Christopher Russell: Obelisks and One Perturbed Bird

Christopher Russell creates stone objects, like these inspired by European decorative arts, at Julie Saul Gallery at Pulse this past March. Objects like obelisks and flora in celadon create a neo-Baroque cornucopia. Altogether though, it creates a dinner setting where nobody gets to eat rather than the accouterments to a 17th c. feast somewhere in the Hapsburg empire. Which rather has me thinking how much fun it would be to decorate an Absurdist neo-Baroque environment in an authentically Baroque palace?

In the Clouds at the Met

Tomas Saraceno's Cloud City looks more structural than nimbus-like or fluffy. I enjoyed the reflective pentagons, but perhaps less so the webs of black cord inside the structure that seemed superfluous and not to scale. An installation you can climb on the roof of the Met is always a treat though. New to the roof of the Met for the upcoming summer and fall, go check it out and get some sun on this hot Memorial Day.

Art as Posession: From the Hearst Castle to Cleansed Bills

Hearst Castle

"The prime aim of these wild Xanadus (as of every Xanadu) is not so much to live there, but to make posterity think how exceptional the people who did live there must have been." (Eco, p. 27).

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hypperreality, asserts that America's wax museums/Hearst Castle/Marilyn Motel etc. arise out of a "horror vacui" since we exist outside of a European, historical past and therefore we need to take fake possession of the real. This is similar to previous function of oil paintings in society. Berger in Ways of Seeing (see previous post) asserts that oil painting was a way of owning property in lieu of the real thing or as a demonstration of what one owned for society and posterity. Basically, its all about possession and value. How capitalist.

So I guess we Americans are left with a simulacrum of the real as a roads to possession. Eco continues that people seem to think if its a good enough simulacrum, such as the Hearst Castle, its almost better than the 'real' thing.

"Cleansed" bill in Draw your Money project.

Roland Farkas, a Slovakian artist in Hungary, gets at this notion with his 2011 project, Draw your Money, where he takes something literally capitalist, a banknote, and turns it into art. Draw Your Money involves cleansing banknotes of the ink markings that give them value. The artist removes the ink from paper money to create blank slates for drawings: "In this way the ink and paper of bills are recycled as materials for an original artwork, the value of which is greater than that of the denominated note from which it was created."

Via Rising Tensions

In trying to thing of something intelligent to say, I poked around the internet and found this. Which kind of sums it all up if you were to throw in some dollar bills.

Oil Painting and Art as Commodity

Art Collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Teniers, 1651

A long, forgive me, but interesting quote from John Berger's Ways of Seeing, which I just read for the first time.

"Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It turned everything into an object. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul --by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged. Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority. 


Pictures immediately spring to mind to contradict this assertion. Works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, Turner, etc. Yet if one studies these works in relation to the tradition as a whole, one discovers that they were exceptions of a very special kind. The tradition consisted of many hundreds of thousands of canvases and easel pictures distributed throughout Europe. A great number have not survived. Of those which have survived only a small fraction are seriously as works of fine art, and of this fraction another small fraction comprises the actual pictures repeatedly reproduced and presented as the works of 'the masters'. 


Visitors to art museums are often overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and by what they take to be their own culpable inability to concentrate on more than a few of these works. In fact such a reaction is altogether reasonable. Art history has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition. The notion of Genius is not in itself an adequate answer. Consequently the confusion remains on the wall of the galleries. Third-rate works surround an outstanding work without recognition --let alone explanation-- of what fundamentally differentiates them. 


The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between 'masterpiece' and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work --an increasingly after the seventeenth century-- was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average."

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp.87-88. 

Think of all those still lifes. The value of the object being protrayed helped determine the value of the painting itself. It was an argument for the patron's wealth or beauty or other impressive quality. Today, with an open art market in full swing, such forms of representation  are just  as present, albeit in a questioning manner. The photographic "portraits" of Cindy Sherman and certainly the oil paintings of Julie Heffernan come to mind.

Color burned butterfly: Bryan Graf

Bryan Grol, Butterfly #1 (c-print, edition of 5, 2011)

I fell for the colors burned into these photographs of New Jersey photographer Bryan Graf (represented by the Stockholm gallery Jonas Kleerup at Pulse, whose has a really nicely designed website, by the by). 

I'm using the term "color burned" liberally; as I don't know nearly enough about photography. So that's more a comment about what the photographs look like, rather than how they are made.

Neon Strings

I enjoyed the blurred neon vision of this string installation at Chicago gallery Carrie Secrist's Pulse booth space. Anne Lindberg created this site-specific installation for the fair.

The neon strings above are visually similar to the drawing below despite being in different mediums.

parallel 30 green, graphite and colored pencil on cotton board

Johannes Girardoni: Print in Yellow

Johannes Girardoni's pieces at Tomlinson Kong at Pulse struck me as being incredibly contemporary and well executed. I don't even really go in for this sort of flat, Baldessari-like stuff.

Yet somehow I especially like this print in yellow.

Exposed Icon #4, 2011, c-print with commercial paint mounted on aluminum, 60 x 40"

Exposed Icon 50, Exposed Icon #42, Exposed Icon #42, 2011, c-prints with commercial paints mounted on aluminum

Eve Sussman's Stereoscopes at Pulse

Elevated Train, Eve Sussman 

I was happy to hear that Eve Sussman's stereoscopes did so well at Pulse.

"Creative Capital the generous grant-giving foundation, had surprising success at their upstairs location in the Impulse section — the part of the fair typically reserved for younger galleries with solo booths — even though the organization's main purpose was to preview pieces from their upcoming May benefit auction. They sold ten editions at $500 each (plus an auction ticket) from former grantee Eve Sussman’s stereoscopic “Elevated Train” series."

The stereoscopes actually put two images side-by-side, and when you look through the viewfinder your eye mixes the two scenes to create one 3D image. This is an old practice, as I remember having a wooden stereoscope with some 1840s-era scenes in my house growing up. Here though, Sussman took pictures of a JMZ platform, peering into the train cars as they passed at night and snapping people on the platform.

These images are from Creative Capital's blog, where you can find more of them and also learn more about the making of the work.

Box o' Yarn at Pulse

Chris Duncan, Halsey Mckay Gallery at Pulse

So much yarn and string lately, including at Pulse, and so in lieu of a proper post consider this my summary.

Ugo Rondinone's spirit level

Sprawling over 2 gallery spaces and featuring the works of 19 artists, artist Ugo Rondinone curated "the spirit level," a beautiful show that ended April 21st. Lots and lots of pictures of the installation below. This show exemplified great curation to me. The works keyed off each other beautifully, and the environment itself became a work of art, as it were. There's a nice review of it in the New York Times here.

Above and below is the entrance to the 24th Street Gladstone gallery, with Ann Craven’s large, dark paintings on the wall and Latifa Echakhch’s “Frames”, rectangular rugs with the centers cut out, on the floor. 

Andrew Lord's ceramic vessels

Saul Fletcher’s tiny quiet Polaroids

Jay DeFeo’s charcoal drawings

 

Sarah Lucas's penises

Bronze reclining nudes by Hans Josephsohn, canvas pyramids by Alan Shields, and a mural-sized suite of Amy Granat’s photograms of flowers.

In the 21st street gallery, the lower room held Peter Buggenhout’s enormous, dust-covered sculptures.

Sam Gilliam’s “Wall Cascade” and “Close to Trees,” two equally huge swaths of fabric hung from the walls.

Joe Bradley's star canvases.

Hans Schärer. Love the teeth so much.

Upstairs room at the 21st St. gallery was filled with Vienna actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler's tortured photograghs alongside Al Hansen’s cigarette-butt Venus torsos on panels.