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10 June 2010 NEW YORK - In New York, the veteran art dealer Luise Ross is known for presenting an unpredictable program of exhibitions that reflects her interest in both unusual, contemporary-art forms and in the work of very individualistic, self-taught visionaries. Over the years, she has become especially noted for having discovered some remarkable outsider or self-taught artists, including, for example, Thomas Burleson (1914-1997), a Texas-born maker of psychologically intense drawings with psychedelic vibes, and the paintings of Finland’s Tyyne Esko, whose folkloric looks belie the trenchant nature of their social and political commentary. (See my May 26, 2002 New York Times article about Tyyne Esko’s art here.) The Luise Ross Gallery is now showing the work of two Icelandic artists, Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir and Guðjón Ketilsson. In such works as paintings, sculptures, prints and videos, Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir focuses on the appearances and textures of snow-covered surfaces in nature. Enlarging images of such surfaces in, for example, her paintings and prints, the artist creates physically and thematically expansive abstractions whose overall character is gentle and muted to the point of being almost ephemeral. By contrast, Guðjón Ketilsson’s works have, in various senses, considerably more heft than Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir’s delicate concoctions. Primarily made of wood, which he hand-crafts with skill and inventiveness, Guðjón’s creations are marked by a sense of humor that is both subtle and sly; the many strange “tools” he has fashioned out of wood and mostly displays here as wall-mounted pieces often have no practical functions at all, even if they do appear to do - or maybe to want to do - something meaningful and effective. They certainly call attention to the meaning of work and of handiwork, in particular, and in their exquisite uselessness lies a certain goofiness and charm. Guðjón’s “ETCETERA,” for example, is a carving of its title word into a wooden wheel that is mounted on a stick. Pressed into and rolled across a long patch of sand on the floor, as it has been in Ross’s gallery, this “tool” merely knocks out an endless strip of impressions of the same mindless word.
In the 2004 catalog of an exhibition of Guðjón’s work in Reykjavík, the Icelandic critic Jón Proppé wrote: “Tools increase our power and allow us to bend the world to our purpose but at the same time tools direct our actions. The tool itself teaches us to use it and to use it correctly but at the same time it is useless for anything else....[T]he tools that we have handy determine what sort[s] of problems we can solve and they also direct our decisions as to which problems we will attempt to solve.”
“I suppose that, by calling attention to what tools can do for us, or to what we do with tools, I’m also calling attention to what it is that human beings do at all - with their hands, certainly, but also to what they might aspire to make or to do in more general terms,” Guðjón told me at the opening of the current exhibition. Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir and Guðjón Ketilsson’s works will remain on view at Luise Ross Gallery, at 511 West 25th Street (Suite 307), in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, through July 30, 2010. Posted by E.M.G.
5 May 2010 NEW YORK - My article about the Japanese modern artist Takesada Matsutani, pegged to his recent museum exhibition in Kamakura, Japan, has been published in the May 2010 issue of Art in America. (See my 7 February 2010 “Journal” item, below, for background information about this artist and his recent exhibitions in Japan.) Matsutani, who has been based in Paris since the late 1960s, was a member of the so-called second generation of the post-World War II Gutai group of prototypical performance and abstract-expressionist artists in Japan. Lately, both in Japan and in Europe and the United States, there has been increasing interest among modern-art historians and curators in the Gutai period and its artists’ varied accomplishments. I summarize this trend in my Art in America article. Click here to open a PDF containing the complete text of this article, with photos, as it appears in the print edition of the magazine. Click here to see the article on the magazine's website. Posted by E.M.G.
30 April 2010 NEW YORK - It’s run, don’t walk time. Time to run over to P.P.O.W., the gallery at 511 West 25th Street in New York’s Chelsea gallery district, to see the just-opened exhibition of the American artist Julie Heffernan’s newest paintings (on view through June 5, 2010). In this collection of other-worldly pictures in oil on canvas, titled “Boy, Oh, Boy,” Heffernan pushes forward her signature, neo-baroque style of rendering eerie-romantic, dream-fantasy images, this time with some powerful thematic twists. That’s because, for the first time ever in her art, in place of a female-nude, alter-ego character who often appeared in fanciful, imaginary garments, including, in one painting, a broad hoop skirt made of flowers and dead animals, Heffernan has now made a lithe, red-haired youth the central subject or focal point of several of her big, new pictures. At the same time, “Boy, Oh, Boy” also features many other new images whose subjects are hard to pin down.
In fact, all of these new paintings depict some very complex worlds within worlds—the whole surface of the Earth on a gigantic, rolled-up carpet; a topiary-encrusted globe installed inside an elegant garden, its surface and exposed innards teeming with life and movement; or a coffin-like tree house filled with small boxes. In turn, these cubbyholes are variously filled with toppling furniture, figures on seesaws or vignettes marked by mirth, girth (one shows a woman with the mother of all bosoms) or erotic antics. A whiff of passing time as something embodied in both the landscape and the human-built environment, and of history as something malleable, wafts through these effusively elaborated compositions, with their visions of weirdly idyllic alternative worlds and odd ecosystems. Heffernan fills every available corner of her images’ pictorial space with precisely rendered figures, objects and activities. If these new paintings feel hallucinatory, they’re also irresistibly compelling as they pull a viewer’s gaze deeper and deeper into their Bruegelesque panoramas of unnatural nature and multifaceted human drama. One can imagine Heffernan’s new paintings giving visual expression to what those heavy thinkers back during the Age of Enlightenment might have found floating through their wildest dreams when they allowed themselves a moment in which to kick back, remove their wigs, let their real hair down and just dream—in a world long before LSD. Posted by E.M.G.
29 March 2010 NEW YORK - At a private dinner gathering here yesterday evening at the Modern, a restaurant on the ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Yoko Ono Lennon handed out her 2010 Courage Awards for the Arts. The prizes, consisting of printed and framed citations signed by Ono, along with monetary contributions to the honorees, went to Guerrilla Girls, the feminist organization of artist-activists that emerged in 1985 and since then has produced posters and live events to raise awareness about sexism in the art world; and to the group’s more recently formed off-shoots, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand (a website) and Guerrilla Girls on Tour, an association of more than two dozen women theater artists who have taken the Guerrilla Girls’ messages to schools and other venues around the world in the form of activist plays, performance-art works and street theater.
This year, Ono also honored Printed Matter, Inc., the New York bookstore that specializes in limited-edition, artist-produced and art-related publications, and the French naturalist writer Émile Zola (1840-1902). Zola’s posthumous award was accepted on behalf of PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Program by the Polish-born American author and former lawyer Louis Begley. Begley is also a former president of PEN American Center, the U.S. branch of the international organization that works on behalf of freedom of expression in the literary arts. In accepting Zola’s award, Begley reminded the gathering of some 80 guests, including Museum of Modern Art associate director Kathy Halbreich and associate curator of media and performance art Barbara London, and New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, among others, that Zola had “risked his life when he stood up for Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army who had been unjustly accused of treason.” Begley noted that Zola’s famous newspaper article, which was published in January 1898 and headlined “J’Accuse,” (“I Accuse”), had “dared to condemn the army’s command for its anti-Semitism and for unjustly sentencing Dreyfus to life imprisonment for alleged treason.” In accepting Ono’s award for Guerilla Girls on Tour, artist-activists “Aphra Behn” and “Julia Child” pointed out that young women at many of the venues at which their troupe has staged theatrical performances or talks to address sexism in the arts have later written to their organization to thank them for visiting their towns. “Behn” and “Child” pointed out that, in such locales, which often are located far away from urban centers, for many female students, even expressing interest in studying or discussing certain modern or contemporary works of art may be strongly discouraged, if not prohibited. (Guerrilla Girls members use the names of deceased female artists and cultural figures instead of their real names and wear gorilla masks in an effort to keep the focus on their messages and not on their individual personalities.) Last year’s first-ever Courage Awards for the Arts were presented, on February 1, 2009, to the New York-based musicians and composers La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and to the Detroit-based collectors of Fluxus art Gil and Lila Silverman, who subsequently donated their extensive collection to the Museum of Modern Art. (Last year’s honoree couples each received citations signed by Ono and honorarium payments of $25,000.00.) As she chatted with her guests at last night’s dinner event, Ono noted that, often, “it takes courage to be an artist or to support the arts,” and that the very personal award program she has created to recognize the achievements of fellow artists and arts supporters in various fields is especially meaningful to her at this stage of her own long and accomplished career. Ono told her guests: “I am very honored to be giving the Courage Awards for the Arts for 2010 to such a deserving group of artists. With your courage, our world is getting brighter every day.” Posted by E.M.G.
7 February 2010 KAMAKURA, JAPAN - The Japanese artist Takesada Matsutani’s exhibition “Stream,” which offers an overview of his production from 1984 to the present, opened yesterday at the Kamakura branch of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama. It will remain on view through March 28. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Kaneko Art Tokyo will present a two-part retrospective survey of Matsutani’s work. The first presentation will run from February 15 through March 6. The second part will open March 15 and run through April 3. Also in Tokyo, Tsubaki Modern Art Gallery will present a separate Matsutani show, titled “The 1960s and Now,” from April 12 through April 24.
In Japan right now, it’s Matsutani’s moment. The Osaka-born artist, who is now 73 years old, represents the so-called second generation of the Gutai Art Association, as the group that was formed by artists from his hometown and its vicinity in 1954 was formally known. The Gutai Art Association was founded by Jiro Yoshihara, the scion of a cooking-oil wholesale company, and 17 young artists who looked to him as their leader. (In Japanese, the word “gutai” means “concrete.”) Yoshihara had made paintings in a surrealist mode but later became interested in abstract art. He commanded his youthful charges: “Don’t copy anyone! Do something no one’s ever done before!” Published in 1956, the Gutai group’s manifesto declared: “Gutai art does not change the material but [rather] brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art, the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other....” Matsutani joined Gutai almost a decade after it was established. By that time, the local media had published breathless reports about such provocative and emblematic Gutai works as Shozo Shimamoto’s painting made by shooting paint from a cannon at a large sheet of fabric (1956); Sadamasa Motonaga’s “Work (Water)” (1956), with its puddles of colored water resting in wide ribbons of fabric stretched like hammocks between trees; and Atsuko Tanaka’s “Electric Dress” (1956), a stage costume consisting of a thicket of color-painted, round and tube-shaped light bulbs. In Kamakura today, Matsutani recalled his early years as an artist. He told me: “I had read about the Gutai artists’ activities in Japanese magazines and newspapers, which described them as ‘scandalous.’ But I liked the energy in their works. It seemed to come from their hearts.” Matsutani developed bubble-like forms from blobs of vinyl glue that he deposited on the surfaces of canvases. With a straw, he would pierce a drying glue bubble and blow air into it, making bulbous forms that popped and collapsed. Once dry, these forms resembled the curves of the human body. Matsutani said: “Working with glue, I discovered its sensual quality and from then on I would always strive for a certain sensuality in my work.” Along with vinyl glue, Matsutani, who has lived and worked in Paris since the late 1960s, has also used pencils or graphite sticks to cover large sections of big sheets of paper with black, abstract forms. He has also mixed graphite powder with his glue to give his three-dimensional abstract shapes some subtle, lustrous color.
In Kamakura, Matsutani is showing Relation, a work that consists of a cloth-covered plastic bag filled with black ink that is suspended about two meters above a flat sheet of white canvas stretched on a rectangular stretcher that also hangs from the ceiling. Beneath it lies a shallow, water-filled metal pan. To start the piece, the artist pricks holes in the ink-filled bag, allowing black ink to drip from it onto the porous, stretched canvas. As the fabric becomes saturated with ink, the excess black liquid drips through it down into the pan, darkening the water below. Nearby, hung vertically from a wooden bar, one of Matsutani’s 10-meter-long graphite drawings cascades down to and sprawls along the floor, setting up a contrast—or “relation”—between its blackness and the manner by which it was achieved with those of the black-splattered painting-in-progress. With this sculpture that is also a painting, Matsutani has concocted a work of art that, in effect, creates itself. The artist told a group of visitors to the museum: “Even after all these years, I believe I’ve remained faithful to the spirit of Gutai.” Posted by E.M.G.
26 January 2010 NEW YORK - The legendary American art dealer Phyllis Kind first opened a gallery under her own name in Chicago in the late 1960s and went on to play a major role in the introduction to the market and to broader audiences of innovative art made by artists with unconventional ideas and art-making techniques. Over the years, Kind also did pioneering research in the field of outsider art and was largely responsible, along with a handful of other dealers in the United States and Europe, for creating an international market for the work of exceptional self-taught artists. Late this past summer, after a long, accomplished run, she closed the second gallery she had operated for many years in New York. My article looking back at Kind’s career and at her legacy has just been published in the winter 2009/2010 issue (no. 68) of Raw Vision, the U.K.-based, international magazine about outsider/self-taught artists and their work. To see this article in its entirety, click here; a PDF will open in a separate window. Or click on the “Articles, Essays, Books” link on the left of this page, which will take you to the 2010 page, where you’ll also find a link to this article. For more about the closing of Kind’s gallery and her contributions to art research, please scroll down on this same page and see my “Journal” item dated 28 August 2009. Posted by E.M.G.
4 January 2010 
NEW YORK - The American artist Stephanie Brody Lederman makes paintings on canvas and paper, and mixed-media objects that are potent cocktails of probing psychological, free-floating emotional and ambiguously poetic ingredients. Based in New York, in recent years she regularly has spent time residing and working in Paris, where she has become an enthusiastic flâneuse, meandering through that ancient city’s narrow streets, soaking up the atmosphere of neighborhoods in which dreamy surrealists once cavorted, and existentialism’s muses danced on the tables of smoke-filled, jazz-pumping boîtes de nuit. Or something like that. The point is that, as a researcher on the lookout for inspiration of her own, over the years Brody Lederman has shown herself to be an alert, sensitive and tireless hunter-gatherer of the kinds of stuff in the atmosphere - words and phrases from overheard conversations; the silhouette of a lantern at dusk; the decorative pattern printed on a candy wrapper; the shape and sound of a walking cane - that other faces in the crowd might overlook. Along with an enthusiastic embrace of the emotionally expressive power of color, she has made such elements the raw material of her art. Through January 9, 2010, the artist is presenting a selection of new works on canvas and on paper at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York’s SoHo district (at 383 West Broadway). Posted by E.M.G.
2 December 2009
MEXICO CITY - Robert Waters is a 35-year-old Canadian artist who has been based here for the past three years. His exhibition, “Taparrabo” (meaning “loin cloth” or, literally, “cover your tail” in Spanish), is on view through January 10, 2010 at Ex Teresa Arte Actual, a former, colonial-era convent in Mexico City’s downtown historic district. In this exhibition, Waters is showing mixed-media pieces that address various Catholic Church themes. They do so provocatively but without the sensationalism that have characterized other art critiques of an ancient institution whose doctrines often have provided easy targets. In his series Christs (2007-2009), he offers portraits of various actors in the lead role of 12 different biographical movies about the biblical Jesus Christ; their images are painted with Sangre de Christo (Blood of Christ), a cheap, Mexican red wine. Dirty Priests (2008) is a cross made up of 17 communion wafers pinned to a wall with accompanying little paintings, made with pig’s blood on paper, of Catholic priests who were convicted in recent decades of sexual abuse or other crimes.
For more about Waters’ artworks, see my review of his Mexico City exhibition in the December 2009 issue of Art in America. Posted by E.M.G.
1 October 2009
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK - The Canadian-born artist Aurora Robson is an environmental activist who makes art or maybe an artist who is an environmental activist. Any way she cuts it (the plastic, that is, of the countless bottles she rescues from the trash and transforms into colorful sculptures), Robson’s art-making and activism are indelibly entwined. Lately, I’ve been speaking with Robson and keeping an eye on her still-evolving, newest projects. Here are some photos I shot last year of her monumental work, What Goes Around, Comes Around. Completed last winter, it was commissioned by Merrill Lynch and later installed in the atrium of a building at its corporate headquarters in New Jersey. (That financial-services company, after a merger, later became Bank of America Merrill Lynch.) Robson used thousands of plastic bottles “rescued from the waste stream,” as she puts it, to make this work of art. An interview I conducted with this very inventive artist has been published in the October 2009 issue of Art in America. You can read this article here. Please note: This is a large PDF, which shows the article exactly as it appeared in the print edition of the magazine. Posted by E.M.G.
28 September 2009
NEW YORK - As an observation about the changing face of retailing in New York and, implicitly, about its very soul, because this city has always been an anything-for-a-price, get-it-while-you-can bazaar, it has become a cliché to point out that the place has lost a lot of its once-unique character now that mom-and-pop shops and small specialty stores have disappeared by the score, only to be replaced by Starbucks, Gap, HSBC and Dunkin’ Donuts outlets on every corner. It’s still true, though. Does anybody remember that upstairs shop in the West 40s, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, that used to sell thousands and thousands of mint-condition 45 rpm singles for a song? How about those now long-gone nightspots like Wonderbar, in the East Village, where an air of inviting insouciance, mixed with nocturnal mischief, offered an enticing cocktail for night owls in a New York state of mind? And let’s not even talk about CBGB, which has transmogrified into a sterile John Varvatos men’s-clothing boutique. Fuggedaboutit. The good news is that, in the face of this onslaught of cheerless corporatization at every turn, there are still a few outposts in Bloombergland where echt merchants with personality, a vision and a smile may be found purveying their wares. Take, for example, Grant Captanian’s Mystery Shop at 1672 First Avenue (on the east side of that thoroughfare, between 87th and 88th Streets, on Manhattan’s baby-stroller-filled Upper East Side; telephone: 212-423-9920).
Captanian’s shopkeeping routine is somewhat irregular. Call it the anti-corporate approach to modern retailing. His establishment tends to be open only if or when Captanian feels like doing some business. Since he is apparently a nocturnal creature, he often opens his shop’s door only after sunset, allowing a generous sampling of its offerings to spill out onto the sidewalk. That’s a good thing, too, since it is often impossible for any human being to step deeper than, say, two feet in any direction into the shop space itself. As treasure troves go, even Tutankhamun’s tomb didn’t hold as many or as diverse a selection of wonders. It was on these tempting but limited-access precincts that a recent, cursory rummage-cum-excavation turned up an assortment of wooden nutcrackers (Christmas is coming), a retired Barbie doll dressed in what appeared to be papal robes, a lamp whose base had been made from a metal ice skate, a miscellany of goblets (great for outfitting that what-to-do-with-it, medieval manse out in the Hamptons), a couple of John Gunther’s ancient Inside books (the Gunther of Inside Europe, Inside Asia fame), a pile of shoes, some suitcases, a metal egg cup, many thickets of beads, and the first volume of Sainte-Beuve’s Oeuvres in the 1956 Pléiade edition. I made off with the Sainte-Beuve for only two bucks. “Oh, that was in there?” Captanian asked with surprise when I showed him my find and paid up. Then he added: “Enjoy!” Rumor has it that someday the Mystery Shop’s owner might actually clear a path through to the back of the shop. Urban archaeologists and cultural anthropologists are salivating at that prospect. Posted by E.M.G.
14 September 2009
NEW YORK - For some riders of the shuttle train that rattled from Times Square to Grand Central Station on a routine round late this evening, the smiles of this summer night were provoked by the radioactive glow of a hard-to-miss pair of red, funky pumps worn by one female passenger who was also dressed in a modest combo of grey trousers and white T-shirt. As I discreetly tried to withdraw a small camera from my bag to snap some photos of this five-alarm-fire footwear, an older man standing a few feet away from me on the platform smiled lasciviously at me - or, more precisely, I supposed, at what he rightly perceived to be my desire to take some pictures and at his delighted (but mistaken) recognition of a fellow women’s-shoe fethishist. Creepy? Or just another night in the New York City subway? Anyway, who cares? Get a load of those shoes! Posted by E.M.G.
28 August 2009 NEW YORK - Those sounds that are breaking through the late-summer hush that prevails in many precincts of the still-away-on-vacation New York art world are those of a door closing and of a collective gasp of disbelief - of big surprise, that is, at the news that one of Manhattan’s legendary art dealers has shuttered her gallery after more than four decades in the art biz.
That veteran dealer is Phyllis Kind, a longtime champion of innovative contemporary art and a pioneering researcher, educator and promoter in the field of outsider art (works made by self-taught artists who generally live and work outside the social-cultural mainstream). The normally vivacious, seventy-something Kind, who danced in a gold-lamé minidress at her 70th birthday bash in 2003 and hosted a “Ship of Fools” costume party in 1982 from which some guests are still recovering (for the record, the hostess came dressed as the biblical Eve), suffered a mini-stroke late last year and has been convalescing since then. Realizing that she would not be able to return to work anytime soon, Kind reluctantly decided to close her gallery on West 26th Street. Before taking over that space in 2006, she had operated her gallery - and held court - for many years at 136 Greene Street, in Soho. A New York native, Kind earned university degrees in chemistry and in English literature. By the early 1960s, she and her then-husband moved to Chicago, where they opened a gallery that dealt in Old Master prints. The 1960s and 1970s were formative decades for Phyllis; it was in Chicago that she sharpened her focus and refined her aesthetic outlook. There, she eagerly took in exhibitions of contemporary art at venues like the Hyde Park Art Center in order to find out what local artists were thinking and creating. She met the artists who became known collectively as “Hairy Who?”; that group’s members included James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum. She also met the painters Ed Paschke and Roger Brown, and enjoyed learning about their interests and influences. All of these artists became known, more broadly, as the “Chicago Imagists.”
From some of the artists she got to know well and with whom she worked in Chicago, Kind learned about such self-taught artists as Joseph Yoakum (1890-1972), whose drawings they collected. Yoakum, whose ancestry was both African-American and Native-American, began creating imaginary landscapes, in colored pencil and ink on paper, when he was 76. Recognizing in such works (which, later, she would collect and sell herself) the essential qualities she sought in all art, Kind began doing her own research about and presenting exhibitions of work made by self-taught artists. Along with a handful of dealers in the U.S.A. and Europe, she effectively helped create a market for this kind of art and became internationally renowned as a specialist in the outsider/self-taught field. Kind opened a gallery under her own name in Chicago in the late 1960s and, in 1979, a second one in New York’s SoHo district. She closed her Chicago branch in 1998. Kind was the first dealer to bring to market the unusual drawings of the Mexican-born outsider artist Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), who had spent the latter half of his life in residence at a psychiatric hospital in northern California. She also showed works by such definitive outsider artists as the Swiss draftsman-composer-storyteller Adolf Wölfli, the Italian Carlo Zinelli and the Chicago recluse Henry Darger. In addition to Nutt, Brown, Paschke and Jagger, Kind also represented such contemporary artists as Robert Colescott, William N. Copley (known as “CPLY”), Alison Saar and Domenico Zindato. In the 1980s era of perestroika, Kind traveled to the U.S.S.R. and hauled back works by Soviet artists who were unknown in the West and barely able to survive in their home country. Such travel was costly and risky. The New York-based film-maker and artist Scott Ogden (Make), who worked as an art handler in Kind’s gallery in the 1990s, told me: “One day, Phyllis saw that I was reading Lolita and told me that it was a good book, but that I really should read another one of Nabakov’s novels, Ada. Later that afternoon, she gave me an extremely old and tattered copy of Ada, which, she explained, she had read one time when she had been jailed in the Soviet Union after getting caught trying to transport art out of the country. The authorities had said she was smuggling. What was amazing to me was how un-out-of-the-ordinary her stay in a Soviet jail seemed to have been to her and the lengths to which she was willing to go to to bring her gallery and collectors extraordinary art.” Kind opened her first exhibition of contemporary art from the Soviet Union, “Direct from Moscow!”, in May 1987. Lisa Stone, curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has known Kind and followed her career for many years. Recently, she told me: “By following her acute instincts, which led her into some uncharted territories, Phyllis made a deep impact on the art world; it will be a duller scene now without her intense curiosity, verve and discoveries.”
Jagger, who recently retired after teaching sculpture for many years at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, became one of Kind’s close friends. Jagger told me: “When I first heard about Phyllis years ago, I told a certain well-known critic that I had met her, and he said, ‘Phyllis Kind does what she believes in. She never can be bought, and people know that - and they trust her.’” Posted by E.M.G.
18 August 2009
NEW YORK - It’s the middle of August. In much of the northern hemisphere, and certainly in this muggy-sweaty, concrete jungle, probably thanks to the global-warming trend of recent years, it’s even hotter (and, this year, wetter) then normal, whatever “normal” is supposed to mean anymore. We’re also in that traditional, slow-news period at the near-end of the summer - a perfect time for Britain’s Ministry of Defense to make public a long-classified stash of documents describing hundreds of sightings over the United Kingdom of unidentified flying objects and just what Her Majesty’s minions in the defense sector had to say about them. The just-released eyewitness accounts from residents around the U.K. who claimed to have seen UFOs, government and defense officials’ responses to those sightings, and inquiries from assorted real or would-be authors of books and self-styled alien-spacecraft investigators fill 14 large files that are all available, free of charge, on a special Ministry of Defense website. The documents, totaling more than 4000 pages, cover the period from 1981 to 1996. They were made public this past Sunday, at midnight, U.K. time. I was intrigued when I read news reports yesterday and today announcing the release of these UFO files. Of special interest: the so-called Rendlesham Forest incident of December 1980, in which Unites States Air Force personnel stationed at a Royal Air Force base in Suffolk, near the southeastern coast of England, claimed to have seen mysterious lights in a nearby forest over a period of three successive nights. I was also curious about a sighting by two young men in west-central England, in 1995, of a UFO and a space alien with a “lemon-shaped head” who reportedly beckoned, “We want you; come with us.” In a video-clip introduction on the Ministry of Defense’s website, David Clarke, a professor of journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, in Sheffield, notes that more than 600 UFO sightings were reported in the U.K. in 1996 (compared with 117 a year earlier). He points out that the spike in reported sightings coincided with broadcasts of the American series The X Files on British television and the release in 1996 of the movie Independence Day. Clarke, who teaches media law and investigative techniques, has been serving as a consultant to the Ministry of Defense in its ongoing document-release program related to UFO sightings.
I admit it: Today I dipped into some of the just-released files. In the documents, many names are obscured by black rectangles marked only with an anonymous censoring office’s designation, “Section 40.” Among the papers that caught my attention was a 1984 note from an exasperated-sounding, defense-ministry official to an unidentified recipient to whom, apparently, he or she had responded many times before, explaining that the ministry did not consider certain UFO sightings to have been defense threats. The bureaucrat wrote: “I suggest that there is little point in continuing this correspondence.” A longer defense-ministry memo from 1985 to another recipient states: “We have to recognize that there are many strange things to be seen in the sky but we believe there are adequate explanations for them.” My favorite tidbit from the newly released UFO files (those from 1993-1994) concerns a woman who, driving through northwestern London at night, was wowed by what she thought was a glowing, alien spacecraft in the sky. (In fact, it turned out to be an airship that was advertising the launch of a new-model Ford automobile.) In a handwritten letter in the defense ministry’s files, the woman recalled her nocturnal vision. She wrote: “I felt so calm and lovely, I just wanted to follow it.” Posted by E.M.G.
13 August 2009
NEW YORK - A few days ago, I saw one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen. No, it wasn’t a biopic about Sarah Palin or even about George W. Bush (who?), or a dusted-off print of the 1973 horror movie, The Exorcist, in which the demon-possessed, pubescent actress Linda Blair’s head spins like an unstoppable top as she hurls firehose streams of pea-soup-colored vomit and some very naughty words, for a little girl, and exhorts J.C. to do the nasties with her... No, the film I saw at Film Forum, one of New York’s leading showcases for independently produced movies and revived oldies, was the new documentary Food, Inc. by producer-director Robert Kenner and co-producer Eric Schlosser (an investigative journalist who has become well-known for his revealing reports about where food comes from and how it is industrially processed). Food, Inc. examines the industrialized, food-production methods that are used by huge, multi-national agribusiness corporations and market-dominating meat-packing corporations in the U.S.A. These corporations are powerful because their senior managers, board members and well-paid lobbyists are all cozily in bed with the very politicians and government-agency executives who are supposed to be regulating their industries. However, as Food, Inc. shows, when a power player like Justice Clarence Thomas, who, before landing a seat on the United States Supreme Court had close ties to Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of seeds for farming, and who, as a Supreme, has made at least one big decision that was undeniably favorable to his old gang, well... Well, just look at what is - or isn’t - happening right now in the current, Democrat-controlled government’s attempt to reform the health-care industry, starting with health-care insurance practices, for evidence of how unjust and corrupt the too-close-for-comfort relationships typically are between lawmakers and their corporate bosses, those non-governmental honchos who always call the policy-making shots. Food, Inc. examines the fast-food industry; the growing organic-foods sector; the marketing and presentation of food products in advertising and in supermarkets; dietary trends (including the alarming fact that one out of three American youngsters is obese); the potentially and actually unsanitary conditions that exist in meat-packing factories; the abuse of workers by meat-packing companies; and the really evil abuse of animals by the meat-production industries. New strains of deadly bacteria in meat products; chickens, hogs and cows that are force-fed industrially manufactured feed, which is often derived from genetically modified corn, and that are forced to stand tightly pressed together, cheek to cheek, in their own excrement; farmers who are threatened by Monsanto for not using the company’s genetically modified seed... You don’t even want to go there, where any of these subjects leads, but Food, Inc. does, and its exposé is both lucid and urgent. In addition to Schlosser, the author of the book Fast Food Nation, Food, Inc. features interviews with Michael Pollan (the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto), the socially conscious food entrepreneurs Gary Hirshberg (Stonyfield) and Joel Salatin (Polyface Farms), and, most movingly, the food-safety activist Barbara Kowalcyk, whose two-and-a-half-year-old son, Kevin, died in 2001 from E.coli poisoning after eating a hamburger. The illness that took his life was unstoppable. Since that time, Kowalcyk has urged lawmakers in Washington to pass legislation known as “Kevin’s Law,” which would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture the power to close down factories that produce contaminated meat. (Memo to Capitol Hill: Shouldn’t the USDA have such authority anyway?) Food, Inc.’s official website notes: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million Americans are sickened, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5000 die each year from foodborne illnesses.” Right now, “Kevin’s Law” is not a pending piece of legislation on the agenda of the U.S. Congress. In 2006, Barbara Kowalcyk co-founded, along with Patricia Buck, the Pennsylvania-based Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention (CFI). A recently posted article penned by Kowalcyk appears on the blog Take Part. In it, the food-safety activist summarizes CFI’s history, mission and activities. See Food, Inc. and, if you’re a meat-eater, you might become a strict vegetarian overnight. Then again, nowadays, some consumers may wonder if even supermarket-sold fruits and vegetables are safe. Maybe the glory days are coming for manufacturers of bleach. Posted by E.M.G.
12 July 2009
15 June 2009
LONDON - It was 40 years ago today that Yoko Ono taught her band to play. In December 1970, the album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band was issued on Apple Records simultaneously with the London-based label’s release of John Lennon’s first, post-Beatles solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Some of the same musicians who played on Lennon’s record played on Ono’s. It was the era of the rock “supergroup,” whose members, typically, came from other accomplished ensembles and whose respective, musical styles and artistic attitudes combined to create bands with especially distinctive sounds. Think Led Zeppelin, Cream or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. By contrast, Lennon and Ono’s concept of what the Plastic Ono Band, as a music-making entity, could or would be, flew in the face of the supergroup model and instead was more related to jazz jamming ensembles or pick-up basketball games, whose participants moved more fluidly in and out of the action. So it was, then, that the Plastic Ono Band’s configuration, when it came to laying down the tracks that would become Ono’s album after the daily recording sessions in October 1970 that led to Lennon’s disc, included Ono (vocals), Lennon (guitar), Klaus Voorman (bass) and Ringo Starr (drums). Later line-ups of musicians in the Plastic Ono Band in live performance or in the recording studio backing Lennon and/or Ono varied considerably. (For a complete history of Ono’s musical career, see my essay on this subject in Yes: Yoko Ono (New York and London: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), edited by Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks.) In recent days, Ono has been in the United Kingdom, fresh from a soujourn in Venice, Italy, where she received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement on June 6 from the organizing committee of the 2009 Venice Biennale. In Venice, at the Palazzetto Tito of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, in an event that is taking place outside of but concurrent with the Biennale, Ono is presenting “Anton’s Memory,” an exhibition of old and new works. It will remain on view through September 20, 2009. In London, on June 11, Ono picked up another prize, this time a lifetime-achievement award bestowed by Mojo, the British music magazine. At an awards ceremony hosted by the magazine, its editor, Phil Alexander, said of the visual artist, composer, performer and peace activist whose label-defying first album was panned by the British press decades ago: “She may have been married to one of the most famous men in the world but she also helped change music as we know it in her own right. First, by introducing avant-garde sensibilities to her husband but, just as significantly, by continuing to push the boundaries of what was deemed the norm way after that.” (BBC) Yesterday, 40 years after the Plastic Ono Band, a “conceptual supergroup,” as it has sometimes been described, was formed, Yoko Ono fronted the ensemble’s latest configuration in a concert in the annual Meltdown music-and-film festival at London’s Southbank Centre - and at 76 years old, she tore the roof off the arts center’s Royal Festival Hall. This year’s Meltdown series of events has been curated by the legendary, American, avant-jazz pioneer, Ornette Coleman. With her son, Sean Lennon, a very capable and charismatic bandleader, on lead guitar, Ono kicked off her gig with a fierce version of “Why,” the rock-meets-avant-garde, primal-scream blow-out that opened side one of her 1970 debut record back in the Age of Vinyl. Just as John Lennon had played guitar on Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (and, years later, on Ono’s single, “Walking on Thin Ice,” which was released in early 1981) with a take-no-prisoners gusto that was rarely heard in his Beatles recordings, Sean Lennon showed himself to be a practitioner of the slash-and-burn guitar style that serves his mother’s most vigorous compositions so well. Ono and her son worked as a tightly collaborative team as they led a polished group of musicians - including Cornelius, Yuko Honda (of Cibo Matto), Mark Ronson and, on “Toyboat” and a new song, “I’m Going Away Smiling,” guest singer Antony Hegarty - through a long set that included “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow),” “Rising,” “Kurushii” and “Mindtrain” (with Coleman, a.k.a., in some quarters, “God,” on saxophone). Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band's new album, Between My Head and the Sky, will be released as a digital download on Sean Lennon’s new Chimera Music label on September 21, 2009. Posted by E.M.G.
8 June 2009
VENICE - The 2009 Venice Biennale, the 53rd edition of the world’s oldest and most venerable international exposition of contemporary art, opened to the public on June 7. It will remain on view through November 22, 2009. Bigger then ever this year, the Biennale’s official presentations, representing 77 different countries, institutions or organizations in their own pavilions or exhibition spaces, spill out of the Giardini park and the Arsenale, the former ship-building center of the now-faded Most Serene Republic of Venice, into numerous venues around the city. Among the new national participants this year: several Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) and the United Arab Emirates. The Swedish-born curator Daniel Birnbaum, the rector of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule, in Frankfurt, Germany, is the director of this year’s Biennale. As the subject of the big event’s main exhibition, which is also its title, Birnbaum chose the open-ended theme “Making Worlds.” Quoting the director’s remarks, the Biennale’s official press materials note: “A work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world and, if taken seriously, must be seen as a way of ‘making a world.’ A few signs marked on paper, a barely touched canvas or a vast installation can amount to different ways of world-making.” And in these late-postmodernist times, nearly a century after Marcel Duchamp, presenting industrially produced objects as “ready-made” works of art, declared that they were works of art simply because he, the artist, could and did so designate them, in effect, anything, anywhere, anytime can be a work of art. So there! Go make a world with that notion. Predictably, many of the works on view at this year’s Venice Biennale offer emblematic examples of what one American critic several years ago dubbed “biennal art.” They are big, to take advantage of and fill the cavernous spaces of some of the Biennale’s most spectacular galleries, like those in the high-ceilinged Arsenale, and they are loud (visually, that is, or even aurally) and they can be bombastic. Subtlety is in short supply at many a biennial bash, where less sometimes masquerades as more, but where more often seems to want to be seen as better. Take, for example, the Round Wooden Rods made by the late Polish artist André Cadere (1934-1978). On view in the main portion of the “Making Worlds” presentation in the large, main-exhibition pavilion in the Giardini, Cadere’s simple creations, each about one meter long, are croquet-like sticks painted with colored stripes. They lean against the walls of various galleries inside the pavilion, where they are unobtrusively sprinkled throughout the exhibition. By contrast, Human Being, a mixed-media installation by the lawyer-turned-artist Pascale Marthine Tayou of Cameroon (who is based in Belgium), fills a large section of the Arsenale’s long, central passageway with the recreation of an African village, complete with wooden huts perched on stilt-like platforms, piles of wood chips, video projections and long poles leaning up against the building’s brick-covered pillars.
Big is also very poetic in the hands of the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. Shadow Play, his mixed-media installation on view in “Making Worlds” in the main-exhibition pavilion in the Giardini, consists of little more than several small, motorized, rotating platforms (without the motors, they’re known as “lazy Susans” in American English; those are round, rotating trays, placed in the center of dinner tables to hold condiments) loaded down with toys, tools and household objects, which have been set up on a long table, along with lamps that shine on them and project the shadows their objects create against a large wall in a darkened room. The shadows that hit the wall overlap and dance with each other in endless combinations of enchanting, multi-layered shapes and shifting, random patterns. The Argentine artist Tomas Saraceno, who lives and works in Frankfurt, also has created a large-scale work with humble materials. Using little more than thick, elasticized, black string, he has filled a large gallery in the main-exhibition pavilion in the Giardini with Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web. Visitors can - and enthusiastically do - actually walk through Saraceno’s thicket of carefully handcrafted knots and webs. On June 6, the Japanese-born artist Yoko Ono, who has been based in New York for many decades, and the American artist John Baldessari, were awarded the Venice Biennale’s top prize, the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement. Among the newcomers to the Biennale this year, the United Arab Emirates has its own pavilion (actually, it’s a space inside the Arsenale). Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, has its own separate presentation, too. Choosing not to ignore the wealth for which the UAE is famous, Tirdad Zolghadr, the curator of its exhibition, has organized a presentation of works by contemporary artists from the Emirates that includes a scale model of the ambitious, $27-billion Saadiyat Island development project in Abu Dhabi that is expected to be completed in 2018. It will feature luxury housing and hotels, and branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid are among the superstar architects who are designing buildings for the project, whose creators hope it will instantly transform Abu Dhabi into an international cultural center. Is Zolghadr’s inclusion of the Saadiyat Island model in the UAE’s exhibition an ironic or an unironic gesture? In these late-postmodernist, economically hard times (for much of the rest of the world, that is, if not for the oil-rich UAE), who knows? Around this Biennale, a certain sense of pomo detachment and self-conscious cool provides a chill to make up for the air conditioning that is not to be found in some of the national pavilions and the centuries-old, elegant palazzi in central Venice, where other, related exhibitions are being presented. Abu Dhabi’s own exhibition isn’t really an exhibition at all, but rather something of a real-estate agent’s sales office, a large space lined with billboard-size photos of a smiling, UAE couple and their child loaded down with purchases from a shopping mall, where they’ve just scooped up armfuls of global luxury-brand goodies from high-priced shops. This presentation is lavishly produced and sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. Definitely unironic, as this year’s Biennale gets under way, are some of the biggest sculptures to be seen anywhere in Venice this summer. These are the yachts that belong to certain art-loving Russian and European millionaires or billionaires (depending on which currency they might be using to count their riches). They’re anchored near the entrance of the Grand Canal - just a euro’s, a dollar’s, a pound’s or a ruble’s throw from the Biennale’s main venues. Posted by E.M.G.
2 May 2009
NEW YORK - I first wrote about the American artist Donna Sharrett in 2000 in an article for the New York Times on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. I was struck by Sharrett’s imaginative use of both common and unusual materials, and by her blending of traditional craft-making techniques and modernist aesthetics to create highly original works that were not exactly conventional collages or wall-mounted sculptures. Sharrett’s work consistently blurs the line between “craft” and “fine art,” at least as far as those rather limited - and limiting - category-defining terms usually have been used in the United States. Now, after a period of labor-intensive, all-by-hand production that lasted a few years, Sharrett has emerged from her studio in the lower Hudson Valley, just north of Manhattan, to present her newest group of mixed-media creations. They’re on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York through May 23 in an exhibition entitled “Reverb,” for which I wrote the following introductory text. (This brief note appears on the card that has been produced to document this exhibition.) Donna Sharrett: “Reverb” Echoes, repeating rhythms, reverberations of thoughts, emotions, sights and sounds - such are the movements in the heart and in the mind that have become both the fleeting subjects and, along with beads, dried rose petals, used clothing and even copper-penny coins, some of the raw materials of Donna Sharrett’s distinctive art. Her mixed-media creations are not quite sculptures and not quite paintings but certainly are the products of meticulous compositional calculations, impeccable craftsmanship and extensive background research. Now, in Sharrett’s new “Reverb” series, her thematic focus has shifted from an earlier interest in memorials to the ineffable nature of memory itself. For Sharrett, such memories usually are deeply personal. At the same time, her art feels quietly and invitingly therapeutic; for all its ornamental fineness, it is still abstract, and viewers may find in its conjoining of unlikely, jewel-like materials their own resonant meanings. To create these works, Sharrett used the bead-like, round, metal ends of her late, musician brother’s guitar strings and string ends from dozens of other musicians who donated them to her. Her new works also allude to music because they take their titles from actual songs. Admirers of Sharrett’s art gave her articles of clothing (denim jeans, men’s cravats) and antique-damask linens, which she incorporated into these new works. All of these elements, the artist notes, “actually contain memories,” for before she acquired them, they all really had been used by their former owners. Now they serve, like Proust’s pastry, as both “placeholders for memories,” as Sharrett says, and as talisman-souvenirs to provoke them. We all share, she observes, “a basic desire or need to remember.” With imagination and skill, in works whose richly elaborated, round-shaped compositions evoke the simple form of the ring, a symbol of the everlasting and of time as a cyclical whole made up of past, present and future, Sharrett continues to explore - and to honor - that unshakable impulse to look back that is an enduring mark of the human spirit. Posted by E.M.G.
21 Apr 2009
HAVANA - The 10th Havana Biennial opened on March 27, 2009 and is scheduled to remain on view through the end of April. Artists from more than 40 countries, especially those in the Latin-American and Caribbean regions, are taking part in this international, contemporary-art exposition, which serves a special purpose as a high-profile showcase for new creations by Cuban artists, many of whom have few or no contacts outside their island home to help them promote or sell their works. I traveled to Cuba a few weeks ago to interview artists associated with the Havana Biennial and to catch up with current art-making trends. I had made my last trip to Cuba in September of last year. That research trip resulted in the publication of my report about the activities of several Cuban contemporary artists in the December 2008 issue of Art & Antiques, a magazine based in the U.S.A. As with past editions of this event, this year, the Biennial's main venue is the Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, a massive fort overlooking the entrance to Havana Bay, which was built during the Spanish-colonial era. Inside the fort, long, stone buildings house bunker-like spaces that serve as the exhibition galleries for works by individual artists or artists' collectives. Several other exhibitions that are officially associated with the 10th Havana Biennial are also on view at various venues in the Cuban capital, including the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam in the Habana Vieja (Old Havana) district. Overall, this year's Biennial offers fewer works of painting and sculpture than it does mixed-media works of a kind that could be described as "conceptualist" or perhaps "wannabe conceptualist." These days, around Latin America, especially in Mexico, a certain strain of what I call gimmick-driven, conceptualist or would-be conceptualist art-making is still very prevalent. Specifically, I'm referring to works whose one-trick plays on the meanings or values of certain appropriated objects or images - frying pans, baskets, cups and saucers, Q-tips, tortillas, supermarket shopping carts, newspaper photos, you name it - purport to provocatively subvert such meanings or values. Many such creations have little or no poetic or aesthetic resonance, however, and after a viewer "gets it" - the new meaning of a stack of dishes or an assemblage of dry tortillas or a familiar corporate or brand logo presented in an uncommon context - there is often little to go back and "get" again. Some exceptions to the banality that characterizes this kind of too-easy (or too self-consciously, too easily ironic), appropriationist art-making do turn up at the current Havana Biennial. Among them: Globalization Factory (2009), a mixed-media work by the Cuban artist Abel Barroso: Based in Havana, Barroso has been interested in what might be called his country's low technological literacy level. Mobile phones, computers and the wide range of everyday, electronic gadgets that consumers in many other parts of the world take for granted are still rare in Cuba, where Internet service is slow and cumbersome, and allowed by the government only in certain hotels, for use by foreign tourists. The government also grants artists, writers and academics who are members of a national, cultural-workers organization limited access to e-mail and the Internet. As Barroso sees it, Cuba is as isolated technologically as it is politically and economically from much of the rest of the world, and it has a lot of catching-up to do. The artist works in wood, carving detailed, oversized replicas of common electric or electronic devices, such as blenders, TV remote controls, mobile phones and laptop computers. Barroso's chunky, exaggeratedly large, wooden copies of these high-tech items call attention to the ways in which, for many Cubans, who can only dream of ever owning the real things, such sophisticated consumer products have become fetishized objects of desire. Prolongation (2007-2009), a mixed-media work by Colectivo Lalimpia: Consisting of a gas-station pump unit whose hose extends and unfurls endlessly, filling the exhibition space with a dense, impenetrable thicket of black-rubber tubing, this eloquently simple work by a five-person artists' collective from Ecudaor refers symbolically to the many, interconnected ways - economic, political, industrial - in which the oil industry and the use of petroleum-derived products effectively control the world - or at least the ways in which many people in it live, deeply dependent on such products.
20 Mar 2009
NEW YORK - On view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, through April 19, 2009: “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989.” This large exhibition charts the flow, over more than century, of some rather influential philosophical and aesthetic ideas, and artistic traditions, from what used to be known as “The Orient” to the West. It examines numerous, overlapping currents of thought and art-making techniques - among them: Buddhist teachings about reality and death, East Asian calligraphy, meditation - that deeply affected the ways in which American and other modern artists who were based in the United States thought about and produced works of art from around the time feudal Japan was forcefully opened up to trade with the West in the 19th century through the end of the Cold War era in the late 1980s. Contact with Asia, either in person or through the exchange of books, artworks or travel notes and research, freed many U.S.A.-based artists’ ways of thinking about what art could and should be. Organized by Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim’s senior curator for Asian art, “The Third Mind” goes way beyond familiar, art-history course factoids about the excitement 19th-century European Impressionists felt upon discovering Japanese ukiyo-e (woodblock prints). It tracks the way traditional, 19th-century art objects literally gave up their physical forms as paintings, drawings or sculptures to become little more than ephemeral events (or, sometimes more precisely, the varied forms of documentation - photographs, videos, sound recordings - that record such events’ fleeting occurrences). Early-modern and abstract-expressionist paintings by such artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Tobey, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock are on view. At the other extreme of the artistic evolution examined here, so are the photos and punch cards that document Tehching Hsieh’s performance work, Punching the Time Clock on the Hour, One-Year Performance (1980-1981), in which the New York-based artist clocked in almost every hour on the hour, every day, for one year. Still photos and a time-lapse film show Hsieh’s hair growth during the year-long period of the endurance effort he undertook for the sake of an artwork that was as intangible as its subject itself: the passing of time. If many or most of the Asian influences on American modern artists that come into focus in “The Third Mind” were associated with Japan, that may well be, Munroe notes, because, since the 19th century, economically, politically, culturally and even militarily, the United States’ closest and deepest relations in Asia - even when the two countries were at war - have been with Japan. “The Third Mind” is a big and complex exhibition whose theme of impactful cross-cultural exchange couldn’t be more relevant at a time of border-dissolving, globalized everything, from brand-name products and popular music to economic recession. (My article about “The Third Mind” has been published in the April 2009 issue of Art in America, the international art magazine that is based in the U.S.A.) Posted by E.M.G.
26 Feb 2009 NEW YORK - Jon Waldo is a New York-based painter whose personal background and research interests include traditional New England handicrafts and folk art; punk rock; graffiti; the 19th-century, American author Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick; and the paranoid-poetic pronouncements of that ubiquitous Beat rambler, William Burroughs. An exhibition of Waldo’s new paintings is on view through March 27, 2009 at Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago. In the early 1990s, Waldo made “word paintings” in which he painted (in plain block letters on what looked like fluttering yellow ribbons) snippets of conversations he had heard in the street, chatter he had heard on the radio or headlines he had spotted in newspapers. These bits of found speech included such inestimable nuggets of Americana as “Smokin’ and drinkin’ for two” (referring to a pregnant woman in Maine), “Nothing is telling me anything,” “It’s alright if you leave me alone” and “My poison.” (Huh?) Later, Waldo produced paintings whose images came from hand-cut stencils the artist made himself, based on his own line drawings of everyday objects, such as toys, cars, electric fans and furniture. In recent years, Waldo has refined his stencil-painting technique. Now he uses acrylic modeling paste and enamel paint with his stencils to create the thick, crusty outlines of his familiar-looking subjects. About his new works on view in Chicago, Waldo notes: “There is a simplicity about my subjects and the manner in which they are depicted.” With the current, worldwide economic recession in mind, Waldo adds: “As a native New Englander, I’ve long been interested in the outlook, partly influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism, of the19th-century Transcendentalist thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated the extraordinary nature of the ordinary. I believe my new paintings express a sense of urgency about just how worthwhile - or necessary - it might be right now to pay attention to and recognize the value of everyday experiences and of the most familiar objects and events in our daily lives. With these new works, I feel excited about finding my own way of calling attention to the enduring charm and beauty of the ordinary.” Posted by E.M.G.
26 Feb 2009 NEW YORK - Forget the worldwide economic recession. Recently, in New York, grooviness could be seen breaking out all over the vast atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, where the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist had installed her mixed-media creation, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters). The installation consisted of far-out, mind-blowing, consciousness-raising, gigantic video projections on all the walls of the cavernous atrium space, visuals that featured such iconic, hippy-trippy fare as colorful flowers in bloom, close-ups of dreamy, human eyeballs and little girls playing with bugs. Visitors to Rist’s soul-soothing, psychedelic chamber were invited to take off their shoes, to sit or lie down on a thick-piled white carpet in the center of the room or, better yet, to lie down on a huge, doughnut-shaped sort of settee that had landed, like a flying saucer, on top of that big rug. Frenetic New York and many of its stressed-out, neurotic, overworked, recession-weary inhabitants could use a permanent, chill-out playpen of the kind Rist had concocted. It was open to MoMA visitors from November 19 of last year through February 2, 2009. Pity that it’s gone. Posted by E.M.G.
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Guðjón’s “tools,” with their organic, anthropomorphic and often ergonomic-looking shapes, at first glance resemble familiar graters, rollers, clamps, diggers or pincers but they are none of those helpful items. Not exactly.
Control (2008) features a figurine of the late Pope John Paul II, creeping along and holding up a cross as he confronts a crucifix. A serpent’s tail extends from the end of his robe. It is sliced like a sausage to reveal a meaty interior, and the effect of this meticulously painted, strange, paper-and-balsa-wood protrusion is visceral. By contrast, The Wave, the Particle, the Light (2009), a projection onto a wall of a computer-drawn, naked Jesus Christ, which turns slowly on various axes before spinning out of control in an intense, white blaze. It gives visible form to the metaphorical notion of the Christian savior as a source of spirit-cleansing, pure, powerful light.
These artists’ works, many of which Kind showed, were partly surrealist and full of fantasy. Their unabashedly handcrafted qualities were the antithesis of the East Coast’s cool-slick, pop-art style. It was with such trend-bucking art forms in mind that, over the years, Kind routinely pointed out what it was that she was looking for when she looked at art. She said: “I look for a strong, original vocabulary of form and for evidence that artists are making art not because they might want to but instead because they have to.” The British-born sculptor Gillian Jagger, who showed her mixed-media works at Kind’s New York gallery in the early 2000s, says: “Phyllis calls art that meets these criteria ‘the art of necessity,’ meaning art in which it is evident that the people who make it do so because they are absolutely compelled to do so.”
Zindato, an Italian, self-taught artist who lives in Mexico, met Kind in 2000. She started showing his work that same year. Last week, he stopped in New York en route to Europe, and we met and talked about the legacy of Phyllis Kind and her gallery. Zindato said: “I always appreciated being able to speak with her, because she always offered revealing observations about my work, calling attention to details no one else would have noticed. She would look at a work and pull out a drawing by Wölfli or Carlo and make comparisons, a gesture that showed how thoughtfully she had been looking at art for so many years. If something about a work of art was too obvious, it was meaningless to her. I would say that her relationship with many works of art was and is really very personal.”
On his own 
My article about the Japanese modern artist Takesada Matsutani, pegged to his recent museum exhibition in Kamakura, Japan, has been published in the May 2010 issue of Art in America. (See my 7 February 2010 "Journal" item, below, for information about this artist and his recent exhibitions in Japan.) Matsutani, who has been based in Paris since the late 1960s, was a member of the so-called second generation of the post-World War II Gutai group of prototypical performance and abstract-expressionist artists in Japan. Here is the complete Art in America article in PDF form. |
My interview with Brooke Davis Anderson, the director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, has just been published in the April 2010 issue of Art in America. Since 1999, Anderson has organized numerous milestone exhibitions at this museum of the work of important outsider or self-taught artists, such as Adolf Wölfli and Martín Ramírez. Now on view (through September 5, 2010): "Approaching Abstraction," an exhibition of works by self-taught artists, culled by Anderson from AFAM's collection, that proposes new ways of looking at the unusual, deeply personal creations of such art-makers. This is a must-see exhibition. Read the article here. The next-to-last page in this PDF is blank, but no text or photo elements are missing. |
My interview with the artist Aurora Robson was published in the October 2009 issue of Art in America. In it, the Brooklyn-based, Canadian creator of paintings and mixed-media collages, and of sculptures made from cast-off plastic bottles, talks about her philosophy of art-making and the techniques she employs. Of special interest: Robson's environmentalist outlook and how she puts her save-the-planet values into practice as an artist and teacher. Read the article here. It's a large PDF. |
My article about a group of less well-known Mexican modernist artists - less well-known outside Mexico, that is, except to Mexican-modern-art specialists and collectors - was published in the May 2009 issue of Art & Antiques. Above: La Ramera (The Prostitute), 1927, an oil-on-cardboard painting by Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (1896-1971), from the Mexico City-based Colección Andrés Blaisten. Photo: Colección Andrés Blaisten. |
