Saturday, February 28, 2009

Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine

Currents, Josh Smith's exhibition of new paintings and collages is brilliant and challenging. At Luhring Augustine Gallery - 531W 24th Street NYC - through March 14th. Gallery website


In this time of turbulent change we should expect the art world to be no different, "what was" has moved into history and a new group of artists are building a new foundation for the next twenty years. At just barely thirty years old, Josh Smith is one of these artists.

Of course we can expect that some in the critical community, bloated from gorging on the excesses of the last decade, will miss the point. We have passed the inflection point, the moment I wrote about in Nodal Time. This moment was the election of Barack Obama as president. It is a new era.
You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard
But you don't understand
Just what you will say
When you get home

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says
"It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?"
And somebody else says, "Where what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone?"

But something is happening
And you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
© Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man from Highway 61 Revisited

I have seen this exhibition several times now. The installation is intense, paintings punctuate the walls, a closely placed staccato of images rattle the senses.


First one has to contend with the tight installation. The paintings are placed close together, with less than half their width of space between them, the paintings function as elements in an installation. I took the installation view seriously, it reveals a process of thought, a conceptual investigation into what makes a painting a painting.

Josh Smith
Luhring Augustine Installation Views
Moreover, this lineup across the walls, of a dizzying number of identically sized paintings ,ironically calls into question the commodification of art at a moment when the fear of financial destruction is at it's height. It is stunning, the individual paintings fight each other for ones attention. It is compelling, one searches for differences, similarities, recognitions between the various paintings, in an attempt to unify the experience. What one experiences is the raw evidence, the residue of a series of intensely creative moments which explore a process of manifesting an internal psychological state.

Josh Smith's approach is unfettered by experience or refinement and I mean this as the highest compliment, for it is all to easy to bend ones output to meet someone else's standard. The problem is that the audience wants to pigeon hole every artist, to bag them up forever in some tight conceptual or visual cul de sac. The artists job, on the other hand, is to defy these expectations, to confuse, to irritate and to blur whatever boundaries are enforced by the outside world. To this end Josh Smith's paintings are hugely successful, with enough "insouciant verve" to match his young age and carry his investigations forward into territory yet unexplored.

The first day I saw this exhibition, I came once with another painter and then later that afternoon I returned to view the exhibition alone. In the subsequent viewings, I paid close attention to the individual paintings and less to my overall impressions of the installation.

In a period of barely over ten years the internet has changed both our social life and how we are able to access information. Artists today are able to see reproductions of other artists work with just a click of the ubiquitous mouse. Further, the digital image is now 'nature' growing like bacteria, billions of them. Artists find ways to come to terms with these evolutionary changes because they define the world we live in.

I am afraid I cannot come up with a concise definition of Modernist aesthetics, maybe in part because I do not believe that Modernism is a style and subject to the rigidity of an "aesthetic." Rather, I would suggest that Modernism (including postmodernism) is a phenomena which we use in an attempt to structure the changes of art in a post agrarian age. Functionally, in the twentieth century, painting sought to extend its self definition, by exploring and including the concepts associated with abstraction, conceptual structures outside the paradigms of representation.

This exploration is finished, painting as a language is essentially now defined. The painters in this new millennium can work with the language provided by painting to reveal truths of our time. Painting cannot die, one cannot negate the process of making an image with marks, one can only fail to use the language effectively.

A side effect of "pluralism" the "anything goes" mentality, is that the art world must now contend with the lack of a hegemonic style, a convenient 'ism' to imprison the artist for commodification. I spoke a bit about a concept of lineage in my post on Anya Kielar. I view 'lineage' in lieu of a particular stylistic definition. As a concept it refers to the roots of an artists works, their influences and affinities, as they exist in multiplicity, it allows for individual identity and historical precedent.

The stylistic associations one might make with Josh Smiths paintings are part of his linage. It includes both Rauschenberg and Warhol and maybe there are some roots in German Expressionist painting from the early part of the last century. Regardless of these associations, Josh Smith's paintings do not rely on them as a point of validation. Rather the references act as a momentary tone, creating complex associations between present and past, the expected and the unexpected.

Moreover, Mr. Smith uses visual materials, collaged or silkscreened, in the same way one would use paint, they composite into a final image which is the individual painting. The focus on the surface shifts our associations from printed street matter to the expressionist image to total abstraction, all done with a recognizable painterly hand.

I've included several images of the individual paintings because ultimately they will be seen individually and they do hold up as paintings. In spite of Josh Smith's youth he has a highly developed pictorial intuition, the ability to construct a successful painting with the materials at hand. His willingness to risk an exploration of the parameters of painting openly is commendable, too much of what passes for painting today is boringly predictable.

It is my opinion that when the current economic crisis begins to abate, the art world will find there is a new generation of artists redefining art as we know it. Typically we will find that the old guard is hanging onto past visions while the young begin to party. Josh Smith is one of these artists.

Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#20]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#21]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#22]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#14]



Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#17]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#04]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#02]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#06]

I had saved the two images below (ref-#13, ref-#25) and at one point thought I might have saved the same image twice. In fact they are two paintings of different sizes worked up, I believe from reproductions of the artists earlier work. I liked them both.

Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#13]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
48 x 36" (121.9 x 91.4 cm) [ref-#25]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
60 x 48" (152.4 x 121.9 cm) [ref-#03]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
48 x 36" (121.9 x 91.4 cm) [ref-#29]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
48 x 36" (121.9 x 91.4 cm) [ref-#30]


Josh Smith
Untitled 2008
Mixed Media on Panel
48 x 36" (121.9 x 91.4 cm) [ref-#35]


All images © 2009 Josh Smith and Luhring Augustine Gallery
Used blogger style.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Brendan Cass at Stellan Holm

Brendan Cass exhibits new paintings at the Stellan Holm Gallery in Chelsea NYC. The exhibition runs through March 4, 2009. The gallery is located at 524 W. 24th Street, website www.stellanholm.com

Brendan Cass is half the age of Larry Poons, and the younger artist seems to have little difficulty in essentially destroying all the old color field abstraction paradigms. Brendan's paintings utilize exuberant over the top color to re-explore the idea of landscape painting. It's a nice show, wear sunglasses. Brendan, check out the late Monet oil studies.

Brendan Cass
Askirkja 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
47 x 67 inche (119.3 x 170 cm)

Brendan Cass
Kopavogur 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
45 x 78 inche (114.3 x 198.1 cm)

Brendan Cass
Tuscany 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
72 x 132 inche (182.8 x 335.2 cm)

Larry Poons at Danese

Larry Poons has a nice exhibition of new paintings at the Danese Gallery in Chelsea NYC. The exhibition runs through March 14, 2009.

Last man standing wins the prize. Larry Poons is arguably the best of the color field painters who had their start in the late sixties. This is the first chance I have had in awhile to see a complete exhibition of his paintings and I took the opportunity to do what most gallery goers don't do, I spent quite awhile in the gallery looking at the paintings.

Gone are the lumps and bumps , the excessive masses of paint seen in some of his earlier works, it is an improvement. The weakness of the "color field" paradigm is that so often the paintings can slip into mere decoration, 'paint treatments' on canvas, which lack anything other than the interesting facture found in a corroding wall. If you slop enough paint on a canvas, choosing your colors with a bit of tasteful decorum, you can create an object which has the fascination of detail found in a Gursky photograph or a painting by Dali.
Robert Pincus-Witten observes in the catalogue text: accumulating freshly-made gestures or suddenly-discovered past ones, Poons instrumentalizes chance (the very hallmark of Abstract Expressionist painting) as he moves along the canvas causeway… the painting oscillates back and forth from the local to the universal. 1 Traces of remembered landscape and distant figures surge and then withdraw into small energetic registers of cascading strokes. 2 Intensely individual and intimate, each definitive brushstroke becomes a part of the whole - the short and frenetic, the calm and the considered, the bold edge of confidence - an arena of action tamed by the sublime.[Danese PR]
I disagree with these observations to some extent. These paintings feel exploratory and to some extent timid or receding. I do not mean this negatively because I see the explorative process fighting against a half century of theory about abstract painting and the color field in particular.

What I found to be the great strength in these paintings, the one factor which saves them for me, is the the latent imagery which emerges upon close observation. What is timid is that its obscuration places it a tad below an optimal perceptual threshold.

It is this latent imagery which potentially can open up the pictorial space in these paintings which otherwise might disintegrate into a mess of colored marks piled up upon one another. A paintings surface is a reference point, but optically the mind can construct an optically true perceptual space which extends our reference both in front of and behind the picture plane (the surface of the paint).

Dan Colen's painting Miracle on 34th Street achieved this expansion of the perceptual space better than any painting I have seen in years.

Mr. Poons new paintings flirt with the representational or recognizable in a way which orders the pictorial and potentially expands the perceptual space.

I was very impressed with these paintings and see them as another potentially breakaway moment in the course of a very long career.

Larry Poons
Neptuno 2008
Acrylic on canvas
67-7/8 x 156-1/8 inches

Larry Poons
Molly Handsome 2008
Acrylic on canvas
68 x 101-1/4 inches

Larry Poons
20-20 And Blue 2008
Acrylic on canvas
68-3/4 x 107-1/2 inches

Neither my photograph or the jpegs on the Danese website do justice to these paintings, worse they make my observations all but intelligible because of the lack of detail. Note: I've added two additional pictures. While I color corrected the photographs I took, they don't resemble the images supplied by the gallery. In part this may be due to the gallery lighting and reflections off the wood floor. Whatever, that's web jpegs for you.
Danese Gallery {link to more iilustrations]
535 West 24th Street
6th Floor

Carolee Schneemann at P.P.O.W

Carolee Schneemann Painting, What It Became at the P.P.O.W Gallery through March 28, 2009. The exhibition was curated by Maura Reilly with illustrated color catalog and essay.

Please note the P.P.O.W Gallery has moved to 511 W. 25th Street, 3rd Floor. The gallery is in the glass fronted gallery building, nearer 10th avenue than 11th.
"I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." - Carolee Schneemann, 1993. [from the gallery press release]
Ms. Schneemann is a legendary performance artist but I had never seen her earlier paintings and assemblages which have been rarely exhibited. I was pleasantly surprised by her painted works. Spanning a period between 1957 to 1965, they are the work of an 'emerging artist' and need no apologies.

Ok, so I went into a time warp, these were paintings from over 40 years ago, but upon entering the gallery I was struck by the freshness and 'in your face' feeling of these works. Certainly if we look back into the period we can ascribe influences or associations, but this is one of the qualities found in the work of young artists. It is an historical lineage digging beck into the past, but illuminated by the light of its present cultural zeitgeist.

In the present, we lack that inner zeitgeist of 50 years ago, of "action painting" and all of the other temporal philosophies which shaped and informed work of that period, or any period for that matter. In the light of this, it is not surprising to see how Ms. Schneemann's artwork evolved from "action painting" to performance. Nascent in these early painted works is a 'devil may care' attitude, a gestural physicality leading towards dance and a taste of controlled chaos found in her performance settings.
The monumental Four Fur Cutting Boards 1963—the kinetic painting-construction in front of which the artist performed her famous photographic series, Eye Body (Thirty Six Transformative Actions)––is the centerpiece of the exhibition. [from the gallery press release]
One can see influences of Rauschenberg in this piece, maybe it's the umbrellas or just that he is the only marker from that period we remember, it was in the air I think. Never the less what fascinated me were the thousands of staple holes in the wood support, stuff from life dragged off the street into the studio, and nurtured to become a backdrop for a performance. 'Action' was a word to live by especially if you were male, Carolee turned it all inside out.

Maybe I am being too nostalgic, but in the years since these artworks were made the population of the US has doubled. The artworld has expanded beyond anything which anyone could have possibly envisioned in the mid-twentieth century. The "young artist" became an "emerging artist", extruded in endless numbers from the MFA mills born in the last twenty years.

Ms. Schneemann's paintings are human, they are tender, angry, sexy, painterly, reactionary, fun, funky, accomplished, damn they are just about everything you would want from an emerging artist today without that sense they were made for a "target market" In today's stressful economic times, Ms. Schneemann attitude towards her art, an in your face take this if you dare attitude, seems like a better model than "branding"

This is a terrific exhibition for the present moment in art.

It's not about the money, it's all about attitude.

Carolee Schneemann
Three Figures after Pontoromo 1957
Oil on canvas
46.5 x 31.5 inches

Carolee Schneemann
Quarry Transposed 1960
Mixed Media
57 x 34.75 x 4 inches

Carolee Schneemann
Tenebration 1961
Mixed Media
52.52 x 46 inche

Carolee Schneemann
Sphinx 1962
Mixed Media
50 x 28 x 4 inches

Carolee Schneemann
One Window is Clear- Notes to Lou Andreas Salome 1965
Mixed Media
77.5 x 48 x 3.5 inches

Carolee Schneemann
Gift Science 1965
Mixed Media
41.25 x 15.5 x 5 inche

Carolee Schneemann
Installation view
Meat Joy Collage, 1999 (?)

Evocative of Hieronymus Bosch the artwork Meat Joy Collage on the left above, is painted and collaged with photographic prints similar to the one below.

Carolee Schneemann
Meat Joy 1964
Gelatin silver print
23.75 x 20.25 inche


Photographs courtesy of the artist and the P.P.O.W Gallery. I would like to note that the actual paintings have an aged patina which the jpegs do not show.