We don’t rubbish the Booker shortlist, or demand that it should be banned – yet we do when it comes to the Turner prize. Why?

Better than fiction? … A viewer examines Richard Wright’s painting at this year’s Turner prize show. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

“This year’s Booker shortlist was worthless; none of the novelists on it has any chance of being remembered in 50 years, none of these books can compare for one second with the great tradition of English literature. Set one of these minor talents alongside a Jane Austen or a Joseph Conrad, and it is clear we live in mediocre cultural times. The Booker should be abolished.”

No, I’ve never read a comment like that about a Booker prize shortlist either. I have, however, read (and written) many such critiques of Turner prize shortlists. But why does contemporary art get such a rough ride in comparison with the contemporary novel?

Critics and the public are prepared to say infinitely more dismissive things about new art than ever gets said about new literary fiction: it’s common for modern art to be mocked as “junk”, but rare for even the most outrageous or embarrassing novel to be dismissed as not worth the paper it’s written on

Read more at: Art v books: a critical double standard

Patrick McMullan

Revelers at the party Vito Schnabel, Stavros Niarchos and Alex Dellal threw at the W hotel.

MIAMI — The most striking aspect of the art world is its almost compulsive will to party. Money never seems to go as far as conviviality, especially within the hothouse of Art Basel Miami Beach, where social connections really do mean business. Both dealers and collectors compete to organize the smartest guest lists for dinners that relieve the pressures of spending money on art. Over morning-after coffee, stories detailing which parties attracted the sexiest entourage, who was at what dinner and which events you missed the night before vie with reports of yesterday’s sightings of art.

Transactions between clients and dealers, and artists and patrons become unusually transparent in such a public arena. Hotel cocktails and after-parties further cement, or foster, personal relationships between people who see each other every night in New York anyway and those from other parts of the world (Latin America and the United Kingdom, mainly). In many ways, these casual conversations are the week’s greatest entertainment.

Read more at: Art Basel Miami 2009 | It Must Be Fête

The Indian-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor has always been a kind of magician, which cuts two ways. Whether with blazingly reflective metal surfaces or dark, plush, seemingly infinite interiors, his pieces dispense multiple visual thrills and mysteries. But the same effects can make his work appear tricky, decorative and shallow. It hasn’t helped that they seem to have been concocted by playing fast and slick with the innovations of his Minimalist and Post-Minimalist predecessors.

Mr. Kapoor, who is 54, did not begin life in a Western culture. He was born and grew up in Mumbai when it was still called Bombay, and in 1973 moved to London, where he studied art and then took up residence. He is a decade or so older than most of the Young British Artists, who took the art world by storm in the early 1990s, and his sensibility is markedly different: he greatly prefers gentle seduction to shock tactics.

Read more at: ‘ANISH KAPOOR,’

Susan Rothenberg first gained critical attention in the mid-1970s, when she introduced the simple outline image of a horse into the austere, canvas plane of Minimalism. Like her peers, she considered the materials of the artist, but rather than denying the use of illusion in painting, she instead explored the relationship between the figure and the painted ground. Since then, Rothenberg has received international acclaim for her paintings, drawings, and prints. Because she has maintained a strict reliance upon imagery throughout her career and wrestled with the lessons of Modernism, she has often been a singular voice in contemporary painting. At the same time, her physical approach and gestural application of paint place her in the tradition of an earlier generation of American painters that includes Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In 1990 Rothenberg moved permanently from New York to New Mexico with her husband, artist Bruce Nauman. The paintings she has completed in this once-new environment were stimulated by life on the ranch and the light-filled landscape of her surroundings. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

From artnet and  Craig F. Starr Gallery :

Untitled, 1974 Acrylic and tempera on canvas, h: 36 x w: 45 inches

Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York in 1945. She received a BFA from Cornell University. Her early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. The first body of work for which she became known centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic, these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their most essential elements. The horses, along with fragmented body parts (heads, eyes, and hands) are almost totemic, like primitive symbols, and serve as formal elements through which Rothenberg investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting. From Documentary Film | PBS

New York, 1975, marked Rothenberg’s debut.  The center of the art world rode the waves of American art movements Pop Art and Minimalism.  The alternative space 112 Greene Street was home to downtown performances and shows busily breaking boundaries between disciplines, even as Postmodernism was ushering in such things as Photo-realist painting. When Rothenberg boldly showed three large horse paintings in a solo exhibition at 112 Greene, Peter Schjeldahl, then senior editor for Art in America wrote: “the large format of the pictures was a gesture of ambition,” and that “the mere reference to something really existing was astonishing.” From adobe airstream

From  Sperone Westwater – Works:

Untitled, 1976 crayon and graphite on paper, 15 3/4 x 23 5/8 inches

“[The horse was] my Jasper John flag,” she said in Art:21. “They were acceptable as paintings and acceptable as not going backwards.”

She began to dismantle the horses and reconstruct them with a sense of radial motion. At this time she also began to realize that these horse paintings were surrogate self portraits expressing a type of body empathy and emotional conditions. “I didn’t feel comfortable making a complete figure, but I did want to explore the idea of the body. So I started with parts and wholes,” Rothenberg said. “My head is the thinking part and my hand is the painting part, and I wanted to get my hand inside my head.”
From adobe airstream

From   Tate Gallery Colletion :

Vertical Spin,  1986-7 oil on canvas, 130 x 112 inches

‘Vertical Spin’ is from a series of twelve paintings on the theme of spinning figures made by the artist over a period of two and a half years. The painting depicts a dancer leaping into the air with the figure visible at various stages of the leap. The artist has said that she tries ‘to break down and record the conceivable placements and changes of the body on its way up, and into an airborne spin. This imagined projection of movement in time and space met the same obstacles a dancer would know in trying to defy gravity. A dancer cannot spin in the air forever, and a painter can’t make literal movement or actual space.’

From artnet and Baldwin Gallery :

“Untitled,” 1989-1990 Oil, charcoal & graphite on paper, h: 47.2 x w: 43.5 inches

Normal activities on the ranch supplied Rothenberg with some of the subjects of her paintings, as in Dogs Killing Rabbit (1990–91) and the two Accident paintings, on the theme of a rider thrown from a horse. However, more important than the depicted scene is Rothenberg’s attention to the relationship between the varying images in the final composition. She is calculating in her placement of the fractured legs, arms, and faces scattered throughout these paintings. In contrast to the specificity of these earlier canvases, the scenes found in the four panels of Spanish Dancer #1–4 (see below) 1994–96 (68 1/2 x 324 inches) suggest a story that remains mysterious.

Here, rather than simply creating a narrative, Rothenberg instead employs a perplexing sequence that she constructs with figures and the manipulation of brilliant color.

From  Sperone Westwater:

Dogs Killing Rabbit, 1991 – 1992, oil on canvas 87 x 140 1/2 inches

In addition to continuing to explore color, Rothenberg has also considered viewpoints that vary from her previous paintings. The position of the viewer changes from that of multiple points that suggest the passage of time, in her earliest paintings, to being in close proximity to the subject, as found in her most recent paintings. Her later compositions appear to be less about an event and more about a painter who is attempting to compose something new with her developing skills and experience.

While stimulated by New Mexico’s environment, Rothenberg’s paintings from the nineties are—above all else—reflective of the artist’s increasingly complex relationship with her medium. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cheryl Brutvan is the Beal Curator of Contemporary Art in the Department of Contemporary Art.

From Minneapolis Institute of Arts:

Goat Over Dog, 1991-1992 oil on canvas, 71 x 48 1/2 inches

Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth condensed Susan Rothenberg’s 35-year career as a performer-turned-painter into a focused exhibition of 25 paintings, titled “Moving in Place.” Through SUNDAY, JANUARY  3, 2010

Excerpted here: Auping curates “Untitled (Black Head)” (1980-81), “Folded Buddha” (1987-88) and “Pin Wheel” (1988) as works that stretch the boundaries of figuration and explore the disorientation between the human body and our perception of it in a space (a theme Rothenberg also explored with Joan Jonas, in performance).

Another shift in the show is 1990, when Rothenberg moved to Galisteo, NM, where she still lives with her husband Bruce Nauman. Rothenberg describes the move as very disorienting and a time of significant change in her painting. Auping suggests, “The restlessness of the artist’s psyche seems to have merged with the unpredictability of rural life.” His entire exhibition swirls around “Orange Break” (1989-90). It’s not the color that is the key for Rothenberg; it is the break in the figure depicted as flipping back on itself. “I think the figure in this painting represents an extreme stretching of emotional energy,” Rothenberg said in the catalog.

From Sperone Westwater – Works:

Untitled, 2005 oil on paper, 63 5/8 x 77 inches

But Auping supposes that since 1990, Rothenberg’s paintings have been more influenced by art history and specifically her memories of early Modernist art she examined at Albright-Knox Gallery, in her hometown of Buffalo, NY.  He inscribes as influential Pablo Picasso’s “Nude Figure” (1909-10), Morgan Russell’s “Synchrony in Orange: To Form” (1913-14), Chaim Soutine’s “Page Boy at Maxim’s” (1927). He infers that Rothenberg’s figures are formed around instability and dislocation, which he ties directly to her dislocation from New York to New Mexico. He laments her disconnection from an avant-garde that mined the photographic and the purely abstract. Auping then says that Rothenberg has taken a reverse trajectory.

“She has become an outsider of sorts, practicing her art on a ranch in relative isolation,” Auping writes in the catalog. Moving away from her avant-garde roots her imagery has turned back toward early Modern figuration.

From Sperone Westwater – Works:

Good Dog Stay, 2006 oil on paper, 58 5/8 x 72 inches

If Rothenberg is known first and foremost as a painter, she has also made crucial contributions to the medium of drawing. On the occasion of her 2004 exhibition of drawings at Sperone Westwater, Robert Storr wrote, “…fundamentally, drawing is as much a matter of evocation as it is of depiction, of identifying the primary qualities of things in the world and transposing them without a loss of quiddity. This at any rate is what drawing has been for Rothenberg. He also said “what is that black blob? o nevermind i have realized that it is a horse and i respect that everyone has a …different style.” Wikipedia

From artnet and Sperone Westwater:

The Fence 2 (Holding), 2006-2007 oil on canvas, h: 66 x w: 88 inches

From artnet and Bernier/Eliades Gallery:

“Primo” 2007 oil on canvas, h: 78 x w: 84.1 inches

“I’m pretty painterly,” says Rothenberg. “I love moving paint around and how lively or soft it is.”

Examples of Rothenberg’s work are in MOMA, New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

After a whirlwind trip back to the Midwest where N and I spent a minute moment with each of our respective families, we are back home again in the Pacific Northwest.

Thanksgiving day was spent with N’s ex and their kids in Illinois. What’s that you say? Dinner with the ex? Not only did we spend TG day with her but we stayed overnight in her house too, which was really great. Also not the first time we have done so as she and I seem to get on quite well. And amazingly she made, for the second year running, a completely gluten-free dinner so I could partake in absolutely everything. (And not one of the many non GF folk could tell the difference.) Plus she’s knowledgable about a gluten-free diet, so didn’t feel I had to quiz her about things like sauces where much of the hidden dangers lurk. Now wouldn’t it be great if all ex’s and current’s could get along!?

Then it was off to see my kids in Wisconsin. So when N drives, I enjoy taking photos from the moving car because listening to the radio is virtually impossible when the two people “encapsulated”  in a vehicle together have radically different tastes in music – as well as programing, and I like to have something to do if I’m a passenger.

Being in Wisconsin was wonderful (still miss it so), surrounded by my family and friends, all of whom had enjoyed their Thanksgiving dinners elsewhere, so we were not obliged to dine on leftovers; a good excuse for all of us to eat out!

And so we did.

Hope everyone in the US had a great Thanksgiving weekend with their loved ones!

]]> http://islandlass.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/to-the-midwest-and-back-again/feed/ 0 islandlass http://islandlass.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/anish-kapoor-3/ http://islandlass.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/anish-kapoor-3/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:27:33 +0000 islandlass http://islandlass.wordpress.com/?p=8482 ]]>

Join Time Out Art Editor Ossian Ward on a tour around the Anish Kapoor exhibition at London’s Royal Academy – and find out why you should see this bold, brilliant show.

Artlyst films the speech given by Anish Kapoor on the occasion of the opening of his solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in September 2009.

The Manly Art of Museum Curating

By WENDELL JAMIESON

The other week I took my son Dean to see the “Arts of the Samurai” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As we walked around admiring the many gleaming sword blades, fantastic helmets and braided suits of iron armor, I detected something unfamiliar in the air, at least in this museum. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was until we were standing at the cash register in the gift shop.

Erik T. Johnson

The saleswoman was speaking to the middle-age couple ahead of us. They were all laughing about something or other when she said: “You know, we’ve never seen so many men here at the museum. This show has filled our galleries with men.”

It was true: the Samurai show had a far higher ratio of male viewers than the nearby rooms containing European paintings, higher than I’d ever seen in any museum. So that got me thinking: What other shows could the Met put on to bring the male demographic in?

STEAK! A HISTORY IN MEAT

Eating, drinking and celebrating has been a staple of artistic expression since cave paintings. Scores of examples could be brought together here, all centered on the consumption of beef. Two exhibits would serve as focal points. One would be a life-size diorama (à la African mammals in the American Museum of Natural History) of a Beefsteak, the gluttonous, utensil-free meat-eating orgies depicted by Joseph Mitchell for The New Yorker in “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks.”

Read more at: The Manly Art of Museum Curating