art market article

Here's a link to an Art Newspaper article on the art market. Thanks Todd Gibson for the link and pulling the good quotes. Below is a quote from some sleazy dealer -

"If you make the business transparent it would collapse overnight. I have to have the option to lie to collectors about what’s available or quote them prices 10 times what other people paid. Entire careers are built upon fabrications, like about which shows sold out and at what prices"

HUGGUH

HUG - This was a total surprise. My photo's included so you might think I knew about it but the photo is actually something they had on file from a January 2004 Creation Story. Those two features along with last month's ADA review mean Style Weekly has been very good to me! Thanks Style Weekly!

GUH - I'm balancing out the above good press with a link to the smarmy Grammer Priss. He shore duz no a lot!

spooky futamigaura

spooky futamigaura, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

This is one of my Futamigaura inspired paintings. Futamigaura is a real place, the name of a beach in Ise, and the home of Meoto-iwa - the "Wedded Rocks" (I think most people just say Futamigaura though). I spent a month in Ise but never saw these rocks, it was only later on a visit to the Ota Museum in Tokyo that I saw Hiroshige's print and became aware of them.

Here are some other artist's versions - Shoda Koho here, Kawase Hasui here and here, somebody else here.

Someone just told me they look like the Pac-Man ghosts.

Hans Heiner Buhr

Through a comment on J.T. Kirkland's blog I've discovered the blog and work of Hans Heiner Buhr, a German artist living in Tbilisi, Georgia. His work is good and he's got some strong opinions - check out what he says about local artist Duane Keiser. He has also posted in the comments section to Kirkland's recent review of Kehinde Wiley on DCist. I'll excerpt -

"I think this is really the opposite of art- very bad art- no art at all. Sorry for the young artist, he has to start again. Wrong road for sure. I can not see any Tiepolo, Titian, Ingres or Raphael at all, but even if, that would be the wrong way too"

Some of the work he's posted on his blog reminds me a bit of the EXCELLENT Nancy Spero show of Vietnam era work I saw in NYC a while back. He's also got me thinking of Joy Garnett.

Best of all, I just love artblogs and how they are letting artists from all over become aware of each other's work and have conversations. Some of my favorite artists now are artists I have never seen in a glossy magazine or have had a Chelsea show. Wow.

Photos of Recommendation: Thumbs-Up Mandala: Pat Adams

Pat Adams
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

This is Pat Adams. Holy smokes! Some of her stuff looks like some of my meatballs!! Wow, she's pretty good!!!

Woah! She's using acrylic and sand and I'm using acrylic and sand!! Am I copying?!? I hereby want to announce due credit to Pat Adams! Something has rubbed off!

For you little people lovers - this is an awful photo of that painting but there are five little bearded men living in that painting's caves. They're trying to make it work!

(this thumbs-up photo is smaller than the previous ones, I'll try to make it bigger later)

CLARIFICATION: These thumbs-up photos are not of the artist with their work, but of the artist with my work. Please click on the links to see examples of the featured artist's work. Pat Adams is great.

Tom Harte

Tom Harte, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

I was at World Cup a couple weeks ago and saw that the Dennis Matthews paintings have been replaced by the work of an artist named Tom Harte. The stuff at World Cup is kind of all over the place - he's got a mother and child, a vase of flowers, something completely abstract, some stylized drawings - and all more than a little amateurish looking except for one piece in particular which struck me as something I could imagine seeing at Zach Feuer's. It was a smallish portrait head of a woman with one cyclops-like eye and a rainbow-ray halo.

Less than a week later I was flipping through ADA Gallery's 12 by 12 racks and saw more Tom Harte portraits, very lovely and sweet. They're wonderful. These seem to be portraits of specific people, as opposed to Cyclopic Madonnas, and are real treasures. Don't they say that when you are looking at someone or something you really like your pupils dilate*? The woman in the drawing above must really love Tom Harte, her eyes are radiating.

Harte has left his initials and the completion date at the earrings of the portrait above but in this one he writes the woman's name, half at each lobe, and in this one he includes a little picture of a horse and cart over one eye and a fish over the other. Those things hard to see or notice, sorry, but they're hard to notice in "real life" too. Here's the final one I got a picture of.

I don't know anything about Tom Harte or his history/education, but I'm thinking he's a bit of an outsider artist. Some of the work is dated as far back as 1994 ( like the piece above) and his pricing makes no sense. The small drawings I mention seeing at World Cup are $100 but the nice Cyclops painting is only $50, and all his 12 x 12 works-on-paper at ADA are also $50. Whatever the case, these portraits are very good.

*I just looked it up - it's called pupillometrics.

Jerry Saltz's Daniel Buren review

Jerry Saltz has a review of Daniel Buren's Guggenheim installation. Read it here.

I blogged Buren's recent lecture - part one here and part two here. I'll probably update this post with more Buren info/gossip later.

He hates the Christo's!

Photos of Recommendation: Thumbs-Up Mandala: Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

This is Nayland Blake.

Cultural Creative

I took this test I saw on Cynthia King's blog Fresh Paint. I'm a "Cultural Creative", she's a "Postmodernist". What are you?

You scored as Cultural Creative.

Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative - 81%
Materialist - 75%
Existentialist - 69%
Postmodernist - 63%
Modernist - 50%
Romanticist - 50%
Idealist - 44%
Fundamentalist - 25%

Cynthia chose a strange Milton Avery as her favorite painting last week. Check it out.

Timothy Michael Martin

This is one of Timothy Michael Martin's pieces in the current show at ADA Gallery. I can't believe the month is almost over and there is so much local art I haven't shared! Maybe I'm getting selfish on my blog. I'll try to spend more time writing about other people's art.

Also included in this ADA show are Buxton Midyette and Chris Norris. I'll go back tomorrow or Wednesday and post something. I think the piece pictured above is my current favorite Mike Martin piece - let's trade!!

Please feel free to share your thoughts or plug/criticize in the comments.

Photos of Recommendation: Thumbs-Up Mandala: Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

This is Lois Dodd.

Daniel Buren lecture II

- this is the second posting of the Daniel Buren lecture. The first post is here.

A Belgian gallery asked Buren to show with them in the early 70's(?) . He accepted and requested that the gallery a. choose the single color for the announcements and b. don't send them. The gallery made a lot of red announcement cards and when Buren arrived he posted a trail of them to the outside wall of the gallery building like breadcrumbs right up to the gallery's entrance. The trail continued around the door and along the gallery's interior walls. He showed at that same gallery another year and did the exact same thing with yellow cards, another year with blue cards, each year another color and another memory of place and color. That line of colored cards is echoed in the green stripes of the current Guggenheim installation.

Buren then began a kind of unprompted defense of his work - "when people want to make an easy critique of my work... it's true ... you can say that, but if you want to be serious you can't say that". Nobody had said anything (as far as I could tell), so this may have been prompted by some past criticism of that Belgian piece. He next showed a selection of his LA bus stop bench images. I think this was in relation to the above defense.

I've just looked at I think every Daniel Buren image on the internet and am disappointed that I can't find any photos of so much of his work. Lots of photos on artnet of things you can buy at galleries but no photos of the above-mentioned LA bus stop bench pieces (UPDATE: found some!) and I'm really surprised and disappointed not to find any photos of two big wild projects he talked about in his lecture. One was a large vaulted interior space - filled with columns and arches - under which he painted black and white stripes. A platform/floor diagonal to the space was installed which was then covered with mirror. The space received sunlight from windows along the top of the wall and the mirrored tilted floor doubled the architecture and doubled the light. All the columns and arches became circles and elongated ovals, sunshine shone from the ceiling and floor. Very disorienting, very Piranesi or Escher.

The other big project I can't believe I can find no images for was a September 2004 project done at Versailles. If you look at this photograph you will note that after the fountain and long expanse of green grass the landscape seems to tilt up. That blue/gray space beyond is water (here it is at a more direct angle). Buren said that this photo is taken from what the king himself viewed, "the way to view my park in Versailles" - "everything you see is completely false, created with geometry and trompe l'oeil". Buren showed us a photo of his Versailles project taken from this "king's view" and we saw what looked like a large black and white striped gate or window at the beginning of the long expanse of grass, framing the view of the lawn (something similar to this older piece but much larger). In fact, we learned from seeing shots at other angles that Buren's piece was not vertical at all but that his stripes (white only) were pieces of wood laid along the length of the entire lawn. From the king's angle view it looked like a vertical gate. It's hard to explain, sorry I have no pictures.

Buren - "All of these laws are false. They are a specific organization. They are not natural. On the right and left (of the king's view of the garden) you can lose yourself, but in the king's view the law was untouchable. Exept this law was false. It was a complete construction. As soon as I realized tht the full garden was done with very false perspective... I returned the perspective."

Photos of Recommendation: Thumbs-Up Mandala: Peter Halley

PeterHalley2, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Okay, I'm going to post some photos this week from the Thumbs-Up Mandala mentioned in the comments section of last week's touched by Daniel Buren post. This is Peter Halley.

Jon Clary

Jon Clary, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Here's a nice print by master printmaker Jon Clary. A spooky meeting of Manet and H.C. Westermann, maybe somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. I saw last week that Jon was selling his Paris Hilton prints for $5.00, but I bought one last year for $10.00!

The market is crashing!!!

Katzen Arts Center @ American University

Jack Rasmussen, director/curator of American University's in-progress Katzen Arts Center, has a blog documenting it's development and including a general call for entries. The call isn't for a specific exhibition and there is no deadline, I think they are just interested in seeing what is out there.

Overwhelm him!!

Options 2005 latest

(UPDATED at bottom)

Couple of new comments posted here today from artists who had studio visits scheduled for this weekend with Libby Lumpkin. She's sick and has cancelled. They're not happy. Are the visits cancelled altogether or just postponed?

I'd like to know how many local artists applied and how many of them made it to the studio visit round. Does anybody know of a non-VCU grad that had a visit or had one scheduled?

(L.L. - get well soon)

Relatedly, somebody named marye has left an interesting question/comment on the last Whitney Biennial 2006 post. She(?) doesn't like the idea of submissions at all and thinks that they cloud the curator's job - "to seek out and gather under one roof art of note". What does that mean? It seems to me like so many of them only look at what an institution is paying them to look at.

Case in point: I'm a fan of Ingrid Schaffner's work at the Philadelphia ICA and contacted her last fall when I heard she would be speaking at VCU in October. I invited her to visit my studio while she was in town and she wrote back (nicely) that she wanted to focus her time on the work at VCU. Fair enough, but when I later find out that almost half of the VMFA Professional Fellowship winners are students who had studio visits with Ms. Schaffner (the juror) I want to puke.

Hilarious insider aside: A grad who passed on his visit with Schaffner gave his slot to an undergrad friend. That's the undergrad who won one of the professional fellowships! As far as I can tell, the two grads that didn't have studio visits with Schaffner are the two that didn't win fellowships.

UPDATE 5/20/05: an article on Corcoran problems in today's Washington Post. I don't know if this is related to Ms. Lumpkin's cancelling the visits or not, but it seems commenter former MICA grad was right about the money problems.

RELATED?: Speaking of curators and money and the need for transparency - a Getty Museum senior curator has been indicted in Italy.

Vittorio Colaizzi

Vittorio Colaizzi
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

VMFA Professional Fellowship recipient Vittorio Colaizzi has sent me a more recent image of his work than what I linked to in my previous post announcing the award winners (22 comments on that post right now).

This untitled piece from 2004 is approx. 20 inches square, oil on canvas. Thanks for sharing, Vic, and congratulations.

a favorite from abroad

Sesshu
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Sesshu is a favorite from abroad. Can you see the little figure on the steps? Here is a bigger and better image of it. Actually, just go to this page and click on the thumnbails to see some great reproductions. Awesome.

If I could figure out how to post two photos to one blog entry I'd have probably posted this one also. He was seventy-seven when he did it.

a favorite

moses
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Others are posting their favorite paintings. Here's one of my favorite paintings - I think it's called Hoosick Valley From My Window - by my favorite artist, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, a.k.a. Grandma Moses. Other favorites are Spring Snow, Thunderstorm, Hoosick Falls In Winter, Hoosick River In Winter, and Rainbow (her last one). Actually, I like almost all of them.

I'm from Hoosick Falls!

good news for VMFA

Martin Johnson Heade, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

"The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts announced last night that it is receiving a gift of $100 million in money and 19th- and 20th-century art from collectors James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin."

Read more here and here.

What is your favorite work currently in the VMFA? Do you think the museum has any pilgrimmage pieces? Something that people travel to Richmond to see?

I like the little Manet and a couple of the no-name Dutch paintings but I don't think they currently have anything that motivates people to make a trip to Richmond. Getting this gift is great.

Thank you to James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin.

Daniel Buren lecture

I have about fifteen messily written pages of notes from last week's Daniel Buren lecture so I expect this will be the first of at least two posts. If you went to the lecture and have anything you'd like to add to the text below please do so in the comments.

The first work he showed was an outdoor wall mosaic from the early 60's - lots of Matisse shapes in primary colors all made from Venetian glass. Buren was careful to emphasize this mosaic was made of pure colored glass, maybe this colored glass relates to his later use of colored gels. Next we were shown a selection of clean white paintings from the mid-sixties and his progression from these to similar paintings covered with taped stripes. Once he found a material with nice regular stripes (maybe some awning material or something) he started to use that as the canvas and instead of adding stripes to paintings he began adding just a little paint to stripes. He would paint over the stripes on the far left and right of the stretched material with white paint. Voila!

It sounds like he had a lot of early frustration, it was "very difficult to show" and he "realized that to have a studio was really incredibly difficult - instead of fighting or being depressed - I left the idea of a studio and I never get back to work except where I do the work". He showed some photos of two guys in suits walking around outside of what looks like a museum with something like striped sandwich boards attached to their backs and above their heads. The only thing they would say when asked what they were doing was "this is white and green stripes".

Buren started to post his striped paper all over Paris. "Paris was a place where everybody was using the billboard for publicity and political manifestoes, it's not like that today. I covered many places like that just as an activity. No announcement, just anonymous". He "started at night because (I) thought it was safer but then realized that it was much safer during the day. Up to May 1968 the police were very nice, the police said okay no problem. After May '68 it was a little more difficult."

His first solo show (he actually used the term "one man show", but typing that I just realized how obsolete it's become) was with a gallery in Milan for which he completely covered the door of the gallery with his striped paper. To enter the gallery was impossible, the gallery was closed. This was that gallery's last show.

There was shortly after a group show in Bern, Switzerland called "When Attitude Becomes Form" that many of his friends/colleagues were invited to show in and "something I thought I should participate in but I was not invited so I thought I should participate anyway". He traveled to Bern and "I covered everything during the night. At that time in Switzerland everything was framed and very clean - it (his papering of the city) was never seen. I was put in jail. I was showing the philosophy of that exhibition 'the artist is free you can do anything' but if you do something that was not expected you are in trouble. The police took me out of jail and asked me to clean what I did and of course I get in my car and I leave (Switzerland) very very quickly."

- Click Here for PART 2

touched by Daniel Buren!

I brought this painting to the Daniel Buren talk Thursday and tried to get him to let me take a picture of him holding it and making a "thumbs-up" sign but he wouldn't do it. He touched it though!

He posed for a photo with me fortunately and I'll be sure to post that twenty-six disposable camera photos from now. I was wearing a striped shirt. I've previously posted images of my work from 2003 and 2004; this one is from 2005 and more indicative of my most recent work. It's only about 10"x14".

The talk was great.

Donny George

Donny George
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Donny George has work up now at Katra Gala, 2225 W. Main Street - not sure if this is a gallery or what - and he also will be showing new paintings next month at Empire Lounge, 727 W. Broad. I'll announce it again later with all the rest of the June shows.

Donny is one of my few non-anonymous commenters, thanks Donny! Brave man. He also has a funny blog on which he critiques various breakfast cereals.

for "confused in CALI"

Gabriel Bennet, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Hey Cali - I've got some photos from the VCU thesis show (2nd round) per your request. A view of Gabriel Bennet's piece is above. I'm not sure what the silver material is, it's not tin foil. More like something from the space shuttle. Also available to see on my flickr account is another view of Gabe's piece, a view of Matt Gamble's work, and a couple shots of Timothy Micheal Martin's stuff here and here. Judith Baumann has posted photos as well, click the little hand on the bottom left to see them all.

For the first round work please see my posts here and here and Judith's photos here.

Marlene Dumas - 1994

Two opposing and simultaneous views on the work of Marlene Dumas from the same October 1994 issue of Art in America -

Jerry Saltz in his article A Year in the Life:Tropic of Painting: "the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold".

Richard Vine in the reviews section on her show at Jack Tilton: "in all these pictures the handling of the paint is direct, notational and extremely deft, as though Dumas were recording her dreams in their raw immediacy".

Whitney Biennial 2006 Update

The Whitney has updated it's Whitney Biennial website, adding a bit of a disclaimer along with a submission deadline -

Submissions

Please note that the Whitney Biennial is not a juried exhibition and, therefore, there is no formal submission process. If you choose to send materials, mail them to the address below by August 1, 2005. Submission packages should be limited to one resume/CV and six to eight images. Acceptable image formats include slides, computer printouts, digital files on CD_ROM (PC Compatible), audio CDs or VHS videotapes. Additional materials, including original artwork, portfolios and catalogues, will not be accepted. Please provide a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you would like your images returned. We are unable to answer individual inquiries regarding the status of a submission.

Biennial Coordinator
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

The official 2006 Biennial website will be published later this year.

I hope they get a lot of submissions from artists all over. Previous posts on this are 12-06-04, 01-16-05, 01-28-05, and 02-05-05.

Naomi Fisher

fisher3
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Tonight is the second to last episode of Survivor:Palau. Sunday is the special two-hour season finale. I'm posting this Naomi Fisher picture to remind me.

Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren - Thursday, May 12 - Artist's Talk, time and place TBA.

I have yet to get the specifics on this talk. I'll try to find out and post later.

UPDATE: I think the lecture is at 5:00pm at the Grace Street Theatre. Either that or it was last week and I've missed it.

Richard Polsky really hates Marlene Dumas

Excerpts from (relatively) recent Richard Polsky Artnet articles mentioning Marlene Dumas -

5-09-05

"entering the realm of the absurd are two Marlene Dumas paintings, each estimated at $800,000-$1.2 million"

12-23-04

"Marlene Dumas -- This year's auction darling. Her outrageous prices for awkwardly painted (to the point of looking unfinished) figures continues to amaze veteran auction watchers. At over a million dollars for a "good" painting, surely collectors have options. Outlook for 2005: Status quo"

11-08-04

"whoever decides to bid on lot 55, the Marlene Dumas painting, in Sotheby’s evening sale on Nov. 9 should think long and hard. With an estimate of $600,000-$800,000, The Taboo (2000) represents a highly risky purchase. Not only is the canvas sloppily painted, which is unfortunately typical of the artist, but it raises an even greater question -- who is Marlene Dumas and why do her pictures routinely carry (and bring) six-figure prices?"

In this article Polsky calls David Hockney "one of our ten finest living painters". I'm really curious as to who he thinks the other nine are but he won't tell - my guess is that he would include Robert Ryman, Jules Olitski, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jasper Johns on his list.

VCU MFA Thesis Shows - Round Two

Matt Gamble
Originally uploaded by Bromirski.

The second round of VCU MFA thesis shows is up until May 15 - once again, lots of good work to see. I can't believe I'm saying this, and if you are aware of my initial strongly negative reaction to his work you may not either, but Matt Gamble has won me over. More on Matt below, following are some of the other highlights -

Gabriel Bennet - Gabe is showing a light, bright, airy, shiny, sculpture that fills the room floor to ceiling. You walk in and see a silver sheet mountain landscape with the highest peak in the far corner and the whole undulating thing falling toward you, complete with a waterfall and giant poppies. The landscape ends at about chest level so you never look down on it. You can walk under or around it to the back and see that the whole thing is some kind of crazily complicated umbrella-like contraption, I don't know if it can actually fold/unfold or not, hooked up to a heavy looking body harness. From this side you might wonder who wears this and for what purpose, the evil Penguin or James Bond, but my final impression is that of a Wizard.

Kate Hudnall - More fantastic! She is using the same little room that Ryan Mulligan made such good use of last time and like him creating another world to step into. Kate is a woodworker and the room has been completely remade into an odd little woodworkers odd little woodshop. She's laid a creaky floor, shuttered the window, fashioned an eccentric woodworker's bench, and filled the room with quirky creations, drawings, and tools. Think Keebler Elves. Think Tom Otterness people. Think Gepetto.

I love that both she and Ryan didn't just use the room to present the work but made the room a part of the work. I wasn't a viewer, I was a visitor.

Tim Devoe - I like Tim's work a lot but can't think of anything to say. He was taking pictures when I visited so I didn't study it too long.

Mike Martin - Mike is showing concurently at ADA (with Chris Norris and Buxton Midyette), I'll talk about his work later.

Matt Gamble - As stated above, it's taken me a while to come around to appreciating Matt's work, and in that time I also think he's gotten a lot better. I used to think Matt's paintings were just plain awful but I now find his work clumsy, awkward, weird, genuine, authentic, endearing, mysterious, likeable, and heartfelt. They look like they might have been painted by Fairfield Porter's sweet retarded brother.

Matt includes in his Anderson Gallery exhibition two paintings entitled Mark, both portraits which look so much like the artist they could only be a brother. Problem is, the two Marks have markedly different hairlines (also one has brown hair and the other black). Same face, same smile, same eyes, same age, and same name - but they can't be the same person. Or are they? I have no idea. I go from thinking these are self-portraits, to portraits of a brother, to just wonderment. I like that feeling.

Matt has set me to thinking a lot about artistic intention. I don't know anymore for sure, but I don't think Joan's hair is supposed to look like a yellow mop on her head. Or maybe it is. Does it matter? The painting is beautiful and full of love. I don't think this guy's upper arms are supposed to be that huge, I don't think the cereal bowl is supposed to be that tiny, or the house is supposed to look like it's falling over. Are the weird things I've come to like about this work things he'd correct out if he could?

I started to come around to liking Matt's paintings before I found out that he is one of the students who received a VMFA Professional grant, and now that he is better educated (an MFA) as well I guess I'll just have to continue playing catch-up and trying to get it. Congratulations Matt.

UPDATE: I just noticed this - Fairfield Porter here Matt Gamble here.

Do you have a favorite from this round or the previous? Or a least favorite? With students competing for and winning at the professional level (VMFA fellowships, another student who was recently awarded a $20,000 Joan Mitchell grant, residencies) I don't think there is any obligation to hold to the old "they're students, room to fail, don't criticize" standard - leave a comment. My posts on the first round are here and here.

Hellacious

hellacious, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Sunflower - Hellacious, 2003, 42"x42"

More 1993 II

Here's the second half of my look back at Jerry Saltz's A Year in the Life:Tropic of Painting - an overview of painting shown in NYC during the 1993/1994 season - originally published in the October 1994 issue of Art in America.

My first post is here, Saltz's full text can be found here.

Category VI. Weird Realism

"it appears as if numbers of people are about to abandon their allegiance to theory. You can almost smell it"

Toba Khedoori
Peter Doig - "his work lacks any sense of archness or strategy"
John Currin - "These were Currin's best paintings and his most peculiar to date. In his next show, I'd like to learn more of what these images mean to him"
Alexis Rockman
Peter Cain
Robin Lowe
Manuel Ocampo
Hugh Steers
Taboo - "something of a natural"
Maureen Gallace - "a sleeper"
Jim Hodges
April Gornik - her landscapes "have shown little sign of growth over the past decade, try to be visionary and descriptive at the same time, succeeding only occasionally"
Elizabeth Peyton
Billy Sullivan
Jane Kaplowitz
Jeremy Dickinson
Robert Yarber
Lois Dodd
Jane Wilson

Category VII. Conceptual Painting and Appropriation

"some people make paintings to make paintings, other people make paintings to make a point" - "If any of these artists ventures too far from the Path of Visual Thinking, their work can collapse into the ashes of irony"

Martin Kippenberger - "garishly colored and crudely painted", "more interested in chaos than either destruction or anything egalitarian. That's what lifts him above all the other pan-stylists"
Deborah Kass - "Her achievement lies in the way she freshens up another artist's style with new meaning"
Guillermo Kuitca
Nicholas Rule - "a disappointment", "I still believe in this guy, though"
Gary Simmons
Ida Applebroog
Annette Lemieux
Komar & Melamid
Dottie Attie
Byron Kim
Catherine Howe
Kay Rosen
Glen Ligon
Adam Rolston - "vapid"
Lawrence Gipe
Sarah Morris and here- "hopelessly caught in the spring of 1989. Their irony and archness is so empty and dogmatic that you can't help but think about all the other artists who have passed this way in the last five years"
Lutz Bacher

Category VIII. Abstract Painting:Underdog or Uber Alles?

"There are many ways you could divide the unusually crowded category of abstract painting: these are only four of them, and the second is the most problematic"

Sub-Section 1. Mutant Greenbergian Abstraction

Larry Poons - "reminds us that as it is with artists, so it is with art movements: Never Count Anything Out"
Fiona Rae
Elliott Puckette - "one of the sweetest yet most austere shows of last season. In her first solo appearance, Puckette streamlined Pollock's alloverness into calligraphic lines and arabesques incised into painted wood. Lyrical, erudite and brimming with restrained emotion, Puckette's paintings read like abstract love letters"
Julian Lethbridge
Sam Reveles
Karin Davie - "Davie's first show was sexy to look at even if it did fade quickly from memory after you left the gallery"
Ross Bleckner
Peter Schuyff
David Dupuis
Rachel Finn
Mary Jones
Craig Fisher
Andrew Masullo - "another sleeper"
Cora Cohen
Richard Kalina
Shirley Kaneda
Greg Kwiatek
Andrea Belag
Jacqueline Humphries
Gary Lang
Eva Lundsager - "who more people should look at"
Lawrence Carroll

Sub-Section 2. Abstractionism

"this may be the kind of work that is helping to give painting a bad name", "these artists make rules rather than break rules. It's amazing that something that started out as bold and open as abstract painting should in their hands end up so obvious and lifeless"

Juan Usle
John Zinsser
David Row
Cary Smith
Andrew Spence

Sub-Section 3. Garage Artists

"like Garage Bands, Garage Artists make their paintings with whatever's around: nails, string, chewing gum, Vaseline, yarn, rags or old underpants"

Joe Zucker
Matthew Weinstein
Fabian Marcaccio
Jim Isermann
Dona Nelson
Donald Baechler
Jody Lomberg
Charles Spurrier
Randy Wray
Jason Fox
Joe Leticia

Sub-Section 4. Mad Max Variations

Rudolf Stingel - "one of the more vexing artists around"
Christopher Wool
Dan Walsh
Edouard Prulhiere - "his exhibition went overlooked and under-talked-about"
Damien Hirst - "multicolored dot paintings, which have been seen at the Cohen Gallery, are as pretty as they are opaque, as dainty as they are deadpan and are purely "Mad Max"
Mike Scott - "needlessly complicated his once austere art"
Steve di Benedetto - "once seemed very promising, combined a murky painter-liness with hard-edged optical effects. Like Scott, di Benedetto tried to do too many contradictory things. Both lacked a sense of resolution or clarity"

This isn't the whole article. There are two more categories!! My eyes hurt, I'll maybe add more links later.

First Friday - May 6

Sorry, I'm just providing a bare-bones listing here of shows I'm sure to hit. I've grouped the galleries that are close to each other together.

Anderson Gallery - VCU MFA Thesis: Round II - from 5pm
Meatballs at Stuffy's - me

1708 Gallery - Charlie Cohan, 8-10pm
ADA Gallery - Timothy Michael Martin, Buxton Midyette, and Chris Norris. My show here was last month so I've got a lot of work up in the back along with some other artists. 7-10pm
Flat International - Siemon Allen, 7-10pm
Art6 Gallery - Jorge Benitez, Sasha Gay-Overstreet, 7-10pm
- lots more galleries around here to visit - leave your recommendations in the comments.

Reynolds Gallery - David Freed, Isabel Bigelow, and Deborah Ellis, 7-9pm
Main Art - Jeff Dodge, Mary Holland, Les Smith, and others, 7-9pm

The places I haven't provided links to either don't have a website, haven't updated it, or I can't find it.

Richmond Recap

Following is a list of local artists whose work I've written about since starting this blog.

ENJOY!

Judith Bauman
Kristen Beal
Saul Becker
Sarah Bednarek here and here and here
Calvin Burton
Jon Clary
Jason Coates
Derek Cote
Don Crow
Tim Devoe
Halli Emminger
Margaret Evangeline - (not local but showed at the Hand Workshop Art Center)
Feast
JD Garn
Joan Gaustad
Jason Hackett
Emily Hall
Eric Hall
Rachel Hayes
Carolyn Henne
Joel Holmberg
Susan Jamison here and here
Ron Johnson here and here
Jules Jones
Sheep Jones
Steve Jones here and here
Shirley Kaneda - (not local but she had a good show at Reynolds Gallery)
Duane Keiser here and here
Nicholas Kuszyk
Michael Lease
Steven Little
Sculpture/Crafts show - (generally critical but no specific names)
Mike Martin
Dennis Matthews
Joe McSpadden
Ryan Mulligan
John Newman here and here
John Ravenal - (curator)
Beverly Reynolds - (gallerist)
DJ Rice
Rachele Riley
Fiona Ross
Jody Schwab
Erling Sjovold
Strange Detective
Lewis Taylor
Heide Trepanier - other viewpoints here and here.
Carly Troncale
Marius Valdes
Bruce Wilhelm

2005 VMFA Fellowships

Got my rejection from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts fellowship program today. Here are the winners in the Professional and Graduate categories -

PROFESIONAL Awards ($8,000)

Judith Baumann - previous post on Judith's work here. She has a good website but it's down. I'll link to it later.
Tom Chambers
Vittorio Colaizzi
Craig Dennis and Susan Eder
Matthew Gamble
Emily Hall - previous post on Emily's work here.
Joel Holmberg - previous post on Joel's work here.
Ward Howarth
Danielle Riede
Fiona Ross - currently featured in New American Paintings.
David Williams - how many can you win?? I think this is his third time in ten years!!
Melissa Worthington

GRADUATE Awards ($6,000)

Nathan Altice
Saul Becker
Benjamin Jones
Colleen Ostrander
Gillian Pears
Charles Roberts
April Taylor-Martin
Deniz Tirpanci

There were sixteen recipients of UNDERGRADUATE Awards ($4,000).

Four of the winners in the professional category are current VCU Painting graduate students. One of the winners in the professional category is a current VCU Painting undergraduate. I know of two VCU painting undergrads last year who applied for the grad prize, neither one eligible, both of whom won. The juror for the professional awards, Ingrid Schaffner, was a visiting critic at VCU last October and visited the painting grad's studios.

What is the point of having categories and residency requirements? How many of those grad students that won professional awards are staying in Virginia? Isn't part of the point of that category to support art and artists working in the state? I guess if only one or two students had won in this category I wouldn't say anything but with almost half something just seems wrong.

In the previous post regarding the selection of the OPTIONS 2005 show Libby Lumpkin writes "I suggested that, in addition to selecting artists from the official pool of applicants, I be allowed to tour the graduate school studios in the region. I know how difficult it is for young artists to keep abreast of all the exhibition opportunities available to them, and I wanted to make sure that no deserving graduate student would be excluded for not having submitted an application".

Libby, the grad students don't need any more help! The MFA programs today act as public relations firms placing students in galleries and shows, buying advertising, and setting up meetings. The MFA programs are all about the rankings; the marketing of the program and select students - to a fault. I imagine that most of the grads reading this are rolling their eyes but unless you're fortunate enough to secure a university position yourself that fantastic level of support currently enjoyed is going to dry up fast. I don't think it's good for you, it isn't good for me, and it isn't good for art. It only benefits the institution.

OPTIONS 2005 III

From the Options 2005 website -

UPDATE 5/3/05: An e-mail from Dr. Libby Lumpkin:

"When I agreed to organize the WPA/Corcoran's Options 2005exhibition, I had no idea how many emerging fine artists were working in theWashington, D.C. area, or how difficult it would be to narrow the selection to the twelve to fifteen artists who will be presented in the fall. I suggested that, in addition to selecting artists from the official pool of applicants, I be allowed to tour the graduate school studios in the region. I know how difficult it is for young artists to keep abreast of all the exhibition opportunities available to them, and I wanted to make sure that no deserving graduate student would be excluded for not having submitted an application. I recently completed my tours of the local graduate programs at Washington's American University, George Washington University, and HowardUniversity, and the regional programs at George Mason in Fairfax, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and Virginia CommonwealthUniversity in Richmond. I am happy to report that I found in these schools a generally high level of professionalism and more than a few extremely promising talents among both young and late-starting artists.

On my first trip to Washington last February, I managed to survey only about one third of the pool of over 300 official applicants. From this group, approximately thirty artists will be singled out for studio visits. This week, I will complete the survey, and the selected artists will soon receive requests for visits. I would like to apologize in advance to the many artists who will not be receiving requests for a visit, almost all of whom are highly accomplished and deserving of recognition. I wish there were time to visit every studio. And, I would like to remind all the artists that I am not rejecting anyone. I am organizing an exhibition. My goal is less to present a fair survey of Washington's diverse and substantial pool of professional-level artists, than to showcase promising new talent alongside local mature artists whose vision heretofore has been underappreciated. The Options 2005 exhibition will privilege the quirky and visionary above professional refinement. I like to be surprised by art, andI hope my exhibition will hold surprises for everyone."

~Dr. Libby Lumpkin 5/2/05

Our previous posts on this are here and here.

Related: Thinking About Art

Show at Plant Zero

I've just come from the show of 1st year painting grads at Plant Zero. Very nice! Lots of rainbows though - I think rainbows have about run their current course, nice as they are.

Here are some brief blurbs on the stuff I recall -

Saul Becker - Nice paintings. He's got some rainbows, a bit of the new goth thing going, but they still seem clean, fresh, and inventive. Clear. Yesterday I was on Frances Barth's site and I like her work a lot, something about some of Saul's stuff has a similar feel.

Saul has just returned from a residency at the Bemis Center and won a VMFA Fellowship (grad level).

Jody Schwab - Do I have that name right? Everytime I see her stuff it's something different, she's been doing a lot of experimenting. Here she has two small bodies of very different work - the paintings and drawings don't hold my attention much but she has some very interesting drooping paint jellyfish/crysanthemum/blue ribbon conglomerations on the wall. If you took out my brain and threw it against a white wall it might look like one of these.

I think I'll go back and look at these some more.

Calvin Burton - Lots of rainbows, lots of experimentation, kind of design-y. He has one small one that looks just like a Neo Rauch without people.

Joe McSpadden - has a good lumpy white one.

Rachel Hayes - Parts of this I really like. There is a shin-high orange fabric "wall" running along the floor near the real wall and a pipe wrapped tight in green and white stripes. These charm points are part of a larger installation of hanging fabric which seems extraneous.

She's got some other interesting work as well.

That isn't all of them - it's a good show - go see it. Not sure how long it runs for.

More 1993

Yesterday I posted the 1993 NYTimes Magazine Art World All-Stars cover. I've also been looking at an old Art in America Jerry Saltz article called A Year in the Life:Tropic of Painting. The article is included in the October 1994 issue but is a study of painting shown in NYC over the course of the 1993/1994 season.

Lots and lots of photos and names and observations and it's fun to look back at in retrospect. He's divided the work into eleven categories - some with subsections - that I will list here along with the artists included, links, and interesting tidbits. You can read the whole article here.

Category I. The Big Cats

"it's important to remember how new the work of these artists once looked and how very little painting today carries that kind of newness"

Gerhard Richter
Francesco Clemente
Enzo Cucchi - "seemed lost in repetition and ersatz paganism"
Sandro Chia - "was shooting blanks. He seems mired in a sappy, vaguely neo-hedonistic realism"
Julian Schnabel
David Salle
Kenny Scharf
George Condo
Markus Lupertz

Category II. The Museum Cats

"three big names and a sleeper"

Lucien Freud
Robert Ryman
Roy Lichtenstein
Vija Celmins

Category III. Keeping On With Distinction

"all over town, quite a few artists - mostly over 50 - went on with the business of making paintings"

Frances Barth - nice site!
Jennifer Bartlett
Lynda Benglis
Bill Jensen
Ellen Phelan
Per Kirkeby
Louise Fishman
John Moore
James Bishop
Martha Diamond
Robert Kushner
Sidney Tillim
Jack Whitten
Robert Zakanitch
William T. Wiley
Konrad Klapheck - "come(s) on like a burst of fresh air"
Elizabeth Murray
Mary Heilman - go to the artists page
Robert Mangold
Chuck Close
Alex Katz

Category IV. Our Bodies, Our Selves, You Asshole

Patricia Cronin
Nicola Tyson
Lisa Yuskavage - "kitschy colored portraits of very young girls who have grossly distorted female bodies. She's a good painter but her color - hyperintense pastel shades - is better than her drawing, which is fairly unremarkable"
Nicole Eisenman - "is over-the-top and out-of-control in a positive way. She's one of the looser cannons around, right now"
Mira Schor
Suzanne McClelland
Lari Pittman
Julian Trigo
Rita Ackermann - "her work has a real "look" to it and a complicated emotional temperature that could lift it above its trendiness"
Marlene Dumas - "the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold"

Category V. Toon Time

"this may be one of the most vital areas of contemporary painting"

Peter Saul
Phillip Smith
Carl Ostendarp
Chuck Agro and here
Christian Schumann - "(his show) was one of the best of the season" - "There's a raw energy and an undermining sense of humor to Schumann's work. He's a natural; there's nothing forced about his work"
Amy Sillman - "her influences are keeping her a notch or two away from something new"
Thomas Trosch - "there is a quaint loveliness to Trosch's work, even if his images aren't that memorable"
Katie Merz
Lily van der Stokker

Ugh. This has just become a really long list. Maybe I should go back and delete everything except for the categories and the artist's I've included a quote for? But I wanted to be able to look up and link to some of these artists.

Okay, I'll just stop here with the first half. Maybe I'll do the rest tomorrow.

UPDATE: THE REST OF THE LIST!!

Mason 4/98-5/05

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Art For The Cash Poor

I've signed up for Art For The Cash Poor in Philadelphia this summer. Do you want to do it? It's happening Saturday June 11th.

You can sell your stuff as long as the maximum price is kept at $150.00. The cost to participate is $40 - a little more if you want to rent a table or chair. Two artists can share a table.

The deadline to reserve a spot is May 7th - reservations must be made via e-mail (info@inliquid.com) by May 7th and payment in full received no later than May 16th.

Then I'm going straight to Basel!

FYI - this is an inliquid event

Surprise!

.
The New York Academy In Rome's Rome Prizes have been announced -

Boyce Cummings, a painter from New York
Yun-Fei Ji, an artist from Brooklyn
Ward Shelley, another Brooklyn artist
Carrie M. Weems, an artist from Syracuse, NY

The judges were -

Agnes Gund, President Emerita, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Nayland Blake, Artist; Chair, Masters Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, International Center for Photography/Bard, New York, NY
Lyle Ashton Harris, FAAR'01, Artist, New York, NY
Alison Rossiter, Photographer, Navesink, NJ
Jenny Holzer, RAAR'04, Artist, Represented by Cheim & Read, New York, NY, New York, NY
Laura Hoptman, Curator, 2004-05 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, New York, NY
Eve Sussman, FAAR'96, Artist, Founder and Artistic Director of the Rufus Corporation, Brooklyn, NY

The above lists are cut and pasted from the American Academy in Rome's website. Notice how they have former NY MoMA curator Laura Hoptman living in Pittsburgh, New York, NY. That's hilarious.

2005/2006

6 NY'ers and one Jersey-ite choose 3 NY'ers and an artist from Upstate.

2004/2005

Seven New Yorkers choosing 3 New Yorkers and a guy in LA

2003/2004

Six New Yorkers and a Chicagoan choose four New Yorkers.

Why do they call this place the AMERICAN Academy in Rome? My old post on this is here.
.
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NYTimes Magazine 1993

Greg Allen's NYTimes article on artworld (or art market, same thing) gender bias has prompted me to post this not very old NYTimes Magazine cover. Artists pictured are John Chamberlain, George Condo, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Claes Oldenburg, Joel Shapiro, Robert Mangold, Lucas Samaras, Saul Steinberg, and Jim Dine. This looks so ancient!

Here's the response to that magazine cover from from the Guerilla Girls.

Related: Greg Allen has more to say on his blog, Tom Moody thinks the article is silly, Nicole Eisenman wants a Mercedes. I'm a little depressed because Eisenman refers to herself as being at the bottom of the totem pole - so where am I??? I'm not even a woman. I must really suck.

Not Too Related: Looking for the Guerilla Girls poster I found this Richard Polsky Artnet article in which he states "the image that really stayed with me was that of Pace owner Arne Glimcher strolling through the crowd holding hands with Julian Schnabel."

Fairy Butler on Greater New York

Fairy Butler has a post on his/her visit to the Greater New York show.

What has happened to Art Star?

VCU MFA Thesis Shows - Round One II

Okay, I went back (first visit here) to VCU's first round thesis shows and was able to spend more time with stuff so here are some more introductions -

Marius Valdes - I saw a film he made earlier this year at a Flat International show about this little cute thing, some kind of unwanted mutant, that gets out of it's jar and encounters the scary world. Here in the gallery he had hundreds of these little unwantables, each unique and super cute. They're about the size a finger at most. Super cute!! I took two. I'm not sure if I was supposed to.

Michael Lease - I can't believe he did this. Michael submitted his own In Memoriam piece to the Washington Post and they printed it. His picture is right there along with a short memorial. I heard that he didn't tell anyone and upset a number of people. Wow. It's so weird to look at a real page of death notices and (a) see someone you know and (b) know that he is not dead. I like this piece because it upsets me - I'm upset that he has gone somewhere he doesn't belong and has defiled the page.

Michael also has a big photo/text installation of people that he used to be very close to but are now no longer in his life. Pictures of ex-girlfriends and childhood friends along with short remembrances.

You can see Michael's piece in the April 10, 2005 Washington Post.

Ryan Mulligan - Ryan has a small room installation called Defense is the Best Defense. There is a drawing on the wall of the Anderson Gallery building and a bunch of ways to defend it or escape, a video of Ryan in a corner of his studio swinging shovels and crowbars at unseen (zombie visiting artist?) assailants, and another video of people reading lines from movies like Independence Day. The room is full of tools and planks of wood, probably to barricade the door and window with, but it looks like he either got away or the zombies ate him.

This room is an act of desperation and it works.

The second round of thesis shows opens Friday, May 6th.

tasteless

I've removed one of yesterday's posts due to tastelessness. It wasn't very well thought-out anyway.

I need to think nicer thoughts.