Forrest Bess at CHRISTIE’S and the WHITNEY MUSEUM
James Kalm presents this program for hard-core Forrest Bess fans only. As one of the most mythic and eccentric American painters of the Twentieth Century, Forrest Bess (1911-1977) exerts a force over contemporary art that is hard to measure. Working in isolation and on a small scale, he was nonetheless able to garner the attentions of critical and art world heavyweights. With his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial of 2012, in an installation curated by Robert Gober, and the presentation of a cache of mostly late paintings from Texas, this program records over twenty-six minutes of paintings, possibly documenting twenty-five percent of his life’s output.
The Outsider Art Fair 2012
As a big fan of “Outsider Art” James Kalm waits in anticipation for the annual Outsider Art Fair. This fair features dozens of regional and international galleries and institutions that concentrate on promoting the work of the marginalized and voiceless. While the New York art scene is glutted with massive museum shows purporting to present the “best and latest” in contemporary art, and despite the differences in production and promotion budgets, there is a level of “authentic” creativity that the “outsiders” possess that can’t be imitated by the commercial art world establishment. This program includes a short interview with Rakien Nomura from the RHD Outside In Gallery.
A New Vision of a Visionary Fisherman
“Chinquapin, 1967” by Forrest Bess shows how he was influenced by his surroundings on the Gulf of Mexico. More Photos »
The art of Forrest Bess (1911-77), like that of Vincent van Gogh, may be in danger of being overtaken by his life story. Especially now, when the work of this eccentric visionary painter — who spent the bulk of his maturity as a fisherman on the Gulf of Mexico, living on a spit of Texas beach — is having an especially intense New York moment.
The current Whitney Biennial includes a show within a show of 11 Bess paintings, organized by the sculptor Robert Gober; it proffers Bess as a kind of foundational artist of our time. And an additional 40 of his paintings can be seen in “A Tribute to Forrest Bess,” an exhibition at Christie’s that is occasioned by a private sale of those works for a single seller. (It makes for the rather uneasy sight of an auction house acting like a commercial gallery handling what is tantamount to an artist’s estate.)
The facts of Bess’s life are nothing if not sensational. They include isolation, poverty, recurring visions — Bess said that he merely copied motifs that had appeared to him in dreams since childhood — and even self-mutilation. In the late 1950s, convinced that uniting the male and female sides of his personality would guarantee immortality, Bess attempted to turn himself into what he called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” through two acts of painful self-surgery that yielded a small vaginalike opening at the base of his penis.
But as with van Gogh’s work, Bess’s small, intensely personal quasi abstractions seem designed to withstand the onslaught of biography. The best of them, made from 1946 to 1970, are initially unimposing yet can rivet the eye with their roiled surfaces, saturated colors and combinations of odd symbols or distilled evocations of the natural world.
Equally important is the way Bess’s works reshape art history. Like Myron Stout, Steve Wheeler and Alice Trumbull Mason, who also favored small size and resonant forms, Bess expands our understanding of the ascendancy of American painting in the 1940s and ’50s far beyond the wall-size canvases of the usual Abstract Expressionist suspects.
There has not been so much of Bess’s work on view in New York since 1988, when Hirschl & Adler Modern mounted a show of 61 paintings. And both the Whitney and Christie’s displays include fascinating, if sometimes unsettling, ancillary information.
At the Whitney, Mr. Gober has juxtaposed the paintings with Bess’s correspondence with New York art world figures like the art historian Meyer Schapiro and Betty Parsons, the leading dealer of the Abstract Expressionists. Parsons gave Bess six solo shows from 1951 to 1967, which demonstrates the extent to which this outsider was also very much an insider, as driven to exhibit his work as any painter in a downtown loft. There are also photographs of the self-surgery.
At Christie’s “Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle,” a marvelous 48-minute film completed in 1998 by Chuck Smith, working with the photographer Ari Marcopoulos, is being screened continuously, if not to best effect, on a small monitor. In this film you hear from numerous affectionate and understanding friends and relatives who knew Bess intimately, as well as from interested New Yorkers. These include Schapiro, the Buddhist writer Robert Thurman and John Yau, a critic who wrote an essential essay for the catalog for the Hirschl & Adler Modern show.
Mr. Thurman floats the thesis that, from a Buddhist perspective, Bess was “maybe someone who had been a yogi in a former life.” He notes that a yogi’s role is to “yoke your body and being to your view of life,” calling Bess’s body “his supreme work of art.”
Jonathan Lasker Early Works at CHEIM & READ
Jonathan Lasker has forged one of the most recognizable and respected painting careers within the New York Scene. His well wrought abstractions are unmistakably unique. This exhibition of “Early Works” gives viewers a chance to view the paintings that were the genesis of his oeuvre, and to see the arch of their development.
A Survey of a Different Color
2012 Whitney Biennial
2012 Whitney Biennial A dancer in Sarah Michelson’s “Devotion Study #1 — The American Dancer.” More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
One of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory may or may not contain a lot more outstanding art than its predecessors, but that’s not the point. The 2012 incarnation is a new and exhilarating species of exhibition, an emerging curatorial life form, at least for New York.
Possessed of a remarkable clarity of vision, a striking spatial intelligence and a generous stylistic inclusiveness, it places on an equal footing art objects and time-based art — not just video and performance art but music, dance, theater, film — and does so on a scale and with a degree of aplomb we have not seen before in this town. In a way that is at once superbly ordered and open-ended, densely structured and, upon first encounter, deceptively unassuming, the exhibition manages both to reinvent the signature show of the Whitney Museum of American Art and to offer a bit of redemption for the out-of-control, money-saturated art world.
Largely avoiding both usual suspects and blue-chip galleries, this Biennial tacitly separates art objects from the market and moves them closer to where they come from, artists, whose creative processes and passion for other artists’ work are among the show’s unstated yet evident themes, along with documentary, color, collage, sexual identity and abstraction. It is a show in continual flux, and will to some extent be different each time you visit, right up to its final day. Multiple visits are warranted, in fact necessary, to get a true sense of this show’s richness and the improvisatory energy it brings to the Whitney.
The Biennial has been organized by Elisabeth Sussman, the Whitney’s curator of photography, and Jay Sanders, a writer, independent curator and former art gallery director known for his erudition in areas of poetry and performance. They have worked in tandem with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, of Light Industry, a film-and-electronic-art space in Brooklyn, who guided the exhibition’s ambitious film and video program. From what I had time to preview, the film selections include at least two of the show’s major works: Frederick Wiseman’s 2010 excursion into unnarrated documentary, “Boxing Gym,” and Thom Andersen’s three-hour “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a meditation on the discrepancy between movies and real life in largely architectural terms that is as enthralling as it is dispiriting.
Another filmmaker who stands out is Werner Herzog, who contributes “Hearsay of the Soul,” a ravishing five-screen digital projection, to his first-ever art show. An unexpected celebration of the handmade by the technological — and a kind of collage — it combines greatly magnified close-ups of the voluptuous landscape etchings of the Dutch artist Hercules Segers (1589-1638), whom Herzog considers “the father of modernity in art,” with some justification. The shifting scroll-like play of images is set to sonorous music, primarily by the Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger, who also appears briefly on screen, playing his heart out. I dare you not to cry.
The curators both signal and facilitate the show’s new equality of objects and events by their ingenious decision to use the museum’s vaulting fourth floor gallery, with its big Cyclopsian window overlooking Madison Avenue, for performing-arts events. In so doing they also remove from contention a space that in past Biennials has tended to encourage big, show-stopping, sometimes bombastic, implicitly macho art objects. (As for the art objects they do include, these tend to be works of modest scale, which they have arranged on the second and third floors in spare, open-plan displays that are almost startling in their avoidance of the usual Biennial overcrowding.)
Read more at: A Survey of a Different Color
Cindy Sherman at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
James Kalm pumps his bike to the Museum of Modern Art to bring viewers a walking tour of the Cindy Sherman retrospective. Sherman is arguably one of the most prominent American artists of her day. In 2011 one of her photos was sold for 3.89 million dollars. She’s been a prominent part of the New York art and fashion scene since the late seventies and is an acknowledged force behind the “Pictures Generation”. This show traces the arch of Sherman’s career from her days as a student in Buffalo, to the latest, large computer assisted photo murals she produced for the entrance to the exhibition galleries. Includes extended excerpts from a discussion of Sherman’s work between organizer Eva Respini and MoMA director Glen Lowery.
A Colossus in Clay Speaks a Generation’s Message
The fourth floor of the New Museum was in ruins. It was almost impossible to walk without stepping on a piece of wood or a pile of rubble, and a fog of dust hung so thickly in the air that it had begun seeping into other parts of the building through the vents.
Any visitor to the museum in early February might have thought that the floor was being gutted, but there was something odd about this scene of destruction: In the middle of it all, a kind of rough gray tower of what appeared to be cement rose from floor to ceiling, looking in places like detritus designed by George Lucas for the planet Tatooine, in other places like something left by the Incas and in others like the underside of an old highway overpass. More than anything else, it looked like the product of a very large rogue 3-D printer infected by a virus, randomly downloading schematics and plans.
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| Robert Wright for The New York Times |
Adrián Villar Rojas beside his towering sculpture, one of the works on display at the New Museum’s Triennial.
But the object, expected to be one of the showstoppers at “The Ungovernables,” the museum’s Triennial — which opens on Wednesday with more than 50 young artists from around the world — was made by human hands. Using mostly clay, one of the world’s oldest and plainest art-making materials, a crew of six men and women from Argentina assembled, shaped and carved the piece, working seven days a week for the last month under the direction of a 31-year-old sculptor named Adrián Villar Rojas.
Until only a few years ago, Mr. Rojas, who was raised and educated in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, was little known even in his own country, working out of a studio in his parents’ garage. But he rapidly gained a following after beginning to show in Buenos Aires, and he was chosen to represent his country in the 2011 Venice Biennale, where a towering forest of his deranged clay structures became an unexpected hit. (Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, proposed that they might be a “new kind of visionary assemblage.”)
He began using clay partly because it was cheap and plentiful and its crude physicality tacked against the ethereal look of a lot of Conceptualist-influenced work by established Argentine artists. But the clay itself — because of what happens when it dries — began to shape his ideas about the kind of work he wanted to make.
“Look at this, we finished this only yesterday,” he said recently in strongly accented but perfect English, showing a visitor to the New Museum a piece of the sculpture. Mottled gray and scarred by deep cracks, it looked as if it could have just been unburied by archaeologists. “It’s an instant ruin,” said Mr. Rojas, who looked almost ancient himself, his hair and glasses dusted with clay powder. “It’s the gift the material gives us.”
He thinks of such pieces as ruins from the future, the wreckage of civilizations yet to come and difficult even to imagine, beyond the fact that they will eventually collapse, as civilizations have an unfortunate habit of doing.
Like many ruins, the piece itself will be demolished, not long after the Triennial ends on April 22, both because there is no good way to take it apart to get it out of the museum and because, Mr. Rojas says, “I really love the idea of not having a body of work.”
Read more at: http://www.nyti.ms/z5jUB5
Jean Dubuffet The Last Two Years at PACE GALLERY
By James Kalm.
Jean Dubuffet is perhaps one of the most highly regarded Post-war European artists, with a breadth of influence far exceeding his reputation as a painter. As the founder and theoretician of “Art Brut”, his ideas regarding the “uncivilized” and “low art” revolutionized the notion of what has artistic relevance, and what lies inside and outside the aesthetic pale. “The Last Two Years” is a summation of Dubuffet’s mastery of painterly gesture, a reduction of means, and an embrace of abstraction, albeit with lingering echoes of his primitive figuration.
Jerry Saltz on the Perverse Master Mike Kelley, 1954–2012
The roiling perverse genius Mike Kelley is dead at 57, reportedly by his own hand. Kelley, a Detroit native, spent his whole career in Los Angeles, where — with Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy, Catherine Opie, Jennifer Pastor, Charles Ray, and Jason Rhodes — he helped turn the incipient foreboding of Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Nancy Rubins, and Chris Burden into an all-out acrimonious art of darkness. In 1992, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art organized many of these artists under the rubric “Helter Skelter.”
Kelley was all of these artists rolled densely into one, a stand-alone visionary in his own right. He is the originator of his own form of sculptural mayhem: cacophonous disorienting agglomerations and sprawling installations of stuff heaped upon other stuff, some made, some found, all organized in ways audiences could access but that also felt infinitely other-ish, deeply carnivalesque, always operatic, and utterly unrelenting. One of the greatest of these testosterone-fueled, grandiose neo-gesamtkunstwerks was Kelley’s 2005 building-filling Day Is Done at Gagosian’s West 24th Street palace. I called this show “Clusterfuck Aesthetics.” It looked like a madhouse and hummed with what architect Renzo Piano called “imaginary cities where everything keeps moving.” The organizing factor was a single found old high-school yearbook. Everything in the show — pictures of kids in Halloween costumes or in school plays, gigantic sculptures with moving parts and films with their own soundtracks — was generated by and based on the pictures from this book. It was a sculptural multiplex megalopolis of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other highly produced idiosyncratic installations, a walk-in cathedral of the id, a trip into America’s suburban past, and Kelley’s burning imagination. He was willing to fail as flamboyantly as any artist of his generation.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy of Arts, review
Whatever game David Hockney is playing in his hotly anticipated Royal Academy show eludes me, says Alastair Sooke.
It is 50 years since David Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art wearing a gold lamé jacket. Within a few years he had earned a reputation as an enfant terrible whose risqué autobiographical work touched upon the taboo subject of homosexuality. With his oversized spectacles and hair dyed silvery blond, he became Brit art’s first celebrity: a charmer whose personality beguiled the public as much as his work.
Fast-forward half a century, and Hockney is still feted and adored. He shed his skin of provocative wunderkind long ago, fashioning instead a role as a plain-speaking chain-smoker specialising in common sense. Following the death of Lucian Freud, he is routinely described as Britain’s greatest living painter. He is certainly the most popular: there have reportedly been more advance ticket sales for his new exhibition at the Royal Academy than there were for the gallery’s blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition in 2010.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is devoted to a single genre: landscape. It came about after the artist showed Bigger Trees near Warter – a gargantuan landscape covering 50 canvases that is now in the collection of the Tate – at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007. After it caused a splash , the RA offered Hockney the full suite of main galleries for a show of landscapes. The resulting exhibition contains more than 150 works, mostly created within the past decade.
Many were painted outdoors and depict the countryside around Bridlington, the small Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has lived for seven years. There are bright oil paintings of wheat fields and tree-lined country lanes. There are multi-canvas vistas of woodland seen in different seasons. There are watercolours of hedgerows and haystacks, charcoal sketches of copses and logs, and more than 50 colourful “drawings”, created using an iPad and printed on to paper, documenting the onset of spring along an old Roman road that runs out of Bridlington. There are even nine- and 18-screen video works that record the fluctuating appearance of Woldgate Woods: captured using high-definition cameras ingeniously rigged on to Hockney’s Jeep, they subject the natural world to the kind of scrutiny that the German artist Albrecht Dürer once lavished upon a clump of turf. Generally the mood is upbeat, homely yet wonderstruck. I half expected to hear a cuckoo sing. The colours are citrus-sharp.
You would be forgiven for asking: what happened? After all, Hockney is best known as the raunchy Californian sensualist who painted sun-kissed boys gliding through the azure swimming pools of Los Angeles in the Sixties. And yet here he presents himself as a modest pastoralist, content to hymn the bounty of nature with quiet exultation – dancing, like Wordsworth, among the daffodils. Once inspired by distant destinations such as Egypt, China and America’s West Coast, he now seems happy pottering about a neglected nook of England. The prodigal son has returned to within 65 miles of Bradford, where he was born in 1937, and settled down. The internationalist has turned parochial. The radical has come over all conservative.
As if to explain this transformation, the second room of the exhibition presents a mini-retrospective of earlier landscapes. We see two dingy paintings from the Fifties, a smattering of stylish canvases from the Sixties and Seventies, and several views of California and the Grand Canyon, including one gigantic work full of oranges and reds so scorching you can practically feel your retina burning up. The gallery functions as a kind of airlock, inviting us to shed our perceptions and consider Hockney afresh as a landscape artist, before venturing forth to look at his more recent work.
Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.
Read more at: David Hockney succumbs to hubris
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