Dance at Socrates Sculpture Park

By Charles Kessler

Sydney Schiff Dance Project, August 17, 2013, Socrates Sculpture Park.

Norte Maar is sponsoring a series of free outdoor dance performances at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. The performances take place at 3pm every Saturday afternoon in August, but you can also go during the week and watch the dancers rehearse, and you can talk to the different choreographers as they work on their dances. I went to the first two performances, and they were exhilarating, especially the Gleich Dancers. There are two dances left – try to go if you can. The whole experience was an absolute delight.

Gleich Dancers, Selection from Speak Easy Secrets, Dance at Socrates, August 10, 2013.

Here you are in a beautiful park – naturally beautiful, not manicured – that's situated on the East River overlooking Manhattan, with trees and large sculptures scattered about. Plus you get to watch extraordinarily skilled dancers up close. You can't have a more pleasant experience – at least in New York in August.

I've been seeing a lot of dance lately, and I've come to the conclusion that dance is magical in a way no other art form (except possibly opera) can duplicate. Real live people (okay, younger and thinner) fly, or are effortlessly lifted in the air as if they weigh nothing; and their movements are more graceful (even when they try to be awkward), and certainly more interesting, than ordinary people's. Sure, flying and all kinds of fantastic things happen in movies, but it's not live. In addition, a lot of dance is joyous and ebullient – something that hardly exists anymore in painting and sculpture, unfortunately.

Then there's Socrates Sculpture Park itself. In the early eighties it was an illegal dump – an abandoned four-acre wasteland. In 1986 the sculptor Mark di Suvero brought together a group of artists and people from the area to clean it up with the idea of making it into an informal community park and a place where sculptors could make and exhibit their art. When I first started going there in the late eighties, it was still pretty raw and didn't look much different from the photo below. 

Socrates Sculpture Park before it was developed. (Photo from the Socrates Sculpture Park website.)

Now it's an official New York City park with an ambitious exhibition schedule and a residency program that not only supplies space for emerging sculptors to make and exhibit their work, but also provides access to facilities, materials, equipment, on-site staff expertise, AND a $5,000 grant. It's much nicer now in a lot of ways, but I miss the exciting entrepreneurial anarchy of the old days.

Anthony Heinz May, one of the 2013 Emerging Artist Fellows, working on his sculpture.

So if you go to the dance performances or rehearsals in August, take the opportunity to look at the sculptures that are in the process of being built, and maybe talk to some of the sculptors.

Details:
The address: 32-01 Vernon Boulevard at Broadway, Long Island City (Queens), NY 11106.
Directions: During the week both the Q and N trains will get you there, but on weekends ONLY the
N train goes there. Get off at the Broadway stop in Long Island City, Queens, and either walk eight blocks west on Broadway (toward the East River – 3/4 mile according to Google Maps, about a 15 minute walk) until it dead-ends at Vernon Boulevard, or take the Broadway bus which comes by about every 10 minutes.
Hours: Open every day from 10 am until sunset.

You can also easily go to the Noguchi Museum, only a block away on Vernon Blvd. at 33rd Road, and make a day of it.

Isamu Naguchi Museum Garden.

Tales of Two Artists: Alex Katz and Eric Fischl

By Carl Belz

Invented Symbols by Alex Katz. Charta/Colby College Museum of Art, 2012.
Bad Boy: My Life On And Off The Canvas by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone. Crown, 2012.  

How do we currently write current art’s history? How, given its elastic chronology and ever-widening geographic reach, its self-consciously elusive look, the multiple urges and identities and media it comprises? How, in the absence of a canon of artists around whom a history might be structured, its sources and development traced, its context established, its achievements described? How, in the face of its censure on quality distinctions, its scapegoating of formalism, its dismissal of originality and artistic intent? How, in other words, do we write art’s history within the broader context of postmodernism’s prevailing hegemony?

Our unwieldy culture and its academic strictures increasingly nudge us to write the history of current art not from the outside in but from the inside out, personally and informally, more often than not via the autobiography and the memoir, genres rooted in direct experience that is unique to the individual writer. In doing so, our voices may be unauthorized by institutional structures, but likewise are they unfettered by those structures and the conventions they embody. In the publications considered here those voices richly inform our understanding not of any classroom theory about art’s making but of its day-to-day studio practice – the actual source material upon which any history of painting during the second half of the 20th Century in New York City must ultimately be based.   

Alex Katz, Ted Berrigan, 1967, oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches (photo courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York).

A pair of distinctly separate generations overlap in bringing those years freshly before us. Born in 1927, Alex Katz grew up in an “off-the-boat” Russian-Jewish family in St. Albans, Queens in the 1940s. He first encountered art at the Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School where “you could do artwork for three or four hours a day, and they’d didn’t really care what you did” – pursued it seriously at Cooper Union after serving in the Navy, and then steadily brought his work and his career to early maturity during the 1950s within the legendary hothouse environment of low budget, artist-run galleries such as Tanager and Hansa on 10th Street in downtown Manhattan. 

Eric Fischl, Sleepwalker, 1979, oil on canvas, 69 x 105 inches.

Fast forward 20 years to Eric Fischl, born in 1948. His childhood was spent in Port Washington – ”a leafy suburb on the north shore of Long Island” – and he grew up in the 1960s living “on the cusp of privilege” that was “designed to paper over our family disfunction.” He stumbled through private school in Maryland, “escaped” for a year to Waynesburg College near Pittsburgh that ended in failure, and first tried art at a community college in Phoenix – his family had moved there in 1967 – ”because – well, nobody fails art.” He painted for a year at Arizona State but developed his art in earnest during the 1970s, first at the California Institute of the Arts, his own generation’s hothouse environment, where he earned his BFA; in Chicago, where he was impressed by the countercultural Hairy Who; and then at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he taught for four years before moving to New York in 1978. 

Observations about art making and the art world anchor both of these autobiographies, though in neither are they presented in equal measure. For Alex Katz the art world is effectively a community identified not first of all by dealers and critics and collectors but by fellow artists working in genres ranging from painting and poetry to music and dance. While he’s circulated widely in that world – and enjoyed wide appreciation within it – art itself is what matters most in the story he offers here. Art as embodied in the modernist tradition, art as art, self-aware and self-defining, art that grasps experience in moments of an ongoing present, art that’s autonomous and impersonal, its existence justified simply by its being before us. In particular, what Katz was already after in his studio in the 1950s was not to tell stories or express himself but to be “an image-maker,” to craft large-scale realist pictures that memorably grasped the look of experience in the here and now, pictures that were clear and sharp, “that made sense as art and as decoration” and would be “strong enough to hang in Times Square.” He got that opportunity in 1977 when he was asked to design a billboard displaying a frieze of women’s heads, each 20 feet high, that was executed from his drawings by a sign painter. “One person recognized his ex-wife in the billboard from a plane circling over New York, waiting to land. We all thought that was pretty sensational...It was one of the great experiences of my life.” 

Alex Katz Times Square Mural, 1977.

Eric Fischl inventories the dead ends he ran into while exploring modernist abstraction during the 1970s before realizing that his real passion lay with the self-expressive, narrative-based “phychosexual suburban paintings” that he began making at the end of the decade and that catapulted him to art world attention at the beginning of the 1980s. While describing at length the genesis of those paintings and their deeply personal meaning for him, the thrust of his narration following their  spectacular reception shifts inexorably from art making to the art world, in particular the over-the-top SoHo art world of the 1980s. A world that was like a force of nature which Fischl compares to surfing: “That’s what the eighties were like, at least at the beginning: that feeling of being swept up and carried by something so much bigger and more powerful than yourself, something you’d worked so hard to catch, and now you’ve caught it and you’re in it.” A world that was also a mass media gold mine: “Going into those dailies and weeklies, the culture of art became populist. We were being written about and photographed on the same pages as movie stars, fashion designers, and rock stars, and by the eighties we had become rock stars ourselves.” Nonetheless, a world that was not without irony: “The truth is I felt like a fraud. I felt I didn’t deserve the recognition I was getting. And part of me wanted even more. And of course the greater the hype surrounding my work, the more distanced I felt from myself.” 

Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981, oil on canvas, 66 x 96 inches.

While both narratives extend beyond the artists’ seminal decades and into the present, their respective emphases on art making and the art world reflect how in each case art discourse was then conducted. Art writing in the 1950s and 60s was based primarily on style, on formal innovations and developments, as it had been since Fauvism and Cubism established modernism as synonymous with the 20th Century. And so it continued with Abstract Expressionism, with the styles of Pollock and de Kooning and their colleagues, when the art world’s critical mass shifted from Paris to New York following World War II. At its best the writing cut through the romanticized artspeak of the time and focused clearly and directly upon formal elements that could be pointed to, described in terms of their interaction and visual effect, and assessed for their originality and significance within the context of modernism’s larger history. Art in that context was perceived as standing on its own and possessing meaning in and of itself, requiring no reference to the artists who made it, other than singling them out for their achievement. By the close of the 60s, however, events both within and outside the art world were shifting art discourse decisively away from that model and bringing it under fire, increasingly associating modernist autonomy with art for art’s sake, with mere decoration, and with engaging formal problems that had little or nothing to do with lived experience.

The new art history that emerged during the 1970s and 80s aimed to correct those shortcomings by focusing not on the formal concerns of individual artworks but on a more inclusive picture of the art making process, on the times and places where particular artworks were made, on the social and political and economic conditions that prevailed then and there, on the media arts that were then popular, and on the backgrounds and lifestyles and personal relationships of the artists who made them – that is, on the contexts in which the artworks were created and exhibited and collected. No longer confined to a timeless Olympian status, the artworks became embedded in the fabric of everyday culture, which was just where Pop Art had positioned them in the process of blurring distinctions between high and low art during the 1960s. And thus, at its best, did the new art history likewise democratize art and make it more accessible. What came to undermine its effectiveness in doing so, however, was the tendency to equate context with content, as if referencing a context – a family relationship, a course taken in art school, a love affair – wouldn’t  just inform the meaning of an artwork but could actually account for it. The quest for accessibility brought art making and artworks closer to our grasp, but it also risked reducing them, leaving us with no appreciation about how hard artists work in order to make art making look easy, and at the same time allowing art objects themselves to seem merely like ordinary, day-to-day things.

Their differences in emphasizing art making and/or the art world notwithstanding, neither Alex Katz nor Eric Fischl possesses a reductive vision of his enterprise. Katz no more engages in solving academic formal problems than Fischl glosses his figures’ psychic identities. On the contrary, the evidence of their respective narratives suggests that each artist conceives of art as capacious and embracing, its practice bountiful in yielding objects that are unique in being identified with meaning. Which makes me think that our concerns about the inadequacies of modernism and postmodernism, about the discourse then and the discourse now, may perhaps say more about those of us who wield the quills than those of us who wield the brushes, more about ourselves than about the artists who make the art in which we currently find insight and delectation – makes me think maybe we should attend a little more closely to their visual and verbal voices when we write their current history.          

Los Angeles Artists In New York This Summer

By Charles Kessler

By my count there have been six major New York exhibitions of Los Angeles artists this summer: Robert Irwin at the Whitney (until September 1st), Ken Price at the Met (until September 22nd), Llyn Foulkes at the New Museum (until September 1st), James Turrell at the Guggenheim (until September 25th), John Baldessari at Marian Goodman (until August 23rd), and Paul McCarthy at the Park Avenue Armory (until August 4th) and at the mega-Chelsea gallery, Hauser & Wirth (closed July 26th). Plus there is State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 (until September 8th), a large group exhibition at the Bronx Museum which is getting a lot of media attention.

DIATRIBE WARNING: I can't stand Irwin and Turrell (I love Price and Foulkes – more on them another time). Not only Irwin and Turrell, but all Light and Space art (although Irwin's more minimal work, like what he's showing at the Whitney now, I at least respect). I find Light and Space art light (as in lightweight) and cheap. Of course one's going to be awed by a miraculously floating disc. FFO man! 

Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968-69, acrylic lacquer on formed acrylic plastic, 54 inches in diameter (MoCA, Los Angeles).

Or a gorgeous colored-light environmental installation.

An installation view of James Turrell’s site-specific Aten Reign, Guggenheim Museum (photo credit - James Turrell).

I mean who doesn't like a sunset? (This reminds me of the time I was looking at a spectacular sunset over the Pacific Ocean with an artist/art historian friend of mine, and I jokingly asked him if he could do better. His brilliant comeback was "He's pretty good, but He's uneven.")

Perhaps this new popularity is precipitated by Pacific Standard Time, the series of more than sixty exhibitions about the history of LA art, but I can't help feeling there's an element of New York condescension at work here, a sop to the cliché of sunny California. (BTW Los Angeles isn't sunny; in fact, it's the grayest city I ever lived in. And it's not just the smog – it's always hazy. The native indians called it the valley of smoke. And, to the credit of the Light and Space artists I guess, they usually capture this hazy light.)  

What really annoys me though is how contrived the work is, and how controlling. I already wrote about Doug Wheeler's risible installation at David Zwirner last year, but they're all so damn controlling. Turrell won't even allow anyone but himself to photograph his precious installations. I snuck this one just to show how people have to lay on their backs to view the work.

I don't have this same general condemnation for all Los Angeles conceptual or transgressive art (I love Mike Kelly), but Baldessari and McCarthy are just plain silly, or, to quote Mostafa Heddaya in Hyperallergic on McCarthy, "infantile." And they've gotten worse. The work they did in the seventies was at least refreshingly raw, but now Baldassari's art is slick and arty, and McCartney's has become overproduced and bombastic (I've provided links above so you can see for yourself). 

I find their popularity particularly galling because some of the artists I respect most from that period, like the painters Charles Garabedian and John McLaughlin; the collagist/poet Wallace Berman; and the many great California ceramicists besides Price, Peter Voulkos foremost among them, are hardly ever seen in New York. 

Peter Voulkos in his studio on Glendale Boulevard in Los Angeles, 1959 (image courtesy of the Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project via the Getty Center).

It's not like they're unknown here, but they're certainly not getting the play I feel they deserve, especially in comparison to the acclaim a lightweight like Baldessari is getting. 

So now that I got that off my chest, on to an important question: Why do some artists go by their nicknames (Ken Price, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons) and others, who are known personally by their nicknames, go by their full names (Robert (Bob) Irwin, James (Jim) Turrell, Barnett (Barney) Newman)? How is it determined? Does the artist decide? The dealer? The first person to write about them? It's a puzzlement.

The Art World is Obsessed With Felines

By Charles Kessler

Cat with Kittens (detail), reportedly from Saqqara, Egypt. Late Period to Ptolemaic Period, Dynasty 26 or later, circa 664–30 B.C.E. Bronze, solid-cast and wood, 2⅜ x 3-7/16 x 1-15/16 inches (Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.406E).

Felines seem to have taken over the art world lately. Here's an article about the trend, and for even more evidence, there's the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition of Ancient Egyptian cats. (BTW, Sunday is the last day you can see the best show in the city – the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition of John Singer Sargent's watercolors.)

Well, I want to be trendy too, so I've decided to devote this post to photos of lions that you can find scattered about the Metropolitan Museum.

Figure of a lion, Syria, Iron Age, early to mid-1st millennium, copper alloy, 7 ⅜ x 10 ½ inches (2002.457a,b). 

Striding Lion, Neo-Babylonian, Mesopotamia, ca. 604 - 562 B. C., ceramic, glaze, 38 ¼ x 89 ½ inches.

Head of a roaring lion, Mesopotamia, Neo-Assyrian, ca. 9th - 8th century B. C., ivory, 3 ¾ x 3 x 2 ¾ inches (62.269.1).

Marble Statue of a lion, Greek Classical, ca. 400 - 390 B. C., marble, 31 ¼ x 63 ½ inches (09.221.3).

Statuette of a double-headed lion, Etruscan, Archaic, ca. 550-500 B. C., bronze, 2 ¼ inches high (1989.281.76).

Terracotta vase in the form of a lion. Roman, mid-Imperial, 2nd century A. D.,  11.4 cm high (74.51.1666).

Cybele on a cart drawn by lions, Roman, 2nd half of 2nd century A. D., bronze, 12 x 54 ¾ inches (97.22.24).

Guardian Lion, Cambodia or Thailand, 11-early 12th century, stone, 42 ⅞ inches high (1979.406).

Incense Burner of Amir Saif al-Dunya wa’l-Din ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi, Iran, 1181-82, bronze, 33 ½ x 32 ½ x 9 inches (51.56). 

***

And NOT at the Met, but just for the fun of it, is this unattributed photo that's been making the social media rounds lately:

I guess it's been that kind of summer!

How to Make Jersey City Even Better

By Charles Kessler

Warning: Although I have written about similar issues before, I feel I must alert readers that this post has nothing to do with art – unless, like some people (Michael Kimmelman?), you consider Urban Planning an art form. It is also about local Jersey City matters that may be of little general interest. Feel free to skip it.

I went on a brief tour of Bushwick with Eric Silverman, partner in one of the few, maybe the only, enlightened development firms in Jersey City. (Just that he wanted to explore Bushwick is proof of enlightenment in my book.) On the way there he asked me if I had any ideas to make Jersey City better, and I mentioned a few. Since I think they were such clever ideas (none of which originated with me), and I have this blog as a soap box, I thought I'd present them. But first some background for those unfamiliar with Jersey City.

Google Earth view of Downtown Jersey City seen from from the Hudson River, overlooking the new high-rise development along the waterfront and the low-rise Historic District further inland.

People often confuse Jersey City with Hoboken, its tiny (population just over 50,000) northern neighbor. But Jersey City is the second largest city in New Jersey with a population of more than 250,000 and growing (slightly less than Newark's 277,000). Jersey City is across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan (5 minutes on the PATH train to the World Trade Center, 10 minutes to the Village) and it's overshadowed by it, like Brooklyn used to be.

Washington Street, Historic Downtown Jersey City.

I'll mainly be writing about a small part of Jersey City, the Historic Downtown where my wife and I have lived for 31 years. The building stock here is primarily 19th-century one-to-four-story brick row-houses (inaccurately known as brownstones). Lately the Downtown has become affluent, hip and popular. (Who coulda knowd?)

Sussex Street in Jersey City

Fortunately, at least for now, it's still diverse (the second most diverse city in the country according to a Brown University study), and pedestrian friendly (we don't even own a car). Jersey City has suffered through corrupt and (even worse in terms of the impact on the city) stupid and arrogant political administrations, but there seems to be some hope for the future in that respect.

Newark Avenue:
Newark Avenue is one of the main shopping streets in Jersey City. It cuts diagonally through the city, and in the Downtown section, many streets intersect it at an acute angle making the intersections too wide to cross comfortably. These intersections (see example below) are also dangerous since cars don't need to slow down to turn onto Newark Avenue. Here's one solution that not only makes it safer for pedestrians, but also creates a space where it's possible to have a small green space or plaza:

Columbus Drive: 
Columbus Drive cuts through the middle of the Historic District, but it's too wide and too fast to comfortably cross (and the walk signal intervals at the intersection of Grove Street are confusing – but that's another matter).

Columbus Drive looking west. I hope you appreciate the risk I took to take this photo for you!

A median strip to slow traffic and narrow the street would be an improvement, but better would be a barrier strip and perpendicular parking (the barrier strip would make it safer to back out of a parking space). Like this:

Adapted from Traffic Calming: State of the Practice, Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE).  

The larger stores on the south side of Newark Avenue extend all the way through to Columbus Drive, but at present most only have their loading docks on Columbus Drive making for an ugly and dull street. (Historically a railroad literally ran down the middle of Columbus Drive – it was still called Railroad Avenue when we first moved here – so it was never attractive to pedestrians or retail activity.) Perhaps the extra street parking and calmer traffic might encourage some of the retailers to open entrances on the street.

Another way to get more retail on Columbus Drive would be to divide the large spaces into two smaller stores, with one having its entrance on Newark Avenue and the other on Columbus Drive. Columbus Drive would get some activity, and owners should like it because smaller stores usually pay more per square foot.

AND, since these stores tend to be relatively wide, have high ceilings and few columns, they would make excellent black box theaters and/or entertainment venues for small theaters, dance companies like Nimbus Dance Works, and entertainment venues like Maxwell’s. Especially suitable are the one-story buildings which might be easy to shore up and remove all the columns.

As long as the entrances to the theaters/entertainment venues are on Columbus Drive, it's unlikely they would be a nuisance to the residents, especially since they are only a block or two from the PATH train, so parking in residential areas shouldn't be an issue. (The city might consider putting limits on the total number of bars allowed in the area to prevent an obnoxious bar scene like Hoboken or the Lower East Side.)

Luis Muñoz Marin Boulevard:
Marin Boulevard, because it also is too wide and too fast (it's a main route to the Holland Tunnel), is a barrier between the Historic Downtown and the new high-rise corporations and luxury residential buildings recently built along the waterfront. The Powerhouse Arts District (PAD) was supposed to induce people living along the isolated waterfront to come out of their apartments and into the Historic Downtown, but sadly the PAD is not going to happen now, so something else needs to be done.

Narrowing Marin to two lanes by adding a median strip and perhaps allowing parking (which actually makes pedestrians feel safer since cars provide a safety barrier) would slow traffic and make it easier and more pleasant to cross. (I can hear commuters, most from outside the area BTW, complaining that it would slow traffic all right – to a crawl. But that's not necessarily a bad thing since it would encourage commuters to stay on the highway to get to the tunnel, and not use the Downtown as a shortcut.)

East of Luis Muñoz Marin Boulevard:
Many of the older high-rise buildings on the east side of Marin Boulevard (the other side of Marin from the Historic District) were built at a time when it was fashionable to build "towers in a park" – tall buildings surrounded by land and surface parking lots. This makes for ugly, boring streets, and unpleasant places to walk.

Google Earth view of Downtown Jersey City showing part of the Historic District on the left, and the surface parking lots of the high-rise district on the right. 

Better would be to build parking structures (if parking absolutely must be replaced) on this valuable land, and surround the parking structures with retail on the ground floor, and maybe even construct more residential on top of the parking structures.

Design Center and Incubator:
While a lot of artists left Jersey City after the 111 First Street fiasco, there are still many designers living here. This facility would give them a venue and perhaps make Jersey City known as a center for design. The facility could provide common equipment and spaces for designing, and possibly also for fabricating their designs. Showrooms and retail spaces open to the public to promote and sell their designs could also be a part of it.  This center could be Downtown, but it might be even more beneficial for Journal Square.

Next post: back to art!

EXPO 1 at PS1

By Charles Kessler

Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1, with his assistant, Margaret Knowles.

Last Thursday I got to go on a tour of PS1's contribution to the multi-venue exhibition, EXPO 1 (until September 2nd) – check here for the other venues. The tour was lead by the curator of the PS1 exhibition, the brilliant director of MoMA PS1, Klaus Biesenbach. To quote from the exhibition website, the show is "an exploration of ecological challenges in the context of the economic and sociopolitical instability of the early 21st century." Biesenbach mentioned in passing that he was concerned such a show could be embarrassing, but he felt that after hurricane Sandy it was important to do. And, as expected in a show as didactic as this, some of the work is indeed heavy-handed and triggered my "oh please" reaction.

Pawel Althamer and Pawel Buchholz, Marcin Leszczynski, Michal Mioduszewski, Slawomir Mocarski, Julia Matea Petelska, Jedrzei Rogozinski, Brodno People, 2010, mixed media and sound, 99 x 236 x 65 inches (© MOMA PS1; Photo: Matthew Septimus).

Fortunately most of the art isn't silly. There's this subtle work by Charles Ray:

Charles Ray, Hand Holding Egg, 2007, porcelain (Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Galler).

And this tense video of a wolf and a deer confined in the same room:

Mircea Cantor, Deeparture, 2005. 16mm film transferred to video, 2:43 minutes looped (Museum of Modern Art). 

And most of all, a powerful, breathtaking/heartbreaking monumental work by Adrián Villar Rojas (whom I wrote about before here) that PS1 commissioned to be used as a lecture room for the exhibition's EXPO school.

It's sort of like a science fiction Greek amphitheater made of clay which, as it dries, will crumble and eventually fall apart. It's already cracking.

Installation view, Adrián Villar Rojas, La Inocencia de los Animales, 2013, MoMA PS1. 

Installation view, Adrián Villar Rojas, La Inocencia de los Animales, 2013, MoMA PS1. 

There's a threatening, eerie presence about the place that's diminished when a lot of people are around, so if possible, try to view this when the amphitheater isn't being used. You can check the schedule  here.

"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" In Detail

The Bonovitz Collection of Outsider Art at the Philadelphia Museum

Bill Traylor, 1943 (collection of Judy A. Saslow).

By Charles Kessler

You missed your chance to see this heartwarming exhibition – it closed June 9th. But don't fret. Although Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz have been complaining that museums don't exhibit outsider art, lucky for you the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the few museums that does. As a result, some of the work that was in this exhibition – one of the most enthralling I've seen in years – will always be on view. The informative exhibition website is still active, and here's a link to excellent reproductions of almost everything in the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection. Best of all, a beautifully illustrated hardcover exhibition catalog with excellent essays about this exhibition, and outsider art in general, is still available.

Installation view, Felipe Benito Archuleta's carved animals, Philadelphia Museum of Art. To the credit of the PMA, each artist was given the respect of having their own space, often their own room. 

There's some dispute about what outsider art is, but it's safe to say that it's art made by people who are not connected to the fine art world. Outsider artists have no traditional art training (although for some reason, trained artists who become schizophrenic are sometimes considered outsider artists). And outsider artists are not engaged with the business side of the fine arts, at least when they first begin making art. 

To be clear, outsider artists are self-taught, not untaught. Nor are they anti-social – they are isolated from the fine art tradition not by choice, but by poverty, racism, geography or some other reason beyond their control. The artists in this exhibition were driven to work hard, they were prolific, and they got better at what they did. Most of them enjoyed showing their work and were pleased when they got a positive response.  

Most outsider artists that we know about began making art late in life, when they were too old to work. They were usually motivated to create art by some inner compulsion or a sign from God. Most didn't see themselves as artists or their work as art, but rather their work served some functional objective like spreading the gospel, curing illness, or documenting some current or historic event. A great deal of outsider art is inspired by popular culture, but it's stylistically very varied.

Many art professionals say that some outsider art is among the best art made in our lifetimes. I agree. And this isn't a trendy new view. Via Lynne Cooke's essay in the exhibition catalog, I learned in 1942 the legendary Alfred Barr wrote:

Just as [Henri] Rousseau now seems one of the foremost French painters of his generation, certain of our self-taught painters can hold their own in the company of their best professionally trained compatriots. [From They Taught Themselves, one of the first books on outsider art.]

Here are some of my favorite artists in the exhibition:

Felipe Benito Archuleta, born Santa Cruz, New Mexico, 1910; died Tesuque, New Mexico, 1991.

Felipe Benito Archuleta, Mule, 1975, wood, paint, sisal, sawdust and glue, 51 ¼ x 70 x 15 ½ inches (PMA, BST-68).

When he was fifty-five, Archuleta received a vision from God that he should make wood carvings, but he said he didn’t feel worthy enough to make religious art like Santos, so, using traditional Santos carving techniques, he carved animals instead.

I find it interesting that eventually Archuleta was engaged enough in the art world that he was encouraged by collectors and dealers to make larger animals. They even encouraged him to make some exotic animals like the lynx below. Unlike the earlier work of animals he saw everyday, for these he needed to refer to magazines like National Geographic. This "insider" influence didn't seem to effect the quality of his work.

Felipe Benito Archuleta, Lynx, 1977, cottonwood, paint, sisal, sawdust and glue, 37x15x29 inches (PMA, BST-67).

In spite of the stiffness and simplification of his animals, they have a disconcerting aliveness about them, as if they are real animals inside a wooden animal costume. Perhaps it has something to do with Archuleta carefully choosing logs appropriate for carving his animals, like Michelangelo did with marble.

Emery Blagdon, born Callaway, Nebraska, 1907; died Callaway, 1986.

Emery Blagdon inside his Healing Machine, 1979 (Photo copyright Sally and Richard Greenhill).

When his mother and father died of cancer, Blangdon started to construct hundreds of sculptures (more than 600 – he called them "pretties") that, according to him, channeled the electromagnetic energy of the earth and healed anyone who came into the shed where they were installed. Blangdon may have been on to something – even though he too died of cancer, he lived to be almost eighty, much older than his parents.

Installation view of Emery Blagdon's machines for healing the sick.

Blagdon's "healing machine" was made up of wire, scrap metal, beads, aluminum foil – whatever was around, and the whole thing was lit by Christmas lights. Entering the shed must have been quite an experience. Unfortunately, separating out just three of his sculptures from their context saps the magical impact they must have had. In this case, photos of Blagdon's "healing machine" may give you a better idea of what it must have been like.

Emery Blagdon inside his Healing Machine, 1979 (Photo copyright Sally and Richard Greenhill).

James Castle, born Garden Valley, Idaho, 1899; died Boise, Idaho, 1977.

James Castle, Gray Bowl, n.d., dark gray paper (from a Sears shopping bag) tied with cotton string; green wax crayon,
3 ¼ x 7 ¾ inches (PMA, BST-15).

James Castle was born deaf and had no language. He wasn't able to work on the farm like his brothers and sisters, so he spent his time making art from things he salvaged in his everyday life – things such as flattened food cartons and cigarette packs, packaging of all types, shopping bags and envelopes; and he made his ink from soot. He produced an enormous amount of work which he carefully stored in his house. He was particularly fascinated with making books and invented his own secret code of symbolic pictographs.

James Castle, Abstract Construction, n.d., cardboard, string, wiped soot wash, 8 x 6 inches (PMA, BST-11).

I find the exquisite sensitivity of the work and meticulous care he took with it very touching. They remind me of Tantra Paintings in that respect.

Sam Doyle, born St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1906; died Beaufort, South Carolina, 1985.

Sam Doyle in his yard, c.1983 (photo by Roger Manley).

Sam Doyle dabbled in art his whole life, but in his early sixties he decided he needed to document significant people and events in his Gullah island community, and important African Americans in general, and he went at it with great intensity. In the tradition of African American yard art, these were displayed in his yard – what he called "The St. Helena Out Door Gallery."

Sam Doyle, Dr. Boles Hi Blood, c.1985, reused corrugated and galvanized iron sheet and paint,  26 x 34 1/2  inches
(PMA,  BST-168).

What I believe to be his best painting, Dr. Boles Hi Blood, c.1985, is inexplicably missing from the PMA website, but fortunately I took a pretty good photo of it. I have no idea what's going on in the painting – perhaps it illustrates a Gullah spirit myth or a medical procedure. But the physicality of the work, the aggressive colors, the bold placement of the figures, the reduction down to bare essentials, and of course the lurid subject, result in an astoundingly powerful and dramatic work. 

Martín Ramírez, born Rincón de Velázquez, Mexico, 1895; died Auburn, California, 1963.

Martin Ramírez, Verticle Tunnel with Cars, wax crayon, graphite, water-based paint on papers, 58 x 23 ¾ inches
(PMA, BST-43).

Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1931, Ramírez was committed to a mental hospital where fortunately they encouraged his drawing. Like many of the other outsider artists, he preferred to draw on found papers pasted together from smaller sheets. His subjects are mostly cars or trains entering or leaving a tunnel, Madonnas, horses and riders, and landscapes, and sometimes he would include images from magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.

Martin Ramírez, Train, Cars, Tunnels, and Windows, 1953, graphite, wax crayon, water-based paint and ink on paper,
23 ¾ x 90 inches (PMA, BST-40).

In 1968, Jim Nutt, one of the Chicago "Hairy Who" artist, discovered Ramírez's work and told Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind about it. Together they bought hundreds of his drawings, and she exhibited them in her gallery as early as 1973. As a result, Ramírez (along with Traylor, below) is probably the most well-known of these outsider artists, and he became an important influence on the Chicago art scene in the 1970s.

Bill Traylor, born near Benton, Alabama, c. 1853; died Montgomery, Alabama, 1949.

Bill Traylor, Runaway Goat Cart, c. 1939-42, opaque watercolor and graphite on cream card,
14 x 22 inches (PMA, BST-52).

Bill Traylor was born a slave on a plantation and remained on the land as a farmhand for most of his life. In his mid-seventies, when he could no longer farm, he moved to Montgomery where he became essentially homeless. In his mid-eighties, stimulated by the teeming street life and its raucous characters, he suddenly began to make drawings of animals, household objects, and what he called "exciting events." He produced an astounding 1200 drawings in four years. One interesting note: the young artist Charles Shannon tried promoting Traylor's work and occasionally bought him art supplies, but Traylor preferred to work on the rough, irregularly-shaped cardboard he found.

Bill Traylor, Men Drinking, Boys Tormenting, Dogs Barking, c. 1939-42, opaque watercolor on card with dark gray prepared surface, 14 ¼ x 21 ¾ inches (PMA, BST-48).

He was a master story-teller, getting down to the bare essentials of his subjects and animating his zany vignettes in a direct and visceral way.

***

The breathtaking quality of the work in this exhibition gives pause. How can such great art be made without art training? Are art schools useless or, worse, can they be harmful?  Can art training extinguish the drive to express oneself and substitute instead a necessity to make work that's tired, super-refined and empty, the way the Academy did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? I suppose it depends. Some people some time do well in some art schools; others are destroyed by them. Some people are helped by schooling; others are gifted enough to not need it.