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.

bird notes

8:30am 12:45pm 11/16/90, 1990, ink on paper, 22 1/2 x 22 1/4 in

Billy Sullivan: Bird Drawings

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

Since the early 1990s, artist Billy Sullivan has been drawing the birds that frequent his East Hampton backyard. Currently on view at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, also in East Hampton, are selected drawings from over three decades of Sullivan's nuanced line, keen observation and his quick and fluent hand. 

detail: 6/22/99, 6:16am 7:09am, 1999, ink on paper, 30 x 22 in

 

I focus on the birds, their activities, movements and rhythms. Watching 

them, you can see that dominance doesn't matter.

B.S. 

Sullivan's mellifluous lines and inky swashes of brush reveal more than the empirical -- they are meditations on being and birdness, flight and stasis and persona, disposition and anima. 

His imagery moves across the page quickly, multiplying with all the briskness of flocks of birds in flight. The drawings are fleeting and minimal, and yet their conveyance of the nature of all things bird is really quite astonishing.

8/6/97 11:45am 12:25pm, 1997, ink on Arches paper, 30 x 22 in

Gallery director Jess Frost sat down with me last week to share some thoughts on the exhibit, which features works dating from 1990 to three drawings completed the weekend before the show opened. 

"The way the birds move around the page, they're almost musical," said Frost. Indeed, Sullivan's methodology requires him to apprehend the birds almost instantaneously.

You want the marks to be as fast as the birds.

B.S.

4/6/03 2:15pm 2:40pm, 2003, Ink on paper, 30 x 22 in

"Some of them are like field drawings," Frost continued, "they're all done from life. Billy sits at his dining room table in front of a picture window. All the works are titled by date and time, so you can tell that certain birds arrive seasonally."

I'm excited every spring when I hear orioles before I can see them. I love seeing hummingbirds arrive in the spring, but I miss hearing 

bobwhites -- they're just not around anymore. 

B.S.

detail: 11/4/12 8:35am-9:44am 10:58am-11:57am 12:03am-1:20pm , 2012, ink on paper, 26 x 120 in

This body of work, you might say, is in direct opposition to Sullivan's acclaimed figurative paintings, which are drawn from his own photography and photographic archives. The paintings are diaristic, crisp and sexy, transforming the humble snapshot into poetic characterizations that depict the life and times of Sullivan, his famed cadre and the people and things in his orbit.
  
In his photography, a renown body of work in its own right, Sullivan has chronicled some 45 years of art world shenanigans that he experienced firsthand, beginning with those halcyon days at Max's Kansas City beginning in the late 1960s. Lauded for the incisive photographic installation he mounted in Day for Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial, Sullivan's body of photographic works bounce from sun drenched beach parties to matter-of-fact nudes and the clubs, cocktails and camp of the 1970s and 80s.

Like the bird drawings, the imagery contained within his portraits and still lifes reveals as much about the artist as it does his subjects.

 

The birds dictate who's in the drawing. Birds have schedules. A cardinal 

always comes at meal times.

B.S.

 

IX 2/9/93 1:55 2:08pm, 1993, Ink on paper, 10 x 14 in

Mourning doves have returned this year, they had been absent for 

a while. Now there are turkeys around and downy woodpeckers

at the feeder and also pecking on the side of my house.

B.S.

Sullivan's hand is smart and honest, without a touch of cynicism. An inventive and buoyant colorist, the bird drawings -- devoid of color -- reveal that gentle bullfighter within the artist.



 

Accompanying the exhibition a limited edition book, BIRDS, with text by author, birder and conservationist, the famed Margaret Atwood and Sullivan's drawings.

 

BIRDS is available for purchase through Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

On the evolution of both the exhibit and the book, Frost recalled her delight when the famed author agreed to include her 2010 essay on bird conservation, originally published in The Guardian, in the book. 

Billy Sullivan: Bird Drawings is on view through January 1, 2013.

new on newtown

Matt Rich, Ampersand, 2012, acrylic on cut paper with linen tape, 54 x 48 1/2 inches

Matt Rich, Patriot and Hatchet

Halsey McKay

Cambridge-based artist Matt Rich exhibits wall-hugging paper paintings at Halsey McKay through July 17. Painterly, economical, and scrappy at the same time, Rich's works seem to defy painting conventions. Incidents of color and structured slices of cut paper weave into delicate geometric abstractions. 

Aspects of the works feel as though they've been sampled from a larger network of found imagery, like splices of graffiti or other paintings. They command the wall with remarkable clarity, but if you find yourself in a jam you can easily slip one under a door.

Matt Rich, Six, 2012, acrylic on cut paper with linen tape, 40 x 24 inches

Hilary Pecis, In Accordance

Upstairs at Halsey McKay, the San Francisco artist Hilary Pecis weds psychedelia, mass media, and assemblage in a body of work that is as crisp as broken glass. 

Hilary Pecis, Ice, 2012, archival inkjet print, edition of 5, 20 x 24 inches

In her current show, In Accordance, Pecis slices and dices into images of natural phenomena torquing space with kaleidoscopic results. Dissonant and apocalyptic, the image field suggests a rejiggering of contemporary vision.

 

Hilary Pecis, Beach, 2012, cut paper collage, 11 x 15 inches

  Reed Krakoff, One Chair   

at Harper's Books

Designer Reed Krakoff, known for his collections in structural, post-modern women's wear, is stretching out. First exhibited earlier this year at Salon 94, on view at Harper's are one hundred chairs, identical except for the color of felt sheathing, designed by the artist's wife, Delphine. 

A somewhat Beuysian experience, here Krakoff poised the simple geometry of the chair with the sensuousness of felt, arranging each unit in distinctly non-utilitarian fashion. The chairs range in scale and color -- from real life to Barbie sized, and from simple grey to eye-popping pinks and acid green. 

Paula Hayes at Glenn Horowitz

Currently at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, the New York artist and acclaimed landscape designer, Paula Hayes exhibits hand-blown glass terrariums, rarely seen large scale drawings, and an intriguing sound installation.

Hayes, whose 2010 exhibit of gigantic terrariums at MoMA, Nocturne of the Limax Maximus, brought the natural world inside the venerated halls of that institution, creates delicate, often life-sustaining environments filled with exotic plants, gems and minerals, and other intrigues. 

Donald Sultan at The Drawing Room

Donald Sultan, Rouge Poppies April 25 2012, conte on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 1/4 inches

On view at The Drawing Room, works on paper by Donald Sultan that range from toothy explorations in charcoal and velvet flocking to buoyant gouaches that celebrate the flowers he cultivates in his Sag Harbor garden.

Skyflowers Blue Green May 31 1997, tempera on Somerset

Sultan, whose iconic images have been a part of the contemporary art vernacular for some four decades, here articulates poppies, oranges, mimosa in a variety of media, and in his series, Wallflowers, the rich botanical imagery of blossoming wisteria, bluebells, and other species spill across white backgrounds with poetic elegance.

As Sultan handily ricochets between the industrial and the bucolic, dazzling color and effervescent blacks and whites, he traverses a language all his own, redefining the traditional still-life, botanical painting, and nature's plenty.

  

Andrew Schoultz at Eric Firestone Gallery

detail, Andrew Schoultz, Ex Uno Plura

And just up the street, on view at Eric Firestone Gallery -- don't miss Andrew Schoultz, Ex Uno Plura, an eye-popping installation of painted vintage flags along with the artist's signature wall painting, on view through July 7th. 

Schoultz's paintings and site-specific works draw on cultural themes and an appreciation of civic, military, and world history. The show, which sparked a bit of controversy among East Hampton's locals, is more of an ode to the American flag than an indictment of it. The installation, an extravaganza of dizzying proportion, absolutely reflects the restlessness and clamor of contemporary living.

Summer in East Hampton is happening on Newtown Lane.

very cool on Newtown Lane

John McWhinnie & Glenn Horowitz in a combined effort = Local 87

Opening night for Local 87 was a fantastic mash-up of some of our favorite East End artists as well as an international brew of cool, cooler and coolest...in a good way. A few pics:

Harland Miller -- perfection

Barbara Dayton and Adam McEwen

Matt Satz: tarred, feathered and smoked out

Back room racks...

Jameson Ellis: slip and slide

Peter Dayton...magic vinyl w/slipcase...memory lane redux.