Currentartpics

INTRODUCTION

2010-07-19T01:12:00.007-04:00

The aim of Currentartpics was to demonstrate a new approach to recent art history and its categories of style, or stylistics. That approach is fully presented at www.depictionandpainting.net. In spite of the title, it proposes a framework accommodating sculpture, printing - especially photography - and Conceptual work.

At Currentartpics, weekly assessments of individual artists allowed me to show how they relate to key strands and styles in Late 20th Century Art, and to some extent, how these are related to each other. The approach is distinctive both for the range of work considered, and its depth or integration, on one hand discerning individual achievement, on the other, competing issues in painting and across the plastic arts.

Artists were chosen on the basis of prominent current exhibitions, in the hope of attracting a wide audience, but this did not always provide opportunities to review important artists such as an Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger or Richard Hamilton, for example. So there are surprising and unfortunate omissions, for which I can only direct the reader to the history section of www.depictionandpainting.net. Currentartpics also allowed me to deal with sculpture, photography and Conceptual works in more depth than was available at www.depictionandpainting.net so that it complements a general theory there in vital ways.

Another important omission has been in video and performance documentation. I had originally assumed that examples of work by say, Douglas Aitkin or Douglas Gordon, Pipilotti Rist or Moriko Mori, would be available on You Tube or similar, but examples there at the time fell short as illustrations, and that branch to the project must await another site, a more generous web.

Nevertheless, after a hundred posts, I felt the site had provided a fairly comprehensive cross-section of contemporary art and pointed out underlying issues for various periods, groups and individual styles, usually ignored or overlooked in established texts. In this respect my approach is a formalist or technical one, dwelling on the constituents of a style, at odds with prevailing interest in cultural or sociological priorities, perhaps, although as I see it, by no means hostile to them.

Gerry Bell
July 2010

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2008-08-12T19:56:00.008-04:00

OLAFUR ELIASSON VERSUS JORGE PARDO

Both artists specialise in installations, in temporary, site-specific works and commissioned fabrication or ‘readily-mades’ (see also Posts 25 and 49). Both artists prominently exploit architectural features, recent technology or engineering, and arrive at a calculated, theatrical presentation. Yet Eliasson favours an increasingly grand scale, samples a site or buildings against a radical redistribution of lighting, temperature, moisture, vapour or vegetation – is intent upon engineering nature as much as the nature of engineering. Pardo, by contrast, proceeds from details of interior design, from by-gone fashions, nostalgic motifs, colour schemes and accessories; freely revises and repositions wallpaper, furniture, lighting, doors and fittings, to highlight the layers of ornament to functions, the layers of function to ornament.

One is immediately severe and profound, the other slight and scattered, perhaps slightly scattered, even frivolous. Yet both are committed to the plastic potential of design, to greater variations establishing a firmer underlying theme or nature. And both find that greater variation involves an environmental scale, an inclusion of the observer that then involves a literal disorientation or loss. This post traces an overlooked but persistent trait to recent installation, takes their work as actually two sides of the same coin.

Eliasson’s use of light to generate colours for interiors is usually seen as inheriting the Minimalist colour environments of Robert Irwin and James Turrell (as the Los Angeles-based Light and Space movement, of the late 60s). The difference is Eliasson’s indifference to surfaces as a field of unusual intensity for a given colour, a disinterest in contrasts or harmonies or accompanying optical constraints. Instead he foregrounds the necessary equipment, cables, stands, their invitation to shadows and silhouettes of participants, their integration with surrounding architecture. Eliasson uses colour to set a level of visibility and mood for all elements to a site, rather than to construct a static and exclusively pictorial spectacle. His installations are predominantly temporary and changing, allow little of the permanence or ‘purity’ of Irwin or Turrell.

In other respects Eliasson’s work echoes familiar developments throughout the 20th century, with its modular assemblies and symmetrical structures recalling Minimalism (see also Posts 42 and 96), the emphasis upon technology and engineering recalling the long and deep ties with industry and design (see also Post 8). Infact Eliasson can seem more kitsch or superficial than Pardo in his tastes. However the artist’s shiny materials, unlike most earlier uses, are dedicated to environmental interaction, reflect landscape and climate, population and resources and demonstrate a steady symbiosis between building and surrounds, that is usually understood as an embrace with nature. Yet the work is often experienced as somewhat bleak or aloof, no matter how crowded or dynamic. For all their inclusion in the work, the participant or observer has no function beyond idle presence, can admire the engagement with nature, provided others do not get in the way. The desired participation in such generous work ultimately herds people, reflects a dubious conception of involvement or environment. And equally, the artist’s hand or eye quickly retreats into so much co-operation or collaboration, leaves the observer with that much less to observe, more to suspect.

Like the recurring use of ‘your’ in titles, there is the telling motif of the mirror, variously resisting closer inspection or penetration of surface with compelling reflection or deflection, briefly holding subjects spellbound by their own presence, prostrate before the work. As a symbol for involvement or artist, it firmly establishes a one-way relation.

As noted, Pardo’s concerns remain more rooted in interiors, are less subject to gradual developments, the influence of atmosphere or climate, although not exclusively. Initial concerns would seem to lie with identifying style to routine lighting fixtures, such as Raymond Hill Lamp (1990) exhibiting a functioning lamp so that it brackets a style of fixture with a quality of light, this in turn reflected by placement and setting. Other early work co-ordinates sculptural elements with gallery surroundings, as in the installation Hawaii (1995), where various rectangular panels, spread across the floor, share shape and colour relations with the abutting yellow wall and filing panel to the reception desk. The work is thus slyly dispersed; its ‘properties’ detected according to architectural considerations; these further distinguishing differences and alignments amongst floor panels. This approach is common throughout the 90s (see also Posts 46, 76 and 93).

But Pardo is particularly interested in the blurring of function and ornament or style. He has continued to use lamps, striking both for their extravagant or stylish fittings and unexpected placements. The nature of a lamp is thus contrasted with an emphatic flourish of culture or style. Again, it is as much the quality of light that then inflects setting, invokes other qualities to space and furniture, as whimsical design or nostalgia. The artist has similarly applied extreme design to clocks and doors (and here briefly, Pardo and Eliasson’s interests coincide, in a group show at Petzel, NY in 2007). These allow various degrees of function, of separation from the strictly decorative.

The loosening of function, the dispersal of the work into surrounding architecture also has a pictorial or 2-D extension. Pardo’s customised wallpapers for example, exploit computer graphics, introduce complex combinations of pictures that defy standard function as wallpaper, yet refuse any single framing between wall and picture. Elsewhere paintings are devoted to familiar decorative motifs or are predictably adorned with additional paraphernalia, underlining the integration with a wider and widening work.

Typically a Pardo installation looks to amplify affinities or links between an array of modest, domestic elements. Often geometric or biomorphic motifs are echoed or coincide with setting or shadows. Functions to objects are relaxed or resisted, so that one can equally regard a dining table and chairs for amusing and sensual rhythm or crystalline modules as a model for illumination or refraction. The work accommodates all, in part, and yet functions undercut by style and situation at some point immobilize the immersed observer. Where nothing is quite used or useable and style is never settled, the work engulfs its surroundings, blurs its boundaries and includes the observer, only to exclude a vantage point. We regard more stylistically there, but only by retreating from any familiar function, in the end style too dissolves under the withdrawal.

For all the whimsy and reverie to Pardo’s work, like Eliasson’s, it carries a subtle and uneasy view of the implied person, for the smoothly expanding installation, where the observer is given so much to look at, but always when in the way of something else.

Eliasson’s own website has been especially helpful in researching this post.

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2008-08-05T21:48:00.008-04:00

SIGMAR POLKE

Polke’s stylistic lineage is obvious and yet puzzling. Like colleague Gerhard Richter, Polke’s career benefits from the success of a younger generation of German painters in the late 70s and early 80s, the Neue Wilden or Neo-Expressionists. Interest in immediate precedents then recognises Polke’s steady drift from Pop Art, his broadening sources, provocative themes, layers of imagery transferred as metaphors, perhaps allegory (see also Posts 26, 40 and 97). But in as much as he exerts an influence, it is only on artists like Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger, initially based in Hamburg, where Polke was employed as a teacher. However his interests encompass as much abstraction and process as impulsive expression, and while this scope (also shared by Richter) surely influences later Cologne-based artists (see also Posts 76 and 82) it is curious, given how little impact Minimalism or Pattern and Decoration have upon German painting directly, how much of it Polke converts.

Polke finally remains loyal to a print sampling model for painting (again, like Richter) that no longer exerts influence, looks decidedly nostalgic by digital and multimedia standards; seems rather to encapsulate a by-gone era. Through it, he sums up many of the concerns of the late 20th century, not least the ambition of a grand synthesis of the abstract and figurative, the painterly and print-sourced, pattern and permutation, 2-D and 3-D. But for Polke, these strands are there almost from the start, in the early 60s. One of the reasons his work seemingly lacks the consistency of Richter, is because his options quickly multiply. If he lacks the commitment to be more than peripheral to Pop Art, it is because Pop Art is quickly peripheral to his commitment.

Polke’s development lies along three lines. The first expands upon print sources for painting, begins with commercial illustration and half-tone screens from common sources, usually, but not always photographic, to gradually include stencils and tracing identified as such by familiar sources, eventually to traditional woodcuts or etchings, these in turn subject to tone screens, more recently, even pixels, and transcribed with varying diligence. The second expands upon print content, begins with obvious and mundane print subjects (see also Posts 16, 61 and 89) then moves to content associated with other kinds of print or stencil, to traditional and historical themes. The third deals with print accuracy or efficiency of process and begins with the ‘dot gain’ to greatly enlarged details of tone screens, accenting distortion or loss of content. Polke then, surprisingly, adopts printed fabrics as supports, contrasting the strictness or accuracy of print, as well as regularity of pattern, with additional painting. Painting’s role as foil or errant instance of print or pattern is then highlighted by its abrupt interruption to the supporting surface. It is this deft alignment of painted canvas with printed fabric that smoothly assimilates pattern and abstraction, exploits figurative motifs as well as more abstract pattern.

Polke can then contrast geometric printed fabrics with clichéd stencils, with vigorous or casual treatment, tracing or more idle depiction, or use more figurative printed fabrics for additional and irregular figuration, further stencils of varying accuracy or recognition, multiple layers. Indeed, a key trait is system or pattern extended or contrasted with unexpected fragments, faltering technique. Polke can mock ‘the rules’ for formal composition, the banality of painting’s abstraction, or the rigour of its enforcement, but ultimately there are sources projected, ‘authorities’, no matter how diminished or distant. This testing or stretching of order or authority, is carried through to content, reflected in political and sexual themes, exotic and historical settings.

Printed fabrics subsequently invite sheer or transparent supports that appeal directly to the stretcher braces as structure or pattern, insist upon an explicit three-dimensional element to the flimsiest of two-dimensional content. And again, this formal feature has its counterpart in the themes, in quaint custom, ritual and formalities. His later interest in freer gesture or application, in spills and delayed chemical reactions for pigment, do not so much deny regularity or compliance with print instance or norm as invoke more occult or mystic powers, ‘higher’ but less reliable authorities, are echoed in the choice of folk tales and maxims, more diffuse imprinting. Polke ‘obeys’ them all, to the extent that they disrupt and obscure one another, to the extent that one marvels at the options, notes the hollow, degraded and eccentric instance, once set against others.

A Polke dot is never a polka dot, is always an enigma plot or a stigma halter, the spots for pics point to optical tricks, for the poked pried loose of the poker.

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2008-07-29T21:41:00.005-04:00

RINEKE DIJKSTRA

The Dutch photographer is noted for her portraits in which uncertain pose is contrasted with reserved or grave facial expressions, obvious role or costume with individual candour or unease. Dijkstra’s work initially favoured severe frontal compositions, central, often symmetrical placement of subjects and discreet, recreational locations. Her large format camera gives the work a compelling focus or resolution that is hardly preserved in JPEGs, yet adds to the strict formality of occasion, the sense of stillness or rigidity, a restraint to figures. The work also reflects photography’s concern with documentary norms, with sharply distinguishing form and content; at a time when digital options would appear to announce their immanent dissolution, when greater fiction is often preferred (see also Posts 12, 60 and 90).

Dijkstra’s work emerged in the mid 90s, with a series of children on summer beaches (1992-6). The works provide a wide frame for a full-length figure, usually in swimming costume, standing with their back to an empty seaside. The figures are occasionally (and engagingly) grouped, but tend to stand alone, empty-handed, directly facing the camera, their slender limbs and physique accentuated by pose and costume. Early examples perhaps use additional, filling light, separating the figure from setting, highlighting the artifice and isolation. The emphasis on the body, the awkward poses thus assume prominence so that the portraits are of immaturity, a gangly patience, a palpably physical impetus to personality.

In this sense, they document typical and social specimens and appeal to photography’s role in realism. This is largely in the service of science rather than art, of course, but in more unusual and imaginative categories, such as those of August Sander or Bernd and Hilla Becher, the documentary approach can prove surprisingly inventive (see also Post 41). The work of Thomas Ruff or Bernhard Fuchs for example, takes up a similar formal austerity inspired by just these sources.

But Dijkstra’s careful formalities are a little conspicuous for just social record. The willowy, unformed figures also flag how bodily personality is conveyed, how directly potential is reflected there. The artist’s preference for youth is largely a category of this. Significantly, a concurrent series poses nude mothers with newborn babies, presumably in a hospital setting, again at full-length, to measure their rounded torsos against small red infants. Mother and baby are seen as a nakedly bodily relation. And again, the distance of framing also suggests a remove for the photographer, a safe distance from issues.

Later works relax the distance, slightly compromise on the extent of the body. In a series at dance clubs (1995-6), the artist singles out young women, their distinctive fashions and demeanour, clearly influenced by the festivities. Here she uses videotapes as well as stills to record their wary reactions to her, but again compositions remain strict. Now individuals are not so much at the mercy of an immature body as conform to circumstances, are subdued or distracted by stimulants, comply in uniformity of dress and fashion. Following works such as a series of Portuguese matadors (2000) similarly record individual immersed in role; their dishevelled appearance immediately after bull fights, at odds with their deadpan, somewhat comic composure. A similar contrast operates in portraits of military figures (2002), but is less effective for the familiarity of role. The works verge on recruiting promotion.

In other works Dijkstra relaxes the strict frontality slightly, as in the series of ‘Almerisas’ (1996-2005), with its angled chair a subtle prop by which to gauge body size, comfort and composure. But the appeal to documentary rigour also carries constraints on category or subject. The isolated or unitary specimen excludes many vital aspects to roles and person, sooner or later relies on greater pictorial resources and involvement. But with this, the photographer then surrenders reassuring norms, some of the touchstones for objectivity and detachment.

For Dijkstra, her increasing subtlety to portraits must risk too much subtlety or triviality. In works such as Vondelpark, Amsterdam (2005) the artist returns to full-length figures and groups, but with new relaxation to pose and composition, a new confidence to the encounter. The work retains the theme of recreation or leisure, offers an almost idyllic setting and attractive subjects yet the meeting is markedly less ardent. Subjects regard the camera evenly, tolerantly, while the photographer is content to include the detritus, to let body and purpose sprawl. The picture no longer holds persons as firmly, but elicits a response to her need to greet and share, to fill a frame with poise.

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2008-07-22T20:41:00.004-04:00

DAVID SALLE

The paintings of David Salle were first recognised as part of the Neo-Expressionist movement of the early 80s. While the artist soon tightened his rendering, restricted gesture and materials, his distinctive compositions of multiple pictures, or layouts, in many ways continue to anchor the work in older concerns, increasingly signal the end of a period rather than a beginning. This post looks at how his style arose, where it led.

From the artist’s account, his earliest works, of the mid 70s, were small silhouettes. This echoes concerns in New Image Painting (see also Post 56) where strict outlines tend to signal a symbolic or metaphoric meaning, acquire a print-like currency. Salle then refined these with tone and modelling and conspicuously sets them well within or around large sheets of paper, drawing attention to placement, the picture’s ‘framing’ distinct from the support. Subsequent paintings invert, superimpose and contrast styles and subjects between pictures, reinforce this disjuncture and unitary arrangement. Where New Image Painting arrives at template-like icons that urge symbolic meaning, Salle abstracts pictures another way, stresses their literal removal or transference, equally prompts non-literal or metaphoric meaning.

Metaphor occurs through contrasts and affinities with other pictures to a layout, occasionally text and then qualities of supporting material. They struggle for a common theme or clear context though, variously obscure or embellish one another, and for a while Salle is happy to extend this relation to collaged supports, accompanying fixtures, including furniture. All variously reflect and contrast with pictures, frame, inflect and participate in style and subjects. In as much as pictures achieve metaphors here, it is firstly for their versatility and uncertainty; their convenient framing yet inconvenient exclusions. The paintings want context for contained pictures, but mostly from other pictures, so that they never quite get enough to give much, endlessly defer to each other and surroundings.

Related to this is the abiding theme of the female nude or seductively presented woman, her face or gaze mostly averted or omitted, the pose submissive yet calculated, formal but carnal. Sexuality here also suffers from a delayed or deferred context; means too many things in too many ways to properly or fully engage; is at once explicit yet fraught with myriad implications. The work reveals and revels in an urgent but shallow focus. Salle clutters or co-ordinates, lest he impose or subordinate.

The theme is developed initially from soft porn and other print sources, to staging his own very theatrical, somewhat fetishist photography, as sources for paintings, in strictly juxtaposed or partitioned layouts, to augmentation with single objects, at times abstract design or irregular framing. All increase the variety of pictures and painterly treatments; encompass stylistic parody and pastiche, more intricate layouts. Yet the work does not necessarily achieve greater distinction. Indeed, the smoother and more diverse Salle’s layouts, the more they remind us of others, especially the work of Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, of how closely the work remains tethered to print sources, for the affinity. Salle’s simple line and tone sketches quickly suffer for the sophistication. Later, more fluent eclecticists such as John Currin or Glenn Brown only underline how crude Salle’s mastery remains, how clumsy his intuitions.

Similarly, Salle’s use of superimpositions and printed fabric supports is overshadowed by the precedent of Sigmar Polke, by a longer, more comprehensive project. Salle was not so much influenced by Polke as arrives a little later at a similar remove from print sources, a similar taste in the outré. In other respects, the kind of multiple and diffuse metaphors that Salle’s layouts summon soon demand a more sustained or continuous picture, or stricter structure; otherwise expire in tedium or chaos. Salle is occasionally drawn to symmetry, to greater pattern in layout, but shuns more schematic arrangements, explored by say, a Pittman, a Taaffe or a de Balincourt. Again this tethers the work to an earlier period; escapes the stark metaphors of European Neo-Expressionism (see also Posts 26, 40 and 44) and New Image Painting, but stops short of following interests in stylisation and diagram.

Finally, where Salle does engage with greater integration in recent works, drawing introduces unusual distortion or exaggeration to figures, elsewhere resorts to a software ‘swirl filter’ for greater abstraction. All are applied to the female figure. The old problem - perhaps the only problem - persists, of separating style from subject or substance, of giving subject more than one style, of allowing style more than one subject. In this, Salle is still caught regarding formalities as something more, remaining at arm’s length from more intimate association.

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2008-07-15T20:33:00.011-04:00

RACHEL WHITEREAD

Whiteread’s signature is casts of architectural features, furniture and fixtures, various common containers from cardboard boxes or packaging to hot-water bottles and baths, in modest materials including plaster, resin, concrete and rubber. The work is instantly recognisable yet strangely detached, anonymous. Casts invert solids into space or voids; detach volumes from context or practical function, assume a symbolic role as container or imprint of fluid yet final practices. They fill and fulfil, measure repleteness or occupation against sealed and standard space. Whiteread’s work often evokes a sense of loss, of being sealed off, somehow excluded. Her most famous work is the monument to Holocaust victims in Judenplatz, Vienna, adding to the sense of interment.

Her work emerged in the early 90s and while the artist acknowledges the influence of Bruce Nauman’s A Cast of the Space under My Chair (1965–68) the interest in turn reflects two strands to British sculpture at the time. The first is the use of domestic furniture as material, not strictly as a ready-made, but rather extension to the Minimalist’s strict modules, to be assembled in some serial or convenient manner (see also Post 36) or combined with other materials, as in the work of Bill Woodrow. Whiteread’s early work paces these concerns; later efforts similarly appeal to modular assembly.

The second is the striking use of architecture as means to reconsider aspects of volume, proportion, light, function, etc. A close precedent is the work of Richard Wilson, with installations such as 20:50 (1987-96) in which a gallery (originally Matt’s Gallery, London) is filled waist high with used engine oil within a steel-plated lining that carefully traces the contours of the room. In such work, Wilson contrasted an interior with unwelcome fluid, invokes a sealed volume with an enclosed or confined one.

Whiteread’s castings of architecture, such as House (1993) and Apartment (2001) similarly highlight a sealed quality to walls and rooms, similarly record a fluid content. However her concern is not really with event or installation, but something more permanent. In theory, she could sample voids by filling them with any number of solid elements of potent association, in manner ranging from Arman to David Mach, and fix them there, but casting announces a fluid presence and its pouring, spraying and coating shape the meaning in certain ways.

Casting is associated with duplication as well as recording, with reinforcing and repair on persons. While many critics seize upon the latter in granting her works a bodily extension, a sense of personal space preserved or defended, there is a more directly sculptural sense in which casting enables duplication or reproduction; points to industry and conformity. The two senses are not mutually exclusive of course, but they do give the work more nuance than is generally allowed in commentary on her work. Casts invert solid and void, encase or simplify volumes, accent containment in smaller works, sheer capacity in larger ones. But the expression or metaphor is equally of a severely compartmentalised engagement as well as an undifferentiated filling, a literal pouring into place or holder. On the one hand, we apprehend familiar objects on terms of novel volume, on the other they are pointedly isolated, all the more remote for maintaining scale and surface detail.

The ambivalence is especially acute where the choice of object involves some prestige or authority. In works based upon display plinths and bookshelves, casting the surrounding space takes on a more provocative or ‘negative space’. Plinths anticipate or respect sculpture for example, but inspire only their inverse in shape, display merely a substitution of materials, the urge to supply only an equivalent volume. With bookshelves, it is the treatment of collections as simply a single volume that seems both amusing (a pun on her surname) and uneasy. There is no distinction by author or subject – at most schematic colour. Rather, they are a measure of décor, a token repository, again possessed on strict yet empty terms.

In the Holocaust memorial this allegiance extends to ‘The People of The Book.’ Yet her choice of the local name tellingly broadens the identity. It is hard to think of a major faith that does not place a premium on scriptures. It would be misleading to think librarians and bibliophiles were chief among the victims. Whiteread is devoted to the cause in the same way that her work adheres to surroundings, opportunities to reside and possess at a gut level. All are occasions to pour herself into situation, to parcel the experience simply in terms of bulk; in the case of libraries, by volume of volumes.

CAP thanks Bill Woodrow for prompt advice in researching this post.

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2008-07-08T20:19:00.006-04:00

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL

At Jack Shainman, NY, the artist presents a series of symbolic portraits of the black artist shielded by enormous palettes or perhaps supporting greatly increased means of painting. Other works provide idyllic scenes of seaside retreat, where figures feature the Afro hairstyle and fashions of the 60s, give the ideals of Black Power a mocking sentimentality or remoteness, much as some recent works hint at a desperate escapism there.

Marshall’s work is noted for its Black or Afro-American themes, a dedication to their roles and standing and the compelling means by which he assimilates these to contemporary painting. The concern with schematic or symbolic arrangements of pictorial space (see also Posts 53 and 57) is foremost and traits drawn from folk and commercial depiction (print and not) reinforce the status of common content as genre, through more concerted or accentuated painting (see also Posts 5, 11, 16 and 43).

The work achieved wider recognition in the early 90s, developing from a Neo-Expressionism with African roots, toward more complex themes; more refined drawing. Figures are now resolutely black, given little or no modelling and approach silhouettes (see also Post 13). They take on an elegant, if anonymous or generic quality, recall commercial illustration, while scrolled captions and large, un-stretched canvas supports recall public banners. The artist also includes stencilled floral motifs, often clogged or dripping with vigorous application, photo-collage or imagery denoting a coarse print source, sentimental and decorative motifs alternated with bold, graffiti-like or abstract gestures that further stretch the array of treatments, compound layout and dense surface.

This ‘maximising’ of techniques also has potent resonance in abstract painting at the time (see Posts 10 and 79) and for Marshall forges a crucial integrity not only across painting and print sources, symbolic and literal settings, but positions ‘black’ figures between a racial identity and a wider, pictorial one. In this, he anticipates the work of Kara Walker, but where Walker anchors her milieu in the ante bellum, in vivid folk and children’s tales, Marshall’s genre is more diffuse, contemporary. His figures are also ‘blacked out’ pictorially, but signal a deeply formal, self-conscious presence, occasionally giving sexual episodes a touching, comic aspect; frequently accompanying scenes of loss or neglect. The ‘black’ figure stares back, out of the picture, wary or resigned with childhood or civic ideals, with the gestures and roles available, the sentiments and tokens expected. The ‘black’ figure is as much a blank figure, the role denied or ignored, supplied for the sake of custom, obscured by a welter of formality.

There is often a wistful, elegiac tone, sometimes explicitly historical, but initially loss or departure is also through the accretion of embellishment or correction, the steady corruption of picture and person, often symbolised by the abuse of floral motifs. These tend to pale colours or white, granting the picture deeper symbolic meaning as it obscures or confines figures, amplifies the sense of lack to ‘black’.

Marshall has been prolific and his work subsequently includes more abstract forays, photography, installation, text-only prints and comic strips. The concern with Black Americans has remained, for the most part, but in painting, sources have thinned, technique narrowed. Tone is decidedly lighter. His interest in text in pictures is predictably drawn to comic strips, but the results are somewhat inert, for the injection of ‘black’ content into a stricter form, for the overpowering precedent of Pop Art and his own, more adventurous use of text and picture in earlier work. The shift gives his Black Power slogans a more nostalgic, wry quality, the stern font recalling banal public instruction or faith. As noted, figures featuring the Afro hairstyle also associated with the era, now take on greater modelling, a more rounded, if slighter picture, when not simply comic for conviction or fashions. The lighter tone and iconography seem almost in counterpoint to Walker’s mythic slavery. The ideals of the 60s now deflated proportionate to her excesses. But Marshall has yet to hit upon a style quite as elegant and provocative as Walkers’. That may lie closer to the work of Chris Ofili.

Similarly, in the series of romantic vignettes included in the current show, the pictures are restricted to a range of greys relieved only by saccharine valentines. Again the illustrational style cannot bring the same weight or wealth of meaning to romance or ‘black’ lovers. Marshall’s figures have become more rounded, more comfortable, less ‘black’ or blank, but are more confined for the maturity.

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2008-07-01T20:10:00.003-04:00

CHRISTOPHER BROWN

Christopher Brown (b.1951) so far has little international reputation, is mainly a West Coast presence. With a long exhibition record and steady following, his work enjoys a certain level of support, but no further. It is tempting to suppose his work does not win wider recognition for the same reason that it holds a firm place at a lesser level – that his charm is at the same time his flaw. This post looks at the work of an artist who is in many ways peripheral to the stylistic influences traced throughout painting in this blog, at advantages and disadvantages to such a position.

Brown’s paintings reveal a tentative, essentially conservative outlook. Examples from the 80s (these only the earliest available on the web – the artist by this time in his early 30s) show a range of interests, from an Expressionist portrait and close study (perhaps ‘appropriation’) after Thomas Eakins, to a stylised or schematic view of Mao swimming within buoys or hats and a bustling but fragmented crowd scene,with a precise historical source in the title November 19, 1863 (1989). Taken together, what would seem to attract the artist are figures placed in public, if not public figures, their spatial situation given some additional emblematic or deeper meaning and vigorous brushwork that further distances them and literal situation. Subsequent works such as Winter’s Blue Cold (1991) and Forty Flakes (1991) give figures a more even distribution or pattern and costume, use a steeper spatial projection and a blurring to figures and shadows that encourages a photographic reference - to long lens views and again a marked ‘distance’. In this, Brown is drawn to photographic genres (see also Posts 30 and 51) and inevitably recalls the work of Gerhard Richter.

But rather than proceed to similar resources, such as surveillance footage and other discreet public documentation, Brown turns to sources with more historical and significant roles for figures, to their identification by period fashions and customs. These are clearly less generic, more specific as pictures and their painterly treatment struggles to distance them from print source, to do more than echo Pop art or Photo-realism, while preserving period detail. Consequently the works are a little academic and sentimental. The figures underline Brown’s need for distant but distinct roles. The artist occasionally ventures into studies of the single figure in the 90s and to more schematic treatments of historical sources, but perhaps sensing the difficulty of bringing adequate pictorial structure to less guarded figures, or maintaining such structures without figures, increasingly turns to schemes or layouts dealing in native birds and their habitats.

These allow the artist a more relaxed approach to drawing, greater scope for abstraction, while using birds as a suitably distant metaphor for human community, adaptation and permutation. They soon inspire similar schemes with related environmental themes, a greater confidence in metaphor and structure and perhaps suggest a reversal in the approach to the figure. Rather than a stark structure derived from actual or literal incident, the structure now determines the appearance and tasks of figures. Works tellingly transfer habitat to house, abstract its sides and space, propose a diagram of property and propriety.

This concern with stylisation or a degree of abstraction is shared across much more acclaimed painting with the turn of the century and Brown’s interests to some extent are echoed in the work of a younger generation (see also Posts 34, 57 and 70). What separates him is firstly how much more tentative and scattered the work looks for seesawing between the linear and painterly, schema and figure across the length of a career. Secondly, the difference is in the weight that the local, regional and recreational acquire as Brown dispenses with the historical and distanced. Now he never quite engages the figures beyond home maintenance – literally in painting – and the sense is unmistakeably of disengagement or retreat, beyond other than home or heartland, a lack of method or rigour to content beyond that.

This is amplified in the most recent work where the artist returns to figures in winter recreation, although can now boldly equate them with home and even painting in the more ambitious works, can more confidently reshuffle space and scale , the painterly and abstract with the linear and figurative. Yet for all the formal freedom, Brown does not stray far from home. Nor can he be at home with more than a house, without gauging points of egress, mapping his options. For the work is happiest at departure and play, dipping into matters or skiing over them, as season allows, taken with appearances closer to home, toying with them, further a field. For the artist’s advocates, these are his virtues, for a wider constituency, as yet they are vices.

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2008-06-24T19:50:00.007-04:00

ANDREA ZITTEL

The present show at Regen Projects, LA - Energetic Accumulators and Token Exchanges – continues to adapt furniture to precise tasks of day to day living; in this case mainly desk spaces for stacking small, miscellaneous items, in satisfying arrangements. Of course, the artist’s tasks seem mainly the adaptation of her day to day surroundings, giving the project a certain circular logic, but her concerns are really hypothetical rather than practical.

Zittel’s work is often comic, exaggerating the reductive functions supposed by domestic design, the life confined to such minimal terms, simple needs and rigid organisation. An intense conformity is partly the point. The absurd dictates of ‘form follows function’ or ‘a machine for living’ results only in life becoming more formalised, more machine-like. But beyond her demonstrations of simple (self) construction from inexpensive materials, there is also a strangely alienated, behaviouristic view of life, a need to define activities so concretely, in terms of objects to hand, for lack of any larger – especially interactive or interpersonal – ambit. It is design that fusses over the details to domestic order to allay more central concerns; that plays at a self-containment and isolation there rather than work at more testing circumstances. It is design for the person without purpose.

Alternatively, the work allows such items to be taken on sculptural or formal terms, as an arrangement of materials, irrespective of function, and to demonstrate underlying links between fine and applied art, to urge a broader definition of ‘function’. Zittel is one of a number of artists, including Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger (see also Post 8) and Franz West, that use furniture, fixtures and architectural features to broaden sculpture thus, to anchor installation to explicit design issues.

Such work relies less upon judicious display of found items – the ‘ready-made’ – than on commissioned fabrication – as the ‘readily-made’ and in this participates in a wider trend (see also Posts 25 and 49). However for Zittel, fabrication is mostly concerned with simplified and D-I-Y steps, modest and common materials, so this aspect is less pronounced than for example in a Koons or Rehberger. Furthermore, the design is sometimes so general that its realisation takes on more of a collaboration with particular builders, whom Zittel duly credits. This gives the work a less certain trajectory, undercuts the crucial distinction between design and function and means that it is not always clear in what sense the work stands as a model – how literal or hypothetical its application might be.

Her early work presented schemes for mating pigeons, as both elegant wooden abstraction – in particular recalling the Minimalist modules of Donald Judd – and practical models for avian breeding. The stark contrast between dedicated function and formal beauty is part of a steady challenge to formal properties in sculpture, following Minimalism. ‘Materials’ then gradually include uses and methods – ‘maximise’ properties – while abstraction subtly inherits connotations of authority and control. But it is when Zittel exchanges birds for humans, switches from breeding to isolating specimens, that her work gains greater complexity. As noted, the concentration on the individual and the isolation of (usually) her needs, takes on a whimsical quality as activities are arbitrarily assigned cubicles, costumes, localities and furnishings. Zittel’s work ranges from painting and prints to sculptures, installations, with lighting fixtures, storage units, carpet and shelving, demonstrating the phases to planning, promotion and merchandising, inevitably including a website.

The emphasis upon self-containment reaches its peak in Prototype for a Pocket Property (1999) literally a small island built for one, from concrete, apparently free-floating and located somewhere off the coast of Denmark. Typically the model is, in some respects, literally a small island, in others no more than a pretence or metaphor for profound withdrawal or abandon. A later project in the high desert of California provides a permanent location for equally remote or far-fetched abodes. It too has a website.

But increasingly, Zittel’s attention seems to lie with the association or combination of possessions, with fundamental questions of affinities and categories. Her Prototype for a Billboard (2005) confidently announces their crucial yet illusory role. Significantly, the billboard features a pair of birds, held in disembodied hands, beside barren bushes, the lower portions of which are left unpainted, along with a square – presumably for text – to the left of the birds. The unpainted timber may be part of the design, may simply be that for which the artist as yet can find no plan or category, may be illusion or ‘the way the world works’ in spite of all plans. Either way, the artist finally does not hold with certainty of function.

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2008-06-17T20:09:00.004-04:00

STEFAN KÜRTEN

A series of paintings, mainly of outdoor sculpture, saw the artist vary his usual concern with architecture and surrounding garden in a recent show at Thomas Dane, London. Kürten has for some time contrasted and stylised differences between man’s design and nature, sometimes extending this to pictorial structures that assert or deny perspective, elsewhere displaying uncanny echoes and expressive aspects to both. The work is unassuming yet deceptively complex and Kürten’s love of linear precision tends to give the work a patient, cautious quality. The pictures of sculpture extend these concerns with appearance and function and where the sculptures are figurative introduce a new, more directly human note. Sadly, the Dane gallery’s web pages for the show are now reduced to installation views. However other web resources allow illustration of underlying elements to his style.

Kürten’s choice of architecture sometimes coincides with that of Peter Doig and the comparison is instructive. Doig also stylises surrounding nature in ways that highlight architectural and spatial qualities, often excludes figures and emphasises a linear rhythm even tracing. But Doig’s sources are casual or private, snapshots of places in passing, where detachment or estrangement are paramount. In Kürten line rarely signals tracing and subjects recall standard domestic models, the genre of home and garden, the carefully planned and preserved abode. Kürten’s attention to detail and pattern often compound the viewing angle with linear and planar aspects to the architecture, sometimes colour and light, so that what is pictured and how it is pictured are fused, present an array from flat pattern elements, either in foreground or background, to perspective and complex volumes. The feeling is of a profound but reluctant, almost furtive attachment across the spectrum.

The emphasis upon architecture in recent German painting is pervasive, quite distinct from mere urban landscape, the work of Christian Hellmich, Martin Kobe, Susanne Kühn, Ulf Puder, Neo Rauch, Thomas Scheibitz, David Schnell, Dirk Skreber and Matthias Weischer, for example, all feature building as a crucial building-block for depiction. It is tempting to suppose this reflects older Bauhaus teachings (see also Post 8) but space here prevents closer analysis.

Kürten’s training at the Düsseldorf Academy surely inclines him to studies in architecture, but while the influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students such as Thomas Struth (see also Post 41) Thomas Ruff (see also Post 66) and Andreas Gursky all concentrate on documentary standards for photography and unusual classes of architecture, painting frames architecture somewhat differently. In any case Kürten has no interest in grand symmetries or panoramas, in imposing scale or wider civic design. Nevertheless he arrives at just as much abstraction. He is interested in looking through surroundings to the architecture, at how these modify or inflect the integrity of planes, such as walls or windows, roofs or paving, at how they build other, larger designs from the state of gardens, the layers of posts, fences, railings, lattices etc.

This glimpsed unity is underscored in the continuous, if somewhat faltering outline, that allows in-filled or coloured areas, especially skies or shadow, foliage or greenery, greater latitude, further flattening the picture, reinforcing the linear cohesion. These are qualities that build upon photographic composition, particularly in attention to precise tonalities, yet when transferred to outline and freer colouring, point to more fundamental issues – to perspective’s preference for architecture, its dependence upon framing in perceiving additional and unexpected aspects.

Occasionally the artist dispenses with a coherent perspective to build from collage-like fragments that hover between pattern and picture. He sometimes uses metallic paints as grounds to further animate outlined areas, so that they reflect differently depending upon light and position of spectator. At other times this in-filling takes the form of roughly repeating motifs, depending upon intensity or complexity of colour and this deft shift from outline to pattern – from continuous line to short, broken ones – is prominent in the treatment of greenery, goes toward a stylistic distinction between nature and culture. The technique also allows a further level of pattern – usually circular shapes of varying colour that appear to float before the scenes, as if an optical distraction. In all three ways, Kürten carries architectural and pictorial qualities through to painting and samples not only a genre of depicted domestic architecture, but expresses an attitude, in the quiet meeting of chance and design, nature and culture.

The paintings of outdoor sculpture also stress placement in parks and gardens, and in more figurative cases, signal a similar approach to person, as circumspect and circumstantial, as architecture or place.

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2008-06-10T19:38:00.005-04:00

JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN

With current shows at White Cube, London, and L&M Arts, NY, the Chapman brothers once more claim attention with their winning brand of ferocious sadism, furious mayhem and free ranging contempt. Yet it would be wrong to see their work driven solely by controversy or provocation. More precisely, their concerns lie firstly with limitations to sculpture or modelling; with the way mode of reference can render outrages unconvincing or comic rather than a failure of reference scheme; how literally the scale and scope of 3-D modelling, implicitly assigns a level of detachment or simplification. Secondly, throughout their work the relentless hostility is often directed to tradition and established norms, for example, in re-creating works by Goya using Plasticine or retail mannequins, in painting upon discarded 18th century portraits or satirical carvings of ‘primitive’ idols. All attack received categories for materials, source and sentiment. Yet where the protest is so loud, the agenda shifts closer to home. Accumulatively, the protests point to an underlying discomfort with identity or integrity, issues with special weight in a partnership. In this sense, the work attacks in order to allay threat at a more basic level. Righteous vigour here flags a private anxiety.

The Chapmans belong to the wave of British artists that emerged in the early 90s under the patronage of Charles Saatchi. But their approach finds scarce precedent or parallel in British art. Their use of toy or hobby figurines in early works is closer to the use of children’s dolls by Mike Kelley, in adopting standard figures or models to unlikely tasks (see also Post 20) as well as Charles Ray’s use of fabricated retail mannequins to perverse ends. Indeed, The Chapmans soon turn to similar mannequins but supply far freer modifications, although with a similar focus upon sexuality. Tony Matelli is another kindred spirit, but his development is slightly later.

The Chapmans’ figurines are initially used to re-create scenes from Goya’s etchings The Disasters of War (1993). The curious conjunction of children’s modelling medium and renowned record of Napoleonic atrocity immediately gives the work an uneasy ambivalence. Goya seems trivialised, toy figurines given impossible gravity, so that atrocities are either distanced or rendered child’s play, while models struggle for a verisimilitude atrocity simply cannot accommodate. The works are really at war with themselves; suggest a war in their making.

Subsequent work vastly extends the tableau. Hell (1999) – sadly lost in a fire in 2004 – contained over 30.000 figures and dwelt upon Nazi atrocities. Larger figures, based on retail mannequins also echo Goya, while others trade in bizarre sexual fictions (these also echoed in recent works by Paul McCarthy, an older, kindred spirit, possible influence). Such figures are often joined at the waist and elsewhere, defying easy reference beyond siblings and sexuality, while steadily advancing the claim for an identity of more than one body, a person of parts scattered or shared; partnership beyond the practical or permanent. The balance of these two themes goes to the heart of their work.

Given the impetus to transgress or surpass, it is perhaps inevitable that their work embraces installation, prints and painting as well as sculpture. Their series of reworked 18th century portraits predictably visits fantastic disfigurements upon subjects; renders them absurd fictions that tellingly deny any stylistic coherence, any historical identity. Portraits are a particularly sore point, here.

But their targets are not always or only art history. In Übermensch (1995) they ridicule the achievements of physicist Stephan Hawking, as the cult of the hero, the supremely gifted and dedicated individual, overcoming enormous adversity. The title links such veneration to fascism. Conversely, Hawking’s example stands as either an overwhelming threat to those committed to collective identities, or endorsement for the mechanically or artificially extended individual.

In the series The Chapman Family Collection works such as Unholy McTrinity (2002) and Grimace (2002) conflate ‘primitive’ idols with toys and Christianity, global marketing, consumerism and faith. These are amongst their more appealing works. Essentially they extend religious imagery, much as they have treated Goya or retail mannequins. But the test remains how true such works remain to their sources, how effectively they direct reference elsewhere.

In the current work, ‘Little Death Machines’, the violence has become more abstract or remote, the models less directly derived from past or present. In fact works now flourish a kind of ramshackle obscurity to their torture; a more confined or rarefied model. The works hint at the machinations of industry, but also allow a more relaxed, whimsical side. The reference now is more diffuse, the violence subtler, more insidious.

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2008-06-03T20:51:00.000-04:00

GREGORY CREWDSON VERSUS COLLIER SCHORR

Both photographers downplay particular camera features or distinctive printing options, instead concentrate on manipulation and classification of subject for rather than by the camera. In other words, what characterises their work is less a matter of how than what, strictly, of the informal over the formal. In this they conform to a wider trend (see also Posts 12 and 27). For Crewdson, elaborate theatrical tableaux steadily expand to engage realism and cinematic anecdote, while for Schorr the quality sought from her young male subjects grows more elusive or fleeting, and most recently is pursued in drawing.

Both photographers stress fiction or artifice. But while Crewdson often uses theatrical lighting and framing from a conveniently empty foreground to reveal fixed poses and stereotypical figures, Schorr confines fiction to a few military props for some of her young men, to role-reversed poses from pin-ups or traditional poses, to modest still lives as a metaphor for place or belonging.

Thirdly, both photographers deal in a marked estrangement or alienation from the presentational norms upon which they draw. For Crewdson, the broader more elaborate views of Middle American life are deliberately hollow projections from some grander vantage point that finally register something like fear or contempt through ostentatious displays of logistics or pyrotechnics. For Schorr, young men are documented as wrestlers, soldiers – even Nazis – and pin-ups, yet the theme remains male youth in roles that require no female counterpart, that if not overtly hostile, then fail as a measure of the feminine, for the feminine. But the threat is not in the roles assigned, nor their indifference to them, but at a much more basic level, where Schorr cannot identify.

Crewdson’s work first gained attention in the early 90s, with intimate tableau of birds and insects, significantly, of collective behaviour in ‘nature’; both viewed at some remove. However, in subsequent works, such as the Twilight series (1998) the artist shifts attention to episodes in the American heartland, often literally dark and disturbing, as much for the intense artifice as errant behaviour. Here the connection is often made to David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986) with its opening and closing scenes of high artifice, bracketing a tale of terror and crime. Crewdson’s earlier works are seen as announcing similar revelations, but his clever play on nature and naturalism through models, does more than frame scenes of disruption and dysfunction. They render them disturbingly restrained and distant, as if no more than models in some higher scheme.

Indeed as the scenes become more expansive, there are works dedicated to the production values, to the extent of manipulation and artifice engaged; that are literally more revealing of the work’s tenor and priorities. And as whole neighbourhoods appear to fall under such schemes, they too are seen as just a more elaborate model or staging, not quite real, or perhaps worth greater effort. Either way, the uneasiness with the extent of artifice leaves the fiction of too much. It becomes forced projection of squalor or desolation, from a distance that ultimately lacks engagement or conviction. They are visions of something hardly known, largely denied. This is quite different from Lynch’s Expressionism or the paintings of Edward Hopper, another frequent comparison that misses the stylistic differences available and necessary to still photography.

Schorr’s work arrives a little later in the 90s, and while there are early works concerned with aspects of student life, her themes are usually young American wrestlers and a family of German youths at leisure. With each, Schorr isolates a peer group, deals less in interaction than individuality illuminated by role and circumstance. But while the wrestlers are factual and the soldiers fictional, neither quite confines young men to such roles nor convinces that such roles are only for young men. And where other work substitutes young men for women, as pin-ups and artist’s models, noted above, the interest in young men clearly points to an absence of options, a frustration with roles. The agenda appears to have only one gender and it is a hostile one.

As in Crewdson’s work, this grants the work a curious distance, and while Schorr is happy to also place men against a backdrop of nature, even camouflaged by it, their nature is no more forthright for it, her photography no closer to identification. Interestingly, her recent work uses drawing to bring figures together, to transcend the iconography of roles, to avoid the isolation of her photography. But both artists bring new expressive dimensions to familiar iconography, even though the expressions may be troubling or unwelcome.

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2008-05-27T20:07:00.000-04:00

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

A selection of works from the early 60s by Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 97) at Gagosian N.Y. inspires a post on a pivotal moment in twentieth century painting. Typically, the gallery’s website offers little in the way of reproductions, happily resources at the Lichtenstein Foundation compensate.

Lichtenstein’s development throughout the 50s essentially matches standard and familiar subjects against strict and abstract treatments, increasingly looks to clichéd iconography balanced against vigorous painterly means. Much like Willem de Kooning’s treatment of Woman or Larry Rivers’ version of Washington Crossing The Delaware, Lichtenstein is drawn to an interruption or incompleteness in treatment, an equivocation to clichés thereby, a composition at once abstract and figurative. Yet what would happen if the subject were as humble or trivial as a comic strip character? Would strenuous painting be mocked or Donald Duck accorded new dignity?

The disparity perhaps ultimately proved too great for the artist, subsequent works turn to more confirmed abstraction. But Lichtenstein was equally dissatisfied there, and out of idle curiosity decided to paint a ‘straight’ version of a single comic strip frame. The result revealed an unsuspected expressive dimension, devoid of painterly ‘interruption’ – the doubts, mistakes and confusions of his 50s approach. Quite the opposite attitudes were now suggested. The ‘straight’ treatment assumes a kind of deadpan reserve, akin to the flâneur’s insolence or hipster’s cool. The isolation of a single frame and dramatic enlargement magnify narrative into amusing oversimplifications, abstract pictorial or formal values by this, yet threaten to cheapen or trivialise these into the bargain.

Coincidentally, Andy Warhol (1928 – 87) arrives at virtually the same style at the same time, but by a slightly different route. He is inspired by the templates and designs given rugged treatment by Jasper Johns. Warhol makes the leap to using stock graphics to much the same ends, to then also abandon painterly treatment for the ‘straight’ copy. Upon seeing Lichtenstein’s work, Warhol shrewdly dropped comic strips and soon addresses print sources more directly through silkscreen, and later, photo-silkscreens.

Such painting now starkly defines itself in relation to styles of printing, looks to highlight crucial differences to the work of multiple instances. Painting does not, of course, immediately look to etchings or woodcuts, or forms of printing usually associated with art. On the contrary, it looks to the commonest and most efficient forms of line illustration. The objective is not so much the popular (despite the label ‘Pop Art’) the revered or preferred, but the pedestrian and mundane, against which to measure overlooked or unexpected qualities of printing through painting, and vice versa.

For even if painting were to do no more than enlarge such prints (which it cannot do, without begging questions of context or framing) the enlargement does not preserve all the qualities of the print, such as the resolution of the inking, or support texture, colour or ageing of support or ink, much less accident, staining, creasing or other typical distress, although conceivably, it might. The ‘straight’ copy is actually very selective. In fact it samples just the lines and colours, perhaps the tonal dot screens, in Lichtenstein’s case, as removed design. And Lichtenstein actually adjusts compositions to heighten this aspect. The absence of these other qualities then point to the supporting canvas in a special way, emphasising its weight, scale or weave, just as the absence of obvious brushwork also exemplify a certain self-effacement or reticence on the part of painting, a literal flatness to its materials, an expressive or metaphorical wryness.

Such work is often still greeted with a mixture of amusement and disappointment, since painting seems at once denuded or debased by the encounter, modest print sources absurdly exalted. But formal values are returned to depiction more generally, rather than just painting, and painting’s role as a work of sole instance, or a one-off, is given new and potent impetus. Unfortunately space here does not permit an explanation of why the resources to painting are greater for being spared the need of strict duplication. However print sampling by painting is further pursued to text (see also Post 67) to layouts (see also Post 61) and obviously to photography (see also Posts 35 and 87) this, generating the sub-style of Photo-realism.

For Lichtenstein the options quickly run to parody of famous works and established styles in painting, to dramatic brushwork, stock treatments of light, reflectance and transparency, to text and obviously the melodrama this allows to comic strips. The focus upon romance is particularly striking, and while his choice of comic strips soon looks old-fashioned, the added distance only strengthens the cliché, the elegantly composed picture and persons that life abandons upon completion, that we uphold out of discretion.

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2008-05-20T21:07:00.000-04:00

DANIEL BUREN

Daniel Buren began as a painter, was soon drawn to abstraction and Minimalism and with that gradually exchanged canvas and independent surfaces for temporary murals, for site-specific and architectural construction. The drive outward; from self-contained two-dimensional works is typical of Minimalism and as works engage surroundings through more striking bases and supports, the emphasis upon strict pattern and colour by pigment or coating also changes. The work applied to wider grounds is no longer about painting, but pattern belonging to other materials and three dimensional structures and on a scale and integration that soon belongs to architecture.

The temporary, repeated or repeatable nature of many of Buren’s works also coincide with Conceptual Art, with the emphasis upon the work as an event or performance, record or plan, upon the terms of the pattern as something like a script or score (see also Posts 33 and 62). Buren’s work is a key part of the French Supports/Surfaces group of the late 60s. As the name suggests, the group was intent upon spelling out the relation between the work and the surface or support upon which it appeared. But this concern was shared with many Minimalists, if less explicitly, and the trajectory of such work demonstrates an important consequence of the broader style. This post traces Buren’s career as a prime example.

The artist’s development was rapid. From initial works in 1964, reflecting an acquaintance with CoBrA, the artist steadily abstracts his pictures to approximate symmetries and a strong linear bias. By 1966 parallel lines or stripes establish an area or fill for looser shapes, are strict, for masking tape, straight and vertical. The additional boundaries then fall away, leaving the work nothing but stripes, of an impressive scale and colour uniformity.

Painting can project such patterns to novel scale, materials and situation, but under Minimalism, it no longer seeks to invent them, but rather re-deploy them. Basic symmetries in stripes, grids, and less obviously, monochromes, are tested against novel materials and technique. But which patterns allow more radical applications, which techniques preserve such patterns (see also Posts 24, 47, 52 and 81), essentially establishes the scope of the project, the ambition of the artist. Differences within the style are sometimes divided between artists dedicated to process, as opposed to system (or pattern).

In Buren’s case he is content to let stripes drive applications, rather than consider the inverse. He occasionally resorts to grids or monochromes, but is not attracted to more elaborate recognised pattern, even of the kind used by colleague Claude Viallat, much less the radical pigments and techniques of contemporaries such as Linda Benglis, Larry Poons or Jules Olitski. Neither more adventurous pattern nor pigment recipe tempts. Instead stripes and flat colours acquire architectural fixture and efficient duplication, yet by this, also lose some of their reference to painting. The project is smoothly exchanged for an interest in three-dimensional qualities, in lighting, transparencies, reflectance and events.

Stripes and grids still recur, but their significance has less to do with pigment, more with other materials and situation. It is this dissipation to one arm of abstraction that occasionally led critics to suppose painting had been replaced by the 80s, or that abstraction no longer needed painting. But this is to exaggerate the impact and impetus of the project, to ignore rival developments in abstraction and painting.

Buren can preserve an interest in colour definition, but that does not necessarily make the works about painting or abstraction. Typically, his work has been applied to public thoroughfares, to paths, gateways, stairs and viewing points, and these situations influence the meaning to the colour. Not that colour ultimately resides in architecture, of course, but such work underlines the surfaces and supports to areas of herding or channelling the public. Egress colours the colour. They signal not just an abstract sense of motion and masses, but also an anonymous conformity or compliance, perhaps alienation. Indeed, the all-encompassing integration of many of his works can feel either stifling and almost coercive, or so subtly pervasive as to hardly register as more than the trivial, to sense the work all but dissolving into mere formula. At times, Buren’s work recalls that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in this respect.

These are the standards against which to measure the site-specific and work of temporary or multiple instances. While they might commence as a projection from painting or sculpture, the impetus to counter projects, not least from architecture, ultimately stalls or traduces them, absorbs them into larger civic concerns. It leaves painting and abstraction other routes, ultimately leaves Minimalism exhausted.

The artist’s own website has been especially helpful in researching this post

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2008-05-13T19:50:00.000-04:00

GERHARD RICHTER

The artist first rose to prominence with paintings conspicuously based on black and white photography, obliquely positioned between Pop Art and Photo-realism (see also Posts 16, 61 and 67). He soon expanded on the kinds of photography painted, including other forms of print, then onto more literal samples of frames and mirrors. At the same time he drastically loosened the treatment of photography, eventually arriving at a distinctive version of abstraction. Richter’s project is remarkable for the consistency or rigour of his interests, for his methodical – if not always successful - explorations and willingness to alternate between branches, to pursue them simultaneously and include unexpected combination.

However this project has not always been obvious. Richter’s treatment of photography literally blurs lens and print or publication attributes, makes for uncertain categories of picture and a somewhat evasive role for painting. To some extent this obscured the point of his colour charts and mirrors for some time, seemed a wayward point from which to approach abstraction. It is only in the 80s, where his large gestural abstractions alternate with blurred still lives of traditional iconography, such as skulls and candles; that a more confident sense of his scope emerges.

The blurring and wiping to painting exemplify a sense of motion, of moving on, disengaging or discovering. In early works, photographic sources are stressed through the use of black and white and blurring that would seem to belong camera process, a loss of focus or a slow shutter’s registration of motion, as if things were glimpsed from a speeding vantage point. In subsequent paintings the blurring becomes more ambiguous. Static objects such as a kitchen chair neither register the directional sweep of movement, nor a consistent depth of field for focus, much less a certain genre of photograph. At the same time, stock publication formats such as postcards, wildlife close-ups, pornography and the obligatory old master reproduction grant the blurring a degraded or coarsened quality, a kind of summary of lowered half-tone screen rulings, exploited at the time by Sigmar Polke, Gerald Laing and Alain Jacquet, amongst others.

Moreover the blurring can be quite painterly, so that the dragged brushstrokes are an obvious extension to the blurring, perhaps also suggest scan lines to a television screen. ‘Blurred brushing’ in this way risks lapsing into traditional facture at a certain point, but this too is tested against the notably photographic genres of aerial views of cities and mountains by the late 60s, arrives at something more like ‘brushy blurrings’. The blurrings next apply to just the mixing or combination of colours, firstly in masses of writhing brushstrokes, their direction measured only against smeared colour differences and then to their obliteration in fields of grey by the mid 70s. Later he uses soft-focus close-ups of brushstrokes to amplify the abstraction, and these soon allow more vigorous technique and introduce a set of layers, blurring, revising and concealing a preceding image.

What starts as blurring in standard figurative photography thus ends in massive wiping, abstraction and painting. Equally and elegantly, what is sampled throughout is not just a loss of focus, motion or print degradation, but reciprocally, the way they constitute a version of painting, its tasks and means. Accordingly, abstract works retain a vestige of photography in the broad wipes of unpredictable colour and shape, while more figurative works resist resolution as just focus, motion or publication.

Yet Richter also pursues abstraction to single colours in a grid or chart, as noted, a print format although not strictly photography. Indeed this aspect to his work is given new interest with the completion last year of the enormous stained glass window for Cologne Cathedral. Pointedly, no blurring or mixing occurs in such works. However, the random ordering is expanded across saturation and luminosity to a formidable range, inevitably rendered imperceptible by complementary contrasts at points, and accommodated only by diminishing size of samples or distance needed to survey them. Colour abstraction is thus rendered elusive to grids, much as in blurring or wiping.

Richter’s impressive system and samples nonetheless make sacrifices. While dragging and wiping can include shifts in direction, tool, colour and consistency, it cannot allow further drawing or more elaborate line, the styles and print layouts available there, the function and cues for local colour. In this respect Richter, remains a prisoner to the photograph and print paradigms for painting. Understandably, it is just these aspects to depiction that attract a younger generation. Richter’s contribution lies in their platform, in demonstrating how photography, paradoxically, revitalises abstraction in painting, how painting continues to provide the principal means of reviewing depiction.

The artist’s own website has been especially helpful in researching this post

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2008-05-06T20:42:00.000-04:00

DANIEL RICHTER

The paintings of Daniel Richter flirt with grand themes and myth for groups of schematic figures, display a relaxed sense of design and finish. They offer a shrewd balance of concerns that run through much of contemporary German painting, if not contemporary painting in general. His work has steadily drawn greater approval from the turn of the century and with shows this year at Regen Projects, LA and David Zwirner, NY, a museum survey at Hamburg, The Hague, Malaga and later Denver, his reputation is secured and a sterner review perhaps in order.

Significantly, the artist’s early work, from the mid 90s, was dedicated to abstraction, to the combination of techniques and ‘maximised’ composition pursued by Albert Oehlen for example, to the graphic and diagrammatic compositions of Franz Ackermann, for instance. Richter drew on graffiti and cartoons, a spectrum of gesture and shapes to chart a territory between the two, between a youth subculture and its stylistic inheritance. However, by the late 90s, the combinations encompass more figurative elements and are no longer content with hard edges, the psychedelic and notational. In 2000 Richter began to use the broadly traced outlines from projected photographs that have pretty much become a staple.

This distinctive outline ostensibly transfers contours from the photograph, but Richter instead assigns them various colours and widths, so that they read as more remote scans, more like an infrared or heat register, and crucially flatten and mask the figure, stress a generic and design aspect. This, together with a loose and scattered facture, and more collage-like placements, essentially preserves the artist’s interest in abstraction. Sources for the figures are by no means obvious, but tend to be drawn from publications on radical politics and youth or counter culture (see also Post 63). The actions pictured are usually public, group gestures, often suggesting confrontation or defiance, public disturbance or unease.

Other works offer more rustic settings, more mythical figures, but both kinds firmly return painting to grand themes and literary resources, effectively to traditional history painting. It is no co-incidence that Richter should assimilate this just when the New Leipzig School and Neo Rauch in particular, achieve wider recognition for similar goals. It is entirely consistent with Richter’s ambition. Yet the differences are stark. Neo Rauch’s work revels in cautious character, perspective and volume, yet deliberately corrupts wider design, a pictorial integrity or composition. Richter, on the other hand, celebrates mere outline and atmosphere, favours the anonymous, frontal and flattened, gladly sacrifices depth, volume and personality for veils of drips and dashes, the deliberate grounds that hold a greater design, a further abstraction.

Neo Rauch’s work is deeply pessimistic, even nihilistic, yet often wildly funny. Richter’s work is idly mannered, perhaps naïve, often pretentious. Where Neo Rauch cannot escape his figures without wrecking the picture, Richter cannot get closer to his, without spoiling line and design. Critics are quick to explain Neo Rauch’s attitude as a symptom of East Germany and ingrained disillusionment, but so far none have cared to do the same for Richter and the new united Germany. Richter is, of course, based in Berlin.

Richter’s use of traced outlines and diffuse, casual facture, does however, draw predictable comparison with the work of Peter Doig. But where the distancing that this technique brings, reflects upon exotic but brief locations for Doig, for Richter, this sense of holiday or detachment is usually directed to more urgent and serious matters, and seems all the more dubious for it. The effect is of a Peter Doig, wistful for a social conscience or peer group pressure. Richter’s figures are never quite real or realised in this sense; their circumstances, accordingly, seem more decorative or dilatory.

Appropriately, Richter’s show at Zwirner was titled The Idealists, and featured air-guitarists in a grim urban setting. It is not surprising that these musical enthusiasts should appeal to the artist, since popular music is often alluded to in his abstract work, but there is also an explicit pretence to the miming that takes on a greater resonance here. Elsewhere in the show, an actual guitarist parades before a crowd in an open-air venue, looking around warily, whilst in others the guitarist is rhymed with an armed guard or soldier; the task, by extension, is one of claiming a new frontier. But this is not just idealism, or deriving a vicarious glory from music or participation. It is to deliberately distract from more immediate failures, to look beyond bleak designs for some greater substance, and to confuse tracing with discovery, following with leading. They are, in all respects, a barren experience.

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2008-04-29T20:00:00.000-04:00

INKA ESSENHIGH

In the current show at Victoria Miro, London, the artist pursues her flowing, charged figures to pastoral landscape, their sinuous rhythms dispersed upon foliage and fields, to whimsical, slightly ominous ends. The style recalls children’s book illustration and animation, the charm of naïve, elegant characterisations that mould natural surroundings. The sense of nature pulsing with animation carries none of Vincent Van Gogh’s immediacy or terseness, obviously, yet the expressive and Expressionist impulse similarly sets everything in an uneasy state of flux, hints at creeping transformation or insidious growth, perhaps entrapment or threat. Essenhigh’s silky modelling, delicate drawing and rich colour all add a deliberate sugar-coating, deepen the attraction, yet also spell something of a denial or retreat to child-like faith.

Essenhigh’s use of playful caricature is perfectly in step with wider developments in the mid 90s, when she first gains notice. Comparisons with John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Rita Ackermann, Nicky Hoberman and others are common and the trend marks the steady transition from Neo-Expressionism to a more refined yet pointed depiction. Essenhigh is distinctive initially for her intensely linear, cartoon or comic-strip style that gives her early work almost a Pop Art flavour. She is not drawn to photographic sources or social stereotypes, but rather archetypal or mythic figures, tokens in very abstract circumstances. And while her sharp outlines and flat colours flag comics and cartoons, crucially, she resists familiar figures or situations, often leaves the figure virtually illegible, beyond placement, or no more than a biomorphic squiggle upon a bounded plane.

In this respect the work seems closer to some Surrealist realm, perhaps to the work of Joan Miro or Salvador Dali, for example. But the equation between print norms and painting styles here is also a way of eliciting shared content for just these kinds of abstract figures and settings; of sampling a wider genre, available to both media. This extraction of genre is really what links Essenhigh to others cited, and is part of a wider shift (see also Posts 16, 37 and 43). Yet the mythic figures actually rely upon formal or stylistic terms for their main attributes. In other words, these kinds of figures can only exist in these kinds of pictures, are really the animating spirit to them.

Essenhigh is not the first to mine this overlap between comics and painting, but she had the good fortune to do it when and where reception is prompt. Interestingly, the early work often grants figures trailing costume or finely attenuated extensions that give them literally, a loose, tenuous identity, and subtly anticipate the greater dispersal in the recent landscapes. Similarly, perspective and distance in works of the late 90s often seem to stretch a figure’s reach, to spread it out and confuse costume or instruments with hostile surroundings or rivals. Yet these blends or contests are the work of ambiguous lines and economy of colour; can transcend mere illustration through deft displacement and combination but are hostage to these means, to inked line and flat colour (her first name perhaps inclines her to the linear).

The project for Essenhigh then becomes one of expanding upon these means, of seeing how well her figures survive in more elaborate worlds. And with this of course, the sense of a genre is altered or diluted. For, when she allows graded tone and volume to her pictures, the figures must surrender some of their ambiguity, yet can generate new, perhaps more child-like, fictions to compensate. The work from around 2002 marks this step and preserves linear flourish and confusion, while situating them within greater modelling, more nuanced colour. But this is an unhappy compromise, where either line or tone is redundant to parts of the picture, rather than mischievously allusive. Subsequent works gradually cede arabesque and intricacy to just the figures, allow more coherent tone and depth to settings. Yet this too tends to rob the figures of some of their power, to isolate their seething influence and animal animus. The figures grow steadily more rounded, more human, the settings more accommodating, less diagrammatic. But there is still an awkward gulf between treatment of figures and architecture.

Stricter or more realistic settings only make the figures too mannered or stylised, so that they seem more like dummies or sculptures, arranged in a scene. More successful works simply concentrate on the figures and their engaging interaction. The flipside to this division between figure and architecture, or figures in isolation, is naturally, natural settings, and the recent landscapes. The scope for plays with scale and depth here seem more promising, for the moment are beyond the manmade world.

The artist’s own website has been especially helpful in researching this post.

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2008-04-22T20:04:00.000-04:00

ANTONY GORMLEY

The sculptor’s recent show, Firmament, featured a massive reclining figure constructed from a lattice of welded steel rods and balls of various short lengths and angles, scarcely accommodated or wholly perceived within the White Cube ground floor gallery at Mason’s Yard, London. The attention to scale, containment and the measurement of site against the figure or human presence, are central to the artist’s work. The outlines to the figure suggest computer modelling or a CAD sensibility and quite apart from scale and materials, give the figure a familiar distance, typically suggest a stereotype or indifferent token, for which Gormley is sometimes criticised.

Gormley’s use of the figure is peculiar, even in a time of studied fabrication and commercial standards (see also Post 20). His figures carry a special remoteness or anonymity that is in large part the heritage of an interest in Conceptual Art and site-specific approaches in the 70s. His early work includes the figure amongst a range of castings, essentially concerned with removing or deriving samples from a site or event, in this respect recalls the work of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, for example. Materials vary from the architectural to implements, or artefacts, to wood and stone. They are presented in distinctive formats in order to signal source and quality (see also Posts 48 and 58) are simultaneously transformed and transported. The distinctive seams to casts stress their function as containers, as broad records of volume, significantly, the internal details of which remain concealed, a little like the work of George Segal.

But here the figure or person is treated no differently from a boulder, provides only a more elaborate specimen. Conversely, related implements and materials may be presented as extensions to the figure – point to site or event as the scope of a figure’s influence. Other works from this time simply trace a figure or parts to materials, confirming the figure as an imprint upon site, material as measure of figure.

So, initially the figure is part of a wider array of subjects for the artist and the castings or perfunctory modellings establish a certain distance or restraint for both artist and figure. The figure is defined merely by the impact upon setting, as muted or inscrutable beyond that. Following works give greater attention to pose, but stress only the figure’s compression or reach, the gesture often to be set against the gallery architecture as measure of scale, substance and context. In all, the figures become essentially a register of psychological distance or literal displacement. Such figures are also deployed in exteriors and there signal similar differences in custom, time of day or season. The figures are now inserted into sites or situations rather than extracted from them.

As they become the focus of Gormley’s work, the principal specimen of a site (or vice versa) their cool generic quality and disconnected or self-contained poses become more prominent and troubling. In the monumental Angel of The North (1995) the substitution of aircraft wings for arms crucially reinforces the mechanical, robotic aspect, undercutting the traditional iconography of angels, giving the imposing figure an ominous, industrial undertone. The north would seem less than human or humane by this, an angel only the exploitation of manufacture. Even as symbols or personifications, Gormley’s approach encounters problems, as public reaction attests. Another criticism points to the curious bias toward men amongst his figures.

In later work he turns from rugged casting and encasing to more detailed modelling or assembly from a range of standard industrial components. This too only underlines the robotic nature of the figures and the artist’s deliberate detachment. Proportion and anatomy often remain standard, even academic, occasionally are reduced to no more then stick figures, while poses resemble fitness exercises or drills, their value, like their materials, in how much and long they displace space and place by. Any personality is again conspicuously ignored. Gormley’s use of crowds of figures is also telling in this regard. The small, simple clay figurines are collected from volunteers among school children and the general public then cast and marshalled in impressive numbers according to specific exhibition opportunities. Again character and engagement are distanced, the figures mere instruments in some larger design. Whether these are faults to the works, or works about such faults, is moot.

In Firmament, all three aspects to the artist’s work achieve new and vivid demonstration, mechanical assembly, confinement within architecture or occupation of place and the essentially hollow gesture or pose, the figure with person removed.

The artist’s own website has been especially helpful in researching this post.

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2008-04-15T19:26:00.000-04:00

LEE FRIEDLANDER

At 74, the famous photographer continues to frame the world with a distinctive eye for composition or structure. Themes remain largely urban, yet desolate, means traffic in pictorial coherence, stick to black and white in establishing scale, depth and proportion for the familiar, careless and overlooked. Yet the approach now carries a certain smooth routine, almost nostalgia. Composition on these terms seems to belong to an earlier era for photography, or perhaps signals a decisive swing in fashion. Friedlander’s show at the Fraenkel Gallery, SF, furthers his car-bound views of recent years, reminds us of photography’s history and contested resources (see also Posts 12, 21 and 27).

Friedlander belongs to a generation inspired by photo-journalism, typified by Life magazine and the Magnum agency of the 40s and 50s. This approach placed a premium on spontaneous engagement with the subject (or strictly, object); with inventive and unexpected angles and circumstances. Photography’s formal properties, the picture planes available to lens, exposure, focus, film and print options, were all to be demonstrated by urgent and interesting situations, by a contest with motion and opportunity. The emphasis on fleeting gesture or atmosphere, understandably earns the name The Decisive Moment, or ‘the art of waiting’, pointedly underlines the difference between stills and movies.

It is not the only approach in the period, of course, but through popular publication becomes the dominant one. For followers like Friedlander the challenge arises in the kinds of events recorded, the means these allow. In particular, Friedlander is notable for the absence of people or figures, apart from the photographer’s shadow or reflection, and so largely motion and sense of moment. Then there is the level, frontal angle of his pictures, the deadpan or prosaic attitude this creates. The photographer’s shadow or reflection reinforces this flatfooted presence. There is none of W. Eugene Smith’s economy of volume and tone, or surprise in expression, for instance. Instead Friedlander relies upon reflections, pictures and text within the frame and deep shadows to create spatial ambiguities or to abstract the picture. Often his photographs appear almost as collages or a layout, to defy a unified picture plane, all the more striking since this is rarely a question of camera angle or darkroom manipulation.

The pictures in this sense are intensely formal, concerned less with freezing motion at a fascinating point than with freezing perspective or orientation from a fascinating point, with testing expectations for picture and object. Photographic means here are less a question of timing than of lens length and focus. This would be unremarkable were it not that the photographer remains dedicated to the quotidian, to urban and familiar settings. He rarely shares any of the exoticism or eccentric flair of precursors such as Henri Cartier-Bresson or Brassai for example. Rather, he uses the everyday to underline his formalism, uses his abstraction to affirm the everyday.

Friedlander is grouped with fellow NY-based photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Joel Meyerorwitz, following his inclusion in MOMA’s 1967 survey New Documents by distinguished curator, John Szarkowski. Yet, there too, Friedlander shares little of their interest in sudden behaviour or anecdote, extreme specimens or outsiders. Actually the show’s true theme was the steady dissolution of the photo-journalistic project, of the way The Decisive Moment inevitably turned into other things. Spontaneity was pursued to the trivial and chaotic, reporting on circumstance ended up with the marginal and freakish. The Decisive Moment slowed to the indecisive prospect.

What seemed like the salient characteristics of photography finally invite revision, but developments there are the work of another post. Here it is enough to see Friedlander’s part in this history. However, his methods are not quite neutral or strictly distinct from material, either. In giving greater emphasis to reflection, to ambiguities and pattern that defy consistent depth, Friedlander eventually builds a world for himself. The things that once tried his photography are now the material that sustain it.

In recent years, as he once more drifts around America, his wide-angle lens maintaining perfect focus from foregrounds of new car interiors to distant architecture and display; framing has become all. The stoic confrontation with the pictorial quirks of the everyday has been streamlined to a drive-by. Rejecting motion to The Decisive Moment ironically ends up depending on the photographer’s mobility. At the same time, the confidence in the status quo, in the little things, regional difference and character, has gone. America under this view becomes simply so many rival frames or windows, reflections and refractions, an elaborate pageant or charade, only to be appreciated in transit.

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2008-04-08T20:36:00.000-04:00

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL

An exhibition at the Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, occasions a review of this distinguished German artist. Like many contemporary Rhineland artists, Trockel favours a diversity of materials, divides her attention between two and three dimensions, found and made work, installation and video. Moreover, such artists are often happy to collaborate, to assist or contribute to collective works, to further disperse individual and medium-specific meaning. This versatility presents special problems for interpretation, makes it difficult to give work a focus or priority, to relate themes along such variation. In much criticism, themes are typically identified without compelling explanation of how they arise from materials; seek the benefits of style without the obligations. Trockel was among the first to adopt this distinctly open approach in the late 80s and has influenced following artists, such as Cosima von Bonin. She provides a good example by which to survey the trend.

Trockel began as a Neo-Expressionist in the late 70s, a contemporary of the Mulheimer Freiheit Group in Cologne, but soon looked beyond painting for her pictures, soon looked beyond pictures for her samples. A pervasive influence to the region and era is Sigmar Polke. In particular, Trockel’s presentation of knitted patterns and pictures as ‘paintings’ and similar use of printed fabrics owes much to Polke’s use of such printing as support to paintings. Polke, perhaps more than even Richter, exploits painting as a demonstration of print properties, as a critique of depiction and the role of painting. Print is pursued from photographic processes to looser tracing and stencil, easily accommodates found textiles as a further step. Polke is rarely drawn to three-dimensional work, but the example of treating painting as the means to display or sample a wider category of picture, is a crucial prededent to Trockel’s collection and presentation of other materials.

The shift is not simply to ready-mades and installation. Ready-made material is displayed within an explicitly pictorial, ostensibly painterly category. Yet the category in turn, is obviously relaxed by such accommodation, becomes pictorial on broader terms, can be abstract or figurative, a work of sole instance, such as painting, or multiple instances, such as print or pattern, temporary or permanent. It is this two-way adjustment to category and elements that soon gives the project multiple but equal options, a strikingly unified field of activity that proves so attractive to Trockel, her contemporaries and followers, so confusing for others.

For, painting and two-dimensional work are not simply absorbed into three-dimensional concerns; ready-made material does not simply replace traditional or plain-made work. Each now serves as a phase or facet to a larger project under which categories are assessed, meaning revised. It is as easy and useful to make paintings of such material, as to make material from such paintings, to import to paintings or to export from them. The difference lies only in emphasis upon category or elements. Both are needed. This greater flexibility owes much to Conceptual Art and its attention to stages to a work (see also Posts 8, 17, 22 and 33) and performance, events and recordings or documentation to a work are similarly embraced, grant the work further stages and greater integration, as does participation of others or their work.

Beneath the themes of feminism, modesty or understatement and discursiveness, commonly detected in her work, it is important to grasp this more comprehensive framework. It accounts for the diversity to her material, urges a more expansive view of such themes, while affording comparison with similar approaches. However the jack-of-all-trades notoriously pays a price in expertise; and too many cooks tend to spoil taste. While Trockel can sustain impressive integrity across videos, installation, sculpture and pictures of various kinds, can include museum or scientific samples and sampling, furnishings, costume and prints - painting remains understandably cursory, often indifferent. The abstract motifs, for example, remain hostage to a by-gone Minimalism, in spite of importing domestic hotplates or flattened food graters, while kitchenware can seem a clichéd overture to female identity.

Yet beyond that, the person dwindles, threatens to dissolve. The theme of constraint or conformity to person – and usually woman – is common enough, but in the current show, a series of collages present a further and moving predicament. In works titled She Is Dead (2008) only a woman’s clothes remain, the rest of the picture a wooden panel scrubbed with thin colour, in others, swirling amorphous spray paint picture a person so vague or abstract, without clothes or role, she is the work of the instant, no more than seething atmosphere. In these works Trockel confronts a new paucity to painting, a more personal and disturbing one.

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2008-04-01T20:59:00.000-04:00

VALERIE JAUDON

In her current show at Von Lintel, NY, the artist turns to more complex permutations on the essentially linear motifs that have sustained her long career. The new work renounces colour to concentrate on a dense combination of short lines, set curves, with variously angled ends. The system or pattern displayed, occasionally allows a grid to the overall picture, but pattern beyond that is actually non-repeating, in configuration of distinct elements, not unlike aperiodic tiling in mathematics, where limited modules are combined without repetition.

Interestingly, such tiling has recently been detected in traditional Islamic decoration, an initial source of inspiration for Jaudon. But her project has hardly been directed to such obscure geometry; on the contrary, it has largely been concerned with obvious and familiar pattern, with their entrenched associations and symbols. Jaudon emerged in the early 70s, and is usually linked with the Pattern and Decoration movement, concerned with the acceptance of a wider range of folk and traditional motifs in painting. Jaudon is positioned at the Minimalist end of such an undertaking, with her interlaced stripes taking their cue from the work of Frank Stella, as well as in use of Asian or Islamic titles, metallic pigments and the pale outlines or rims to stripes.

Under Minimalism, basic pattern in stripes, grids or monochrome, were matched or tested against striking application of materials, scale and situation. It defined painting on those terms, yet quickly appealed to sculptural and architectural considerations (see also Post 28). Just what pattern supported such extension to painting, just what painting allowed such pattern, essentially measures the course of Minimalism, its steady acquisition of maximising attributes (see also Post 10 and 79). Pattern and Decoration (P&D) pursued more elaborate motifs, soon arrived at the figurative or repeating pictures, and is instead drawn to prints, textiles and other craft; similarly disperses the project for painting. Jaudon’s interlaced stripes are thus cautious by P&D goals. She resists both more figurative motifs and shaped canvas, or more architectural projection. Her civic commissions are duly competent but unexceptional as design or technique. Her painting constrains vigorous surface or facture by intricate pattern rather than threatening pattern with less compliant surface, although this aspect is all but invisible in reproduction, due to the large scale of works. One perceives the pattern at a distance (and in reproduction), the painting up close, so that the two need hardly fight over middle ground.

Interweaving stripes and the implied depth to Minimalist pattern are pursued in angled grids in the 70s, by artists such as Sean Scully and the largely forgotten Don Sorenson. But Jaudon has no interest in even this much depth or relaxation to painting. Her patterns can accommodate Gothic arches and arcs of various span and intersection, but the ‘background’ to such stripes or bands is rarely greater than the width of a band. Depth, or more picture cannot test her painting either, and her range to pattern and painting emerges as rather conservative in comparison with rivals, perhaps classical in its restraint. By the 80s the range of abstract and figurative motifs used in painting all but dissolves ‘pure’ abstraction (see also Posts 24 and 53) and attention shifts from obvious pattern to something like problematic relations between motifs (see Posts 32 and 78). Here too, Jaudon’s work looks diligent but dull however she soon rises to the challenge. She allows motifs more background, stretches the interval between interweaving bands and introduces softened or blurred vertical bands that compete with more regular and symmetrical motifs. The effect is not unlike the illusion of draped fabric. At any rate, interest lies in distinguishing such disruptions to pure pattern, as a more insistent measure of surface or ‘background’.

Jaudon then develops two further strategies to test integrity of pattern. The first is with greater colour and definition to stripes in the ‘background’, the second is with greater variety of colour and shape within the ‘foreground’ pattern, although she maintains hard edges and even curves. For all its severity, the work finally makes room for more painting, for greater incident and interest. In the latest work, this relaxation surprisingly does without the tension between ‘background’ and ‘foreground’, pattern and painting, instead focuses on variations to motif, and motif reduced to relatively short, broad white lines in close relations. In some ways the work harks back to the early 70s in the density and intricacy of elements, but pattern has now gained a deeper, more sophisticated project, for the moment demands less of painting.

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2008-03-25T19:26:00.002-04:00

RICHARD PRINCE VERSUS SEAN LANDERS

Both artists have a peculiarly fragmented body of work; present troubling inconsistencies of style. Both artists resort to text in painting and comic content. Both flirt with various contemporary styles only to reveal their own weaknesses. By the same token, each is victim of the stylistic momentum of rivals that undercuts their own impact. For all that, the difference between them is between an artist adept at pictorial forms, but bereft of an ambition to harness them, and one convinced of ambition, but ultimately prepared to compromise it for the sake of pictorial forms.

Prince (b. 1949) is the older and more circumspect. His career was launched in the late 70s with cropped and re-photographed details of advertisements, highlighting settings for luxury goods. The work is firstly about commercial iconography; secondly, the camera’s closer framing gives them a slightly different meaning from simply cropping the originals, accentuates qualities of print and links these to the re-framed composition. Formal qualities to the composition are perhaps debased or obscured by attention to print surface, alternatively, commercial print qualities are elevated by the comparison with entrenched formal qualities. Either way, re-photographing stresses differences between camera and print properties, announces a project of iconography, albeit detached by such differences.

Unfortunately, re-photographing photographs at that time is swept up with notions of ‘Appropriation’ and ‘Simulacra’ and on those terms Prince’s work looks somewhat cautious. Throughout the 80s he takes up the theme of cowboys and the open range, used as a setting for Marlboro ads. He later switches to less polished sources for the frank, perhaps folksy sexism of biker’s girls and similar pairings of women with heavy vehicles in specialist journals. Here photography is deliberately casual and re-photographing can do little more than coarsen print characteristics, often given the work a Warhol-like tonality. While modesty of technical resources here work against the iconography, up to a point, re-framing the composition can do little and around this time Prince begins to look to other avenues. He turns to silk-screened cartoons and jokes that carry much the same sexual attitudes.

Yet graphic and text sources require other kinds of re-framing to properly identify such features, and their placement upon vast canvases quickly immerses them in acute stylistic problems, that again traduce Prince’s project. The works lack Ruscha’s graphic expertise, for example, (see also Post 67) or Warhol’s bolder approach to silk-screening, finally feel like late and lame Pop Art. Prince can labour the surface, but only to the cost of typeface and layout and the project steadily loses focus. He soon alternates between his own (direct) photography, Neo-Expressionism, other remote print-sourced work, sculpture and installations. Each only confirms his limited engagement, dissipation of concerns. Iconography divorced from photography, it seems, soon finds Prince out of picture, but anxious to paint.

By contrast, Landers’ (b.1962) first allegiance is to Conceptual Art, to performance and installation and his interest in text proceeds from documentation. Text is applied to painting presumably from dissatisfaction with the scope and impact it has had on such events. Landers uses painting to extend his utterances in this sense, augmenting performance, to give them a graphic or pictorial dimension rather than gauge norms of print or publication. The work is hardly a foray into calligraphy or script though, and content is largely satirical and self-deprecating. The artist ‘writes’ paintings, or paints ‘writings’, but the results initially are somewhat crabbed and turgid, notably mostly for the arrangement of text into loose blocks or shapes.

As Landers seeks greater pictorial resources, relations between text and imagery take more concrete form, and gradually image rivals text. The artist’s comic discourse finds equivalents or suggests a more exclusive approach. But Landers is never quite able to make the comic picture funny enough, or his own. Not because he lacks expertise, since competence is often part of the joke, not because so much of the silly imagery and treatment reveal the overwhelming influence of his associate, John Currin, and not even because Landers persists with more elaborate parody and pastiche, only to reveal surprising ambition; but because Landers’ commitment is firstly to the verbal and so a temporal rather than spatial domain. Pictures, in this respect, strictly exceed Lander’s needs.

Significantly, Landers returns to texts, at least intermittently, giving greater emphasis to overlaying and intersecting comment; uses colour rather than shape to particular comments and enlarges lettering, in a step toward more concerted calligraphy. The works grow in depth, visually, jettison much anecdote, verbally. The artist can now write paintings with more fluency, paint writing with less flippancy, but not before disclosing severe shortcomings to the project.

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2008-03-18T19:26:00.000-04:00

ALBERT OEHLEN

A show at Thomas Dane, London offers the artist’s now familiar combination of computer generated imagery printed onto canvas or panel, reworked with paint into layers of gesture, variously translucent and opaque, biomorphic or geometric, linear or tonal, abstract or figurative. The new work is restrained by the artist’s standards and gives new prominence to text, but the easy inclusiveness and disparity of elements continue to press the issue of abstraction for pictures, the resources of painting. For many, Oehlen’s ‘maximal’ compositions amount to a surrender to the arbitrary, to just ‘anything goes’ and a dead end for abstraction. This post looks at how Oehlen arrives at this style, at what ordering it retains.

Significantly, Oehlen began as a Neo-Expressionist, concerned firstly with figuration. His approach there is distinct from the ragged allegory of exponents in Cologne, the satirical revival by counterparts in Berlin. Oehlen is less concerned with print sources for pictures, than his Hamburg colleague Martin Kippenberger (even though Oehlen studied with Sigmar Polke). Oehlen’s Neo-Expressionism is noted for its heavier, more fluent facture, attention to literal objects (with tone and depth) albeit treated in an abrupt or peremptory way. Satire or ridicule arise through unlikely or eccentric subjects, scarcely recognisable through brutal treatment, or in traditional subjects, dealt with severely, as in Rotten Renaissance Rita (1984).

However, toward the end of the 80s Oehlen seems to have drifted to more schematic or stylized subjects, and by the 90s these in turn give way to greater abstraction, pairing hard edge, biomorphic forms with greater geometry or gesture. In many respects this is a timely move (see also Posts 10 and 18). But Oehlen takes up the issue indifferent to Minimalist concerns with process and extended materials, to Pattern and Decoration and the repeating motif (see also Posts 24 and 53). As a consequence his work can seem conservative where materials and technique are concerned, flaccid where composition or structure is concerned. There are examples where he includes patterned fabric, obviously recalling Polke, and wooden surfaces acknowledging extended materials, but generally he concentrates on a range of shapes or motifs across degrees of the organic or geometric, transparent or flat, linear or tonal. If there is a pattern, it is so diffuse as to encompass all in any configuration, if there is a native form or ideal for painting, it is so versatile as to allow myriad variations.

Oehlen maximises the options, in much the same spirit that he baulked at the figurative or more concrete depiction. And the effect is actually the inverse. Where his Neo-Expressionism never quite got close to the subject, his abstraction never quite escapes it. The organic, mechanical, translucent or runny all run to concrete reference when set in generous variation. When stretched wide enough, differences in abstraction turn some more concrete or figurative. In effect, there is never enough pattern to completely abstract the picture, never enough picture to quite do without pattern. Evasion, or the deliberate scattering of commitment, now shapes as a central theme.

The dismay felt by some toward this dissolution of structure then, is real enough, in so far as any purity of abstraction is maintained, but abstraction need not be exclusive or absolute here. While Oehlen allows a surprising range of elements and versions, especially through the 90s, it quickly becomes clear that there is no way to include all kinds of abstraction, in any number of versions, and that some ranges hold more excitement than others. His work duly alternates between the more figurative and less, the more stylish or fashionable and less. In the mid 90s, experiments with basic Photoshop tools applied to commissioned murals and mosaics lead to inkjet printing onto panel for painting and inevitably to the introduction of photography by the same route. Understandably, this becomes the preferred method, for painting and ‘collage’. The artist is able to exploit not only a greater precision to linear and colour grading through the computer, but more standard depiction. Where these set the key for further painting, Oehlen is able to derive stricter variations and differences, notably in the restriction to colour or upon stable grounds. Even where little of the print remains visible, volume and spatial orientations tend to anchor the composition, inspire looser orders, related objects and qualities.

In more recent work this construction has tightened even more and the diversity to printed elements, or collage, is almost the work in itself, leaving to painting mostly just the scantest blurring of colour or outline. Interestingly, these blurs often align with the figure or body, contrast pointedly with text or language and give the abstraction a deeply visual, corporeal value. Oehlen’s work, while elusive on so many traditional and favoured levels, is never far from a point.

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2008-03-11T19:12:00.000-04:00

JUAN USLÉ

A distinctive technique, attractive colour sense and often surprising compositions continue to draw admirers to the abstract paintings of Juan Uslé. This confirmed by both his current show at Cheim and Read, NY (ending 15th March) and recent survey at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Malaga. The work is so easy on the eye the artist is equally celebrated and censured for flaunted facility. Unfortunately the web offers too few examples of the artist’s early work to trace the development of his style. But since his work displays remarkable consistency over the past 18 years at least, this post looks instead at where Uslé fits in with abstraction currently, at why his work should draw this divided response.

The course of recent abstraction has been touched upon in earlier Posts (see 32, 10 and 14), as has the drift to lesser levels of abstraction (see Posts 24, 53 and 57). Here the interest is in how the formal elements allowed by Minimalism, or full abstraction, are teased into further variety. For, even to sustain the principles of Minimalism is to cautiously increase the options, to concede new variations and steadily ‘maximise’ formal elements. The strictest ordering or pattern soon paves the way for more relaxed, complex or elusive versions; for pattern detected across preceding patterns, along successive elements. By the 80s, traditional Pattern and Decoration have been assimilated, are extended by novel materials and technique or else compounded in more elusive relations between motifs.

If there is a single influence or relevant comparison for Uslé in New York (where he moves in 1987) it is probably the work of Jonathan Lasker, a pivotal figure for his dedication to just these relations. Lasker similarly favours linear formulations, overlapping motifs and often intriguing technique (and now also shows with Cheim and Read). However, for Lasker relations between parts are not just a deft play on the diversity of line, its role in shape and colour. They shrewdly make multiple connections from one kind of line or shape to others. The pattern may be diffuse, but the threads are fine and many. With Uslé, the diversity of parts, never quite display this complexity. At times he can seem very like Lasker, in the schematic arrangement of motifs and linear engineering, but the variation lacks the resonance and ingenuity of a Lasker. They are too diverse, in too few ways.

At other times Uslé’s lines or brushstrokes broach more figurative or stylised depiction, but these are rarely pressed or sustained. Then again when Uslé reins in the whimsical variation, retreats to just stripes or segments thereof, for example, the variation can seem not enough, too tame or traditional. Greater emphasis then falls upon the artist’s distinctive technique, in which a diluted or dispersed pigment is variously dragged or raked across the canvas, delivering a curious texture or distribution to colour, a somewhat mechanical feel to line, not unlike the work of Bernard Frize. Colour duly acquires a translucence or thinness that recalls fine fabrics, a sheer coating that inspires clothing, after a fashion. These are perhaps the artist’s most frank expressions of attitude. Line is more patterned for the unusual tool, but the patterns severely constrained, or again, combined with so much else that the effect is no more than mannerism.

Yet it is surely the lightness and directness to Uslé’s compositions that given them much of their appeal. If the price to be paid for that is a looseness to structure, an excess of variation, the reward is in some part surprise and insouciance. Critics have found his work dominated by technique and elegance, superficial or showy but this may be to mistake content for form. Are differences with Lasker simply differences in character or attitude? Put another way, is the artist entitled to a more diffuse structure for the greater emphasis on technique? There are other standards available. Unfortunately Uslé falls short of precedent and peers there as well. To compare Uslé with Albert Oehlen or Fiona Rae, for example, shows how much further diversity of technique may be carried, how cautious Uslé looks by comparison. Equally, to compare the work with more concrete diagram or chart, such as some works by Jules de Balincourt or Thomas Scheibitz reveals Uslé’s reluctance or indifference in that direction.

On one scale he is too reckless; on another not bold enough, on another too aloof. To see him as a compromise, or the best of all three, is to place a premium on moderation. Uslé stakes out a territory clearly enough, but it is for those who have little at stake.

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2008-03-04T18:38:00.000-05:00

JUAN MUÑOZ

A retrospective of the sculptures of Juan Muñoz (1953-2001) at the Tate Modern, London, traces a surprising return to the figure from what were initially site specific or architectural concerns, and with the figure to old issues of materials and stylisation. London held a special place for Muñoz as a student and site for later work. The survey capitalises on both and illuminates a brief career in the closing decades of the 20th century.

As a student in the 70s, Muñoz absorbed developments in sculpture on both sides of the Atlantic. As Minimalism dissipated, construction relaxed, (see also Post 36) attention to location and site specific work gradually turned to use of architectural features. In the US, Conceptual Art’s foray into Land Art as either real estate or landscape gardening (see also Post 48) gives way to sculpture of architectural structures, in the work of Dan Graham or Alice Aycock, for example. Industrial architecture is the initial inspiration and related elements arise in the work of artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Siah Armajani and Vito Acconci. For Muñoz, his initial tower structures reflect this interest, but do not share the emphasis upon pre-fabricated components or industrial standards, actually are at pains to avoid them. Instead his work concentrates on the status of models, scale and context of their use.

Location has a way of redefining use and even extent in such work, of making adjacent materials models as well. This happens in early work like Minaret for Otto Kurz (1985) where a small frail tower is placed upon a Persian carpet, the carpet then suggesting a scale map and setting for the tower. Scale models can also suggest distance in some settings, or confirm attendant visual cues, as in the patterned floor to The Wasteland (1987). The figure, as in some works by Giacometti, seems to exude distance as much as diminution, even when we approach.

From the start, Muñoz includes token figures to his architectural structures and registers more vernacular (and Spanish) features with his famous balconies and remote railings. Again, the scale and placement of these fixtures promptly orientates gallery walls and spectators to respective distance, to the way these participate in the work to some extent, while uses are made remote or decorative. Railing or balcony is recognised, despite their impracticality, the location by implication is all the more unwelcoming for this attenuation of fixtures, the sacrifice to display. The work places the spectator on a delicate footing, the feeling often of caution.

The artist is soon drawn to issues of proportion as well as scale for the figure, and in the late 80s favours the male dwarf. Scale of figure to additional fixtures then takes on further complexity, again spreads the extent of the work to furniture and qualities of furnishing. In later work, mirrors are sometimes used as ways of highlighting this interaction. The measure of the dwarf, like railings or balconies re-orientates the gallery. Bodily proportions in turn invite the artist to considerations of dress or costume for figures, and these to levels of stylisation or abstraction. Muñoz’s series of ballerinas reduce the figure to a schematic head and torso, rotating on a rounded base. Their seeming flexibility of movement and balance nevertheless reinforces their fixity of situation, similar dependence on supporting furniture.

Muñoz’s installations are distinct from the elaborate settings and props provided to figures in the installations of Edward and Nancy Kienholz, or George Segal, the intricate detail and methods of commercial model making (see also Post 20). His approach is remarkable for the redirection of traditional materials like bronze and wood and issues of abstraction, to later concerns with installation and heightened context.

Inevitably Muñoz progresses to multiple figures, their interaction and the drama this gives to settings. Yet while groups (now mostly life-size and of normal proportions) often call attention to aspects of surrounding architecture, their silence and stillness tend to be accentuated. The spectator moves amongst them as if in a freeze frame. A work such as Two Seated on a Wall (2000) adopts the metaphor of a string of tiny figures between the mouth of the speaker and ear of the listener to represent speech and reinforce its exclusion, the strictly visual engagement available. In other ways, gesture and poses call for or exploit theatrical lighting and ominous mood to institutional architecture. Double Bind (2001) in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern was particularly melodramatic (for a detailed review, see James Hall).

While the artist elsewhere demonstrates a talent for drama, his contribution is not so much in the lively gestures of his Conversation Pieces, but sensitivity to how and where to stage them.

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2008-02-26T18:59:00.000-05:00

COSIMA VON BONIN

The installations of Cosima von Bonin deal in familiar, even orthodox concerns. There are surprising combinations of furniture, fittings and architectural features gathered in impressive variety, partitions, platforms, railings, improvised and mobile fixtures, booths, barricades, hangings and upholstery, together with toys, ornaments, luxury and sporting goods, all tidily placed for contrasts and comparisons in shape, colour, texture, scale and function; for neglected or optional codes and connotations. Bonin’s signature is perhaps diverse use of commercial textiles, sometimes mounted and framed as pictures – even paintings – elsewhere applied to unlikely items of furniture and fittings.

The installations display a curious range of standard goods, in a range of curiously non-standard ways. They continue a trend in installation to formidable assembly; prominent adaptation and puzzling content (see also Posts 7 and 8). The effect is a little like the work of a very distracted or confused interior decorator. Bonin is highly regarded in Germany and her recent show at MOCA L.A. (Sept 07 – Jan 08) consolidates her standing. Yet there are reasons why her work should prove attractive in Germany, offer more resistance elsewhere. This post looks at the particular range of goods and materials favoured by the artist and the way they are used.

Her work is not exclusively composed of readymade articles, and the articles are neither exclusively prestigious nor modest. It would be a lazy conclusion to describe the range as between high and low culture, good and bad taste, expensive to cheap. Nor are all the articles devoted to retail or trade display, to domestic or private use, to frivolous or everyday use, indeed some are not easily recognised or have no obvious function. The artist makes some articles, uses her own possessions, sometimes makes works that strongly suggest favourite German artists, such as Rosemarie Trockel and Sigmar Polke and at other times invites friends to contribute. It is this complexity or depth to the range of material that firstly recommends the work, but it is also the thorough-going integration of the private, the eccentric or exotic with the standardised, industrial and commercial that holds a special appeal for German art.

The issue frequently centres on architectural aspects and influence (see also Posts 15, 46 and 54) but in installations, this influence becomes especially pointed. There, the architecture of the gallery itself smoothly engages with the installation’s partitions, racks, lighting schemes, plinths and seating arrangements, provides the opportunity to use the material differently to some extent, to reshuffle categories, reconstrue meaning, while demonstrating the building’s overriding versatility, social purpose. The work is in a sense shared with architecture and a civic plan, the influence teased out to the level of toys and furniture.

Bonin’s work follows in the wake of Reinhard Mucha’s adoption of office furniture in striking arrangements, Thomas Schütte’s attention to décor and fittings, Katharina Fritsch’s table settings and arrays of toy animals, Rosemarie Trockel’s knitted Rorschach and animal patterns, items of clothing in documented photographs and related compositions (this to stress the German strain to Bonin’s work). The artist need do no more than imitate and combine to register a small signature here, extend and invite to provide installation with a powerful impetus to assimilation. And the works are finally about this wealth of resources, her restless navigation of the clutter and options, a skittish, impatient character.

So Bonin’s approach carries greater resonance in Germany, and particularly for her Cologne-based contemporaries, where this more scattered, perhaps promiscuous view of the artist’s role is widely shared. It derives at some distance from Sigmar Polke, more so from Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen with the 80s boom and entrepreneurial turn. It goes almost without saying that Bonin is happy to use works as setting for performance, to direct film or videos, to write or design for others, even to DJ, as further phases to the same expansive engagement. Not surprisingly, elsewhere her involvements look less distinctive or compelling. Outside Germany, the affinities with preceding and adjacent artists, the smooth integration with domestic and industrial products, tend to look like a surrender to commerce rather than a subtle and supple redirection of uses. Similarly, items taken singly from installations, predictably lack the context and friction.

All the same her approach allows greater flexibility than a blanket commitment to commission or the readily-made (see also Posts 25 and 49) and if her variations on the work of others are not especially bold, remain a little too tasteful, they at least provide a point of departure or structure that installations by others so often struggle without.

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2008-02-19T18:53:00.000-05:00

SHIRIN NESHAT

Shirin Neshat continues her installations of video and related stills at Barbara Gladstone NY, again freely adapting stories by fellow Iranian émigré Shahmush Parsipur and expanding upon the theme of cultural identity, that has driven her work from its first appearance in the early 90s. Neshat is interesting both for the way this theme has developed through the move from photography to video, and more generally for the way video then approaches narrative and cinema but retains an art gallery and fine art context.

Neshat’s photography commenced as a response to her return to Iran in 1990 after an eleven year absence as an American citizen. The Women of Allah series (1993-7) is notable for the use of Persian or Farsi calligraphy and embellishment, often imposed on the hands of Iranian women (sometimes the artist or child) in traditional chador, militant stances, and stark black and white prints. Neshat’s encounter with contemporary Iran coincided with the wider interest in local and sub-cultural identities in art, in what is sometimes called Identity Art. Her work compounds a string of potent issues in the representation of Middle Eastern, Islamic, fundamentalist women in Iran by a US-based (of all places) émigré. The work confirms western stereotypes of sexual oppression, ruthless enforcement and hostility to depiction, while subtly signalling a profound alienation or rupture with both ideologies.

It is Identity Art surely at its most acute, since identity for women is largely confined to a single shapeless costume, for all adults, occasions, seasons, while culture is essentially reduced to the severest reading of Islamic scriptures. Moreover depiction, even as photography and only where it allows some further distinction, is literally and literarily over-written, reminding us of the grave suspicion ‘graven imagery’ holds under all of the Abrahamic creeds; the power its suppression then extracts, its rivalry to The Word.

The alignment of female identity with text here is ambiguous. For the casual western observer, text presents another teasing veil, concealing a supposed direct or natural encounter. For the Farsi reader, the contemporary poetry is shown surviving under Islamic doctrine, within the narrowest of constraints. Women are then taken as ‘the poetry’ to Iranian culture; poetry’s role as that of women to more masculine Iranian literature. The use of text upon or over figures, the rhyming of the black veil with the black and white of the print and isolation of figures against blank backgrounds; all highlight non-literal or metaphoric reference for the pictures. This more indirect meaning is also co-opted as a feminine domain, a discreet avenue of expression to circumvent restrictions on more explicit statement.

Neshat is soon drawn to motion pictures and opportunities for greater gesture and ritual, set against crucial architecture and locations, in group or collective action, set to music rather than dialogue or commentary – pointedly avoiding the explicit and articulate - and as challenge to predictable sequence or narrative. In themselves, these no more than announce her ambition as a film maker, but tellingly, Iranian cinema has been especially alert to such symbolism over much the same period, in many ways anticipates and answers Neshat’s work. So that in order to decisively stretch this range of expression; she relies upon distinctive screening configurations and a gallery rather than cinema context. She uses screens or channels on opposite walls with overlapping or complementary events pictured, sound often similarly displaced to generate more remote connections, metaphors for a troubled middle ground or combination. But by this, ironically, iconically, reference is firstly to cinematic or television norms, and obviously Iranian motion pictures, then to the artist’s uneasy distance or diffidence. Cultural identity by this route begins to seem somewhat aloof and evasive, the video installation demonstrating her detachment and divided loyalties.

Yet here too Neshat tethers picture and story to literature (Parsipur’s novel Women Without Men) eventually concedes dialogue and stricter narrative, colour and elaborate lighting. But work then looks less effective as installation, less distinctive as motion picture. Later works such as Mahdokht (2004) and Zarin (2005) dispense with dual channels and deal in more nuanced sexual roles, in childhood and adolescence, mystic fertility and a romantic, even clichéd embrace of nature. Inevitably Neshat advances toward a feature film by this series of short studies and the current show adds Munis (2008) and Faezeh (2008) to them. Events remain characteristically bleak (murder, suicide, rape and madness) but Neshat has now moved beyond black and white, Persia or Iran, female or male, discovers myth and deeper identity where history no longer reaches.

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2008-02-12T19:00:00.000-05:00

JASPER JOHNS

A comprehensive survey of mainly grey works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY and an accompanying show of works on paper at Matthew Marks, NY once more return this acclaimed artist to the public eye. At 78, Johns’ achievements stretch over half a century, and while his influence rests largely with his work of the 50s, his development has continued along rigorous, if less inspiring lines.

Johns rose to prominence in 1958 with works that use a repertoire of stencilled alphabets, words and numbers, concentric rings - usually called targets - and most famously, the design of the American flag. Such two-dimensional objects are not strictly pictured of course, but merely presented or instantiated and Johns’ emphatic brushwork and heavy encaustic paste allow modulations within a given colour; determine precision to line or edge (see also Post 71). The paintings sometimes use three-dimensional attachments to contrast the two-dimensionality at issue, to set scale and relate surfaces in other ways. The object emerges both transcendent and resilient, absorbing such variations while conversely imposing a level of compliance upon brushwork and colour. The exercise may seem meek in its conformity and narrow variation or daring in its choice of such familiar objects and idle treatment.

His deeply ambivalent attitude owes much to the work of Robert Rauschenberg but it is Johns’ more condensed means that exert the greater influence, especially over American art (see also Posts 13 and 56). The influence is felt firstly in Frank Stella’s black paintings; dispensing with a familiar design for an obvious one, maintaining a similar adherence to ‘straight’ lines, but now stripped of more traction than thinly applied household enamels. More ingeniously, Johns’ influence is re-directed in the work of Andy Warhol, where Warhol initially exchanges stencils or templates for familiar graphics or illustration – crucially focuses design on print source. Edward Ruscha similarly exchanges template lettering for established typefaces and similarly stresses the contrast with print for painting. Bruce Nauman takes up the three-dimensional component to Johns’ work with less obvious templates for body parts, rough cast and neon lettering. Each radically extends the project and tends to point to Johns’ comparative conservatism, promptly assign him an historical niche.

Johns subsequently relaxes the nature and arrangement of such templates and degree of conformity, in works such as Map (1962) and Diver (1962). But means quickly look arbitrary without closer alignment; design and template simply lose traction and identity. Johns turns to simpler geometry, to circles and squares but these carry less detail, do not then exhibit a compelling adherence or lack either. He tries irregular shapes in even distribution, like paving stones, and then parallel lines in small groups of uneven length, or a hatching pattern. Here the ordering is built up from line and makes special demands of painting for distinctive instance. Yet line in short straight parallels of even width only pushes Johns’ painting to more cursory and decorative detachment. Johns varies spacing to lines, adds layers and greater density to off-set this.

By the late 70s he combines hand prints with stencilled text, hatching and paving into more diffuse pattern. Compliance is less an issue than coherence. Pattern is then augmented with more figurative motifs, sharing surprising affinities and then by greater compartmentalisation or layout, in the arrangement of parts. He introduces traced outlines to traditional works, although often veiled in obscurity, together with photo-release or transfers, faux wood-graining and trompe l’oeil supporting nails. Parts vary in how easily they are recognised, what they stand for, by this arrangement and elsewhere. Tellingly, Johns soon adds those familiar ambiguous drawings such as a hag/beauty, two profiles to a vase or the famous duck/rabbit, heavy-handedly signalling his continued ambivalence.

The project begins to look somewhat dry and flat footed in comparison with much that has followed him. Johns started from a devotion to strictly two dimensional objects, not unlike those Picasso and Braque take up around 1912. But where they demonstrated resemblance between such two-dimensionality and various three-dimensional objects, so that text, wall-paper or wood-grain, for example may depict other objects in multiple and overlapping ways, for Johns the opposite view proved equally compelling. Two-dimensionality was never so suggestive or free, was merely adjusted with each painterly instance. Yet as Johns steadily expands his repertoire, it is precisely the allusiveness that fired Picasso and Braque that eventually appeals. His later work reflects this, but there is now no need to vigorously ground them in paint, this would be counter to their purpose, but equally, no way to properly engage with such drawing, once line is schooled in only the strictest and most reassuring of outlines. Johns settles for tracing too obscure to easily register, design too diffuse to properly trace or depict.

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2008-02-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

By the artist’s standards, Runts is a modest series, presently showing at Pace Wildenstein, NY. They continue the restrained photo-montages the 82 year-old has favoured of late. Subdued or de-saturated colour, subtle cropping of edges to the photographs, and with greater prominence, a play with spatial continuity, all gently restate longstanding concerns. Composition in the photographs themselves; with their emphasis on frontality, strong graphic or two-dimensional elements, text and depiction in graffiti and folk art, are familiar Modernist concerns. All distil the artist’s taste for ambiguity and disparity, his much quoted “gap between art and life” where he remains comfortable with hybrids, misfits and half measures.

Rauschenberg’s interest in blending photography with painting reached a turning point with his illustrations to Dante’s Inferno in 1959. There, the technique of photo-release allowed close integration with pencil and watercolour. The text is storyboarded from top to bottom, left to right, with images from the popular press serving as metaphors. The layout linked images to the text but also contrasted them with each other; drew abstract or formal qualities between them into the interpretation. Temporal and spatial continuities are juggled with stylistic ones and soon suggested a more general project.

In 1962 the artist turned to photo-silkscreens combined with painting on a grander scale and by engaging with printing more directly, coincides with Pop Art (see also Posts 16 and 61). But while his choice of photographs overlaps with Andy Warhol in the use of topical figures, such as President Kennedy (while Warhol adopts Jackie) sporting events, the Statue of Liberty and reproductions of the old masters, Rauschenberg also included photographs of technical diagrams, ornithological charts, the NASA space programme, military craft, close-ups of a mosquito, heavy seas, a glass of milk and his own photographs of the urban landscape. His layouts share with Warhol the repeated silkscreen, overlaps, changes of colour to a given screen and irregular inking, but also use colour separations, segments and objects to a photograph carefully or roughly painted around and over in same or other colours. Warhol samples icons of detachment, of glamour or gloom, Rauschenberg the range in between. His pictures balance the abstract and figurative, print and painting; are always more and less than Pop.

Figures and objects hover between literal depiction and more symbolic roles and placement; are fragmentary, obscure, only glimpsed. The feeling is variously of tremendous freedom or disengagement, versatility or indifference, confusion or contempt, doubt or disdain. The richness to the work of the early 60s remains a pinnacle in his career. Rauschenberg melodramatically dispensed with photo-silkscreens upon receiving The Grand Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale and eventually returned to photo-release, applied now to fine fabrics (see also Post 71). Painting has almost no role here and layouts trade in formal links between photographs, in repetitions, rotations and approximate symmetry. The work is pointedly restrained, strives for a lighter, slighter note.

Later, other techniques allow photographic printing to metallic surfaces and extravagant if decorative painterly gesture. The tracing and cropping of edges or parts of the photograph return, enriching the layouts, but tracing seems as far as Rauschenberg allows drawing. The ground upon which the photographs are placed increasingly shapes as a puzzling, even disturbing void. He continues more ambitious works throughout the 90s, now using greater resources to colour printing and more exotic, international content. The work to some extent recaptures some of the scope and vigour of the early 60s, but the greater technical finesse also distances. Moreover, the project by this time seems remote by other trends. The print paradigm for painting has long since dissipated, the interest in intermediates, in formal diversity within a picture, has given way to more and stricter categories, to degrees of abstraction (see Posts 24 and 53) rather than a grand spectrum.

Runts reflects this shift. The photographs now cluster squarely around a location or landscape, where in earlier times they would have been at pains to remain open to more categories. The photographs do not provide compelling continuity, yet differences often hinge on the familiarity or identity of objects, so for example, in Little Egypt (2007) where the sky stops at an immense white wall or lack of picture, while the lawn continues, aligned with the edge between details of a mural to the left, the top of which then appears upon ‘the white wall’. Similarly, Lighthouse Wall (2007) offers perhaps two levels of car park as well as two pictures, and the equipment to the foreground shares perspective with the figures behind. The famous gap now confined to no more than a matter of continuity against contiguity.

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2008-01-29T20:38:00.000-05:00

PAUL McCARTHY

The artist’s large survey show, including new work, presently at S.M.A.K. Ghent (Belgium) and his well publicised merchandising over Christmas prompt this post. McCarthy emerged in the late 60s as a performance artist and his project has steadily spread from recording performance and displaying props and sets, to sculpture involving fabrication, even manufacture – hence the Christmas chocolates. Yet McCarthy’s concerns remain consistent and while hardly subtle, illustrate the changes to Performance Art over the period, their impact on Conceptual Art more generally and some severe limitations to project and artist.

McCarthy’s early performances achieved prominence for their pantomime-like outrages, explicit sexuality and violence in an uneasy black humour. Performance Art initially concerned itself with performance as no more than automatic or involuntary responses from a person to variously challenging situations or tasks (see also Post 22). However as the project gains momentum, more elaborate tasks and responses beckon. For McCarthy this involved masks, utterances and rudimentary props for body parts and fake blood. The artist assumed stock or stereotypical characters, required rudimentary sets, additional cast, but resisted plot or story for largely unmotivated or incoherent carnage, often accompanied by incessant babbling. Performance Art is clearly drawn closer to theatre by these concessions, in part signals the eventual dissipation of the project, but importantly, here performance and props are not just crude or hokey, but concerned with the destruction or damage to their very function, ultimately to performance. The emphasis is really upon the literal dispersal of person across a performance.

In this sense McCarthy reduces Performance Art’s minimal person to extreme bodily terms; the task to spreading its contents violently across stage or occasion. The work stakes out possession of stage or event by bodily fluid or waste, even as the person is mutilated or destroyed. And material expelled from the body, quickly invites material consumed, foods and liquids such as ketchup and chocolate that pointedly resemble bodily equivalents. All are freely scattered throughout a performance, drench increasingly elaborate sets, from Hot Dog (1974) to Bossy Burger (1991) using part of an actual TV Sitcom set to The Hogan Family, to the massive frigate constructed for the Caribbean Pirates performances (2001-5). The use of readymade sets reinforces the rage directed against popular or established norms. Yet this is balanced by the profound impoverishment to person, the meagre resources allowed performer. The performer in his work is not just challenged by occasion or stage, but must resort to sexual and other bodily engagement in order to meet it, often ‘leaves his mark’ only as the departed. This is pointedly continued even in later work using mechanised mannequins, such as Garden (2001) with its set salvaged from the 60s TV Series, Bonanza. Other works surrender more by this sophistication.

The sheer messiness and excess however, is typically compared with the precedent of Herman Nitsch or even Joseph Beuys. But McCarthy is not drawn to Christian or arcane ritual, tellingly, characters are inspired by children’s fiction and cartoons, from safely (and sadly) two-dimensional models. For the hostility directed toward them also reflects a dearth of options, they are models thrust into more full-bodied situations, clearly beyond their domains. Ultimately the theme shapes as one of inadequacy or over-ambition. In this respect, it is interesting that McCarthy remains acutely alert to contemporary developments and is occasionally drawn to parody and satire. With the acclaim of Jeff Koons’ sculptures for example, McCarthy then devotes more attention to sculpture, similarly adopting children’s toys as models, but only to introduce disturbing modifications as in Spaghetti Man (1993), the work thus neatly pacing, if not stalking, the interests of someone like Charles Ray as well.

Other works combine mask or cartoon-like heads with penis and testicles, returning to the crude equation between person and sexuality, while the recent shift to enormous inflatables projects his cartoon characters and props to the realms of popular marketing, (see also Post 49) much like his chocolate Santas. Contrast is sometimes made between the rough and ready nature of McCarthy’s performances and recordings and later, more focussed and sophisticated productions, by say Matthew Barney. For Barney the recording then requires elaborate presentation, while McCarthy remains content with a large screen in a darkened gallery. Each must maintain a delicate relation with gallery context and fine art. For McCarthy the transfer of his themes to sculpture to some extent tethers performance and recording this way, but must then divide his attention between them, court other compromise.

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2008-01-22T19:06:00.000-05:00

ALBERTO BURRI

Another of the quiet revivals at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, provided an opportunity to briefly review this key figure to mid-20th century painting. The work of Alberto Burri (1915-1995) is noted for the introduction of unusual materials and techniques, their use in abstraction. Earlier use of novel materials focussed on recycling and surprising juxtaposition, particularly of printed matter: striking three-dimensional elements (as in the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1949), for example). But by mid-century the kind of materials adopted emphasise the imposition of two-dimensional reference upon them. They provide an unconventional base or support that draws attention to the effort or resistance to ascribed pattern, picture or notation. This aspect of painting is often called materiality, the particular phase considered is here termed Traction.

Traction has more figurative use in the work of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) and Jean Fautrier (1889-1964), where basic picture planes (technically, orthogonal projections) are engraved or carved into a pigment augmented by plaster, glues, shellac, shoe polish and varnishes, amongst others things. The work of Antoni Tàpies offers similar strange pastes, and occasional notation, later allowing the figurative. Burri is noted firstly for his distressed and patched burlap or sacking, restricted colour in compositions that otherwise continue the biomorphic or organic abstraction of earlier artists. Yet ‘line’ is now coarse seams or patches, the colour harmonies, shapes and edges emphatically determined by the material. Burri subsequently turns to heated plastics to determine shape or ‘drawing’ from a chemical exchange with the supporting material. The work is literally about what makes a line or shape, colour or pattern from the support. Metaphorically, the organic shapes can suggest wounds, stained dressings, swelling, blistering and inflamed skins, an unnerving close-up of human distress or resilience.

Traction is largely a European trend and is sometimes contrasted with The New York School’s use of imposing scale to induce new techniques to abstraction. The difference is famously seen as cooking with rich pastes in modest servings as opposed to a stark smorgasbord, conducted over vast expanses. But there are crucial exceptions. The work of Robert Rauschenberg takes up traction with his black paintings, is possibly influenced by Burri after a trip to Italy in 1951. His subsequent work reflects a new and enduring attention to fabrics. Coincidentally, Burri, who began as a medical student, only took up painting while a prisoner of war in Texas in 1944. Rauschenberg, a native of Texas, spent much of his military service as a hospital orderly.

Rauschenberg’s interest in traction is rarely confined to one material and not always foremost as a compositional strategy, however his taste for shredded newsprint is passed to his colleague at the time, Jasper Johns, whose work incorporates it in a heavy encaustic and applies it to distinctly two-dimensional designs such as flags, targets, text and maps. Traction by this route is eventually inherited by New Image Painting, in mostly subdued form, but re-emerges more vigorously in the work of Joe Zucker in the 70s and then Julian Schnabel.

Burri’s influence upon abstraction is soon overwhelmed by Minimalism’s stricter symmetries, architectural ambitions. He also uses wood in veneer-like slices, although wood-grain is a somewhat familiar pattern, after Picasso and Braque, lacks a certain friction. He tries thin metal sheeting, again worked by heat and inevitably turns to sculpture, of welded steel sheets. Later works concoct vivid cracking or crackle, but again the clarity or ease of pattern rob materials of much traction. Yet, to ask more of materials can easily obscure a two-dimensional aspect, stress other, occasionally surprising qualities, brittleness or pungency, coarseness or crumpling, appeal to senses other than the visual. In this respect Burri’s work perhaps prepares the way for Arte Povera, with its diverse materials in surprising combination, including motion, sound and smell, site specific and temporary installations; that extend the visual and tactile with the transient. A current show at Luring Augustine New York includes many of these artists. Joseph Beuys is commonly associated with this group and his student Anselm Kiefer returns to traction in a more elaborate and figurative form in the 70s. The tendency continues to attract occasional exponents, such as Alexis Harding (see also Post 3).

For Burri its application was strictly abstract, although abstraction then remained a relaxed geometry or ‘organic’ sense of pattern. Ultimately his materials and techniques seem too loaded, not simply alternatives to paint, but redolent in other, extraneous associations that restrict their use in further abstraction. Minimalism took a purer view of chemistry and geometry (see also Post 52) but could not sustain it, even on the grandest scale. This is partly why work such as Burri’s continues to attract interest.

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2008-01-15T19:28:00.000-05:00

FRANK NITSCHE VERSUS THOMAS SCHEIBITZ

They studied together in Dresden and now work in Berlin. Nitsche is the slightly older (b. 1964), Scheibitz (b. 1968) achieved international recognition slightly sooner. Both deal in abstraction in painting in terms of plans or designs for common objects (see also Post 14). Both stress the linear over the tonal. But where Nitsche’s work remains focussed on the curves, rigour and colour of industrial design and graphics, Scheibitz’s work has straddled issues of scale, level or degree of abstraction and 3-D modelling, encompassing maps, charts and the legibility of icons or symbols. One encounters technical difficulties for painting, the other encounters difficulties in category of picture. Both demonstrate the renewed vitality and scope of painting (see also Post 15).

Nitsche’s recent show in Dresden consolidated rather than extended his project. From around 2000 the work tended to feature a central motif on a surrounding ground while later work offers more complex, integrated relations. But often there is little to distinguish work over the period. Line and shape are precise, often derived through successive layers or pentimenti. The measured, streamlined curves and uniformity of line suggest industrial or engineering design, the arrival at ergonomic or aerodynamic solutions; at mechanical rather than organic objects. Range of mostly subdued colours adds to the allusion. Variety to width of line and parallels, add to the sense of accuracy and where intersections of lines of different widths occur they build overlapping planes, so that the work then toys with depth or volume, reinforced by colours assigned to adjacent shapes. In a work such as MDX 12 (2000) this arises around the central intersection of the broad, roughly horizontal line and intersecting points. But colour there is notably cursory or incomplete and the work really showcases process, the design method, at its most general or abstract.

Nitsche’s work is about the assumptions to these elements, for material and use, the world implied in the smooth assimilation of necessities. Abstraction in painting, of course, rarely confines itself to these means so the contrast is particularly effective. Yet such line, colour and their revision cannot be quite the same in a painting either, especially on a large scale. Nitsche maintains the ruled lines and smooth curves but allows colour a more relaxed application and this, if anything is accentuated in more recent work. The effect is curiously jarring. To maintain an immaculate finish would be to risk leaving the painting as only a further step to the design, while to emphasise painterly qualities is to risk the painting not strictly addressing such design. So the work seesaws – line is about a certain kind of design but colouring is partly about painting. Yet painting has its own lines as well as facture; colour is as important to design as line. What might balance the equation is a distinct means of making lines, that would allow the precision while still asserting an obvious painterly attribute. Nitsche has yet to introduce such a technique, but is perhaps aware of the problem.

Scheibitz, on the other hand, is not hampered by such a narrow sense of design. His work emerged in the late 90s, dealing with a broad, somewhat mechanical stylisation for a variety of objects, but then is drawn to architectural themes, to 3-D models or sculpture, to more schematic or metaphorical reference. Temperamentally, Scheibitz has less discipline or focus than Nitsche, although his use of outline, carefully ruled segments and paint drips, all exhibit close affinities. He even has a small work titled Franky (1998).

Scheibitz also favours incomplete elements and ambiguity, the sense of process and reworking. A work such as Anlage (2000) has many of the ingredients of a Nitsche, yet toys with both larger architecture and greater abstraction. The work angles planes for perspective, builds windows and shelves, a neighbourhood in progress. For Scheibitz the variety of meaning to a painting, the levels of representation are carried through to sculpture, where different angles suggest different readings, reveal different colours. In works like Table with Tray (2006) function is actual as well as representational. Elsewhere, what counts as a literal flower or symbol, a model or aspect of the actual, a sufficient or effective stylisation, stretch the artist’s project, allow his line greater latitude than Nitsche’s, but then diffuse the reference, stall its impact. His work struggles to maintain a design or object, not from lack of painterly resources, but rather a surfeit.

Both artists thus encounter problems with their projects, but this only to confirm the role of painting in picturing and remodelling the world.

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2008-01-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

MARY HEILMANN

A well-publicised survey of the paintings of Mary Heilmann recently ended its run at Houston. Heilmann has been a quiet but persistent presence and the retrospective was perhaps overdue. Then again, there is the suspicion that some quarters resort to her work at this point simply to prolong a fading glory.

Heilmann’s work emerged in the early 70s, marked by casual facture and colour relations measured against stripes, a grid or shaped canvas. Her work is often small scale, at a time when such work commands whole walls, but remains firmly in the wake of Minimalism in its focus upon paint technique, geometry (or symmetry) and colour differences (see also Posts 14, 18, 33, and 52). Minimalism quickly shapes as a matter of how much or which system (or pattern) to allow geometry, what additional properties to colour to allow paint and application. Work may promptly resolve to monochromes (acute symmetry) or assume specially shaped canvases in reconciling pattern to support, in appealing to the surrounding wall as a determining factor. Frequently the project turns to three dimensions, looks to architectural considerations to set standards and sometimes departs to temporary and hypothetical stages and the realm of Conceptual Art.

Pattern, on the other hand, cautiously concedes overlapping or interweaving stripes, attendant shapes and soon slender tone and volume, arrives at traditional motifs to ornamentation, even repeating figuration with Pattern and Decoration. These two strands, colour/material and pattern, in various combination, pretty much set the course for Minimalism throughout the 70s, chart its gradual dissipation, public indifference.

For Heilmann, however, neither option holds much attraction, which is largely why her work has not achieved greater prominence. Her interests remain with broadly brushed modulation to colour and precision of basic geometry. But once the equation is grasped between colour definition to a given shape – conversely, shape to a given colour - and pattern to picture frame, then choice of brushstroke or application, colour combination or rigour to pattern all begin to look increasingly arbitrary or trivial. Heilmann can play off the austerity of work by forerunners and urge a greater relaxation to pattern and facture, but this only places greater scrutiny on her dogged allegiance to stripes or grids in the first place. The work often feels like a tired or strained comic routine, relying on a ‘straight man’ as stripes or grids, in order to burlesque his role with relaxed facture, exuberant colour.

A work such as Surfing on Acid (2005) and similar, allow the horizontal bands variety in edge, width and length which in turn influence area and intensity of colour, contrasts with neighbours and consistency of technique. One ‘surfs’ the bands, aware that their identity as stripes, edges or colours is tenuous to the point of hallucinatory. Occasionally Heilmann stretches stripes into more figurative readings, as in Capistrano (1994). In Go Ask Alice (2006) she adopts a perspective to the grid and similarly overruns it with extravagant variation. Colour is again vivid, not so much to demonstrate a theory of harmonies or contrasts, but to add to the overall brightness of spirit, the relentlessly upbeat mood. Actually, variations on monochrome would serve her colour interests just as well, but this is perhaps to accept a rigour the work is now intent on dispersing.

Two later developments have been the introduction of line, in the late 90s, and curved or biomorphic shapes, early in the new century. Works such as 21st Century Fox (1998) and Chemical Tune (1999) use diagonal straight lines across a field of subtle rectangles and scattered circles of contrasting colours. The angles and intersections to the lines deftly coincide with background shapes and so build a tentative volume or projection upon them. Line is thus contrasted with colour as two dimensions are contrasted with three. Line here is also surprisingly uniform and straight, given the artist’s resistance to such rigour in many other respects. But it remains a striking formulation, if only as a prelude to more elaborate depth and objects.

Heilmann’s biomorphic shapes grew out of an interest in curves measured against the picture frame and especially with shaped canvases. But now regularity or familiarity of shape do not influence perception of colour much beyond vague proportions and placements. The works take on a different kind of approximated balance or pattern, size, placement and colour all sharing only a family of curves. This is hardly new territory for abstraction though. While a survey of her career can mark these changes, dwell on her compliance or complacency, it is hard to see what relevance it might hold beyond that.

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2008-01-01T19:50:00.003-05:00

SANTIAGO SIERRA

The current show at the Lisson Gallery, London, features large rectangular blocks of aged and compressed human excrement, that have their origin in India and a practice of waste collection apparently enforced by religion and a caste system. The gallery web site is typically unhelpful but clearly the artist again courts controversy with the introduction of such materials. For some, Sierra’s entire career is dedicated to just pranks and scandal, since sculptural properties are surely mocked by such material and process, while as reference to the obscure and unhappy practice at hand, the objects seem obtuse or ineffective. Objections to Sierra’s work fall into two categories, rejecting his means and his ends; the politics that generate his projects, and the politics generated by his projects. This post looks at the development of these means.

Sierra’s work has its origins in Minimalism and the primary forms and construction that quickly turn to industrial standards; look to modules or unitary components in simple alignment and stacking. Works make competent – but by the 90s – unremarkable contributions to the project pioneered by Donald Judd and Carl Andre, advanced by Tony Cragg and others. However Sierra also attends to related industrial practices, in works such as 20 Pieces of Road, Madrid (1992) in which a road surface is removed in given squares, as an example of road maintenance as well as its literal displacement, its redefinition as squares of bitumen. The work does not disrupt an actual road (although later Sierra does this as well) but extends a routine process to obtain unitary materials, still in step with Minimalism. Less tidy objects, similarly targeting waste, bundle or coat waste material into less regular (and to some extent, less successful) modules.

The growing co-operation with civic bodies and commissioning of labour signals a subtle shift of emphasis. Sierra is increasingly concerned with duration for works, as an index to the labour involved. A work such as 24 Blocks of Concrete Constantly Moved for a Day by Paid Workers (1999) simply manoeuvres blocks of concrete within the exhibition space according to basic tools and cheap labour. The work is less a record of the actual movement of the blocks than the trail of damage and debris accumulated. It samples or displays these additional properties to the blocks, gives a somewhat grim social dimension to their Minimalist austerity.

As Sierra’s attention turns to hired labour as a material, the pretext of a Minimalist object, a nondescript module, shifts to the terms of the exhibition site itself, to architectural features or standard functioning for a building. Sierra can then simply fill a site with a prescribed (and often, proscribed) labour sample, as in 450 Paid People in the Museo Rufino Tamayo (1999) or Congregation of Illegal Workers at the International Fair of Contemporary Art, Paris (1999) or allot them nominal modules as in People Paid to Remain inside Cardboard Boxes, Guatemala (1999). A more radical departure is to simply tag and identify a labour source by tattoo or later dyeing, where conditions are desperate enough to allow such measures. These works, understandably, exist mainly as documentation rather than performance. There was even a work where workers masturbated at a given address.

The point is not simply that anything is for sale when and where the chips are down far enough, but that art is now drawn inexorably to these ‘market forces’ as surely as it is to life or nature (see also Posts 8, 25 and 49). Sierra starts from the Minimalism of primary units but steadily discovers their wider use entails delegation and subordination, that the work is animated by its interaction with conflicting demands and conditions, with an increasingly globalised and ruthless economy. Obviously Sierra is not the only artist drawn to these means or issues; Vanessa Beecroft and others adopt similar strategies.

245 M3 (2006) and Submission (2007) draw attention to crucial features of their respective locations through temporary adaptation and modification, involve less performance. Both works proved highly controversial and were prematurely halted. Here the respective issues – Jewish persecution and illegal immigration – were so sensitive that even the most imaginative or experimental treatments were not permitted to interfere with orthodox message or prevailing identity for the sites. Even where the artist patiently negotiates all regulations and proprieties, these may yet prove so various and unreliable that the work no more than records the politics encountered. So, are the means then too political? Does the work thereby cease to be art? The answer will depend upon how lively one allows art, how cultivated one prefers politics.

The artist’s own website - www.santiago-sierra.com - has been vital to this post.

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2007-12-25T16:47:00.000-05:00

EDWARD RUSCHA
Since this is the final post for the year it is an extended edition

The recent show at Gagosian, Davies Street, London, titled Busted Glass offered depictions of a sheet of broken glass laid over grounds of various colours. The trompe l’oeil, while serviceable; is characteristically shallow as depth, fixing our attention on the shape of the edges, the modulation to the background colour. It is an illusion that paradoxically reminds us of the two-dimensional qualities of the picture; that for all its concreteness or realism entails abstraction. Actually it is a slender variation upon a theme that runs throughout Ruscha’s career, in which depth and depiction are balanced against materials and surface, and more notably, where picture balances against text.

The concern with text is inherited from the artist’s main influence, Jasper Johns, and merits closer inspection. In works such as Tennyson (1958) Johns uses the stencilled word as a template to a variety of paint application for a two-dimensional object – text. (Incidentally, the work is incorrectly dated on the Des Moines Art Center website). Ruscha takes the step of using standard and familiar typefaces and words as a more elaborate form of stencil, against which to measure painting, in a more passive or compliant mood. The step effectively underlines the print source of text, highlights the singularity of painting in certain ways and this emphasis makes it part of the Pop Art movement. It is this shrewd choice of entrenched word and typeface that make the work refer to more than mere signage. Pop Art is better understood as the use of obvious or mundane print sources, rather than strictly popular or preferred ones. Indeed the movement initially was emphatically neither. This of course is to take a much stricter view of the movement than more accepted versions.

Painting gains a new deadpan reserve in this sampling of print, while the reframing and selection of formal elements give even printing’s most prosaic examples a new dignity and rigour. By the same token the printing style reciprocally points to unexpected and potent properties of painting. This arises because even if painting were to do no more than enlarge a print (which it cannot do without begging the question of its context or framing) the enlargement does not preserve all the properties of the print, such as resolution of the inking or the support texture, colour or ageing to paper or inks, much less accident or incident to a given instance, such as misprint, staining or distress. In fact such painting isolates just the lines and colours, (in Lichtenstein’s case, as Benday dots) as a seemingly disembodied design and the absence of these other properties then serves to point to the supporting surface in a special way, emphasising its scale or texture in relation to the immaculate lines, single or flat colours, so that the absence of brushwork for example then figures as a special kind of self-effacement or reticence, a literal flatness to its three-dimensionality or material presence, an expressive or metaphoric wryness.

Ruscha is properly a founder of the movement, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and others and the parameters he allows for painting and print are similarly cool or severe. However, Ruscha can allow typefaces volume, as in the 20th Century Fox logo and extends this to the extreme perspective of Standard Station (1966). A similar concern with perspective and architecture prompts studies of Los Angeles apartment blocks that hover between plan or projection and realised object. This use of volume and depth in turn leads to works such as Quit (1967) and Self (1967) that no longer carry an obvious print source in word or typeface and steadily depart from Pop. Other works from this time use small objects at actual scale, set in a hovering, abstract depth, as in Olive, Screw (1969). Trompe l’oeil here is really a way of granting a concrete object an abstract dimension, much as a word is granted volume and perspective in certain typefaces. Ruscha similarly adds liquid properties to typefaces, drawing them further into depiction, further from Pop.

The artist also pursues the sampling of printing beyond painting and even text to book formats such as Twenty Six Gasoline Stations (1963) consisting of photographs without accompanying text, while later books introduce sequences to the photographs, such as Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966) and even notional events such as The Royal Road Test (1967) and Crackers (1969). Publication is thus sampled for the collection and conformity of photography, for pictures as books or vice versa. Ruscha’s interests here also coincide with or anticipate Conceptual Art, in the use of documentation and recording (see also Posts 17 and 48). Other experiments carry collection and sequence to film, but it is painting as text-only works and qualities sampled against text there that remain central of his project.

Ruscha next adopts phrases, even whole sentences drawn from everyday conversation and applied in silkscreens. In contrast to Johns’ stencils, they print only backgrounds to the clear area of the letters and use unusual pigments including gun powder, Pepto-Bismol, spinach, carrot and onion stalk extracts. Obviously such works now constitute prints, even where text and typeface do not particularly suggest a publication. However eccentricity of message and method align it with painting by this and assert qualities of surface as oblique reflections upon the meaning of the text, much as choice and placement of typefaces do, in earlier works.

This link between text and background, whether as mere surface and pigment, a nominal depth or tone, more elaborate picture and trompe l’oeil, remains throughout his career. By the late 70s the links are structured around charts or diagrams, locating a mood or era, often using sprayed silhouettes as soft-focus or distanced icons or clichés. Text is not automatically foreground; foregrounds are not necessarily text, and blurred silhouettes are sometimes so compelling as a treatment of common objects, they stand alone.

By the 90s Ruscha turns to sharper backgrounds, stylised in other ways and offering equally whimsical metaphors to text. He also introduces clock faces as another kind of diagram and returns to illusionistic effects with wood-grain, vertical ‘film scratches’ and clumps of long grass. Again, the work juxtaposes rather than integrates these elements allows illusion will quickly discover its limitations, their symbolic value. So that shadows for example, also record a time of day, like a clock face, while clumps of grass suggest the unkempt and unobtrusive march of time. Ruscha thus allows a greater flexibility to text in painting, includes other forms of notation, other degrees of depth and depiction.

It is an impressive range. But while Ruscha’s spare rather restrained approach remains widely admired, it is finally, a product of its time as much as place, and while any number of artists from Richard Prince to Graham Gilmore, Monique Prieto, Dana Frankfort and even Jules de Balincourt exploit text in works and as works, Ruscha’s sensitivity to typeface, placement or layout are not shared and are as often under-appreciated. For it arose in the context of abstraction, careful attention to distinctions between two and three dimensions, picture and object, painting and print. His work has helped to transform these issues so that later artists no longer feel the need to stretch meaning across the spectrum, confine painting to such tidy distinctions. Instead they pursue wider, less formal categories, more urgent issues. In this sense Ruscha resists imitation, deflects influence and remains at an alluring distance.

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2007-12-18T19:39:00.000-05:00

THOMAS RUFF

The photography of Thomas Ruff belongs to The Düsseldorf School, reflects his training at the Academy there under Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers stressed a documentary approach, an awareness of design and history to the most mundane or overlooked artefacts (see also Post 41). For Ruff the pictorial standards for such cataloguing have in turn become the object of his work, so that subjects or topics are often secondary or deliberately distanced. A category of picture, or genre, is revealed in his work by revising typical or expected features in some way, emphasising some, introducing or omitting others. He thus extends documentation to the means of collection, pictorial categories themselves. His contribution is by far the most radical of the school and effectively signals the dissolution of the Bechers’ project, to some extent the limits of traditional photography.

Ruff’s development is usefully contrasted with that of fellow student Andreas Gursky. For Gursky it is the Bechers’ wide angle restraint and frontality that inspire further additions to categories of architecture and civic planning, by retreating to loftier vantage points. Ruff’s approach is quite the opposite. Initially he concerns himself with intimate décor (crucially introduces colour relations) and notably portraiture confined to head and shoulders, against a blank background under flat lighting. It is obviously the format of official identification records, yet since the photographs are taken with a large format camera, allowing high resolution to negative and are printed to roughly life-size, the effect creates a curious jarring to the familiar format.

The pictures are so much more than the little ID of a passport or badge that the format now seems intensely artificial or arbitrary, the sitters, all the more unknown or anonymous, for the greater scrutiny. In fact it is the ID format itself that is now displayed, simply through a shift in scale and resolution, and takes on prominence as a fiercely exclusive, even confrontational genre. Much is made of the sombre expressions of the sitters, but given the dedication to neutrality and facial features, a stony concentration seems only appropriate.

Gursky also quickly adopts colour and then digital manipulation (inspired by Jeff Wall) in furthering his grand and intricate designs. For Ruff the ID format confirms the potential of photographic formats and techniques rather than prompting other brackets of individuals or groups. He is also drawn to digital options, but only as his interest switches to found pictures or established categories that can be manipulated or re-presented through them. In the 90s Ruff adopts infrared or night imaging and applies it to nondescript architecture, sometimes comic garden ornaments to showcase a military or police format and the work echoes the uneasy dedication of the ID format in its narrow focus, its gritty green chiaroscuro. Other works from the time use police ID modelling software to create fictive suspects and elsewhere stereoscopic presentations, while the range of found imagery stretches from studies of the night sky to political montages and modernist architecture. Official records of the stars are presented in greatly enlarged prints and sharpened focus, but as with the portraits, the effect is also of content distanced by the new context, a specific configuration of stars rendered as an abstraction, a rigid range of dots, distant and decorative.

Architectural themes continue throughout Ruff’s career. He turns to public and high rise housing, office blocks and warehouses. But here the ‘distinctive’ features tend to rely upon setting for scale, colour and other circumstance, are less strict in composition, less distinctive as format. Found works dispense with the formality, so to speak, proceed from publication and further function. Ruff tints portions if only to alert us to their altered or revised status, the presence of further print options. A Mies van der Rohe house for example is cleverly sentimentalised, or imbued with advertising hyperbole.

Ruff’s attention thus steadily shifts to digital and printing options. In the new century stock shots of equipment are similarly tinted, disengaged from illustration. In the Substrate series, comics are filtered through Photoshop to pure, but perfunctory abstraction. More recently web sourced imagery ranges from catastrophes to tourist spots and historical episodes, all stretched beyond pixel integrity in printing and rated for popularity and access by this pictorial economising. Lastly there are nudes drawn from porn sites, and these are blurred, somewhat like a Gerhard Richter, but do not quite filter photography from pornography. Ruff’s project has led him to new tools and an impressive range of themes, the work however is in matching them.

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2007-12-11T17:54:00.000-05:00

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Another retrospective of the work of Louise Bourgeois begins a grand tour of international museums from its current address at The Tate Modern. At 95, it will presumably be the last in the artist’s lifetime. Bourgeois is known mainly for her sculpture, their bodily or biomorphic themes, diverse scale and materials that run to installations, even performance. Her patient development is also remarkable, so gradual in fact that for some time it has seemed to defy stylistic analysis or an adequate historical perspective.

But Bourgeois’ path has become clearer with time and her steady progress from biomorphic totems in the late 40s and through the 50s, in families and groupings, to more ambiguous hybrids of human and other animal, vegetable and mineral in uncertain cultivation, trace a shift in sculpture’s priorities for materials, for the range of content and the routes of such reference. The Surrealist roots are clear enough, just where Bourgeois departs from them, less so.

Earlier biomorphic sculpture stresses integration with material and process, a refinement or abstraction through the felicities of carving and modelling. The artist arrives at transcendent forms, yet native to materials. This approach begins with Constantin Brancusi, Hans Arp, Henry Moore and others, although they vary in degree of purity of form. Advocates in New York, such as Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi apply the shapes to new, perhaps precarious construction. Noguchi in particular absorbs furniture and functions, promotes personage to pillars or columns, in a way that invites Bourgeois’ totems. Soon the biomorphic element need hardly be present at all to prompt figurative allusion, strictly no longer belongs to Surrealism but a more abstract expression.

However Bourgeois is not inclined to greater abstraction. Instead her attention turns to more puzzling hybrids of animal and vegetable. The biomorphic now is not defined by dedication to carving or modelling, but to fictive realms of mutation and adaptation. The difference is between reference to remote but concrete realms and remote reference to abstract realms. The difference also carries a new flexibility to materials; and this change in emphasis is a large part of Bourgeois’ contribution, although slow to be recognised. For Bourgeois does not abandon marble and casting, even as plaster, rubber and plastics equally serve. She is not after a literal ‘special-effects’ accuracy to her nodules and bulbs, limbs and bulges, but rather their metaphorical potency, their propagation in diverse materials. It is this more complex relation to materials that give the work its richness and resonance of meaning; that ultimately proves influential. Yet, while she departs from biomorphic orthodoxy in this way, it is not territory that attracts immediate interest.

There is great interest in novel materials at that time, in the work of Claes Oldenburg to Duane Hanson, from Eva Hesse to Lynda Benglis, for example, but it is only as Pop and Minimalist styles tire in the 70s, and as Bourgeois’ scale and ambition grow, that her work coincides with wider interests. The Destruction of the Father (1974) with its mixture of plaster, latex, theatrical lighting, its theme of crumpled profusion, family exhaustion, signals this convergence. Sculpture then looks to less formal construction, feminism looks to more equitable sexuality, while Bourgeois looks to shifts in scale, location and material to drive metaphors. Confrontation (1978) expands a similar tableau into an actual arena, where Bourgeois then staged the performance - A Banquet/A fashion show of body parts - in which performers wore gowns fitted with similar rows of protuberances.

The sexual element to many works is often taken as liberation or frankness, but more accurately sexual differences, roles and growth tend to confirm group or family identity, to be a phase or flowering that pairs elements, parses unity, passes reproduction to representation. Later works use more diverse materials; arrive at installation and more readymade components. Body parts now offer metonyms for the person, within architecture that displays and imprisons. Significantly, such works are often titled Cell, preserving biological and collective metaphor. Occasionally the figure appears by proxy or setting, all but renounces her signature, while novel materials now add a surprisingly sentimental note; rely upon setting for the familiar distance. So the variety of materials brings with it more concrete representation, greater disparity with works.

Later Bourgeois can thus accommodate the figure literally, by parts, at an intimate scale, as well as on the grandest or public scale, in metaphor that makes a spider into the structure of grasp or span, frail and absurd, innocent and reassuring. Sculpture triumphs over the tyranny of materials or technology by such displacements, and Bourgeois’ contribution, while slow has been continual and resolute.

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2007-12-04T19:30:00.000-05:00

KARA WALKER

The current Whitney Museum survey of Kara Walker’s work signals a sustained accomplishment as well as surprising popularity for work that deals in provocative racial and sexual stereotypes. Walker’s work is also known for its concentration upon silhouettes; these, often black paper pasted or projected directly to the gallery wall, others mounted on canvas, largely for preservational reasons while others find easy service in various print forms.

The preference for silhouettes emerges for Walker in the mid 90s, while she researched slave stereotypes, related caricatures and folk imagery. The attraction is by no means automatic given these sources and some of the impetus is surely due to contemporary currents at that point, to the growing interest in caricature, for example (see also Posts 5 and 11) to other uses for profiles or silhouettes (see also Post 13). Where African American or black themes arise, precedents perhaps incline her work in other ways.

For example the work of Kerry James Marshall, from this time, tends to flatten modelling of figures to a compelling minimum, often leaving only eyes as much more than a silhouette. Often Marshall’s work is un-stretched, and together with heraldic captions, tends to allude to folk or protest banners, a resistance to conventional framing or situation, that gives this relaxation an unmistakeable agenda. The work also features casual over-painting and dribbles, emphasising re-workings, cancellations and adjustments. These effectively stand as metaphors for compromised and ravaged policies for improvement and integration, and again these qualities build a stylistic context within which to place Walker.

The work of Michael Ray Charles from this time also features vigorously distressed or aged surfaces, for imagery that is drawn from black stereotypes used in earlier advertising. Here emphasis upon surface gives the work the quality of a rescued relic, an aura of reverence or complacent chic for what is essentially a demeaning caricature in the service of minor commerce. The battered surface thus takes on a more loaded, ambiguous meaning in the context of a contemporary image of black Americans. It is retrieved, but not without some loss. Both examples thus stress the picture surface in dealing with black stereotypes, in Marshall’s case even while broaching the silhouette. Part of what is distinctive to Walker’s approach is the conspicuous absence of this engagement with surface, indeed with even a definite or lasting surface to the work at all. So the attraction is not just to silhouettes, but a cooler, literally more detached approach to picturing black Americans.

Much of the impact of the silhouettes comes from the incorporation of the standard white walls to an exhibition space, as obvious counterpoint to the black figures. And the figures are not just cast into shadow of course, or lurking ‘in the dark’, but are racially black, are a pun and upon a white world, with black humour as a market or magic in the blackout or blind spot to power, in passing, playful projection. The eloquence of black to silhouette in fact almost overpowers their historical status as genteel amusement or currency in cartoons and children’s illustration since. All become suffused with slave and racial stereotypes, not merely located in a distant ante bellum but the nursery and myths that stalk history.

So effectively does Walker match silhouette to an image of black Americans, that for many the work becomes narrowly doctrinaire, the agenda too didactic, and soon dismissed as monotonous. But this is to miss how much is concealed by her silhouettes. For Walker’s characters are rarely straightforward and their interactions or situations often introduce sexual or violent acts, not just between races, but men, women and children. There is often as much feminism as racism at stake; in other cases the ambiguities to silhouettes cloak deeper myths and metamorphosis.

The distinctive wall tableaux on closer inspection rarely dwell on the tasks of slavery, even at their most mythic, but more often turn to the obscurities or ambiguities afforded by silhouettes. In this sense Walker’s silhouettes transcend slave stereotypes and become less about the roots of black Americans than an arena in which to project profound fears about sexuality and identity, hostility and dependence, superstition and trust. The distance from history is more pointed in a series of prints that take civil war episodes literally as a background. It is not so much that a black presence is otherwise unavailable – and virtually inconceivable - to these scenes, but that Walker’s concerns are so much broader, more comic and mythic. Silhouettes have become the source of a much greater emancipation, black and American, only in outline.

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2007-11-27T19:10:00.000-05:00

TILL GERHARD

Till Gerhard is a young German painter who has achieved some prominence in the last few years with work dealing in counter-cultural or obscure group customs, often outdoor gatherings, retreats to nature, driven by mystic, perhaps sect beliefs. These are treated with a decided distance and mockery, although for the most part respectfully drawn, deftly painted. The territory coincides to some extent with the work of contemporaries such as Jules de Balincourt and Kaye Donachie, but Gerhard is distinctive both for the breadth of activities included and a treatment that literally distances them through painterly obstruction, at times caustic abstraction.

The pictures often have photographic sources but the emphasis is on the mysterious or remote ideals driving the depicted behaviour and how little the pictures can explain or show of this, how obscure the aims or beliefs remain in spite of pictures. The work tends to revel in painterly dissolution at the margins, as well as spots and spatters that sometimes recall lens refractions, elsewhere raindrops. Both give the pictures a casual, hurried quality, the private record of celebration or promotion, rather than a more formal or finished view. Either way events are distanced by foreground incident, obscured by the bubble and fizz of attendant excitement, as in Walden (2004).

The paintings extend photographic qualities in this way and build a genre for group rituals, esoteric practices. In Gebuesch (2004) this applies as much to a geodesic dome of uncertain scale, nestling amongst shrubbery, as to the aftermath of a large gathering at a cemetery in Dawn (2005). But here, distancing is not just by more painterly means at the margins, to the brilliant pink sky and spatter, but by the small magenta flares that mysteriously arise across the scene. In Mistaken (2004) a strange red drapery hovers amid tree trunks bleached out by flash photography, and in White Spirit (2006) the central figure is wrapped in a white confusion. The blend of painterly and photographic qualities thus begins to introduce its own objects, to move from treatment, to things treated and further undermine and alienate the group’s purpose, the picture’s resolve.

In this respect, comparisons with de Balincourt and Donachie are instructive. Where de Balincourt pictures such groups as primitively conformist, schematic stereotypes, Gerhard instead supplies just distance, a dispersed mystique to the picture. Where Donachie looks to peer and group dynamics for a trust and devotion, verging on the religious, Gerhard is content to record their remote locations, their costume and decorations. Donachie is keyed to the blank and vulnerable identity, in dour tones and facture recalling a little, Luc Tuymans. Gerhard is keyed to their fleeting embrace of nature, their inaccessibility even by more flexible technique. Donachie accordingly concentrates on the figure and gesture, de Balincourt on stylisation and design, while Gerhard stretches incident and occasion. All find the breakaway group or cult rich ground for new distinctions in painting and genre.

While Gerhard does not share de Balincourt’s more ideological perspective or Donachie’s psychological and sexual undercurrents, he nevertheless embraces a wider range of examples. The work not only alludes to the 60s and drug culture, but accommodates other costume and roles, even effigies, festivities for houses, social unrest, even weather. All deal in obscure ceremony, pretence or faith in ends beyond the visible and pictured. The pictures not only stress their distance from this conviction but also point to the concealed identities that arise, comic stereotypes they resort to, and further absurd constructions painting might make upon the playfulness.

Avant-garde Backlash (2006) and False Guru (2006) are examples of this aggressive foregrounding or inscription to the picture. Both ridicule not just casual observation or depiction of events, but attempts to abstract or encapsulate underlying beliefs, to get at the motives and purpose of the group. Tellingly, the effect is a mixture of graffiti (the use of spray paint) and more painterly abstraction (the Pollock-like trailed drips). The artist’s condemnation would seem to be balanced by frustration, unable to properly participate nor transcend or depart the scene. The work uncomfortably oscillates between responses, registers a deep ambivalence.

In this sense the artist struggles for a unity within pictures that de Balincourt more comfortably allows between them. De Balincourt settles for a diverse body of work, Gerhard strives for diversity within works. Both carry distinct attitudes. Elsewhere, Gerhard simplifies figures through broad brushstrokes, more conventionally, arrives at a comfortable distance. It remains to be seen how much incident and mystery he is prepared to sacrifice or entertain.

CAP thanks the artist for advice while www.tillgerhard.de was closed.

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2007-11-20T19:50:00.000-05:00

BERNARD FRIZE

The paintings of Bernard Frize use line in abstractions that allow surprising complexity in terms of colour, facture, width and intersection. They stretch the definition of line. For advocates of pure abstraction, Frize’s work is interesting for the way it resists both the trend to expand technique along other avenues as well (see also Post 10) and to compromise on level of abstraction (see also Posts 14, 24 and 53). This approach to line prompts comparison with the work of Brice Marden and Jonathan Lasker, although the Frenchman’s stricter compositions seem cautious by their standards, less compelling as an extension to colour. This is because French Minimalism, largely through the Support/Surface Group, inclines the painter less to the details of repeating or related motifs, as in Lasker, less to auxiliary properties to colour, as in Marden. Instead it concentrates on pattern applied to various supports and conditions; to means that steadily loosen or revise the end, to pattern dispersed by relaxed application.

In this respect, it is easy to see why Frize is attracted to gestural qualities to line, to additional aspects revealed in the task of applying pattern to a given surface. Yet Frize’s development is not quite a smooth progression from Support/Surface tenets. While an early work such as Suite Segond (1980) shows him committed to abstraction, with a distribution of circles resulting in coinciding shapes/colours through overlap and juxtaposition; following works such as Still Life with Delft Vase (1983) abruptly switch to the figurative. This change presumably allows line now as either background or outline, while tone or shape remains distinct from either. In effect, it separates functions for line, aspects to the motif. Still Life with Tureen (1983) narrows the focus to just outline, but crucially allows shifts in intensity of colour, in width and resolution or ‘bleeding’ of line, so that the course or direction of line takes on greater prominence, begins to demonstrate the means of inscription, beyond any consistent outline for tureen.

With this focus upon line in place, Frize returns to abstraction (sadly there are few examples on the web for this period). Works such as Eixen (1992) then concentrate on lines generated by a peculiar device, perhaps only multiple brushes in the hand, allowing parallel lines of various colours to be applied simultaneously. The curves and angles available through this device or technique then reduce or enlarge line widths accordingly, creating an illusion of depth, or of ridges and hollows to the planes. The technique effectively reduces the picture to just lines, strictly parallels, gives each a colour, measures shape and variation by application. The result is ingenious and attractive, but parallels then suggest less certain combinations available to the device, propose other devices or applications.

In Alternante (1999) Frize takes a simpler approach to parallels, a wider variety of colours. The effect is far more Minimalist, although actually each horizontal line has three colours, each colour varies in weight or width and consistency, each intersection combines colours, supplies vertical parallels. The pattern is deceptively complex, and while still only parallel lines; lines gain surprising latitude in other respects. The project progressively supplies these additional qualities to line measured against patterns or structures, where parallel lines are less prominent. In Portable VVX (2000) a kind of interlacing combines multiple colours to a single ‘stroke’ again, together with single colour ‘strokes’, both of varying strengths, sometimes literally overlapping, elsewhere abutting or intersecting. As a result the interlacing all but collapses, as individual strands as colours or ‘strokes’ struggle for consistency. This balance between pattern and additional qualities to line, give the work an odd oscillation between relaxation and rigour, ingenuity and accident.

Increasingly Frize alternates between stricter pattern and more informal or complex versions; can allow line more space or compress it to unitary blocks that then trade mainly on colour variation. In the recent show at Simon Lee, in London four strategies are used. Lines are granted degrees of colour, yet remain strict in width, curve and length, secondly lines are granted intervals of colour that conform to strict pattern, in departing from grey, yet present no consistent colour beyond this. Thirdly Lines are restricted to straight lines, uniform width, are allowed extended intersections with other colours, so that overlap and change of direction are often shared or blurred. Finally there are sprayed lines that blur edges and colours, but these are the slightest variation. Finally, Frize sustains abstraction by this expanded view of line, but is perhaps obscured a little by reliance on familiar pattern.

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2007-11-13T22:02:00.005-05:00

R. B. KITAJ (1932-2007)

Ronald Brooks Kitaj led a restless, essentially nomadic life and his painting reflects his shifting enthusiasms. He was an American, although best known as a member of the Royal College of Art group of 1960-62, identified with the British version of Pop Art. The group rarely share the close attention to common or mundane print sources, of Lichtenstein or Warhol, instead, often arrange the picture into smaller, discrete pictures, or a layout, that together with text, tend to carry a weaker allusion to print (see also Post 16).

Kitaj’s sources are not contemporary advertising or graphics, but an array of historical and literary publications, often obscure. His project is initially a history painting constructed from layers of such reference. In early works such as The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (1960) and Reflections on Violence - Gedanken über Gewalttätigkeit (1962) the task is firstly how to assimilate and arrange these sources in a painterly way – to signal iconographic derivation by this. The work struggles to resist mere collage with a kind of sketchiness; that in turn begs art history for clarity. His later collages for photo-silkscreen prints only emphasise how easily print absorbs collage, how little it leaves to painting. But as Kitaj steadily flattens colours and modelling, gives outline a heavier, deliberate abbreviation, the style arrives at something like standard graphics or illustration, and these give works such as The Ohio Gang (1964) and Walter Lippman (1966) literally a keener focus.

Remote sources are now contrasted with ‘graphic’ simplifications, while as painting, such techniques are attenuated by greater size and surface. The effect is curiously detached, even brittle. His technique is dry and thin, literally and emotionally. There is no need to actually trace iconography, even if possible, since strictly the work now becomes about this opacity to heavy outline, flat colours and disparate layout. Graphics are pressed to the point of obscurity; iconography haunts even cursory illustration. There is also Kitaj’s distinctive dry brush or rubbing technique at this time, which recalls the mottled wear and aging to cheap publications, particular the covers of paperbacks, subtly converting a common if overlooked print property to a stylistic one.

So while Kitaj is obviously not Pop in the sense of Warhol or even Peter Blake, print and layout formats are not easily restricted to ‘popular’ iconography. In general the British example urges degrees to Pop Art in this way, provides a porous periphery to the print paradigm for painting.

Kitaj’s work is also notable for the theme of sexual confrontation. Prostitution is sometimes explicit, but often sexual favour or attraction is something negotiated and arranged throughout the work, emerges almost as the culmination of method and mood – at once calculated and crass. In Synchrony with F.B. - General of Hot Desire (1968) a portrait of Francis Bacon as business man or gangster presides over the strangulation of a naked women, her legs spread, her face indifferent amongst the abstraction. In The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin) (1972-4) a bored woman remains the centre of attention for a conspiratorial group. The Henry Kissinger-like figure opposite her, and the unmistakeable caricature below of Richard Nixon as a Red Guard, comically sabotaging the negotiations, surely locate this encounter as the U.S. peace talks with North Vietnam, well after Benjamin and any aura Paris may once have held. The surrounding eavesdroppers and guards recall The Ohio Gang (1964). In both cases a woman is to be persuaded, enlisted; used in some way and one suspects; but briefly.

In later works Kitaj tires of fragmentation and diffidence and looks to a more relaxed and forthright style. Portraits and landscapes then offer more mannered drawing, but struggle to accommodate tone or modelling and he often seems to retreat to pastels as a remedy. In the late 80s his enthusiasm turns to Matisse and a lighter, broken facture. Political and historical themes gradually give way to more whimsical anecdote.

It is tempting to see this loosening as a response to the Neo-Expressionism of the time, but the artist’s interests cease to be of wide concern, in any case. His 1994 retrospective at The Tate met with a savage backlash, for example. Interestingly, a related brand of history painting arises in the work of Neo Rauch not long after. Where Kitaj is never quite comfortable with pictorial continuity or contiguity, Rauch’s more fluent approach, paradoxically provides more grades of disjuncture, re-drawing and fiction. Kitaj’s restlessness never allowed that commitment, ultimately he set more store in literature and history. It turns out even history painting does not always need that much history or literature, that more frivolous efforts often only underline the problem.

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2007-11-06T21:36:00.000-05:00

JAMES CASEBERE VERSUS THOMAS DEMAND

Both photographers concentrate on 3-D scale modelling, especially of architectural interiors yet differ radically over means and subjects. Demand’s work perhaps commands the greater interest currently, and there are two reasons why this may be. Before considering these, Casebere’s contribution is carefully reviewed.

Casebere began in the mid 70s, making comic studio-based tableau such as Fork in the Refrigerator (1975) in which a gigantic fork penetrates a refrigerator. Such work shares an interest in cartoon imagery and whimsy, with photographers such as Sandy Skoglund, for instance. However Casebere’s interests shift to more public architecture in the 80s and the modelling takes on a more simplified set of volumes, often against a black background, with theatrical or cinematic lighting. From dealing with extreme fantasy the work now emphasises an evocative, fictional setting. However detail, or lack thereof, then treads a thin line. For while the models are clearly not realistic in great detail, this does not necessarily make them greatly fictional. Rather, fantasy here struggles against falsity, so that the model demonstrates certain melodramatic lighting or smoky atmosphere, and yet lacks the detail to pursue these to greater detail or distance.

Model, lighting and angle subtly test the overall impression or evocation to the photograph. Casebere’s use of prison models in the mid 90s exploits both the dramatic heritage and the inherent austerity of such architecture. The mood never ‘escapes’ the model, the model cannot do more than nod to the melodrama of the lighting and angle. Casebere has occasionally built his models for exhibition also, but mostly they remain tools for his photography, and the photography does not just lie in the stagy lighting, but in the ability of the camera lens and focus to direct attention to the details of the modelling, in delivering a coherent depth or perspective. This is something so basic to a camera, as to be often overlooked in assessing photographic qualities.

Casebere’s work subsequently seeks more exotic architecture, less familiar in scale and construction and often introduces a watery motif to foregrounds, as in Yellow Hallway (2001) and Green Staircase (2002). Here the scale of the water ripples again underlines the inconsistency of scale, the failure of fiction, in fact. In others, angle toys with the water, strives for other
theatricality. But this balance to the conviction of the models also underscores the standards of lens and focus brought to bear on both.

Demand’s work arrives around 1994 and his model making restricts materials to paper and card, immediately reducing all surface textures to a smooth, uniform colour, emphasising crisp volumes, subtle colour schemes, often in even or flat lighting. His choice of subjects looks to popular or topical publications, where the factual nature of photography is foremost. His patient reconstructions, as is often noted, tend to strip objects of wear or accident, to give scenes an anonymous, generic character. Perspective and proportions are maintained, but the realism stops at basic volume, flat colours. But notice that the work does not seem exactly false for this, as occurs in Casebere, but rather abstracted. There is no appeal to intangible qualities of mood or atmosphere, so the factual sits more comfortably on Demand.

But again the relation of model to photography is in fact an opportunity to demonstrate how lens and focus channel attention to this austerity of volume, surface and colour. To regard the model itself would be to lose this in consideration of scale, extent and varieties of point of view. It takes photography to filter these out, to ruthlessly measure the model against lens, exposure and focus – against what had become the mechanics of realism in depiction – and to properly register what has been modelled.

Demand has broadened his range of subjects, with exterior and natural settings, notably the spectacular Grotto (2006) and relaxed his model making, allowing the layers of card to appear at the base of the stalagmites in Grotto, and in other works, foregoes local colour to use bare card to the component volumes. In both cases model making is emphasised and the subject further abstracted, but not falsified or fictionalised.

Demand’s models make less demands in a sense than Casebere’s; allow him to be stricter with the terms of modelling, its treatment in photography. It is a more elegant if less ambitious project. But secondly, Demand’s more sociological scope fits comfortably within a broader German approach to art and design (see Posts 8, 15, 41 and 54) so that the project enjoys formidable reinforcement, within and beyond photography.

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2007-10-30T20:26:00.000-04:00

GARY HUME

The recent show of paintings by Gary Hume at White Cube, London continued the artist’s interest in flat shapes or silhouettes played across grounds, often the polished aluminium support the artist has favoured since the late 90s. The outlines are characteristically ambiguous, the fill to them occasionally a more modulated field of hatched lines or small strokes of various colours now, introducing a subtle concession to gesture, but essentially maintaining the format.

Hume’s most popular works are probably the portraits, animal and floral motifs that arise in the mid 90s. His work there shares interesting parallels with other ‘trace and fill’ approaches, such as that of Lisa Ruyter. However Hume is much freer with his tracing and the emphasis shifts accordingly. His project has more to do with the distance the bold tracing places on familiar icons. The work abstracts the object, but only so far, toys with a kind of debased or clichéd abstraction; hovers between standard icon and greater abstraction. This interest owes more to the erosion of boundaries between the two that occurs throughout the 80s, in works by artists such as Philip Taaffe and Lari Pittman.

Hume emerged around 1990, with a series of works using the design of a door or double doors, often the kind with inset windows (this example not a painting of course), found in institutions, sometimes with inset panels, recalling a past era. However the salient feature to these works is not the style of the doors but their 1:1 or life scale and high gloss enamel finish in commercial or industrial colours. In size, design, colour and finish works such as Incubus (1991) are actually scrupulously realistic, and yet the absence of volume or tone almost obscures such accuracy. Instead the works are as easily treated as an abstraction – which of course they are – but interestingly now, the choice of commercial pastels and high key tertiaries resist the norms for geometric abstraction as well, so that shapes, proportion and composition then give the painting a peculiar and uneasy scale, the work is door-sized, yet shapes, colour and space also take relations from the picture frame, give the materials and painting a ghostly (even parasitic, as the title suggests) proximity to the object depicted.

Hume’s project then is about abstracting or filtering out various qualities to commercial enamels, standard door design; geometric abstraction in painting. The design is not just for a standard door or abstract painting, the painting is not just a door or design, the door is equal parts abstract and actual. This variable or polyvalent approach to painting straddles abstraction and the more concrete or figurative; floats between the popular and obscure. It gives the work an arch attitude, not quite Pop, not quite purist or formalist, a bemused detachment from more concerted painting, from a closer engagement with icons and their worlds. It is an attitude shared by many of his British contemporaries.

Hume’s work subsequently turns to more figure-based themes, but it is notable that shapes are rarely dogged tracing, that they keep their distance from common icons, maintain a high gloss finish, if only to contrast with the uncertainty of shape or outline. Elsewhere they are transferred to prints, and surrender a little of that insistent finish. Works such as Francis Bacon (1998) or Whistler (1996) can nevertheless deliver an amusing caricature and much of Hume’s popularity lies in his ingenuity in this. However in following works Hume sheds the flat colours to allow mere outlines, stressing the simplification to icons. Bare outlines soon allow superimposed sets or layers of competing versions that again tend to filter out a literal reading, take on a more abstract function, underline a given width, hesitation or brittleness for a given object.

The exercise is hardly novel but it shows how Hume gradually extends outline, continues to balance abstraction against the figure; looks for the simple and familiar from which to build the complex and elusive. More recent work looks to less obvious objects, Pink and Green Smoke (2005) and Regents Park (2005) attenuate the derivation, trace more freely. Other work returns to flat silhouettes, thus distanced. Drawing and colour can still tease the object but they lack the link to décor offered by doors. Works such as American Tan VIII (2006-7) now compound layers, use outline against fill and polished surface and the effect is elegant, but each layer now filters a little less, is stricter for the variation. While superimposition has freed his tracing, it remains to be seen if it can bring a similar liberation to colour and finish.

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2007-10-23T21:19:00.000-04:00

ANISH KAPOOR

This post coincides with the elaborate installation by the artist now at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The sculpture of Anish Kapoor is notable for the way it has merged Minimalist abstraction with an older concern for biomorphic imagery, with reliance upon fabrication and industrial process yet an attitude toward materials that often gives work a site-specific and ritualistic accent. Kapoor’s Anglo-Indian heritage perhaps disposes him toward some of this, and much commentary is quick to point to the link, but here his style is traced simply in terms of sculpture in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Kapoor’s work first gained recognition in the early 80s, along with a wave of British contemporaries such as Bill Woodrow, Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon, yet Kapoor’s work is distinct firstly for its biomorphic imagery, mixing botanical and biological shapes, often with a strong sexual element to protuberances and recesses. This Surrealist strain continued in particular in the work of Louise Bourgeois. Secondly, there is Kapoor’s use of vivid pigments in powder form at this time, the surplus in generous piles, anchoring the work to the floor and a precise location.

The pigments in effect disguise the surface of the materials (variously, polystyrene, cement, earth, acrylic and wood) and identify the shapes by colour and pigment attributes, a single physical location, so that coating and overspill become the sculpture, in more ways than one. The colours condition the perception of volume, even scale, and give the shapes a theatrical aspect – a role or play to surface and volume, that is usually described in terms of spirit or transcendence. The grounding of the work, literally on the floor, also has echoes in Bourgeois’ work in the late 60s and 70s, but the treatment of materials by pigment in this way actually paces a different strand to sculpture.

In the work of Conceptual artists like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy from the times, objects and sample materials to a specific location are often arranged in Minimalist forms – circles, squares, piles and lines - either to be documented or removed to exhibition sites. What is sampled from a location – the materials collected – is by necessity given a form in presentation, yet what is sampled and what is sampler in this way, or what is presentation and representation, are not always clear cut. The form necessarily channels its content; the content absorbs some of its form. Like Kapoor’s pigments, we cannot know what such forms would do to other materials on other occasions, so that their true impact or the ‘true shape’ to a material remains conspicuously fugitive in such presentations, ultimately salutes spirit. In this sense Kapoor’s use of pigments owe as much to contemporary developments in sculpture as to Indian customs.

However, while such coatings remain an abiding concern for Kapoor, powdered pigment does not. By the same token while an abstracted, even divine sexuality to recesses, protuberances and uprights continues in his work, the more organic or biomorphic does not. The work becomes more abstract, sexuality is transformed into a planar and spatial interplay.

Later works steadily contrast holes and uprights with their material, surface and volume, as much as colour, so that holes smoothly assume circles, flatten into dishes, lengthen into tubes, take on a topological slipperiness only accentuated by highly polished surfaces, and more recently, mirrored surfaces. Mirrors of course, instantly draw upon their surroundings in perception, so that again work becomes both anchored to site, yet evasive, a surface difficult to catch as plane or volume, evanescent and immaculate. Thus works like Mother as A Mountain (1985) give way to examples such as Mountain (1989-91) or Mother As Void (1989-90) to When I am Pregnant (1992) to Red Circle (1996) to Turning The World Inside Out (1997) to Untitled (2003) to Untitled/Pregnant Square (2004) to S-Curve (2006). Or, for a more masculine accent, works develop from Untitled (1983) to Untitled (1987/8) to Ishis Light (2003) to Spire (2004) to Reverse Perverse (2006).

The gigantic Marsyas (2002) is surely the most extravagant demonstration of this shape shifting, exalted topology. Later works such as Untitled (2006) refine these concerns, faintly echo the sexual metaphor yet surrender more to fabrication and finish. This year’s installation in Munich promises a return to more tactile and frankly, messy surfaces, while Kapoor now embarks upon a kinetic dimension to his work. It is a mark of both the fundamental nature of his interests and his invention, that his themes easily assimilate motion, even amongst the period architecture and décor of the Haus der Kunst.

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2007-10-16T20:55:00.000-04:00

JULES DE BALINCOURT

The paintings of Jules de Balincourt are a good example of the way painting now moderates and alternates between abstraction and the more concrete, encounters new demands even as it relaxes old ones. The grand design or shrewd diagram, a revered colour code or proportion to outline, text or ground, all beg questions of perspective and propriety, of the final allegiance for such Olympian detachment. Politics baulks at that, doubts the big picture. By the same token, there is no starting ‘bottom-up’ either, with mere detail or pure means, without appealing to some sub-class or genre. The ambitious painter cannot trust a class or its members, a style or its objects and consequently painting proceeds with a mixture of suspicion and allure.

Balincourt is a relative newcomer, recognised around 2002-3 and noted firstly for his maps in which US nationhood and foreign relations are amusingly shuffled. While the example of Jasper Johns inevitably comes to mind, Balincourt’s concern is closer to the metaphorical mapping schemes of later artists, particularly from the 80s onwards, either in extending the allegory of Neo-Expressionism (see also Posts 26, 40 and 44) or to the charts and layouts that follow from Pattern and Decoration (see also Posts 2, 24 and 53). Balincourt’s touch is lighter, looser for the most part and significantly, he is not content with just the broad sweep of the master plan. From the beginning, other works look to more concrete examples for symptoms of some overall scheme. His work there shares some of the hard edge qualities of commercial illustrative style, but tellingly, Balincourt’s temperament and informality shy from stricter detail, so that the effect is often clumsy or faux-naif.

In works such as Gathering (2003) and Peaceful Protesters (2003) we move from the schematic to generic scene, the ‘naïve’ idealism of a sect or sub-culture, but the mesh of graphics is not quite standard and generic enough, nor more forthrightly naïve, and ultimately lack conviction, cannot project. This unfocussed, technical shortcoming nags at later works, especially with figures, as in Neighbourhood Watch (2004) and New Found Land (2004). Understandably Balincourt shifts the focus to more architectural concerns in Feast of Fools (2004) and The People Who Play and The People Who Pay (2004) and looks more confident devoted to the single comic figure or stereotype such as Youth Nationalism (2004) Poor Vision (2005) and this year’s impressive Holy Arab (2007).

On the other hand, the ‘big picture’ flourishes along themes of transmission or projection, from the modest Media information Center (2003) to Ambitious New Plans (2005) Violent Peace, Violent Healing (2006) Infect You, You Infect Me (2006) and Open for Season (2007). The military agenda that accompanies many of these works climaxes in his recent show at Zach Feuer, NY, with Think Globally, Act Locally (2007) and Unknowing Man’s Nature (2007) where a city grid is target or battery for a bombardment of incomings or outgoings. It is a vision that irresistibly suggests recent American foreign policy, as it ruthlessly extends the metaphor for communication. The works attain an impressive spatial abstraction, but while assuming a lofty ‘strategic’ viewpoint, cannot then quite cede greater latitude to paint, allow more abstraction. Interestingly, works like Boxing Your Subconscious (2005) and Remembering Our Great Dead Heroes (2007) address precisely this heritage to painterly abstraction and mock the organic and gestural against the hard edge and geometric.

Balincourt also returned to his maps this year with We Warned you About China (2007) a less direct cartography now, and the show was also notable for works devoted to landscape, such as I’m Just a Fire in The Night (2007) Untitled-cliffs (2007) Untitled-lake (2007) where attention to atmosphere, stylisation of water or light to crucial panoramas, again are less than compelling, largely because the detail needed cannot be sustained by loose handling. Balincourt wants the particulars but seems undecided on what they are or how to render them.

More successful are smaller, freer subjects, such as Cycles of Morning and Dyeing (2007) – a makeshift rack of coloured rags on a beach, that with eyes, takes on a haunting persona. This intersecting of the abstract and concrete, the more and less stylised, is an issue shared by contemporaries as diverse as Neo Rauch and Dana Schutz. Balincourt’s scope and invention distinguish him, although as yet he perhaps lacks the technical assurance of either. It may be his work will never achieve greater consistency, but lack of rigour is sometimes the price for inspiration.

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2007-10-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

JULIAN SCHNABEL

The paintings of Julian Schnabel continue to be well publicised, perhaps less in public galleries than some of his contemporaries. Schnabel will probably remain ‘the broken-plate guy’ in art history, forever associated with his beds of shattered plates; that marked his emergence in the late 70s. These are less in evidence in recent years but his work remains surprisingly consistent in emphasis on materials and techniques. Schnabel, along with David Salle is often regarded as an American exponent of Neo-Expressionism, yet their work remains at some distance from German or Italian versions (see also Posts 40 and 44). This difference is essential to an appreciation of Schnabel.

An early work such as Muchos gracias por las insiables (1975) shows how his work grew out of collage, already favoured broad painterly treatment. In particular the figures on the left are variously outlined and filled by painting, grant the prints a little of the role of templates that variously channel depiction. This aspect in fact is close to a wider trend, identified mostly with Richard Marshall’s New Image Painting exhibition in 1978. The model is really the early work of Jasper Johns, where the use of a design or template orders brushwork and colour, inflects the design through intermittent and approximate compliance. This ambivalence holds an enduring appeal for American artists (see also Posts 13 and 24). Where Warhol then imports standard graphics and silkscreen printing to this end, later artists sometimes look to forge new or less familiar icons within a similar format.

Amongst New Image artists like Neil Jenney and Susan Rothenberg, something akin to John’s short, broad brushwork persists, while the more subdued techniques of Nicholas Africano, Denise Green, Lois Lane and Robert Moscowitz still contrast facture with outline, often with a single or flat colour. Only David True and Joe Zucker extend drawing beyond icon and ground, only Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Hurson use a layout of multiple pictures. Notably, Zucker’s cartoon-like drawing is executed with an extreme facture, adopting cotton swabs and Rhomplex. This comes closest to Schnabel’s use of broken plates.

But Schnabel actually reverses the priority. Facture does not conform to drawing or outline, on the contrary, drawing contends with facture or surface, and drawing is neither especially familiar nor strict. This marks his big break. The work often has the feeling of an explosion or disintegration. In The Patients and Doctors (1978) and Divan (1979) facture is extended to a collage of shattered plates, in some ways reminiscent of the mosaics of Gaudi’s Casa Mila, although fragments are often placed in approximate order to their wholes, stressing derivation and disintegration. It is a determination to include material that literally outweighs drawing, resists depiction at all costs. In short, Schnabel exchanges ambivalence for extravagance. While the plates rarely serve as metaphor for the object depicted, they nevertheless express a fragility or destructiveness to materials, indeed a certain wanton abandon to opportunity or indulgence. It is a recipe that literally labours the picture across a surface. Then again, drawing is adjusted to rugged surface, radical pigment or application, vast scale, weathering or other distress, to duly draw the surface into the picture, if only reluctantly, or ‘badly’.

The key difference between a Schnabel and a Kiefer – between American and German Neo-Expressionism – lies in the relation between materials and picture (and largely explains preferences in subjects). For Kiefer materials demonstrate a revision of uses and a renewal of reference, for Schnabel materials demonstrate a continuation of painting, a persistence of reference. The first embraces the endlessly sayable and restatement, the second an assimilation of the ineffable or inchoate. Both arrive at Neo-Expressionism in drawing, less as a revival than to stress indifference to preceding print or template forms, to standard or literal meaning. Both use text in casual scripts, but for Schnabel their literary value is stretched against graphic relations to other marks and surface.

Schnabel’s expansion of painting is not confined to broken plates. Animal hides, velvet and antlers are recruited; various found surfaces including discarded theatrical backdrops, also serve. Painting takes on a superimposed, graffiti-like role, also suggested in the use of spray cans and scrawled inscriptions. ‘Site-specific’ amendments loom as an obvious progression by the 90s, although subsequently Schnabel devotes more of his career to film making. His painting then oscillates between more conventional – and frankly, disappointing – depiction and looser gestures, tied to text or collage. He maintains a commitment to novel materials and techniques, even as this dilation soon recommends installation (see also Post 3).

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2007-10-02T20:25:00.000-04:00

KAREN KILIMNIK

A show earlier this year at The Serpentine Gallery, London and a touring survey prompt this post. Kilimnik’s work centres on painting, extends to photography and installation and concerns a kind of bemused worship or ardent identification with glamorous and fanciful roles and stories drawn from unlikely sources. Her work is not restricted to popular or topical subjects, her paintings do not underline print sources, so while her work nevertheless derives from Pop Art in some respects, focus lies elsewhere.

The target is not just cherished fiction for the young or vulnerable, but a kind of painting that answers the identification a little too wholeheartedly or not quite wholeheartedly enough. And where Kilimnik finds her range, the effect is not quite cheerful or sentimental, but rather an uneasy pathos. It is this acute, psychological dimension that finally distinguishes – and recommends – her work.

Kilimnik’s style developed slowly. An early example such as Brigitte Bardot Shopping in Shorts (1985) significantly looks to a star from an earlier era, invests her with a further nostalgia. The drawing, like a fashion sketch, notes the belt over a loose blouse, hot pants and sandals, is not just of a star in France, but essentially costume and attitude. However the drawing does not convey much more than the dress illustrator’s sketch as yet, does not acquire the neurotic attachment to remote icons of her mature work. A slightly later work, the photograph Me as Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet Before Horse Race (1988) squarely focuses on the relationship between fan and icon, the discrepancy between child star and adult woman (notably against an abstracted background, in soft focus). But the work is in some ways eclipsed by similar themes in the photography of Cindy Sherman at this time, and, one suspects it sacrifices too much of her source material in the interests of self-portraiture. Her subsequent photography does not pursue this direction.

Kilimnik’s drawing can include anecdote and strengthen the sense of spontaneous and intimate engagement, but it is as she broadens her range of subjects and uses a looser treatment that the work finds a subtler genre, makes a more incisive attitude. The works are small scale, even at a time when the trend is to easel-scale painting, and now include historical pastiche as well as images of sentimentality. The work is often dismissed as dealing in the faux-naif, inspired by Jim Shaw’s Thrift Store Paintings, perhaps, or the slacker indifference of Luc Tuymans, and her work overlaps with these certainly, in Chloe from Blood on Satan’s Claw (1996) and Me Getting Ready to Go Out to a Rock Concert with Bernadette in Moscow in 1977 (1997) the latter work, not to be confused with a larger, 2006 version. But importantly, the range of subjects and treatments increasingly comprise ensembles, are exhibited in salon-like clusters, and usually in an installation providing elaborate décor, an all-encompassing framework for this diffusion; sometimes called the scattered approach.

Kilimnik’s work is often bracketed with that of Elizabeth Peyton, and the differences are illuminating. Peyton’s work is more narrowly concerned with celebrity portraiture, in particular with contemporary young men. Her treatment stresses bright lips, an effete or effeminate expression and often passive pose. Peyton sentimentalises, in a knowing parody of adolescent girl’s depictions of male idols and this has no parallel in Kilimnik. Even where Kilimnik covers similar ground, her picture conveys an emptiness rather than prettiness, literally struggles to depict Leonardo DiCaprio, for example, much less render him on adorable terms.

The difference points to a more general feature to Kilimnik’s work; the fixation on distant or childhood icons, their hasty or casual treatment. In works such as Steed Leaving for Costume Party on Deserted Island - Emma Stays Home to Work (2006) drawing remains surprisingly accurate while painting looks rushed or a travesty. To some extent Kilimnik uses painting to translate the figures (from The Avengers TV series of the 60s) into a desperate folk art, beyond that demonstrates an inadequacy on both sides: as painting and mythic couple. There is finally, a crippling vacuum between them. Kilimnik seizes and hordes old identifications but there is anxiety in what use they might now provide, in the overload. Tellingly, the arrays prompt décor, furniture, perhaps summon old episodes or more recently, a whole ballet of ritual gesture, but the sense is of an absence of more than that, the fuller person or picture, the more assimilated enterprise. The work clings to relics at the periphery, for compensation.