Random Acts of Culture

Today’s New York Times has an article on “Random Acts of Culture,” a wildly successful program begun by the Knight Foundation to “weave the arts into the fabric of the community.”  Their biggest hit so far (with more than seven million views on YouTube) is a performance of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus organized by the Philadelphia Opera in the Grand Court of Macy’s Center City, Philadelphia. It involved 650 singers from 28 different organizations and the world’s largest pipe organ. Here it is. Enjoy -- it’s a real upper!

Koch vs. Ashbery - Sparring Poets

John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch

From the website This Recording, an audio and visual recording archive, comes this transcript of a hilarious and brilliant 1965 interview of John Ashbery by his friend Kenneth Koch. The two acerbic poets really go at it. Here's a taste:

JA: Let's ignore for the moment at least your enigmatic statement that the way things come together reminds you of Florence –

KK: I did not say that.

JA: Anyway I wish you would explain for me and our readers –

KK: Listeners.

JA: – why we seem to omit references to the cities in which we are living, in our work. This is not true of most American poetry. Shudder.

KK: Hmm. I guess we do. I did write one poem about New York while I was in New York, but the rest of the poems about America I wrote in Europe.

JA: I repeat, why we seem to omit ALMOST all references – ?

KK: I find it gets to be too difficult to get through my everyday associations with things familiar to me for me to be able to use them effectively in poetry.

JA: Snore.

KK: I myself am bored by my attempts to make abstract statements and wish I could do it as facilely as you do. I'm going to cut out my previous statement. What made you snore?

JA: Well, if you're cutting out your statement, then my snore naturally goes with it, I suppose.

KK: Maybe I won't cut it out. Or I might just keep the snore.

More Online Cultural Resources

When I blogged about the Google Art Project, I forgot to mention a prior venture of Google’s: Google Earth’s 3D tour of the Prado (which may explain why the Prado isn’t one of the museums in the Art Project). Like Google’s Art Project, there are stunning images of paintings captured using a super-high-resolution camera. The interface is kind of clumsy — if you’re not careful you can accidentally zoom to Poughkeepsie. Here's a video about it:

Google is far from the only online resource -- the University of Michigan's School of Art and Design has an extensive collection of them on their site. But perhaps the single most useful online cultural resource is the Europeana archive of paintings, music, films and books drawn from about 1500 of Europe's galleries, libraries, archives and museums. They already have a staggering 15 million items and it’s just the beginning -- the European Union wants all public domain masterpieces accessible by 2016.

Here’s a video about what you can find on Europeana:

Europeana Launch Video from europeana on Vimeo.


And speaking of online resources, the Brooklyn Museum, in another of their many efforts to reach out to a broader audience, is conducting an online experiment to determine if our initial reaction to a work of art is changed by what we are told about the work. I found it a fun exercise. Here's the link: Brooklyn Museum: Split Second: Indian Paintings.

Charles Garabedian at the Santa Barrbara Museum of Art

Installation Photo

Christopher Knight just published an excellent review of Charles Garabedian's retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Google Art Project

Google just launched a new website, the Google Art Project, where you can take virtual 360 degree tours of major museums around the world — seventeen of them so far. As you work your way around the galleries, you can click on a painting for a close-up view and get detailed information about that painting. Best of all, each museum has one painting of their choice that can be examined in astonishing detail because Google photographed it with a super-high resolution gigapixel camera. 

I found the site doesn't work well with Safari but does okay with Chrome and Firefox browsers; and I don't know about Internet Explorer.

Here's a list of the super-high resolution photographs on the site:

• MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art / The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh
• Uffizi Gallery / The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
• Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian / The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, James McNeill Whistler
• Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza / Young Knight in a Landscape, Vittore Carpaccio
• Museum Kampa / The Cathedral, František Kupka
• Rijksmuseum / Night Watch, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
• Van Gogh Museum / The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh
• Alte Nationalgalerie / In the Conservatory, Edouard Manet
• Palace of Versailles / Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France, and her children , Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
• National Gallery / The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger
• The Frick Collection / St. Francis in the Desert, Giovanni Bellini
• Gemäldegalerie / The Merchant Georg Gisze, Hans Holbein the Younger
• Museo Reina Sofia / The Bottle of Anís del Mono, Juan Gris
• The State Tretyakov Gallery / The Apparition of Christ to the People (The Apparition of the Messiah), Aleksander Ivanov
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art / The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
• The State Hermitage Museum / Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn
• Tate Britain / No Woman, No Cry, Chris Ofili

See if you can identify which paintings these details are taken from. 

Detail #1

Detail #2

Detail #3

AARP Painter Supreme: A Note on Late Style in the Art of Our Time

Hans Hofmann painting on the dunes, 1943,  Photograph by Herbert Matter

 By Carl Belz

Around the time I was first learning about art and art’s history, which was in the late 50s and the 60s, it seemed there’d be little or no chance to witness the late styles of the artists of the New York School who were then being celebrated in the world of contemporary art for “The Triumph of American Painting”. Little or nothing, that is, to compare with the haunting visions of the aging Donatello, Titian, Michelangelo, or Rembrandt, which we’d found so moving while being introduced to the Old Masters, because so few of our contemporary masters seemed to be surviving beyond their initial maturity. Gone by 1970 were Gorky, Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Newman, and David Smith, titans all, leaving in their wake the impression that the first generation of Abstract Expressionists had been born to a tragic destiny, their careers aborted by the forces of nature or their very own hands.

Against this bleak pattern of careers interrupted, Hans Hofmann stands as an earthbound and enlightening exception. A full generation older than the Abstract Expressionists among whom he circulated, and by whom he was highly respected, his firsthand experience of Matisse and Picasso in Paris at the start of the 20th century inured him to the cultural alienation that haunted many of his younger colleagues and too often propelled them toward lives of excess and self-destruction. In contrast, Hofmann was comfortable with the meaning of his enterprise; he had nothing to prove and was content to move his painting along at its own pace. He was content as well with being a teacher of art at private schools he operated for many years in New York and Provincetown, his name synonymous with  the push/pull theory that grounded his pedagogy with the message that a painting’s surface be everywhere taut, with every part in dynamic tension with every other part, thus making the painting a vital and integrated whole.

Hofmann, Hans (age 84), The Clash 1964 oil on canvas 52 x 60 inches (Berkeley Art Museum)

The fact of Hofmann’s legendary teaching of push/pull was in fact the first fact I learned about him and it was so clearly evident in his pictures that they at first seemed academic, as if his push/pull theory had been employed as a formula for their making. How off the mark that impression was hit me with the force of an epiphany when I encountered firsthand the full Hofmann experience at his 1963 MoMA retrospective. For towering before me was a painter whose work blew away one after another of the critical theories I’d been absorbing in the classroom and decisively gave the lie to any thought that his pictures were formulaic. There were paintings clearly structured as landscapes that also included crisply edged rectangular slabs of color, thus challenging the abstract versus representational divide insisted upon during the 50s in the name of modernist autonomy. There were paintings combining troweled pigment with thin washes of color, thus questioning the then-current call for singularly unified surfaces. There were recent paintings in which impulsively dripped lines suggested human figures or animals, thus recalling a Surrealist practice that had presumably been buried since the 1940s. And there were paintings, one after another after another, in which color eclipsed all of the above, casting aside the dictates and debates and theories of the day—including even the master’s own push/pull—color whose sheer and exuberant radiance left no doubt about its primacy as a vehicle for meaning.

On top of all that, there remains the fact that Hofmann hit his stride only after 1950 when he turned 70 and that he worked with undiminished power until his death in 1966. In that stretch he painted with the energy and daring of a 30-something artist in possession of the experience and authority of a fully mature adult. With each decade that has passed since I first saw them, his pictures have for me just gotten better and better, feeling ever vital as they expand their embrace and deepen their understanding of painting’s richness and the pleasures it provides. In this, the example of his achievement has become inspirational; regarding modern culture at large, his achievement has broadened our understanding of late style expression generally by leavening the tragic vision of our human condition with a joyous and celebratory declaration of its boundless emotional and intellectual capacity.


Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

Tribeca and the LES

By Charles Kessler

Tribeca:
I haven’t been to the Tribeca galleries very often in the last few years, but all of a sudden there were several shows I wanted to see there. I’ll start with the best: POP: Eddie Arning, Freddie Brice, Ray Hamilton at KS Art, 73 Leonard Street (between Church and Broadway) curated by Anne Doran. All three artists were self-taught and didn’t start making art until later in life; and they all died in the 1990’s. The idea for the show was that, even though they had no connection to the mainstream art world, they,  like the Pop artists, employed common objects and advertisements in their art. While that is true, I don’t think anyone could possibly confuse them with Pop in any way because Pop Art is very refined, slick even, and this is very raw work. 

I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand how these guys, especially Freddie Brice, can be so good. I know the work was selected by Anne Doran, who has an excellent eye, so possibly this show is especially good — but they did a lot of excellent work.

Maybe self-taught artists have a late style like fine artists sometimes have. Maybe they reach a time in their lives when they don’t care about mundane things, they don’t care about what other people think, and they just go for it in a very direct and unselfconscious manner. And there’s the fact that they were very productive, they worked very hard at it for many years. Kerry Schuss, owner of the gallery, knew these artists and told me Freddie Brice, who was schizophrenic, worked compulsively, covering his entire room with art; and when he didn’t have paint he’d use water. So, like fine artists, maybe their hard work paid off.

But that still doesn’t explain the sophistication of some of this work. Take Freddie Brice’s Shore Stor for example. Look at the playfully rhythmic brushwork above the heel and the way the brushstrokes capture light; note the placement of the shoe so it’s cut off on the right throwing everything forward, and the boldness of the writing and how it activates the space around it. Sure the brushwork where the tongue and shoelaces would be is kind of muddled, but that adds to the charm and in a way underscores how good the other brushwork is.

Freddie Brice, Shore Stor, 1993, acrylic on canvas board, 24 x 20 inches

What really blows me away is the use of simultaneous effect in Brice’s Two Watches, Two Rings. It’s hard to see in reproduction, but the background is light greenish on the top of the painting and pinkish on the bottom portion. As a result, the entire background glows. And look at the bits of red on the top edge and bottom right — it’s right out of the Clyfford Still handbook! I just don’t understand where this uncanny ability came from — but the creative vitality and boldness of the work is thrilling.

Freddie Brice, Two Watches, Two Rings, 1992, acrylic on canvas board, 30 x 24 inches

There are several other interesting shows in Tribeca. Briefly:

• Kimmerich, 50 White Street (between Broadway and Church), a beautiful new gallery, is showing, in conjunction with Anton Kern Gallery, a very large collage by Michael Odenbach that’s made up of what seems like thousands of tiny texts and images.   
• The alternative space Art in General has a combination architectural installation and props for a performance by Ohad Meromi. Usually this kind of thing doesn’t work as a stand-alone installation but, while you are always aware these are props, enough thought went into the configuration of the space (spaces really) that it holds up as an installation. While you’re there, check out their bathroom -- it’s one of the most interesting in the city.     
• ApexArt, 291 Church Street, another energetic alternative space, has a show curated by Gary Fogelson and Michael Hutchson that documents the story of innovative, locally produced, Boston’s channel 5.

The Lower East Side:
In contrast to the self-taught artists at KS Art, George Condo: Mental States at the New Museum was a real downer. I’m not going to waste time on it; suffice to say the work is academic, illustrational really, boring in composition (every one is either centralized or all-over), silly and adolescent (grotesque deformations — oooo, scary) and derivative — that it is intended is not justification for this much imitation. Enough said.

Another LES bummer was Heinz Mack, Early Metal Reliefs, 1957 - 1967 at Sperone Westwater’s new space near the New Museum at 257 Bowery. What the hell has happened to the Sperone Westwater Gallery? I know this work was done fifty years ago, but it was decorative then and it looks even thinner now. And this new tall and narrow space, which encourages a salon-style hanging, isn’t helping. It’s hard to believe that this is the same gallery that once gave Gerhard Richter his first solo show in New York and for years showed Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Not Vital, Richard Tuttle and several Arte Povera artists. I guess some galleries are like some artists, they have about ten good years, and that’s it.

To counter the enervating and depressing Condo and Sperone Westwater shows, check out “Park Here: an Indoor Pop Up Park” at OpenHouse, a space art organizations have been using for temporary shows, 201 Mulberry Street (between Spring and Kenmare). Hurry though -- Sunday, January 30th is the last day. When I went, people were really using it: eating lunch, reading, kids running around, couples snuggling on the “grass.” A real upper.

Park Here - An Indoor Pop Up Park, 201 Mulberry Street, until Sunday, January 30, 2011.

Charles Kessler is a Jersey City-based artist and writer.

More on the Jersey City Museum

The Jersey City Museum Shuttered

The Star Ledger finally broke some old news: The Jersey City Museum is in trouble. The Jersey City Independent had a detailed report on the museum last September. I blogged about it even earlier, as did Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City) in an excellent piece of investigative journalism. But the power of the Ledger has focused more attention on this tragedy. Paddy Johnson has another post on it today, as does Hrag Vartanian (Hyperallergic). Even the Los Angeles Times weighed in with a link to the Star Ledger article. The Jersey City Reporter only has a few paragraphs, more like a blog link, probably because they recently fired their only real reporter, Ricardo Kaulessar — more bad news for Jersey City.

The building was a mistake to begin with. They should convert it into an art incubator and move the Museum somewhere else -- somewhere cheaper.  I have nothing more to add.

UPDATE: Add WNYC News to the mix.

The Met, Chelsea Galleries and Some Reading Suggestions

By Charles Kessler

It’s a slow time for art in New York -- relatively speaking, of course. There aren’t many good exhibitions around, and no blockbusters. On the other hand, there aren't as many tourists, and kids are back in school, so the museums aren't as crowded as usual (except for the always hectic MoMA). Now is a great time to enjoy New York museums' permanent collections. 

THE MET:
I was looking forward to an undistracted contemplation of Cezanne's Card Players, a painting I visit almost every time I go to the Met, but dammit, the painting was taken down! But wait a minute..., it was removed in preparation for an exhibition of Cezanne’s card player paintings and drawings that opens February 9th. Yaaay! It’s an exhibition that began at the Courtauld Gallery and got rave reviews from London critics.

And of the million other things at the Met, be sure not to miss two great Madonna and Child paintings: a touching Andrea del Sarto that will take your breath away that’s on loan to the Met, and a newly restored Filippino Lippi whose bright colors will knock your socks off. Well, I guess that sounds unpleasant -- but I'm sure you'll like them.

Andrea del Sarto, Madonna and Child, c.1530, Oil on wood, (Lent by Mrs. Alfred Taubman)

Filippino Lippi. Madonna and Child, ca. 1485. Tempera, oil, and gold on wood, before and after restoration

CHELSEA GALLERIES:
Chelsea is in the midst of the winter doldrums, but there are a few shows worth the trip:

It's good to see Ellen Gallagher at Gagosian on 24th explore a number of fertile directions in her first exhibition in New York since her Whitney Museum show in 2005.

112 Green Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) at the David Zwirner Gallery on 19th is a museum-quality survey of one of New York’s first artist-run galleries. Most of the work is by Gordon Matta-Clark, as it should be since he was the driving force behind the gallery as well as one of the most interesting artists of that period. But it was also good seeing an Alan Saret "gang drawing" (made with fistfuls of colored pencils) and one of his wire sculptures. Saret pretty much dropped out of the art world in the mid-80's, and I've seen very little work of his since The Drawing Center did a retrospective of his drawings in 2007.

Alan Saret, Four Piece Folding Glade, 1970, wire, 144 x 60 x 36 inches

The Andrea Rosen Gallery has three good exhibitions, including an excellent video program curated by Rebecca Cleman and Josh Kline of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). I can’t get the overly fancy Rosen Gallery website to display information about the exhibitions, but here it is if you want to give it a try: Andrea Rosen Gallery

For those unfamiliar with EAI, it’s a Chelsea-based repository of more than 3500 artist-made videos. Their mission is to foster "the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.” Individuals can make an appointment to view work in their collection free of charge. I did, and, with the help of the knowledgeable Rebecca Cleman, I learned a lot about the history of artists’ video.

Brice Marden at Matthew Marks on 22nd presents solid, handsome work, but work that’s too much like what he’s been showing since his  “Cold Mountain” show at DIA in 1991.



SOME READING SUGGESTIONS:
Because of the yucky weather, I haven't seen as much art as usual lately; but, as a result, I’ve had time to read more than usual. Here are some of the better things I've turned up:

Joanne Mattera has come up with practical alternative ways for artists to exhibit their work and rates them according to how desirable the DIY venue:
Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Marketing Mondays: "Where Can I Show?" Part 1
Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Marketing Mondays: "Where Can I Show?" Part 2

Paper Monument, a semi-annual print journal of contemporary art, in association with n+1, published a droll, yet accurate and useful book on art etiquette: I Like Your Work.  Excerpts posted here include instruction on proper introductions, and net etiquette. Here’s a sample of my favorite, how artists must dress:

Artists must first of all distinguish themselves from members of the adjacent professional classes typically present at art world events: dealers, critics, curators, and caterers. They must second of all take care not to look like artists. This double negation founds the generative logic of artists’ fashion.

Both Paper Monument and n+1 are well worth checking regularly for some of the best writing you’ll find on the net about politics, literature, and culture.

The Guardian has an insightful interview with Cindy Sherman here. And finally, this ArtInfo interview with Glenn Lowry on Why MoMA Needs to Grow — Again is yet more vindication of my complaints about MoMA’s new building.


Charles Kessler is an artist and writer based in Jersey City

Reading Suggestions

14th Street and Eighth Avenue subway station

 By Charles Kessler

Via Laura Collins-Hughes in ArtsJournal came this photo of artist Jason Shelowitz’s official-looking, MTA notice. I love that it’s next to a Tom Otterness sculpture.  

Christopher Knight raises an interesting question about the need for, or even desirability of, natural light in a contemporary art museum. And Nicolai Ouroussof (am I the only one that finds him difficult to understand?) of the New York Times adds:  ...the perforations in the skin will make the sunlight mottled and uneven. And forget hanging art on most of the exterior walls. My guess is that after the first show, the entire wall will simply be boarded over, and you’ll never see it again.

The Metropolitan Museum has come up with a unique way to reach out to a broader audience, or at least better engage the audience they already have. They launched a new program called Connections where members of the Met’s staff use images from the Met’s collection to explore various broad topics such as virtuosity, the ideal man, the ideal woman and religious art. I looked at most of them and found them entertaining and insightful, but I especially appreciated their enthusiasm.

Speaking of the Met, a few weeks ago the Times reported that after a year of restoration the Met is now convinced that their controversial full-length portrait of the young King Philip IV is indeed by Velazquez. I checked it out yesterday and I’m not impressed. I’m not qualified to judge, of course, but when compared to the other Velazquez paintings nearby this looks pretty weak.

Jonathan Jones has a funny (in a dry British way) post in the Guardian about Jeff Koons suing the manufacturer of ballon dog toys: It's funny, of course, at least if we believe those reports – the idea of an artist who so enthusiastically guzzles up images from the world around him asserting unique ownership of one of them. But I wonder if Koons has a point. I can imagine that he gets genuinely annoyed to see his influence in so many toys, souvenirs and even design objects without the least hint of acknowledgement.

Here's a thoughtful post by Ben Davis in ArtInfo where he discusses the current predominance of art news over art criticism.

And here's a bit of good news: a relatively new nonprofit, United States Artists, was formed to solicit donations to support work by artists. From their website: Supporting outstanding artistic talent has been realized by the USA Fellows program over the past 5 years. By the end of 2009, 213 artists had been named USA Fellows, each receiving a grant of $50,000, for a total of direct investment in artists equalling $10,000,000. USA's investment funded new dances, poetry, films, theatrical productions, musical compositions, paintings, sculpture, and more. Worldwide audiences of all ages have encountered these stimulating new works in galleries, on stages, in print, and online.

Since support for the arts, at least support for those making art, is no longer a government priority, this is an alternative — an insufficient one, but something.