Review of Tom Thayer at Derek Eller Gallery

 


THE FAMED EXPRESSIONIST EDVARD MUNCH WAS KNOWN TO leave his paintings out in the rain on occasion, a habit he explained by saying, "It will either kill or cure them." I don't suspect that Tom Thayer has ever left one of his paintings outdoors but they do have a cracked, desiccated and weathered appearance that suggests it might not matter if he did. The cut-out corrugated cardboard figures hanging from dirty strings and gnarled curls of wire also help give off the impression that this work has been sitting undiscovered in an attic for about 30 years—despite the fact that everything here is from 2012 and Thayer is only 42-years-old.


Even his videos—which are subjected, it would seem, to every form of analog video degradation known to man—have a "Video tape dumped in a mop bucket" feel. The best of these, Empirical Video Study is shown as a projection. Its multicolored, oscillating wave-forms and distorted abstractions remind one of what the unpaid-for premium cable TV channels (the scrambled porn) used to look like, except the colors are more muted—pale, static-y tangerines and faded, off-tint magenta's predominate. That, and its rhythms are more furtive and hypnotic than herky-jerky.


All of this would seem to be deliberately anti-aesthetic, faux-naïve, or a pointed affront to good taste except that Thayer's overall attitude isn't a rejection of (or an ironic gloss on) anything so much as it is marked by a casual but complete indifference to those standards in the first place. To pull a variegated collection of clumped-up lint from the dryer's lint filter and use it to fill in a goofy cut-out profile of a face—With the Force of the Moon and the Ocean—isn't an act that's determined in opposition to anything. It's a gesture, particular to itself—as if to say, this is the world, or part of it. It is abject, quotidian, fraught with pathos, entropy, degradation and sadness, but also charming, weirdly funny, and beautiful.


It's a refined vision, also. The overall formal intelligence and sense of economy (along with the silhouetted figures and dangling strings) calls to mind late Jasper Johns, but the general tone is reminiscent of a different artist altogether: the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still. Paintings by Still tend to feel as if one is staring into outer space and finding that there's no one out there: we're all totally alone. Imagine, then, if Still had the sense of humor to hang a Johns-like cut-out silhouetted figure in front of that existential void. It's funny, yes, but not exactly "ha ha" funny. By suggesting that we're all alone, it resists that condition by attempting to communicate—even as it implicates its own efforts as comically futile. This is paradoxical—funny because it isn't funny, and sad because it's utterly mundane: the type of thing best expressed through corrugated cardboard, lint and VCR-tracking errors—just some of Thayer's derelict materials.

Review of Benjamin Butler's "Some Trees" at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery

Originally Published in Artillery Art Magazine

One might easily dismiss Benjamin Butler's paintings as blandly pretty or ironic "bad painting," a faux-amateurish retread of early 20th century Modernism. But they are, in fact, rather subtle paintings with a deceptive simplicity that belies a lot of art-historical knowledge and painterly know-how: the kind of work that takes time to warm up to.

All of them in his recent exhibition "Some Trees" depict not so much trees, as a nearly schematic glyph: the idea of a tree. As in Untitled Forest (2012), for instance, the suggestion of branches is rendered as one or two veering curves attached to a vertical line—enough to convey "tree"-ness. Mondrian's trees come to mind, as if Butler is picking up an art-historical loose end and running with it, although, stylistically, they are more akin to Alex Katz. Similarly, Butler's nods toward Minimalism suggest an attitude of resisting both the idealism of pure abstraction and the picturesque qualities imbued in his subject.


Initially, almost everything about these paintings seems to assert their status as an object. Paint is applied in ways that are unassuming and spare: either dry and scumbled or in very thin washes. These techniques emphasize the grain of the canvas, its materiality. Green Forest (2010-2012), a piece comprised of five oddly-proportioned columnar canvases (each about 76" x 7"), similarly asserts the canvas as an object—not unlike Frank Stella's early work. Also, like Stella, Butler's marks are sometimes laid down in tracks with slight space between them, as in Autumn Forest (Sixty-Three Trees) (2012). Without much over-painting, every step of his process is visible. This makes them performative in a way that feels both loose and fastidious—that is, deliberate and controlled but not precious or fussy.

Butler's consistent allusion to trees complicates all of this insistent materiality. The overall flatness is contradicted by the tree motif, which lets space—an intimation of sky—open up behind them. This implies a horizon line situated (with one exception) outside the frame. That is, these are trees that we are looking up at, an attitude suggesting, it would seem, a kind of reverence for his subject (or, perhaps, for his early 20th-century sources). Forty-Five Trees at Sunset (2012), for instance, seems, at first, almost like a grid painting or a mosaic before suggesting, gradually, the sense of light emanating through a forest. It also has a surprising, very evocative, sense of place. Like Milton Avery, he can wring a lot of atmospheric effect out of surfaces that would seem, initially, rather abstract. In fact, the best summary of Butler's work might be contained in the John Ashbery poem from which he garnered his title (Some Trees): "That their merely being there means something"—though, perhaps in Butler's case, the reverse. For all their "meaning"—their paradoxes, ambiguities and art-historical name-checking—we are left, in the end, with the specificity of their simple presence.

Other Reviews of Benjamin Butler's work:
Ken Johnson
Will Heinrich
Roberta Smith

Review of Amy Feldman's "Dark Selects" at Blackston Gallery

In & Out, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 75 x 80

The paintings included in Amy Feldman’s debut solo show “Dark Selects” (all works 2012) all convey a sense of quick efficient activity constrained by the unity of the single driving impulse: as if a rush of practiced activity could be a way of chasing after one clear yet multifaceted thought. Each work is an initially flat-seeming grey-on-white abstract composition that is revealed upon closer inspection to preserve, to varying degrees, some traces of their painterly production – some drips, light scumbling, and over-lapping brush-strokes. The thin nearly consistent application of paint makes the presence of intermittent drips and off-hand, apparently unfinished areas seem initially incongruous while their overall flat opacity allows them to seem integrated, however tenuously. It’s this dichotomy of form and material held in an unusual and fragile harmony that generates their most unusual effects.

That is, from a certain distance the quirky elegance of her compositions seems like an unlikely result of the gestural intensity implied by the drips. But up close this sense of reserve evaporates and the exact opposite impression occurs: the overall coherence of the whole seems like a contrived or artificial product of an alternately haphazard or deliberately off-hand patch-work of marks. It is weird and destabilizing but also thrilling to see paintings that seem almost at odds with themselves. For instance, in Owed – a large circular donut shape with repeated semi-circular edges like a cartoon cloud (or anus) - the subdued coherence of the work fragments completely, reveals itself to be an utterly provisional, almost an accidental product of these accumulated visceral efforts.

Owed, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80.

Look at them even closer; put your nose right up to the surface of All or Nothing, for example, and you’ll find something else entirely: a fine spritzing of tiny speckles (like paint applied by flicking the bristles of a brush loaded with watery thin paint) distributed almost uniformly across the canvas. From farther back these speckles dissipate into a vague texture accentuated by hazy accumulations, as if offering an amorphous vibrational counter-point to the svelte grey composition. Despite her works remarkable clarity, she’s determined how their effects might differ dramatically with viewing distance or, even, how a slight shift in perception might reveal a vastly different aspect or attitude. They also play with our perception of time. Far from seeming merely quick, these speckles demonstrate how these paintings are actually crafty, pain-staking, and calculated

In & Out, for instance, features a series of concentric not-quite-circles – more like round-corned wobbly off-kilter rectangles – that seems to recede into space inconsistently and then waver as the well-calibrated negative space asserts itself. Despite its relative simplicity, it seems unpredictable in a way – as if all the capricious choices of a virtuosically idiosyncratic hand give it, spatially, a complex ambiguity. The edges of the forms seem to waver and undulate. By painting over the edges of the frame and harnessing the figure/ground relationships into an unexpected optical illusion, Feldman also manages give the painting the sense that it’s about to defy physics – to warp and weave like a glitch in the Matrix. This effect is echoed in All or Nothing – a riff on Kenneth Noland’s famous Chevron paintings. The double “V” formation is contained in a vertical banner form that seems ready to start flapping in some illusory breeze and wrest itself free of its physical support any minute.

All or Nothing, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 96 x 80

She also demonstrates how even a simple form, in the most capable hands, can become fraught and out-of-control - subject to entropy, destabilization, or implosion - once it gets too big. She’s made a point of finding the line that separates control from chaos and then stepping just over that line. In this sense, the flat graphic quality of her work is a measure of her control, confidence, and familiarity with her own visual language, while the drips, which seem almost too neat or consistent but also incongruous, become an index of her anxiety. They’re accidents, that is, but accidents on purpose (as they say.) Far from being just an ostensibly incidental by-product, it just might be that it is these “accidents” which (by adjusting all of the other variables) she’s been conspiring to engineer all along.

Other Reviews and blog posts about Amy Feldman:
Roberta Smith
Anaba
Two Coats of Paint
Howard Hurst

Joyce Pensato's "Batman Returns" at Friedrich Petzel Gallery

For More images of the exhibition see the Friedrich Petzel site.


The idea of the artist’s studio transferred into the gallery is a relatively familiar one. As this show demonstrates, however, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good one. Part of this has to do with the nature of studios. Artists studios are always an object of fascination for art lovers. Studios are the machines that we build to build our work. Great art is likely to be the product of an interesting machine. Our studios, like our houses and apartments, are also products of how we organize our minds.

Here the studio detritus is included along with several of Pensato’s white and black enamel paintings. Scattered throughout the gallery, on the floor or piled on stools and milk crates is a large collection of stuffed animals, found images, drawings, photographs, and toys. Most of them are characters that appear in her paintings. All of them are spattered with her black and white enamal paint, as if catching flack from any number of intense painting sessions. Most of them look filthy too - as if they’ve been kicking around on the floor of an art studio for years (as they undoubtably have.) Some of her milk-crates and stools have enamal hardened on them like shiny black icicles. Most impressively, there’s an astonishingly huge chunk of accumulated enamel paint (several inches think and large enough to cover a wide swatch of studio floor.)

What’s wonderful about this, as is often the case with artists’ studios, is that the machine that she’s built to build her work (her studio), is so of-a-piece with her work itself that it almost renders the paintings themselves a bit extraneous. Fortunately, that’s not the case. If the paintings couldn’t be made without all the bizarre accoutrements of Pensato’s studio then it’s also true to say that her studio couldn’t have been made without the paintings. Here, they reinforce and inform each other. They show us a lot about how she makes her work and even more about why she would in the first place.

It’s nearly impossible not to see Pensato’s work in relation to Mike Kelley’s, especially in light of his recent death. Kelley famously examined the pathos of dingy stuffed animals. However, where Kelley only ever made anti-paintings and explicitly rejected and the attitudes of Modernist painting, Pensato has found that the tools of painterly abstraction could be quite effectively brought to bear on the problem of exploring these characters’ weird combination of charm and abjection. If there’s an immediate art-historical source for Pensato’s painterly technique it’s probably De Koonings black and white enamel paintings from the late forties. By melding Kelley’s unusual concerns with some serious painterly chops, Pensato seems to reveal something about the expressive force of both. While these projects might have seemed at one time diametrically opposed (Kelley once spoke, figuratively, of his “figure/ground” oriented art school training as a type of “trauma”), Pensato has shown us how surprisingly compatible they might actually be.

Her resolutely controlled figure ground relationships force us to see the simple, stark out-line of these characters as if for the first time. The black and white areas tend to flip back and forth between their status as positive or negative space. The intensity of her brushwork, the drips, and the anguished simplified expressions not only evoke German Expressionism but also transmute some of its power. They seem less like cartoon characters in this context and more like spectres of our own subconscious – the rage-filled cartoon duck inside of us all. Cartoon characters, by their nature, are usually presented as slick brightly colored illustration or shiny plastic objects. This belies the fact that the emotions they access in us might not be so neat. The intensity of her mark-making, and her proficiency with these materials helps to reinforce and accentuate some of the darker, latent content of these characters. Rather than an ironic exercise, this seems like an appropriate form of redemption. Donald Duck’s angry, dark soul never looked so good.

Review of Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

This image is a Chris Martin painting from a previous exhibition, for images of the current show see: the Mitchell-Innes & Nash site.

If you spend a lot of time looking at art there inevitably come moments when you find yourself liking things that you wouldn’t normally think of as the type of thing that you like and vice versa: things that seem like the type of thing that you’re usually predisposed to like but which nonetheless disappoint. In the case of Chris Martin’s show at Mitchell-Inness Nash, it was the latter, for me.

There is, after all, a lot to like about his work. There’s a seemingly fearless attitude toward painting at work here. He seems to be having fun. His big color fields – often in harsh unadultured primary colors or combinations of orange and green – on huge canvases - have an initially pleasing monumental presence. He's not shy about approaching the word “heroic.” With its grand scale, curvy oscillating forms, and characteristically loose facture this is painting that openly advertises its faith in “painting” as a vehicle for transcendance – an aspiration they advertise more successful than they fulfil.

The inclusion, here of several images of psychedelic mushrooms, gnomes smoking pipes, an oriental carpet used as a ground for painting, and images of Miles Davis, also all speak of a striving for transcendence or, perhaps, maybe just a valorization of mind-altering drugs. Martin’s commitment to painting itself encourages the former. Even so, these two attitudes (of painterly commitment and an almost Dada-esque habit of under-mining his own paintings by punching holes in them and attaching random pictures and objects) sit uncomfortably with each other. The images and objects themselves are treated as if their inclusion in the paintings is a stylistic choice rather than an encroachment on the painterly field by a contradictory attitude: hippy tapestries meet John Cage. It ends up feeling like he’s taken the lessons of Rauschenberg and Johns purely as stylistic cues. What’s weird about this is that one gets the sense that this is a vein of painting that has defined itself against the idea of “theory” and “post-modernism” as much as it defines itself in favor of anything else. His attitude seems to be, almost overtly, a calculated rejection of Warhol’s attitude even as he seems to owe a great many debts to Warhol.

The most jarring instance of this disjunction occurs in a painting of – of all things – Amy Winehouse. The painting looks like nothing so much as a mediocre Schnabel. Amy Winehouse’s face is crossed out with two overlapping, sloppily executed “T” shapes. It would be unmemorable except for the occurrence of a few haphazardly placed light-gray foot-prints – as if Martin simply stepped onto the still half-dry paint and the dust and grime on his soles adherred to the surface. It could easily be accidental although we know, from the context, anyway, that it isn’t. What’s jarring about this is how calculated its apparently chance occurrence appears to be. It seems not so much accidental, as in Pollock’s paintings – an incidental side-effect of painterly activity - as it seems to evoke Warhol’s parodic painting of dance-routine foot-patterns. Those paintings codified the idea of making a painting horizontally rather than vertically, declaring its status as a conventional move. What seems odd about this foot-print here is that it seems calculated to come off as uncalculated – as if we’re meant to applaud his insousciance for “breaking the rules” when we already know that this has been defined as a "rule." In his own words Martin describes his practice like this “The discipline is going into the studio and moving materials around. Then I just back off, suspend critical judgment, and just let things happens.” Maybe that “suspending critical judgment part isn’t such a great idea, actually.

If the boundary between painting and the world is so undeniably porous, then why hasn’t he let more of it in? The materials that he includes in his paintings suggest that we might put “anything” into a painting but then the “anything” that he lets in seems oddly proscribed. As numerous artists have demonstrated the familiar detritus of the world is adequate material for art, with or without paint. Likewise, painting remains perfectly capable on its own. Martin’s material promiscuity and painterly chops are all good things, but the confusion of means with ends strikes me as relatively myopic. If you’re going to open your paintings up to the world, open them up all the way.

Carter Mull

Carter Mull’s “The Days Specific Dreams” at Taxter & Spengemann from 5/6/11 to 6/11/11
As published in Artillery Magazine.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. That might sound like a trite bit of conventional wisdom, but there’s more truth to it than we sometimes seem to acknowledge. At least, I might hazard to guess, Carter Mull thinks so. With a mix of images that focuses on the technology of media and communication, art-history, and pop-culture appropriations, his work suggests a sense of visual time travel and inspires the thought that the past is less distant than we think. His almost kaleidescopic and of-the-moment style – big colorful photos collaged together using a mix of digital and traditional photographic techniques – makes older appropriated imagery seem brand new while familiar pop subjects are contextualized historically. A rather contemporary looking Brillo box in Z is for Marylin (b) (2011), for example, suggests the degree of our precise historical distance from the Pop artists like Warhol who pioneered the use of that type of subject matter.

Granted, none of this is, undoubtedly, the first thought that his work is likely to evoke. Perhaps the opposite, actually. These things are, after all, pretty flashy with a prismatic palette that would suggest associations with amateurish quasi-psychedelic PhotoShop trickery if it weren’t pulled off with an impressive elan, scale, and technical expertise. They come off at first like nothing more than fantastic eye candy so it’s almost startling to recognize that the style is as much a means as an end. The compositions are vaguely reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s loose funky grid formats although his intent and imagery are more like Sigmar Polke’s.

The first clue, then, that these works might be up to other things is the repeated use of an unfolded front/back page of The New York Times, photographed straight on, parallel to the picture plane, and centered squarely in the middle of his compositions. Newspapers have a particular, essential, relationship to the history of pop art, of course, but here they’re used to evoke both the dailyness of the mundane, their dissolution into the digital world and, contrarily, their opposition to the daily and mundane: a reminder that the alternately sudden and gradual march of historical events can and do cause seismic shifts in the shape and structure of the world that we all have to live in. It’s hard then not to imagine these works slipping into the past one specific day at a time.

Alternately, the older images serve an opposite function. In Typist, an engraving of a loom from Diderot’s Encyclopédie (an 18th century encyclopedia) is over-laid with a rainbow hued gradient that could have come from some currently hip graphic design source: a recent iPod or American Apparel ad, for instance. Juxtaposed with the silvery reflective prints of iPhones scattered all over the gallery floor, the unavoidable message is that even antiquated technology was once newfangled too. That is, our perception of the past is based not on some rational sense of chronological time but, rather, keyed to the aesthetic of its representations. That’s something worth remembering.

Karl Wirsum

Review of Karl Wirsum at Derek Eller Gallery in September of 2010 as published in Artillery Magazine.

Karl Wirsum’s show “Drawings: 1967 – 1970) at Derek Eller Gallery, is his first solo show in New York in 20 years and, judging by the evidence on hand here, this has been an aggregious over-sight. Maybe not a surprising one, though – Wirsum’s career – like that of the other members of the group of Chicago Imagists known as “The Hairy Who?”, was built on a certain indifference to the supposed cultural elite, in particular the supposed importance of New York as a cultural capital. As it turns out, though, we obviously need artists like Wirsum more than they need us.

At their most basic level, the drawings in this show resemble, very superficially, what happens when kids try to learn to draw by copying superheroes out of comic books without understanding how the patterns of light and dark and over-lapping contours are supposed to create volumetric form. This is usually a liability but by employing this technique deliberately – not unlike how Lichtenstein revealed the abstract qualities of comic book panels merely by blowing them up to epic proportions – Wirsum finds an opportunity here.

One of my favorite drawings in this show was a black, yellow, and orange drawing of a cow-girl twirling a lasso. It feels like something that could be a strip club neon sign straight out of Las Vegas but it’s somehow more mysterious. There’s a totemic quality about it as if the buxom cow-girl has been elevated to some sort of mythological status while the crummy aesthetics and lurid materialism of the source material has been identified as grotesque and roundly rejected. Another drawing here of a red-head in a pin-up pose (all of the ddrawings here are figures of some sort) seems to simultaneously mock and re-invent its source. The hair is treated as a flat abstract firy red shape interspersed with lightning-like white hightlights while the body looks unfinished, defined only in contour, with a face and arms filled in with lines that suggest razor-wire as readily as lip-stick.

Other works include a pair of sexy legs with a black helmet shaped skirt and the caption, “Nazi helmet skirt”, and a few drawings of what might be native women appropriated from old National Geographic’s, and a standing figure with a frogs face and a vibrating body of abstract psychedelic doodles that reminds me of the phrase “like being inside of an Aztec pinball machine” which the comedian Marc Maron once used to describe what it was like to close his eyes while under the influence of some very intense mushrooms. In all of these works Wirsum is taking familiar types and motifs and rendering them strange alien, totally abstract, and precisely differentiated. Characters, images, areas of abstract decoration, or stylistic choices, sometimes seem to reoccur but never exactly the same way twice. Despite – rather, probably, because of – his drawings loose funky attitudes, it’s immediately clear that they are products of sophisticated visual thinking in which multiple ends are always approached simultaneously, and a semi-improvisational process in which every line seems to be part of a process of discovery.

Hiroyuki Doi at Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Review of Hiroyuki Doi at Ricco/Maresca Gallery as published in Artillery magazine.


The term “Outsider” whatever it might have once meant is, at this point, nothing more than a marketing angle for galleries to sell art made by artists who exist outside of the normal social and power structures of the art-world – meaning, mostly, that they don’t have MFAs. Granted, some historical examples of artists from this category (Darger, Wolfi, et al) are real marginal characters – lunatics, cranks, and social isolates (not to mention the occassional pedophile) – but being an artist is marginal to begin with. Not just that, there are at least a few “insider” characters that might be described variously as lunatics, cranks, social isolates or even pedophiles.

Hiroyuki Doi would have to be a prime example of how this category has become irrelevant and therefore misleading. Doi is an untrained artist who started making work late in life (in his 30s.) Now, he’s sixty-four and, having been in a show at The Folk Art Museum and made appearances at The Outsider Art Fair, makes some of his living selling art. I suppose that, given his biography, what makes him an “Outsider” is the fact that he made work for a long time, solely for its own sake, for his own personal satisfaction. Of course, that’s not the definition of an “Outsider,” that’s the definition of an artist.

His work itself, for what it’s worth, bears none of the hall-marks of mawkishness that we might associate with that category either. Each piece is made from ink on paper, and composed of innumerable tiny circles, varying slightly in size though all about ¼” or smaller, organized in a loose Mandala-like symmetry. The term “obsessive-compulsive” might almost apply except that their repetitiveness belies an astonishing intricacy. They have the look of of light-filled effervescent sea foam or airy nebulae – ephemeral but also concrete. Not unlike a Jackson Pollack painting Doi’s Alkaseltzer constellations allude, tantalizingly, to any number of natural phenomenon without literally representing any of them.

Each circle seems to form a spontaneous grouping with the circles around it and therefore to form aggregate structures at varying scales. In part, this happens because his precise touch allows him to activate negative space inside of each circle. This sense of order – a consciousness of every part (at any scale that we choose to examine the work) – also effectively communicates the idea that these circles are meant to be seen as metaphors for the individual. We’re all unique and special, they seem to suggest, but only as part of a larger whole. In the U.S., the notion of the totally atomic, self-reliant, transcendently special “individual” underlies many of our guiding myths (cowboys, celebrity, laissez faire economics) – even as the modern world has completely eroded any actual autonomy. Our core beliefs, as a nation, are, on some level, misguided and deluded – not just wrong but absolutely contrary to reality. Doi’s work (abstract though it may be) suggests a useful antithesis.