Aho at Alpha

In the Boston Globe, Cate McQuaid reports that Eric Aho's earnest new paintings of the icy Vermont landscape are wild in more ways than one. "There's the way he slashes paint over his canvas, with bold, big, unfettered strokes. And there are the places he portrays, plunging his viewers deep into a fire-scorched wood, or bringing us to the brink of a frozen river where the ice has reared up and shattered. In his compositions, brute force comes face to face with vulnerability, and chaos collides with order. These nature paintings capture something of humanity, then, as well." Read more.

"Eric Aho: Wilderness," Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA. Through June 4.
Related posts: Provincetown pigment

"It's such a kick, seeing things...that's where it starts"

Alexandre Gallery sent me a link to a thoughtful video interview of Lois Dodd in her studio. Dodd talks about the painting process, why she paints what she sees, and how she survived for so long without a day job. Taped in Dodd's New York studio by Bill Maynes, January 2007.

"Lois Dodd: Landscapes and Structures," Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY. Through May 30.
"Lois Dodd: Directly Considered," Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME. Through July 19.

Related post: Berthot and Dodd: Compare and contrast

Rosa Loy's Leipzig dreamworld

At artnet Charlie Finch absolutely swoons over Leipzig artist Rosa Loy's new paintings. "Rosa is not afraid to blatantly paint-check her influences: languid nymphs sampling a long bolt of orange silk drifting down a hidden staircase are right out of Balthus and the knowing smiles of a tableful of women devouring turkeys are a sly dig at John Currin’s notorious Thanksgiving tableau. Sinister asides, such as a fetus in a brick of ice, evoke Dalí and Francis Bacon. If John Currin’s women talked back, fashioned their own narratives and then sacrificed Currin in a puff of smoke to a nearby wood nymph, they would be transformed into Rosa Loys. Her narrow mythos is seductive and diabolical, the season of the witch, pictures so sly, that you can’t resist. Neo Rauch is arch and wooden by comparison." Read more.

"Rosa Loy: Close to Me," André Schlechtreim Contemporary, New York, NY. Through June 7.
"Neo Rauch," David Zwirner, New York, NY. Through June 21.

Related posts:
Neo Rauch at the Met
John Currin confesses in British press that stupidity is liberating

Clement Greenberg vs. Harold Rosenberg

In The New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl reports that The Jewish Museum’s chief curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, has focussed “Action/Abstraction” on the writers, interspersing paintings and sculpture with abundant texts, photographs, and memorabilia. "Film clips display the men’s differently impressive rhetorical panache: Greenberg is incisive and imperious, Rosenberg droll and oracular. (Parallel shots witness Pollock dripping and de Kooning stroking.) Born to Jewish immigrants in New York, both critics were public intellectuals in the heroic mold of Partisan Review and other small but scarcely humble organs of cosmopolitan thought. Buoyed by America’s ascendancy among nations after the Second World War, they projected the confidence of New York as the new world capital of progressive culture. Each seemed to covet a throne of high-cultural authority which proved, in the end, not to exist. Their quarrels have been outlasted by the art that was their pretext. The resilient mergers of feeling and form in Pollock’s galvanic fields, de Kooning’s dismembered figuration, Rothko’s transcendent color, and, in sculpture, David Smith’s stately animation mutely chastise lopsided partialities of any stripe. But the notion of bracketing the artistic and the critical audacities of the watershed postwar era is so good it’s a wonder that no museum has tackled it before. The result suggests, to me, the pleasant conceit of considering Rosenberg and Greenberg themselves as types of Abstract Expressionists, in discursive prose: Rosenberg lyrically impulsive, like de Kooning; and Greenberg as starkly decisive as Newman. Both aspired, à la Pollock, to perfect unconventional modes of argument that would knock any would-be antagonist cold." Read more.

"Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976," curated by Norman L. Kleeblatt. the Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Through September 21.

Rodney Graham examines modernist myths and moments in Morris Louis tableau

Rodney Graham' show at 303 Gallery (loathed by bloggers for their "no photography allowed" policy) consists of drip paintings styled in the manner of Morris Louis, and a huge studio photograph in which Graham recreates the fictional livingroom where the paintings were created. In The Washington Post, Blake Gopnik describes the image. "The photo shows a 50-something man in blue silk pajamas -- Graham himself, recognizable from his appearances in many other works -- standing in the middle of an elegant modern living room while he pours paint onto a cream-colored canvas. The piece is a nearly perfect distillation of the myth of Louis, which includes the crucial fact that he poured his massive "stain" paintings in his suburban living room in Chevy Chase, without, it's said, leaving much mess behind. In Graham's version of the myth, carefully spread newspapers protect the living room's parquet floor while the handsome artist -- Louis was known to be the subject of his female students' crushes -- stands immaculate among his paints. The room itself, carefully staged in a photo studio in Vancouver, is a stunning evocation of the best of postwar design. It's got a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired flagstone fireplace, a cedar-lath cathedral ceiling, sliding garden doors in floor-to-ceiling glass, walnut veneer walls and custom shelving done in perfect Danish-modern style. Its accessories are also absolutely right: a vintage Revox reel-to-reel tape recorder as well as art books by the big names of the day, such as Erwin Panofsky and John Russell. (The absence of works by Clement Greenberg, Louis's mentor and the most famous critic of that time, is notable.) The artist's pigments sit in period household vessels such as Revere Ware pots, with their trademark copper bottoms, and Tupperware bowls in 1960s green and pink; a cigarette dangles from his lips, Brat Pack style. (Louis died of lung cancer in 1962.) Even the newspaper on the floor is a legible facsimile of the edition from Nov. 8, 1962 -- two days old by the date of the depicted scene, and therefore ready to do dropcloth duty.

"The whole thing stands as a re-imagining of a crucial moment in history. It's like all those pictures that try to re-create the instant of the Annunciation. And like such pictures, the goal isn't so much strict historical accuracy as narrative power. What matters isn't how perfectly they capture the past but how well they help us enter it. We can be convinced by Graham's imaginary scene, even as we realize that Louis's own living room couldn't have been anywhere as grand as the one in Graham's photo, and the abstract picture that its artist paints is not so much a perfect Louis painting as a generic stand-in for one." Read more.

"Rodney Graham: The Gifted Amateur," 303 Gallery, New York, NY. Through June 8.

Habitat for Artists: Studio shack update

(Note: Look for my essay, "Lost in Space: Art Post-Studio," which examines the evolving studio needs and expectations among contemporary artists, in the June issue of The Brooklyn Rail.)



Here are some pictures of the studio shack Simon Draper is building for me up at Spire Studios in Beacon, NY. Spire Studios are on the same road as Dia Beacon, but on the other side of the train station. The shack has a lovely veranda (construction in progress) on the front, which was helpful during the downpour on Thursday. The roof still needs shingling, so currently it's covered with a big brown tarp. Inside there's a built-in desk that's ready to use right below the window. On the outside, instead of putting up wooden siding, I'm plastering the particleboard shell with posters from old projects, both text and image. At the opening reception yesterday, all the visitors who stopped by seemed think they'd like to have their own shack, too. The more extroverted, entrepreneurial artists were across town at Electric Windows.

Plagiarism scandal in Seattle

At Two Coats of Paint we have nothing but humble admiration for hardworking art critics, so we're saddened to learn that Nate Lippens of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been accused of plagiarism. John Marshall reports that Lippens' articles are being examined after one of his art reviews was discovered to have striking similarities to criticism published two years earlier in Art in America."The P-I is looking at dozens of pieces written by Lippens for the newspaper between July 2006 and April 2008. All links to his articles through the P-I's web site have been withdrawn until they have been thoroughly examined and cleared to return to the site....In an e-mail to the P-I on Wednesday, Lippens said: 'I never knowingly plagiarized material. ... I'm completely mortified and ashamed for betraying the implicit trust of my colleagues, friends and readers. I know that I can't undo it or regain that trust but I do offer my sincerest apologies to everyone involved.'" Read more.

At Artdish, editor Jim Demetre wonders why someone as witty, intelligent, and seemingly knowledgeable as Nate Lippens would appropriate text from other sources. "The implications can be career-ending and the benefits ($90 a review from Hearst, last time I checked) very minimal. Did he lack the self-confidence to express his own judgments? Was he too lazy to formulate and construct his own arguments?...Just looking at the examples sited by Christopher Frizzelle, I would say that the similar passages are largely used for the purposes of establishing background and context for the show in question. When a New York artist or international art star shows his or her work in Seattle for the first time, many of us have never seen it before but are expected to go to some lengths to provide this to the reader.... When I wrote for the P-I, I would often find myself reviewing a dance piece with very little to go on and would find myself looking through press materials for clues as I approached a deadline and a very limited word count. When was the company established? What were its artistic objectives? How did it fit into the larger art scene in which they existed? These things had to be established at the beginning of the review so that I could follow up with the necessary description, analysis, and judgment. I usually found this to be the most difficult part of writing the piece and an easy place to find myself appropriating information I could not have observed first hand. It seems that plagiarism can be a slippery slope in this gray area..."Read more.

The art of Jersey

Presented by the Morris Museum, New Jersey Then & Now, traces New Jersey's depiction in representational art from the 18th century through today. Dan Bischoff reports in The Star-Ledger that the show is actually pretty funny. "You could say the irony that seems to dominate much of contemporary art had its origins here in the 1960s, with the Fluxus movement and Allen Kaprow, the Rutgers professor who invented happenings with the late New Brunswick sculptor George Segal, if not with Roy Lichtenstein and Pop. But 'New Jersey Then & Now' suggests there was always something funny about Jersey...." Don't miss the Valeri Larko industrial landscapes, which Larko paints year-round on industrial sites throughout the state. When it's really cold, she paints in the car. Read more.

"New Jersey Then & Now, " co-curated by Ann Aptaker and Mikaela Sardo Lamarche. The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ. Through September 14. Artists include Grace Hartigan, Ben Shahn, Faith Ringgold, Leonard Baskin, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Gasser, Joseph Mora, Valeri Larko, George Segal , Chris Kappmeier, and others.

Painting for umpteen years: Lutes and Dill in LA

In the LAWeekly, Peter Frank's picks this week include Jim Lutes and Laddie John Dill. "Gloriously elaborate and hermetic, Jim Lutes’ invariably small paintings — currently rendered in that most ancient of painting media, egg tempera — are also radiantly, insouciantly gnarly in their cartoonishly but viscerally strange imagery. The denseness and obsessiveness of Lutes’ work skirts surrealism, expressionism and Pop as it sucks up spirit and atmosphere, its urban references finally imploding into almost — almost – inchoate abstraction.

"Laddie John Dill’s new material abstractions, hewn from his usual gritty combinations of stone and steel and stuff, open up the formula on which he has relied for the last umpteen years, revealing a newly found formal, even architectural strength and a surprising lyricism wrought from the hard substances themselves. There has always been an element of the monumental in even the least of Dill’s formations, but here monumentality — tempered by that lyricism and by the human-scale details that relieve these works of their potential ponderousness — is the goal. Still and all, Dill is trying not to overwhelm us, but to elate us, with the expansiveness, and variety, of this recent work."

"Jim Lutes: Cancel the Band," Kinkead Contemporary, Culver City, CA. Through May 17 (tomorrow).
"Laddie John Dill," LA Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA. Through May 17 (tomorrow).

Cook unwowed by Decordova Annual Exhibition of new New Englanders

In The Phoenix, Greg Cook writes that all the work in this year’s DeCordova Annual is "proficient, but nothing wows — or freaks you out. The exhibit can be grouped into variations on a theme: landscape as digital animation or a little garden; family memories as deadpan photos or cartoony paintings; technology in painting as surreal scenes or gestural abstractions....In Jamaica Plain artist Matt Brackett’s surreal oil painting, a woman stands in water under a pier at night waving her hand over glowing yellow waves, or a woman in a fur-collared coat scuttles across an icy marsh at sunset with her arm full of oranges. Brackett sketches out compositions, stages them with models, photographs them, pastes various photos together, and then paints the composites. It recalls the photos of Gregory Crewdson, which are alternately cheesy and seductively strange, like something from David Lynch or The X-Files. Brackett’s scenes head in this direction, but they can feel forced, like studio set-ups and still-life props rather than something plucked from dreams. Another variation of technologically backed painting is Bostonian Mark Schoening’s black-and-white abstractions that look like splatters of mud and straw. They’re built from alternating layers of painting and digital print-outs of manipulated images of architectural fragments, but this part-man part-machine hybrid doesn’t come to life." Read more. If you disagree with Greg Cook's assessment, make sure to comment below.
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"The 2008 Decordova Annual Exhibition," organized by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Nick Capasso, Dina Deitsch, and Kate Dempsey. The Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Through August 17. Artists include Mitchel K. Ahern, Matt Brackett, Leah Gauthier, The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Niho Kozuru, Eva Lee, Yana Payusova, David Prifti, Kirsten Reynolds, Mark Schoening, Vanessa Tropeano, and Marguerite White. See images of the show here.

Hrag Vartanian on Brooklyn's street art

In The Brooklyn Rail, Hrag writes that street artists are rebellious lawbreakers exerting their right to public space, but on the other hand they are the ultimate capitalists monetizing their talents into commodities that sell increasing well. "Free of the stigma of graffiti’s spray-painted scribbling, street art is a kinder, prettier, gentler, more intellectual evolution of the same genre. The consensus of the street art community is that the term refers to work of any medium made on the street. In an email interview with Gaia, a 19-year-old street artist, he explained to me some of the intricacies of this constantly evolving form, '…the one defining factor is that it directly addresses the question of what is the definition of private and public space [and its ownership]...this is a question that street art inherently poses simply due to its illegal nature and that other art inherently does not consider because it is sanctioned.' If London is the global center of street art, New York is only a step behind with north Brooklyn acting as the epicenter of that American hub. Relatively cheap rents, a burgeoning hipster/arts community, the ubiquity of derelict spaces and an established graffiti culture makes north Brooklyn fertile ground for the new experimental world of street art." Read more.

Electric Windows: On May 17th and 18th artists will be painting murals live on the street in front of 510 Main Street in Beacon, NY. The pieces range from 8'x12' to 8'x8' At the end of the day on the 18th all of te pieces will be installed in the windows of the vacant factory building across from 510 Main Street. According to the organizers, both the creation of the art and the installation will be an amazing site to see. Participating artists include Above, Chris Stain, Cycle, Dan Funderburgh, Daryll Peirce, Depoe, Elbow Toe, Jim Darling, ILOVEMYBOO, Lady Pink, Michael De Feo , Mr Kiji , Peripheral, Media, Projects , Peat Wollaeger, Rene Gagnon, Rick Price, Rissssa Boogie, Ripo , Ron English , Tes One , The Love Movement , Tina Darling, Ultra , UPSO , You Are Beautiful. For artist links click here.

Eve Plumb paints, too

Eve Plumb may be best known for playing Jan Brady on the dopey but strangely compelling 1970s television series "The Brady Bunch,'" but she's a dedicated painter, too. In the OC Register, Jan, er, I mean Eve, talks to staff writer Christa Woodall about painting. "I started painting about 20 years ago, and it's been very much an off and on process, with life interrupting and crushing rejection, because if I could have chosen two more rejection field careers, I could not imagine more than acting and painting. But painting I can do on my own time, at my own pace. It's completely my own decision, and I have control – that's why I've stayed with it through all those hard times. It's liking something enough stay through the times when you're wasting supplies, it seems like. It's perseverance." Read more.

"Eve Plumb Paintings," Pure Color Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA. Through May 31. Visit her website for more information.

Shameless promotion of an old friend's spellbinding new book

In The New York Observer, Adam Begley recommends Lise Funderburg's recently released memoir, Pig Candy. "If you're after a memoir pure and simple—a life exposed with intelligence and feeling—you could hardly do better than Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir (Free Press, $24), in which Lise Funderburg takes us down to Monticello, Ga. (pop. 2,500), the place her father, a light-skinned black man, had escaped from, the place he came back to in his prosperous late middle age. The story is built around her father's attachment to his 126-acre farm—an attachment that grows stronger even as metastasized prostate cancer weakens him. Pig Candy—the title refers to barbecued pork—wears its somber themes lightly. Yes, it's about mortality, race and filial duty, but Ms. Funderburg never lectures, never preaches, never prettifies. She unspools her story with quiet candor and an unpretentious faith in the significance of what she has to say." Funderburg isn't a painter but we've been friends since college, and her thoughtful memoir honestly examines her tumultuous relationship with a difficult father. Visit Funderburg's website for more information. She will be speaking on Sunday at the Philadelphia Book Festival.

Rauschenberg is dead

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night of heart failure. He was 82. In The NY Times, Michael Kimmelman writes that Rauschenberg's primary interest lay in the process, not the product. "The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. 'Screwing things up is a virtue,' he said when he was 74. 'Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.' This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, 'to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.' Rauscheberg “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,' Jack Tworkov said, 'and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists....'” Read Michael Kimmelman's fascinating obit in the NY Times.

2008 Turner Prize shortlist: No painters this year

The Tate today announced the four relatively unknown artists who have been shortlisted for the 2008 Turner Prize. As usual, no painters were selected, although the list is uncharacteristically dominated by women.

The jurors:
David Adjaye, Director, Adjaye Associates; Daniel Birnbaum, Director, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste; Suzanne Cotter, Senior Curator, Modern Art Oxford; Jennifer Higgie, Editor, Frieze magazine; Stephen Deuchar, Director, Tate Britain

The shortlist (lifted from the press release):
Runa Islam: For her solo exhibition Centre of Gravity at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen and National Museum of Art, Oslo and the presentation of her work at Venice Biennale 2007 for the continuing development of a unique visual language in her films. Islam creates closely choreographed films with open ended narratives that are analytical and emotionally charged.
Mark Leckey: Mark Leckey has been nominated for his solo exhibitions Industrial Light & Magic at Le Consortium, Dijon, and Resident at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, which combine sculpture, film, sound and performance. With wit and originality, Leckey continues to find new genres through which to communicate his fascination with contemporary culture.
Goshka Macuga: For her solo exhibition Objects in Relation, Art Now at Tate Britain and her contribution to the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art for her carefully staged, mixed-media installations in which she draws on the conventions of the historical archive and exhibition making. Enacting a form of cultural archaeology, Macuga enlists the collaboration of artists past and present in dramatic environments that suggest new narratives and associations.
Cathy Wilkes: For her solo exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, that showed her personal approach to figurative sculpture. Through rigorous, highly charged arrangements of commonplace objects and materials, Wilkes has developed an articulate and eloquent vocabulary that touches on issues of femininity and sexuality.

Related posts about awards given to painters:
The four Turner Prize-winning painters
Joan Snyder receives MacArthur genius award
Whitfield Lovell receives a MacArthur genius grant
Baltimore painter Jo Smail wins Trawick Prize
Marlene Dumas receives €55,000 Düsseldorf art prize
Painter Tony Shore awarded Baltimore's $25,000 Sondheim Prize

"Elizabeth Peyton can really paint"

In Time Out New York T.J. Carlin writes that to paint people is to watch them grow old on an infinitesimally small scale of time, and that sitting for an artist makes the subject incredibly vulnerable. "That is the truth of portraiture and the reason why I’ve been disinclined to like Elizabeth Peyton’s work. Although allusions to Warhol abound because of Peyton’s penchant for portraying the skinny art and media glitterati, her equally thin way of painting tended to leave me feeling high and dry: Instead of being receptive to the emotive qualities of her subjects, I wondered if her connection to them was real. More important, there has also always been a perplexing split in her oeuvre—between depicting friends who pose for her, and working from magazine photos and movie stills of high-profile actors and celebrities. It’s difficult to be wooed by a painting when you feel unsure of the emotional investment of the artist. In this latest exhibition of Peyton’s work at Gavin Brown, her inconsistency seems only more galling because the truth of the matter is, Peyton can really paint....Given the gems in this show, it’s hard to buy into the metanarrative, advanced by some critics, which constitutes the main praise for Peyton’s work: that the artist’s cursory style and content constitute a commentary on contemporary values. In this show, Peyton appears to turn away from conveying a pop-cultural demimonde that may be relevant to the art world, but is increasingly losing global appeal. Instead, she seems to be answering the lure of painting as a private act, which makes one think of another pop-song quotation: 'Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it?'" Read more.

In New York Magazine Jerry Saltz reminisces about Peyton's early years and her first show at the Chelsea Hotel. "The times changed, and as Peyton became a star, her paintings became psychically static and claustrophobic. There were startling moments—in her 1999 depiction of the German rocker Jochen Distelmeyer, his baby blues can melt you—but her Prince Charmings seemed lost in time, unthreatening, more elves than flesh and blood. Her visions of modernity floated free of anything vulnerable....That’s changing, especially in the drawings. Her swoony weightlessness is sprouting roots and gaining gravity.... Subtle as these changes are, they are promising for an artist that some have feared has been drifting in her own lighter-than-air meringue style, making bonbon portraits of the cute and famous. We’re getting to see what life is doing to Peyton and what it’s doing to us." Read more.

"Elizabeth Peyton," Gavin Brown enterprise, New York, NY. Through May 17.

Mothers' Day linkfest: Bloggers on painting

Check out Joanne Mattera's post on Thomas Nozkowski, Tomma Abts, and Roberto Juarez. She's chosen to report on these three artists as a group, because "the constancy of elements in their work, as well as the range of expression within their self-imposed parameters, bring greater depth to their painting, and certainly more profound pleasure in our perception of it." As usual, she has lots of good pictures. Read more.

Also, at Catherine's Art Tours, Catherine Spaeth has an interesting update on David Diao. "David Diao’s paintings over time have been oddly resonant with their historical moments. Diao began exhibiting paintings in New York in 1967, and 'Untitled (1969)' stood out in the exhibit “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” for its monochromatic scale and subtlety of gesture. A glowing pale pink with a gentle moire effect belied the aggressive and rather silly athletics of repeatedly running from a distance to sweep a dripping sponge of paint over the large horizontal field propped against the wall. This entire exhibit was shot through by multiple and varied desires to take painting to the next level at a time that it was under siege, but it was in Diao’s painting that a certain allegiance to Modernist painting was held, even to the medium-specific aim of revealing the supporting stretchers as a mark of tension in painting’s support. For Artforum in 1969 Emily Wassermann wrote of Diao's paintings that '...these are purely optical surfaces which somehow are not sensed as tactile or palpable.' Sheer opticality is code for Modernist painting’s achievement, and at this time it was both notable and belated." Read more.

Steven Alexander visits Anne Seidman's show in Philadelphia. "Although all the paintings are built out of many layers, ranging from juicy amalgamated color fields to loose geometric spacial divisions, the final stage or end product varies greatly from one piece to the next. We can see, imbedded in each surface, the intuitive organic painting process taking place – each action determining the direction of the next. Also evident is a sort of willful inventiveness, an experimental attitude that compels Seidman to avoid formulaic solutions, so each painting has the freshness of a new breakthrough." Read more.

At Dangerous Chunky, Carolyn Zick welcomes NYC blogger and painter Joy Garnett to Seattle. "I’ve been a fan of Joy’s Newsgrist for a long time, and have followed her ambitious rise amongst art bloggers. I honestly fear she might not sleep due to her vast output via both studio and on-line. For those of us who some times feel long in the tooth over this internet stuff, all I can say is 'We’re not worthy.'" Joy Garnett, along with Saul Becker and Michael Schall, are featured in Platform Gallery’s show "Eden’s On Fire!" Read more.

Note: To all you new mothers out there who are dying to spend the day alone in the studio, forget it. As my sister pointed out to me on my first Mother's Day after giving birth (ouch), it's emotionally stingy not to spend a few hours with your kids. Read Musa Mayer's painfully honest book, Night Studio: A Memoir Of Philip Guston, for pointers on how not to be an artist/parent. Guston was her father. FYI, Elizabeth Murray is a better role model for artists who want children. Read why here.

Anne Seidman's oddball forms

In the Philadelphia Inquirer Edith Newhall calls Anne Seidman's paintings acts of faith rendered in color on rag board. "Since her show here three years ago, her compositions of shapes have become less reminiscent of views of city buildings and more suggestive of close-up exteriors and interiors. (Perhaps that's why they share an uncanny affinity with the room they're in). Though abstract, they can bring Sarah McEneaney's domestic scenes to mind - minus the figures, animals and furniture - while her thickest, glossiest puddles of paint and oddball forms veer in the direction of the Austrian master of awkwardness, Franz West. You wonder what prompted them, how her slightly off-kilter geometric shapes keep their precarious balance, and how they can be so different but pass for cousins." Read more.

"Anne Seidman: Touching," Schmidt Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. Through June 7.

NY Times Art in Review: Kannemeyer, Quabeck, Bessone, Nilsson, Dodge

"Anton Kannemeyer: The Haunt of Fears," Jack Shainman, New York, NY. Through May 17. Ken Johnson: "A Tintin-style painting for a Bittercomix cover shows a happy white man on safari in an antique car driven by a black servant. The car is filled with boxes labeled Texaco and Halliburton. As a machine-gun-toting black soldier stands guard, and poor black natives with amputated limbs look on, the car rolls across a plain littered with skeletons and pools of blood. In these and many other works Mr. Kannemeyer’s semiotic sophistication, graphic ingenuity and X-ray political vision work together in morally rousing harmony."

"Cornelius Quabeck: Critical Mess," Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY. Through May 17. Roberta Smith: "From an American viewpoint this work stirs together the appropriated images of David Salle, Richard Philips and Martin Kippenberger and the collage narratives of the Los Angeles artist Alexis Smith. They have an attractive nonchalance, but they could have been made 20 years ago. It would be nice to think that this shortcoming has caused Mr. Quabeck to name his debut 'Critical Mess,' and that he intends to straighten it out."

"Amy Bessone: With Friends Like These..." Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans, New York, NY. Through May 23. Roberta Smith: "The absorption of the tactics of set-up photography by representational painting has a long, tangled and often retrograde history. The Los Angeles painter Amy Bessone, who was born in New York in 1970 and studied art in Paris and Amsterdam in the early 1990s, gives it a few skillful twists without adding anything new."

"Gladys Nilsson: Recent Watercolors," Luise Ross, New York, NY. Through May 31. Ken Johnson: "Her pictures might be read as allegories of consciousness: mindscapes dominated by large, relatively slow-moving ideas — the big women — with nattering, peripheral thoughts, fantasies and anxieties carrying on like unruly children in the background. Informed by such disparate sources as Indian miniature paintings, Miró and Disney, Ms. Nilsson’s works conjure infectious states of euphoric delirium."

"Tomory Dodge," CRG, New York, NY. Through May 23. Karen Rosenberg: "The young Los Angeles artist Tomory Dodge emerged around 2004 as a painter of prismatic, quasi-abstract landscapes based on the California desert. Mr. Dodge has removed most traces of representation from his latest paintings, the best of which bring to mind the explosive brushwork of Joan Mitchell and the squeegeed surfaces of Gerhard Richter. In the process he has also obliterated the sense of place that makes his work so compelling."

Read all the reviews here.

Studio update: Itinerant painter

Every professor has a wildly optimistic, first-day-of-summer-vacation “List of Things To Do.” Here's mine. The most significant decision has been to continue working out of my cramped room in the attic rather than rent a proper studio. In a larger space, I could work on more projects concurrently, but renting studio space can also feel like a burdensome ball-and-chain, both psychically and financially. I've also decided I’d rather get out and work in the world. Inspired by Austin Thomas, who was voluntarily studio-free for three years, I’ll adapt my projects to suit my space-challenged circumstances, borrow larger space as I need it (Brice Marden, if you’re out there, maybe you have some to spare?) and/or work outside. After all, painting en plein air doesn't necessarily mean you have to paint a picture of the landscape. With TCOP reader Valerie Larko’s invaluable advice on painting in the wild, I’m preparing to work publicly, which is challenging for a reclusive misanthrope like me.

Ongoing painting projects:
In both the “Tower Series” and “Blue and White, Red” paintings, I’ve been exploring the transformation that mechanically-drawn linear perspective undergoes when combined with the vague uncertainty of hand-painted line. Over the summer, I’ll be working on primed, unstretched canvases (40” x 54”) tacked to light board, propped against a building with a couple of milk cartons, possibly on the street where you live.

Habitat for Artists
Simon Draper has invited me to participate in “Habitat for Artists." Draper created a little shantytown of artists studios, shacks really, near Dia Beacon where I’ll be working intermittently throughout the summer. The other artists included are Dar Williams, Chris Albert, Richard Bruce, Alexis Elton, Kathy Feighery, Marnie Hillsley, Matthew Kinney Sara Mussen, and Lori Nozick . The opening reception is Saturday, May 17, so if you feel like taking a trip to Beacon, please stop by. We're located a short walk from the train station. I’ll be chronicling the evolution of our community throughout the summer.

Book Projects
All the book projects I started over the past year, and never quite finished, need attention. Some are written and need images, some have images and need text, some need only be laid out and sent to press. Eventually I hope that the book projects will be available at independent bookstores that specialize in artist books. Stay tuned for publishing dates. Forthcoming titles include White and Blue, Red; Keeping our Distance; Erfindung (sort of); Sharon in the News (Dedicated to Ariel Sharon); and The Search for Moby Dicks.

Plus I'll continue writing for The Rail, and I have a vague notion to curate a painting exhibition, but more on that later.

Yau on Helen Miranda Wilson

In The Brooklyn Rail, John Yau suggests that Helen Miranda Wilson, whose show at DC Moore recently closed, has moved beyond the Americana references of her earlier abstract paintings, and, in the process, achieved something quite radical. "For just when nearly everyone thought that nothing more could be done with stripes laid down, one after another, and that various practitioners seemed determined to nudge geometric abstraction into a state of deep hibernation that I would characterize as minute variations on non-spatial stasis, Helen Miranda Wilson lets us know that we might have gotten it all wrong. As Wilson’s recent luminous paintings make clear, geometric painting doesn’t have to be large, static, non-spatial, and hard-edged. It doesn’t have to evoke the spiritual, continue the paradigm of paint-as-paint, or be painterly. It can do something altogether different: it can be intimately scaled, personal and impersonal, optically raucous and bitingly colorful. It can even be dizzying, as if you are standing on a high-speed whirligig, and the world is a bunch of feathery-edged bands of color flying by. And the colors glow, seemingly both solid and transparent....In these paintings Wilson moves into a territory that is all her own. The paintings are color sensations in which a complex range of feelings and possible readings are evoked. It used to be, or so some people claim, that when a painter did something new and different, others would notice it. Except in the case of very few artists, this hasn’t been the case in years. Wilson doesn’t care, and that is to her credit. She has persistently gone her own way for nearly forty years, and never made a single concession to the marketplace or to stylistic trends. That, to me, is heroic." Read more.

Abts' traction

My contribution to the May issue of The Brooklyn Rail is a review of the New Museum's Tomma Abts show. "For Abts, honesty and sincerity are guiding principles. In a conversation with Peter Doig reprinted in the museum’s exhibition brochure, she unabashedly admits that her process is intuitive, and that she can’t explain why or how she makes decisions as she paints. In an age of hyper-ideation and inflated art rhetoric, in which ideas may be valued more than emotional insight or intuition, Abts’ ingenuous simplicity, like that of Chauncey Gardner in 'Being There,' is refreshing. From the beginning, she says candidly, her process is directed towards completing the painting. 'I know once a painting is finished, but I never know how to get there.' For Abts, painting is about harnessing her own unconscious, rather than giving visual substance to an external idea or conceptual conceit.

"As to paint handling, Abts says that she 'tries to define the forms precisely.' In keeping with the implied desire to cut off over-interpretation, and evoking minimalism, she adds that 'the forms don’t stand for anything else, they don’t symbolize anything or describe anything outside the painting. They represent themselves.' For the most part, the paintings, all vertically oriented, are spaced evenly around the gallery, and hung at a standard height. Curator Laura Hoptman, to her credit, makes no attempt to force the paintings into a more fashionable context with any sort of coy installation strategy. The curator thus appears to be signaling to the viewer that these paintings, small and traditional though they appear, are discrete entities that can, indeed, speak for themselves....." Read more.

"Tomma Abts," organized by Laura Hoptman. New Museum, New York, NY. Through June 29. Traveling to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles,CA, from July 27 through Nov. 2.
Related post:
Abts in heaven

Joe Brainard: The Nancy Book

In celebration of The Nancy Book, published by the Siglio Press, Tibor de Nagy has organized a show of Joe Brainard's drawings of the Nancy cartoon character. Along with Brainard's poems and drawings, the book includes essays by poets Ron Padgett, who is also from Oklahoma and one of Brainard’s many friends, and Anne Lauterbach. At Artnet, N.F. Karlins reports that Brainard, who was gay, probably came to know the term "Nancy-boy" after moving to New York from Oklahoma . Both Nancy and 'pansy' were frequent motifs in his many collages and small drawings, transformed by him into terms of acceptance and endearment. (Many of his flower drawings remind me instantly of Fantin-Latour’s). 'If Nancy Was a Boy' shows a grinning Nancy lifting her skirt to show off her penis. 'If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket' has our heroine peeping from a sailor’s pants, the sailor being an appropriated photo shown without his head. Nancy smiles and waves. These works have such an insouciant charm, I suspect even the Pope would chuckle if he saw them."

"Joe Brainard: The Nancys," Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY. Through May 17.

Taaffe retrospective: Bending the shape of time

In ArtForum, Bob Nickas reviews Philip Taaffe's current retrospective at the Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg in Germany. "It's not so easy to recall that first hit, that immediate emotional and intellectual warp one felt when confronted by Philip Taaffe’s transformation of a Barnett Newman or a Bridget Riley in the mid-1980s. Maybe that’s what—and who—retrospectives are really meant for: the artist’s original audience who, sent back in time, revisits its initial experience of the work. For some, Taaffe’s early paintings were highly provocative; but for all the attention they first generated it’s clear now that they were often misread. When those early paintings are seen again and in relation to all that came after—within his full body of work—they seem less provocation than invocation, less a nihilistic statement on the “end of painting” than a direct engagement with history and the act of painting....

"It’s always gratifying in a retrospective of a living artist to be able to see new works, to get a glimpse of where the artist may be headed. The paintings made expressly for this exhibition, presented on a second-floor gallery, further reveal Taaffe’s visual and temporal nomadism, with works referencing Coptic panels from Cairo, Viking and Celtic motifs, and images from Mesopotamia. That they follow the paintings that came before is clear—and they often take on the form of the totem or frieze—and yet they feel different, more archaeological, more primal, with a spectral light. 'Tirggel Painting with Lion Encountering Reindeer,' 2008, in fact, seems closer to cave painting than to contemporary representation.

"The spiral is central to Taaffe’s iconography, and the spiral is, after all, not merely a symbol of turning but of return. What Taaffe has been doing now for almost three decades, as his paintings reveal again and again, is nothing less than bending the shape of time. He began by looking at art from the ’60s; today he travels much further back, to earlier centuries, to ancient civilizations, searching for ways to reimagine the world in which we live that acknowledge those “ancestral connections.” It was fitting that the exhibition ended with a room in which one encountered not only 'Unit of Direction', 2003, a complex double spiral, but an early work, 'Aurora Borealis,' 1988, a luminous, twenty-foot-long optical black-and-white horizon that brought the retrospective, perfectly, full circle." Read more.

"Philip Taaffe: Das Leben der Formen, Werke 1980-2008," Kunstmuesum-Wolfsburg, Germany. Thorugh August 3.