Fly By Night, Away From Here

Journal entry for 17 May 2011 | Link

It has happened a few times now that I've gone to New York City for the weekend, only to come back too late and without sufficient energy, computer access, or rudeness to my hosts to bang on the keyboard for the sake of a journal entry. (It's not a pretty process to witness. Harrumphing is often entailed.) Henceforth expect to see these new posts on Tuesdays rather than Mondays, although I hope not this late in the evening. This is all leading up to a reinstatement of Artblog.net and the weekday schedule, though I know better than to divulge the target date.

'Twas a productive trip: Ying Li at Lohin Geduld, Leon Kossof at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, Norman Bluhm at Loretta Howard, Jules Olitski at FreedmanArt, Virva Hinnemo and George Negroponte at Kouros, and finally Elisabeth Condon, who gave a scintillating talk on the last day of her show at Lesley Heller Workspace. The heaviest rain kindly stayed off of me.

Making Friends and Influencing People

I wouldn't have known about the show at Kouros except that the gallery read my Arts Fuse review of a show at David Hall in Wellesley, Mass that coincidentally included the artists, and Kouros quickly got in touch. I thought well enough of the David Hall show, but I felt that its curator, Charlie Finch, was due for a bit of pushback against some immoderate prose styling of late.

For example, a recent essay at Artnet referred to the “stupid stains” of Helen Frankenthaler, called Thornton Willis “an old guy who until recently was noticed for aborting one of the trickiest shapes to Ab Up, the triangle,” and worked in a dozen other digs that were equally astute. His authorial intemperance, incoherence, and incontinence would have made him one of the greatest anonymous Internet trolls of all time. But he esteemed himself an art critic, and missed his true calling.

A discussion ensued upon the Book of Face which you can read there if you do that sort of thing. It involved Peter Plagens as well as some Artblog.net regulars. It felt like old times there for a moment. I would quote some choice passages but this journal entry will never see the light of day if I trouble to ask the authors for permission to reprint their comments. Due to travel I was obliged to let the conversation trail off, for which I'm sorry, but a few points occur to me in looking it over. One is that the notion suggested a couple of times, that the discussion which Finch's writing provokes is healthy and preferable to no discussion at all, strikes me as odd. Writers are obliged to be accurate and interesting, and whether someone capable of the latter but not the former is preferable to the converse is not worth discussing. Two, I calibrated the work in the show to the level of Robert Natkin and Ralph Coburn, and I don't think it would have been reasonable to compare it to Frankenthaler just because Finch had brought her up in an unrelated article. A critic has to have high standards, but a show can be meritorious without being superlative, and a critic renders himself useless if he can't switch gears accordingly.

A Reading

Alan Pocaro.

Anytime an exhibition promises The New—whether by title or press release—I hear alarm bells. My immediate thoughts conjure up images of artworks that question, examine, provoke, or reconsider some previously ill-considered idea; and above all else, I expect to have my expectations challenged. So when I received an invitation to attend the press preview for Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection at the Dayton Art Institute, I envisioned the clichéd: galleries bursting with post- consumer detritus, obnoxious video displays, and funhouse style installation. Considering that the trip north on Interstate 75 is treacherous even in the best of weather, hesitation preceded acceptance.

A Viewing

The masters in their salad days.