In the unit: Maziar Behrooz (left) and Michael Halsband, (right)
When Maziar Behrooz's architectural sculpture, Rapid Deployment Functional Unit at Salomon Contemporary opened to the public, it was as if spaceship Behrooz had landed in East Hampton. Visitors couldn't wait to don blue booties and climb inside its glowing, minimal interior.
"One of the challenges I had was to extract every sense of function that one would ordinarily associate with a building to bring the unit to a point where it is pre-functional," said Behrooz. "I want you to be able to project your own fantasy on the space."
By all indications, the award-winning architect did just that. People's reaction was vigorous, physical and interactive. It was as if this container, devoid of reference, was a modern oracle that spoke through a language that is elastic, open-minded, electric.
Look for my profile of Maziar in the September 2nd issue of the East Hampton Star. JMG
Everything changed forHope Sandrowa few years ago when she crossed paths with a cockeral in the woods near her home. No ordinary farm animal, "Shinnecock," as he came to be known, is a Paduan rooster, one of the most prized birds in this species. Like a fugitive from some aviary "Project Runway," Shinnecock is, in a word, majestic. Tall feathers erupt into plumage atop his white head.
Once prized as egg layers, Paduans have had their "mothering" traits bred out by breeders who value them for exhibition only. So, when a new brood of chics busted out of their pearly whites a few months later it was clear: love was in the air. Despite warnings from specialists to the species' inability to procreate, six healthy offspring were born.
But the real surprise was the derivation of Shinnecock's offspring. They popped out all different varieties and now, some four years later, dozens of wildly different colored birds -- orange, black, dappled, white -- populate Sandrow's meandering property. Rocking the proverbial boat, Sandrow's chickens have produced mostly purebred offspring who have vastly different coloration and characteristics of their parents, anathema to the things we know about genetics. You are invited to witness the complex social interaction among this blended family through alive video feedand the four streaming cameras Sandrow has installed in the open air studio.
Recently, Sandrow and I exchanged thoughts in an online interview for Blinnk:
Janet Goleas: Tell me about the broken eggs. Is this a response to the gigantic egg recall in the U.S.?
Hope Sandrow: This artwork predates the salmonella outbreak, but, you're right -- eggs created by the Shinnecock Family are not subject to contamination.
This heritage breed is the oldest known fowl dated to a 1 A. D. sculpture in the Vatican Museum. One idea explored in this work is the act of "creation," both singularly and in the context of the universe. It's one of the first questions posed to children:
"...the problem about the egg and the hen -- which of them came first -- was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla, my comrade, said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world..." Plutarch, Table Talk, Moralia, 120 A.D
Also, the cracked shells are the remains of each egg consumed and they document the hen's original works. Consuming food -- or art -- is the reasoning for the title, "Food for Thought" given by my collaborator Nixon Beltran, a dancer and performer. It was Beltran's and the Building and Grounds manager at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center idea to feed these works of art to the artists-in-residence.
JG: The large egg is so beautiful. What's it made of?
HS: This egg's plaster composition projects a sense of delicacy in spite of its size. It's exhibited here just as it was displayed in the A.G. Edwards office in Watermill: Caring for nest eggs...that's what we do. It was printed on a placard as the company motto. Ironically, this was prior to the 2009 banking and mortgage financial crisis.
JG: Tell me about this image that introduces the show. It's a boy and a bird.
HS: This white Padua rooster is the patriarch and founding
father of the flock. He followed me home one day and made it his home,
too. Shinnecock, named for where we met, is poised here in my open air
studio alongside a young boy who is watching his father climb up a dead,
100 year old Oak tree that he's about to fell.
Each day that Shinnecock has lived with us he's taught us how intelligent and resourceful he and his flock can be. As he's learned English and begun to communicate his needs, he inspired us to change our lives to accommodate him (proving Michael Pollan's point in his book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World).
From the gallery website: "Saville’s plinth provides a framework for a collaborative exhibition. It is an artwork which transfers the power of curatorial decision-making to others, namely the individual artists in the exhibition, but also to the individual collector who purchases a plinth from the edition. Saville once observed that, ‘it all looks like art to me now."
Barbara Kruger installation, Thomas Moran gallery, Guild Hall
Still subversive after all these years: Barbara Kruger at Guild Hall (Aug 14-Oct 11) has electrified the gallery floors, ceilings and walls of this historic institution like never before. In her signature style, Kruger incites a kind of declarative poetry that is subversive and hypnotic. Evoking a sort of group swoon -- her installation is dizzying, provocative and very black and white.
Although her career began back in the 70s, (she was in the 1973 Whitney Biennial) Kruger really burst on to the scene in the 1980s with what would become her signature agitprop style of seductive epithets and savage quips.
Part cultural critic, part pissed off feminist, Kruger became the voice of a generation that looked askance at the rhetorical nature of advertising, consumerism, corporate greed and racial and gender stereotypes. Her works seemed to have unlimited power to expose truth, often with shocking clarity. One of her best known pieces, Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), 1987 seemed both an indictment of American culture and a feminist call to arms. "Barbara Kruger is one of the most important artists of her generation," said Guild Hall curator, Christina Moussaides-Strassfield. "It has been a pleasure and an honor to work with her on this exhibit. It's everything I thought it would be, and more." Throughout the last three decades, Kruger's terse vernacular and pertinent observations have made the world sit up and ask, "Who's in charge here?" At Guild Hall, she reasserts her relevance. JMG
Bill King has been making art for over sixty years now, and his exhibit of bronzes at Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett reveals the sort of sureness of hand, sagacious wit and the deft and economical poetry that only a lifetime of focus can bring. What a pleasure. The sculptures, mostly pedestal size bronzes of figures engaged in a variety of contortions and bon mots, are touching and farcical and they exude a playful tragi-comedy that conjures the likes of Samuel Beckett, Moliere and America's quintessential "everyman," Dagwood Bumpstead. The artist Dennis Oppenheim, whom, it's fair to say is bewitched by satire of another kind, and I talked with Bill last Monday at the home and studio he shares with his wife, the artist Connie Fox.
Mama's Boy II
Here are a few excerpts from our conversation:
Janet Goleas: When did you realize you were an artist, or that you could make art?
Bill King: When I was 20. The first day, the first year at Cooper Union. I went there to study architecture -- so before that I thought, "what's an artist? Somebody with an organ and monkey on a string?" One of the instructors took us to the Museum of Modern Art to a show of Elie Nadelman. There were about 15 people in this drawing class and we all went. Anyway, I looked around and thought, "I can do this." The arrogance. Wow. And...it turned out I could.
Bill King at his East Hampton home, summer, 2010
JG: Did you have a gallery back then?
BK: I was with Charlie Allen and a place called Roko Gallery -- Mike Freilich's gallery on Greenwich Avenue. They had just started Skowhegan up in Maine. It wasn't much of anything then, but it's a big deal now. They had a city-wide contest to win a scholarship to Skowhegan -- one prize for painting and one for sculpture. I won the sculpture prize. They showed us in the village -- down on Greenwich Avenue. I sold a couple of pieces, and that was it.
JG: You were still a student?
BK: I was graduating that spring. I had ideas about what I wanted to do. So many things were uncomfortable to me -- like the Cedar Bar, Greenberg.
Dennis Oppenheim: Did you know De Kooning?
BK: Oh, yes. I liked talking to DeKooning -- that was an education. He was always so smart and so perceptive.
Dennis Oppenheim in King's studio
DO: There was a bit of shyness about him, wasn't there?
On DeKooning and the Abstract Expressionists, Clement Greenberg and the Tanager Gallery:
JG: Your work stood apart among the abstract expressionists.
BK: Oh, yeah, I was harassed for that. But, I still considered myself one of them. In the end, you just have to do what you're going to do. I was snotty. Maybe every artist feels superior -- looks down on their fellow creatures.
JG: I'm surprised to hear that. You seem like the antithesis of the ego driven artist.
BK: Don't you believe it.
DO: What were those early sculptures like?
DO: Pop art emerged in the 60s -- did you find yourself drawn to that sensibility?
BK: I guess I thought there was something missing in art history and I wanted to fill it up. But I didn't invent anything. Picasso invented it all. We went to Italy one summer and stayed in a friend's flat in Vallauris -- perfume country. It was 1950. To our surprise, Picasso was there working in the property next door. After supper we'd go over and hang on the fence and watch him work. His whole place was surrounded by barbed wire -- he would have been pestered to death, I suppose. He worked at night in a greenhouse with bright fluorescent lights. So there he was. He was a little guy, working on a goat and a monkey mother. We'd just watch him all night. I saw him on the street there a few times. Once our eyes met. He had eyes just like the ones he painted. They weren't so big, but they were so intense. There was something going on in there that I didn't see at the Cedar Bar.
Bill King, Dennis Oppenheim and me, Monday, August 9, 2010
DARIO ROBLETO,The Common Denominator of Existence is Loss, 2008
Last Monday, the artist Dario Robleto joined us at the home of Nancy and Stanley Singer for a viewing of his new sculpture, installed this past weekend. I was thrilled to be curator this year for the Singer's fantastic collection of contemporary art -- one of the best anywhere. A highlight in the new installation was seeing this Robleto work, which had been on exhibit elsewhere for some time. A few friends joined us for a tour of the hang, and we were treated to comments by Dario, who discussed the concept behind this sculpture.
Robleto, renowned for his fanatical interest in history and human development, weaves together visual and ideological narratives that expose the effects of war, love, mortality and mythology and how they impact humanity and culture. He is the quintessential empath, evoking meaning in his art the way a talisman averts evil or produces magic. Like a latter day alchemist, Robleto reorders/reconstructs lives and fates through conceptual themes, and in doing so weaves a powerful and enigmatic tale through which his subjects are resurrected through the artist's eyes.
Here is an excerpt from his discussion of The Common Denominator of Existence is Loss on Monday, July 26:
Dario Robleto: "One of the questions I asked myself was: had anyone ever pinpointed the moment in time where the first human-induced extinction occurred -- the first time we crossed that line, which, you could argue, has changed everything. We are now reaching a peak in that process in terms of the level of the extinction rate in the world at the hands of our activities. This piece tried to explore those issues.
In my research, I found that there's a species of cave bear that is widely considered to be this first extinction. So, what you're looking at here are actual cave bear paw fossils of that particular species. They are lying next to human hand bones. The object they're holding on to (he points to a long braid that looks like a rope of human hair; the skeletal "hands" are holding on to it) -- and this is a common theme in my work -- finding ways to materialize sound; in other words, to use sound as a substance. This braid they're holding is made from audio tape. I'm very interested in sound. I've often used vinyl records. And so, naturally, what the actually recording is, is crucial to my work.
The recording in this piece is another interest of mine -- the history of recording technology. As you know, Edison is given credit for inventing recording technology and is widely considered to have the earliest recordings that you can actually hear. But, there was another inventor working parallel to Edison, Frank Lambert, who is now credited with having the earliest playable recording, predating Edison by just a few months. It's a fascinating story -- I'm very curious about these lost inventors tinkering away in their studios.
We've all lost touch with the fact that in those days, recording technology was seen as a potential a solution to immortality. In Edison's notes, as well as other inventors, they talk about cheating death -- because if they were successful your voice could outlive yourself. In one of Edison's early sketchbooks, he imagined potential markets for recording technology. One of his concept was to place a recording device on the top of a coffin -- it could be marketed to mothers that have lost their children. They could play the recording of their child's voice. Of course in the end, the technology that was used for mass culture turned into something completely different.
But, imagine Frank Lambert -- he's got this machine on his table, and if it works, he feels it can solve the problem of immortality. You have to ask yourself, "What am I going to record?"
What he chose to record is a beautiful, poignant recording of him counting down time: 1:00, 2:00, 3:00. 4:00. That he potentially created a machine that could cheat time and then instinctively began counting it down -- I find that so poignant. The tape here is a transfer of that old recording. I do this process where I heat the tape and slowly pull it into strips. They're literally holding on to time, (the bears and humans) and the fates are side by side these two creatures." DR
Thank you Dario. And enormous thanks to the Singers.JMG
The theme of last night's gala-extravaganza, Paradise, (dress code: Heavenly) was mitigated by the steamy hell that was the weather. That aside, it was fun. Here's the guerrilla greeter whose leaves were soaked with Wilson's new fragrance, WM:
The forest was filled with installations from artists from everywhere; Australia, Thailand, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, Germany. They lined the path alongside smokey torches and tee pees, silver-slathered actors in slow motion, musicians perched high in the boughs of trees, iridescent performers inside string tents and, of course, pod people hanging from branches like sausages wrapped in twine:
I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with paradise, but, hey, there's a lid for every pot.
So, here we were, at the party of the season. Fabulous costumes, great people watching, lots of art donated by generous artists and hot, gorgeous weirdness. JMG
The Radiant Guest, works by Paul P. and Scott Trevealen at Edsel Williams'Fireplace Project examines the kind of visual conundrums that erupt when two distinct idioms find a shared cadence. In this case the two artists are also partners so the poetry that has emerged from this, their first collaboration, is especially poignant. The artists, both widely lauded, share a variety of convergences in their art, but they differ widely in methodology.
While both Paul and Scott deal with issues of cultural and sexual identity, Trevealen works in collage, film, installation, photography, video and various book forms, lending a diversity that has resulted in collaborations with artists such as AA Bronson and G.B. Jones, among others. A full reprint of his ground-breaking zine project, This Is The Salivation Army, (1996-99) was published in 2006 by Printed Matter. Google Treleaven, and you'll find a bevy of accolades going back to the 1990s.
Paul P. makes small, sensuous paintings that seem to hover in between moments. They are romantic, nostalgic and so specific that you can feel the artist's breath. The works here, mostly of places, respond to beauty and longing.
Ken Johnson said of P.'s earlier portraits of young men: "There is more spiritual yearning than carnal desire in P.'s work. The play with conventions of visual and literary romanticism and the codes of former sexual undergrounds adds a sophisticated intellectual dimension that Oscar Wilde would surely appreciate."
A muse of Paul P.'s, John Singer Sargent painted numerous ocean side scenes as well as his renown portraits. What artist could be more germane? Check out the Royal Academy of Arts show at the Sackler on view thru September 12: Royal Academy/Sargent
I had a chance to talk with Paul and Scott last week. Here they talk about chance, reinventing content and reveling in the divine accidents within this show. Check it out:
All of the works were executed independently, so the collaborative aspect of the hang revolved almost completely around chance:
Here, Scott talks about the pronouncement of the 3rd Mind. I love this part:
FYI: I have no idea where the soundtrack came from. Very magical, like the work. JMG
Sunday's annual Pollock-Krasner Lecture at Guild Hall featured art critic extraordinaire, Jerry Saltz. Incisive and immensely entertaining, Saltz engages in art world horseplay like the thinking person's Dane Cook. He's funny, irreverent and very smart. And, as if life wasn't complicated enough, recently Saltz embarked on a second career as a TV personality. He's now a judge on the Bravo reality-television series, "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist."
He talked about seeking credibility as a writer, and for others, as an artist. He discussed "radical vulnerability" and "alienated majesty" -- both of which I wish I could clarify. He said "the best artists are the most self-critical," a concept that is inarguable, and he opined that as artists, we could do no better than to find our "inner Gustons" -- this, of course, referring to Guston's late stage coming-into-his-own. So excruciatingly true.
Perhaps most poignantly, along that same line he quoted Jasper Johns who said, "I dreamed I painted the American flag." And then he pointed out the cruel dichotomy there -- the fact that the hopes of every generation to that point were hinged on the inclusiveness, equality and fairness that the American flag promised. And Johns, a homosexual, had not experienced a moment of that inclusion in his young life.
It was a provocative and thoughtful talk. JMG
Mel Kendrick: Object Negatives now on view at the Drawing Room through August 1. (See interview below)
The title "Object Negatives" relates both to his sculpture as well as the large format photographs shown here. Striking in both subject and execution, the photographs are drawn from Polaroid negatives created in the process of documenting his own work. Like the methodology he employs in making sculpture, here Kendrick effects a resurrection of sorts, finding substance and drama in material that might otherwise be trivialized -- the negatives that are pulled from instant film. The images, stark and suggestive, evoke the broad functionalism of Russian Constructivism along with its powerful graphic iconography. But they are also mysterious -- unknowable -- images that conjure, as the press release notes, the iconic Modernist film still.
In his sculpture, Kendrick slices into blocks of wood and plaster, culling from the dense interior both positive and negative shapes that are reassembled to make a new whole. The sculptures are defined by a rigorous sense of presence/absence, as forms empty out into new boundaries and reconfigured space.
Late last year, Kendrick's monumental works titled, Markers, received wide praise when they were installed at New York's Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Yesterday, Mel Kendrick sat down with me at the gallery to talk about his work, exchange a few ideas and walk through his show. The conversation begins as we are looking at a catalog depicting his "Markers" installation at Madison Square Park:
Janet Goleas: The stripes seem to create an optical illusion that mixes frontal, mid-ground, background space – the planar information bounces between 2 and 3 dimensions.
Mel Kendrick: The black and white elements function on a couple of levels – especially in the city. When there are no leaves on the trees you relate them to the surrounding architecture, the crosswalks, the white lines in the road. And then in the spring when the trees are green there’s really nothing black and white near them – then they’re just set against color.
The group is called “Markers” because it’s such a basic marking system of black and white stripes. The stripes act almost like camouflage -- where what’s going on inside them becomes a little harder to see. The imagery is still retrievable, but it’s harder to discern. Here, in the red sculptures which are mahogany, the surface of the block and the interior of the wood define the sculpture.
Each material has its own peculiarities. For instance, for the wooden sculptures I laminate multiple layers of wood and form them into a block. I sort of make a sculpture for the sculpture – it’s a minimal block of wood. Then I paint the exterior with Japan color. After that, the cutting begins.
JG: Is the color significant to you?
MK: It’s significant in the sense that it’s really red. It’s the same red as a Milwaukee tool box. Japan colors are heavily pigmented and the paint seems to sit on the surface, which is something I really like. It’s almost like the color is another material – somehow it’s also like a marker. With the red sculptures, which are mahogany, as I cut and reposition, the red turns up in unexpected locations.
JG: It becomes a record of your actions.
MK: Exactly. Back to your original question, each material has its own peculiarities. The black and white plaster pieces with the wood grain on the outside were plaster cast in molds of interlocking layers of black and white. Then they’re cut the same way the wood sculptures are.
JG: It’s not so easy to cut plaster.
MK: No, it’s not. But there are ways to do everything.
JG: I understand that cement is a new medium for you.
MK: Yes -- technically it’s called pre-cast concrete. The one at Longhouse Reserve, for instance, is cut before the mold is made because I can’t cut the concrete. So it’s a stack of a positive mold on top of a negative mold. The top is created from the bottom and the bottom is created from the top. Again, it’s poured in layers of black and white concrete. People seem to love trying to figure out which parts are related to one another.
JG: I would love to see the process – it is so complex. The molds themselves must be like works of art.
MK: Oh, yeah – they are in some ways. They’re made of foam – a very lightweight material. They look the same, but they’re the opposite. The molds are so lightweight they could blow away. The sculptures, on the other hand, weigh about 16,000 lbs. This one (he motions to the sculpture outside, in the gallery garden), two people couldn’t really lift the top portion – it’s that heavy.
JG: Where do you make them?
MK: In upstate New York. They’re too big for my studio. The people I work with are masters at making structures from this super dense concrete. But the pigmenting is the hard thing. I don’t think anyone has achieved this black of a black in concrete. And the white is difficult – the white cement comes from Denmark and the white sand is important. One of the things I like about the concrete is that it changes with the elements – it gets darker when it rains, for instance. It gets streaks as if it was quarried stone.
JG: What was surprising about doing things on this scale for you?
Kendrick's Markers, Madison Square Park, NYC; James Ewing, photographer
MK: The way people reacted to them. There are different reactions to public sculpture – generally, I think if it’s not representational people tend to keep away from it. But with this – I don’t know if it’s the playfulness of how they look or the fact that there were five of them – a family of them – but these works didn’t seem to suffer the fate of many abstract works. People climbed on them. I saw adults scratching their heads, wondering if /how the pieces fit -- or didn’t fit – together.
JG: They do seem to shape shift in front of your eyes. Did doing work in this scale affect you in some way? Did they take on characteristics you didn’t expect?
MK: I’ve always felt there’s a sort of “scalelessness” to my work – that they can easily be seen at almost any scale. You can easily project them into another scale. At least I did. In that sense it wasn’t surprising. I guess I’ve always felt that because of that – the architectural elements or something -- the making of a large work does not contradict anything about the interior relationships of my work. To me it was all positive.
JG: Jessica Stockholder talked about how different people’s reactions were to her installation (also at Madison Park) than she expected. Perhaps it sort of gives the art a second – or third – identity.
MK: Well, yes – you think people are going to stand here, and align their sight-line there and they don’t necessarily do any of that.
JG: The circles are very evocative. Brancusi’s heads – they seem to have bodily connotations.
MK: It’s impossible not to know about Brancusi. I don’t think about Brancusi in my work, but that’s such a big part of the vocabulary of non-representational sculpture. It’s never absent. His work was incredibly radical, and when you think of what preceded it – we can’t even know how radical it was. He would look out his studio window onto decorative balustrades and ornate architectural elements. But it’s not about the material. I use wood because of the irreversibility of the process. You make a cut, and you can’t unmake it. If you make a mistake, you change it, incorporate it. It’s the opposite of Michelangelo’s David – honing in to David, getting closer and closer – where everything else falls to the ground. I use everything. It all gets reincorporated into the work. I call those decisions my “drawings.” I don’t draw on paper, but the evidence of that kind of thinking is in my work. There’s been such an emphasis on drawing in the last 50 years – usually as a preparatory stage for something. It’s the immediacy of the thing – it allows people to witness what the artist’s decision making is. I felt, coming out of Minimalism, that I wanted to hold on to the mistakes as much as the good ideas.
JG: Well, in some ways your drawing tool is your saw.
MK: Yes, sometimes it’s like that. Because I work in 3-dimensions, it’s always a surprise -- you make a mark on one side and something happens on the opposite side that’s completely unexpected.
JG: I was surprised that numerous critics made a connection between annihilation and reclamation in your work. It had such associations to carnage – it wouldn’t occur to me.
MK: I think it had to do with earlier works I did which revolved around dismantling natural shapes and then reconstructing – reordering – them. Like in the Core Samples – I would rebuild the inside next to the outside so that there’s a constant back and forth. And even earlier than that, because I work in sculpture I very much thought about how it stands on the ground, on the floor of the gallery, or in relationship to people, and sometimes I would place a pipe leg or some sort of prosthetic device on it. There was often this sense that the work had survived something. Now it’s less anthropomorphic -- perhaps more intellectual.
JG: There’s a kind of pragmatism in your approach now.
MK: Yes. The point, too, is often to go to something you think you know and find something new. Doing these photographs now, it’s something completely different.
JG: How does this aspect of your sculpture relate to the photographs? Are these photographs of actual works – not fragments -- but actual sculptures?
MK: Yes, prints of Polaroid negatives of actual works. Isn’t that funny that they’re negatives – that I find more information in the negative than in the positive? The positive in the photograph is known so it need not be shown. Nowadays, a negative is an archaic object -- the information it holds has become...unusual.
JG: The conversation they have with your sculpture is interesting.
MK: Yes, I wasn’t sure how it would work – especially with the red pieces, but the conversation seems to isolate certain aspects of the work -- and it creates a dialogue.
JG: Where is your studio?
MK: It’s on the lower East Side. I have a studio here, too. You know -- I work where I work. A sculptor’s studio has to be sort of like a hardware store. When I was at the American Academy in Rome I had a wonderful time meeting people, looking at art, architecture. It was great, but I didn’t do any work. Since I don’t sketch or draw, if I’m not in my studio I’m likely not going to get any work done. New York is like my factory – I guess I’m sort of stuck on it. JMG
Sunday, July 11: Last night's Midsummer Party at the Parrish Art Museum was a glorious mixture of art, cocktails, fashion and did I say fashion? It was fun and spectacular, and the people watching did not disappoint. And, while events like this are typically not the best circumstance for looking at art, the current show Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008 was a treat to behold. In fact, it may be the most effective installation this museum has ever mounted -- Downes's panoramic paintings of urban landscape and architecture seemed to wrestle the difficult design of Atterbury's 19th century building into relative silence -- not an easy thing to do. The paintings, mostly envisioned as if through a fisheye lens, warp latitude and longitude into dizzying vistas of curved lines and torqued rectangles. The perspectival drama here throws off visual acuity and in the process Downes seems to establish new ground rules for seeing. After some 35 years of mining this subject, his mastery of it is somewhat legendary.
Rackstraw Downes has homes in New York and Texas, and the visual incidents he depicts in his paintings are typical of the kind that take place in the vast netherworld that connects these two locations. In places where visual opulence is limited to row houses and two-point perspective, Downes locates a kind of roadside majesty that exists above and below the horizon line. It's arresting, in some ways. Wearying in others. In this minimalist terrain devoid of even the slightest seductions, the rewards are strictly about artistry. Downes is a work horse, and his approach to painting is precise, rigorous, painstaking. Like a modern day plein aire artist, he paints not in front of a snapshot, but in front of the bus depots, factories, underpasses and scaffolding that are his subjects. And then, with a sort of depression era work ethic, Downes methodically covers his territory. Like Giorgio Morandi with whom he shares both a palette and an unerring focus, Downes has claimed a good part of the landscape for his own.
Back to the party...the Parrish is in a mood to celebrate these days because next week they break ground in Water Mill on the much ballyhooed, slightly truncated, $25 million dollar Herzog and de Meuron longhouse that will be the new Parrish Art Museum. Last night's honorees were the "Lady Gala" art patron/philanthropist, Beth Rudin DeWoody and the painter, Ross Bleckner, two individuals that, come the proverbial history of the Hamptons will have their own chapter headings. And I suppose they should.
