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Monday, November 20, 2006

Eric Sall reviewed in artUS

Eric Sall review in artUS
Eric Sall's atm show is reviewed in the Oct/Nov 2006 issue of artUS. Click here to see it bigger and read it.

The reviewer, Nadja Sayej, has an interesting article/interview with Tino Sehgal in the same issue.
Posted by Martin at 6:45 PM
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting the review Martin, it is the first time I've read it, and thanks for the comments Bruce. For the record, I was born in South Dakota, not North Dakota as Nadja stated, and yes, there is a difference.

11/21/2006 12:28 AM
Anonymous said...

isn't nadja sayef a current grad student at hunter? i think maybe.

more people around here, interesting in writing, should consider submitting to magazines like that, or to that saatchi site her articles are on.

11/21/2006 1:19 AM
Anonymous said...

Art criticism can be useful beyond the author's intentions. Sayej's criticism of Eric Sall's work articulates some important qualities that might be the very reason to like his paintings. An intoxication with prismatic, multiple colors, a kind of placed thingness (Sall's gravity bound ground plane), a wide wide variety of marks (thin washes and cake-icing slabs), a courting with pop culture cartoon imagery, which is never explicit, only a feeling, and, perhaps most importantly, this forced disjunction, seeming about to spin out of control or to collapse, along with a brazen playfulness, a denial of modernist program (She mentiones Malevich, but we could also cite Buren).
But that's not all that can be said about Sall's work. The above words sound like a generic description of a great deal of 80s-90s critically-intended abstraction (I'm thinking of David Reed or 90s Shirley Kaneda or even 1980s Richter), but Sall isn't re-hashing them: all you have to do it look. But it does seem as if he is taking that mode of abstraction's-language-estranged as a baseline, and building on that. So for that reason the work is somehow familiar, even if highly skilled and inventive.

I don't quite understand Bruce's position re: scary theory and abstraction's relationship to it. It sounds like he is criticizing two poles: both easily likable painting AND the intellectual's outrage at being rendered irrelevant by nice abstraction, and if that's the case then bravo.

Whether he was sincere or sarcastic, he is absolutely right that abstraction should be scary and complicated, i.e., the most exciting work gnaws at our ideas of what a painting should be. The hard part is to keep gnawing 10, 50, 300 years later.

As for "Nadja's own meaningless abstraction," after a quick google, sure it's suave, but so is Sall. She has committed (?) to a certain territory, a certain language, and perhaps she interprets a lack of committment in Sall's work, and reads it as a cynical market play.

Art criticism is always a power play.

11/21/2006 8:40 AM
Anonymous said...

Paul Valery said:
"The eyes are organs of asking."

11/21/2006 1:46 PM

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