Category: art

Just a Vegas-y two second video, but I wonder if this rain machine gives a hint of what’s coming this week at Olafur Eliasson’s MoMA/PS1 show.

Another of the things that Richard Serra said at LACMA last week has stuck with me was the artist’s call to arms for abstraction: basically, for artists in the 20th century, you’re either with us [i.e., Serra and Malevich] or you’re with the terrorists [i.e., Duchamp].

I was reminded by it, ironically, by the Times’ review of the new Tomma Abts show at the New Museum. By now, the spatial effect of seeing Abts’ arduously determined, small-scale, abstract paintings installed in large, white cubes is part of her experience. Abts’ room at the Carnegie International–which was also curated by Laura Hoptman–was an engrossing highlight; the paintings commanded the industrial space at greengrassi in London, too.] Ken Johnson writes, “Ms. Abts’s 14 small works look as though they died and went to heaven.”
But he also said, “Stylistically the paintings seem oddly out of sync with the present; they could be recently rediscovered works from the 1950s or ’60s.” That sense of anachronism seems inextricably tied to both the style–abstraction–and to the size. Though I can think of powerful exceptions, it seems like abstraction and smallness have been out of sync since WWII.

Abstractionist Thomas Nozkowski, who gets namechecked by Johnson–and whose resurgence is happening right now withfirst show after switching from Max Protetch to PaceWildenstein–talked in 2004 of deliberately choosing in the 70’s to paint on small board instead of giant canvas…

You can’t really understand artists of my generation until you factor the political atmosphere into any analysis of their work. I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could fit in my friends’ rooms. So I started making 16 by 20 inch paintings that you would recognize today as my work, in 1975. These pictures, initially for political reasons, had roots in subject, in things that connected to the real world.

…and of the extremely skeptical response he received at the time, from curators, dealers, and his fellow artists:

I remember Steingrim Larssen who was then the director of the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen coming by, and, to my surprise, he got excited about the paintings. This was 1975 or ’76, and he pulled a whole group out, said that he thought they were really interesting and then said, “Your psychiatrist told you to do these right?” He just thought it was some kind of therapy, he couldn’t imagine that this was serious work. I got a lot of that. Even Betty Parsons who was very supportive and loved young artists, she would flinch whenever I showed her a painting. So, I joined a co-op gallery to have a way to get them out of the studio and into the world.
…
There was an organization called The Organization of Independent Artists and they were attempting to subvert the gallery and museum system and all the established hierarchies. They had decided that each artist shown in their group shows would pick the next artists and so on. I was one of the artists chosen for the second show. I remember going to the organizational meeting and being told that the other artists had decided I couldn’t be in the show because the paintings weren’t serious.

Andy designed this postcard for the Walker Art Center, which is cool.
But the notes on the flickr photo are even cooler.
cf. the most heavily annotated photo on flickr [kottke]

I don’t know, is it a good thing to be rustled awake in the middle of the night by a compulsion to write about an exhibition you saw in December? It’s like having a flashback, only to the Elk Grove Village Marriott instead of the Hanoi Hilton.
“The Office” was curated by Ethan Sklar, director at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, where the show ran from November 30, 2007. Given its focus on the object, material and spatial aspects of the corporate workplace, it’s worth noting that it was “downsized” in January, and was closed [let go?] on February 9th.

Like hitmen traveling to Europe, it’s the little differences that caught artists’ attention as they explored the cubicle farms and conference rooms, and some of the work has the feeling of self-consciously aestheticized, if not exoticized, souvenirs of the trip: Tim Davis’ Manet/Viacom, a 2002 photo of an emptied out office. Martin Soto Climent’s As yet untitled, a plastic venetian blind draped lyrically off the wall, and Nicole Wermers’ French Junkies #2 a lacquer and steel cube smoking station whose improbably Juddian features are immediately recognizable in the recontextualizing gallery setting.

Other artists were attuned to the invisible and overlooked elements of corporate space: Jay Heikes’ The Hill Upstairs was an artfully [sic] stained fragment of a drop ceiling. While downstairs, Peter Coffin installed a generic, grey carpet with the grain set at an angle. The first round of perceptual disequilibrium was definitely physical, as if the walls weren’t plumb, but once I realized what was going on, a reflexive economic disorientation kicked in: if only he’d laid it straight, he could’ve saved 25% on that carpet, easy.
Which got to the crux of Sklar’s curatorial focus on artists exploring “products whose original form and structure [and he adds later, value] are inextricably linked to their functionality, production and utility.” By celebrating objects created or redesignated as art, whose exponentially enhanced value derives from its new-found uselessness, the gallery is the diametric opposite of the office. Or at least it’s supposed to be.

There’s an element of Surrealist perversity to “The Office”: only a very confident collector, with a very conscientious cleaning crew, could take Kris Martin’s la lettre perdue–a 5×7 envelope freshly liberated from its mundane supply room existence and thoughtfully propped against the wall–and return it to his office as his latest art world trophy.
But the irony of the show cuts both ways; after all, its second incarnation was “downsized” to make space for the gallery’s next show. Artists may be highly attuned to the aesthetic and social implications of the corporate environments other people inhabit, but in this week especially, where gallerists are busy adding their personal touches to a warren of identical cubicles at a giant trade show, the differences between “The Office” and “The Gallery” can be very little, indeed.

I’m reminded of the indignant reaction when Andy Freeberg showed his “Sentry” series at Danziger Projects last September. His photographs, shot on the sly, capture the uniformly daunting entrance desks of Chelsea galleries. Often, just the top of a nameless attendant’s head peeks out above the stark, minimalist cube. On his own site Freeberg wondered, “in this digital world of email and instant messaging that supposedly makes us more connected, are we also setting up barriers to the simple eye to eye contact that affirms our humanity?” Well, yeah. How else are you supposed to get any work done?
The Office, 30 Nov 2007 – 9 Feb 2008 [images via tanyabonakdargallery.com]
“Sentry,” Andy Freeberg, Sept. 6 – Oct. 13, 2007 [image via danzigerprojects.com]
Andy Freeberg – Statement [andyfreebergphotoart.com]

RC Baker gets all caught up in the spirit in reviewing Zwirner & Wirth’s re-creation of Dan Flavin’s historic 1964 exhibition at Green Gallery, the first time he exhibited only-flourescent works. The show sounds fascinating, and when combined with Flavin’s original installation sketches and documentation and a dedicated catalogue, it surpasses the one-room approximation of the show that was included in the 2005 NGA/Dia/MFAFW retrospective.
Instead of grounding the show and its reception at the time, or exploring how its details related to the artist’s later, lifelong practice, Webster just emotes about being in the space. If that’s an attempt to channel 1964 viewers’ experience, it’s unfortunately not labeled as such. And I think Webster is wrong in his description of how Flavin’s estate deals with the artist’s chosen materials, which were once off-the-shelf, but are now obsolete:

(the Flavin estate periodically commissions large batches of discontinued hues from G.E.)

When I spoke at length with Flavin’s last studio assistant, Steve Morse, who is now the conservator of the estate, for my NY Times story on Flavin’s work, he told me that in the 1980’s, there was a period when GE’s formulation changed, and they started buying up every green light bulb they could. They still have some left, or they did in 2004, anyway. But since then, the estate has documented the chemical formulation of the coating of each color of light bulb, and when it needs more, it has them fabricated in small batches. The off-the-shelf, mass-produced product had become a custom, handmade object. Almost like art.
Dan Flavin: Light White, Light Heat [vv via man]
“Dan Flavin: The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition” runs through May 3rd [zwirnerandwirth.com]
Previously: Lights Out: The Dark Side of Success [nyt]
My interview with Stephen Flavin

If anyone’s life’s work could have at once so little and so much to show for it, it’s Agnes Martin. From Brian Droitcour for Artforum:

This brisk tour of Agnes Martin’s career–forty years in twenty drawings–is anchored by On a Clear Day, 1973, a series of prints offering thirty ways to regard the square.
…
In the 1970s, Martin pared down an already spare vocabulary. These prints are a glimpse of her shifting priorities, and the drawings around them protract that glimpse into a lifelong panorama.

From the gallery’s press release for the show, a little background:

In the late 1950’s Agnes Martin’s landscapes and biomorphic surrealist works transformed into abstraction and what would eventually become her signature examination of rectangular grids within a square format. Her work ranges from early tight grids to the opening up of forms to wider rectangles. Disillusioned with New York, Martin moved to New Mexico in 1967 and abandoned painting. When she resumed her work around 1974, the earlier primarily black and white palette modified to include monochromatic washes of subtle pastel colors, perhaps influenced by the New Mexico landscape. While Martin’s abstract repetitive forms have been associated with Minimalist style, she considered Minimalism impersonal and over-intellectual, preferring her work to be characterized as Abstract Expressionist due to its more personal and spiritual nature. Inspired by emerging concepts of Taoism and Zen Buddism in the 1950’s, Martin, like many of the Abstract Expressionists, sought a style that transcended the material world and spoke more of the mind and the experience of the sublime.

On A Clear Day was instrumental in Martin’s own retrospective re-evaluation of her work and was apparently a catalyst of sorts for her resumption of painting in 1974. For details, check out Lynne Cooke’s essay accompanying the Dia’s exhibition of pivotal paintings from 1974 – 1979.
Though it might be tempting, in the absence of any apparent content beyond the grids, to investigate and catalog the variations and details that were surely deliberate decisions on Martin’s part, Cooke argues that this is not what Martin was after when she began painting again:

her endeavor would not be to mobilize the viewer in a process of “looking for” but to immerse the solitary, stationary spectator in an indeterminate, luminous space, in attentive contemplation, “looking at.”

Brian Droitcour reviewing “Agnes Martin, Works On Paper” at Peter Blum Soho trough March 15 [artforum]
Peter Blum Gallery Soho [peterblumgallery]
“To The Islands, Agnes Martin Paintings, 1974-1979 [diacenter.org]
[image via portlandart.net]

As he was working on it the last few months, my friend John Powers kept hinting that his upcoming show would have a bit of the Deathstar and a bit of the disintegrating disco ball. He’s not kidding. The Force is strong with this one.
Empire, 45-in diameter, styrofoam and anodized aluminum, at Virgil de Voldere Gallery, the Chelsea Arts Bldg on 26th st through Mar. 29 [virgilgallery.com]
John Powers’ portfolio site [johnpowers.us]

Holy ^%$&! Man Smuggles Art To The &%#$ing Moon!
In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60’s bad boys Michael Heizer’s and Dennis Oppenheim’s desert drawings. He called them Moonworks.
Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.
I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA’s official channels were unsuccessful.
Myers revealed the exhibition’s existence to the New York Times, which published the story Nov. 22, 1969, two days after the Apollo 12 crew had left the moon–and the Intrepid–and two days before they arrived back on earth. Here’s the photo from the story:

According to Myers, who was involved with E.A.T. on the Pepsi Pavilion project at the time, the six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4″ x 1/2″ x 1/40″, with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.
According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg’s wavy line; Novros’ black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd’s 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, “the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art” [a sculpture which is in MoMA’s permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, “similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer.” Warhol’s contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as “a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature.”
Actually, it’s a drawing of a penis. Here are some other photos by Frosty Myers, published, I believe, with a 1985 Omni Magazine article by the arts writer Phoebe Hoban. That would be the Warhol Penis there in the upper right.

As the NASA spokesman told the Times when asked about the Museum infiltration, “I don’t know about it. If we had been asked, it sounds like something we’d have very much interested in [sic]. If it is true that they’ve succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art.”
[emphasis added for ironic amusement, though to Myers’ credit, it turned out to be a pretty good grouping of artists to have involved.]
But is it conceivable that someone could have smuggled dirty pictures onto a mission to the moon? Actually, yes. Even if Warhol hadn’t sent that penis to the moon, Apollo 12 would still have achieved the first known incident of lunar nudity.
The back-up crew for the A12 mission surreptitiously inserted reduced photos of Playboy centerfolds into the flight crew’s fireproof plastic cuff checklists which were only discovered about 2.5 hours into their first moon walk. [if you’re at work, that first link is to nasa.gov, and the second is to playboy.com. The same scans are available at both sites, though NASA has conveniently embedded theirs in a PDF.]

In addition to the six drawings, the Moon Museum also acquired a large collection of photographs; astronaut Alan Bean accidentally left several rolls of undeveloped film behind on the lunar surface. The checklists came back with the astronauts.
Related: Frosty Myers, the SoHo pioneer, had a retrospective exhibition last November-December at Friedman Benda Gallery in Chelsea. [friedmanbenda.com]
Also, he had a sitdown with my favorite crazy at The Grey Lady, design/home writer Joyce Wadler. [nyt]