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To read the Raw Vision Ramírez essay, click here. To read the article about abstract art from Art & Antiques magazine, click here. A PDF will take a few seconds to download.
18 May 2013 Paintings on view in New York: Pour, baby, pour! NEW YORK - Barnett Newman once observed: “We are creating images whose reality is self-evident...” Uh-huh. Pollock dripped. Newman famously “zipped” (his narrow, vertical stripes, or “zips,” helped energize the pictorial space of his vast color-field paintings, he theorized). De Kooning pushed paint around and scraped it back off again. Fontana painted a canvas a solid color and then, daringly (?), slashed its surface. Countless other abstract-expressionists, as modern art’s canonical story tells us, flung paint at their canvases and found diverse ways to explore its communicative potential in fits of soul-stirring, existential Sturm und Drang that forever changed our understanding of what paintings could be and how they could appear. Indeed, many an abstract painter’s efforts called as much attention to a painting’s nature as a physical object as they did to the method by which it was produced or to its real or imagined meanings.
And then there were the paint pourers. Think Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Jenkins, Morris Louis... Theirs was a different kind of very fluid, accident-accepting, sometimes-controlled, sometimes-not-so-controlled, splishy-splashy way of creating paintings. Now, simultaneously, two New York galleries are presenting “Pour,” an exhibition that examines the work of a group of contemporary artists who make paintings on canvas and other support surfaces using a variety of pouring techniques. Co-curated by the artists Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, one part of “Pour” is on view at Asya Geisberg Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea district through June 1 (537B West 23rd Street, telephone 212-675-7525). Part two is on view at Lesley Heller Workspace, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, through May 24 (54 Orchard Street, telephone 212-410-6120). Artists whose work are featured in the two-part presentation include Ingrid Calame, Kris Chatterson, Roland Flexner, Angelina Gualdoni, Carrie Moyer, Carolanna Parlato, David Reed, Jackie Saccoccio and Carrie Yamaoka. During my recent visit to the Asya Geisberg Gallery’s portion of the exhibition, where I met up with Condon, the artist noted that the diverse selection of works on view at the show’s two venues “examines the techniques of post-World War II abstraction from the vantage of today’s digital culture.” In her own work, Condon incorporates various modes of paint-pouring, experiments with reflective materials and allusions to ancient Chinese painting’s push-me-pull-you perspectives. Like several of the works on view in “Pour,” Condon’s paintings are marked by energetic compositions that play with a viewer’s perception of pictorial space.
In their written notes about the exhibition, Condon and Prusa point out that, by “[f]loating, pouring and sweeping liquid pigment on canvas and panel, alone or in combination with ‘dry’ applications, such as drawing and collage,” the artists whose works are on view “redefine form and space in terms of speed, texture and depth.” Works on view in “Pour” include Roland Flexner’s small (each about the size of about three playing cards), black-and-white abstractions on paper made with liquid graphite, which the artist pushes around his surface by blowing on it through a drinking straw. The resulting compositions resemble surreal landscapes or frothy cascades, and their rich tones are as vivid as the sharp gradations of grays and blacks in fine photographic prints. In works like Jolly Rancher (2012), made with acrylic and graphite on canvas, Carrie Moyer offers big, bright bon-bons marked by dynamic plays of overlapping layers of color and of shape-defining, drawn lines against the hard edges of solid, colored forms. Using oil paint and mica on linen, Jackie Saccoccio creates surfaces with a luxurious sheen; her compositions feature blob-like forms that seem to break up into nets of interwoven lines of drippy color or, conversely, thickets of drippy filaments that gather and congeal into formless forms that float on or near the top layer of a multilayered pictorial space. An enthusiastic colorist, Carolanna Parlato uses acrylic on linen or canvas—assorted pinks, lemon and pastel yellows, fiery orange, acid greens and more—in some of the exhibition’s most vivid examples of the paint-pouring method. Elegant and ecstatic, her paintings seem to revel in their exploration of a very liquid paint’s shiny, viscous goo. By inevitably calling attention to how real, live human art-makers create their works (as opposed to computers or nameless fabricators to whom an art-product marketer merely sends his designs to be manufactured), “Pour” may be seen in part as a reaction against the hands-off aesthetic that asserts that eliminating any visible evidence of the touch of the artist’s hand in a finished piece is a most desirable goal. Whatever the theoretical, compositional or thematic concerns of the artists whose works are on display, “Pour” also offers a powerful reminder of a remark Joan Mitchell once made in response to a French critic who got lost in his own over-intellectualization of her art-making motivations and methods. Taking aim at his obfuscation, the great abstract-expressionist artist retorted: “You don’t get it, do you? It’s about paint!” Posted by E.M.G.
28 February 2013 In New York, the Guggenheim Museum Goes Gutai My article about the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s new exhibition, “Gutai: Splendid Playground,” has just appeared in the Japan Times, the independent, national, English-language newspaper that is published in Japan. Read it on the newspaper’s website here. See a PDF that shows the print edition’s page layout by clicking here. Go Gutai!
20 November 2012 Aurora Robson: Transforming “materials from the waste stream” to create bold, beautiful sculptures NEW YORK - To look at the Canadian artist Aurora Robson’s colorful, richly textured creations is to stop and ask, dumbfounded: “What are they made of - paper, fabric, expertly crafted glass or maybe clouds of magically colored air?”
In fact, Robson, who also makes paintings and collages, and is a licensed welder, constructs her sculptures using cast-off plastic bottles, a practice, she notes, that allows her to transform “materials from the waste stream” that would otherwise become trash into objects of beauty and wonder. Technically speaking, by using polyethylene terephthalate (commonly known as “PET”) bottles that are destined for the garbage bin after they have been used to hold water or soft drinks, Robson does not use recycled materials; instead, what she does is rescue materials before they can become waste.
I’ve written a brief essay for the publication that accompanies Robson’s current exhibition at the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. You can see it here in the form of a PDF. About her art and sources of inspiration, Robson told me: “There are certain problems I’m interested in helping to solve through my work. One is the plastic debris problem, which is a symptom of a much bigger problem in terms of our collective consciousness as human beings. I hope other artists, designers and architects will [also] recognize the potential of all of the cast-off plastic that is accumulating around us [and] is a big problem in our environment.” She pointed out that plastic trash does not biodegrade; instead, it can take thousands of years for plastic to photodegrade, that is, to decompose with exposure to light. Robson said: “Every piece of plastic that has ever been produced still exists. This fact has influenced my desire to interrupt the waste stream with my work.” Sculptures on view in the conservatory exhibition include Kamilo, which was made from plastic trash that washed ashore on the southern point of Hawaii, and Be Like Water, a cascade of shimmering forms made from 9000 clear-plastic bottles and 80,000 bottle caps. Robson has observed: “I am interested in provoking reflection on consumption without making people feel guilty.” Instead, she has said, she is interested in “motivating them in a positive way.” An earlier interview of mine with Aurora Robson was published in the October 2009 issue of Art in America. Click here to see that article in PDF form.Posted by E.M.G.
28 October 2012 Modern art’s history, retold: Making room for artists from Japan NEW YORK - In recent years, in the art world in the West, more and more curators, dealers, teachers, critics, collectors and artists themselves have been paying closer attention to and seeking information about the activities of art-makers in and from other parts of the world—Asia, Africa and South America, for example—that traditionally have not been extensively documented in the history of modern art. To be fair, that’s probably because the main currents of modernism (a multifaceted aesthetic outlook that had broader social, cultural and even political implications) developed in Europe and North America before spreading and finding practitioner-proponents elsewhere.
After emerging in the mid-19th century from more than 200 years of self-imposed isolation from the West, Japan began the insatiable assimilation and processing of ideas, styles and technology from abroad that has characterized its modern history, including—and often most interestingly—in the visual and design arts. Now, a wave of exhibitions in the U.S.A. and Europe focusing on Japan’s modern-art history is offering some superb opportunities to get to know how Japanese artists and thinkers absorbed incoming aesthetic ideas from the West and also how they formulated their own fresh approaches to art-making and contributed in their own distinctive ways to the global development of modern art. Today, with this back-and-forth idea exchange in mind, some art historians are taking a so-called transnational approach to examining the role of Japanese artists and those from other parts of the world in modern art’s broader evolution.
My article about this recent wave of Japanese modern-art exhibitions has just been published in the November 2012 issue of Art & Antiques (U.S.A.). Click here to see the article as it appears in print. A PDF will open in a separate window. Two of the most significant exhibitions in this field will soon open in New York. On Nov. 18, the Museum of Modern Art will unveil “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-garde,” an exhibition examining one of the most energetic art-making periods in post-World War II Japan (on view through Feb. 25, 2013). On Feb. 15, 2013, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will open “Gutai: Splendid Playground.” This survey of the ideas and creations of one of the most influential post-WWII Japanese modern-art movements will run through May 8, 2013. For more about this recent wave of curating and research concerning Japanese modern art, in particular, see my article, “Whose Modernism Is It Anyway?” in the Brooklyn Rail, July-Aug. 2011. Posted by E.M.G.
14 October 2012 What to do with all that stuff? Storage, mon amour. NORTH CAROLINA, U.S.A. - I’m at an undisclosed location in the heart of the Bible-thumpin’, flag-wavin’, “sweet tea”-drinkin’ Deep South taking in the scenery of seven-lane highways slicing through residential neighborhoods (say “political boondoggles” with a thick Southern accent) and endless strip malls and churches with signboards that declare: “God loves our troops.”
Just before I headed this way, a friend sent me a photo he had shot with his mobile phone of a sign for one of those along-the-highway storage facilities way out in Nowheresville, the kind at which you rent a lockable unit, small or large, stash your belongings in it and pay by the month for the luxury of having less clutter at home. I’m intrigued by everything about these places—their physical design and appearance, the ethos or culture (are those the right words to use in this context?) of storage centers and the customers who use them, and the relationship between human beings and their possessions this particular kind of commerce calls to mind. I visited one storage facility here and managed to snap a few photos, even though doing so probably was very verboten. Omnipresent security cameras in these places monitor a visitor’s every move. Posted by E.M.G.
18 September 2012 A fresh look at Brody-Lederman’s mysterious works on paper TOKYO - In the U.S.A., my new article about the most recent works on paper created by the New York-based painter Stephanie Brody-Lederman has been published in the September 2012 issue of Art & Antiques. Here is a link to the article as it appears in the print edition of the magazine. The artist has posted it on her website. I’ve written about this artist’s psychologically charged, emotionally ambiguous, not-quite-abstract work before; with its unabashed lack of guile or self-conscious irony, it turns a lot of tired postmodernist posing on its head or maybe it shows it a clear path to the door.
Brody-Lederman’s paintings, mixed-media works on paper and sculptural objects reflect an array of fleeting feelings, observations and impressions gathered from everyday life. Her art routinely mixes snippets of overheard conversation with vivid colors and simple depictions of an endless stream of lanterns, chairs, trees, dogs, boats, cars, food, jewelry and other objects or subjects that cross the artist’s path or roam from the periphery of her vision into a vast “To Keep” file that resides somewhere in her busy mind. Designs on candy wrappers, colors of paper scraps on the sidewalk, unusual words in newspaper headlines, the shapes of shadows, the sounds of feet crushing along gravel paths, the stiffness of the fabric in a pleated lampshade—such details are the raw materials of Brody-Lederman’s art. Her pictures, with their hints of anxiety, romance, trepidation or longing, are more impressionistic portraits of uncertain psychic atmospheres than realistic depictions of places or events. Appearing in her works in various media, her simple, poetic-declarative word fragments (“Spoonfuls of the old country” or “Fireflies and candlelit dinners” or “You’re winging it/From shore to forest”) can sound as goofy as they can disjointed. Nowadays there’s something refreshing in the spontaneity—or the daring?—of an artist who takes a scrap of raw feeling or a full-bodied, multifaceted emotional response to anything and makes it the subject of her work, as opposed to making one-trick-pony works that merely serve to illustrate points of a critique and that end up designing their compositions to death at the same time. There’s something inescapably life-affirming and humanistic at the heart of Brody-Lederman’s art, no matter how unsettling some of the emotional-psychological buttons it pushes might be. In a culture that obsessively celebrates death even as it superficially worships youth, to honor life and the enduring human spirit in all its confounding complexity is a big—and remarkable—task for any artist to take on. Posted by E.M.G.
8 September 2012 Just my type: On the trail of old Japanese letter forms ZUSHI, JAPAN - A few days ago I picked up a new book that has just been published in Japan. It is Taipo Sanpo (Tokyo: 誠文堂新光社/Seibundō Shinkōsha), by Kentarō Fujimoto, a graphic designer who hails from Hokkaido and is based there now. As an art director and designer, Fujimoto has done it all—he has created logotypes, online publications, packaging, books and more. The Japanese title of his book can be translated as “Type Walk” or “Type Stroll.” It refers to the content of Fujimoto’s book and how he found it.
Taipo Sanpo is a collection of photos of store or company signs, printed announcements or product packages in which old, now rarely found examples of Japanese typography appear. Often the type specimens Fujimoto captures in his photos and describes in his accompanying texts are one-of-a-kind; obviously each one was created especially for a particular shop or product brand. The author gathered the examples of old type forms that appear in the book during his strolls through Tokyo and other places in Japan. He writes passionately and with humor about such details as the thickness or narrowness of a single stroke of a character or the overall personality of a written name or word. (In Japanese, the borrowed Chinese characters with which, in part, Japan’s national language are written are called “kanji.”)
Fujimoto’s book appears at a time when various compilations of advertisements and other forms of popular “material culture” (as historians now refer to printed matter, furniture, jewelry, clothes and hand-made or industrially manufactured stuff of all kinds) from Japan’s 20th-century past are turning up in bookstores in this country. Right now in Japan, in certain quarters there seems to be a sense of nostalgia for the early and the latter parts of the Shōwa era (1926-1989), or the reign period of the late Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989). Those were the times before World War II, when Japan was absorbing and processing a diverse range of artistic and intellectual ideas from overseas, and also democratizing, and the period after the devastating years of militaristic, fascist rule and war-making, when the Japanese rebuilt their country in an “economic miracle” that culminated in the boom years of the 1980s. Compared to today, when Japan and many other countries are facing huge economic uncertainties, political paralysis and wrenching social changes, those “better” days were marked by a sense of prosperity and of optimism about the future.
Can such sentiments be conveyed by typography? Certainly in the sense of playfulness, exuberance, drama and even confidence that some of the type specimens Fujimoto captures and describes in his new book, they can. Right now, Taipo Sanpo is only available in its original, Japanese-language edition. In the spirit of Fujimoto’s search for interesting examples of type design in Japan’s visual environment, I shot the photos that appear here, above. If you like typography and graphic design, then, wherever you are, grab a camera and go out and preserve some similar, special specimens of visual culture before they’re all overtaken—everywhere—by McDonald’s and Starbucks logos.Posted by E.M.G. 1 September 2012 Memo to pencil: Look sharp!
Years ago, when I first lived in Japan, I owned a pencil sharpener of this same design. It’s a hand-crank model with an ingenious, pull-out clip apparatus (not visible here) that holds the pencil steady while it’s being sharpened. The gizmo can also be clamped to a tabletop for extra stability. If you like to write with plain pencils or to draw with colored pencils, this sharpener delivers the perfect point; it also allows you to control the sharpness you’re aiming for, which is especially important when you’re using certain kinds of colored pencils. If I were selecting a group of representative objects of/from/about humankind to send to the first planet out there on which some form of life is discovered, in order to, you know, show the new folks what life’s all about down here on this weary rock, in addition to breath mints, roller skates, an iPod, an iPad, a copy of Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), a package of Velveeta, a jar of Marmite, a pair of garters and a copy of Yoko Ono’s first record album (Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, 1970), I would include one of these Japanese-designed pencil sharpeners. It is the Sistine Chapel, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Boeing 747, Brunelleschi’s dome and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider all rolled into one, in miniature, on my desktop. Sharing this souvenir from my little corner of this land of ancient spirits and modern desires... Posted by E.M.G. 5 August 2012 Goo, goo, g’joob, it’s hot in Japan. Gu-Gu-Gutai: Gutai’s hot now, too. TOKYO - One of the most inventive art movements to have emerged in Japan in the early, post-World War II era, Gutai has become known for its wide range of prototypical performance art/event art experiments, which included presenting exhibitions in unusual settings (a pine-filled public park, the sky above an Osaka department store), and for many of its members’ strong, stylistically varied statements in the field of abstract painting. The movement took its name from that of the Gutai Art Society, which was founded in August 1954 by Jirō Yoshihara (1905-1972) and 16 younger artists from the Osaka-Kobe area; their first headquarters was in Nishinomiya, near Osaka. Well-educated and affluent, Jirō was the scion of a family that owned a cooking oil company. Through imported Western art publications, he learned about developments in abstract art and eventually stopped painting in a quasi-surrealist mode in order to explore abstraction’s liberating, expressive language for himself. In Ashiya, near Osaka, Jirō had been teaching European-style oil painting techniques to a handful of younger artists. It was with some of these young charges that he established the Gutai group. (It was a time in which Japanese art-makers in various fields—calligraphy, traditional painting, and so on—often gathered and presented their work under the auspices of named associations whose members shared certain fundamental aesthetic principles; such clubs or societies still exist in Japan today, representing both amateur and more skilled levels of talent.)
As Gutai’s leader, Jirō urged his confrères to break radically with the past and create art forms that had never been created before. In the group’s original manifesto, he wrote that Gutai art did not “falsify” the materials with which it was made. Dismissing the art of the past that filled “altars…palaces…salons…and antique shops,” he commanded: “Lock these corpses in their tombs.” “Gutai” can be translated as “concrete,” “material” or even “embodiment.” Among the Gutai artists’ experiments: Shozo Shimamoto made sculptures to be walked on; Atsuko Tanaka fashioned an “electric dress” made up of colored light bulbs; and Kazuo Shiraga created abstract oil paintings with his feet, his body swinging from a rope suspended above canvases that lay flat on his studio floor. Now on view at the National Art Center, Tokyo, through September 10, 2012, “Gutai: The Spirit of an Era” chronicles the activities and achievements of the movement’s participants from its founding until its dissolution in 1972, following Jirō’s death. Since that time, interest in Gutai has increased steadily both in Japan’s art world and overseas. Another big Gutai exhibition will open next February at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Coming soon to Hauser & Wirth, a gallery in New York that has branches in London and Zürich: “A Visual Essay on Gutai” (September 12-October 27, 2012). This gallery show will feature representative works of various artists who took part in Gutai at different stages of its evolution.
The excellent catalog of the National Art Center, Tokyo’s exhibition has been published in a bilingual, Japanese-and-English edition. In the U.S., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has a good selection of Gutai works in its permanent collection. In New York, McCaffrey Fine Art has shown the work of Kazuo Shiraga (1924-2008) and Sadamasa Motonaga (1922-2011), and Paula Cooper Gallery has shown the work of Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005). In Japan, the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History has significant Gutai holdings and has pursued extensive research in the field. In Kobe, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art also has a large, definitive collection of Gutai works. Go, go Gutai! Posted by E.M.G.
27 July 2012 In the good ol’ summertime, Tokyo-inferno style: It’s global warming, baby!
Right now in style-conscious Tokyo, everybody is walking around in shorts and T-shirts. In the throng at Shibuya Station, one leggy, blonde, foreign woman glided past me not in a thong but in little more than some kind of purple panties and a hippie-fringe blouse that resembled a big, puffy, shredded Kleenex. As I walked through the streets of one of Tokyo’s busiest business districts—like a fool, in a suit!—I spotted this little, wooden, traditional-style structure, which was tucked away on a narrow side street among the skyscrapers. It’s small architectural gems like this one, along with the overall coziness and labrynthine character of so much of Japan’s urban space, that never fail to seize my attention and my imagination here. To see some of the ingenious dwellings some Japanese contemporary architects have created in recent years on unfathomably tiny plots of land in Tokyo and other cities in Japan, do a Google search using these words: “Tokyo small houses.” Also check out this photo-filled group of articles on this subject in the online architecture magazine Dezeen. Posted by E.M.G.
1 July 2012 As abstract as they wanted to be… NEW YORK - The Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition, “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960,” showcases a wide range of works (mostly paintings) in different paint-scraping, paint-splashing, canvas-manipulating modes. They were created both by artists whose names are very familiar from the heyday of one of modernism’s best-known eras—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Robert Rauschenberg—and also, refreshingly, by numerous, less well-known but no less inventive elaborators of abstraction’s powerfully expressive language of vibrant color and ambiguous form. Often, it seems, they all took great joy in experimenting with their materials and reveled in creamy oil paint’s exhilarating, sensuous goo.
The works on view have been culled from the museum’s collection; seen together, they give a vivid sense of the creative energy that fueled still-fresh, still-evolving varieties of abstract painting in the period leading up to the opening of the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building on Fifth Avenue in 1959. In the early ’50s, the museum’s director, James Johnson Sweeney, organized two movement-recognizing exhibitions of works by younger painters from Europe and from the United States (or by those who were based in the U.S.), and the museum acquired many works from those two presentations. Among them were paintings by Karel Appel, Alberto Burri, Georges Mathieu and Kenzo Okada. Taking its title from that of a 1952 book, Un art autre, by the French critic Michel Tapiè, “Art of Another Kind” examines such abstract-art movements of the past century as COBRA, art informel, kineticism, Spanish informalism and Italy’s Forma 1 and Gruppo Origine. In the exhibition, Burri’s tableaux with burned-wood or patched-and-painted burlap surfaces; Asger Jorn’s “A Soul for Sale” (1958-1959), whose oil-and-sand mixture on canvas collapses foreground and background in its pictorial space; James Brooks’s boldly calligraphic “Dolamen” (1958), which also features sand mixed with oil paint; and Jean Dubuffet’s “The Substance of Stars” (1959), with its shimmering crust of metal foil on Masonite, are some of works that caught my eye. So did Alfred Manessier’s “Variation of Games in the Snow” (oil on canvas, 1951), with its black grille of abstracted forms—are they cars, trains, women in silhouette?—against a foggy ground, and Kumi Sugaï’s “Shiro” (oil on canvas, 1957), whose broad, splotchy, austere strokes against a murky white ground recall those of Sino-Japanese written characters. Tancredi Parmeggiani’s “Composition” (oil and tempera on canvas, 1955), seems to channel the sense of energetic movement in two dimensions the Futurists had earlier savored, while the Chinese-born Zao Wou-Ki’s “Mistral” (oil on canvas, 1957) is a beguiling exercise in mysterious light and atmosphere conjured up with little more than a few overlapping strokes of black and white and two small patches of red. This exhibition’s inclusion of works by artists like Zao, who has long been based in Paris, demonstrates how timely (or overdue) it is for major museums to make room in modernism’s canon for those non-mainstream innovators who made significant contributions to how abstract art could look and what it could say. “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960” remains on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through September 12, 2012. (The screen shot from the museum’s website shows a detail from artist Conrad Marca-Relli’s “Warrior” (oil and canvas collage on canvas, 1956)). Posted by E.M.G. 15 June 2012 Off-Broadway: Make-up meets mortality in Chris Tanner’s extravaganza, “The Etiquette of Death” NEW YORK - Check out my new blog—click on the BLOG button here, to the left—for a brief review, with photos, of the just-opened music-and-dancing revue, “The Etiquette of Death,” which is running through July 1, 2012, at La Mama E.T.C.’s Ellen Stewart Theater in downtown Manhattan. Below: Some photos from the production, which is full of big ideas, big laughs and some very big hair...
Posted by E.M.G. 1 June 2012 With concern and compassion, artists respond to last year’s Japan disasters NEW YORK - More than a year has passed since Mother Nature’s double-whammy, earthquake-and-tsunami strike against the Tōhoku region of northeastern Japan and a series of explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant on the coast of Fukushima Prefecture, which resulted in dangerous radiation leakage over a wide area. Today, thousands of Tōhoku residents remain homeless, temporarily housed in evacuation shelters. As recently as May 26, referring to a reservoir at the severely damaged nuclear-power plant, in which used fuel rods are kept, the New York Times reported: “The public’s fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new catastrophe, now that the three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns are in a more stable state, and as frequent quakes continue to rattle the region.” My feature article “Visualizing Disaster,” about ways in which three artists who work in different media and in three distictive styles have used their art to respond to last year’s disasters, has just been published in the June 2012 issue of the American magazine Art & Antiques. Click here to open a PDF, which shows the entire article as it appears in the print edition of the magazine. Please give it a few seconds to download.
“Visualizing Disaster” looks at an ambitious series of paintings in oil on sheets of copper or aluminum by the New York-based, Bosnian-born artist Amer Kobaslija, whose wife is Japanese and who has made numerous trips to the eartquake-and-tsunami-affected region. Kobaslija has been documenting the destruction in large and small paintings whose vigorous passages of what seem like abstract brushwork actually add up to vivid depictions of collapsed buildings and unbelievable, landscape-filling expanses of debris. With a nod to the Japanese print-maker Hokusai, who created “One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji,” one of the 19th century’s most iconic series of images of Japan, Kobaslija has titled his still-evolving series of paintings “One Hundred Views of Kesennuma.” It focuses on Kesennuma, a small town in the distasters-ravaged zone. My article also examines a series of 1000 portraits of people from the Tōhoku region who lost their homes; made with felt-tip pens on paper by the New York-based, Japanese-born artist Naoto Nakagawa, they literally document the human face—or faces—of the disasters. (Scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on “Older Posts.” On the page that opens, scroll down to an item dated 10 July 2011, which describes Nakagawa’s “1000 Portraits of Hope” series in more detail. He began making the pictures last year.) “Visualizing Disaster” also describes the Tokyo-based artist Hiroyuki Doi’s large abstract drawing, “Hope for the Earth,” whose sprawling composition, he says, symbolizes a mother’s enclosing womb, the forces of the universe protecting the Earth and even a nuclear reactor. “This work is my way of expressing my condolences to all of the people who lost their lives in the disasters,” Doi says. “It commemorates all of their souls.” Posted by E.M.G. 15 May 2012 Lumps, legs and impressions of another kind of LA-LA Land in Mexico City
During this stay in the Mexican capital, I’m thinking of my late mother and of how dramatically Mexico City changed over the period of several decades after she left its colorful markets, traffic-choked avenues and cozy side streets for a globe-trotting life that included long periods of residency in such countries as Morocco, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Japan and, of course, the U.S.A. She left her native land when she was in her twenties. Back in the early decades of the long-ago 20th century, when numerous surrealist artists visited Mexico and, before after World War II, emigrated from their homelands and settled in Mexico City, among other welcoming retreats, they used to remark that Mexico was a place that was surrealist avant la lettre; as they saw and felt it, it had offered an authentic surrealist atmosphere long before surrealism had found a name. In Mexico City, I enjoy snapping photos as I walk around from neighborhood to neighborhood. Here is a portfolio of images of one of my latest obsessions—large, myserious packages that are called “bultos” (“lumps”) in Mexican Spanish. They’re everywhere. Also some photos from the area around the Mercado San Cosme in the Santa María la Ribera district, which is full of elegant, old houses whose charm still shines through the layers of dust and age that mark their façades, and some photos of part of the sign of my hotel, shot through my room’s big window. I like sleeping with the curtains open, allowing the glow of two of the sign’s letters—a big L and a big A—to glow and create shadows in my room, like a set in some unknown director’s Latin-American film noir, in which I am the rum-sipping, inquisitive, restless protagonist, searching for clues—about love, life and those big, bulky packages?—in rollicking taxis and smoky cafés. Click on the image above to open the photo portfolio. Posted by E.M.G. 1 May 2012 Alchemy and strange allure: Suzan Frecon’s essays in space, color and form NEW YORK- The first works of the New York-based artist Suzan Frecon’s that I ever encountered were several of her saturated-color paintings made with watercolor on old ledger paper from India. They are related to but still very different from her small, medium-size and sometimes very large oil paintings on canvas, which typically feature only a few very simple shapes set against solid backgrounds in compositions that are shot through with a discernible tension. That visual-perceptual vibe is generated by the carefully considered proportions of the curved, round or oblong forms that appear in each work’s pictorial space and by the relationships of those forms to each other.
When it comes to color, Frecon is a tireless explorer and a perfectionist; to arrive at the variations of the earthy reds, rich blues and other hues and shades that are hallmarks of her palette, she experiments exhaustively with paints whose oil-and-pigment combinations she mixes herself. “I like that you can feel as though you’re stepping right into the space of the painting with a canvas this large,” Frecon told me during an interview at her studio a few weeks ago as we examined a nine-foot-tall picture-in-progress. About her creative approach, which she referred to as “building” a painting, she said: “I look for my structure to hold my art.” She noted that “the ground, the format, the size [and] the relationship between the forms within it that are generated by the outside form” are the elements of each painting-edifice she develops, to use her construction metaphor. “Stepping Into Space,” my feature article about Frecon’s work and her background as an artist, has been published in the May 2012 issue of Art & Antiques. In this article, I note of Frecon’s paintings: “Light reflects off their surfaces, with their varied sheens, even as it seems to emanate from deep within them. Frecon’s slow, deliberate art-making processes have produced paintings whose solidity belies their evanescent air. Look closely at them, and become lost in the depths of their saturated colors. Look again, and be transported as those same planes of color seem to gently lift away from their moorings.” Click here to read my article as it appears online. Or click here to open a PDF, which shows this article as it appears in the print edition of the magazine. Above: Here are some photos that I shot of the artist in her Manhattan studio with some finished works and some paintings-in-progress. Posted by E.M.G. 17 April 2012 Gillian Jagger: To find out what makes an artist tick, take a good look at her bulletin board
Scroll down on this page to find my news item, dated September 23, 2011, about her last solo exhibition, which took place at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, last autumn. A few weeks ago, I visited Jagger in the Hudson Valley, where she keeps several studios in former barn buildings; she needs the ample space for her large-scale, mixed-media works, which often incorporate sections of dead or uprooted tree trunks. She finds them on her rural property. In her drawing studio, I shot this photo of Jagger’s bulletin board, on which she had pinned up a selection of photos documenting in a random, non-chronological order the history of her art-making career to date. “Many artists like to keep favorite works of theirs or works they consider to be especially signifiant nearby in their studios; often they serve as valuable points of reference,” Jagger observed. She added: “In my case, though, since many of my works have been so large, I count on photos to help jog my memory.” For me, in my research work as a critic and art historian, encountering a visual storehouse like Jagger’s bulletin board is like stumbling upon a treasure trove of intriguing artifacts and information nuggets. I also very much enjoy looking at the board and appreciating it as a medium of visual communication and as an engaging object in its own right. To see a higher-resolution (300 dpi) version of the above digital photo, click here. A photo will open in a separate window. Poke around an artist’s studio long enough and, even without asking too many questions, you just might find some clues to help explain what’s on her mind, and what makes her tick. Posted by E.M.G. 10 April 2012 The irrepressible artist Yayoi Kusama, in her own words
My article about these two new books has been published in the April 2012 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. Click here to open a PDF containing the complete article. In this piece, I note about Kusama’s distinctive creations: “If the real-imaginary world to which she has given oddly alluring form looks and feels hallucinatory, it is because, as [she] explains in these books, her art has always flowed from and, for Kusama, has always served as a potent antidote to the neuroses that have long haunted her.” Viewers who are familiar with Kusama’s art will recognize the polka dot as one of her signature motifs. In these books, she explains that endlessly reproducing those bountiful dots on just about everything has provided a “self-obliterating,” soothing response to her ills. In the early period of her New York sojourn, Kusama writes in Infinity Net, her outlook could be summed up like this: “Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot....I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.” Both of these books remind us that Kusama’s abiding, driving energy, which has found compelling expression in her work’s love-sexy titillations, despite—or because of—her magnificent obsessions, is and has been the real, central subject of her art. Unlike so many self-consciously detached, irony-filled art exercises, it is, unabashedly, a strange but irresistible affirmation of life. Posted by E.M.G. 5 April 2012 Japan disasters, one year later: Still thinking about, helping and honoring the suffering Tōhoku people NEW YORK - Yesterday evening at Teachers College, Columbia University, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, members and supporters of the Consortium for Japan Relief (CJR) hosted a symposium titled “The State of Mental Health in Tōhoku, Japan.” The CJR is an organization whose members include students and faculty members from throughout the Columbia University community, most of whom are Japanese. In addition to numerous guest speakers, the symposium showcased the efforts of another student-created group, United Students for Disaster Relief/Recovery, whose members come from countries—Haiti, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan—that in recent years have all experienced devastating natural disasters. Based on lessons learned in the recent past through responding to crises in their native countries, the members of United Students for Disaster Relief/recovery have created a Wiki website that functions as a clearing-house for information about how, in response to future calamities, individuals and groups can most effectively offer assistance to victims, evacuees and other affected people when such events occur around the world. Featuring specialists in psychiatry and mental-health services, an expert in radiation studies and a veteran international-affairs expert with a focus on Japan, yesterday’s symposium examined the emotional, psychological and even spiritual conditions of the many residents of Japan’s northeastern Tōhoku region who were displaced or left homeless by the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear-power plant accidents that occurred in March of last year. Consortium for Japan Relief member Daiyu Suzuki, a Teachers College student and current Fulbright Fellow who is pursuing a doctoral degree, offered opening remarks at yesterday evening’s gathering. Later, he told me: “Tonight’s event focused on mental-health issues, which are often overlooked in the broader, mainstream media coverage of disasters. In the case of Japan, the trauma associated with last year’s events was so big that we are still learning just how much of an impact it had on the people who were hurt or who lost their homes.”
The data from last year’s big blow to the northeastern coast of Japan, in which tsunami waves reached heights of up to 20 meters (about 65 feet), are staggering. (The earthquake’s magnitude measured 9.0 on the Richter scale.) As Dr. Mitsuru Suzuki, a mental-health consultant to the Japanese government’s foreign-affairs ministry and professor in the neuropsychiatry department of Iwate Medical University pointed out in his talk yesterday evening, since the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, 343,935 people had been evacuated from their damaged or destroyed homes, and 116,787 Tōhoku residents were still being sheltered in temporary housing facilities. To date, 15,854 people from the affected region have been declared dead, and 3155 are considered to be missing. Columbia political science professor and longtime East Asia expert Gerald L. Curtis noted that, “in the disaster-hit region, for the people who are still living in temporary shelters, there are no facilities for getting together and socializing; older people, in particular, feel forgotten and alone, since many young people have fled the region in search of jobs in the cities.” Greenwich, Connecticut-based school psychologist Shizuko “Kame” Barnes has made trips to Tōhoku, where, she noted, more than 7000 schools were damaged or destroyed, to work with teachers who are wrestling with severe stress (their students’ and their own) in a culture that prizes unsinkable perseverance and frowns upon those who display weakness. Columbia radiation biophysics professor David Brenner noted in his talk that people from the area surrounding the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant on the coast of Fukushima Prefecture face the added hardship of “radiation stigmatization.” Brenner said, “People are afraid of identifying themselves as coming from the affected region. It becomes a mark of disgrace.” Dr. Katherine Shear, a Columbia professor of psychiatry, told the symposium audience that, remarkably, over time, trauma is something most human beings are able to overcome, but that those who have a harder time coping with its effects should be treated with compassion and special care, for, as she noted, “For everyone who experiences trauma, it’s something that requires release and resolution.” She noted that, in Japan’s perseverance-demanding culture, “symptoms of grief or of post-traumatic stress disorder are often considered shameful, so sufferers become hidden and feel alone.” As much as some sufferers might need extra attention, Shear said, “The culture must learn to adapt” so that it can address their needs. Posted by E.M.G. 5 March 2012 Jane Wilson: Profile of a painter’s painter and her life-long exploration of color and light NEW YORK - For many years, I’ve followed the work of the New York-based, American artist Jane Wilson, who has shown her paintings regularly at D.C. Moore (535 West 22nd Street in Manhattan; telephone: 212-247-2111). Wilson’s most recent solo exhibition was presented at this gallery late last year, and it was, typically, a stunner. Wilson was born in Iowa in 1924 and moved to New York in 1949. She is now a grande dame d’un certain age and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters who is much admired by her peers for the enduring freshness of her creative vision and her technical aplomb. This latest gallery presentation of Wilson’s gave me an opportunity I had been looking for to write about her work. The result is my feature article about the development of her art and ideas, which has been published in the March 2012 issue of Art & Antiques. To read this article as it appeared in print, click here. A PDF will take a few seconds to download. From this new article: “What is it about the ineffable, elusive essence of any color—what...Wilson has called ‘the color within a color’—that compels so many artists to want to figure it out and guard that precious knowledge, and to infuse each new work with a visible expression of that understanding? That quest, at once deliberate and unpredictable, scientific and, for some artists, even spiritual, lies at the heart of Wilson’s most recent paintings of big skies hovering above blurry-elastic horizon lines. Some mark off the borders of stretches of bare or verdant earth. Others hint at out-of-sight, beyond-the-frame expanses of restless, unknowable seas....”
Wilson’s paintings have “seamlessly blended the techniques of gestural abstract painting with unabashed, unmistakable references to the real, perceived world—to some of the most elemental aspects of nature....Looking at her newest canvases, with their thickets of long, stringy brushstrokes here or their passages of broader, undulating strokes there, which shift through Wilson’s broad expanses of sky in translucent layers, with rhythmic movements, it is easy to believe the artist is painting with little more than colored air....[H]er decision to concentrate on landscapes set her apart from those abstractionists who looked inward to the subconscious or who mined the emotional stirrings of their own souls as starting points for their actions on canvas. Wilson recalled: ‘I had one of those devastating conversations you have with yourself; I said: Let’s look at this’—meaning her own work—‘and see what it’s trying to say. I found it was dominantly horizontal and about light and gesture and I found a great deal of emotion in the gesture, as long as it was not extravagant. I just wanted my own little corner in which to paint what I wanted to paint.’”... “For years, the artist has brought [a] Buddhist-like awareness of nature’s changing conditions, especially as they are reflected in the pageantry of ever-permutating cloud formations and the drama of the skies, to her art-making. Indeed, in her newest paintings, like Cold Moon (2010, oil on canvas), Getting Colder (2011, oil on canvas) or Looking Up (2011, oil on canvas), Wilson’s brushstrokes themselves seem to emulate the random-pattern behavior of clouds as they swell, gather or fall away to reveal patches of vibrant color—sometimes only wisps of vibrant blue or pink, recalling the expertly placed highlights on a Rubens angel—that turn out to be the very lifeblood of a composition....It’s with a sensitive, revealing language of rich color and light that, over the course of a lifetime, this keen observer of nature’s rhythms has painted the soul of the sky.” Posted by E.M.G. 27 February 2012 Music, art, innovation, peace: Yoko Ono presents 2012 Courage Awards for the Arts NEW YORK - At a private dinner gathering yesterday evening at The Modern, a restaurant on the ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) building on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, multimedia artist Yoko Ono Lennon presented her 2012 Courage Awards for the Arts to the Nazareth-based violinist and music teacher Nabeel Abboud-Ashkar, a co-founder of the Polyphony Foundation, a music-education organization whose mission statement notes that it “believes in the power of music to spark conversations and bridge the divide between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel.” Ono also honored the artist, human-rights activist and author Kate Millet, whose ground-breaking book, Sexual Politics (1970), offered a probing critique of patriarchy in Western society and culture; the feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann, who famously used her own body as the subject and raw material of her work; the performance artist and founder of New York’s Franklin Furnace Archive, Martha Wilson; and the museum curators Sabine Breitwieser and Jenny Schlenzka. Breitwieser is currently the chief curator of media and performance art at MoMA. Schlenzka is an associate curator at MoMA P.S. 1, the branch of the museum in Queens that focuses on contemporary-art programming.
Breitwieser and Schlenzka had organized a public reading at MoMA last November of a portion of the transcript of the U.S. military tribunals that took place during the latter part of the Bush-Cheney administration at the American naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba. On Ono’s website, Imagine Peace, Breitwieser recalls that, after arriving at MoMA last fall, she had “wanted to emphasize performance as a collective and participatory project.” With that goal in mind, she “thought it would be interesting to examine if a public action or performance [could] create a ‘collective experience’ and a ‘collective memory’ among the performer(s), the audience, the space and the organizing institution.” Breitwieser notes that, in fact, the written record of the tribunal proceedings did seem to take on a new character when it was publicly “performed.” The reader-paticipants in last November’s event told her and Schlenzka, who had worked as a curator in the field of performance art before at MoMA, that, as Breitwieser puts it, “while reading the text[,] something happened with it[;] it turned into something else.”
Ono has explained that she created her annual awards as a way to “recognize artists, musicians, collectors, curators, writers—those who sought the truth in their work and had the courage to stick to it, no matter what. And with this courage, I see an avenue to peace. Each year, I choose several recipients to honor their work as an expression of my vision of courage.” In accepting her award, Schneemann noted that, because Ono’s prize comes from one artist to another, for her it seems to honor “the grandeur of intimacy” that artists share and cherish among themselves in a community in which new ideas are always percolating. “Just keep doing it!” Ono replied, referring to Schneemann’s often controversial art-making, in which the frequently naked female body has played a symbolic role as both a laboratory in or a battleground on which ideas about artistic creativity and various notions of power have been played out. Wilson, who founded the Franklin Furnace Archive in downtown Manhattan in 1976 as an alternative kind of museum and venue for performance art and other new, ephemeral art forms, with which mainstream institutions could not or would not keep up, recalled hearing Ono’s screaming against pounding rock rhythms and experimental vocalizations in moody sound collages on her 1970 record album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. “I was a young woman from a conservative, Quaker family in Pennsylvania,” Wilson remembered. She added, with a mixture of seriousness and irony, “I heard you scream, and that scream expressed all the frustration I had long felt for having been born female—and inspired me to overcome it and not be afraid to pursue my own life as an artist.” Later during the evening, Ono told me: “These awards are very meaningful to me. I’m deeply inspired by all the honorees—by their courage, their determination, their spirit. In their own ways, they’re all working for peace.” Posted by E.M.G.
1 February 2012 [Flower-covered] hats off to Hans Krüsi!
Now my latest article about Krüsi, based in part on that recent research work in Switzerland, has been published in the February 2012 issue of the American magazine Art & Antiques. (Click here to see the article online. Click here to open a PDF of the published article.) Something that really interests me when it comes to Krüsi, a humble man who was poor until his art-making activity was discovered, which led to some financial success in the local art market, is the ways in which he created and projected an artist’s persona. To be sure, Krüsi was a genuine artist. He was the real deal. But he also enjoyed publicly playing the role of the eccentric artist, and his thousands of photographs—of himself in flower-decorated hats and vests; of his home (which was also his art-filled studio); of his beloved animals, including cats, rabbits, cows and birds; and of his exhibitions—offer a vivid record of this self-taught artist’s fascinating process of self-invention. It might seem to have been a quintessentially postmodernist performance art exercise avant la lettre. It certainly was sophisticated and consistent, and it reminds me of the non-stop photographing and audio-recording of just about everything, even his most routine, banal telephone chats with his friends, that Andy Warhol made throughout his art-making career. From my new Art & Antiques article: “[O]ne of the most remarkable aspects of Krüsi’s multifaceted oeuvre is the fact that, in it, viewers can find plenty of evidence showing that the energetic autodidact regarded himself as both a genuine artist and also as someone who was self-consciously playing the public role of an artist from almost as soon as he started making little pictures to sell along with his flowers....Using a reel-to-reel recorder and, later, a cassette recorder, Krüsi also made hundreds of audio recordings of ambient sounds, including church bells ringing, cows mooing and birds chirping. All of these items are now stored at the [Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau]; with them, Krüsi captured and preserved not only some of the sources of his artistic inspiration but also some of the defining aspects of his self-conscious Swiss identity.” Posted by E.M.G. 1 January 2012 A new year’s wish...
NEW YORK - I saw this rainbow shimmering over a small bay on the north coast of Jamaica when I was visiting that sunny island a few weeks ago. See a rainbow, make a wish, right? Looking at this photo now, I wish that a big, global epidemic of PEACE, LOVE and UNDERSTANDING might break out everywhere in 2012. You never know. The unexpected does sometimes occur on this weary, ailing planet. Happy New Year to everyone! Posted by E.M.G. 8 December 2011 Welcome to the world of vernacular photography...
10 November 2011 Artist/arts activist Martha Wilson in the Brooklyn Rail NEW YORK - My article about Martha Wilson, the New York-based artist, arts activist, educator and founding director of the Franklin Furnace Archive, has been published in the November 2011 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. In it, several well-known feminist artists, including Suzanne Lacy and Lynn Hershman Leeson (whose docu-film about the feminist art movement, !Women, Art, Revolution, came out earlier this year), and the art historian/critic Lucy R. Lippard share their observations about the lasting place Wilson’s work as an artist and institution-builder has earned in the history of feminist art and, more generally, in the history of conceptual art. Wilson’s most recent solo exhibition was presented at P.P.O.W. in New York from Septemer 9 through October 8; please scroll down on this page to read my item about it, dated September 10. Meanwhile, the New York-based organization Independent Curators International has published The Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. The book is a compendium of essays, book excerpts, and magazine and newspaper articles chosen by Wilson herself, an assortment of texts that played a big role in the past in shaping her thinking about art, politics, and the status of women and the role of the artist in society. It also includes some of Wilson’s own writings. The book is available from ICI, through its website. To read my article in the Brooklyn Rail, please click here. (Photo at right, courtesy of P.P.O.W.: Martha Wilson, Invisible, 2011, color photograph, text; 26.5 inches x 37 inches.) Posted by E.M.G.
2 November 2011 Kusama looks back at her formative heyday: New York in the 1960s TOKYO, JAPAN - With her colorful wigs, wide-eyed gaze and paintings, sculptures and clothes covered with all-over swarms of her signature polka dots or “infinity net” patterns or thick, phallic, sausage-like stuffed protrusions, Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) has become one of the most visible figures on today’s international art scene. Her look, as much as her art’s distinctive motifs, which have been reproduced in a multitude of what the Japanese call “goods”—postcards, tote bags, key chains, coffee mugs—have become indelible emblems of the globally recognizable Kusama brand.
It’s Kusama’s world. Grab some polka-dot stickers, plaster them all over your body and dare to enter it. There was a time when the inquisitive and the adventurous who did cross over into that trippy-playful headspace to join Kusama in her inhibitions-smashing performance-art events (many of which had to do with shedding all their clothes) would eagerly strip down and allow the artist to paint or plaster the blank canvases of their bodies with polka dots or polka dot stickers. In interviews, Kusama used to say that she took an obsessive approach to making her art. “Kusama’s Body Festival in ’60s,” an exhibition that is now on view (through November 27) at Watari-um, a small museum in Tokyo, looks back at the formative heyday of Kusama’s art-making in the 1960s, when she lived in New York and developed many of the themes and techniques that would become the hallmarks of her multifaceted oeuvre. Among them: her Infinity Net paintings, her soft sculptures and her painting-meets-sculpture-meets-performance art events (like her “Body Festival” in New York’s Washington Square Park, 1967) and all of those endless torrents of dots. In the press release the artist prepared for her 1968 “Alice in Wonderland” happening, which took place in Central Park, she wrote: “Featuring me, KUSAMA, mad as a hatter, and my troupe of nude dancers.” In Japan, a new book by Kusama, たたかう (“Tatakau,” which means “to fight,” “to battle” or “to struggle against”), has just been published. It complements the Watari-um exhibition and covers the same thematic territory. The book is full of photos and reproductions of posters and announcement cards for Kusama’s New York-era exhibitions and events. It includes photos of many of her performance-oriented works and such gems as a reproduction of a December 1955 letter Kusama received from Georgia O’Keeffe after the young Japanese artist had boldly contacted the legendary American modernist to ask her for advice and assistance regarding the art world. For photos of Kusama and news about her activtities, see the artist’s own website. Posted by E.M.G. 24 October 2011 In stunning, never-before-seen landscapes, a totally rad Ramírez TOKYO, JAPAN - Currently I’m working in this fast-paced, sprawling city that is home to a national government in paralysis that is wrestling with some very serious economic challenges (sound familiar?), along with some of the world’s most dazzling-wacky architecture and an endless supply of all things cute: stuffed-animal toys, pastries, mobile phones, bicycles—and people, like the androgynous youth in hot pants, a blue-sequin tank top and a bowler hat who handed me a flyer advertising a restaurant at which cute foods—a pork cutlet on a bed of rice shaped like a teddy bear, sundaes with balls of ice cream shaped like bunnies’ heads—are served by young women dressed as “fantasy maids.”
Just before I left New York, I had an opportunity to see the remarkable group of never-before-shown, mixed-media drawings by the Mexican-born, self-taught artist Martín Ramírez that are now on view at Ricco/Maresca, a gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea district (529 West 29th Street; telephone: 212-627-4819). Ramírez (1895-1963), whose work first came to the art world’s attention in the early 1970s, and who spent the latter part of his life in a psychiatric hospital in northern California, has earned a place as a genre-defining giant in the canon of outsider art’s still-evolving history. The works on display in the current gallery show, “Martín Ramírez: Landscapes,” which is on view through November 12, are revelatory. They will certainly change the way viewers who are familiar with Ramírez’s work and life story think about and comprehend the breadth and depth of his artistic vision. Both within the context of Ramírez’s own body of work, with its distinctive draftsmanship and signature, sensuous forms, and also, more broadly speaking, within the field of 20th-century drawing, these works expand and deepen the meaning of what landscape images can be. My article about this exhibition has just been published in the New York Observer. I invite you to read it here. Posted by E.M.G.
23 September 2011 La Wilson: Thinking outside the box (inside the box, that is)
A selection of Wilson’s newest mixed-media works from the past several years is now on view at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, the mid-Hudson Valley, riverside town that lies about two hours by automobile or train north of Manhattan. (See above item about Gillian Jagger’s exhibition, which is also now on view at this same gallery.) Dealer John Davis first showed the artist’s work in 1983, in an earlier incarnation of his gallery in Akron, Ohio. In her assemblage pieces, which exude an air of mystery and of playfulness at the same time, Wilson takes such humble items as wooden spools, pencils, dominoes, flat-head nails, colored embroidery thread, dice, hair clips, typewriter keys, small hand tools and light-switch plates, and through simple gestures like slicing them in half or placing them in unusual positions, completely transforms their character and meaning. In Wilson’s hands, a clothespin can become as elegant as a diamond brooch or as sinister as a dagger. She uses antique metal type or letter-press type forms, too, often stuffing sections of a box’s space full of texture-yielding objects, such as bullet casings, beads or carpenters’ folding yardsticks. The old wooden boxes she uses to hold her assemblages become integral elements of each one and often set the overall tone of a work, from funky to eloquent. Étude (2010), one of the most ephemeral-feeling creations in her current exhibition, consists of a group of felt hammer tips from the innards of a piano placed inside a small, shallow box like the delicate, color-streaked shoots of an exotic tropical plant.
For many years, Wilson has studied and followed the tenets of Buddhist thought. She used to keep a beloved pet rabbit, too, but it achieved satori and died several years ago; it had been one of her favorite companions here in this material world. In the Midwest, Wilson has enjoyed an enthusiastic cult following. Nationally, she is admired by fellow artists who work in and appreciate collage and assemblage modes of art-making. In the essay for the catalog of a retrospective exhibition of Wilson’s work that was presented at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, in 2004 (“La Wilson: Altered Objects”), I wrote: “Wilson does not make art about art, per se, as much as she makes art about the making of art.” (So check your winking, postmodernist sense of irony about the appropriated and recontextualized at the door; Wilson’s creations are surreal, abstract or pomo by accident or by unintentional affinity, not by design.) About the odds and ends that are the raw material of her art, the artist once told me: “I just try to find a home for them....The thing is to go in and find relationships [between them] that I never imagined or heard of or thought about. I just love that feeling of them coming together.” La Wilson’s works are on view at John Davis Gallery (362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson NY 12534; telephone: 518-828-5907) through October 9. Posted by E.M.G. 16 September 2011 In mysterious, dreamy images, photographer Emi Anrakuji uncannily captures Japan’s current, anxious mood NEW YORK - Works of art that feel or appear mysterious because that’s the kind of effect their makers aim for and hope they will have can certainly attract attention. Even more compelling are those works of art in whatever form—pictures, objects, songs or instrumental music, films, dances, stories or poems—that, somehow, unwittingly and with a sense of timeliness and relevance that seems uncanny, capture the mood of the moment right now with an air of mystery and an uncertain but just-right emotional pitch. In this way, the images the young, Tokyo-based photographer Emi Anrakuji is showing in her just-opened solo exhibition, “A Decent Life,” at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery (at 547 West 27th Street, in Chelsea), seem to perfectly reflect the mood in Japan today.
As her homeland wrestles with an ongoing economic recession, a sclerotic national government, the challenges of a fast-aging population, the daunting task of rebuilding the north-central region of the country that was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, and the fear and panic that have followed leaked-radiation reports associated with a nuclear-power plant that was damaged in those disasters, among many Japanese, the mood today is one of high-anxiety uncertainty. “Actually, I started making the images in this series several months before the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan earlier this year,” Anrakuji told me at her exhibition’s opening reception yesterday evening. “But I do recognize that their eerie quality catches today’s mood.” In her photos, the photographer appears as a kind of untethered, roaming Everyman in a plain, light-colored frock, who floats through the streets of Tokyo like a spirit in a dream. In almost all of her photos, Arankuji’s face is not clearly visible. In them, she turns up in pedestrian tunnels, concrete passageways, in the back seat of a bus or in the urban underbrush, sometimes exposing part of her body and sometimes sipping at a little bottle of an energy drink, one of many bottles of that kind of popular potion that she can be seen lugging around in a clear-plastic bag. (If ever many Japanese people felt they needed a shot of stamina, mixed with confidence and optimism, that moment might be right now.)
(Emi Anrakuji’s exhibition, “A Decent Life,” is on view through October 8, 2011.) Posted by E.M.G. 10 September 2011 Artist Martha Wilson at P.P.O.W., New York: Aging gracefully, with political consciousness, “beauty” and sass NEW YORK - The artist, cultural activist, freedom-of-expression advocate and educator Martha Wilson is well-known as the founder of an important contemporary-art institution. In 1976, in New York, Wilson established the Franklin Furnace Archive, an alternative-space museum, whose purpose, its mission statement explained, was “to champion ephemeral forms neglected by mainstream arts institutions” and, in particular, with regard to the still-new genre of artists’ books that was emerging at the time, “to serve artists who [chose] publishing as a democratic artistic medium and who were not being supported by existing artistic organizations.”
By the time it closed its doors at 112 Franklin Street, in downtown Manhattan’s TriBeCa district, in late 1996, Franklin Furnace had presented many memorable exhibitions and a wide-ranging program of performance art events. It also had built up a renowned and definitive collection of artists’ books and ephemeral material that was often related to performance art, including photographs, videotapes, posters, pamphlets, collage works and limited-edition printed material of all kinds. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired that collection. In 1997, after closing its physical space, Franklin Furnace launched its website, which has served as a platform for webcasts of performance and other Internet-based works of art. Under Wilson’s direction, the organization has continued its grant-making program in support of artists from around the world and has won major grants in support of its ambitious, ongoing project, the Franklin Furnace Database, which contains information about every performance art work, temporary installation, exhibition or benefit presented by the institution; it also offers images of events presented during Franklin Furnace’s first ten years. Now, in a solo gallery exhibition (“I Have Become My Own Worst Fear,” on view through October 8) that opened yesterday at P.P.O.W., in Chelsea, Wilson’s own new, performance-and-photography-based works are being showcased; with their interweaving of candor, humor, psychological analysis and subtle, social-political critique, they revisit themes she first began examining in the early 1970s as a younger, unabashedly feminist artist. Among them: the ways in which clothes and make-up shape a woman’s perceived identity in the world (and of herself); how our Western, developed societies “allow” or perhaps expect women to age; and how, in contexts that are sometimes beyond her control, given a society’s definition of what feminine “beauty” can or should be, a woman’s body may serve as a powerful platform for self-expression—or a battleground for a contest between a woman’s courageous sense of herself and the forces of Mother Nature (whose own feminist credentials sometimes seem dubious at best; what’s with all the macho-aggressive earthquake- and hurricane-making lately?). “I’ve always mixed humor with politics and the analysis or critique of social norms, values and trends,” Wilson told me at the opening of her P.P.O.W. exhibition yesterday evening. Standing next to a photo of herself dressed as an elegant, older matron (with great gams) in a red skirt suit, on which was printed the title “The Legs Are the Last to Go,” the artist added: “A sense of humor is especially worthwhile when self-identity and aging—your own inevitable process of getting older, that is—are your subjects.”
As much as I admire and respect Wilson for her accomplishments as an institution-builder and, most significantly, as a champion of free expression for artists and all supporters of democratic values in these chilling, paranoia-loving times, I also regard her as a remarkable locus of many of the intellectual, cultural and aesthetic currents that have evolved around her over the years and, in one way or another, have crossed the paths of the places, events or creative, collaborative efforts with which she has been associated. Examples: Wilson’s presence as a teacher at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in the early 1970s, when numerous, prototypical conceptualist artists were passing through to lecture and create event-based works, and her in-the-eye-of-the-storm advocacy for free speech, a civil right protected by the U.S. Constitution (remember that old thing?), during the “culture wars” of the 1990s. In 1998, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding the so-called decency test for awarding federal arts grants, which the conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms had demanded, Wilson wrote: “I believe the net effect of this law will be that artists will continue to take sexuality as their subject (as they have been doing for 30,000 years), but many presenting organizations will become frightened off by controversial content. Sigh.” Alas, maybe Martha Wilson is something of a venerable institution herself. Posted by E.M.G. 1 September 2011 With the passing of Leonora Carrington in Mexico, a revived interest in female surrealist artists NEW YORK - Born into an affluent family in northern England in 1917—her father was a texile magnate, her mother a devout Catholic from Ireland—Leonora Carrington was known from an early age as strong-minded, inquisitive and rebellious. As a young woman, she made her debut in high society at an elegant ball and was even presented at court to King George V. (Years later, she would mock that encounter in a story she would pen about a hyena who meets the monarch.) In her twenties, after studying painting with Amédée Ozenfant and discovering surrealist art in London in 1936, she met the German surrealist artist Max Ernst. With him (he was married, had a son and was more than twice her age), Carrington began a romantic affair that become a mentor-student relationship, too. They headed to Paris, where they hobnobbed with such modern artists as André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró. Once, in Paris, Miró handed Carrington some coins and told her to go fetch him some cigarettes. In 2006, recalling that moment in an interview with a British journalist, she said that she gave the artist his money back and advised him that, “if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself.”
Carrington and Ernst separated after the Germans invaded France, and conditions in Europe worsened. Carrington experienced—or endured—a traumatic-dramatic adventure that led to her escape from Europe after a nervous breakdown and a stint in a mental asylum in Spain. She also fled from the clutches of her father’s pals, who would have packed her off to a psychiatric hospital in South Africa. From Portugal, she headed to the U.S., then to Mexico, where she settled and spent the next seven decades of her life. She died in Mexico City on May 25 of this year. In Mexico, Carrington married a Hungarian-immigrant photographer and befriended other artists and intellectuals from Europe who had sought refuge there from the war. She became a close friend of the Hungarian-born photographer Kati Horna (1912-2000) and the Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). Varo, who also painted in a surrealist mode, became one of Carrington’s closest friends and artistic peers. The two artists shared deep interests in alchemy, the occult, shamanism, the superstitious and magical aspects of Mexican culture, and the imagery of dreams. I was one of the last journalists to interview Carrington at her home in Mexico City. Toward the end of her life, she became very reclusive. She adamantly refused to speak about her personal life or the themes and content of her art. She declined to interpret or analyze her work. Admired for her vivid imagination and the fine craftsmanship that was always evident in her paintings, prints and sculptures, Carrington earned a lasting place in Mexico’s own modern-art history. A naturalized Mexican citizen, her coffin was draped with a small Mexican flag during a private burial service that took place at Mexico City’s British Cemetery soon after she died. My feature article about Carrington’s life, work and legacy has just been published in the September 2011 issue of Art & Antiques. (Click here to open a PDF.) A big exhibition focusing on the art and ideas of female surrealist artists who lived and worked in North America and South America will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art late next January. With the passing of Carrington, a giant in this sub-category of the larger, diverse surrealism field, expect art historians, curators and collectors who specialize in both modern Latin-American art and modern art in general to start poking around for available works by this most individualistic maker of strange, magical, indelible images. Posted by E.M.G.
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TOKYO - Among other urgent errands on my “To Do” list today, I picked up a pencil sharpener I had special-ordered from a stationery shop in a large department store. Here’s a photo of the little treasure. 
All of these exhibitions come at a time at which a growing number of art historians and curators in Japan and the West are becoming interested in Gutai’s “transnational” character—in how its artists used the mass media, constructed and projected their group’s identity and values, and unabashedly asserted the fullness and seriousness of purpose of their contributions to the dominant art currents of their time, despite their relative isolation and distance from the era’s leading creative and market centers, such as New York or London. (See my article about this tendency in the 
TOKYO - If Japan’s capital feels hotter than ever right now—certainly more swelteringly hot in the summer than I can remember it ever having been over many years’ time—then blame it on global warming, right? Is any other proof needed, along with all those sweating polar bears and melting icebergs, that, around the world, temperatures are rising, and familiar weather patterns are dramatically changing? Even springtime cherry-blossom season has been occurring earlier and earlier.
NEW YORK- In recent years, I’ve been following with interest the development of the British-born sculptor 
NEW YORK - Last month, the Japanese modern artist 
NEW YORK - Last summer, I had an opportunity to go back to Switzerland, the country where I spent the formative years of my childhood, to do research about the Swiss outsider artist Hans Krüsi (1920-1995) at the 
To read this article online, click 
HUDSON, NEW YORK—
"Vernacular photography" is the term that's being used nowadays to refer to photos whose creators and, sometimes, whose intended purposes are unknown. It's also the name of a hot collecting category. My article about this field and some of the leading collectors of these unusual, often dramatic images was published in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Art & Antiques (U.S.A.). See it here. A PDF will take a few seconds to open and download.
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My article about the legendary, British-born surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who died in Mexico City in May 2011, was published in the September 2011 issue of Art & Antiques (U.S.A.). I was one of the last foreign visitors to meet with the reclusive artist at her home in the Mexican capital before she died. See the article here in the form of a PDF. It will take a few seconds to download and open.
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Now available: My essay, "Nostalgia for the Future," about the American painter Stephanie Brody-Lederman, in a limited-edition chapbook published by Ballena Studio. To order a copy, send a check or money order for U.S.A.$6.00 (U.S.A.$7.00 for orders outside the United States) to: Edward M. Gómez, P.O. Box 7339, J.A.F. Station, New York NY 10116-7339 U.S.A.
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My article about an interesting discussion that is now going on in the field of outsider/self-taught artists' art has been published in the February 2011 issue of Art & Antiques(U.S.A.). The debate focuses on this question: Should there even be a distinction of categories between art made by academically trained, "professional" artists and art that is created by self-taught art-makers? Here is the complete Art & Antiques article in PDF form. |
My article about the Japanese modern artist Takesada Matsutani, pegged to his recent museum exhibition in Kamakura, Japan, has been published in the May 2010 issue of Art in America. (See my 7 February 2010 "Journal" item for information about this artist and his recent exhibitions in Japan.) Matsutani, who has been based in Paris since the late 1960s, was a member of the so-called second generation of the post-World War II Gutai group of prototypical performance and abstract-expressionist artists in Japan. Here is the complete Art in America article in PDF form. |
My interview with the artist Aurora Robson was published in the October 2009 issue of Art in America. In it, the Brooklyn-based, Canadian creator of paintings and mixed-media collages, and of sculptures made from cast-off plastic bottles, talks about her philosophy of art-making and the techniques she employs. Of special interest: Robson's environmentalist outlook and how she puts her save-the-planet values into practice as an artist and teacher. Read the article here. A PDF will open. |
