ARTPULSE MAGAZINE

Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia

raisa — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 01:27:38 +0000

Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia. Edited by Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya and Michael Lee. Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space with Studio Bibliothèque and seed | projects, 2010. 187 pages. ISBN 9789889896393

By Irina Leyva-Pérez

This book opens the forum with a simple yet intriguing question: Is it different to curate an exhibition in Asia than in Europe? There are many reasons why it could be dissimilar, and those are precisely the foundation of this book. The title, Who Cares?, is cleverly forged from the etymological root of the word “curator,” a comment about its function while directly questioning the support system for the arts in the region, giving us a hint of the conceptual intention.

By including 16 essays from a diverse collection of writers, the editors intended to cover all the angles within the theme: the curatorial process, exhibitions, commercial success and audience reaction. Situations such as interaction with the public might seem irrelevant when discussing structures, but when we are talking about public spaces it becomes of utter importance in this context. They also note the tendency towards a collaborative crossover between diverse disciplines, which is vital to accomplishing many projects that demand networking. When it comes to discussing events that legitimize these efforts in the region, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art emerges as an important point of reference, somehow bringing everybody together in the effort.

The fascination with Asian art and its explosion in the market could make us infer that the region has an effective infrastructure in place that makes its success possible, when, in fact, that is far from the case. Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, one of the editors, points to the overlapping roles of existing institutions, portraying the panorama of the visual arts in the region as an incipient arrangement that tries to compensate for the lack of an effective infrastructure. He also stresses the importance of the multitasking role of the curator in Asia, while noting the different vision between those who work for a museum and those who toil for art galleries.

Recently we have seen in books about contemporary art the tendency to use interviews as a resource to comment on a particular subject matter. Here we see it in some of the texts, offering the reader firsthand information from a reliable source.

The idea behind this book, and the common thread that runs through these 16 essays, is the study of the challenges of promoting art in Asia, particularly the process of curating exhibitions there, touching upon neuralgic points that together make a whole. By shining a light on the peculiarities of the region and the many factors that contribute to its functioning, the authors are exposing problems and situations that reach beyond Asia’s borders. While many of these challenges are unique to each country and the socio-political development of the region, others can be seen in the worldwide artistic context, making this provocative book noteworthy beyond its original scope of interest.

Irina Leyva-Pérez is an art historian and critic based in Miami. She is the curator of Pan American Art Projects.

Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating

raisa — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 01:20:39 +0000

Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating. Edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris. New York: apexart, 2007. 128 pages. ISBN 9781933347103

By Shana Beth Mason

Less of a “how-to” guide on becoming, being and remaining a contemporary curator, the second edition of Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating is a lucid, plainly crafted text by such respected theorists and active curators as Boris Groys, David Carrier, Sara Arrhenius and David Levi Strauss about how curating factors into the practices and practicalities of contemporary art in general. apexart, founded in 1994 by New York-based artist Steven Rand, functions as a salon-style environment, in which the promotion and consumption of art and artists takes a backseat to theory-driven workshops and curatorial exercises. This edition concisely outlines critical issues and interesting solutions in the field, noting how the curator has transformed from an administrator of the exhibition into somewhat of a celebrity, sometimes capable of upstaging the artist(s), artworks and their cohesive dynamic altogether.

In the preface, Rand describes the shift from research to social networking in the curatorial field, a consequence of “the values and insecurities in society today.” The problem, for Rand, is the tendency of young curators to sacrifice creative risk for career stability. Curating, in this context, takes its ideal shape as a product of research, artist-curator communication and cross-referencing fields of social anthropology, political theory and art history. In the current educational climate, degrees in curating have sprung up independently of academic departments that, for Rand, “results in exhibition essays describing the work, quoting others, and engaging in classical obfuscation by using the kind of rhetoric that makes the insecure give undue credit to the writer rather than question the content.”

The body of the text further outlines the intellectual anatomy and aims of the curator. Groys, for example, contends that the curator is a form of iconoclast: destroying the spiritual integrity of the artwork (and in the process, the artist) and revealing that the institution in which art is located strips the art of individual status as a unique creation is a part of the curator’s goal. The end result is informing audiences that the illustration of history using artwork is a futile effort, and herein the curator’s success can be measured by how clearly that message is conveyed. David Carrier argues that the importance of the curator is not to simply corral a series of works together and find a suitable, logical thread to bind them; curators have taken the position of critic, in that their tastes drive the overall nature of exhibitions, thus the successful presentation of an exhibition means that their tastes find widespread agreement and their methodologies employ enough creative risk to startle their detractors.

Risk is a word quoted often in this book. Curators are, more than ever, at the mercy of declining institutional budgets, critical publications ever-more scrutinizing of their efforts than that of artists and museums combined, and a general public increasingly cautious of philosophically heavy, esoteric exhibitions. Above all, these authors insist that spontaneity, passionate historical engagement and sheer determination push the curator towards fulfillment.

Shana Beth Mason is an art consultant and critic based in Miami. She holds a Master of Arts degree with a focus on modern and contemporary art from Christie’s Education London.

Whitney Biennial 2012

raisa — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:29:17 +0000

Andrew Masullo (b. 1957). 5030, 2008–10. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches. Collection of the artist. © Andrew Masullo; courtesy Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles

Whitney Museum of American Art - New York

The First Rule of the Biennial is You Don‘t Talk About the Biennial

By Stephen Truax

It’s impossible to write a straight review of the 2012 Whitney Biennial when it is being actively picketed. One must consider the political/economic context that may occlude any effective discourse or artistic offering made from within the institution. This is, unfortunately, the state of most things in contemporary American life: How does one go to the ATM without thinking about the global bank default? How does one pursue a higher education without considering the looming threat of a student-loan debt crisis? How can artists today-or really, anyone-make their labors compensable without contributing to the plutocracy that is the American status quo?

A boycott has been called against the Whitney. Arts & Labor, a working group of Occupy Wall Street’s Arts & Culture Committee, has released a public letter to the Whitney demanding it end the Biennial in 2014. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has called upon the Museum to drop sponsorship from Deutsche Bank and Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s has been in an ongoing dispute with its unionized art handlers who were locked out in November 2011 when they demanded higher pay. In a YouTube video, Diana Taylor (partner of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg), a member of the Sotheby’s board, publicly declared that she would resign if Sotheby’s accedes to any of the art handlers’ demands at a meeting of the Hudson River Park Trust (of which she is chair)(Vartanian). Furthermore, in December 2011, Sotheby’s (NYSE: BID) reported its highest annual profit since 2007: $171.4 million (Boroff). Thus, OWS protesters have staged multiple demonstrations in conjunction with the Biennial, including one at the VIP Opening Reception.

The groundswell of grassroots political activity, especially here in New York, is impossible to ignore. Since the Arab Spring in 2011, protests have sprung up and largely continued consistently around the world in a broad array of countries, including the U.S., U.K., Lybia, Syria and recently across China¹ and Russia (Barry and Schwirtz). As the Biennial is charged with reflecting or describing the current cultural context in America, it must address the change that is at hand.

Andrea Fraser has once again taken center stage, however this time with her essay, “L’1%, C’est Moi,” written for the Berlin-based publication Texte Zur Kunst. Throughout the article, the artist argues that the price of art does not rise based on the volume of the whole economy; instead, the price of art rises when income inequality increases (Fraser). She also makes clear the disturbing ties between major art institutions’ board members and massive global corporations, especially regarding the profits many personally saw after the financial meltdown. Fraser exhibits the “work” in the Biennial as a book standing on a pedestal.

Nick Mauss, Material Studies, 2008-11 (detail), digital photographs, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery (New York) and Galerie Neu (Berlin)

Another circumstance makes this 2012 Biennial unique, as two neighboring exhibitions in New York designed to directly compete with it are concurrently on view: the New Museum’s Triennial, “The Ungovernables,” and the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Brucennial. The Biennial, despite showing largely emerging or mid-career artists, is being railed against by underdog artists, curators and institutions as “the establishment,” which leads us to an interesting question: As the widely accepted establishment, how can a critique of the establishment be effectively launched from the Whitney?

Curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders have been planning this exhibition since December 2010. The touchstone of the 2012 Whitney Biennial curatorial project is human touch. Throughout the exhibition we see handmade painting and sculpture, hand-painted details throughout installations, and a makeshift, DIY aesthetic. This Biennial more than any other deals with history and the anxiety of influence from Modernism (and even earlier). It is actually difficult to discern which works are historical and which are contemporary. The curators underscore the imperative of analyzing the relationship between all analogous creative disciplines’ impact on visual art by turning the Biennial into a platform for performance, including a rock concert, dance performances, theater productions, an avant-garde cinema, a publication platform, etc., all free with the cost of entry. It is literally impossible to sum up the efforts and intentions of the curators in this short review.

The underrepresented painter Forrest Bess’ (American, 1911-1977) sincere abstractions in unfinished wooden frames bear striking similarities to contemporary motifs, including provisional painting, recalling the Pre-War period, Arthur Dove, et al. The small solo was actually curated by artist Robert Gober, who helped ensure that Bess would realize his dream postmortem: that his paintings be displayed alongside ephemera that includes photographs of his self-inflicted surgery on his genitals to become simultaneously man and woman.

Andrew Masullo’s idiosyncratic, small, colorful abstract paintings (a sort of Mary Heilmann meets Thomas Nozkowski) installed playfully not following a center line seem to be looking back to the same art historical moment in the early 19th century as Bess. Hand-painted, brightly colored cement/clay sculptures by Vincent Fecteau (presented on classic pedestals) also recall early Modernism. The handmade theme extends through multiple media, including Luther Price’s Handmade Slides, 1999-ongoing, a slide carousel set to automatically click through a series of hand-distressed film slides, simultaneously competing with contemporary painting while employing antiquated technology.

Wu Tsang, Production still from WILDNESS, 2012 (in progress), high-definition video, color, sound. © Wu Tsang. Courtesy of the artist.

A more prescient take on painting is Nicole Eisenman’s paintings and lithographs, which depict dysphoric interaction with contemporary technology in a lighthearted, colorful style. Breakup, 2011, shows a sad sort of cartoony face staring down into a Smartphone in horror/disbelief/despair. She makes us emotionally invest in her characters and take her paintings seriously, primarily by how convincingly they are painted, with all the bravado of thick, sexy oil paint and the subtle colors of a Bonnard. Eisenman is also opening up the remote practice of painting the public by hosting a public figure-drawing class of live models in the Museum’s galleries.

The curators explore how sculpture can be a useful foil to the historically laden tradition of painting, with Cameron Crawford’s large works, which include painted canvas, stretcher bars and other endemic materials of traditional painting, deconstructed and represented as sculpture. Elaine Reichek’s large digital embroidery on linen textile paintings are not to be overlooked as a plausible solution, either.

The allotment of space at the Biennial is disproportionate: Most of the fourth floor has been dedicated to blinding white theater seating and a massive stage. For the first time-I think-ever, you can see out the Breuer Building’s rhrombus-shaped windows. Sculptor Michael E. Smith cleverly positioned one of his untitled styrofoam-looking sculptures in front of one of them to bask in the oblong sunlight.

A woman wearing a horse mask and a brown leotard walks aimlessly around her “pen,” while another girl mops and sweeps the floor after her. A huge neon wall sign of a wiggly drawing of a girl’s face gleams down in aqua blue. Philip Glass-like melodic tonal music plays loudly. In a dressing room around the corner, several performers prepare for the performance. It is not difficult to imagine a casual museum-goer approaching Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1-The American Dancer, 2012, and saying, “What the f&#*…?”

A whole series of dressing rooms are on the back side of the “stage,” the most memorable being Wu Tsang’s GREEN ROOM, 2012, which transforms his small booth into the back room of a gay bar in L.A., and shows a video of a drag queen performing in front of a live audience. It is extremely convincing, right down to the smell.

The Biennial offers a few works of true excellence, typically more conceptual than process-based, including Werner Herzog’s hilarious contribution of opera-like music by Ernst Reijseger paired with rotating images of etchings by the Dutch landscape painter and printmaker Hercules Seghers (c. 1589-c. 1638) in a multichannel video. The work is simultaneously sincere and insouciant: People leave truly touched or snarkily laughing along with Herzog.

Sarah Michelson Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer, February 26, 2012 at 2012 Whitney Biennial, Photograph © Paula Court.

Similarly positioned between the authentic and the contrived is 31-year-old Nick Mauss’ obtuse selection of work from the Whitney’s permanent collection-including a very strange Marsden Hartley painting-inside a custom-built antechamber. Mauss worked with a theater designer to construct a unique architecture out of stretched velvet that’s appliqued with cut pieces of velvet that appear to be hand-painted architectural details of a Beaux-Arts building. This complex work is inspired by the antechamber designed for Guerlain by artist/designer Christian Bérard. This was the most telling piece of the curatorial vision behind the Biennial, touching on all points: the handmade, the intersection of contemporary art with early Modernism, and a unique context in which the viewer is invited to have an experience.

While the Whitney Biennial list is once more filled with all relatively unknown artists, the art has been eclipsed by the political milieu surrounding it. Despite the innovative new platforms Sussman and Sanders have contrived to reinvigorate this 80-year-old tradition, it seems more like a desperate cry than a solution to the systemic problems the Whitney Museum of American Art, and, of course, all other major art institutions in the U.S., now face. The first rule of the 2012 Whitney Biennial is you don’t talk about the Biennial.

(March 1 - May 27, 2012)

WORKS CITED

• Barry, Ellen and Michael Schwirtz. “After Election, Putin Faces Challenges to Legitimacy.” The New York Times. March 5, 2012.

• Boroff, Philip. “Sotheby’s Falls After Auction Revenue Drops” Bloomberg News. March 1, 2012.

• Fraser, Andrea. “L’1%, C’est Moi.” Texte zur Kunst Issue no. 85, “Art History Revisited.” March 2012.

• Vartanian, Hrag. “Girlfriend of NY Mayor Tells Sotheby’s Art Handlers to Eat Cake.” Hyperallergic. December 3, 2011.

NOTES

1. See, “Unrest in China: A Dangerous Year.” The Economist. January 28, 2012.

Stephen Truax is an artist, writer and independent curator based in Brooklyn.

Luis Cruz Azaceta: Shifting States

raisa — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:05:53 +0000

Luis Cruz Azaceta, Shifting States: Bloodline, 2011, mixed media on canvas, 42” x 58”

Arthur Roger Gallery - New Orleans

By D. Eric Bookhardt

It has been said, most famously by the 17th-century poet John Donne, that “No man is an island.” And while no doubt true in the philosophical sense that Donne intended, human history has largely been defined by the things that isolate and divide us as individuals and communities, not the least of which are the ideological and geographical divisions that confront us in everyday life. In ways both physical and metaphorical, Luis Cruz Azaceta has long been an artist of islands. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1942, he emigrated to this country in 1960, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and made a name for himself on another island, Manhattan, as he rose to prominence in the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. He was considered one of America’s leading Hispanic artists by 1992 when he and his wife, Sharon Jacques, moved to New Orleans, another city surrounded by water. There, as before, his work continued his long-standing theme of individuals either literally or figuratively at sea, surrounded by mysterious forces in which mere mortals are often in over their heads. Throughout his long career, his painterly style has evolved from the gestural expressionism of his earlier years to an ever more abstract sensibility, yet the underlying humanistic impulse that propels his work has never wavered.

Be that as it may, his “Shifting States” exhibition at New Orleans’ Arthur Roger Gallery appears to break new ground in ways that may initially seem enigmatic. Blood Line suggests a Rorschach blot studded with the oddly similar forms of mosques, radar antennae, minarets and microwave towers in a bristling nimbus of potential mayhem. Its colorful crimson arabesques appear paradoxical, but pointedly so. We live in a time of epochal clashes, not of so much of civilizations as of cultures struggling to internally assimilate the implications of encompassing social and technological changes even as they attempt to maintain the bedrock belief systems of the past. It is a time when archaic holy men mandate the enrichment of uranium in space-age centrifuges and holy warriors in robes are stalked and exterminated by remote-controlled drones, a conflation of archaic militancy and recent military-industrial technology that leads to a pervasive disequilibrium as socio-cultural centers of gravity are challenged by the tectonic shifts of changing times. Blood Line is both Rorschach and cipher, a portent of peril and promise conjoined in an unstable trajectory.

Luis Cruz Azaceta, Surveillance, 2011, mixed media on canvas, 30” x 48”

Employing similarly encoded forms, Surveillance suggests a maze of circuits attached by electronic umbilicals to lethal-looking pods in improbable candy colors. All sprout ominous appendages, and the effect is unsettling, as if people now exist in a maze of invisible connections, silently stalked by our own Smartphones and GPS devices reporting our every move to invisible cybernetic observers, silent sentinels that record our preferences, political views and buying habits in distant data banks linked by satellites to vast electronic migrations of capital encircling the earth like ethereal tidal currents. At the individual level, these new electronic tides encourage people to feel connected even as they swamp them with unknown implications that even the most autocratic rulers ignore only at their own risk. In the geopolitical realm, nation states become like vessels, or floating islands, in turbulent seas of capital where they must stay afloat as best they can or rely on reluctant neighbors for bailouts that may or may not come, and at costs never imagined in more buoyant times.

As traditional ways of life are increasingly washed away by tsunamis of technologically propelled change, individuals and nations may arm themselves against forces that defy their understanding. In Shifting States: Iran, the silhouette of a civilization defined by both ancient and futuristic forms appears on a horizon accompanied by its own simulacrum like a chimera reflected in a mirage, only here neither its friends nor its enemies, nor perhaps its own citizens, has any reliable way of knowing the difference between the appearance and the reality. In Shifting States: Iraq, that nation appears as a heavily armed vessel afloat in a sea of smoke, an ethereal nimbus surrounding a militantly bifurcated form defined by guns and minarets above and dripping oil pipelines below. That sense of militarized technology evolving into a hyper-realized and near-autonomous entity in its own right is effectively conveyed in Scramble. Here forms suggestive of electronically linked weapon systems appear as militaristic constellations in a kind of cybernetic cloud, in a rhythmically pulsating composition like a science-fiction reprise of Mondrian’s iconic modernist opus, Broadway Boogie Woogie.

Luis Cruz Azaceta, Scramble, 2011, mixed media on canvas, 36” x 36”.

Such compositions of seemingly floating forms relate to Azaceta’s earlier Neo-Expressionist images of boat people, or more specifically, individuals adrift in leaky vessels that have taken them far from home, even as their destination, their dream of sanctuary, remains a distant hope. If the mysterious forces of new technologies have in some ways mitigated our dependence on nature, it is also true that nature has not been a passive bystander in this process but has become a more powerful adversary as human activity leads to climate change and the concomitant intensification of storms, hurricanes and floods attributable to global warming. Although man-made barriers to rivers and lakes may protect us for a while, nature remains both a benefactor and an implacable adversary. Even the elaborate levee systems along the banks of waterways like the Mississippi River sometimes become inadequate, so emergency measures must be implemented, as we see in Morganza Water Spill, a composition that returns us to the elemental source of Azaceta’s inspiration, the waters that both enable and destroy life as we know it.

The title refers to Louisiana’s Morganza Spillway, a channel with floodgates that, when opened, shunt river water away from large cities and into ancient swamps, where they may rise to turn adjacent towns and villages into islands confronted with varying degrees of inundation, just as the city of New Orleans was itself inundated like a modern Atlantis when hurricane Katrina’s tidal surge pushed the Gulf of Mexico through its surrounding wetlands. All of which returns us to the ancient mythic notion of the sea as a metaphor for all things mysterious, hidden or sequestered, a notion Azaceta has updated to include the unintended consequences of technological innovation. Now, as in times past, individuals and communities are at the mercy of unpredictable protean forces, buffeted about like boats in eternally shifting seas. Or as John Donne put it in the lines following his “no man is an island” metaphor, ask not “for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Azaceta suggests that even now, centuries after Donne penned those fateful words, human destiny remains as unpredictable and unresolved as ever.

(January 7 - February 18, 2012)

D. Eric Bookhardt is a New Orleans art critic and journalist. He contributes to ARTnews, Public Art Review, and Gambit Weekly, among other publications. He is currently the editor of Inside Art New Orleans and president of the Center for Gulf South History and Culture.

Thomas Scheibitz: A Panoramic View of Basic Events

raisa — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:43:27 +0000

Thomas Scheibitz, A Panoramic View of Basic Events, 2011, oil, vinyl, lacquer, pigment marker, and spray paint on canvas, 74 ¾” x 114 1/8”. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery - New York

Paintings Aren’t As They Appear

By Stephen Truax

Thomas Scheibitz appears to be a straightforward Modernist artist resembling the classic painter-sculptor-collage artist model à la Matisse or Picasso. Scheibitz’ presentation is conspicuously simple. The artist’s seventh solo at Tanya Bonakdar consists of modest-sized paintings, (markedly smaller than the oversize work for which he’s known), two freestanding sculptures, preparatory drawings/collages and framed prints. Each of the 16 preparatory drawings (Worksheets, all 2011) displayed on a sculpture-like table illustrates the process he uses to develop his enigmatic paintings. The forms and compositions recycled throughout his oeuvre purport to be nothing more than that: garden-variety, landscape-based abstraction. We are asked to take his practice at face value. However, to read this enigmatic conceptual artist as merely a painter/sculptor would be missing the point entirely.

A lexicon of abstract forms and a consistent color palette links all three of the 43-year-old German artist’s practices, emerging from a long progression from landscape painting to pure abstraction, not unlike The Bay Area Figurative Movement, especially the landscapes of Diebenkorn and Thiebaud. However, where Diebenkorn’s pictures from the 1960s were laboriously worked and display the angsty effort and self-doubt of their maker, Scheibitz’ hand is light and brushy, almost effortless-though not effortless in a Zen-like-Mary-Heilmann way but more like the predetermined composition and choreographed brush strokes merely appear effortless.

Simple geometric forms populate Scheibitz’ paintings: globes, cubes, arrows, pyramids, diamonds, boxes, spades and, in this show, numerals and punctuation marks. Painted slightly 3-D with shadows and shading, the objects exist in unique interior (architecture) or exterior (sky) environments. Unbroken painted lines can be four or five feet long, holes in large gray over-painting are placed just so, perfect gradients are constructed in straight horizontal painted lines, drips cross boundaries with such exactitude they appear intentional. His paintings aren’t so much “discovered” (through the mystical intuitive process described by the Abstract Expressionists) as designed.

It is telling that since Scheibitz’ debut in the international art market with his 1999 solo at the ICA London, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2005 alongside conceptual performance artist Tino Sehgal and was included in the 2007 exhibition at the Tate Modern with two painters who have tested painting to its extreme limits. Anselm Reyle executes a critique of painting with his sculpture-like re-creations of iconic Modernist works, and Manfred Kuttner’s eye-boggling, bilaterally symmetric geometric abstraction in non-art materials tests painting’s boundary with design and craft. Just within this context we must look at Scheibitz outside the realm of the classic painter-sculptor.

As it turns out, Scheibitz is heavily involved in graphic design. He often publishes his own catalogues or is deeply involved in their design; in 2003, Scheibitz opened his own publishing company, DIAMONDPAPER, with Karsten Heller. Scheibitz also works closely with galleries and museums on the layout and design of his own exhibitions. The same is true at Bonakdar; the glass-topped table that displays his drawings is clearly custom-made in the language of Scheibitz’ sculptures, and one painting is mounted on an extreme diagonal and embedded in a frame-sized recession in the gallery wall. It is clear his practice is much more about questioning the medium of painting rather than blindly participating in the canon.

(January 12 - February 18, 2012)

Matthew Brannon: Gentleman’s Relish

raisa — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:29:20 +0000

Matthew Brannon, Pleasure / Guilty, 2011, wood, metal enamel, 5.5” x 16.5” x 1.4”. ©Matthew Brannon. Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York. Photo Credit: Cathy Carver.

Casey Kaplan - New York

By Stephen Truax

New York-based artist Matthew Brannon continued his development of bewilderingly obtuse fictional narratives (which inform his entire practice) in his latest exhibition at Casey Kaplan, New York. The viewer was led through a noir world of psychologically complex relationships by a group of interrelated works, including handmade sculpture, letterpress prints-and only since this latest show-painting, which if read together may develop an overarching plot line, or not.

“Gentleman’s Relish,” in the artist’s own words, described “a private detective with erectile dysfunction who is hired to investigate a sexually deviant dentist.”(Stillman) The show consisted of three scenes, one for each room of the cavernous Chelsea gallery: a bar in a London train station, an apartment lobby and a powder room. Two additional scenes (the prologue and epilogue) will be staged at London’s Frieze art fair. The exhibition is constructed around a narrative which operates like a play, or a novel, yet is presented not on stage but in a gallery, which the viewer is invited to tour like a theater set, emptied of actors.

Brannon, 40, is known for his perplexing letterpress prints, which pair iconic symbols of his own design (a house plant, slippers, a glass of wine, a type writer, a knife, and poetically concise text related-or not). The prints are not editions, they are unique, and typically displayed on custom-built pedestals, walls and in display units to underscore the print’s three-dimensional physicality. From this imagery, Brannon conjures sculpture, which he uses as props and stage settings for his incredibly specific stories.

“Gentleman’s Relish” combined both: the sculptures, paintings and signs operated as props; the prints as symbols (or evidence); the text as stage notes; and a narrator’s monologue that guided the viewer through the narrative like a crime scene. Casey Kaplan (a fetishistically austere, often sparsely installed gallery known for its eccentricity) was transformed by Brannon’s unique curatorial vision.

The walls were painted an attractive light gray, which played perfectly off the light-gray and charcoal paintings of plants and leaves (the oil coyly applied in unsexy daubs on linen), ultra-crisp toothpaste-green wall signs (PLEASURE, GUILTY), ravishing notes of powdery pink in the doors, a chandelier and prints. The evidence compiled reveals a murder and the protagonist waiting at the bar to be captured by the detective. The story’s tension is echoed throughout the exhibition by its saccharine aesthetic, its too-perfect cleanliness, its effeminate color story and design sensibility, which contrasted sharply with gruesome texts and bleak titles.

Graphic design and interior decoration are clear entry points to this work. Though trained as a painter, Brannon’s focus on the context in which his work is presented began early on in his practice, when he became more interested in building custom settings for which his paintings would be displayed (office or domestic interiors) than the paintings themselves. With this presentation, Brannon seems to be critically analyzing art’s role as a conveyor of meaning and the possibility to make meaning. In the same interview, Brannon says, “I’d discovered a platform with which I could say anything.”(Stillman)

(October 27 - December 17, 2011)

Works Cited

• Stillman, Steel. “Matthew Brannon.” Art in America magazine, November 3, 2011.

Stephen Truax is an artist, writer and independent curator based in Brooklyn.

Jason Shawn Alexander: Undertow

raisa — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 23:33:21 +0000

Jason Shawn Alexander, Santa Monica, 2011, ink, graphite, oil stick, paper collage, oil on paper on canvas, 95” x 52”

101/exhibit - Miami

By Jenifer Mangione Vogt

There is stillness in the work of emotive painter Jason Shawn Alexander that is simultaneously comforting and disturbing. In his exhibition “Undertow” at 101/exhibit, which showcased 20 new paintings, all created in 2011, there was a demonstrated melancholy, and perhaps this is the “undertow” to which the show’s title refers. An undertow is, after all, “a current below the surface of the sea moving in the opposite direction.” As the word implies, no matter what you see on the surface of Alexander’s work, there’s something tugging at you from a greater depth.

For example, in A Matter of Disagreement, a figure appears to writhe painfully to the right of the canvas. However, the viewer is left to wonder why. The title insinuates an argument, so perhaps the figure has just been struck and the body is reacting to the blow. Or perhaps the “disagreement” is one between body and mind. Maybe the subject is dealing with a physical disability, in which his mind wants to go in one direction but his body takes another. The cause isn’t as important as the strength of the work itself to evoke a narrative within one’s mind. Hence, the deeper pull.

Alexander tells stories in all of his works, and as with most art, viewers assign meaning and significance based on their mental state-of-mind-their own Rorschach reaction. However, not all artists tell stories as effectively, or as effusively, as Alexander, nor do they evoke the emotional response that his work elicits. He portrays an alluring cast of characters, drawn from life. “The people in my work primarily are people in my life-ones I really want to portrait and explore more in paint,” he says. “The ones that I’ve used that I don’t really know, I’ve used because I have ideas for images or narratives that their specific look tends to work for.”

Jason Shawn Alexander, Migration, 2011, oil on paper, 109” x 76”

Women in Alexander’s life are frequently his subjects and are particularly enticing, such as his wife Dinora, the central figure in Migration, or the woman in Heather, Heather, who appears in multiple canvases. These women are real, not idealized. They slouch; their breasts sag in the normal way. They’re often depicted nude, or topless, and, as such, vulnerable. In Jessica, the woman appears as though she may be evaluating her body. There’s an enticing fragility to all of Alexander’s women that indicates a longing for approval, which he provides, because his portrayals evoke sympathy, as though he is exposing their frailty in a gently protective, yet provocative nonetheless, manner.

There’s a physical depth to Alexander’s work in “Undertow” that marks an evolution of his artistic process. This phase finds him working in layers, moving beyond simply painting into the realm of mixed media, and this makes his compositions equally intriguing from the standpoint of their construction. As 101/exhibit director Sloan Schaffer points out, “These canvases are the most complex constructions of his paintings yet. This work demonstrates a new freedom in expression. He’s let his guard down. He never did this because he was always afraid that people would not view him as a fine artist. So if you look at work from 2008 and 2009 it’s just oil on canvas.”

Alexander’s initial guardedness was the result of his being mostly a self-taught painter, hesitant initially to deviate from the fine art standard for painting yet voraciously learning the craft in order to expand his knowledge. He began his career as a comic book illustrator and was successful, but the feeling of being stifled and constrained in that work led him to begin painting for himself. The narratives that develop within his work emanate from an inner calling. He has a need to express his own stories, his own life, through imagery that is sometimes literal, sometimes obscure, but always personal.

Jason Shawn Alexander, Undertow, 2011, oil on canvas, 54” x 54”

He learned to paint by observing mentors and continuously studies art processes and artists. However, he forces his mind to be tabula rasa when he works. As he wrote on his blog while preparing for this exhibit, “Having all of this knowledge, literally a small library full of art history through current contemporaries. Forcing myself, in the end, to throw them all aside and accept no influence for a few months.” Also vital for him, he said in an interview, is the importance of keeping his workspace clutter-free. “I can’t have distractions. It takes all of my concentration to focus on two paintings at a time. If anything else existed in that space it would take over. “

We can pinpoint the beginning of Alexander’s looser, yet more physically intricate, style in Santa Monica, a work that combines drawing, collage and painting. And while Alexander conveys that he counts Francis Bacon among the artists that influence him, there are also, especially with this work, similarities to the pictorial language of David Salle. What are most interesting in Alexander’s works at this point are the layers-drawing, painting, paper and ink, indicative of the moment in which he begins to work with no limitations, with no walls up. This is the moment when he makes that transition and allows himself more creative freedom.

This current process involves working first on a drawing, which is then adhered to canvas and painted upon. As Alexander explains, “I believe I’m much more of a natural draftsman than anything. I wanted to incorporate the drawing much more. I began working on the floor in large sheets of paper, then mounting them to the canvas. There were problems with this method from having to cut the drawing up and put it back together and possibly ruining parts of the drawing. I began tearing paper and mounting it to canvas, first, to add texture to the work and allow me to then draw with ink and quill directly on the piece.”

The result is work that is as nuanced in construction as it is in allegory, work that tells both a visual story and a physical one. For Alexander, the progression to the point we see in “Undertow” is profound, yet this is only one stop on his journey.

(December 2, 2011 - February 8, 2012)

Jenifer Mangione Vogt is an arts writer based in Boca Raton, FL.

Vincench vs. Vincench: A Dissident Dialogue from Cuba

raisa — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 23:13:08 +0000

Jose Angel Vincench, Dissident (English): Compromise or Fiction of the Painting Series, 2009-2010, acrylic on canvas, 48” x 48”. All images are courtesy of ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, Coral Gables, Miami.

ArtSpace/Virginia Miller - Miami

The Artist in Front of the Mirror
(Or Words in a Narrow Room)

By Joaquín Badajoz

With the same seamless gesture of a man devoting himself to a shaving ritual-creating the perfect lather to coat his face, choosing the right blade to slide along his skin, until becoming, with a few strokes, a naked reflection in the mirror-the artist faces the canvas. It is in this moment, when he portrays himself, or the facts in which he is immersed, the private becomes public and the artist’s odyssey begins.

For the artist, the canvas is the mirror-the vehicle that allows him to reach out, without self-censorship, to begin a dialogue that starts with his own public statement of his doubts as well as some dangerous certainties.

“Vincench vs. Vincench: A Dissident Dialogue from Cuba,” the first solo exhibition in the United States by Cuban artist José Ángel Vincench, begins as a battle between art and ideas, or image and ideology in pursuit of a typography of ideology. That is the main reason why words are so influential in Vincench’s current work. Although I do not consider this an ideal exhibition to introduce to an American public unfamiliar with his previous artworks, “Vincench vs. Vincench” is a fine example of his maturity and development as a conceptual artist.

To understand and appreciate this substantive artistic proposal, it would be helpful to backtrack to his early artwork, which is characterized by impressive aesthetic dialogues with Lucio Fontana, Jiří Kolář, Chuck Close and Victor Vasarely, among others. An exhibition showing samples of his early series, The Symbolic Trace (La huella simbólica), would unveil a sharply polysemic approach to images that I previously considered a sort of figurative abstractionism.

“Vincench vs. Vincench: A Dissident Dialogue from Cuba”, Installation view.

Language is always at the center of the ideological trade, creating a parallel iconography-”the jargon of the winners,” full of derogatory and laudatory concepts-that has a great impact on society and therefore is rightfully a weapon for every caustic biographer of his circumstances, such as Vincench. In autocratic regimes, a word can easily become a label and, therefore, lead to retaliation, ostracism or persecution. On the other hand, any critical or even satirical approach, whether artistic or literary, is considered a political statement. “A joke is not always a joke. It’s a form of defiance,” as Chinese artist Pi San recently told Brook Larmer in a piece he wrote for The New York Times magazine.

Following the steps of the anti-establishment and critical art of the 1980s, Vincench targets two of the most dangerous words in the Cuban political scenario and divests them of their political connotations, blasting away their real etymological meaning. In a country in which the words “dissident” and “exile” are used to label traitors and counterrevolutionaries, the artist bets for his right to dissent as an intellectual and critical thinker. “Because I am an artist, an intellectual, I see things differently. I want to show people that dissidence is just another way of looking at something,” he explains. Therefore, “Vincench vs. Vincench” becomes a graphic dialogue about what these words represent in the context of the identity of a nation-particularly in one that must harmonize the different discourses to gradually become a whole.

Dissident (Swedish): Compromise or Fiction of the Painting Series, 2009-2010, acrylic on canvas, 48” x 48”

What Vincench hopes to achieve is a de-fetishization of these words to reclaim their true meaning-an attempt to “set the record straight” in the conversation of a nation in which the original etymology of the words has been displaced by ideology. In this sense, once the old fetish is deconstructed, a new icon can emerge from within, making his conceptual process a sort of constructivist learning intervention in every sense, as a construction of a new model and as recognition that the social architecture is framed by the interaction of unique individuals and their mental representations. This is one of the reasons every piece in this exhibition is also unique.

Together with the Dissident series, showing paintings of the word and its meaning translated into 12 different languages-a beautiful work-in-progress in a Kosuth-meets-Indiana concept-there is a mosaic built with 100 pieces in small format with the same dimension but different finish titled Cuba y la noche (Cuba and the Night), with the word “dissident” in Spanish. Nevertheless, where Kosuth, Indiana-or even John Baldessari-focus on idea as art, Vincench embarks in a re-reading of art as ideology in permanent arm-wrestling with the demagogy of the manipulative political rhetoric. His proposal is more etymologic and encyclopedistic than philosophic: rather than create a totally new approach to the ontological truth, he tries to regain the words’ concealed meaning, to illuminate through facts. At the end, Vincench’s Babelian confusion shows that dissidence is a worldwide engine that helps to calibrate the social machinery, and that it is not that bad after all to just think different in the age of the global “occupy” movements and the end of autocratic regimes.

Dissident (Spanish): Compromise or Fiction of the Painting Series, acrylic on canvas, 2009-2010, 48" x 48".

“Vincench vs. Vincench” includes various installations and artifacts from the artist’s series Exile/Destierro. “Exile” is another word intertwined in the last 53 years of Cuban history that is deconstructed letter by letter in what seems to be a spelling test of diasporic identity. Every exile is a wor(l)d in himself. Every personal history is unique but necessary to accomplish social completion. The artist’s letter-shaped bags in Kraft paper or taffeta highlight the poetry of the material as parody and acceptance of the universal historic classification. If every human imaginary is an expression of the materials-stone, bronze, steel, gold, etc.-used in a particular historic age, then his artwork is a radical testimony that Cuba’s society is still in a very precarious stage of evolution: the Age of Kraft and taffeta, at least in the sphere of social communication.

Family) Series, 2011-2012, installation, 70.8” x 67” x 55.1” approx size for each trailer. Work in progress.

The same modus operandi works for the huge plastic bags, or duffle bags (which Cubans call “gusanos” -”worms”), made of taffeta, mimicking the island of Cuba. These bags were made fashionable on the island during the ’80s by the expatriates who began visiting their homeland after decades of exile. The transference of this metaphoric but derogatory term from the beholder-every Cuban expat was labeled a traitor and called a “gusano”-to his belongings, thus as a semiotic symbol of the whole island, is an explicit message of the exiles’ impact over contemporary Cuban society and a clear reference that the island is condemned to its incompletion without the memories and social imagery of the Cuban exiles. A Christmas tree of “reconciliation,” displaying the dictionary’s definition carved in wood in English and Spanish, is a surprising addition to the exhibit that reinforces this message.

In this complex art of dis(arti)culation, Vincench is also addressing ethical breaches. This exhibition is also an assertion of the necessity for an ethical and critical approach to art and society under a new artistic agreement. His artwork also makes us remember a disturbing phrase from Robert Motherwell: “Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.”

(November 4, 2011-February 3, 2012)

Joaquín Badajoz is and independent art critic and writer based in Miami.

Urbanitas

raisa — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 23:12:40 +0000

Santiago Porter, Juzgado, 2007, C-print, 18” x 24”. All images are courtesy of Pan American Art Projects.

Pan American Art Projects - Miami
Curated by Irina Leyva-Pérez

By Raisa Clavijo

“Urbanitas” assembled the work of ten artists who have approached the theme of the city from different perspectives. The exhibition included works by Gustavo Acosta, Luis Cruz Azaceta, José Manuel Fors, Tony Berlant, Luis Enrique Camejo, Carlos Estévez, Santiago Porter, Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Magnus Sigurdarson and Tracey Snelling.

A city should be conceived not only in geographic or architectural terms, but also as a state of mind, an accumulation of customs and traditions that differentiate and identify its inhabitants. In this sense, Carlos Estévez conceives the city as an expression of the human being’s personal universe. Each man embodies the place in which he was born and has spent his entire life, or the place where he has relocated and into which he has had to integrate himself. The works of Estévez, which spring from a profound humanist perspective, incorporate symbols associated with the idea of the city as part of the personal “imaginarium” of man as a social being. Gustavo Acosta approaches the city from memory. This artist, who has lived in various parts of the world, re-creates images that have remained etched in his mind (buildings, airports, theme parks and aerial views of the urban tapestry) in a collection of landscapes with a metaphysical flavor in which the very buildings interpret the artist’s opinion of them-what they mean to him and how they are susceptible to change as a result of the inexorable passage of time. In his oil paintings, Luis Enrique Camejo has also documented his personal journey through various urban centers by capturing fragments of life typifying the ambience of each of them.

Rogelio Lopez Marin (Gory) Untitled, from the New York Series, 2008 C-print,30 x 20 inches

In his photographs, the Argentinean, Santiago Porter captures the deterioration of Buenos Aires after the economic crisis that shook the country between 1999 and 2002. He captures buildings that were symbols of both economic and governmental power, which now lie dilapidated and forgotten, as if mocking the symbolic connotation they once held.

The city of New York is used as a pretext and as a theme by Gory, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Tony Berlant and Milton George. Gory traps details lost in the chaos of everyday life-edifices in ruin or under construction, objects discarded in the street, flashes of storefronts, etc. Cruz Azaceta approaches this urban center from a social and political standpoint in pieces such as Terrorist (2010) and Museum Plan for Strategic Games (2006), alluding to 9/11 and the repercussions of this event on recent U.S. history. In their works, Tony Berlant and Milton George convey the sense of abandonment felt by the ordinary person upon arriving in a great bustling and chaotic metropolis like New York.

For her part, Tracey Snelling presents a body of work based on the relationship between physical space and the experiences of human beings residing in it. Her oeuvre manifests a debt to voyeurism and the film noir aesthetic. She constructs models of motels with windows through which the visitor can peek at videos made from fragments of numerous classic movies. On occasion she incorporates snapshots of herself into the enigmatic, sordid or amusing scenes in which she reconstructs events taking place in these spaces.

Finally, Magnus Sigurdarson uses his great sense of humor to address the process of adapting to a new city, a new country and a new culture. In his photographs, he presents himself as a Beefeater, the anachronistic personage symbolic of London, wandering around the city. The artist finds himself in diverse amusing situations, observing details of the metropolis’ daily life, as though searching for the means to insert himself into a totally alien social context.

“Urbanitas,” uses the city as a pretext to relate physical space with themes alluding to politics, migration, exile, identity and human relations. It is an exhibition that challenges the visitor to reflect on his environment, the city in which he lives, and to render his own interpretation of the places he frequents.

(December 10, 2011 - February 4, 2012)

Raisa Clavijo is an art critic and curator based in Miami.

Neo Rauch: Heilstätten

raisa — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 22:50:10 +0000

Neo Rauch, Aprilnacht, 2011, oil on canvas, 118 1/8” x 98 3/8”. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York and Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig/Berlin.

David Zwirner Gallery - New York

By Stephen Knudsen

Neo Rauch got his a second wind in New York, recovering from the cramped curation of his exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007-a show that had his paintings ducking low ceilings both figuratively and literally. In the 2011 show at the David Zwirner Gallery, that mistake was not repeated, with his new mural-sized paintings balanced in vast horizontal and vertical white space without accoutrements of any kind. The last thing a painter of heroic scale needs is space constraint.

Of the dozen new paintings, most of the large ones brim over with disjointed viewpoints, vanishing points and figural relationships. These are hallmark Rauch paintings that make you feel like you are falling into the rabbit hole-paintings that depict people with grit, always fixing, making do, trying to find inspiration to go on and keep the faith in spite of utopia in entropy.

Thankfully, Neo Rauch has given us something new as well. Consider April Night, 2011. When surveying his work of the last two decades, one is hard- pressed to find any large figurative painting like it.

The 10-foot-tall April Night breaks ranks by reeling back into something calm and quiet. Reasons for this are difficult to deduce, as Neo Rauch has become increasingly guarded about his personal iconography. Though he understands the impulse to have his rhetorical inventory explained, ultimately he feels the work best reveals its intellectual and visceral evocations over time in non-verbal space. Speaking with Hanna Schouwink, gallery partner and long-time advocate of Rauch, one gets more ringside clues into the work. She spent time with the artist in his studio while this body of work was in production. Ms. Schouwink confirmed Neo Rauch’s concerted intention to pare down April Night, remarking that originally there were three figures in the painting. The calm in April Night feels like a good exhale-a counterpoint to the super-packed and active imagery of the artist’s other paintings.

In April Night, the building, excavating, carrying and pulling of a typical Rauch painting is reduced to thinking. The two figures lounge on stumps, communing with an owl and an owl’s head-not unlike the bizarre Max Beckmann paintings with figures holding fish in unholy ways. All of his work acknowledges the limitations and yet the great will power in human energy, and interpreting his iconography at that starting point is often effective.

The owl can be seen as the wide-eyed hunter in search of inspiration. The woman and man, with their eyes closed, are trying to decipher and process that inspiration. They signify the artist as hunter, with paintbrushes placed in the falconry gloves. However, sometimes there is no inspiration. Sometimes the artist finds it. Rauch does not stop there, because the thinking and the introspection are written in some code in nature. Stumps make letters on the ground, and branches seem to spell something out in the sky. It does not matter what the message is other than some kind of information about to ignite.

Neo Rauch has lived most of the 51 years of his life in or near Leipzig, Germany, the city of his birth. Even while East Germany was communist, he stayed and was conditioned in a way that those artists who left for the free West could never be. He witnessed the limping economy of communist East Germany (GDR) and the sprawl of uninspired gray concrete that was the Berlin Wall. He saw Leipzig poison itself with industrial waste, and he experienced the physical and psychological repression-all of this constant until the euphoric reunification of Germany when he was 30 years old. In the 1980s, Rauch studied painting at Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts, choosing to embrace the figure in painting even though it was certainly distasteful that the figure was key to Social Realism, the GDR-sanctioned art. Indeed, signifiers of coping with repression, as he experienced it, populate his works. In April Night, the figures wear the coats of East German border guards-a nod to the past and the long-vanquished wall. The man also wears guard boots, but as a 21st-century fashion update the woman’s boots are pink.

Neo Rausch, Heilstätten, 2011, oil on canvas, 98 ½” x 118 ¼” x 2 ½”.

In hindsight, Neo Rauch’s unusual choice of artistic lineage seems like a smart fit. But a little more than just a decade ago, it was not looking that way. Making large figurative paintings, which feel narrativish and evoke sensibilities that can go back centuries, is just what most of his contemporaries, from the East and West, distanced themselves from-and for good reason. Such an approach is a tough way to go in a contemporary art world bent on exacerbating the latest idiosyncrasies, with a great deal built on digital influence. If anyone deserves to emulate and continue the lineage of greats like Max Beckmann, it should be someone like Mr. Rauch.

Taking a retro stance kept the artist in obscurity for a good part of his career, and he was willing to accept that in order to paint on his terms. But after the buzz over his paintings at the 1999 Armory Show in New York, that all changed. Rauchmania has been brought to fever pitch by some critics such as Roberta Smith, collectors such as Saatchi and curators such as Gary Tinterow. So why did the work, on its own terms, catch fire? Smith, writing in a 2000 New York Times review, was right to praise formal qualities in the work and the artist’s ability to “effortlessly move back and forth between material [loose details] and representation.”¹ Many of the works are painted well, with a quality that only gets better as they get bigger. In the 19th century, Gustave Courbet taught us the power of placing the laborer on a heroic stage, and Rauch gets that right without question.

As cryptic as it often seems, the iconography is what ultimately resonates. We seem to grasp the power of it even if we are unsure of the precise message. Mr. Rauch ‘s work cries out about the struggle in a time when we find our direction to be suspect. But the works do not push this pessimism too far. Unlike an Odd Nerdrum post-utopia, all is not lost. We still heal. We still try. We still have potential to have a thought that will do good.

April Night evokes the idea of thought, both intellectually and viscerally. We intellectualize the thinking figures, but we also feel the invitation to meditate through the formal qualities of the work. The painting plays down Mr. Rauch’s characteristic wild, graphic-like design, and he gets the idea of thought across in a new way, here, by allowing figures, objects and ground to tonally merge more than usual. In a sense, a little Leonardo sfumato has taken hold, and I am not simply speaking just of the little smoke from the fire. Forms dissolve in the atmosphere of twilight. This is a quiet color language that speaks to the electrical impulses of thinking, which are akin to the voltage through the power line and April’s near emergence into a Northern European spring.

Even the process of the painting is about a stream of thought let loose. Rauch works without any preparatory drawings and photographic mediation, starting with an object or face and letting it evolve organically. In a recent interview with Rita Pokorny, Mr. Rauch said that hopefully the work becomes “an animal, a living thing…As soon as I have the feeling that the thing has blood circulating through it, a nervous system, a skeleton, then questions as to the message become completely marginal.”² Rauch clearly wants the viewer to come away moved on a gut level rather than just an intellectual level.

A companion piece to April Night, the bronze sculpture titled The Hunter confirms one of the interpretations of the painting: that of artistic inspiration and thought. According to Hanna Schouwink, one of the early titles considered for the sculpture was simply The Painting. Ms. Schouwink remarked, “I find it so interesting that this painter makes a sculpture that is an allegory for painting.”³ Neo Rauch has stated in German television interviews that he mixes his paints right on the studio floor and that faces just appear on the floor and beg to be put on canvas. Likewise, The Hunter has faces appearing on her torso.

The meaning of the sculpture certainly has other facets, however. It is more ominous than April Night, for instead of a human holding the head of an owl, the owl has collected human heads that have been affixed to the figure’s upper body as if hung by a cord around the neck as trophies.

Today, the owl is often an emblem of wisdom, with roots in Greek mythology, but it can also signify evil and ignorance harkening back to interpretations in medieval bestiaries and later in Goya’s Caprichos series. In that perspective, the owl signifies a crisis of reason that is as destructive to our humanity now as it was then.

The sculpture, The Hunter, shows up in the painting Heilstätten and confirms this expanded meaning of the work. On the furthest horizon, in a small area near the center of the painting, a man in a purple coat seeking care (or having received it) stands with head down before the sculpture-an act of ideological triage, of finding something redemptive in our present condition. The fuel cans that he has carried and set down also speak to the idea of finding the energy to go on in spite of it all.

These new works clear up a misconception. We should take Mr. Rauch at his word, that he has little interest in emulating pure Surrealism or Social Realism. He is no more either of those than Picasso was. There is no jingoism for the state and/or the subconscious.

In 1820, Hegel remarked, “The owl of the Roman Goddess Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”⁴Good philosophy, and inspiration for that matter, often comes too late for its age. But it can still come, and that is why Mr. Rauch’s paintings, even with their recognition of compromised and failed utopias, do more than inform on gloom. They can speak of transformations wrought by processed inspiration, and in April Night this creative energy is painted with uncharacteristic suspense and quiet, feeling like a sublime whisper that the game is not over. Of course, the title of the show foretold this: “A Place of Healing.”

NOTES

1. Smith Roberta, “Neo Rauch.” Art in Review. The New York Times March 10, 2000. <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/10/arts/art-in-review-neo-rauch.html>

2. Pokorny, Rita. “Interview. You won’t find an ‘Untitled’ among my works.” The Art Newspaper Issue 224 May 19, 2011.

<http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/You-wont-find-an-Untitled-among-my-works/23592>

3. Excerpt from a conversation with Hanna Schouwink in December 2011.

4. See, Hegel, G.W.F. “Preface”. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Ted Honderich (ed.), Oxford: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995, pp. 638.

(November 4 - December 17, 2011)

Stephen Knudsen is a professor of painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and exhibits work internationally. He is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine, Chicago Art Magazine and The SECAC Review Journal. He is also a co-developer of Image Comparison Aesthetics for theartstory.org and developer of Fourth Dimension Color Theory and the Dual Color Wheel, both of which are used widely in universities.