Installation view

January 6 – February 20, 2010

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present the first New York show of shaped, monochromatic paintings from 1965-66 by Ronald Davis – including four iconic examples that have not been on public view since the 1960’s.

In the fall on 1965 Ronald Davis introduced a series of eight geometrically shaped, richly painted monochromatic canvases at the newly opened Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles. Consisting of rectilinear forms (e.g. a rhomboid, a parallelogram etc.) this body of work presented an illusionistic spatial order while also projecting an even greater sense of depth than their 4″ deep stretchers provided.

At play in Davis’s applications of two- point perspective were the lessons of spatial fictions learned from methods artists had employed in the past – from early Renaissance painters to Duchamp and, more contemporaneously, to the shaped canvases of Frank Stella. With this new and relatively radical body of work, however, Davis introduced the notion of depicting a three-dimensional abstract shape emanating from the wall as a monochromatic form. The idea of painting as object, hotly considered at that time, took on even greater depth with this work as it seemingly beamed out images of colors and shapes. Davis’s concerns with articulating space and perspective amounted to an investigation of form as it encompassed matter. “The nature of form in space…” as curator Susan Larsen has noted “… is the subject of Davis’s continuous probe.”

The work of Ronald Davis resides in over forty museum collections in North America and Europe. It has been the focus of over eighty solo exhibitions including six at Nicholas Wilder, Los Angeles, five at Leo Castelli, New York and five at Blum Helman, New York.

Davis was born in Santa Monica, CA and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 – 64, and then moved to Los Angeles where he lived and worked until 1993. Davis currently resides with his wife Barbara in New Mexico.

Nathan Hylden, Untitled, 2009
Acrylic on aluminum, 34 x 28 inches

October 1-31, 2009

Paul Kasmin Gallery presents “Affinities,” a show that juxtaposes new paintings by Nathan Hylden with works by Josef Albers, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Curated by Meredith Darrow, the show connects Hylden’s geometric forms and repeated gestures with those of his art historical predecessors.

Like Albers, Stella and Warhol, Hylden uses a regulated process to create variations within a systematic sequence and to continue Modern Art’s redefinition of pictoral space. Starting with a stack of identically sized aluminum panels, Hylden adds layers of paint and ink to these reflective surfaces, changing the order of operations for each panel. As the series progresses, older panels are used in the creation of newer ones— for example, vertical bands of white paint bridge the borders of separate panels, forming an indexical link between these individual works within the larger series. Another unifying motif presents itself in the screen-printed image of a one-to-one photograph of a blank canvas hanging on a wall. Hylden deliberately chose the loaded notion of a “blank canvas” to evoke long-standing concerns about the relationships between the illusory depth of an image and its physical support. Grounding itself in Albers’s pure geometry, Stella’s insistence on the potential of formal abstraction, and Warhol’s interest in serialized imagery, Hylden extends the conversation to the next generation of artists and viewers.

Nathan Hylden was born in 1978 in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the Art Center in Pasadena and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. His works have been shown in several international group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen in Tokyo, Art: Concept in Paris and Johann König in Berlin.

Meredith Darrow is an independent curator living and working in New York City.

Steven Parrino, Untitled, 1993

October 11, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The MAGASIN is starting its season with a portrait of the artist Olivier Mosset. The exhibition takes the form of a tribute, gathering works by different artists, but never showing Olivier Mossetʼs own work. The artists are of all generations, from Carl André to Stéphane Kropf including the famous group of artists 1m3 among the youngest. As a key figure of the artistic scene and part of a family with the same artistic sensitivity, Olivier Mosset keeps close links with them. He collects or swaps works with them. He has today gathered an important collection, most of which was offered to the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Other works are to be found at the MAMCO in Geneva, the Consortium in Dijon and in Tucson.

The exhibition aims at drawing a portrait of the artist through a series of rooms organized around different specific subjects. A first room will introduce his roots, with Chardinʼs engravings (given each year by his grandfather to his colleagues), or Gregoire Müllerʼs portrait. Another one will highlight portraits of Olivier Mosset with Steven Parrinoʼs photographs of him and acrylic paintings by Walter Steding. Another room will reveal quotations, borrowings and copies (from Hugo Pernet in particular). The following rooms will show monochrome paintings, floor-based works, and the indestructible link between Olivier Mosset and the bikers world.

Participating Artists:
Donald Alberti, Carl André, Ian Annul, Janine Antoni, Matthew Antezzo, John Armleder, Art Club 2000, Richard Artschwager, Olivier Babin, Fia Backström, Donald Baechler, Francis Baudevin, Jérôme Beauvarlet, Lisa Beck, Ford Beckman, Joseph Beuys, Alexandre Bianchini, Mike Bidlo, Dike Blair, Philippe Bodenmann, Serge Bramly, Gavin Brown, Neil Campbell, François Chessex, Robert Colescott, Collectif 1m3, Michael Corris, Mark Dagley, Jamie Dalglish, Ricardo De Olivera, Steve Di Benedetto, Alain Dister, John Dogg, George Dupin, Gretchen Faust, Helmut Federle, Sylvie Fleury, Roland Flexner, Christian Floquet, Catherine Eyde, Jonathan Genkins, Fritz Glarner, Janine Gordon, Christophe Gossweiler, Dan Graham, Amy Granat, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Bill Gruner, Wang Guangyi, Raymond Hains, Marcia Hafif, Isabel Halley / Joanna Avillez, Peter Halley, Stephane Huitmere, Nicole Hassler, Drew Heitzler, IFP, Alain Jacquet, Kyle Jenkins, Michael Jenkins, Kim Jones, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Ben Kinmont, Yves Klein, Serge Kliaving, Jeff Koons, W.J.M. Kok, Joseph Kosuth, Frank Kozik, Stéphane Kropf, Alix Lambert, L/B, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Louise Lawler/Sherrie Levine, Ange Leccia, Serge Lemoine, Lépicié dʼaprès Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Renée Levi, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Russel Maltz, Christian Marclay, Jackie McAllister, Matthew McCaslin, Allan McCollum, Mathieu Mercier, Haley Mellin, Tom Merrick, Jonathan Monk, Elena Montesinos, Valentine Mosset, Grégoire Müller, Chuck Nanney, John Nixon, Cady Noland, Eric Oppenheim, Dimitry Orlac, Elisabeth Oser, Virginia Overton, Steven Parrino, Laurie Parsons, Nicolas Pasche, Yan Pei-Ming, Luciano Perna, Hugo Pernet, Gilles Porret, Philip J. Reilly, Delphine Reist, Bettina Rheims, David Robbins, Christian Robert-Tissot, Walter Robinson, Gerwald Rockenschaub, David Row, Claude Rutault, Lisa Ruyter, Frederic Sanchez, Adrian Schiess, Peter Schuyff, Michael Scott, Donald Sheridan, Tara Sinn, Howard Smith, Keith Sonnier, Walter Steding, Frank Stella, Valentina Stieger, Rudolf Stingel, Vincent Szarek, Blair Thurman, Jean Tinguely, John Tremblay, Li Trincere, Allan Uglow, Günter Umberg, Lily van der Stokker, Jean-Thomas Vannotti, Ben Vautier, Not Vital, Joan Wallace, Wallace & Donohue, Dan Walsh, Joan Waltemath, Andy Warhol, Stephen Westfall, Larry Weiner, Peter Young, Michael Zahn.

 

The new James Turrell Museum of the Hess Art Collection celebrated its opening on April 22, 2009 in Colomé, Argentina. The museum is the only one worldwide dedicated specifically to the work of James Turrell, who is regarded as one of the most important contemporary light and space artists. The new museum is based on a plan created by Turrell himself. Commissioned and built by Swiss businessman, wine producer and art collector Donald M. Hess, the museum showcases nine light installations representing five decades of Turrell’s career over 18,084 square feet (1.680 m2) of exhibition space.

Donald Hess has been collecting works by James Turrell for the past 30 years and has commissioned two new installations for the museum in Colomé: Spread (2003), a 4,000-square-foot walk-in environment of blue light, and Unseen Blue (2002), the world’s largest Skyspace. Other permanent works in the Hess Art Collection include Alta Green (1968), an early piece that demonstrates Turrell’s first experiments with light and architecture, as well as Lunette (2005), a corridor whose interior has been punctuated by a vertical portal to the outside sky and filled with natural and warm white neon light. Additional site-specific works include Stufe (White), (1967), City of Arhirit (1976), Slant Range (1989) and Penumbra (1992).The permanent exhibition is supplemented by numerous drawings and prints. All works on display are drawn from the Hess Art Collection, Bern, Switzerland, in which James Turrell is represented with 22 pieces.

Donald Hess is one of the world’s major collectors of contemporary art. His impressive collection spans five decades of recent art history from Abstract Expressionism through current positions. It contains over 1,000 pieces by 65 international artists including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Gilbert & George, Franz Gertsch, Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Motherwell, Yue Minjun, Shigeo Toya, Gerhard Richter, Frank Stella, James Turrell and Ouattara Watts among others.

Beginning in 1989, Hess began sharing his passion for art with the greater public by exhibiting his collection in museums built on wineries owned by the Hess Family Estates. The first museum opened at the Hess Collection in Napa Valley, California, USA in 1989 and the second at Glen Carlou in Paarl, South Africa in 2006. The third and newest – The James Turrell Museum of the Hess Art Collection, opened on April 22, 2009, at Bodega & Estancia Colomé, in the Province of Salta in northwestern Argentina. A fourth museum is planned for the Peter Lehmann winery in the Barossa Valley, Australia. All are free of admission and offer guided tours.

A newly updated, comprehensive catalogue of the Hess Art Collection will be published by Hatje Cantz in Autumn of 2009.

Bodega and Estancia Colomé, Ruta Provinvial 53, Km. 20, 4419 Molinos, Salta Province, Argentina

 

Works by Burgoyne Diller

January 23 – March 6, 2009

Featuring artists Matthias Bitzer, Liz Deschenes, Burgoyne Diller, Dan Flavin, Raymond Hains, Yuichi Higashionna , Gregor Hildebrandt, Akira Kanayama, Barbara Kasten, Camilla Low, Sherrie Levine, Kasimir Malevich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anthony Pearson, Florian Pumhosl, R.H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Anselm Reyle, Alexander Rodchenko, Haim Steinbach, Frank Stella & Katja Strunz.

 

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Since it was founded in 1976, Art Monthly magazine has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The interviews collected in this book offer unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists. From Russian Constructivists of the 1920s to Turner Prize winners, this collection of interviews constitutes an entertaining and alternative history of 20th-century art written in the first person.

Contributors include: Naum Gabo, Clement Greenberg, Victor Pasmore, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin, Anthony Caro, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Michael Snow, Gilbert & George, David Tremlett, Jasper Johns, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Boyle, Gustav Metzger, Ed Ruscha, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, RB Kitaj, Ilya Kabakov, Leon Golub, Joseph Beuys, Stephen Willats, Barbara Kruger, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jeff Wall, Liam Gillick, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Bill Woodrow, Sophie Calle, Gary Hill, Jimmie Durham, Thomas Struth, Willie Doherty, Mark Wallinger, Anya Gallaccio, Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Simon Patterson, Angela Bulloch, & Mike Nelson.

Edited by Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson
Essay by Iwona Blazwick
Introduction by Patricia Bickers
Publisher: Ram Distribution, 2008

 

Carl Andre, 7 Hollow Square, 2008 

September 6 — October 11, 2008

Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by Carl Andre. Continuing his strategy of arranging standardized elements in geometric configurations, Andre’s new works take pre-cut columns of western red cedar wood as their constituent building blocks. Placing these timbers upright, Andre has delineated quadrilateral perimeters in an increasing numerical progression. This rational ordering system made visible in cedar wood animates the artist’s long-held interest in the relationship between the material, physical world and the theoretical world. 

Andre started his career as a sculptor working with wood. In 1958-1959, he was carving wood timbers using a chisel or saw to create abstract pieces with geometric, often symmetrical patterns. These early works recalled both the verticality and symmetry of Brancusi’s sculptures and the rigorous logic of the paintings of Frank Stella, whose studio Andre was sharing at the time. In 1960, Andre started his Elements series, using identical timbers of equal size in various configurations. This series marks the moment when Andre definitively abandoned the manipulation of materials. He progressively moved on to materials such as granite, limestone, steel, lead and copper.

Here we are far from the living-room and close to science-fiction Jean Baudrillard,
“The Ecstasy of Communication”

Your aluminum finish slightly diminished is the best I ever have seen Jefferson Airplane,
“Plastic Fantastic Lover”

In 1987, the year Mark Dagley’s paintings currently on view at Minus Space were first exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, abstract painting was exploring its newfound relationship to the digital age. The hard-edge lines and shapes that had been a mainstay of avant-garde trends in abstraction from painters as different as Kazimir Malevich and Gerald Murphy in the teens and 1920s to Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella in the 1950s and 60s, were being used by painters in the 1980s to symbolize the allusive space inside a computer.

In 1987 the latest innovations in computer technology were delivered to us as squat, clunky objects. From the first home IBM models to the hulking video game stations found in every bar in the East Village, the information encoded in the machine was inseparable from its physical structure. Twenty years later, in our relentless attempts to assume authority and ownership over the unfathomable, computers are increasingly designed for minimal effect–sleek, aluminum, and pearly, they are veritable “non-sites” of information. This transformation from an object-based system of communication to an increasingly virtual method of transmission is mirrored in abstract painting’s move from an embodiment of frontal space, manifested through color, form and canvas shape, towards the illusion of infinite space, rendered with digital-like precision.

Dagley’s paintings, like these now ancient-seeming machines, bring us back to a time when information and form were unabashedly conjoined in one package. The awareness of abstraction in painting as a historical continuum was married to a Downtown street aesthetic, bringing new color, form and texture into studio practice. The surface of each painting is an all-over glossy, impenetrable substance–a mirrored screen that camouflages a handcrafted construction, from visible canvas edges, to the elegant wood structure.

The four paintings selected for this Crib and Standard, suggest an otherworldly artist’s basement laboratory, an abstraction from the graveyard. When confesses that after the successful completion the painting “seemed to take on a prompting him to construct a series from variations design. However, like Frankenstein, contained too much latent power for After debuting the works in a celebrated Shafrazi, Dagley moved on to politer canvases and began experimenting pieces.

The Shafrazi paintings are mutable, on a myriad of meanings and forms, sublimely lacquered diner tabletops to Tetris space. The play of contrasts, from wooden support, suggests an inanimate Sitting comfortably in their own aura the paintings are like mutant rejects showroom, with an aesthetic tang that pulls surface repels at the same time.

Clone is the diabolical court jester of the group, coming the closest to suggesting an infinite space beyond the visible field of the viewer. The painting’s precisely delineated diamond pattern of mauve, pale yellow, maroon red, greygreen and navy is cut-off indeterminately at its edges. A rectangle of space cut out of its middle creates a thickly improbable frame in fairground colors for any slip of wall space behind Clone. The cut-away frame is a device that Dagley returns to in many of his pieces, ranging from simple rectangle borders to the step-ladder, geometric edge of Clone and Crib. Hero, not on view at MINUS SPACE, but exhibited at Shafrazi, took on a figurative life of its own as a jack-o-lantern-like face with square eyes, nose and mouth. Ghost, a severe jet-black, and Crib, in tropical starburst hues, are animated enough to appear as long-lost Pacman figures. Like the first blocky faces and bodies in computer games, a human form is referenced through minimal visual cues.

The trial and error experimentation involved in the conception and execution of the Shafrazi series is at once playful and workmen-like. Dagley realizes the final structure and color pattern through acrylic sketches, a kind of painter’s blueprint model for the finished architecture. The second step is to build a half-size cardboard maquette of the form. It is only after these preliminary works have been made that Dagley begins work on the final structure. An even surface of polymer resin is applied to the hard-edged acrylic paint job, adding a thickness and sheen that becomes brilliantly apparent after a thorough going over with a propane torch to remove air bubbles.

Dagley first discovered polymer’s sensitivity to oxygen distributed by the torch by unsuccessfully attempting to even the surface by blowing on it. The visible result of applying a synthetic plastic to the paint is that over time the colors have slightly warmed in hue, adding a patina of gravitas to an otherwise fun-loving palette.

Steven Parrino, Dagley’s studio mate in the late 1980s, was conducting his own experiments in the deconstruction of traditional painting supports, giving the tired mantra of “the death of painting,” an amplified existential bent. Immaculately constructed minimalist canvases in black, silver, white, and red were cut in half or loosely re-stretched on their frame, granting a baroque symmetry to the painter’s fatal motorcycle accident.

Parrino’s art, inspired by the limits of theory, was able to encompass the heartbeat of life itself. Similarly Dagley’s Shafrazi paintings belong to the unruly class of geometric abstraction that indulges in an outsider diet of industry, punk rock, perceptual games, and a shot of 1960s cool. The formal tropes of abstract painting are clearly understood with reverence–why else would they be so jocularly pushed to their extremes?

In a recent conversation with painter Don Voisine, Dagley revealed that his original conception of the series was fed by a need to create objects that were ‘not in the least bit cynical.’ The paintings have now been brought to a new audience at MINUS SPACE after twenty years stuck in pause, and it is our privilege to be able to experience again this reverential and formal abstraction masked as insouciance. One thing is certain, for Mark Dagley’s paintings there will never be a final game over.

 

Nora Griffin is a Brooklyn painter and writer for The Brooklyn Rail.

 

 

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March 2 — May 12, 2008

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol’s “I want to be a machine;” the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella’s “Straight out of the can; it can’t get better than that.” Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.

 

 

Erwin Redl, Matrix XV, 2007
LED Installation with fiber-optics, 30 x 30 feet

January 24, 2008 — October 2009

Sensory Overload tracks the development of Kinetic and Op art, whose optical stimulation and interactivity introduced new dimensions to art. Stanley Landsman’s Walk-In Infinity Chamber (1968), which has not been on view for nearly fifteen years, together with Erwin Redl’s dramatic Matrix XV (2007), a 25 x 50 foot LED installation, punctuate this extraordinary immersive experience.  Chronological in its presentation, the installation begins with works by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, two Bauhaus instructors whose ideas stimulated the developments of these styles, followed by vibrant early Op art pieces from the 1950s and 1960s by European and American artists such as Victor Vasarely and Richard Anuskiewicz. The development of Albers’ ideas into geometric abstraction during the 1970s is visible in the works of artists such as Al Held and Frank Stella, and the works of Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe and those of the so-called post-hypnotic artists such as Bruce Pearson and James Siena show the continuation of the optical tradition in the 1980s and 1990s. Select images, films, and videos will be projected in two black box theaters.

 

 

Kenneth Noland, Following Sea, 1974
Acrylic on canvas, 98 x 98 inches

February 29 — May 26, 2008

Color field painting, which emerged in the United States in the 1950s, is characterized by pouring, staining, or spraying thinned paint onto raw canvas, creating vast chromatic expanses. Exemplified in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, and Frank Stella, these paintings constitute one of the crowning achievements of postwar American abstract art. Surprisingly, there has not been a major exhibition or book to date that has examined the color field artists as a group or color field painting—its sources, meaning, and impact. Color as Field, encompassing approximately forty-one large-scale canvases, presents a remarkable opportunity for viewers to fully comprehend the aims of these artists, view their finest works in close relation to each other, and experience the beauty and visual magnetism of their pictorial handling of space and color.

Morris Louis, Floral V, 1959-60 

November 9, 2007 — February 3, 2008

Color field paintings are expansive canvases washed with flat areas of solid color. Color as Field is the first exhibition to bring together the works of major color field painters. The show features about 40 color field paintings and explores their sources, meaning, and impact. The exhibition includes paintings by color field artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, and Frank Stella, along with their precursors, important abstract expressionists, including Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions.  Why abstract art?  What is abstract art good for?  These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar.  It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work.  They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we work to move abstraction forward.  And for artists making abstract work now, Pictures of Nothing is necessary reading.

The 2006 publication of these lectures, given as the National Gallery of Art’s Mellon Lectures in 2003, offers the many of us who could not attend the talks access to his clear, concise, deeply informed and often funny examination of the art of the last fifty years.  The discussion of abstraction begins, after a very brief summary of the early 20th Century, with the 1950s – the Cold War and Abstract Expressionism.  While it progresses to 2003 in a fairly linear chronology, Varnedoe also moves sideways, describing the significance of multiple and seemingly contradictory things happening at once. 

James Turrell, A Frontal Passage, 1994
Light, 12′ 10″ x 22′ 6″ x 34′

Pop Art and Minimalism emerging from the same moment.  Frank Stella making paintings that are equal parts Pollock and Johns.  Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman make quiet, subtle works that appear similar but are worlds apart.  Although Varnedoe is forced, in the interest of time, to omit many artists and works that could have been included, he’s not working in art historical generalities.  He’s looking at specific ideas, moments and relationships.  With regard to this he says, “Epochs do not have essences, history does not work by all-governing unities, and works of art in their quirkiness tend to resist generalities.” 

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959
Enamel on canvas, 7′ 6 3/4″ x 11′ 3/4″

As he leads us through de Kooning, Johns, Judd, Kelly, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hesse, De Maria, Turrell, Halley, Richter, Marden and Serra (and many others), Varnedoe keeps an emphasis on experience and our responses to the very particular details of a piece.  Small differences, he says, make all the difference.  Whether it’s how we experience the work directly or how the work relates to our experiences in the world, he ties the art to our personal encounters.  Through this he builds his argument that abstraction isn’t grounded in something universal.  Rather it’s based on responses that are our own.  Subjective.  Individual. 

It’s this, a culture that coheres because it values independence, that abstraction offers us.  In Varnedoe’s words, “This is why abstract art, and modern art in general, being based on subjective experience and open-ended interpretation, is not universal or the culmination of anything in history but the contingent phenomena of a modern, secular, liberal society.” 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968
Brass, 22″ x 48 1/4″ x 36″

Varnedoe concludes with a reference to the faith that abstract art requires.  As he describes it, “Not a faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith.  A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing…”  His faith, his unwavering belief in abstract art is present in every word of these lectures and it’s what makes his insights and arguments so extraordinary.

A modern, secular, liberal society.  That’s something to have faith in.

 

Lynne Harlow is a New York City-based artist.  She will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.

Kirk Varnedoe. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock. Foreword by Earl A. Powell III, preface by Adam Gopnik. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006.

 

 

Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964
Transit & Garden 1 (left to right)

 

Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community.  I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work.  Our discussion that follows is published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s first retrospective exhibition, taking place at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, from April 27 – June 2, 2007.

 

Matthew Deleget: The first time I learned of Ward Jackson’s work was just a few years ago.  I was walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum taking in the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition, seeing all the usual work by all the usual suspects, when I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible lozenge-shaped painting, a small one, installed on a short wall near the elevator bank.  It was a work by Ward Jackson and it was slipped into the exhibition by one of the Guggenheim’s curators on account of the fact that Jackson had recently died, age 75.  As I poured over his painting, I wondered to myself, who is Ward Jackson?  So, Julian, maybe you can help me answer that question, who was he?

 

Julian Jackson: That’s really a big, if short, question. He was a painter, a writer, an editor, an archivist, an opinionated observer, a passionate viewer, and was deeply engaged, his whole life, with art. Most of all, Ward Jackson was a real New Yorker, the kind who outgrows a small town, and follows his dreams to the big city.

His early interest in art and his restless intellectual curiosity led him, via art magazines, to a precocious interest in abstraction that had to have been pretty rare in his rural hometown of Petersburg, VA, in the 1930s and 40s. While studying painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), he began a pivotal correspondence with Hilla Rebay, the curator for the Guggenheim family who had recently launched the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which, of course, later became the Guggenheim Museum. She encouraged him to send sketches, which she would review offering comment. I can imagine him eagerly waiting for the return mail! Her interest in his work, which meant so much to him, fostered both his life-long interest in the complexities of the figure/ground relationship in abstract painting and his scholarly interest in the early development of abstraction.  When he neared graduation, she offered him a job at the Guggenheim.   After a period of study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, Ward finally settled in New York and took her up on it.

He started in the mailroom where he worked with Dan Flavin (who later dedicated a light piece that curled down the ramp to him ) before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed, and worked through various positions until becoming the archivist in the early 70s. In that position he remained an active part of that institution until his retirement in 1996, though even then he was called upon for projects and maintained desk space in a series of ever smaller nooks of Leiderkranz Hall, the rambling building on 86th Street that housed the archives at that time. For instance, when the cafe was remodeled in the late 90s, Ward curated the photographs that still hang there as a visual history of the museum.

The last time he and I went to the Guggenheim together was in the summer of 2003. Matthew Barney’s vast project was in the rotunda then, but we had come to see the exhibition of Malevich’s brilliant early work that was installed in an upstairs gallery. Ward knew well the intricacies of the building, and led me through a bewildering series of back offices and staircases so as to avoid the Barney. Everyone knew him and he had the run of the place. Before reaching the gallery, we passed an open door, which briefly revealed the rotunda. Ward held his hand beside his face to block out the view and hurried forward to view unsullied the distant idealism of the early Malevich. As a true believer in abstraction, he felt that the Guggenheim had gradually lost its moorings, sense of mission, and drifted far from its founding ethos under Baroness Rebay. This sense of traditionalism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, but was a deep part of him and deeply informed his work. We left the Malevich via another circuitous back way heading to the basement so that Ward could empty his bulging mailbox into his own equally and always bulging shoulder bag. It was the last time that he would visit place he knew and loved so well.

He passed away early in 2004, and Lisa Dennison, who curated Singular Forms, and who had known him at the museum since the 70s, generously included that painting that you saw in the exhibition. At the opening a large group of friends and colleagues gathered there sharing wine and memories. That corner of the ramp that night felt like a crowded opening in a small gallery. I know Ward must have felt right at home.

Well, that’s a long answer to your short question, and it really only touches on one side of him. Ward was certainly passionate about his job, but most of all, thought of himself as a painter and his work will be the focus of the exhibition at Metaphor.

 

Ward Jackson
Composition, 1948
Oil on masonite, 24 x 18 inches

MD: That was an inspired answer.  Ward is clearly someone that continues to inspire you and inform your work – both as an artist and director of a gallery.  Maybe you can tell me about your experience coming of age as an artist.  How and when did you realize your uncle was an artist?  How did he impact your world-view and development?

 

JJ:  Well, art must be in the genes because I was drawn to it. I was always drawing from an early age. We had a good small museum in Richmond where I grew up and my parents often took us there after church on Sunday. Maybe that’s why I still think of art as possessing a sort of spiritual component. Anyway, my grandmother lived nearby the museum so we would sometimes swing by her house afterwards for lunch. Her dark old Victorian townhouse house was chock full of Ward’s early work from the late 40s and early 50s.  She stored it for him all over her walls. To me, my grandmother’s house felt like an extension of the museum and I loved roaming through the cluttered hallways looking for his paintings.

Among his student works were the paintings he had made while studying with Hans Hofmann, and in them, there is a free, gestural energy added to his interest in figure / ground. I loved those paintings, and to this day, keep my favorite one on a wall in my studio. Of course, I had met Ward at family holiday gatherings, but he was an adult, quiet, and didn’t have much to do with the kids. Still, I loved the idea that we had an artist in the family and felt a real kinship with him just from looking at his paintings.

As I grew older and more serious about art, the idea that art could actually be a career was made more tangible by his example. I was kind of in awe of the fact that he worked at a great museum, painted seriously, and lived in New York. In the early 70s, as I was finishing high school, Ward had a one-man show at the Virginia Museum.  It was the first opening I ever went to and it was great. He was showing the bright, reduced abstractions of his Virginia Rivers series, squares of pure color bisected by contrasting colors on active diagonals. These paintings blended tough abstraction with pop color and were very challenging. By this time I felt confident enough to talk to Ward about his paintings and, in a sense, that conversation put me on the road I’m still on as a painter and curator myself.

During that period Ward had also been regularly sending me copies of the publication that he and two partners had started called Art Now New York. It was a three-fold folio containing 8 1/2 x 11 inch reproductions of work recently exhibited in New York, accompanied by statements from the artists. In the four-year run of Art Now (which later morphed into the Gallery Guide), they published everyone from DeKooning and Jasper Johns to Brice Marden and Robert Smithson. It was a window into the art world for me as a young student and a great introduction to a bunch of interesting artists and their thought processes. I would love to see Art Now compiled into a book project because, looking back, the four years of its run (1968–72) were a moment of extraordinary ferment in American art with Pop, Color Field, Minimalist, and Earthwork artists all sharing the stage with an older generation of sculptors and painters. These folios reflect the energy in that mix. In many cases the statements that Ward solicited and edited are absolutely seminal primary statements by some of the really significant artists of that period.

When I began traveling to New York as an art student, Ward would let me stay in his wonderfully cluttered studio on Union Square. He would set me up with a Gallery Guide underlined with his choice of shows that he thought I should see and would usually take me through whatever was showing at the Guggenheim. He was a great source of information and inspiration.

 

Ward Jackson
Rite of Spring, 1952
Oil on canvas

MD: I would like to talk a bit more in-depth about Ward’s early years, in particular his time spent with Hans Hofmann.  As you know, Hofmann had a reputation for being enormously generous as a teacher and had profound impact on modern art in America.  What do you think Ward took away from his studies with Hofmann?

 

JJ: In order to fully answer that question, I should back up a little bit to Ward’s student years. I mentioned the correspondence with curator and painter Hilla Rebay, which sharpened his interest in figure / ground relationships of the sort found in late Kandinsky. This connection led in 1948 to an invitation by George L.K. Morris to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in their 11th annual exhibition in New York. This opportunity, coming when Ward was just twenty, led to a lifelong, close, and collegial friendship between the two men.  Morris was himself a painter and writer.  He was the first art critic for the Partisan Review, a founding member of the AAA, and an outspoken supporter for the development of abstract art in America. Twenty-three years older than my uncle, Morris became something of a mentor to him, encouraging him in his studies and earliest professional opportunities.

Though tempered with his own restless approach to mark-making, this period of Ward’s development clearly shows the influence of his contact with these two powerful advocates for a type of homegrown abstraction employing a shallow cubist division of space and floating isolated shapes that was very much a part of the critical stance of the AAA at that time. In this period he also toyed with Surrealist automatism in a series of small-scaled works in egg tempera on panel.

This tight and cerebral approach to artmaking was given a good shake in the sunshine when he earned the chance to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the summer of 1952. Hofmann’s insistence on an art based in the study of nature and grounded in exhaustive experience with drawing and composition brought to Ward’s work a looser, organic energy and heightened ambiguity of space. The experience of working outside, close to the sea and the primal landscape of the seashore with its omnipresent horizon obviously touched a nerve with Ward.  It was something he returned to again and again, and it informed his work in various ways for years to come. For the rest of the 1950s, Ward turned his back on the earlier Neo-Plastic styles that preoccupied him as an undergraduate student and plunged into the orbits forming around the key gestural painters of the time, particularly Kline and DeKooning. In this way his contact with Hans Hofmann was critical because through his summer of work with him, he was pulled from the one camp, with its foot firmly planted in styles linked to the 1930s and thrust into confrontation with the dominant aesthetics of his own moment.

 

Ward Jackson
Red Vertical, c. 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 57 x 49 inches

MD:  As a young artist, Ward had a number of ongoing “mentor” relationships with established individuals, such as Rebay, Morris, and Hofmann, and he participated in an exhibition with the members of AAA, most of whom I assume were older and more well-known in the artist community. You did say, however, that it was Hoffman who pushed Ward into the “aesthetics of his own moment.”  I would like to know a more about this.  Who were some of the younger artists, with whom Ward developed friendships at this time, the artists of his generation?

 

JJ: To tell you the truth, I know less about this period of his life partly because I was barely walking at the time and partly because Ward talked about that time in his life less than others. At this point I’m very sorry that I didn’t sit down with him sometime specifically to learn more about that important juncture in his life. Like most artists, Ward was more interested in the present than the past and, by the time the two of us were starting to become close, more than twenty years had passed since he had studied with Hofmann.

What I do know is that he moved to New York in 1952, and began his life as an artist in earnest. Over the next ten years, he explored and expanded upon the gestural style of land / cityscape based abstraction that he had first dug into with Hofmann. He was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and, like so many other of his peers, he began his exhibiting career in New York as part of the 10th Street scene of cooperative galleries that grew up around Irving Sandler’s pioneering Tanager Gallery. The tenth street co-ops provided important alternative exhibition opportunities for the flock of younger artists who, like Ward, were drawn to New York in the post-WWII period.

Most of these artists were working in some variation of the abstract and semi-abstract styles one associates with that period. The big players of that moment like Pollock, Kline, Newman, Rothko, and DeKooning were dominating both the scene and the uptown galleries so the downtown co-ops, many of which were artist-run, played an important role in nurturing younger artists. Artists as diverse as Allan Kaprow and Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Alice Neel, Al Held and Yayoi Kusama, and hundreds of others all benefited from the support and early exposure provided by these rough and tumble, do-it-yourself spaces.

New York in the 50s must have been a great place to be a young painter with its heated air of intense debate and discussion and Ward was there. He had his first solo exhibitions in the mid 50s at the Fleischman Gallery, just around the corner on 9th Street. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out much about that gallery. If anyone reading this could give me more information about it, I’d be grateful. I have no doubt that Ward was a keen observer of the scene, as well as participant, and made many acquaintances there that followed him through his long tenure in the art world. One friend from those years that he often mentioned was Judith Rothschild.

 

MD: Judith Rothschild was an abstract painter and active in the artist community.  She was also a member and later President of American Abstract Artists.  Tell me more about his relationship with her.

 

JJ: Well, this brings us to some of the interesting contradictions of Ward’s life. Judith Rothschild was indeed a serious artist, a good one, and was very involved as a supporter in the 10th Street scene and, as you said, the American Abstract Artists. She was also a wealthy heiress, well able to support her art life. Ward, whose salary at the Guggenheim was modest at best, and whose lifestyle was always marked by utter frugality, was, throughout his life, fascinated by and drawn to the wealthy. George L.K. Morris, his wife artist Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Judith Rothschild were longtime friends and colleagues with whom Ward spent a great deal of time through the years in mutual critique and discussion of both their own works and larger movements in the artworld.

 

Ward Jackson
Bridge, 1963
Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: This background information, particularly about an artist’s formative years, is always so critical in terms of understanding where an artist is coming from, his/her point of view, and overall value system.  It is a great segue into the work he was making in the 1960s, the work that first brought him to the broader attention of his peers and the greater art world.  How did Ward arrive at making hard-edge geometric abstraction in the early 1960s and what territory did he specifically stake out for himself?

 

JJ:  Like many members of his generation, Ward was also struggling to find his own voice. The fevered energies of Abstract Expressionism were beginning to sputter by the late 50s. Rauschenberg and John’s were already, by the mid-50s, pushing back against the overheated dominance of gestural painting by infusing its tropes with ironic detachment. Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers were looking for new ways to bring imagery back into painting. Ellsworth Kelly had recently returned from Paris charged with a freshened approach to pure color abstraction and Al Held had embarked on his series of huge paintings based on simplified letter forms. Ad Reinhardt was deeply engaged in the process of clearing his work of the marking and emotionalism that colored so much work of the later 1950s, and the ground-clearing work of Barnett Newman was also becoming better understood. These streams of activity were clearly informed by a heightened criticality in pointing the way toward the developments of the 60s and the cooler sensibilities that came into play in that period.

Ward responded to this crux moment with a body of work, the black and white diamonds, that marked the arrival of his mature style and laid out certain themes and approaches that would engage him for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1959 or so, his notebook drawings show him experimenting with the diamond as a framing device for calligraphic linear abstractions. Over the next couple of years in dozens of drawings, he begins to respond more directly to the tough formal and symmetrical imperatives of the diamond format itself, gradually developing a set of tightly balanced compositions that utilize its radial stability and echo its prominent diagonals. Transit, the painting that you mentioned at the very beginning of our talk and that was included in the Singular Forms show at the Guggenheim, is a good example of his breakthrough work. The diamond-shaped, ‘square on end’ canvas is first divided by a broad central white vertical band that overlaps, or cuts through, two centrally-stacked black diamonds. At the left and right hand corners of this shaped canvas, smaller diamonds in black are separated from the core by white outlines the same thickness as the ‘spine’. The result, though starkly graphic, is a subtle and ambiguous play of overlapping planes in a relatively small and tightly compacted space.

Ward first showed these pieces in an exhibition at the Kay-Mar Gallery in 1964, in which he shared the walls with a remarkable group of artists — Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt.  The hierarchic and emblematic inner geometries contained in this and the other paintings of this series set Ward’s work slightly at odds with the heightened material concerns of many of his peers in the exhibition. In a sense he was looking back to earlier, more pictoral iterations of abstraction while his fellows were busily staking out the more reductive strategies of Minimalism. Ward’s sense of scholarship and painterly lineage ran deep, and throughout his subsequent career, he honored them with his own personal, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to pictorial space and the problems posed by figure / ground relationships. He would often tell me in later years, “Mondrian only painted 13 diamonds.” Clearly he felt that the great master of Neo-Plastic painting had only scratched the surface of the possibilities contained within the prismatic confines of that difficult format.

Ward was devoted to the ideals of Mondrian, though his own work for the most part eschewed rigorous Neo-Plastic conventions. And like Mondrian, whose early works in particular showed the influence of his spiritual engagement with Theosophy, Ward’s work was to some extent colored by his own spiritual studies. Ward practiced Kriya yoga, a meditation technique focused on the transformation of physical energy to spiritual energy by visualizing its movement up the spine and outward. From the earliest black and white diamonds, Ward was interested in the primary vertical structure of the form, and its reinforced cruciform symmetry lent itself to the punchy diagrammatic nature of some of his more mandala-like paintings, especially in later diamond works from the 80s and 90s.

 

Ward Jackson
Virginia Rivers Series: Winona, 1972
Acrylic on canvas

MD: To continue that train of thought, how did Ward’s work change and develop into the 80s and 90s?  For instance, I’ve heard he was constantly making drawings on index cards, a couple of which I’ve seen recently in American Abstract Artist exhibitions.  How would you characterize his late work?

 

JJ: Beginning in the 50s, Ward established the practice of his ‘drawing books’ as he called them, small 4 x 6 inch pads that he always carried in his jacket pockets. On each page he would line off six squares or diamonds and, in these little spaces barely more than a square inch or two in size, work out in serial fashion the ideas that would later become paintings. In this way he could work whenever he wanted and wherever he was. These sketchbooks were an important part of his process and it has been fascinating for me to go through them as I have become more familiar with his linear development. I’ve been able to see how he would gnaw on an idea sometimes over a span of years, before committing it to canvas. This helps explain the fully resolved constructions of the paintings, as well as sheds some light on the sometimes-hermetic nature of his imagery.

As I described earlier, Ward’s work throughout his life swung on a pendulum from inner concerns to outward observation resolved in formal terms and back again. There was always a tension between the seen and the imagined, but as he moved into the 80s and 90s, the free play of ideas, as evidenced in the pages of the drawing books, became more personal and less programmatic. He developed various series simultaneously and within the self-imposed confines of his chosen format was able to engage a wide range of thematic material. One key theme that I have touched on are the group of mandala-like diamonds. Ward was plagued with various health problems during those years and his inherently spiritual approach to artmaking found a deepened release in these paintings, which often featured a rising central axis that, widening as it rose, emulated his positive meditations. This impulse was also at the core of his ‘ladder’ series, which actually began with a group of studies of his view of the World Trade Towers. Those iconic towers, which he could see from the window of his studio, fascinated him with their soaring verticals framing a clear center shaft of sky. At night he was interested in the rung–like arrangements of lit and unlit floors against the darkened night sky. The metaphor of ascendance was an important one in his work, the yearning to transcend the physical. The ‘ladder’ pieces sort of reconciled his key interests as they were based on his close observation and experience of the city, and yet, were also expressive of his personal brand of spirituality.

In his last works, the ‘opening space’ group, Ward returned to more strictly formal concerns exploring once again the unique particularities of space within the diamond format. These are among the most rigorous and successful of his works in this form, I think, reflective of his years of wrangling with it. On their face these final drawings, and the one painting that was their result (Homage to Mondrian, 2001 – 2003), are composed of just two broad bars of color, one an elongate rectangle hugging the lower left edge of the canvas, the other swung upward as if hinged to form a raised horizontal axis bisecting the canvas left to right slightly above center. These bars carve the space and seem to push it to the right creating tension within the diamond while dividing it into four separate and discrete areas of color, each with a different shape and volume. The result has a tough, elegant pictoral logic that pays a final debt to his brilliant precursor.

 

Ward Jackson
Homage to Mondrian, 2001-03
Acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: During Ward’s last twenty years, you clearly shared an increasingly close relationship with him, which was precisely the same time you came of age as an abstract painter.  You were undoubtedly well-versed in his ideas, process, and practice.  So, on a more personal note Julian, what was Ward’s influence on your own work as a emerging painter?  I think it is also worth mentioning here that you are currently the Secretary of American Abstract Artists, a position long occupied by your uncle.

 

JJ: Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, where all adults seemed to be either moms or insurance men, it was tremendously liberating to know that such a thing as ‘artist living in New York’ was actually a career option. I learned a great deal from him and have been inspired through the years by the toughness of his conviction and the purity of his persistence. Ward never achieved fame or great fortune, but his work as a painter and participant in the artworld was a source of intense search, discovery, and joy for him. It framed his life and filled it with meaning. What more can any artist ask?

I am also an abstract painter and inherited his interest in the lineage, development, and potential of abstraction as a mode of discourse. My own work and sensibility, though, has always had a softer focus. As a painter I’ve been more interested in atmosphere than edge. Ward never quite approved of what he considered my romantic tendencies and frequently accused me of being “too Turneresque”. He was a tough critic with a tightly-focused perspective, still, as Pollock said, having a strong point of view to push against is tonic for an artist. Gradually though, Ward accepted the seriousness of my own work as a painter, and later sponsored me for membership in the AAA. I think in the back of his mind he was always hoping to protect his legacy in the group, and sure enough, he put me right to work as his typist for the minutes. Deciphering his handwritten notes was always an interesting perceptual challenge.

 

Julian Jackson
Cloudlight, 2006
Oil on panel, 36 x 32 inches

MD: And finally, let’s talk for a moment about the exhibition of Ward’s work you are currently organizing.  You are mounting the first retrospective of Ward’s work at your gallery — Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY — which you founded in 2001 with your wife, artist Rene Lynch.  This must be a labor of love for you.  How are you approaching his exhibition and what would you like the audience to walk away with?

 

JJ: Running Metaphor is itself a labor of love, but this show is special for me. I’m seeing it as the culmination of my long and fascinating relationship with Ward. We’ll be exhibiting a small group of key pieces from each decade of his active working life from the late 40s until he stopped working due to health problems in 2003. Southerners like Ward and myself are made keenly aware of heritage and ancestry and, with this exhibition, I’m paying homage both to my uncle and to a member of the family of artists. I’m very pleased to be able to present a small selection of his life’s work, to frame a sense of the scope of that life, to honor it, and to bring it back into the light. Obviously, I’m very close to the subject of this show, which makes it impossible to be as objective and critical about the work as I might normally be when presenting an exhibition, but I do think the work speaks for itself. I’ll be very interested to learn how a contemporary audience sees and responds to his work.

Those of us involved in the artworld and artmaking to whatever degree are always most alert to the smoke of today’s fire, burning in the moment. Retrospectives are a chance to step out of time and take a longer view. Artists are made up of many things and context is one of them. Each artists’ contribution helps define and frame his or her moment. With hindsight we can see who was in the middle of the frame and who was out at the edges, but in a very real sense, the edges themselves play a constant and critical role in the definition of the center. I would like the audience to walk away from this show with a heightened appreciation of the flow of time that we’re all a part of, a renewed appreciation of the interesting contributions of my uncle, Ward Jackson, and a greater appreciation of the many fires that burn with heat at the edges.

 

Julian Jackson is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE.

Links
> American Abstract Artists
> Hans Hofmann Estate
> Judith Rothschild Foundation

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”  —Rogers Hornsby

“I knew we were in for a long season when we lined up for the National Anthem on Opening Day and one of my players said, ‘Every time I hear that song I have a bad game’.” —Jim Leyland

“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of all.” —Earl Weaver

 

Ivy at Wrigley Field, Chicago

 

New York Met Jose Reyes

It’s Opening Day. No more sitting around in a gloomy existential funk like The Rajah, waiting for April to finally come.  It’s here.  Time to play ball.  Last night, in the first game of the season, the New York Mets crushed the Saint Louis Cardinals in a typical coulda-woulda-shoulda reprise of last season’s harrowing National League pennant match-up. This morning, I gleefully emailed the box score and the quotes above to a friend. It’s an understatement to say he’s not a big fan of the game.  His response?

 

New York Yankees Billy Martin & Thurman Munson

 

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II, 1955

 

‘Last night this all started again? Oh God.’
The Green Monster at Fenway Park, Boston
Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 1995

Yep. It starts again. The pastoral cliches.  The slow diurnal rhythms.  The eternal truths.  The last at-bat heroics and the sniping clubhouse intrigues.  The barstool arguments, the ebullient hosannas, and the enraged cursing of the heavens above.  I don’t quite consider my friend’s dismay secular heresy, since some people find baseball about as exciting as watching paint dry. But I do find it a bit puzzling.  Honestly, the sheer beauty of baseball lies in the fact that it’s the only game not subject to the constraints of a clock.  All the action happens in real time, and without interruption, save the sudden downpour. It writes its own dramatic narrative as it proceeds.  Although the standard nine innings are prescribed, twelve- or fourteen-inning games, while rare, are not unusual.  Now suppose adding a couple of extra hours to the day just because a few things were left unfinished, or maybe even calling the whole thing off on account of rain…  We experience the game as idle participants, sensing its unfolding mysteries in ways that, come to think of it, are preternaturally similar to how we look at paintings, or how we listen to music.  Baseball is not a spectator sport.  On occasion, it offers us opportunities in which we may find ourselves at peace in the world with our fellows.

 

The Pee-Wee Padres

 

Sylvan Lionni, Interregnum, 2005

Kids will play in the summertime from sunrise to sunset.  At least that’s what I remember about growing up in the Seventies, during what was arguably baseball’s last great Golden Age.  One clear July afternoon, two boys with a ball, a glove, and a bat get a ‘game’ together with the schoolyard brick wall as backstop.  The quirky, unruly, powerful figure of the imagination takes the field with them.  ‘I’m Joe Morgan. I’m Rollie Fingers.  I’m Dennis Eckersley.  I’m Rod Carew’.  Another boy with a glove drifts by on a bicycle, as restless and bored in the summer heat as Hornsby was at his window, and gets to play outfielder.  ‘He’s Oscar Gamble.’ 

 

Cincinnati Red Joe Morgan

 

Oakland A Rollie Fingers

 

Minnesota Twin Rod Carew

 

Boston Red Sox Dennis Eckersley

The rules of baseball are sometimes curiously organized, even to the point where a game may inexplicably end in a tie, which defies all logic, as with the preposterous 2002 All-Star Game.  For all its compulsive obsession with distances, speeds, and statistics, baseball has a loose structure, and from now until October a contest will arise almost anywhere, anytime, from street to sandlot to stadium, with an absolute minimum or maximum of players involved.  Play is governed solely by consensual agreement, from the ad-hoc statement ‘This sewer grate is second base’ to the binding contract which stipulates ‘You will be paid $252 million dollars over the next ten years to play this game’.  The numbers are malleable.  The framework is that of the concept of a game, baseball, and the game itself is completely improvisational, even provisional. 

 

Cleveland Indian Oscar Gamble

 

NY Giants Fan Marcel Duchamp with Katherine Drier

Oddly, it resembles a language, as it is based upon principles of flexible substitution.  A pitching staff is governed by a rotation.  The ace hurler blows his arm out.  The line-up is juggled.  The youngster from Triple-A is called up to The Show, as he’d once dreamt back in the schoolyard.  This does not suggest that players are expendable, or even indispensable.  Their value is simply determined at any given moment by the circumstances at hand.  The American League position of Designated Hitter is the fearsome apotheosis of this brusque mercenary thinking, as pitchers are characteristically horrible batsmen, and in the AL do not appear at the plate.  The DH rule, instituted in ‘73, is considered by priggish zealots to be impure, or an abomination.  Although I’ve been an abstract painter for nearly twenty years, hard-edges aside, I’m neither zealot or prig, and am very happy that Travis Hafner will start at DH for the Cleveland Indians this season.  In a pinch, I’ve never quite believed that a walk is as good as a hit.

 

The Lovable Sweet Lou Pinella

 

Hot Stove Diamond

It’s Opening Day.  Yankee deadbeat Carl Pavano heads to the hill for the first time since anyone can remember when, and New York clips Tampa Bay.  Toronto takes the Tigers in ten.  The hapless Royals unexpectedly get Curt Schilling’s number early, and the Red Sox go down.  Chicago has new skipper Lou Pinella at the helm, but the Reds sink the Cubs, 5-1.  Sweet Lou does not see fit to kick any dirt or scream apoplectic invective or hurl any bases around the diamond this soon in the season, but give him time.  It’s one of those eternal truths I mentioned earlier.  Oh, and Dustin, Natalie, Angie, and Michael: Dan Rose and I will meet you at The Bat at six-thirty on the seventeenth.  Beers at Stan’s before the first pitch.  Go Tribe.

 

Elaine Sturtevant, Warhol Flowers, 1990

 

Bugs Bunny in ‘Yer Out!’

 

Michael Zahn is a Brooklyn-based artist.  He will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space on April 21-22, 2007.

 

Alexander Liberman, Omega IX, 1961

March 8 — April 28, 2007 

In addition to being the Year of the Pig, it also appears to be the year of Op Art.  Another great survey exhibition including Yaacov Agam, Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Hannes Beckmann, Fletcher Benton, Karl Benjamin, Francis Celentano, Tony Conrad, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Benjamin Cunningham, Gene Davis, Jose de Rivera, Julio Le Parc, Leroy Lamis, Alexander Liberman, François Morellet, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Bridget Riley, Julian Stanczak, Frank Stella, Luis Tomasello, and Victor Vasarely.

Although he has shown extensively in Europe for many years, it’s only in the past decade, when he began showing with Peter Blum, that his stature in America has grown large in a more public way. This, despite the fact that Marioni exhibited his work at Bykert Gallery in the 70’s, was tapped by Brice Marden for a show at Artists Space, and was included in a recent Whitney Biennial. However, it took the New York art scene a long time to take notice—until it was unavoidable really. As soon as it appeared that the renowned critic Michael Fried had apparently stepped out of retirement (at least from contemporary art) in order to give Marioni the nod, how could the art world no longer take notice? 

That said, who would expect anyone involved in a trend conscious commercial art scene to get excited about monochrome painting? The works’ beauty was too basic, non-critical even. In truth, the monochrome tag doesn’t even really fit Marioni so well. The term implies a kind of one-dimensionality, whereas his works are polychromatic, having been made from multiple transparent glazes of color. Marioni was once a part of the Radical Painting Group, which included nearly all of today’s leading monochromists. I find the “Radical” title suspect too, however, because it seems to overcompensate for what is an inherently conservative art movement. I have many more issues with the orthodoxy of the Radical Painting than with the art itself. What’s most interesting about much of Marioni’s painting doesn’t always jibe with the official party line anyway.

Marioni’s current exhibition inaugurates Blum’s new Chelsea gallery space. Although only five paintings occupy this spacious ground floor gallery, it feels quite full, as the works are both large and commanding, though still humanly scaled. Most of the paintings are about ten by eleven feet, and just off square. The color is complex, with a bias towards green. What often appears black at first glance is often two or more distinct color glazes that produce the effect of black in their overlay. Marioni’s ambition is immediately apparent in these new, larger paintings. They seem much more closely aligned with Abstract Expressionism, and the broader stretch of “American Type” painting in general, than with the late-minimal practice of Radical Painting. In many ways, by broadening the scope of his project, and making a play for greatness, Marioni has now left his fellow monochromists in his wake. 

With its dark and fulsome surface, Painting, 2006, which is the show’s centerpiece, recalls Clyfford Still’s grandiose untitled, 1952, (Art Institute of Chicago). Marioni has tested the limits of his program with these new paintings, pushing his tools and materials to their absolute limit. Though, as with Still, one often wonders about the necessity of extreme size. Would the paintings be any better or worse plus or minus a few square yards? It’s hard to say.

At roughly seven by seven feet, the smallest but still sizable painting in the exhibition, also titled Painting, 2006, is also one of the show’s most radiant. Its off-white and pale yellow combination catches raking light from the North as it filters through the gallery’s frosted glass door to the left. The experience is purposefully Vermeer-like, and the painting’s soft golden glow recalls the plaster wall and drawn drapery in the Dutch master’s intimate Woman Putting on Pearls. To his credit, Marioni manages to achieve more nuance with acrylic paint, than most painters are even capable of realizing with oil. He is one of the very few painters whose acrylic surfaces never feel plasticky. In fact, they often look rich, juicy even, in their carefully manipulated downward flow.

Despite the glow, I do, however, have a few issues with Marioni’s work. If these paintings are principally about a color experience, it seems to me that they are fundamentally flawed in that they have highly-reflective, glossy surfaces. How can the viewer become enveloped in the color, or experience the “body-transfer” that the artist himself desires, if one’s own image is constantly reflected within the paint? The paintings operate as colored mirrors most times, blocking one’s gaze. This deleterious effect was slightly diminished in this instance in that the gallery is relying on natural light, so the space is darker, and the light more ambient than one might expect.

Secondly, I feel that Marioni’s constant use of a paint-roller runs counter to the emotional effect he now seems interested in putting across. The roller texture itself is generic, impersonal by nature, and most often recalls the skim-coated surfaces of sheetrock walls. I understand the idea of distancing or removing the hand, and the formalist rigor that such a strategy implies—I don’t necessarily want to be taken to the brink of the sublime in the same bombastic manner as with Still—but the reliance on the roller strikes me as a kind of hedge or dodge. It seems like Marioni might be holding back, or playing it safe, hiding his hand behind the roller, at the most crucial moment in his career, especially now that he has many people’s attention. 

One problem that I have with monochrome painting in general is that all of the action seems to be relegated to the margins. The most interesting activity in the paint is always happening at the edges where the paint tends to unfurl. I understand and acknowledge the critical function of servicing the edge and the role it plays in formal painting. I’ve just grown weary of scanning the sides and bottoms of paintings looking for painterly incident and excitement. Certainly a Pollock painting is as interesting at its core as it is at the edge. Frank Stella once famously remarked that the Abstract-Expressionist always “got into trouble at the corners,” whereas the monochromists are only too happy to stay there and face them.

Also, I don’t buy the implication that monochrome painting is somehow the most superior type of color painting. Duochrome and trichrome painting are also modernist and reductive but often more complex in their color interaction—think of Albers, Louis, or Rothko for starters. Color becomes activated in the presence of other colors, so the whole idea of having a single, dominant hue seems wrongheaded somehow. Often the white wall of the gallery is the strongest counterpoint to a monochromatic field, which is why they’re often reproduced as installations in catalogues rather than in isolation. Wouldn’t more internalized counterpoints, besides marginalia, be advantageous to the advancement of color painting? Even atonal music, such as Terry Riley’s infamous composition In C, contains many structural counterpoints. Even Ad Reinhardt, a common influence among the Radical painters engaged composition to some degree.

I’m not so much questioning the quality of Marioni’s paintings here, as much as I’m debating the dogma of Radical Painting. Clearly, he understands a great deal about color. He’s devoted most of his life, successfully, to the pursuit. I once saw a medium sized yellow painting of Marioni that had the absolute density of dwarf star. The yellow was advancing so strongly that I felt as if I were being shoved around the room. I also appreciate the fact that his work is unabashedly heroic. Some critics might read this as a historicist strategy, an attempt to regain paintings lost authority, but to me it seems more germane to these grim times than much of whimsical work that is supposedly much more relevant. This is easily one of the most ambitious painting exhibitions of the year. I find Marioni’s painting exemplary, rather than temporary, among contemporary art.

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art. 

David Reed is a grandmaster — no painter has contributed as much in terms of expanding the vocabulary of abstract painting and maintaining its relevance during this era of marginalization, although there are many in New York who currently enjoy greater status. With a rare combination of technical virtuosity, historical ambition, and genuine image innovation Reed’s work is advancing in a world that’s dissolving into total digital delusion. No other post-modern painter has developed an oeuvre this rich in the last 30 year period.

Reed’s recent show at Max Protetch picked up where the last one left off, but, surprisingly, there was a detectable fracture within his continuum that perhaps foreshadows some future break. The exhibition included five large abstract paintings along with some corresponding works on paper that revealed the artist’s working process in great detail. All of the qualities one associates with Reed’s paintings are still firmly in place—the scalloped rotary gestures with their shifting velocities, the implied cinematic scale, and his rhapsodic use of color at full bleed. When looking at any of Reed’s horizontal paintings, such as #517 or #477-2, one can almost hear the Niagara heavy voice of some fifties-era narrator theatrically boom “THIS…IS CINERAMA!”

Unfortunately, the rapturous spell is broken at times by some of Reed’s more niggling tendencies—his endless retouching, the harsh recutting of contours, or the visual blight of wayward sandpaper grain. In some way these incidental glitches add to the paintings’ mystique of customized handicraft, but more often than not they just interrupt the surface polish and overall flow of the image.

There’s much to be said, however, for the stunning mechanics of these paintings. In Reed’s vertical #516 one can enjoy his deft polyphonic fusion of purples and pinks that weave, cleave and hover over a reverberating chord of yellow and orange underpainting. His complex chromaticism becomes compounded as the banded colors drop in temperature from warm to cool, no achromatic blacks or grays were applied this time. Reed is essentially a color glazier who dramatically laminates the split spectrum to both harmonious and dissonant effect. His process results in paintings of unparalleled visual splendor that have often been labeled “decadent” because of their spectacular flourish. These paintings are undeniably, perhaps suspiciously, seductive, but in terms of today’s wider culture Reed is competing for attention in a world that’s been blindsided with such wild technological opiates as The Polar Express in 3-D IMAX.

Frank Stella once famously railed against the anemia of modern painting in his Working Space lectures (1983-4), insisting on the necessity of reincorporating Baroque/Caravaggesque type complexities:

After Mondrian abstraction stands at peril. It needs to create for itself a new kind of pictorality, one that is just as potent as the pictorality that began to develop in Italy during the sixteenth century. The problem is not the overwhelming ambitiousness of the undertaking, but the difficulty that abstraction has today of relating to the past—for example, in extending its roots beyond Cubism.

At long last, hasn’t Reed responded in a manner that Stella’s own scrap metal sculpture can never hope to fulfill? Only within the microcosm of abstract painting itself, where one pole is dominated by the extreme reductiveness of the so-called “Radical” painters and the other is exhausted by the sheer scope of Gerhard Richter’s all encompassing photo-expressionism could Reed be seen as decadent.

Reed is really a special case. His work’s overt sensuality reaches towards the engagement of a broader audience. If David Reed hadn’t digitally inserted one of his paintings into Scottie’s (James Stewart) bedroom in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, if he hadn’t broached that virtual realm, we would then really have to take George Lucas’s claims to being a “true painter” seriously?

Critics who earlier may have mistaken Reed’s project as some kind of reinvestment in Roy Lichtenstein’s pop-cartoon brushstrokes, or more bizarrely targeted him for his compulsive chronology, have been proven short-sighted. They failed to grasp the breadth and potential of Reed’s program. How many abstract painters have even tried to engage popular culture at any level? How many painters have successfully addressed the inescapable impact of film and more recent domination of digital media? The necessity of Reed’s contribution should not be underestimated, nor should the excesses of his painterly effect be denigrated. In short, Reed defined and refined a whole new set of possibilities for abstract painting that extend well beyond an endgame strategy. The artist himself once stated “I don’t want to be the first painter and I don’t want to be the last.”

#517 is a large, horizontal painting defined by 3 bubbles, or subsets, that each encapsulate a loose, lyrical green line that is at once both dislocated and locked in place. There is a tension here within the gesture that goes beyond the striking red/green color contrast and seems to embody the subversive desire to disrupt the careful synthesis that the artist has so carefully and painstakingly achieved. It’s almost as if that serpentine gesture, in its struggle to set loose, may be the herald of an emerging late style within Reed’s painting itself.

In his unpublished essay “Thoughts on Late Style”, the late Edward Said outlined several, mostly intransigent, qualities that often define an artists’ late work. Adorno defined a similarly difficult and contradictory event when analyzing Beethoven’s final string quartets:

The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.

#517, like some tropical storm upon landfall, is as much falling apart as it is gathering itself together.

Reed’s painting is beginning to become more interesting in its discord than it previously was in its harmony. This new dissolution is best witnessed in the polyphonic fusion of #516 where the color is clearly acting out, becoming intransigent—behaving badly. In #516, an array of individual forces are separating from the overall image and fracturing the armature of an artificial synthesis. Within the core of #516, dithyrambic disenchantment and pleasure freely collide. The painting is alarmingly unstable, like the radioactive isotope Uranium-238. There is something new to admire in Reed’s work, and it manifests itself in the emergence of a late style. Or more succinctly, in the words of Josef Albers:

By giving up a preference for harmony, we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.

With real maturity there often comes a stripping away. Maybe this is something that a discussion of style cannot even truly approach, however, we recognize this quality in the late works of all great artists. In terms of painting one thinks of Titian, Hals or Rembrandt, Cezanne, or pre-feeble DeKooning. The fissure is already there in Reed’s work; will style prevail or the painter himself?

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

 

1 Stella, Frank. 2001. Caravaggio from the Norton “Working Space” lectures at Harvard University, 1983-4, reprinted in The Writings of Frank Stella. Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig.

2 Lucas, George. [nd] Beyond Star Wars: What’s Next for George Lucas. Interview with Kevin Kelly and Paula Parisi. www.darklords.net.lucasin3.htm

3 Foster, Hal. 1980. David Reed, The Clocktower. New York: ArtForum 19, no. 4 (December): p.72-73.

4 Smith, Roberta. 1999. A Luscious Journey, Exhaustively Annotated. New York Times, August 20: p. E35.

5 Reed, David. 1990. Interview with Stephen Ellis for David Reed. Los Angeles: A.R.T. Press.

6 Said, Edward. 2004. Thoughts on Late Style. LRB, Vol. 26 No. 15 dated 5 August 2004. www.edwardsaid.org

7 Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

8 Albers, Josef. 1963. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press.

How do two planes meet? Forget Henny Youngman for a second, this is the kind of question that painters often worry over. Granted it’s an issue that most people today are oblivious to, especially masons, judging from the snaggletooth brick face one sees on any new building. This subject of planes-the transition of form within painting-has been given great and careful consideration by the painter Joanna Pousette-Dart.

This was Pousette-Dart’s first solo show in nearly a decade and it included about a dozen, mostly large and untitled works, painted on canvas covered shaped panels. Typically two cleaver shaped, curved edged forms, were conjoined horizontally at midsection. This immediately established an unconventional major/minor relationship that had the natural organic fusion one finds in a porterhouse steak, where T-bone and tenderloin are inextricably linked. A few of the pairings recalled the art of the Northwest Coast Indians-Chilkat blankets specifically. Quite often the edges of the two main planes ended sharply at pointed tips, which aided the illusion that some of the paintings were physically expanding across the wall. I don’t know Pousette-Dart’s exact rationale for using shaped canvases, but it has nothing to do with the more familiar modernist strategies as explored by artists like Neil Williams or Frank Stella in the mid-60’s. Her approach seems much more intuitive, eccentric, and anti-programmatic.

The dynamic complexity of the two interlocking planes, which were sometimes concave and at other times convex, was further heightened by Pousette-Dart’s gestural overlay. Her most visually interesting paintings were rife with all manner of spatial inversions and strange reversals caused by the deft interweaving of the artist’s taut, lyrical line which often accounted for both volume and contour, as well as open and closed form simultaneously. Pousette-Dart handled the alternately conjunctive/disjunctive clash of oppositional elements in an exact and graceful manner. Although, in some instances, the plow shaped planes overpowered the finer lines.

The guitarist Eric Clapton earned the nickname “Slowhand” because someone once made a contracted pun of “Eric slow-clapping hand”, but it stuck because it aptly described his deliberate playing style, which was a studious reworking of bluesman Freddie King’s bends. I heard a young artist call Brice Marden “Slowhand” once, at a time when his gestural lines looked a little flat-footed and lock-stepped at the edges-arch as opposed to airy. In certain passages some of Pousette-Dart’s lines also suffer from a similar “Slowhand” syndrome, perhaps because a difficult stiffness sometimes accompanies such strenuous elegance. I don’t think, like some, they’re necessarily derivative of Marden but rather late DeKooning, with whom she probably shares a generalized generational interest.

Strangely enough, it’s the sometimes feeble latter-day DeKoonings with their crack ribbon calligraphy and glassy surfaces that may well prove more influential in the long run than his canonical postwar work. On one occasion I once heard Marden publicly declare that “When someone wanted to learn how to paint, they went and looked at DeKooning”. I’m almost positive that he was referring to the later, Xavier Fourcade era DeKooning. Who has had a greater influence on today’s few remaining gestural abstract painters, Pollock or DeKooning? If you’re concerned at all with painting, it’s not necessarily a dead debate. Anyone who attended DeKooning’s centennial show at either Gagosian Gallery or Mitchell-Innes & Nash this summer might have given that question some thought even at this late date.

Another striking characteristic of Pousette-Dart’s painting is revealed in her use of color, which achieves a quality of light that’s surprisingly not local. New York City light is often described as diffuse and silvery. Pousette-Dart’s paintings emanate a hard light, a relentless, arid light that one might associate with another environment altogether; someplace Western, Iberian, or pseudo-Mediterranean like Fresno. This might stem from the artist’s frequent use of clean, mostly unmodulated, color or the silicate dryness of the acrylic medium itself, but all of the paintings consistently radiate a stark luminosity that is both forceful and unique.

Once again though, it’s the interior transitions that are most compelling. Although he’s an altogether different kind of artist, the literary critic Gregory Stephenson stated the following in an article on the darkly apocalyptic and conspiratorial Robert Stone novel Damascus Gate. I think it somehow applies to Pousette-Dart too:

The overarching, underlying, interweaving theme is that of vision and division: the universal struggle between the forces of disunity and discord, opposition and conflict, and those promoting attraction and combination, harmony and unity. This struggle takes place at every level: the metaphysical, the historical, the material and the mental, and within each human heart.

Stone’s aesthetic has been categorized as “vitalist”, which unfortunately makes me think of survivalist compounds, camouflage, canned tuna, and the Turner Diaries, but I get a strong sense of something direct and vital in Pousette-Dart’s art too. She’s actively engaged in a regenerative, recombinant approach to abstract painting. She’s clearly reconsidering what painting is all about, from the support up, but she’s hasn’t surrendered the pleasurable part of the experience like so many of her contemporaries who began working under a similar premise. Maybe iconoclasm is an inheritable family trait after all?

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.