NURTUREArt Auction

Check out NURTUREArt's auction on October 11, 2011 at the Chelsea Art Museum. Tickets for the auction can be purchased at the following link: http://nurtureart.org/?p=2451

Read Sharon Butler of Two Coats of Paint for a great history of NURTUREArt by clicking the link above. NURTUREArt is an artist-run organization that supports both artistic and curatorial endeavors.

Robert Morris, Anti-Form

Artforum (April 1968)

In recent object-type art the invention of new forms is not an issue. A morphology of geometric, predominantly rectangular forms has been accepted as a given premise. The engagement of the work becomes focused on the particularization of these general forms by means of varying scale, material, proportion, placement. Because of the flexibility as well as the passive, unemphasized nature of object-type shape it is a useful means. The use of the rectangular has a long history. The right angle has been in use since the first post and lintel constructions. Its efficiency is unparalleled in building with rigid materials, stretching a piece of canvas, etc. This generalized usefulness has moved the rectangle through architecture, painting, sculpture, objects. But only in the case of object-type art have the forms of the cubic and the rectangular been brought so far forward into the final definition of the work. That is, it stands as a self-sufficient whole shape rather than as a relational element. To achieve a cubic or rectangular form is to build in the simplest, most reasonable way, but it is also to build well.

This imperative for the well-built thing solved certain problems. It got rid of asymmetrical placing and composition, for one thing. The solution also threw out all non-rigid materials. This is not the whole story of so‐ called Minimal or Object art. Obviously it does not account for the use of purely decorative schemes of repetitive and progressive ordering of multiple unit work. But the broad rationality of such schemes is related to the reasonableness of the well-built. What remains problematic about these schemes is the fact that any order for multiple units is an imposed one which has no inherent relation to the physicality of the existing units. Permuted, progressive, symmetrical organizations have a dualistic character in relation to the matter they distribute. This is not to imply that these simple orderings do not work. They simply separate, more or less, from what is physical by making relationships themselves another order of facts. The relationships such schemes establish are not critical from point to point as in European art. The duality is established by the fact that an order, any order, is operating beyond the physical things. Probably no art can completely resolve this. Some art, such as Pollock's, comes close.

The process of "making itself" has hardly been examined. It has only received attention in terms of some kind of mythical, romanticized polarity: the so-called action of the Abstract Expressionists and the so-called conceptualizations of the Minimalists. This does not locate any differences between the two types of work. The actual work particularizes general assumptions about forms in both cases. There are some exceptions. Both ways of working continue the European tradition of aestheticizing general forms that has gone on for half a century. European art since Cubism has been a history of permuting relationships around the general premise that relationships should remain critical. American art has developed by uncovering successive alternative premises for making itself.

Of the Abstract Expressionists only Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of the work. Pollock's recovery of process involved a profound rethinking of the role of both material and tools in making. The stick which drips paint is a tool which acknowledges the nature of the fluidity of paint. Like any other tool it is still one that controls and transforms matter. But unlike the brush it is in far greater sympathy with matter because it acknowledges the inherent tendencies and properties of that matter. In some ways Louis was even closer to matter in his use of the container itself to pour the fluid.

To think that painting has some inherent optical nature is ridiculous. It is equally silly to define its "thingness" as acts of logic that acknowledge the edges of the support. The optical and the physical are both there. Both Pollock and Louis were aware of both. Both used directly the physical, fluid properties of paint. Their "optical" forms resulted from dealing with the properties of fluidity and the conditions of a more or less absorptive ground. The forms and the order of their work were not a priori to the means.

The visibility of process in art occurred with the saving of sketches and unfinished work in the High Renaissance. In the nineteenth century both Rodin and Rosso left traces of touch in finished work. Like the Abstract Expressionists after them, they registered the plasticity of material in autobiographical terms. It remained for Pollock and Louis to go beyond the personalism of the hand to the more direct revelation of matter itself. How Pollock broke the domination of Cubist form is tied to his investigation of means: tools, methods of making, nature of material. Form is not perpetuated by means but by preservation of separable idealized ends. This is an anti-entropic and conservative enterprise. It accounts for Greek architecture changing from wood to marble and looking the same, or for the look of Cubist bronzes with their fragmented, faceted planes. The perpetuation of form is functioning idealism.

In object-type art process is not visible. Materials often are. When they are, their reasonableness is usually apparent. Rigid industrial materials go together at right angles with great ease. But it is the a priori valuation of the well-built that dictates the materials. The well-built form of objects preceded any consideration of means. Materials themselves have been limited to those which efficiently make the general object form.

Recently, materials other than rigid industrial ones have begun to show up. Oldenburg was one of the first to use such materials. A direct investigation of the properties of these materials is in progress. This involves a reconsideration of the use of tools in relation to material. In some cases these investigations move from the making of things to the making of material itself. Sometimes a direct manipulation of a given material without the use of any tool is made. In these cases considerations of gravity become as important as those of space. The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms which were not projected in advance.

Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied since replacing will result in another configuration. Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.

Teleport Me!

In Taipei at the National Palace Museum: Painting Reunited, through September 5th, 2011.

Click the link above to read all about my favorite painting of all time in the world. You can play with a section of it on the Museum's home page, but only a small section. The desire to see the scroll in its entirety persists. Here at Raggedy Ann's Foot, enter the top image from bottom right, travel down the images from right to left and exit the bottom image at the lower left. It's a bumpy ride, I know, but enjoy the "hemp stroke" mountains and dotting techniques that make this scroll a masterpiece!

When I traveled to Taiwan for the second time, in 2005, with the naive hope of seeing the painting, the closest I got was an oversized cloth-covered catalogue of the Museum's Yuan Dynasty collection. I bought it immediately and dragged the book to China, where in the cold December month copied the scroll, segment by segment, from the book to sheets of rice paper. It did not fulfill my desire to see the scroll in its entirety, but I felt much closer to the composition, and learned how Huang rotates the space, taking us in front of and then behind the rising mountains, offsetting the peaks with lowlands and reefs. Back in the US I lugged the book to a Kinko's, photocopied the segments and pasted them together. Wherever I go, I take the mini-scroll with me, some pages blacker than others, dented now with the times it's been rolled and moved. Still, I yearn to see the painting as conceived by my teacher and mentor, Huang Gongwang, a Yuan Dynasty great. Teleport me.

Studio Visits in Long Island City

S.E. Nash

S.E. Nash

S.E. Nash's studio

Detail

Several weeks ago I visited Long Island City to visit S. E. Nash. Check her website, linked above, for even better images of her worlds within worlds, constructed from sintra, which resembles paper, but is more solid.  (I've just rechecked the link and to my horror, found it did not work. In case it continues not to, the site is senash.com).

I also visited Thomas Martin, whose quirky marker drawings you can see at http://thomas-martin.org. He works small, repeating shapes, and moving back into them with collage-like elements (lines or planes). Thomas has worked with D. Rockburne, and you can see this influence combined with his curiosity about structure.

Thomas Martin, a work from 2009

His collages led me to think about Lisa Hamilton's geometric and folded works on paper from 2010, which you can see here: http://lisahamilton.net. Since I've last seen her work she has taken this concept and run with it in longer, serial formats.

Lisa Hamilton, from 2010

Shows, Part III (Figments)

Dan Christensen, from The Ghost  in the Machine, curated by Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg

Pure magic: color as space. Wall looks pink, but color seems true-r in painting.

Li SongSong at Pace Gallery, 25th St.

Part of a scroll from Schroeder, Romero & Shredder's worldclass exhibition (linked above)

Japanese wood block prints...gorgeous ceramics...mixed with contemporary art. This gallery is mounting some memorable shows! "Vivid" and "Pavers" from 2010--and now this! Truly a museum quality exhibition--what I am showing here is a mere taste of what is in the gallery.

Shows, Part II

 "Painting Expanded" at Tanya Bonakdar.

Knit painting. Better color than portrayed here.

Josh Faught. Find the fingernail in the pink field of bloom.

Below, Terry Winters at Matthew Marks, 1980s but timely in the revival of lush and painterly paint. Look at the color!

Below, Carrie Moyer in Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, curated by Kate McNamara. This exhibition sparkled with summery slices of brilliant color and thoughtful installation.My phone camera did not capture the show's luminosity.

 Moyer, Polly Apfelbaum (table in front), Nicole Cherubini (sculpture). The Cherubi was charming--the Apfelbaum like little cakes for the eyes.

Shifting gears down the street with Jessica Rohrer, PPOW (their website uses this image as well).

Not sure the image can do justice to the strange space that occurs perceptually in Roher's bay window below.

Shows

Pat Lay at Sideshow

Pat Lay, detail

Pat Lay, who in addition to sculpture has been making collage tapestries of motherboards and other technological images.

Mark Grotjahn, detail 

Mark Grotjahn

Grotjahn's surface close-to

More Grotjahn-nice red in back

Grotjahn-detail

Mark Grotjahn's breakout show, passionately and totally painted.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Detail of Dupuy-Spencer, photographed through a crowd of people at the opening with an iPhone

A new presence, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer at Museum 52, showing with Nicole Eisenman and Leidy Churchman.

Third and Final Post: Beijing, Ritan Park and Golou Da Jie

Ritan Park...

Sun Mural, 6 x 15 metres

Kua Fu chasing the sun...

Beijing was a whirlwind: two weeks of appointments, galleries and on a fine Sunday morning, a memorable bike ride to Ritan Park. A full hour in flowing traffic through Beijing's rotaries, from our hotel near the view above to Ritan, one of China's oldest parks. Built in 1530 as an altar for ritual sacrifice to the sun god, the park features a mural that combines public art with spiritual devotion in its  sumptuously glazed and patterned ceramic tiles.

The view above became familiar on the trip. I often sat at this cafe mid-morning over coffee, unable to relinquish the attachment despite the best tea in the world. The view afforded no end of entertainment: a small child bouncing on a huge, green animal toy across the walk, an ancient woman with a cane who stopped to doze on the bench outside and passersby returning home from the night before or hastening to work.

Yangshuo, China

Every time I am in China, there comes the time to splurge on a 5-star hotel. On a four-day trip to Yangshuo, an hour's taxi from Guilin (see photo above, on approach) and three-hour flight from Beijing, I selected the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat. A western-style dining room, baked cookies served on arrival and spying a New Yorker jarred my Asian immersion, momentarily. Spacious quarters, ambling gardens and room lights that could only be activated by remote control corrected the disjunction: indeed, this is China.

Men rowing long bamboo rafts with chairs affixed floated past my balcony on the clear and gentle Yulong River. No greater luxury than a motorcycle taxi to purchase a ticket and be rowed gently downstream, mountains looming around. Have your photo taken here, eat some beer fish there, beckoned small, river-based business as our raft drifted past. Natural waterfalls puncutated the meandering pace of the raft, sometimes suddenly, drenching us, other times gently. It reminded me of the rocking pace of Disneyland rides as a child: Pirates of the Carribean, particularly. I wonder how many Disney designers traveled to Asia--seems so many of their ideas germinate here.

What I love about China, and for that matter Los Angeles, is the natural abundance in landscape. There does not seem to be any limits to what the land will do. Pine trees growing out of rock? No problem. Water, mountain and desert combined? Why not? In Yangshuo, the karst mountains loomed irregularly from the river, creating a Flintstones-like terrain I cannot wait to paint. Above, the views from my room are still beautiful, photographed on an iPhone in the raw, hot middle of the day. Yet, it was on a night motorcycle ride that the views were most amazing: the mountains' shapes reflected in the river, moonlight glowing, seen at a glimpse as we sped past, the engine of the motorcycle the only noise one heard.

Yuan Dynasty painters and their commitment to landscape as a mode of resistance to unwelcome political rule led to some of the greatest painting in China. Wandering was not simply a matter of spiritual seeking, but an active choice for freedom, to live as one wished beyond the confines of institutionalized demands. Yet, wandering is also practical in my experience of China. Each time I go, the landscape opens itself to deeper exploration, like chapters in a book. One place summons an association to another place, or demands more time spent than I have. There is never just one landscape and never just one reason to wander.