The Empty Guggenheim
The Guggenheim has emptied itself almost completely of art on it's walls for the fiftieth year anniversary celebration. The Frank Lloyd Wright building stands alone as a work of art. It is refreshing, almost glorious to take in the encompassing white spiral. There are 3 exhibitions of note currently taking place: Tino Sehgal, Anish Kapoor's "Memory" and "Contemplating the Void."
For this artist the whys and wherefores about Sehgal's mise-en-scene or situational constructs can be interesting but in the end the participant experiences a subjective reality that recalls one's own associations. Using the museum as arena, and the empty Guggenheim lends itself well, there is nothing really new going on. Since it is not a new concept to think of the museum as an arena, or theater, I'm not sure sure why this is significant. I did read some of the rhetoric surrounding it but I'm not convinced that it is. It is fun though.
'The Kiss' (my title) was the only piece that was taking place while we were there. I noticed children asking the the museum goers if they would like a tour. (Jerry Saltz, the critic for New York magazine, was so taken by his experience because the little girl who asked him was so dear that it made him cry.)
The adults didn't seem open to this part of and the kids seemed shy. It wasn't working. 'The Kiss' brought to mind all famous kisses, Rodin, Munch, you name it. It also brought to mind a visit to the Pompidou Center where, on the Plaza, there was a couple involved in deeply serious kissing. It was intense passionate kissing. We figured the French will always be French, cool. We should be so demonstrative. We went in for at least two hours and when we came out they were still at it! To get back to the Seghal the first two dancer performers moved seamlessly together. I couldn't help but wonder what it was like for them. Quite engaging, the male dancer took the lead and every movement was conscious and graceful. When we came back later, it was a different pair, they weren't as well matched and it was a bit maudlin.
Anish Kapoor's "Memory" is about subjectivity. From a distance the square void looks like it could be a painting. It is reminiscent of his work with pigment because the black space within the rectangle appears rich and dense, the space is amplified by the dark interior inside the iron barrel behind the wall. The barrel weighs twenty-four tons. I wonder how necessary that is; does it need to weight that much, is there meaning in it? It recalls Richard Serra in its materials and forbidding exterior. It also looks quite expensive.
The heaviness and rust color in the iron provides the opening in the wall with an illusion of deep space and darkness framed by a reddish tinge on the periphery. The guide emphasized the "processional method of engaging" with the sculpture. The guide insisted that we line up behind her and follow her to the mouth on the wall from three differing approaches. With each step we had our own vision of the piece and our own memories to take away.
"Contemplating the Void" exhibition was an open call that invited artists and architects to design a piece that would fill the Frank Lloyd Wright interior space. There were approximately 200 entries and all were exhibited. Standouts were Christian Marclay filling the space with ping-pong balls, Pipilotti Rist fills hers with a clitoris, hair and all (I heard a child say eeww); and that seemed kind of predictable. There were a number of rain forests and many really complicated proposals. Anish Kapoor wanted to fill it with a spiral of magenta powder and many many want to fill it with more spirals. I thought of a small group parachuting into it, like a Magritte and then a tornado rising out of it. Matthew Ritchie had a very nice drawing of an ecosystem of sorts and Richard Meier and Partners was inclined to make it more Wrightian. Anthony McCall's solid light installation seems that if it were realized on a grand scale it could be awe inspiring.
The Pompidou Center emptied itself in 2009, Le Vide (the Void) re-staged historic examples of vacant installations. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim is a space that lends to contemplating the both emptiness and fullness.
The whole museum seems to be an arena, and a very public public space.
Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig, Eric Fischl at Mary Boone, and David Hockney at Pace
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Nicole Eisenman's new paintings at Leo Koenig are inventive and challenging. In Beer Garden With Ash the androgynous character in the forefront gives the feeling that the chatter behind is in his head. For me, the Triumph of Poverty is successful even if her references are obvious, she uses them well and its fun. The little Bruegel figures at the bottom make a small and fabulous entrance. The spatial handling gives the image more presence, it resonates in the space because it is not in pieces. Its challenging for her, I think, to make a cohesive image without too much stuff everywhere. One gesture can say more than 100 little pieces. We are witnessing her evolution as a storyteller and the lump of a group rats huddling near the bottom of the painting are a surprise. The painting doesn't reveal all right away, in terms of subject too, this is a painting for our time. It looks like Oliver Twist begging for a bowl of soup, the family has lost its house and the 'pleasantville' suburban houses have morphed into a car-house of horrors for the family.
Guston said it was okay to paint cartoons and now we see not particularly inventive cartoon paintings everywhere, down 25th St Mike Kelley's are similar but he is better at it . A lot of contemporary painters went to the same R Crumb cartoon school. She succumbs to it in her small work; she is inventive and over the top with some of her character creations. I think of Ensor, but his vision was less cluttered and more invented. For her less can be more and her repertoire of crazy types can become more her own.
I would like to see more engagement with her materials . I don't think that she is really painting yet and is still making pictures but she may be on the verge of painterly discovery. I want to see strokes that connect us with alienation, depression and weirdness. Her strokes feel like some one who is quite sane, there is a workmanlike and mechanical feeling in her more developed work. And all of the artists she quotes to wit: Vuillard, and Munch, among others all have a distinctive mark and peculiar and indiosyncratic way of organizing space.
She is a painter for our time and I for one would like to see her grow
Eric Fischl takes on the bullfight and toreador theme with mixed results in "Corrida in Ronda", an exhibition of paintings by ERIC FISCHL at Mary Boone.
In most of the paintings in the Corrida in Ronda series the bull wears a garland of flowers and the animal is skewered there resulting in a mixture of blood and flowers as death surely and slowly follows. It is pretty distasteful but in a culture like ours that is steeped in surround sound simulacra of violence, what the paintings signify is tame. It is a difficult subject because the ritual is alien to our culture, it is uniquely Spanish and I wonder if the local Spanish attitude toward the bullfight has changed since the modern age. This theme also fueled the work of several major artists.
Manet, who some refer to as the dry modernist who created access to Spanish painting for our contemporary age, struggled mightily with and may have felt that he lost the battle with his Dead Toreador. which is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He initially constructed the painting to include a bullfighting ring on the upper half. After much public criticism, Manet cut the painting and what we see now is the the Dead Toreador. The Bullfight is the upper half and can be seen at the Frick Collection.
Many painters consider painting to be a battle from which to emerge victorious. At times while painting I have imagined myself fencing with the brush. The bullfight could be viewed as a metaphor for the fighter's lightness and dexterity versus the bull beast's dark massive force, man versus nature, artist vs. art, and painter vs. painting.The bullfight ring and the toreador encompasses the grand gesture, and like opera it HAS to work. The bravado and or mystique that accompanies the bullfight in Spanish painting in Picasso's La Corrida , and Tauromaquia Manet's Dead Toreador, Goya 's Tauromaquia and Bullfight is a tough act to follow. It is grand gesture. Goya painted his bullfight as in one of his last paintings during his exile in Paris, shortly after his Disaster of War series, his emphasized the sacrificial and brutal aspects. I believe part of Fischl's process was to take photographs and base his paintings on the pictures and his actual experience. As a group the paintings seem like a stage separate from the place with no noise, clutter or crowd. Neither is the blood a major player on the stage as in Goya's Bullfight. They are distanced from the spectacle and informed by the photographs as a separate experience from the actual hot, dusty, smelly, brutal reality.
Eric Fischl is light and deft with his strokes in Corrida In Ronda #8. The sword is key and consists of a single red stroke of paint. That paint stroke bisects the canvas into thirds and sets up a triangular relationship with the toreador, sword and dying bull. In triumph, the fighter is pictorially equal to the bull, the thin red stroke; delineating the sword is key and is also evidence of the grand gesture of the painter himself: his stroke of blood red paint in battle with painting, which he has subdued. He takes a back seat because the stroke is king, the brush is like the sword in battle as the bull wears a garland of flowers and is skewered there. The bull dies slowly in the mix with a garland of blood and flowers. The pictorial construction here marries the content, hand in glove. This grand gesture encompasses the struggle between man and nature: subduing nature with bravado and delicacy. As is the tradition in Goya' hometown, Zaragoza, the fighters make their own costumes and according to the press release Goya created the costume's basic design. This violet one Fischl represents so delicately in Corrida In Ronda #8 ,that I thought I was looking at a vase of lilacs for a moment. Thinking of Manet's last flower paintings I also considered the lightness of it, almost too light in color and weight, difficult to believe the painting is about ultimately about killing and death. This is an elegant and light drenched piece, with no trace of awkwardness but it with left me with an emotional ambivalence. Does the painter emerge victorious and does it matter?
I think Eric Fischl is more convincing painting pictures with more relational objects in them. The plane that stands in for the arena is vast and bleached. It is challenging to paint a black mass, bleached by the light with a lone figure emerging victorious on the margins. It is technically difficult to draw while looking down. Across is always easier (he does look across in some, but there is flatness and a staged feeling). And there are few distinguishing characteristics on the mass of the bull. He does well in a few, but not in all of them. And why is that red blanket not a player in at least one? In Corrida La Ronda No. 6 the space looks chopped up and the blankets look incidental while main figure seems stiff and to have his head falling too far forward. In Corrida La Ronda No. 3 the Bull is too prussian blue, the fighter feels merged with the bull and I am not convinced about the presence of his right leg, the one that is hidden by the blanket. To compare, Hopper always convinces us that what is hidden and necessary is there. The bull looks to long for the whole configuration and the group: man, blanket and bull, appears to separate from its environment, cut out, and also connected like leggos in a funny way, and stiff. That said, Corrida La Ronda No. 1 and 2 are masterful, the space has to be believable for a grand gesture to work. It is a stark and unforgiving approach, these individual shapes on this plane with so much at stakethere.
David Hockney has come full circle. Personally I didn't respond to his work in the past, but since he has returned to Yorkshire, he's been seeing a lot in those Yorkshire woods. He has discovered painting after years of doing good illustration and making pictures. The two shows are a pleasure to behold in Fauve-like color. In the left hand Gallery at Pace on 25th St, Fauve meets R. Crumb again in amazing technicolor. He can't seem to leave the cartoon images behind. Turn the corner into the main galleryand it shifts into painterly invention like a garden of forking paths. A magical feast for the eyes as his strokes make space and colored light we travel that space and/ or surface. It is a painting, he invents and solves his own pictorial riddles as he works and we are engaged in the process. He also seems to have had a visitation from Cezanne. We are not just looking at an ipso facto picture, his strokes are realized as he is drawing spaces with color. David Hockney is making a world and this paintings are fresh and engaged. Perhaps they do recall van Gogh, or whomever, it doesn't matter. We are looking at a living process now and while in some of the individual paintings on 57th st seem simple, they are present to us and they are about his vision, and I don't mean just what he sees with his eyes.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
On a recent August Saturday, I went to Governor's Island for an Art
rt Chakra Excursion hosted by Renee Riccardo and Anne-Francoise Potterat.
It was a small group which we chalked up to a very hot day.
Our group met near the visitor's center on Governors island to the
right of the ferry exit. The island seems like a small town, a time
capsule from the early sixties, just waiting for allwho arrives to be
surprised and amazed by the island itself and the Creative Time PLOT09 installations. We were on the island for the entire afternoon and we
only saw a few pieces. There just isn't enough time. It is a many
faceted experience and its great just to lie in the grass. The island
provides hammocks and people were sleeping in them right next to our
yoga class near the chimes.
Klaus Weber's "Large Dark Wind Chime (Tritone Westy)", an over-sized wind chime made with tempered aluminum, was our first stop. We arranged to have a yoga class there with Anne-Francoise teaching under a giant tree that must be at least 100 years old. We arranged ourselves in a circle and Anne-Francois began the chakra breathing segment of the class with our eyes closed. The sound of the chimes was overwhelming and because they were so loud, a little comical. They lent themselves to meditation, even though they play the "devil's music". In the middle ages one could be excommunicated for using those tritones in music. The Church was afraid the tones could be sexually arousing. The sounds mixed with the the chime of a nautical bell nearby. It was a cornucopia of sound; with children playing, all manner of conversations and helicopters overhead. With the breeze, the sun's heat, and the senses of the body magnified from closing our eyes the experience of the chimes was strong and inescapable. The chimes, considered 'the devil's music' and always to be avoided unless...well, I suppose we were mightily exposed to it.
After the yoga, Renee led us to Alexander McCall's installation, "Between You & I" in the St. Cornelius Chapel. It was a great way to follow
the yoga experience. It's a light sculpture:"The fields of light interact with one another, the visitors in the space.... like two human companions, they attempt to comprehend themselves in relation to one another". One needs to let the eyes adjust, it is a little like a fun house at first, and once that happens, it is spectacular. The next stop was the The Bruce High Quality Foundation's film "Isle of the Dead" which "tells the story of a decimated art world coming back to life in zombie form." It is screened in a movie theater that is in a small town Mayberry-like structure. The film is very amusing, it seems to relate in some way to generational uncertainty, rapid change with no crystal ball telling the future.
Renee talked about her
experience as an extra in the film. In the film the zombies
eventually meet in the movie theater, (the one we were in) and sing a
song from the sixties, the name of which escapes me, as they follow the
bouncing ball. The zombies, and Renee was one, endured take after take.
In one of the Victorian houses was Edgar Arceneaux's "Sound Cannon Double Projection": an infrasound, a sound that is almost too low to be heard. There were warnings that some people can't tolerate it. Infrasound can cause "bizarre feelings such as anxiety, extreme sorrow, paranoia, or even the chills". There is a theory that the vibration can make a place feel haunted. It certainly did seem haunted but Governor's Island is like a time capsule, (maybe one house has to be haunted) that one hopes will be preserved. There are installations in house after house.Tercerunquinto's storyboard and video of an act of defacement on the island s notable as is AA Bronson and Peter Hobbes, Queer Spirit invoked "historical, queer, and marginalized practices as a way to heal the past and acknowledge the present".
Mark Wallinger's "Goat and Sheep" piece divided us all on the ferry. Because I had a bicycle I couldn't go to the upper deck. The ferry takes a
few minutes but I waited for almost an hour both to board and waited to board on our return. It is great to ride a bike on the island. You can
rent them. As the curatorial statement remarks: "the Ferry is a reminder, rendered in playful terms, of the dualities that we mull over every day: good versus bad, right versus wrong, and us versus them." I was a sheep and I wish I had been a goat.
It was a long afternoon, with still much to see and Renee provided just the right
amount information with genuine enthusiasm and engagement and she didn't overwhelm us. The tour would have been a little longer if it hadn't been so
hot. We all wanted to relax, Renee's and Anne-Francoise's flexibility and spontaneity is part of what made the excursion so enjoyable.
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Contents
The Empty Guggenheim
Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig, Eric Fischl at Mary Boone, and David Hockney at PaceShare
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Governor's Island Saturday
elles@pompidou
Eric Fischl
A Great Day in the Springtime
John Waters at Marianne Boesky
Guest of Cindy Sherman
New York Art Fairs |
