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The Obama Portraits

It’s surprisingly moving to see the Obama Portraits which are currently on a tour of cultural institutions around the United States and are on view at The Brooklyn Museum through this Sunday October 24. I bet I’m not the only person who got a bit weepy upon walking into the exhibition & catching sight of the paintings. People lingered in the space, standing close and looking, stepping away to chat or look at the film about the works running in a side room, then returning to the paintings. No one seemed to want to leave and everyone wanted a selfie or a picture of themselves in front of each, myself included.

okay I’ll get that part out of the way right up front:

I think it is fair to say that for the many Black visitors, it was an essential aspect of the event and it is particularly moving to witness how Black viewers engaged in this memorialization–something that the Obamas fully understood, took into account, and mentioned when the works were unveiled, but it mattered to everyone present. It is certain that after the ongoing, bruising, treasonous assaults on the most basic decency in the body politic over the last few years, there is a deep sense of loss and of nostalgia for a time when we had a President and First Lady who symbolically and in their personal behavior in their public roles were exceptional.

Indeed, the portraits themselves exemplify how the Obamas approached the symbolism & communicative meaning of every aspect of their public role, notably in their thoughtful and, historically speaking, groundbreaking choices of artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, and in their collaborative embrace of the formal and symbolic approaches chosen by these two artists for their portraits.

I had watched the public unveiling of the portraits online with moving and interesting remarks by the Obamas and by the artists and I had seen many pictures of the work but was curious what they would look like in person, since both artists relied on photo sessions & each, though very different as painters, has a flat painting technique.

Seen in person, the paintings hold their own as paintings, in addition to their symbolic importance and role as events. Though both flat paintings in oil, they operate differently on the spectrum of photo to painting. 

Sherald’s Michelle Obama is a bit less resembling or less evidently photo-based, and the dress and the exquisite blue ground operate independently as beautiful abstract elements, with Sherald’s trademark grisaille representation of Black skin creating a pensive even mysterious mood, capturing the reflective private character of this publicly ebullient and outgoing figure. Speaking as a painter who was curious about the physicality of the surface, I did notice that unless viewed frontally, the skin area is painted with enough medium to be unevenly reflective, unlike the rest of the painting surface. 

Wiley’s Barack Obama is a painting that is much more evidently based on photography in its brighter more artificial lighting, its frontality, and its surface. While Sherald’s Michelle Obama sits at some distance from the picture plane, protected from us by the expansive field of her remarkable abstract patterned silk dress, Wiley’s Obama sits much closer to the picture plane, leaning towards us with authority and with the slight coldness which is a facet of his remarkably self-contained character. He is up in our face, daring us to react to or contest his being.

Obama is seated in a chair which is in front of a wall of vines and flowers. This was considered a somewhat curious and unusual choice for an official state portrait when the painting was first revealed to the public, and yet it is remarkably effective in conveying the duality of Obama’s personality: leaning towards us is the powerful man, with large exquisitely drawn hands and a big most likely expensive watch just peeking from his jacket and shirt cuff. This is the official man, the man of power. The leaves and flowers represent the exotic background not just of the painting but the unusually diverse backgrounds of the person, the man with the Kenyan father, the childhood in Indonesia, the adolescence in Hawaii, the political career in Illinois, the Otherness of this quite unique individual who despite of and also because of all this complexity and exoticism, reached centrality in our troubled country.

The most interesting moment in the Barack Obama portrait is at the foot of the painting, where Obama’s feet meet the ground, except that is not exactly what is happening: it is more that he seems to be floating in space at that point in the painting, again emphasizing the complexity of Obama as a historical and public figure and perhaps, as also in the reflective and slightly melancholy though regal representation of Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald, reminding us in our current moment of political trauma, insecurity and, sadly, mediocrity, that there was a moment when this remarkable couple were the President and First Lady of the United States of America.

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The Obama Portraits tour runs through May 2022. Upcoming venues include:

Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Los Angeles—Nov. 7, 2021–Jan. 2, 2022 High Museum of Art;  Atlanta—Jan. 14, 2022–March 20, 2022 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Houston—April 2, 2022–May 30, 2022

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“I WILL ALWAYS BE A PAINTER. OF SORTS'”–ALLAN KAPROW PAINTINGS NEW YORK @Hauser & Wirth

‘OH THE PLEASURES OF PAINTING . PLAYING IN MUD . THE SMALL CHANGES IN TONE . LIKE MUSIC TO MY EYES . PAINT IS YOU . PAINT IS ME . SUCH A PLEASURE TO PAINT . TO PAINT IS TO LIVE . A MISTAKE . A RONG TURN . A SLIP. IMPOSSIBLE . NOT IN THIS RELM . THE JOY . HAPPINESS . THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING . TO CREATE THINGS LIKE GOD . TO DISTROY AT WILL A WORLD OF MY OWN. TO EXPERIMENT IN A PHALS FALSE WORLD . WHERE NOTHING COUNTS . AND EVERYTHING COUNTS . IT BRINGS ME CLOSER TO TRUTH . TRUTH DOES NOT EXIST . PAINTING DOES . GOOD PAINT . BAD PAINT . RIGHT PAINT . WRONG PAINT . NEVER TOO MUCH . TOO LITTLE . TO BIG . TO SMALL . IT IS . THAT IS WHY I LOVE TO PAINT . I WILL ALWAYS BE A PAINTER . OF SORTS’

Artists who leave painting behind, for sculpture, as in the case of Eva Hesse, or for Happenings, performance, conceptual art, and “un-art,” as in the case of Allan Kaprow, occupy a special category, one that hits painters who stuck with the ancient medium like a cream pie in the face: they were so so good at it, but felt it was insufficient for them to grow as an artist, so what does that say for the rest of us?

It turns out Allan Kaprow could paint, really well. The current show at Hauser & Wirth, “Allan Kaprow Paintings New York” is a joy, a pie in the face of painters, and a lesson in the history of Western Art at a particular moment of transformation and intense seriousness of purpose–before fashion and commodity culture totally won the day.

That this exhibition of paintings comes as a surprise is due to the fact that Kaprow is best known for his conceptual performance pieces and as a theoretician of post-studio art and non-art, or “un-art,” and, in the late 50s and early 60s, Happenings, one of which, YARD, coincidentally, was staged in 1961 at the same location as the current exhibition, when it was the back yard of the Martha Jackson Gallery–and restaged by William Pope.L at the same location in 2009, now indoors in the structure where the yard used to be, when Hauser & Wirth opened at the same address. The gallery site is like a Roman excavation of post-War art in New York.

In his Acknowledgements to Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life: Allan Kaprow, editor Jeff Kelley notes the irony of curating a “retrospective ‘exhibition'” of Kaprow’s Happenings especially “if no objects remain from that career.” The “remains” of Kaprow’s career, over the past decades, during his lifetime and since his death in 2006, have mainly been the captivating ephemera of performances and happenings, a few artist’s books documenting via austere photography and bold sans serif typeface rigorously controlled instructions for interpersonal actions, an occasional recreation of a major performance event, such as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, from 1959, recreated in New York in April 1988, and, also, Kaprow’s writings. In one of the best, most cohesive collections of essays by an artist, Kaprow leads from the front in his writings and his own practice, tracing the development of art from, in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in 1958, the moment when Jackson Pollock’s ‘s performativity, as captured in photos by Hans Namuth and Rudy Burckhardt, takes the body of the painter beyond the surface of the painting and into the real, to a moment when what Kaprow considers the compromised nature of art in a capitalist society is transcended into life itself. “The Education of the Un-Artist,” I, II, and III (1971- 74) articulate prescient ideas which are still being explored in contemporary art of social practice as well as in explorations of art and technology, ideas which at many levels of the international artmarket are ever more radical at a time when the commodification of art has intensified exponentially.

Kaprow’s worked increasingly through gestures of anonymity. In Paul McCarthy’s contribution to Artforum‘s Passages for Kaprow, he begins with a recollection that encapsulates what Kaprow sought, as a–“un”–artist:

IF YOU TALKED TO ALLAN, he would say he wasn’t an artist. But he still maintained a kind of presence in the art world. I once did a gallery show in the early ’90s and asked him to contribute. After a while he came back and said, “Yeah, I want to do something. Could you ask the dealer to take a garden hose and water the sidewalk every day before the gallery opens?” The piece essentially went unnoticed. It wasn’t announced; there were no photographs or indication by the gallery that anything had happened. And yet it was a kind of participation.

In the same Passages, Lucas Samaras, Kaprow’s former student, shares his recollection of a similarly anonymous gallery-based non event.

Lucas Samaras, “Matters of Fact,” Artforum, Summer 2006
https://www.artforum.com/print/200606/allan-kaprow-life-like-art-11037

 

The paintings in the exhibition were done in a short period of time, from 1954 to 1956 when Kaprow was in his late twenties, having studied art since his teens as a student at the High School of Music and Art in New York City–he later received an MA in art history from Columbia. In his twenties he also studied with Hans Hofmann, John Cage, and Meyer Schapiro, while being involved with the founding of the Hansa and Reuben Galleries, and the Fluxus group. By the late ’50s he had moved towards his first Happenings and had also begun writing about art. So his movement through the medium of painting took place during a relatively brief period but it is clear from the paintings that he had absorbed and learned to deploy the practice with genuine capability from which a painting career could have continued, as it did for many of his contemporaries.

Alan Kaprow, “Subway with Self-Portrait,” 1956. Oil on canvas 50×36″ Hauser & Wirth

When you walk into the first floor of the gallery, you are confronted with a vibrantly composed painterly painting, with a self-portrait jumping out at you from the complex and jazzy composition of New York City.When you turn around to proceed into the main part of the first floor you read on the wall the statement on the pleasures of painting quoted above.

Allan Kaprow, “George Washington Bridge, with Cars,” 1955. Oil on canvas, 42 x 50 inches, © Allan Kaprow Estate

The paintings on the first floor explore New York City. These city paintings, many of them of the city’s main bridges, share commonalities with the funky return to representation and figuration via a meld of loose abstract expressionist brush strokes and paint application–lots of scumbling and blobs of paint–and a sort of ecstatic folk primitivism adopted by his contemporary and friends in New York in the mid to late 50s, such as Red Grooms, Robert Beauchamp, Gandy Brodie, Mimi Gross, Jan Müller, and Claes Oldenburg (with Eva Hesse picking up the tradition in the mid-60s). Paintings like Kaprow’s George Washington Bridge, with cars have the feel of Joseph Stella run through Ruckus Manhattan. These are very joyful paintings.

In the back room of the first floor are more experimental works that leave representation behind for a collage approach that might jive with Cobra or with more recent European abstraction by artists like Raoul de Keyser and others. This painting represents another direction–philosophically as well as stylistically–within painting that Kaprow tried on and also discarded, although the representations of language –HA HA–point towards his later works.

Allan Kaprow, “Hysteria,” 1956. Oil, silver foil & fabric collage, 72 1/8 x 67 1/4

On the second floor are figurative paintings, with their roots above all in German Expressionism–you see Ernst Kirchner in the jagged outlines of nude figures and in the vibrant reds and greens that dominated his palette. One painting of artists including Kaprow painting from the nude places him within a culture of painting which, as it happens, didn’t end just because Kaprow left it behind. This season in New York city galleries and the global art world, the tide seems to have turned abruptly from the flood of zombie formalism to the tsunami of figuration in every possible permutation of styles, a return to order not unlike the one observed in the moment after Cubism, after World War I, not unlike the return of figuration by German, Italian, and American Neo-Expressionists in the 1980s. That this show opens now, and that these paintings by Kaprow represent a phase that he quickly and radically moved past, is quite interesting and ironic. But whereas there is often a large dose of what I’ve taken to calling millennial pathos (as well as postmodern genericity) in a lot of the often very capable paintings of this new wave of figuration, Kaprow’s paintings retain a living rather than a mournful or sentimental connection to all their antecedents.

Allan Kaprow, “Red Figure with Cage,” 1956. Oil on canvas, 69 1/4 x 47 5/3″

When I went to see the show I sat down on the one bench in the gallery, which happened to be in front of my favorite of these works, Standing Nude Against Red and White Stripes (1955). The painting’s use of stripes give a bold sense of overall surface, within which the figure disappears so that the painting is at once figurative and an abstraction, while still-life details establish Kaprow’s mastery of the medium at  perhaps the last point in modern art history when painterliness could be deployed without quotation or irony. The blob of white paint which establishes the reflection and three-dimensionality of a vase has its roots in Chardin and many others from the Grand Tradition of Western painting while having the independent physicality that marks it as a paint thing on a ground, separate from its role as representation.

Kaprow’s ecstatic declaration of his love of painting was discovered written on the interior of the stretchers for this painting when it was being restored. And yet perhaps it was just at this moment of glorying in the act of painting that Kaprow felt a growing awareness of the potential for inauthenticity within the seemingly authentic.

 

On the third floor, Kaprow’s more familiar art historical profile is reestablished and then again ever so slightly destabilized.

In a small room you can watch videos from the 1970s. That the room which contains that part of Kaprow’s work for which he is known is so small makes sense: Happenings, video performances, books, occupy space and time in a flexible way which hardly needs more than the wall space for some ephemera–posters and books–and a video monitor.

A black and white 16mm film transferred to video such as Comfort Zone (1975), part of a group described as Video Scores for Activities, presents a man and a woman engaged in simple patterns of action, attraction/repulsion, controlled by instructions set by the artist. These scenes are minimalist, psychological by their un-emotive qualities–formally they recall his significant contemporaries, Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman, via a 1960s corporate instructions manual.

But then Kaprow–or rather the curators of the exhibition–throw us a curveball: two rooms of  impeccably achieved, beautifully framed, abstract charcoal drawings from 1975. These drawings look an awful lot like “art.” I think to myself, “Allan was holding out on us,” and in a sense he was. I somehow doubt these drawings (and indeed the paintings even) would have been exhibited in his lifetime, if he had anything to say about it. But then the drawings throw another curve: although they look like so many other drawings from the 70s and even the 80s–one can well imagine these as the drawings of a well established conventional abstract sculptor or painter–they are in fact the trace of breathing, Drawing based upon the breath, each formally impeccable work may be the indexical trace of an exhalation.

breath

Yet, he kept these drawings and he kept the paintings. And in them we see the recognizable and intact trace of his teacher Hans Hofmann, whose life drawing classes he attended in Provincetown, MA and whose ideas about form and figure/ground he absorbed before discarding. And even the method of meditative indexicality seems slightly troubled by what seem to be traces of erasure, therefore of intentionality and composition.

Looking at the videos, you can understand that Kaprow found the “un-art” he could do that suited his moral and intellectual aims and made a contribution to the development of [art] thought and practice that continues to resonate. But one may reasonably doubt that in these mature works he felt the pure happiness he experienced painting, as he wrote on the stretcher bars, except when he reflexively applied the lessons of his youth to the composition.

About a decade ago, when I taught a contemporary art seminar which traced the development of art making and ideology from modernism to postmodernism, I showed students an interview with Kaprow recorded by The Video Data Bank, contrasting it with the PBS documentary on John Cage, I have Nothing to Say and I am saying it.  My own view included something perhaps only I could think of, given my personal background, which is that listening to John Cage is to see in part the privilege of being white and Protestant in American in the 20th Century, while to watch Kaprow is to consider what it means to be an asthmatic Jewish kid trying to enter into that zone of privilege, of art, while being repelled by his own pleasure and virtuosity in it. [I should say that the brief film clip in the Video Data Bank’s online catalogue does not contain whatever caused my interpretation]. That is my very subjective interpretation of the difference of their tone, except that I feel certain that what gave Kaprow’s desire to escape the condition of “art” so much weight is that this struggle was very real and went to the core of his being. It wasn’t an art game, even though he often structured events very rigorously, like games with many rules, however arbitrary

So one wonders, upon seeing this show, if, for Kaprow, painting embodied the egoism he so wanted to transcend. And yet another painter might have worked through youthful virtuosity towards as much rigor and truth as they could achieve within painting.

There is no value judgment here. I deeply enjoy the paintings because they are part of the family of art into which I was born. But I value even more the challenge to my ideas of about what could be [art] posed by Kaprow and other artists who did move from painting to performance, or film, or concept. During the years I taught his writings, and reading them again now, I think his collected essays would in fact be enough of a mark.

‘OH THE PLEASURES OF PAINTING . PLAYING IN MUD . THE SMALL CHANGES IN TONE . LIKE MUSIC TO MY EYES . PAINT IS YOU . PAINT IS ME . SUCH A PLEASURE TO PAINT . TO PAINT IS TO LIVE . A MISTAKE . A RONG TURN . A SLIP. IMPOSSIBLE . NOT IN THIS RELM . THE JOY . HAPPINESS . THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING . TO CREATE THINGS LIKE GOD . TO DISTROY AT WILL A WORLD OF MY OWN. TO EXPERIMENT IN A PHALS FALSE WORLD . WHERE NOTHING COUNTS . AND EVERYTHING COUNTS . IT BRINGS ME CLOSER TO TRUTH . TRUTH DOES NOT EXIST . PAINTING DOES . GOOD PAINT . BAD PAINT . RIGHT PAINT . WRONG PAINT . NEVER TOO MUCH . TOO LITTLE . TO BIG . TO SMALL . IT IS . THAT IS WHY I LOVE TO PAINT . I WILL ALWAYS BE A PAINTER . OF SORTS’

Allan Kaprow, “The Artist in Studio,” 1956. Oil on canvas, 60 1/8 x 47″

 

 

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Painting in the 1980s: Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the 80s at Pace Gallery arrives at an interesting moment in terms of the abrupt shift of stylistic currents and tropes that characterize art history and it offers an opportunity to revisit the situation of women painters in the 1980s.

Brief study prompt: Painting in the 1980s–you weren’t supposed to do it–that is, if you were a woman, and especially a woman interested in discourse on gender politics. Different story if you were an American, Italian, or German man.

Or you could do it, although particularly if you were a male artist, but certainly not sincerely, there had to be an ironic twist. An appropriational basis in photography and language helped.

The title of the show implies the aesthetic tensions of that moment, that is, the title is not Elizabeth Murray: Paintings of the 80s, which would place the focus on her work alone during a certain time period of her working life, but Painting in the 80s, that is, her activity of painting in the 80s and, beyond that, the activity and the discipline of painting at a particular moment in Western art history.

Starting in the early 1980s, the art market experienced a huge surge after a decade of relative recession which had been, not coincidentally, marked by creative and political experimentation and which was, notably, the decade of Murray’s first fully mature work. In the new market boom, large Neo-Expressionist and appropriational painting, largely by male artists, was the dominant medium and of course the favored market commodity, with women gravitating (and being pushed, by both external and internal forces) towards photography and photobased media (with correspondingly lesser market value). While the language of the heroic history of painting could still be applied to the former, along with newer modes of criticism influenced by postmodern theory, or, even, one might say, despite the dominance of the anti-essentialism of such theory, the other–work by women artists including those peripherally or explicitly interested in gender–was drawn to and delimited by the same theory with an emphasis on an anti-essentialism that particularly targeted painting.

A so-to-speak mantraic recap of that period might be, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault Derrida, and, when it came to women artists, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer…not forgetting Baudrillard and Mary Kelly, and more, but you get the idea.

Of course there were powerful women painters during that time period, including in addition to Murray, artists such as Susan Rothenberg and Ida Applebroog. But international exhibitions and biennials of contemporary art usually included very few women and of these the three mentioned above were ubiquitous.

And at that time, as I have observed elsewhere, it was useful for such painters to do work that could be parsed for their representational depiction of ideas about the female body, femininity, gender and feminism. Abstract artists–including women painters and sculptors whose work had been so influential and notable within feminist art discourse in the 70s–often felt left out of major exhibitions and texts devoted to women artists and feminism. In that moment Elizabeth Murray’s work was a beacon. To walk into Paula Cooper Gallery in the 80s or into Murray’s first major museum retrospective, at the Whitney, in April 1988, was a thrill and inspiration. To walk into Pace Gallery today is to experience that thrill anew.

Elizabeth Murray, “Making It Up,” 1986. Oil on canvas, 10′ 4 1/8″x7′ 11 1/8″ Image used by permission © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

The paintings from that period, now as when they were first created and exhibited, are bold, confident, powerful, intensely physical, courageous in their assertion of space on and off the wall, massive, inspiring in their use of color and paint texture and application.

But at some level the paintings operated and still operate beyond discursiveness. At a time when representation and enculturation of female identity was the issue at hand, feminist criticism couldn’t quite get a grip on a large twisted broken shield or heart like a shield working at a monumental scale, leaping out at you from the gallery wall, where you couldn’t directly address a feminist narrative by which I mean the narrow interpretation of what a feminist narrative might be where representation, figuration, and appropriation would allow you to speak of psychoanalysis, for example. Not that Murray wasn’t widely admired but the important feminist criticism of the day was focused on artists whose work could be discussed in relation to Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and there were clear specifications of what work was part of that discourse and which wasn’t.

These theoretical references were also the lodestars of a dominant anti-essentialist discourse on how the female and the feminine were socially constructed and you couldn’t address Murray’s work without dealing with how engaged she was with the basic components of painting—figure and ground, oil on canvas and support, and this was in the dangerous territory of the essentialism of painting itself. And while in fact Murray’s work demolished Greenbergian tenets, at the same time her painterly ambition both embraced and reinvigorated the great tradition of New York School painting of which his philosophy were an important component.

Elizabeth Murray, “Like A Leaf,” 1983. Oil on canvas (6 parts) 98″x90″x9″ Image used by permission © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

And, finally, as I try to give a sense of what being an artist in the1980s was like, Murray did not use “the language,” as someone once used the term to me, “those of us who have the language.” Her references could be literary and philosophical, what she said about her work was deep but different than an academic discourse, as much rooted in daily visual experience as in popular culture and in direct transmutation into paint of such experience. In discussing her work she did not use what later became known at International Art English. Very much like Philip Guston, she was very eloquent about becoming an artist, the personal and cultural sources for her imagery and style, and about studio process.

I have a history of constructing vivid but sometimes revealed to be false memories of favorite paintings by artists I love: a painting will be a lodestar in my mind, and I will remember not just it, but the wall of the museum or gallery that it hung on, and perhaps at the core of my memory is my memory of myself at the instant of seeing it. It is the moment of the coup de foudre, love at first sight, but, more than that, of when an imperative and a challenge is revealed to you in one glance. As time passes, I try to find the work again, but often can’t find any trace. Sometimes it is eventually proven to me that it never existed as I had remembered. For example, for the longest time there was a Guston painting of cherries that I had seen at McKee Gallery. There are many wonderful paintings of cherries by Philip Guston and though I love them all, somehow that one painting was in my mind the best one. I remembered where it was installed the gallery, on the back side of the back dividing wall. But no reproduction matched my memory. Finally I asked about it at David McKee Gallery, Guston’s dealer for four decades, and they figured out the year of the show I was talking about and were able to show me the layout of the show and the images, and evidently I had constructed the painting. Strangely, once my memory was proven to be false, the image began to fade in favor of verifiable works, though the ideal persisted.

Another such painting that stood out in my memory in my personal archive of works particularly significant to me–was a large multi-part question mark I had seen at Murray’s retrospective Elizabeth Murray, Paintings and Drawings, which opened at the Whitney in 1988. I never forgot the work, or more specifically, its subject, its materiality, its scale. And, again, more specifically, I remembered myself seeing it, being struck by it: it was there and I saw it, in that way you remember seeing across the street or across a large room a person who you will later meet and fall in love with, but you already did at the first instant of vision. Over the years I always wanted to see it again, and I looked for images of that painting, without success. After the Guston cherries episode I understood that I was capable of inventing archetypal paintings by other artists. Had I made up Elizabeth Murray’s monumental question mark?

Lurking in the back of my mind when I went to see the current show at Pace Gallery was the hope that it would be there. Without seeing it I walked purposefully towards finding it. And, in the back wall of the back room, there was the painting, Cracked Question. Apart from being more askew than I remembered, less vertical, more horizontal, it looked like the painting I fell in love with but doubt set in when examination of the Whitney exhibition catalogue did not include it. Detective work and pestering of friends ensued and mention of the painting was found in a review of the show written by Rob Storr,

Like an interrogative sentence in Spanish, Murray’s show both began and ended with the same punctuation mark, but one whose significance vastly exceeded its simple editorial or grammatical function. Looming just beyond the brightly hued paintings of the 1970s that created one at the entrance, Cracked Question (1987), a mammoth multi panel, multi-faceted picture that dominated the central room of the Whitney installation, was at once the first image on which one’s eye’s fell and a tense conclusion to the chronological sequence of intervening works. (Storr, “Shape Shifter,” Art in America (April 1989), p. 275)

Storr’s description of the pivotal position of the work in the show filled in my memory of seeing myself seeing it. [Because such stories interest me, I think the solution of the mystery is that the show originated in 1987 in Dallas at the Dallas Museum of Art, and was surely planned before that. Cracked Question dates from 1987 and the Whitney show opened in the spring of 1988 so it must have been a late, but, as Storr indicates, central addition.

Elizabeth Murray, “Cracked Question,” 1987. Oil on canvas (6 parts), 13′ 5 1/2″x16′ 2″x23 1/2″ Image used by permission © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

The work is massive, sober, architectural, dramatic. In my notes I wrote that it is dispositive, it feel instinctively that it solves a problem, a conflict, although its subject stays at the moment of the question. It is sculptural and would be seen as such under any circumstances, but the dark grey and metallic silver paint emphasizes the segmented painting’s relation to steel and stone. Each part is as powerful as the whole, yet the whole embodies its existence as language–speaking of Murray’s relation to “the language,” Cracked Question is language. It doesn’t represent a punctuation mark, it is a punctuation mark. It does not only pose but it is a philosophical question and a philosophical text, that takes place in the languages of form and color and space and matter.

A friend spoke to me of the “ferocity” of Murray’s work. Cracked Question embodies and exemplifies that ferocity.

This show arrives at a moment when, after several years of the dominance of abstraction–much of it a variant of what has been termed “zombie formalism”—that is, constructions and deconstructions of established tropes of abstraction, usually very elegant, and often disconcerting, particularly for those viewers who lived through the “original” phases being sampled or replicated, because of the works’ lack of the historical content and the crucial trace of struggle for form and content that had characterized those earlier movements–there are suddenly dozens of exhibitions of figurative painting ranging in style from Alice Neel-like realism to a poetic fantastic that emerges from surrealism and can sometimes border on millennial pathos. So, right now, figuration is in, not in all cases with a overt political message, unless in terms of the racial or gender identity of the artist and the figures represented in the paintings.

So is this a case of bad timing or of good timing for this presentation of Murray’s great works from the 1980s? It is always fascinating to think about how sometimes museum retrospectives, though planned years in advance, open just at the moment when that artist’s work or that artist’s most controversial works look presciently fresh to a new generation. Often such works are revived precisely to give contemporary artists the historical buttress that will burnish their reputations: thus late figurative works by Picabia, previously seen as kitschy aberrations were first restored to critical favor in the 1980s at a time when it seemed to retrospectively offer an important patrilineage for and contribute to the historical buttressing of the work of a then emerging David Salle. Last year’s extensive Alice Neel exhibition at David Zwirner seemed perfectly keyed to the work of emerging art stars like Jordan Casteel. So what will young artists experiencing this moment’s stylistic Zeitgeist make of Elizabeth Murray’s greatest works, seen at this moment?

Elizabeth Murray, Interview with Sue Graze and Kathy Halbreich, “Elizabeth Murray, Paintings and Drawings,” exhibition catalogue, H. N. Abrams, 1987, p.131.

It should be noted that while the overall effect of Murray’s work is one of abstraction, and the artist described herself as an abstract painter in an interview included in the 1987 catalogue, there are many representational elements and references in her paintings, in a stylized style emerging from cartoons, comics, and graffiti as well as from pop artists like Claes Oldenburg: works are shaped like shoes or cups and contains stylized abstracted but identifiable figuration and still-life imagery. But her relation to representation is not in the realm of narrative or allegory, the thing itself is the important thing, the painting as an object that projects into our space carrying pigment on its surface. The importance of three-dimensionality is apparent when one compares her oil paintings from this period to related drawings: even when these are on several pieces of paper creating a shape or a broken field, they operate in a more conventional relation to form. The objectness of the shaped paintings from this period makes them always more than the working out of abstracted, biomorphic or geometric forms on a flat surface, since the form of the support itself is a biomorphic or geometric abstraction.

Elizabeth Murray, “Table Turning,” 1982-82. oil on canvas (2 parts) 8′ 10 1/4″x8′ 2 1/4″x4 2/4″ Image used by permission © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

That places them in yet another situation of appearing to be beyond language: how she declares space is different than Barnett Newman’s declaration of the equivalence between figure and ground: what is painted as form and shapes on the large shaped works may be securely within the realm of figure, but on the other hand the whole object itself is figure on the ground of the wall in a way that conventional easel paintings, even Murray’s own earlier works, are not. Thus, again, if the works can’t be incorporated or tamed into discourse of gender representation, nor to the terms of the new critical language of gender, racial identity, national identity politics, they also can’t be reduced to the purely formal terms of the earlier discourse that had characterized painting from the late 1940s to the 1970s.

 

The sculptural nature of the works emphasizes the sculptural nature of oil paint itself. One of the things I have always found the most inspiring about these works is how the three dimensional support allows me to really experience the physicality of pigment. This is one of the things that painters live for, the moments when paint comes alive in a generative fashion, so for me, how Murray allowed oil paint to dry unevenly–an area of color will be matte and then shiny, which in itself becomes sculptural. And it is never enough to look them frontally, you have to experience the surface from the side to really see the color and the brushstrokes.

 

A year after Murray’s show at the Whitney, which included, in addition to Cracked Question, a number of the works in the current exhibition at Pace, I wrote the essay  “Figure/Ground,” in which I confronted the critique of painting I have indicated as dominant in the 1980s with other discourses that were not usually brought to bear on it, including those of feminism and of feminist studies of the gendered, misogynist aspects and roots of fascism. In one of the last paragraphs of the essay, I wrote about some of what I love about painting:

For a painter there is certainly tremendous pleasure in working out a thought in paint. I tis a complete process in terms of brain function: an intellectual activity joining memory, verbal knowledge, and retinal information, is a given visible existence through a physical act. But the value of painting cannot rest of any individual artist’s private pleasure. Painting is a communicative process in which information flows through the eye from one brain, one consciousness, to another, as telemetric data speeds from satellite to computer, without slowing for verbal communication. Incident of paint linger in the working mind of the painter as continuous thrills, as possibilities, like words you may soon use in a sentence, and–in a manner that seems to exist outside of spoken language—as beacons of hope to any human being for whom visuality is the site of questions and answers about existence. The black outline of a rock in a Marsden Hartley landscape, the scumbled white shawl in a portrait by Goya, the glaze of a donor’s veil in the Portinari Altarpiece, the translucent eyelid of Leonardo’s Ginevra di Benci, the pulsing red underpainting of a slave’s toe in a Delacroix, the shift from shiny to matte in a passage of indigo blue by Elizabeth Murray, are only a few of a storehouse of details that are of more than professional interest to me.

 

Images used by permission © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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“Certain reflections about art making and learning about art making” 1986

I have been teaching art since I was 22 and still a graduate student myself. Teaching is part of the way my mind is structured and I think that teaching includes learning, or continuing to learn. At this point I feel that learning might best be pursued without the pressures of teaching, but that is another story. The rest of the story is something I am considering putting into a book that would use my teaching archive as a starting point for short reflections that would situate the teaching ideas of past moments in relation to current ideas.

I recently went through my large file cabinet because I needed to find  a document with some important log-in information, which naturally was not in the file cabinet though I did eventually find it in a pile on the cabinet, which by the way normally I can’t open because of several overstuffed rolling file cabinets parked in front of it with piles of papers on top of them. Instead I went through folders of teaching materials, syllabi, but mainly all the essays that I have taught on feminism, painting, early modernism, minimalism, Fluxus, Debord, Space (exhibition space), and more, each grouping including the original xerox if a PDF version has not been found online or scanned yet, and my heavily annotated teaching copies.

In a folder of random material, I found a statement that I seem to have written for a class I taught at SUNY Purchase in the fall of 1986. I have no recollection of what the circumstances were, or whether I read this or handed it out. The statement is dated October 26, 1986, which I think is the day I wrote it, which was a Sunday, for a class at Purchase the next day.

Texts I wrote shortly after this one, such as “On Failure and Anonymity,” [Heresies 25, 1990] explore similar territory particularly in relation to art market pressures. Teaching is situational and interventional so I assume that this statement was written to address some issues that had come up in a specific class and, if written today, such comments would be less uniquely focused on material and formal production of art objects and less specific to painting. In fact ten years later I wrote and produced a videoscript to express my disgust at MFA students who were rebelling against reading the fairly moderate composite of classic modernist and postmodernist texts I was assigning to them. One point of my book would be to point to the extreme reversals that can take place in art and therefore in art education, necessitating for the teacher historical self-awareness and the ability to adapt while maintaining one’s core values. So on the one hand in the past years I have taught in a situation where political, theoretical, identity-based content is the primary line of instruction and where issues of form and style including the development of form in Western art history have been to a great extent reduced for the students to free-floating appropriatable photo images unrelated to any materiality, context, or struggle to achieve form. On the other hand issues of history, style, form and materiality still do matter in individual works and even in terms of achieving market success and my emphasis on these concerns made sense not only to my own work in the early 80s but also in the context of Purchase at that time more than to my own more conceptual and political graduate education at CalArts.

Thus despite completely different artworld conditions, educational philosophies, and theoretical discourses, a lot still resonates for me in this statement, and I can read through it my continued concern about how hard it is to continue to make art at all much less grow as an artist once one leaves school.

I wrote:

My few weeks here have led me to certain reflections about art making, and learning about art making.

My path into these reflections began by my trying to put into order what I learned about being an artist, about art and the making of it, and when I learned it.

Each person’s history is different, but there are beginnings of art life in each of your histories or you wouldn’t be here. In my case, my parents were artists and worked at home. I probably learned more than half of all I know about every aspect of art and the profession* of being an artist by the time I was 11 years old (when my father died) [*art and profession two different things]: about the role of art in daily life, about colors, brushes, work habits, art history–through art in the home, through books, weekly visits to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan, also about the frustrations of trying to further a career, the financial problems, the difficulties and the humiliations of dealing with clients. I know that being nurtured in a home where art was the vehicle of all values is unusual. But I still had to come to my own understanding of this life and make my own decision to make it mine.

I learned and still learn and get inspiration,ideas, hope and encouragement from art that I see, mostly old, some new. A subcategory of influence not to be underestimated is art that I hate or am threatened by. Sometimes it is easier to steal from art you hate. And of course self-definition via contrast is sometimes more dynamic than self-definition via sympathy.

I also learned from hanging out with older artists, seeing how they lived, how art permeated their lives. I learned as much about their viewpoint in art from what they thought about movies, T.V., politics, how they dealt with daily problems in their studios, their small pleasures and pet peeves, how they liked their eggs fried, than from any direct influence or instruction.

In graduate school I learned how to gossip about art, art history and the art world as an insider. I learned about cynicism and politics. The most effective teaching, again, took place in incidental, anecdotal encounters with faculty and other students, after hours, in the cafeteria, in hallways. Talk of art was everywhere but at its least vital in group crits and organized seminars.

After graduation I learned about my own psychological stake in remaining an artist. I also learned slowly about my basic themes. In a battle for my survival as an artist I learned about how to get through work blocks, about what my work was in relation to myself and to other work. In my mid-thirties a lot has been learned but it is a process which I see, with happiness, as a lifetime of work.

What I feel is crucial to an art student is to begin to examine the source and the nature or his or her interest in making art. Every thing that follows in this statement must be understood as preceded by the question of why are you doing it at all? are you doing your work because you are an art student? are you doing something central to your existence? You cannot put these questions off until you are an artist. The path begins with such questions of identity and motivation.

I sense at Purchase and at other places I’ve taught in recent years a tremendous fear of content–especially emotional, psychological, but even political or theoretical. Part of the problem stems from the overwhelming domination in most art teaching of a formalist approach, in a degraded form.

Students are led to struggle with the mechanics of making art, and they expect that if they learn the mechanics, they’ll succeed in conquering the other, the who-you-are, what-you-want, the content. Whereas I think that it should be made clear than even the mechanics return to the who-you-are. the emphasis can only be on the mechanics that have resonance for you individually.

It is important to learn about materials and techniques, composition, traditions of pictorial representation, about space etc… but you can only learn from the elements you are compelled by. The others are a drag, and drag you and your work down to apathy, inertia, boredom and depression.

It must be understood that the mechanics of art making are in themselves content. They are vital only if they are seen as concrete things that are of real interest to you. They cannot function as impersonal tools. AS such they lead to deadened art. The issues of death, sex, love, hate, happiness, need, loss, attraction, repulsion, despair and exaltation exist in a 6B pencil, a stick of charcoal, in blue oil paint, in fluorescent orange, in the textures of canvas and burlap, in the square, the triangle, the cube, the sphere, the vector. There is no escape.

Don’t try to solve other people’s problems. Try to listen to yourselves and find which are your own problems. They are the only ones you will be interested enough in to spend time trying to solve. When facing a landscape, a still-life, a figure, a canvas, it is necessary to know of the conventions of representation and manufacture, but much more crucial is what it is in what you are looking at or thinking about that involves you. Studies have shown that when people see something sexually exciting in an image, their irises widen instantly and momentarily. Tune in to whatever it is in the landscape, the figure, int eh color, in the materials that make your irises widen. There are the potent details and clues of life and of art making. They are also the direction, the horizon, what my driving instructor years ago called High Aim Steer. Because if even briefly and incompletely you sense your own interest, your particularity, and trust it, you will teach yourself what you need to know to make what you have sensed.

This is what I meant when I said that I have no sympathy for boredom. I do not think that any visual experience, any experience at all, is indifferent. Meaning is masked by fear, but everything has meaning, everything has content, and only if yo make the effort to tune in to that content, can you begin to establish a discipline of self-criticism that will sustain you outside of school.

Mira Schor, Oct.26, ’86

*

Just out of curiosity I wondered what I was working on at the time I wrote this statement. Here is Walking Tuning Fork, dated November 10, 1986

Mira Schor, Walking Tuning Fork, 1986. Oil on 5 canvases, 80×12 inches overall dimension

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Pier 92

I usually start my annual obligatory (imposed on me by the society I occupy, would not necessarily go otherwise) visit to the Armory Show at Pier 92 (the more intimately scaled “classic” side) before venturing into the maze of the more vast and high-ceilinged contemporary side of Pier 94. However yesterday by chance I started on Pier 94. Early in my journey I was standing with my friend Susanna Heller at a booth of a respected gallery telling her about seeing a show last year where the paintings in reality were so boring and empty that I could not find even the most banal compliment to offer to the gallerist. There was simply nothing to say about the work except that there was nothing to say about it. Upon which Susanna say, “Mira, do you remember anything about what we were just looking at?”

Ghastly huge work, all 689 inches wide of it: AIDA Makoto, “Jumble of 100 Flowers” 2017-2017. Acrylic on canvas, 79 x 689 inches.

As a living artist I have to admit that I would like to see my work well presented and represented at such an art fair, but by the end of my rather incomplete tour of Pier 94, my friends and I felt terribly tired, and further and more dangerously, dispirited about the whole idea of being artists.

Handsome paper mixed media work by Peter Linde Busk, “Everything, Everyone, Everywhere. Ends,” 2016, at Josh Lilley. In a way a perfect fair work: large and visible, eye catching, handsome, done with quality, hip and very effective mix of materials from low, cardboard, to craft, ceramic, but presented without context.

Florine Stettheimer, Asbury Park South, 1920, detail

Florine Stettheimer, Asbury Park South, 1920, detail

Only one work shone out of the blur–Florine Stettheimer’s masterpiece, Asbury Park South from 1920 (a painting scandalously deaccessioned by Fisk University in 2012) in a group exhibition organized by Jeffrey Deitch that orbited and created a lot of visual noise around it in a manner both consistent with Stettheimer’s aesthetic of excess and disruptive of the ability to properly view her painting. Many artists, including myself, have been influenced by Stettheimer, for various aspects or characteristics of her work, the narrative, the etiolated figuration, the gay sensibility in both senses of that word, the beautiful color, but in addition the works are so beautifully crafted and patented, the most beautiful colors, the most extraordinary surfaces, scumbled, dry, sculpted. This painting gave us a lift but we were still oppressed and depressed by the whole situation. Or at least I was.

Then we left selfie land and we made our way up the stairs to Pier 92. First we came upon Kathy Butterly’s works, beautifully installed at Tibor de Nagy Gallery with Shoshanna Wayne Gallery. I envy Kathy, I love ceramics and porcelain and glazes and the way color works in such media, and thus I envy her because she makes beautiful things using these elements, things that give pleasure, that people want, which is something my parents who made beautiful jewelry also did, which I can’t say that I do–my work, critical, political, and intellectual,dreamy and personal, it appears that so far it is an acquired taste! I also relate to these works because they are modest in scale and invite the viewer into a relationship that is more intimate than most of the large shiny works typical of art fairs.

Kathy Butterly, Shoshanna Wayne Gallery and Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Kathy Butterly

Next we were drawn to a Native American painting on animal hide and discovered the most beautiful and engaging group of drawings by mostly 19th century and early 20th century Plains Indians, at Donald Ellis Gallery. The inventiveness of these drawings in the artists’ efforts to depict using very reduced means (am referring to the works on paper with pencil and sometimes ink, materials which appear to be what was available to them on reservations) what they were seeing and experiencing was absolutely inspiring.

SHield and cover, Crow, Northern Plains, c.1870, buffalo hide and paint, Donald Ellis Gallery

Shield and Cover, Mescalero Apache, Southern Plains c.1880, buffalo hide and paint, Donald Ellis Gallery

Plains Indians, drawing, Donald Elllis Gallery

Plains Indians, late 19th century, Donald Ellis Gallery

I discovered a few Jack Tworkov works in a couple of galley booths: his poetic elegance and measure always sing out to me. Next an exhibition at Jonathan Boos of Jacob Lawrence works from the 30s,40s, and 50s, beautiful color, tenderly observed details, jagged forms. A small richly impasto Jess vase of flowers on a thin panel, an intense Ossorio.

Jack Tworkov, oil sketch, Hollis Taggart Gallery

Jacob Lawrence, Interior (Family), 1937. Tempera on paper, 30 3/8 x 25 1/5 inches, Jonathan Boos Gallery

Jess (Collins), Petals of Paint, 1964. Oil on plywood, 16 x 12.25 inches.

Clearly when you see older work now, it is the product of a system of filtration and of intensification, the dross of the time period has been filtered out and the richness of meaning has intensified over time as more historical information has been pressed into the work by the passing of time, but I also thought that my friends and I are perhaps the last generation that can really understand this work in a living way rather than an archeological way: we were brought up with the values of materiality, form, style, process, search for truth (belief in some kind of truth or honesty), with the analogue, the handmade, the personally developed (not as recipes that are copied and reconfigured endlessly but without the struggle that went into the initial works, as in zombie formalism) — at time when artists sought within the work rather than researched before the execution of the work. It often feels that our knowledge sets us apart–in a bad way: we can’t put our knowledge forward in the current mode of the sampled and reprocessed–often done very very proficiently–because we absorbed the initial relation to making of these older works, made by our parents, teachers, older friends. [I should add that often I am led to rethinking this impression, because at the same time there is so much art being made by young artists all over the world, with after all as much desire and imagination as any other previous generations brought to their work, yet, as Susanna pointed out, that may be truer when you see the work online, then one sees the work in person (as opposed to on Instagram, for which so much work is now both unconsciously and consciously created) and its potentially alienating synthetic nature often reasserts itself.

I have often quoted my mother’s words upon seeing a show at the Whitney on Picasso’s influence on American art. She was then 95 and, as it turns out, only a few weeks from her death, and she found it hard to stand for a long time, but in the taxi home she said, “it’s the kind of work that makes you want to go home and work.”

I should say that over my life as an artist (and I include in this my work as a writer about art) I have often gotten as much energy from work I “hated” as from work I loved, because the antagonism pushed and liberated me to move forward and live in my own time: such a relation may still be operative, but I suspect that the depression my friends and I felt comes from seeing now in a lot of art fairs work we just saw five minutes ago in our MFA student critiques, and from the fact that even those significant challenges to our world view are by now kind of old as well, though they may not feel that way to the people doing them or the collectors fawning over what seems to be the latest thing, really just by the latest person.

So Pier 94 made us want to give up on art making, with a few exceptions (some contemporary + Stettheimer, who died in 1944), Pier 92 made it possible to want to go home and work in the studio.FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail