Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Postcapitalist Painting

"In America..." Published in Krokodil magazine, Soviet Union, 1953 (text translated from Russian)

Some 64,000 years ago, woken beings not too different from us scrawled upon cave walls with red ochre hand-mined from the earth. What connects that kind of activity to the contemporary art exhibited at today’s galleries, art fairs, and museums? There is a disconnect between the felt nobility and inherent good employed to describe learning about and fostering an appreciation for art on one hand, and the decidedly classist, sexist, and racist bias the ‘art world’ routinely demonstrates on the other. The current global economic system of hyper-capitalist, cancerous profiteering rewards such divisive strategies; these strategies arguably underlie the very structures of the current economic paradigm. If systems of health care and education that don’t rely on a profit incentive can be imagined, then a world of art that doesn’t can be too. Such imaginings, practically speaking, are to remain in the realm of thought experiment only. There is no indication that the tide of capital the high end of the art world is awash in will be rolling back any time soon. Even on the non-profit end, much of their funds are still frequently provided by global corporate capital: the lead funder of PST: LA/LA was Bank of America.

Despite this, here in Los Angeles and beyond, thriving communities of working artists exist with the support of artist-run initiatives and alternative exhibition spaces that operate outside the interest and influence of oligarchic wealth. In Los Angeles, the artists of this community produce relevant, grassroots contemporary art activity, and a great deal of that activity is painting. Such a great deal in fact, that some definitive currents and strategies have emerged among the painters of this community. By no means are the basic notions here restricted to the single medium of painting defined at its narrowest at the exclusion of other mediums, or artists who do not identify primarily as painters – ‘painting’ as it were, like all other medium designations, is approached here as one of several overlapping sets of issues and considerations more than as neatly defined classes of products. What the work of these artists has in common is a direct and human-scaled approach. Most of these works range in size from modest to minimally heroic, since they are not industrially fabricated by the alienated labor of technicians in warehouses but hand produced in the studios and studio spaces of artists who are more than likely maintaining a living that has little or nothing to do with sales of their art work. Many of these artists, not being products of brand name MFA programs, remain generally unknown to the commercial gallery world and its audience. Others have broken through to the larger art world stage embodying these notions intact. The exhibitions where you can find many of these artists’ work are frequently organized by artists from within the community itself engaging in extra-studio practice from within the community itself, and the information about where and when typically stays among the social media networks established by them. Exhibitions are often of an ephemeral nature with limited public opportunities to experience them. The audience for them is typically other artists. Some of the overlapping aesthetic and conceptual groupings that have emerged among the painters of these communities as I see them range from edge-to-edge intuitive abstract strategies (Daniela Campins, Rema Ghuloum, Stacy Wendt, John Mills, Max Presneill), to more materially-based pattern and grid riffs (Britton Tolliver, Mandy Lyn Ford, Nano Rubio, Ana Rodriguez, Jenny Hager) all the way to deconstructed investigations of figure-based elements and other represenations (Kristy Luck, Christina Quarles, Maja Ruznic, Ranee Henderson, Joshua Hagler, Josh Peters), to engagements with landscape notions (Christine Frerichs, Esmeralda Montes, Stephen Parise, Carl Baratta, Hung Viet Nguyen, Virginia Katz) as well as engagements with identity, relationships, and media representations (Loren Britton, Michelle Carla Handel, Kyla Hansen, April Bey, Casey Kauffmann).

The unapologetic embrace of painting by working artists of modest means has a larger corollary within our current cultural paradigm. The insatiable hunger for new, novel forms of art coupled with the dismissing or throwing out of older forms thought to be obsolete echoes the wasteful capitalist notion of planned obsolescence. A reassertion and reacknowledgment of painting’s development can be seen as part of a critique of this notion. Also, a connection can be made with regard to perceived notions of commodification of particular mediums. On the surface, a case is made that more conceptual, dematerialized practices challenge the market’s ability to commodify them, leaving painting, sculpture and other materially based forms as tainted with an inherent marketability. However, a deeper analysis uncovers a contrasting take. Indeed, it was a breakdown in financial markets for “dematerialized” and “conceptual” commodities – mortgages, stocks, bonds, debt, securities, derivatives, insurance policies, etc. – that nearly led to complete economic collapse in the previous decade. Indeed, some of the seminal figures of more conceptual bents are canonized market darlings with the “paperwork” relating to the art works becoming a fetishized commodity itself. Against this, the material character of painting and related mediums now stands as a document of the creative, un-alienated labor of working artists, as opposed to both the “administrative” aesthetic of many conceptual and project based practices and the anonymously fabricated designer works of artists like Hirst, Koons, Murakami, etc. This is not to say that there isn’t a hot market for painting, merely that its marketability is no less “inherent” than that of dematerialized forms, whose non-art analogs exist almost as pure commodities, financial products that are essentially shared fictions of government enforced ownership.

It would be a stretch to say the painters mentioned above share a common aesthetic concern. However, grouped together as such, commonalities bubble to the surface when compared to the more recognized artists and trends du jour. Each of the above-mentioned painter's works has a more idiosyncratic, individual characteristic when compared to the repetitive processes of zombie formalism, the last identifiable success aesthetic of the decade. No one wants their work to seem like it was mass-produced to be flipped on the market. No one is making the same painting over and over. This individual characteristic is analogous to and works in conjunction with the notion of indexicality, as defined by German art writer Isabelle Graw. The works directly refer to, and are therefore indexical of the actual artists themselves, and they evoke the artist’s presence when experienced by the viewer. This individualized indexicality can be said to be the result of the reaction to zombie formalism, retro-packaged by writer Chris Wiley as ‘Debt Aesthetics’. Debt Aesthetics refers to the paintings taking on the visual characteristics of currency itself and being traded as such in the wake of the crash of traditional, (barely) regulated sources of credit and markets. This being the case, the overall eclectic reaction to Debt Aesthetics/Zombie Formalism can be summed up as an attempt at a post-capitalist practice, in the case of painting, postcapitalist painting. It is not painting as an attempt to create value that can be used to pay off debt. It is not painting as a commodity that lies somewhere between Monopoly money and BitCoin. It is painting as art. So it speaks to the original question art poses – what is art – and it poses the question not in opposition to capitalism per se, but beyond it, over it, bigger and more universal as an idea than capitalism, speaking to a future that has moved on from it, in light of its increasingly inevitable unsustainability. In no way does the 'postcapitalist' designation imply anything about the above painters' own personal political beliefs. Their work, in my view, is what painting might look like in a world that doesn't revolve around financial profit. It is an initial attempt, a furtive beginning, at envisioning a future, as the great art of the past often attempted to do, if only in hindsight.

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Memorial Day Weekend, NY, 2018 – part 1

Day 1

When we come to NY, we stay with friends in Greenwich Village. It’s a dream really. We walk to Chelsea because we’re from LA, and walking through a sea of humanity to get to where you’re going is sort of what we came for. There’s absolutely nothing comparable to window-viewing in Chelsea, but it’s good to have some specific targets in mind. We hit one right away, an exhibition of Inka Essenhigh’s paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery on W 22nd St. Essenhigh was an early influence of mine, she came to speak at the University of Houston when I was there, in ’02 or ’03. At the time I was still looking at contemporary art for ‘permission’; permission to paint this subject, or that way. Then and nowEssenhigh’s forms seem slick and precisely defined in reproduction, like animation cels for lost scenes from Disney’s Fantasia. In person, the paintings reveal Essenhigh’s hand and the minutiae of her decisions. Figures melt into floppy, suggestive forms, occupying a world free from the constraints of gravity, space, reality. The clarity of the enamel paint surface draws the eye into beholding ambiguous forms that tease with narrative possibility. 


Inka Essenhigh, Girls Night Out, 2017, enamel on canvas, 60 x 58 inches, 152.4 x 147.3 cm

Inka Essenhigh, The Shape You're In, 2017, enamel on canvas, 46 x 72 inches, 116.8 x 182.9 cm

Inka Essenhigh, Party of the Flames and Flowers, 2017, enamel on canvas, 48 x 55 inches, 121.9 x 139.7 cm

One street over from Miles McEnery is one of the tentacles of the Gagosian empire (there are 5 in NY alone). Within the gallery on this warm May day is Ancestors, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Jenny Saville. This is as good as it gets for me. Opinion is divided, but for me these works offer a corporeal vision of a psyche dismembered and fractured by history. They seduce with amorous revulsion, weeping with paint and gestural fits. Bodies of diverse size and color are smashed together and placed on pedestals, daring the viewer to see them in a light that is still not bright enough – the light of a non-male eye. Historically, statistically, most images of women are produced by men. Correspondingly, it is not surprising to me at all that Saville’s “pyrotechnics” are dismissed by critics oblivious to their own biases, with repeated comparisons to Rubens, Salle, Condo, Auerbach. Gagosian’s roster is 79% male, and represents the penultimate stage of artist canonization before institutional enshrinement, where the gender statistics aren't much better. Art does not exist in a hermetic vacuum, divorced from the context of its time or the systemic oppressiveness that defines that time. The standards of formal analysis are not absolute Platonic ideals above issues of identity. Art, like scripture, often reveals more about the reader/viewer than the author/artist. 


Jenny Saville at Gagosian, New York

Installation view of Jenny Saville: Ancestors at Gagosian, New York.
Jenny Saville, Fate III, 2018, oil on canvas, 102 3/8 × 94 1/2 inches, 260 × 240 cm

Day 2

We head down to the Bowery to catch Songs For Sabotage, the 2018 New Museum Triennial, dubbed by Jerry Saltz the “I Am More Woke Than You” triennial. I didn’t feel that it was "strung out on privileged bullshit" but I am not totally unsympathetic to what I think he means. There was perhaps less of an electric air to it than the last triennial, Surround Audience, but 2015 was a different time wasn’t it? Bailing out on an attempt to process the concept of geontopower certainly helps maintain Saltz’s "folk critic" point of view (a "folk critic” with a Pulitzer Prize no less). But to dismiss Elizabeth Povanelli’s admittedly esoteric concept upon it’s first major exposure in the world of art feels a bit hasty. Were it used to justify distant, opaque, cynical, elitist gestures, perhaps I would dismiss it as well – art that dismisses the viewer should be dismissed by the viewer. Fortunately, the approaches and tactics present in Songs are familiar, accessible, and responsive, while at the same time remaining highly idiosyncratic and unexpected. As for geontopower, it is the New Museum after all, and new approaches to obsessively unpacking the unprecedented, cancerous monetizing of every aspect of life actually does feel like the right thing to be doing at this point in time. Like much great art, these works from all over the globe attempt to contend with content that defies cogent, verbal articulation. The heat of the hot button issues can be felt in many of these works without knowing specifically which buttons the artists are pushing. I give in to the urge to share images of the work of Los Angeles painter Janiva Ellis: riots of color and imagery, unabashed, hand-wrought, and immediate. Playing with the fire of faces, caricature and cartoons, Ellis's bold color and sunny skies are spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down. 



In the Lower East Side we visit three galleries: Magenta PlainsCANADA, and yours mine & ours gallery. Our hosts in the Village recommend an exhibit at Magenta Plains, a solo exhibition of paintings by Alex Kwartler. Subjects and objects include tuna cans, popcorn, pennies and the titular snowflakes. I am drawn to a pair of Tuyman-esque paintings of pennies dissolving into grey, austere fogs, fading memories of money. Just my two cents. At CANADA, the paintings of Daniel Hesidence are close to hitting a moving target between imagery and effect. Recurring head-shaped forms force a tense reckoning with the other visual information. The strangeness is compounded by the swirling line work flipping over and under, trying to play at being recognized as something too. While walking down Eldridge St. I notice some work I recognize from LA, Mandy Lyn Ford at yours, mine & ours. Though the materials of Ford's work are paint, cardboard, glitter, canvas, wood, and the like, in her hands they read more along the lines of cake, frosting, sugar, sprinkles, etc. Abstract painting as decadent, over the top dessert. Those colors, that glitter, and the confection-like qualities combine with the ferocious material presence and sublime interior logic, both two-dimensionally and three, to create a more 'nutritious' tension.









Saturday, October 14, 2017

Thoughts Left on the Page


installation view, Daniela Campins: In the Middle of This Frase, Eastside International (ESXLA), Sept 15th - Oct 20th, 2017


Part one of a series, working title: "Postcapitalist Painting"

Introduction


To the outside world, it seems that Los Angeles’s cup runneth over with new art museums and high-end galleries. Some of these new, moneyed cathedrals of fetishized capital exist to present high-end contemporary art collections that include million dollar acquisitions by the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra and Basquiat (Broad, Marciano). Others are sprung from real estate development riches (Main Museum), or are new incarnations of older, established institutions (ICA-LA). Without digging too much deeper, one could be forgiven for thinking that the art world begins and ends among these spaces and the new mega gallery outposts that are springing up along side them, affirming the legitimacy of the art within, in part, by their market performance (Hauser and Wirth, Spruth Magers, Maccarone, Matthew Marks, etc). The art exhibited at these places wins the public relations battle, and this side of the scene has its front to the world at large. But beyond the spectacle of this there is a community of established, working, contemporary artists at the ground-level in Los Angeles producing important work, despite little engagement with the moneyed side of the art world-industrial complex. A great deal of what they produce is painting. Such a great deal in fact, that some definitive currents and strategies have emerged among the painters of this community. What they all have in common is a direct and human-scaled approach – most of these works range in size from modest to minimally heroic; and a strong indexical sense of the presence of the artist themselves – as this work is not industrially fabricated in quantity by the alienated labor of technicians in warehouses but hand produced in the studios and studio spaces of artists who are more than likely maintaining a living alongside their practice that has little to do with the market demands du jour. Some of the overlapping aesthetic and conceptual groupings that have emerged among the work of these artists range from edge-to-edge intuitive abstract strategies, to more materially-based pattern and grid riffs all the way to deconstructed, figurative investigations and more.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

The Spectre (excerpt)



A spectre is haunting the art world – the spectre of all who have been failed by the rapidly irrelevant notion of “contemporary art”. All the powers of the old art world-industrial complex have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre—galleries and collectors, curators and critics, museums and patrons: 

  • Contemporary art enters broad public consciousness almost only as a function of late/ advanced/neoliberal capitalism. 
  • Too many students of art are indentured by crippling debt, unable to join the economy or advance in society. 
  • Many of the schools that teach art are overpriced administrative cartels that exploit faculty labor at the expense of students who are regarded as little more than customers. 
  • The continued dwindling of governmental support, respect, or faith in the arts creates even fewer opportunities for contemporary artists. 
  • The metropolitan centers for contemporary art are almost uninhabitable without the wealth and resources available to the upper class. 
  • Small, mid-size and emerging venues and marketplaces for contemporary art are getting squeezed out of the scene, acutely reflecting the larger wealth and income inequality across the globe. 
  • The political response from contemporary art has been stymied by its own systemic complicity in the larger issues; many who are privileged enough to participate in art benefit from the status quo. 
  • There is a fundamental disconnect between the moneyed world of contemporary art and the less institutionalized scene of most working contemporary artists today.


On one end there are art stars, post-internet online celebrity artists, many commercial galleries, many corporate sponsored and private museums, the larger, well-funded art nonprofits, most collectors of contemporary art, art fairs, art auctions, online art sales platforms, much of the art world print media, the brandname art schools and programs, many professional curators, art advisors/consultants/buyers, writers, academics, and critics, and art book publishers. 

And on the other end there are artist-run initiatives, un-institutionalized or less institutionalized alternative spaces, small-budget, specific, and civic-run art non-profits and museums, working artists (artists with day jobs a.k.a. regular jobs), many state university art programs, community college and university exhibition spaces and museums, artist-curators and exhibition producers, online and social media based art writing and blogging, artist-run or alternative art study programs and independent art presses and publishers. 

The latter is all too familiar with, and has aspired to be part of, the former. The former appears barely aware or cognizant of the latter. The edges of the division are not precise, but the world of art of the 21st century is increasingly seeming like two worlds, the distinctions more felt as much as they are deduced by the participants. The motivations of both worlds are probably the same at heart (the wealthy were already wealthy when they got into art), but one side has its face to the world as the entire, official world of art and the other is easily viewed as trying to “sneak in”, hoping to not be mistaken for the help, as those of us on that side frequently actually are—preparing and shipping art work for exhibition, assisting artists successful enough to hire assistants, adjunct teaching art to communities the art world’s doors are not generally made known to at community colleges and public universities. These are often gigs that new MFA’s from the brand name schools aren’t typically caught doing, perhaps because they have been taught that they won’t have to—teaching first-generation college students about drawing and painting is not a representative ambition of such students of these professionalized programs. In such an era as this, the notion of an artist whose only self-imposed obligation to the world is the production of their own personal art practice can easily smack of self-indulgent entitlement at best, and oblivious abuse of developed-world privilege at worst.

Read the rest in the latest issue of Rabble, available for $5 from Insert Blanc Press

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Accidentally On Purpose

Allison Miller, Bed, 2016, Oil, oil stick, acrylic and collage on two canvases 113 x 93 inches overall, 56.5 x 93 inches each. Photo by Jason Ramos 

Splotches, squiggles, stripes, deckle edges. The namable things in Allison Miller’s paintings exist just over and under the threshold of identifiable, representational imagery. Each of the decisions documented on her canvases are paradoxically imbued with both intuitive investigation and methodical consideration. Individually and as a whole, the works in her first solo exhibition at the Pit in Glendale, Screen Jaw Door Arch Prism Corner Bedassert an internal visual logic that defies immediate verbal articulation. However, the presence of the squiggles, grids and framing devices open her language up enough to prevent a completely hermetic system. Bold and graphic declarations of color, shape, and composition give some of the canvases, like Corner, Jaw, and Bed a flag or banner-like feel.

Jaw, 2016, Oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas,
 60 x 52. 5 inches.
Photo by Jason Ramos
Door, 2015, Oil, oil stick, oil pastel, and acrylic on canvas.
Photo by Jason Ramos

The squiggles are accompanied by a bold black stroke of paint and dual, taped-off "less-than" mathematical signs in the largest work of Miller’s to date, Bed. The work is a double decker stacked diptych that commands the entire back wall of the Pit’s next door gallery, the Pit II. Just like her imagery, Bed stands within an in between space, this time between painting and installation. The perspective of the room amplifies the visual destination of the canvases themselves, the angles along the floor and ceiling aligning with the sharp, sideways double-V signs, in turn reiterated by the freehand marks adjacent to them. Passages that seem dictated by controlled accident or chance subsequently reveal specific, conscious addressing of the drips, smears, and cover-ups upon closer reading. Isolated drips in the painting entitled Jar seem surrounded by force fields deflecting a spray of black and pink misted paint. Points of contact between red and green bacon-strips of paint on the left side of Drag Arch are emphasized with dark strokes that seem copied and pasted from the right side of the painting, where they are gathered together within a bright yellow trapezoidal field. Further inspection of the yellow patch recursively uncovers what could be more of those bacon strips on a microscopic scale, or perhaps very far away.

Screen, 2016 (detail)
Jaw, 2016 (detail)

Some of the moves, such as the aforementioned force-fielded marks, sideways V’s, and dark strands and squiggles, have occurred enough in her previous recent work to indicate an idiosyncratic lexicon going back to at least 2007. Denser, fussier compositions from the aughts have now given way to more open fields and a bolder, more striking juggle of higher-key hues. Light-valued grounds in a lot of the earlier work situated them within a drawing context that the work of Screen Jaw Door Arch Prism Corner Bed transcends with a more painterly all-over consideration of the format. Foregrounded linear elements still serve to organize and activate some of the compositions, such as in Bed, Screen, and Door, but in others, they now serve to accent and contrast the fields of color and shape, as in Prism, Corner, Drag Arch, and Jaw. All of this adds up to a slow, satisfying distillation of an abstract language that flirts with hipster nonchalance, but only upon first glance. Sustained viewing is rewarded by unexpected formal revelations in each work. These revelations make Miller’s decision and process available to the viewer, and invite a deeper kind of seeing and use of simple, abstract elements. 

Drag Arch, 2016, Oil, oil stick, acrylic, and pencil on canvas 60 x 58 inches. Photo credit: The Pit, Glendale, CA

Screen, 2016, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Photo by Jason Ramos

Friday, October 14, 2016

Hand–Eye Coordination


If there's an odd familiarity to this installation it’s probably because Holy Mountain was an influence, as it mentions in the exhibition statement. Transforming the space by activating the floor is in Polly Apfelbaum’s wheelhouse, but in Face (Geometry) (Naked) Eyes, Apfelbaum deftly activates the perimeter and other parts of the space as well. Bold, primary, formal choices dominate overall, such as the stripe which frames a diverse series of wall mounted ceramic pieces. These eccentrically shaped ceramic paintings contribute multiple layers of contrast and linkage throughout the installation. The rough, intimate, individual quality of the ceramic pieces pop against the immaculately designed hard-edged environment. This also connects and contrasts the hand-woven floor pieces designed and produced by Apfelbaum with weavers from Oaxaca, Mexico. The back and forth is amplified by the handmade ceramic beads suspended over the rugs. Each bead seems indistinguishable from one another until closer inspection reveals the unique, organic form of each one.


The ceramic paintings presented here highlight an intersection of ceramics and painting that is a recurring interest in the current moment. Allison SchulnickMary HillRy Rocklen, among others have made use of clay’s materiality, presence, indexicality, and evidence of the hand to present objects that have undeniably painterly qualities. Apfelbaum’s wall mounted pieces read as shaped abstract works, faces, paint palettes, open books, plates, dishes, personal pan pizzas and more. The extensive sampling of these particular, tactile, craggy, bubbly, expressive works give viewers an opportunity for detailed, close-up looking. Face (Geometry) (Naked) Eyes as a whole is best taken in from wide angles, and the arrangement of rugs encourages this vantage point as viewers are forced to the perimeter (though there is the option of walking on the rugs with booties). 


The wooden wall pieces mounted in the back area come up a bit short. They are almost invisible from the entrance, blending in with the deep red background they're set against. Upon discovery it’s easy to see their formal and conceptual links to both the ceramic paintings and the rugs, as well as the satisfying level of craft they embody. Though their camouflaged placement within the gallery also gives them the feeling of being tacked on, like an afterthought.