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Where to Begin

Journal entry for 11 Apr 2011 | Link

So, I fail at journaling. On the other hand, one could argue that it's forgivable to fail at journaling if one is up to productive stuff instead, which I'm glad to report is the case. Let's run through them, shall we?

Stains Upon Silence

First and foremost, I've managed to talk a few people who are not me into publishing my writing. Back in February I profiled Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens, who were kind enough to meet me in Chelsea to view their concurrent shows.

A question for arcritical readers: Has a married couple ever had overlapping, solo exhibitions at separate galleries in Manhattan? Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens couldn’t think of one, and nor could I. If their case is indeed unique, then her exhibition at Gary Snyder Project Space and his at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which overlap for nine days, is an item for the record books. Adding a delicious romantic twists is the fact that the overlap includes Valentine's Day.

I then acted as contributing editor for a Judicial Review installment at the Arts Fuse covering the new(-ish) Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts. Not long after I was asked to write regular blurbs and brief exhibition reports for the New York Sun. These are slated to appear three times a week if you'd like to keep up with what I consider to be the important goings-on of the New York art calendar. One of these entries I would consider to be a short review, that of Jenifer Riley at LaViola Gallery.

Pleasingly noodly and loaded with allusive speed, they take a surprising gestural approach to geometric abstraction.

This month my essay about the Edward Gorey show at the Boston Athenaeum appeared in the New Criterion.

One can usually identify Edward Gorey to those not familiar with his name by reminding them of the opening credits for PBS’s Mystery!. But this represents a single item in an oeuvre that includes over one hundred books of his own authorship, illustrations for fifty more written by others, designs for the stage, and stuffed animals that he sewed himself. Nearly 200 works are featured in an exhibition entitled “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey,” which originated at the Brandywine Museum and now appears at the Boston Athenæum, accompanied by a catalogue written beautifully by The New Criterion’s own Karen Wilkin. The show attests to the pictorial genius of a man with outsize erudition, a maudlin yet gleeful sense of humor, and an infectious love of language.

Last but not least—arguably most, in fact—yesterday after my usual bedtime I filed my first review for Art in America. This will appear in the May issue. One of the ideas behind my putting Artblog.net on hiatus was that I was publishing too much of my own work and wanted to get it placed elsewhere. Now that elsewhere includes one of the glossies, this happy turn of events heralds the second coming of Artblog.net. In the meantime, though, expect the regular (ahem) Monday updates in this very space. Artblog.net is very broken and it will take considerable doing to bring it up to contemporary programming standards.

Go See Art 4.0

In January I launched the newest version of Go See Art, which aspires to track the chronological progress of every art exhibition in New England. It's not doing a shabby job of it - I just listed the 600th exhibition in the database, and it is tracking over 200 venues. I humbly claim that it has no equal. Much like when I set this up for Miami, then Los Angeles, by doing so I've garnered a considerable knowledge of the layout of New England museums and galleries in a short time. The old saws about the region's aesthetic conservatism and sleepiness are bunk. A great variety of things are going on. Click around and see for yourself.

Stirring the Pot

I recently took exception to some Theory-based assertions in the comics community.

There’s only one way to verify Caro’s assertion, stated a few different ways, that lowercase-t theory or uppercase-T Theory have something important to offer comics. That is to create said comics and see how they turn out. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that such-and-such might to be possible in comics, but there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way. Attempting to make it that work that way gives you mannerism. I call it the Shopping List Problem. One can see certain characteristics in a successful innovation of style, inspiring other creators to copy the characteristics. But quality in art is not a shopping list of characteristics, checked off and accounted for in the new work. It’s an integrated whole that generates forward from the intuited feelings of individual creators. The head serves the heart. The other way around is poisonous.

Hilarity (read: 147 comments and counting) ensued.

And Art

The studio has seen its share of action as well.

There is also a fairly recent episode of The Moon Fell On Me. And that's not even all of it, because I'm behind on scanning and photographing the considerable pile of figure drawing I've done this year. Trust that while I've neglected you, dear reader, I've neglected little else.

George Tooker, RIP

The master egg tempera painter died March 27. Lawrence Downes remembers a haunting work.

“Government Bureau,” a 1956 painting by George Tooker, was inspired by his maddening encounter with the New York City Building Department. Most people who waste hours in line just end up with sore feet and headaches. Mr. Tooker, who died on March 27, emerged with one of the best-known depictions of modern alienation and despair.

Climb the Black Mountain

Oh to be in New York on Wednesday for Elisabeth Condon's opening at Lesley Heller.

Readings

Alan Pocaro.

The ready-made is so entrenched in contemporary practice that its status is canonical. So much of today's—and yesterday's—conceptually driven work would be unimaginable without it, and yet by redefining art making for the past half-century or more, the ready-made has become emblematic of society's disconnect with art and art's disconnect with itself. How is it that an object from everyday life can be elevated to such status?

Jed Perl.

I thought I had made my peace with the death of originality. Personally, I do not believe that originality has died, but I recognize that the obituaries cannot exactly be ignored. I keep abreast of whatever is being said about the death-of-originality movement’s dead white males, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. And I try to see as much as I can of the work of practitioners who, paradoxically, are alive and kicking, beginning with Jeff Koons and Richard Prince. Mostly, I don’t comment on this stuff, figuring that as a critic who still believes in originality I am under no obligation to chronicle its demise. But a comment is in order now, because the very people who brought us the death of originality are increasingly preoccupied with the defense of their own originality. Nobody has said it better than the art historian Rainer Crone, who worked closely with Warhol from 1968 onward, and recently wrote that Warhol’s unique contribution to contemporary art was “the rejection of authorship as an essential feature of authenticity and originality.” I guess that means that the death of originality is a new form of originality.

Peter Plagens.

I find myself thinking about this stuff lately because I’m now almost 70 —an age I seem to have reached suddenly, and quite unjustly, overnight. I realize that I entered the art world, with a newly minted MFA degree, almost 45 years ago. Back then, an artist as mature as I am now would have entered the art world in—Omigod!—the 1920s! Which is to say: The art world in which I now find myself is as different from the one that I entered as the one that I entered was from the art world in the days of the Calvin Coolidge Administration.

Viewings

Amanda Palmer and the Young Punx. (Warning: John Ruskin would be scandalized.) PSY by Seven Fingers. (We saw this performed in January. Music is Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches.) A Month of Sunday Walks by Leanne Shapton. Snow Day! All social constructs have dissolved. John Porcellino on comics. Black Fag (sic). Schaffer the Darklord.