Another Great Art House Production

There's still time to see what I think is one of the best theater productions I've seen in a long time -- and I go to a lot of theater. And from the enthusiastic reaction of the audience tonight, I'd say others agree with me. 


Art House Production's The Constant Never will be playing tomorrow (Saturday) and next weekend. Don't miss it! The multimedia play has charming and inventive music (it reminded me of a soundtrack of a French animated film - The Triplets of Belleville maybe?), live actors interacting with video actors (video designed by Sara Wentwoth), and some first rate acting and writing. 
PERFORMANCE DATES:
May 7-8, 13-15, 20-22 at 8pm
LOCATION:
One McWilliams Place, Jersey City, NJ 07302
(old St. Francis Building, SE corner of Hamilton Park)

TICKETS $20 general admission
To purchase in advance, visit:
www.brownpapertickets.com

Nancy Cohen’s New Work

Nancy Cohen, Up from Under,  2008, 14 x 28 x 10 inches 

(Metal, glass, wire, resin, paper pulp). 

Photo by Ed Fausty.*

Click on the image to enlarge it.

I went to the studio of Jersey City artist Nancy Cohen to see her new sculpture and reliefs -- some of the best work I've seen in a while.  It's very difficult to make successful colored sculpture because, often rather than the color looking like it's inherent to the materials, it looks like it's been arbitrarily applied to the surface. And even when color doesn't appear to lie on the surface, colored sculptures tend to lose their sense of weight. That's not necessarily a bad thing, people have been making great colored sculptures forever, and in fact, Jeff Koons exploits this weightless quality with his balloon sculptures, as does Joel Shapiro in his new work now at Pace Gallery. 

Jeff Koons, Balloon Flower (Magenta), 1995-2000, high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating, 114 x 132 x 108 in.,  West Broadway outside the World Trade Center PATH station

Joel Shapiro, installation view, Pace Gallery, 534 W.  25th Street (until May 15th). 

But this phenomenon makes the interaction of color more difficult. In order to interact, color needs to be disembodied, to float freely, to breath -- something more natural to painting (see post below on “Soft Eyes”). But I think Cohen manages it by, among other things, using shiny, transparent and semi-opaque materials. The glossy sheen of the surfaces encourages unfocused contemplation, and, as a result, the work feels, to some extent, disembodied. (The only sculpture I can think of off hand that is at all similar is sixties California Cool School Sculpture, except they seem disembodied but don’t take advantage of the color possibilities.)  In addition, Cohen’s play with the rapid movement of line keeps the eye moving rapidly over the surface, and in and out of space, adding to the disembodiment of the object. 

Nancy Cohen, All for One, 2008, 22 x 18 x 10 inches (Glass, resin, steel, wire, handmade paper, wax)

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Now, IMHO, here’s what makes her works unique: they maintain their tactility and physicality even while appearing disembodied. Line is experienced as a physical thing -- a wire or string; and  color is experienced as inherent to the object itself -- the materials ARE that color through and through, so they don’t look applied to the surface, and the objects maintain their sense of weight. 

Cohen’s work is a delicate balancing act: too physical and colors won’t interact; too immaterial and the sculpture loses its weight and tactility. (This sometimes happens for me when I recognize an object in a sculpture -- a spoon or a spring or some other object. It’s fun, and adds another level to the work, but this awakening takes me out of the experience -- it burst the bubble.)

It might be helpful to compare Cohen’s work to someone like Frank Stella. Cohen’s work is obviously more intimate than Stella’s (who I always thought of as an abstract Pop Artist). But more important, Stella’s sculptural reliefs seem hollow and weightless, and the color gives the impression of being only on the surface. Stella uses color to distinguish one shape from another, and to create a liveliness bordering on chaos (which might be the point). He never really deals with the interaction of color. His works are an assault of color, but he never deals with color per se. Cohen’s work, on the other hand, has the illusionistic space, light and color interaction of painting but still maintains the tactility and weight of sculpture. 

Frank Stella, K.37 lattice variation protogen RPT (mid-size), 2008, protogen RPT with stainless steel tubing, 56 x 35 x 28 inches

* Ed Fausty’s “Digital Pigment Panoramas” can be seen at Sawadee Thai Restaurant, 137 Newark Ave. in  Downtown Jersey City until June 28th. There will be a reception for him on May 18th, 6-8 pm.

Some Worthwhile Links:

1. Harmonious minds: The hunt for universal music - life - 10 May 2010 - New Scientist: 
2. High Stakes Criticism: An Interview with Greil Marcus < Features | PopMatters: An Interview with pop music critic Greil Marcus"
3. The joy of cubism | Art and design | guardian.co.uk: Jonathan Jones, "The joy of cubism" Intellectual attempts to understand the cubist world of Picasso and Braque are misplaced – we should just enjoy it"
4. The pros and cons of financial innovation : The New Yorker: "THE FINANCIAL PAGE, TOO CLEVER BY HALF? by James Surowiecki"

A Movie Worth Seeing

Don’t miss Exit Through the Gift Shop, the brilliant house of mirrors documentary by British street artist, Banksy. Here is an excellent review by Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. And here, some background material about Mr. Brainwash (Thierry Guetta) in L A Weekly.

Soft Eyes

I’m actually not going to write about Julia Roberts -- but I’m glad I got your attention. What I want to write about is a different kind of “soft eyes.” It’s a way to look at paintings, especially paintings involved with spatial illusions and the interaction of color.  To experience this type of painting -- to allow the illusions to happen -- I believe it’s necessary to look with “soft eyes.” That is, to look with passive receptivity, without focusing on any one thing, to pay gentle attention to peripheral as well as central vision, to allow the distinction between figure and ground to dissolve by, as it were, looking through the painting.

I know this sounds atypically Zen for me, and in fact it is a concept taught in Aikido,  but also Neuro-Linguistic Programming and equestrianism. In addition, my old friend, the physiologist and psychologist, the late Ed Wortz (LA shrink to the art stars) told me once that your eyes dilate when you look at someone you love, and that’s why loved ones seem to glow. I think “soft eyes” is a similar phenomenon -- it’s like falling in love.   

CLAUDE MONET, Les Bassin aux nymphéas, 

1917-1919, Oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches

I bring this up now because I just fell in love -- with the show Claude Monet, Late Work at the Gagosian Gallery (until June 26th). Yes, the same gallery that gave us the great Pablo Picasso, Mosqueteros show last year (Larry is such a show off!).   These are paintings of light and space. Colors breath and interact with adjacent colors, making them appear brighter and sometimes changing their hue. Figure and ground, especially in the latest paintings, the Nymphéas, are ambiguous to the point where they sometimes merge. Even our point of view -- where we are in space relative to the image -- is confusing. Are we floating above the waterlilies? Looking through them? Looking at a reflection? There is very little to grasp and hold on to here -- you just have to let go and love them.  

CLAUDE MONET, Nymphéas, 1914-1917, 

Oil on canvas, 59 x 78 3/4 inches

Vegetation

Ming Fay, On Orchard Street, 2010, wire, foam, paint, etc.

It seems every time I go to the galleries some subject or other predominates, as if there's a theme for the day or something. The last few times, for example, it was portraits, then landscapes, then slow motion videos, and then small abstract paintings. I know it's just a coincidence, and that seeing patterns is what humans do. Still, it's weird.

The theme for yesterday, a gloriously beautiful day to walk around the Lower East Side, was vegetation. Ming Fay at Lesley Heller (54 Orchard Street, until June 6th) filled the gallery with a playful, colorful jungle of branches, vines, pods and fruits. On the other hand, Martin Schwenk's off-white tree branches, at the tiny Number 35 Gallery (39 Essex Street, until May 28th), were relatively austere. And Dana Levy's mesmerizing and funny videos of ivy overrunning a house in Greenwich Village (Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, 21 Orchard Street, until May 16th) fit the theme perfectly. 

Martin Schwenk, Secret Life of Plants, silicone, plaster or acrylic glass

Not exactly on the theme -- okay, I acknowledge it's a stretch -- was a lively body of work by Katherine Bernhardt at Canada Gallery (55 Chrystie Street, until May 23rd). Bernhardt is known for large, slapdash (in a good way) paintings of models taken from fashion magazines. They were masterful in their painterly simplicity, but I was afraid they were becoming a trademark. Not to fear -- Bernhardt is too much the painter for that. Instead she painted the walls of the gallery, in the exuberant manner of Keith Haring, and filled it with large paintings inspired by a trip to Tombouctou.

Installation view, Katherine Bernhardt, Tombouctou 52 Jours.

The bright color and bravado brushwork is what immediately strikes you, but to pull off work like that you have to be gifted at drawing. The shapes play against one another and the edge of the canvas; nothing is left to hang loosely in space. And every shape is alive with energy and vitality. It's this vitality, this organic sense of growth and movement, more subtle and ambitious in its way than the other more literal work, that I believe ties these paintings to the vegetation theme of the day.

Malware

Yesterday morning some people got this malware warning when checking into this site. AT NO TIME WAS ANYONE AT RISK OF MALWARE FROM THIS BLOG. The cause of the warning was a live link to Modern Art Notes (MAN), and that link was quickly removed. Anyone linking to MAN from this blog would have received another warning, and even then, if you proceeded, you would have to open an ad on their site to be infected. For anyone interested, Douglas McLennan, the editor of ArtsJournal, the leading art news aggregator which also houses Modern Art Notes (and 60 other art blogs) wrote an explanation of what happened here. 

David Brooks is a Tricky Bastard

I know this is an art blog, but it annoys me that so many of my friends fall for this guy because he comes off so reasonable. Besides, it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want!

Monday’s op-ed was typical. Brooks spent the first half making the obvious point that almost everyone missed the housing bubble. (Duh.) Then he states: The premise of the current financial regulatory reform is that the establishment missed the last bubble and, therefore, more power should be vested in the establishment to foresee and prevent the next one.  and that the Democratic bill ...doesn’t solve the basic epistemic problem, which is that members of the establishment herd are always the last to know when something unexpected happens. 


Well that’s neither the premise nor the conclusion! The problem is NOT that no one foresaw the housing bubble. Given the lack of regulations, what could be done if they had?  The problem is that deregulated financial institutions were allowed to gamble big time, make an obscene amount of money (with no productive value to the economy), and, when they failed (as gambles inevitably must), the losses were catastrophic. 


Here is an analogy of what happened: Financial firms insure your house. Fine. Regulators make sure they have the resources backing the insurance, so if something happens to your house they can pay off the policy.  After de-regulation, however, they not only sold insurance on your house WITHOUT THE RESOURCES BACKING IT, but they sold policies on your house to thousands of people with NO ownership in your house at all. And even that wasn’t enough -- they packaged together bits and pieces of these insurance policies, contrived to get AAA ratings for the package, and sold them too. So if your house catches fire, they not only have to pay off the owner, but the thousands of other people they sold policies to as well. 


But David Brooks says because “members of the establishment” didn’t foresee the housing bubble they can’t be trusted to re-regulate the economy. ONE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHER!

WOW! Check out Art Fag City on the Jersey City Museum

Some great reporting by Paddy Johnson, with Anne Johnson contributing. You may also want to read my suggestions for the future of the museum.

Noteworthy Links

Dieter Roth. Literaturwurst, 1968. Book of cut-up novel, water, 

gelatin and spices in sausage casing, 20 11/16 x 16 3/4 x 4 ¾ in.

98Bowery.com
This site is Marc Miller's autobiographical and historical documentation of Downtown New York art and music from 1969-1989. It is a must read particularly for anyone interested in the New York punk art and music scene in the 1970's. In addition the site has just re-published (in an up-dated internet version) the 200-page catalog documenting the first five years of ABC No Rio, and the larger artistic environment of the times (like Colab, the Real Estate Show and Lower East Side Poetry) that Miller wrote it in 1985 with artist, writer and co-founder of ABC No Rio, Alan Moore.

In Mexico, artists can pay their taxes with artwork - USATODAY.com
Not everyone can pay with art. Participants must register with the Tax Administration Service, Mexico's version of the Internal Revenue Service, by submitting a body of their work to the jury and proving they have shown or sold artworks.

Major Earners in the Cultural World - Graphic - NYTimes.com
Glenn Lowry, Museum of Modern Art, $1.32 million. Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation was paid $2,741,960 in 2008; Richard Armstrong, the current director is paid $84,473. The highest paid woman (12th): American Museum of Natural History president, Ellen V. Futter, $889,038.

Currently Giving Her Show Away: Chauney Peck | Slog | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
She does hope for an "offering" in return.