Bill Jensen

Cheim & Read

http://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/2012-01-12_bill-jensen/?view=checklist#

Except for the fact that Jensen is represented by one of the top galleries on the planet, you might think that theres a cult following.

Somehow maintaining his stature as an indie painter in the eyes of his less fortunate art making admirers is something of an art world oddity, and has probably benefited a career that might not have flourished without that cache of reticent, working guy art star.   

Ever since his tumble into the painted void at Mary Boone, Jensen’s exhibitions are always fraught with an air of trepidation and anticipation, what will this recalcitrant (at times) Brooklyn Bohemian, once a lowly art laborer just like you and me come up with next?

Part of the Jensen allure is an aura of mysterious identity. His elusive persona (coined “Bashful Bill” by videographer Loren Monk) is reflected in his use of furtive pigment that dissolves resolve right in front of our eyes. Appropriately, Jensen’s approach to painting is hard to discern, is he purposeful or passive, demonstrative or demure? Giving Jensen the benefit of any doubt I suppose we could say that his work has gone beyond the boundaries of physical purpose and presence to achieve a less densely structured and formal beauty.

Yet Jensen does expound (if not on camera) a proposition for his paintings that describe a filmic premise inspired by the greatest (I say this unabashedly) visual filmmaker of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky. Of course all painters should be inspired by Tarkovsky, (the most profound image maker since Rembrandt) but that Jensen should focus so intently on a filmmaker dedicated to saturating his celluloid in an enriched vision of the physical world’s earthy substance seems ironic. Perhaps Tarkovsky’s exalted command of the human condition is what interests Jensen more.

He sites more specifically Tarkovsky’s cautionary tale of the icon painter Andrei Rublev, an achingly grim, yet devastatingly beautiful narrative that might dissuade lesser art students from picking up a brush.  

It may be a good thing that Jensen diverges from Tarkovsky’s stark literalism and lets his pigment disperse. Jensen’s work inhabits a nether region of interior immateriality, not celebrating the majesty of nature in the here and now, but optically describing the visceral remains of an otherworldly photographic process not quite completed.

His dark gestures of sinewy texture derive from palette knifing oil paint to exquisitely fine films of semi translucent layers. This seductively lovely process lures his art into a kind of trance-like monochromatic stasis. The artist’s love affair with ultramarine violet can get tiresome, and the flattened picture planes tend to become stretched and stressed out looking.

The large black and white, neo-Dubuffet works are the clunkers of the show. These unfinished looking slabs of concrete crevasses should have been left in the studio. Its possible that eventually they could have been transformed but now seem a lost cause. Jensen has always needed help choosing what to show. Why the gallery hasn’t been more assertive I don’t know. 

But technical intent and results don’t seem to be what motivates Jensen. My favorite piece in the exhibit “Oracle Bones III” is a small messy looking canvas that reeks with a wonderfully ancient patina. Innocuous though it may seem, this is painting incarnate. A softly radiating lumination emanates a Gustonian essence. Sloppily applied drips detail a nuanced history of paint covering paint. This bit of archeological excavation reveals a vessel transported through a sense of history, mummified by medium and chroma.

Jensen’s conundrum of process resisting pictorial stability tends to try the eye. Not that painting has to please and soothe, but pictorial integrity requires internal coherence. Substance results from a foundation built on patience and perseverance. Jensen has an extraordinary ability to compose rapturously intuitive narratives that sing to us in color and form, but mostly his stories have no plot, beginning, or ending.

ORACLE BONES III 2009-10
Oil on linen
20 x 28 inches

PASSIONS ACCORDING TO ANDREI (RUBLEV/TARKOVSKY) 2010-11
Oil on linen, diptych
53 1/2 x 78 1/2 inches

SUBSTANCE, SPIRIT & SHADOW (T'AO CH'IEN 7TH C) 2010-11
Oil on linen, triptych
55 x 126 1/2 inches overall

DOGAN 2011
Oil on linen
40 x 32 inches

Gender (Fender) Bender

HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, The Brooklyn Museum.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/hide_seek/#

OK, I know the Brooklyn Museum is a bastion of fashionably controversial, culturally conspicuous consumerism, but all the narcissistic strutting and posing on display (including the viewing audience, there was quite a fabulous crowd in attendance) at Hide and Seek distracted me from an intriguing premise; the transition of homosexual artistic identity from chaste Victorian to the  Calvin Klein tidy whitey & chains crowd.

And therein lies the dilemma of an exhibit themed on the liberation of gender identity. Landscape art, abstract art, and even pop art, all made art for arts sake. But I tend to get suspicious when ulterior motives like gender empowerment enter into the equation. Things always seem to get polemic and stratified, losing sight of artistic craft and process.   

However unlike selections of feminist art from the same period, some of the more contrived contemporary work in H&S is plagued not so much by political rhetoric, as a kind of preening slave-to-fashion obsequiousness.  

One particularly heavy-handed use of metaphor was Lyle Ashton Harris’s life sized self-portrait French kissing his brother while holding a menacing looking pistol to his sibling’s chest. C’mon, I get it already, firearm as sexual innuendo, powerlessness vs penetration, offend the religious right, etc. Thanks so much for cramming it all down my throat. (just kidding)

Haven’t we seen enough over-sized, super glossy C-Prints of shockingly sensational homo-erotica in Chelsea already?

Whats most revealing about this exhibit is how completely and radically homosexuality has transformed its expression in visual art from the repressed, but exquisitely refined libido of Grant Wood’s preppy looking “Arnold Comes of Age” to a morbid yet compelling drama of Canadian AA Bronson’s death bed portrait of his partner.

David Wojnarowicz’s (WANA-row-vitch) paintings aren’t seen to full effect in this exhibit, but his video “Fire In My Belly” which put H&S on the map when it was removed from the National Portrait Gallery exhibit in Wash DC has gained this exhibit more notoriety than it deserves.

The video itself could only be considered offensive to those overly sensitive and intolerant mullahs and saints populating the halls of congress. In fact, Fire In My Belly is an effective piece of visual poetry, and relates to Wojnarowicz’s strong skills as a painter.

Mapplethorpe’s semi crucified self-portrait cheerfully greets the viewer. His exquisitely demented porno gleefully transcends the medium of S&M, gaily proceeding to wickedly witty compositions rooted in personality and grace.           

There are enlightening gems here; Grant Wood’s portrait of his mother  “Women with Plants” contains a wispy, almost windblown brushiness, contrasted by her craggy visage.

Florine Stetthiemer’s ghostly and solemn portrait of Duchamp belies her flamboyantly theatrical fantasy stage scenes.

Lee Miller’s dreamlike shot of Joseph Cornell superimposed with toy sailboat, lends a Freudian chiaroscuro to this serene scene.

But some things are better when left behind the closet doors, and Hide & Seek could have stood to hide a little bit more. That the sublime and substantial work in this show derives mostly from libidos disguised and camouflaged, rather than the uninhibited acting out of glaringly explicit decadence run amok, seems to indicate that gender for genders sake became a means to an end here.

Ultimately then, and ironically enough, art that’s all about sexual orientation tends to imitate life, and not very convincingly at that.

 

Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera, 1994, a triptych by Lyle Ashton Harris (created with his brother Thomas Allen Harris)

AA Bronson (Canadian, b. 1946). Felix, June 5, 1994, 1994 (printed 1999). Lacquer on vinyl, 84 x 168 in. (213.4 x 426.7 cm). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Purchased 2001. © AA Bronson, courtesy Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin

Grant Wood, "Arnold Comes Of Age", 1930

Grant Wood, "Women with Plants", 1929

Florine Stettheimer (American, 1871–1944). Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, circa 1925. Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 24 1/2 in. (61.6 x 62.2 cm). Gift from the Estate of Ettie and Florine Stettheimer, Michele and Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts. Photography by David Stansbury

Lee Miller, Joseph Cornell, New York,
1933.

Netflix pick of the week: Scarlet Street

1945 Directed by Fritz Lang, with Edward G Robinson & Joan Bennett

The moral of the story for all those careerist art types is to be careful what you wish for. Especially if a connivingly seductive Joan Bennett takes all the credit for painting your canvases.

This cautionary film noir casts E G Robinson in the unlikely role of Chris Cross (!) an unassuming bank bookkeeper turned outsider artist at night. Lured by a duo of truly rotten and duplicitous con persons (Bennett & Dan Duryea) to give up his paintings for the promise of big bucks and gallery shows, things go from bad to worse as Chris’s crush on Kitty (Bennett) turns violent.

Lang’s expressionist take on film noir cinematography and screenplay lends an unusual pathos to this story. Gritty and believable characters struggle for survival, while haunted by their actions. Theres nothing heroic or redemptive about Chris, he’s sold out and now must pay his dues.

At least the art has a happy ending.

Matta, Pretty Boy, Pretty Good Painter.

Matta: A Centennial Celebration, on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Matta’s birth.

Pace Gallery Chelsea
 

http://www.matta-art.com/

 

Conundrums abound in this overtly zealous painter’s manic space, but you can’t accuse him of not trying, like Gorky he let it all hang out.

Matta’s Surrealist origins shape a lifetime of mostly hectic, unfussy canvases that contain cogently conceived contemplations, urgently constructed.

Leaving his native Chile for Paris in 1933 he hung with André Breton and became the youngest member of the Surrealist circle.  A literalism creeps into this early work, but Matta’s playful nature (which becomes an important saving grace during a long, industrious career) invigorates cubist doctrine and design.

After moving to NY at the beginning of WW2, he quickly joins the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist scene and connects with Gorky’s quirky synaptic painterly rhythms. Matta’s  “inscapes” and his “psychological morphologies” are inherently indebted to Gorky. Matta repays this kinship by having an affair with Gorky’s wife, (to be fair Gorky was suffering horribly at his time from cancer, depression, and a studio fire that wiped out some important work, he must not have been much fun to be around) and is excommunicated from Surrealist society.

Moving back to Europe for the rest of his life, Matta launches into a prodigious output of paintings inspired by socially relevant issues and technological phantasmagoria.

His mid century scheme features a modernist sensibility manifesting as an obsession with goofy, apocalyptic visions of techno sci-fi dilemmas run amok.  The most spectacular visages are spread out in a mural-like format of an extended rectangle. This provides us with a left-to-right narrative read that repeats itself a bit too much. The semiotics can get a tad predictable, even if his use of vivid pigments saves the day.

Figurative references abound in these epic compositions. Elastic, skeletal forms extend stretched out limbs that integrate a casual architecture. This zesty Mad Magazine cartoon-esque figuration succinctly anticipates graffiti.

Matta’s strengths as a painter are apparent; his expansive spatial atmospheres, and chromatic saturation are applied with a delicate airbrushed finesse, and achieve a sublime pastel fragrance. But the confluence of flatness and a murky palette at times lead to uncertainty of intent. He seems to lose focus easily, compositions can strive for harmony and end up a-tonal and off key. Excessive reliance on scratchy, hasty looking drawing weighs down already clunky and tentative cacophonies that for all the excited mark making end up static and slightly stale. With Matta sometimes you have to pick and choose to find the rewards.   

Then seen to be surging from some orchestral wellspring of momentous seismic activity, a gargantuan canvas like “L’Homme Descend Du Signe” goes rocketing towards an electro-mechanical nirvana, exuding a violet haze enveloping free-floating sections of disjointedly animated creatures.

This cosmic theater evokes sweeping cinematic vistas of space age paraphernalia that entertain notions of wit and whim. We know the painter was having fun and so are we. 

"L'homme descend du signe"

1975 (75/8)
406 x 835 cm.

"El espejo de Cronos"

1981 (81/1)
315 x 495 cm. 

  "Burn, Baby Burn"

   1965-6
   298 x 971 cm.

  "Être Atout"
  (from suite 'Être Atout')

  1960 (60/15)
  200 x 288 cm.

 

"Comme elle est vierge ma forèt"

1992 (92/7)
300 x 530 cm.

 

"Les Roses sont belles"

1951
201 x 281 cm.

 

"Etoile artaud"

1991 (91/15)
200 x 300 cm.

 

"Les découvertes du fouilleur"

1955 (55/2)

 

untitled

1937
22.8 x 29.2 cm.

 Matta in his studio.

Tom Evans

Sideshow Gallery, Williamsburg Brooklyn

Tom Evans and Sideshow go together like a horse and carriage. Tom being a workhorse of a painter, and Sideshow his old school vehicle rattling along on its wooden wheels, displaying these painterly wares for the all the village to see.

Not that Evans is old fashioned, just out of fashion, which makes me appreciate his new work even more.

This vivid stew of neon luminescence ignites a visual fuse, and detonates before our eyes. This is action painting incarnate, tumbling scrums of acrobatic color fields wrestle each other to the floor (or perhaps the foreground) and emerge victorious in most of these boisterous canvases.

Evans says he was feeling “kicked out of painting”, and decided to get rid of some older works that were over cooked and burdening his oeuvre. He put many of his past efforts out on the curb for collection and started anew. This is a good sign, real painters always rid themselves of perceived clunkers. The last thing you want to do when rooting through your storage racks is continually remind yourself of how hard it is to learn how to paint.

However Evans has mined his previous wealth of art making expertise here, superseding flatness by draping sections of the picture plane with flecked patches of textured brushwork that connotes patterned animal pelts.

Although Evans did not waste any time with these paintings, they still accumulate a certain gravity that helps balance out the struggle for pictorial integrity that all authentic painters strive for.

These untamed riffs of muscular abstract activity promulgate physicality in the here and now, while refreshing our aesthetic senses with their unpretentious artistic vigor. 

 

Eva Lee - Reteach A Thing Its Loveliness

Streaming Festival 6th Edition at The Hague, Netherlands

http://www.streamingfestival.com/archive/2011/artists.php?id=1047&f=Eva&l=Lee

Just think, 20 years ago when we were all still so analogue Eva Lee’s ode to nature could not have been seen. I don’t think she would have tried to paint this short lyrical sonnet using Old Holland, it really could only have taken form on a digital canvas.

But it is at heart a painting, and a pleasant one to look at.

The opening passage fades in to a shimmering black & white pool of shifting amoeba that could also represent a map of cosmic background radiation. Crackling on the soundtrack lends a primal quality to the scene. The interaction between the macro and the micro pervades this work and instigates a crisp visual dialogue.

Undulating kaleidoscopic orbs inflate and deflate in a very Hippie Trippy hallucinogenic manner. This ironic throwback reference is but one interpretation, the eye-catching yellow green chroma could intuit backlit stained glass or insect patterning.      

Kudos to Ms Lee for a clever digital age reinvention of the painterly craft. Dick Blick should take notice!

The Degenerate Craft Fair

A sort of anti-art fair, the Degenerate Craft Fair features over 75 artists, designers and their work. Just in time for holiday shopping, most of the items offered will cost less than $50.

http://degeneratecraftfair.com/

Jeanne and I will be there, hosting a rare live appearance of “Ray & Dawn, The Astronuts”.

Ray and Dawn will provide personally autographed copies of their famous “Moonwalk By Earthlight” photos for a nominal fee. (considering the astronomical expense of getting them to the moon and back)

We hope to see you there.

Eliot & Jeanne

159 Bleecker Street
Between Sullivan and Thompson Streets
Take the 4, 6 to Bleecker Street or
A, B, C, E, F, M to West 4th Street

December 10th 12pm to 9pm
Opening night reception from 6pm to 9pm
Featuring music and free beer.
Beer has been lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery

December 11th 12pm to 6pm
First 50 visitors receive a tote bag full of goodies

Check out this amazing computer animation flyover of the 9/11 monument:

http://www.friendsseminary.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=738873

Dark Star

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum

Good old adorable Richard Serra, cute as a button, whats not to like?

Well, according to the artist during his 2008 interview in the Guardian: “I don't give a shit but I care quite a lot.”

So where does that leave his befuddled but adoring public art aficionados? Perhaps admiring substantial works on paper with titles such as: “US Courts Partial to Government” and “The United States Government Destroys Art”. These typically monolithic concepts allude to the artist’s controversial public art fiascos in New York and California, and his reputation for grouchy, left-leaning proclamations.

Something tells me this guy has a really big heavy chip on his shoulder. But good for him, he’s proven he can take it, and with his “revenge drawings” it’s been best served Xtra Large.

Serra’s humorless, monumental obstructions, dominating and oppositionally defiant, still manage to convey the artist’s touch, and this long over due exhibit of his works (mostly) on paper gives us a sense of Serra’s funkier side.

Patina is the heart and soul of Serra’s art, the softer side of the iron man. The “Forged Drawings” series exemplify the fortitude of matter, while entropic decay (rust) seduces the flesh. The slightly sweet whiff of Ivory Black entices us with the possibility of undulation. The potential for malleability however remote, draws us in, while simultaneously, resolutely stolid object-ness commands authority, rebuffing any flirtation with delight. 

The “Forged Drawings” are as intimate as Serra has ever become, approaching radiance despite their immense gravity and gooey coats of paint stick.

The “out-of-round” group of works on handmade paper starts to suggest post war painting outside the minimalist constrictions of monochromatic flatness. These pulsating black holes stuffed with fermenting black carbon exude a painterly mess; much the way Pollack espoused splashy whippets of untamed pigment.     

The larger scale works on linen from the ‘70s, such as “Abstract Slavery” are stapled to the wall in a causal looking manner, most likely as they were in the studio. They are attached to the wall slightly off kilter, skewing our reference to “square” and setting a nice perceptual shift in motion. This is one of Serra’s keys to keeping such formidable work from becoming too static.

Calling the artist a minimalist becomes a misnomer. Serra’s work is really all about maximalism. His blackened blank screens are primed for total absorption of all mass, light, and sensation. They contain everything and nothing.

Although ego driven his work always denies personality, a totalitarian polemic guides the artist’s process. This is art deprived of spontaneity, and improvisation but rich in grandeur and architecture.  

His formalist zeal for rigidity and manifesto constantly reminds us that theres little room for dissent, its Serra’s way or the highway.  

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={2C49726E-A17C-428D-A97C-60552A47D829}

http://minimalexposition.blogspot.com/2009/06/richard-serra-forged-drawings-minimal.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/oct/05/serra.art

Forged Drawings, installation view.

Forged Drawing Round

Richard Serra (American, b. 1939)
out-of-round X, 1999
Paintstick on handmade Hiromi paper; 79 1/2 x 79 in.
Private collection
© Richard Serra
Photo: Rob McKeever

Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents

Metropolitan Museum of Art

What a racket!

At least according to the title of Romuald Hazoume’s street-smart sculpture “Ear Splitting”.

I’d have to agree; this eccentric collection of contemporary sculpture by both African and American artists is a noisy, rambunctious gang of aggressively tough looking assemblages.

This exhibit expounds on how traditional African masks, meant to establish tribal, social and spiritual hierarchies, has influenced contemporary art rooted in a low-tech, scavenger ethos.

The objects here have reinvented the original African context of primitively hand-carved wooden art that invoked magic, divination, and shamanism, into a glowering group of facial symmetries fabricated from junked plastic jerricans, discarded electronica, and metallic roadside detritus that conjure up a post apocalyptic, mad max-ian aesthetic.

The two contemporary African artists in this exhibit are both from the West African republic of Benin. The exhibit seems to extend out from an indigenous Beninese spiritual practice called Vodun, which conveniently morphs into visual art much the way Voodoo imbues artificial figurines with a literal connection to deities and psychic weaponry. 

Calixte Dakpogan’s piece “Perroquet” (Parrot) is a tautly economical gesture of great expression. This mechanical bird head’s stunning simplicity of form is generated by craftsmanship of the highest order. This is has it should be.

Dakopogan, his brother and a cousin run a metalsmithing shop in Porto Novo going back generations. They are devoted to Ogun, the god of iron (and junked auto carcasses) that litter the highways and byways of this former slave trading port.

This dedication to rusted remnants recovered, and then rediscovered lends wit, irony, and a scrappy originality to a found art tradition that thrives on third world frugality.

An American artist in this show, Willie Cole, brings his forebodingly bristling headdress “Shine” to prominence in the exhibit. Based on tribal styles that feature intimidating and protruding appendages, his use of black leather high heel shoes spikes the artwork with a fetishistic slant.

“Next Kent Tji Wara” then spins us on our heels. A pink bicycle frame has been twisted and turned into a gracefully posed antelope, poised to leap. Cole’s ingenious use of unexpected sculptural fodder dovetails beautifully with what you thought the curators intended for this installation.

So I’m not exactly clear what the Benglis pieces are doing here. (the cynical side of me might even think the curators thought a sexy name was needed) This well-known art star seems incongruously out of place. Especially when presenting blown glass, a highly risky medium that always makes me cringe, and form associations with the preciously pretty.

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/african_icon/images.asp

http://www.caacart.com/pigozzi-artist.php?i=Dakpogan-Calixte&bio=en&m=42

Romuald Hazoumé (Beninese, b. 1962). Ear Splitting, 1999. Plastic can, brush, speakers. Courtesy CAAC–The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Romuald Hazoumé

Romuald Hazoumé (Beninese, b. 1962). Ear Splitting, 1999. Plastic can, brush, speakers. Courtesy CAAC–The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Romuald Hazoumé 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calixte Dakpogan (Beninese, b. 1958)
Perroquet (Parrot), 2005
Iron, plastic, copper; H. x W. x D.: 32 11/16 x 22 1/16 x 14 15/16 in. (83 x 56 x 38 cm)
Courtesy CAAC - The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva
© Calixte Dakpogan 

 

 

 

Willie Cole (American, b. 1955)
Shine, 2007
Shoes, steel wire, monofilament line, washers, and screws; H. x W. x D.: 15 3/4 x 14 x 15 in. (40 x 35.6 x 38.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Hortense and William A. Mohr Sculpture Purchase Fund, 2008

Willie Cole (American, b. 1955)
Next Kent Tji Wara, 2007
Bicycle parts, spray paint, and brazing; H. x W. x D.: 37 x 20 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. (94 x 52.1 x 21 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Hortense and William A. Mohr Sculpture Purchase Fund, 2008 (2008.260)