Sharon Lacey

So, this Saturday I raced through the Chelsea galleries before heading to the Frick and the Met to pay homage to past masters. Pace Wildenstein is showing David Hockney paintings. It is the first exhibit of Hockney’s work in New York in 12 years. The paint handling in these Yorkshire landscapes is quite juicy and exciting (not that his cooly detached flat application of the medium isn’t exciting too)!  The exuberant colors and tactile surface of the paintings are so refreshing, especially after seeing the usual gallery offerings:  badly painted images of sex organs (see Mike Kelley at Gagosian), inscrutable installation art (see Mark Manders at Tanya Bonakdar), and elaborate conceits using found objects (see Fischli and Weiss at Matthew Marks). I still adore Fischli and Weiss, but a life story told with 800 magazine ads…. I guess I disliked it precisely because I do enjoy their photographs and wished to see some. As for their sculptures, I preferred the  Sleeping Puppets to the everyday objects in Clay and Rubber.

Another highlight was Eric Fischl at Mary Boone.  His striking compositions of matadors are painted with his characteristically loose broad brushwork. In the wide spectrum of artistic attitudes between sincerity and irony, I think Fischl is closer to the former. Perhaps he is referencing Manet; I viewed the Manet matador paintings at the Frick almost immediately after seeing the Fischl show.  To my eye, there are similarities in their works which go beyond subject.  I’m still a little unsure what to make of it, but I’m fairly certain it is not an attempt at kitsch….

More later…. I saw a lot of work. So glad the Met stays open ’til 9pm on Saturdays.

I really don’t need to add any commentary to this…. Here’s an article from last Sunday’s New York Times entitled, Benedict Woos Artists, Urging ‘Quest for Beauty.

Pope Benedict held an event at the Vatican to speak to contemporary artists and architects about the need to “communicate beauty” in their work.  Anish Kapoor, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Liebskind were among the invited guests. The event was considered a P.R. success even though half the 500 invited artists did not attend.

In his 1999 wax sculpture, Ninth Hour, Maurizio Cattelan portrays Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite.  Typically, contemporary artists have had little dialogue with the Vatican, or have portrayed the Vatican hierarchy in an unfavorable way. From the look of things at this recent event, artists would gladly accept commissions from the Vatican, but as Archbishop Ravasi reminds us, “I wouldn’t rule it [commissions] out, but we’re not in the Renaissance.”

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Cory Arcangel is a digital artist whose work is concerned with how technology and media affect culture.  On the heels of our close look at Andy Warhol’s influence on contemporary art, I thought you may enjoy Arcangel’s use of Warhol (along with the Pope and Flavor Flav) in this remaking of the video game “Hogan’s Alley”.

In the film we watched, Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture, Stephen Koch notes, “Wahol’s art is thought provoking; though one of the thoughts it can provoke is ‘B_llsh_t! This is just b_llsh_t. This is nothing but a soup can!’  But if you hold back from that and start asking, ‘why would anyone put a soup can on a work of art to have me look at it?’ pretty soon you do start moving forward with some real thoughts.” He goes on to say it is possible to look at a Rembrandt painting without thinking. Or a Michelangelo. And it’s entirely possible to look at a Fragonard without thinking. (I always fear taking someone’s quote out of context may misrepresent the speaker; Koch was not passing judgment about any of the artists he mentioned or stating a preference, merely making an observation). So, the greatness of the work is not contingent on its power to provoke thought. Premodern work typically invited the viewer to “see” certain things, or to “feel” certain things, but to “intellectualize” or “theorize”? Not so much.

I was discussing Duchamp’s Fountain with my brother the other night, and said something like, “I see his point, but….”  At that my brother interjected, “That’s the problem; you just said it. I’m sick to death of people making points!”  (Ironically, this is a very good point).  Why do artists feel it’s necessary to make points? Has visual art become too conceptual? Are we stuck in a Twentieth century mindset? Jean Baudrillard, a brilliant theorist who makes lots of good points, states in his book The Conspiracy of Art, “here is the point:  it is all the more necessary to talk about art now that there is nothing to say about it.”

Andy Warhol once said he liked “boring things” and wanted things to be “exactly the same over and over again.” In his art work we see a focus on the banality of everyday life, a trend that has remained prevalent in contemporary art.  Also, the focus on consumerism, the cult of celebrity, and superficial reality are themes that Warhol popularized.  Many artists followed his lead, including Jeff Koons and Claes Oldenburg whom we discussed in class.  We’ll look at many other examples in the remaining weeks of the semester….  Rest assured, there’s lots of boring work to come.

Last week in class I mentioned the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson , but I didn’t have a chance to describe his work in any detail.  The following images are ones I took at his 2008 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Take Your Time.

A prevalent theme in Eliasson’s work is perception itself. Because he takes the way we see –  or individuals’ sense of vision –  as a subject, the audience is crucial to his work. (To paraphrase Philip Guston, a Piero painting doesn’t care if 10,000 spectators fall off a cliff…. not so with Eliasson’s work, which is completed by the spectators’ viewing of it).  In the two pieces depicted above, you can see the emphasis is on the viewer’s relationship to the work. The rainbow-colored light projected from the center of the gallery casts the spectators’ shadows on the wall, and in the second piece, the bright yellow light renders the museum visitors monochromatic, giving the sense of walking into a black and white movie. You can explore his website to read about his other major works, and to view videos from the “Life in Space” lectures he hosts in his Berlin studio, in which experts from diverse fields discuss topics related to color, vision, and neuroscience. (They only sound boring…. Follow the link to check them out.  You’ll be surprisingly entertained)!

When we were discussing altering the classroom space by painting it, I thought it may be useful for you to explore some alternatives to mural painting for transforming entire rooms.

The following video shows Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist at MoMA talking about her 2009 show Pour Your Body Out. (The photo above is from the same show) .

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The 2004 Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller uses this quotation from Shakespeare (“What is the city but the people?”) as the title for his current project on the London underground. Tube drivers are given a booklet with quotations from philosophers, writers, and other intellectuals, to read on the Piccadilly line, adding a personal touch to an otherwise routine commute. Amidst the usual announcements like “Mind the gap,” commuters are treated to memorable sayings like Engels’s, “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory,” or Dostoevsky’s, “Beauty will save the world.” Following are several other examples:

“There is more to life than increasing at speed.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Hell is other people” Jean-Paul Sartre
“Everyone should be respected, but no-one idolised” Albert Einstein
“Nothing is worth more than this day” Johann von Goethe”
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once” Albert Einstein
“The afternoon knows what the morning never expected” William Shakespeare

Deller says of this project, “Originally, when asked to think about a project for London Underground (LU), I suggested a day of no announcements on the Underground, but obviously this was not possible, so I came up with the idea to give staff a collection of quotes and the idea grew from there. I often wish announcements were more personal and reflected the realities and absurdities of living and working in a big city. I think the traveling public enjoys some humour and unexpected insight during their journey.”

In another current public art project in London, the sculptor Antony Gormley has asked for ordinary people to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square to demonstrate, well, “What is the city but the people?” The work is titled One and Other. You can watch a live feed of the “plinthers,” as the participants are called, reading poems, talking to the public, sleeping, etc. as they occupy the fourth plinth. Every hour for 100 days, a new person will assume the position; the idea is to portray the whole of humanity, not merely kings and generals, in this living sculpture project.

Last week in class we discussed the controversy surrounding Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc .  In 1981, the sculpture was installed in Federal Plaza in New York. It was commissioned by the U.S. General Services Commission, which earmarks .5% of a federal buildings cost for art work; Serra’s curving wall of raw steel cost $175,000. It was disliked by many of the people who used the park, and the public complaints resulted in a hearing, and the eventual removal of the sculpture. “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing,” Serra comments at the time. “Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.”

Hmm. What is the city but the people? Nathan Glazer in his book From a Cause to a Style points out that Serra’s Tilted Arc, a piece that was intended to be anti-capitalist and favor the working class, “ends in the furthest reaches of elitism, rejected by those for whom it was originally designed….” Opponents of Tilted Arc were not so much concerned with the artist’s intention as they were with enjoying the sun in the plaza and having a pleasant outdoor spot to eat their lunch without a being “assaulted by a very large and ugly object whose purposes they could not divine” (Glazer’s words, not mine). It is incorrect to assume the complaints about this sculpture came from philistines who didn’t appreciate the significance of public art works; No less than Carole Glueck of thre New York Times wrote that it is an “awkward, bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest outdoor work of art in the city.”

In defense of his work, Serra stated, “it is the explicit intention of site-specific works to alter their context…. Works which are built within the contextual frame of governmental, corporate, educational, and religious institutions run the risk of being read as tokens of these institutions…. In such cases, it is necessary to work in opposition to the constraints of the context, so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of questionable ideologies of political power.  I am not interested in art as affirmation and complicity.”

I doubt the people who protested the arc disagreed with this social critique. The question is – to paraphrase Glazer – do you combat the awfulness of these institutions and ideologies by adding to the awfulness with a visually unappealing work?

Cy Twombly’s 2001 work Lepanto is a painting in twelve parts; the work depicts a 16th century naval battle between the European forces under Venetian leadership against the Ottoman invasion. The piece was exhibited in 2002 at Gagosian, and the press release states “The glorious sequence of panels is to be absorbed as a single image, a panoramic portrayal of war on a heroic scale where the viewer stands in the midst of the battle through to the destruction by fire of the Turkish fleet”.  Of course, the battle of Lepanto is the subject of paintings by Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian. Turner’s scenes of naval battles are also well known. In many of Twombly’s paintings he’s working in the idiom of pure abstraction or is engaged in process painting; his versatility is marvelous. In recent works, Twombly has painted flowers (which may be the most shocking subject to art worldlings).

Here are a couple TateShots in which the Tate’s Director, Nicholas Serota takes a look behind the scenes at a Twombly exhibit, and John Squire (British artist and ex-Stone Roses guitarist) describes some of Twombly’s works.

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I’ll be brief. I thought some of you may be interested in how photographers like Aaron Siskind were influenced by the painters we’ve been discussing in class – the New York School or Abstract Expressionists. The painter Franz Kline was a close friend of Aaron Siskind, and his work became the focus of a series of Siskind’s photographs, appropriately titled, Homage to Franz Kline.  In 2003, the Andrea Rosen Gallery mounted an exhibition called Aaron Siskind: An Abstract Expressionist Eye in which Siskind’s work was shown alongside that of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Hugo Weber. Read more about Siskind on the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s website.

The pace, the architecture, and the environment of the modern city influenced the work of many painters, and continues to do so.

In our examination of geometric abstraction in class, we focused on the connection between nature and the metaphysical and the art of the early 20th century. Writers like Robert Rosenblum suggest that the Northern Romantic tradition had great influence on the art of the Modern era.  Artists such as Freidrich, Turner, and Whistler – whose simplified compositions oftentimes offered the viewer little more than a horizon line in the way of regognizable imagery – paved the way for the color field painters of the New York School.  And much has been made of the theosophical/ spiritual underpinnings to the works of Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky...

But this connection to nature or to the world of Platonic forms is only a piece of the story of geometric abstraction.  We have yet to address the influence of the urban environment (in which the majority of the artists we’re discussing worked or currently work). Below is a video clip on the British artist David Batchelor whose use of color derives from his surroundings in bustling London.

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In the next video segment, you’ll see the artist Peter Halley in his New York studio discussing how the city has influenced the look of his paintings.

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Of course, Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” (pictured at top) is an early example of geometric abstraction, in which the painter makes use of the familiar grid structure, the repetition of lines and hard edges, to infuse his work with the energy of urban life.

Several years ago I came across the curator Laura Hoptman’s introductory statement for the 2004 Carnegie International. You absolutely must read her remarks regarding contemporary art and metaphysical reality (follow the link)!  After last week’s class discussion about the spiritual in Modern and contemporary art, I thought you may appreciate her succinct statement. With a majority of contemporary artists addressing banal everyday concerns in their work, it is unusual to discover artists who are addressing what some philosophers have termed “the Ultimates”.  Hoptman chose to include in this 2004 exhibition those artists who were confronting “fundamentally human questions,” such as, “the nature of life and death, the existence of God, the anatomy of belief”.  Read about the artists included in the Carnegie International to better understand how contemporary artists are treating subjects like myths, spirtuality, belief, the mysteries of the cosmos, etc.

In class, we looked at early Modernist works by Malevich and Mondrain, both of whom were in the Theosophical Society.  Geometric abstraction was one common way to describe the spiritual without relying on traditional Christain iconography.

Geometric abstraction is still a common way for artists to express concepts like Truth, or the nature of reality.  Ross Bleckner is one of my favorite contemporary painters who is working in this idiom.  For his work, he takes inspiration from the natural world, and beauty is a primary concern. In the foloowing video, he comments on his “Meditation paintings” and on his recent appointment as the U.N.’s Goodwill Ambassador to Uganda.

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