Love in the Afternoon

To understand contemporary art you must mis-understand Marcel Duchamp. The readymade is the template for all things postmodern. But how do you choose which store-bought object to sign? The broken and mended Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even is the clue to the real meaning of the readymades. The readymades, including most famously the signed urinal, the bicycle wheel, and the bottle rack are idols of the marketplace. They are symbols.

And thus we come to Papa Dada’s redemption as an occultist and the unraveling of all things given, taught, copied — to be replaced by the cosmic/erotic, mechanical/mystical remythification of art.

At least in Artopia, which is the only reality worth taking seriously.

Did not Duchamp write: “To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space seeks his way out to a clearing.”

In Artopia we think of Duchamp as one of the great poets of the last century; perhaps too much of a dandy, perhaps too much of a chess-player and a poseur, perhaps too much of a gentlemen — but always a prestidigitator of the first order.

            THE

If you come into * linen, your time is thirsty because * ink saw some wood intelligent enough to get giddiness from a sister. However, even it should be smilable to shut * hair whose * water writes always in * plural, they have avoided * frequency, meaning mother in law; * powder will take a chance; and * road could try……

Replace each * with the word: the.

                                              (Marcel Duchamp, 1916)

So by all means read Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins (Badlands Unlimited, Brooklyn, 2013) if you must. Tomkins seems to have been in the habit of visiting Papa Dada, with a tape recorder in hand. In 1964. The interviews, embalmed in the MoMA Library, have never been transcribe, edited and published before. Alas, you will not learn anything new — unless, that is, you have not read anything about Duchamp before, including Tomkins’ info-packed Duchamp: A Biography (1996).

Wait. I did learn two new things from this slim offering: Duchamp could be very boring, particularly when explaining why artworks should take a long time to make — like his two masterpieces, the unfinished The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelor, Even and the posthumous Given: The Illuminating Gas. How self-serving. How old-fashioned. I think the faster the better. I make my new big paintings in 8 minutes flat. When asked how long they take me to make I say eight minutes and 55 years. That’s how long I have been studying art and, in both senses of the word, practicing.

The second thing I learned is that the master himself preferred Robert Rauschenberg to Jasper Johns. In this regards, Duchamp is still ahead of the curve. Rauschenberg is one of those artists who will look better and better the further we get away from him. Is this because he was generous, energetic, and convivial? More like nature than like scripture? Whereas Johns, I fear, worshipped by so many for his intellect, may not fare so well. Too dry.

Tomkins does not ask Marcel if his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy was his Jungian anima. Had he read Jung? Who was Marcel channeling? Was he conversant with the Kabbalah, Christian or otherwise? And on the literary front, had he ever met Alfred Jarry? He could have, because he was “studying” art at the Académe Julian in Paris in 1904-05 and Jarry lived until 1907. Did he know the works of that other super-punster, Raymond Roussel, who was also alive in Duchamp’s youth? Did he know any of the descendants of the 19th century Parisian “alchemists” who sponsored August Strindberg’s mad Parisian forays into mystical chemistry? Why did Dada Mama Beatrice Wood run from drawings to ceramics, from Marcel’s charms into the arms of Krishnamurti? Why was she hypnotized by the search for a glaze of gold? But I guess no one asked those kind of things in 1964.

In short, Tomkins didn’t really ask the right questions. Robert Smithson told me he once confronted Duchamp at a party: “I see you are into alchemy,” he accused. “Why, yes,” answered Marcel.

The interview texts are lean. Although not ever published in the New Yorker, they smell of that rag’s triple-edit, editing style. So 20th century.

Speaking of which…

Way back in 1996, yours truly published a Duchamp “interview” which if readers really read they could have deduced would have had to have been conducted many years after his death. Marcel was truly underground, not merely artistically underground. It was upon the occasion of the Whitney’s “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York” which, of course, was invested with a lot of Duchampiana and was guest-curated by a very distinguished art dealer specializing in Dada. I ventured to say that most of us had already seen the major works, but going to the Whitney was a lot cheaper than training down to Philadelphia, where because of patron Walter Arensberg so much of Duchamp’s oeuvre is interred. That in itself is an interesting story.

Wealthy cryptologist (Francis Bacon was Shakespeare!) Arensberg tried palming off his collection of 36 Duchamps, 19 Brancusis, and 28 Picassos on a West Coast group of art fanciers and then the University of California; even the nascent LACMA rejected the stuff. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, oddly enough, did not, filling all conditions save the founding of a Bacon/Shakespeare research center.

Although I blush to say it, my 1996 review, disguised as a fake interview, is far better than Tompkins’ recently revealed interviews. It certainly is wittier. You can read it HERE.

Postlude: The Will to Completion

I have been pondering the Will to Completion in regard to survey exhibitions. Why must curators (and perhaps their bosses) insist that every retrospective or survey include everything available rather then just the best examples? We see this in the Jay DeFeo exhibition now at the Whitney. Even great artists only produce one or two masterpieces and everything else is experiment, repetition, or treading water. Duchamp may be the one exception since every scrap is fraught with meaning.

Surely completion is the disguise for the need to satisfy markets and collectors, to cement relationships, and to avoid aesthetic decisions. Surely also to objectify the satisfactions of the successful hunt. But worst of all it is caused by the Will to Completion itself, the creator of a Demon of immense power. Postage stamp collectors and collectors of mid-century modern American dinnerware know whereof I speak. In my own case, I have collections of lightning rods, gear-shift knobs, glass transformers and rug-guards. I am always on the look out for more, but I think I may have cornered the market. Is there a Holy Grail of glass rug-guards? I almost started a collection of 45 rpm to 33 1/3 adaptors, but miraculously before I started yet another foolish quest I found someone who had already plugged that hole.

Why do we need to be definitive? The will to completion is probably a sin. Every oriental carpet must have at least one mistake.

More on subject is my library. I count on my bookshelves 12 books about Marcel Duchamp. Isn’t that quite enough? Why do I feel I have to own every book about Marcel Duchamp? I have 32 publications about Andy Warhol. I have more Warhol books than Duchamp books, not because I like Andy more than Marcel, but because there have been more books published. It’s the dreaded Demon of Completion that makes us acquire books that only repeat what has been written before.

This time, however, I fooled the Demon. Almost. Should I buy The Afternoon Interviews or not? I did not buy the ink-on-paper version ($16). I bought the Kindle download ($5.99). Because of Kindle, I am saving shelf space and a lot of money on bookmarks. Never have to buy or build more bookshelves. And I have eluded the ever-present danger of book-mites.

My website.

ARTOPIATECTURE: small houses, pods, huts, retreats….

My recent paintings.

Suburo Murakami, Passing Through, 1956

“Gutai: Splendid Playground”   (Guggenheim to May 8) forces a rewrite of  art history.  The co-curators, Alexandra Munroe and Ming Tiampo, in their catalog essays meet the issues head-on. The subject matter demands it, for Gutai is the unfairly scorned  post-War Japanese avant-garde movement devoted to the kinaesthetics of painting, the spiritualization of matter, and interactive art. 

Kazuo Shiraga made paintings with his bare feet. Saburo Murakami hurled himself through layers of paper. Shōzō  Shimamoto  threw bottles of paint. Akira Kanayama used remote-controlled robot toys to make etherial drawings on vinyl. These are the true heirs of Jackson Pollock. Not Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. Why has this authentic descent been repressed?

Munroe, whose Scream Against the Sky (Abrams, 1994) is the standard survey of Post-War Japanese art, charts a bit of  Guggenheim history, citing the 1963 Japanese trip of  curator Lawrence Alloway. Alloway was the  Brit who coined the term Pop Art. He included both Gutai founder  Jirō Yoshihara and Atsuko Tanaka in the Guggenheim International Awards exhibition of 1964.

Munroe also outlines the support for Gutai in terms of the Post-War, anti-Soviet propaganda push that used Abstract Expressionism as a symbol of freedom of expression under democracy.  Gutai, at least in its kinaesthetic painting phase, was intended to show what could happen in art when totalitarianism, such as that under the wartime Hirohito regime, was removed. Indivdualism was to be the new Japanese motto. Even the artists themselves thought this was a great idea.

In the U.S., however,  American artists apparently had little knowledge of how their paintings were being used by the State Department, the United States Information Agency,  and perhaps the C.I.A.

Munroe, in an essay that is exceptionally forthright for an exhibition catalog,  goes right to the point:

The leading university textbook in use today, Art since 1900, reserves a scant five of its 816 pages to “the dissemination of modernist art through media and its reinterpretation by artists outside the United States and Europe.” The authors cite Gutai and the Brazilian Neo-Concretists but misread both as derivative, disregarding their critical agency. Indeed, their terms “dissemination” and “reinterpretation” preserve the construct of Euro-America as the dominant center and Western modernism as the master narrative, perpetuating a kind of canon that other disciplines have long since dismantled. Such closed, geocentric views of the history of modernism perpetuate the West’s stronghold on avant-garde originality, relegating modern art made outside the putative centers as belated and derivative.

Why Was Gutai Marginalized?

Nationalism? Americanismo and Eurocentricity are not enough to explain the Big Silence. I think the sources of both are racism and the lust for power and profit. This more fully explains, alas, the shunning of Art Informel and Tachisme on this side of the Atlantic, as well as the marginalization of Gutai in both Europe and the U.S.

When I was writing for Artnews in the very early ‘60s, the editor forbade even a mention of Pierre Soulage,  Jean Fautrier, George Mathieu,  Nicholas de Stael, or Hans Hartung.  Jolly Jean Tinguely and Niki de St. Phalle  were o.k. I internalized this, but still somehow managed to grab a cover story on Jean Dubuffet. I particularly liked Dubuffet’s championing of Outsider Art and detectected an all-overness in his later paintings that connected to Pollock.

Now, as a painter as much as a critic, I hope  I can look at these shunned European artists with new eyes. And at Gutai.

Heirs Apparent

Aspiring to liberate painting from the museum, the wall, the frame and even the paintbrush, Gutai artists moved in radical directions.  Early experiments focusing at first on process, investigating a variety of both art and nonart materials, ultimately resulted in “performance paintings” that incorporate time and space into their very being.

Ming Tiampo, Co-curator, Gutai, 2013.

                                       Do what no one has done before!

                                                                                Jirō Yoshihara, Founder of Gutai,  1955.

The Gutai Art Association was the victim of what  in technical terms is called the double-whammy. Gutai (meaning “concreteness” or perhaps “embodiment”) was associated by the N.Y. art establishment with Art Informel, Taschism, and other anti-formal styles in Europe. These were dismissed as being inferior to American Abstract Expressionism,  deemed the only ligitimate heir to European modernism. If you could prove paternity then there was money to be made. To put it bluntly, the market had to be cinched; American hegemony had to triumph on the cultural as well as the political and economic fronts.

Exceptionalism and the special mission of America needed to be maintained or once again all hell would break loose.

New York was the new Paris. But even Paris had been fed by and had off-shoots in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Moscow. Oh, sorry,  we conventiently forgot about that.

Gutai dared to propose that a major art incubator could exist outside Paris or New York, and, yes, even Tokyo. The 59 artists of Gutai were located along the Hanshin Belt between Osaka and Kobe.

The import of Gutai goes on and on. Not only must we obliterate the master narrative, we must look at the situation that Gutai pre-saged: decentralized world culture. Everyone once wondered what the new New York would be. Just as New York became the new Paris, surely New York would eventually be superceded. Sorry, no such thing has happened.

All points on the globe are the same distance from the cloud and thus at no distance from each other. There are auction sites here and there, but there is no Paris. There is no New York. There is no capital of art. Even art museums and galleries whose numbers once could authenticate an art capital are migrating to the web.

Kazuo Shiraga, Work II, 1958l.

Decentering Power

What was Gutai’s secret? The art was sensational. And they had their own  magazine to promote the cause. Jackson Pollock himself had two issues of the Gutai magazine in his library when he died. Gutai — for better or worse – reached out and formed alliances with two other artist groups on the so-called periphery —  Zero in Dusseldorf and Nul in Amsterdam. There were also connections made with Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Fluxus, and Experiments in Art and Technology. Like Futurism, de Stijl, Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism, Gutai had an international outreach.

In an era of post-Performance painting, it would serve art well to look at Gutai, which in Phase One proposed no difference between painting and theater and, in fact, predated Kaprow’s first U.S. Happening  (1959). Monroe gives as an example Jaurakami Saburō’s paper-penetration Work (Six Holes), 1955, but the catalog reveals even earlier Gutai candidates for world’s first happening/performance.

But we must also find a theoretical basis for global art-culture as it has now formed.  The Cold War narrative has proved inaccurate, unhelpful, restrictive, ungenerous, and uninspired, leading to the “death of painting” at the hands of the Greenbergian formalists who championed flat color and their descendents, the Artforumalists, who prefer photography and words to art, forgetting that photography is the mother of all lies and words must be translated.

Gutai One and Two 

Both Munroe and co-curator Ming Tiampo, following a Japanese precedent,   divide Gutai into  two phases. What I am calling Gutai One (1954-1961) and Gutai Two (1962-1972) are as different as Analytical and Synthetic Cubism were.   Gutai One is frantic and funky, theatrical; Gutai Two is cool and technological. The dates should not be the only vectors, because works of either kind can occur in Gutai One or Gutai Two.

There are two things Gutai One and Gutai Two have in common.  The first is that in both the artists courted audience interactivity — in the first period through participatory playgrounds and ad hoc festival art, all of a decidedly  low-tech sort; in the second, through technology.

The second characteristic the two periods of Gutai have in common is the attempt to alter cultural situations.  Gutai One was definitely an attempt to free the arts in Japan from the nightmare of the Hirohito era, which privileged conformity. Gutai Two, paradoxically, was a response to the sudden hegemony of Japan’s  technological surge — not, however, an attack; but, it would appear, an attempt at humanizing it.

Gutai Two failed at art, just as the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology ) 9 Evenings (1966) did in the U.S . Celebrating technology is like celebrating lunch. On the other hand, to use technology to criticize technology you have to be in bed with the  enemy. In the U.S. the love/hate nature of Pop did not transfer to Tech Art,  with the possible exception of the funny/scary works of the ingenious Nam Jun Paik.

At the Guggenheim, Yoshida Minoru’s  Bisexual Flower (1969) is not engaging; or  even amusing. Montonaga Sadamase’s Work (Water), made for an outdoor festival in 1956, now recreated for the Guggenheim rotunda, looks like it is Gutai Two, and that’s not good. In certain kinds of art, time and context are all.  Compare the photos here:

Sanamasa Motonaga, Work (Water), 1956.

Work (Water), recreated 2013.

After 1962 Gutai came in from the streets and playgrounds. Gutai, now with its own art center, embraced technology and lost a more powerful vision. This Tech Turn produced some really slick stuff. What Gutai gained in internationalism through its alliances with the tech-oriented  Zero Group (Dusseldorf) and Nul (Amsterdam), it lost in achievement.

Of course, I am simplifying. Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) was active in both phases of Gutai. And, believe me, she is one of the great ones.  Electric Dress, 1956, and Work (Bell), 1955, are as technological as anying in Gutai Two; and although her gloriously astringent  Work (Yellow Cloth), 1955 –three pieces of commercially dyed, found cloth — transcends both Gutai One and Two,  Round on Sand, 1968, a sand drawing on a beach, would fit best in Gutai One

And Shuji Mukai’s Happening: Burning All My Works, 1969, in which he did just that, should be in One not Two.

Atsuko Tanaka, Work (Yellow Cloth), 1955.

Atsuko Tanaka, Round on Sand, 1968

The Scream of Matter Itself

Yes, indeed; it is time to take a closer look at Gutai.

We know that Pollock’s art was crucial to the founder Yoshihara. He intuited Pollock’s spiritual import by demanding in the Gutai manifesto that art materials be brought to life:

Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other. The material is not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit does not force the material into submission. If one leaves the material as it is, presenting it just as material, then it starts to tell us something and speaks with a mighty voice. Keeping the life of the material alive also means bringing the spirit alive, and lifting up the spirit means leading the material up to the height of the spirit.

                                                                                                                                      Jirō Yoshihara (1905-72)

There’s a thread that needs to be picked up. Painting as performance, restyled as “post-performance painting”  is part of contemporary practice.  Why was this thread  “lost”? Critic Harold Rosenberg almost embraced performance with his Action Painting concept, but buried it under some inept and heavy-handed Existentialism. And after de Kooning he anointed no winners.

Critic Clement Greenberg recycled Gotthold Lessing. Surely we must keep everything neatly separated. During the Cold War, art had to be separated from politics. Lessing’s 1766 dictum that poetry and painting must be kept separate was expanded.  Painting, poetry, theater, history, dance, became forms trapped within their own self-referring purity. This leads to some curious results. If you take poetry out of Schoenberg and Webern you get Milton Babbitt. If you take theater, poetry, history, and myth out of painting you get…Jules Olitski, which was exactly the point.

And he was not the worst of Mr. Greenberg’s products.

Shuji Mukai: Happening— Burning All My Works, 1969.

Is The Theater Really Dead?

How can you not see the theater in both Pollock and de Kooning? Robert Rauschenberg did. Carolee Schneemann did. Allan Kaprow was not  the only one smart enough to run with the ball, while others produced confections for board rooms, bored businessmen, and embassies abroad, under the Greenbergian gun.

But isn’t Kaprow Pollock’s most important heir? Just when you get your mind bent around that one, Gutai comes around again .Gutai is an earlier and more cogent heir, since abandoning paintings was never on their menu.

So changes are afoot. We are getting a full dose of revisionism. Mark my word; Gutai will be followed by Art Informel and clearly, since there is a curious essay on Brazilian Concretism and its affinity to Gutai in the catalog, that misunderstood movement also will be regained .  Whether or not these correctives are a product of the insatiable art market or the academic meat-grinder, which has similar needs, is not for me to say. I prefer to think it’s a function of justice.

And finally…..

Thus it is our task to rewrite art history. We do, of course, have a new tool.  Diagrams are destiny. Change the diagram and you change the world. Instead of a ladder or staircase or even a tree, we  should picture a braid with as many strands as we can stand.

Art styles do not follow one another step-by-step or even as an ongoing argument. They disappear and reappear. They twist and turn. They rub up against other styles. They migrate and transmigrate. They pop up in very strange places. As in parapsychology, causality is replaced by synchronicity.
No space.

No time.

No place.

No translation required.

Note: You can download to your iPhone  and iPod Touch for free the amazing Guggenheim Gutai educational material, including images and specifications of every artwork in the exhibition. Start by going to: guggenheim.org/apps. And, needless to say, you can do this almost anyplace in the world.

John Perreault is on Facebook and Twitter. John Perreault website. John Perreault’s art. The Artopia Project also includes: artopianews; artopiatecture; thehousedetective ; johnperreault.tumblr. AND pinterest.com/johnperreault1/

Winner of adAPT:  nARCHITECTS and the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation.

Congruent with the world-wide need for urban housing, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg last year launched an RFP for adAPT NYC. Seems there will be an experimental building in Kips Bay, featuring apartments of 225 to 300 square feet. This is below what the current building code allows. Pre-fab, green, plug-in micro-apartments are now a real possibility. 225 square feet? Bigger than a room at the YMCA, but smaller than an East Village walk-up.

The Japanese who made urban history in the last century with their famous, now threatened, Tokyo pod-scraper are currently obsessed with filling every sliver of land, every alley, every oddly shaped parcel in Tokyo with some of the smallest and most glamorous single-family and/or single-occupant houses on earth. Commuting? Forget about it. Everyone hates it. See here my recent essay on small Japanese houses.

In New York we also have an urban implosion, but with a slightly different set of parameters. Soon we will need 1.8 million one-to-two person apartments.

“We have a shortfall now of 800,000, and it’s only going to get worse….”
said Bloomberg. “People from all over the world want to live in New York City.’

Everyone wants to be where the action is.

Or as Ann Sothern says in the 1939 Hotel for Women: “I saw the lights of Broadway all the way from Kansas City.” Or as I always say: I saw the paintings on MoMA’s walls all the way from Wall Township, New Jersey.

Micro-Unit by Amie Gross Architects.

The Dorm Is the Norm

If you crave more than a computer-generated rendering or a micro-unit, “Making Room,” at the Museum of the City of New York showcases various proposals. Note that the centerpiece is not the adAPT winner. Instead the star attraction is a full-size, 325-square-foot, studio designed by the New York City-based firm Amie Gross Architects.

You can walk right in, sit on the unopened sofa-bed across from the flat-screen TV that folds down to become a table. I don’t know if you can really cook in the kitchenette or take a shower in the luxurious (to me) bathroom.

But why at half the size does it feel so much bigger than the 600 square foot East Village walk-ups now renting for $2,800? The Gross studio-apartment is on the square side, whereas East Village walk-ups are long and narrow, and were once called railroad flats. Big immigrant families lived in them. The loo was down the hall and if there was a bathtub, it was in the kitchen, had a lid, and doubled as a table. The secret? Everyone spent a lot of time on the stoop or the roof. How is that different from youths today putting in time at one Wi-Fi coffee-bar or another?

Micro-units are perfectly feasible in a world of take-out/eat-out scarfing and out-of-home frolicking. Some of the new micro-houses in Tokyo don’t even have kitchens. A built-in parking spot or room for a hobby like rock-climbing or cello- is more important than a kitchen or a single purpose living room.

The Gross at the Museum of the City of New York has shelves with a few books. And really not much stuff. No accumulated piles of art magazines , no paintings wrapped in garbage bags, no clothing too precious or to embarrassingly ragged and stained to recycle. No multiple sets of mid-century modern dinnerware. No walls of outdated tape- cassettes and cd’s. No flea market treasures. No memorabilia. No film cans, film stills. No drawing pads, no easels. No filing cabinets stuffed with manuscripts and mimeographed poetry magazines.

Here’s the secret to our brave new future:

We have to become Japanese. We must find cubbyholes under staircases; we must be cunning and neat; we must be on constant guard against clutter. The trend in Tokyo now is to digitalize all your books and thus be able to eliminate cumbersome bookcases and shelves. If there is a bed that is not a sofa-bed or a Murphy bed it must be on top of drawers.

If we live alone, as 46% of New Yorkers (young and old) now do, and do not envision guests, we could be satisfied with one chair. Our computer desk can be our kitchen table or the kitchen table/desk can slide out of the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. See here for inspiration: Small Spaces by Azby Brown, Kodansha.

Do we really need a full set of dishes? Do we need dishes at all if we subsist on take-out? Clothes? Nerdy NYU guys in the East Village live in droopy rayon basketball shorts, flips, and T- shirts. All year round. That’s all they need to wear to run downstairs for a cappuccino, or a $15 Luke’s lobster roll or a $10 porchetta sandwich.

And, oh, yes, headroom counts, as does a view, any view. And freedom. Space is psychological. The average living space per person in India may be 50 square feet, which is the minimum space allowed for a U.S. prison cell, but at least you can come and go as you please. The average space per person in the U.S. may be 600 square feet, but if it is in suburbia, is it any better than a prison cell?

Fig Tree in Queens, NYC Backyard

The Plots Thicken

Every time I take the Long Island Railroad through Queens, I look out through the train window and envision neo-modern Japanese houses wedged into backyards now sporting little else but dilapidated garages used for storing outdated VCRs, stuffed pandas and broken bicycle wheels. I see a carefully wrapped and winterized fig tree or two. Alas, they too will have to be sacrificed. I see the flagpole plots: narrow driveways leading to storage units and tin gazebos. And odd triangular bits of land. I imagine all-white houses with skylights and wonderful indoor gardens.

Although it is harder than ever to cross the Hudson River, the East River is no longer the river Styx.

But are there no unused spaces in Manhattan? I would plant houses on the Park Avenue meridian instead of tulips.

I would fill-in alleys and byways.

– Extra Place. Between The Bowery and 2nd Avenue off of First Street.

– Hall Place/Taras Shevchenko Place on 7th Street between Bowery and 2nd Ave. Does
the Ukrainian Museum really need an entrance on Taras Schevchenko Place. Why
not around the corner on 6th?

– Jersey Street between Crosby and Lafayette, South of Houston/ North of Prince.

– Freeman Alley between Bowery and Chrystie, running north off Rivington.

– Florence Place (Chinatown)

– Collister Street and Trimble Place (Tribeca)

– Charles Lane and Downing Street (Greenwich Village)

– Broadway Alley (Between Third and Lex/ between 27th and 26th)

And don’t forget those tempting donut holes at the center of most blocks. What do we need them for? Clotheslines? Alley-cat courtship fences? Pigeon poop pile-ups? Wet mattress storage? Stinky ailanthus trees?

But, wait a minute. Whatever happened to rooming houses and residency hotels? Before we start building mini-apartments on a large scale or indulging in Borough and alley in-fill, perhaps the Mayor’s Office should look at these for inspiration…..

Chelsea Hotel W. 23 St.

Like Father, Like Son, or Yes, We Have No Pianos

In regards to residency hotels, do not think of S.R.O. hotels but of the sainted residents of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, ranging from Viva and Brigid Berlin to Virgil Thomson. Both Louise Brooks and Veronica Lake ended up at the Martha Washington Hotel for Women. But the less said about that the better. Or that I once temped at a mid-Manhattan hotel where the only topic in the office was how to get rid of the perpetually soused Ana May Wong.

I was born in New York City , but grew up mostly in Jersey.  After escaping Montclair State Teachers College, I headed straight for home, my real home: Mannahatta.

Like many immigrants before me, I lived in furnished rooms.  The last and best was on W. 12^th Street, a few doors down from the New School. All the rooms had sinks, but there was a shared shower and two shared toilets on each floor. Cooking was forbidden. The end-table/desk sported my  clandestine hot-plate for boiling water for instant coffee and occasional meals of what was called Rooming House Stew or, worse, Fairy Pudding — macaroni, canned tuna, and cream-of-mushroom Campbell’s soup. Don’t even think about trying it. You could also add potato chips  for crunch.

The other tenants were poets, book store clerks, novelists and an artist who made a living with paintings of enormously endowed naked-men. And there was also the mistress of a Cuban existentialist.

My father had lived in a rooming house in his youth too. There was one feature I envied Although he said he was tortured by the constant repetition of their song “Lullaby of Broadway,” his downstairs neighbors were the songwriters Harry Warren and Al Dubin.

 
Come on along and listen to
The lullaby of Broadway.
The hip hooray and bally hoo,
The lullaby of Broadway.
The rumble of the subway train,
The rattle of the taxis.
The daffy-dills who entertain
At Angelo’s and Maxie’s.

When a Broadway baby says “Good night,”
It’s early in the morning.
Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight until the dawn:
Good night, baby,
Good night, milkman’s on his way.
Sleep tight, baby,
Sleep tight, let’s call it a day,
Listen to the lullaby of old Broadway.

Was there really a rooming house that allowed a piano?

John Cheever’s Hudson St. Furnished Room  by Walker Evans (1931-33) Metropolitan Museum, NYC

John Perreault is on Facebook and Twitter. Main John Perreault website. John Perreault’s art. The Artopia Project also includes: artopianews ; artopiatecture ; thehousedetective ; /johnperreault.tumblr. AND pinterest.com/johnperreault1/

Hideyuki Nakayama: 0-House/Empty House. 2011

Small is new. And the interest in small houses is global. Small is serious. The causes are economic, ecological, and in some places the need to skirt onerous building codes.

Locally, garages turned into studios or storage units and the proliferation of out-buildings can be noted in suburbia and even in the outer boroughs of New York City. It is not that we need less space, but that we are hungry for more: a tool shed, a storage unit, a guesthouse, a man cave, an office, a studio. We are insatiable. For the post-urban, the glamorous need for a retreat and the righteousness of off-grid living are easily combined. Hippie meets hipster meets anchorite.

My interest in new Japanese residential architecture fits in where small houses now rule. We have no room for anything else. Or so the fantasy goes. And let’s face it, 99% of architecture is fantasy, hence cabinporn.com which, I should add, is not about bears in heat.  But there is no fantasy behind the housing needs of reubanization.

Suppose Design, House in Fuchu, 2011. Footprint 629 sq. ft.

Small Is Mandatory

SmalI is not only beautiful, it is mandatory, particularly in America where persons on average have three times as much living space as anywhere else, where five-bedroom houses sit largely empty in gated communities, but where — like the rest of the world — most people would rather live in cities. And populations keep growing and aging. Where are the granny houses of yesteryear? Why are today’s youth deserting suburbia? What will urban living look like in the future?

NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg recently initiated a RFP for an apartment house that must have 75%, 300 sq. ft. micro-units, temporarily suspending the building code, which is anti-tenement and anti-SRO. San Francisco is toying with units even smaller, from 290 to 150. Both projects are geared to providing sorely needed affordable housing where it is most needed — downtown where the lights are.

Apollo Architects: Grow, 2012. 700 sq.ft. plot.

Why Japanese Houses?

Well, all of the above, plus Japanese Neo-Modern houses force reconsidering what a house is. Even looking at pictures of them changes your body. Could you live in a house with a 300 sq. ft. footprint? Would your body image shrink or would you grow to fill those atriums?

Cathelijne Nuijsink’s How To Build a Japanese House by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam (2012), is my inspiration here.

Of the 23 architects interviewed, you might know Kazuyo Seijima and Ryue Nishizawa, the architects of the New Museum on the Bowery in Manhattan. What happened? Was the New York context too taxing for them? Or was it just that small house achievemnts do not necessarily mean big building success. The New Museum has some of the worst exhibition spaces I have ever seen and is totally  claustrophobic.  The proportions are all off. It is indeed a narrow site: 71 x 112 feet. But the headroom afforded by high ceilings only works on the 4^th floor.  Difficult sites are  what the new Japanese architects are supposed to be good at.

On the other hand, not too far away on the Bowery, Norman Foster’s much narrower 25 X 100 foot buidling for the Sperone, Westwater Gallery uses headroom (27 f high first floor with a mezzanine above) perfectly. Is it the gigantic elevator? In itself it can be used as a moving gallery space. Or is it the impeccable attention to details?

If someone will stake me, I will gladly go to Japan and check out the alluring “pet architecture” and the photogenic neo-modernism now proliferating. I think I am fairly good at reading photographs, computer drawings, and floor plans (with some videos thrown in).  But you never know. As we say in Artopia: Photography is the mother of all lies.

How many architecture surveys are given by those who have never been to Rome, or Athens or stood beside the Great Pyramids of Giza? How many professors have praised Gehry’s Bilboa Guggenheim Museum without ever looking at an exhibition there?

Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim.

Looks Like Art, Smells Like Art 

If you line up all the Japanese Neo-Modern houses since 1995 (?) they would show rapid, nonutilitarian, stylistic changes and are therefore art. I refer to art-historian George Kubler’s definition in his The Shape of Time (1962), a touchstone of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

New Japanese houses are given titles, e.g. M House, K House, but also Living Through House, Ant House, Skate-Park House, Mineral House, Sunken House, Sway House, 3-Way House with Rock Climbing, Rosie, Roadscape House, Sway House, House Towards the Cherry Tree, A Life With Large Opening, Rainy/Sunny House and Empty House, the extremely narrow house on the cover of Cathelijne Nuijsink’s How To Build a Japanese House by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam (2012), my inspiration for this essay.

The center of Hidyuki Nagayama’s O-House or Empty House is a kind of visual pass-through, with the practical parts pushed off to the sides. The two-story drape is used for drama, privacy, and/or signaling people are at home inside, somewhere, if not always visible. In itself this enormous drape may be a reference to Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House in ancient times (i.e. 1995).

Shigeru Ban, Curtain Wall House, 1995

There are other small neo-modern houses being built in Europe, the Americas, Australia. But none are as weird and challenging as those being built in Japan. Here is a link to Pinterest board of 125 new Japanese houses. Some of this strangeness effect (another sign of art) is because of local conditions:

1. The Bubble.

The Japanese economic bubble burst in 1991, meaning no more big projects for architects. They gobbled up residential housing instead.

2. Strange Plots

Strange plots yield strange buildings. Plots in Japanese  cities are small and often oddly shaped. 

3. Life Is Short

Because the land is worth more than the house, the average Japanese house has a life-span of only 30 years, meaning neither the client nor the architect must conform to fancied market requirements down the road. 

4. Hobby Housing 

Houses designed by architects, as elsewhere,  are for the elite. In Japan the clients  usually have individualized demands: sound-proof rooms for music practice and hobby-spaces. I have come across Super Car House, for an automobile collector (which features a special display space for a collectible auto in the living room; Skate Park House for a skate-board enthusiast; and Rock-Climbing House with a practice wall for its rock-climbing couple. Instead of family-centered houses, the demand is for couple or individual-centered ones. Children grow up and move away to other living units, whereas hobbies  stay.

5. The Culture of the Anti-Monumental 

Monumental buildings are not within the Japanese purview. Mansions are rare. 

6. Less Is More 

Although bereft of furniture in the Japanese tradition (or because of the siren-call of the photogenic), these new houses often have amazingly complex interiors. They look small from the outside, but like the TARDIS Police Box of Dr. Who they are much bigger inside. Skylights, glass walls, exposed staircases, high ceilings, mini-atriums, and windows that glean  “stolen scenery”  open up the modest interiors.  Built-ins leave more room for getting around. 

7. The Dorm Is the Norm

Some new Japanese houses are  without full kitchens, since take-out and dining out are preferred.

In summary: Japanese clients dare to be demanding:

I want a house with a built-in, off-street garage for my orange Miata on the  isosceles-triangle plot inherited from my father-in-law when his land was split four ways; an all-white house, inside of which I can practice playing my cello and my wife can weave. A sauna. And, oh, yes, a view of the cherry tree across the street and upstairs a skylight so I can see the skyscrapers above and on a clear day Mount Fuji. In six months please.

Atelier Tekuto, Mineral House 2012

An expanded version of this essay with more pictures, more links and quotes from the architects can be found at artopiatecture:  LINK.

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Yves Klein: Large Blue Anthropometry,1960

“Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949—1960” (Guggenheim Museum to Sept. 12) consists primarily of artworks collected by the Guggenheim before the 1959 opening of its Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue. This odd and in some ways adventurous exhibition is a trip back in time, a survey of works promoted by then director James Johnson Sweeney. Not one to avoid exaggeration, he called the artists he glorified “tastebreakers” or those who “break open and enlarge our artistic frontiers.” The 90 works cascade down or struggle up the spiral ramp, but are broken into two unlabeled sections: Euro and USA. The bookends are Vasarely’s irrelevant Op-Art painting and Jackson Pollock’s small Untitled (Grey and Silver) of 1949, which looks like it was cropped from a larger painting.

Antoni Tapies: Great Painting, 1958. Oil and sand on canvas.

Paintings Look Good on the Ramp but Sculpture Doesn’t

As you climb the ramp, the Pollock is the introduction, or, if you elevator to the top and skip your way down, the awful Vasarely sets the tone. Where does the exhibition begin? Where does it end?  Which end is up? Always a problem at the Guggenheim.

There’s so much traffic now that if all exhibitions started at the top (as I remember they were meant to), and if the customers knew or were forced to conform, the cozy elevators would not be able to handle the crush.

Vis-à-vis starting at the bottom: someone must think the hike is good exercise or that it slows down the rapid descent compelled, with or without roller-skates, by starting at the top. I should also add that the elevators stop one ramp short of the actual end or beginning, meaning you always have to double back if you want to begin at the very top of the spiral.

The recent John Chamberlain retrospective started at the very top and worked its way down, whereas the groundbreaking “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936” in 2010 cheerfully slugged its way up the ramp with one awful painting after another. That exhibition ended with the large mural that once graced Adolph Hitler’s dining room, Adolf Ziegler’s campy Four Elements: Fire, Water, and Earth, Air, putting a nail in the coffin of the classicism that roamed both Europe and America between the two world wars of the last century.

By allowing two beginnings (or endings), “Art of Another Kind” splits the difference.

In any case, in either direction, it is difficult to break from the linear and notions of progress or decline. Museum buildings, like proscenium stages, generate scripts. Frames or pathways predetermine meanings. At the Guggenheim, Maurizio Cattelan recently “solved” the problem, but lost the battle, by hanging all of his works in one big chandelier of bad jokes, in what appeared to be an attempt  to avoid the lack of development in his oeuvre. Lack of development might be OK if you are Ad Reinhardt or Josef Albers, but he is neither.

In the current exhibition, are we to believe that New York Action Painting led to European Art Informel? Or is it the other way around? Correct answer: neither. If you check the dates, those apparently warring styles were virtually simultaneous. Would it not have been more interesting to present the works juxtaposed, and strictly chronologically? Mixing up the Euros (plus one or two Japanese artists) and the Americans? Then it might be easier to see differences (if any) and similarities (more than were visible at the time).

Emilio Vedova, “Image of Time (Barrier),” 1951.

The Match Was Fixed                                                                                                              

Contradicting past-director Sweeney’s more generous, ultimately more accurate vision, “Art of Another Kind” through its caesura perpetuates the postwar division between Euros and Americans created by the self-serving marketing efforts of critics such as Clement Greenberg, Thomas Hess, and Harold Rosenberg. And, I should add, efforts by complicit U.S. curators, collectors and dealers, not to mention artists, who obviously had a stake in this fake boxing match. Alas, most art history textbooks, in the U.S. at least, still toe the line.

The match was fixed. The U.S., specifically New York, was deemed the site of the triumph of abstraction and the next step after Cubism. This was nationalism. This was how we showed the rest of the world we were better than the nasty USSR. And, oh, yes, better than France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

Notwithstanding gems by Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Pollock, many of the American paintings in the show are as formal and dead as the European successors to the School of Paris that were accused of same. We must look again.

Time changes history, even art history.

Many of the European paintings on view are not all that bad. It is time to look with new eyes at the work of such artists as Antoni Tápies, Pierre Soulages, Emilio Vedova, ex-Surrealist Judit Reigl, and even the early work of Jean Dubuffet, wine-merchant to the Surrealists. Lucio Fontana, one of the best of the Italians, is already covered by a recent and ever so timely show at Gagosian. At the Guggenheim, Yves Klein’s Large Blue Anthropometry (1960), painted with naked female models coated with International Yves Klein Blue, is wild and as great as any Pollock drip painting. Like the best of Pollock, it was executed on the horizontal and looks like it was made by an animal or an alien from some unknown planet. It blasts a hole in the curved wall of the Guggenheim and punctures art history.

Judit Reigl, Outburst, 1956.

Other Groans and Provisos

Apparently Joan Mitchell was not a “tastebreaker” and was left out. If you want to see a great Mitchell, scoot over to the MOMA lobby just beyond the tolls to see Wood, Wind, No Tuba of 1980. Neither Elaine de Kooning nor Louise Bourgeois were “tastebreakers,” but are included in the Guggenheim’s sampling. Were there no Mitchell’s purchased during the survey window? If not, this points to a fault of time-bound surveys gleaned from a museum’s storage rooms. No one collection is perfect.

And why, oh why at the Guggenheim do we need the sprinkle of sculptures, perpetuating the MoMA error in its AbEx survey of last year? Reversing my insistence that Action Painting and Art Informel should be united, sculpture and painting of this period should be separated. Please, break the rules. One wonders why Constantin Brancusi’s fine Adam and Eve (1916-21) is included, since he had absolutely nothing to do with Action Painting or Art Informal and also date made rather than date accessed seems to otherwise apply. But there is no excuse at all for Louise Bourgeous’ Femme Volage (1951) or Eduardo Chilida’s From Within (1953). Sculpture, alas, in those exciting days of Action/Informel could not hold a candle to painting — unless you count ceramics-giant Peter Voulkos, which would still be too revolutionary for the art world. Not until Chamberlain do we really get Action or AbEx sculpture. Does a survey of Impressionism or Surrealism or the Ash Can School require sculpture? Certainly not.

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Apollinaire Bandaged

John Perreault as Apollinaire. Halloween, 2005

1. NEVER USE THE FIRST PERSON.

In in the late ‘60s, art critic Lawrence Alloway said that, like the poet Apollinaire, I was of the peripatetic school of art criticism. When, in ancient times, I was writing for the Village Voice I walked around looking at art and made it seem part of ordinary life. He did not mean I was Aristotelian, for the same term is used for Aristotle’s (and Socrates’)  ambulatory style of philosophizing .

Although I am decidedly anti-Aristotelian, I am indeed a teacher. Some mean-spirited folks might call me parenthetic rather than peripatetic, for, yes, I think of everything I write as if it is in one big parenthesis or parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis. Well-knit or not, peripateticism is also the composition solution when you want to encompass a lot of art.

So I thought I would try a re-run. A little of this, a little of that. And a lot of walking around.

2. NEVER OFFER PERSONAL INFORMATION

The High Line Park Snakes Through Chelsea Art District

I plan ahead. There are over 350 Chelsea art galleries. I glean my itinerary  from announcements, listings, ArtNet, ArtDaily and a few other places — even taking into account the scant number of announcements I now receive by snail mail, their function largely subsumed by email. Artists still seem to want physical announcements sent, so thousands are printed. But I want to see the proof that they are all mailed out at today’s postage cost and at the throw-away rates. I remember that artist, writer and former Berlin coffee-house girl, Lil Picard handed out art announcements she had received, from two huge shopping bags, as a Street Work in 1969. Now I recycle announcements by doing instant coffee drawings on the envelopes.

Nevertheless, some believe posterity will demand a paper-trail, little cards to archive as proof that something really happened. This is a USPS conspiracy to forstall the total decimation of its services, all so 20th-century.

So how and where to start?

In one afternoon – art critics never appear anywhere before noon —- you simply cannot cover Chelsea, midtown, uptown, SoHo, Tribeca, the East Village, the Lower East Side,  DUMBO, Williamsburg and now Bushwick. So obeying the new rule that you should go where the moneys is, I decided on Chelsea. I grouped the target galleries by street and planned my path.

Arrived there by taking the  R uptown to the L, then the L crosstown to 8th Avenue and then, rather than switching to the uptown 8th Avenue Local, just walked the long crosstown then uptown blocks from 14th and 8th to 19th and 1oth. Too Much Information!

Getting home? Darn it. Just take a cab!

3. NEVER ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG

When the Chelsea Gallery District was just sprouting, I proclaimed it would never work. Too hard to get to. I was wrong. I now think the transportation difficulties are part of the glamour. People somehow had already managed to find their way to the Piers, full of what I call sports dungeons, so why not art venues between 10th and 11^th Avenues?

And now there is the glorious High Line park. You can walk from 30^th to the Meatpacking District along an old, elevated railroad track, wonderfully planted with native grasses and wildflowers. The High Line was once used for delivering meat but is now for  delivering tourists. One day, I predict, it will sport a monorail. In the meantime, the design conceit is that of a river running downtown, widening as it meanders. It works. Even in winter. And you can finally see bits of the Hudson River, at least until the view is totally blocked by high-end hotels, ritzy condos, and designer showrooms.

New York City grows in weird and unexpected ways. As you know,  the Whitney will be the High-Line anchor where once there was butchery of cows, pigs, and chickens; then leather bars and S&M establishments. 

New York City has a mind of its own. It wants to reclaim ancient river views. It wants new places for high-end boutiques.

4. NEVER REVIEW YOUNG ARTISTS; NEVER COMPARE

My first stop was  the Grayson Cox installation, “The Water’s Fine,” at the Gasser and Grunert Gallery, 531 W. 19 (closed.) I had seen an intriguing video on ArtNet, in which Cox is  interviewed by artist Jon Kessler and Fia Backstrom, in situ. If you don’t have the patience for the video, then Imagine this: single-stemmed cafe tables for stand-up dining, but the displaced tabletops are perfectly round holes, everything else is a single- height platform, wall-to-wall, filling the gallery. So to see the things on the walls I had to to crawl under the platform, then pop-up through the holes near the “art” on the walls. The wallpieces are – I hope intentionally — stand-ins for art. Or art for prairie dogs. They are basically weak Richard Artschwager,   which is saying a lot, since that artist’s work is weak to begin with. Or are they reinforced Neil Jenny’s?

So what I really saw was other visitors popping up through gopher holes. You could  also lean against the edges of the holes and chat with whomever popped up.

5. NEVER ADMIT YOUR FAULTS

Whenever there is a grid in Manhattan the even numbers are on the south side of the street and the odd ones on the north, but there is no telling if the numbers on  adjacent blocks are lined up. The length of the street and the frontage of the various buildings is what determines where the numbers end up. At least it’s better than in Tokyo where the numbers are according to  the age of the building. #1 is the first built; #2, which may be five buildings away, is the second built, etc.

Since I can never quite remember how the numbers play out in Chelsea  and am too lazy to Google, I always have to guess. Is it easier to go to 11^th Avenue then swing around the next block or shorter to go back to 10^th?   It’s a meaningless throw of the dice, since you never know what new art in what new gallery you may come upon, or what awful artist or art critic you might avoid.

Audrey Flack: Self-Portrait as St. Teresa

6. NEVER FIND FAULT. NEVER ADVISE

The day of my art search, Audrey Flack, like Cox, was near the end of her run. She was represented at one of my favorite galleries, the oldies-but-goldies Gary Snyder (529 W 20). The show consisted of her  bronze statuettes, plus two gigantic, mix-media heads; one of her  iconic Photo-Realist still-life paintings was visble off the playing field. Flack, by the way, is not the only woman Photo-Realist, for there is also Idelle Weber.

Flack’s edge is sharpest when she confronts kitsch head on. More power to her!  She is at her best when I am forced to question myself.  What am I looking at?  Is Flack serious? What century are we in?

The bronze sculptures, however, have a scale problem that the paintings never had. Sofia (Vanitas), 1995, is  much smaller than the announcement photo had lead me to believe.  I was nonplussed. It is the best of the allegorical statuettes, but would have been great, fantastic, stupendous if it had been life-sized. A scull-headed female figure – half skeleton, half- anatomical model —  dripping with jewels? And holding a crystal ball? Why not?

The gigantic,  Maya-like, mixed-media Daphne, 1996,  is 72” tall. But even better is Self-Portrait as St. Teresa at 68″.  I want Flack to do another self-portrait head like this, but of herself as Medusa; the Medusa statuette is not scary enough.  Or of herself as Eleanor Roosevelt  or Wonder Woman.

7. NEVER COMPARE, DISMISS, OR REMINISCE

Douglas Heubler (1924-1997), at Paula Cooper 534 W 21 (closed), was one of the artists selected by art promoter Seth Sieglaub for his “breakthrough” conceptual art show at Leo Castelli in 1969.  I always found Heubler’s early work droll.  We cannot easily forget: The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do no wish to add anymore.   “Crocodile Tears,” a collection of photo/text pieces derived from a screenplay of the same name, however, is of little interest. These wall-piece story-boards are even worse than the meaningless juxtapositions of John Baldessori. What was Heubler thinking? He should have followed his own advice.

8. NEVER REVEAL ARTISTIC ROOTS.

Ernesto Neto: Installation

Ernesto Neto, at Tanya Bonakdar, 521 W. 21 to May 25 is the Brazilian known for updated participatory art, pioneered in its “tropicalia” form by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.  Neto uses nets. The new installation is crocheted and, of course, if visitors remove their shoes they may crawl in and bounce around, wildly cellphone-pixing each other. Photo op alert!

Since last year, when I found myself  tangled up in Gustav Metzger’s drop-cloth at the New Museum, I resist most forms of art that require me to get under or into them. But come to think of it, I have a long history of resistance to participation; I had no problem shaking hands with Lygia Clark when she first visited the U.S.A., but I resisted crawling into Oiticica’s “nest” when it was shown at MoMA as part of the Information show. I don’t know why I was seduced by Grayson Cox’s gopher holes. Maybe it is anything resembling Fiber Art that I should resist.

9. NEVER WRITE ABOUT CRAFT

Sheila Hicks, of course, is the exception. A big sampling of her work is now at Sikkema Jenkins (530 W. 22., to May 25).  Most are on the small side; a mistake I think. They look like samples. With some editing, she would easily be seen as one of the great ones, which, in any case, was the Craft World consensus before  that World disappeared and was transformed into  Everything Art (or MAD Art). Everything Art is not art, it is everything. So why bother? Are we to compare Hicks major efforts to Robert Morris’ felt pieces or to the hanging threads and latex of Eva Hesse? Hicks’ fiber pieces can anchor an atrium or decorate an airplane cabin and that may be enough. But they are not in the least bit anxious. 

10. NEVER REPUDIATE YOUR OWN OUTDATED OPINIONS.

“Gilbert & George: London Picture” at both Sonnabend at 536 West 22^nd  and Lehmann Maupin at 540 West 26th and in the Lower East Side at 201 Chrystie Street to June 23 is disappointing.   After the voluminous show at Sonnabend, not only did I not want to visit Lehmann Maupin, I never wanted to see another Gilbert & George artwork again. These are made up of black and red headlines  (shades of Barbara Kruger) lifted from London tabloids. LONDON TERROR BOMB TARGETS…..MOTHER RAPED AT TRAIN STATION. Help! Why did I ever take them seriously?

11. NEVER COMPARE PERIODS OF AN ARTIST’S WORK

Bryce Marden’s “Ru Ware Project” (2007-12) , Matthew Marks, (502 W to June 23) tries to recreate from memory the super-rare colors of 11^th century Chinese Ru Ware the artist saw in Taipei in ‘07. It is splendid. But here is the problem. Seeing  the RuWare panels, followed by Marden’s new oil-on-marble paintings (at 526 W. 22^nd) and then walking into a back room and seeing one of his recent tangled strand paintings gives one pause. The marbles are tasty. But suddenly we are forced to realize that the tangled yarn paintings are…weak. Now they seem to owe more to Rosenquist billboard spaghetti than anything else

Joseph Nechvatal: asstrOnOmnical affected autOmata, 2011

12. NEVER PRAISE AN ARTIST WHO HASN’T HAD AN ARTFORUM COVER.

Joseph Nechvatal’s  nOise anusmOs,  at Gallery Richard 514 W. 24, to May 21, is one of those exhibitions you won’t be able to forget.

What are viruses? Viruses live. Maybe. To biologists and the like, they are totally confusing. They don’t fit into the Three Domains or the Six Kingdoms. Where did they come from? They require host cells to replicate. We fear them. The HIV virus causes AIDS. 25 million dead!  Although deadly, viruses are also metaphors. We dread computer viruses, but everyone hopes their YouTube clips go viral. The artist/writer/composer Nechvatal has even proposed that humans may be viruses, living off the earth.

Nechvatal, once associated with the now-historical Co-Lab and ABC No Rio venues, is the virus guy and has been for quite awhile. He has figured out how to use algorithms to act as “viruses” on images and sounds, in effect programming artworks that make themselves……Always anti-postmodernist, his new exhibition is strangely alluring. What I like more than their mode of construction is the de-stabilization they cause. The end-products of his algorithms and robotic ink machines  look attractive indeed. But then: Aha! They are close-ups of anuses. I think we all have them –males and females – but they are taboo.

Nechvatal, the virus guy, risks becoming the anus guy. Good for him. He posits an anus cosmos, without even quoting Artaud. Wide awake and a bit of an activist during the denial stage of the AIDS/HIV crisis, he knew what he was doing when he began using “virus” programs on his own art to produce robot-paintings. And we always liked the mysterious surfaces  of his layered “drawings.”

He is a thinker too. Visit his website for such essays as Emergence of the New Paradigm: Viractuality. Chew on this:

After a long period of temporal disjunctions following the demise of the modernist project and the excessive abuses of the post-modernist non-project; I wish to now suggest that a new clarifying paradigm has emerged based not, however, on the ideals of the raw, the pure or the reduced – but rather on the internal tic-tic-tic bomb time of the embedded and patient viral attack.

So I am suggesting here a seething project of critique within critique that re-energizes the broken gaps of temporal displacement that followed the demise of modernism and the appearance of now listless – super fragmented – irresponsible – glut of post-modern de-construction.

You can also get a taste of his Viral Symphony on YouTube.

13. NEVER PRAISE A PAINTER WHO BREAKS THE RULES.

The mystery of Ron Gorchov (Cheim and Read, 547 W.25^th, closed) is why he is not more celebrated. He is what used to be called  a painter’s painter. Is that the kiss of death? Maybe we do not care what serious artists think of other artists. Gorchov has respect – possibly another curse. He even has a signature look that dates far back. You can always recognize his saddle or shield-shaped canvases reliefs, minimally inscribed with flattened-windshield forms. They are wonderful to look at but impossible to figure out. That is their glory. Maybe we are looking at pre-antediluvian art or extra-terrestrial paintings. Speaking of which…..

14. NEVER  REMINISCE

When I was a youth, I came into the city as much as I could. And I looked at art. My first ah-ah moment, I like to say, was listening to artist Budd Hopkins giving a gallery talk at the Whitney – which  then, by the way,  had free admission. In a building behind MoMA then, there was an open door between the two institutions. Hopkins “explained” Adolf Gottlieb’s Frozen Sounds, standing right in front of it. Years later I became friendly with Budd through his wife, critic and curator April Kingsley. By then he was deeply involved in the alien kidnapping conspiracy, hypnotizing people to help them remember needles stuck into their stomachs and other places by the bug-eyed demons. He played tapes that were hair-raising, but for me not as hair-raising as his short talk on Gottlieb years before — even more hair-raising than the photos of Pollock in Life magazine  that I had seen when I was in high school. Yes!

So, of course, I had to take a look when I came upon the unexpected Gottlieb show at Pace at 534 W 25^th street (now closed): “Adolph Gottlieb, Gravity, Suspension, Motion: Paintings  1954-1972.” Not all of the paintings are great, but they all look good, better than the Gottliebs in MoMA’s 2010 Ab-Ex show. My favorite: Four Square; a horizontal with a “sun” and two-auras on the left, and four circles on the right. You can see some others here:

Liked four Square of 1964 best….this and others can be seen HERE.

15. NEVER ATTACK OR COMPARE

And then, of course, I figured I might as well take a look at the Beverly Pepper sculptures at Marlborough, 545 W. 25^th, across the street (also now closed). Four  Cor-Ten exercises in curves knocked the ground-floor ceilings. Did I like them? Anything that bumps a Chelsea ceiling  is bound  to be impressive. But picturing the sculptures  outside, turns them offensively corporate and offensively Cubist. The poet Apollinaire, who was the first to write about Cubism, would roll over in his grave. Competent work, but not transcendent. Where is my old friend Lila Katzen now that we need her? She was rolling steel way before Pepper and had the added virtue of a stock of stories about her pal Franz Kline in P-town.

Olek (?): Shopping Cart

16. NEVER WRITE ABOUT ART OUTSIDE THE GALLERIES

And then, off-list, I came upon a shopping cart fastened to a pole. The cart was covered with a crocheted skin of yarn. Must be Olek, I immediately thought. She has crocheted unexpected, temporary coverings for the Wall Street Bull and for  Tony Rosenthal’s Alamo at Cooper Square,  among other things. I did find a shopping cart on her website. Was this the same one? How did it get here in Chelsea?  Polish-born Olek is the Queen of Yarn. There are guerrilla crocheting groups, it’s true. They cover bicycle racks and fences and benches. But Olek thinks big. She has a good yarn:

A loop after a loop. Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet. Life and art are inseparable. I crochet everything that enters or leaves my space. Sometimes it’s a text message, a medical report, found objects. There is the unraveling, the ephemeral part of my work that never lets me forget about the limited life of the art object and art concept. What do I intend to reveal? You have to pull the end of the yarn and unravel the story behind the crochet.

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. And is now at  the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., until May 15; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook and now on Tumblr.  You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault. Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

For Art Cops  cartoons  animation go to Youtube: John Perreault Channel. Click:  Coffee Dance for newest animation. 

Clyfford Still: 1954 PH-11231, 1954.

Way Out West… 

Since I was in the Denver area, I decided I just had to see the Clyfford Still Museum that opened late last year. Mark Van Wagner and I finished the installation of our travelling show, “Drawing from Sand,” in one day flat, so there was some breathing room. I call it “a small show with a global impact.”

Van Wagner and I  met through Facebook because we both use sand. One thing led to another, and although we never spoke to each other, 100 emails later our joint show opened in the Kauai Museum in Hawaii, and thence to Boulder, Colorado (after that to Bellport, N.Y.).

My fear of being pelted by stones thrown by hippies in tie-dye outfits because I was wearing New York black was groundless. Boulder is fine. Naropa University, site of our show, is very Buddhist, very cool. Although the student garb is far to colorful for my taste.

Now, of course, I have to figure out what to do about Clyfford Still.

Still’s one-artist museum is right next to Daniel Libeskind’s “cutting edge”  Denver Museum of Art, which is right next to Ponti and Sudler’s  PoMo building, itself once called cutting edge. Will the DMA keep adding buildings every time there’s a new architectural fad?

In contrast, the Clyfford Still Museum is sedate. The art is not, nor was the man.

Clyfford Still Museum, Denver.

Still claimed to be the first Abstract-Expressionist and would allow no contenders.

Still: 1944-n-no2, 1944.

Although he showed with the Betty Parsons Gallery — along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman — he reserved all laurels for himself and was quite cranky about it. Furthermore, he did not countenance unapproved interpretations of his art and worked himself into a snit. My Uncle Barney had obviously stolen the zip from him. But “Big Blue,” now on display is dated 1951 and Newman’s Onement is 1948. Who stole what from whom? More research is needed.

And Still’s old friend Mark Rothko had gone commercial. In fact, Still blustered and fumed and withdrew from the art world and would not let anyone buy or see his paintings. Later he apparently gloated over Rothko’s suicide, but he did not see a contradiction when he was  lured  by the deep pockets of the Marlborough Gallery. If that is not going commercial, I don’t know what is.

Still: 1951 PH-2472, 1951

Still held back over 800 of his artworks, which seems to be about 80%. And willed the lot to whatever city would put up the cash for a Clyfford Still Museum. It could not show the work of any other artist, because he was beyond compare. Nor could there be an auditorium or a restaurant. 

Was Still crazy? Or just crazy like a fox?

The first floor of the one-man museum is devoted to educational displays — including a rather paranoid letter to critic Clement Greenberg and an equally mad  letter to Betty Parsons that announced his withdrawal from the evil art world — the same art world that is still with us. If you want further evidence of Still’s hubris see Tyler Green’s three-part story. Click here.

And Green actually likes Still’s paintings!

Here is a link to  Mr. Still’s letter to Greenberg.

Clyfford Still in his N.Y. studio, 1959-52. Unknown photographer.

The more I know about Still the less I like him. He was, according to Green, a McCarthyite, and he called the Museum of Modern Art in New York the “Great Gas Chamber of culture.” Perhaps he had heard that Philip Johnson, who co-founded the Department of Architecture, had been pro-Hitler in the Thirties. Maybe, but I doubt it. When MoMA wanted a painting he pawned off what he thought of as an inferior copy he made just for them.

Should he go to the head of the Ab-Ex pantheon? Or was his boast much bigger than his light?  Now, at last, we can see for ourselves, but I think it will take awhile to digest such gnarly, willfully difficult paintings. And the man sure was full of himself.

On the second floor of the Still Museum is a chronological installation, beautifully displayed in a succession of well-proportioned rooms. In contrast to the externally  ultra-photogenic  Libeskind next door, there is not one obtuse or acute wall in the whole museum; there is not one dead space or “spear closet.”

The early work offers the same old story. Provincial paintings, WPA, and then the breakthrough moment: a vertical, crooked streak of red on a stygian plane, supposedly made in 1944. This is followed by a fully fleshed-out survey of the Stills that really look like Stills — mostly big bruisers with inflections that make many think of shredded wallpaper or birch bark or peeling billboards. Gloom provides the continuity with his  WPA work. And doom haunts every abstraction, save for  the requisite opening up to joy that we now seem to expect of old men.

Matisse was the forerunner of this “late works” phenomena;  and then de Kooning. There’s a  “late works” trope in classical music that tortures musicologists. One could characterize the “late works” trope in art as simplicity and light , whereas in music it is characterized by the depths of Beethoven’s last  string quartets, or Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosis —- rather than Schoenberg’s turn to tonality, which confuses everything. Maybe Schoenberg was really a painter.

“My work in its entirety is like a symphony in which each painting has a part,” Still wrote. If this is the case, then his last movement is a kind of triumph of talent over a pompous, paranoid  personality. And thus so is the entirety. Gestures in a void. A bit like a few corn flakes in an empty bowl.

And then a triumph?

Late unidentified Still.

As much as Rothko and Newman, Still came up with a signature style. But perhaps we could say a language rather than a style. A style is too easily reinterpreted as a brand.  That is not quite how art works. You need style plus spirituality. And you need biography. Unfortunately the Still biography stinks. The back story is loathsome.

Can we really separate the man from the art? If knowledge of Matisse’s passivity, if not quite outright collaboration, under Vichy, has soured me on his late work, then how can I look with favor upon the work of a right-wing crank like Still?

Still is being pitched to the Denver locals as a maverick. Was he? He seems to have had too many teaching jobs to be a maverick. Nevertheless, when you stand in front of his paintings, you get the picture; you get  grandeur. Or is it a full dose of the grandiose?

More than anyone else, except de Kooning, Still privileged tactility. The paint application, usually in large vertical “shreds”, brings you back to the surface of the canvas and ruptures the light. There’s a struggle akin to de Kooning’s gnostic fraktur, but unlike de Kooning, the war is not made tolerable by insouciance or wit.

Just as with de Kooning, you wonder when Still knew a painting was finished. Are the paintings finished? Some of them are scary. They are not paintings that can kill, as he claimed; but they are not to die for. Perhaps like de Kooning, Still  just walked away. Paintings are not made; they are abandoned. If this is the case, that moment of turning his back is Still’s true act of creation. If he was the first abstract expressionist then his work is the synthesis of his successors. So what stood in his way? He didn’t get along with anybody. He was a grouch. And an egomaniac. And he was the only artist in the world.

Clyfford Still is a bad influence.

Still Jigsaw Puzzle, Still Museum Gift Shop

The John Perreault Museum 

Now, as an artist,  I am no longer merely content to demand a retrospective at MoMA or the Whitney. The stakes are higher. I want my own museum. But, like Still in his will, I have stipulations. Not just any city will qualify. After all, what did Still have to do with Denver? Nothing.

The place that wins the honor of hosting the John Perreault Museum, unlike the Still Museum,  must have something to do with the life of the real John Perreault. Clyfford may have passed through Denver a couple of times, taught at the then far-distant Boulder for one meager semester, but he had as much to do with Denver as he had to do with Oshkosh or Sheboygan. The City of Denver put up the cash.

The John Perreault Museum must be in New York City, where I was born, preferably in the East Village where I have lived so long.

The John Perreault Museum must continually have all my unsold artworks on display and they should always be in  the majority. Otherwise, the museum may show examples of work by any artist I  have written about as an art critic, even artists I have attacked.

Unlike the Clyfford Still Museum, no part of the John Perreault Museum may be rented out for events of any kind. Strollers will be forbidden, as well as humans under 16. As at the Still, photography will be allowed, but even with flash. And pencils and pens, if used to take notes, will also be permitted, unlike in the Museo del Barrio and the New Museum in NYC. Snapshots and note-taking spread the word.

Clearly the John Perreault Museum will be even stricter than The Still.  Like at The Still, no auditorium or restaurant, please. Absolutely no gift shop; absolutely no Perreault jigsaw puzzles. No dance or music concerts anywhere in the Perreault Museum. No docents, gallery lectures. No loud talking. Only whispers. No poetry readings except of poems by Perreault.

Sumptuary laws will apply.

All clothing worn by visitors must be black. Perfume is forbidden. As are cowboy boots with or without taps and click-clack high-heeled shoes of any sort. No one must be taller than my art. Jewelry will be confiscated, especially jewelry that jingles and jangles, including the 14 k. gold watch bracelets worn by very rich lawyers and accountants.

No starch, no pudding. And above all, no art criticism.

____________________________________________________

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. And is now at  the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., until May 15; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook and now on Tumblr.  You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  

Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/03/clyfford-still-in-the-still-of-the-night.html/feed 0 http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/03/clyfford-still-in-the-still-of-the-night.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/artsjournal/OmRC/~3/m6UH2k-YrcQ/cindy-sherman-against-photography.html http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/02/cindy-sherman-against-photography.html#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:02:19 +0000 John Perreault http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/?p=1517  

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman

Since one critic has already deemed Cindy Sherman “the successor to Cézanne, Picasso, Pollock and Warhol,” I feel I am free to delve into other things. The headline to his preview panegyric was The Last Star, so one of these days I will have to write a pithy essay explaining why we don’t need any more stars, thank you; and the last great artist is me. The need for heroes or heroines is perennial, even in something as pure and as uplifting as art.

Upon the occasion of the must-see retrospective now at MoMA until June 11, another critic announces that Sherman’s career is the first of a woman artist that resembles those of Picasso, Johns and Bruce Nauman.

However, I will go all out and say that Sherman’s 2008 “Society Lady Portraits” are as good as, if not better than, her career-making “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80). She has avoided the male slump, which I define as the usual decline of male “upstarts” who are inspired and then should be retired. But no names here; you can fill in the blanks.

This Is Not A Photograph

I will also boldly assert that Sherman is not a photographer, and her works are not photography. She is an artist. Stuck in the sausage of language, if you call yourself a ceramist, a woodworker, a glassblower, a weaver, or a photographer, you are not an artist. It must be a slip of the tongue or false modesty when Sherman calls herself a photographer. This may still work when potters humbly call themselves potters, implying that their calling is higher than art, but it works for little else.

Sherman’s “photographs” are against photography. They require interpretation.

Take a look at them now at MoMA. Although under the aegis of the Photography Department, and co-curated by an associate and an assistant curator of same, Sherman’s works are being shown in the 6th floor galleries, usually devoted to much higher forms of art than photography.

Likewise, along with location and manner of display, I learned yet another way of judging art. Rather slow about such things, I came upon a piece on Sherman on Bloomberg News:

Shortly after a major Cindy Sherman retrospective opens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Feb. 26, one of her most famous images will be sold at Sotheby’s. The combination could boost her prices after last year’s career high auction total of $13.7 million.

In a nutshell, some track annual auction sales totals of various artists, for investment potential, I would guess, and not just for the fun of it. Mind you, unless you are Damien Hirst who auctioned off his own work in 2008, artists usually do not directly profit by auction sales of their art. Not in New York City. The merchandise is usually sent to the gavel by other hands and the profit returns to same.

Missing: How does Sherman’s projected annual auction sales figure of $13.7 million compare with those of others we might know? Hirst? Jeff Koons? Or photographers like Nan Goldin or Annie Leibovitz ?

But there’s another reason besides her annual auction figure that Sherman’s work cannot be photography. Be honest. Do her images give you that good-old photo feeling? Decidedly not. They will not make you weep for the poor or give you false information about the indigenous peoples of the world. They will not cause you to wax nostalgic about families, ancient resorts, or puppies. They will not afford the frisson of images of sexual outlaws, soldiers on battlefields, literary giants, or skate-boarders. They will not make you confuse pictures with reality.

Photo-Homeopathy

If photography is a disease, than Sherman is the cure. Her work is homeopathic. It is sly. She does not preach, the way so many photographers find themselves doing. No deep captions give add-on meanings to her images.  She is not producing a sub-set of literature or illustration.

And she is not producing self-portraits. In some sense, every artwork is a self-portrait, but for Sherman using herself as a model is merely a convenience. She is always there. She does not fret or object. She works cheaply, and for long hours. If the viewer, despite the artist’s protestations in interview after interview, persists in seeing the works as self-portraits, then a great deal is lost. The message becomes trivial. Sherman is myriad. So what. Aren’t we all? Walt Whitman said it first.

What is more interesting is that under all the make-up, costuming, and prosthetics we still recognize her, in image after image. She is the star of those Noir and Neo-Realist films we can never exactly identify. Later she is the model, the clown, the matron. She is each of the carnival giants on the wallpaper mural  that provides the required photo-op at the entrance to the exhibit.   She is the actress who never quite disappears.  Nevertheless….

It’s Not All About Me

Beginning with the brilliant, black and white “stills,”  Sherman’s influence has been enormous, which is usually another sign of greatness. Media critique and gender politics were instantly enriched. She has been an inspiration to other artists. Her work has been copied, riffed, mimicked, extrapolated, but never quite enlarged upon. Although we see her face lurking in almost every made-up image, not one of her descendants has inscribed loss of identity or pseudo-empowerment the way she has. Men may be crazy, but womankind is all mythed up.

Does she parody femininity by using the Max Factor disguises that many women feel they still have to don? When my mother, who had lived through the Depression and World War II, wore make-up, she called it putting on her war paint, once a not uncommon phrase. But men wear disguises too. And I don’t just mean just facial hair or the eye-liner affected by rock stars. Both men and women wear roles, are sometimes oppressed by them, but also play with them. I can be a soldier, a doctor, an auto-mechanic, a banker…..oh, no. It’s the Village People!

Of course, some boys dress up as girls, but that is another story. That merely balances out all the girls who dress up as guys.

But women are expected to be in disguise. Men like them that way. And women claim that glamor is power. The Max Factor Factor is not a trivial trope.

Sherman is recording impersonations, roles, fantasies. And at the same time getting over her girl-guilt about dressing up and play-acting.

Another Artopia Motto

To the degree that Sherman’s work parodies photographic genres, like Hollywood publicity stills, fashion photography, pornography, and most recently and most gloriously, the aging but perfectly coiffed and facially altered grande dames of her Society Portraits series, her art is against photography. When she parodies well-known paintings, she is slamming the photography-imitates-art genre. But — oh, yes — most photography imitates art and little else. Just as photographs originally tried to imitate paintings, digital imaging now tries to imitate photography. Sherman now works digitally, an even more intense way of framing photography.

Sherman’s images are wantonly conceptual. You cannot look at Sherman’s viscous oeuvre without thinking of the Artopia motto: Photography is the mother of all lies.

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. It will travel to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  

Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

Damien Hirst: LSD. Courtesy Gagosian.© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

International art-star Damien Hirst, who in the late-’80s helped incite the Young British Artists fracas, has produced vitrine art (sharks and other taxidermist beasties suspended in formaldehyde), spin paintings, spot paintings, medicine cabinets, butterfly collages, and bad Bacons. Only the latter have been deemed total failures. But stick around. They will be back. In his poly-headed oeuvre (including spectacles such as the lucrative ’08 auction of his own works) Hirst’s middle finger is always prominent.

The spot paintings, for instance, are now deployed globally in the 11 Gagosian sales venues. No museum could offer, as does the Empire of Art, “THE COMPLETE SPOT PAINTINGS 1986-2011.” The closest rival to such global outreach, the Guggenheim franchise, only has five platforms: New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Abu Dhabi.

How global can a gallery get? The Gagosian website lists: three galleries in New York (980 Madison, 555 W. 24, 522 W. 21; to Feb. 18 ), two in London, and others in Beverly Hills, Rome, Paris Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong. The gallery gamble is to cover all squares. Or is it to pander to impulse buying? Gain points for jet fuel savings?

The not unrelated museum game goes something like this: how many branches can you have – all more or less showing the same kind of art – without wrecking tourism. The so-called MoMA syndrome goes global. Art made familiar by media will always disappoint.  Surely, in the case of museums one might have the buildings themselves as a draw. Alas, the Bilbao Effect seems only to apply to Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. Rarely does anyone go to a museum just to see the building. In terms of the Guggenheims, alas, once you are inside, the art is the same as the art you have already seen back home. What you have experienced  is a brand. When you visit any of the Gagosian/Hirst eleven spot-painting show, you double your fun. What you experience is two brands: Gagosian and Hirst.

Hirst: Cuff Links.© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Existing Through the Gift Shop

I have only viewed the three New York spot displays, so I will never qualify for the signed print offered to those who make it to all eleven, the print that will be “dedicated personally to you .” I can say this though: in New York both the 24th Street and the Madison Ave Gagosians come with gift shops. First there was Keith Haring’s stand-alone Pop Shop; then there were Marakami hokum shops in museums showing that artist’s retrospective; and now here’s the Hirst Spot Shops. Has the joke gone too far? No, not really. Is this art for the people (as it was with Haring) or is it Hirst making fun of museums?

Even we who are not jetsetters or eschew such anti-ecological transports can participate. Souvenirs abound. I myself would have sprung for a scarf, but none were offered. A missed opportunity, I think. But then again, the art itself,  once sold,  is merely a souvenir of the spectacle of 11 simultaneous exhibitions, right?

And the Twain Shall Meet

Is there any other way we can spot the convergence of galleries and art museums? Both produce catalogs of the requisite weight and verbal persiflage. Whereas museums can be rented for special events, but as  high-end art galleries resist that income stream as too messy. Galleries sell art; but, when necessary, so do museums. It’s called refining their collections. And whereas most museums, but not all, have collections, commercial art galleries have stock.

Damien Hirst: Installation at Gagosian Chelsea (W. 21 St.)

© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012
Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Spots Before Your Eyes

The spot paintings are done by hired help, according to Hirst’s designs.  These  are generated by two simple rules: (1.) Equidistant deployment of spots and (2.) no color repeated in any dot in any one painting. Those who may think it has all been done before, by Kusama (on her body or everywhere) or Sol LeWitt (on walls instead of canvases, but with lines) are wrong. We still find it hard to believe that Kusama is sarcastic and Sol LeWitt was incapable of such.

Kusama: Self-Obliteration, 1968

Take a look at this website that show some spot/dot paintings by other artists. None have the insouciance of the Hirst spots. Or the commercial monomania.

Francois Morellet, Untitled. 1954.

Walter Robinson: Untitled. 1980s.

John Armleder: Untitled. N.D.

The good thing is that it doesn’t take long to look at the Hirst spots. You can speed right through, although it is not exactly the case that when you have seen a few you have seen them all. I found some surprises here and there. All are in the Madison Avenue three-floor venue. Amidst the majority of standard spot paintings, there are really, really small spot paintings, spot painting with half-dots at one edge, one spot painting clearly labeled “Controlled Substances” (giving away the pharmaceutical subtext of all these art pills), and, best of all, one painting with drippy dots, the canvas resting on the floor against a wall. Has it fallen? Is this a spot sport or a mistake? In terms of the first theory, I doubt it. There are no nails or screws on the wall above, and here, as everywhere, there are neatly attired guards in every room. More than in any museum.

One thought I had was that, at least in Chelsea, the Hirsts are more about the architecture of the galleries than about art, more about display. They make those all-white post-industrial rooms look gorgeous. Just imagine what they will do for your private airplane hanger or your Olympic size indoor swimming pool or the lobby of your condo in Abu Dhabi.

These dead –pan paintings are place holders for art. Rather than artworks, they are symbols of art.

Hirst: Controlled Substances.

When Bad Boys Collide

For what it’s worth, former Bad Boy of Brit-Pop, David Hockney, now showing at the Royal Academy in London, has been quoted as casting aspersions upon Hirst for not actually painting his own works and using assistants instead:

Hockney, seen as Britain’s greatest living painter, believes that artists should produce their own works. He said: ‘I used to point out at art school, you can teach the craft, it’s the poetry you can’t teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft.’

Hockney quoted a Chinese proverb that to paint ‘you need the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won’t do’. He added: ‘The other great thing they said – I told this to Lucian Freud – is, ‘‘painting is an old man’s art’’. I like that!’

                                                                               Mail Online…Jan. 3, 2012.

David Hockney: Portrait of an Artist, 1971.

Really, hasn’t Hockney ever heard of Duchamp or LeWitt? Let’s face it, Hockney peaked with his California scenes. Thereafter he might as well have let assistants paint for him. He has been so out of touch. Since it is obviously good to be bad, no pretty cellphone drawings or British landscapes will bring Hockney back to reality, or make him bad again.

Is David miffed that recently when Hirst wavered and decided to actually paint, he riffed on Francis Bacon and not on him? Bacon was really bad. You know, falling in love with and living with the man he caught robbing his house. And, I am told, drunk for 60 years.

I look at it this way. There are MGM artists and Warner Brother artists. And then there is Poverty Row. Hirst aspires to MGM. Hockney has always been sort of Republic Pictures. Maybe Disney. Bacon, with all those tortured bodies and Inquisition scenes,  was always rather Hammer Studios.

And now in the wings, there’s Banksy who is definitely Warner Brothers. Banksy’s success probably mean we may soon have to call last year’s Bad Boy, Sir Damien.

In terms of Hirst’s on-the- spot extravaganza, some sequences are better than others. I hate the Op Art results when Hirst deploys the large spots so that there is one lodged in each corner of the canvases. Ouch. All-over is best. Tondos end up too Op also. So, as the wise guy used to say, if some are better than others, then it must be art.

Hirst is in the long line of artists who want to have their cake and eat it. It’s art against art. Is he more like Duchamp or Dali? Is he more like Picabia or Warhol? Hirst is our greatest satirist, the Daumier du jour.

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. It will travel to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  

Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

Edwin Dickinson, The Fossil Hunters. Not on view at the Whitney.

Can artworks survive once they have fallen out of fashion? Or no longer inspire further art? Are off the grid? Are not part of the ongoing dialogue, but come across, if at all, as dead ends? As orphans, bachelors, old maids?

Roberto Matta (1911-2002) at Pace to Jan. 28, Diego Rivera (1886-1957) at MoMA to May 14, and Francis Picabia (1897-1953) at Michael Werner to Jan. 14 were each at one point vital to the art life, so probably deserve a new look.

The Artist’s Artist, the Painter’s Painter

But Edwin Dickinson? When was he central? He didn’t fit into American Scene painting or Modernism. He was not a Dadaist, a Cubist,  or a Surrealist. Although he was briefly saved from starvation by the Works Progress Administration’s easel-painting subsidy, he did not produce overt socially conscious art. He certainly never tackled murals. On the other hand, his art was just too strange to be considered academic. Maybe too poetic?

The way art history has been written, he has no heirs. That needs to change. Different times require different views of the past. And different family trees.

Dickinson(1891-1978) is well-worth looking at and thinking about. There are lessons to be learned, particularly if you yourself are that rare thing, a true oddball, lone wolf, keeper of your own secrets, priest or priestess of art rather than of career.

Three Strikes and You Are Out

The Babcock Gallery (774 Fifth Ave., to Jan. 22) is now offering “Edwin Dickinson in Retrospect.” All three faces of Dickinson are sampled: the lovely premier coups (some of them pre-de Kooning action paintings); hints of what went on in his big paintings, but only hints; and the self-portraits.

The  premier coups or first strikes are masterful. This method simply requires that mistakes be jettisoned right there on the spot. Doesn’t look right in front of the subject? Scrape it down! The results range from delicate to dynamic.

This comes right out of the Munich tradition. The difference is that Dickinson did not treat his first strikes as outdoor sketches, meant to be used in larger, finished works, but offered them as finished works themselves. They are raw, special. You participate. You not only feel where he was standing in front of his subject and at what angle he was viewing it, but you can identify his movements in applying pigment.

In contrast, the  “machines,” or what curator Douglas Dreishpoon and Pollock-expert (!) Francis O’Connor in separate essays persist in calling the “symbolical” paintings in the catalog for “Edwin Dickinson: Dreams and Realities” (Albright-Knox,Buffalo, 2002), are diabolical.

Symbolical as opposed to symbolic, or like the Symbolical Rites of the Masons? Dickinson’s masteful The Fossil Hunters might have been painted by a modern-day El Greco in a severe fit of depression.

The first strikes are about the known, what we can see with our eyes and can jot down with our paint rags, palette knives, and little pinkies (one of Dickinson’s favorite outdoor tools). Here is Dickinson’s philosophy:

“If you do not bring anticipations to the sight of an object when drawing it, anticipations which are connect with associations in your lay life, it is easier to get it right then to get it wrong.”

The machines or the subject paintings or the “winter paintings” done entirely in the studio were also not preplanned, according to Dickinson. He just went ahead. They are about what we cannot know. The angle of vision is either too high or too low; one object blocks another or turns it into a splinter or shard. Bodies are cadavers. And the light is always dimmer than twilight. Stygian. Faces are in shadows or otherwise blurred and incomplete.

Dickinson, The Cello Player, 1924-26. De Young Musuem.

The Big Ones: My List of Dickinson Machines

Interior, 1916.

An Anniversary, 1929-21. Albright-Knox,Buffalo,NY

The Cello Player 1924-26. De Young Museum,  San Francisco.

[Dickinson’s list of depictions: “14 books; two potatoes; 2 saucers; 3 sheets of music [Intermezzo from Cavalieria  Rusticana, violin allegro from Marriage of Figaro]; 2 china pitchers; 7 shells; 1 photograph; 1 trilobite; 3 kettles; 1 rose; 1 music stand; 1 chair; 1 organ; 1 piano, 1 cello….John Cordes…..” Cordes was the model for the cello-player. Dickinson, who did not read music, played the cello by ear.]

The Fossil Hunters, 1926-28. Whitney Museum of Art.

Woodland Scene, 1929-1935.

Composition with Still Life, 1933-37.  Museum of Modern Art.

Ruin at Daphne, 1943-53. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[His last “machine,” the depiction of a made-up archeological site, evincing too much red pigment for my taste, took 10 years and was never finished, or only “finished” when it was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and thus left his studio.]

Dickinson, An Anniversary, Albright-Knox.

Masterpieces Gone Missing

At Babcock, the closest thing to one of the “winter paintings”  is  Francis Foley (1927), only 50 by 40 inches, but exhibiting the silvery tonalities and skewed perspectives of the big works. And the fabric. A must-see. And the first-strike paintings are also worth braving jolly Christmasy midtown Manhattan.  Self-Portrait in Uniform of 1942 (it’s a Civil War getup) is also special, self-portraits being his third specialty, developed in the second half of his life. They too are destabilized. Are they vain or introspective?

Dickinson, Self-Portrait in Uniform, 1942. Courtesy Babcock Gallery

In the survey now at the Brooklyn Museum called “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” (to Jan. 29), you can see Dickinson’s  Helen Souza, 1929, which, although hardly one of his “big ones,” is twilight gray, utilizes a surprising perspective and point of view, and is a startling exercise in surface, texture, and varied paint-application. Is it unfinished? What is the struggle that it embodies? Plastic or psychological, or both?

Dickinson, Helen Souza, 1929.

Alas, neither MoMA, the Whitney, nor the Metropolitan have any of their once very popular Dickinson“subject paintings” on display right now. They are — dreaded term — in storage.

Dickinson painting outdoors in Provincetown, n.d. Courtesy Provincetown Art Associaion.

He Was Not a Hermit

Whatever happened to Dickinson? Although he eventually moved to New York, he is associated with Provincetown, Massachusetts. Too New England. Furthermore, in the battle between Provincetown and Woodstock to become the summer art capital, East Hamptonwon. Dickinson lived in P-town and later in nearby Wellfleet year-round. However, let us not think Dickinson was unsociable because he spent 14 bone-chilling Cape Cod winters in uninsulated studios making art.

From his spare diaries we learn how disciplined he was. Up early, out on the beach, then scraping paint in whatever draughty workspace he could afford. But he also keeps track of a full social life.

Still feeling ill – up late painted myself AM.. PM painted eve home…..AM painted – PM painted. Eve saw Manon. Rec’d valentine scarf from Tibi. Bright moonlight on snow. Cold…AM in & out – walk on dunes. Wretched day. PM worked at office. eve at Tibi’s.

The early death of his long-suffering mother from tuberculosis and the suicide of his older brother were anniversaries dutifully noted each year in the pages of his day book, with never a comment. Just there, like winter, like ice.

His definition of art was “something that moves the spirit through the eye.”

When asked about his influences, he replied: “I suppose being alive and awake.”

When queried about the meaning of his art, he replied: “I wouldn’t be able to say.”

Dickinson, Laboratory Beach, 1935. Private Collection.

Dickinsonwas the last of the art line that goes from the Munich School to William Morris Hunt, William Merritt Chase and Charles Hawthorne. Dickinson studied with both Chase and Hawthorne, the latter when he had an art school in Provincetown.

In many ways, he was also one of the last of the independent artists.

He was accustomed to the largesse of juried exhibitions and exposed his art that way, as did many others before the advent of the full-fledged gallery system. For long stretches he was ‘”commercially unaffiliated” and seemed not to have minded. Although he had shown at the then prestigious Carnegie Institute, the Albright-Knox, and the American Academy of Art., his first solo exhibition in a commercial art gallery was in 1936 on 57th Street in New York at the young age of 45.

After 1942, he went without a gallery until 1961. Of course, he was nicely represented in curator Dorothy Miller’s MoMA show “Romantic Painting in America” in 1942 and again in her “15 Americans” of 1952 (along with Rothko, Still, Pollock, and Bradley Walker Tomlin). When asked to submit an artist’s statement, he submitted a self-portrait.

Elaine de Kooning’s “Edwin Dickinson Paints a Picture” (Ruin at Daphne) appeared in Art News in 1949. She wrote that he was “A great artist [who] reconciles poetry with perspective.”

He was not invisible.

Otherwise, he saw nothing wrong in teaching. From various accounts, his students at Cooper Union and the Art Students League were in awe of him, but appreciated that his critiques were strictly one-on-one. He treated students as if they were fellow artists. Here’s an interview with painter George Nick, a former student.

But perhaps he should have stayed in Provincetown or Wellfleet and froze to death. Perhaps he should have walked out to the tip of the Cape Cod curl and just waded into the icy brine to join his beloved brother in the afterlife, leaving behind his wife and two children to go it alone. His brother in the ‘20s had leapt from a sixth-floor window in Greenwich Village, almost in front of his eyes.

When economic necessity forced Dickinson and family to move to New York City, where there were more teaching jobs, he clearly did not have the time or energy to paint more of his large paintings. Francis V. O’Connor, in the big Buffalo tome mentioned above, offers more than enough intuitive psychoanalysis in his essay, “Allegories of Pathos and Perspective in the Symbolical Paintings and Self-Portraits of Edwin Dickinson.” Once Dickinson was safely married, his oedipal conflicts were resolved. His father could be forgiven at last for marrying so soon after the first Mrs. Dickinson’s death. Of course, no more “winter paintings” were in the offing.

An Unfinished Life

The story of Dickenson’s life has not much to it; but his art does. Sometimes the large paintings were cut down into smaller paintings. Sometimes just abandoned. He told arts writer Katherine Kuh:

None of the large paintings is really finished. there comes a time when I stop because to go on would mean reorganizing the canvas from the bottom up. I can’t throw away the investment of so many years — nine years in the case of Ruin at Daphne. So I make the best of a bad job by finishing them as well as I can. In other words, they all topple over when they are about three-fifths done.

So like Willem de Kooning!

In fact he and de Kooning, 13 years his junior, became friends. Dickinson, the elegantly bearded art teacher, valorized spontaneity and indecision or struggle, which may have influenced the younger man. Certainly, as Elaine de Kooning (who introduced them) might have predicted, there was a resonance between the two.

Oh, to see some paintings by each side-by-side!

Dickinson, Nude Figure, Marie, 1939. Courtesy Babcock Gallery

What Goes Around Comes Around

Why are Dickinson’s six big paintings so spatially and emotionally unsettling? Is it because they simply do not fit any known style-category?

I hypothesize that their previous popularity can be accounted for not because they seemed antimodernist, but because they are doom-ridden, anxious, nerve-wracking. There is always a market for doom. You can stand only so much Matisse.

Antimodernism we can deal with. It is just the other side of the coin. But Dickinson’s upsetting machines stand clear of the game. They are not morbid like the rotting figures of Ivan Albright. They are wreckage, if not debris. The viewer is  flummoxed, puzzled, fascinated, transfixed, like the South Pacific trading partners of the Trobriand who were paralyzed by the ornately carved canoe prows they confronted. No normal man could have made these complicated paintings. (Yes, I have finally gotten around to reading Alfred Gell’s witty, insightful, game-changing Art and Agency, An Anthropological Theory.)

In the recent Dickinson literature, romantic hopes abound. He will be the new Ryder or the new Hopper, rediscovered in the nick of time and saved from unjust oblivion by an unforeseen bend in art history. Have we come to that bend?

Can’t happen. Won’t make a good enough story.

Throughout his life, Dickinson loved going to the movies, beginning with the silents. Perhaps they influenced his machines and even his first strikes: tilted points of view, views from above, truncated subjects. But picture a film in which we see exact, real-time recreations of Dickinson painting, scraping down and repainting his machines indoors, the artist wrapped in coats and scarves; then intercut with the spontaneous, outdoor first strikes; then reels of him teaching class after class at Cooper Union, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Students League until, with the exception of the self-portraits and a few first strikes, the teaching takes over the art-making.

“One learns to draw faces better by painting torsos,” he tells a class.

“Love,” he tells a stymied student, “will find an answer.”

Or, my favorite, “Taste is the enemy of art.”

And then there is the total strangeness of his most famous painting, The Fossil Hunters, which took 192 sittings. It was mistakenly exhibited sideways, not once but twice. Is this because he signed it vertically on the right side? The first time was at the 1928 Carnegie International. Corrected for an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, it was then shown sideways again and stayed that way at the National Academy of Design in New York,  where it won the Altman Prize for Landscape.  That would be the center of my allegorical biopic.

Dickinson: The Fossil Hunters.... On its side.

1. Don’t get married and have children.

2. Don’t teach.

3. Don’t make more than one kind of art.

4. Make lots and lots of product. Picasso made 40,000 artworks; Warhol clocks in

     at 10,000, not counting prints (in some sense they are all prints). Damien

     Hirst, who has so far made only 4,800 works, not counting prints, was quoted

     by the  L.A. Times as determined to beat the both of them.

5. Always be able to explain what you are doing.

6. Always sign your artworks at the bottom, front or back; and indicate the top on

     the back. Never, never sign vertically down the side. That’s just asking for

     trouble.

7. Eschew tactility, varied surfaces, paint-handling.

8. Produce artworks that are photogenic.

9. Never be ahead of the curve.

10. Don’t be too original; just be original enough to make your product a brand.

     Too much originality is always punished or ignored.

_______________________________________________________________

Fast Track:

*****     An Edwin Dickinson Retrospect, Babcock Gallery

****       Late Works of Matta, Pace Gallery

***         Diego Rivera Murals, MoMA

**           Francis Picabia, Michael Werner Gallery

*             Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, Brooklyn Museum

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition runs from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. then travels to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.