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September 2010
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Spontaneous Charm: The 2010 EAF at Socrates
by Alice Gregory September 28, 2010
Close by, Trenton Duerksen’s Armchair Palimpsest squats like a sturdy lighthouse. A tapered, white base frames four walls of blackboard (chalk included); atop this is a wooden block on which an abstract, cartoonish form emerges into the sky, like the cross section of a La-Z-Boy arm, complete with lever. Buoyed on it all is a huge, white beach ball that due to light reflecting off a nearby condominium complex, appears lavender against the pale sky. It bobs around like the head of a doll with a broken neck. It’s as though Duerksen has pillaged Pee Wee’s Playhouse and translated the furniture for the purposes of high design. “It’s a really elaborate pedestal is all,” he says, with goofy self-deprecation. Whatever it is, I want it.
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Auto Biography: Bernhard Fuchs at Jack Hanley
by Laila Pedro September 27, 2010
In pictures like Weißer Fiat-Bus (White Fiat Van), and Grüner VW-Transporte there is a regrettable surfeit of what I always think of as ‘serious-memory-light,’ a sort of aggressively mellow, late-afternoon-inflected, golden tone that is just desperate to be described as “evocative” but comes across as intensely maudlin. This sentimentalizing tendency is evident in other heavy-handed touches: the repeated use of a grey-on-grey theme, the mists, the path-heading-into-mysterious-woods motif, the way the gaze lingers on the beginnings of rust around a window frame.
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Later for Others: Danh Vo at Artists Space
by Stephanie Harris September 25, 2010
The sheer curtains concealing both windows and walls – reveal, upon closer inspection, flowers embroidered in some of the fabric.
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Doing Without: Tyler Dobson at Real Fine Arts
by Zak Kitnick September 24, 2010
Seen together, the works seem strangely familiar, but its uncertain if this familiarity is due to the recognizable style of the New Yorker cartoons, or because they have been similarly appropriated before. Without being able to think of a specific example, one gets the feeling that it has been done and redone and done again, and that this recontextualization is not likely the last. If the saying, ‘Those who don’t know history often end up repeating it,’ could be adapted to art it might read, ‘Those who know art history often end up repeating it.’ But the question shifts, too: in what ways is it new?
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The Flashing Lights Settled Deep In My Brain: “The Wilderness Downtown” and the Limits of Digital Imagination
by Sam Biederman September 14, 2010
The presentation capitalizes on the fact that a computer remembers better than a person, with more detail and more accuracy. Google Maps then provides the truer memory of the appearance of your childhood street, Arcade Fire provides the emotion, and the program itself directs the eye. All you need to do is experience the thing and, when prompted, type a postcard to yourself as an adolescent. The Wilderness Downtown doesn’t allow the viewer to draw connections of his or her own; it takes you by your collar and tells you where and what and when to remember, and then it tells you what to do about it.
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Strange Bliss: Anj Smith at Hauser and Wirth
by Laila Pedro September 13, 2010
Anj Smith, Reconstruction, 2010. Via Hauser and Wirth
When I was a child, a cheap print of the Mona Lisa hung in my father’s studio. Along with Picasso’s The Musicians, it is the first thing I remember staring at for hours. I didn’t pay any attention to the lady or her (insert preferred adjective here) smile until many years later: instead, I was obsessed by that marvelous background. The collapsed perspective – of looming mountains, or craggy, thimble-sized castles, and serpentine roads leading to nowhere, cradling a fantastic, calm sea – looks different in every print I’ve seen.
The occasion for spilling virtual ink on the Mona Lisa is Anj Smith’s Geometry of Bliss, currently at Hauser & Wirth on the Upper East Side. According to the gallery, Smith’s painting, ‘R.’, “depicts a close friend of the artist as a 21st-century Mona Lisa…an enigmatic figure…Neither a woman or a man, R. is instead a person suspended in transition.’ The nominal subject is exquisitely complex, drawn with a kind of old-Masterly care and minute attention to detail, looming large in the Renaissance proportioning of the canvas. The suspension between genders is readily apparent– what, quickly scanned, appear as Rapunzel-like tresses may in fact be sort of Edwardian sideburns. The delicate face is overpowered by a heavy nose, somewhat mashed down the middle like a prizefighter’s. The figure’s arm is almost definitely male– or at least, muscled and hairy as it is, it bears the visual hallmarks of maleness. The gender division is echoed by the human/animal division: what look to be a tiny possum, a squirrel, and something vaguely sloth-like nestle in the figure’s hair, part of an inward-curling spiral that ends near the navel and sucks in every object depictd, including the glowing green sea.
Anj Smith, R., 2010. Via Hauser and Wirth
As before, I was utterly captivated by that background, unequivocally apart from and unknowable to the subject, yet inescapably drawn into the structure of the work by Smith’s careful composition. The very specific sea-green (it looks like an amped-up version of the Crayola color) is by far the brightest and, emotionally, the deepest color in the painting; a single moment of openness and vulnerability. Its fragile centrality and essential opacity are highlighted by the object in its center, either an upward-reaching branch, grounded in nothing, or a downward-shooting lightning bolt, stemming from nothing.
Anj Smith’s paintings (the word is inaccurate, or at any rate insufficient: they are sort of more than paintings, or other than paintings, but more on this later), have been described as “extravagantly detailed magic realism” (by the gallery), and as “self-consciously mannered Gothic-Surrealist” (by Martha Schwendener, in the Times). In fact, neither of these convenient catch-all labels, whose ubiquity threatens to render them meaningless, really applies, nor is this kind of grabby academicization really necessary. Smith’s exhibition is a lot of things, but what these portentous phrases are gesturing towards is its most basic quality: a marvelous weirdness permeating her images, their textures, and the somber tonalities of her figures’ delicate physiology.
Anj Smith, Evolution in Poetic Language, 2010. via Hauser and Wirth
That said, tentacles of surrealistic expression are everywhere in this work, with differing manifestations. The first of the small-scale renderings, in a gallery almost by itself, is Reconstruction, and it calls to mind Kahlo’s doubled self-portraits, turning the body inside-out and destabilizing its subjectivity. Here, a figure reclines, its pose reminiscent of an Ingres Odalisque. The head of this quasi-feminine figure, crowned with an unsettlingly organic sort of Renaissance bouffant, is vaguely Elizabethan, the dueling references conflating time and genre. This generic, thematic and physical superimposition-by-suggestion happens repeatedly, in various iterations, in almost every work. The referentially-layered, inside-out body is apposed, almost lazily, by a form that repeats throughout the show: a sort of hanging, roundish amalgamation that manages, somehow, to assert itself as a subject. On closer examination, the mass consists of perfectly drawn rats within what appears to be an enclosure of barbed wire. Because of their positioning and the emotional dialogue generated therein, each of these two very different constructs holds its own, confounding what is expected, or even permitted to constitute a subject: animal, human, gender—the divisions are craftily and cannily confused.
Anj Smith, Social Science, 2010. Via Hauser and Wirth
Smith’s Evolution in Poetic Language is, in some ways, exactly that. The dual presence of two vague subjects move in a less literal direction than the precise figures of R. or Reconstruction. Here the main figure, suspended luridly from some kind of apocalyptic clothesline in a crepuscular sky, is almost frightening, a face-like orb draped in the gauzy, tattered veil that also appears repeatedly. Composed of pop culture references and arbitrary memories, it evokes a self by shaping its components into the gestures of a face. That “clothesline” attaches it to another, more abstract face, as though the artist is moving further towards abstraction with the creation of each subject. Evolution in Poetic Language is, like the other works, more than a painting, in the sense that it refuses to stay flat. Smith layers paint to such a degree that her linen canvases take on a dimensionality and complexity reminiscent of a coral reef. This sculptural quality, and its highly enameled, almost lacquered, finish, add another level (quite literally) to the engagement with surface, tactility and communication that the relating figures within the show evoke. The works are literally polished, totally finished. The strongest, somehow, are those, like Social Science that dispense with faces and figures entirely. The inscrutable pomegranate, pierced with feathers, and that meme-etic miniature branch/lightning bolt growing out of a crumpled cigarette butt gives the inky blackness of the canvas a compelling emotional intensity. Put another way, Smith’s best is even better when the figures step back and let the colors speak for themselves.
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Double Deceptions: Interview with Jasmin Tsou
by Idiom September 9, 2010
In Chromophobia, David Batchelor’s cultural history of color, he writes that “Western philosophy is used to dealing with ideas of depth and surface, essence and appearance, or basis and superstructure, and this just about always translates into a moral distinction between the profound and the superficial…if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception. It is a surface on a surface…How things appear is one thing; how things appear to appear is another.”
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On the 75th Birthday of The Frick Collection
by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn September 8, 2010
The ever-diminishing line between art and commodity is not a new problem; it pervades the history of western art since the renaissance. One thinks of the Medicis’ use of frescoes and other commissions for political gain. However, unlike the Medicis, Frick did not support the most adventurous artists of his day. He was not a patron of new and radical work. He simply bought what was already considered masterful, by artists long dead. All of our great institutions of art walk this line. The Metropolitan and the MoMA were founded and are funded by businessmen not unlike Frick, but at least they had the decency to build a legitimate museum in the public trust, and not a temple to themselves.
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Words and Other Crimes: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts at Maccarone
by Alice Gregory September 1, 2010
Eric Doeringer, who in the past has sold bootleg copies of contemporary art, printed fake Art Basel VIP cards, created a tongue-in-cheek “fan site” dedicated to Matthew Barney, embroidered the “Polo” logo by hand onto generic shirts, and recreated several books by conceptual artists, here perfectly recreates a John Baldessari wall drawing. It’s hung across from a series of canvases by Brooklyn-based artist and editor Charles Gute. These depict the grammatical errors in works by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Yoko Ono, and Sol Lewitt. Gute uses standard proofreading marks – in red ink no less – to correct instructions written by conceptual artists, instructions meant to be hyper-specific so as to be accurate enough that the pieces they describe are endlessly and hand-lessly recreate-able. My favorite edit: “Ambiguous pronoun referent – please be more specific.”
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