That Tired Old Thing Called Vitality
We wander around in that ‘sluggish mishmash’ says Peter Schjeldahl, a so-called ‘mishmash’ which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now, where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Art is wide open…coming now from the four corners of the globe, in fact there are no more four corners of the globe…mutating, materializing – the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard – M. Kimmelman’s fretting over the so-called ‘value’ of ‘Il Ducio’’s madonna/child…this value has changed…hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance…art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific…Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and scale for determining quality….Are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders…give me some shit…but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy, full of life kind, like…the Chris Ofili kind…you know where I’m going here, the Vitality…
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, ‘c’eci n’est pas un pipe’…all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter…talking about our old friend ‘vitality’, the fact that there either is a heart beating or not…witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Hard Wired/Hot Wired
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.
Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…
Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…
FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…
Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.
Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…
Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…
FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…
Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Review of Huang Chih-Yang from New Chinese Art at the Asia Society
With a proliferation of blockbuster shows outside New York, ie. Van Gogh in D.C., Monet in Boston, Delacroix in Phildelphia and M. Cassat in Chicago and the majority of exhibitions in New York being video, performance, photography and installation I was recently jolted by the unique vision on display at the Asia Society Gallery of New Chinese Art. This exhibition brings to the stage a variety of imagery from divergent sources within Chinese culture both domestic and expatriate. The work that moved me out of my complacency was by the artist Huang Chih-Yang and is an exhibition unto itself of eight large hanging scrolls, contemporary visions of the figure painted in ink on paper. Huang’s work exists beyond the cultural boundaries of traditional brush and ink on scroll because of its bold scale and modern psychological edge but it also springs from this ancient continuum in a primal and very vital way, in the same way that the large portrait pieces done by Lucien Freud of Leigh Bowery draw on the tradition and historical anomaly of western easel painting. But first, the consideration of scale in contemporary art which in Huang’s work is totally appropriate and which also harkens back to ancient Chinese sources, ie. The caves at Dunhaung and Shaanxi. Huge scale itself should not be a ploy to mask deficiencies or even be a prerequisite for contemporary art but when combined with a mastery of all other components that pull together and complete a work of art, outsize scale can deliver an amazing punch. I’m thinking of Chuck Close’s portraits, his most recent being free and painterly work so alive and vibrant because he has finally used the paint in a sensuous and authoritative way. So scale can enhance or detract but when used successfully and succinctly as Huang does here one perceives and it resounds with a durable and deep resonance to both ancient and contemporary sources.
What so fine tunes Huang’s art is it’s build upon those very traditional sources. His brushstroke is a muscular rendering of volumn and form at once a visual abstract panorama of lush vibrant marksmanship and then in full focus the delineation of the figure with a complete psychological component. “Zoon”, the Chinese character that titles this series refers to craziness and reflects Huang’s concern with emotion, fear, taboos and fantasies. Unlike many of the new Chinese artists he has not adopted the language of minimalism but instead draws on native Taiwanese folk tradition and skews it with a momentum imbued with the modern elements of fragmentation and deliberate chaos that resists the authority of the newly industrialized Taiwan. These monster humans are not civilized people…as Huang says…”Man is such an animal. I am such an animal.” His work deals with the myriad elements of natural environment, traditional culture, urban modernization and unmasked human nature. His work creates a panorama of elemental human emotion and a physicality driven by a staccato industrial brushstroke and most importantly breaks with the conditional notion of a static “Chinese” art and instead creates a powerful new mix of cultural vision in sync with the larger world we now inhabit.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
With a proliferation of blockbuster shows outside New York, ie. Van Gogh in D.C., Monet in Boston, Delacroix in Phildelphia and M. Cassat in Chicago and the majority of exhibitions in New York being video, performance, photography and installation I was recently jolted by the unique vision on display at the Asia Society Gallery of New Chinese Art. This exhibition brings to the stage a variety of imagery from divergent sources within Chinese culture both domestic and expatriate. The work that moved me out of my complacency was by the artist Huang Chih-Yang and is an exhibition unto itself of eight large hanging scrolls, contemporary visions of the figure painted in ink on paper. Huang’s work exists beyond the cultural boundaries of traditional brush and ink on scroll because of its bold scale and modern psychological edge but it also springs from this ancient continuum in a primal and very vital way, in the same way that the large portrait pieces done by Lucien Freud of Leigh Bowery draw on the tradition and historical anomaly of western easel painting. But first, the consideration of scale in contemporary art which in Huang’s work is totally appropriate and which also harkens back to ancient Chinese sources, ie. The caves at Dunhaung and Shaanxi. Huge scale itself should not be a ploy to mask deficiencies or even be a prerequisite for contemporary art but when combined with a mastery of all other components that pull together and complete a work of art, outsize scale can deliver an amazing punch. I’m thinking of Chuck Close’s portraits, his most recent being free and painterly work so alive and vibrant because he has finally used the paint in a sensuous and authoritative way. So scale can enhance or detract but when used successfully and succinctly as Huang does here one perceives and it resounds with a durable and deep resonance to both ancient and contemporary sources.
What so fine tunes Huang’s art is it’s build upon those very traditional sources. His brushstroke is a muscular rendering of volumn and form at once a visual abstract panorama of lush vibrant marksmanship and then in full focus the delineation of the figure with a complete psychological component. “Zoon”, the Chinese character that titles this series refers to craziness and reflects Huang’s concern with emotion, fear, taboos and fantasies. Unlike many of the new Chinese artists he has not adopted the language of minimalism but instead draws on native Taiwanese folk tradition and skews it with a momentum imbued with the modern elements of fragmentation and deliberate chaos that resists the authority of the newly industrialized Taiwan. These monster humans are not civilized people…as Huang says…”Man is such an animal. I am such an animal.” His work deals with the myriad elements of natural environment, traditional culture, urban modernization and unmasked human nature. His work creates a panorama of elemental human emotion and a physicality driven by a staccato industrial brushstroke and most importantly breaks with the conditional notion of a static “Chinese” art and instead creates a powerful new mix of cultural vision in sync with the larger world we now inhabit.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
El Anatsui
No less than the great twentieth century innovator, Pablo Picasso exclaimed, “My greatest artistic revelation came about when I was suddenly struck by the sublime beauty of the sculpture done by the anonymous artists of Africa. In their passionate and rigorous logic, these works of sacred art are the most powerful and beautiful products of the human imagination.”
Well, African art is anonymous no longer and still breaking unprecedented ground. Almost a hundred years later the art world has finally come full circle, with the advent of a year long celebration in London of Africa 2005 and the multiple exhibitions of the recent work of Ghanian/Nigerian artist, El Anatsui. Featured along with several high profile contemporaries from the African continent, art that may once have been called ‘tribal/primitive’ has now given way to the future and inspired a new artistic and cultural, arena in the ‘transvangarde’. A professor of sculpture from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Anatsui both scholar and artist forged a prolific career from the early 1960’s with exhibitions around the globe working in clay, wood, metal and recycled objects. Using a chainsaw and pneumatic tools he carves wooden frieze like reliefs, creating a powerful, dynamic of ideographic, abstraction which are then charred or painted, infused with and accessing the complex history of colonialism in Africa.
Anatsui now steps up to the plate with a mesmerizing collection of work that breaks barriers and moves beyond indigenous tradition. With subtle improvisation, and his inspired handling of metal bottle tops, crushed flat, then tied with wire he weaves together metal ‘textiles’ like ‘Earth Cloth’, ‘Young Woman’s Cloth’, ‘Flag for a New World’ and ‘Peak Project’ to form monumental swaths of metallic, shimmering color and multi-dimensional construct. The visual field is awash in a gorgeous mosaic that at one and the same time creates a huge yet fragile splendor, a tender and barbaric vitality. Think of standing in awe before the mosaics of Ravenna for the first time without ‘reading’ the content. Ancient glamour is made new, while proportion and sensibility are recast to the present. His work is flush with the concept of ‘remix’, a transformation of recycled waste into a glittering celebration of a global, ritual identity outside the confines of indigenous, local connotation. The rigorous opulence of El Anatsui’s work awakens and charges the mind’s eye with an immediate, radical force reaching far beyond even the most powerful synthetic film/cinematic visual. The viewer is transported through a phantasmagoria of scale, color, surface, shine and movement that delivers on the scale of nature’s own radiant visual bounty. This is not art to find clever, to dissect or to bolster tired post-modern cliches but rather art that charges and creates a force field of universal allure. The frame has long since been dispensed with in western art and never so powerfully as these pieces show now.
The complex nature of ‘Signature’ revolves around the methodology and production of art…taking fallen timber, stacking it, painting it, placing it solemnly in a quiet forest to create a tableau of the simplest arrangement…culling abundance, marking it, coloring it…this is where the influence of art begins, as the viewer steps forward into the magic, the transformation…a deferral of meaning with only the pure desire to view and the pure felt vitality remaining.
Africa 2005 is a year long cultural celebration in London. El Anatsui’s work shown at Hayward Gallery, London as part of ‘Africa Remix’ show, October Gallery, London and ‘Man Cloth’ is at the British Museum, London.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
No less than the great twentieth century innovator, Pablo Picasso exclaimed, “My greatest artistic revelation came about when I was suddenly struck by the sublime beauty of the sculpture done by the anonymous artists of Africa. In their passionate and rigorous logic, these works of sacred art are the most powerful and beautiful products of the human imagination.”
Well, African art is anonymous no longer and still breaking unprecedented ground. Almost a hundred years later the art world has finally come full circle, with the advent of a year long celebration in London of Africa 2005 and the multiple exhibitions of the recent work of Ghanian/Nigerian artist, El Anatsui. Featured along with several high profile contemporaries from the African continent, art that may once have been called ‘tribal/primitive’ has now given way to the future and inspired a new artistic and cultural, arena in the ‘transvangarde’. A professor of sculpture from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Anatsui both scholar and artist forged a prolific career from the early 1960’s with exhibitions around the globe working in clay, wood, metal and recycled objects. Using a chainsaw and pneumatic tools he carves wooden frieze like reliefs, creating a powerful, dynamic of ideographic, abstraction which are then charred or painted, infused with and accessing the complex history of colonialism in Africa.
Anatsui now steps up to the plate with a mesmerizing collection of work that breaks barriers and moves beyond indigenous tradition. With subtle improvisation, and his inspired handling of metal bottle tops, crushed flat, then tied with wire he weaves together metal ‘textiles’ like ‘Earth Cloth’, ‘Young Woman’s Cloth’, ‘Flag for a New World’ and ‘Peak Project’ to form monumental swaths of metallic, shimmering color and multi-dimensional construct. The visual field is awash in a gorgeous mosaic that at one and the same time creates a huge yet fragile splendor, a tender and barbaric vitality. Think of standing in awe before the mosaics of Ravenna for the first time without ‘reading’ the content. Ancient glamour is made new, while proportion and sensibility are recast to the present. His work is flush with the concept of ‘remix’, a transformation of recycled waste into a glittering celebration of a global, ritual identity outside the confines of indigenous, local connotation. The rigorous opulence of El Anatsui’s work awakens and charges the mind’s eye with an immediate, radical force reaching far beyond even the most powerful synthetic film/cinematic visual. The viewer is transported through a phantasmagoria of scale, color, surface, shine and movement that delivers on the scale of nature’s own radiant visual bounty. This is not art to find clever, to dissect or to bolster tired post-modern cliches but rather art that charges and creates a force field of universal allure. The frame has long since been dispensed with in western art and never so powerfully as these pieces show now.
The complex nature of ‘Signature’ revolves around the methodology and production of art…taking fallen timber, stacking it, painting it, placing it solemnly in a quiet forest to create a tableau of the simplest arrangement…culling abundance, marking it, coloring it…this is where the influence of art begins, as the viewer steps forward into the magic, the transformation…a deferral of meaning with only the pure desire to view and the pure felt vitality remaining.
Africa 2005 is a year long cultural celebration in London. El Anatsui’s work shown at Hayward Gallery, London as part of ‘Africa Remix’ show, October Gallery, London and ‘Man Cloth’ is at the British Museum, London.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Jenny Saville’s Got Religion
Jerry Saltz doesn’t need to worry about splintered guitars being put back together again, humpty dumpty style or even the ghost of Duchamp plaguing us forever although on some days I wake up cursing and wishing the Mutt’d been strangled in his sleep and on other days thinking he did the greatest service to artkind that’s ever been done but more on all that later…Like I said ‘not to worry’…somebody’s been doing their homework and leave it to the Italian’s to recognize one of their own…
Jenny Saville’s got religion, ponder her new triptych installation for the Bilotti Chapel in Rome. If she were a soccer star, I’d be a wild, raving fan…panting after painting! Art with a capital A just doesn’t get any better than this. Is she merely aping the patrimony of the Renaissance or is she reaching down with secular hands into an ancient vein of iconography, a complex renewal of the tactile painted vision…and they said it couldn’t be done. This new work sends her deeper into her covenant with painting, her exploration of the mortal body…plying an archaic complexity, she’s working her way into the mystery. Charged ecstasy, adoration…a leap to divine love? Make no mistake, this is no leap but a steady, clean stride through halls previously trod only by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, you know, the big guys…While everybody’s over at Art Basel paying a deserved homage to James Rosenquist’s, ‘Ode to Human Rights’…here we’ve got the real thing…the paint is ‘gut’ instinctive not calibrated, no need for the pantone chips or a graph chart here. Willful and in command, her color is real and the texture of her brush dances…pure broad swaths of thick creamery…measured, defining strokes, a pliant, confident strength lifts the image…tissue and muscle surface and shape the body…the human visage emerges, technique is transcended, honed and refined to masterpiece standard. One can feel the adrenaline, these paintings breath. She can finally leave off talking about de Kooning and take down her studio reference image of Rembrandt’s, ‘Woman Bathing in a Stream’. This consummate mark making is an astounding combination of abstraction, figuration and meaning…humankind cast out of the garden, the fullness of the body’s magnificent enigma placed front and center…Jenny Saville walks with the giants now…and her passion takes us with her…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Jerry Saltz doesn’t need to worry about splintered guitars being put back together again, humpty dumpty style or even the ghost of Duchamp plaguing us forever although on some days I wake up cursing and wishing the Mutt’d been strangled in his sleep and on other days thinking he did the greatest service to artkind that’s ever been done but more on all that later…Like I said ‘not to worry’…somebody’s been doing their homework and leave it to the Italian’s to recognize one of their own…
Jenny Saville’s got religion, ponder her new triptych installation for the Bilotti Chapel in Rome. If she were a soccer star, I’d be a wild, raving fan…panting after painting! Art with a capital A just doesn’t get any better than this. Is she merely aping the patrimony of the Renaissance or is she reaching down with secular hands into an ancient vein of iconography, a complex renewal of the tactile painted vision…and they said it couldn’t be done. This new work sends her deeper into her covenant with painting, her exploration of the mortal body…plying an archaic complexity, she’s working her way into the mystery. Charged ecstasy, adoration…a leap to divine love? Make no mistake, this is no leap but a steady, clean stride through halls previously trod only by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, you know, the big guys…While everybody’s over at Art Basel paying a deserved homage to James Rosenquist’s, ‘Ode to Human Rights’…here we’ve got the real thing…the paint is ‘gut’ instinctive not calibrated, no need for the pantone chips or a graph chart here. Willful and in command, her color is real and the texture of her brush dances…pure broad swaths of thick creamery…measured, defining strokes, a pliant, confident strength lifts the image…tissue and muscle surface and shape the body…the human visage emerges, technique is transcended, honed and refined to masterpiece standard. One can feel the adrenaline, these paintings breath. She can finally leave off talking about de Kooning and take down her studio reference image of Rembrandt’s, ‘Woman Bathing in a Stream’. This consummate mark making is an astounding combination of abstraction, figuration and meaning…humankind cast out of the garden, the fullness of the body’s magnificent enigma placed front and center…Jenny Saville walks with the giants now…and her passion takes us with her…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Cecily Brown/Gagosian Gallery, Spring 2005
Cecily may have come riding through the door to fame and fashion with her brash titillating use of copulating bunnies and sexual posture in the same way that John Currin breached the walls of the Chelsea galleries and popped open the eyes of the cognoscenti with his buxom fooleries aka Tom H. Benton but who would’a thought a girl’s hot sex could get so boring, so old, so fast…not to worry…Cecily’s now through the door and settled in and maybe a little bored with the frenzy, the tooling tempest in a four square canvas. Looks like she’s found something to sing about, think about or wrestle with, her own personal ‘laocoon’. Showing her true colors she plays to the paint and plies her trade with her hard won, strong academic training from the Slade where Cezanne’s MO still reigns…and rightly so…one of the few training grounds for painters that want to move the paint around here in the 21st century. She has corralled her energies to this complex, less facile intention rather than just grabbing attention. Working furiously for the last several years she has integrated all elements in this new work to achieve an enervating balance of paint, narrative, brushstroke scale, and color to present a visual that is as mesmerizing as a walk in the woods – radiance, in sync with nature’s light streaming, visual bounty. This new work is elegant improvisation, a jazz like series of tableaux. From Cezanne, the mentor projects….’The real and prodigious study to be ventured is that of the diversity of nature’s picture’ or capturing nature’s changes while preserving it’s permanence as lifted from David Sylvester’s essay on Cezanne. And while we may want her to go hog wild and get us closer to the energy, and to create an expressionism with all the same power and movement of Reuben’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’…well, give her time…give her time…She’s calmed but way far from bored or stuck…you can still see her heart fluttering, her mind moving and the bells ringing…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Cecily may have come riding through the door to fame and fashion with her brash titillating use of copulating bunnies and sexual posture in the same way that John Currin breached the walls of the Chelsea galleries and popped open the eyes of the cognoscenti with his buxom fooleries aka Tom H. Benton but who would’a thought a girl’s hot sex could get so boring, so old, so fast…not to worry…Cecily’s now through the door and settled in and maybe a little bored with the frenzy, the tooling tempest in a four square canvas. Looks like she’s found something to sing about, think about or wrestle with, her own personal ‘laocoon’. Showing her true colors she plays to the paint and plies her trade with her hard won, strong academic training from the Slade where Cezanne’s MO still reigns…and rightly so…one of the few training grounds for painters that want to move the paint around here in the 21st century. She has corralled her energies to this complex, less facile intention rather than just grabbing attention. Working furiously for the last several years she has integrated all elements in this new work to achieve an enervating balance of paint, narrative, brushstroke scale, and color to present a visual that is as mesmerizing as a walk in the woods – radiance, in sync with nature’s light streaming, visual bounty. This new work is elegant improvisation, a jazz like series of tableaux. From Cezanne, the mentor projects….’The real and prodigious study to be ventured is that of the diversity of nature’s picture’ or capturing nature’s changes while preserving it’s permanence as lifted from David Sylvester’s essay on Cezanne. And while we may want her to go hog wild and get us closer to the energy, and to create an expressionism with all the same power and movement of Reuben’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’…well, give her time…give her time…She’s calmed but way far from bored or stuck…you can still see her heart fluttering, her mind moving and the bells ringing…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Luc Tuymans/David Zwirner Gallery/2005
Inscrutable, intractable Luc Tuymans cultivates an austere momentum and gets more out of less than any painter alive…wrestling down post modern, multi-culti mania he has created an art pared to the bare essentials, think of a Balanchine ballet. His deft work is a relief, a tease, an insider’s reference point for all that is hip, painterly and politically charged.
Delineating a consistent, pervasive unease Tuymans works are vaporized remnants, spare membranes that alternately ‘bait and switch’ the viewer’s focus…utilizing the imagery of found photographs, untainted by the contaminant subjectivity, with the plastic relief of Tuymans’ pliant, ‘hand’ moving consummately through every painting. This subversive high wire act tantalizes. The viewer is shell shocked, a deer in front of the headlights…his works are a mute scar, a ‘sonic welt’.
Morandi with a wily, bad attitude? Maybe, but Soutine he’s not and unlike his big sister Marlene Dumas, a provocateur who wrenches a range of coloration from her gorgeous, smutty palette Tuymans resides in a succinct quiet, ever so carefully evoking silent, haunting reprisal. He paints with the ashes of post war Europe then downloads universal anxiety and combines the northern predilection for ‘sober’ into serial utterances so perfectly loose, yet airtight. Random markers…no heroic stance, no histrionics…just a fragile, steady plaint, a reminder. Where’s the ‘insight’ as the painter’s inquisitor’s bulb burns brightly? ‘Proper’, the recent 2005 show at the David Zwirner gallery is imagery suffused with klieg light…Condi, the genteel table, the canopy bed, the ballroom dancers, S. Croce…Do these touchstones qualify for a check list unveiling what’s ‘Proper’? Is this a necklace of mendacious, amoral evil parading as rootless, sublime anomie? Each painting is at one and the same time a disconnect and then a steppingstone to a soft spoken allusion just beyond one’s reach…a relentless unfiltered honesty…political insight as moral reprisal with imagery all dried fragments…bloodless. ‘Proper’ meets all criteria for Tuyman’s intentioned autism, illuminating a dissertation on deadly propriety. Where is the victim…the trail of blood?
The gossamer wings with which Luc Tuymans utilizes to convey this rooted posture become a deep, residual ache… Holding his breath, cold endurance is key to Tuymans…Somewhere, somehow Luc Tuymans is relentlessly holding on by the skin of his teeth…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2006
Inscrutable, intractable Luc Tuymans cultivates an austere momentum and gets more out of less than any painter alive…wrestling down post modern, multi-culti mania he has created an art pared to the bare essentials, think of a Balanchine ballet. His deft work is a relief, a tease, an insider’s reference point for all that is hip, painterly and politically charged.
Delineating a consistent, pervasive unease Tuymans works are vaporized remnants, spare membranes that alternately ‘bait and switch’ the viewer’s focus…utilizing the imagery of found photographs, untainted by the contaminant subjectivity, with the plastic relief of Tuymans’ pliant, ‘hand’ moving consummately through every painting. This subversive high wire act tantalizes. The viewer is shell shocked, a deer in front of the headlights…his works are a mute scar, a ‘sonic welt’.
Morandi with a wily, bad attitude? Maybe, but Soutine he’s not and unlike his big sister Marlene Dumas, a provocateur who wrenches a range of coloration from her gorgeous, smutty palette Tuymans resides in a succinct quiet, ever so carefully evoking silent, haunting reprisal. He paints with the ashes of post war Europe then downloads universal anxiety and combines the northern predilection for ‘sober’ into serial utterances so perfectly loose, yet airtight. Random markers…no heroic stance, no histrionics…just a fragile, steady plaint, a reminder. Where’s the ‘insight’ as the painter’s inquisitor’s bulb burns brightly? ‘Proper’, the recent 2005 show at the David Zwirner gallery is imagery suffused with klieg light…Condi, the genteel table, the canopy bed, the ballroom dancers, S. Croce…Do these touchstones qualify for a check list unveiling what’s ‘Proper’? Is this a necklace of mendacious, amoral evil parading as rootless, sublime anomie? Each painting is at one and the same time a disconnect and then a steppingstone to a soft spoken allusion just beyond one’s reach…a relentless unfiltered honesty…political insight as moral reprisal with imagery all dried fragments…bloodless. ‘Proper’ meets all criteria for Tuyman’s intentioned autism, illuminating a dissertation on deadly propriety. Where is the victim…the trail of blood?
The gossamer wings with which Luc Tuymans utilizes to convey this rooted posture become a deep, residual ache… Holding his breath, cold endurance is key to Tuymans…Somewhere, somehow Luc Tuymans is relentlessly holding on by the skin of his teeth…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2006
Paloma Varga Weisz
Gladstone Gallery/NYC
December 2008
A mysterious purity, refined stillness pervades the work of Paloma Varga Weisz. Only the essential corroborates and fills the work. However unique her varied, materials may be, each piece resonates clarity of line and a whimsy that is medieval in stance and depiction. The posture and glance of the two imposing, woven figures lean into an arc reminiscent of full bellied, medieval madonnas, arms arched, like courtiers at dance. Solemn solitude, the wooden faces are a mask,…the curvature of the basket bodies sway in an endless chaconne,…an interior meditative consciousness plays in their faint smiles. There is an utterly sensitive luxury beyond tactile in the natural wood, hand rendered. Into another room are three gilded heads, edifices, organisms inflated. The patined, coppery surface of bulbous twirled do’s atop muted visages, two in wood, one not, complicit expressions, sly, engaging, secretive. In another room, a wooden cask, itself iconic, a sculptural vitrine for a woman’s hanging fur coat possibly the cask that housed a product that created wealth for such a luxury. From the hanger, earthy porous hands and feet dangling in the balance, the cask ominous and powerful, the black fur coat a somber, bourgeois accoutrement, stillborn, hung. Next tableau, solid, serious work clothes on a seated figure, hunched over a plain desk, simple woolen vestments, durable mien until one sees the fantastical penis nose resting, propped on the table undermining all bourgeois composure, complacency tweaked, satisfaction calmly split asunder…Next to this and on two other wall spaces are a portrait gallery of human visages, each unique,…individuals rendered in water color with zen sufficiency but with all warty imperfections, characterization on target. A refreshing break, work like this is so simple, the antithesis of blowhard, contemporary over the top, overkill,…One adjusts down upon entering the gallery,…down but not devoid, rather a cool, pervasive tonic,…natural materials wrought in a pliant, pre-industrial, hand, features pulled from a northern, cathedral flying buttress or after leaving the gallery, found right there on the street, everyone looked different, out of modern context, all frailties in place,…Realigned with the human.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
2008
Gladstone Gallery/NYC
December 2008
A mysterious purity, refined stillness pervades the work of Paloma Varga Weisz. Only the essential corroborates and fills the work. However unique her varied, materials may be, each piece resonates clarity of line and a whimsy that is medieval in stance and depiction. The posture and glance of the two imposing, woven figures lean into an arc reminiscent of full bellied, medieval madonnas, arms arched, like courtiers at dance. Solemn solitude, the wooden faces are a mask,…the curvature of the basket bodies sway in an endless chaconne,…an interior meditative consciousness plays in their faint smiles. There is an utterly sensitive luxury beyond tactile in the natural wood, hand rendered. Into another room are three gilded heads, edifices, organisms inflated. The patined, coppery surface of bulbous twirled do’s atop muted visages, two in wood, one not, complicit expressions, sly, engaging, secretive. In another room, a wooden cask, itself iconic, a sculptural vitrine for a woman’s hanging fur coat possibly the cask that housed a product that created wealth for such a luxury. From the hanger, earthy porous hands and feet dangling in the balance, the cask ominous and powerful, the black fur coat a somber, bourgeois accoutrement, stillborn, hung. Next tableau, solid, serious work clothes on a seated figure, hunched over a plain desk, simple woolen vestments, durable mien until one sees the fantastical penis nose resting, propped on the table undermining all bourgeois composure, complacency tweaked, satisfaction calmly split asunder…Next to this and on two other wall spaces are a portrait gallery of human visages, each unique,…individuals rendered in water color with zen sufficiency but with all warty imperfections, characterization on target. A refreshing break, work like this is so simple, the antithesis of blowhard, contemporary over the top, overkill,…One adjusts down upon entering the gallery,…down but not devoid, rather a cool, pervasive tonic,…natural materials wrought in a pliant, pre-industrial, hand, features pulled from a northern, cathedral flying buttress or after leaving the gallery, found right there on the street, everyone looked different, out of modern context, all frailties in place,…Realigned with the human.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
2008
Pipilotti Rist
‘Pour Your Body Out’
MOMA 2008
Pipilotti Rist’s, ‘Pour Your Body Out’ breathes desire, relishes the naked physical, gives new meaning to the color fuschia, the taste of raspberry, makes one want to run out, roll around bare on the grass, then slide into a deep pool of crystal water…A streaming, no holds barred, enveloping bath of pure consciousness…I haven’t had this much fun since a video surround at Expo 67 as a teenager,…or my first time smoking pot. This is a light filled, happy, trippy, in your face, up your sleeve and around the corner, visceral trip, a loop of pulsating visual splendor, amid dissolved body boundaries. Breaking open the four square canvas, blowing out the walls, Pipilotti Rist grabs you coming and going. This is art as experience akin to ritual, the Greek maenads on a tear through the hills, heads on fire, heart beat pulsating. A primal Eve bites into the apple, fully flush, ripe desire unbound, satisfied. Back to the garden,…no bleak, forlorn foreboding, just a gushing, palpable oneness. Woman rooted in her natural habitat, unbuttoned, no set table, no table at all,…Just pluck from the tree, pick from the ground, no body is clenched, hovered, prone in work, anxiety mode. Across time and rooted in the primal, lush images spill out and over,…a rooting boar searches, it’s fleshy snout quivering, naked toes splash through the rain,…a powerful infusion of energy, light, earth, buoyant water and inside, menstral blood flows out onto the body alive,…no boundaries, no domesticity, encounters are not mandated, experience is random,…not contained. Are we ready for this kind of freedom in art, or in life, no looking over one’s shoulder, seamlessly hog wild on the prowl…equal parts desire and digestion...A raw tenderness, infuses consciousness. As in the contents of Rist’s ‘handbag’, her metaphor,…the world is random, filled with myriad tools for probing, entering the senses,…a jumble,…rambunctiousness abounds. Here life is a deep root, a cosmic spore, setting off a web of shape shifting fantasms,…wild utterances, gorgeous sighs where the art springs out and margins expand, the opposite of defined, categorized. At the MOMA exhibition children were leaping through the air, bouncing into the images, the elderly smiling, eyes uplifted to the bounding play across the walls,…Art and experience opened out at a cosmic full tilt…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
2008
‘Pour Your Body Out’
MOMA 2008
Pipilotti Rist’s, ‘Pour Your Body Out’ breathes desire, relishes the naked physical, gives new meaning to the color fuschia, the taste of raspberry, makes one want to run out, roll around bare on the grass, then slide into a deep pool of crystal water…A streaming, no holds barred, enveloping bath of pure consciousness…I haven’t had this much fun since a video surround at Expo 67 as a teenager,…or my first time smoking pot. This is a light filled, happy, trippy, in your face, up your sleeve and around the corner, visceral trip, a loop of pulsating visual splendor, amid dissolved body boundaries. Breaking open the four square canvas, blowing out the walls, Pipilotti Rist grabs you coming and going. This is art as experience akin to ritual, the Greek maenads on a tear through the hills, heads on fire, heart beat pulsating. A primal Eve bites into the apple, fully flush, ripe desire unbound, satisfied. Back to the garden,…no bleak, forlorn foreboding, just a gushing, palpable oneness. Woman rooted in her natural habitat, unbuttoned, no set table, no table at all,…Just pluck from the tree, pick from the ground, no body is clenched, hovered, prone in work, anxiety mode. Across time and rooted in the primal, lush images spill out and over,…a rooting boar searches, it’s fleshy snout quivering, naked toes splash through the rain,…a powerful infusion of energy, light, earth, buoyant water and inside, menstral blood flows out onto the body alive,…no boundaries, no domesticity, encounters are not mandated, experience is random,…not contained. Are we ready for this kind of freedom in art, or in life, no looking over one’s shoulder, seamlessly hog wild on the prowl…equal parts desire and digestion...A raw tenderness, infuses consciousness. As in the contents of Rist’s ‘handbag’, her metaphor,…the world is random, filled with myriad tools for probing, entering the senses,…a jumble,…rambunctiousness abounds. Here life is a deep root, a cosmic spore, setting off a web of shape shifting fantasms,…wild utterances, gorgeous sighs where the art springs out and margins expand, the opposite of defined, categorized. At the MOMA exhibition children were leaping through the air, bouncing into the images, the elderly smiling, eyes uplifted to the bounding play across the walls,…Art and experience opened out at a cosmic full tilt…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Taste, Values, Standards, Something Serious (Sincere)...Maybe...Not
As in life so too in ART...It might be worth remembering Morandi's statement upon first viewing Jackson Pollack's work...'You know those Americans, They jump in the water before they even know how to swim...I love it'...Well, there's a lot of global activity, jumping in the water before knowing, wanting or caring how to swim right now...There's even a lot of just plain jumping, jackassing around, leaping off of tall buildings and landing plop...sometime's there's gorgeous bracing innovation and sometimes embracing stupid or calculated cluelessness just for the hell of it...there's a lot of movement, slow and fast, impaired and otherwise and there's some laid to their beds with their heads spinning or staring off into the distance, doing work that reflects a 'declining to comment' moment...This goes way beyond a subjective, post Pop art, moral relativity, crowd the stage, 'bring it on' stance...more like a cultural ADD...a glance at Peter Doig and Dana Schutz...you know what I'm talking about here...one moves skitterishly between wanting to care or not and the other's in spiral, 'over-achiever' overload...you gotta love it...
The modern art world lives awash in a global tsunami of opportunity, a proliferation of contemporary work from all four corners of the globe...in fact there are no more four corners of the globe...the door is wide open, mutating, materializing - the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard - M. Kimmleman's musing over the so-called 'value' of 'Il Ducio's', Madonna/Child...this 'value' has changed...hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance...art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific, the traditional...the hallowed concept of 'authenticity' has evolved beyond it's archaic source and now the arbitration of value, taste and standards hovers over and speculates on a heady mixed brew, toward a consensus of possibilities...Not anarchy, exactly but possiblities.
You definitely can't go home again...but there is a way forward...moving through pockets of residual resistance, careful not to pick up any annoying ticks...from the 'registrars' of the archives of modernism, the PC academic turf guards to those in lockstep with the ultra hip and merely clever...break on through, wake up and smell the turpenoid because just as in life, now a 'Re-Mix Beyond Boundaries' is the order of the day.
So what's in this heady brew...with biennials abounding globally, Art Basel, ArtBasel/Miami...both London and NYC's gallery/auction/museum scene mixing it up, the Saatchi Gallery's upped the ante putting their money on the painting horse, China, the Germans, Russia, Islamic Art, the uber Sotheby's, Tobias Spinmeyer's wink and nod, Africa, South America, all charged and ready to go...a veritable merry go round...a cultural 'chug a lug'...While pondering the depths...the kitchen sink with a wink, posture or pander toward some skills, some art history, some moral center or NOT at all...maybe a totally craven cave in to the market or a schizophrenic dirty dance between these several forces of art spin following on the heels of trend...a cat's cradle of art...fixed, flipped and turned inside out...Pandora's box is gushing...
Ambivalence just doesn't do it and indifference is a defence...gung ho, clever antics alone don't do it either, neither does flavor of the month or disposable...Pose is ok for fashion but Art reaches for archetype, races toward the primal and passionate, can't abide things halfway...even when austere it needs to be truly so...but passion doesn't mean spill your guts, do it with some concentration, agility, relationship to a reality, a viewpoint or vision. With all the glut, the imposters, the chargers on the battlefield can ride way out of hand...for instance, let's put four over achievers on the mat together...Matthew Barney, Tim Hawkinson, Paul McCarthy and Keith Tyson...yikey, crikey...give me a twelve shot tequila hangover anyday...you know what I'm talking about here...some restraint, not a straightjacket just some restraint...pull back and resist the flame, the gobbelygook, the obvious and pare off the flab and focus. I'm thinking about the Damian Hirst show at Gagosian last year, the multitude of paintings...way out of line here...maybe it's a guy thing, maybe it's just attention grabbing, squeaky wheel get's oiled thing...Anyway...
Cranky types get flustered, dig in...hold their breath...try to parse it out. 'We wander around in that 'sluggish mishmash'...says Peter Schjeldahl a so-called 'mishmash' which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Take a deep breath...but the playing field just keeps getting larger and wider and weirder...Are we just making it up as we go along...well, yeah as we clamber over old platitudes, parade and plunder...everything's ripe for the picken now...Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and a scale for determining the pulse, the aptitude, the qualifiers in a piece of work...For starters here, are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders...Give me some shit...but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy kind like the Chris Ofili kind...you know where I'm going here, the Vitality...
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, 'c'eci n'est pas un pipe'...all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter...talking about our old friend 'vitality', the fact that there either is a heart beating or not...witness Anish Kapoor's 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interiors magazine's 'projects' in the snow. It doesn't just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor...this piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka - packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane...it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone...his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro...it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography...Now, look at the Bean in Chicago...heavy - the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda - full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy - instead, the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy...they are both seeds incarnate and energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Some works are inviolate...the Laocoon, Vermeer's 'Woman with a Jug'...like UNESCO heritage sites...they exist not in an airtight vacuum but in a timeless, ageless blue chip, gold standard...
Let's talk about Painting, my medium of choice...a striving, wild eyed, phoenix...currently busy being infused with the tantalizing elements of all imagery global. These are some of the basics...it's tactile, it's immediate and painting moves and gets life from the innate physicality of the individual painter's body. The heart pounds, the mind focuses and the 'hand' moves...it's primal, it's startling and however refined, intellectual or matriculated it can be or NOT, it still wants and gloriously sometimes has my fixation of choice, Vitality. a plastic materiality is skillfully constructed, a complex blend of vision/concept/forms which comes alive to the viewer's retinal consciousness. Plying relevance with these magic intangibles it creates and leads the viewer through a spontaneous symphony or cacophony of visual movement. But we're talking about good painting here not bad painting...here we go...Let's talk about skill, just one component of good painting...and to name a few esteemed endeavors like playing the violin, world class tennis or architecture, it takes training, practice, craft and engineering so to speak...Good painting combines with deep, innate proportion, an intact 'hand' and a craftsmanship that can set the piece of work up on it's legs but not seal every last bit of life out of it or look like its been wrapped up or squeezed from the MFA grinder...to promote a core vision (again that relationship to something) with able plastic standards. So what's a core vision in this day of fluctuating parameters...well, an agile deference to decency and well-being, acknowledging complexity, weaving a path through the straits of history, memory and conscience...not just a lean, clean 'don't get flummoxed machine' but taking hold of hope and celebration...
So let's talk about those who talk about art, who create the space for art...but first for some critical distance and relief from the well intentioned conventional, sometimes in-bred, righteous trilling, the academic turfbound rant and help with wrestling down the 'post, post modern, multi-culti mania, go-round' let me offer up a re-mix with an astute, focused, ever original, lively voice and put things in wide screen perspective. Not a fem smack down aka old school Germaine Greer or a suck up to Madonna like Camille Paglia or even the affable, amenable, rational Jerry Saltz but a nuanced, appreciative, schooled, cogent and down in the trenches art afficionado parlay...Treading on holy ground here...Why aren't there any German, women painters??? What's with that??? And cudos to the UK in developing and freeing up major paint plyers like Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown...and all those painting people waiting in the wings. Are we going to make a push for Abstract Expressionism again...have we acknowledged there might be a second coming here...What about the figure??? Are we finally over all preconceptions, post and misconceptions...Let's face it artists are born but careers are made and critical focus is key to putting jewels in their settings, moving the ever gregarious queue of artists up and along and when need be, 'inciting to riot' the next generation of players across the stage...
Good criticism involves getting things out in the open, undermining the status quo while placing the very able artists in view and keeping the visionaries roiling until they burn off, emerge more brightly, nag at your conscience or blossom under your very nose. Good criticism respects the insightful, fair player stance, protects against the 'schooled', humbugs and fuels the voracious mind committed to art.
Prodigious talent comes around a few times in a generation...but not to cut back on access for the many that are called that never get chosen, art needs all the warm bodies/minds it can have...but let's talk about more than numbers, let's talk about 'disposable' here...there really is a lot of shit to wade through now...PC culture that we are which takes a co-opted affirmative action stance as it's core value tries to bely the nasty fact that disposable trend, fashion, cronyism and hutzpah are the drag here, the sludge that we're wading through...'The Whitney Biennial' need I say more...a hodgepodge or vital mix...a stretch, a reach, a pandering, a preying on...And, where's the painting??
The good thing is what this does expose is the final rent, a radical opening in the dull, stultifying patriarchal, western civ fabric holding down and providing cover for the old school, and instead...a proliferation of mixing it up and creating vitality...out of the woodwork leaps the merry makers, the bunglers, the pundits, the bounders, the tribe of others...oh happy days until you realize someone's got to stem the tide of the 'disposable' merry go round, the ADD thing...As I said, take a deep breath, gather yourself and look, look smart not hard and look for relationships, vitality, able plastic standards, proportion authentic to the 'hand' and that spark of pulse quickening genius...
As Pier Paolo Pasolini once said...'Archaic civilization--superficially called folklore must not be forgotten, despised and betrayed, but it must be integrated within the new civilization.' 'The irrational must not be dismissed which would be impossible but simply checked and dominated by reason, by productive and fertile passion. Curses transform themselves into blessings'.
I wish...
Stephanie Bell Behnke/2006
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