Thursday, August 9, 2007
Brice Marden
Brice Marden was born October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland, from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1958 to 1961, when he received his B.F.A. degree. In the summer of 1961, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, and went on to enroll at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, receiving an M.F.A. degree in 1963.
It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that characterized his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality.
In the summer of 1963, Marden moved to New York with his wife, Pauline Baez, whom he had married in 1960, and with whom he had a son, Nicholas. They later divorced and he married Helen Harrington in 1969. He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth and whose work furthered his interest in gridded compositions.
Marden made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in the winter of 1964. It was during this time that his first solo exhibition was presented at the Wilcox Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Marden spent the spring and summer of 1964 in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. His first solo show in New York was held at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, and in the fall of that year, he became the general assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. In 1968, he began constructing his paintings with multiple panels. From 1969 to 1974, he was a painting instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta in Kassel, and he was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975. A show of drawings made between 1964 and 1974 traveled in 1974 to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened an interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction. Around this time, Marden traveled to Thailand, where he became interested in Far Eastern calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. During the 1990s, Marden has continued to exhibit regularly in New York. He was the subject of two major traveling shows, Brice Marden—Cold Mountain, at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Menil Collection, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Kunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1991 and 1992; and Work books 1965–1995, which traveled in 1997–98 to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Brice Marden was born October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland, from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1958 to 1961, when he received his B.F.A. degree. In the summer of 1961, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, and went on to enroll at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, receiving an M.F.A. degree in 1963.
It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that characterized his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality.
In the summer of 1963, Marden moved to New York with his wife, Pauline Baez, whom he had married in 1960, and with whom he had a son, Nicholas. They later divorced and he married Helen Harrington in 1969. He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth and whose work furthered his interest in gridded compositions.
Marden made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in the winter of 1964. It was during this time that his first solo exhibition was presented at the Wilcox Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Marden spent the spring and summer of 1964 in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. His first solo show in New York was held at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, and in the fall of that year, he became the general assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. In 1968, he began constructing his paintings with multiple panels. From 1969 to 1974, he was a painting instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta in Kassel, and he was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975. A show of drawings made between 1964 and 1974 traveled in 1974 to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened an interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction. Around this time, Marden traveled to Thailand, where he became interested in Far Eastern calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. During the 1990s, Marden has continued to exhibit regularly in New York. He was the subject of two major traveling shows, Brice Marden—Cold Mountain, at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Menil Collection, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Kunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1991 and 1992; and Work books 1965–1995, which traveled in 1997–98 to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Angela Bulloch
A storm in a pixel
The brooding opening sequence of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm (1997) assumes some importance in the recent work of Angela Bulloch. It begins with a train making its way from New York to the suburbs. The train grinds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Paul Hood, the nerdy adolescent the film converges upon, reads to himself from the November 1973 issue of his favourite comic book, The Fantastic Four. ‘It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four…because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other…without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal antimatter.’ This fragment of narrative from the comic is an allegory of the entire film, which tells of the insidious ramifications husband and wife swapping had on the nuclear family during the Watergate era. All of this action is played out against superlative examples of ’70s interior design such as Verner Panton shag-pile carpets and lamps, making it all the more enticing a subject for Bulloch.
Bulloch has been progressively working through films from the late ’60s and the turn into the ’70s that take their respective epochs as their subject matter. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) was the subject of Blow-Up TV in 2000 and his Zabriskie Point (1970) provided the point of departure for Z-Point in 2001. So given this progression through time, it is no surprise that she has now moved on to the early ’70s with the recent Antimatter series, albeit by way of a ’90s film about the period.
In the present series of pixel boxes, minimalism is used to establish a language through which a narrative scenario can be played. The seemingly unified formal vocabulary that Bulloch fashions often leads to a certain level of opacity in her work – a consequence of how she abstracts from the films the pixel boxes are premised on. Thus although Bulloch relies on the formal rigour of minimalism to render the surface design of the art work instantly legible, beneath this veneer all kinds of action takes place which percolates through to the viewer slowly. The precise way Bulloch uses the films is key to this process. In each work a short sequence from the selected film is slowed down and a sophisticated system of digital motion image processing is used to filter it. Digital imagery is hereby recast as a new pixel-based architecture in which the rudimentary components of narration and cinematic image are dismantled.
The sequences from the given film are chosen because they are particularly striking. For example, the modernist house the heroine watches being blown-up in the desert in Zabriskie Point is taken as the point of departure for the series Z-Point. The sequence begins by showing her as she leaves a luxury villa in her car and shifts to some financiers discussing plans for building luxury houses in the desert. The camera then returns to the heroine gazing almost paralysed at the villa as it suddenly explodes. There follows a series of slow motion explosions from the interior wherein food, clothing, books and furniture are propelled through the air. In the finished animation sequence of Z-Point, these slow motion shots have an entrancing effect as they are submerged in bright, light blue tones into which one or two single, dark brown, slightly moving pixel squares are deposited.
A series of glass-fronted wooden boxes contain the fluorescent tubes bringing the pixels to life. Using custom-made software the diagonally arranged tubes inside the cubes can be modulated to an almost infinite variety. The individual cubes form the elements of a modular system that are stacked up in different combinations, in cubes, towers, or columns. The colours move constantly and result in lyrical waves of change, differing according to the particular sequence that has been manipulated.
In the new series based on The Ice Storm each member of Paul Hood’s family constitutes a different particle of antimatter. The series appends the formal vocabulary of the earlier ones by painting a phrase associated with the respective character from the comic on the wall behind the pixel box unit. Antimatter3: The Thing (2004) is a portrait of Paul’s father Benjamin Hood and comprises 13 pixel boxes in which reds and greens pulsate against the word WHROOM! which hugs the wall behind it. Meanwhile, Antimatter3: Invisible Girl (2004), a portrait of Paul’s mother, consists of only five pixel boxes wherein pinks and blues dissolve into whites and the word SCREEEEEEEEEE! graces the wall. In a further work from the series Paul Hood himself is represented by the Human Torch and the phrase FLAME ON zips across the wall.
A fascinating point of correspondence can be found between the periods from which the films Bulloch uses derive and the internal development of minimalism. Consider how Bulloch’s series starts with Blow Up, a film contemporaneous with the austerity of high minimalism, and then moves onto Zabriskie Point released four years later in 1970 in a moment that marks the full onslaught of the critique of minimalism. Artists who really came into their own during this period such as Robert Smithson injected the raw forms of minimalism with narrative, later enhancing this by actually using film itself. The upshot is that while the basic language of Flavin et al is significant for Bulloch it is only by way of its critique through post-minimalism and its reintroduction of narrative.
For narrative to be fed through such a rigorous language is unusual and that a certain level of ambience results is even more so. As Bulloch filters the late ’60s and early ’70s through her work it enables us to see these decades afresh, in relation to the film and design culture of their time, pixel by pixel.
A storm in a pixel
The brooding opening sequence of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm (1997) assumes some importance in the recent work of Angela Bulloch. It begins with a train making its way from New York to the suburbs. The train grinds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Paul Hood, the nerdy adolescent the film converges upon, reads to himself from the November 1973 issue of his favourite comic book, The Fantastic Four. ‘It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four…because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other…without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal antimatter.’ This fragment of narrative from the comic is an allegory of the entire film, which tells of the insidious ramifications husband and wife swapping had on the nuclear family during the Watergate era. All of this action is played out against superlative examples of ’70s interior design such as Verner Panton shag-pile carpets and lamps, making it all the more enticing a subject for Bulloch.
Bulloch has been progressively working through films from the late ’60s and the turn into the ’70s that take their respective epochs as their subject matter. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) was the subject of Blow-Up TV in 2000 and his Zabriskie Point (1970) provided the point of departure for Z-Point in 2001. So given this progression through time, it is no surprise that she has now moved on to the early ’70s with the recent Antimatter series, albeit by way of a ’90s film about the period.
In the present series of pixel boxes, minimalism is used to establish a language through which a narrative scenario can be played. The seemingly unified formal vocabulary that Bulloch fashions often leads to a certain level of opacity in her work – a consequence of how she abstracts from the films the pixel boxes are premised on. Thus although Bulloch relies on the formal rigour of minimalism to render the surface design of the art work instantly legible, beneath this veneer all kinds of action takes place which percolates through to the viewer slowly. The precise way Bulloch uses the films is key to this process. In each work a short sequence from the selected film is slowed down and a sophisticated system of digital motion image processing is used to filter it. Digital imagery is hereby recast as a new pixel-based architecture in which the rudimentary components of narration and cinematic image are dismantled.
The sequences from the given film are chosen because they are particularly striking. For example, the modernist house the heroine watches being blown-up in the desert in Zabriskie Point is taken as the point of departure for the series Z-Point. The sequence begins by showing her as she leaves a luxury villa in her car and shifts to some financiers discussing plans for building luxury houses in the desert. The camera then returns to the heroine gazing almost paralysed at the villa as it suddenly explodes. There follows a series of slow motion explosions from the interior wherein food, clothing, books and furniture are propelled through the air. In the finished animation sequence of Z-Point, these slow motion shots have an entrancing effect as they are submerged in bright, light blue tones into which one or two single, dark brown, slightly moving pixel squares are deposited.
A series of glass-fronted wooden boxes contain the fluorescent tubes bringing the pixels to life. Using custom-made software the diagonally arranged tubes inside the cubes can be modulated to an almost infinite variety. The individual cubes form the elements of a modular system that are stacked up in different combinations, in cubes, towers, or columns. The colours move constantly and result in lyrical waves of change, differing according to the particular sequence that has been manipulated.
In the new series based on The Ice Storm each member of Paul Hood’s family constitutes a different particle of antimatter. The series appends the formal vocabulary of the earlier ones by painting a phrase associated with the respective character from the comic on the wall behind the pixel box unit. Antimatter3: The Thing (2004) is a portrait of Paul’s father Benjamin Hood and comprises 13 pixel boxes in which reds and greens pulsate against the word WHROOM! which hugs the wall behind it. Meanwhile, Antimatter3: Invisible Girl (2004), a portrait of Paul’s mother, consists of only five pixel boxes wherein pinks and blues dissolve into whites and the word SCREEEEEEEEEE! graces the wall. In a further work from the series Paul Hood himself is represented by the Human Torch and the phrase FLAME ON zips across the wall.
A fascinating point of correspondence can be found between the periods from which the films Bulloch uses derive and the internal development of minimalism. Consider how Bulloch’s series starts with Blow Up, a film contemporaneous with the austerity of high minimalism, and then moves onto Zabriskie Point released four years later in 1970 in a moment that marks the full onslaught of the critique of minimalism. Artists who really came into their own during this period such as Robert Smithson injected the raw forms of minimalism with narrative, later enhancing this by actually using film itself. The upshot is that while the basic language of Flavin et al is significant for Bulloch it is only by way of its critique through post-minimalism and its reintroduction of narrative.
For narrative to be fed through such a rigorous language is unusual and that a certain level of ambience results is even more so. As Bulloch filters the late ’60s and early ’70s through her work it enables us to see these decades afresh, in relation to the film and design culture of their time, pixel by pixel.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Candida Höfer
Among the prominent disciples of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer may still be the most underrated, as these two gorgeous shows remind us. ''Traces,'' at the Goethe-Institut, is a small group of photographs, from the past five years, of the interiors of libraries and museums: Beinecke at Yale, the Pierpont Morgan in New York, the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and others. Sonnabend Gallery offers a larger number of new pictures: other buildings (museums, palaces, libraries) in Venice, Germany and the Netherlands.
For more than 30 years, Ms. Höfer has been compiling her deadpan inventory of public spaces, a social catalog of architectural history. Empty and vast, these places can sometimes seem like just occasions for photographic spectacle, the pictures are often so chillingly awesome. But Ms. Höfer is a straight photographer whose humanity and improvisatory spirit come across if we are patient enough to appreciate the serendipity of her light, the subtlety of her color and the quiet, melancholy pleasure she seems to take in finding, as if almost by chance, poetry in institutional form.Her real topic is ambience, a fleeting sensation. Her challenge is to avoid both the dry architectural document and clinical abstraction. When Ms. Höfer's work succeeds, it implies a secret world. You might say she captures the ghosts moving through these spaces, leaving their traces.
They appear in the willowy shapes of three pools of light, like the Three Graces, cast by the trio of tall windows onto the marble floor of the Ca' Rezzonico. Blinding light through the doorway of the archaeological museum in Venice is another trace, which dissolves the sculptures in the room, leaving only an arrow visible on the interior wall, pointing visitors as if into the ether. And in a library in Utrecht, Ms. Höfer catches the ghostly interplay of distilled white light through arched windows with the white of a sculptured bust, different from the white on the railings that frame shelves of books, some yet another white -- a kind of formal call and response.
Her self-portrait in a mirror at the Palazzo Zenobia, nodding toward Velázquez, is a reflection of a reflection of a room full of trompe l'oeil paintings of sculptures, themselves illusions, ghosts of ghosts. Ms. Höfer stands at the center, nearly hiding behind her camera in the empty space, capturing the essence of absence.
Among the prominent disciples of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer may still be the most underrated, as these two gorgeous shows remind us. ''Traces,'' at the Goethe-Institut, is a small group of photographs, from the past five years, of the interiors of libraries and museums: Beinecke at Yale, the Pierpont Morgan in New York, the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and others. Sonnabend Gallery offers a larger number of new pictures: other buildings (museums, palaces, libraries) in Venice, Germany and the Netherlands.
For more than 30 years, Ms. Höfer has been compiling her deadpan inventory of public spaces, a social catalog of architectural history. Empty and vast, these places can sometimes seem like just occasions for photographic spectacle, the pictures are often so chillingly awesome. But Ms. Höfer is a straight photographer whose humanity and improvisatory spirit come across if we are patient enough to appreciate the serendipity of her light, the subtlety of her color and the quiet, melancholy pleasure she seems to take in finding, as if almost by chance, poetry in institutional form.Her real topic is ambience, a fleeting sensation. Her challenge is to avoid both the dry architectural document and clinical abstraction. When Ms. Höfer's work succeeds, it implies a secret world. You might say she captures the ghosts moving through these spaces, leaving their traces.
They appear in the willowy shapes of three pools of light, like the Three Graces, cast by the trio of tall windows onto the marble floor of the Ca' Rezzonico. Blinding light through the doorway of the archaeological museum in Venice is another trace, which dissolves the sculptures in the room, leaving only an arrow visible on the interior wall, pointing visitors as if into the ether. And in a library in Utrecht, Ms. Höfer catches the ghostly interplay of distilled white light through arched windows with the white of a sculptured bust, different from the white on the railings that frame shelves of books, some yet another white -- a kind of formal call and response.
Her self-portrait in a mirror at the Palazzo Zenobia, nodding toward Velázquez, is a reflection of a reflection of a room full of trompe l'oeil paintings of sculptures, themselves illusions, ghosts of ghosts. Ms. Höfer stands at the center, nearly hiding behind her camera in the empty space, capturing the essence of absence.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Carl Andre (1935- )
Carl Andre was one of the founders of the art movement known as Minimal, Systemic, or ABC Art. It is an art that seeks to eliminate everything decorative, extraneous and additive, reducing all components to art's purest elements; it is precise, cerebral and austere rather than accessible. Andre once said that what was beautiful in art was "not that someone is original but that he can find a way of creating in the world the instance of his temperament." His own temperament is close to the tranquil philosophy of Taoism, and many critics refer to his work as "pacific." He reveals little about himself. The men in the family tended to be in building or metal working trades; his father, a marine draftsman, was also an accomplished woodworker, and his grandfather was a bricklayer. In an interview video-taped for the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the artist said of Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born: "The industry was granite-cutting and monument sculpture ... My uncle and father mostly worked in the shipyards ... In 1951 I went as ascholarship student to Phillips Academy, Andover [Massachusetts]. It was there that I first got to know the joys of making art." He was the youngest of three, the only male; his mother wrote poetry and his father took the children to museums and read aloud to them. He later worked at a steel company and on a railroad, traveled to Europe, joined the army. In 1964 he was invited to exhibit at the Hudson River Museum (where this writer was Assistant Director) in a suburb outside of New York City. As Minimalism attracted critical attention, he began exhibiting in the city.For his one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the artist set out eight rectangular sculptures deployed on the gallery floor, each made of 120 bricks. "One hundred twenty is the number richest infactors," Andre explained, "arithmetic is only the scaffolding or armature of my work." Equivalent VIII, one of the eight works, was made two bricks high, six across, and ten lengthwise (technically and sometimes referred to as "2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher"). The titles supposedly were derived from Alfred Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds made in the 1920s and 1930s, called Equivalents. The sculptor's works have nothing to do with clouds, but in mathematical theory the Equivalence Relation has to do with the relation of sameness between elements, while in physics, the Principle of Equivalence demonstrates the distinction between inertial and gravitational forces-- the sort of disciplines that concern Andre.Emplacement, environment, and relativeness are important in all of this artist's works. "A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous," he said. "Everything is an environment, but a place is related particularly to both the general qualities of the environment and the particular qualities of the work which has been done." The bricks in Equivalent VIII are humble materials, basic to building, construction, and manufacture; by treating these cubic, tesserae-units as sculpture, we begin to view the work's physical reality as anesthetic phenomenon. And since placement generates and energizes the piece, Equivalent VIII and its surrounding environment become one work of art.Carl Andre invariably works within a strict self-imposed modular system, using commercially available materials or objects, almost always in identical units or bar forms, such as timber, styrofoam, cementblocks, bales of hay, etc., with only one type of material per work. He considers the setting or placement an essential part of the work, and the form of each piece is largely determined by the space for which it is constructed. "I don't think spaces are that singular, I think there are generic classes of spaces. So it's not really a problem where a work is going to be in particular. It's only a problem, in general, of the generic spaces: is it going to be the size of Grand Central Station or is it going to be the size of a small room?"
Equivalent VIII created considerable controversy in London and New York when newspapers ridiculed the Tate Gallery's purchase (the 1966 work had been dismantled; Andre made a new version for the Tate). Although the London Sunday Times referred to it as an "insouciant masterpiece," the Evening Standard called it a "pile of bricks," and even the venerable Burlington Magazine denounced the museum for squandering public monies on something that "might have occurred to any bricklayer." In New York City this writer defended it in a letter to the New York Times: "A lot of people find profound meaning in this abstract balance between the spiritual and the material, which manifests harmony, proportion and pure order." As a result of the notoriety, Equivalent VIII, of course, became one of the Tate's biggest attractions. Interestingly, Andre's cubical work is in a museum named after Henry Tate, who made his fortune manufacturing cubes of sugar. Andre's emphasis on horizontality with the floor strikes at the traditional concept of sculpture as a vertical and anthropomorphic form. The artist's arrangement of his designated units were made on anorthogonal grid by mathematical means; and like scientific and mathematical models, the physical manifestations of concepts and theories are often beautiful objects in themselves. The rectilinear systems of Equivalent VIII are vertical and horizontal coordinates that manifest themselves in a commensurable pattern of structural regularity and symmetry.The correspondence of parts with reference to a median plane has its counterpart on the opposite side of that plane so that the two halves are geometrically related as a body and its mirror image. The Cartesian grid, a system in which we control our immediate environment, is the principle rule of this arranged composition ("arranged" implies a fixed notion to the parts and a pre-conceived idea of the whole). Andre's usual method of cohesion for his forms is inertia and gravity: no mortar or other binding material is used.For the ancient Greeks, symmetry was first applied to the commensurability of numbers and agreement in dimensions, then to that of parts of sculpture or statues, and soon to the elegance of form in general. Symmetry was considered a "binding together" in a world of mutually related parts of the whole; it presupposed a way in which differences might be preserved yet integrated. Today we tend to regard symmetry as a bilateral arrangement of parts where the whole is divided into a number of identical elements or units that are uniformly distributed around a point, plane or line. The order which Carl Andre imposes on his materials is not designed to create an art object to be gazed at, so much as to create a set of conditions which generates a perceptual response which we experience as art.
Carl Andre was one of the founders of the art movement known as Minimal, Systemic, or ABC Art. It is an art that seeks to eliminate everything decorative, extraneous and additive, reducing all components to art's purest elements; it is precise, cerebral and austere rather than accessible. Andre once said that what was beautiful in art was "not that someone is original but that he can find a way of creating in the world the instance of his temperament." His own temperament is close to the tranquil philosophy of Taoism, and many critics refer to his work as "pacific." He reveals little about himself. The men in the family tended to be in building or metal working trades; his father, a marine draftsman, was also an accomplished woodworker, and his grandfather was a bricklayer. In an interview video-taped for the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the artist said of Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born: "The industry was granite-cutting and monument sculpture ... My uncle and father mostly worked in the shipyards ... In 1951 I went as ascholarship student to Phillips Academy, Andover [Massachusetts]. It was there that I first got to know the joys of making art." He was the youngest of three, the only male; his mother wrote poetry and his father took the children to museums and read aloud to them. He later worked at a steel company and on a railroad, traveled to Europe, joined the army. In 1964 he was invited to exhibit at the Hudson River Museum (where this writer was Assistant Director) in a suburb outside of New York City. As Minimalism attracted critical attention, he began exhibiting in the city.For his one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the artist set out eight rectangular sculptures deployed on the gallery floor, each made of 120 bricks. "One hundred twenty is the number richest infactors," Andre explained, "arithmetic is only the scaffolding or armature of my work." Equivalent VIII, one of the eight works, was made two bricks high, six across, and ten lengthwise (technically and sometimes referred to as "2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher"). The titles supposedly were derived from Alfred Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds made in the 1920s and 1930s, called Equivalents. The sculptor's works have nothing to do with clouds, but in mathematical theory the Equivalence Relation has to do with the relation of sameness between elements, while in physics, the Principle of Equivalence demonstrates the distinction between inertial and gravitational forces-- the sort of disciplines that concern Andre.Emplacement, environment, and relativeness are important in all of this artist's works. "A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous," he said. "Everything is an environment, but a place is related particularly to both the general qualities of the environment and the particular qualities of the work which has been done." The bricks in Equivalent VIII are humble materials, basic to building, construction, and manufacture; by treating these cubic, tesserae-units as sculpture, we begin to view the work's physical reality as anesthetic phenomenon. And since placement generates and energizes the piece, Equivalent VIII and its surrounding environment become one work of art.Carl Andre invariably works within a strict self-imposed modular system, using commercially available materials or objects, almost always in identical units or bar forms, such as timber, styrofoam, cementblocks, bales of hay, etc., with only one type of material per work. He considers the setting or placement an essential part of the work, and the form of each piece is largely determined by the space for which it is constructed. "I don't think spaces are that singular, I think there are generic classes of spaces. So it's not really a problem where a work is going to be in particular. It's only a problem, in general, of the generic spaces: is it going to be the size of Grand Central Station or is it going to be the size of a small room?"
Equivalent VIII created considerable controversy in London and New York when newspapers ridiculed the Tate Gallery's purchase (the 1966 work had been dismantled; Andre made a new version for the Tate). Although the London Sunday Times referred to it as an "insouciant masterpiece," the Evening Standard called it a "pile of bricks," and even the venerable Burlington Magazine denounced the museum for squandering public monies on something that "might have occurred to any bricklayer." In New York City this writer defended it in a letter to the New York Times: "A lot of people find profound meaning in this abstract balance between the spiritual and the material, which manifests harmony, proportion and pure order." As a result of the notoriety, Equivalent VIII, of course, became one of the Tate's biggest attractions. Interestingly, Andre's cubical work is in a museum named after Henry Tate, who made his fortune manufacturing cubes of sugar. Andre's emphasis on horizontality with the floor strikes at the traditional concept of sculpture as a vertical and anthropomorphic form. The artist's arrangement of his designated units were made on anorthogonal grid by mathematical means; and like scientific and mathematical models, the physical manifestations of concepts and theories are often beautiful objects in themselves. The rectilinear systems of Equivalent VIII are vertical and horizontal coordinates that manifest themselves in a commensurable pattern of structural regularity and symmetry.The correspondence of parts with reference to a median plane has its counterpart on the opposite side of that plane so that the two halves are geometrically related as a body and its mirror image. The Cartesian grid, a system in which we control our immediate environment, is the principle rule of this arranged composition ("arranged" implies a fixed notion to the parts and a pre-conceived idea of the whole). Andre's usual method of cohesion for his forms is inertia and gravity: no mortar or other binding material is used.For the ancient Greeks, symmetry was first applied to the commensurability of numbers and agreement in dimensions, then to that of parts of sculpture or statues, and soon to the elegance of form in general. Symmetry was considered a "binding together" in a world of mutually related parts of the whole; it presupposed a way in which differences might be preserved yet integrated. Today we tend to regard symmetry as a bilateral arrangement of parts where the whole is divided into a number of identical elements or units that are uniformly distributed around a point, plane or line. The order which Carl Andre imposes on his materials is not designed to create an art object to be gazed at, so much as to create a set of conditions which generates a perceptual response which we experience as art.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman was born December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied art, mathematics, and physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1960 to 1964. He went on to study under William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California at Davis, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1966. In 1964, Nauman gave up painting and began experimenting with sculpture and Performance art and collaborated with William Allan and Robert Nelson on film projects. He supported himself teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and again at the University of California at Irvine, in 1970.
Since the mid-1960s, the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes sculptures, films, holograms, interactive environments, neon wall reliefs, photographs, prints, sculptures, videotapes, and performance. His Conceptual work stresses meaning over aesthetics; it often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about existence and alienation, and increasingly it provokes the viewer’s participation and dismay.
In 1966, the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, held Nauman’s first solo exhibition. In 1968, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, initiated a long series of solo shows. Also in 1968, he was invited for the first time to participate in Documenta in Kassel, and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to work in New York for one year. In 1972, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, which traveled in Europe and the United States. Nauman moved to New Mexico in 1979. A major retrospective was held at the Rijksmuseum Króller-Müller, Otterlo, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in 1981. Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, he has developed disturbing psychological and physical themes with imagery based on animal and human body parts.
Nauman has received many honors, including an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, the Max Beckmann Prize in 1990, the Wolf Prize in Arts-Sculpture in 1993, and the Wexner Prize in 1994. The most recent Nauman retrospective was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to many venues throughout America and Europe from 1993 to 1995. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
Others have written about Bruce Nauman's Northern California years, but this exhibition and its accompanying catalog are the first to explore in depth Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and often most innovative works. Between 1964, when he arrived in Northern California, and 1969, when he left the area definitively, Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary. He explored new, untested materials in his early fiberglass and rubber sculptures, as well as the methodology that became known as Post-minimal. He was also among the first to use his body as an expressive instrument in live performance and in his classic studio performances made for film and video, and was among the pioneers of the latter form. His search for new means and sources of expression led him to experiment with neon in sign-like reliefs, to make interactive installations, and to explore the relationship between words and images. He also made his first strictly sound piece during this time.
As a graduate student at UC Davis (1964–66), Nauman studied with Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, and William Wiley. Wiley was especially sensitive and receptive to Nauman's unconventional approach to artmaking. He encouraged Nauman to experiment and, following his own example, not to worry about the final appearance of a work. To this day, Nauman takes a piece as far as he needs to in order to do the job—surface refinement is superfluous.
Nauman had arrived in California in 1964 already possessed of many of the ingredients that were to nourish his art—a grounding in mathematics, science, philosophy, and music, for example—as well as a solid moral sense and, most importantly, a keen and curious mind. Once in California, Nauman not only observed what was happening in visual art on the West Coast and beyond through publications and contact with visiting artists at UC Davis, but drew information from the Bay Area's vibrant new dance and music scenes. Literature (Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Malcolm Lowry, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, in particular) and Gestalt psychology also played into his artmaking.
Many of the themes and subjects that appear in Nauman's work to this day can be found in some of his very earliest works, including in a group of sketches that he left behind in his graduate studio that have only recently come to light. These include the artist's studio as a site; the relationship of sculpture to its physical environment; fountains, stairs, and chairs as metaphor; wordplay (encouraged by Wiley and Arneson); the inversion of exterior and interior; the tension between exposure and concealment; and the art potential of ordinary activities. Most important, though, are the fundamental themes he addresses throughout his oeuvre—the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over whatever form it takes—that define his work and profoundly influence artists all over the world.
Because it seemed to exemplify many aspects of his philosophy, I named this show A Rose Has No Teeth after the eponymous work, an embossed lead plaque, which Nauman made in 1966 when he was only twenty-four years old. The piece is at once a commentary on traditional outdoor sculpture, which Nauman found uninspiring, and a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's language theory as put forth in Philosophical Investigations, from which the phrase derives. The artist intended the plaque to be affixed to a tree where, over time, it would disappear as the bark grew over it. As Nauman sees it, more typical outdoor sculpture, large and ambitious as it might be, can never compete with the scale and grandeur of nature itself. Not surprisingly, given his intelligence and range, Nauman was able, in this unprepossessing work, to raise fundamental questions about both art and language.
Nauman, although geographically removed from the centers of Conceptual art activity, was in the forefront of the revolutionary changes taking place in art and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist. Even as a graduate student, Nauman demonstrated a precociousness and originality that made adventurous curators and dealers take notice. He had his first major solo show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1966 just before receiving his master's degree, and by 1969 was exhibiting with the leading galleries for vanguard art—Leo Castelli in New York and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf. He was included in virtually all the early landmark Post-minimal and Conceptual art exhibitions; in 1972 a survey of his work was co-organized by Jane Livingston at the Los Angeles County Museum and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, an unusual tribute to such a young artist.
Co-published by BAM/PFA and UC Press, the catalog that accompanies the exhibition contains important essays by UC Berkeley art historian Anne Wagner, art historian and curator Robert Storr, and media curator and critic Robert Riley, along with my essay tracing the development of Nauman's work of the late 1960s.
Bruce Nauman wins Praemium Imperiale Award 7 June 2004
The American artist Bruce Nauman was named a winner yesterday of a $135,000 Praemium Imperiale award for sculpture. Other winners of the awards, given annually by the Japan Arts Association to recognize lifetime achievement in arts categories not recognized by the Nobel Prizes, were Georg Baselitz of Germany for painting, Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil for architecture, Krzysztof Penderecki of Poland for music and Abbas Kiarostami of Iran for film. In addition, the Young Sound Forum of Central Europe, a contemporary-music orchestra, was awarded a $45,000 Grant for Young Artists.
BRUCE NAUMAN
Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Since the mid-1960's he has created a far-ranging body of work that underlines his determination to describe the human condition in all its contradictions. His conceptual work stresses meaning over form and often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about alienation. Like many of his peers in the 1960's, Nauman was expanding artistic practice by introducing performance into his work, moving away from static objects to create an art of experience. The performance-based works offer investigations of our most basic physical emotions and psychological states. Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists today and has set standards both in the diversity of his artistic means and the breadth of his concerns.
Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light
Bruce Nauman deals with the big questions of life, in the words of his 1983 neon: Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain. Nauman's work focuses on the essential elements of the human experience. Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, premiering at the Milwaukee Art Museum January 28 – April 9, is Nauman's first solo exhibition in Wisconsin, the state in which he was raised. Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of America's most innovative and provocative contemporary artists.
Bruce Nauman works in diverse media; this exhibition focuses solely on light. Light offered Nauman a medium that has the quality of being both elusive and effervescent while aggressively pervading an environment with its message. Nauman's art is motivated by ideas, not an attachment to a particular medium. Through the use of neon signs, a public and familiar means of communication to relate an idea, Nauman's goal is to make the viewer think. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman noted, "he inspires reverence, or loathing…It's hard to feel indifferent to work like his."
"This exhibition is all about the visitor's experience," said Joseph D. Ketner II, Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator and curator of the exhibition. "Visitors will walk into a darkened gallery full of neon signs and fluorescent light environments. They'll experience a disorientation of light and space, just as Nauman intended."The exhibition is divided into three sections, split by two fluorescent light environments (a room and a corridor). The sections are: early neons based on identity, word game neons and figurative neons. There are approximately 15 works in the exhibition.
The first section in the exhibition features Nauman's early neons on the subject of identity. Working in his first professional studio, the neon beer signs in the shop fronts of his San Francisco neighborhood intrigued Nauman, who became determined to subvert the commercial purpose of the advertisements. In response, the artist created Window or Wall Sign (1967) and hung it in the window of his storefront studio. With this piece he sought to achieve "an art that would kind of disappear – an art that was supposed to not quite look like art." Nauman then embarked on a series of neons that grapple with questions of identity. Interested in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and building upon his early performance works, the artist produced Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (1966) as an innovative exercise in portraiture as sculpture. With My Name As Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968) he forces the viewer to contemplate a signature as the object of art.
Two fluorescent light environments divide the exhibition's three sections. The rooms force the viewer into tight or oblique spaces with harsh lighting effects that heighten the perception of space. The two works are the Helman Gallery Parallelogram (1971), a green fluorescent light room, and the Corridor with Mirror and White Lights (1971), through which the viewer must pass, providing spatial counterpoints to the neon signs.
Language, signs and symbols make up the second section. Nauman's work in neon during the 1970s emphasizes the neon as a sign, presenting provocative twists of language. He was acutely aware of the confrontational potential of neon when exhibited in a museum or gallery and offered harsh and humorous socio-political commentary in such pieces as Raw War (1970) and Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972). This series culminates in the monumental, billboard-scaled One Hundred Live and Die (1984). His largest and most complex piece neon, Nauman employs overwhelming scale to bombard the viewer with sardonic aphorisms.
In the third and final section of the exhibition, Nauman explores the pictographic potential of the medium for image-based signs. Hanged Man (1985) makes a playful reference to the children's word game while providing a biting criticism of human rights abuses then in South America and Southeast Asia. With these neons, Nauman acknowledges the great power of images to convey ideas.
Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941. He grew up in Milwaukee and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1964. His father worked for General Electric and the family moved often. Some of his family still lives in Wisconsin. Bruce Nauman currently lives in New Mexico.
A 96-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with images of 75 Nauman works. In incisive essays, Joseph Ketner II, chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Janet Kraynak, a New York based art historian, and critic Gregory Volk analyze and interpret these works in light.
The exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum's new chief curator Joseph D. Ketner II. The exhibition is sponsored by Carlene and Andy Ziegler. After its debut at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Elusive Signs travels to Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, N. Miami (2006); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (2007); Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal (2007); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Victoria (2007); and Queensland Art Gallery, Australia (2008).
Bruce Nauman was born December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied art, mathematics, and physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1960 to 1964. He went on to study under William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California at Davis, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1966. In 1964, Nauman gave up painting and began experimenting with sculpture and Performance art and collaborated with William Allan and Robert Nelson on film projects. He supported himself teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and again at the University of California at Irvine, in 1970.
Since the mid-1960s, the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes sculptures, films, holograms, interactive environments, neon wall reliefs, photographs, prints, sculptures, videotapes, and performance. His Conceptual work stresses meaning over aesthetics; it often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about existence and alienation, and increasingly it provokes the viewer’s participation and dismay.
In 1966, the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, held Nauman’s first solo exhibition. In 1968, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, initiated a long series of solo shows. Also in 1968, he was invited for the first time to participate in Documenta in Kassel, and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to work in New York for one year. In 1972, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, which traveled in Europe and the United States. Nauman moved to New Mexico in 1979. A major retrospective was held at the Rijksmuseum Króller-Müller, Otterlo, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in 1981. Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, he has developed disturbing psychological and physical themes with imagery based on animal and human body parts.
Nauman has received many honors, including an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, the Max Beckmann Prize in 1990, the Wolf Prize in Arts-Sculpture in 1993, and the Wexner Prize in 1994. The most recent Nauman retrospective was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to many venues throughout America and Europe from 1993 to 1995. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
Others have written about Bruce Nauman's Northern California years, but this exhibition and its accompanying catalog are the first to explore in depth Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and often most innovative works. Between 1964, when he arrived in Northern California, and 1969, when he left the area definitively, Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary. He explored new, untested materials in his early fiberglass and rubber sculptures, as well as the methodology that became known as Post-minimal. He was also among the first to use his body as an expressive instrument in live performance and in his classic studio performances made for film and video, and was among the pioneers of the latter form. His search for new means and sources of expression led him to experiment with neon in sign-like reliefs, to make interactive installations, and to explore the relationship between words and images. He also made his first strictly sound piece during this time.
As a graduate student at UC Davis (1964–66), Nauman studied with Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, and William Wiley. Wiley was especially sensitive and receptive to Nauman's unconventional approach to artmaking. He encouraged Nauman to experiment and, following his own example, not to worry about the final appearance of a work. To this day, Nauman takes a piece as far as he needs to in order to do the job—surface refinement is superfluous.
Nauman had arrived in California in 1964 already possessed of many of the ingredients that were to nourish his art—a grounding in mathematics, science, philosophy, and music, for example—as well as a solid moral sense and, most importantly, a keen and curious mind. Once in California, Nauman not only observed what was happening in visual art on the West Coast and beyond through publications and contact with visiting artists at UC Davis, but drew information from the Bay Area's vibrant new dance and music scenes. Literature (Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Malcolm Lowry, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, in particular) and Gestalt psychology also played into his artmaking.
Many of the themes and subjects that appear in Nauman's work to this day can be found in some of his very earliest works, including in a group of sketches that he left behind in his graduate studio that have only recently come to light. These include the artist's studio as a site; the relationship of sculpture to its physical environment; fountains, stairs, and chairs as metaphor; wordplay (encouraged by Wiley and Arneson); the inversion of exterior and interior; the tension between exposure and concealment; and the art potential of ordinary activities. Most important, though, are the fundamental themes he addresses throughout his oeuvre—the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over whatever form it takes—that define his work and profoundly influence artists all over the world.
Because it seemed to exemplify many aspects of his philosophy, I named this show A Rose Has No Teeth after the eponymous work, an embossed lead plaque, which Nauman made in 1966 when he was only twenty-four years old. The piece is at once a commentary on traditional outdoor sculpture, which Nauman found uninspiring, and a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's language theory as put forth in Philosophical Investigations, from which the phrase derives. The artist intended the plaque to be affixed to a tree where, over time, it would disappear as the bark grew over it. As Nauman sees it, more typical outdoor sculpture, large and ambitious as it might be, can never compete with the scale and grandeur of nature itself. Not surprisingly, given his intelligence and range, Nauman was able, in this unprepossessing work, to raise fundamental questions about both art and language.
Nauman, although geographically removed from the centers of Conceptual art activity, was in the forefront of the revolutionary changes taking place in art and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist. Even as a graduate student, Nauman demonstrated a precociousness and originality that made adventurous curators and dealers take notice. He had his first major solo show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1966 just before receiving his master's degree, and by 1969 was exhibiting with the leading galleries for vanguard art—Leo Castelli in New York and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf. He was included in virtually all the early landmark Post-minimal and Conceptual art exhibitions; in 1972 a survey of his work was co-organized by Jane Livingston at the Los Angeles County Museum and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, an unusual tribute to such a young artist.
Co-published by BAM/PFA and UC Press, the catalog that accompanies the exhibition contains important essays by UC Berkeley art historian Anne Wagner, art historian and curator Robert Storr, and media curator and critic Robert Riley, along with my essay tracing the development of Nauman's work of the late 1960s.
Bruce Nauman wins Praemium Imperiale Award 7 June 2004
The American artist Bruce Nauman was named a winner yesterday of a $135,000 Praemium Imperiale award for sculpture. Other winners of the awards, given annually by the Japan Arts Association to recognize lifetime achievement in arts categories not recognized by the Nobel Prizes, were Georg Baselitz of Germany for painting, Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil for architecture, Krzysztof Penderecki of Poland for music and Abbas Kiarostami of Iran for film. In addition, the Young Sound Forum of Central Europe, a contemporary-music orchestra, was awarded a $45,000 Grant for Young Artists.
BRUCE NAUMAN
Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Since the mid-1960's he has created a far-ranging body of work that underlines his determination to describe the human condition in all its contradictions. His conceptual work stresses meaning over form and often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about alienation. Like many of his peers in the 1960's, Nauman was expanding artistic practice by introducing performance into his work, moving away from static objects to create an art of experience. The performance-based works offer investigations of our most basic physical emotions and psychological states. Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists today and has set standards both in the diversity of his artistic means and the breadth of his concerns.
Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light
Bruce Nauman deals with the big questions of life, in the words of his 1983 neon: Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain. Nauman's work focuses on the essential elements of the human experience. Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, premiering at the Milwaukee Art Museum January 28 – April 9, is Nauman's first solo exhibition in Wisconsin, the state in which he was raised. Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of America's most innovative and provocative contemporary artists.
Bruce Nauman works in diverse media; this exhibition focuses solely on light. Light offered Nauman a medium that has the quality of being both elusive and effervescent while aggressively pervading an environment with its message. Nauman's art is motivated by ideas, not an attachment to a particular medium. Through the use of neon signs, a public and familiar means of communication to relate an idea, Nauman's goal is to make the viewer think. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman noted, "he inspires reverence, or loathing…It's hard to feel indifferent to work like his."
"This exhibition is all about the visitor's experience," said Joseph D. Ketner II, Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator and curator of the exhibition. "Visitors will walk into a darkened gallery full of neon signs and fluorescent light environments. They'll experience a disorientation of light and space, just as Nauman intended."The exhibition is divided into three sections, split by two fluorescent light environments (a room and a corridor). The sections are: early neons based on identity, word game neons and figurative neons. There are approximately 15 works in the exhibition.
The first section in the exhibition features Nauman's early neons on the subject of identity. Working in his first professional studio, the neon beer signs in the shop fronts of his San Francisco neighborhood intrigued Nauman, who became determined to subvert the commercial purpose of the advertisements. In response, the artist created Window or Wall Sign (1967) and hung it in the window of his storefront studio. With this piece he sought to achieve "an art that would kind of disappear – an art that was supposed to not quite look like art." Nauman then embarked on a series of neons that grapple with questions of identity. Interested in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and building upon his early performance works, the artist produced Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (1966) as an innovative exercise in portraiture as sculpture. With My Name As Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968) he forces the viewer to contemplate a signature as the object of art.
Two fluorescent light environments divide the exhibition's three sections. The rooms force the viewer into tight or oblique spaces with harsh lighting effects that heighten the perception of space. The two works are the Helman Gallery Parallelogram (1971), a green fluorescent light room, and the Corridor with Mirror and White Lights (1971), through which the viewer must pass, providing spatial counterpoints to the neon signs.
Language, signs and symbols make up the second section. Nauman's work in neon during the 1970s emphasizes the neon as a sign, presenting provocative twists of language. He was acutely aware of the confrontational potential of neon when exhibited in a museum or gallery and offered harsh and humorous socio-political commentary in such pieces as Raw War (1970) and Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972). This series culminates in the monumental, billboard-scaled One Hundred Live and Die (1984). His largest and most complex piece neon, Nauman employs overwhelming scale to bombard the viewer with sardonic aphorisms.
In the third and final section of the exhibition, Nauman explores the pictographic potential of the medium for image-based signs. Hanged Man (1985) makes a playful reference to the children's word game while providing a biting criticism of human rights abuses then in South America and Southeast Asia. With these neons, Nauman acknowledges the great power of images to convey ideas.
Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941. He grew up in Milwaukee and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1964. His father worked for General Electric and the family moved often. Some of his family still lives in Wisconsin. Bruce Nauman currently lives in New Mexico.
A 96-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with images of 75 Nauman works. In incisive essays, Joseph Ketner II, chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Janet Kraynak, a New York based art historian, and critic Gregory Volk analyze and interpret these works in light.
The exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum's new chief curator Joseph D. Ketner II. The exhibition is sponsored by Carlene and Andy Ziegler. After its debut at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Elusive Signs travels to Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, N. Miami (2006); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (2007); Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal (2007); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Victoria (2007); and Queensland Art Gallery, Australia (2008).
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Robert Morris
b. 1931, Kansas City, Mo.
Born February 9, 1931, in Kansas City, Missouri, Robert Morris turned to art and art criticism after studying engineering, eventually writing a 1966 master’s thesis on Constantin Brancusi at Hunter College, New York. Since then, Morris has continued to write influential critical essays, four of which serve as a thumbnail chronology of his most important work: task-oriented dance (“Some Notes on Dance,” 1965), Minimalist sculpture (“Notes on Sculpture,” 1968), Process art (“Anti Form,” 1968), and Earthworks (“Aligned with Nazca,” 1975).
During the 1950s, Morris grew interested in dance while living in San Francisco with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti. After moving to New York in 1959, they participated in a loose-knit confederation of dancers known as the Judson Dance Theater, for which Morris choreographed a number of works, including Arizona (1963), 21.3 (1964), Site (1964), and Waterman Switch (1965).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Morris played a central role in defining three principal artistic movements of the period: Minimalist sculpture, Process Art, and Earthworks. In fact, Morris created his earliest Minimalist objects as props for his dance performances—hence the rudimentary wooden construction of these boxlike forms, which reflected the Judson Dance Theater’s emphasis on function over expression. Morris exhibited entire rooms of these nondescript architectural elements at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1964 and 1965. In the latter half of the 1960s, Morris explored more elaborate industrial processes for his Minimalist sculpture, using materials such as aluminum and steel mesh. Like these industrial fabrications, a series of Neo-Dada sculptures Morris created in the 1960s also challenged the myth of artistic self-expression. These included ironic “self-portraits” consisting of sculpted brains and electroencephalogram readouts as well as other works directly inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s quasiscientific investigations of perception and measurement.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the rigid plywood and steel of Morris’s Minimalist works gave way to the soft materials of his experiments with Process Art. Primary among these materials was felt, which Morris piled, stacked, and hung from the wall in a series of works that investigated the effects of gravity and stress on ordinary materials. A variety of these felt works were shown in 1968 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Subsequent projects Morris made during the late 1960s and early 1970s included indoor installations of such unorthodox materials as dirt and threadwaste, which resisted deliberate shaping into predetermined forms, and monumental outdoor Earthworks. Since the 1970s, Morris has explored such varied mediums as blindfolded drawings, mirror installations, encaustic paintings, and Hydrocal and fiberglass castings, on themes ranging from nuclear holocaust to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Numerous museums have hosted solo exhibitions of his work, including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in 1986, and Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1990. In 1994, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, organized a major retrospective of the artist’s work, which traveled to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. The artist lives in New York City and Gardiner, New York.
b. 1931, Kansas City, Mo.
Born February 9, 1931, in Kansas City, Missouri, Robert Morris turned to art and art criticism after studying engineering, eventually writing a 1966 master’s thesis on Constantin Brancusi at Hunter College, New York. Since then, Morris has continued to write influential critical essays, four of which serve as a thumbnail chronology of his most important work: task-oriented dance (“Some Notes on Dance,” 1965), Minimalist sculpture (“Notes on Sculpture,” 1968), Process art (“Anti Form,” 1968), and Earthworks (“Aligned with Nazca,” 1975).
During the 1950s, Morris grew interested in dance while living in San Francisco with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti. After moving to New York in 1959, they participated in a loose-knit confederation of dancers known as the Judson Dance Theater, for which Morris choreographed a number of works, including Arizona (1963), 21.3 (1964), Site (1964), and Waterman Switch (1965).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Morris played a central role in defining three principal artistic movements of the period: Minimalist sculpture, Process Art, and Earthworks. In fact, Morris created his earliest Minimalist objects as props for his dance performances—hence the rudimentary wooden construction of these boxlike forms, which reflected the Judson Dance Theater’s emphasis on function over expression. Morris exhibited entire rooms of these nondescript architectural elements at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1964 and 1965. In the latter half of the 1960s, Morris explored more elaborate industrial processes for his Minimalist sculpture, using materials such as aluminum and steel mesh. Like these industrial fabrications, a series of Neo-Dada sculptures Morris created in the 1960s also challenged the myth of artistic self-expression. These included ironic “self-portraits” consisting of sculpted brains and electroencephalogram readouts as well as other works directly inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s quasiscientific investigations of perception and measurement.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the rigid plywood and steel of Morris’s Minimalist works gave way to the soft materials of his experiments with Process Art. Primary among these materials was felt, which Morris piled, stacked, and hung from the wall in a series of works that investigated the effects of gravity and stress on ordinary materials. A variety of these felt works were shown in 1968 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Subsequent projects Morris made during the late 1960s and early 1970s included indoor installations of such unorthodox materials as dirt and threadwaste, which resisted deliberate shaping into predetermined forms, and monumental outdoor Earthworks. Since the 1970s, Morris has explored such varied mediums as blindfolded drawings, mirror installations, encaustic paintings, and Hydrocal and fiberglass castings, on themes ranging from nuclear holocaust to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Numerous museums have hosted solo exhibitions of his work, including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in 1986, and Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1990. In 1994, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, organized a major retrospective of the artist’s work, which traveled to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. The artist lives in New York City and Gardiner, New York.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Galerie Lelong
www.galerielelong.com
www.galerie-lelong.com
Galerie Lelong, New York is part of an international network of galleries in New York, Paris and Zurich. The gallery's program in New York is focused on contemporary painting, sculpture, photography and installations, made by a diverse group of artists from the United States, Europe and Latin America. The program includes a concentration of contemporary sculptors such as Petah Coyne, Andy Goldsworthy, Jaume Plensa and Ursula von Rydingsvard as well as artists who are critically engaged with contemporary culture such as Alfredo Jaar, Cildo Meireles, Nancy Spero and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The gallery represents the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the Estate of Hélio Oiticica.
Galerie Lelong in Paris and Zurich have a rich history in presenting many of the key modernists of the 20th Century such as Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Eduardo Chillida, Joan Miro and Antoni Tapies. This history continues through the 21st Century with the work of David Hockney, Jannis Kounellis, and Sean Scully.
The gallery is an active publisher of contemporary prints, multiples and books, including artists' writings and catalogue raisonnes.
ShadowWorks by Richard Artschwager, Petah Coyne, Angelo Filomeno, Andy Goldsworthy,Catherine Lee, Dorothy Napangardi, and Kate Shepherd
Also on view: Sean Scully: Aran Islands
June 28 – August 3, 2007opening reception: Thursday, June 28, 6 to 8 pm
Shadow, a group show with works by Richard Artschwager, Petah Coyne, Angelo Filomeno, Andy Goldsworthy, Catherine Lee, Dorothy Napangardi, and Kate Shepherd will open to the public on June 28, 2007. The works in the exhibition, while differing in medium, date and form, all share an interest in shifting impressions of light, shadow and fluidity. The exhibition will remain on view through August 3.
Richard Artschwager is one of the iconic post-war American artists. His heterogeneous body of work draws from eclectic sources and investigates unusual materials. On view is the trompe l'oeil Dame Redend (Speaking Woman), composed mainly of rubberized hair. Petah Coyne is represented by an earlier work from the ‘80s. Known for richly layered installations with wax, silk flowers, and taxidermy, among other materials, her sculptures have an anthropomorphic presence. The work featured in Shadow is directly figural, and its use of steel and organza is unique among the artist's works. Angelo Filomeno contributes a monumental painting, entitled Coat of Arms with a Skull (after Albrecht Durer engraving). The painting is made with painstaking embroidery of silver thread and Swarovski crystals, which allow the image to appear and disappear. Andy Goldsworthy scratches a white line across grey slate, combining drawing and sculpture in the work Drawn Slate. The grid-based "mark" paintings made by Catherine Lee in the ‘70s also relate to the line and underlie her interest in rhythm and gesture, still a hallmark of her contemporary sculpture. Made on raw linen attached to the wall with grommets, the paintings are a calligraphic record of her working process. From the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi will show two paintings of her delicate and intimate patterns of lines and dots that evoke journeys and the forging of paths. Finally, Kate Shepherd's featured painting interprets the building as cage, her line shifting between actual and imagined structures.
On view in the small gallery is Sean Scully: Aran Islands, a portfolio of 24 black-and-white photographs taken by the artist in the group of islands off the west coast of Ireland. Renowned primarily for his paintings, Scully's photography is an ongoing area of his practice and exploration. Scully visited the islands in 2005 and was drawn to the tightly clustered stone walls that meander over the land. Known for his usage of color, he chose black-and-white film for the Aran Island works, emphasizing the structure and surface. The photographs on view appear in the book Sean Scully: Walls of Aran, published in the UK in May by Thames and Hudson and to be released in the U.S. this September.
www.galerielelong.com
www.galerie-lelong.com
Galerie Lelong, New York is part of an international network of galleries in New York, Paris and Zurich. The gallery's program in New York is focused on contemporary painting, sculpture, photography and installations, made by a diverse group of artists from the United States, Europe and Latin America. The program includes a concentration of contemporary sculptors such as Petah Coyne, Andy Goldsworthy, Jaume Plensa and Ursula von Rydingsvard as well as artists who are critically engaged with contemporary culture such as Alfredo Jaar, Cildo Meireles, Nancy Spero and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The gallery represents the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the Estate of Hélio Oiticica.
Galerie Lelong in Paris and Zurich have a rich history in presenting many of the key modernists of the 20th Century such as Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Eduardo Chillida, Joan Miro and Antoni Tapies. This history continues through the 21st Century with the work of David Hockney, Jannis Kounellis, and Sean Scully.
The gallery is an active publisher of contemporary prints, multiples and books, including artists' writings and catalogue raisonnes.
ShadowWorks by Richard Artschwager, Petah Coyne, Angelo Filomeno, Andy Goldsworthy,Catherine Lee, Dorothy Napangardi, and Kate Shepherd
Also on view: Sean Scully: Aran Islands
June 28 – August 3, 2007opening reception: Thursday, June 28, 6 to 8 pm
Shadow, a group show with works by Richard Artschwager, Petah Coyne, Angelo Filomeno, Andy Goldsworthy, Catherine Lee, Dorothy Napangardi, and Kate Shepherd will open to the public on June 28, 2007. The works in the exhibition, while differing in medium, date and form, all share an interest in shifting impressions of light, shadow and fluidity. The exhibition will remain on view through August 3.
Richard Artschwager is one of the iconic post-war American artists. His heterogeneous body of work draws from eclectic sources and investigates unusual materials. On view is the trompe l'oeil Dame Redend (Speaking Woman), composed mainly of rubberized hair. Petah Coyne is represented by an earlier work from the ‘80s. Known for richly layered installations with wax, silk flowers, and taxidermy, among other materials, her sculptures have an anthropomorphic presence. The work featured in Shadow is directly figural, and its use of steel and organza is unique among the artist's works. Angelo Filomeno contributes a monumental painting, entitled Coat of Arms with a Skull (after Albrecht Durer engraving). The painting is made with painstaking embroidery of silver thread and Swarovski crystals, which allow the image to appear and disappear. Andy Goldsworthy scratches a white line across grey slate, combining drawing and sculpture in the work Drawn Slate. The grid-based "mark" paintings made by Catherine Lee in the ‘70s also relate to the line and underlie her interest in rhythm and gesture, still a hallmark of her contemporary sculpture. Made on raw linen attached to the wall with grommets, the paintings are a calligraphic record of her working process. From the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi will show two paintings of her delicate and intimate patterns of lines and dots that evoke journeys and the forging of paths. Finally, Kate Shepherd's featured painting interprets the building as cage, her line shifting between actual and imagined structures.
On view in the small gallery is Sean Scully: Aran Islands, a portfolio of 24 black-and-white photographs taken by the artist in the group of islands off the west coast of Ireland. Renowned primarily for his paintings, Scully's photography is an ongoing area of his practice and exploration. Scully visited the islands in 2005 and was drawn to the tightly clustered stone walls that meander over the land. Known for his usage of color, he chose black-and-white film for the Aran Island works, emphasizing the structure and surface. The photographs on view appear in the book Sean Scully: Walls of Aran, published in the UK in May by Thames and Hudson and to be released in the U.S. this September.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
The FLOMENHAFT Gallery History
www.flomenhaftgallery.com
The Flomenhaft Gallery is part of Eleanor and Leonard Flomenhaft’s plan for a new chapter in their lives. Eleanor and Leonard are both stockbrokers. Eleanor is also an art historian. Their purpose is to divest themselves of a portion of their art collection and use the resources to display artists to the public who are well known to the museum community, but could benefit from the Flomenhafts’ enthusiasm and expertise.
The art was accumulated according to the interests of Eleanor Flomenhaft as a curator and director of a museum and her husband Leonard, who has a recognized fine eye. Eleanor curated many exhibits for The Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, the Montclair Art Museum and the Neuberger Purchase Art Museum. Currently she is curating an exhibit, “Women Only,” which will travel to seven museums. Exhibits she organized traveled throughout the United States, to the Saint Petersburg State Museum and The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia, to the Netherlands and to several cities in Japan. She has juried many exhibits including the Central American Biennale and has been interviewed numerous times on the radio and television. She has written extensively on contemporary art and wrote the first book in the English language on CoBrA art, the abstract expressionist art of post World War II Europe. Works by Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, Eugene Brands, Eric Bulatov, Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Henry Heerup, Carl Henning Pedersen, Faith Ringgold, Pat Steir and Carrie Mae Weems are just a few excellent work at the gallery.
Artists represented are: Emma Amos, Joan Barber, Paul Brach, Neil Folberg, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, Mira Lehr, Dina Recanati, Miriam Schapiro, Roger Shimomura, Jaune Quick to see Smith, Linda Stein and Flo Oy Wong. The Gallery is in a refurbished building in Chelsea and consists of two spaces, one for exhibiting current shows and the other which is called the “Flomenhaft Gallery Annex” for viewing works by artists when not on exhibit.
www.flomenhaftgallery.com
The Flomenhaft Gallery is part of Eleanor and Leonard Flomenhaft’s plan for a new chapter in their lives. Eleanor and Leonard are both stockbrokers. Eleanor is also an art historian. Their purpose is to divest themselves of a portion of their art collection and use the resources to display artists to the public who are well known to the museum community, but could benefit from the Flomenhafts’ enthusiasm and expertise.
The art was accumulated according to the interests of Eleanor Flomenhaft as a curator and director of a museum and her husband Leonard, who has a recognized fine eye. Eleanor curated many exhibits for The Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, the Montclair Art Museum and the Neuberger Purchase Art Museum. Currently she is curating an exhibit, “Women Only,” which will travel to seven museums. Exhibits she organized traveled throughout the United States, to the Saint Petersburg State Museum and The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia, to the Netherlands and to several cities in Japan. She has juried many exhibits including the Central American Biennale and has been interviewed numerous times on the radio and television. She has written extensively on contemporary art and wrote the first book in the English language on CoBrA art, the abstract expressionist art of post World War II Europe. Works by Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, Eugene Brands, Eric Bulatov, Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Henry Heerup, Carl Henning Pedersen, Faith Ringgold, Pat Steir and Carrie Mae Weems are just a few excellent work at the gallery.
Artists represented are: Emma Amos, Joan Barber, Paul Brach, Neil Folberg, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, Mira Lehr, Dina Recanati, Miriam Schapiro, Roger Shimomura, Jaune Quick to see Smith, Linda Stein and Flo Oy Wong. The Gallery is in a refurbished building in Chelsea and consists of two spaces, one for exhibiting current shows and the other which is called the “Flomenhaft Gallery Annex” for viewing works by artists when not on exhibit.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
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