March 27, 2004
"Happy Medium" at Clementine Gallery
An Artforum.com review of the new group show at Clementine Gallery. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
For this ingratiating show, Artforum contributor Meghan Dailey gathers together and gives context to six artists who've recently been bouncing around New York nonprofit spaces. The work included, though not necessarily their best, is strong and representative, and what emerges is a kind of hobby-shop chic that pairs material exploration with an investigation of the boundary between two and three dimensions. Lisa Sigal, whose ambitious wall-size installation in "Abstruction" at Artists Space was a highlight of the autumn season, contributes another pastel-hued painting-architecture-sculpture hybrid that riffs on the existing space. Recent Hunter MFA grad Karin Weiner, who has a sharp solo debut at ZieherSmith through April 3, contributes several mini-dioramas in which small wooden shelves support tiny architecture-model women in handmade landscapes; they gaze into the distance of a National Geographic–style postcard taped to the wall. Jimbo Blachly, the 2002 SculptureCenter prizewinner, includes three haphazardly elegant wall reliefs that look like studies for larger interventions in the natural environment. Each artist's low-key propositions suggest an imaginative enterprise that deserves continued support.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
March 25, 2004
Sven Birkerts on criticism
An earlier post made note of Dale Peck's supposedly final negative review. (Click here to read that magazine's press release about the article.) The target of that essay, Sven Birkerts, has his own go at the state of criticism--including a fairly detailed summary meta-critical discourse over the last twelve months--in the Spring issue of Bookforum. The piece is a long defense of the humanist, belletristic, arguably "rearguard" critical style that has waned considerably since the widespread importation of theory (and academic language/specificity) into general interest publications. A key paragraph:
What I am talking about here is, it's true, more polemic and feature-related journalism than reviewing per se, but the vitality of the latter depends in a thousand subtle ways on the vitality of the former, and if our situation feels demoralized, dissipated, without urgent core, it is to some degree because we are without a larger rallying cause and without any stirring sense of possibility. This is not to say that there are no rallying causes available—I can think of a few, beginning with the outrages of the current administration—but that we seem to be without the rallying will. We have lost the sense that there is any gathering place. Our intellectual life is fragmented. It has, perhaps of economic necessity, migrated into the academy, where it can only conform to the dominant strictures of theory-suffused disciplines (the luftmenschen of old, as Russell Jacoby reminded us in The Last Intellectuals, are no more). Connected and informed as never before, we nonetheless register a dispiriting sense of isolation, of not mattering.
and later:
Partisan Review in its heyday was a model of mattering. Its circulation never exceeded fifteen thousand, but it nevertheless outlined the very nerve system of influence in our collective cultural life. Its main contribution, over and above the contents of any of its pieces, was that in its great years it gave us an intellectual idea of ourselves. It created the terms of the debate. By postulating a certain kind of intelligentsia, it helped to foster it. That intelligentsia was nonacademic (though academics devoured the journal) and politically and morally engaged; it deplored provincialism and assumed a cosmopolitan view; it believed in the necessity of the modernist project. We have nothing like the modernist aesthetic certainties. Indeed, our lot—henceforth—is to be suspicious of all projects. In a pluralistic and relativistic culture like ours, the clash of rival pundits may be the best we can come up with.
Having recently purchased the Fall 1962 Partisan Review for a friend (fifty cents at Strand!) and marveled at its contributor list, I can understand Birkerts's position, even if the "pre-emptive strike" timing of this essay undermines the high road implied by his tone.
All of this is particularly relevant today, as after work I am heading to SVA for a panel titled "The Crisis in Criticism," featuring Jerry Saltz, Nancy Princethal, Raphael Rubenstein, Katy Siegel, and one or two others. (Though the word crisis loses its bite when I look to my bookshelf and see Maurice Berger's The Crisis of Criticism, published June 1998.)
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
March 21, 2004
Lecia Dole-Recio essay from 2004 Whitney Biennial catalog
The lack of posts stems from the fact that I'm still recovering from last week. In the absence of anything new, here's the text I wrote on Los Angeles artist Lecia Dole-Recio for the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalogue. I'll post a few here and there as fillers until I'm back on my feet and posting reviews and commentary again. Dole-Recio's art is my favorite discovery of the exhibition. Her works are on the second floor, paired with a large sculpture by Eric Wesley. Here's the text:
Continue reading "Lecia Dole-Recio essay from 2004 Whitney Biennial catalog"Lecia Dole-Recio creates variously scaled artworks that can simultaneously be considered paintings, drawings, collages, or wall-based sculptures. Using a wide array of materials including cardboard, paper, tape, a knife, graphite, and glue in addition to paint, her hybrid works employ a language of handmade geometric abstraction to explore material, surface, the picture plane, and color.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 16, 2004
Saltz on painters who use photographs
Though I first mentioned it here, Jerry Saltz has only just now published his thoughts on painters who use photographs as sources for their work. Here is the link. Food for thought.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 13, 2004
Alan Saret at James Cohan Gallery
Here is an Artforum.com review of the Alan Saret exhibition now on view at James Cohan Gallery. The link dies in two months, so here is the full text:
This significant selection of Alan Saret's wire sculptures and colored-pencil drawings from the late '60s through the mid-'80s displays the artist's focus on form and process. Pushing out from the wall, hanging from the ceiling, and balanced on the floor, Saret's variously scaled sculptures—made from precise tangles of nickel, steel, and copper wire, both coated and uncoated and prone to shifting over time—are simultaneously wispy and clotted, their volume dissolving into the airy voids between lines drawn in space. The 2-D works, rainbow-hued clusters of marks set adrift on large expanses of graph paper, are not studies but a parallel practice, and they re-create this paradoxical impression of density pulled from immateriality. Be sure to read the titles, as many (like Planetary Vertical Ensoulment, 1970) hint at the spiritual realm Saret aspired to and often depicted in other works—a dimension that is otherwise missing from this show. Saret deserves the attention given to other post-Minimal artists; let's hope the recuperative process encouraged here is not just momentary.
I highly recommend this show. I was familiar with Saret's sculptures, but had never before seen the drawings, which are revelatory in their beauty. See especially the two horizontally-oriented works on graph paper hung one over the other in the front room and, if they're still there, the two drawings in the viewing room at the back of the gallery.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 12, 2004
Kazin on 1930s New York
This week I tore through a paperback copy of Alfred Kazin's Starting Out in the Thirties, the second volume of his memoirs. (The first was A Walker in the City.) It's an engaging read, set up as a series of portraits that more or less alternate between family, loved ones, and his peers in intellectual and literary circles. It is a selective account of the period, to be sure, but an entertaining one. Here's a nice passage, in the chapter devoted to 1936:
I had a lot of time to kill in those days, and vaguely looking for jobs, picking up books to review and manuscripts to rewrite, I wandered about the midtown streets, more and more fascinated with the great crowds adrift on Broadway all day long. In the unnatural blaze of lights over Times Square marquees at eight in the morning, there were already lines of men waiting outside the burlesque houses, and in the smoky balconies of Forty-second Street, where they specialized in triple features and where I often spent half the night, people sat glued together in a strange suspension, not exactly aware of each other, but depending on each other's presence.... I could feel myself just about ready to give up and let go. I could feel the pressure of all those crowds aimlessly filling up Times Square all day long. Everything was suddenly adrift.... I was still trying to fit things together in my own way...."
A fun fact I picked up from the book: The New Republic offices were at that time located in a building I now pass half a dozen times a week: 421 W. 21st St.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
March 11, 2004
Willie Doherty at Alexander and Bonin
An Artforum.com review of the Willie Doherty exhibition now on view at Alexander and Bonin. The link dies two months from now, so here is the full text:
At a moment when many artists are retreating from political issues into abstraction, mysticism, or play, Willie Doherty—in "Non-Specific Threat," his austere show at Alexander & Bonin—presents five photographs and a video that focus on implicit violence, the dangers we project onto unknown figures, and language's ability to alter what we perceive as menacing. Doherty is a native of Derry, central to Northern Ireland's modern civil rights movement, and it is easy to let biography color our understanding of his work. Yet the "non-specific" in the title is key. His last New York solo presented a photographic detour to Berlin, and the dingy, decrepit locations he uses here signify the underside of a generic metropolis. Each photo shows the same vaguely thuggish-looking man, with a shaved head and an impassive face, from a different angle; in the video, the camera slowly circles him while a monotone voice-over alternates between confidential declarations—"I am your invention," "You manipulate me," "We control each other"—and predictions of a bleak future devoid of TV, radio, airplanes, music, and other things that constitute modern life. The confluence of intimacy and apocalyptic vision is uncommonly distressing.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Short feature on Sue De Beer
Here is the text of a short feature on Sue De Beer written for the forthcoming issue of Issue magazine:
Continue reading "Short feature on Sue De Beer"Sue De Beer’s art is a mature reflection on the complex interior lives of disaffected suburban American teenagers. Her video installations, photographs, and sculptures are littered with references to the pop culture detritus central to our adolescent search for identity. This combination of horror films, underground bands, underground heroes, and video games animates but does not define the psychological territory it haunts. The props and sets in De Beer’s videos are handmade and deliberately imperfect: the action, such as it is, resides not in the (constructed) world but in the muddled hearts and minds of her protagonists. With that transitional period’s trademark uncertainty, her characters muse on loneliness, aspiration, memory, sex, and fate.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 10, 2004
Award for art criticism
Nathalie Chicha mentions a new prize for art criticism (link to rules and related article by one of the judges) co-sponsored by the Guardian and Modern Painters magazine. I plan to enter.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 8, 2004
David Altmejd feature
My feature article on New York artist David Altmejd is included in the March-April issue of Flash Art. (The site isn't updated to reflect the new issue.) It just came out a few days ago and should make its way to newsstands around the country in the coming weeks. Here's the first paragraph:
New York artist David Altmejd’s grotesque sculptures, usually comprised of heads or other fragments of monster bodies, directly engage the repressed underside of our imagination and incongruously mix the things we dare not consciously consider with a certain sense of cheap glamour. His recent works, accumulations of small, sparkling found elements surrounding an incomplete werewolf body, spring from an intuitive process that serves as metaphor for peering into this realm of the unspoken. Altmejd rarely knows how a work will look when it is finished: he is an obsessive conjurer, bringing implausible sculptures into being as if he was in a trance or channeling spirits through the Ouija board. Often grouped with “new Gothic” artists, his use of the werewolf as horror movie cliché touchstone instead of, say, the knife-wielding serial killer, is telling. His is a morbid, Victorian-era take on the heinous (typified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein): the sculptures are absent any explicit violence, preferring the dread of the unknown or otherworldly to a forensic analysis of cruelty. It’s easy to imagine Altmejd’s monsters as protagonists in a cryptic narrative, yet Altmejd does not intentionally set any in motion. Instead, his creative energies are invested in the object itself—the artist likens his practice to process art—and the rest is left to the viewer. The sculptures are specimens laid out for us to examine, and they are dark, exquisitely beautiful (often employing eye-pleasing colors and seductive materials), compulsive, meticulously detailed without being fussy or perfectionist, shiny, and just a little bit sick. The intensely appealing layer of crystals, glitter, rhinestones, jewelry, and other materials that seem to spring up organically from the plaster heads defers the horror of beholding such monstrosities. Altmejd highlights the tension between the need to avert our eyes and to take in every gruesome detail; his bringing together of opposite worlds—the horrific and the glamorous—suggests that the distance between them may reside in our perceptions alone.
Check out the magazine to read the rest and see images of Altmejd's artwork.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Whitney Biennial website now online
The Whitney Biennial website is now live, a few days ahead of the exhibition's opening to the public. I contributed twenty-four essays to the catalogue, all of which are on the site. (When clicking on individual artist's names, the essays attributed to 'BJS' are mine.) Tomorrow night is the first of two opening receptions and after-parties. As much as I'm looking forward to congratulating all of the artists in the exhibition that I know or wrote about, I'm definitely looking forward to the end of the hoopla so I can concentrate on new projects.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 5, 2004
More online broadcasts of art discussions
Here is a link to the panel discussions held during the Frieze Art Fair last October. They are saved as MP3 files available for streaming or download.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 4, 2004
Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg at Cohan and Leslie
An Artforum.com review of Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg's collaborative show at Cohan and Leslie. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Collaborative art practices by definition negate the myth of the solitary artist-hero. Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg's haphazard array of life-size replicas carved from sea-blue and -green polystyrene—a JumboTron scoreboard, a Marshall amp, beer coolers, string lights, speakers, and microphones—are tied together by the duo's interest in social interaction. Each piece, whether it evokes sports arenas, rock concerts, backyard barbecues, or press conferences, nods to a group activity; at their best, they directly engage the viewer, toeing the line between sculpture and theater prop. Dozens of collages, photographs, and drawings further the theme: The "ATM Drawings," 2001–2004, which look like a cross between energetic toddlers' scribbles and astronomical charts, are plotted with nodal points mapping the social moments that make up the flow of daily life: your commute, your job, your trip to the ATM, and so on, ad infinitum.