History of English, the cartoon

Part one of ten, more here.
Originally from lines and colors.

Richard Serra Drawing at the Met

The artist in his exhibition

My expectations were not high for the Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His monumental, simple sculptures hardly seemed likely to be very impressive in sketch form. But as the artist has mentioned in interviews, this body of work is separate from his sculpture--and his black or two-toned large drawings interact with the space and the viewer in some of the same ways his sculptures do and maintain the impressive scale one is used to in his work. For clarification, see above: those black walls enclosing the artist are the drawing.

Institutionalized Abstract Art, 1976

Altogether, walking through the galleries was a zen experience, and not just because the crowds from the Alexander McQueen show hadn't stumbled in. The large shapes and neutral palate (more on his use of black below) gave focus to the experience of walking through the exhibition, and noticing how the works interacted with the space, and my space.

From an interview with the artist on Artinfo.com:

• Could you tell me about your use of black in your drawings?

I think black is a property, a material. And as a property I think it's the best way to articulate drawings where you don't have to get into the metaphors present in the use of chartreuse or pink or anything else. And I studied with [Josef] Albers at Yale and I proofed his book and taught the color course and I really got it down to just dealing with black

• And you see it as a material with a weight?

As a property. Because it absorbs light, it manifests itself as weight more than things that reflect light.  
[....]

• How does this show relate to your 2007 MoMA retrospective, or how do you want people to relate the two shows?

It's a different body of work. I'd like it to be seen as an autonomous body of drawing, good or bad, and just be judged that way, or be reviewed that way, or just be viewed that way. But if people start making relationships to the sculpture then they're really missing the point. It's about what they are in their definition as drawing. They're not trying to redefine what the sculpture is, and they're not pointing to the sculpture. They make spaces and places, but they're not sculptural spaces and places in the way that sculptures make their own spaces and places.  

Serra's comment on black having weight seems very true in this show. The works pictured here are mostly from the mid-1970s, when Serra started using black paintstick, a mixture of pigment, oil, and wax. He has continued to use paintstick to make thick black textured surfaces from the first 'Installation Drawings,' monumental works on canvas or linen pinned directly to the wall and thickly covered with black paintstick, to the work he created specifically for the Met's exhibition in 2011.

Still Life & Motion at DCKT Contemporary

Bouquet, Everest Hall, 2011

Still Life and Motion: Everest Hall and Sean Capone opened Thursday night on the LES DCKT Contemporary gallery, and alltogether made for a nice, small show that speaks to a very contemporary way of handling the age-old still life genre. Everest Hall provides the still lifes of the exhibition's title, with roses on rather geometric  backgrounds that seem paper-thin, fragile, and false. Sean Capone provides the motion, showing roses and other flowers exploding and fading out like a kaleidoscope setting for a flat screen. The works complimented each other nicely, but Hall's work seemed the weaker part of the show. 

Still from Sub Rosa (What We Do Is Secret), Sean Capone, 2009

Capone's two video installations were fascinated to watch as they played on an endless loop. I was also very intrigued by the sales premise behind them. Literally a few minutes after complaining to a friend about how I can't afford any of the artwork I see, I looked at the price list and saw the videos being sold as a file on a USB drive for $125, and that they artist had limited the editions to 100. The artist created his own principle of scarcity that was really interesting, and I could certainly dig projecting those patterns onto my living room wall 24/7. I was also really impressed and interested by the site-specific installations he had created in the past. In fact, they are amazing: see here. 

FloralWall (Skull & Void #3), Sean Capone, 2010

Sol LeWitt: Structures at City Hall Park

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. 

-Sol LeWitt

The Public Art Fund has created a Sol LeWitt cubeland in the grass of busy City Hall Park, not to mention creating a very informative accompanying website to go with it. Up through December, you have plenty of time to come down and stroll among his 2-dimensional creations.

Worker touching up the aluminum sculpture with white paint

Le Witt, who died in 2007, was a prolific and influential American artist whose structures, or sculptures, demonstrate his Conceptual and Minimal roots. This outdoor installation of sculptures tracks his work from the more recent organic and colorful forms of the 00s to the white cubes of the 70s that began it all. I would have enjoyed seeing more of his later works--Splotch stands out starkly against the other white geometric structures, but certainly the earlier works are more emblematic of his oeuvre.

And so, a backwards chronology:

Splotch 15, 2005

One x Two Half Off, 1991

Tower (Colombus), 1990

Complex Forms, 1990

Stars, 1989-1990

Complex Form 6, 1987

Pyramid (Munster), 1987

Double Modular Cube, 1979

Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974

Lydia Venieri: The Last Conflict

Can a cornucopia of fake flowers, shiny things, dolls, dolphins and unicorns escape being twee? The Lydia Venieri exhibition The Last Conflict: Retrospective: Sculpture, Video, and Photography is, as the title suggests, a mixed media installation that occupies the majority of Stux Gallery's space that begs the question.

Her bubble sculptures, supported by tree trunks or suspended from the ceiling, depict hyperbolically natural flora and fauna. The materials mix the organic (moss, wood) and plastic. The miniature ecosystems seem like the baubles of fairies from a bad production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Authenticity is hardly the point, however.

The exhibition also featured satin digital color prints from the artist's "Planet Exodus" series. In them, wide-eyed dolls pose like models.

Their large eyes reflect the manmade surroundings, and suggest a (fake?) innocence in the face of natural devastation. The worlds Venieri portrays in the dolls' eyes, and in the video installation as well, suggests the world of man in conflict with the natural world.

That message comes differently from the mouths, so to speak, of the little plastic people that Venieri employs.

Rather like a Japanese Lolita, Venieri's exhibition tweaks twee on the nose, and manages to seem coy about the darkness underlying her plastic arts.

Up through June 25th at Stux Gallery.

Play Your Cards Right

The Cloisters in Fort Tryon park, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is displaying a lovely set of fifty-two Medieval playing cards that constitute the only known complete deck of illuminated ordinary playing cards (as opposed to tarot cards) from the fifteenth century. The face cards are especially fun.

The Met says that their "exaggerated and sometimes anachronistic costumes suggest a lampoon of extravagant Burgundian court fashions." Perhaps, but I think they look charming. The real question is: how did they survive this long?

Li Songsong at Pace

These huge canvases with their impasto surfaces struck me as almost ugly at first: the colors, the quasi-photographic Gerhard Richter feel, the imagery. But by the time I left Pace these works by Chinese painter Li Songsong had not just grown on me, but wowed me.

I had a visceral reaction to the textured, thick application of paint.

The scale was humbling.

The imagery took on more context and nuance seen together, and the grids of color the images were reassembled in seemed less rigid and more poetic.

This one is incredibly layered both in the subdued pastel and sepia coloring and literally: As you can see below, the artist mounted separate metal panels and layered them on top of one another.

This canvas seems almost Impressionistic in the way it dabbles light through the trees. The subject, however, is anything but.

Up at Pace Gallery through August 5, and certainly worth a viewing this summer.