"Critical Wrongs," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Let me be the first to admit it, I’ve been wrong. 

Recently, within the “art critical establishment,” there’s been near-hysterical teeth gnashing and hand wringing over the diminished state of contemporary criticism.  In an open letter, A Call to Art Critics, published in the December/January Rail, Irving Sandler lamented this “crisis of criticism” and its seeming irrelevance, a position that was echoed by several respondents in subsequent issues.  The recently published Critical Mess,a collection, edited by Raphael Rubinstein, of essays by some of New York’s most esteemed writers, ponders this and related challenges.  And, in a controversial address given at the New York Studio School on February 22, 2007, Donald Kuspit stated that “Both art and criticism have been defeated by money…” essentially accusing critics of becoming the jailhouse punks of the big money dudes from the art market.   

Blame for the perceived decline of the relevance of current art criticism runs the gamut with all the usual suspects: too much money in the market, no government support, societal decadence, lack of appropriate education, the failure of artists to follow the dictates of their muse by selling-out to entrepreneurial collectors, and maybe even global warming. 

It’s time to stop the Chicken Little whining and come clean.  The purpose of art criticism (and all philosophy for that matter) is to be WRONG.  It’s that simple. Rather than constructing ornately designed arguments and lambasting the decadence of the art world, the market, and the rich, critics and theorists should simply realize that it’s their job to be wrong and to be brilliantly provocative at it.  This is not to say that that they’ve failed in their calling.  Rather it is the realization that as we evolve from one stage of thought to the next with few “eternal truths” to count on, inevitably the preceding levels become, if not obsolete, then at least accepted and institutionalized.  In our brave new world of the Internet, with 24-hour art blogging and online magazines, ideas trends and fashions spread with the speed and invasiveness of computer viruses.  Today’s brilliant insight is tomorrow’s tired cliché.  Once we critics accept our job as being wrong, we can then get down to the serious business: how do we make art criticism relevant, if not to 95% of humanity, at least beyond the walls of our tiny, effete and elite intellectual ghetto?

The primary problem facing art criticism since Duchamp is the question of just what is art?  It follows that if you can’t really define art, your ability to criticize it becomes even more difficult, if not debilitated.  Let’s cut to the chase and assert that the purpose of criticism is to examine and elucidate a work of art in order to derive greater pleasure, enlightenment, and satisfaction from it.  Interpretation, description and judgment all have their places, but are invisible if if the way they are conveyed isn’t compelling for the reader.  I think our worthy task is to make art criticism engaging, challenging, even fun.   

Having been rejected by the AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and as someone who has always considered himself an artist first, I may not be the guy to opine on this dismal state of affairs.  The following are not value judgments, just observations.  A quick scan of the major of critics in general doesn’t reveal a wide swath of social diversity.  Nearly everyone is highly educated, middle-aged (being generous), and white.  Many are academians and most are leftists, some, stone-cold Marxists. A number of the academic critics couldn’t give a rodent’s rear-end whether anyone outside the institution pays any attention to their writing; they’re satisfied to keep their dialog confined to a small circle of fellow professional specialists.  Finally, just as art styles are rapidly changing to keep pace with new media and technology, criticism is undergoing a fundamental shift as its venues migrate.  Those who can’t adapt will end up as sun bleached bones along the cultural highway.   For art criticism to avoid the same fate as the Shakers, we should seek out the widest divergence of opinion and diversity of voices, demographically, politically, and philosophically.  Most of all we should look for a good story, a unique perspective, an unexpected twist on the standard formula.  The critical practice will keep chugging along because, as Clement Greenberg said, “If you can’t criticize it, it ain’t art.”  I may be wrong, but you know I can’t be more right than when I’m wrong.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1978 where we’ll find…an America at the tail-end of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent history.  The Vietnam War came to an end three years previously, and many of the social changes shepherded in during the sixties had run their inevitable course, being replaced by ambitions closer to one’s father’s version of success.  The “Essentialist” stage of Feminism had peaked, but a summing-up of its accomplishments, at least in the arts, was still awaiting the energies of a driven personality, someone like Judy Chicago.

Few works of contemporary American art have achieved the iconic status of essentially existing through their documentation rather than their actuality.  One is Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on the high desert shore of the Great Salt Lake.  Another is Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party.”   As an avid peruser of art publications, I’ve probably seen dozens of reproductions of it over the years, though never in person.  So it was with genuine curiosity and a mediated sense of late ‘70s nostalgia that, during the last week of March, I visited the Brooklyn Museum’s newly dedicated Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and its centerpiece “The Dinner Party”.  Advertised as the first public space dedicated to the presentation of “Feminist Art”, the Sackler Center marks the Brooklyn Museum’s ongoing efforts to preserve unique works that might not find permanent homes in New York’s “mainline” museums. 

Hand-woven tapestries emblazoned with Feminist utopian slogans like “and then everywhere was Eden once again” hang overhead in the hallway approaching the pavilion, which was designed by Susan T. Rodriguez of Polshek Partnership Architects in consultation with curator Maura Reilly.  Seeing “The Dinner Party” for the first time I was struck with its sheer size.  Dramatically lit in a darkened room to enhance its ritualistic aura, each side of the triangular table is at least forty feet long and seats thirteen women. The entire ensemble is mounted on a low platform tiled in glistening white ceramic inscribed in gold script with the names of 999 other women of distinction.  The individual place settings include a painted/sculpted ceramic plate, chalice, knife, fork and spoon, along with a richly embroidered table cloth with the name of each honoree as well as motifs relating to her legend and culture.  Advancing chronologically from ancient goddesses to the mid-twentieth century, each effigy becomes progressively more extravagant, and the plates develop from mere paintings to voluptuous, full-fledged sculpture.  Stylistic allusions become more blatantly decorative.  There is no question that “The Dinner Party” is a major artistic statement reflecting major aspects of Feminist thought in the late seventies.  Complaints regarding its simpleminded bombast, exaggerated reliance on vaginal imagery, and dated references actually enhance the “trip back in time” experience implicit in the installation, and reestablish a connection with some of the salient issues that made this phase of Feminism so provocative. 

While studying art at a college in the northwest in the late seventies, I knew a female grad student who was coaxed into leaving her studies, going to California, and spending a year and a half working on “The Dinner Party” at her own expense.  She came back chastened and bitter, feeling like she’d been used.  Relegated to one sentence at the bottom of the second page of the press release is the fact that “The Dinner Party” is a collaborative work involving over 400 artists who freely volunteered extensive amounts of their time and energy.  Admittedly a work of this scale may require a communal effort and a kind of maniacal commitment, and for a great work of art some of us can forgive a certain amount of bad behavior.  That Chicago has kept these contributors anonymous while supposedly spotlighting other anonymous women is in itself an irony not lost on those keeping score.

For another take on women and time travel, a quick stop by Figureworks Gallery and a peek at Meridith McNeal’s “Keeping Room” is in order.  Step inside the gallery and you’re transported into a Victorian parlor with pea green walls, maroon velvet curtains and gold brocade tassels.  A pair of matching ruffled and pleated gowns, one adult, and one,  a little girl’s, have been painstakingly stitched together from a collection of subway maps (both outdated and current) anddisplayed on classic seamstress forms.  The walls are hung salon-style with cut-out silhouettes mounted on antique wallpaper and period gilt frames.  A dollhouse resembling a miniature stage set mimics the layout of the installation.  This simulacrum is complete down to a teensy version of itself, which throws yet another scale of perception into the mix.  (If we could see the past would it be in miniature?)  McNeal has stated that she longs to maintain a connection with the past, to see time compressed, not unlike the built environment of New York, which is a commingling of elements from various periods of its history.  “Keeping Room” is her chance to “keep” a little bit of the past, and an invitation for us to join her there.

"Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cuningham Gallery March 29, - April 28," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

For the sake of brevity let me dispense with old bromides about dogs and tricks.  What I’ll simply say is that Phil Pearlstein is an American art treasure.  Whether you appreciate his stubborn pursuit of “New Perceptual Realism” (how many of us can say we’re actual founders of historically recognized movements?) or your teeth are set on edge by his seemingly academic and traditional rendering of the naked (as opposed to nude) body, Pearlstein is a living example of what it means to be a vital and enduring presence on the New York art scene.  You’ll never read about him being arrested for drunkenness, buying dope, indecent exposure, or making “art” with body fluids.  While fashionable magazines and tabloids lionize misanthropic twenty-somethings, Pearlstein has practiced a daily concern with a more risky and ultimately more profound challenge, that of trying to make “good” paintings, and just as often as not, succeeding.

The basic story is that when Pearlstein began painting his rigorous form of realism in the early sixties, his compressed space and snapshot-like style of cropping disposed many critics to group him with other realists, both Pop and photo, who were breaking free of Abstract Expressionism’s death grip.  Pearlstein’s commitment to sharply rendered form expressed mainly through the classic nude model, without reliance on mechanical aids, (a preoccupation of artists since the Renaissance, and beautifully depicted by Dürer in engravings of an artist peering through a frame with a wire grid—a kind of proto-camera—to measure a foreshortened nude). Cameras don’t lie, but that’s not to say that they tell the whole truth.  Look closely at a Pearlstein painting and you begin to see glitches and anomalies in the foreshortening.  Features like hands and feet seem to waxen and increase in size as well as detail and visual heft.  In “Two Models with Large Whirligig” (2006) a reclining woman’s head appears visibly larger than her hip, which is closer to the viewer.  Likewise, the propped-up ankle of the model on the painting’s left edge is disproportionately thick in comparison to her slender, foreshortened foot.  Yet, due to the seamlessness of Pearlstein’s stylistic approach and attention to surface nuance and shadow, despite these illusionistic warps, everything seems to fit together pictorially.  By shifting one’s viewpoint in front of the painting, these “distortions” slide in and out of proportion, not unlike the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” (1533).  At this point the question of abstraction crops up.  Is this effect the consequence of a deliberate sequencing of abstract shapes, or a type of myopia, or the sly scheme of an intentionally unreliable observer?

 A requirement of setting a good example is the wisdom to follow great examples.  As an expert in and early champion of the stylistically peripatetic Francis Picabia, Pearlstein appreciates the importance of remaining open to new challenges and social shifts, and of avoiding formulaic cul-de-sacs.  Several recent pictures depict models whose bodies are lit by a neon Mickey Mouse, a visual double entendre and wicked pun.  In “Two Models, Neon Mickey Mouse, African Chair and Ladder” (2006), the synthetic glow and striated shadows across the models’ skin tones cast by the neon insinuate a crass amusement park/shopping mall glare into the Pearlstein’s familiar warm and natural-looking world of wood furniture, faded Indian carpets, and weather-worn antique toys.  Symbolically, the support struts of the neon sign even appear to impale the model on the ladder, a sort of brash modernist crucifixion.

If art is a reflection of humanity, then Pearlstein has accomplished his mission not only by portraying his subjects as contemporary humans, casually and unapologetically naked, but by literally painting the reflections and shadows of the accoutrements of modern life on their skin.  With these new works, the modernist dictum “what you see is what you see” is no longer an assured declarative statement.  Pearlstein transforms it into a philosophical question with implications that challenge not merely our vision, but our perception as well.

"Brooklyn Dispatches," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

It’s over, it’s peaked, it’s sooo yesterday.  Never fear, the “art fair mania” bubble has burst.  We’ve reached “Post-Art Fairism.”  While standing in a line stretching for blocks to get into The Armory Show, an elegantly dressed European gentleman was asked if he’d seen anything that stood out during this trip.  “Well there was the piece in the park where they give you drugs and whiskey, perform oral sex on you, and then steal your wallet.”  “That wasn’t part of the fair, they were just local whores” responded the questioner.  “Maybe, but at least I came away somewhat satisfied, and they didn’t put me on a waiting list.” But seriously, as a passionate fan, I’m not saying that the art fairs will go away (I wouldn’t want them to), only that the seemingly endless proliferation phase has reached a tipping point.

To bolster my argument I offer a few observations.  While scuttling between Pulse, Fountain, the Armory Fair, Scope, and The Art Show, I couldn’t help but notice several gallerists, who had participated in several recent extravaganzas but were sitting out the shindig this time around. Some, looking twitchy, seemed to have a serious case of art fair “jones.”  Talking to them, they sounded like recently reformed drunks still not quite over the Florida bender, swearing never to indulge in that kind of self-destructive, déclassé behavior again.  Though they all insist through clenched smiles that they’d done “really fine” in Miami, I had to believe that they’d be participating now if they weren’t fried both emotionally and financially.

Although I’m not exactly the power broker type that art world bigwigs seek out for advice or comment, I must have chatted with no less than five individuals in the process of organizing even more fairs, an enterprise that happily forgoes the dirty job of actually having to sell art.  Fair organizers, instead, tap an income stream dealing in the potential  opportunity to deal.  Add to this the bad timing of New York’s art fair week (too soon after Miami, with lousy late-winter weather almost guaranteed), crowded aisles, booths stuffed more like flea market bazaars than “artistically tasteful” presentations, and some just plain “Day of the Locust” bad manners displayed by a number of would-be visitors (in one case, fair management stationed a security guard to protect a performance artist who was aggressively poked and prodded by the pointy toes ofhigh heeled viewers). You know we’re due for a change.

As a veteran of dozens of fairs, sprinting through this year’s New York offerings (350 booths/gallery displays and counting) I’ve found that marathon viewing induces a state of visual overload that diminishes sensitivity to individual works and evolves into a meta-view of the artistic trends.  Like watching a zoetrope, the increasing speed of multiplying images makes apparent the latest shifts and tendencies through  dynamic, animated movements: cardboard and packing tape sculptures, computer-aided abstraction of architectural space with lots of masking-tape lines, and soft-core porn, an old fave, dressed up as the new transgressive feminist avant. 

Despite my grousing about the Armory Show’s lack of risk, extravagant gestures, or crazy subversive installations that scare, insult, befuddle and challenge, there were some standouts.  Imagine a dollhouse for a dysfunctional Barbie who’s an incorrigible packrat strung out on meth, and you’ll be able to picture “Tantamounter 24/7” (2005).  This miniature re-creation commemorates an installation/performance project undertaken by the European art collaborative Gelitin at the Leo Koenig Gallery in 2005.  Another presentation worth seeing, thanks to an exception to the fair’s policy of exclusively featuring living artists, was Öyvind Fahlström’s “Life Curve No.1, Ian Fleming” (1967) at Galerie Aurel Scheibler.  This influential artist, who died young, should be better known here, and his work, a personal gloss on Pop, which commingles collage, photography, and painting, looks like it came out of the East Village yesterday. 

At PULSE, Fred Tomaselli’s “Echo, Wow and Flutter, Sideways, Flopped and Mirrored” (2006), a wallpaper design at Art Ware Editions, raises many questions, not the least of which is: why does this look so right?  A large silver-leafed canvas by Tood Pavlisko, featuring bold script spelling out “Cocaine” in tufts of white plastic tabs at Monique Melocke made my nose tingle nostalgically for the big bad Eighties.  Works by Ted Victoria are always a thrill—half-magic, half-science project.  A small low-tech projection of overlaid images at Schroeder Romero was poetic in its simplicity.  Brose Partington’s “Tide,” an elegant black wave of undulating fabric 75 feet long, sponsored by Dam, Stuhltrager, that literally lapped at the feet of passersby entering and leaving SCOPE was one of the few installations that broke out of the booth box and created a state of solemn awareness through its own unpretentious presence. 

Capping off a Saturday night of fair hopping, the Design Industries Fighting AIDS (DIFFA)’s Dining By Design benefit was a surprising treat for a very worthy cause, and the creativity of its installations challenged anything at the art fairs.  Each participant produced a fantasy table setting that was auctioned off to benefactors as a seating for luxury dining.  Memorable tableaus included Continental Airline’s dining niche overhung with a virtual upside-down garden of fresh tulips.

Don’t throw out that extra-wide tie, those ankle-length peasant skirts, or your six-inch platform shoes.  Like your Aunt Agnes admonished, “Just wait, they’ll come back in style.”  The fashion wheel has turned and, at least for the moment, we’re given permission to consider various types of abstract and experimental painting again.  The critically well received “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” at the National Academy of Design will hopefully raise awareness and appetites for abstract painting.  Curated by Katy Siegel in consultation with David Reed, “High Times” (reviewed in the March 2007 Rail by Ben La Rocco) is a look back at the not-too-recent past when, as Robert Pincus-Witten explains in his brief catalog essay, an anti-painting jihad had been proclaimed, spearheaded by October magazine and a cadre of Downtown deconstructivists.  Of course, like the cockroach, painting survived, but its most advanced manifestations evolved in response to other art forms, such as performance, video, process art, Conceptualism, and feminism. 

If “High Times” illustrates painting’s limitless adaptability, then a spate of current abstract painting shows in and around Williamsburg demonstrates its appeal to new generations of practicing artists. In a curatorial career that’s spanned more than twenty-five years, Larry Walczak of “eyewash” finally decided to put together his first painting show.  “I‘d been making my usual studio visits when it became apparent that there was a synergism happening with several artists.  There was a freshness and a natural vocabulary that included hard-edged, optical, gestural and even computer animation.”   “Brooklyn Abstract” at Supreme Trading features thirteen painters from all around the “biggest borough,” and, as with “High Times,” it demonstrates the broad gamut of recent abstract investigation.  When questioned about the sudden resurgent interest, exhibitor Don Voisine, responded, “I’ve been working abstractly for twenty-five years so I’m glade people are looking at it.  I think abstraction is more open to interpretation.  Maybe it’s a reaction to all the figurative work being shown in the galleries now.” This diversity of approach includes the “all over” fields by Jesse Lambert composed ofzippy brush strokes, drips,  and in high-keyed colors cartoon images, fractured and repeated to the point of unrecognizability.  Peter Barrett has crafted interlocking painted reliefs that operate somewhere between the early black paintings of Frank Stella and diagrams of chemical compounds.  Peter Fox contributes an ambitious wide-framed diptych completely covered in a pointillist swarm of primary color drips.  By contrasting the manipulation of the physical properties of paint with its coloristic nuances, Fox achieves luscious results that tweak accepted notions of paint/painting.

Other abstract painting exhibitions in and around the nabes include Cynthia Hartling at Galeria Janet Kurnatowski.  These new works demonstrate Hartling’s continuing development of a solidly colored, simplified, almost naïve, design.  With techniques as varied as staining, knifing, sanding, and glazing, these small to medium-sized pictures display a newfound confidence.  The duration of time in fabricating the pictures has worn and polished the imagery like stones on a beach or the armrests of an old chair, eliminating non-essential elements and distilling content to a satisfying frankness.

Also intriguing is the scruffy, nonchalant elegance of a group of paintings by Jonah Koppel at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.  Looking like finger-painted slabs, centrally positioned blocks of textural paint (a mixture of synthetic polymer and pigment) are haphazardly overpainted in neutral monochrome tones of earthy greens, browns, and yellow.  The low-keyed color, velvety matte finish, and laidback presentation exude a casual though comfortable rigor.

Artist, writer, and curator, Joe Fyfe, a well-known Brooklyn art advocate, has recently been working in Cambodia and Viet Nam as a Fulbright Research Fellow.  His uptown show, at James Graham & Sons, is a selection of works inspired by his travels.  Although Fyfe has a reputation as a prickly and “serious” abstractionist, these sensuous collaged paintings reveal a “serious” sense of humor.  Fyfe’s signature burlap supports are cut, spliced and glued back together with narrow hunks of intensely colored felt and fabric functioning as compositional cross members.  The lightness and supple character of the paintings are reiterated by their loose attachment to their supports, more draped than stretched.  Because the hues of the added fiber elements are dyed rather than applied, they contrast intensely with the washy, white-stained burlap.  Accumulations of skuzzy lint, stray threads and patched holes imply a kind of hobo chic aesthetic while carrying material analogies to the drips, splatters, and smudges of Abstract Expressionist painting.  These works feign an austere formalism while remaining as endearingly shabby as Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp.”

"Fair Market Values, Art Basel Miami et al," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

“Ladies and gentlemen, in approximately five minutes we will open the doors on Art Basel Miami Beach 2006.  On behalf of public safety we ask that you not charge the gates.  There is plenty of art for everyone.  We will be open until eight o’clock this evening, so everyone will have plenty of time to buy all the art they want.  VIP card-holders please pass through the gate on my left, all others through the gate on my right.  Once again there is plenty of art for everyone, do not charge the gates.”  The white cordons are lowered and the crowd surges forward.   

The above pre-amble is not satire.  It’s a fairly accurate paraphrase of a statement made by a security supervisor to a mob of anxious fair goers at the Thursday, December 7 opening of Art Basel Miami Beach.   In what, over the last five years, has become the greatest art world gathering in the Americas, Art Basel Miami Beach focuses the art world’s enthusiasms, angst, and passion like no other event.  With the participation of over 1500 artists, 200 of the world’s most prestigious galleries, and scores of glamorous and important collectors, curators and critics, ABMB is the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl all wrapped up into a nice convenient package, and that doesn’t even include the ancillary fairs, private gallery space projects, and gorilla/freelance art happenings. 

The beginning of December draws close, there seems to be a convergence of factors intent on whipping up the fervor of the art market.  The economy is robust with Wall Street bonuses at record levels, real estate is still strong, and the weak dollar makes recently soaring auction prices seem like bargains to European and Asian collectors. 

Denial and exclusion just inflame desire, and the organizers of ABMB have perfected the technique, with over 600 galleries applying for inclusion, and only 200 being accepted, 40 more than last year.  After a fifteen minute interrogation, mug shot, and background check, I finally charmed my way into a set of credentials.  The press-room is stocked with gourmet coffee, bottled water, and high speed internet connections.  The press packet includes the beautiful six pound catalog, half a pound of maps, guides, schedules, notebook and pen, all packaged in a white designer “man-purse” with fluorescent logo and elastic strap, (meant, I suppose, to alleviate shoulder pain from lugging the hefty tome around).  During the pre-opening tour, I made it a point to check out the collectors lounge, and was astounded by its extravagant elegance (taffeta drapes, scores of white lilies, and internally illuminated Lucite tables).  After seeing what I’ve been missing, I’ll never settle for tourist class again!

By assimilating any competing impulses, Sam Keller, the head organizer of ABMB, has done a brilliant job of expanding the scope of offerings.  Within the fair itself there is Basel Nova, a selection of younger more experimental galleries located around the peripheral walls of the convention center.  In this group, New York’s Spencer Brownstone Gallery displayed a floating loop of magnetic tape held aloft by the breeze from a pair of facing pedestal fans.   This piece by Zilvinas Kempinas was as simple as a pocket comb but imbued with the whimsical aerodynamic physics of a Mr. Wizard demonstration.

Spread throughout the fair were the Art Kabinett galleries, specially commissioned selections of works by individual artists which amounted to mini museum shows.  My vote for most historically relevant exhibit was the Rudolf Schwarzkogler show in conjunction with Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna.  For years I’d heard the legend of Swarzkogler, the twenty eight year old Viennese Actionist, rumored to be a major influence on Chris Burden, and how he’d ritualistically sliced off his penis and jumped or fell out his apartment window to his death in 1969.  Though the myth was refuted, the exhibition did include a varied selection of his unforgettably disturbing performance photos, notebooks, and drawings. 

Art Positions, a shanty town collection of about twenty freight containers located right on the beach three blocks east of the convention center, provides a chance for a younger crowd to frolic in the sun, stroll in the sand, and view “avant” art in a less sterile more alternative venue.  Though limited by the dimensions, a convincing Puerto Rican social club with a Tito Puente theme was created in the Anna Helwing Gallery booth by Mario Ybarra Jr.  Unfortunately neon lighting in the Zach Feuer container was not conducive to view paintings, but works by Christopher Ruckhäberle and Dana Schutz seemed to come off despite it.  The opening night celebrations at this beachside location featured a concert with Peaches singing a selection of songs including “Shake Your Tits, Shake Your Dicks,” and “Fucky, Fucky,” which left me humming their catchy tunes to myself for days after.

With the final tally of transacted business surpassing $400 million, ABMB is unquestionably the King Kong of art fairs, but how ever big it is, it’s only part of the Miami art fair story.  One could even say that, with the way things are divided up geographically, this is a tale of two very different cities.  ABMB acts as the epicenter in Miami Beach, a group of smaller “hotel” fairs are located along Collins Avenue, close enough to benefit from the foot traffic to and from the convention center.  Just north, housed in the Dorchester Hotel, probably the nicest facility of the “hotel” fairs is INK Miami, the print art fair.  I made the mistake of letting a lady at the reception desk apply a “temporary” tattoo with the INK logo to my bicep.  The damn thing took weeks to wear off.  Other prints that stick with me are a Chris Johansen etching of a utopian solar system titled “This is a picture of space”, at Paulson Press.  With examples of works by Juli Mehretu, Laura Owens and Richard Tuttle, Crown Point Press also impresses with its commitment to younger artists and experimental techniques.

Moving south we come to FLOW and BRIDGE which, though unaffiliated, were none the less housed next door to each other and seemed to function like Siamese twins.  At Roy Boyd’s, I enjoyed the epoxy resin paintings of Markus Linnenbrink. The pieces always have a spirit of pushing the limits of just how far you can go with lots of paint and a nice selection of power tools (drills, sanders, and routers).  Some of the hallways and spaces were claustrophobic, but a video presentation of swimming polar bears in the lobby reduced anxiety.  Next door at the entrance to BRIDGE, “ACQUIRE ME” a fourteen foot tall inflated text sculpture by Brooklyn artist Tom Broadbent, greeted visitors.  Miniature river environments in trunks by Kate Vance and a grid of color Polaroids of women’s breasts culled from various movies by Emily Roz caught my eye at Front Room’s room.  A group of “sled” sculptures, accumulations of exotic ethnic brick-a-brack by Newark New Jersey artist James A. Brown at Rupert Ravens Contemporary, were raw and demanding and seemed to challenge the slick “easy listening” work that is endemic to many of these affairs. 

Situated a couple of blocks south of Lincoln Road was AQUA.  This two story hotel with open central courtyard is acknowledged as the cream or the hotel fairs, and its mellow vibe made it a destination for after hour partying.  London’s Keith Talent Gallery presented small paintings of misanthropic snowmen by Dave Humphrey and a near life size sculptural tableau called “Fascist Fruit Boys”, a group of rampaging vegetable-headed cartoon characters stomping a poor bag of fries kid, by Saun Doyle and Mally Mallison.  If coloristically complex abstract paintings that riff knowingly on accepted representational devices is your bag then works by Daniel Sturgis and Gary Stephan at Cynthia Broan fill the bill.

At the far south end of the Collins Avenue art strip is POOL, the only fair with rooms booked by independent unrepresented artists.  It included everything from eccentric ceramics to wind blown ink drawings and lots of photography, but lacked the kind of over the top self deprecating humor that made last year’s FRISBEE fair such a memorable goof.  Across the street DIVA (the digital and video fair) took a page from Art Basel Positions and circled the wagons, setting up a village of freight containers on the beach.  Between the glaring sun and the high temperatures of the baking cubicles, this venue is perhaps the most unforgiving environment for a mid-day video viewing I’ve ever seen.  Still, Adam Bateman’s book washing tape at Boreas was choice as was Jillian McDonald’s zombie on a subway, Adam Simon’s video portraits and Marcin Ramocki’s “ 8 BIT”  at artMoving Projects.

So much for Miami Beach, the Miami fairs NADA, PULSE, PHOTO Miami, and SCOPE are another matter and require a mile and a half road-trip across Biscayne Bay.  Generally located in the Wynwood district north of Downtown Miami this is a marginal neighborhood of low rise industrial parks and ramshackle Cubano bungalows and when compared to the Collins Avenue vicinity, exposes the other side of the Greater Miami’s social matrix. 

NADA has again set up shop in the Ice Palace Film Studios, a labyrinth of high ceiling bays, with the attractive bonus of a front yard with hammocks and an open air café.  With over 80 galleries from 20 countries, NADA still exudes a New York attitude with its tough internal politics and focus on Chelsea fashion trends.  I liked the urgent griminess and all inclusive notational drawings of Dominico McGill at Derek Eller.  Drippy broad-brushed portraits of vamping glamour models on dark grounds create a dichotomy of means in a work by Katherine Bernhardt at Canada.  I bumped into fellow Brooklynite art-head Chris Martin at the Ben Kaufmann booth.  We both had out sights set on the muscular abstractions of Berlin painter Matthias Dornfeld which echoed the innocent urgency of Tel R with out the sweetness. 

A light grey shuttle van was provided for the five minute jaunt north to PHOTO Miami, a fair as slick as a glossy photo finish.  Business looked brisk at Bernard Toale where I contemplated a large photo of a butchered haunch of elk hanging from a tree in a rugged mountain landscape by Laura McPhee.  Joe Fig’s recreation of the famous Hans Namuth’s picture of Jackson Pollock painting from underneath a pane of glass includes a miniature Pollock action figure dribbling paint on glass attached above the photo.  Anthropomorphic monkey portraits by Jill Greenberg at Clamp Art were riveting and a particularly pensive baboon with a Kramer hairdo provoked an out right belly laugh.  Of the alternative “tent” fairs, PULSE seemed to be firing on all cylinders.  Nick Lawrence of Freight Volume was overwhelmed with demand for collage books by Brian Belott, large drawings that mimic wacky junior-high notes by Michael Scoggins, and the unusually vibrant free-standing collage sculptures of Pepe Mar.  The proliferation of quirky figures in landscapes shows how ubiquitous the shadow cast by John Currin is today.  Large painterly female heads by Cornelia Schleime at Michael Schultz though of a related sensibility, diverge on a different trajectory through her tactile facture and sensuous use of the medium.

SCOPE, the seminal force that launched a dozen satellite fairs, this year ups the anty by moving out of the Townhouse Hotel and into its own huge tent in Roberto Clememte Park.  Though this year’s version is bigger and shinier, SCOPE maintains its mischievous punk nature.  Because of the number of galleries showing video, digital and mechanized art, there’s a constant din at SCOPE like the production floor of a factory.  Rodney Dickson’s circa 1968 Vietnamese snake bar, the “Queen Bee” has a strangely attractive presence and is a great place to hang out and have a drink during breaks in art viewing.  Notable offerings included: scruffy target-like paintings by LA artist Mark Dutcher at Solway Jones.  Eerie photos of a pair of hooded girls in Children of the Corn type landscapes by Christa Parravani resonated at 31 Grand.  A full sized Hummer carved from recycled Styrofoam by Andrew Jung was impressive and was presented in the art-yard by Lincart Gallery.  Raunchy Abstract Expressionist conglomeration paintings that stuck in my head like lint on polyester by Dona Nelson were shown at Thomas Erben.

Though I made a point of visiting every fair listed as well as several freelance/guerrilla projects that weren’t, there are just way too many to mention.  Some worth note were: Pierogi and Ronald Feldman, Grendal, and Fountain.  Pierogi and Ronald Feldman’s space on North Miami Avenue featured along with a roster of gallery regulars, a stainless steel and plate glass freezer in an open bay displayed a 4.5 ton “ice cube”, which artist Tavares Strachan traveled to Alaska to have cut from a frozen river and sent back to the tropics.  There’s got to be an easier way to chill our Chablis. 

“Grendel”, a collaborative guerrilla exhibit organized by Williamsburg provocateurs Jack the Pelican, Dam Stuhltrager and Newark’s Rupert Ravens showed works too big for fair booths and featured a massive mangrove tree fashioned from colorful knotted fabrics by the artist team Guerra de la Paz, and a room sized installation of light activated gizmos by Mark Esper.  Around the corner capitalizing on the success received from confronting New York’s Armory show was the Fountain crew.  Daniel Edwards’ realistic sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth was the centerpiece of this collection from Capa Kesting.  Galeria Janet Kurnatowski’s selection included gem like examples of small works by James Biederman, Ben La Rocca and Shane McAdams.  Other contributors were McCaig-Wells, Front Room and Neil Stevenson.

Putting my poor abused feet up to rest after this marathon I begin to sort through the various tendencies, trends and implications of what all this art fair mania means.  1) Money: whether we admit it or not, artists and galleries run on money and ambitious ideas can get expensive.  Miami brought out the hedge fund types and they were throwing shit-loads of cash at some very “speculative” offerings.  2) Exposure: several dealers told me that they were being seen by more potential clients in four days than in four years in their home spaces.  3) Contacts: this was a chance not just to sell and meet clients, but to catch up with fellow artists, dealers, writers, and collectors.  People’s guards are let down briefly and there’s an incredible leveling when no one’s ensconced in their multi-million dollar architectural fortresses.  4) Measuring up: it’s always good to compare just how well you’re presenting yourself and your ideas, and whether new influential concepts are popping up above the horizon that might require attitude adjustments.  This is especially important for New Yorkers since, as the art market capital of the world, we’ve become paralyzed with financial considerations, and money doesn’t like change.  5) Gossip: damn, you could hear and see enough juicy stuff to fill ten check-out-line tabloids.

 Finally, how will all this effect art?  With an ever higher percentage of yearly gallery income derived from fairs, will dealers pressure artists to design work for the “quick kick”?  (One “scientific study” states that for art fair visitors the initial decision between “looking” and “seeing” a work is made in 0.4 seconds.)  Will this kill support for more sublet work that might require a few moments of quiet reverie? 

“You will be assimilated” like this threat from Star Trek’s Borgs, Art Basel Miami Beach has become so rich that they can buy the good graces of darn near anyone, whether influential critics (we’ll fly you down first class, limo you to the convention center, and put you up in a four star hotel, just show up for your half hour lecture) to museums and institutions, (funding is abundant) to collectors, (the only amenity missing from the collectors lounge were Nubian slaves with ostrich feather fans) to dealers (bring bushel baskets and pitchforks to scoop up the cash)!  Is the whole Basel Miami 2006 thing an anomaly?  Has the saturation point finally been reached, or will 2007 see 50 fairs?  I doubt it.  We’re seeing Darwinian economics at its most unregulated, a true force of nature, human nature.  Love it or hate it, that’s what makes this scene so incredibly frustrating and fascinating.  Welcome to our brave new art world.

"Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt Placemats & Potholders (Memory & Desire) At Pavel Zoubok," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

As a young artist recently arrived in New York City and seeking some kind of exposure to the big league Soho gallery world, I availed myself to the weekly critique/look-see sessions then being offered by the Drawing Center.  I showed up for my five-minute evaluation, which was delivered by the influential artist, writer and curator Thomas Lawson, then working as an advisor.  After glancing briefly at my portfolio stuffed with collages I’d been working on in a hopeful frenzy (a mélange of gold and silver leaf, disco-tape and soft core porn clipped from S&M magazines), Mr. Lawson dismissed me by asking if I were familiar with the work of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.  I’d never heard of him, but was told that he showed at the Holly Solomon Gallery, where I immediately rushed to see a small installation of quirky wall-mounted altars festooned with tinfoil and glitter, along with strings of “ornaments” including iconized rats.  At that point I realized that Lanigan-Schmidt’s pseudo-Byzantine Funk-Pop vision, transgressive commingling of the sacred and the profane, and his use of reflective and transparent materials were so utterly unique, that it would be totally redundant for a poor schnook, like me to try and cultivate anything in this field.  Besides which, his apparently naïve devotion to his religious and sexual constructs were so authentic, that I simply abandoned the entire body of work, knowing I’d never be able to achieve his level of artistic honesty.  Instead, I became a fan, trying to make a point of seeing all his shows at Solomon and wherever else I could find him.

Times and fashions change.  The Pattern-Decorative movement that had counted him among its brethren was soon eclipsed by Neo-Expressionism, but as the East Village art scene started to take off, Lanigan-Schmidt, a denizen of the neighborhood as well as an artistic eccentric with deep connections to the Gay Rights movement, was soon adopted as an exemplarily member of that artistic epoch.  The cruel mill of time kept up its pernicious grinding, and between the devastating plague of HIV, the collapse of the East Village scene, and the fickleness of an art market that now wanted to “think” rather than “feel,” Lanigan-Schmidt frequently dropped from view.  Years would pass and I would wonder if Lanigan-Schmidt was still alive, still working, still collecting his glittery treasures, still twisting aluminum foil and wrapping colored cellophane over his wacky icons.  Once, while scavenging through the remainder bins in the basement at the Strand, I was thrilled to find a third-hand copy of a Lanagan-Schmidt catalogue printed in the mid eighties, but at this point in the New Millennium, Lanigan-Schmidt seemed more a myth from a long-past golden season, someone whose name you could mention as a talisman to a small coterie of initiates who shared an appreciation for the most brilliant and gaudy eye to have ever noodled “trash flash” together.

Since the mid-eighties, a couple of generations of artists have appeared on the scene, brandishing foil, pipe-cleaners, cellophane, glitter, and dime store doilies without a clue about the aesthetic precedents for this material exuberance.  Happily, a couple of years ago, I spotted a blurb for a two-person show at one of the new galleries popping up on West Twenty-third Street, Pavel Zoubok.  Stapled to the Soul paired collages by Lanigan-Schmidt and Jerry Jofen, who had in common an obsessive use of Swingline staples as both a fastening agent and decorative element.

Placemats and Potholders (Memory & Desire), with its informative catalogue and essay by the New Museum’s Dan Cameron, brings us up-to-date with the spiritually transformative practice of Lanigan-Schmidt.    “Jackie and Mona” (2006) is like a glorious “box of chocolates” with thick strands of foil forming bezel settings around gem-like blocks of silk, plastic pearlescent nuggets, and comically altered puffy photos that include a bug-eyed Shakespeare and a rendition of a big haired “Mona Lisa”  recalling Nancy Sinatra during her These Boots Were Made for Walking heyday.

A foray into total abstraction in some of the “placemats” departs from his normal focus on heads and figures clipped from fanzines or snapshots. In works like “Nymphs and Satyrs Denounced by St. Augustine” (2006), he explores more purely the formalism of the decorative.  In “Placemat (Bitter Celibate)” (2006), the collage’s shape parodies that of a Baroque picture frame, with rounded corners and scalloped edges.  Bands of glittering color, form diagonal grids echoing harlequin check, and fragments of golden florets, rhinestones, lozenges of fluorescent pink, magenta, green and sapphire blue are encased within layers of cellophane, recalling the deep, lacquered finishes of medieval enamels.  By eschewing photos and ironic comic kitsch, he reduces the work’s exterior associations with movie stars, friends, lovers, and art history.  Instead, pieces like “Midnight Bubble Bath” (2006), generate their potency from the integration of their unique color combinations, their raised line-work of pipe cleaners or twisted foil, and their reflective-and-shiny versus dark-and-matte finishes of their surfaces.  Perhaps, like the empty place left for Elijah at the Seder table, Lanigan-Schmidt sees the ‘Placemats” as memorials for friends absent and the “Potholders” as emotional insulation for desires that still burn hot.

"The Dirty Work of Making Art History," published on Eye on Brooklyn Blog

By Loren Munk

For those of you who have been keeping an ”Eye On Brooklyn”, I would like to thank Larry Walczak for his initial posting that featured my “We Are Our own Art History” project. I truly appreciate the community response the project received, and it was a lot of fun to interact with you folks from the neighborhood.  Now that I’ve had a chance to look over some of the reactions, reviews, and responses, I just wanted to share some of the outcomes and observations that the project elicited.

As part of my theory The Physics of Aesthetics, I believe that art is more than just the residual matter, the painting, the drawing, the poem, the video, the performance etc. Rather it is a force that flows through individuals, communities, and relationships and it spawns the impetus for these artistic productions.  One way of representing these forces is through the diagrammatic representations of maps and charts.  Another aspect of The Physics of Aesthetics is the art historical record which creates a foundation for our perceptions regarding “visible” versus “invisible” art.  That is, which efforts have been considered important enough to be preserved and seen, and which efforts have been erased.  To this point, forces outside the actual communities such as speculators, critics, scholars and “art historians” with little or no contact to the artists themselves, have been privileged with the prerogative of making these determinations.  Though it may appear audacious, my experiment in asking the Williamsburg arts community to help create a record of its own history was a simple way to see how people actually regard themselves and their practices in relation to the big world of ART HISTORY.  The mere idea that the individual artist, we poor struggling drudges, would be able to have any relevant input into the exclusive realms of actual history was absurd.   Never being one to shy away from looking foolish, I hoped to design a project that would essentially take on a power of its own and direct itself, and that it did.

Having photographed a wide variety of personalities from the Williamsburg community over the last nine years, I began the charting with more than 120 portraits of local folks that I’d become acquainted with.  In my appeals for participation to the public which were published in the Brooklyn Rail and with help from both Larry Walczak and David Gibson, we were able to add about another 110 photos during the exhibition bringing the current total somewhere around 230.

Jerry Saltz recently commented that he didn’t understanding why so many male artists seemed “obsessed with history” (maybe that’s why they call it “his” story).  Ironically, from what I could see, women were more prone to make an effort to be “on the art map” than men.  For some, I assume it was just a goof or vanity, still others made the effort to come by the project and make sure their photos were taken and added to the map, even though they had little or no real connections to Williamsburg.  Perhaps it was the lax criteria and unjudgmental nature of the project.  Conversely there was also the other end of the spectrum wherein some fairly accomplished artists refused to have anything to do with it, as if they didn’t want to be stigmatized as part of the Williamsburg scene, perhaps they had beefs with some of the other folks (they didn’t think some individuals should be included), or maybe they thought I would exploit them, that the project might compromise their privacy. 

Unexpected responses included a very generous contribution of original prints from a lady who had lived in the neighborhood for fifty years where she raised a family, painted, drew and printed the local sites (in what I must say is a very sophisticated and sensitive style) and who had moved to Long Island recently, but returned for this opportunity to be part of Williamsburg’s community.  A young galleriest who nearly cried because he said he’d never been included in anything like this before (maybe it was just too many beers).  Still others were angered at being placed outside the central locations and were displeased with the how they were portrayed.

In one of his subsequent posts regarding a review by R.C. Baker in the Village Voice, Larry stated that Baker had omitted mentioning the main thrust of the show, represented by the large interactive diagram mapping the constituents of the Williamsburg arts community.  Other reviewers also ignored the Williamsburg connection.  These omissions might signal the art press’ boredom with the whole Williamsburg thing or their Manhattan chauvinism. Perhaps beyond being a place which had cheap rents and attracted an active tribe of bohemians, there is the realization that to this point, despite it early potential, there are few local artists or galleries who have cracked the big times, and established the ‘burg as a world class art neighborhood like Greenwich Village, East 10th Street, Soho, or the East Village.  Or like the Williamsburg eulogy delivered by William Powhida (presented elsewhere on this blog), they see the scene in a declining phase and believe it’s only a matter of time before it flickers out (remember Soho and the East Village).  Maybe (probably) the reviewers just didn’t find the piece or the community that interesting.  In any case, the process of mapping history is an ongoing and messy business.  For anyone still willing to make contributions you can drop things off at Dam Stuhltrager Gallery or contact me at www.lorenmunk.com.  We Are Our Own Art History.

"Erik Guzman “The Lost Sense” Front Room Gallery October 20 - November 19," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

The objects produced by Erik Guzman leave this viewer in a conundrum.  Are they machines that want to be sculptures or sculptures that want to be machines?  The Futurists theorized about sculpture that would incorporate mechanical motion and celebrate modern life.  Shortly thereafter Duchamp stuck the front fork and wheel of a bicycle on a stool and the world of sculpture has never been the same.  But where the Futurists envisioned a technological utopia, and Duchamp created a whimsical sexual metaphor, Guzman’s “The Lost Sense” seems to represent a philosophical cul-de-sac for both these directions.

Walk past the two tall sheets of sandblasted aluminum with their oddly decorative symmetrical cutouts propped against a wall of the first gallery and proceed into the darkened second room.  You are confronted by a strange, space-age contrivance, attached to the far wall just below eyelevel.  This “machine” features a centrifuge-like device with a thick, sleekly milled spindle axis, measuring about three feet across.  A solid steel sphere, slightly smaller than a hardball, is mounted on the end of one arm.  This is counterbalanced on the opposite end by a broad, polished metal strip with curving eyelets, countersunk screws, electrical wiring and a bank of 650-watt theatrical light bulbs.  A sleek white aqua-resin cowling with a circular channel encases the rear two-thirds of the object.  On the floor is a carpet of Beuysian felt extending about eight feet in front.  At this point “Lost Sense” appears to be a static group of beautifully crafted objects, all of the metal parts having been fashioned from the cutouts from the larger of the two aluminum sheets in the front gallery.

Now the fun begins.  A sensor pad under the carpet activates “Lost Sense” when an unsuspecting spectator approaches within a meter of the thing.  Slowly the arms start to rotate within the resin cowl.  In a moment the light bulbs begin to shine with a dim, red-orange glow.  As the rotational speed increases, so does the brilliance of the lights.   Within thirty seconds light reaches a blinding level. You can feel the blast of radiant heat with each rotation of the lighting bank.  The entire gallery is engulfed in the zooming, strobe-like beams projected from the rotor.  The lights blast, the axis whirs, the wall begins to vibrate.  The gleaming aerodynamic forms start to look threateningly like weapons.  At some point most observers standing close to “Lost Sense” begin to move back for fear that something bad is about to happen, an over-amped piece of high-tech art accelerating into the danger zone. 

This fearful awareness is exactly the response the artist is seeking.  Mankind, it seems to Guzman, has lost much of its innate sense of self-preservation.  The technological utopia, dreamed of by the Futurists, has become a nightmare overwhelming us in a sea of useless stimulation.  It’s too late for clever polemics or philosophical demonstrations; only a threat to life and limb can hope to penetrate the ennui and register the urgency of the situation.  But it’s not just a fight or flight response that “Lost Sense” triggers.  It also exerts a curious magnetism, a desire to experience the flat-out power of a work of art and the possible disaster it might cause.

As for the question of whether “Lost Sense” is a machine or a sculpture: traditionally sculpture is defined as an aesthetic treatment of three-dimensional form in space, while a machine is any combination of interrelated parts that employs energy to perform a task. Therefore, in traditional terms, “Lost Sense” is a machine, but a machine whose function is to produce a specific aesthetic result.  Can a jolt of fear and trembling be valid responses to visual art? Perhaps. Just don’t stand too close.

"Peter Caine “New Works” At Jack the Pelican Presents September 8 – October 8," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Time was there were things that one just didn’t discuss in polite company: bodily functions, religion, and politics.  Culture, at large, was supposed to filter out the grosser elements of life, but now we brandish our expertise in the latest and greatest outrages with pride.  Aw shucks, doesn’t the obscene shock and awe us any more?

With this, his fifth solo show in New York featuring his animated sculpture, Peter Caine welcomes us into the new millennium.  In his “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” (2006), a rollicking Marquis de Sade, with a face like a pile of gravel, straddles the bow of a battered rowboat.  On his left sits an economy-sized jar of Vaseline next to a Bible open to Deuteronomy 23-24.  His britches are open and his erect penis gushes an endless flow of simulated semen, while a silver-faced George Washington dangles Barbara Bush’s decapitated head over the frothing fountain, “I don’t know if I can fit that in my mouth.  That’s naughty, so naughty, lip-smacking naughty,” squeaks Caine’s voice in his best First Lady imitation on an endless tape loop.  Behind them, an aroused Honest Abe in blackface flails a Confederate flag over the portside gunwale.  Other crew members on this macabre boating party are Dorothy from the “Wizard of Oz,” her head a cluster of flashing, gyrating gadgets, the axe-wielding Tin Woodsman, and Prince Whipple covered in a skin of Wheat Chex.

After “Crossing the Delaware,” we pass through a grove of tall, irregularly cylindrical columns called “Cabana Boys” that seem to mock the existential austerity of Giacometti and Brancusi, by twisting and jutting about like fabric-covered hoochie-coochie dancers.

“Rudolph and Friends” (2006) depicts our red-nosed hero as a dope-smoking reprobateridden by a stovepipe-hatted Lincoln brandishing a Hitler mask and a bloody, head-shot, chocolate-brown Shirley Temple with a popped-out eyeball.  Rudolph’s sleigh is a ratty shopping cart filled with white fleece and trashcan pickings.  Bringing up the rear is a green-lipped, hip-swiveling Rasta-Santa toking a huge joint and singing Christmas carols.

“USS Sperry” (2006) is the showstopper.  Its black lights and fluorescent paint engulfs the entire back gallery, submerging the viewer in a cartoonish, radioactive lagoon.  Glowing barrels imprinted with nuclear symbols litter the ocean floor between rock outcroppings and coral blooms.  A frogman monitors atomic levels with a Geiger counter as schools of brilliant tropical fish swim among floating bubbles and anchor chains.  This scene is based on Caine’s own experiences while serving in the Navy aboard the USS Sperry and, aside from a bug-eyed sea horse, should be viewed as a serious take on radioactive waste disposal by way of his trademark insouciance.

As a child, Peter Caine dreamed of three career paths.  One was to be a veterinarian, which he’s pursued through a love of, and caring for, animals.  Second was to be a stand-up comedian.  He’d stay up late and tape comic routines from the “Johnny Carson Show,” then work up his own acts.  Third, after visiting a Van Gogh exhibition, the child Caine knew he wanted to be an artist.  (Poor Vincent.  If he could see what his work inspired, he might well chop off his other ear.)  A fourth career the artist might have picked is cinematographer.  Each of his ambitious tableaux is designed with an eye for the dramatic.  Characters are cast, the staging is blocked, actions programmed, costumes chosen, props selected, lighting devised, dialogue written and recorded.  Smoke and bubble machines, electric balls, antique fans, and mechanical gizmos of all kinds lend the shebang the sensation of a grungy mad professor at work on some diabolical passion play.

After a couple of visits and a period of Kantian contemplation to clear my aesthetic pallet, I realized that much of this works staying power springs from a double-edged nostalgia. To one side are innocent memories of visiting Christmas window displays at places like Macy’s, featuring Santa and his elves making toys, Mrs. Claus baking cookies, and reindeer flying over rooftops.  The darker, more magnetically disturbing side recalls the bawdy humor of bathroom joke books, or the pioneering, sexually explicit provocations published in Zap by the great underground comic artists S. Clay Wilson and R. Crumb at their most puerile.  Childlike ingenuity and the desire to create a fantasy world slam up against an over-the-top indecency that rivets the viewer with an almost masochistic challenge to probe his or her levels of personal propriety.

Despite the popularity of high-tech art and “new media,” the realm of animatronic sculptural installations is still fairly small.  Paul McCarthy and the brothers Jake and Dino Chapman come to mind, but Caine has claimed ignorance of both these oeuvres until six months ago.  Although largely self taught, Caine shies away from the from the more naïve classification of “Outsider” artist preferring to be considered as a contemporary rather than folk artist, and like many of today’s TV pundits he knows which buttons to push and he’s merciless in confronting social norms, sacred cows and the overly sensitive looking to be insulted.  

The recently closed Dada exhibition at MoMA, with its rugged materials and abundance of repugnant subject matter, exposed one root of Caine’s anti-aesthetics.  Pollock’s piss-like dribblings or Twombly’s fecal-like globs, which morphed during Proto-Pop into Peter’s Saul’s garish cartoon heads, might be another.  Satirizing racial stereotypes has been acceptable when it comes from the studios of established African American artists like Robert Colescott or Michael Ray Charles, but what kind of response can we expect when these jibes are posited by a white guy?  Beyond that there is a quaint folksiness from the heartland quality, like listening to the grizzled local eccentric at a truck stop whose caffeinated rants begin to bare striking similarities to the deconstructivist ideas of Adorno and Derrida. 

Among the questions taunting the viewer is whether Caine is a cutting-edge transgressive bad-boy, tweaking both the middle class and intelligencia, while also making a mess of art market cordiality, or a wacky overly energetic hayseed with a perverted sense of what sophisticated humor entails?  Whether the world beyond the precincts of Williamsburg is ready to validate Caine’s vision, who can tell.  Meanwhile, we can amuse our selves by taking bets on whether the avant-garde’s covenant with unbridled creative expression trumps its current commitment to the politically correct.

"History by Exclusion, Illuminating the “Dark Matter” of the Art World," written in conjunction with the exhibition “We Are Our Own Art History” at Dam & Stuhltrager Brooklyn, New York

By Loren Munk

Whether you want to admit it or not, if you’re reading this, you like me are probably a minute part of the “art world.”  Now that doesn’t mean we get the attention we deserve from the likes of ARTFORUM, Flash Art or Art in America, have our works installed in major museums or get personality profiles published in the glossy “Art Press.”   No, what it means is that we partake in the reception, exchange and generation of the energy which is manifest as art.  The paintings, sculptures, music, poetry, photography, dance, drama and what ever else defined as “art” is merely the residual matter left over from the human expenditure of the energy that is “art.”  As energy, I believe, that art may be governed by forces that that can be analyzed and calculated, indeed that there is an extra-aesthetic nature to art that lies more within the realm of rational science than in the ephemeral mystical world of “taste,” or “quality.”  This branch of thought I call the “physics of aesthetics,” and it encompasses the whole spectrum of cultural activities from economics, to social relationships, artistic production, and finally history. 

There are many parallels between the “physics of aesthetics” and the world of regular physics.  For example, astrophysicists tell us that within our own universe ninety percent of the material out there emits no light, and is therefore called “dark matter.”  Yet because of the huge amount of this “dark matter” it obviously produces the bulk of forces which though invisible, nevertheless shapes and influences the nature and destiny of our cosmos.

Likewise in our art universe most of the artists and their production are invisible to the broadest sections of society.  The reasons for this are as varied as the individuals the circumstances and attitudes of those who practice art.  Yet their influences are felt and the forces generated by their creations shape the perceptions of art.  Till now the final arbiter of value and influence has been the receptacle of art history, you could call it the light of art.  Tragically the arts community has been subjected to a set of criteria for inclusion within that history that has been set by academicians and intellectual “specialists” who were themselves non-artists, responding to their own biases and other unknown motivations, and are generally outside the artistic community. 

Perhaps these musings are symptomatic of the Post-Modernist challenge to the meta-narrative that was Modernism, an effort to question the establishment’s hegemony.  Perhaps it is time for society at large to broaden its views, to begin a more rigorous observation of cultural production, to question the notion of the “mainstream theory” of what and who constitute a serious “history” of art.  And perhaps it is time for the arts community to break the repressive stranglehold of the elites, who have dictated the standards and definitions of what should be illuminated as relevant art. 

It has been argued that because of the messy business of art and life that to present a clear and understandable narrative to the uninitiated, (not to mention a more succinct sales pitch) its history must be manicured and trimmed like a topiary bush.  Many museum curators, historians and critics see their jobs as gatekeepers to the realm of history and “good taste,” akin the death-camp guards whose job it is to decide who goes directly to the gas-chambers, and who lives another day.  Meanwhile the people who make up the bulk of the arts community have little or no voice in deciding their own fates. 

There is too within this new awareness a sense of memorial, a desire to extend the ever contracting attention span of the arts audience. We wish to honor, however humbly, those on the margins, the disenfranchised and those who have previously achieved notoriety, but through the machinations of current historical and marketplace practices have been erased.

It was with an eye to the above ideas, however vague or inarticulately expressed, that about eight years ago I began to develop a series of text based works that would illustrate some of the principles of the “physics of aesthetics.”  As a conventional painter with little science or history background I’ve sought to use the sensual qualities of paint to illustrate the narrative of painting, to make a self-referential framework within which to examine the media, the networks of relationships and extra-aesthetic factors that have created our contemporary perceptions of “painting,” and art.  I can only hope, with these feeble efforts to attempt to illuminate some small portion of the “dark matter” of the art world.  Perhaps now we may begin to question what is art, who gets to decide and what’s the artist’s place within society?  As self-selected members of the art world it is time we declared, “we are our own art history.”

"Rosa Loy “9 Wege” at David Zwirner June 27 - July 28," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Imagine one of Balthus’s pubescent models running away from the chateau, joining a band of gypsies or a bizarre cult of female smugglers, and ending up in a university town behind the “Iron Curtain”. Later, she begins to paint, inspired by the dreamlike experiences of her exotic life.  And, to complicate matters further, there’s a mysterious twin sister who may or may not be real but who still holds influence over the complex comings and goings of these painted narrative tableaus.  While, to my knowledge, none of this ever happened to Rosa Loy (although she did attend the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, the legendarily liberal East German city, where she later became one of the few women painters associated with that boys’ club marketed as the “Leipzig Schule”), her paintings do invite overwrought interpretations to explicate their oblique happenings.

In “Disorientierung” (2006), Loy depicts a chilly, moonlit landscape in which two ash-blond women, mirror images of each other, struggle with a long, thick, entangling crimson vine.  Dressed in contemporary jeans, boots and winter coat, the figure on the left appears in control of the tussle, with both hands pulling on the single vine that loops around her waist.  The woman on the right, wearing what appear to be white medieval pantaloons, is enwrapped in several maroon coils that lift her off the ground.  Perhaps this isn’t a fight between twins but a rescue attempt, the sister of the world saving the sister of fantasy from the grasping tentacle of reality. 
Beyond this struggle-filled narrative, there is another battle waged here between the artist’s need to render a figure precisely, to model form and to depict a traditional sense of depth, and her desire to sprint past the fill-in phase of the painting in order to concentrate on the visual focal points of her complex compositions.  Loy, like Balthus’s late works, utilizes casein, a water-based binder with a short drying time, which requires her to work fast and make decisions on the run, so to speak.  As with watercolor, the image’s highlights seem to be the white of bare canvas, with shadows built up by overlaying glazes of pigment.  This classic technique provides a vantage point into the painterly process, which, in Loy’s case, is a precarious balance between fresh, spontaneous paint handling and a perfunctory casualness that leaves one with a sense of raw uneasiness.  Any kind of overworking deadens the surface and reduces the colors to milky mush.

Loy populates her narratives almost exclusively with women engaged in indecipherable activities.  “Exorzismus” (2006), depicts a boxing match in which the combatants wear color-coordinated gloves and miniskirts, while the image of a female archer hovers behind them as if projected on the wall.  In “Mitgefühl” (2006), a magisterial redhead, holding a crystal scepter, kneels beside a reclining girl as if ministering to her. In “Träumen” (2006), two young women wander through a dreamlike landscape amid lush hedges of tropically hued foliage. Loy’s color sense is often split between translucent scrims of neutral or pale pastel tones and slabs of saturated synthetic hues dense enough to induce claustrophobia, as with the tangle of eels in the phthalo-green-keyed “Orientierung” (2005).  The eels float up a bedroom wall like freeform calligraphy, their sickly castexacerbating a creepy dreadfulness, as the attending women wrangle their slippery prey with gray-green stained hands.  In “Septemberglocken” (2006) two women stride up a muddy umber road accompanied by a pair of triangular cobalt blue shadows so opaque they could be ridden like skateboards.

While many critics have noted the influence of not only Balthus and Giotto but also Neo Rauch, Loy’s husband, on the artist, I also see strong parallels with the enigmatic films of David Lynch, and the classically inspired paintings of Hans von Marées (1837-1887).  Like Lynch, Loy cobbles together pictures from disparate pictorial sources, twisting slightly the accepted meanings of symbols and signs to fit a new storyline.  And as inLynch’s Mulholland Dr., Loy wrests her potential shocks from the split between the fantastical and the real-world personas of contemporary women.  Loy’s struggle to unite a venerable figurative tradition within a modern painting criterion, and her placement of frontally lighted, stylized figures within a shallow space or landscape, lends her pictures a mythical northern chill that echoes the heroic late works of her fellow German, Marées. 

The hype surrounding the “Leipzig Schule,” perhaps reflecting the neo-conservative tendencies within the academy, has focused mainly on the male members.  Loy has sidestepped the clichéd sensationalism and swaggering bravura of the “bad boys” and, by offering a more authentic, less bombastic vision to the movement, she has widened its appeal. Leipzig should be glad.