The Norton Simon Museum is doing another small, surprising show from its storerooms: “Surface Truths: Abstract Painting in the Sixties.” It’s 17 works that Norton Simon probably wouldn’t have approved of—acquired, at any rate, by the spendthrift Pasadena Museum prior to Simon’s takeover.
The paintings are mostly hard-edge abstractions, large to XXXL (above, Jack Youngerman’s Red-Vermillion and Frank Stella’s 32-foot wide Damascus Gate I).
The artists range from the canonical to the un-Googleable, and I guess
that’s the appeal. It’s a core sample of what the most astute West Coast
collectors considered to be important, in the post-painterly sixties.
One surprise is how many NY and DC color field painters the museum has.
The show also reminds you how important Paris was to this generation.Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly spent time there, as did Sam Francis (not in the show, but his Basel Mural is upstairs).
A standout is Washington/Provincetown artist Thomas Downing’s Red-1966. He became known for hand-painted “Spot” paintings, some rigorous and some more free-form. Here the colors so resemble lipstick shades that you’d swear it’s a feminist conceptual piece of the next decade or later.
Downing taught Sam Gilliam, and you could be forgiven for thinking he inspired Damien Hirst—and, um, Bansky.
To see Liesl Bradner's interview with Jack Youngerman in the LA Times click here.
Since its invention in the 19th century, the art of photography
has transformed the way we locate memory and the tools we use to identify or give
meaning to the visual moments of our lives. From the start, photography was a touchstone
for our collective dreams and our shared sense of history, whether personal or
cultural. For Vicki Ragan, an artist whose works traverse numerous idioms, the
photographic lens has acted as a partner in her ongoing explorations of thought,
memory and sense of place.
An obsessive collector, Ragan's studio is a
veritable Wunderkammern filled with oddities and objets d’art and the endless
parade of knick knacks that line her walls and shelves. Tiny pitchers and
decorative plates, wooden chairs, vintage pictures and maps, sea shells, buttons,
plastic bugs, matchbooks and little animals spill out of storage boxes. These
are the raw materials with which she choreographs still life elements and the visual
poetries of remembrance, mysticism, presence and waking dreams. In much of her
work, she shares in the Surrealist dislocations of Man Ray and Merit Oppenheim,
the lyricism of Odilon Redon, Joseph Cornell’s precision and mysticism and the seductions
of what Susan Sontag called “the melancholy object.”
In The Little Dress Series,
Ragan transforms a gauzy undergarment into something unearthly – even beatific
– an object that evokes loss, divinity, tenderness. The little dress, her muse, has traveled with the artist
across the U. S. and throughout Europe and Mexico since she acquired it in
2001. In these places the dress serves as
a marker, locating time and place somewhere
in the dreamy threshold
that
exists between twilight and dawn, sleeping and waking. In Provence, France, 2007, the little petticoat
hovers on the tips of long grasses that splay across the French countryside. Delicate,
diaphanous, the object glows from within as if it possessed its own light
source. The embodiment of childhood is implicit.
Early in her career, Ragan worked at Brandeis University as a
scientific photographer where she was routinely asked to document objects that
she didn’t understand and sometimes couldn’t identify -- molecular models and
the like. Perhaps this experience played a part in Ragan’s attraction to the visual
conundrums she often employs in her work. In juxtaposing elements and shifting the
meanings within identity, memory and concept, Ragan has come to create her own
mythologies. Whatever form her work
takes, it exudes a kind of articulated wonderment in which even everyday
objects seem in touch with a higher power. Ragan
has a special ability to convey timelessness and mutability, to invoke
hallucinations and to marry fantasy and reality. JMG
Dennis Oppenheim, Whirlpool (Eye of the Storm), 1973
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
John Keats
sweet dreams, Dennis.
Dennis Oppenheim,
September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011
Dennis Oppenheim, an artist whose body of work traversed
multiple art forms and helped to redefine a generation of artistic idioms, died
at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York on Friday. The cause of
death was cancer said his wife, Amy Van Winkle Plumb. He was 72.
Mr. Oppenheim was a pioneer who pushed the boundaries of Body,
Earth and Performance art, sculpture, video and public art, leaving behind an
enduring legacy that covered over four decades. His artistic evolution was
fueled by intense curiosity and a ravenous intellect, an acute sense of satire and
an abiding irreverence for the status quo.
Dennis Oppenheim lived in New York and Springs. Striking for
his tousled hair, often dyed multiple colors, eclectic dress and general
impishness, he was frequently in the company of his yellow lab, Twister, who
survives him. An avid collector, Mr. Oppenheim’s home was a veritable museum of
art and artifacts – pumpkin heads and clowns, puppets and vintage dolls,
miniature houses, fine art. “Visiting his house was always the biggest treat
for me,” said Alice Aycock, his friend and former wife. “It was like crawling
through the attic of Dennis’s mind.”
Mr. Oppenheim moved to New York in 1967 after receiving his
B.F.A. from the School of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts)
and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. He lived in Northport, Long Island
where he taught in a nursery school during the day and commuted into New York
to spend his evenings at Max’s Kansas City, the famed art world watering hole
of the 1960s and early 1970s. There he befriended the artists John Chamberlain
and Neil Williams and club owner, Mickey Ruskin. His first solo exhibition at
John Gibson Gallery in 1968 would signal Mr. Oppenheim’s entry into the
vanguard of the New York art world and a trajectory that has been unflinchingly
provocative, inventive and adventurous.
An early proponent of Earth art, Mr. Oppenheim challenged the
nature of artistic discovery as he traveled across the country making large
scale projects such as “Annual Rings,”1968, a sculpture of concentric circles
carved in snow that flanked the U.S./Canada border at the St. John River. His
seminal art from this period included “Canceled Crop” and “Salt Flat,” works
that were so large and so remote they could only be viewed from the air. His
Body art included works such as “Reading Position for Second Degree Burn,”
1970, in which the artist lay in the sun at Jones Beach for five hours with an open
book across his chest. The result – a wicked sunburn in the shape of, well,
literature. In the 1980s Mr. Oppenheim turned to conceptual installations based
on machines that iterated the artistic process and various dynamic actions.
These complex, often enormous installations incorporated numerous technologies
animated by locomotion, combustion, detonation and varying aspects of fire, electricity
and movement, either implied or actual.
In a 2009 interview with Douglas Kelley the artist said, “I
don’t stay very long with any one piece.” He recalled, “When I was in graduate school
wondering what kind of artist I was to become, it did not occur to me that…I
would be floating in an atmosphere of dislocation. No one is particularly
prepared for the artist they become.”
By the 1990s, Mr. Oppenheim’s oeuvre had grown to infuse
sculpture and architecture in numerous works of public art and permanent
installations across the world. With major works in Germany, Italy, Spain,
Argentina, Lithuania, China, South Korea and throughout the United States and
Canada, Mr. Oppenheim came to signify the quintessential arbiter of art in
public places. In 2010, the unveiling of his 60’ high “Safety Cones” in
Herford, Germany drew throngs of beaming enthusiasts. Over 7,500 artists and
performers, young and old spectators and delighted public officials gathered in
celebration of the sculpture. Its popularity was so profound that it inspired the
break-out tune, “Wilkommen Safety Cones,” sung by cheering crowds.
Dennis Oppenheim exhibited his works
internationally in galleries and museums including the Tate Gallery, London;
the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C. In 2007 he was recognized for Lifetime Achievement at
the 2007 Vancouver Sculpture Biennale.
Born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington to David Oppenheim
and the former and Catherine Belknap, Mr. Oppenheim is survived by three children,
Kristin and Erik Oppenheim of New York and Chandra Oppenheim of Maine and two
grandchildren, Erin Carden and Issa Innisfree Oppenheim-Pressman. A sister, Valerie
Long of California, also survives. Predeceased by his first wife, Karen
Cackett, he and the artist Alice Aycock were married in 1981. Although the
marriage ended in divorce the two remained close friends and colleagues. In
1999, he and long time companion, Amy Van Winkle Plumb were married.
Mr. Oppenheim will be buried at Mountain View Cemetery in
Oakland, California. A memorial will be held at a later date. Memorial
donations have been suggested to ARF (The Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons),
P.O. Box 901, Wainscott, NY 11975.
Visiting Michael Rosch's studio is sort of like entering a museum of decisions. There are the roads taken over here, the roads less taken over there, and, of course, all the other roads -- and they all swirl around a central focus that is constantly shifting, mutating, reinventing itself. I met with Rosch earlier this month to talk about his art, his visit to Japan and his show at Keyes Art Projects now on view in Chelsea. We sat down in his studio for a chat and a cup of tea:
MR: When I bought my house the land was just scrub oaks; some big, some small. The land was totally untouched. I spent a month pulling out bittersweet.
JG: Bittersweet -- that's the choking vine?
MR: Right, yes. Perfect name for it. Some of the vines were 4 inches in diameter. It got to the point, though, that I liked the vines so much that I'd climb to the top of the tree to unravel the whole thing. That's the memory, and that's where this work really comes from -- from the physical experience. I didn't save it, I just liked doing it. We constantly unravel and wrap things up.
I always felt the bittersweet has just as much right to strangle the tree as the tree has.
The work at Keyes Art Projects is selected small sculptures that reiterate this idea along with assembled canvas paintings and works on paper. The watercolors achieve a sort of gestural Surrealism where form rises out of darkness like the words inside a Magic 8 Ball. Lines ravel and unravel in swirls of color. Some appear biological. Others look like automatic writing -- elastic and fleeting -- like light traces left on the retina after a flashlight waggles in the dark.
During a visit to Japan, Rosch took a watercolor class and purchased dozens of water based pigments -- probably some of the finest pigments in the world. We looked at the huge array of powders that came in glass viles, corked at one end.
JG: What's the difference for you between oil painting and watercolor?
MR: I think we have an intrinsic understanding of water. We are mostly water, after all. With oil paint there are ways to be clever, but watercolor is pretty honest.
JG: Your trip to Japan seems to have had some impact on the way you look at your work.
MR: Well, yes. We went to so many cultivated gardens and every one was extraordinary. Everything
has its presence in Japan -- nothing is taken for granted.
You
can't capture the experience on film or in print -- it's a physical
space. It's a revelation. It's transformative -- you have to walk it, be
in it, move through it.
It's the magic space of real space that
interests me. Intuiting real space.
Rosch installed curls of steel throughout the hallways of Keyes Art Projects, to stunning effect.
MR: The gardens, over time, are tempered. When you're walking through the spaces there's an amazing cohesion. Probably the garden that affected me the most was the smallest one. The way it walked and the scale of what you saw when you walked it really made you spatially aware. I'm not Japanese. It's just a crazy idea of mine.
Rosch seems to have a sixth sense for bringing focus to unknowable things -- he's a sort of übermensch who finds himself contemplating string theory while bending metal.
Installation view
Small Curves Watercolor No. 6, 2010
Small Curves Watercolor No. 24, 2010
Michael Rosch, Small Curves. On view thru January 4th.JMG
Stunning book arts:The Island of Rota, a
collaborative effort between the designer Ted Muehling, the world's
most interesting neurologist Oliver Sacks and the photographer Abelardo Morell is now on view at the The Drawing Room in East Hampton.
photo by Loring McAlpin
Organized by MOMA's May Castleberry, the book is one in her ongoing publication series that is published in conjunction with the Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Under Castleberry's keen eye, The Island of Rota now takes its place among some of the world's most seductive and sought after limited-editions. In her tenure as New York's preeminent publisher of artist's books, Castleberry has sought to bring artists and writers together to reinvent the book as a work of art, or, as Ted Muehling put it, to create "an artful book."
L:Ted Muehling, R:May Castleberry
"It doesn't always happen this way," said Castleberry, "but this time I knew it (the collaboration) would happen organically."
The text was selected from Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Colorblind, in which the author examines a neurological abnormality that has resulted in total colorblindness among a century of island residents populating a tiny Pacific atoll in Guam. In the book, Sacks explores the adaptive vision of these islanders and, at the same time, reignites his youthful passion for botanicals.
Micronesia is home to jungles of prehistoric cycads, a plant species that has existed there for over 500 million years, since the Palezoic age.
At last week's presentation of the book, Ted Muehling talked about many things, cycads among them:
Ted Muehling: Oliver has an amateur interest in botanicals and
this text is basically about him exploring specific islands in
Micronesia and their ancient plant forms -- plants that have endured for
millions of years. I was very taken by it.
TM: One of the first lines in the book goes back to his childhood -- it was during the second world war. He grew up in London, and his beloved mother took him to the gardens at Kew...writing about this later in his life, Oliver still has this childlike wonder. It's a wonderful text. He quotes Darwin frequently, and he tells stories back and forth about plant forms and explorations. We chose to take this quote -- the last line of Darwin's Origins of Species. I think it sums up Oliver's enthusiasm -- it's quite beautiful:
"...whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." evolved."Charles Darwin
cliche-verres by Abelardo Morell, photos by Jonathan Singer
TM: Abe Morell was very enthusiastic to do the book. Oliver's text is full of visual possibilities -- from early map making to ships that sailed the Pacific in 1500 and all these different plant forms. We went to the New York Botanical Gardens and met with the head of cycads...Abe took some plant material...the photographs -- they are cliche-verres -- really suggest fossils. Some of them are extremely abstract. They look like outer space.
My job in putting the book together was to combine this very deep text and these beautiful images and to create a seductive 3-dimensional artifact. The text is so worth reading -- I started thinking about Micronesia and what might represent these atolls, islands, plants -- and what Oliver was talking about. I worked a lot with Dieu Donne -- they do exquisite work -- and a brilliant man there named Paul Wong. We pressed the paper pulp on to sea fans so that each one is unique, and that's what we made the cover with. Very textural.
Photo by Loring McAlpin
May Castleberry: May I tell them, Ted, how completely obsessive you are?
Ted found a silk paper that he loved, but he felt it needed something more explicit and so he would crinkle it up. Then he spent nights ironing it -- I would call him up and he would say, "I'm ironing" -- until it got a certain rattle when you touched it. No other designer that I've ever worked with had such an impact on the design of a book.
Ted Muehling: The book is in black and white. For Oliver, being a neurologist he actually went to these islands for various reasons, one of them being that there are true "achromatobes" there -- people that are truly colorblind. Most people that are colorblind see color wrong, but these people see only black and white. They have developed an extreme sensitivity to light. They also have a a pan-sensitivity to texture and their ability to see is very precise. And so, I wanted to keep the book in the sepia/black and white range and still make a very rich book. So the texture is important -- the sound of the paper -- the silkiness of it. It was another layer of thinking about design and the experience of going through the book.
The Island of Rota is an edition of 135 with a deluxe edition of 25. The deluxe version comes with an extraordinary bookcase milled from Polonia wood. Muehling then addresses the wood -- drilling myriad patterned holes and randomly inserting mother of pearl, abalone and tiny seashells across the surface. The result: a subtle but dazzling surface that glistens with things of the natural world.
TM: This box is made from Polonia -- my friend Chris Lareke makes them for me from a tree he milled. It's the type of wood that the Japanese and Chinese use for precious lacquerware and ceramics. It's used to hold precious things. The perforations -- I'm doing them.
MC: You can hear Ted's drilling all over Sag Harbor!
TM: (laughter) There are mollusks called Teredo worms and they ate through a lot of the early ships that sailed. The Japanese celebrate this kind of wood -- they'll often make objects from this type of deteriorated wood. I collect pieces of wood like that -- these boxes remind me of walking on the beach as sand dabs disappear into the sand. I inset mother of pearl, abalone and pearls, tiny seashells. Being a jeweler, I have all this raw material in my studio. Each box is different.
With typeface by Leslie Miller, Dieu Donne handmade papers both inside and out, breathtaking cliche-verres and fantastically absorbing text...you won't find a better stocking stuffer this year. JMG
at Islip Art Museum November 27 through January 25, 2011. Opening reception is Sunday, December 5th from 2-4pmat Islip Art Museum, Brookwood Hall, 50 Irish Lane, East Islip.
David Slater
David Slater's narrative
painting style has morphed in and out of wavy dreamscapes, political
fury and the kind of cultural
warfare that came to define a generation. Eccentric and uncompromising, spend any amount of time with David and you'll agree: inside this artist beats the heart of a revolutionary.
Over nearly half a century, Slater has developed an image bank of picture stories derived from dreams and memories, notes from the underground and tales that range from his insurgent participation at Wounded Knee to cross-country train hopping to epithets from the Kabballah and the literary arts. He transcribes these stories into the visual diaries he's maintained for decades, and it is from these works on paper, now numbering in the tens of thousands, that he creates his paintings. Slater somehow manages to merge the secular and the spiritual, the rational and the hallucinatory, the blasphemous and the righteous with a kaleidoscope of skulls, schooners, sunrises and scorpions. If Max Beckmann, Diego Rivera and R. Crumb procreated, David Slater would undoubtedly be their love child.
Peace Gala, 2003-06, oil and collage on canvas
His bookshelves and closets are lined with the spiral notebooks that house decades of crafted images. In contrast to the formal architecture of his canvas paintings, his handling of water media allows for a shoot-from-the-hip imagery that slurps across the page like melted ice cream. Slater's loose brushwork bounces between the masterful and a raw primitivism that exudes frankness.
It turns out his story-telling abilities are not limited to painting -- he tells a good story in person, too. In fact, in January, NPR's John Biewen from Duke University, will feature Slater in conversation about John Steinbeck on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Travels with Charley. The choice of David Slater, who lives within walking distance of Steinbeck's Sag Harbor home, was inspired.
Here's an excerpt from our interview last week:
Janet Goleas: When did you feel you first hit your stride as an artist?
David Slater: I was in my late 20s – a graduate student at RISD. Right around
this time I started winning awards, selling my work. Things were really happening. I became affiliated with a gallery. Things were really moving along. One weekend I went to the gallery owner's home outside of Boston. It was a mini-Monticello, filled with Persian rugs. She started to say to me, "Well, if you would work more in
this (or that) direction…"
I took my lit cigarette and ground it out on her rug -- I was a drinker then -- and I said, "I don’t compromise." And I walked out. Well...that ended my
affiliation with her.
Slater's radical thinking also hit its stride around this time:
DS: I was assistant teaching at RISD while I was getting my masters, and they liked the way I taught so they hired me. At that time, I thought to myself, 'I’m going to teach so flat-out radically, that they’ll have to
fire me.' And I did that. I’d be trashing the war effort, and here’s the son of the
Dupont family in my class. I just kept pushing things as far as I could go. Finally I did get fired.
JG: Did you inspire your students or did you just vent?
DS: Well, some of them I inspired. Mary Boone was my student – and I’ve
seen her a few times since then and she’ll run up to me and say, “Oh, this is
my teacher!” You know, to Ross Blechner or something. Many of my students say I
inspired them. I thought I was a good teacher.
JG: Did you feel you squandered a burgeoning career?
DS: Well, I still feel glad I did it. I don't regret any of these decisions. I
was in this very safe situation at RISD. It was a good place to be in some ways -- I'd just gotten my masters -- but I just felt like I didn’t know
enough. Also, I was in the whole hippie axiom thing of “tune in, turn on and drop out”
– that’s what I was doing. I didn’t give up art – I just felt like all the people who were
buying my art were a part of the society that was enmeshed in making money from the war. I didn’t like it.
JG: Back then, it
seemed if you had any backbone at all you would reject the status quo.
DS: I felt that by leaving this very protective environment in favor of having
experiences – hitchhiking, traveling, different adventures – all somewhat
fueled by psychedelics, I have to admit – that I was increasing my knowledge. There was a lot of
drinking going on among faculty there, and it seemed like everyone would eventually die of cirrhosis of the liver….I gained so much more knowledge by living my life.
JG: Instead of being the lonely painter drinking himself into a coma.
DS: (He nods) ...And leaving academia was important to me. It didn’t seem entirely honest – there was absolutely no
acknowledgment of what you would do after you graduated. No concept of how you
would make a living. No one would tell you anything. They'd just tell you to keep on painting.
JG: My education was like that, too. We all thought we’d get teaching jobs
or work in restaurants for the rest of our lives – that all that mattered was making art.
DS: I don’t regret any of those experiences. I've left the past behind, but people think because I have long hair that I'm some sort of hippie. Actually it relates more to an Indian concept of the world than a hippie
concept – Indians don’t cut their hair because they feel they were
born this way. That’s partly why I do it – I haven’t
had a haircut since 1969.
JG: You really haven’t?
DS: No. I got a trim once. It tangles and breaks off here and there. Yesterday I was in the bookstore (where he works) and I was reading a book
about the Jewish Brigade, which was an aspect of the British army – not too
many people know about it—they actually had a brigade of 5,000 men who fought
the Nazis – you know – they were very motivated. So, I’m reading this book and –
it’s very poignant – and I have tears in my eyes and all of a sudden Isaac
Mizrahi and a whole film crew come in the store and they’re taking down books
and filming and running around. So they’re talking about my hair and I say I haven’t cut my hair
since 1969 – and they go What!! They really liked that.
David Slater is represented by the Gerald Peters Gallery.
More to come... JMG
Everything Slater touches somehow mutates into an objet d'art
, in which the author examines a neurological abnormality that has resulted in total colorblindness among a century of island residents populating a tiny Pacific atoll in Guam. In the book, Sacks explores the adaptive vision of these islanders and, at the same time, reignites his youthful passion for botanicals. 
. I think it sums up Oliver's enthusiasm -- it's quite beautiful: 
. The choice of David Slater, who lives within walking distance of Steinbeck's Sag Harbor home, was inspired. 
