gaze from the house to the ground, a beautifully handled passage. Around her head is a halo of burning white slogans of militant, anti-religious, anarchic character, burning bright against the dark, ominous sky, that read, “Destroy the Abrahamic Moralist Trilogy of Terror. We will establish a new state. Kill Breeders, Steal Babies.”

Ms. Mellor’s celebrity portraits are at once more extreme and more ambiguous than her Dorothy murals — despite the rape and pillage the latter entail. You are never quite sure what the criteria might be to enter her pantheon, which consists both of personalities toward whom one imagines she is politically antipathetic (Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher, Shimon Peres, Mother Theresa, and even Cherie Blair come in for rough treatment) and icons that “Friends of Dorothy” usually reserve affection for, Barbra Streisand, Billie Holliday, Audrey Hepburn, and Madonna. Madonna, in fetish gear and with smoke coming out of her ears, has gaping wounds about her body, a recurring trope in Ms. Mellor’s portraits that perhaps reflects the artist’s past as an S-and-M cabaret performer. Even feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous come in for some gentle mockery.

Nicole Kidman, who has been the subject of infatuated portraits by Ms. Mellor in the past, has in this series sprouted a beard. There are abstract rays of color that intersect at the point of her left eye. Her legendary alabaster skin is afflicted by the pox. When in the past Ms. Kidman was depicted by Ms. Mellor as Judith clutching the bleeding head of Tom Cruise-as-Holofernes, the symbolism was not difficult to decode. The bearded lady, though, could mean anything — and is arguably richer for the ambiguity.

Ms. Mellor manages simultaneously to recall the ferocious politics of Sue Coe and the fey infatuations of Elizabeth Peyton. She seems intent on debunking the whole culture of celebrity while at the same time working through her individual feelings, which run an emotional gamut, toward these individuals. They are given a life in paint with which to counter the disturbingly conflicted meanings projected upon them, whether by the media or by Ms. Mellor herself.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 26, 2008 under the heading “The Erotic, the Political and the Personal”

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