John Yau
JOHN YAU has just completed a book of essays, The Wild Children of William Blake.
John Yau has just completed a book of essays, The Wild Children of William Blake.
Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968), Robert Lax (1915 – 2000) and Ad Reinhardt (1913 – 1967), who became lifelong friends, met in 1935 at Columbia University while working for the Jester, the school’s humor magazine.
John Yau is the author of Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon), the publisher of Black Square Editions, and a weekly contributor to the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He is currently working on many projects.
After Hurricane Irene prevented them from meeting at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine, where a selection of his sculptures was on exhibition, Richard Van Buren and John Yau met in New York to discuss his work and his upcoming show at Gary Snyder Gallery (November 10 – December 17, 2011).
In 2009, Barbara Takenaga exhibited Langwidere (2009) at DC Moore, a series in which she challenged herself to paint the same painting 30 times. Each work was 12 by 10 inches, and started with a small circle, which became the origin of a widening spiral of variously-sized circles.
Joanne Greenbaum’s exhibition consists entirely of wildly colored, cacophonous abstract paintings measuring 16 × 12 inches, which are installed salon-style, with some paintings paired and others lined up diagonally, with the bottom left corner of the upper painting nearly touching the top right of the one below.
Josephine Halvorson is a contemporary observational painter whose work enters into a lively philosophical dialogue with an unaffiliated group of international artists that includes the German painter Peter Dreher, the Spaniards Antonio Lopez and Isabella Quintanilla, and the Americans Lois Dodd, Catherine Murphy, and Sylvia Plimack-Mangold.
Shortly after RIG, Phyllida Barlow’s debut installation with Hauser & Wirth (September 2 – October 22, 2011) opened in London, Editor John Yau and the artist talked on the phone about her exhibition.
Ambitious from the beginning, Ai Weiwei studied English at the University of Pennsylvania and Berkeley before attending Parsons on a scholarship, which he soon lost after he failed an art history exam given in English. Over the next decade Ai Weiwei took more than 10,000 photographs, many of which weren’t developed until recently.
For years now, whenever Jasper Johns has had a show, you could count on a reviewer to cite his best-known axiom: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it…”
As the Lower East Side progresses toward a “total make-over,” and chic hotels and designer co-ops replace its tenements, I wonder where the community of poets and artists who cannot be assimilated will move?
This exhibition of 24 works (all completed since 2000) is the first museum exhibition of Daniel Douke, who has quietly left his earlier hyperrealism (also called photorealism) to become a painter/sculptor bent on meticulously mimicking an object down to its dents.
There are two parts to this exhibition. In the main gallery space Judy Ledgerwood has hung eight paintings, all 60” x 60”, while in the north gallery she has completed a painting in tempera on three walls.
Shortly before her show, Transformations: Wood Sculpture, 1957–1967, and Recent Photographs opened at DC Moore (May 5 – June 4), Mary Frank invited Artseen Editor John Yau over to her studio to discuss the sculptures, drawings and photographs she would have in the exhibition.
Dear Laurel Nakadate:
This is what I have dug up so far.
You were in born in 1975 in Austin, Texas, and raised in Ames, Iowa, both university towns.
This is what I have dug up so far.
You were in born in 1975 in Austin, Texas, and raised in Ames, Iowa, both university towns.
I am not sure when I noticed that “5 against 4” (2010 – 2011) and“Pharynx Dentata” (2010) faced each other from opposite walls, like confident duelers and lifelong partners.
Jane Freilicher embarked upon her enduring subject in the mid 1950s, at the height of Abstract Expressionism. For nearly 60 years, and through the comings and goings of different styles (Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Neo-Expressionism), she has painted a vase of flowers in front of a window.
This interview was conducted via e-mail in Spanish. It began after a series of conversations, in which Juan Uslé and I decided that this would allow him to feel most at ease in language.
Shortly before the opening of his exhibition, Louder Milk at Pierogi (April 8 – May 8, 2011), Tom Burckhardt invited ARTSEEN Editor John Yau to his studio to discuss his new work.
Each figure is doing something absurd, impossible, and mundane, simultaneously swimming, smoking, and crying; using his front teeth as a wood chipper or plane; sleeping comfortably under a pile of coffin-like shapes (an inversion of the princess and the pea); talking on the phone while neatly cutting one’s eyelashes without blinking.
In April 1916, Jean Crotti (1878 – 1958) was in an exhibition at the Montross Gallery, New York, along with Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger. The newspaper dubbed them “The Four Musketeers.”
One of the best things about the state of painting right now is that nothing is central. You can literally paint whatever you want in whatever way you want. Amid this chaos, a viewer like myself understands and (for a second or two) even sympathizes with the critics and theorists who hate painting, and who have declared that a realm in which they have no authority has ceased to have any validity.
The key to Chuck Webster’s work is drawing. His first show at ZieherSmith in 2003—this is his fifth solo exhibition at the same gallery—was packed salon style with drawings, most of them less than two by two feet. Many were done on old paper, rather than the pristine sheets you buy in an art supply store.
Shortly before her exhibition at the Alexandre Gallery, Lois Dodd and Rail Art Editor John Yau met at the gallery to discuss her new paintings.
Kurt Knobelsdorf is a young artist who recognizes that one way to gain authority—as well as negotiate the minefield planted by those who fervently believe in any of the currently popular, theoretical-cum-marketplace isms—is to paint (the death of painting be damned), while steadfastly refusing to assimilate into the mainstream, particularly in terms of subject matter.
Dear Reader, can you imagine the following scenario? One day, in the spirit of Institutional Critique, the curators of the Museum of Modern Art decide to organize a series of exhibitions under the collective title “Missed Opportunities” and announce that the first show will focus on Maria Lassnig
By John Yau
Peter Saul and Sven Lukin are lone wolves in extremis. Both were born in 1934, Saul in San Francisco, CA, and Lukin in Riga, Latvia. They belong to the generation of Pop and Minimalist artists that began gaining attention in the turbulent ’60s.
The first solo show of Gordon Onslow Ford (1912 – 2003) in New York since 1946, which brings together major works made between 1939 and ’51, is a landmark event that, among other things, further expands our understanding of what was happening in art during the 1940s.
Shortly before his exhibition at The Pace Gallery, Thomas Nozkowski and Rail Art Editor John Yau met at the gallery’s warehouse to discuss his new paintings and drawings.
The coincidence of concurrent solo shows at David Zwirner this month by Suzan Frecon and Al Taylor (1948 – 1999), both of whom I met many years ago, stirred up a lot of memories. One in particular was of a review of the 2000 Whitney Biennial that appeared in the Village Voice.
This is my list of the essential books of Christopher Middleton, the ones I believe you should read if you want to learn what he has been up to for the past 60 years:
In his first solo show in New York, Joshua Marsh continues to explore as well as expand the slippery exchange between definition and deferral, a thing’s weight and light’s weightlessness. The subjects of his paintings are undistinguished domestic objects and outerwear.
What do you get when you cross a cartoonist’s animation sense with an abstract artist’s search for pure form? Answer: Tom Burckhardt, or at least one part of him and his uncategorizable project.
In recapitulating the death of painting, as well as further buttressing their assumptions as to what constitutes vanguard art, critics often construct a narrative bracketed by the dates 1958 and 1962, from the year that Jasper Johns first showed his hand-painted encaustic “flags” and “targets” at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, to the year that Andy Warhol stopped painting and began using silkscreens for the majority of his output.
“Flesh,” Willem de Kooning famously said, “was the reason oil paint was invented.”
A down-to-earth artist if there ever was one, he recognized the corruptibility of flesh, and to represent it one needed a susceptible material.
A down-to-earth artist if there ever was one, he recognized the corruptibility of flesh, and to represent it one needed a susceptible material.
Guest Room/Contemporary Art is the brainchild of Nicolas Lemmens and Olivia Delwart. Situated in a quiet neighborhood on top of a hill in what is known as upper Brussels (there are two levels to the city), the gallery is a small white cube facing onto the street; it is open Wednesday and Saturday from 2:00 to 6:00 pm, and by appointment.
The graphite drawing “Towards 280 (Study)” (1976) proves to be a useful lens through which to consider this exhibition of drawings and paintings, drawn almost exclusively from the Thiebaud Family Collection, the artist’s studio, and from family members.
Since 1995-1996, when the often plain buildings in his work became a metonym for the physical thing we call a painting, Merlin James has mounted a compelling, well-thought-out challenge to the commonly accepted narrative that, historically speaking, painting was a stand-in for a window (concerned with three-dimensional space) that became a surrogate wall (concerned with the two-dimensional surface).
The Swedish painter Eve Eriksson (1910-1992) would have turned 100 this year; and to mark the centennial of his birth, Thomas Kjellgren, the director of the Kristianstads Konsthall, has mounted a selection of more than 50 of the artist’s paintings and drawings (all untitled), most of which were done between 1978 and 1992, when he lived in Malmo.
In 1961, while living on Edisto Beach, off the coast of South Carolina, Jasper Johns bought sheets of plastic from an art and drafting supply store in Charleston.
Between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, in Kyjov, a small city about 160 miles from Prague, a dirty, unkempt man wandered the streets daily, carrying contraptions that resembled cameras. His neighbors, depending on their level of faith in the communist ideal of civic progress, considered him either a harmless old coot or a stain on society.
Kathy Butterly is an American original whose closest forbearer is George Ohr (1857-1918), “The Mad Potter of Biloxi.” The formal traits she shares with Ohr include a penchant for crumpled shapes, twisted and pinched openings, and making (as Ohr was understandably proud to point out) “no two alike.”
In the midst of installing his first exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery in collaboration with Bernd Schellhorn of Berlin, Germany (April 1 – May 22, 2010), Norbert Prangenberg took time off to sit down with Rail Art Editor John Yau on site to talk about his life and work.
Just a few days before the artist’s opening reception of her recent exhibit Errätus at Galerie Lelong (March 18 – May 1, 2010), Ursula von Rydingsvard welcomed Consulting Editor Irving Sandler and Art Editor John Yau to her Brooklyn Studio to view the works and then discuss her life and work.
On the occasion of his new exhibit Secret Storm: Paintings 1967-1975 (March 17–April 17, 2010), which for the first time, brings together this group of provocative and controversial early paintings as well as watercolors and drawings from the period, the painter Mark Greenwold welcomed Art Editor John Yau to the DC Moore Gallery to look at the works, and to discuss his life and work.
The first poetry reading I gave after graduating from Bard College in 1972 was because of Gail Mazur. Although she didn’t know my poetry or me, she graciously invited me to give a reading at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge, Mass. It must have been in 1973 or ’74, as Gail founded the series in 1973 and ran it for many years. I remember being very anxious about making the most of this opportunity.
Robert Ryman is always testing things. In 1953, while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, he bought some paint and brushes because he “wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work. That was the first step. I just played around. I had nothing really in mind to paint.
On the occasion of the current exhibit of his working drawings and color studies, which is showing for the first time at Peter Blum SoHo till March 6, 2010, the painter David Reed welcomed Art Editor John Yau to view the works at the gallery a day before the opening reception. Afterward, they both sat down to talk about his life and work.
Dan Walsh welcomed Art Editor John Yau to the site of his exhibit Days And Nights at the Paula Cooper Gallery to talk about his new group of paintings.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JERRY SALTZ’S AMERICA AND MINE
In 1960, Frank Lobdell told an interviewer “being anonymous is really the best condition to be able to create.” Thankfully, in the half-century that has passed since the artist made this remark, he hasn’t quite achieved his goal, but he has gone his own way, building upon his early encounters with the work of Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, of other Abstract Expressionists and, most importantly, Pablo Picasso.
On occasion of the artist’s new exhibit The Party Is Over, which will remain on view at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue till March 6, 2010, Elisa Sighicelli paid a visit to the home of Art Editor John Yau to talk about her new body of work and more.
A week before the opening reception of a new body of paintings at Tibor De Nagy Gallery, Richard Baker welcomed Art Editor John Yau to his DUMBO studio to view the works, and to talk about the painter’s work.
Have seriousness and high-mindedness been placed on a pedestal to the exclusion of nearly everything else? It sure appears that way when I try to count all the exegetical tomes, essays, and reviews citing Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault while supposedly explicating a contemporary artist’s project.
In his seminal essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire defined the modern artist, or flâneur, as a “solitary individual endowed with an active imagination.” This figurewas a detached but passionate individual walking through the city, carried along by its tumultuous crowds, observing but unobserved.
For those who are willing to go to a slightly out-of-the-way, risk-taking gallery, located at 1182 Broadway between 28th and 29th Street, now would be a good time to hightail it over there and discover the bright, bold, erotic paintings of the Belgian Pop artist Evelyne Axell (1935-1972).
From Dubai to Japan to Boston to Brooklyn to Romani Gypsy grandparents, the stories in Anatolia and Other Stories (Black Lawrence) are varied and, conceptually, architected on an intriguing premise. The first story, “Dubai,” reads like a Malamud folklore legend/Flannery O’Connor hybrid.
In 1957, Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) wrote in his journal: “My hope is to confront the picture without a ready technique or prepared attitude—a condition which is nevertheless never completely attainable; to have no program and, necessarily then, no preconceived style. To paint no Tworkovs.”
In the first installment of an extensive, three-part interview with Thomas Butter in White Hot Magazine, David Novros, who traveled in Europe in 1963-64, recalled that “in Spain, I went to Granada, and saw the Alhambra, and it occurred to me that painting could have the same quality of being non-pictorial, or being ‘not a rectangle,’ not a picture in a rectangle.”
On a late Saturday afternoon in August, Publisher Phong Bui and Art Editor John Yau drove up to High Falls, New York, to visit the poet and writer Robert Kelly at Consulting Editor David Levi Strauss’s library to discuss Kelly’s life and work.
On the occasion of his three one-person exhibitions, Selected Portraits at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, (Oct. 25, 2009 to Jan. 4, 2010), Portraits, 1986-1995 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. (Oct.11, 2009–Jan. 10, 2010), and A Kind of Rapture at Yossi Milo Gallery (Nov: 5, 2009- Jan. 10, 2010), Robert Bergman welcomed Art Editor John Yau to his New York City studio to talk about his life and work.
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Clark Coolidge, Michael Gizzi, and I lived within 30 miles of each other, in that UFO zone connecting western Massachusetts and mid-Hudson Valley New York, we often got together. When we weren’t scouring the countryside checking out secondhand bookstores, and talking about whatever was our enthusiasm, we took road trips.
My long held curiosity about Sanford Wurmfeld’s paintings was piqued by the announcement stating that this would be the first time E-Cyclorama (2008), “a monumental painting…made on canvas stretched onto a 37-foot-long oval cylinder” would be shown in the United States.
The slapstick performer, after skidding into a pratfall, always gives a wink to assure the audience that everything is okay. For all the strangeness she packs into her work, the performance and video artist Patty Chang never winks, allowing a merciless collision of hilarity, discomfort, and confusion to unfold.
Coinciding with his recently published monograph A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, Art Editor John Yau paid a visit to the Rail’s Headquarters to talk about his observations of Johns’s work with Publisher Phong Bui.
This was the first solo show in New York of the innovative sculptor John Outterbridge, who, at 76, is well-known as an artist, community activist, and arts teacher in South Central Los Angeles and Compton.
This is the first museum presentation in America of the drawings and paintings of Unica Zürn (1916-1970), who is known in the English-speaking world as the author of two books, translated as The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts (1994) and Dark Spring (2000).
I wonder how many artists would readily admit that Peter Saul has influenced them. He certainly was the first to make high art out of strident and cartoony in-your-face images.
Painter and sculptor Thomas Scheibitz is sharp, smart, and funny without devolving into parody or citation. With a vengeful glee that I find utterly delightful, he turns formalist geometric abstraction and minimalist sculpture on their heads and glues a dunce cap to their feet. It seems to me that Scheibitz has taken a vow not to be boring, ponderous, or jokey.
First known for her works on paper, Xylor Jane now paints on square or nearly square wood panels. Her methodology continues to be simple and straightforward, a fat dot of paint carefully placed within each square of a grid. Think Georges Seurat meets Alfred Jensen meets Peter Young and you get an inkling of what the artist does with her deliberately limited vocabulary.
Is anyone surprised anymore when the culture mavens at the New York Times get it all wrong, again?
This exhibition of eight paintings that Philip Guston completed between 1954 and 1960 got me thinking about the one or two surprises that I have encountered in nearly all of this artist’s exhibitions that I have seen since his retrospective in 1980, the year he died, and how there is very little explanation or follow-up to them.
While preparing for his new exhibit, Robert Mangold: Drawings and Works on Paper 1965–2008 (on view from March 6th through April 4th, 2009), the painter sat down with Rail’s Art Editor John Yau.
When Stephane Mallarme said that everything exists to end up in a book, he didn’t mean an art history book written by a university professor with an axe to grind.
Chris Martin is not afraid to make art that openly alludes to the work of Paul Feeley, Alfred Jensen, Philip Guston, Forrest Bess, Blinky Palermo, and Frank Stella, but in a way that is sophisticated and innocent.
The pairing of Andrew Forge (1923-2002) and Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) makes sense for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is their devotion to perception and their desire to grasp the tangible and intangible aspects of reality.
The drawings and photographs of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) are slowly but surely becoming better known to a wider American audience. In 2003, Holland Cotter, who has been her most eloquent champion in New York, wrote in the New York Times, “if people, especially young artists, knew about Mohamedi, they would love her the way they do Eva Hesse.”
A lot of reviewers have focused on the fact that this exhibition is the inaugural show of the American branch of Haunch of Venison, a commercial gallery that was bought by Christie’s, an art auction house, which is owned by Francois Pinault, a billionaire collector (did any of his money recently disappear?).
On the eve of his three-person exhibition (January 8th–February 14th, 2009) at Team Gallery, Rail Art Editor John Yau paid a visit to Stanley Whitney’s Cooper Square studio to talk about his life and work.
Charles Seliger’s place in history has yet to be fully secured. Born in 1926, he was the youngest and most precocious artist in the group that gathered around Peggy Guggenheim in New York in the 1940s (Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock were also part of this circle).
For those who still need a guide, poets can be divided into two groups, those who have at one juncture or another used collage (or a related methodology) in their writing, and those who haven’t. The former are interested in what has been called (rather negatively) the experimental, while the latter regard themselves as traditionalists.
Antonio López García is the titular head of the Madrid Realists, a group of painters and sculptors little known outside of Spain. They are bound together by their commitment to working from direct observation, which many consider passé, if not altogether old fashioned and obsolete.
Jess (1923-2004) was twenty-five when he decided to become an artist, and felt, as he would later say, that he had come to art too late to learn how to draw. As he put it: “I didn’t start out as a child or young man to develop skills with the hand and eye."
Bruce was innovative in a wide range of mediums, including filmmaking, drawing, photography, and sculpture. He possessed an impeccable logic that he would follow through on, no matter the consequences.
Shortly after Richard Artschwager’s exhibition of paintings and sculptures opened at Gagosian Gallery (January 24–March 8, 2008) the Rail Art Editor John Yau and his wife, the painter Eve Aschheim visited the artist in his Manhattan apartment and home in Upstate New York to discuss his work.
In 1929, Philip Goldstein—he changed his named to Guston in 1935—enrolled in Manual Arts High School, Los Angeles, where he formed a lasting friendship with a fellow student, Jackson Pollock.
In the past few years, we have gotten tantalizing indications of Nicolas Carone’s achievement as a draftsman, as a sculptor, and as a painter. But the full extent of what he has done remains hidden, like an iceberg. Whatever the backstory, the reason for this is simple. From 1954 until 1962, Carone, who was born in 1917, regularly exhibited his work in New York, first at the Stable Gallery and then at Staempfli.
Best known for his symbolic paintings—encrusted surfaces jam-packed with lattices, neural networks, cracked TV screens, helicopters, Ferris wheels, and octopi pushing against the painting’s physical edges—Steve DiBenedetto first gained larger attention when his work was included in an eight-artist survey, Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2005).
On the occasion of Simon Frost’s recent exhibit, Nimbus, at Peter Blum SoHo, which will be on view till May 10, 2008, the artist welcomed Rail Art Editor John Yau on-site to view his new body of work.
This small selection of Brainard’s hilarious reworkings of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip character, Nancy, celebrates the recent publication of The Nancy Book, published by Siglio Press, with an essay by Ann Lauterbach and a memoir by Ron Padgett.
There is something quintessentially American about Jake Berthot’s paintings and drawings. For one thing, he is self-taught, which means that, like Robert Ryman and Jasper Johns, two other largely self-educated artists, he is a perpetual student. In Berthot’s case, he uses underpainting and glazing to build his surfaces, as well as an isometric-orthographic grid (visible in many of his exquisite pencil drawings), in order to locate the tonality, mark, or line.
The small selection of lithographs and works on paper by Matsumi “Mike” Kanemitsu (1922-1992) offered a tantalizing glimpse into the work of an artist who has largely been bypassed by history. The first time I came across his name was in “Personal Poem” by Frank O’Hara, which I read in 1971.
In 2005, Helen Miranda Wilson, who has been celebrated for her small, highly detailed paintings of sky, landscape, still-life, and personal moments, began showing geometric abstractions, apparently having left representation behind.
Something of that porousness between machine and human is to be found in Lydia Dona’s most recent exhibition, which consists of one large, three-panel painting (seven feet high and sixteen feet wide) and four prints. The ostensible subject is what lies behind the surface of upscale, urban lives.
Ever since he completed his groundbreaking Flag (1954-55), Jasper Johns has persistently and, for many, annoyingly defined himself as an individual of no special merit, fixed identity, or authorial “I,” who stands outside both the Marxist definition of worker and the romanticized notion of the artist as hero.
These days you would think that the only woman artist over seventy-five is Louise Bourgeois. And yet, even if Leaf didn’t pave anyone’s way, and was in fact a completely isolated figure, as she has been called by some observers, her work—she paints, draws, and makes sculptures—demands far more attention than it has received.
A contemporary of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Rodrigo Moynihan (1910-1990) was in his early sixties when he began painting still lifes and self-portraits in the studio, and these paintings occupied much of his attention until his death.
Since her first exhibition in Germany in 1970, when she was in her early twenties, Harriet Korman has been sectioning the canvas into distinct compartments. Initially, she did this by precisely spacing thin vertical bars across the surface, methodically divided by thinner horizontal ones.
Drawing is one way to get out of a hole. Ever since Bill Jensen arrived in New York from Minneapolis in the early 1970s, bringing with him drawings of spirals and ellipses, drawing has been central to his practice.
Might it not be time to begin rethinking what happened in painting in the 1980s? Typified by some as the moment when painting came back from the dead, and judged by others as further proof of painting’s retrograde position, the eighties was a decade full of hoopla, with lots of posturing both inside and outside the art world.
Thomas Ruff’s latest exhibition of large-scale, modified digital photographs is a continuation of an Internet-based project, jpegs, which he started in 2004. It expands upon his earlier, Internet-based nudes, where he downloaded and categorized, then altered and enlarged, low-resolution images of pornography.
It is very easy and probably even comforting to think of Merlin James as a contrarian, and certainly many people do, but this lets you off the hook. The reason he has been pegged this way is because he is a highly articulate painter and writer who openly rejects the belief that painting is dead, and even has gone so far as to say that painting should not be included in exhibitions of works done in other mediums.
In conjunction with the painter’s two on-going exhibits at Museum of The City of New York, which she shares with her late husband, the painter, filmmaker, photographer Rudy Burckhardt (February 1 to May 11, 2008) and at DC Moore Gallery (from March 26th to April 26th, 2008), Yvonne Jacquette welcomed Rail Art Editor John Yau to her loft/studio in the garment district to talk about her life and art.
What aberration allows bad artists to make terrific films? Why is it that the clichés that make for turgid art become acceptable and engaging when they are translated into celluloid? I am thinking of Julian Schnabel and Jean Cocteau, who, besides being self-aggrandizing artists who have made interesting films, also share a misguided obsession with Pablo Picasso.
The art world finally seems to be catching up with the sculptures and drawings of Al Taylor (1948-1999), who stopped painting in 1984, and began making constructions in 1985 (he made his first mature drawings as early as 1974). Dating between 1985 and 1990, this exhibition of “early work” serves as an introduction to the first five years of a wildly prolific and sustained outburst of sculpture and drawing that lasted fifteen years.
Richard Artschwager (b. 1923) is an American original, and, like Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) and Peter Saul (b. 1934), he will never be seen as a mainstream artist. In his introduction of his longtime friend, Malcolm Morley (another interesting misfit), which he read at the Skowhegan Awards ceremony in 1992, Artschwager said something that holds true for his own work.
I think it would be extremely pleasant and even comforting if I could find a new or at least different way to fuck up my life. If only I could delude myself for a few minutes more than usual, if only I could have a few minutes when I believe that what I am doing will turn out okay. It never does.