eyes wide squint

Todd Norsten: This Isn't How It Looks

Glenn Horowitz

Todd Norsten is a Minnesotan whose long visual arms have stretched across continents landing everywhere from The British Museum to the 2006 Whitney Biennial. And no wonder -- the twenty five neat rectangles on exhibit at Glenn Horowitz are a sublime mash up of art and artifice.

Norsten paints in a hybrid of the trompe l'oeil tradition and the paintings here -- cheeky, subversive and oddly sentimental -- will take you completely by surprise.

Tilden, 2012, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

Invoking a sort of non-compliant formalism in these complex works, it's clear that Norsten -- despite what it looks like at first glance -- revels in the tenets of modernism and post-modernism. His mostly minimal imagery is possessed by a sumptuousness that is based as much in the process of painting as it is in linguistics. The painterly seductions are lucid but elusive, bouncing from content that is crisp and cunning to a methodology that employs a jaw-dropping level of craftsmanship.

 

Look closely, because the appearance of casualness here is a ruse. What seems to be a crisscrossing field of strapping tape is not. It's painted by hand and it just looks uncannily like strapping tape (with a few scatological bits of dust that are actual dust as opposed to dust simulacra...). 

I don't know -- call me seduced -- at this point I could be convinced of just about anything. These works are that surprising. 

Milligan, 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

The paintings are cool and white, with content that bounces between jokily flatfooted text to variously cunning or surreptitious visual antics and painterly invention. Celebrating a broad swath of contradictions, idioms slam against one another as they collide with the picture space in a frisky, mind-against-matter tumult. 

Norsten pushes paint around, too, with joyfulness -- often slathering sticky fields of pigment over the face of what looks like a finished painting or troweling it across the surface like so much grout. He sometimes bullies the paintings and other times his approach is gentle, even salacious. His reverence for fine art is most manifest here.

Stanton, 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

So -- this is where paradox went. 

While the act of counterfeiting strapping tape, rubber stamp impressions and commercial fonts is fascinating enough, Norsten is working in the service of a larger concept. Taken altogether, the conversation begins with issues of authenticity, ending somewhere in the realm of what exactly is painting now?

If Norsten were a performer he'd be Andy Kaufman, the artful and duplicitous satirist of the 1970s and 80s, whose puzzling comedic exploits continue to intrigue.

Humulka, 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

I saw Kaufman in 1979 at Harrah's in Reno, in a vast dinner theater of red velvet, surf 'n turf and booze, and that performance remains one of the most captivating, unsettling and obtuse events in my memory. 

He emerged on stage as one of his alter-egos, a sleazy, incompetent lounge act who jumped rope, pounded congas, paused, sang poorly, paused again. The audience laughed nervously, shifting in their seats. The show went on (and on) to what soon was a silent crowd. 

Suddenly -- a piercing stage light illuminated Kaufman and in a single motion he tore off his clothes revealing another alter-ego, this one dressed in a rhinestone-encrusted white suit, shiny shoes and bell-bottoms. He picked up a microphone and became -- and I mean became -- Elvis. It was extraordinary.

Strobes flashed back and forth as he shimmied and shook, crooning with the voice of an angel. The thunder-struck audience went wild with applause. It was a non-sequitur of spectacular proportions.

Weekly, 2012, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

Not such strange bedfellows, Andy Kaufman and Todd Norsten. Both artists trade on authenticity in a way that is beguiling, elliptical, a little preposterous and filled with incongruity. And that incongruity translates into subject matter.

Norsten converts our ubiquitous blue tape (below) into a verb. It's not painter's tape -- it's painted to look exactly like painter's tape -- and I think it's fair to say that the viewer's apprehension of that fact becomes a part of the painting.

It's not unlike the way Kaufman inhabited his alter-ego, Tony Clifton, when he was transformed into Elvis. (To be clear, Andy Kaufman was pretending to be Tony Clifton, but Tony Clifton wasn't pretending to be Elvis. The manifestation of Elvis almost seemed to be coming from a third party -- or from Elvis himself. In that way, it was different from an impersonation. It was Elvis. Or, at least it felt that way). 

In Norsten's methodology, we experience the opposite of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox -- there's something alive and in person in this transformative work, and it seems to be happening right before our eyes. 

Wilbur, 2011, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

                  

Both artists beg the question: where is the art located? Is it in the language, the obfuscation, the sleight of hand, the facility? 

Like Kaufman, Norsten's craftsmanship provides a road map that walks the viewer into the broader content -- an endorsement, of sorts, that legitimizes the work. But after thinking about the uncanny nature of the paintings I couldn't help wondering -- what if it really is strapping tape? 

Sort of like, what if Elvis really isn't dead? If Norsten was pretending that actual strapping tape was a tour de force paint job and, in fact, it really was strapping tape, how would the art and all of the ramifications related to it, change? In other words, where do we locate the art?

Don't miss Todd Norsten at Glenn Horowitz, on view through May 18th.

the rose in my wall

Jay DeFeo (1929–1989), The Rose, 1958–66. Oil w/wood and mica on canvas, 128 7/8x92 1/4x11 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley, CA, purchased w/funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation 95.170. © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph by Ben Blackwell

 jay defeo

 at the whitney 

I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-70s. By the time I arrived, Jay DeFeo's legendary painting, The Rose, had long been entombed behind a sheet rock wall, placed there for protection and because at the time there was just nowhere else to house it. I studied history in the conference room where it was stored, and all the while I envisioned it throbbing behind that wall, just inches from my professor. 

Back then, few of us had seen Bruce Conner's 1967 film, The White Rose, which documents the removal of the work from DeFeo's 3rd floor San Francisco apartment. We scarcely knew what form it took or what it really was. But we knew it was there, and a powerful legend swirled around the painting as well as the artist, its only rival the hammer and sickle rumored to have been painted out of Diego Rivera's famed mural, also at the Art Institute.

  

DeFeo working on Deathrose, 1960. Photograph by Burt Glinn. © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos

The 1970s were a dizzying time to be a painter, let alone a young woman maturing in the dawn of feminism. While we blithely passed judgement on rich and famous female artists or those that seemed to wear their feminism on their sleeves, I'm not sure we really understood that female role models were in such short supply.

On the other hand, there was a special place for the artists we revered -- and we did, on the whole, respect and exalt many women artists -- especially the visionaries, the tragic and the hard-living ones like Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse, Joan Mitchell and Meret Oppenheim. But the Bay Area's beat artist Jay DeFeo had, by this time, earned a category all her own. 

Removing The Rose from DeFeo's apartment at 2322 Fillmore Street in San Francisco

You've heard all the stories -- DeFeo's obsession with and grim devotion to the painting, variously called Deathrose, The White Rose, and finally, The Rose -- an apartment-consuming, light-blocking, one-ton object massing over a seven-year period in the artist's Fillmore Street apartment. When she and her husband, the artist, Wally Hedrick, were evicted, the painting was removed along with the wall it had colonized. Months later it would be interred at the Art Institute, left to repair underneath layers of wax and plaster. And there it remained for some 25 years.

For me, being a young female artist in San Francisco at that time meant being haunted by Jay DeFeo. Her legacy, albeit one that was inflated with inaccuracies, was that of madness, delusion and crushing obsession. It was said the painting had consumed her; that it had pillaged her mind and destroyed her marriage; and that -- and this is perhaps the most romantic notion of all -- she had never worked again.

This, on top of the unfair and untimely death of Eva Hesse at just 34, and the power and sadness of Frida Kahlo whom, even in our midst seemed to be both a better painter than Rivera and perhaps the most overlooked artist of her generation, it all seemed to be a mighty and somewhat intoxicating conflation of our shared (and feared) destinies. Why we were so drawn to these women goes, I think, beyond their talent. That's another, and most interesting, conversation.

The Eyes, 1958, graphite on paper, 48 x 96", Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of the Lannan Fnd

For DeFeo, maybe it was the toxins from the near ton of lead paint in her living room that drove her into frailty. Or that, in concert with her daily intake of tobacco and booze. Or the fumes inside the creative mind. She was a good painter -- in fact, her early works, if uneven, reveal a deft and muscular hand and an elastic sense of composition. But she would never again create a work of the magnitude or focus as The Rose -- a work that is, in a word, sublime. 

The later works fall prey to various artistic pitfalls -- a touching but academic reliance on draftsmanship and compositions that seem chiseled out of a sort of calcified corner of the Ab Ex tradition. Still, she soldiered on. Looking at the body of work now on view at the Whitney, it's clear why Dorothy Miller, MoMA's pioneering curator, selected DeFeo for the seminal exhibition, 16 Americans, in 1959.

Crescent Bridge I,  (1972) synthetic polymer and mixed media on plywood

But the reason I wanted to write about this work is not only my direct history with it, but the idea of the Masterpiece. What is it? Does the idea or the possibility of creating a masterpiece exist in the 21st century? Are there absolutes required for a work of art to achieve such status? And, if and when we encounter a masterpiece, what is it that allows us to apprehend it as such?

Whitney Museum of American Art

At the Whitney, The Rose  hangs in its own chamber, recessed behind partial walls, something like the chancel of a cathedral. Surrounded by blackness, the painting is staged with lighting that rakes across its radiating fissures like The Raising of Lazarus. It's affecting, with everything in the exhibit leading up to this crescendo. Turning the corner into the gallery, the mica-infused surface glimmers with intent, artfulness, and sorrow. 



The painting, far too heavy to hang on a wall, is raised up on a sort of art-pontoon where it holds court close to but separate from works of the same period. I'm not sure why, but I kept thinking of Francis Bacon's Popes -- the centrality and perspective, and the gravitas -- to be sure. 

All the lighting and drama aside, I'm guessing The Rose could slay dragons from the side of a road.

After Image, 1970,© 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: by Paul Hester

I felt sad after leaving the Whitney, and while I acknowledge that there are sorrowful elements in DeFeo's work, I'm not entirely sure why I was so deflated. Is it that in the end, genius requires a greater sacrifice from women than it does from men?  Is it that madness -- even temporary madness -- is one of the requisite skill sets for greatness?

The post-The Rose works were competent but fractured, the vision disparate and the joie de vivre in her hand was now tempered -- circumspect. Still, she could push paint around, and in a few small works the oil paint rushes to corners and structural edges with a quality that is so tactile you can almost feel it between your teeth.

Still -- competence, beauty and steadfastness are worthy attributes, but a masterpiece they do not make.

Is madness required? 

JAY DEFEO: A RETROSPECTIVE

Whitney Museum of American Art

through June 2, 2013

cool tectonics on chrystie street

Tectonic Drift

Brian Morris Gallery

                                 

Amanda Church, Engagement, 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 24"

Tectonic Drift at Brian Morris Gallery offered up a slice of perfection this winter, commingling painterly ferociousness with optic precision in varied works by Amanda Church, Brian Cypher, Stacy Fisher, Gary Petersen and Russell Tyler.

Odds n' Ends (5), 2012

Stacy Fisher's sculpture, Odds n' Ends (5), appears in the window like a mushroom cloud, setting the stage for this bright amalgam of works that become visible as you descend into the gallery, situated just below street level on Chrystie Street. 

 

Fisher's studio practice is of the take-no-prisoners variety and it yields a melange of incongruent form, spatial/architectural hiccups and things that make you feel as if they carry memory inside them. Her imagery -- rectangles, wood anatomies and hulking, globular shapes -- possesses a lingering anima that feels partly human.    

  

Stacy Fisher, Orange Striped Wall Sculpture, 2010

                                                       

Fisher has commented about generating her work from key phrases like "irregular squares" or "bunches." Like concrete poetry, her use of salvaged house paint (and otherwise ordinary materials) allows her to employ a "found" palette and this, alongside the samplings of wordplay that are framed in the service of creating her work is provocative, and it lends a mystique to pieces that play in the margins between flatness and depth, painting and sculpture, and the anthropomorphic and its opposite, whatever that might be.

Brian Cypher, Deep Divide, 2013, oil on canvas

In a similar way, Brian Cypher flirts with the recognizable in paintings that transform thought and process into imagery. The resulting canvases appear to be in a constant state of reinvention -- as if they will continue to morph in concept and form while they're on view. Cypher's paintings are a topology of furrows and fissures, filled with visual references and abstract form that defy categorization. 

 

The imagery in Deep Divide conjures inflated lungs or yin/yang, and of burrowing in like a feral cat might -- as if meaning was buried deep inside the canvas. The process of discovery is palpable in these refreshing works.

Amanda Church, L: Blondie, 2012; R: Resistance, 2012, both oil on canvas

Eros and artifice meet in works by Amanda Church, whose blithely sexual paintings celebrate the flesh amid dreamy landscapes, sinuous, meandering lines, and fictive pink and lemon yellow figures. 

Church employs frank sexuality as if she's descended from Francis Bacon -- sans his brutality, darkness and downright scariness -- placing the figure in and out of dimensional expanses where it hovers between flatness and deep space. Her elastic forms and use of torqued perspective glide the viewer into a netherworld of candy colored sensuousness. 

In Engagement (at the top), cranberry contours swirl around plushy orbs like so many silk scarves. Church's brushwork is tactile and it lends a toothiness to the sexual metaphor with soft striations of paint and the velvety, pigment-rich surfaces she creates. 

Gary Petersen, Point the Way, 2012, acrylic and ink on masonite

Gary Petersen, Ray Waves, 2013, acrylic and oil on masonite

Gary Petersen's use of line is intuitive, ricocheting from corner to corner to corner like the trajectory of a billiard ball. As his linear motif accumulates across the surface, it crisscrosses at various junctures and -- almost accidentally -- frames out spacial forms (mostly trapezoids and wedges) that anchor the imagery within the perimeters defined by kinetic pathways.

Gary Petersen, Somewhere in Between, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Petersen animates the picture field with lines that vary from dense color bars to labyrinthian architectures that fracture, push and weave through the composition. His palette is plastic and prismatic, invoking contradiction, playfulness, and a space-bending joie d'vivre that is full of life.

Russell Tyler, TV, 2012, oil on canvas

Russell Tyler scavenges technological debris such as television test patterns and early computer graphics, commuting it into subject matter. In his paintings, structure and process lay cheek by jowl, slathered on to canvas with a smart and precise sense of total abandon.

Russell Tyler, Computing II, 2013, oil on canvas

For Tyler, whose imagery ranges from lateral bars of thick gradient color to frenzied game boards and reconfigured Nintendo backgrounds, the painting process is something of a throwdown between himself and the canvas. The results are exhilarating, carrying within an overwhelming sense of immediacy, freshness and a not so subtle commentary on the sort of dystopian universe that defines much of modern living.

For the writer, poet, martial artist and occasional healer Brian Morris, the gallery business is clearly one that reflects a broad range of contemporary and contemplative thought. This is definitely a gallery to keep your eyes on.

Stacy Fisher

Brian Morris Gallery
163 Chrystie Street
New York City, 10002

brianmorrisgallery.com

a bicycle wheel by any other name

detail: Pre-empt, 2008, furniture parts, 9 x 40 x 19"

Judy Richardson

OK Harris

 
The old souls that inhabit Judy Richardson's sculpture are the kind that take up residence in life's residual moments. Their component parts, a melange of balusters, inner tubes, broken glass and myriad struts, spokes, joists and ribs, seem to be washed of original content, but not of history. Meticulously repurposed by Richardson, each part seems to carry its own internal narrative -- distinctly separate from, but never quite independent of the whole. 

On view at OK Harris through March 2, Richardson's wanderlust is in full force, employed by a sort of unmitigated Bohemianism that weaves through the broad narratives of memory and entropy, healing and reclamation. Her work is timely -- sentient -- something you want to see.

 

background: Chastity, 2010; Vietnam, 2010

Foremost in the gallery is Vietnam, in which the bones of disassembled chair legs are bound into vertical stacks that double as crutches or a cache of assault rifles. The two umbrellas that hover over them offer more tenderness than protection -- sort of like hiding under your desk in case of nuclear war.

detail: Vietnam, 2010

Here, Richardson's bundled legs, like huddled children, transport me to my childhood where I see Pearl S. Buck's Peony half open on my nightstand. The fragility of the work is evident but it also possesses a quality of indefatigability, and this is key to her art. 

In some ineffable way, Vietnam pulls at your heartstrings. I think of the crucible of landmines and subsequent tragedies, along with so many lost children. Not to be maudlin -- there is sorrow in this work, but at its core lay the heart of a warrior.






Around the corner, another umbrella form dominates the structure of Chastity, as it pulls us into a vortex of optics and physical memory. Like the cone of a giant tuba, you want to dip your head inside to absorb this mathematical convergence of warped lines. Richardson often invests her works with an abiding anthropomorphism, and here the towering figure nods forward, also invoking associations to Asia -- this time with a modest curtsey.

detail: Chastity, 2010

The act of  
recycling is 
political at its 
core  -- an act
of redemption and evolution whatever
the motivation.

The elements  
in Richardson's sculpture have 
already been something. Their 
past lives resonate
with a former usefulness that 
is soulful, and 
their anima 
resides here, 
in this fragile
relationship 
between 
the artist 
and the object. 

In this way, 
you feel like Richardson has 
not so much reassembled 
parts of things 
as she has coaxed new life out of materials that
have taken up residence 
in her studio. 

This is where the beauty is.

Richardson intuits and repurposes elements without eradicating the delicate balance between their unique character and the altered consciousness she brings to them.

Job Search, 2011, electronics, found materials, 54 x 64 x 24"

In, Job Search, the artist has engineered a maniacal aggregate of silicon chips, circuitry and casings, filament and defunct power cords. 

Heaving over splindly metal legs, the ponderous mass boasts two hulking "woofers" (not exactly defunct, since they were never more than simple apple carts) now distinctly inanimate. But in this configuration, flanking an electronic wannabe-monster, they recall deep space or cavernous sound chambers, and their depth acts as the mythic rabbit-hole that leads to someplace you really don't want to be.

An ode to powerlessness, Richardson was unemployed at the time. 

Swirl, 2007, wood, 14 x 24 x 12"

Swirl (above) flings energy the way a loose spring shoots off its axis -- spiraling outward the way it would from a centrifuge -- yet the wood curls not with a wallop, but like chocolate shavings, unfurled.

Ride, 2012, bicycle wheel, glass, metal, tar, 32 x 32 x 8 inches

A bicycle wheel by any other name -- is always a bicycle wheel. Except that in Ride, a circle of broken glass, shards of metal and swiftly deflating tires, any connotations of the wind in your hair are thrown asunder. For this inveterate bike rider, humor is where you find it, and here it's full-throttle -- going nowhere fast.

Among all this connecting and configuring, Richardson finds the human body; rendering it not in form, exactly, but in its coupling, memory, kinetics and psyche. 

Eskimo Boat, 2012, metal, wood, inner tubes, 68 x 26 x 10"

I recall watching a Latina co-worker as she kneaded flour and water together with one hand while regaling us with stories of her grandmother. When the mixture coalesced into dough she tossed little cakes on a hot grill, flipping them until they morphed into crispy golden bits of deliciousness. Flour and water. Go figure.

To me, this is how Judy Richardson makes sculpture. She is a diviner of refuse, rolling it between the palms of her hands until life slips inside -- eloquently invisible.

Pre-empt, 2008

Don't miss her show, on view in Soho until March 2nd.