In Terms Of

Tag: Mirror

  • 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.

  • The Air That I Breathe

    This essay is the fourth of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the first, second, and third texts.

    Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late
    The Koons Effect Part 2
    Friday, September 12, 2014
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York

    Jeff Koons, one of four Art Magazine Ads, 1988–89, offset lithograph on Simpson Ragcote paper, 38 x 29¼ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Concluding the two-day symposium on the work of Jeff Koons was a keynote address by the art historian Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By choosing a single decade—Crow’s talk was titled “Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late”—the scholar conveniently avoided discussing the artist’s work since the early 1990s, typically considered the divisive break between those who respect and loathe the artist, in particular when Koons exhibited his Made in Heaven series (1989–91). Indeed, in a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, one critic wrote, “Watching Koons between 1985 and 1992 was like being on a roller coaster, beholding the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty, and the ugliness of our culture.”1 Even the exhibition’s curator, Scott Rothkopf, skirted the later work in his catalogue essay “No Limits,” which analyzes Koons’s work up to Made in Heaven before defending the artist against the art market for the last half.2

    Crow’s delivery was slow, calm, assured, and never overbearing; his modest confidence was almost fatherly. He began his talk by discussing three artworks typically understood as “distant from Koons” but with “corresponding and congruent” ideas. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65), a sculpture comprising water inside a Plexiglas cube that responds to an exhibition’s environment, becoming “a living organism that reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings.” Condensation Cube, Crow noted, can exist in the three chemical phases of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—depending on its physical conditions. Crow returned to the notion of phases, and to elements such as air and water, and also to conceptual, representational, and literal phases of imagery, several times during his talk.

    The second predecessor work was Andy Warhol and Billy Klüver’s Silver Clouds (1966), consisting of helium- and oxygen-filled balloons made from Mylar film, “a still very novel DuPont product,” Crow said, that was used by NASA for the first communication satellite, Echo 1, launched in 1960. The third work was unfinished: Gordon Matta-Clark’s made drawings for an airborne structure of his own; he even corresponded with the American businessman Gilmore Schjeldahl, the inventor of Mylar film and the creator of Echo 1, circa 1977, during his research. Matta-Clark’s project was concurrent with Koons’s earliest works, The Inflatables (1978–79). “These two projects,” Crow said, “while coincidental in time, manifest vastly different scales of endeavor and intended effects on their audiences.” Unlike Matta-Clark, Koons avoided engineering problems by purchasing his materials—mirrored squares and plastic toys—off the shelf.

    Thomas Crow speaks right on time (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Moving to Koons’s series The New (ca. 1980–83), for which Koons entombed out-of-the-box vacuum cleaners in upright Plexiglas coffins, Crow asked, “Why choose vacuums in the first place?” While many would offer “commodity fetishism” as an answer, he argued that these machines signify “tiresome, disagreeable, and never-ending work.” With a design basically unchanged since World War II, Crow said, vacuum cleaners are simply not seductive. When the machine’s power is switched on and off, its bag inflates and deflates, just like a pair of lungs. “The mental enterprise of reconciling the fantasy of immortality—being forever new—with the fragility of actual life is not something that Jeff Koons invented,” he explained. “To the massive contrary, it comes close to a core definition of the whole symbolic dimension of human culture.” For Crow, Koons’s work is about mobility and stasis and the contradiction between the mortality of humanity and the idea of perfection that people over the centuries have attributed to gods and demigods. “Needing a tool,” Crow remarked, “doesn’t make you a commodity fetishist.”

    Crow argued that Koons’s populist touch surfaced in the three distinct bodies of work in the Equilibrium series (1985), which included the cast bronzes of the inflatable lifeboat and snorkel, the floating basketballs in glass tanks, and the appropriated Nike posters. The bronze works are hollow—the air is trapped inside. The poster of Darrell Griffith (a.k.a. Dr. Dunkenstein) featured dry ice (a carbon dioxide that skips the liquid phase) rising from bisected basketballs, and the poster of Moses Malone boasted a dry seabed. Crow noted the racial tension inherent/embedded in professional basketball, in which white fans deify the unfathomably natural talent of black players. These revelations arrived relatively late in the artist’s career, the scholar said, but he seized them. The posters in particular, Crow stated, “must have confirmed the artist even more deeply in his sense of the rightness of his sculptural intuitions.”

    Thomas Hoepker, 1989. Jeff Koons with collection of his sculptures in New York, 1989, archival pigment print, 18 x 24 in. (photograph © Thomas Hoepker)

    Crow briefly discussed works from the Luxury and Degradation series (1986), which showcased “anonymous drinking artifacts” used in “suburban Bacchic rites,” and from Banality (1988), for which vernacular and religious images were enlarged to ridiculous proportions using the means of Old World craft. Entering the 1990s, the critical tide, which had been on Koons’s side until then, turned against him. It was acceptable, art historically speaking, for Koons to employ bronze casting and fabricate Minimalesque cases Koons used for The New and Equilibrium. But, it seems, the pornography of Made in Heaven was rejected. In 1994, Koons turned to air and matter again in the Celebration series (1994–2014), whose works featured thin, liquid membranes such as balloons. Unlike a heat-sealed plastic rabbit, a balloon is expansive, and its surface becomes thinner when blown with more air

    From the audience, the artist Josiah McElheny asked Crow how today’s Koons squares against 1980s Koons. During a Flash Art panel in 1986, Crow replied, Koons was a twentysomething artist who wanted to be taken seriously at the time.3 Is that just as much an act, McElheny wanted to know, as the self-help affirmation guy that Koons has become? During the symposium, McElheny noted, panelists perceived the fun in Koons’s act as a portal into dark, uncomfortable places—and, like many other thinkers, one should not take Koons’s words at face value. “He’s speaking through his art in a way that’s quite transparent,” argued Crow, “and that goes against the grain of the things he generally says.” Topics such as the quest, danger, and allegory, as well as supernatural personification, were historically the domain of fine art, Crow said, but have since been suppressed in modern times. Now we find these ideas in astrology columns and young-adult fiction. Echoing the artist Carol Bove’s position from last night’s panel, Crow wondered aloud, “Where myth has gone to live now that we don’t feel we believe in this anymore?”

    Buster Keaton on Palm Sunday (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Another audience member asked, “Where is Mike Kelley in this?” After a moment of flabbergast at the momentous nature of the question, Crow responded, “Kelley is honest. He’s always honest.” Kelley and his admirers, the scholar continued, share an intellectual ambition and an educational influence, as well as a desire for mythic, emotional expressions but not in a high-minded way. According to Crow, Kelley “had to debase to get to affirmation.” The artist Stephen Prina recalled that Kelley worried about the psychoanalytical aspect of stuffed animals: because people understood these objects to reference the artist’s own past, Kelley became scientific and conceptual about their display, putting them on tables like specimens. Prina concluded the digression: “I’ve only become worried about infantilism as an adult.”

    In Terms Of count: 7.

    1 Jerry Saltz, “Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds,” New York, June 25, 2014.

    2 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 15–35.

    3 The panel discussion was moderated by Peter Nagy and comprised Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe, Peter Halley, and Ashley Bickerton. See David Robbins, ed., “From Criticism to Complicity,” Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986): 46–49.

    Read

    Elizabeth Buhe, “Blowing Up the Koons Effect,” IFA Contemporary, September 25, 2014.

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