Florescent tubes at odd angles topped the largest piece with a harsher white light. Two tanks of liquid nitrogen behind another black proscenium wall promised relief, but nothing played out on stage. Perhaps the band had quit after its equipment exploded, although one sculpture emits a steady drone. Most of the audience must have followed them. The show was supposed to go on anyway, with a release of artificial clouds.
But the work looked as lifeless and oversized as the rest of the show, and I felt the heat all the more. Where is a blast of vapor at seventy degrees above absolute zero when I need it?
Violette hints at existential questions, but he stumbles on practical ones of function and common sense. The show continues downtown, with much the same imagery but pumped up even further, in sculpture and prints. The florescent lights flare out like a death star from one wall, with a mysterious cartoon outline at its center—whether the trace of the artist or a mirror of his viewer.
Instead of frigid gas, an exploded drum kit has the potential to emit flames, when it feels up to it. As the musical references make clear, this artist comes from the right scene, and you obviously do not. He also takes himself very seriously.
Today, Minimalism may seem as pure and formally reserved as Modernism could ever become. This same summer, Richard Serra has supplied the Museum of Modern Art with blockbuster crowds and its latest old master. At the time, however, Minimalism seemed anything but pure.
Michael Fried famously complained that the art object had given way to theater. Violette riffs on that generation, but he means theater more literally—not as a shared space for art to address the viewer, but as stage set and spectacle. They project artificial light, because they refer to a world that comes alive only at night. The rock salt surely alludes to Robert Smithson , who used it as a material and proposed art as a site of entropy.
It could also come right out of a frozen margarita. Violette's grand theater extends the pretension of Bill Viola or Matthew Barney. Where they cite opera, though, he still believes in rock and roll. His bombast and breakage also belong to the current fashion for installations that reach to the gallery walls in order to trash the joint. He also has much the same impulse, in a gallery's need for superstars, the kind that simulate entropy in order to leave their mark.
A star like this can bring fans out for his first New York solo show in years even in summer. At his best, Violette makes one take a giant step back to avoid the heat. Earlier work set out beds of neon lights, with covers like those of an outdoor grill.
I thought of a cross between a tanning salon and a torture chamber, and I mean that only halfway as an insult. Too often, though, he comes across like a musician who still considers it the height of transgression to crank up the chords and to smash his guitar.
He thinks literally in black and white, not to mention fire and ice, and I could stand for a real blast beyond the smoke and mirrors. A show like this represents the bulkhead of "avant-garde in bulk," but need that entail complicity with the culture industry or complicity with the art world?
Yet it is totally sincere and totally lacking in an academic agenda. It likes both a studied air and an off-gesture, as in works titled Not Yet Titled.
It also creates memorable images, even if they seem like images from a manufactured rebellion. They show why the puzzles and problems of contemporary art do not boil down so easily to finding someone to blame. And that someone could not so easily satisfy artistic or political conservatives in any case. It comes back to the puzzle of success and inertia. In almost all entertainment media, audiences and commercial pressures have grown.
Major distribution outlets lie in fewer and fewer hands, while alternative outlets grow exponentially, like this Web site. Think of the death of free-form radio, as fewer and fewer companies own stations, combined with more and more concert spaces, more downloads, and satellite radio.
Think of so many multiplexes with the same few choices, combined with Netflix and YouTube. The problem with Postmodernsim is not the "low" character of the content but that the artists are not doing enough to make it visually interesting. OK Marc you have shamed me into commenting on BP. There are many built in problems associated with the kind of painting we see in the BP awards and with their presentation on the internet. To begin with, Nolameme mentions that one of the paintings picture is "too dark".
Well, they are all too dark, because they got too dark in the process. If you download these pictures and put them through auto levels most of them immediately look more like themselves there are some tonal combinations that get totally thrown off in auto levels - yellow Rothkos will turn purple - but one has to just be able to spot it Then there is the general mental set of people who choose to paint this way in the 21st C.
Up until the midth C. Painting relatively tight realist portraits was what a painter did. As a result all the best painters painted relatively tight portraits. As a further consequence some of them are among our masterpieces.
I don't think painting this way attracts the most talented and ambitious artists any more. This can be seen not only in the general level of quality of the pictures but also in the way many of them choose to paint them. There is a real strain of obsessiveness running through these pictures, not only the "every-little-wrinkle" I mentioned before but the overdramatization with raking light, the intense expressions, the need to find "interesting subjects" - old people with "lived in" faces in particular, rather than ordinary people painted in interesting ways - the compulsion to disguise the paint, the feeling that there is a dulling cast, or film over the painting and that the picture has been worked to death, the use of color to indicate or draw attention rather than just be good color, and much else.
These things do not provide mediocre pictures but the personalities that gravitate in this direction often do. There is loose painting and tight painting here, mostly the latter. The tight paintings tend to suceed more, ironically, because it is easier to do. Not less work, just easier. As I mentioned before, the middling qualitiy drives me to admire the meticulous realism more than the actual esthetic quality of these paintings.
What I miss are paintings that show real virtuosity, the ability to just get in there and slam the paint around and come out with something absolutely convincing. A couple try but miss, Like Benford and Ball. One, Hardy, comes close, and it looks like one of the best pictures, much as I dislike the saturated "goldiness" of the color.
I agree with 1 one's choices, with the strong exception of the Todd painting, and I could find another 8 or 10 I like as well. I don't go along with Nolameme so much except for Hardy, and I bet Pohlschmidt has painted better pictures - he seems to have a good touch.
Anyone who has done much realist painting knows the irony of detail, that it is easier to put over tiny meticulous detail than it is to paint a convincing wall, and look good doing it. People admire detail. Look at the walls, and the backgrounds, and the flat surfaces, and notice how often they go flat and lose conviction.
That's because the artist is not that good a painter. And then go look at, say, Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, and see the dancing livliness of that wall above her, all in earth color. He didn't know what kind of face to put on this scary lady, but he could do a wall in his sleep. Very interesting review in today's Times. Smith's discussion of Bannard's work in terms of camps. Recalls Catfish's comments about sides at the start of this thread. BTW Opie, your comments about BP are quite wonderful reading, it's great to see you get down and talk painting.
Similar idea. Thanks EC. We should "talk painting" with more regularity. Marc introduced this exhibit to try to get something going and I cold-shouldered it and then felt guilty about it, and then when I got into it it was fun to examine, of course. The Bannard review took a while to get there. The show opened 2 months ago. I guess by "camps" you mean "taking sides". Your observation is accurate. Discussing things in political terms often serves as a substutute for simply evaluating the art.
Roberta Smith says: "These betwixt-and-between works — the best on view — suggest a kind of Minimalist Color Field style that would have been anathema to both teams.
The fact is that Bannard was welcome in the Minimalist group, having been the one who suggested "notches" to Frank Stella, along with thick stretchers that increased the dimensionality of the relationship between the picture and the wall. The exhibit opened in , a year before "Mr. Bannard took a more painterly approach, one more in line with the theories of Clement Greenberg", according to Smith.
Are we to think that Greenberg rejected the work in "Post Painterly Abstraction" a year later because of conflicts with his unspecified "theories"?
This is how come you have to be careful reading notables such as Smith. The drama she conjures up just does not square with the facts. But the latter two are more or less friendly with each other. Greenberg recognized artists from both "teams", as Smith likes to call them.
I grant that the review is at least as harmless as it is unenlightening. And in the world of "reputations", ink is better than no ink. So I'm glad it surfaced. Right, Catfish. Greenberg couldn't care less whether a painting was maximal or minimal or realistic or abstract or red or green. He only had to like it. Re: 15 Ingres and Vermeer really knew how to add a subjective effect to their tracings - you can see how they held their breath, bit their tongues, and clenched their teeth in the paintings.
Dali's on the other hand are supreme as posters - cold, aloof and clinical. Picasso's have a combined architectural objective and sexually visceral subjective assertiveness. Monet could have turned mere shit into fields of visual abundance. I remember soft yellow paint in the receding hills of Dali.
Beyond that I'll have to see it again, but I'm not making a special trip. Ingres--he did hold his breath, he is supreme, supreme! Vermeer also, though I love Ingre's intensity so much more. I wouldnt' class Dali with those painters but do think the melting clock is one of his best paintings. Could be the small scale of the work, and the more abundant paint than usual on it. I remember the cool, green face of the clock and little licks of paint in the back, ocean I imagine this from memory and the yellow of the sand as being for Dali, satisfying.
There's something of the Stella quote what you see is what you see that conjures the philosophy of this blog. I hate to be a wet blanket EC - you seem to enjoy painting so much who am I to spoil it. I guess I am just a serial critic. Can't help myself. We don't have much philosophy here, except for Franklin's guidelines, which I think are a model for any serious blog, and the general no-nonsense tone.
Franklin, A photograph is a bad Modernist painting, and a Modernist painting is a bad poem. None of these items suffer in quality from this comparison. You've established Modernist and literary standards for postmodern art, but we're left with no idiomatically postmodern ones.
Intellectualism is a medium in postmodernism. You acknowledge as much, even if you use "conflate" unflatteringly. So intellectualism must be taken into account in quality. Otherwise we're rating postmodern expressions as modernist objects, which I think is beside the point.
To extend your wonderful metaphor, I'll accept boring and ugly things into my museum -- smart or otherwise -- if I find them profound a word I'm going to leave undefined for the moment, but which I offer in opposition to "high" or "great". Their ugliness may even accentuate their profundity. Why discriminate among the Muses?
But this whole debate may be moot. Opie just said what I was thinking: Discussing things in political terms often serves as a substutute for simply evaluating the art. If postmodernism is taking food out of peoples' mouths, then let's discuss as much. But is that the same sort of value? The disjunction is crucial. The priest and the artist, he says, might both be consigned to the catacombs, but they are separate catacombs.
Religion aims at the perfection of the soul; art aims at the perfection of a work. There can only be a Christian spirit in which an artist, a scientist, works or does not work. W e live at a time when art is enlisted in all manner of extra-artistic projects, from gender politics to the grim leftism of neo-Marxists, poststructuralists, and all the other exotic fauna who congregate around the art world and the academy. The subjugation of art—and of cultural life generally—to political ends has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age.
Among much else, it makes it increasingly difficult to appreciate art on its own terms, as affording its own kinds of insights and satisfactions. At the same time we lose something important when our conception of art lacks a spiritual dimension. That is to say, if politicizing the aesthetic poses a serious threat to the integrity of art, the isolation of the aesthetic from other dimensions of life represents a different sort of threat.
The idea that art should serve as a source—perhaps the primary source—of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic notion that continues to resonate powerfully.
This Romantic inheritance has also figured, with various permutations, in much avant-garde culture. This much, I think, is clear: Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
I t seems to me that there are as many opportunities for confusion as for enlightenment in linking the ambitions of art and religion. There is much to bemoan about the state of art and culture today. Above all, there is a lack of seriousness underwritten by a lack of traditional skill. But in this sense, the emancipation of art from religion is less an impediment than an opportunity. The secularization of art enables the really gifted artist to develop his talents to the full; it also permits those with little or no talent to produce vast quantities of phony or vulgar trash.
The triumph of the latter does nothing to impeach the promise and the achievements of the former. Man is the sort of creature whose nature is to delight in art and aesthetic experience; I believe that he is also, by nature, a religious animala creature who becomes who he really is only by acknowledging something that transcends him. These different aspects of humanity will often conspire, but we do both a disservice if we blur or elide their essential difference.
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