My review of the Dorksy Gallery’s group show, “Recipes for an Encounter,” appears in the latest issue of Art Practical. Also featured are reports from Sydney and Los Angeles, as well as reviews of interesting spaces like Steven Wolf Fine Arts and Altman Siegal Gallery and neat conceptualists like Michael Guidetti.
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Points of Reference
Assorted sources of gratification, amusement, and inspiration.
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1085: Drawing Series-Composite, Part I-IV, #1-24, A+B, (detail), 1968/2003. Photo: Bill Jacobson. Image Sources: Dia:Beacon
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1085: Drawing Series-Composite, Part I-IV, #1-24, A+B, (detail), 1968/2003. Photo: Bill Jacobson. Image Source: Dia:Beacon
Learn why this combo rocked my world in the previous post, “Good New for Art Lovers.”
—
Designer and happiness evangelicist Stephen Sagmeister’s TED talk videos
Graphic designer Sagmeister wants to promote happiness. He’s compiled some advice on living in an exuberantly designed book called “Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.” In his TED talks, he presents his ideas in a very elemental, approachable style. At the risk of making a huge generalization, I found his demeanor self-possessed in a European way—dry wit and nonchalance just short of indifference. (It makes American enthusiasm—wide eyes, big smiles—seem like ostentatious over-sharing.) Presenting simple, innocent gestures with such unconcerned confidence can sometimes come off with a whiff of entitlement, but for all his success—which is evidently abundant—he is modest and gracious, always using the pronoun “we” to share the authorship of his work (but never naming names).
Anytime designers can break free from the conventional corporate path is great; Sagmeister’s direction—happiness—is an interesting choice.
Some of Sagmeister’s projects look like art. He makes installations, photographs and other creative gestures, often on his sabbaticals. Some of the appropriations of contemporary art techniques seem a bit apparent. At one point during his slide show, I winced, because a text made of shadows so recalled the work of Fred Eerdeckens. I haven’t got a problem with designers, or other artists, trying creative approaches that have been done before. It’s just that designers’ images aren’t held to the same critical standards that the works of contemporary artists—the creative risks are not the same. With Sagmeister’s office located in Chelsea, it’s safe to assume that he sees lots of art; a nice gesture, if he does borrow from what he sees, would be to collect art, rewarding those whose inspiration has enhanced your life (if not also your firm’s bottom line).
[On a related note, M is currently studying design that moves beyond visual style. I’m eager to see what he discovers. As designers generate content, and become authors and researchers, with what criteria should their work be judged?]
—
Designer Ed Fella charms and confuses young ‘uns with talk of photostats and Letraset at the Walker
Ed Fella is an interesting counterpart to hip Sagmeister. Fella, known for his handmade design work and typographic doodles, has a cult-like following among art and design students. His work is delightfully old-school. He’s also completely transparent about his appropriation of styles, and of the insignificance of the content of his work beyond the design community.
In his lecture at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he’s got a kindly conversational style, both grandfatherly and professorial. With his quirky hoarding of images of vernacular signage, his pursuit of offbeat methods, his unapologetic borrowing of historical styles, and his insistence on making room for young designers, Fella is generous and forthright.
[Can I just say how great it is to be able to access museum lectures online? It’s a proper extension of museum’s purposes.]
—
Chris Duncan
Eye Against I
Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions, San Francisco
Chris Duncan, Eye Against I, installation view. Source: Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA.
Chris Duncan, Obstructed Image #14, 2010, Found paper and tape, 14 x 20 inches. Source: Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA.
This show manages to be sparse but massive. In encompassing and altering the gallery’s architecture, it brims with Duncan’s ambition. It places the viewer literally within his vision. The smaller works look brilliantly simple and expertly executed. I think the tape-out pieces are sublime.
Wish I could be in San Francisco to experience it firsthand.
Art in Odd Places festival is almost here!
I’m helping out with a cool grassroots art project called Art in Odd Places. The opening reception is this Friday, October 1, and it continues for 10 days. There will be all sorts of public art projects all along 14th Street in Manhattan. Check it out.
Good news for art lovers
I had a revelatory experience looking at squiggles on a wall today.
For the first time, I gained a deep appreciation for Sol Lewitt‘s work. Though I’ve seen a few of his works in person and many in reproduction, the innovation, technique and phenomenological experience did not become reified to me until my visit to Dia:Beacon today.
There are eight rooms dedicated to Lewitt’s early wallworks at the Dia:Beacon in upstate New York. While all the works followed instructions, and often consisted of no more than pencil line on white walls, they resulted in myriad visual experiences. They were immense, immaculately executed, and beautifully situated in one of the best buildings for viewing art that I’ve seen in the US.
The drawings brought to mind ideas about order, grid, variation, geometry, the human hand and authorship. I thought about the attention to detail that the executors brought to their tasks, the roots of our associations between abstractions and whimsy or gravitas, the simplicity of the materials, and the ingeniousness of Lewitt’s efficacy.
The works grounded me at Dia:Beacon. I was flooded with gratitude. I felt lucky to be able to see the works in person in such a lovely setting. I was also grateful to the Dia Foundation for allowing so much space to individual artists. I never saw anything like this in California. This dedication was complimented with a commitment to direct, uninterrupted viewing experiences. Didactic texts were minimal; perfect, indirect sunlight filtered in from the building’s northern windows; guards were sparse, demure, and inconspicuous; and there was plenty of space and peace.
It might seem strange to admit, but standing in a room with only pencil lines and squiggles on a grid, a dopey smile spread across my face. This the quality and scale of the viewing experience and the stellar collection re-energized my excitement about being in New York. At the risk of hyperbole, Dia:Beacon elevated my expectations of what is possible in art.
Also on view are breathtaking “negative sculptures” by Michael Heizer, and many fine examples of Fred Sandback’s yarn installations and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs. I also loved the cool basement full of uningratiating works by Bruce Nauman (including his recent studio-mouse-surveillance videos, complete with shop stools), Louise Lawler’s humorous bird calls-based outdoor sound piece, and a room full of On Kawara’s date paintings. Robert Irwin’s landscape design formed a soothing contemporary art idyll. I didn’t want to leave.
Photographs were not allowed, and in any case, my snaps would not do any justice to Lewitt or Dia. You’ll just have to see it with your own eyes.
Dia:Beacon
Beacon, NY
Brian May, guitarist, astrophysicist, stereography enthusiast
We were barreling down a long corridor of ivy-covered trees in Tennessee when we finally listened to Terry Gross’ interview with Brian May (Fresh Air, WHYY, August 3, 2010), guitarist of Queen, co-writer of classic songs, astrophysicist and author of a new book on stereography.
It was one of those episodes of Fresh Air that you don’t soon forget.
It was a funny thing to hear May, with his humble and polite demeanor, describe touring with Queen, writing arena anthems, the non-issue of Freddy Mercury’s sexuality, and the pain of Queen’s limited success in America largely due to our homophobia. It was vital. I also relished paying attention to the strange structure of “We Will Rock You,” and May’s nerdy explanation of how he achieved the arena-like acoustics in the studio.
Of course the interview was spurred by May’s recent book of stereography, which is related to his PhD in astrophysics.
To be have a life in the arts, and to achieve the kind of success where your artwork becomes part of the culture, is really nothing short of extraordinary. To change courses and pursue specialized academics, and then share your love of science with a general audience, speaks to an admirable ambition and confidence. What an inspiration!
Schjeldahl on Rist
In “Feeling Good” (New Yorker, September 27, 2010; abstract here ), Peter Schjeldahl reviews Pipolotti Rist’s show at Luhring Augustine in NYC, and in the process, extols the singular artist and her commitment to pleasure.
I savored the subject and the conveyance. I admire Rist’s work for it fearless optimism and exuberance. She manages to make massive installations that are friendly and participatory. Schjeldahl’s words brim with enthusiasm, and he also contextualizes Rist’s work with a preternaturally long view.
A few of my favorite passages are:
The first two lines:
The Swiss video- and installation-maker Pipilotti Rist is an evangelist for happiness like no other first-rate artist that I can think of, except, perhaps, Alexander Calder. Like Calder, she is immune to solemnity, and her work appeals to more or less everybody.
This gem:
Color is more than the keynote of Rist’s art—it’s practially the theology.
Her pop cultural affinities don’t unite high and low so much as make them seem like interchangeable engines of pleasure. Rist resolves no critical problems of contemporary art. She just makes you forget there are any.
(I wondered about this same dialectic—this addiction to criticality as radical opposition—in my show Irrational Exuberance, and it was discussed in the closing dialogue, As Is: Pop and Complicity.)
…not that thought is allowed much traction. There’s a steady state of wonderment at having a body right here, right now…. Imagine, as Rist makes easy in the show’s main room, being a sheep in a lush meadow entirely surrounded, as far as you can see, by what you like to eat. Life surely vitiates such sublime contentment most of the time, but numbness to it seems an optional tragedy.
Just as positive psychologists want you to know: Optimism is a choice.
Schjeldahl takes a strong position in the course of explaining Rist’s significance:
Pleasure is a serious matter in and for art, which must justify itself continually in a global culture of mass entertainments. Glumness is an understandable but self-defeating reaction of people determined to somehow make a difference. Rist is remarkable for having insisted on bliss in an era, which peaked in the nineteen-nineties, when a parade of artists ambitiously expanded art’s physical scale and social address only to burden it, self-importantly, with theoretical arcana and political sanctimony.
As a critical writer, I aspire to this level of expertise and confidence.
Proof that writing about art need not be burdened by art-speak, pretension, or obfuscation:
Responsible as well as responsive to contemporary art’s enlarged public sphere, she maintains standards of craft and sincerity—outward discipline, inward necessity—that speak for themselves, without critical gloss or winking irony.
free museum admission on saturday
Love free admission to museums.
Dislike junk mail.
Free admission to museums through Smithsonian on Saturday, September 25 here.
What’s the catch? Toyota will donate $1 to museums if you sign up for emails from them. That’s nice but the last thing I want in my in-box are ads for a car I’m not in the market for. I’ll take the ticket and pass on the spam. Because it’d be so much easier to donate a dollar during one of my regular visits to galleries and museums, aside from already donating art, volunteering with grassroots art organizations, and offering discounts on professional services to artists.
Two Shotgun Reviews
My reviews of Stephen Vitiello’s A Bell For Every Minute and the group exhibition, Usable Pasts, are published in Art Practical, Issue 2.1. The issue features 34 Shotgun Reviews.
R+D 