Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes, On Matisse

There's been a lot written on MoMA's Matisse show, including on this blog, but some of the best is by Tyler Green here.

Apps for MoMA, Museum of Natural History and Others

 I recently wrote about how good the new MoMA app is. Here's another view:
Critic’s Notebook - Apps for MoMA, Museum of Natural History and Others - NYTimes.com

Roberta Smith on ‘Abstract Expressionist New York’ at MoMA

In an excellent review of this show, Roberta Smith rightly points out its limitations. See below:

It should be said that in mounting this show, Ms. Temkin had to work with the hand dealt her by generations of curatorial and trustee decisions and preferences. Especially blatant is the institutional bias against the great Willem de Kooning, represented here by a meager four paintings placed almost at random.

She left out what I feel is an even more important shortcoming -- they only had TWO paintings by Clyfford Still (see above)! I'll be posting on this in more detail later.

Bodies in Urban Spaces - Photo Journal - WSJ

Performers form a “human sculpture” on Sunday during a piece entitled “Bodies in Urban Spaces” by choreographer Willi Dorner. (Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal)

Bodies in Urban Spaces - Photo Journal - WSJ

The Return of The Reposessed, "Haunted" at the Guggenheim

 By Tom Mcglynn

Anthony Goicolea, Nail Biter, Still of a video

“Haunted” reanimates our response to what Oliver Wendell Holmes once described as the world “skinned”; to the power of the photographic image to index our imagination when its embodied subject has been long since, or even recently, gutted.

Co- curators Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman assemble a wide range of artists from Marina Abramovic (predictably) to Lawrence Weiner (not so), in a shadow play of debased spirituality and back door transcendentalism which might initially seem retardaire, but perhaps serves a purpose in repositioning photography beyond a premature post- modern end.

The exhibit is deftly intertwined with past and present photography, video and performance, in an associative ramble up the Guggenheim’s ramp, effectively mirroring the museum’s architecture in a recursive memory loop that collapses into itself in sometimes surprising ways.

One such instance is the succession of the archival approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Water Towers, 1980”, with a single simultaneous exposure of multiple prints from another series by these same artists’ in Idris Khan’s “Homage to Bernd Becher, 2007”. Another enactment of photo (in this case filmic) re-possession is Douglas Gordon’s “Bootleg (Empire), 1998” in which he captures Warhol’s fixedly iconic “Empire” from a shaky hand held camera in a Berlin theater. The augmentation of temporal duration in both instances takes on an idiosyncratic symmetry that exudes as its byproduct a highly distilled spirit; one might say that is dead on arrival, if not for the fact that the connections between the image and its origins are never completely severed.

What really haunts this work is the realization that, as Deleuze referred to it in his critique of cinema, the “ image renders visible, and creative, the temporal relations which cannot be reduced to the present.” The inclusion of film and performance documentation offered a flickering foil to the insistent interrogation of the fixed image. Moving pictures play with time, sometimes resuscitating art and sometimes coating it in perpetual amber.

The former is found in Thomas Demand’s extraordinarily understated film from 2002 entitled, “Recorder”. Its subject was appropriated from a banal detail of a promotional film for the unreleased Beach Boys album, “Smile”. Constructed from Demand’s materials of painstakingly cut paper, his typically eerie verisimilitude is animated here into an image of a now archaic reel –to- reel studio recording device that spools on endlessly. A barely audible, unsynched sound loop of Brian Wilson playing a harpsichord accompanies the film. The artist’s reference to the tragic hubris of genius in attempting original creation, and his own obsessive reverse engineering, conjure Frankenstein’s ghost.

Tacita Dean’s filmed homage to the recently deceased in, “Merce Cunningham performs Stillness (in three movements)”, invites one to witness a peculiar kind of artistic embalming or celebratory preservation. Cunningham sits in a quasi-modernist folding chair in a dance studio space making quotidian gestures timed to John Cage’s notorious composition of space and time duration, 4’33”. Shown on multiple panels from differing camera angles, Dean’s work aggressively inhabits real space (taking up a large area of the upper ramp of the museum) and is one of the most phenomenological pieces in the show. Her flat screens in space offer both projection surfaces and barriers to walk between and around. The complex didactic structure of this work, its tactical re -assembly of past/ present moments, is pleasantly under taken by the dancer’s subtle performance.

“Haunted” avoids many possible pitfalls of such a potentially sentimental premise for looking at photography, and creatively reexamines postmodernist strategic assumptions in an attempt to elucidate our more present aesthetic needs. If the reality of those needs can’t quite be grasped yet, the show nevertheless comes as a recognition that they exist. Melancholic reflection and magical thinking won’t bring back already dead authors, but their interior echoes may help loosen the mesmerizing spell of mere surface considerations in our current photo-rhetorical regime.

On leaving the museum I noticed that the central skylight had been covered so that only artificial light infused the space. I’ve never seen the Guggenheim in such graded values and it struck me how sensitive a choice this was to make close the hollow of the museum, which felt not so much like a mausoleum but a neo- platonic cave.

(Note: This is admittedly late for the run of the show but still early for Halloween)

Jersey City Art Tour - Today and Sunday

There are two group shows, very near each other, that I thought were particularly strong. They had an interesting premise, they stuck to it, and the work was first rate: PSYCHOPOMP at Curious Matter, 272 Fifth Street (just west of Jersey Avenue) and 365 Days of Print at the Embankment Gallery, 608 Jersey Avenue (at Fifth Street).

PSYCHOPOMP was organized by Brooklyn-based artist and curator Vincent Como. He describes psychopomp in their website this way: Arriving just before death, then leading the soul to the afterlife is the role of the psychopomp. It is a beneficent spirit, a horrible creature or in various cultures an animal.
On the sidewalk outside the gallery is a charming book kiosk, called Le Bouquiniste. For only a few dollars you can purchase one of these delightful, tactile, intimate, limited edition poetry and artist books.

365 Days of Print was the inspiration of Maya Joseph-Goteiner, who explained in her blog:

Last November, after reading about The New York Times grappling with debt and considering whether to discontinue its print edition, I initiated this blog. In it, I began to explore the newspaper as object and inspiration for making art or comment every single day. Since April, I have circulated a call for artists to contribute to 365. Fourteen artists are currently participating or have contributed to 365. As a result artist Peter Delman whose work often addresses current events offered to host the first 365 dop exhibition at his space The Embankment Gallery.

The theme has generated a lot of good work. See below:

Maya Joseph-Goteiner, Ode to you, January 13, 2010, C-Print, 11x 14 inches

 The Jersey City Museum, in their moment of need (see here, here and here), turned what was supposedly an attempt to reach out and befriend the art community, into a complete fiasco, and made plenty of enemies in the process. Not only did they send out an open call for artists to submit work for a Fall Art Tour exhibition, when the proper thing to do is decide on a show and curate one. But they made matters much worse by including the names of all the REJECTED artists on the rejection letter. What are they thinking? Nevertheless, they came up with a good (uneven, of course) show and, as you can see below, one surprisingly well-installed given the difficulty of hanging mixed shows like this.

Jersey City Museum Art Tour Exhibition

Also worthwhile are several shows at 190 Columbus (NOT 109 Columbus as stated in the Tour Guide). Norm Franceur has a good piece here (see below) as well as in the Jersey City Museum (light sculpture in the cornor of photo above), several works in a zany show at Balance (18 Erie Street) and probably several other venues in the Tour -- he's prolific and very good.

Norm Franceur @ 190 Columbus Drive

Matisse: Another Look at “Radical Invention”

Cezanne, Three Bathers (1879-1882)

 By Kyle Gallup

As the final days of the Matisse exhibition, “Radical Invention 1913-1917,” at MOMA
draw to a close, I wonder if I have anything to add to the rich volume of articles, reviews and interviews surrounding the show. I’ve seen it four times. Each viewing has brought me an inner calm allowing me to see more deeply into Matisse’s workings and accomplishments as an artist. The paintings themselves openly display their maker’s will and serious pursuit. Matisse’s inventive drawing, color, touch and experimentation can be endlessly described and discussed. For me, I continue to go back to the unexpected bonus of the small Cezanne bathers in the first gallery, the picture that Matisse held onto through hard times and throughout most of his career. Everything that Matisse needed was in that picture. He created his life’s work out of it.

Matisse bought “Three Bathers” (1879-1882) in 1899 from Vollard for 1200 francs. After nearly four decades living with the painting, in 1936, he donated it to the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. In November that year he wrote a letter to curator and author Raymond Escholier (1882-1971), stating plainly how important the painting had been for him over the years. 

"In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance; for this reason, allow me to request that it be placed so that it may be seen to its best advantage...I know that I do not have to tell you this, but nevertheless think it is my duty to tell you so; please accept these remarks as the excusable testimony of my admiration for this work which has grown increasingly greater ever since I have owned it."

He looked at “Three Bathers” for sustenance. I believe he also saw in this painting, and in Cezanne’s pursuit of his particular vision, an example of how his own artistic search might be sustained. For Matisse, extracting essential elements directly from “Three Bathers” allowed him to maintain a direct connection with Cezanne and to explore new aesthetic dimensions of his own. There lies the tradition of French painting and the seeds of what was most modern. Matisse knew it without a doubt when looking at the elder artist’s work.

Each painting seems to find Matisse touching the canvas brush stroke, by stroke, building up flat areas of color, articulating the surface. He’s feeling his way through and around the paintings. He draws and paints the figures, modeling form with his brush by working and reworking the linear edges of figures which finally creates a kind of volume that is integrated with the flat surface of the painting.  In still other paintings in the exhibit, Matisse defines flat areas with his drawing. He paints and repaints allowing the under color and transparency of earlier layering to come through. The surface always breathes even after many alterations. His connection to the picture’s surface and color is always close at hand.

Matisse sculpts his three-dimensional figures, helping him better understand form. His working process of adding and subtracting allows him to finally leave what is most essential to the sculpture he is working on. This is also true of his process while he paints. In the series of small black prints, Matisse uses a delicate white line to animate the black field.

Matisse transforming his sculpture Back (II)  into Back (III), May 13, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Archives, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

For Cezanne it was a dogged pursuit of visual perception—light and form—translated onto a flat surface. Matisse’s quest was much more tactile, workmanlike, a sculptor in paint finding a way to create form, almost willing the paint to create volume while maintaining flatness and integrity of the surface. In the final painting of the show, “Bathers by a River” (1916) he is able to shed the articulated figure for the complete flatness of the figure on canvas.

In their bold and determined working processes, the artists’ work offers inspirations to new generations of artists.  Though I don’t have an extraordinary small Cezanne or Matisse to hang in my studio, there are shows like “Radical Inventions,” which remind me of painting’s importance. Or I can make a visit to MOMA or the Met, answering the need to take a step back from one’s work and review the grand past.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Local Artists Turned Down by Jersey City Museum Staging ‘REJECTED!’ Show During Studio Tour | The Jersey City Independent

Local Artists Turned Down by Jersey City Museum Staging ‘REJECTED!’ Show During Studio Tour | The Jersey City Independent: "In August, the Jersey City Museum put out a call for Jersey City-based artists for a fall show that would debut at the annual Artists Studio Tour; not long after, it sent rejection letters to the artists who didn’t make the cut, and included the names of all of them on the document."

Museography: Why Are Big Museums Always in Parks?

An aerial view of New York's Metropolitan Museum, which sits between Central Park and the Upper East Side. (photo via flickr.com/atomische)

Museography: Why Are Big Museums Always in Parks?: "My suspicion is that the choice has to do with an inherited British idea about greenspace, the influence — if not the explicit plans — of Olmsted or Burnham, and the influence of the City Beautiful movement. That special ingrained 19th century vaguely Anglo proclivity for the park that performs the appearance of picturesque wilderness for its urban adventurers. Build art its own fortress or five star hotel and put it on the (make-believe) urban frontier — from there, a person can take in the triumphs of civilization amid the unknown terrors of Central, Grant, or Golden Gate Park."

Warhol's Factory Records

Warhol's Factory Records: "It's purely speculative what might or might not have happened to The Velvet Underground had they not been introduced to Andy Warhol. At the time, they weren't on anyone's radar, simply the resident group at Cafe Bizarre, a tourist-friendly club in New York's Greenwich Village. Even so, they were hardly a jobbing beat combo. Singer-guitarist and electro-shock therapy survivor Lou Reed, in-house songwriter for bargain bin pop imprint Pickwick Records, bonded with classically trained Welsh viola player John Cale over a mutual love of alternative tunings. Their androgynous drummer, Maureen 'Moe' Tucker, beat with mallets on toms and an upturned bass drum (no cymbals). Sterling Morrison, an accomplished bass player, claimed not to enjoy playing the instrument. Their songs, with gothic titles like 'Venus In Furs,' 'Heroin,' 'The Black Angel's Death Song,' were challenging, cacophonous drones; the antithesis of the Californian sunshine and love idyll. Undoubtedly, the VU were never going to see 'chart action' or shake the President's hand."