Author Archives: Mira

What does a man see when he looks at his own image?

Towards the end of the opening of Susanna Heller’s exhibition at MagnanMetz Gallery of recent paintings, “Phantom Pain,” as the gallery emptied, I happened to witness a profound moment: Heller’s husband, sociologist Bill DiFazio, wheelchair-bound since loosing his left leg three years ago to a terrible illness, rolled his chair up first to gaze deeply and long at a painting by Heller of him sitting in his chair, Lost in Thought. Then he moved purposefully to contemplate the second painting of him in his wheelchair, Phantom Pain. I wondered, what was he thinking when he looked at these portraits, which so exactly mirrored his present self.

Susanna Heller, Lost in Thought, 2013. Oil on canvas, 50″x33″

Heller is best known as a painter of New York cityscapes, the site of her epic walks through the city, through the complex linearity and rough materiality of her Brooklyn neighborhood, of subway tracks and bridges, of the patterns of the city streets and island outline seen from the bird’s eye view of her studio in the World Trade Center Tower One in the ‘90s and the patterns of disintegrated metal in the paintings from after 9/11. In the current exhibition this aspect of her work is represented in the first, main room of the gallery by several paintings, including Rolling Thunder (Night for Day), a tour de force nineteen foot wide painting in which she represents the thin, vulnerable, nervous skyline of post-Hurricane Sandy New York City, dwarfed and threatened by the vast and turbulent sky and sea swirling around it.

Susanna Heller, Rolling Thunder (Night for Day), 2013. Oil on canvas. 69″ x 238″

Artist and writer Bradley Rubenstein has an interesting appreciation of this painting in his review of the show, “Spirits in the Material World,” looking at Heller’s views of the city through the “post-apocalyptic” lens of Cormac McCarthy‘s “ruined landscape in The Road,” and Heller speaks of her approach to landscape in a February 2013 video interview on Gorki’s Granddaughter filmed in her studio shortly before the exhibition opened . Her discourse on painting is refreshingly unstrategic and utterly haptic, as she speaks about trying to convey as directly as possible the most intimate and almost primitive aspects of perception, of points of view in relation to up and down, gravity, and scale.

Heller turned her unflinchingly curious gaze to the calamitous injuries her husband suffered when he lost his left leg to necrotizing fasciitis, a horror movie illness that most victims do not survive. The doctors who saved his life, caring for him through over twenty operations in three months, probably never had encountered a patient’s family member so driven to confronting painful realities and so able to turn them into art. She sat in the hospital making hundreds of drawings, of her husband lost in a forest of medical machinery, and of the vistas of the East River soaring outside the hospital window. She drew to save her sanity as she tried to help save his life. Some of these harrowing drawings are installed in a corner of the same room as the paintings of Bill in his wheelchair. Unable to paint during many months of caretaking, in her mind she imagined, catalogued, memorized the paint marks that might articulate what she was seeing. When she was finally able to return to the studio she began to work from these drawings and these mental maps.

In my snapshot, Bill’s back was to Waiting for Dawn. The painting is as raw as his body in those early months, the figure lost, disintegrating, supported by another kind of tower,of all the equipment of the most modern interventional medicine. The painting is vertical, a bed, a kind of falling tower, a coffin with its withered occupant a disintegrating effigy. The paint is rough, encrusted, melting. The man looking at his image in a wheelchair is the man who survived that painting, who left that state of in between life and death to return to an altered life, though the trauma can never be made whole.

Detail, Waiting for Dawn

A glorious abstract blob at the top of Waiting for Dawn, maybe the TV monitor for all the medical equipment but maybe also a cloud drifting in from the river is characteristic of the fine line Heller walks between representation and abstraction in her paintings. In her cityscapes, she characteristically fights to achieve a true representation in paint of her experience of urban space: despite her familiarity with the subject, the paintings are worked, sometimes even overworked, paint is scrapped, reworked, erased, painting scraps are glued on.

Heller talked about painting the figure as something for which she had no skills, as foreign as nuclear physics, thus it is interesting that these paintings of immensely difficult painful subject matter are painted with a vigorous simplicity that allows the viewer and the subject to simply be, “lost in thought,” in the turbulent space she is always looking to embody, with all the horror and melancholy of a life transformed by sudden, dramatic, near fatal illness. The human figure and the very particular figure of her husband created a challenge to one of the core aspects of her approach in the studio—that of doubt that haunts every brush stroke, and something new to her work happens in these portraits that is different than the encounter with landscape: in the first portrait of Bill, in the hospital, the overworking or overthinking becomes a powerful expression of the drama of the human body pushed to the limit of survival, where “overworking” is an embodiment of flesh itself in flux. And in the more recent paintings of Bill in his wheelchair every mark seems to have arrived there with a minimum of second guessing and Heller’s line becomes more fluid, her use of outline reminiscent of Alice Neel’s later portraits–each artist is pitiless yet empathetic, though Heller doesn’t veer towards caricature. Abrupt application of painterly paint, impasto outbursts seem open and spontaneous, arriving as thoughts, not as statements or struggles.

In meeting her match in this specific human figure, the haptic approach flows unimpeded.

Susanna Heller, Phantom Pain, 2013. Oil on canvas. 50″ x 33″

These are not easy paintings in their somber subject matter, the phantom pain of mourning and loss but anyone interested in painting, and particularly in seeing a kind of approach to painting that is unsynthetic should go see them.

John Berger writes, in his essay, “Painting and Time,” “Paintings are now prophecies received from the past, prophecies about what the spectator is seeing in front of the canvas at that moment.” He continues, “a visual image, so long as it is not being used as a mask or disguise, is always a comment on an absence. Visual images, based on appearances, always speak of disappearance.” And what was the man seeing when he looked at his portraits that recorded the presence of absence, “phantom pain”? He says he saw in them that his wife loved him and understood him deeply. That is what he says. But the photos suggest something else as well, the ineffable gap between the person and the image: even one’s reflection in the mirror is fundamentally a stranger, a very familiar one perhaps, yet at some level Other.

On the other hand brush marks are indexical traces of the painter in the act of painting, making these paintings, at another level, self-portraits of the artist.

Susanna Heller, studio visit, November 18, 2011, photo: Mira Schor

Phantom Pain runs through April 20

Susanna Heller is represented in Canada by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto

A drawing

I bring to my life as a teacher of art aspects of my own education as an artist. Some elements of that education are part of the history of post war American art and education, for example the shift from formalism in the modernist era to the experiential, experimental, and political tendencies of my graduate education at CalArts in the early 70s. I can sift these experiences through a critical analysis shaped by subsequent developments in art and art education and bring that layered knowledge to my teaching at any moment with a confidence that these experiences are part of a history that can be discussed and shared as part of a legitimated common heritage within the arts.

But there are parts of my experience and of my development as an artist that I realize cannot be extrapolated as easily to anyone else’s use: the most irreducible of such experiences is the fact that my parents were artists and that I watched them work from an early age, as they worked at home.

I was reminded of this today when I was putting something back into a closet where I keep most of the works on paper by my father Ilya Schor and noticed some sheets of stiff paper that were just stuck under something else. This closet has a cabinet of Ali Baba character to it: I reach into a dark corner and out comes some wonderful drawing or painting or engraving, on some scrap of paper I hadn’t seen before, and today was no exception to this seemingly magical uncovering of random treasures–at least to me. It is an experience which can be as daunting as it is wondrous, since I am responsible for somehow cataloging, preserving, and determining the fate of the works that I discover. Among the sheets of paper I discovered today was a self-portrait drawing. Judging from the thinness of his face, I would guess it was done in the late 1940s or early 1950s. He worked with India ink and used a small steel-nibbed dip pen, like this one, used by my mother, still in their studio:

Before he went to art school in Warsaw, he had, as a teenager, been trained as an engraver, in Eastern Europe, in around 1920.

What strikes me today looking at this newly discovered self-portrait drawing is the effortless complexity of drawing marks that go into delineating his cheek bones, forehead, eyes, these last never actually outlined, just suggested by an intense deepening flurry of sharp little marks. I am also struck by how the lines of ink seem to go against the grain of form: they do not operate in an academic version of rendering, and yet the convex and concave lines somehow add up to an accurate suggestion of volume and contour.

I share this drawing today because it is just one example of the combination of skill in a traditional art practice–representational drawing–and visual intelligence in action that I could watch up close as a child: the image I always come back to in my memory is of being just tall enough that my eyes were level with my father’s hands as he sat and worked at his table in the workshop off of our kitchen. He was happy to let me watch and to show me a few tricks or flourishes. To watch him summon representation out of such abstraction, out of a flurry of gestures of the hand, with deft skill, speed, focus, and pleasure, was a total pleasure, it was very absorbing, and as good as any magic act a child could watch, and it was a daily practical lesson in art making of a kind that now unfortunately either comes trapped in outdated academic tropes or is simply not part of what a contemporary artist might think was useful or necessary to representing contemporary media culture. Children today are being described as “Generation Swipe,” so the trend away from the steel-nibbed dip pen will continue, as art will continue, but such absorption in an embodied effort to bridge the gap between the real and representation still carries meaning.

Resisting Pier Pressure

I stuck to my guns and did not give into Pier pressure this year. I had been adamant after last year that I would not go to Armory shows at the piers again. I had gone for about 8 years, and in the mid-2000s I could funnel and process boredom into research for my essays “Trite Tropes, Clichés, and the Persistence of Styles” and “Recipe Art.” But each of the past three years I would resolve never to go again, because basically it’s out of the way, tiring, and even if you see a few good artworks and run into a few friends, and are seen being part of the artworld in some capacity, if only physical presence, by the time you struggle to re-find the city, via taxi or some of the longest walks to public transportation ever or the little jitney buses to civilization, if you are lucky, you can’t remember a thing. Only your camera remains a record of ever having been there and the sameness of my photo folders from year to year was grating on me. But each year I got drawn back because a group of friends would say, let’s meet, and then you think, well, OK, must see to talk to students about, don’t want to be left out, or don’t want to forgo pleasure of hanging out with friends. I almost got sucked in by that mechanism again this year, but finally I managed to hold tight.

I had not been to Chelsea for several very busy weeks, and shows were piling up that I wanted to see. My compromise with Art Fair culture was to go to the Independent because it was in Chelsea and then see a few shows. It was a beautiful spring-like day which, following upon a grey wintry snowy slushy day, gave me a boost of optimism and my choice of action left me with enough energy to cap the day by going to the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory.

Briefly: both of these Fairs seemed disappointing, with a mix of vulgarity on the one hand, and vacant genericity on the other–works that would look tacky in a Nike shop and works that would look blamelessly attractive in a corporate boardroom, this pertaining in particular to the works exhibited at the Independent, with the Park Avenue Armory presenting more blue chip works that had a different kind of blandness with a few really pieces in the mix in a less circus- like and calmer atmosphere. But in each fair, one art work or series of works by one artist stood out and redeemed the whole exercise. As my mother said, on our way home from the last museum exhibition she saw–a 2006 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of the influence of Picasso on American art–it makes you want to go home and make art–she was then 95 years old and could barely stand up at the show and she still felt that inspiration. That is what I look for, that is why I started this blog, to record those moments, when amidst all the dross and worse that forms part of any decade of negative thinking, an artwork cuts through the crap and makes me want to turn on my heels, cover my eyes as I rush out of the building, and try to get home with that sense of inspiration and renewed energy to make art intact.

At the Independent, I came up first to two small grey works hung on a wall.

Were they paintings? There was the trace of what might appear to be a raised brushstroke on one, but then I realized that this was not a painting but a clay tablet, of a restrained abstraction in a modernist vein. Many more such tablets were arrayed on four sun-raked tables, lying flat, as much sculpture, installation, and display in the archaeological section of a museum, like cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylonia, or like books presented in a museum setting, with their covers closed, presenting a nearly inscrutable face. Most of the tablets were gray clay, one was the color of yellowish wax. A few were completely plain, blank slates, others had geometric forms cut into them or as raised forms upon them, one had a small face peeking out of a small fold or slit in the clay field.

The works’ use of geometry and other aspects of painterly and well as sculptural abstraction refreshed the possibilities of abstraction developed in the modernist period. The work asserted that one can use a circle or a triangle or a line on an “empty” field and make it have the same interest of a genuine search for form and a belief in formal and composition aesthetic categories as artists from the modernist movement and make it seem newly experienced.

These works exemplified my ideas about modesty as a qualify in art that is not limited to small scale but that engages formal and intellectual rigor and ambition for the art work, rather than punching you in the face with the artist’s ego.

This is work by Anna-Bella Papp, a young Eastern European artist and I can only hope that the visual clarity, intelligence and dignity of these works is something that the artist can hold on to and grow, rather than devolving into production if her works encounters material success.

Last year, the Park Avenue Armory exhibition of the ADAA was a relief from the Piers, quieter, more sedate, with greater emphasis on the modern than the contemporary. It was possible to see some art, and that was a gift, so I went back this year. The atmosphere remained more civilized, less like the midway of a county fair, but perhaps familiarity led to feeling a bit less inspired, until on my way out, I passed the booth for Galerie St. Etienne. I stopped, thinking, oh, they may have something worth seeing..and turning a corner into a small enclosure I found myself in front of a small yet vital masterpiece, Egon Schiele‘s watercolor Newborn Baby from 1910.

Egon Schiele, Newborn Baby, 1910. Watercolor and pencil on tan wove paper. Galerie St. Etienne

I suspect that many people value Schiele more for the sexual angst expressed in the synergy between his subjects and his style, than for his aesthetic decisions. This work’s intimate, pitiless yet deeply humanistic focus on a newborn baby, body akimbo and marked by the disproportionality of the neonatal, painted in the vivid colors of birth, pink, purple, and red washes and and impasto yellow belly button marking the last moment of total physical connection to the mother’s body, is another way of considering both Schiele’s artistry and his deep sympathy with the vulnerability and strangeness of human embodiment.

These two valuable experiences with art were worth more than acres of the Piers, and though I can’t say I was able to go home and make art, I left while I was ahead and with these experiences stored in my mind for future support and encouragement.

On being a “Lady”

I can’t review an exhibition in which my work is included, yet I would like to encourage people to see the exhibition To Be a Lady which has been extended through March 22nd and is particularly conveniently located for people coming to New York for the College Art Association conference next week, as it is installed in a public space a block down Avenue of the Americas from the Hilton Hotel, at 1285 Avenue of the Americas.

Alma Thomas (1891-1978), Red Scarlet Sage, 1976. Acrylic on canvas
46 x 36 inches, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York

I figure that since the show is divided into two parts, installed along two separate sections of the space, with one side featuring the works of women artists who are deceased, and the other side featuring those of us still among the living, I feel that I can safely recommend the dead without incurring controversy among the other living artists in the show or referring to my own work in it or the ramifications of the word “lady, ” which I know has stirred some controversy. Curator Jason Andrew of Norte Maar has assembled some terrific work in this show, a diverse group of works by notable artists and artists that some may be less familiar with, and in each case has included a very good example of the artist’s work, and in some cases quite a surprising one. Again, I am just talking about the dead. The works are grouped in open bays or booths, creating in effect small mini-exhibitions with some interesting synergies.

Alice Neel (1900-1984), Sunset in Spanish Harlem, 1958.

The first work in the show is a vibrant abstraction by Alma Thomas, next to an equally vividly hued work by Charmion Von Wiegand, two hard edge abstractions, yet of a very different nature and sense of scale. On the opposite side is a small but intense vertical abstraction by Louise Nevelson, and a cityscape by Alice Neel: I am particularly fond of works by Alice Neel that are not portraits, but still lifes and cityscapes, because one can appreciate her drawing and paint application in a different manner when they are not applied to her strong sense of figuration which may overwhelm a viewer’s ability to fully appreciate her more abstract qualities.

In the next bay is a beautiful work by Irene Rice Pereira. It is interesting for me to see this in particular because I used to hear about her work when I was a child in the 1950s and there was always a dismissive edge of contempt when her name came up, but I didn’t know how much that may have been the result of sexism and cliquishness–the work in the show has a formal clarity and elegance that defies those condescending views. Next to this is a work by an artist who may not be well known, except to a select group of inside artworld people in New York, the painter and writer Edith Schloss. Schloss had lived in Rome from the early 1960s to her death in 2011 at age 92. Her work is a charming, fantastical abstracted still life in landscape. Recently restored to a wonderful condition, it could easily appear in the show of a up and coming young painter today. In the same bay there is a strong free-standing work by the sculptor May Wilson, and a luminous large painting by Janice Biala.

Edith Schloss (1919-2011), Untitled, 1973. Oil on canvas, 31 5⁄8 x 35 5⁄8 inches, Courtesy of the Estate of Edith Schloss

The third grouping is particularly interesting, with Barbara Morgan‘s contact proof photos of Martha Graham performing some of her first signature works, in 1935, next to more abstract works by Morgan, a work by Ruth Asawa. In that bay is also a very strong Louise Bourgeois sculpture, Flower Petal, a large white bronze that is one of the most important works in the show, and one of the most surprising. I thought I knew Bourgeois’s oeuvre really well but I had never seen this work, which is both slightly unusual in terms of imagery and form, and yet has Bourgeois’s characteristic boldness and sureness of form. The white coloration adds to the impact rather than diminishing it. And finally in that grouping there is a major Lenore Tawney piece, a black thread weaving, in remarkably good condition, a forbidding minimalist work in an ancient tradition of craft.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Life Flower I, 1960. Bronze, painted white: 22 1/2 x 34 x 23 inches, Bronze base: 27 1/2 x 15 1/4 x 15 1/4 inches, Stamped: LB 5/6 MAF 2010

Other outstanding works in the show are paintings by Pat Passlof and Jay DeFeo, Lee Bontecou, sculptures by Betye Saar and Viola Frey, with the installation of the dead punctuated by a painting by Elizabeth Murray, hung high above a doorway area.

I wish I could tell you more about the works by living artists, those you must see for yourself, though I will say, as a preview, that one very gifted young artist, a former student of mine, told me at the opening that he nearly fainted when he saw the remarkable Nancy Grossman.

This is a rich various group of works, many rarely seen or never seen before and well worth seeing.

Hurtling through life at a deliberate pace: an appreciation of Richard Artschwager (1923-February 9, 2013)

The last work in the chronological installation at Richard Artschwager‘s 2012 retrospective at the Whitney Museum was a large pastel on paper drawing representing the figure of a man, simplified and streamlined, something like a crash test dummy, his legs half through a pneumatic blue steering wheel that his hands rest upon though with a firm grip, as he drives alongside a blue band of sky, a green band of landscape along a brilliant yellow road. There is no car, just a steering wheel and the figure “in the driver’s seat” moving forward along an empty but glorious colored road, his body ageless yet his feet gnarled by age, his head tilted pensively, slightly away from us, the viewers, and toward the view, empty but glorious and endless.

Richard Artschwager, In the Driver’s Seat, 2008. Pastel on paper, 25 x 38 inches. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.

I have often thought of this work since I saw it last fall. One evening I was thinking about my own life and particularly of how I wished that I could slow down enough to be able to invest greater time and kindness in other people because that is such a richly important part of one’s life but in the same instant visualizing myself as hurtling through my life like an early astronaut with little control of my spacecraft, just launched out into an unknown but speeding trajectory of my work as an artist. I thought of the Artschwager piece, In the Driver’s Seat, which I felt profoundly addressed that image I felt so viscerally of the forward motion of a life hurtling toward the unknown. Yet it radiated a supreme calm and a joy that altered the darker side of my own vision.

I learned just now that Richard Artschwager died today, at the age of 89. He was a unique and a great American artist, whose work was marked throughout by a calm, philosophical and deliberative quality, sharp intelligence, utter formal clarity, and a cool, sometimes even remote yet mischievous nature.

I first saw his work in a Whitney Biennial in the mid 1970s, only I didn’t know who had made the objects I noticed–in fact I wasn’t totally sure the strange objects were artworks in the exhibition–strange steel wool like oblong discrete objects placed in unusual locations, inside the building, but not exactly where an art work might be located–near a fire alarm, above an exit door, and, as I recall, outside the building as well. A couple of years later he visited the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design where I then taught and thus I discovered the identity of the artist who had created those strange “blps,” and I had the opportunity to get to spend some time with him.

I was just talking about his lecture this past week, thinking of the way that artists spoke in the ’70s: at worst, you got male artists presenting one work after another in a monotonous “and then I did this and then I did this” stream of aggressive and oppressive non-revelation, or, on the more positive side, an artist would visit who spoke as he or she wished (though in those days still most often a he), from whatever starting point, and at whatever length was necessary to get across the thoughts in their work: and the talks were about works but those good talks were always about thoughts, ideas, desires for art, not about exhibitions or market. Artschwager’s was such a talk, marked by a particular characteristic that had some in the audience puzzled–he would stop and you could see his mind working through something, and when he began to speak again, he was at the next point, having left out that step. You had to keep up with him, get used to the way his mind worked, and that deliberative, thorough, yet elliptical method was a perfect equivalent for the way that his works appeared to address space and the viewer.

Last year, I wrote about his work, some of it also late work in a similar vein to In the Driver’s Seat, in a beautiful exhibition at David Nolan Gallery, in the blog post, Youthfulness in Old Age. Please take a look and I will expand on this post at a later date.

His gallery has just posted a notice with a marvelous picture:

Richard Artschwager, Photo: Rachel Chandler, Courtesy David Nolan Gallery

An interview with Richard Artschwager by John Yau and Eve Ascheim from 2008 can be read here.