Dana Schutz
Tuesday, December 7, 2011
AMT Visiting Artists Lecture Series
Parsons the New School for Design
Dana Schutz, Twin Parts, 2004, oil on canvas, 78 x 72 in.
“What’s going on here?” is first thought a person might have on first encountering a painting by Dana Schutz. One might do well, of course, to ask that same question when viewing any work of art, but because Schutz has spent ten years plus creating pictures that, while largely figurative and representational, are highly unusual or improbable, extraordinarily goofy, and charmingly awkward. Her subjects include portraits of Frank, the last man on earth, and the activities of the Self Eaters, who constantly devour and regenerate their bodies. Even the less bizarre scenarios are befuddling, such as her version of the Mona Lisa in profile. In a recent talk at Parsons the New School of Design, Schutz expressed her fascination with the “weird science-fiction landscape she’s in.” About the woman with the mysterious smile, the artist wondered, “How’s she going to get home?”
Dana Schutz at Parsons the New School for Design
Schutz chose a chronological approach to her talk, first discussing the development of her work from her undergraduate days at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio to graduate school at Columbia University in New York, and from her early professional career to the present day. Many of these paintings and drawings were collected for her second survey exhibition, the critically praised Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, which was coming to a close at the Neuberger Museum of Art. The artist said that her introduction to contemporary painting came in the mid- to late 1990s, a permissive time for the medium, since people were supposedly not paying much attention to it. With an interesting take on the postmodern pastiche, Schutz believed that “you can make many meals out of leftovers.”
The artist spoke of the risk of creating a subjective space and the need to find a balance between self-indulgence and making something others can relate to. At the same time, she continued, creating a painterly painting in the late 1990s was considered either a masochistically bad decision or an extremely naïve one (the interpretative phrasing is mine). Schutz described how her approach to painting moved from “picture/object” to “person/container,” which wasn’t entirely clear but makes sense considering how, in the words of one audience member, her work seems so personal. And Schutz is definitely an odd bird with a wild (and wild-eyed) imagination that’s incredibly open and curious, not obscure, hermetic, or cynical.
Dana Schutz, Party, 2004, oil on canvas, 72 x 90 in.
Competently articulate when talking about her work, Schutz ran through several dozen images of paintings, offering tidbits on certain pieces and calling attention to their peculiarities—the big toe pointing at the viewer in Presentation (2005), for instance, or the cobbled-together object depicted in an early work that could be representing the end-of-the-semester dump of failed art-school projects. A picture of a girl sneezing, she said, was made to show what sneezing feels like, since the action happens so fast we can’t observe its frozen moment. Schutz said the tangled politicians in Party (2004), inspired in part from the Republican National Convention in New York of that year, might portray a media disaster or a celebration, or a farce of both. She said her painting of Poisoned Man (2005), modeled after the disfigured Ukrainian prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, could be seen as a Dorian Gray.
Schutz conceded that she struggles with fiction, but earlier in the talk she claimed a need for narrative. Narrative, however, isn’t the right word to describe her work. There’s not so much a story as there is a situation, often invented and not usually experienced firsthand. For example, she made The Autopsy of Michael Jackson (2005), painted several years before the performer’s death, because of a fascination with how his body always seemed already sectional or disjointed: the feet dancing on their own, the gloved hand, the vocal hiccups—his body ripe for dissection. Even something like the extremely uncomfortable How We Would Give Birth (2007) is a conjecture, since she doesn’t have kids.
Dana Schutz, Historical Reenactment with Plants (I’m Into Conceptual Gardening), 2008, oil on canvas, 96 x 120 in.
Her scenes are wild and improbable, but with a structure or system that helps viewers make sense of them. Schutz asked, “What if you’re building a Colosseum but are short on time, or you want to garden but only have bed sheets?” You might make something like the eight-by-ten-foot painting, Historical Reenactment with Plants (I’m Into Conceptual Gardening) (2008). Or the kind of cute, kind of disturbing figure hanging in Needy (2007): “The painting wants to hug you, but you don’t want to hug it back,” she buoyantly and wryly commented. Schutz showed a few images of situations that combine a trio of verbal activities, such as Swimming, Smoking, Crying and Shaking, Cooking, Peeing (both 2009), “with the three together, it’s a problem.”
Dana Schutz, Poke, 2010, oil on canvas, 40 x 36 in.
“People like that exist in Cleveland,” Schutz said, referring to the earth-toned figure in Time Traveler (2007) sporting a 1970s turtleneck. She identified the person on the left as a former art-history professor. The artist said she had a recent lunch with a good-looking friend and noticed, for the first time, how beautiful his blue eyes were. She instinctively reached out to touch them, an event captured in a painting called Poke (2010). “You know that haircut’s not gonna be good,” talking about other activities taken on by the clunky, cumbersome hands she has been painting lately.
Someone asked Schutz if she paints strange scenes because she wants to break social norms. No, she has neither the desire nor the urge to experience the things she paints, which are sometimes, she admitted, just horrible images that come to mind. Dumb, crazy things can work in a painting but be a disaster in real life—just look at Gravity Fanatic (2005) or Frank’s sunburned, naked body. Ouch!
In Terms Of count: 3.
This essay is the first of three that reviews a day of seminars at the Performa Hub.
“Provisional Seminar 517: Dennis Oppenheim, Lecture #1, 1976”
Dennis Oppenheim and the Art of Survival
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Proposed Curriculum on Contemporary Art and Performance
Performa Hub
The reconfiguration of Lecture #1 at the Performa Hub (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Dennis Oppenheim and the Art of Survival, organized by Amy Plumb with Pamela Sharp and Aaron Levy, celebrated the legacy of the seminal New York artist who died this past January. Three interrelated “provisional seminars addressed three performance-oriented works: Lecture #1 (1976), Theme for a Major Hit (1974), and Radicality (1974)—perhaps purposely chosen, in memory of the absent artist, for their lack of the appearance of a physical performer in their initial iteration or regular presentation format.
The day began at the Performa Hub, located in a former schoolhouse in Little Italy, with a re-creation of Dennis Oppenheim’s not quite well known but nevertheless important work, Lecture #1. (The Whitney Museum of American Art owns but rarely shows it.) The ad hoc configuration resembled the 1974 version, with slight but not insignificant adjustments. Forty-eight folding seats in the room, arranged in four rows of twelve, replaced the simple, blocky chairs of the original. A marionette of the artist moved from the front podium to a folding chair, displacing another puppet, described in a period review as a black man, from his seat. Substituting the recorded audiotape, a live, surrogate speaker (Levy) read the work’s text aloud. At the Performa Hub, the audience was asked to stand at the sides and back of the room.
The surrogate performer for a live reading of the text from Lecture #1 (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Oppenheim’s haunting text takes the plane crash that killed Robert Smithson as a point of departure, spinning an unnamed artist’s tale of a mysterious series of (ficticious) deaths of American avant-garde artists (e.g., Walter De Maria’s suicide, a bomb on a Boeing 747 killing Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, and others). The increasingly paranoid rant leaves off in late 1987, the art world devastated by the work of probably one person (who may or may not be an artist.)[1]
Thirty-five years after Oppenheim first presented Lecture #1, much can be read into the text, coincidentally or not. For example, September 11 is the date attached to Michael Heizer, who “was found trampled to death outside his trailer in Reno, Nevada.” The speech also seems to forecast SoHo’s decline, perhaps the artist’s comment on New York’s near bankruptcy in 1975. The narrator talks about real-estate defaults, with SoHo becoming a ghost town, not unlike the empty chairs of the lecture room. Junkies and squatters have filled the famous gallery building at 420 West Broadway, the story continues. Of the two galleries that remained, “the caliber of work they exhibited bordered on department store art and its proprietors had no way of relating to any sense of recent art history.” That sounds like the south-of-Houston gallery scene anytime after 2000.
Floor plan for the reconfigured Lecture #1
After the lecture ended, the audience sat down. Les Levine, a central figure in New York during the 1960s and 1970s whom the art world has neglected, despite his important work in media art, presented an updated version of a work (I didn’t catch the title) with a simple premise. Seated at a table, he invites an audience member to come speak on whatever topic he or she wants to. Levine only can ask questions on what the participant has already talked about. Once a person leaves the table, another may approach it. For today’s seminar, three participants had been chosen in advance.
The cranky critic and professor Thomas McEvilley, who befriended Oppenheim in the early 1980s, was the first at bat. He emphasized how the artist’s Site Markers and Viewing Stations (both 1967) reversed the theory of art, and that Lecture #1 addressed the end of the avant-garde. McEvilley also spoke about Oppenheim’s break from art in the mid-1980s, in which a depression led to a period of solitude in which the artist didn’t make work but instead read numerous texts on postmodernism.
Thomas McEllivey, with catalogue in hand, addresses the audience (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Levine asked McEvilley why the avant-garde ended? It was postmodernism, he answered, that wiped out the avant-garde. He did not explain what this meant and began repeating himself: Oppenheim reversed the terms of art, postmodernism pulled out the rug from under everyone, the artist experienced a second-career comeback in the mid-1980s. McEvilley also mentioned that no New York museum has staged an Oppenheim retrospective, forgetting that P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) hosted one in 1991–92, that the catalogue published his essay on the artist, and that Ace Gallery presented a medium-sized survey in 2000–1 in its old, cavernous space west of SoHo, which received a mixed review from Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times. Despite all this, McEvilley is correct—a museum in the city that Oppenheim called home since 1967 should be preparing a retrospective.
McEvilley exited, and a British chap, Anthony Haden-Guest, took his place. Haden-Guest also wondered about the history of the avant-garde, which he said died in literature long before it did in the visual arts. Breaking his rule, Levine tried to steer the conversation back to the seminar’s topic, but Haden-Guest preferred to talk about Dennis as a person. A third speaker, the artist Roger Welch, said saw Lecture #1 as ironical, as a warning. Levine asked, “What do you think it’s about in his mind? Why choose that way to address this topic?” Welch suggested the work is a commentary on the artist’s lecture circuit and also being a performer. “If artworks are representative of the artist, how does this work represent Dennis?” It means that other people are pulling the strings.
As an experiment, Levine’s exercise would naturally yield unpredictable results. That said, the discussion might have been more interesting had he invited regular members of the audience to the table. Even if these other participants were not Oppenheim experts, their perspectives could have offered fresh ways of looking at the artist’s work and legacy. The good news is that the opportunity still exists.
In Terms Of count: 4
[1] For the complete text and an installation view of Lecture #1, see Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations (Milan, Charta, 2001), 172–73.
An Evening with Hal Foster
“The Art-Architecture Complex and The First Pop Age”
Monday, November 28, 2011
The Kitchen
The Kitchen invited Hal Foster, a historian, critic, and professor of art at Princeton University, to discuss his two recently published books. After an introduction by Tim Griffin, director and chief curator of the venerable institution, the soft-spoken Foster established the evening’s agenda: he would read from the books before being joined by Griffin (and then the audience) for a Q&A. The following narrative draws from both parts.
Hal Foster, Townsend Martin ’17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, consecrates his two new books (photograph by Ben Duhac)
The Art-Architecture Complex, Foster instructed, considers the relationship of image to building, of Pop design to the postmodern built environment. One might immediately think of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, as the quintessential convergence of image and art, but I immediately thought of how Milwaukee’s identity has been inextricably subsumed by Santiago Calatrava’s addition to the city’s art museum. The book’s first section examines three starchitects of the new global style—Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers—whose work promotes a “banal cosmopolitanism.” In its second part, the book looks at architects such as Zaha Hadid and Diller Scofidio + Renfro who are influenced by artists and by art history, and how their approach dovetails with the contemporary art museum. The third area explores how art has been transformed by the built environment, using figures like Richard Serra, Anthony McCall, Robert Irwin, and others responding to architecture. This final section, Foster revealed, revises his 1986 essay on “The Crux of Minimalism,” which appears in the excellent collection The Return of the Real (1996), which I read as an undergraduate.
Richard Serra’s sculptures in the Grand Palais in Paris grace the cover of Hal Foster’s The Art-Architecture Complex
The preface to The Art-Architecture Complex, which Foster read from while interjecting extemporaneous commentary, begins to explain two key concepts for the book: affect and phenomenology. Affect, sometimes called atmosphere, is an imposed feeling coming from elsewhere, whereas phenomenology concerns a body moving through a space that is having its own, unscripted experience. Recent architecture uses affect to seize experience from the person inside a structure, according to the author, while also warping the transparency of modernism, from its lofty ideals to its lightweight and glass building materials, into an obfuscatory encounter. During the Q&A an audience member accused Foster of creating essentialist categories—polarities also questioned by Rowan Moore in his book review in the Guardian—but Foster categorically denied her claim. Instead the schism is a “thought experiment,” a way to bracket or frame his arguments. Affect, he continued, imposes an emotional ideology that crosses class, racial, and other social divisions, not unlike, observed my companion to the talk, attempts at emotional manipulation as seen in Hollywood action or romance movies.[1]
These notions of images and affect—or at least the struggle between people and the larger cultural sphere surrounding them—connected the first book to the second, The First Pop Age, in which Foster positions five Pop painters who upheld the tableau tradition (Richard Hamilton, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter) as both canny experts and dialectical theorists, and not as “dupes of the media, its zombies in art,” as their detractors would have it. Consumer society conflates the fetishisms of commodities, sex, and semiotics, which Pop artists picked apart and handed back. Like the impatient fan of a mystery novel, the author read the last pages of The First Pop Age to the audience at the Kitchen.
No one, not even Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger, can escape the barrage of new Hal Foster books
Foster said he came to art through Pop and Minimalism, both of which interested him because the former movement dissolved the body, and the latter called for its presence. At the time, he admitted, Pop was too close, especially since it mightily informed the work of the Pictures generation.[2] Now he feels there’s more distance to study it. Though “committed to the Minimalist trajectory” for a long time, Foster began to understand elements of Pop in areas he had not considered before: in body art, installation, institutional critique, and other genres that traditionally sprang from the sculptural side of 1960s art. About Donald Judd he said: “I read the criticism but didn’t look too hard at the work.” Now he sees illusionism writ large, a pictorial unbound. “Pop has weirdly become the primary term.” Griffin and Foster mentioned the recent Judd show at David Zwirner Gallery, which had a correspondence with new media in the sense that both art and the internet alter our sense of space.
The reasons to become a critic or historian, Foster explained, are the same for an artist or architect: a discontent with the status quo.[3] He sees the aesthetic of Dia:Beacon or the Museum of Modern Art, which opened new buildings in 2003 and 2004 respectively, abandoned their original commitment to modernism in favor of affect. Dia:Beacon is a new sublime, he said, a new Hudson River School. The old attitude has evaporated in art, too, and the perversion in its place needs criticism and history to counter the spell of artists such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, who reverse the terms of Minimalism. Thus the pessimistic but hopeful Foster still insists on criticality as a value, but, he said,
Foster described The First Pop Age as an homage of sorts to Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), a text that took on the postwar image world through not only classic twentieth-century architects such as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, but also Futurist and Expressionist architects whom the modernist march of progress had previously cast aside. In this way Foster elucidated, Banham’s revision was a form of periodizing, distinct from historicizing. By looking backward, the older author posited that the postwar period had been experiencing a second machine age, using an approach not dissimilar, I think, from George Orwell’s commentary on his own era through a story set fifty years in the future. This second machine age was the world Foster was born into, one in which, he laughed, people optimistically believed that they might never die. Ars longa, vita brevis.
In Terms Of count: 11.
[1] Under the guise of their gallery, Famous Accountants, the New York–based artists Kevin Regan and Ellen Letcher recently experimented with what they called “affective technologies” with a similar idea in mind. Earlier this summer, at NURTUREart Gallery in Brooklyn, Regan and Letcher led five days of encounter groups based on exercises from Will Schutz’s posthippie, pre–New Age book Joy in order to automatically trigger emotional responses from participants. The program, a word that, not coincidentally, plays on the notion of “programming” in the nefarious sense, was called More Joy.
[2] Students come to Foster, he said, thinking he is an expert on Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and the rest. Even though he lived through the Pictures generation, he learns more about that art from his students, who can identify his blockages and assess the work to be done.
[3] In an amusing twist, Foster claimed that an artist’s value depends on his or her use by other artists, not unlike the important criterion for academics: the more other scholars cite your journal articles, the better your chances for tenure and promotion.
Further Reading
Read Benjamin Sutton’s review, “Art Historian Hal Foster at the Kitchen: ‘We Live in the Age of Trauma,’” of the same panel for the L Magazine.
Josephine Halvorson: On Her Work
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
New York Studio School of Painting and Sculpture
Phong Bui, Portrait of the Artist, 2011, graphite on paper, dimensions unknown (artwork © Phong Bui)
Josephine Halvorson’s manner of speaking—straightforward and lucid with modest confidence—corresponds directly to her intimate oil paintings depicting close-cropped scenes of outmoded factory machinery, walls and doors of seemingly abandoned buildings, and interior views of simple homes, such as a few books resting on a wooden shelf or an empty fireplace. In a recent review, the New York Times critic Karen Rosenberg called her work “rugged, deeply gratifying realism.”
Halvorson’s talk at the New York Studio School coincided with her excellent second solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, called What Looks Back. Taking the podium and adjusting her digital presentation, the artist mentioned that she had previously attended several talks in this very room, and thanked the comfortably full house for coming, despite tempting competition from a Jay-Z concert at Madison Square Garden taking place that same night. Hers was the standard artist’s talk, which she emphasized as a supplement to seeing the work in person or reading about it. Her simple aim was to describe how she works as an artist and how she came to paint the way she does.
As much as Halvorson’s work resists suitable verbal description, or at least strongly favors feeling over words, it is language, she believes, that frames the function of an object. It is also central to her work in another way, as she tries to instill into her students the idea that an artwork should speak for itself. To underscore this point, the artist showed a digital image of Sign Holders, the opening painting of her exhibition, and explained her interest in its absence of language. The work depicts two metal slots in which factory or train-yard workers would position signs, to be changed as often as needed.
Josephine Halvorson, Sign Holders, 2010, oil on linen, 40 x 30 in. (artwork © Josephine Halvorson)
As a painter, Halvorson is not in opposition to, or burdened by, the history of art. If fact, she often “bumps into it,” discovering the nineteenth-century American trompe-l’œil painter John F. Peto without intentionally seeking him. She readily admits a love for the work of Arthur Dove and Jasper Johns and acknowledges both an adherence to the traditional still life and a debt to its major figures, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Giorgio Morandi. Surprisingly, she also credits Roman frescoes as an influence.
Understanding a painting, Halvorson suggested, is actual and associative—what is it as an object, and what does it represent? In graduate school at Columbia University, she set up rebuslike scenes (A plus B equals C) in her studio to paint, a practice she has since abandoned. She has also given up the studio, choosing to work en plein air on a French easel. In this way, she said, her selection of things to paint follows the way of a photographer. Painting objects has remained consistent in her practice, but instead of their relationships adding up to a statement she calls attention to the complexity within a single one. These objects, possessing a “history waiting to be painted,” call out to her. After being painted, they look back. Making a picture that is an accurate representation is not her goal; she is instead interested in a confrontation. Finished in one sitting, the painting is a record of the time she spent with the object. Further, in plainspoken reflexivity, she said she appreciates being able to tell how a work of art, or an object, was made just by looking at it.
Several stories Halvorson told about how a few works in What Looks Back came about, including the “one that got away,” appear in the November 2011 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. In fact, much of the content of her lecture can thankfully be found in her interview with the paper’s publisher, Phong Bui. For the New York Studio School talk, she embellished her anecdotes by projecting snapshots taken during her travels, showing, for example, a canvas (Mine Site) propped into a rental car’s open hatchback because strong Death Valley winds broke her easel. Several photographs of her experience in an Icelandic slaughterhouse, manifested in Carcass, concluded with an earnestly silly shot of her and the slaughterhouse owner standing with the finished painting, not unlike something in a family photo album.
Josephine Halvorson, The Heat Inside, 2011, oil on linen, 38 x 30 in. (artwork © Josephine Halvorson)
Halvorson talked about her process, disclosing that she spends half her time mixing paint to find the right feel. “Color gives identity to form,” she said. The values in her colors remain consistent, which can sometimes be attributed to overcast days having the most even, consistent light. One audience member asked if, since Halvorson does not maintain a studio to paint, does she have a place to view the work. Yes, the artist replied, because curatorial preparations for her exhibitions go through at least two rounds of editing. The final selection represents all her interests, though she resists a strict narrative. She also wants to avoid redundancy. Someone asked about proximity. Halvorson works at arm’s reach, a conversational distance. The actual Sign Holders, though, were placed higher on a wall in real life. Perhaps, she wondered, a future installation of paintings could take distance into consideration. Last, Halvorson described the gestation process for her work, which can take days to years before she takes the creative plunge. In doing so, she realizes the inner work, the embodiment of preconceived ideas and feelings, using the language of painting.
In Terms Of count: o.
Richard Aldrich on Walter De Maria
Monday, October 10, 2011
Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Dia:Chelsea
The loquacious Richard Aldrich (photograph by Erin Goldberger)
Philippe Vergne wasn’t kidding when he introduced the evening’s speaker, the artist Richard Aldrich, by declaring, “A world of words is present in your work.” Vergne, director of the Dia Art Foundation since 2008, also stated that any one work by Aldrich, a painter who sometimes incorporates text into his spare canvases of splotchy colors and sketchy lines, contradicts the next. Each piece, continued Vergne, requires its own language.
Talking a mile a minute, Aldrich has plenty of words to spare. His presentation for the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, this time on Walter De Maria, a sculptor and composer best known for The Lightning Field (1977), was largely unscripted, though Aldrich occasionally referred to a written list of topics to cover but jumped frenetically from one idea to the next, often starting a new sentence without really finishing the previous one. The lecture wasn’t so much stream of consciousness as it was a machine-gun sputtering of thoughts. He kept up this relentless pace for about a half hour, a performance of sorts that reminded me of the opening lines of a song by the Fall: “I drank a jar of coffee, then I took some of these, and now I’m totally wired!”
Aldrich had worked for Dia in its exhibition space on Twenty-second Street from 1999 to 2004, initially as a guard before upgrading to the bookstore. His “graduate-school education” came during his time there, absorbing the images and texts that helped him to historicize art (he holds just a BFA). The following few paragraphs, which I constructed from my notes, do not attempt to provide a narrative but rather give a jumbled chronology of Aldrich’s ideas from the order in which they were received.
Richard Aldrich with white light (photograph by Erin Goldberger)
Aldrich claimed there are no books on De Maria except for the Dia one, and there’s also a CD containing Ocean Music (1968), which, as the title indicates, plays ocean sounds for thirteen minutes before fading into the artist’s drumming. For its companion piece, Cricket Music (1964), drumming begins the piece, transitioning into the sound of chirping crickets after a while. Fabricate the past because you don’t remember. De Maria was the original drummer for the Velvet Underground [it was actually a precursor band, the Druds, with Lou Reed and John Cale]. The Velvets and Sonic Youth, Aldrich claimed, are all the reasons a twenty-three-year-old needs to move to New York. He had a record label—which means he had about a thousand dollars to burn—with three or four releases already. De Maria was crazy about controlling photographs of his work, which is why you don’t see reproductions often. A snooping Dia Foundation polices his images on the internet.
Walter De Maria self-released Drums and Nature in 2000, but the disc is out of print
A while back Aldrich wanted to reissue the CD on his label, so he nervously called De Maria on the phone, with a script in hand to read. Barely a few words into his pitch, Aldrich heard the phone click dead. He almost didn’t call back but did, and De Maria told him, “I think I accidentally hung up the phone.” The older artist said that Aldrich should call him about the proposal again in a year, so he did, and then asked De Maria if he could write him a letter, which he did too but never heard back. The rerelease never came out.
With a warmth in his work unlike most Minimalists, De Maria comes up every couple years, changing Aldrich’s understanding of him. A case in point was when he recently discovered the yellow painting that was included in the legendary Earth Works exhibition at Virginia Dwan Gallery in New York. Its title is The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth (1968), according to a plaque affixed to an incredibly wide canvas. De Maria later made similar works in red and blue [in 2011]. He phoned in the Dwan work, which was painted not Caterpillar yellow but John Deere yellow.
Walter De Maria, The Statement Series: Yellow Painting/The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth, 1968, 7 x 20 ft. (artwork © Walter De Maria; photograph by George Hixson, Houston)
At this point Aldrich stalled, pressing a pen against his head before commenting randomly on Robert Morris’s gray plywood sculptures first shown in 1964: “Everyone knows what an L is. They know these objects.” Then Aldrich said, about the Yellow Painting, that it’s not the work that matters but the shift in understanding. Then he named a couple other works, such as The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany, and relayed his observation about the weird air and smell in The New York Earth Room (1977)—which Aldrich considers the quintessential earthwork and Minimal installation.
Vitamin P, a book published by Phaidon in 2002, was preinternet in a way, Aldrich proposed, with its vast collection of images. It made him think about the ways things look versus act versus function. It takes De Maria a long time to do things—this slowness breaks down the way art is digested.
“Does anyone have any questions about … anything?” he abruptly asked, shaking the audience from its spell. Someone wondered about De Maria supposedly never touching his work. Aldrich’s answer leaned on a fact he learned while reading the artist’s Archives of American Art interview, in which De Maria said his girlfriend was a fashion illustrator and that he wanted to emulate the lightness of her work. Aldrich saw the film Hardcore (1969) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “I don’t really have a record label anymore,” he joked. “I sold it for millions of dollars.”
The hidden part of De Maria’s work is time, or the potential for other things. The artist takes something so blatant and ignores it, like the sculpture at Dia:Beacon, with balls that roll within the shapes of a swastika, a cross, and a star. Skul is the name of Aldrich’s record label. He hilariously mistitled several De Maria’s pieces, especially The Kilometer Where You Can’t See It in Kassel. These delays and shifts in meaning—Aldrich needed help from elsewhere, like from those in the front row, who he looked to several times for answers.
Richard Aldrich, Automatic Drawing, 2011, oil, wax, and charcoal on linen, 84 x 58 in. (artwork © Richard Aldrich)
Another attendee asked Aldrich if he thinks De Maria is cultivating a persona, though not a false persona intended to deceive people. The speaker said he doesn’t know this, except that De Maria is soft spoken and calm. Aldrich briefly described the plot of Hardcore: it contained the camera zooming out from the close-up of a cow and two cowboys, played by De Maria and Michael Heizer, shooting guns at each other.
Walter De Maria: Trilogies is on view at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. In the spring, the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis hosted an exhibition of Aldrich’s work, called Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting, in which he displayed four works by older, historical artists next to his own. At the time of this lecture, Aldrich had paintings on view in New York in a solo show called “Once I Was…” at Bortolami Gallery, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened a survey of his work this month.
In Terms Of count: 0.
