Thursday, June 14, 2012

Three-Letter Literature


A few days ago, using Facebook, I sent out an appeal for three letter texts I could use in the work I'm now making in the studio (an example is above...). This blog entry got me thinking. I wanted to anthologize the responses, and I need to make good on my promise of drawings for the contributors...keep an eye peeled for those...more contributions welcome!

Jeff Buddle:
"Ode"
Why not try?
Who can say?
The old man?
Fie! Let him
rot. Try now!

Tony Bures:
You may ask who led who?
How did bee and owl die?
Why the red sky?
The air run out and our pen now dry?

Kristan Campbell:
may eye
one fly
the one
not yet
you die
our fix
not let
you cry
the mix
lip fun
can dye
our ash
can run
the sky

Emily Cobb:
Bee not sad
Sis, wee fly
Fox our day
Bat the sky!
Eye per owl,
Rat out foe,
Lie, jaw, yak,
Ilk nor doe.
Matthew Parrish:
"Out"

Hmm, hum, aha!
Sip rum and see the sun
set sky. Dry off,
pet the dog, toe tap,
hit the bed,
end the day,
her age.

Cecilia Snyder:
Cat has fun fur and
will let you tug and pet him
now rub his shy tum

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Abstract Engine


It must have been a slow news week because the Wall Street Journal gave over space to Terry Teachout for an essay on "The Seductive Lure of Abstraction.”

Teachout takes the occasion of a travelling exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn paintings as an opportunity to muse on why people care about abstraction in the first place. This may be a question that still stumps readers of the Wall Street Journal, and as much as I admire Teachout for trying to answer it, I found his response a little tired. He couldn’t stick to the problem at hand, often wondering away from the subject of painting to dance and music – as if imagery and narrative were really the same thing. Let’s take another go.

Richard Diebenkorn, Yellow Porch, 1961, oil on canvas,70 1/2 x 67 in.
Anyone who looks at a 60’s Diebenkorn ‘landscape’ and a mid-70’s ‘abstraction’ like one of the Ocean Park paintings will immediately recognize how fragile the wall that separates the real form the abstract can be. Why is abstraction framed as ‘seductive,’ as if to succumb to it is to be, in some way, unfaithful to representation?


Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #83, 1975. Oil on Canvas, 100 X 81 in.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Realism as we know it didn’t exist until the mid-19th century when certain artists started to portray subjects familiar to the growing middle class and to cater to that audience’s interests (which often included a voyeuristic interest in poverty and hard circumstance)…things that seemed ‘real’. Compared to what? To the religious and historic subjects supported by the patronage class of the late 18th century, of course. Concurrently, many artists of the late 19th and early 20th century were drawn to abstraction by growing certainty that painting could be like music – that it didn’t need to refer to stories to be moving, that it could be beautiful based on its own formal properties. The fact that such views constituted a shift from the previous generation – a means of making two generations distinct from one another and thus creating a new market where none had existed before – seems like something no one wants to address. One sometimes wonders if the imperative to ‘make it new’ wasn’t really motivated by a horror of being seen as old…

But painting has – even when it carried water for its political or religious sponsors – always been driven by an abstract engine. One need only think of the legendary battles of skill between ancient Greek artists over who could paint the thinnest line. Or of Leonardo’s advice to seek the landscape imagery in stains and shadows on the wall. A hundred examples could be offered, and I invite you to add yours to the comments.

An artist like Richard Diebenkorn (or, for that matter, his mirror image Philip Guston) who slides across some perceived barrier between real and abstract ought to remind us of how entwined those things are – how artificial our ideas of reality actually are and how abstract the world actually is.

What makes Diebenkorn’s paintings worth talking about is their quality of specificity – of being so certainly about something that words seem to fail. (Teachout takes up the wordless defense that is so tired…artists are always saying that their works are outside of language. Such artsits should read more to see what people who use language can do with it…there’s a difference between something being beyond words and being beyond my words...) In Diebenkorn’s pictures, that sense of specificity comes in part from the way the artist reveals the process of making the picture. One sees lines drawn and drawn out, colors scumbled over colors, as if each decision were being made and then questioned. As if something had been seen and then recognized as mistaken…the pictures depict a world of second- and third-guesses.

When I go to see Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings at the Corcoran, it won’t be to cast a vote for the real or the abstract. I will go because the paintings show me how false such a division is, and how much of the world they allow me to see.

Thursday, June 07, 2012

Stephan Sagmeister @ ICA | Erin Rose Boyle @ UArts

 Stephan Sagmeister at the ICA.



Little jokes like this are abundant in the gallery...
 Erin Rose Boyle's show Two Moms, Three Boys, Two Dogs is in an office at the University of the Arts.







Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Art Seen - Ellen Harvey @ Locks Gallery

Ellen Harvey's Arcade/Arcadia at Locks Gallery

The etched mirror images reflect and echo...


a small image of Tuner's original gallery (?) is tucked into a corner, easily overlooked. It is, in may ways, a kind of key to the show. Thanks, Carmina, for pointing it out.

Apparently when installed in Margate, the pavilion was skinned with walls and ceiling. Here is it more skeletal, allowing the viewer to see in through the structural frame. It is especially interesting to see the guts of the work - its wires and joints.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

Art seen, June 3


I've been looking forward to seeing H. John Thompson's work at Napoleon. It was worth the wait...


A snapshot from the group exhibit Intramural at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. The clearing sky threatened to outshine any shows.


At Grizzly Grizzly, high-contrast paintings by Mark Sengbush and tiny sculpture by John Chewkun

I've also been looking forward to a chance to see Scott Kip's work, and was pleased to see the show at Marginal Utility.