Jenny Saville Now

by Stephen Cummings

What do you say about Jenny Saville? One of the Young British Artists who found fame in the early nineties, Saville remains perhaps best known for that first body of work she produced to fill London's Saatchi Gallery in 1994. Those paintings were brazen at the time, large and naked and very much anti-ideal. Saville confronted her audience without being combative. Her feminism proffered vulnerability. Arranging the naked form became her routine, and the nakedness, along with the British connection, led maybe inevitably to comparisons with Lucian Freud, a painter whose surfaces are as unpolished as his subjects, and comparison to whom is not a small compliment.

But that was 1994.

Two decades since those earliest works were snatched up, Jenny Saville at Florida's Norton Museum of Art puts old and new side by side, demonstrating both stark change and general continuity in the artist's work. The shock of the monumental, unlovely nude has certainly dulled with the passage of time, as has Saville's flirtation with bloody things. Women have remained her focus, though not so much the image of women. But without the confrontation of Saville's early subjects, what we're left with are just these paintings and drawings. And emphasis, unfortunately, must be placed on just.

Absent a powerful political message, Jenny Saville must be considered as a painter. That the artist is skilled there can still be no doubt. Her series Reproduction drawings, for example, demonstrates highly competent draftsmanship; strong linear development, replete with varied weights and cross-contours and utmost confidence — all the things we try to teach students in drawing class. Her paint application is equally facile, but how many MICA graduates paint just as well?

Comparisons to Freud are all well and good when we're considering the strange baseness of pale, human flesh, but what more does Saville have in common with the recently departed master? Looming large and bursting at the canvasses' edges, her figures are much too grandiose to share his concerns. And while Saville moved on to splashier, more demonstrative paint application, Freud's was a long obsession with coarse, awkward plainness. To her credit, Saville herself draws a contrast: "Freud's women are dead bodies; they lie there," she says. "I don't make those images." And as the Norton points out, "Critic Charles Darwent wrote about [Saville's Fulcrum] '[...] The echo is less of Freud than of Francis Bacon, humanity on the butcher's block.'" But is comparison to Bacon fair? Here again is the British connection, but the pain of a Bacon painting is abject. Even his paint is tortured, barely holding on. Saville's, by contrast, is smooth and easy. She likes that way paint flows.

More descriptive in the early years, the brushstrokes in much of this exhibition document Saville's tendency toward broader, more blatant mark-making. "I have moved away from the anatomy of the body to the anatomy of paint," she said. With a statement like that you might expect to see a painter like Willem de Kooning, whose figures were almost obliterated by "the anatomy of paint". But Saville's paint, rather than redefining her figures, remians wholly beholden to description. However free her brushstrokes almost are, they still subordinate themselves to her very reserved mosaic — and not a Chuck Close-like mosaic either. Heads so large as Saville's compare naturally to Close, but are not nearly straightforward enough to be so powerfully honest. Their roving gestures come across as forced, if not as forced as the containment of would-be wild brushstrokes within unsurprising portraits.

The most recent piece in Jenny Saville is Isis (2011), an over life-size portrait of a pregnant mother, and an exemplar of the artist's progress from her initial pluck into stardom. Gone is any hint of confrontation in this subject. The woman is placid, content, and, frankly, attractive. She is a contemporary embodiment of the Ancient Egyptian goddess of motherhood — or so it is indicated. Saville's description is lovely, but the content, including "ancient texts" projected across this woman's body, is entirely tacked on. Those splashy, overemphasized strokes of color have fortunately gone away, reverting to the simpler, softer approach. What we're looking at in the end is a portrait, plain and simple, forced lighting situation or no. There is not a hint of Freud, nor Bacon. Instead, the artist Jenny Saville resembles most closely with this canvas, more than any other I can think of, is John Singer Sargent, whom de Kooning called "a good, bad painter".

Art 2011: The Best of Further Wanderings

by Stephen Cummings

In a year that felt abundant with looks back at great artists my biggest regret in terms of seeing art is not having made it to New York for MoMA’s first ever retrospective of Willem de Kooning. Of course no one can be everywhere, and while I was fortunate enough to be in a lot of places this year, the trouble with being all over is that you’re bound to miss a lot from any one place in particular. So again I offer a selection of the best new works and exhibitions I managed to see over the past year. My route was at times directed by art, and at others by the whims of my life, but having bounced up and down both coasts and through several cities in between, I hope the list presented here can provide some kind of useful sample of the best the country had to offer in 2011.

A Small Self-Portrait

The year got off to a strong start with three exceptional pieces on display simultaneously at UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum. Roberto Cuoghi's untitled self-portrait is a rare achievement in the practice of drawing. Far from feeling academic, this small piece is a staggering turn of realism with a figure as viscerally present as any painted by Manet or even Rembrandt. Coughi's portrait is unpretentious and uncanny, and reinforces realism's place in contemporary discourse — though given the rest of the portraits in this body of work, Cuoghi certainly doesn't subscribe to the school of though that prizes it above all else.

The Cutters

In adjacent galleries could be found the Hammer's All Of This And Nothing, featuring, among other works, Gedi Sibony’s The Cutters. The language of this piece was so concise, and its feeling of completion so thorough, it was clear from the beginning this would likely be one of the best things I’d see. Sibony is truly one to traffic in arrangements. As reported in W magazine a few years back, “He avoids altering his finds from their original state [...]. Before an opening he’ll spend days arranging his works so that the light will energize them, creating rich ‘situations’ for viewers.” The richness of The Cutters was, as mentioned, a quiet and powerful thing to behold.

Anticultural Positions

Also part of All Of This And Nothing was Paul Sietsema’s Anticultural Positions, a thirty-minute, looped film featuring black and white stills of the artist’s working surfaces interspersed with text from a lecture he reportedly presented in 2008. The effect was disjointed and abstract, a gorgeous visual experience complimented by the mesmerizing rattle of the projector. Literally readable in parts, but overall quite bewildering, Anticultural Positions nevertheless created an atmosphere to be savored.

The End

In Pittsburgh, another video piece proved even more enthralling. Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End, on view at the Carnegie Museum, enveloped its audience in a visual and and auditory landscape like nothing I’ve ever encountered. The weird, warped music and vast, white wilderness combined to create an environment both serene and exhilarating, and Kjartansson’s odd mix of exuberance and flippancy make him a joy to watch.

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris

Another collection of greatly varied styles came from an in-depth look at a single artist in the de Young Museum’s Picasso. It was the same traveling show that left Seattle earlier in the year, drawn from the currently renovating Musée National Picasso in Paris. Now, I’ve visited that museum, but something about the way this show was laid out made the work absolutely thrilling. While it felt a little thin in the early years — a number of Picasso’s best early works having been snagged by the Steins, interestingly — man, did Picasso take off as he got older. Still lifes, portraits, busts, bathers, and even some lesser known landscapes from the artist’s early days to his last made Picasso an unforgettable look at the master.

B. Wurtz: Works, 1970 - 2011

And maybe equally unforgettable was Metro Pictures Gallery’s retrospective of B. Wurtz. Little known outside the confines of artistic circles, Wurtz has been steadily producing smart, playful sculptures since the 1970s. Some of these are freestanding, some hang on the wall, but all incorporate surprisingly common objects to produce compositions of uncommon originality and wit. So light are Wurtz’s creations that they made even Richard Tuttle’s work, concurrent at the nearby Pace Gallery, feel leaden. Reviewing the show in June, Roberta Smith was quite right in her sentiment that, “Mr. Wurtz’s show may be, in its own quiet and eccentric way, one of the high points of the summer, if not the entire year.”

Bryson Gill: Plaisir l'Oeil

by Stephen Cummings

The trompe l’oeil tradition goes back a long way in the history of painting; a Baroque term, so Wikipedia reminds me, used to describe the devices of perspectival painting intended to ‘deceive the eye’ into perceiving great depth where, on a flat surface, obviously none could exist. (Ceilings opening onto the heavens were popular.) Artists working on architecture today are similarly deceptive — Banksy, perhaps most comically — but trompe l’oeil painting refers most often to that class of still life works whose represented objects are depicted in a relatively shallow space, one so carefully rendered as to fool the viewer into believing he sees not a representation, but the objects themselves. The most apt illustration of this tradition dates back to ancient Greece, where, as Pliny tells us, the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius struck a bet to see whose painting could most closely mimic the real world. Zeuxis’s grapes were real enough to entice birds to swoop down at the supposed fruit, but when he asked Parrhasius to pull aside the cloth covering his painting, the painter realized he had been beaten, for the ‘cloth’ was the painting itself, and while Zeuxis had fooled the birds, Parrhasius had fooled Zeuxis.

Following the Renaissance, trompe l’oeil still life painting proceeded with variable popularity from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth, but the practice was largely eclipsed by the rise of Modernism, sputtering out with provincial Americans producing staid collections of playing cards and other clutter depicted against wooden backdrops. Given the accelerating pace of the twentieth century, it’s no wonder a tradition predicated on artists’ mastery of illusion was shunted aside when our collective focus shifted to ideas, and materials, and a general questioning of tradition itself — not to mention painting’s shift, from illusion to literal flatness.

So imagine my delight upon entering San Francisco’s Triple Base Gallery to find the paintings of Bryson Gill in his new exhibition, The Optimist Gene. Having determined to see the show from a look at the gallery website, I had already been fooled, asking a friend to come along to see “Oh, some paper collages, I don’t know.” As it turned out, what appeared to be folded paper scraps were strokes and daubs of paint, presented in thoroughly convincing trompe l’oeil.

Far from being old-fashioned, Gill’s approach is fresh and exciting. He's embraced the painted focus of Modernism, allowing his ‘paper’ forming strokes to rise from the linen surface of each painting in unabashed impasto. These marks are as much paint as they are mimics of paper texture, abjuring the smoothness of traditional trompe l’oeil in favor of something not nearly so fussy, yet even more convincing. Meanwhile, the paintings’ ‘cast shadows’ are soft as can be, so thin as to appear stained into the fabric, and masterfully carrying off the illusion of depth. In this way, the artist has achieved the Postmodern joke of literal/representational simultaneity. It’s a trompe l’oeil — but! no, it’s just paint strokes.

Filling out these canvases are playfully stained and patterned backgrounds, further emphasizing the flatness of each affair, and in one piece making up the entire composition. A few of the works offer a Picasso-like still life sensibility in which the simplest shapes become suddenly complex elements of one of painting’s classic subjects, but still maintain the light-heartedness of present day. Even a stick-figure is not outside the purview of this artist, whose humble paintings are as pleasurable as they are deceptively simple, and become all the more exciting the longer they manage to linger in your mind.

Through January 1st.

Bryan Christiansen's Nature Preserve

by Stephen Cummings

If Bryan Christiansen's exhibition at Stremmel Gallery in Reno challenges anything, I suppose it's Stremmel's status as a purveyor of hotel wall decorations priced for the wealthy, art-inexperienced. (Unfortunately, he's paired with John Randall Nelson.) That's a little simplistic, but it's fair to say that Stremmel is at least not on the cutting edge — such as it is. With pretty pictures, and pleasant sculptures, this isn't a place to go to see what's going on; it's a place to go to pick up something Westerny, or something with nice colors; it's a place you've seen before if you've wandered on vacation through some vaguely artsy quarter in a tourist district. Happily, Christiansen's work bucks the trend of the expected. It's nice, yes, even pretty, but there's less pretension here. Add to that a little lighthearted self-awareness, and this artist is well deserving of the recognition Nevada Museum of Art offered in 2010.

NMA has compared Christiansen's sculptures to Bruce Conner and Ed Kienholz, although with some serious caveats that rightly show the artists to be pretty much wholly dissimilar. These creatures are much too sweet to draw parallels to such brutal assemblages as theirs. (Was a comparison to Deborah Butterfield too obvious?) There also, judging from the current work, seems to be little basis for the notion that these pieces "represent Christiansen's own triumph of the present over the past and his strength to confront some of life's most challenging contradictions." (Seriously, what does "[his] own triumph of the present over the past" even mean?)

What the museum did get right in describing these works is the phrase "exquisitely crafted". Christiansen's frozen menagerie is like something Richard Jackson might make if he could ever let go of his grumpiness. The forms are, again, sweet, and cleanly put together, but absent is the heaping bowlful of irony. A couch is a deer and that's all there is to it.

Ok, so there's some irony. What Brad Bynum described as "a neat inversion of hunting" yields beasts resurrected from discarded human detritus, Christiansen stalking the streets and alleyways to find it. The hunted has become . . . well, the hunted. Timorous, elegant creatures have become stilted, ornamental furniture, and furniture here is taxidermy. It's a little like Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, being both representation and stubbornly not. Then there's also the "hide" of an armchair, splayed out as if a trophy rug, and a trio of framed "hide" pieces, prodding the nature of stretched artist supports. These are whimsical things; puns in physical form.

Piecing together living forms from scrap is hardly unique in the artsy crafty West, but Christiansen's work hints at an awareness of his surroundings. His exploration is one of made and found and what's made and what's found and what's to be made of what's found. It's an exploration that raises the bar for Stremmel, and is a welcome development in Reno. Bryan Christiansen may be making pretty animals, but he would appear to be more than just a craftsman.

See more work from Bryan Christiansen on the GO SEE ART Flickr page.

The Beautiful, Bizarre End

by Stephen Cummings

No praise for the Carnegie Museum’s summer programming would be complete without mentioning Ragnar Kjartansson. Having gotten some attention representing Iceland in the 2009 Venice Bienniale, Kjartansson was brought to Pittsburgh this year for his first U.S. solo museum exhibition. Song collects four of the artist’s video works (as well as one limited run performance which I unfortunately didn’t catch) and sprinkles them throughout the museum to offer their often comedic and occasionally moving experiences.

The videos variously display a half-buried, unclothed guitarist (Kjartansson), a triptych of one expectorating mother (Kjartansson’s), and the captivating nonagenarian pianist Pinetop Perkins (now deceased), whose performance deserves mention for its unadorned directness if nothing else. Perkins is mesmerizing in this piece. Sitting at his piano working his way unhurriedly through a well-worn repertoire, the man may as well be tickling a dusty old stand-up in some bygone saloon or speakeasy. He’s a hold-out from an era that’s slipped away, a time capsule in himself. Kjartansson’s The Man is as much a document of Perkins as it is a piece in its own right, highlighting the tension in mechanical reproduction between what is made and what is observed.

Whatever the case, the prize of the show is The End, which featured at that little biennial mentioned above, and is here unencumbered by any painting performance. With four guitars, two amps, a bass, one drum set, one baby grand, two bottles of bourbon, and ten furry, skin caps, this performance is assembled in the only way it could be: on video, in five projections. Kjartansson and his collaborator and fellow musician Davíð Þór Jónsson play every part in the thirty minute concoction, the only members of an eight piece ensemble uncollected in a snowy Canadian wilderness and filling the gallery’s four walls. It’s brilliant. The song, a patient, folksy kind of thing, ambles along as it pleases until those points where it builds into a great cacophony, piano or drums taking control, before settling back into its regular, leisurely warp. The mood is easy, but affecting, and the odd collection of instruments makes for a wriggling, intriguing texture, here bluegrass, there classical — now an electric guitar squawk?

Kjartansson seems to thrive on upending expectations. The setting in this piece would appear to indicate a reverence for sublime nature, but then there’s all that recording equipment, as though this great outside were actually just some inside somewhere. And of course there are the performers themselves, clearly committed when it’s their time to play, but when it’s not, hey, it’s cold outside. They warm their hands, they look around. Sometimes they take whiskey breaks. On separate walls, both of the nonperforming bystanders just walk away. There is no decorum in this group, a nonchalance which bends the enthralling audible and visual components toward something equally laugh inducing.

If you haven’t seen this piece, it’s well worth the visit. And hey, it’s in the lobby, so you didn’t hear it from me, but just wander in. I guarantee Kjartansson wouldn’t mind. And if you’ve ever wondered why art should be taken so seriously, go see for yourself that it’s not always supposed to be.

Zak Prekop Makes Good Paintings

by Stephen Cummings

Zak Prekop makes good paintings — at least as far as I can tell, given the selection currently on view at the Carnegie Museum. As part of Pittsburgh's 2011 Biennial, the museum has assembled a group of works ranging from generously sized found objects to stacks of a newsprint comic book to sculpture that urges the use of 3D glasses. The sampling makes Prekop's flat canvases appear downright traditional, even as they thwart expectations. While much else in the show seems to be clambering (yes, clambering) for attention — albeit with a fairly uniform detachment — Prekop's works stand out from the others not because they stretch farther, but rather because they hang back, waiting for you to take notice. Do.

In total there are seven paintings, roughly human in size. I say 'paintings', though all but one of these pieces include collaged paper. They represent a breed of abstraction somewhat reminiscent of the irregular, amorphous color forms of Ellsworth Kelly, as well as the great collages of Henri Matisse, which he called "drawing with scissors." Two pieces in fact are straight collage in the Matisse tradition, but with their cut paper shapes adhered to the backs of their stretched, bare canvases — and minus the color. Much as these predecessors, Prekop is drawing with the edges of his shapes. This as opposed to forming the edges of those shapes through his drawing, just one of the apparent contradictions that makes the work so engaging.

If there is any expression in these forms at all, perhaps it is to be found in the edges, but taken with the work's other elements, a cool remove is constantly established. Where there is color, it tends to be muted. Where there is pattern, it is interrupted. Where texture is evident, it is ever used to emphasize these paintings' stubborn flatness. Even when offering up a deep, Yves Klein blue, or running blue and red racing stripes across a canvas, Prekop deliberately interrupts his compositions, substituting reticence for would-be boldness. Fields of paint are broken up to make their holds on the canvases merely tentative. Much of what is presented seems as though it has already been peeled away. There is nothing of Agnes Martin's search for the sublime in the patterning here. Something so grand is necessarily undermined. We're not allowed to grab hold of anything in considering this work, as though we're repeatedly being told No, it can't be.

This is precisely these paintings' allure. Because nothing is asserted without due contradiction, a skepticism is instilled that is either melancholy or refreshing, or probably both. Without being allowed to fall wholly into any one illusion, we must enter each deliberately, aware of the impossibility of the journey, but willing to indulge nonetheless, just for the moment. What Zak Prekop has offered is a space stripped of presumption, where everything must be taken as false before anything can be accepted as true. The result is a group of works that do not ask you to come in, but, once you have, are reluctant to let you out.

Another On Kawara

by Stephen Cummings

My compliments to the Carnegie Museum of Art for hanging their collection chronologically. The practice is in no way unusual of course, but in this particular configuration it allowed me to experience an old artist in a new and supremely satisfying way. I've seen On Kawara's paintings before, those brazenly direct canvases putting forward nothing but a date. Oct.31,1978. Apr.24,1990. If you don't know about the Today Series, it might make you go, Huh, someone painted a date. If you do know, it sort of makes you go, Huh, he really does paint the dates. The experience definitely has a slant of novelty, but the paintings are more than that. There's a Minimal appeal to the work; clean, white letters on flat, dark grounds; and there's something vaguely profound about the act of constructing the date and offering it up for consideration, as though the day itself were being made, or would not have otherwise been. Most often you'll see these canvases alone, single examples amid the throb of post-modern (are we calling it that?) exuberance, or reticence, or reductive, deconstructive explication. At other times you might find two or three together, a little huddling group looking skeptically at the other artists' paintings. Why so showy, Ellsworth Kelly? Then there are those retrospectives, which I have not seen myself, but that pictures indicate are filled with nothing but date paintings, great, stark gatherings of day upon day, powerful in their uniformity.

At the Carnegie Museum my experience was different. Perusing the Scaife Galleries from present to past I first came upon Kawara's Feb. 29, 1988, a small, grey to black object in the classic Kawara style. My reaction was typical, something along the lines of, Ah, On Kawara. Little more thought was given. I've seen these, after all; my visit was not interrupted. Farther on however, in another gallery, I found myself considering Apr. 27, 1978. Wait, hadn't I just seen On Kawara? Confused, I backtracked to find the first painting. Indeed I had. So little notice had I given the first time that I still was unsure whether my mind was playing tricks on me when confronted with the second, red painting. Now I could compare them in my mind; I had forgotten some of these Today paintings came in color. The pleasure began to set in. Around another wall, 19 Jul. 68. This one was again grey-black (more grey and less black?), but with rounded lettering, more like the free-loving ‘60s. I laughed out loud.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the surprise. Setting aside the novelty, however, there is much to recommend this way of presenting and considering Kawara's work. It's tempting to group the Today paintings because their forms are so similar. Presenting them far apart from one another must be a far more conscious decision than with the work of someone like Philip Guston, for example, whose paintings underwent massive transformations during his career. By seeing them apart, we are reminded that each painting is in fact unique, something that's easy to forget when they are presented serially. We may also be reminded of their similarities though. It helps to see Kawara's paintings grouped with other paintings of the same period, to be reminded what Frank Stella and Paul Feeley were doing when Kawara painted 19 Jul. 68, and what Bruce Nauman was doing when Feb. 29, 1988 was made. The Today Series is remarkably consistent in the presence of such changing approaches, and all the more remarkable for having remained so over so many decades.

The greatest pleasure for me was to be reminded of the passage of time, to remember that each of these dates is distinct, and represents a real time in the past. Kawara's paintings — whether you see the accompanying newspaper-lined boxes or not — are like time capsules sent out into the world to remind us of our own existence. One day in 1968, On Kawara actually made the day, a day different from all the other days, distinct from the day before and the one after. And here it is for us too see in 2011, 19 Jul. 68, just as it was then, made by a man alive on that day, considered by you and me on this day. Without the progression, from one day in 1968 to another, separate and distinct, in 1978, to yet another, equally unique, just as far removed, in 1988, it’s too easy to see each painting as just another day, one in an endless series of sameness. Fortunately, at the Carnegie, these paintings are much more.