In Terms Of

Tag: Painting

  • Make American Art Great Again

    “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art” with James Little
    Wednesday, November 15, 2017
    Lunchtime Lecture Series, Art Students League, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, New York

    James Little (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience gathered in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery of the Art Students League, a midtown Manhattan art school founded in 1875, was mostly middle-aged folks and senior citizens, with a scattering of younger people who were probably students. They arrived to see and hear James Little, an abstract painter and professor, give a lunchtime talk. I was unaware of him prior to the event—I did not know if he was a critic, an artist, or some other art professional before showing up. Born in Tennessee in 1952, Little earned his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art in 1974 and two years later received an MFA from Syracuse University. June Kelly Gallery has shown his work since the late 1980s.

    Today’s wordily titled topic, “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art,” felt like a time warp—meaning Little’s complaint was decades old. He characterized the current situation of contemporary art critics as a decline of quality that he likened to an “unedited book.” Critical debate, he claimed, has diminished since Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), Hilton Kramer (1928–2012), and Robert Hughes (1938–2012) were actively writing. An attitude of confusion was manifest in the most recent Whitney Biennial, he said, which included a 2016 artwork by Dana Schutz, whom he referred to as “Schultz,” that caused a controversy. Protesters accused Schutz, a white woman, of playing around with—and profiting from—the suffering of African Americans. “There was a big uproar about the fact that she did a painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket,” Little said. “The whole time, nobody said anything about the quality of the work. It was never mentioned…. What I recognized was that the critics weren’t stepping up, the artists weren’t stepping up, and we were just accepting this, accepting what they were feeding us, with no debate, with no criticism.” Little’s speaking style avoided complete sentences or thoughts. The supporting arguments behind his statements lacked substance.

    Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, oil on canvas, 39 x 53 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    I was puzzled and wondered how much reading Little had done on the controversy. Coco Fusco avoided the topic of quality in a Hyperallergic essay, focusing instead on censorship. Calvin Tomkins, though, noted the “deftly brushed colors at the top” of the painting in his New Yorker profile last April. Elsewhere in the long read Tomkins wrote, “The horror is conveyed in painterly ways that, to me, make it seem more tragic than the photograph, because the viewer is drawn in, not repelled.” A New Republic piece by Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye compared the painting’s formalism with its subject matter; it also contextualized Open Casket within Schutz’s oeuvre, noting the artist is not known for her solemnity. These three examples are the first ones I read while writing this review. If I had followed up with dozens more articles on the subject, I’d surely uncover further discussion of the painting’s formal qualities. Little declared that criticism is essential, that it improves art, provides direction for artists, and even offers them something to resist. Criticism can only do these things if a person reads it, which Little seems not to have done. I wondered if he actually saw Schutz’s painting in person instead of online.

    Chris Ofili’s painting Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in the traveling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, provoked New York’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani to call for censorship and defunding. “Nobody talked about the quality of that painting,” Little exclaimed. “Nobody said whether it was a good painting or a bad painting. Or if it was despicable. They didn’t say that. He made the guy famous. And that’s my point.” Later during the Q&A, Little agreed with an audience member that if Schutz had the skills, fewer people would have complained. “Dana Schultz was one of shock value. And she got it. She was in the right place to get shock value, and she got it in the Whitney. If she was a better painter, it could have been different. If it had been something, a personal experience of hers, it could have been different.”

    The matter of a white woman painting a lynched black boy had little to do with the work. For Little, closeness to the subject matter is important. That an artist needs to experience his or her subject matter firsthand is an odd stance to take, considering that few painters in the Italian Renaissance witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the beheading of John the Baptist. Maybe Little meant that an artist depicting current or recent events should bear witness to them, implicating an early text-based work by the artist Glenn Ligon, who riffed on the “I am a man” posters created in the wake of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, which Little lived through as a teenager—though his recollection of basic facts of the event were faulty in several important ways. Nevertheless, Little was there but the appropriator was not, and therefore Ligon trivialized the situation.

    Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864, oil on canvas, 29 7/8 x 60 3/8 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Little paired a slide of Open Casket with a work by Mary Cassatt—the first in a series of comparisons of art influenced by pop culture, the media, consumerism, and novelty (which was bad) with art connected to tradition (definitely a good thing). Contrasted here next were Paul Cézanne’s apples and Carl Andre’s bricks, then Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864). Little showed an installation of rocks by Joseph Beuys called The End of the Twentieth Century (1983–85) and a painting from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series (1890–91). Little wondered how we got from one to the other without any critical debate, positive or negative. Once again, I was perplexed about this alleged dearth of debate. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the evolution modern art. Bringing this specific painting by Manet was confusing. The artist had painted a bull in the picture, but critics wrote that it looked like a rat. Manet cut down the canvas and saved only the bullfighter. Does Little support critics having the power to force an artist drastically alter even a finished and exhibited painting?

    Little periodically read passages from the writings of Greenberg, Kramer, and Hughes—critics whom the art world generally recognizes as having conservative views. The quotes were meant to buttress the artist’s “I am not a Duchampian” stance. Fair enough. Not every artist should embrace the readymade. Little further articulated his position: “I don’t think idea is enough to constitute art. I think art has to have vision, content—emotive content. It has to serve a purpose to humanity. It’s essential for our spiritual and mental health.” For Little, Andre is minor art, and “minor art is not major art.” Minor art that proliferates today is evidence of a cultural decline. “When art gets better, everything else gets better.” In other words, the relationship of art to life is a matter of trickle-up economics.

    Jacob Lawrence, panel 35 of The Migration Series: They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, 1940–41, casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (artwork © Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation)

    Little said he felt nothing upon seeing Duchamp’s urinal or Beuys’s Felt Suit in a museum, but he marveled at Manet’s fallen bullfighter. “I had an aesthetic experience,” he said of his episode. “What I mean by aesthetic experience is the experience that you have when you see a great piece of art. It’s a life-changing thing.” Little’s definition of the aesthetic experience was wholly subjective, even tautological. You not only know it when you see it, but it’s completely explains itself. “Rembrandt is Rembrandt” was what Little stated to demonstrate the self-evidence of greatness. Art “has to offer something,” he continued. “It has to enrich my life and my experience in order for it to be art. It has to give me something I didn’t have in the first place. It has to take me further along in this journey.”

    The three photographs comprising Ai Weiwei’s action Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) fail to meet his criteria for art, but paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941) do. Lawrence’s paintings speak for themselves as art, Little said, through a connection to the past, their color and composition, and their narrative. “An idea alone does not create an aesthetic experience,” Little reiterated. “An idea alone does not create art.” Little was agog at why Ai would drop a two-thousand-year-old Chinese vase, when a quick Google search would have turned up the answer. Sometimes an artwork doesn’t reveal itself immediately. Don’t we check the museum wall label to see who the subject of a portrait is? Does the iconography of ancient sculpture of Egypt or the Americas reveal itself to a nonspecialist? It needs interpretation.

    Cady Noland, Industry Park, 1991, zinc-plated steel chain link fence, 100¼ x 216 x 3 in. (artwork © Cady Noland; photographer unknown)

    I sympathize with Little’s disbelief that a destructive act can be creative. I agree that rigorous formal training is a necessary precursor for a certain kind of artist—but not all artists. What puzzles me is how Little started the lecture by lamenting critical discourse, but then began condemning art he doesn’t like and pleading for a return to reason. I understood where he was coming from but failed to grasp a coherent argument. A photograph of Cady Noland’s Industry Park (1991), which consists of an unaltered chain-linked fence displayed in a gallery, was projected onto the screen beside him. People don’t see their lives improved by this art, he said. Art needs rigor to make. “We can no longer allow for the public to feed us stuff that we don’t understand, or don’t really matter to us in our daily lives.” Description, novelty, and consumerism has infiltrated criticism, and Little finds the writing of Robert C. Morgan, Karen Wilkin, Mario Naves, and James Panero to alleviate this. Is it because they praise art he likes and denounce art he hates?

    A chain-linked fence does not reach the masses, Little remarked during the Q&A. Noland’s work does not provide an aesthetic experience. It’s only utilitarian. The Art Students League has provided traditional artistic training for decades, he reminded the audience, educating Jackson Pollock, Louis Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. “We can’t throw this [tradition] out the window, you know, because somebody decides they want to go out here and take a chain-linked fence and put it up in the Museum of Modern Art. And we look at it like it’s some, you know, revelation. No, it’s not a revelation! That’s what I’m saying! I’m gonna go get me a chain-linked fence when I leave here, and I’m gonna put it in my backyard. Is there any difference? Well maybe it’s Earth art.” Little has seen art exhibitions of trash swept into a corner—a clichéd insult that is ironically based on real life—and a room full of grocery carts. (Could the latter show be Josh Kline’s recent solo outing at 47 Canal?) Little admitted he was a conservative formalist, which he confidently understands as meaning “I know what I’m doing.” He obviously demands high craft and skill from artists, who make their work by hand, with a vision, and a sense of history. Further, Little feels he belongs more to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the twenty-first. He does not make art for himself but rather is concerned what others think and feel about it, including his fellow artists.

    An audience member speaks during the Q&A (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the Q&A an audience member asked about the connection between Rembrandt and Pollock. Thomas Hart Benton, Little replied, served as the lineage of formal training, which includes studying classical art and knowing the figure. “Where [Pollock] took it was another place.” Pollock had “developed a relationship with the medium” of paint and expressed himself through paint. Rembrandt was connected to Titian, El Greco, and Leonardo. “Look, if you gonna built a house, would you build it without a foundation? I guess not.” Someone else argued that Duchamp and Beuys attempted a dialogue with the past. “What you just said is right on,” replied Little. “They were trying to do that. I’m saying that they didn’t do it…. The others, they weren’t trying to do it—they did it.” Little returned to Beuys’s Felt Suit. “When I walk past this suit, at the Walker Art Center, it did not do anything for me. That’s just the way it is. It just didn’t do anything for me.” The work presented a conundrum. “Why is this here?” he wondered. “Why is there not an outcry against this art? Critics have failed us. I pray for another Clement Greenberg, and Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes. I pray for it because we don’t get that.” Little contented that we have failed to uphold standards. That “we” includes artists, scholars, curators, museum professionals, and the public. Little was not surprised that art mocking middle-class values has found an audience among the wealthy elite who fund art museums and serve on their boards. One attendee remarked, “Whose interest does that serve?” The lecture thankfully ended before a discussion of collecting practices began.

    Earlier this year Bomb interviewed Little for the magazine’s Oral History Project. “His paintings are guided by intuitive responses to form, color, and feeling,” LeRonn P. Brooks wrote in his introduction to the piece. “This approach is not overly calculated, though its complexity may suggest so.” Little was interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail in 2009 and profiled by ARTnews in 2011. In the latter, he described his process in detail, describing how he applies layers of paint (made from powdered pigment and mixed with varnish and beeswax) to his surfaces to produce a high sheen. Though I disagree with most of what he said, Little’s views did not put me off. In fact, I am curious to see his paintings in person, to understand why he believes the things he does and how his vision for art manifests itself in his own production. I don’t wish to persuade him of accepting the value of Duchamp, Beuys, and Noland. How he feels about his own art is of greater interest and importance.

    In Terms Of count: coming soon.

  • Running in Circles

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Olivier Mosset in Conversation with Marie Heilich
    Wednesday, November 18, 2015
    Parapet/Real Humans, Saint Louis, MO

    The speakers, from left: Marie Heilich, Olivier Mosset, and Amy Granat (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Olivier Mosset was in town for the opening of his exhibition at Parapet/Real Humans, a project space run by Amy Granat in a storefront in the Fox Park neighborhood of Saint Louis. On view was a framed set of four lithographs of two thick black stripes on a square of white paper. The set, it turns out, was made for a Swiss Institute benefit in 2004. Granat said the work reminded her of September 11—I suppose any two vertical lines will do that. The artist compared them to an optometrist’s vision test. As someone who can’t see six inches past his nose without glasses or contacts (and who never skips his annual eye-doctor visit), that made more sense.

    With long gray hair and a long gray beard, Mosset easily looked the part of a sixties Euroactivist and biker outlaw—he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since the mid-1990s. His interviewer was Marie Heilich, assistant director of White Flag Projects in Saint Louis, a slender brunette with bangs, dressed in all black and armed with an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College. Mosset’s talk—a rare speaking engagement for him, we were told—was largely a monologue. Heilich made intermittent comments and Granat, who was operating a smartphone that projected slides of the artist’s work on the wall beside the speakers, jumped in every so often.

    Heilich encouraged Mosset to revisit his early years, so he gave a brief history of BMPT, a group of four European artists (Mosset with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni) that came together in 1966. “The idea was to question what gives value to painting,” Mosset said, targeting uniqueness, personal expression, and color as culprits. His conception of art, however, began changing a few years earlier, when Mosset had been floored by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw at Kunsthalle Bern in 1962. “This was in,” he recalled his excitement, “This was happening.” Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), the sculpture of a shaggy taxidermied goat stuck in a car tire, “was quite a shock—is this art?” But Mosset still had classical modernism on the brain, as he twice emphasized the painted nature of Piet Mondrian’s work, declaring that reproductions of it are nothing like the real things. Though he wasn’t familiar with Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art at the time, he acknowledged an affinity with them. I got the sense that Mosset is unburdened by tradition, not antagonistic toward it. Give painting autonomy, he even said at one point.

    Olivier Mosset, Sans titre, 2004, suite of four lithographs on Rives, 200 x 200 cm (artwork © Olivier Mosset; photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For Mosset, Rauschenberg taking home the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, marked the end of the importance of Paris, where he had moved two years before, at age eighteen. Previously the French avant-garde consisted of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, and others. BMPT reacted against that group’s preferred materials: found objects and rubbish. Earning notoriety after its first event, BMPT was invited to participate in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where the artists painted their works—Buren’s stripe, Mosset’s circle, Parmentier’s fold, and Toroni’s brush mark—during the opening, not in advance. (They subsequently withdrew from the exhibition the next day.) At that and other events they projected slides, played audiotapes announcing “art is the enemy of freedom” and “art is the enemy of presence,” among other statements, and handed out their propaganda pamphlets. “Ideas are the art, not the paintings,” Mosset declared. Audiences soon came to recognize each member’s signature style, so the four agreed to do each other’s work.1 Mosset began painting stripes and later introduced color: gray stripes on white, then green on white, then white on color, and so on. After that he made monochromes (more specifically, they are single-hued paintings).

    Mosset continued his monologue, which by this point felt like someone reading a Wikipedia article—it was all factual recollection in a dry tone. Even in Paris, he said, people were talking about New York, so he traveled there in 1967, where he met Andy Warhol. After moving to the city ten years later, he sought out the painter Marcia Hafif after she wrote an essay on contemporary painting called “Beginning Again,” published in Artforum in 1978. With her and Joseph Marioni, he formed the New York Radical Painting group, which had exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1983 (New Abstraction) and at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984 (Radical Painting). Mosset also got hip to a newer scene of artists, including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Mosset worked with John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Steven Parrino, and Cady Noland, but the artist barely mentioned these collaborations during tonight’s talk.

    BMPT, Manifestation 1, January 3, 1967, 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. From right to left: Michel Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni (photograph ©Bernard Boyer)

    Mosset affably stated that he has no strategy, does what he wants, and cannot control trends. “I’m basically interested in abstract painting,” he said, and somehow people are attracted to what he does. Heilich questioned him about his social and flexible practice, in which he diminishes his own authorship (evident, for example, in his work with BMPT), but Mosset construed the question differently. “The art practice is very selfish,” he responded, and exhibitions involve a community. “It’s personal when you do it; it’s social when you show it.” Mosset believes the gallery gives you the distance to see your work differently.

    During the Q&A, an audience member inquired about the meditative nature of his circle paintings that, she conjectured, might signify emptiness or completeness. Mosset deflected this impression and said he was thinking of the shapes found in works by Johns and Kenneth Noland, which have formalist, not symbolic, meanings. (He also recognized that he did invent the circle.) The questioner asked him if the circles got better and better as he made more of them. Yes, he replied with a smile, but they were still the same.

    Heilich asked, “Do you see any contemporary approaches that stand out to you, for better or worse?” He didn’t identify any artists or styles but instead considered the differences between then and now. “At the time in Paris, we could react against what was happening, whereas today, I don’t know exactly what you can react against. It’s a different era.” And who else to blame but the internet. A younger audience member argued that “artists will always respond to each other, and to each other’s work, but that kind of clear dialogue [from the sixties], I don’t think it’s actually possible now.” Today everyone has a voice and a platform, she continued, but with equity that voice is minimized. Mosset agreed—there are now more artists and more information. I feel sorry for them, overwhelmed by online communications, and am sure artists from forty to fifty years ago probably had the same anxieties about their own ballooning art world. The audience member was relieved that artists are becoming activists again. Culture is important, Mosset chimed in, especially after the recent terrorist attack in Paris.

    The audience at Parapet/Real Humans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Earlier Heilich had observed that Mosset’s practice—producing circles, stripes, and singular colors—united painting and the readymade in the same object. This idea made sense at the moment but unraveled the more I thought about it. His practice is actually artisanal and small batch, not mass production, and analogous to someone like Gilbert Stuart, whose cranked out 130 versions of the Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “A second painting might be a repetition,” Mosset said in a recent interview, “but it can never be a replica.”2 You can’t help but admire the audacity of painting the same type of picture for years, if not decades, while at the same time pity the paucity of ideas.

    Trying to vary the topics, Granat asked about Mosset’s interest in motorcycles, which he collects, rides, and occasionally exhibits with his paintings. While such lines of inquiry did not lead to interesting discussion, the effort was appreciated. And while I enjoyed hearing from an artist whom I have not previously studied, I was disappointed with the light moderation—Mosset did not get into much detail about the meaning of his work and with art itself. It seemed as if Heilich was too timid (or just too polite) to cross-examine this art-historical figure about any radical ideas he has or might have had, or to find out what makes him produce what appears to be redundant or complacent work.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Olivier Mosset made circle paintings from 1966 to 1974. Daniel Buren obviously never stopped with the stripes.

    2 Sara Stephenson, “Collaborative Reduction: Q+A with Olivier Mosset,” Art in America, February 10, 2011.

  • Critical Conditions

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Fields and Praxes: Dino Zrnec and Marko Marković in Conversation
    Tuesday, October 20, 2015
    Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY

    The Serbian sculptor Marko Marković has expressed an interest in museum conservation departments and in the process of finding, restoring, and preparing objects for exhibition. For him, the final display is as much the work of archeologists and conservators as it is the labor of artists, artisans, and curators. In addition, Marković is not a fan of the normal exhibition catalogue for an artist, with an art historian or curator explaining the art. He would rather provide a fictional document for audiences to follow, to create something believable beyond the contemporary artist’s professional requirements to present work in galleries, to create a portfolio website, and to give talks.

    Marko Marković speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During a lecture at Residency Unlimited, Marković read a written paper while projecting images behind him. His tale started with Jeffrey Horowitz, a University of Oregon professor, who in 1985 made an accidental discovery during an excavation at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Horowitz—who may or may not be a real person—found documentation for an unfinished architectural work or broken pieces of an artwork—it’s hard to take in everything. The folder also contained a ninth-century Asian book of geometry and conflicting inventories (from 1864 and 1878) of an archaeological dig in which the Kritios Boy, also known as Acropolis 698, was discovered. Side by side Marković showed two vintage-looking photographs of identical piles of sculpture, except that one included the Kritios Boy among the rubble, and the other omitted the statue. Unless you are a scholar of archaic Greek art, it was impossible to know which image was digitally altered.

    Continuing the tale, Marković highlighted a second, more recent archaeological discovery, in 2013 in Ebla, Syria, by scholars at the University of Sapienza. A clay sculpture of a nude torso was unearthed, conserved, scanned three dimensionally, cast in plaster, and exhibited a year later. Through Greek in origin, Marković said, the work had a different stylistic appearance: hard edges instead of smooth curves. This second find was actually Marković’s own sculpture. His elaborate backstory—with real and invented facts and using found and Photoshopped images from the nineteenth century, the 1980s, and today—creates a specific way to view the work. In a later conversation, he told me that, unlike other acts of parafiction in art, his discrete sculptural creation is the primary focus, not the narrative that accompanies it.

    Pieces of painted drywall by Dino Zrnec at Galerija Galženica (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Marković’s talk was followed by a presentation by the Croatian painter Dino Zrnec, who articulated his primary interests: the conditions of display and experimental processes. Zrnec showed documents of recent exhibitions at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria and Galerija Galženica in Velika Gorica, Croatia. For the latter, he transported rectangular sections of drywall—one had white acrylic paint on it, and another had white oil paint—from his studio and leaned them on the wall. He also removed a square piece of ceiling board and stretched a canvas over it, again leaning it. These material explorations remind me of what Robert Ryman and Gedi Sebony have been doing in New York. Zrnec took a similar approach in Graz. The exhibition’s curator, Katia Huemer, wrote:

    The interventions Zrnec employed in order to engage the existing structure were at once minimal and ruthless: the artist cut various shapes out of the wooden panels in the walls of the project space, stretched fabric over them, then inserted the cut-out shapes back into the incised hole. The front of the resulting canvas disappeared into the wall, leaving only a few visible hints that the “actual artwork” was hidden behind it.

    While visiting museums in New York and Philadelphia, Zrnec paid attention to how art is displayed, noting how the raised platform on which Robert Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959) rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art adds a sixth step to a five-rung ladder that is part of the work. (He is not the only one to notice the plinth.) Such curatorial maneuvers could be considered a slight shift in authorship, and Zrnec said he is thinking of ways to cannibalize the work of another artist for his next exhibition.

    Dino Zrnec, 23:30–11:13, 2013, plastic tumblers and oil on canvas, 50 x 35 cm (artwork © Dino Zrnec)

    Zrnec recounted another exhibition, which took place in an abandoned post-office building in Croatia, where he showed several paintings that had created themselves—almost. He poured turpentine in plastic cups that held surplus paint, placed them on a canvas on the floor, and left the studio. Coming back the next morning, he set the finished painting upright. Here the act of creation takes place while the artist is somewhere else.

    Both artists were on a two-month residency in New York after capturing the annual award for emerging artists in their home countries: Marković won the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award in July, and Zrnec received the Radoslav Putar Award in June. Eriola Pira, program director of the Young Visual Artists Awards, which administers the awards from the United States, joined the two for a conversation.1 She asked about the award’s meaning, but neither artist made an effort to provide a sufficient answer. Zrnec felt it was important for artists under 35 to come to New York, and Marković expects a stay in the city to “raise the level of my practice.” These responses, along with the tenor of their individual presentations, attested to a tight-lipped, unforthcoming attitude. Were Zrnec and Marković elusiveness by personality or unsure of their English language skills? Were they holding their cards close? This was frustrating at times because their conceptually oriented work demands explication

    Pira’s question about developing new artistic languages stalled. “I still think there are some possibilities within painting,” Zrnec replied. “That’s why I am practicing painting.” Marković declared that works are usually unfinished and not always bound by the exhibition. “Every project continues,” he said. “It takes time to develop” The geometric sculptural models he designs on the computer are not always built, but sometimes he draws these virtual objects on a wall or creates videos for projection. His answer made me wonder if he will deliver his Kritios Boy lecture again, with additions or changes to the story.

    Eriola Pira pulls the teeth of Marko Marković and Dino Zrnec (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Both artists articulated a strong attachment to their chosen medium—painting and sculpture—and downplayed the significance of installation, even though the exhibition space plays a crucial role in their work. For Zrnec, the meaning of his work is cumulative as it moves from the studio to the gallery and beyond. “If I were to show [my paintings] in a new space, I would transform them,” Zrnec said, “and they would become something else.” Pira prodded him further: “Your work has been described as performative. Do you agree with that?” With the paintings made with plastic cups in mind, Zrnec replied, “It’s me but it’s not me.” He reiterated his interest in situational qualities: “I always try to experiment with these very technical processes, and to think of the conditions of the work.” He also relayed a story about the limitations of studio space: “I had this small room and I wanted to make a big painting. So I decided to cut really big canvases, but I would stretch them around smaller stretchers … fold them like a very random item, a t-shirt. And then I would paint them from all sides, in different monochromes.” A single canvas might be painted while on several different sized stretchers, achieving a provisional quality. Such a painting could potentially fit over a sofa, a love seat, or a La-Z-Boy, depending on your needs.

    Marković was prompted to describe a recent exhibition with his twin brother, which focused on the Serbian architect Nikola Dobrović’s masterwork, the Ministry of Defense building, destroyed in a NATO air strike in 1999. The Markovićs had separate rooms: a project for the restoration of the building for his brother (an architect), and a room for the artist’s six-foot plaster cube made from a single modular unit in plaster, cast from an outside wall of the defense building. Marković stacked the pieces to form the work and in one corner broke a hole to allow viewing of the interior. “For an antimodernist,” Pira commented, “you rely a lot on the grid.” Marković reminded her that Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Grids” emphasized the ambivalence or irrationality of the grid.

    Painting in commercial galleries in New York has not impressed Zrnec. There are not so many painters back home, he said, and art institutions have their own agendas. Though Conceptualism and performance are the dominant postwar trends in the former Yugoslavia, he feels an affinity for Croatian artists from forty years ago. “Most of the Conceptual artists had brushes in their hands at one point in the sixties [and] seventies,”

    “Is the construction of a work the discover of it?” an audience member asked Marković toward the conversation’s close, adding, “You’re discovering what was already there.” While he didn’t quite answer affirmatively, a good way to interpret his work is as an archaeology of the future. And it’s promising that two artists are exploring strategies of presentation that are artistic in nature, not curatorial.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 I served on the jury that selected Dino Zrnec as the winner of the Putar award in June 2015. I also conducted studio visits with both artists two days after this talk.

  • The Body, Unrestrained

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Art Talk: Clarity Haynes
    Tuesday, October 13, 2015
    Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

    Willem de Kooning, Two Women in the Country, oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas, 46⅛ x 40¾ in. (artwork © Willem de Kooning Foundation)

    It was Willem de Kooning who once remarked, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”1 For artists from Peter Paul Rubens to Jenny Saville, this assertion is incontestable—there is no better way to portray human skin in the medium. De Kooning also said that “beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.”2 The visual thrashing ones sees in the Abstract Expressionist’s midcentury paintings of women is not what the New York–based artist Clarity Haynes has in mind for her Breast Portrait Project, an ongoing series of paintings of women’s torsos that take the genres of both portraiture and the female nude in new and unexpected directions. Her view is more sympathetic to the women she paints, though the works still make some viewers uncomfortable, including me.

    Over the past few years, Haynes has invited women from the New York LGBTQ community—typically her age or older—into her studio to pose. The smooth surface of her paintings, which have minimized brushstrokes that give off an airbrushed quality, belie the jagged topography of the people she portrays. The women are often large in size and in courage. Some bear surgical scars—such as those from mastectomy—and many have sagging skin, plump rolls, and stretch marks, conveying how the weathered body unravels after decades of living.

    Pinar Yolaçan, Boro, 2009, Lambda print, 20 x 18 in. (artwork © Pinar Yolaçan)

    Haynes gave an artist’s talk at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, focusing on the Breast Portrait Project, setting aside other types of work she does. The event was held in the context of Body Utopia, a group exhibition of six artists at Trestle Gallery, which comprised color photographs by Chitra Ganesh and Pinar Yolaçan, three framed charcoal drawings by Riva Lehrer, two videos by Sondra Perry, a sculpture by Constantina Zavitsanos, and a painting by Haynes. Body Utopia was a judicious selection of expertly installed works in diverse media by an intergenerational group of artists, all focused on “bodies of color, queer bodies, bodies with disabilities, [and] bodies that don’t conform to societal norms and conventions,” as described by Priscilla Frank in the Huffington Post. It was Haynes’s first outing as a curator, and the first time she contextualized her art with that of her contemporaries. For the catalogue she wrote, “The making of art is, for some artists, the making of a utopia, because it posits an alternative space, medium, and reality through which to explore our subjectivities and our bodies. In other words, we get to call the shots.”3

    During her talk, Haynes described the Breast Portrait Project and articulated her connections to feminism and to art history. She dates the project to the late 1990s, when she was regularly attending women-only music and cultural festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Where Womyn Gather.4 After making a self-portrait of her torso (and later of several friends), Haynes decided to change her practice, which at the time was social action, studying film, doing murals, and “having every kind of job you could imagine—most of which involved wearing some sort of costume.” Anything but painting. At the festivals, which usually offered some sort of art activities, she would spend one to three hours, under a tent, drawing pastels of the exposed torsos of her fellow festival goers. Haynes would then give the finished work to the commissioning subject, but not before documenting it, and the person depicted, with a photograph and a written statement by the sitter. While the drawing left the artist’s possession immediately, Haynes has stayed in touch with several women from the festivals via Facebook, even though she may have only met them in person once or twice.

    Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed, 1828, watercolor on ivory, 2⅝ x 3⅛ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    While the origins of the Breast Portrait Project lay in 1990s alternative culture, it has personal precedents from art history, which Haynes articulated. In particular she cited two works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Sarah Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed, a miniature 1828 self-portrait of her bare breasts, intended only for the eyes of the American politician Daniel Webster; and a lover’s eye painting from the eighteenth century. Both pieces offer a fragmented part of the body and emphasize privacy and intimacy. The oversized scale of the figures in Haynes’s recent paintings correspond to the Buddha Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai), a larger-than-life wooden statue from the twelfth century housed in its own room at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. When the artist revamped the Breast Portrait Project in 2009, she said, “I wanted to make feminist bodies that could be super large, super powerful.” These works, averaging five feet in height, were shown in 2011 at a solo exhibition at Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn, under the title Radical Acceptance.5

    Carlo Pittore, Portrait of Steve Nusser with Artist, 1983, oil on linen, 24 x 18 in. (artwork © Carlo Pittore Foundation)

    Haynes had decided to become an artist at age sixteen, and her lifelong interest in skin and detail is evident in a watercolor self-portrait from 1987. An early supporter of her resolution was Carlo Pittore, a New York figurative painter who had moved to Maine in the 1980s. It was Pittore who, over a summer they spent together and many visits after, encouraged her to have a strong work ethic, and to paint from life, as he did.

    When she was younger Haynes admired the early work of Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, but she now looks to Ellen Altfest, Rackstraw Downes, Catherine Murphy, and Josephine Halvorson, painters whom she said “record the facts.” A turning point for Haynes happened during a lecture by Altfest at the New York Studio School in December 2012, where Altfest described the long process for making her detailed paintings. After this talk, Haynes let herself develop a single painting for one to three years. Because she works from life, she gets to know not only the bodies she depicts but also the person inside them, like the trans bodybuilder Roxanne, whom she finished painting in 2012. “I really enjoy the long process of slowly getting to know the body,” Haynes said, “the specific body.” She continued, “It’s emotional when it ends, because you’re not going to have that regular time of seeing each other.” The relationships continue outside the studio: Leonora, whose breast portrait was hanging in the Trestle Gallery show, was in the audience tonight.

    The general form of the Breast Portrait Project—frontal view, centered composition, neutral background, and a body cropped at the neck and waist—remains consistent. What varies is the shape, color, and texture of the woman, and also things like necklaces and clothing (pants). The artist realized the importance of such accoutrements after a year’s worth of comments by visitors to her studio.6 In each work Haynes includes a body’s changes over time, but she retains temporary details that she likes. “With Leonora’s tan lines, I was really having a hard time letting that go, because I really like those tan lines,” she said. “And there were times in the winter when they were not there, to the same extent.” Haynes’s subjects are sometimes solicited randomly: she found Leonora in a coffee shop, approaching the older, butch lesbian out of the blue. “Recently I met Dilma in the restroom of a doctor’s office. She was singing in the bathroom.”

    Clarity Haynes, Leonora, 2015, oil on linen, 58 x 79 in. (artwork © Clarity Haynes)

    A triptych Haynes made as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts depicted three classic stages of life: youth, middle, and elderly. “I … think a lot about age in my work,” Haynes said. “I think about how old women are portrayed in art history,” through tropes like the maiden, mother, and crone. The art historian Svetlana Alpers, Haynes said, “pointed out that there’s a history of gendered distrust of detail in art.” Michelangelo disparaged Flemish painting as inferior to the Italian, tempera-based variety, writing a long paragraph about how Northern painters paint and to whom it appeals (“It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young…”). If he spent all that time negating detail, Haynes remarked, it must have really bugged him.

    One of the Body Utopia artists, Riva Leher, who was visiting from Chicago, offered additional observations about how Haynes’s work relates to art history. Northern Renaissance art has “the sense of a luminous, permanent present,” Leher said. And about Haynes’s work she observed, “There’s an inner luminosity in how you’re painting the body…. There’s a slow sense that the painter is telling you that the person you’re looking at is utterly worth your attention, is worth your quiet attention.” In Lucien Freud’s bravado painting, “there’s always a scrim between you and the subject,” which Leher likened to the British artist’s inner struggle and his dialogue with art history. We don’t see “his desire to bring you the pure presence of another human being, unmediated.” While all art is mediated in some way—including the apparently transparent qualities of even  trompe l’oeil painting—such realism plays a significant role in Haynes’s work. The subjects of the Breast Portrait Project are older bodies that are neglected, if not unseen entirely, in not just contemporary art but also our culture at large.

    Installation view of two paintings by Clarity Haynes in a 2015 exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum called A Collective Body: Uncovered and Illuminated; the sculpture in the foreground is by Stacy Latt Savage

    Leher observed that Haynes’s work lacks blood, trauma, and other qualities that cause people to flinch. The artist agreed: “When people see a disabled body they see pain, and they will not [have] any other reading—they will see pain. I often find that if they see a scar, they see pain, and that’s not my intention, so it’s sometimes kind of frustrating. Because what I feel like I’ve learned … over time is that a trauma may or may not have been a physical trauma, depending on how people reacted, what the memory is.” For Haynes’s friend, a scar from open-heart surgery as a child was a good memory—everyone at the hospital treated her like a princess. Lehrer said that our society doesn’t have the language to approach scarring apart from the wounded warrior. During the last fifteen or so minutes of the talk, the artist and the audience had a good discussion about trauma, healing, and reclamation, about scars, intimacy, and body acceptance, and about gender and gender expression.

    With a self-identified affinity for women’s spirituality and body-image consciousness of the 1970s, Haynes offers work with a striking balance between social and aesthetic issues—hitting the mark in every way possible.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Willem de Kooning, quoted in Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 72.

    2 De Kooning, quoted in John Elderfield, “Woman to Landscape,” in de Kooning, a Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 277. Some sources give the quote as “Flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented.”

    3 Clarity Haynes, “Visionary Bodies,” Body Utopia (Brooklyn: Trestle Gallery, 2015), 3.

    4 Haynes projected a photograph of a 1994 protest march with Riki Wilchins, the author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (1997), and the transgender activist Leslie Feinberg when MichFest articulated an informal policy about only welcoming attendees who were born female biologically. The conversation touched on the tension between respecting the pioneers of the feminist movement and pushing against their resistance to trans issues.

    5 Haynes’s work has been chosen for the next Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In addition, Stout Projects in Brooklyn will host a solo show of her work in February 2016. Haynes is also scheduled to speak at the New York Studio School on December 8, 2015.

    6 I visited Haynes’s studio on April 14, 2014.

  • Nice Guys Finish

    A Talk with the Critics: Ben Davis, Carol Kino, Andrew Russeth, and Benjamin Sutton in Conversation with Sharon Louden
    Wednesday, September 23, 2015
    New York Academy of Art, Wilkinson Hall, New York

    The journalist Carol Kino (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Two years ago I stopped attending panels of art critics discussing the state of the field, mainly because the subjects such events would cover could easily be predicted: (1) money, and how there is little to be made writing about art; (2) a perceived loss of power in the art world, ceded to dealers, curators, and collectors; and (3) the differences between writing for print and online publications. Speakers overwhelmingly wrung their hands over problems that have existed for decades. The numbing repetition—I can’t even.

    I almost skipped this “Talk with the Critics” panel, part of a series moderated by the artist Sharon Louden on professional-development issues for MFA students, for fear of more of the same.1 But I was familiar with and respect the work of the four New York–based participants—Ben Davis, national art critic for Artnet News; Carol Kino, a journalist for the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers and magazines; Andrew Russeth, co–executive editor of ARTnews; and Benjamin Sutton, metro editor at Hyperallergic—and decided to give it a shot.2 The level of discourse was reasonable and pedestrian. That’s not surprising, considering Louden’s focus for the series is to demystify the work and approachability of critics for the academy’s graduate students. What follows are summaries of the major topics.

    Why Write Criticism?

    In college Russeth attempted to make art, unsuccessfully, so he studied art history. After studying with Rosalind Krauss, who “was a force of nature … [who] really made the stakes seem very high,” Russeth became attracted to what he perceived as the glamor of art criticism, deferring a halfhearted interest in law school. Sutton covered film, theater, and art for his school paper, and Kino came from a similar background—wanting to write about culture. Falling in with an art crowd in New York, she discovered she had a good eye. Davis, who studied cultural theory and philosophy in school, was introduced to the art world via Rachel K. Ward’s ill-fated group exhibition Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport, where he met the artist and writer Walter Robinson, who invited Davis to work for Artnet Magazine, which he edited. Artforum had deceived Davis into thinking that art was a place for ideas: “The art world is where important ideas go to die,” he joked.

    Andrew Russeth on the left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What Do You Look For?

    For Sutton, the lure to write about the big show was stronger when he was younger; now he finds it more rewarding, for example, to travel to out-of-the-way places and spend more time with fewer shows. Russeth aims to reset the balances where critical consensus is skewed or wrong, and also “to get people’s eyeballs on something new.” As a journalist, Kino looks for a good story, often on current events with “some meaty sociopolitical aspect.” “I look for a sense of contemporaneity,” Davis said, which he sometimes finds in older art, which can become relevant again.

    How Do You Find New Things?

    Louden tried to get a conversation going about Instagram, but the four critics had other ideas. “People drop casual comments at dinner parties,” Kino said; she also depends on friends who are artists and publicists. “The artists always know,” Russeth affirmed, identifying younger, plugged-in dealers and even collectors as those offering good recommendations. Davis rephrased the question to uncover the panel’s not-so-hidden motive: “How do you get written about?” Instead of boilerplate invitations, Davis said, write something personal, like “You may like my work for this reason.” Kino advised artists to time their pitches right for a publication—which may publish a review while an exhibition is still on view, or months later. She hesitates to carrying on correspondence with artists who don’t have galleries, or whose work isn’t appropriate for galleries, because her outlets are not interested in covering unusual situations. Sutton, who wades through press materials daily, recommended that prospective artists contact him by email, not phone or Facebook. Rather than brownnose with critics, Russeth said, he advocated artists to “start a gang,” reiterating an idea from Dave Hickey. “The best way to do it is to have a big group … have curator friends, have artist friends, have writer friends,” all of who can promote your work to others.3

    Can Critics and Artists Be Friends?

    Russeth has no problem with it, though unfavorable writing can lead to disappointment. Sutton finds it inevitable that artists and critics form relationships and views the separation between them to be old fashioned. Kino reminded us that an even older school—dating to the 1950s—fraternized comfortably. Davis cautioned against losing the balance between insight and embeddedness; he also recognized that “an honest review” in intimate art scenes outside New York “would mean severing all these relationships.” And then: “I don’t have a hard and fast rule except to be honest about it, if you’re writing about someone who you have knowledge of.” Regarding Robert Morris’s personal relationship with Krauss, Davis said, “A lot of art history formed by people who knew each other very intimately. You’d be foolish to overlook that as a source.”

    The contemporary Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What’s Up with Listicles?

    Louden identified lists, such as “6 of Our Favorite Hamburger-Themed Artworks for National Burger Day” and “14 Young Power Players Set to Become the New Art World Aristocracy,” as a recent trend in art writing. The format, Davis claimed, is cheap to produce and does well—much better than reviews of small shows in Bushwick. The BuzzFeedification of discourse has spawned the entertainment article about art, he said, adding that it’s new to have an audience “amused by art.” While ARTnews publishes intelligent lists, Russeth revealed that the well-researched article gets an audience over time. Sutton argued that a well-written listicle can be informative.

    What Are the Issues in Painting?

    The audience Q&A started with an inquiry about contemporary painting. Russeth singled out a couple of schools in play—the networked painting of R. H. Quaytman and postinternet art—and told us he has to argue for painting’s relevance when writing about the medium. (Really, still?)  Sutton seeks what looks new or demonstrates a variation, break, or improvement in any medium, and Kino digs for personal stories and avoids theoretical discussion.

    From the crowd, the art historian and critic Irving Sandler—who began writing in the 1950s and was friends with many Abstract Expressionists—pressed the issue further. Davis ducked the question to ask his own: “What is art?” Kino placed the burden on artists, while Sutton stressed the need to pay attention to art scenes outside New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Online publications such as Burnaway and Pelican Bomb do that well, he said. (Louden added Bmore Art.) Russeth argued that criticism can be a tool to counteract obscene amounts of money circulating in the art world, and also to upend male white dominance.

    What Do You Love and Hate in Writing?

    Sutton likes writing about art that he doesn’t get initially, that gives him a new perspective. Kino hates an opinionated reviewer’s personality coming through strongly. “I like original ideas, plainly stated—that’s pretty boring,” Davis said, noting that his monthly roundup of art writing for Artnet News demonstrates his interests—though I notice that he recently sought recommendations for the list on social media. Russeth loves criticism that lays it on the line—he wants opinion, writers coming out swinging and being risk takers. “That’s what leads to better art,” he declared.

    Benjamin Sutton on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What about Trends and Brands?

    Figurative art has roared back over the past ten to fifteen years, Russeth pronounced, partly because critics and historians have broadened their view. “People like Joan Semmel, Martin Wong, Philip Pearlstein—I mean, they’ve never looked better, right?” He explained, “It’s no longer necessarily a zero sum game, which when I read art history, it kind of feels like it once was.” For Davis, “contemporary” has eclipsed terms like postmodern or pluralism, an issue he explored in his 2013 book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. When teaching painters, video makers, and performance artists, he observed, “The question, implicitly, that’s there, without being proposed, is, what are we all learning that’s the same?” Instead of having a unifying theory of it all, Davis detects a herd mentality in galleries, where “consensus about what was competent” has replaced “consensus about what was good and bad.”

    Sutton has witnessed an acceleration of branding in culture, when fashion crosses over into the hip, cool art world. The fast-fashion retailer H&M, he said, collaborated with Jeff Koons last year to produce a handbag. (Don’t forget about Takashi Murakami’s popular monogram bags for Louis Vuitton.) Taking a long view, Davis connected the early-nineteenth-century Romantic view of the artist with the Industrial Revolution. By the late 1990s, he sketched out, the fashion industry had evolved from producing couture for the few to cranking out ready-to-wear clothes for the masses, with designers producing sunglasses, cosmetics, and perfume. Huge conglomerates now use art to recapture high fashion’s exclusivity. “The whole point is that there’s a tension” between art and fashion, Davis concluded, not a synthesis.

    What’s Your Definition of Art?

    Russeth said that art, at its best, is a protected field to talk about things you can’t talk about elsewhere, in a safer and fuller way. He left out “through objects and images.” Sutton agreed but emphasized that art is not protected because it is permissive. Davis noted that art is a general term for excellence—an advertisement can be so good that it is art—so what is fine art? The tradition, the museum and gallery culture, and economically (a person with control over his or her labor). Earlier Kino had passed the microphone to Davis but got it back, saying “You know it when you see it.” She added that art constantly redefines what is art.

    In Terms Of count: 9.

    1 I spoke on a “Talk with the Critics” panel with Hrag Vartanian and Lily Wei in November 2013.

    2 Sutton was my editor at the L Magazine in 2011–12.

    3 Russeth misattributed the quote, slightly. Here is Hickey: “That’s why I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl’s advice on how to become an artist: ‘You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.’” What Russeth left out was the final step: “Then, I would suggest, when your movement hits the museum, abandon it.” Hickey, “Romancing the Looky-Loos,” Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 152.

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  • Where All the Action Is

    Lee Lozano Drawings and Paintings: A Conversation with Jacqueline Humphries, Jutta Koether, and Bob Nickas
    Wednesday, July 22, 2015
    Hauser and Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York

    In her notebooks, Lee Lozano asks herself, “WILL I ‘GO BACK’ TO ‘JUST PAINTING’?”

    I first discovered the work of Lee Lozano (1930–1999) in 1997, when reading the reprint of Lucy R. Lippard’s classic chronology of Conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The descriptions of Lozano’s experientially based art from the late 1960s, including Dialogue Piece, General Strike Piece, and Grass Piece, were among the most compelling in the book. Because of the radical nature of these works—making art from talking, from art-world protest, and from the desire to “stay high all day, every day”—I thought everyone knew about her.1 So when Lozano was rediscovered in the early 2000s, having left the art world for good thirty years earlier in her infamous Dropout Piece (initiated in the early 1970s), I was surprised. But upon reviewing the artist’s slender exhibition history and bibliography during the eighties and nineties, her omission from the historical record was clear.2

    The first question posed by Robert Nickas, the moderator of tonight’s conversation at Hauser and Wirth, was this: When were you first exposed to Lozano? The painter Jacqueline Humphries said she first saw Lozano’s work in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, organized by Katy Siegel and David Reed, at the National Academy Museum in 2007. Humphries had also read Siegel and Reed’s conversation about the artist, published in Artforum in 2001. The conversation’s third participant, the artist Jutta Koether, became acquainted with Lozano’s work “as a concept, as an idea” in the 1990s—through Nickas, actually. Strangely, based on her words and expressions, it seemed as if Koether had never actually seen Lozano’s work in person before tonight.

    The painter Jacqueline Humphries (center), flanked by Robert Nickas and Jutta Koether (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tonight’s conversation was held in conjunction with an exhibition of five large paintings and numerous tiny drawings from 1964 to 1966, Lozano’s fourth solo show with the gallery since 2007. Despite Nickas’s unconventional approach to curatorial work and criticism, and despite his longtime support of Lozano’s work—he organized Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961–1971 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2004—he framed the discussion around clichés: the death of painting, the artist as outlaw, the inadequacy of categorization, the goodness of failure, the performative turn, and, of course, the rediscovery of forgotten artists. Doing so produced a mostly stilted, directionless talk—the speakers missed the mark, and not positively so. Maybe they just didn’t prepare ahead of time. In spite of these obstacles, the talk had numerous moments of interest.

    Koether is attracted to Lozano’s multifarious practice: her process, her being female, and her “antagonistic propositions about failure and rejuvenance [sic] of painting.” Hauser and Wirth’s current exhibition created a “highly problematic proposition about Lozano” that interrupts her unified idea of the artist. “There’s not one Lee Lozano,” Nickas reminded her, briefly describing each of her five periods, such as the Tools works, the Wave paintings, and the written conceptual pieces, which came quickly over her ten-year career. Humphries said that museums often misrepresent an artist’s diverse body of work with an authoritative, streamlined version, and most artists she knows do a bunch of stuff. Well, duh.

    Why did Lozano paint, Nickas asked, when she could have done anything? “Is painting acquainted with winning [more] than any other practice?” he wondered. Looking around the room, Humphries saw something unique in the paintings that viewers, both then and now, can’t come to grips with. “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” she said. “They do something else.” Lozano wasn’t reliant on anyone, Koether conjectured. “She would want to paint because people told her not to.” Koether then launched into a meandering filibuster that barely made sense, followed by a similar monologue from Humphries. The group was at its weakest when discussing the physical qualities of the paintings in the room, yet Nickas didn’t bring the conversation back to earth.

    Jutta Koether (right) talks about rough sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In the late 1960s, Nickas claimed that Lozano interacted with sculptors and artists who worked with language—Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Dan Graham—rather than with painters. He also positioned Lozano’s work (e.g., depictions of hammers and drills and of shapes with volumetric forms) as masculine—a gendered view that Humphries challenged. “I never knew what that meant,” she firmly stated, noting that nobody calls out men who paint pictures of women for being feminine. Nickas fumbled with a definition of masculinity as portraying toughness and violence and mentioned that Lozano, in her art and writing, had a man’s voice. Koether explained this observation as a symptom of the time. “It’s like really rough sex … all the time,” she said. “It’s brutal—it’s very hard and super desperate.” While Humphries recognizes the “unbelievable force” in Lozano’s work, the artist is also cheeky and, formally speaking, was addressing mainstream issues in American painting at the time, such as mass and scale, in spite of the radical qualities that people usually ascribe to her work.

    Nickas was refreshingly skeptical about the performative aspect of contemporary art—he said “there’s not a lot behind it”—but Lozano is the real deal, especially regarding her Wave series of paintings, one of which was completed after fifty-two consecutive hours of work. The real topic of discussion, however, was Lozano’s social relationship to the New York art world and how she integrated social performance into her studio work, which Humphries attributed to the emancipatory politics of the 1960s. Representative works are Dialogue Piece (1969), for which Lozano invited people to her SoHo loft for a conversation whose content would remain private, and Drop Out Piece, for which Lozano withdrew from the art world and eventually left New York, later settling in Dallas to live the life of an acid casualty.

    Most contentious was Lozano’s Boycott Piece (1971), which comprised her refusal to speak to women for two months—though apparently the work continued until her death. Tonight’s speakers felt uncomfortable with this resolution, which the curator Helen Molesworth has called “consummately pathological” and “incredibly disturbing,” though they understood how Lozano was critiquing institutional sexism, both within and outside the art world.3 Koether identified the problem of Lozano trying to be more revolutionary than the revolution, and Boycott Piece has affected the way she understands the artist’s entire oeuvre.

    Though Koether finds Lozano’s position to be “nonreconcilable,” I can’t help but think of other controversial artists who push moral and aesthetic boundaries, such as Santiago Sierra and Adel Abdessemed. Though their strategies and results are questionable, it’s generally a good thing to see artists like them working with contentious subject matter and pushing liberal attitudes. After all, it was Lozano who wrote “‘SEEK THE EXTREMES, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS.’”4 Nickas more or less accepted that testing limits pushed Lozano beyond painting, and beyond the art world. Humphries said we will never know her reasons for dropping out—especially since, Nickas added, “it’s a world people want to drop into.” Koether postulated that acting crazy and aggressive might be the only way out of an enduring problem of sexism.

    “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” Jacqueline Humphries said of the paintings on view (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Nickas detected rage, not anger, in Lozano’s work, based on her written statement: “I am not angry at anyone or anything but I feel rage.”5 Koether agreed, seeing rage in the tight control of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls around her. Moments later, during the audience Q&A, an attendee refuted that idea. “One person’s rage is another person’s tranquility,” he shrugged, adding that, when considering the brownish-orange color in one painting, “rust isn’t rage—it’s slow deoxidization.” Koether was unmoved: “I still think they’re very angsty.” Humphries called the paintings austere, not minimal, and Nickas compared Lozano to contemporaneous Californian artists, calling her “the Light and Space artist of darkness.” Humphries concurred, stating that the works on view contain neither air nor figure-ground. Lozano had a sensibility, she continued, not a style; Humphries believes Lozano made works that she wanted to see for herself. Nickas said that one of Lozano’s goals was to “picture time and space, expanding and contracting. It’s improbable, but you just have to accept it.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101.

    2 The Lee Lozano revival can be traced back to an exhibition of her work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1998.

    3 Helen Molesworth, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 65, 70.

    4 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, April 24, 1969, in Lee Lozano: Notebooks, 1967–70 (New York: Primary Information, 2009), unpaginated.

    5 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, Book #5, December 29, 1969, in Barry Rosen and Jaap van Liere, Lee Lozano: Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Hauser and Wirth, 2006), unpaginated.

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  • Next Question: Is Art Dead?

    Is Painting Dead?
    Friday, May 16, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    This early painting panel was one of the best—real feeling on urgent issues expressed to an audience of peers. Today we may smile complacently at the title question. At the time, art’s higher authorities had declared painting dead and buried. Perhaps it was only some sense of a coming rebirth that gave painters courage to ask the question out loud. But when Nicholas Krushenick says “I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS!” we hear the voice of the votary since the Renaissance. (Will video artists some day say how they love clicking in that cassette and watching the little light come on?)

    One other note: artists reading this report in 1975 would have known that “The Article” referred to “The Painted Word,” an article by Tom Wolfe which had recently missed the point about painting in Harper’s Magazine. Shortly thereafter it was published as a book, achieving wide notoriety, if not acclaim. Today I had to think a moment to identify it.

    Moderator: Burt Chernow
    Panelists: Nicholas Krushenick, Stuart Shedletsky, Shirlann Smith, and Robert Wiegand

    Judy Seigel, “Is Painting Dead? Artists Talk on Art May 16,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3

    The subtitle of this panel, “Is Jerking Off Getting Out of Hand?,” could mean anything from, “Once you’ve seen one jerk-off in an art context, you’ve seen them all, so a painting renaissance is inevitable,” to “Painting itself is the equivalent of jerking off, so why paint?” In either case, if you’ve been waiting tensely for the verdict, the panelists agreed that painting is not now, nor is it likely in the foreseeable future to be dead. In fact, one assumes that the four painters convened exactly in order to reach that conclusion. It did, however, take them three-quarters of the evening to start to explain why.

    For openers, the now-infamous query was projected onto the screen: “Artforum wishes to ask you as a painter what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. [T]hose understood to be making the ‘inevitable next step’ now work with any material but paint….” A show of panelists’ slides with commentary by each was followed by talk of The Letter, The Article, The Critics, Other Painters, and The Situation.

    The Letter

    Shirlann Smith: It’s a love letter from Artforum—the kind you’d write at the end of a long marriage. But the language is so literary—intellectual, not words I’ve ever heard artists use.1

    Robert Wiegand: Is Artforum dead? They never had to fish before. They came on Bang! Bang!

    The Article

    Stuart Shedletsky: It’s a tantrum by an essentially literary person who doesn’t “get” art.

    Wiegand: There was a bit of truth on some levels and that made everybody a little uncomfortable, but he stretched it.

    Nicholas Krushenick: I have never been to a party at Ethel Scull’s.

    The Critics

    Krushenick: I’ve enjoyed a certain amount of honesty from Harold Rosenberg. He admitted the critic is finished. Greenberg [apologetic tone] has been a constant champion of die abstract idea in art.

    Shedletsky: The critics can tie up Brice Marden with Fragonard.

    Wiegand: Rosenberg said, “It may be time to abandon, not art, but art criticism, which has become little more than a shopping list.”

    Other Painters

    Burt Chernow: Who are the painters today that keep painting alive?

    Krushenick: Jasper Johns hasn’t given us a new image in years. (My wife will kill me for saying this.) Stella is still about making art, and I respect him tremendously for that, whether it succeeds or fails. A lot of people just give us bricks and bunny rabbits. Noland is still making a fantastic try at making art…. Richard Lindner, Alfred Jensen, Yrisarry, Jo Baer.

    Wiegand: D’Arcangelo, Chuck Hinman.

    Audience: I don’t hear any names of new people keeping painting alive.

    Wiegand: There doesn’t have to be something new every week.

    Shedletsky: Heroes don’t come along as often as Artforum would have us think. They change geniuses every week.

    Krushenick: Work today is all intellect, no passion. Anyway, all artists are not created equal.

    The Situation

    Chernow: Will new technology replace painting, or coexist?

    Wiegand: No one got excited when Rauschenberg got involved with dance. No one’s going to get excited when I get into video.

    Smith: There’s a tendency to want to perform, to go where the action is.

    Shedletsky: I sit in front of all those tapes and get terribly bored. I want to go home and watch television.

    Audience: If painting is dead, it’s dead in the colleges.

    Krushenick: On 50 percent of any given faculty you have this meatball who makes a (lousy) watercolor every two years. And he has an enormous amount of power.

    Audience Q&A

    Audience A: Is art dead?

    Audience B: That’s next week!

    Audience C: Art has never been more alive. It’s traveling in all directions. They’re waiting for that one direction, but we don’t have to offer it to them.

    Shedletsky: The impulse to make art is a very primal, basic human impulse, since the caves at Lascaux.

    Audience: Is the idea all important? Are the hands that produce the idea interchangeable, or does art lose in translation?

    Krushenick: They had assistants four hundred years ago. BUT I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS! I even stretch and prime the canvases myself. There’s a delicious, beautiful factor to running a brush across a surface. I don’t want to relegate that to someone else. If I did, I’d be standing around all day watching the schmuck.

    Shedletsky: Works of a certain type, for example, Judd’s, don’t suffer from fabrication. But you couldn’t imagine getting someone else to do a de Kooning.

    About here a bona fide screaming match between Krushenick and a fellow in the audience who seemed not to care for abstract art attested to the success of the panel and the vigor of feelings about art.

    Krushenick and Fellow: (Incoherent)

    Krushenick: Fuck you.

    Fellow: Your art lacks passion. It’s an intellectual color exercise. It’s like wrapping paper.

    Chernow [calmly]: Do any of you ever sneak off into a room a do a little still life, or something?

    Krushenick: Figurative painting outsells abstract painting six to one. I turned from it and never looked back. I want to die with my finger on the pulse of the twenty-first century. In a strange way it’s the most delectable life style I’ve ever encountered. If you never get any success in your life, you could say on your deathbed, “I’ve had a wonderful life!”

    Conclusion

    Artforum can’t be dead because artists hate it so much and read it so much and painting can’t be dead because it gets reborn about every fifteen minutes.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 The full text of the letter appears below. The responses from artists were published in the September 1975 issue.

    Artforum wishes to ask you, as a painter, what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. It appears that painting has ceased to be the dominant artistic medium at the moment. And we assume that the debates between its two major ideologies, abstract and representational, have outlived their usefulness to the current scene. Our thinking here refers to the fact that neither side has triumphed over the other in a historical verdict to which both had appealed. On the contrary, those understood to be making “the next inevitable step” now work with any material but paint.

    1. How do you think this has affected the need to do painting today and the general morale in the field?

    2. What possibilities, not found elsewhere, does this medium offer you as an artist?

    3. What energies and ideas in painting strike you as worth attention, and why?

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Next Question: Is Art Dead?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 13–15. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Much Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting

    The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness
    Thursday, June 4, 2015
    Jewish Museum,     Scheuer Auditorium, New York

    Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.

    Step One

    Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.

    Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 x 49 7/16 in. (artwork © Estate of Sigmar Polke)

    One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.

    Step Two

    Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2

    Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)

    Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.

    Step Three

    Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.

    Step Four

    Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?

    Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Step Five

    Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she  repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.

    Step Six

    The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?

    Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm (artwork © Martin Kippenberger)

    Step Seven

    A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.

    After Steps

    The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”

    2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.

    Watch

  • Pawns in the Game

    Sarah Thornton in Conversation with David Kratz and Peter Drake
    Thursday, May 14, 2015
    Spring Lecture Series
    New York Academy of Art, New York

    The cover of Sarah Thornton’s book, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014)

    The journalist and sociologist Sarah Thornton was interviewed about her latest book, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), at the New York Academy of Art, where she was also the school’s commencement speaker for this year’s graduating class of MFA students. The book chronicles the upper crust of the contemporary art world—the kind you read about in the Scene and Herd section of Artforum.com—from 2009 to 2013. Benchmarks in conversations and studio visits with the dozens of artists that Thornton interviewed were Jeff Koons, whom she considers to be conservative, and the high-risk Damien Hirst. Other recurring characters include Maurizio Cattelan, Ai Weiwei, and Andrea Fraser, as well as the artist couple Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons and their daughters, Grace and Lena Dunham. The people profiled in 33 Artists in 3 Acts, mostly midcareer professionals who were born in the fifties and sixties, are “all the real deal,” she said, with no authenticity and credibility issues. (She would need to write a separate book for emerging artists.)

    Wearing white jeans, a black blazer, and athletic sandals, Thornton was interviewed by David Kratz, a silver-fox painter and the president of the New York Academy of Art—a small graduate school that specializes in representational and figurative work—and the painter Peter Drake, who is also dean of academic affairs. Kratz inquired about the image of Gabriel Orozco’s chessboard work, Horses Running Endlessly (1995), which illustrates the book’s introduction. “Is that the art world?” he asked. Calling Orozco a “strategic player” (but not explaining what that meant), Thornton disclosed that the art world isn’t as egalitarian as a chessboard occupied only by knights—the punch line of Orozco’s work.1 Instead, the art world has “kings, queens, and pawns,” though I’d argue that the art world has more sacrificial pieces than power players in its own chess game. Success acculturates artists into the art world, she said, and they must figure out their position. Thornton believes that the art market should be part of an art school’s curriculum and warned against early career burnout from success—a future problem that I imagine many wish they would have.

    Gabriel Orozco, Horses Running Endlessly, 1995, wood, 3 3/8 x 34 3/8 x 34 3/8 in. (artwork © Gabriel Orozco; photograph probably by Yugen)

    Kratz asked about artists whose “crazy” works for them, and whose “crazy” doesn’t. In the former category Thornton placed Grayson Perry, famous in Great Britain but not so much here, who is a happily married transvestite potter with a daughter in college. The aging Young British Artists grumbled, she continued, at his winning the 2003 Turner Prize not because he dresses in women’s clothing but because he produces ceramics. Regarding bad crazy, Thornton said that Yayoi Kusama is the only artist whose craziness is acceptable. Yet if Kusama (b. 1929) were in her thirties today, Thornton said, nobody would accept her kooky behavior.

    High art and functional objects apparently have strong class divisions, at least in England. As a writer, Thornton identifies with craft, though it’s not wrong if an artist employs the labor of others to complete a project. She identified Christian Marclay’s breakout video The Clock (2010) as the example: Marclay had teams watching films but edited much of the footage himself. What is the different between art and craft, Thornton was asked. The concept makes it art, she replied, though the lines can blur. It is possible, Thornton continued, for artists to become craftsmen of their own work, if it becomes slickly produced. Perry, she said, claimed to be able to teach others to make his work, but they cannot make the art he is about to make.

    Drake directed attention back to 33 Artists in 3 Acts, asking Thornton if artists have their own view of success. She recounted how one thread in the book follows Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman, two photographers from the Pictures Generation, whom Thornton called “artist soul mates.” While Sherman’s career has certainly been larger than Simmons’s, the disparity hasn’t affected either their creativity or their friendship.

    Damien Hirst, The Crow, 2009, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 in. each (photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates; artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.)

    Thornton reiterated the importance of Hirst in her narrative, which makes sense for a journalist covering the economic side of the art world. Her profile on the bad-boy artist in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2009 was positive. She changed her tune in a 2010 article in the Economist, for which she researched Hirst’s direct-to-auction sale of his work in fall 2008. Bypassing the traditional dealer/gallery system and heading straight to the deep-pocketed collectors was a move that netted him $200 million. Thornton’s personal access to Hirst ended there, at least until 2013, when she cornered him in Qatar during a press preview for his retrospective Relics. “I don’t know how he feels about the book,” Thornton remarked, “and I don’t know if he reads.” The snark didn’t stop there. Thornton finds Hirst’s recent paintings to be “diabolical,” especially considering that he gave up painting at age 16 and took it up again in his forties. His spot paintings, which were shown in every Gagosian Gallery worldwide in 2012, are the “diffusion line of brand name.” “He lost faith in his practice,” she added, calling him an “interesting sculptor and an opportunistic painter.”

    An audience member asked if any of the artists she wrote about have overcome adversity. They all have, she said, emphasizing that the Chinese Ai and the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn have been challenged on political and governmental levels. Another person inquired about the art-world game, which Thornton described as soccer, because it’s always changing. She advised the audience member to “choose your game, be good at it, and make others play it.” She also advised artists to understand social dynamics and etiquette and to not get duped. Some well-established dealers are notorious for not paying artists, Thornton revealed, and advocated banning them from art fairs.

    Someone asked if it is true that the most successful artists have great self-doubt. Yes, she replied, and artists such as Cattelan embrace it. She also implied that Hirst is insecure. The final question from the audience addressed artists and suffering. Thornton’s unexpected, thoughtful response concerned motherhood: artists such as Sherman and Marina Abramović sacrificed having children for their careers. Yet having children, Thornton appended, is not the credibility killer for women artists under 55 that it once was.

    I sensed that Thornton presented herself as outsider to the art world. In her writing, she said, she watches the dynamics of opinion rather than passes judgment. I also sensed disconnect between her and the audience, which routinely failed to respond—with laughter or applause—to her stories at the right moments. A few times Thornton was the only person laughing at her remarks. The setting at the New York Academy of Art was informal, and the attendees seemed to be made up of young artists—the pawns of the art world. This made Thornton’s jet-setting glamor something of a mismatch, but not glaringly so. I was left to wonder what she offered to the school’s graduate students.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 More positively, Thornton interpreted Horses Running Endlessly as a “dance floor in a multicultural club.”

  • Not Just Another Ism

    Eroticism in Art
    Friday, January 24, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Eroticism, or rather explicit eroticism, was suddenly right out there in high-art country, courtesy in part of the new pluralism—and also of the women artist’s movement. It’s hard to say if Judith Bernstein’s hairy screws would seem erotic in the present day of Mapplethorpiana, but a major charge of the movement was explicit material from women. Joan Semmel, for instance, painted larger-than-life-size photo-realist couplings in phosphor colors. John Kacere’s close-up renderings of the buttocks of young women lying down in silky underpants and garters were, on the other hand, more what you might think of when you thought “erotic art.”

    Pat Passlof says the panel was “reticent.” Perhaps it was the topic. Or perhaps we hadn’t yet learned the spill-everything style of the ‘80s.

    Judith Bernstein, Five Panel Vertical, 1973, charcoal on paper, 150 x 60 in. each (artwork © Judith Bernstein)

    Moderator: Joan Semmel
    Panelists: John Kacere, Judith Bernstein, Bob Stanley, Charles Stark, and Louise Bourgeois

    Slides of everyone’s work and a film of Louise Bourgeois’s were projected on a wall with a provocatively placed protruding pipe.

    Joan Semmel began by citing Lucy Lippard: the more explicit the imagery, the less evocative the erotic work. Response from panelists was poor until John Kacere broke the ice with a meandering monologue on the mediocrity of porn: “If you’re very hungry, it doesn’t take much to turn you on.” Panelists were asked if their own work turned them on; Kacere again. “You can’t be horny for a month.” Panelists agreed that, in effect, their work was not really porn or even erotic—it just referred to a “beautiful human experience.”

    Joan Semmel, Hold, 1972, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 in. (artwork © Joan Semmel)

    Judith Bernstein said the political implications of her work are overlooked. Louise Bourgeois likes good-looking men who don’t know they are—a rarity, says she. Kacere dominated the evening with a series of wry ramblings on his unrequited youth. Semmel described men’s images of women as doll-like sexual objects. She prefers focusing on gestures that reveal the whole person. She told of a couple who found they could not live with her work. Unhappy with the thought of subject matter overwhelming painting, she resolved the issue with the idea that she had achieved the ultimate desire of every artist: disturbance of the viewer. (It has to be said here that the overpowering of the pictorial by subject matter constitutes a perfectly workable definition of pornography.) Semmel’s recent work, however, has taken a leaf from Lippard: less explicit imagery with a brilliant play on exaggerated foreshortenings which flatten surreal perspectives. “When my work changed from abstract to figurative, the emphasis shifted from the drama of paint to that of volume.”

    From the audience, Burt Hasen brought up the biomorphic nature of the species: “Men are women and women men.” Ignored as a drunk raving, Hasen was speaking well to the issue as others kept to popular theories of power role-playing. Semmel deserves credit for carrying a reticent panel virtually single-handed (except for the voluble Kacere).

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Pat Passlof, “Not Just Another Ism” was originally published in WIA Newsletter 2, no. 5 (February 1975); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 8. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.