paintings + drawings

More thoughts on CAMP.

In the latest issue of The New Republic, Jed Perl tackles the nothingness of new museum buildings and recent exhibitions. The piece, though often a tad cranky for the day of yesteryore, offers some juicy tidbits that should certainly be considered by Bay Areans who support building Donald Fisher’s Gluckman-designed CAMP in the Presidio:

“These exhibition spaces, whether the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles or the New Museum in New York, are as incoherent as the art they have been designed to house. They are bland, generic warehouse-style spaces--places to dump expensive stuff.

…What there is to discuss is not visual experiences so much as visual stunts, which are frequently mind-boggling in their size and complexity. Mostly what I can offer, after all this museumgoing and gallerygoing, is a series of postcards about nothing written from places that felt like nowhere...

...It is important to point out that nothing and nowhere are themselves significant artistic themes. De Kooning in the 1950s liked to say that he was painting New York's "no-environment." What is often forgotten today is that painting no place, as de Kooning did in his greatest canvases, from Excavation to Gotham News, actually requires an acute sense of place. A painting or a sculpture, whether abstract or representational, must always be a place--a unique locale, a little universe. The particularity of the place draws us in. We focus our attention, we linger, we explore...

...The artist's sense of place is the stranger's sense of place, the outsider's sense of place. Such a dispensation can feel expansive and inviting. It can also feel exclusionary, because its particularities push out other particularities. An art that pursues its own viewpoint, and does so unironically, can seem elitist, because it propounds a secret. "This is just for us," the work declares--but it is always the case that the "us" includes anybody who can imagine himself or herself into this particular place. Anybody can enter, but not without making an effort.”

Since few people have actually seen Fisher’s collection, Perl’s thoughts on the contemporary museumgoing experience do beg the question – is Fisher's demand to be segregated in the Presidio an attempt to add a certain weight to his project, a gravity that would otherwise be lacking and more obvious were he to build South of Market near our many established culture centers.

Yep, still mad.

Over lunch on Friday, someone asked me if I was still mad at the Oakland Museum's publicity department, and for a moment I was confused.

Mad? About what? 

Then I remembered.

Yep. I'm still po'd. I'm from Pennsylvania, the land of grudges.

Backstory is here. And the funny part is here.

Continuing saga of CAMP

1. Possibly, Fisher looks at the Presidio as the easiest way to get what he wants? Chronicle's John King sez, "personally, I think the decrepit industrial buildings down at Pier 70 would be great for a museum like the Fishers'. But the political and regulatory hurdles on a site like that make the Presidio look like a cakewalk. "
2. Vote is in on Curbed SF. Majority sez build the thing where Fisher demands.
3. Starting today SFMOMA blog offers locals the chance curate their own dream shows. Just like Don Fisher does - but you can't stash the chosen pieces in your own ugly corporate headquarters.

Best pull quote in awhile.

was from Sunday's NYT feature on Marlene Dumas:

“I like it a bit crueler. Francis Bacon once said that is why he went for figuration against abstraction — he didn’t like Pollock as much because he said abstraction couldn’t be cruel enough for him. I did get things from Francis Bacon — the fact of the figure in an abstract background. It is a figure, but where is the figure?"

In the studio (sorta).

Super piece from Sharon Burler on the changing dynamics and requirements of artist studios is up now on The Brooklyn Rail. Butler, with her usual fantastic insights, traces spaces in the late 20th Century to now.

Oh yeah, also get over to her blog and see an amazing painting by her father and some excellent recent related pieces by her.

Misrach at the National Gallery.

Nearly half a decade after Berkeley's Richard Misrach debuted a group of photos at PaceWildenstein, the series is now travelling. The current stop is in DC. Yesterday, Tyler Green panned the National Gallery, explaining that "a distinguished museum is supposed to be more than sizable square footage available for the enlargement of a commercial gallery show."

Paddy Johnson makes a convincing argument that it's no big deal. I gotta go with Johnson.

Michael Zahn on himself.

Know what I like about Michael Zahn’s work? That it's impossible to say what gets me the most about his pieces. I just have some gut reaction to it. The paintings suck me in.

You know what I'm talking about. Every so often, you've had that experience. Maybe not to Zahn, but to someone's work. That's what is so great about art, the unexplanable exhilaration.

Since I find it nearly impossible to riff on his work, check out this interview with Zahn at Henri Art Magazine. From the piece:

“I guess the relationship I have to Minimalism contends with its mode of address, and with the scale of things.

Last night I was talking with a friend about this idea of making a life-sized maquette of something, which sounds kind of stupid, but I think that’s more or less what I do alot of the time.

One of the paintings for the show at Eleven Rivington is called Hang. It’s a two-panel painting and is just under seventeen feet long. Its internal division evokes the structure of the gallery’s north side, which is all glass and opens to the street. In this sense, the painting resembles a huge window, or a curtain wall.

It also shares an affinity with Blinky Palermo’s wall painting Fenster I, a transposition of the facade of the Bremerhaven storefront in which it was exhibited.

Yet the large scale of Hang, by physically doubling the horizontal expanse of the wall on which it’s placed, projects another elevation into the room itself. This second architecture to which the painting refers is the virtual lattice of the graphical user interface. The broken black dashes across the painting’s top and the overlapping white panel at its right suggest glitches, images or components that haven’t loaded.

Technically, a ‘hang’ occurs when a computer doesn’t respond to input from a keyboard or a mouse; if a computer is hung, the user needs to restart the machine to continue. Hang thus acknowledges the alleged failure of heroic abstract painting, while humorously rebooting its program.

The modulated tints of Hang, basically variations on red, green, and blue, are then distributed across the three walls of the gallery, creating an immersive, all-around space perceptually networked by these colors. This triad establishes a ground against which the exhibition at Eleven Rivington is figured.

I suppose this is what I mean by something being ‘life-sized’. It creates conditions that implicate the viewer in its presence.”

Read the rest here.

And below are some installation shows for the current show.

Letter to the editor (David Bonetti on sucky museum publicists).

After bitching about my lousy treatment at the hands of the Oakland Museum’s publicist, I got these two hilarious and poignant anecdotes from my old friend David Bonetti.

When I first started writing about art, David’s style – enlightened, but accessible -- was something for which I strived. Still do.

Anyway, here you go, enjoy: “i read your item about the dis you received at the oakland museum. (just think - what does being dissed by the OAKLAND MUSEUM mean???)

it reminded me of the event i was invited to at sfmoma in their old civic center digs (literally, rented space). nicholas serota spoke before the annual gala dinner for trustees and supporters. it was made clear to me that i was being invited only for the lecture, not the dinner. okay, i thought, there will be two tiers and i will be in the lower one. no problema. but once there, it was clear that i was the only person invited to the lecture who was not also invited to the dinner. serota gave a groveling, ass-licking talk aimed at getting sf collectors to give money to the tate. (it was profoundly embarrassing.) i shrank through the event. at the end, i tried to walk nonchalantly to the elevator - remember the infamous elevators? - but i was intercepted by rena bransten and bryon meyer. "where are you going," rena said. "home," i said. "aren't you staying for dinner?" "i wasn't invited." "what?" and both rena and byron insisted that i stay, that the museum find a seat for me, that i could sit with them, that it was an outrage that the museum would invite me for the lecture but not for the dinner, etc., etc. etc. i insisted that i really didn't want to stay, that i appreciated their position, but that i'd rather go home - NOW. they relented and that was that.

the next day i called the sfmoma press department and sternly told them that they should never put anyone through such an ordeal again. they said that john lane said that if such an important member of the international art world as nicholas serota was going to give a lecture - on robert ryman, about whom he had nothing but classic comix comments to make - the press should be invited. i was told that kenneth baker had also been invited but that he had declined the invitation. smart boy!

after that i was regularly invited to both the annual lectures and dinners, but i refused to attend. except for the jeff koons lecture, which i wanted to hear, but i declined the dinner afterwards on a matter of principle. i am pleased to report that koons gave his talk backed by an image of his erect penis, a work from his "made in heaven" series that john caldwell refused to hang in the koons show. how do i know that? because to make my deadline i needed to come to the show early and i walked into a gallery where koons and caldwell were in the middle of a heated exchange over the piece. in that battle, caldwell won. the piece was not hung. (although you can't say that, ha-ha-ha, about jeff - unless he hired a stunt man to sub for him.) but koons got the last laugh. it was a very tense event as everyone listened to his suave talk with the image of his enlarged penis behind him.

i'll never forget it, and i'll bet don fisher won't either.”

Schjeldahl on Koons in The New Yorker.

"We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time."

Also included in this tasty nugget:

"Painting is a medium of concerted imagination, symbolizing consciousness. It’s not a flat dump for miscellaneous ideas."

Entire review is here. (via AFC)

Twombly on work and professionalism.

"I'm not a professional painter, since I don't go to the studio and work nine to five like a lot of artists. When something hits me, or I see a painting, or when I see something in nature, it gives me a thing and I go for it. But I don't care if I don't go for three or four months. You know, when it comes it comes..."

(via Sharon Butler.)