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Dream Catcher – Giles Lyon

Friday, April 27, 2012

“…when you look at walls mottled with various stains or stones made of diverse substances, if you have to invent some scene, you may discover on them the likeness of various countries, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great valleys and hills in diverse arrangement; again, you may be able to see battles and figures in action and strange effects of physiognomy and costumes, and infinite objects which you could reduce to complete and harmonious forms. And the effect produced by these mottled walls is like that of the sound of bells, in the vibrating of which you may recognize any name or word you choose to imagine. I have seen blots in the clouds and in mottled walls which have stimulated me to the invention of various objects, and although the blots themselves were altogether devoid of perfection in any one of their parts, they lacked not perfection in their movement and circumstance.”
Leonardo Da Vinci Treatise on Painting

What Leonardo was letting us know was that nature, happenstance and imagination can work in concert. He was discussing a visual theoretics that would later fuel the early part of the 20th century, something that would become the basis for the exploration of the primal urges lurking beneath the Modern sensibility. To depict the world beneath that “civilized” era Picasso turned to the mythologies of Africa and the Mediterranean, the Surrealists invoked Freud and Jung looking for archetypal experiences and dream visions, and Pollock explored the ecstatic spirituality of the American West. But there in Leonardo’s Renaissance those seeking new visual understanding had to work through Dark Age superstitions and doctrinaire persecution. One could find monsters and visions behind every tree and blade of grass, in every image and every statement. To see them was dangerous, to paint them foolish, but to tell how one might conjure them where none existed was blasphemous. Leonardo, whose imagination spans centuries, understood the power of nature and imagination. He understood that the need to connect to something deeper in the secret visual life around us could fuel a new kind of art, a new kind of painting. And he left it there like a map for those that followed.

GIles Lyon Green Yellow Animal Spirits

This past fall I had a visit with the artist and painter Giles Lyon. His studio is in Brooklyn at the back of a building shared by other artists and exhibition spaces. The studio is filled with works in progress, older work stacked neatly, and bits and pieces of life collected and set aside for inspiration. Outside the windows there are garden yards and full-formed trees. Daylight slants into the space moving across the room with the time. Color is everywhere – mottled, bright sheets of color – greens, yellows, reds, and blues. These moments of urban greenery outside and artist’s life inside combine all at once to feel vibrant and expressive. There’s a connection to nature that’s a bit startling in these very artificial times and in this very artificial city. I spent a pleasant afternoon with Giles talking about all manner of things; art, politics, life. All of this experience feeds back into his work in ways that many professional artists can not be bothered with here in the 21st Century. We are far too connected and far too involved with one another to notice. In this Giles is a throw-back and I mean that in the very best sense.

I “found” Giles’ work a few years ago at a gallery show in Chelsea at the then named Feigen Contemporary. I connected immediately with the paintings. Giles was working in an AbEx style but doing it very self consciously. He was changing the intent of the historical style to make over “action painting” into a thoughtful reexamination of the act of painting. It was an abstraction of processes. After laying down the drip, the slash or the stroke he would delineate the graphic nature of the result. It was a way to reclaim the pictorial, to push the edges of the lost abstract “figure” against the ground. This process was done without irony using history directly to express something personal instead of merely commenting on the past. Giles found a way to manipulate an academic style, to make it his own, to create a language of abstract poetic forms from within the meme. This was no small feat, an ambitious undertaking. Over the years I’ve caught bits and pieces of his work and have always been impressed at the visual rigor he has applied to these painting.

These newer works begin with color washed and stained into the canvases. He’s moved from the skeins of paint to the field of hue, from Pollock to Rothko in a way. This encompassing ground starts out of the old school Color Field painters. It’s a technique connected to the flow of paint, the way it pools and streaks, absorbs into the canvas creating space, light and veils of hue. This use of color, the push and pull within it, was part of the AbEx “action painting” imperative, part of the physicality of the materials themselves, and part of the will of the artist guiding and defining these processes. These Post-painterly Abstractionists explored the openness of the field, the beauty of the ground itself. This movement was the poignant coda at the end of Modernism. It carried within it the last of the School of Paris, the last of a Modernist sensibility. Giles’ use of color to define the field comes out of that time and connects directly to the bright expressive color preferred by Matisse and the Nabis. He is intent on defining his painting’s connections to Modernism’s emotive possibilities rather than to Postmoderism’s artificial colors and product placements. These grounds become visual sounding boards from which the artist begins to look deeper, both within the painted surface and within himself. He is seeking archetypes, nature, older mythologies, things that resonate beneath the polite surfaces of our contemporary personalities.

Giles feels a connection to aboriginal culture, to the Shamanistic religiosity and vision quests practiced in the Northwest. This visual language is arcane and foreign to me and many like me, but I respond viscerally to the drawings, to the beautiful line work and the dreamlike imagery. I understand that this is a personal experience for this painter, and he’s going somewhere that many of us would not. He’s trying to achieve a deeper involvement in a kind of living and understanding of our subconscious lives that many of us, myself included, only read about in literature or see in movies. This connection allows Giles to take the Color Field further, literally, to reach back to the Surreal, to Miro, to Pollock, to find a connection to a more primal experience of our contemporary culture. Within the field there are things to be found, images to pull from the beautiful color ground just as Leonardo advised. The line work is impeccable, strong, involved. Eyes, teeth, mouths, abstract landscapes, birds, animals, gentle or angry, appear from the Color Field. It’s a cosmology of imagery found deep within the spaces of the painting surfaces. He is conjuring, pulling our primal past into the Postmodern. It’s a Jungian tight rope strung between the performance of the line and the power of visual imagination. He asks a lot of us, to go on this quest for nature, to find a different kind of painterly interaction using an older experience of vision. What I find arresting in this work is the way the images emerge, the way Giles’ incisive line pulls those images into view as if they were always there, as if we were somehow ignoring our own deeper urges while losing ourselves within those veiled surfaces. It’s surprising. And it leads one to believe that these menageries from our subconscious lurk everywhere in our past even in the most cliched of Modernist tropes, even in the most beautiful abstraction.

In these vibrant paintings Giles hopes to remind us of our humanity, of our history, and of our collective memories. For more about Giles Lyon and his work link here.

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Vision – Provocation

Friday, April 6, 2012


Clement Greenberg BBC Interview – double click to play

In the surprisingly candid and touching video above Clement Greenberg mentions that many of the artists of the time did not see Pollock as a proper painter. And at the beginning of the clip you might see why. Pollock used paint differently, as a way to record his involvement in the moment, like a captured experience in time – almost like a photograph. Now I want to be very clear about one thing most American painters don’t think about when we stand before our canvases. We do not acknowledge that America does not have a tradition of painting. We do not have that kind of visual history in our genetic makeup. Painters are an afterthought. Even as AbEx fever raged in the minds of the small group of committed painters on 10th Street, even as America proclaimed it’s coming of artistic age in paint – we still weren’t painters. Truth is most of the AbExers had come from Europe or were taught by Europeans that were steeped in the philosophies, aesthetics and politics of old Europa. Whatever AbEx was it wasn’t a strictly American movement. What we had to do in order to take the cultural stage and declare our readiness to overtake Paris as the art world center was to inherit, or better, steal the idea of Modernism – depending on your viewpoint. And Modernism, the flowering of 20th century culture, was all about the history of painting.

At that time America was not yet the “Super Power” it would become. Our art was still considered provincial and unformed by the rest of the world. But after the international success of the Americanization of Modernism America began to export the Art that truly reflected our own culture, that came from our own experiences. And why not? America was the new super power, the new empire, and like any empire, it began to erect its own distinct culture everywhere it found a foothold. We didn’t need European visual history to make the point of our cultural power. We had our own. Paint and painting is just not all that interesting to us, it’s never defined us the way it once defined Europe’s Culture. It never represented life in America. And the younger generation of American artists that rushed to the fore after AbEx made their mark on the art world’s stage through other means and in other ways. True, some were “painters” but they did not approach painting as the Europeans had done. Instead these artists relied on and embodied American corporate values like productivity, quantification and electronic imagery – all of which come from Hollywood, TV, advertising and manufacturing. Think of Stella, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Judd, Rosenquist and Andre – the artists of the early Postmodern years. And most all of that art, most all of our truly American art, was formed and documented through the use of the lens, formed by what lenses could do and how those lenses defined and fashioned us. Our avant garde never gave a good god damn for painting, for seeing like painters, for making images, spaces and light like the great European painters once did. No. Painting was as old, outdated and passé as the war torn history of Europe. We had something far more “real”, something far more “true to life” humming through our culture. And it had absolutely NOTHING to do with painting.

America’s Forgotten Old Man

We begin this provocation at the moment that America began to form itself into the nation we experience today. Matthew Brady was America’s first great imagist, its first great Avant Garde Artist, its first great provocateur. And in his work you can see all the future of American (Post) Modernism, from 291 to 10th Street right into Warhol’s Silver Studio. From portraiture to landscape Brady set the tone for how Americans would confront European visual traditions. From his studios in Washington and New York Brady formed a vision of America that played between two intellectual opposites. On the one hand he photographed the powerful, rich and famous in highly stylized and mannered portraits. In these works he was carrying on the visual traditions of Europe and creating something that would become our Hollywood culture, the culture of fame, glamor and celebrity that is still prevalent in every media outlet in America. On the other he and his studio documented the harsh realities and unfortunate incidences of the lives of everyday Americans. What we see in this disparate body of work is the interior and exterior, the studio and the world, artifice and nature. His art captured the speed and violence engendered by a growing mechanized culture as it defined the ethos of this new nation. And in doing so he reformulated an old critique, an old problem that had faced painters through the centuries – artifice or reality? But Brady did this through the new lens/machine, the democratic eye, rather than in paint. In Brady’s photos as in American culture – reality and artifice become one.

The contact sheet of America’s most famous President (the analog precursor to the thumbnail archive) is stunning. First because of the prescience and collaboration between the sitter and the artist. Lincoln was one of the first Presidents to understand the power of image, the star power that mass produced images can bestow. He sat for Brady many times and his face, as Brady fashioned it, is still to this day etched forever in the minds of every American. That face, or rather Brady’s images of Lincoln are as ubiquitous as the Mona Lisa and just as mysteriously fascinating. Yet we don’t often think of these images in that way, we don’t “see” Lincoln as an art historical watershed. They don’t matter as Art because we have all been continuously fed these sorts of images every day of our lives. It’s how we communicate with one another. That face based on Brady’s image is on our fucking currency. We forget sometimes about the mind behind the image. Brady used the lens in clever ways. In many of the photographs of Lincoln, especially the close ups, Brady played with the depth of field, strongly focusing on Lincoln’s face and allowing the rest of his head to slightly blur. He was making sure that this face would register strongly in our unconscious, that this sculpted vision of Lincoln would remain with us like a dream, emerging from the ground and lodging into our collective memories. We take it for granted today, the ubiquity of these kind of images, of manipulative close ups and focus, especially in photographic images, but at the time of the civil war, this kind of encounter, this visual intimacy with a “life-like” image was a new experience for the American public. We have craved and coveted this kind of intimacy with fame ever since.

Second is the amazing structure and composition of the contact sheet itself. Though Brady would never present the work in this way (at least I don’t think he did) this contact sheet is a Postmodern miracle. From Warhol to your computer screen, most of the faux antiqued modernism and quantified structures that we see looks and acts in our minds exactly like this contact sheet, and in fact, most every contact sheet that came after Brady – taped, grease penciled, unregistered, collaged, repeated, delightfully fucked up. The composition not only speaks of the intimacy within the image, but the intimacy within the processes of the photographer. We see a double capture, something we Americans prize in everything we experience – reality as artifice presented as experience. The composition in this contact sheet is classic Warhol and classic late 20th Century. And even more telling in the processes of the contact sheet is the fact that this offhand quantification and explication also mimics the way artists had for centuries made drawings, worked out ideas in their sketch books. Only now these processes were being done through the machine. For the American this kind of process, this working method is what we prefer to engage with: the unfinished, the unmade, and the undone. It allows us to find the piece, to bond with the subject, to discover ourselves within it, to be a part of the finish and to make the thing great. It means WE must experience the process, we PARTICIPATE rather than have the thing arrive as a full blown vision before us. Like most things in America that is what we crave. You see this in our reality TV shows, our political talk shows and in the myths and biographies of our famous citizens. In this way we can see the experience not as a product of genius, but as a democratic event, an elected leader, as one of us. And that means we get to choose, to feel that our opinion counts, just as our speech has been promised to us, just like a Coke and a smile.

I have to say that I’ve always been fascinated by the disparate nature of Brady’s body of photographs especially as it concerns the “real” life of Americans. Brady ran a massive project during the Civil War photographing and documenting that conflict. This was a first for art in this country and you can imagine the logistics involved. Because of the nature of the tools the teams of photographers capturing the images could not “shoot” the work on the fly. The camera had to be stationary, and so we have a kind of before and after experience in the work. For instance there are the posed shots of the battle commanders around a campsite and then there are the disastrous found images taken in the aftermath of a battle. When Brady first showed these photos the American public was horrified. They had not seen death presented in such a baldfaced and vile manner before. There was none of the heroism, none of the great cause. Liberty was not leading the People over the barricades. All that was there was a “true to life” moment captured by the machine. This reality was empty of virtue, clean of drama and vicious in depiction. There wasn’t any of the painterly space or dramatized narration that the art going public expected to see in Art. Rather they were confronted with a different experience – the violence of process, the all consuming ground.

The truth about the lens/machine is that it conflates artifice and objective imagery. That distance between the abstraction of the “image” (the focus and framing that happens in the machine) and the “reality” of existence (the world outside that framing) is fraught with all the questions that the coming American Century would wrangle with over and over again. Questions regarding our participation in society, in relationships, context – what defines individualism, romantic engagement, Manifest Destiny, country, wealth, class, sex and race – public issues with which we are STILL and ALWAYS coming to terms. Our visual avant garde began right here – NOT with the early Parisian Modernists and their struggle to paint in the face of a vast and powerful history. Painters in Europe were still engaging with the magic of the newly reproduced photographic image and how to incorporate that “reality” into painting. Americans had none of the visual tradition of this European legacy, and we found that we could easily do away with the problem that faced the painted image. And that is exactly what we did. We became Sunday painters and avant garde photographers. We Americans don’t see, we experience (which is why many Europeans don’t “get” us,) and the lens machine was the best, quickest and easiest way to achieve that “experience” for our Art. Inherent in the use of lens images are many other thornier questions about reality and imagery that Brady’s work also brings up. They are questions of authorship, reproduction, replication, appropriation, copyright, and just about any of the current “problems” that preoccupy today’s art world. Of course when we look at Brady’s work today it looks naive and dated, but it also brings with it the nostalgia and sentiment that defines so much of the art we make and encounter today.

Death is an overrated literary idea…

“Two attitudes underlie this presumption that anything in the world is material for the camera. One finds that there is beauty or at least interest in everything, seen with an acute enough eye. (And the aestheticizing of reality that makes everything, anything, available to the camera is what also permits the co-opting of any phtograph, even one of an utterly practical sort, as art.) The other treats everything as the object of some present or future use, as matter for estimates, decisions, and predictions.” Susan Sontag “The Image-World” On Photography

Greenberg was onto something important in that interview. For the American painter the old ways of seeing and painting didn’t make sense. This difference in understanding vision and culture put Pollock in the Cedar Street Tavern in the last year of his life. These drunken bouts speak to his nagging uncertainty and his loneliness in the face of his achievement. It also exacerbated Pollock’s Romantic inclination for a literary death. The old man makes clear that Pollock wanted to return to the Impressionists, to learn from them. And for me this points to our own continuing conundrum about painting. Pollock wanted to learn about painterly vision in Nature, about the way the Impressionists would see and paint through time instead of seeing and painting in time – visual culture versus experiential culture. His palette, composition, techniques and light and space would have had to change. And you can see this renewed struggle with European painting in his last “failed” works. He had stripped out the color, he had reclaimed the brush and reintroduced the figure. Another great push was on the way. In a telling gesture Pollock’s very last painting was entitled “Search.” In that painting he’s back to the clotted surfaces and chunky imagery of his younger work, like he’s working back toward something, trying to remember something he had forgotten. But in reality, that memory was something he may never have had access to, something that he had never really experienced first hand. Maybe a new kind of hybrid vision would have come from Pollock’s need to look at the Impressionists. What would have happened if Pollock spent some time in Paris? Who knows what l’Orangerie would have meant to Pollock?

You can see this struggle take root in many of the more prescient Postmodern painters as well. Frank Stella’s Working Space is all about the visual anxiety that American painters feel when confronted with the European visual traditions. He writes of finding volumetric space and light for a new kind of abstraction. He’s seeking a kind of hybridization of vision just as Pollock did those years ago. David Hockney approaches the same issues from a different perspective through his Secret Knowledge – which turns out to be a historical account of the lens in painting. David Reed begins with the Baroque and tries to marry European vision into American abstraction – light, hue, value, flatness, objectness – it’s all there. But for the most part we painters still ignore the conundrum, we still find it too difficult to confront. We keep replaying the recent past. I think the thing Greenberg was lamenting in Pollock’s need to reconnect with Europe is what we’ve been discussing here. We painters have to approach our history differently, we have to understand it differently in order to form better questions, find other solutions, and work our way out from under the Postmodern morass in which we find ourselves. If we are honest about our past as painters we might find our future a bit more interesting and a bit more relevant in our time.

Final Part to come…

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I didn’t get a Harumph outta that guy…

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Paul Corio takes up the conversation about the Art Press on his blog-azine No Hassle at the Castle. The Cindy Sherman exhibition at MOMA has been a real eye opener. Not necessarily because of the exhibition itself but because of the uniformity of the discussion about the exhibition. I’m not just talking about whether the show was liked or not liked by the press, but the uniformity in the REASONING behind that like or dislike. Nearly every review about the show said exactly the same things, keying on the very same issues. In all seriousness, you could cut and paste, mix and match from any of the reviews and make one of your own. No one would see any difference whatsoever. Yes, the algorithm about how one was to write about the show was firmly and openly in place. It reminded me of the way political discussion is run in this country. Usually an army of “interviewable” personalities connected to the (whatever) current administration is sent out in waves to the political talk shows loaded with specific talking points about a certain issue. The media replicates and distributes this message OVER AND OVER again in the news cycles and news discussion shows until those “talking points” become something like a truth. We begin to believe whatever the message says because it comes from many authoritative voices, all saying the very same things, broadcasted across many media outlets. It resembles confirmation – one show confirms the precepts given on another show. I guess we’ve learned the same lesson here in our little world. I kept thinking, “…couldn’t someone say something, anything different than the 5 or 6 phrases that have come to define the way we communicate about this particular show.” It’s part of the reason I placed all those quotes in the original post.

This conformity in thinking struck a nerve with Paul as well, and he gives an extremely cogent discussion about “the discussion,” how it’s rooted in the Postmodern imperatives that we’ve come to accept as wisdom. He also delineates the reasons that these particular talking points, this particular conformity, has come to define the Art Press.

“Sherman’s work illustrates a whole constellation of ideas that form much of the basis from which these critics think about, look at, and review art: gender, identity, high vs. low culture and the ensuing debate about quality and criteria, value, originality and authorship, the centrality of painting and the disruption of a specific kind of historical teleology. An enthusiastic reception to Sherman’s show would represent more to these writers than the canonization of a particular artist – it would further cement the institutional validation of a whole set of ideas which their careers, sensibilities and credibility is connected to.”

Basically it all adds up to this:

There’s a lot at stake for a lot of people. And who can argue with that…?

One of the things that I truly admire about Paul is that he has a lot of positive energy about Art, about his feelings about the power of Art. In our sometimes high-keyed discussions he will always defend the power of art and artists to make visual magic. It’s at those times that I am grateful to have Paul as a friend even if I disagree with what he is saying. Could there be a better teacher, a better example of an engaged and thoughtful artist for the next generation? I don’t think so. That kind of energy and enthusiasm even in the midst of struggle, any struggle, is hard to come by. And you can see it for yourself. His post ends thoughtfully on a high note looking forward to a change, to a new idea, a new way of visually engaging. I highly recommend you check out the link at the top of this post! And COMMENT, please, either here or on Paul’s Blog-azine! We’d like to hear your voices on this issue! What do you think of the art critics, conformity in the press, talking points, and protection of one’s phony baloney jobs?

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Did I Read That Right…?

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Ok. It took this long for someone to actually say some unfortunate TRUTH about the suck up Art Press. And it comes from Adam Lindemann – the almost but not quite self-hating collector of equestrian class art. As Henri pointed out in a recent post on the Cindy Sherman Show all the critics were hyperventilating in order to inflate the value of one of their own darlings…

“I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things…The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue. What’s the point of everyone saying the same thing? Do they really all like the same things or are they afraid to step out and say something different, even provocative? If I were an artist, I think I’d get suspicious if everyone in town chimed in about how wonderful I was.” Adam Lindemann All Hail Sherman!

Well there’s a lot riding on these kinds of things. Money, reputation, money, notoriety, money, invitations to previews and after parties, money, interviews with the star, money, sex, and then there’s the money. And who can blame the critics. They complain they don’t get paid a lot. They complain that they aren’t taken seriously. They complain that they aren’t feted. But they do seem to line up in celestial configurations to congratulate the very kind of art they bemoan the rest of the time. How often have we read a critic go on about how things have to change, that styles remain the same, that art is being made for the one percent, only to have them glorify those very institutionally approved artists and their work once they have a Power-Retro at one of the POMO Country Clubs here in town.

But to have a major COLLECTOR point this out to US stings just a bit. Adam also describes the unfortunate “apple polishing” that was going on at Jerry’s Facebook page over the one “bad” review of Cindy Sherman’s show. To me this particular thread smacked of the bad faith and the fear and loathing that takes place among the art world cognoscenti towards any divergent opinions. I have seen it many times in my years. I’ve seen it shut down some really good artists and critics. Look, most of us are not doing our jobs in the studio anyway. We just want to make a living, get all bougie, go along to get along. We don’t even consider the larger cultural issues or what’s at stake for art and artists. We don’t see that the divergent opinion may actually HAVE a valid point to make no matter where it comes from. All I’m saying is that when the collectors can see that we’re slacking off, that our expectations for professional advancement overrides our passion for Art and real dissent, then things are way out of whack. So I say thanks Mr. Lindemann! We’ll get right on it.

However, Mr. Lindemann, you have to find something else to collect. It’s time to move ahead and be a bit bolder. I don’t know what you’re collecting these days, but going on about Koons and Prince doesn’t bode well for the future. You have the cash and the time to really make a difference and influence the direction of the art world. No one listens to artists or critics, but they will listen to you, because for other collectors, other people that have real influence in the real world, you have “skin in the game.” Most of those folks don’t see that we, the artists, have our actual lives in this mix, that we work very hard and have to live very hard. Quite frankly, why should they? We chose this. But they do see that you (someone they know and have to dinner) really loves Art and that it can have real meaning in one’s life. Why not stretch a bit, collect outside the institutions, the known quantities? What could it hurt? I’ll tell you the truth, it would be VERY cheap in comparison to Gagosian’s. You might make it an underground thing, something daring that gets the pulse racing, something like the Steins in the early Modernist years, something REAL at a time when the unreal and the hyper-real blanket all of our lives. And who knows, one or two of the artists you find may go on to do great things. I don’t know you, that’s for sure, and you may be doing something like this right now. If so, I give you massive props, and I’d love to hear about it. But if you aren’t doing this, then it’s time to step up!

The other great read that I came across was by Charlie Finch – “Why Art Is Like Sports.” Charlie unleashes on the elite collectors of which Adam Lindemann is one. And he explains the system and how it works in such a way that one can not argue with his conclusions. I especially liked this coming on the heals of Art Fair Week…

“But without the support of the suckers in the public who remain the engine of the spectacle, the whole upper tier quickly collapses, so the public essentially settles for a watered down product to fulfill its nebulous fantasies at higher and higher prices.”

Charlie is at his best when he takes it to artists in this way. He understands that money corrupts, it leads, it shapes the way we look at the world, especially for the ambitious professional. Charlie’s prodding us, making us itch, trying to get us to do our fucking jobs and think! I would C&P another quote but the whole thing is great. Just go and read it if you haven’t already.

For me what this adds up to is consensus. When artists arrive fully blown parroting the party line why do we fall in with it? Why are we not looking for the divergent idea? Why do we continually settle for what we know rather than look for something we don’t? I’m not talking about social/political provocation. I’m talking about another way of approaching what we do, another way of seeing and making art. And I think being brave enough to struggle with the unknown, find original solutions to age old problems, is what these two articles are demanding of us.

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Art Fair Strut

Friday, March 9, 2012

This Saturday March 10 the Invisible Dog will be having an open studio/group show. Friend of Henri Giles Lyon will be a part of the experience, and we highly recommend that you catch the G train to Bergen and have a look see! Giles combines Color Field, AbEx and a really beautiful style of drawing to create amazing, trippy abstractions. I’ll have more to say about Giles’ work in the near future, but for now you can check out his website here.

If you haven’t had a chance to see Paul Corio’s show of abstract paintings make sure to stop by Pratt Institute’s Grad CommD Gallery on the 7th Floor 144 West 14th Street. Color everywhere!

Friend of Henri Mark Wiener will be part of the Highline Open Studios this weekend @ 551 West 21st Street. He’s also got work in Scope Art Fair at the Dorian Grey Gallery!

Painter and Impresario Jackie Saccoccio has recent work featured at Eleven Rivington’s booth in the Armory Show.

There’s so much Art in town at the moment that you CAN NOT begin to believe the diversity and ubiquity of it all! It makes one realize (yet again) that Art is no longer just a passion but an economy, a very huge economy. I hope all you artists make money and connections this weekend – Good Luck and Enjoy yourselves!

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Working Wit’ Mercury…

Saturday, February 25, 2012

If ever there was an artist that embodied the full doctrine of Postmodern ineffability Cindy Sherman is that artist. And what’s truly surprising is the lock-step conformity of the Pictures Generation as they lionize one of their own. I have never been able to go the “full Sherman” in the way that Jerry did in his article. I don’t care for the POMO ambiguities. There’s just too much time spent in front of a mirror, too much play acting, too much “stardom” in the manner of Schwarzenegger. No matter the role it’s always Arnold, and in this case, no matter the photo, it’s always Cindy…

“When collectors buy a Sherman photograph, they want her. Last year one of the 1981 “Centrefold” series (pictured) made $3.9m, then a record for a photograph at auction. Bemused by how much collectors want her in the frame, the artist mimics a male voice: “Is she behind that mask? I only want it if she is in there!”” – The Economist

“What is most interesting—and what the show explores wonderfully—is the tension between real and fake, and what is at stake in Ms. Sherman’s playacting. There’s something about the way she depicts personae in her work that has always seemed reminiscent of the first sentence of William Gaddis’s first novel The Recognitions: “Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.””Miller.

“She has a luminous way of breathing life into things that cannot be ­described. Giving herself over to her own processes, Sherman opens up thought and makes pictures that subtly withdraw from definition, dislodging meaning, undermining ideology, becoming what I’d call radically passive. She sings the song of her selves.” Saltz.

“Ms. Sherman is often lauded for being a skilled, chameleonlike actress, and she is — an actress always teetering on the brink of being in a role, but never all the way in.” Smith.

There’s playfulness and generosity to Sherman’s work, right down to the way she leaves most of it untitled — the better to let viewers create their own narratives. If you like, aim your smartphone at the digital coding alongside the show’s text blocks and hear what other artists have to say about her. Hoffman.

“There comes a time when the true star shines and that time, when a modern Sleeping Beauty lies dead in her glass sarcophagus in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, while her public partied on downstairs, has arrived for Cindy Sherman, whose message of artificial seduction and the simulated trap of the image over our lives is more germane than ever.” Finch.

What does one say about all of this commentary? Only this:
“I know who I am! I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude! You’re a dude who don’t know what dude he is!”

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Paul Corio at the Lapin Agile…

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

My friend and colleague, Paul Corio, is opening a new show of his recent work later this week at the illustrious Pratt Institute. Ok, it’s not the Lapin Agile, but I felt like Cabaret des Assassins was a bit OTT… Many of the Friends of Henri will be attending the opening to celebrate our friend, so come on by and introduce yourselves while taking a bit of time to indulge in Mr. Corio’s mind warping spaces! Hope to see you there.

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Vision – Left Overs

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

If you haven’t played the video above you won’t get this.
This scene begins with Modernism. Right there on the beach are perfect modernist abstractions. They are like sculptures that we come across in museums all over the globe. Only these are not sculptures, they’re barricades, omens for the coming day. Inside the landing craft we’re experiencing the visual past. Beautiful photographic portraits of faces, faces that are trying to confront the inevitable. What we’re looking at is a narrative of emotion, like Walker Evans portraits – pictures, photographs, static moving images. We are looking at the end of the 19th Century, the end of narrative, the end of the enlightenment, and quite frankly, the end of the individual. As the door drops the whole world changes. Suddenly the camera is no longer outside the action detailing individual moments, but it’s within the moment, guiding the vision, pushing the world along. The lens condenses and abstracts, flattens and obscures at breakneck speeds. Structure, Design, Form and Composition break into a thousand pieces unable to maintain visual presence in this hyper-reality. There are no stories to outline, no visions to detail, only the capture of the turbulent churning and flow. Subjects quickly rise into view and fall back into the ground again. Confusion, violence, fear, distortion, all of it, all of this optical SPEED, is being directed and captured by the constantly moving and angling lens. We are everywhere on that ground, all at once. We are not seeing, we are experiencing, and this is the major difference between the optical and the visual. It’s the difference between experience and contemplation. In this new world there are no reference points, no sense to be made of the situation. There’s only the next ground, the next moment, the past forgetting. There is no history, no future, only this very instant played out, captured and replayed by the lens/program.

Perfect Moments


Ansel Adams

In our last post we examined the WAY the lens worked; the warping and enclosing of our vision, the flattening of space, the off kilter instant compositions, the detailing of our sight. At first photography was considered a low form, a popular one, one used to quantify and elucidate. But the early photographers were also trying to define this new medium as a tool to make “fine art.” They wanted their work to be taken seriously, and so, they modeled their approach after the history of painting. There was however a difference – the hand. Painters had a long history of laboring “genius.” They created fleshy magic in order to manifest a vision. Their claim to a personal vision was tied to the skill of their hand, to the way they overcame their physical limitations. (Think of the learning curve that Cezanne or Van Gogh underwent.) The photographer realized that in order to make a claim for Art he had to get past the democratic ease of the machine. The thought was to put the focus on the disposition of the artist while in the act of “creation.” In other words the fine art photographer would not be about the labor of making. Instead photography would be all about the moment of performance. One had to wait like a fisherman, wait for the perfect light, the perfect moment, then flip the switch. The composition would be “always already” in the position of the lens, in the angle of the light, but that particular revelatory moment was only understood by an “artist.” The fine art photograph was a vision unimpeded, a vision captured in an instant of pure clarity. This is unlike a painter’s understanding, which was always grasping at a “truth” over time, through labor, through the hand and the eye. The photographer’s hand had absolutely nothing to do with the “making” of the image. It was understood that a photographer’s vision would not be hamstrung by a painter’s physical limitations, by the labor and expertise that went into the facture of the work. Rather, the lens/prosthetic would enhance one’s immediate relation to reality, to the moment, ultimately freeing the ARTIST to become a more perfect visionary.

It didn’t take long for the photographer/artist to be recognized in this way. But the artistic glorification of the perfect moment wouldn’t last very long. It was found that one could capture these images from life over time, first with multiple cameras, then with a motor. By the end of the 19th Century those single perfect images became a stream of images, a chunk of existence permanently quantified for replaying whenever we wished. Images captured in time could be replayed through time. The photographer didn’t have to lie in wait for an image to appear. Theoretically this meant the machine could run without the artist, indefinitely. Time streamed onto a strip of film (today into a chip.) The idea of a single “discovered” image became something else – it became one moment representative of a series of moments – an icon, a compilation, a poster. Real time viewing did away with the singular thing, the photograph, and vision became something else entirely, something that had never before been experienced. The making of an art work, the physical involvement in the process, the crafting of specific moments, no longer mattered. The machine captured everything. All images became found images, always already, a vast storehouse of documentation. Rather than makers or hunters, we became choosers. “The fine art photographer” quickly became an anachronism along with painters. Photography is no longer about the camera or the moment, but about the lens/program. It has been untethered from any medium and any history. The lens is the perfect Postmodern vehicle.

In the meantime painting was playing an endgame it did not quite understand. In the early 20th Century the Parisian avant garde had discovered that moving pictures were breaking up time and space, unfolding shattered images across the surface of the ground. Representation, movement, light, space, imagery; all of that history of Painting as we inherited it, suddenly looked old-fashioned, rigid, awkward and incomplete in comparison to the immediacy and directness of the picture plays. How could it not be? Electric communications, lights, gasoline powered engines, flight, speed, movies and television; all of these super powered inventions were changing our relationship to how we saw and experienced our world, and to our chagrin, we painters found that painting was far too slow to describe this new world, far too slow to keep up. Painting found itself in the rearguard scrounging for whatever glimpses of reality it could find. By the middle of the 20th Century the static image had finally been discarded by painters in favor of representations of processes and materiality, and most of that “painting” began to define the primacy and ubiquity of the lens/program. Today we paint grounds, we collage, and we “process.” We don’t challenge the lens image, we don’t dare define the world outside of the frame. We find images from among others. We contextualize those captured moments. We see only what is there on the screen.

iPhones and Private Parts

There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity—allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility.
Susan Sontag On Photography

Even with so many images available there is an unrelenting sameness to the way photographs show us the world. The lens/program treats everything in the same way. It works with predictable and unbending codes. It makes no distinctions, offers only certain choices. Absolutely EVERYTHING it appropriates becomes Art – flattened, abstracted, quantified and composed. It doesn’t matter what one photographs, there is an egalitarian sameness to every photographic image. It makes us all connoisseurs of choice. We admire someone’s selections, collections and displays – tumblr pages, flickr sites, and photo networks. Today most of us carry a lens at all times. We use it to extend our memories and document our existences for the program. However these captured moments LOOK and FEEL the same. We use the lens to present the human figure in exactly the same way that we do food products or automobiles. Look at these videos – watch HOW the camera works, HOW it levels all vision to the SAME vision:

The lens prosthetic has become another seamless tool for living just like computers, flat screens and spectacles. In our electronic lives these lens captured moments have become the “content” streaming on the internet, images of our passing. We carry our cameras into the most intimate moments of our lives. We hump from POV. We “read” and “write” journals and diaries on projected and programmed representations of “paper.” These programs shape the content of the lenses. They allow us to instantly access a kind of outsourced “professionalism” without the pain of study or practice, without the flesh. We become auteurs of our own lives. And in order to share and participate in this artificial world, in order that we move from “out here” to “in there,” we have learned to live through our lenses. We are photographing and photoshopping, iLifing our lives in ways that culture never could before. Today this new “reality” is found where consciousness streams without the filter of the failings of flesh. We have moved beyond “making,” or “creating,” we simply have to show up, appear before the lens. It turns out that the 20th Century was about something we did not expect. Painters could not capture the REASON for the collapse of the Loud family in the 1970s nor do they understand the basis for a multi-billion dollar IPO by Facebook. Let’s face it, Painting didn’t have a freakin’ chance….

But what of the stuff outside the frame – What kind of reality is that?

Left Over Vision

If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown . . . Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory . . . Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales.
Rem Koolhaus Junkspace

So much of the painting, especially abstract painting, that we see today absolutely HAS TO BE completed by the lens. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. It must be captured and re-presented in order for it to be “seen” or understood. Rem Koolhaus’ essay on Junkspace dovetails with this idea of lens based vision. Photography makes all things into interesting things; a long corridor to nowhere, a leftover room, an empty strip mall, a foreclosed home, a forgotten billboard, a food court, an empty canvas. All these things only exist when the camera captures them. Junkspace is the entropy felt after the interaction of the lens in the failed designs of the artificial world. There is no Junkspace in nature. It is the proliferation of the ground, the endless looping of billboard space upon which we collage our passing moments. Yet that collage can never be visual, it must be experiential, re-played in real time, a passing televised reality moment. The collage submerges back into the ground, becomes the ground, because it is never about a singular moment, a rising subject, but about the experience of disparate moments or contextual inferences. In this Junkspace we believe that the representation of the ground will set us free. I know this because Siri tells me so…

For us, painters, here in the 21st century our interest should be the world NOT captured by the program, the one that lies just outside the edges of the viewfinder, the unquantified existence. Granted our eyes are not used to that space, it is bland and boring, but it is where we might engage a new and different kind of reality. As Fran Liebowitz said, “…the world went inside the television and became the world.” What’s important for painters is the detritus left out by the lens. That’s the fleshy seen world, the tactile world of emotion and feeling, the world that smells funky after the all night bender. As it stands now we no longer work with our own imagery or paint images from our unmediated visual lives. Look at the painters most admired in this time – most all are in thrall to the lens or the way the lens replicates and reproduces its own reality. We cut and paste these found images across a billboard space and then do what’s leftover with the paint in our hands – we accost the image, mostly with a rough hand, hoping to maintain some semblance of critical relevance or angry control. We have been forced to collage and “treat” the ground. And it is to the ground that we return to OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. The ground allows us to be present in this Postmodern “world,” present in the electronic reality, present FOR the lens to complete us. But the ground can not define, it can not provide meaning, it does not individuate experience or vision; the ground merely validates.

Why do I still make the case for painting? Because I believe that we painters can still make something visually compelling even in an age blinded by the screen. But in order to do that I believe we must come to a new kind of hybridized sight and vision. I find the lens necessary to communicate in our time, but it’s far too limiting a tool. My vision is much larger than the confines the screen imposes on me, and I’m sure yours is as well. I want to see something “thickly” taking cues from both our vast visual history and our new lens realities. The anachronism of the static painted image can actually become a strength if we ask the right questions, if we approach vision with smarts and panache. I want to make the case for new images, new abstractions born of this kind of hybridized vision. I want these works to be “familiar” and novel at once, neither one nor the other, yet engaging both the screen and the world around it. What we need to accomplish this kind of vision are a set of different questions about what painting can be, what we might be looking at in the world. And so we’ll begin with these – What if we leave the ground behind? What if it we no longer allow the viewfinder to organize our looking, drawing, imagining, seeing? What if we engage Junkspace in a more thoughtful and purposeful way? What if things, the actual things in our fleshy world, suddenly became much more interesting to paint than collaging the relationships between those things? How would one confront the thing in itself, the rising subject, the visual encounter without the lens, without Postmodernism’s contexts, without the reliance on Junkspace materiality? What kind of painting would that be, would that look like? How would you make it?

more to come…

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De Koo 4 U

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I highly recommend you check out d richmond’s recent run down of the Great De Kooning show at MOMA @ immaterial culture. There’s a fantastic visual dialog going on between the d’s. But my favorite part of these posts is the postscript where we get a taste of the painters’ lives, not so much de’s life which we all, painters I mean, seem to know about, but d’s life which is as real and as rich. And that, my friends, is priceless.

“The past year was a financial disaster as many artists of my age who haven’t made it are finding a difficult time to find even occasional work. But seeing De Kooning and knowing his personal history of financial difficulties and personal problems and yet still forging ahead with a determination to do whatever he wanted to do despite the commercial pressures to maintain a certain style and not giving a damn about various artists or critics disgust with the Women paintings, etc was fortifying.”

Speaking of de’s end times… There is a wonderful Charlie Finch article on the last day at MOMA on artnet. I agree with Charlie in his assessment of de’s work, though I did think the show was extraordinary, exciting and engaging. However, we are a long, long, long way from that kind of painting and that kind of vision. And I totally agree with Charlie’s assessment of the reinstalled contemporary collection. Though I will say that many of those works were just lost on the Super-sized walls of those galleries. Note to Starchitects – we are there in your building to look at art works not to inspect the underbelly of a Boeing 787, though that particular idea would produce wood (both male and female) in quite a few contemporary artists’ super lows.

money quote: “But that was all the candy to be found, for, per MoMA’s rigid Eurocentric habits, where the dry candy of the mind is everything and what dazzles the eye is nothing, Temkin has hewed to the pretentious intellectualism of MoMA’s contemporary “vision.”"

And finally there has been a recent spate of spent credibility in the Art World with a few folks reaching the ignominy of intellectual bankruptcy. Hirst’s tongue in spotty cheek world tour, Prince’s constantly morphing court narrative around the term “infringement,” and, dare I say it, Jerry Saltz’s game show conundrum. The Postmodern endgame has become a spectacle of the ethical. Who’s the real deal and who’s posing? It’s going to be an interesting year!

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Show: After Duccio

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

This Friday is the opening for After Duccio at Ventana244 in Brooklyn. Friends of Henri Michael Zahn and George Hofmann will be featured! And we highly recommend that you get off your duffs and make your way out to the opening! There are a group of wonderful artists involved in the show and here’s a bit of the PR for the exhibit.

Artist Andrew Huston selects multimedia works by Michelle Ceja, Matthew Eiraldi, George Hofmann, Sherrie Levine, Gerhard Mantz, and Mike Zahn….
WWW.AFTER-DUCCIO.COM, the title of the show, is also a domain name created by Mike Zahn. It’s linked to a Tumblr page where the artist has uploaded more than two thousand image files that resist anachronistic taxonomies of genre or style. In this respect, Zahn has followed the archival impulses of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Robert Heinecken, or Bernd and Hilla Becher to a ridiculous end, but a deep engagement with the brilliant color, subtle tactility, and historical recognition of his subject cites the irreducible facticity of any object’s remainder. In this respect, Zahn’s position isn’t so far afield from the one staked by painter George Hofmann, whose luminous Duccio Fragments navigate metaphorical abstract space by means of expressive gestures that metonymically recall passage from the Byzantine to the Renaissance. Matthew Eiraldi’s untitled sculpture is presented as an actionable bootleg version of the piece thumbnailed on the Saatchi Gallery website, and reproduced to approximate scale without the artist’s expressed permission. This ‘reblogging’ of a depicted thing within the nominal space of the white cube exponentially factors the equation of authorship with value and originality with legitimacy, variables of which Sherrie Levine, through her distinctive appropriations of Walker Evans, George Herimann, and Constantin Brancusi, is an acknowledged master. Michelle Ceja and Gerhard Mantz each conflate the actual and the virtual by animating surface, texture, and volume. The sculptural quality of their documents record the accession of light to our empirical senses by presenting fungible points that speed along vectors to infinite places where the viewer, at any particular moment, is not, but given time could potentially be.

I’m sure you’ll also come across Paul Corio and Dennis Bellone in deep conversation about the state of painting somewhere in the audience. Don’t be afraid to grab a beer, introduce yourselves and have a chat with all of these fantastic folks.

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