Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass

by Stephen Cummings

It seemed the great majority of opinions formed around Michael Heizer's instantly famous sculpture, installed last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, had been decided well in advance of it's actual creation. In the extreme cases, it was either the greatest thing to happen in four thousand years, or the worst possible thing anyone could ever do with a boulder. Mostly though it was just a novelty of engineering, of the effort involved in moving an object so heavy through a cityscape so sprawling — and how expensive that was. Christopher Knight, writing for the LA Times, produced an interesting analysis of the phenomenon, and was, as far as I have found, the only person to note in print that all of the judgements, whatever else they were, were coming in a little bit prematurely. "I can't tell you how many people have asked whether I like a sculpture that doesn't yet exist," he wrote last March, three months before the piece was finally unveiled.

For those who did reserve their judgements for a finished product, the reaction was middling. Many, as is usual, preferred to make no judgement, and again report on the process of bringing the piece to fruition, or the ceremony of the opening, but for those who chose to write about the earthwork itself, Knight once again provides an appropriately representative sample: "Huge advance publicity set up a love-it-or-hate-it anticipation for either a masterpiece or a fiasco. But this work is neither." Having now seen the work myself, I am inclined to agree, but the question then is why.

First it should be reiterated that the boulder itself is not the artwork. In other words, don't just go glance at the rock and proclaim dissatisfaction — or, for that matter, not go and still proclaim dissatisfaction. Rather, this piece seems to be about the experience of approaching and walking under the boulder through the concrete trench — just about being everywhere called a "slot" — that forms the lower portion of this large earthwork sculpture, along with the hardware holding the rock in place, namely a pair of heavy steel shelves bolted to the trench walls and the boulder. The surrounding field of decomposed granite serves mostly as a framing device, directing the focus to what is inside the trench, not out.

Much criticism has sprung from the title of the piece, Levitated Mass, which, if for some reason you're inclined to take the title of an artwork literally, promises that the famously massive boulder will float in midair, or at least present the illusion of floating. And then there was LACMA Director Michael Govan promising repeatedly ahead of time that the title was indeed to be taken literally. "The piece is actually called Levitated Mass, because, as you walk down the ramp, it will appear that the rock is levitating," he states in a YouTube video released by the museum before the rock moved from its quarry. Govan has not been one to hold back, either in his advance proclamations or subsequent praise for the piece, so it may not be surprising that it doesn't quite live up to his promises. My favorite analysis on this point comes from a deadpan Wikipedia contributor, taking a little bit more liberty than Wikipedians are generally afforded, writing, "Initial plans for the work described the boulder as being affixed to the trench walls themselves, giving the boulder the appearance of 'floating' when viewed from within the trench via optical illusion, hence the work's title. With the addition of the support shelves, this illusion does not occur." Another way of looking at it could be that the boulder does not appear to levitate any more than the ceiling in your home does when you walk down the stairs, but the writer is on to something in citing the shelves.

Ignoring the the title of Levitated Mass, we should evaluate the piece, as we would any other, based upon the reality it proposes. And what seems to be proposed, standing under the two story boulder, is that a feeling of uneasiness should set in. No, we shouldn't suspend our disbelief to think the rock is levitating, but its purchase should feel uncertain, sort of the way Richard Serra's best sculptures bend the space around themselves, disorienting viewers and seeming on the point of toppling. As it stands now, Wikipedia is on the mark. The great steel brackets lend too much stability, relegating the megalith oddly to the status of a giant knick knack, placed carefully on the mantle.

Curiously, only architectural publications have seen fit to delve into the compromises made in constructing this piece. Architectural Record notes, "The design and engineering team had to balance Heizer’s vision with the safety of the public," and goes on to describe some of the earthquake safety measures implemented in the construction. And in The Architect's Newspaper, a more exhaustive list:

Many of the design details of Levitated Mass prioritized technical requirements above aesthetics. The cement trench rises above the decomposed granite of the surrounding grounds to waist height—otherwise the building code would have required a glass railing. ADA-mandated handrails make an unavoidable contribution to the interior of the trench. And two of the concrete trench’s more noticeable characteristics have more to do with nuisance abatement than artistic panache: the skimcoat cover on the concrete will make graffiti easy to wash away and recoat, and triangle notches on both ends of the trench are meant to keep skateboarders off the concrete.

All of these elements have an effect on the experience of the piece, and one wonders if these compromises could have been mitigated? Why, for example, didn't the ADA mandated handrails simply continue to the top of the trench? They would then have appeared more as a conscious design element than regulatory accommodation. And indeed, why aren't the trench walls closer together so as to support the boulder directly? One imagines that the bolts holding the rock in place could have been disguised somehow.

As with any artwork, such speculation is just a critical exercise, since the piece is already made and not going anywhere — this one more than most. I wouldn't go quite so far as Christopher Knight in calling this piece "good". The word that comes to my mind instead is 'fine'. It's just a shame that in a piece designed to dominate a landscape for hundreds, or, it's been suggested, thousands of years, the compromise stands out just a little bit more than the vision.

Art 2012: Ocean Park at OCMA

by Stephen Cummings

It's rare to come across an Ocean Park painting in the gardens of galleries dotting our country's coasts and interiors. Rarer still is it to find more than one in a single outing. Isolated, these paintings are novelties, wanderers from that great body of work by the great Richard Diebenkorn, his crowning achievement, his masterpiece(s).

We know because we've seen them in books, salivating and wondering if we'd ever have the opportunity to see them in person. Those stragglers we find now and again are confirmations of Ocean Park's existence, but alone they only intensify the curiosity. On the page the paintings are bright, their colors played up against the intense white, and their sizes obliterated, reduced to measurements of too many inches. With only the occasional representative, the question inevitably persists: what must the others be like?

This year, for anyone with the means in Southern California, Eastern Texas, or within a reasonable radius of Washington, D.C., that curiosity was finally satisfied with Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, "the first major museum exhibition to explore the artist’s most celebrated series", as the Orange County Museum of Art put it.

The colors of the catalogues did not accompany these paintings into real life. Diebenkorn's reality is much more subdued and contemplative. The paintings, as we know, fill walls, but less well known is that many fill mere inches. With rooms and rooms of Ocean Park, each piece was no longer a memento, but a full fledged force to behold — or by which to be held, turned, pushed. There is no monolithic Ocean Park, not in size or palette or medium. With uncommon authority, each canvass — or collage, or etching, or cigar box lid — directs you in its own way and offers its own unique rewards.

One long held measure of a painting's effectiveness has been its ability to function both up close and at a distance. The painting, it is said, should excite the eye no matter what the proximity. Surprisingly however, many of these works do no such thing, and interestingly manage to in no way fall short. While most paintings that draw you in and prove wanting only disappoint, Diebenkorn's seem simply to say to you, 'No no, go stand over there,' as though there is an optimal viewing range for every piece, and each will let you know in turn what that position is.

In this way the paintings upend the common notion of "push and pull" which generally refers to the illusion of space within a painting. At the Orange County Museum, the push and pull was of the visitor, paintings tugging you in from other rooms, pressing you into oblique viewing angles, pulling you right up to the layered surfaces, and pushing you back when you got too close.

What's more, for all the buzz around their landscape inspiration — some have mentioned overhead views of farmland in addition the Ocean Park neighborhood itself — there isn't much space in these paintings. Diebenkorn seems to keep colors flat precisely to prevent them from competing for depth. Thus, a mark that's technically over can be through, as in Ocean Park #54, in which an opaque blue line pushes its way through a same blue scumbling. The interplay here is between millimeters, not miles, for as with much of the artist's work, what each piece reveals more than anything else is the process of its own making.

The what of that process was of course Diebenkorn's constant revision. A layer of yellow over red, washes of pink and blue and green resolving finally to a beige rose, lines that intersect and intertwine and flow from here to there all to tie that end of the surface to this one. Diebenkorn could let flecks of paint fly as well as Cy Twombly and may have given more attention to edges than Piet Mondrian. Asked once whether he had ever let a particular group of paintings out of his studio, the artist replied, "These? No, no, they're not done. Or, they're sort of cooking." For Diebenkorn there was no recipe to follow; he just had to keep tasting to see if he'd gotten the balance of flavors right.

There has been no shortage of praise for this traveling one man show. The widely known but little conglomerated series stands as a capstone to what was already an impressive artistic career. The Dallas Morning News referred in its review to Diebenkorn's "Southern California sublime"; The LA Times called the show one "you might have wanted to see but that you didn't know you really had to see -- until you [saw] it," (italics added); and The Washington Post billed the exhibition as "a large, dense, rewarding show devoted to one of this country’s finest abstract painters." The greatest praise may have come from critic Mat Gleason, writing for The Huffington Post, who declared, "If you miss this one, you are just not into art." Gleason's elaboration on this statement highlights the semi-elitist assholeishness of much of the art world, but the fact remains, the exhibition was really quite good.

So while it may not be particularly impressive to top the list of someone whose obligations over the past months prevented much in the way of far reaching art viewing, I've little doubt this series would have been the jewel in the crown of any good year.

Esther Traugot

by Stephen Cummings

Jasper Johns showed us decades ago that a cast of a light bulb is something quite different from the bulb itself. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, likewise, found that wrapping objects, buildings, landscapes could transform them dramatically; the historical seat of German government repurposed into their monumental sculpture, if only for the time it was enveloped. More recently, knitters have entered the fold, Olek, probably most famously, covering the Charging Bull in New York's financial district.

The impulses are different, but the results are interestingly similar. Johns, in his usual way, chose something ubiquitous and made it into high art, a not unprecedented, but still somewhat absurd gesture. Christo and Jeanne-Claude elevated an already elevated construction, making profound again a selection from the once most highly regarded art form. And Olek turned the banker's ego pink.

Each of these artists transformed the somethings they worked with into very similar, but undeniably different somethings else, and it is as a part of this tradition that Esther Traugot has positioned herself. Crocheting sheaths of golden fiber, the artist encases fragments from the natural world, simplifying them into irregular pieces of sculpture. The smoothing out is common to each of the artists mentioned, making the objects on display more digestible by their presentation, and by being simpler, somehow more worthwhile. Such is the case with Traugot's Rootsy, part of her Outside In show recently on display at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland. The wrapped object is both adorned and erased by its casing; writhing bits of tree mounted for consideration, swallowed by the pollen-yellow, interlocking threads.

Thus, by loop upon meticulous fiber loop, does this artist "gild" her subjects, making precious the insistently banal. In contrast to Olek's blunt emasculation, Traugot raises her subjects' profiles by the tediousness of her action. At once cradled and adorned, these objects are treated with reverence, whether attention is drawn to the surface or its shape. Yarn blankets the inside of Home Again 2, standing in for the creature that once inhabited this shell, protruding like an odd, careful growth. In Egg an exterior portion of the object is ornately framed by its intricate cover, as though inviting us to take a look at the lovely texture.

But then again, it's an egg in a sweater.

Whatever the profundity of Traugot's sculptures, they're also weird. The tediousness of the adornment is in a way as banal as the objects themselves. When a piece of a twig or shell protrudes from its wrapper it's unclear what the difference is. The parts behind the yellow screen are notionally preserved, but as fragile as ever. Why take so much care with this part and not that? The answer may be that no part is more important than another. In the past, Traugot's cast-off bits of wrapped up nature have been installation, artifact, and plays on the tradition of landscape in art, but in all cases the pattern of yellow curls invites a look at each object that would not otherwise have happened. Traugot, like her predecessors, forces a look at things we've all seen a thousand times, only to have us see something else.

See more work by Esther Traugot on the GO SEE ART Flickr page.

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.

If you don't have anything interesting to say . . .

by Stephen Cummings

I get it. Art has diverged fairly radically over the past century and a half from what the general mass of humanity expects or recognizes or accepts or wants art to be. Obviously. It is thus no wonder museums feel the need to provide some kind of written context for much of the work they display. English, after all, is generally intelligible — certainly more broadly intelligible than art — in English speaking countries. (One exception unfortunately: artist statements.) So, in addition to titles, dates, media, title cards are also adorned with little blurbs of information, presumably to illuminate things about works of art that we might not otherwise have noticed. Sometimes it's helpful, but I would like to offer some unsolicited advice to the Seattle Art Museum: If you don't have anything interesting to say, please, don't say anything at all.

Case in point: a trio of sculptures by Nicholas Nyland, loafing away the summer at SAM's Olympic Sculpture Park.

From what I can tell (and I can't say for certain because I haven't seen the other work in person) Nyland's sculptures tend to be a bit more interesting than those in the park right now. The wacky playfulness that brought forth odd, colorful piles recalling Antoni Gaudi and Lucio Fontana, what Jen Graves called "sweet messes", seems to have given way to bland geometry. Bland because these geometric forms that demand to be considered in themselves have been mussed by hollow, arbitrary colors, as though the geometry were not enough. Bland because the haphazard geometry of the two brick pieces is not enough. And bland because what should have been three sculptures made of rope, are for some reason to be considered as one, as though each unit were not enough in itself. To consider them together removes the simple power of any one.

So Nyland didn't quite hit it this time. It happens. But! here's the Seattle Art Museum to save the day! Just a little context will make your whole viewing experience worthwhile — unless it turns out the museum basically tells you nothing. As an example, let's examine the label for Nyland's Embroidered Path, a piece made of bricks splotched with color, laid into the floor of the park's meadow.

Using bricks he painted with vibrant glazes and then fired, Nicholas Nyland created Embroidered Path, a sculpture masquerading as a garden path. Placed directly into the soil so that each brick is seamlessly integrated into the Meadow, this modest work recalls decorative walkways used in formal and backyard gardens, further revealing our attempts to shape nature. Visitors are encouraged to walk on Nyland’s Embroidered Path through the Meadow.

There are several problems in this short description, which we'll consider in turn:

1. Do we really need a physical description of the piece directly in front of us? It's right there.
2. The description is inaccurate. Each brick is not "seamlessly integrated into the Meadow". Some are clumsily tilted out of the ground, and I'm going to go ahead and say that even if they weren't, the meeting of brick and earth with plants growing out of it necessarily includes a "seam". What is the point of calling it seamless?
3. "[T]his modest work recalls decorative walkways [...]." No shit.
4. "[F]urther revealing our attempts to shape nature"? Where does this come from? Was there something else that partially revealed our attempts to shape nature?

The only thing really to be gained from the museum's helpful little tidbit is that visitors are encouraged to walk on the piece. The rest is fluff, trying to make the work bigger than it is, and making it kind of sad by being so feeble. The other labels are not much better, mentioning the nautical context of proximity to Puget Sound, but failing completely to suggest or consider what that might mean.

So what's the museum's alternative? Pointing out something about the work that isn't blatantly obvious is a good start. It might also be good to say things that don't seem to come out of nowhere. What artistic traditions does this work draw upon? (Besides the fact that it's a path. Obviously it's a path.) Is the location actually important, or are you just saying it's important? Are these site-specific works, destroyed upon removal? Alternatively, perhaps some of the artist's biographical information could be included. Who is he? Where did he come from? Is all his work like this?

The answers to these questions are not to be found at the Olympic Sculpture Park this summer. Maybe next year. Or, and I know this is crazy, the museum could say nothing, and the work could be left alone, forced to speak for itself.

Digging Paint

by Stephen Cummings

Ryan Miller's a smart ass. (That's Ryan Peter Miller, sorry. Probably a union thing.) When I first saw his work in 2007 I called him Mr. Contemporary Art — whatever that can mean. There was an attitude in the work that set him apart from his then MFA colleagues. On the walls of his open studio hung small panels that took shots at artists and movements and even painting media with the brand of ironic iconoclasm that's proven important over the past few decades. Most prominent in my memory are a Warholian sort of memento mori that turned childish things oddly serious in its poking fun at encaustic paint, and an aggressively blunt poke at — well, if not everything, at least a lot of things. It was funny, and snarky, and maybe a bit much at times, but it stayed with you. All this work was organized into a pair of Ain'ting shows in that and the following year, so you'll probably remember it if you happened to be in Phoenix/Tempe at the time, lookin' at art.

I paid a fresh visit to Miller's studio recently and was happy to see he's still dripping, molding, pushing paint together in ways related to but quite distinct from those Margie Livingston started playing around with — and getting praise for — a couple of years after. These aren't just pretty pictures — well, objects; Miller has more of an agenda, more of an awareness, and more of a sense of humor. One work in progress is half paint half mustard; another casts acrylic as paper. The attitude is out in front in works like these, but the pieces that really caught my eye were slightly more lighthearted: a series of, of all things, dinosaurs. [1]

In this group of panels, Miller is creating images — as opposed to objects with an emphasis on their own objecthood — but he's hardly painting a picture in the traditional sense. Each panel consists of layers and layers and layers of thinly applied acrylic, strata that have been carved into to reveal the visages of these prehistoric behemoths. He's digging for dinosaurs; it's funny. The quality of these super simplified pictures reminds me of postage stamps for some reason — three foot width notwithstanding — but they're maybe more reminiscent of the old game graphics that appeared as primitive lines of color on our early '90s TV screens. That, and the fact that we're looking at dinosaurs, a childhood favorite, takes us back, as the paint takes us literally back into the painting surface, into its own history. Things start to get tangled up quickly in these, maybe part of their appeal, but equally important is that the panels are just gorgeous. The surfaces glisten, milky and tactile, and there's something mysterious and stimulating about those hollowed-out troughs of color, reminiscent in their flickering juxtapositions of the divisionism of Georges Seurat or Chuck Close, an unexpected treat. The paintings were displayed in Chandler last year, so maybe you saw them then, but if you didn't (as I didn't) they're well worth seeking out.

So keep an eye out for Miller; his is a an active mind with a sharp wit. And if he's occasionally heavy-handed in his protests, at least he has the chops to make the experience one to indulge in.

1. I'm nerd enough that I feel obliged to point out that Pteranodons are not dinosaurs, strictly speaking, but pterosaurs. Please forgive me the use of the catch all.

This Unassuming Drawing

by Stephen Cummings

How often do you come across a really good drawing? I mean a really good drawing. Something that grabs hold of you and won't let go. For me it's not that often. I think of Leonardo's portrait of The Virgin and Saint Anne, or Seurat's portrait of his mother. Maybe some of those spare, celebrated arrangements by Schiele? Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great drawings out there, but some take it to another level. Fortunately you can see what I'm talking about, provided you get yourself over to the Hammer to have a look at one small piece by Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi.

It's a self portrait, like every piece in this particular body of work (unless that Pazuzu sculpture can be said to be included), and untitled like the rest of them as well. What makes it stand out is its solidity, its straightforwardness, and the absolutely exquisite handling of the materials.

Looking out from the page is the head of a heavyset man, with no pretense to anything else. And I should go further and say, a drawing of the head of a heavyset man, with no pretense to anything else. Lines unravel toward the edges of this paper like those of the old masters. This thing does not seek to be a window onto a world; it's a drawing. Marks bold and delicate make up the concentrated but serene figure. It's a confident draftsman who can allow the tiniest lower eyelashes to coexist on the page with a flattened haze of hair and fat lines around a fat neck. Moving across the face a near sculptural right eye composed of clear, concise marks gives way to the soft, sfumato whisper of the left side of the head, a rich, receding space cut out by the bold, dark lines that define the form's left edge. Because the crudeness of these lines brings us firmly to the surface of the paper, it's as if the face is sunk into the space beyond. Elsewhere can be found a stubble made not of stippled pigment, but of depressions poked into the page, possibly with the staples mentioned in the list of media. These same holes form pores in other areas, and in still others mere stippled value. In an otherwise graphite palette, the ear and cheek on the right side betray subtle hints of color, and the whole fleshy guise sits atop a collar pushed forward by its whiteness, whiteness achieved with help of that white-out tape you can find at office suppliers as well as some coarse scraping away of the paper. This drawing, in short, is a tour de force.

There are artists who take great pains to insist that virtuosic draftsmanship is superior to other forms of art. Their work is boastful and self-conscious and stale. And Cuoghi, with this matter-of-fact, fat beauty, displays a level of virtuosity that they can only dream of.

Amidst All This Nothing

by Stephen Cummings

So word is that the staff at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is all aflutter because a hummingbird built its nest in their courtyard. And while that in itself might have elicited a certain amount of excitement on any normal day, this little construction project happened to coincide with the installation of the Hammer's latest show, and in that show there is a piece which, in a one hour video, on a little Toshiba flat-screen, features — are you ready? — a hummingbird, asleep on a twig.

It's pretty magical.

All Of This And Nothing, which opened last week and runs through April 24th, features works by fourteen contemporary artists from LA and without. According to the museum, "these artists conceptually and emotionally invest simple [...] materials with a newfound poetic meaning while offering a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of our lives and the objects that make up the world around us." It's kind of a nebulous notion that, thought about from different angles, could describe a huge swath of the artwork from now or the past. But the show hangs together pretty well, though it does rely heavily on the assumption that certain things just are amazing.

For example, do you think it would be amazing to watch a hummingbird sleep? Well then you probably are going to find Fernando Ortega's video to be pretty amazing. (Though now of course you can watch in real life just outside the galleries. Undercut?) What about the idea of a spider weaving a web in place of a harp's strings? Then get ready for three dull photographs of just that, none more interesting than the next, and possibly less interesting as a series. With curatorial complicity, Ortega is absolutely the worst offender in this, staking his work almost entirely on our wholesale acceptance of his profundity. But it's not just him; from room to room too much is being made of things all over the place.

Evan Holloway took some real bad photos, but there they are on prominent display. Paul Sietsema's drawings are not bad by any objective test, but being told about the "obsessive" process of their making does not catapult these papers into the hyperbolic realm the curators see them occupying. Frances Stark makes good work, but the collages in this show are rather clunky. Yet it seems we are asked to regard them more highly simply because they depict the artist at work in her studio. And then there's Charles Gaines' Manifestos, in which he used historical texts as the basis for musical compositions through an arbitrarily applied system of assigning notes to letters. As Gaines himself admits, "I could do any text in the world [...] apply it to the system, and it would sound the same." So why this grand treatment? Is it necessary that these huge drawings of the specific texts and corresponding scores accompany the music? And four thirty-some inch flat screens perched oddly on hardboard podiums? Really? And why hardboard? I guess the artists is at fault here too though, having made those silly drawings in the first place. It's all just so . . . overblown. Perhaps one of the docents put it best when she said of the Ian Kiaer installation that opens the show, "You're supposed to kind of go back to when you were five in this room. I don't know why, but."

That said though, this show is very worth seeing. Gaines' piece is worth hearing, Sietsema's drawings are kind of interesting, and Ortega has a kinetic sculpture/installation on the ground level that makes you go, Huh. But more than that, amongst the smattering of glorified whatnot, a handful of pieces stand out as whole, and not overdone, and you are encouraged not to miss them.

In the third gallery sits the show's most commanding piece, a high, broad section of wall and doorway from the studio of Gedi Sibony. The Cutters exists in that tradition of assemblage begun by Robert Rauschenberg, but is a much more minimal, quiet, solitary thing, something akin to Agnes Martin or the drawings of Georges Seurat. Revealing little more than drywall, metal framing, primer, and some hanging canvas, the economy of language in this piece is striking. [1] Passing around and through it gives such a clear sense of its completeness that it's no wonder Sibony felt the need to physically cut it out of his work space. However he managed that, it was worth it; with a couple of other pieces offering an even greater economy of materials and arrangement, Sibony's presence in the museum has a singular authority.

Midway through the exhibition, Sergej Jensen offers up one of those minimal compositions that strikes an iconic position in your mind almost before you've become aware of it. One of his three contributions to the show, this particular untitled arrangement of various sewn fabrics reposes in a muted palette of grays. It's a constructed fitting together of rectangles that you almost feel like you've seen before. But this familiarity, while it may allow you to pass by without too much consideration at first, keeps the piece with you, and you may find a nagging urge to keep returning to it, if for nothing else than to figure out what you must have missed.

Toward the end of the show you will find Paul Sietsema's Anticultural Positions, a gorgeous black and white film featuring close-up stills of the surfaces of the artist's work tables intercut with text modified from a 1951 lecture of the same title by Jean Dubuffet. The pairing has the sort of arbitrariness that went into collaborations between John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and it has that sort of success too. These two inputs compliment one another. An exceedingly close examination that can be likened in some ways to Chuck Close is kept from being tedious by the addition of Dubuffet's words, and those words in turn seem to make an effort relate to the changing images that precede and follow. Despite the separation of half a century, these two languages hold together quite well.

And before you escape the circuit of galleries you will encounter at last the great white expanse of Karla Black's Once Cut, a broad field of plaster powder sprinkled evenly across the gallery floor and interrupted by the addition of a few colorful bath soaps and liquids. It's a thing that makes you stop and wonder about it, whether you're new to art and questioning whether any of this is art at all, or if you're more experienced and trying to decide whether this composition and its materials hold together the way you expect. In either case, one thing is sure, you won't be able to see it at all if you don't make it out to this show.

1. The museum gets a little carried away again, stating, "Sibony conjures the magical from the mundane." But hasn't that been the nature of art since, you know, forever? Paint being essentially mud and all that. Silly museum.
2. The original version of this post featured a paragraph about the work of Jorge Macchi. It has been removed after further viewing caused me to rethink such high praise.

Art 2010: A Wandering Best Of

by Stephen Cummings

I didn't spend enough time in any one place this year to claim to present a synopsis of a region's best, but I did, in my wanderings, see a good deal of good art. (Mostly I was in Seattle.) Some have been praised already, both on this blog and off, and some I would be remiss if I let the year pass without giving them mention. So before the date turns, here are the best new things I came across in 2010, in no particular order.

A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter

Early in the year I walked past a well-made black box in Seattle's Lawrimore Project and couldn't be bothered to examine it more closely. It was clearly related to Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of its Own Making, a fixture in Seattle Art Museum's Minimalism gallery, but the night was wearing on and I was eager to make my way home. Mistake. Only later did I learn in The New York Times Magazine that this piece by Caleb Larsen actually tries to sell itself on eBay . . . all the time. All the time? Yes. Once someone buys it, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter sets up a new auction with a newly revised opening bid, and the owner is required to send the piece along once sale is made. A hilarious take on the consumerism that is the art market, I bid Larsen's Tool Godspeed in repeatedly raising its own price into perpetuity — or not — and pointing out one of the absurdities that has been made of art in our time.

Untitled (Shit Happens)

Another irreverent favorite, found in Indonesia, was Malaysian artist Ahmad Fuad Osman's presumably operational blender serving as home to a fish and a water plant. I hate to heap praise on an art star, but Untitled (Shit Happens) was so blunt, so cocky, so absurd, and so unsettling, I can't help but mention it again. The very real possibility of so easily snuffing out an unsuspecting, if inconsequential, little fish — and the neon letters seemingly taunting you to do so — is a surprisingly disturbing prospect. It's the kind of thing that makes people object. 'This isn't art!' (Notice it's not about the fish.) But it knows, and it loves it, and it is.

Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death

Also previously mentioned was Seattle Art Museum's staging of Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death, a selection of photographs and short films by American master Andy Warhol. What was refreshing about this show was how much the museum stood back, and allowed the work to just be on display. Then of course, the work was powerful and enthralling all on its own. And in what ended up the humblest of curtain calls, Dennis Hopper's Screen Test was made more poignant with the coincidence of his death.

Chuck Close Prints

In the other Washington, another American master. There's nothing surprising about a collection of Chuck Close's work coming off as impressive, large as it tends to be, but what was most impressive about Chuck Close Prints at the Corcoran Gallery was its deep insight into the art and process of printmaking. I worried at first that it would be instructive like that time Bobby Jindal talked to us all on national television, but the museum assumed no stupidity in its audience, and managed to present printmaking from its fundamentals to a number of elaborate and unconventional processes in a way that was both interesting and understandable — and not patronizing. The lens of Chuck Close's oeuvre offered an ideal and commanding structure for this heavy undertaking.

Wall

A very different deconstruction of process could be seen in March at Seattle's Western Bridge. In a three-day performance, Corin Hewitt cut, removed, reinforced, rearranged, and otherwise fiddled with the inner and outer portions of gallery walls where he could be observed both directly within the gallery and by closed circuit video from the outside. I preferred the video, in which objects became suddenly not themselves when they were revealed to be photographic reproductions, or stacks of the like, and photographs became objects as the mind lost track in the jumble. Unsurprisingly, it's not really about the wall.

A Dirt Crown Worth Its Weight

Continuing a tradition of good work, Bryan Schoneman staged a thesis performance in the University of Washington's 3D4M Gallery in which he operated an oversized machine built solely for the purpose of pouring dirt onto his head. Schoneman may contradict me on this, but I'm convinced it's not really about the dirt. Instead, The Dust Settles seemed to be about the slow, eerily peaceful atmosphere arising from the artist's bizarre, trivial exertion. In either case, it later won an award. (Congratulations.) With any luck, galleries will learn to accommodate the mess so more of us can see Schoneman perform in the future. And if they don't, they'll miss out, because I'm sure he'll manage to find other venues.

Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass)

The other highlight of the MFA season was Samuel Payne's installation and/or assemblage at the Henry Art Gallery's UW MFA Thesis Exhibition. (Full, if cryptic, disclosure: I was personally involved with this show.) Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass) has been called overkill, but such is the specificity of Payne's language that this piece was anything but. Surely it was difficult to decipher, but Payne's work needs to be understood in the context of its past incarnations, and this piece built upon a personal iconography developed by the artist over the course of years. There were the paper covering that began on his studio wall, the shoes oriented maybe in cardinal directions to allude to his travels, the music stand from a number of previous pieces, the sound of chopping wood from — from who knows where. It's hard to be specific about this piece without being really specific, which is why I hope to write more about it in the future, if I can muster it. In the meantime, just envision a complicated conglomeration of recycled forms and works and memories.

Beat Memories

Speaking of memories, Allen Ginsberg took some photographs, and the National Gallery mounted an exhibition. If I am to mention a photography show, it would certainly be appropriate to include MoMA's first ever retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but we already knew he was a great photographer. Allen Ginsberg, the poet, was the more surprising. Plus, in addition to some darn good photography, each print included a hand-written caption of sorts, a little prose poem inseparable from the image, which added that much more richness to the experience. I'll let Ginsberg close us out, with the caption that stayed with me all the rest of the year.

I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984

Allen Ginsberg