In Terms Of

Tag: Diego Velázquez

  • I’ll Be Your Mirror

    Matthew Miller Artist Talk
    Saturday, November 15, 2014
    Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, New York

    Matthew Miller, Untitled, 2014, oil on wood panel, 48 x 32 in. (artwork © Matthew Miller)

    Matthew Miller’s work for the past five years has primarily involved naturalistic representations of his own unusually shaped, closely shaved head, usually with a neutral, enigmatic expression on his face. The Brooklyn–based artist talked about his paintings—oils on wooden panels executed in a painstaking old-master style—in front of a tight crowd at a gallery with a long, unwieldy name, Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia.

    Miller stated that Can’t You See It, I Am One, his solo exhibition that is on view through December 21, was his first opportunity to do a show as a unit. This presentation, he said, has four propositions; they take the form of five untitled paintings from 2014 (one proposition comprises two highly similar works) that hang from the eastern wall of the gallery. He read from a short statement about the subject of his work, written a few years ago for the magazine Comment, that got the conversation rolling:

    He isn’t looking at you. He’s looking at the picture-plane, the site of the methodological drama and the working space of painting. He is obligated to the spectatorial pretense of the portrait. The “black of portraiture” takes up the rest of the frame and, with its fact-of-the-surface application (a sign-painter’s), competes for presence. However, this black is cousin to the cinematic green-screen, or like the enchanting blackness of an open barn door at midday.1

    “Oddly enough, I still stand by most of that,” Miller said.

    El Greco, Portrait of a Sculptor, 1576–78, oil on canvas, 37 x 34 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    For this gallery talk he directed the audience’s attention to the largest work in the show, which shows the head and shirtless torso of a Caucasian man (Miller himself) standing next to a wooden beam, which has been chipped away by the chisel dangling from his right hand. The gallery’s press release compared the work to El Greco’s painting Portrait of a Sculptor (1576–78), which is said to depict Pompeo Leoni. A similar painting is Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan Martinez Montañés (ca. 1635), and you can probably find other canvases with a similar pose and conceit. It’s classic art history. (Similarly, another Miller work shows the artist with brush in hand, not unlike Judith Leyster’s famous self-portrait , one by Vincent van Gogh, and many others throughout the ages—only here Miller doesn’t actually depict himself painting anything.)

    Unlike many old masters, Miller wasn’t commissioned to paint his works. Rather he made them on spec for gallery display, not unlike most contemporary artists. It makes you wonder why he would labor for so long to make something depicting himself, rather than what might be pleasing to an art collector. “I do this with a great sense of self-awareness,” Miller said of his practice “not just show you that”—meaning, I think, the representational aspects of the image—but also to “take apart components of self-portraiture.” What is his relationship to the painted subject? “It’s a me-and-it thing,” he said. “He’s always the artist.”

    Surprisingly, Miller does not use a mirror while in the studio. “I just know how to paint this guy’s face,” he said, and tries not to stylize him. But because the facial expression is neutral, the artist said, it is “less legible” and “more complicated.” Indeed, it’s difficult to read the subject’s face, other than by eliminating expressions of affect—such as happiness, anger, or disgust—that are perceptibly implausible.

    Matthew Miller on the level (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Miller aspires for a “painted plausibility” across his oeuvre, he said, and aims to sustain a persona, an idea a few audience members expanded on, tossing out descriptions such as iconic and archetypal. It might be more interesting, however, to think of the figure in Miller’s paintings not as elevated or ideal but rather as anonymous, a characteristic that makes the portrait specific or singular but unknown. After all, if you didn’t know these were self-portraits, you’d wonder why the artist produced five paintings of the same peculiar-looking person. When and how does Miller become less the artist and more just a guy in a picture?

    Likeness and fidelity are important to Miller but not explicitly the point. For instance, the artist always leaves out the large, horseshoes-shaped scar on the right side of his actual head. Moreover, while comparing the five works at Pocket Utopia to images of earlier paintings, you plainly see how his treatment of the head and face changes from year to year, and not necessarily in a way that depicts the process or effects of aging. A Miller from 2014 differs from a Miller from 2012 or 2010.

    Miller explained the painting’s background: he had set out to sculpt a self-portrait but failed. After making forty drawings of the abandoned carving, which was on view in the gallery, he embarked on the painting. Miller called the wood piece a “philosophical object,” describing it in the same way someone would describe a scholar’s rock.

    Matthew Miller, Untitled, 2014, oil on wood panel, 24 x 16 in. each (artworks © Matthew Miller)

    An audience member asked about the “chiseled male body” in the image, comparing the human body to the carving, shaping, and molding of sculpture. Miller said there are “types that are empirically me” in his art but admitted that his younger brother modeled for the torso—the artist was uneasy about his own body for the painting. Later, while looking closely at the work, I noticed that the treatment of the chest is gauzy, while the hand and face are more naturalistically detailed. The block of wood is somewhere in between. The levels of verisimilitude vary and therefore are not evenly distributed in a composition, which is perhaps what Miller meant by his self-reflexive approach to self-portraiture.

    The talk and discussion lasted about a half hour, during which Miller gave away few secrets. One intriguing statement he made concerned the sturdy black background in most of his works, an opaque but reflective darkness that he identified as theoretical, metaphorical, and symbolic space. That black background fluctuates between an airless space to infinite depth, introducing substantial mystery into his work and raising a screen onto which a viewer’s ideas can be projected.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Matthew Miller, “Untitled,” Comment, April 21, 2011.

  • I Don’t Want No Retro Spective

    This essay is the third of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, fourth, and fifth texts.

    The Retrospective
    Monday, April 7, 2014
    Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
    Center for the Humanities
    Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

    Ed Ruscha, I Dont Want No Retro Spective, 1979, pastel on paper, 23 x 29 in. (artwork © Ed Ruscha)

    For artists, the solo exhibition reigns supreme. For curators, it’s the group show. From major events such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Whitney Biennial to curator-driven institutions like the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Witte de With in Rotterdam, and MoMA PS1 in New York, the authorial curator’s name has typically transcended the artworks on view (or so the story goes). While the art-publishing industry ceaselessly cranks out new books on curatorial issues—nearly always an edited, multiauthored tome—few critical studies have considered the theory and practice of showing the work of a single artist, which is perhaps the bread and butter of art museums worldwide. For the second session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” titled “The Retrospective,” one panelist presented a brief investigation into the history of the solo exhibition while two more offered case studies on atypical exhibitions of a contemporary artist.

    Exhibitions are generally categorized as solo, group, and collection, explained João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Foundation in Portugal, and scholars have typically historicized the group show. He cited key studies such as Ian Dunlop’s classic The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art (1972) and Bruce Altshuler’s massive two-book set, Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959 (2008) and Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 2: 1962–2002 (2013), as providing concise histories of the form.1 For curators, Ribas said, group exhibitions contribute to economies of reputation and curatorial prestige. Nevertheless, the “one-man show,” he acknowledged, has formats, methodologies, and conventions of its own: chronology, biography, connoisseurship, evaluation, and mediation (e.g., the purity of the artist’s voice, curatorial self-effacement). Ribas didn’t discuss collection shows, though I imagine that museum handbooks and guidebooks follow a conventional scholarly logic of highlighting the greatest hits of an institution.

    Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855, oil on canvas, 142 × 235 in (artwork in the public domain)

    Ribas’s preliminary research into the history of solo exhibitions started with Nathaniel Hone, an Irish artist who independently presented a satirical painting called The Pictorial Conjuror after the work’s rejection from the Royal Academy’s annual exposition in London in 1775. Ribas pinpointed the names of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European artists who had important solo and single-painting shows in public and private locations: John Singleton Copley, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne, among others. William Blake’s solo showing in 1809 had a visual and theoretical system, Ribas said, and Joshua Reynolds’s 1813 exhibition in London was organized for general symmetry and an overall pleasing effect. Further, Ribas noted that James Abbott McNeill Whistler designed interiors for his paintings and Paul Signac had formulated ideas about the ideal display of his work.

    Various nineteenth-century accounts described one-person exhibitions as commercial and career advancing, which was certainly true of Gustave Courbet, whom Ribas said purposefully identified a solo presentation of his work—housed in a temporary structure near the official Exposition Universelle of 1855, which featured more of his paintings—as an “exhibition,” not an “exposition,” to enhance the term’s arrogant commercial connotation. (The Painter’s Studio, pictured above, was among the highlights of Courbet’s independently produced exhibition, which he called The Pavilion of Realism.) Ribas reported that other sales tactics involved concepts of a good picture and the importance of an artist’s late work. He also mentioned how a retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work in Beijing in 1985 was highly influential to Chinese artists.

    Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald)

    Lewis Kachur, an art historian at Kean University and the author of the excellent book Displaying the Marvelous (2001), discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s “un-retrospective” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011–12, which Kachur characterized as a witty engagement with the career survey. The Italian artist was horrified, Kachur said, when the Guggenheim offered him a show. Cattelan proposed an all-or-nothing gambit: the museum had to display every work he has ever made. Despite his usurping of the curatorial role—the selection of objects would already be determined—the museum’s senior curator Nancy Spector agreed to the novel format. The show, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, had no chronology, theme, or choice: “It’s everything, it’s all,” Kachur said.

    As Cattelan “sweeps his work into the immediate present,” the overall effect of his oeuvre, which hung from the skylight down the center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, circumvented the individual contemplation of objects. Kachur enumerated various precedents of artists engaging the museum’s central atrium and surrounding architecture. Alexander Calder was the first to suspend work in the museum’s open space, in 1964, followed by various types of presentations by Jenny Holzer (1989), Dan Flavin (1992), Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen (1995), Nam June Paik (2000), Matthew Barney (2003), and Cai Guo-Qiang (2006). Cattelan claimed to have seen every show at the Guggenheim since 1993, when he moved to New York, and would have been aware of these installations. Kachur’s research into the subject, he admitted during the session’s Q&A, was limited to the published material on the exhibition—he hasn’t conducted visits to archives or interviews yet. Even so, the scholar’s trajectory looks promising.

    Installation view of Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (photograph by Benoit Pailley)

    Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, described her experiences planning a retrospective for Rosemarie Trockel. Allergic to the white box, this German artist prefers to show in institutions that challenge her. And because she values her studio time and wanted to spend less on exhibition administration, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos was conceived as a traveling show for multiple venues. Each iteration of the exhibition, though, did feature new and different elements. Cooke and Trockel elected to include art by her peers and objects important to the artist, as well as works by so-called outsider artists like James Castle, Manuel Montalvo, and Judith Scott. The Madrid show included eighteenth-century botanical drawings—and also their late-nineteenth-century transformations into exquisitely crafted glass objects—that all Spaniards know, Cooke said, just like they know the paintings of Diego Velázquez and El Greco.

    The two also took field trips together and considered past work, unfinished projects, and new projects. They didn’t write a list or set of goals—at least not at first. The show, Cooke said, developed organically, in an associative way. Despite such close collaboration, Cooke relayed that Trockel did not want to be identified as a cocurator for the show, but the Reina Sofía’s website credits both women as organizers. When A Cosmos landed at the New Museum in New York in 2012, my strongest reaction was that the show looked heavily curated, which may relate to Cooke’s discussion of the art historian Svetlana Alpers’s concept of the “museum effect” and of the differences between visual distinction and cultural significance.

    Lynne Cooke, Lewis Kachur, João Ribas, and Chelsea Haines survey the retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience Q&A, adeptly moderated by Chelsea Haines, a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, touched on concerns ranging from practical to absurd. Someone asked about a hypothetical exhibition that has neither artist nor curator, which Kachur called a “riderless horse.” Someone else brought up the idea of a curator’s “portfolio artist.” Sometimes our reception of individual artists, Ribas said, is shaped by their exhibitions, giving credit to Cooke’s past work with  Hannah Darboven and to the 1960s dealer Richard Bellamy’s framing of his artists.

    In Terms Of count: 10.

    1 I would add Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994) and Jens Hoffmann’s Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) to this list, though I’m sure there are many others.

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