Landscape Pages

Some new stuff I'm trying out.  An exploration into the connection between xeroxed books and the landscape.  Lines, linear, movement, duration...stuff like that.  Very new, very unresolved.

Nine Hundred Foot Drop, Marked

Here's a new piece that I've recently installed in the Laverne Krauss Gallery at the University of Oregon.  This is an in progress shot but the installation looks more or less the same. The images are each 30"x40" and they are positives of black and white photographic contact prints that have been spray painted with orange marking paint.

Tom Burr at Sculpture Center

Along with Dia: Beacon I would have to say that Sculpture Center in Queens was one of the most interesting places to look at art.  Like Dia: Beacon, Sculpture center is committed to giving their artists great freedom in designing and installing their exhibitions which results in what I would call more complete statements.  If a gallery show is a sentence Sculpture Center is a paragraph.  Certainly this is the case with the Tom Burr show currently on view.  Burr's work is informed by a number of influences including literature, fashion, and the history of sculpture.  The central area of the show is devoted to three important figures in modernist art and culture: Chick Austin, Frank O'Hara, and Kurt Weill.  I was impressed by the way Burr is able to use such delicate arrangements and gestures to suggest meaning and history.  Particularly in the use of draped cloth, Burr is able to reference both fashion, theater and the history of drapery in sculpted form.  While his work is highly conceptual and requires a fair amount of unpacking, the elegance of the forms created with materials ranging from a straight jacket, a modernist chaise lounge and magazine clippings, create instant visual interest that allow me to consider the works more closely.  

Whitney Biennial

The biennial is a lot to wrap your head around and it goes without saying that there's going to be some work you hate and some work you really like.  If it seems like a random assortment of art styles, strategies and media then that simply reflects the reality of artistic production in America today.  Therefore, we are left with a show that is distinctive yet disparate.  I found it a bit exhausting but that may have been due to the fact that I had already been to MoMA earlier in the day.  When in New York never try to go to the Whitney and the MoMA in the same day, its murder.  But we were on a tight schedule and we had to do it.  So I came away from the biennial mostly liking work that I expected to like - Walead Beshty, James Welling, Mungo Thomson, Carol Bove.  There was a considerable amount of installation work - one of my favorites was an installation created by Phoebe Washburn that consisted of an assortment of fish aquariums outfitted with various hoses and pumps that moved Gatorade between the tanks in order to feed and grow flowers.    Mungo Thomson's Coat Check Chimes was wonderful in the way that it "bracketed" my experience of the show - greeting me on entering the museum and as I picked up my coat to leave.  The piece is made up of custom tuned hangers that are placed above the regular coat check conveyor.  As the conveyor is moved to find your coat it causes the hangers above to rattle and clang together like wind chimes.  Like much of Thomson's other work it can be read in part as a statement on emptiness and duration.  Everything that you view in the show between dropping off your coat and picking it up functions as part of the piece.  Your experience of it - how long it takes before you hear it again - is based on how long you decide to spend in the museum looking at the show. 

Color Char at MoMA

The show Color Chart currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibits an array of works that reveal a change that occurred sometime in the early to mid twentieth century during which artists began to look at color differently.  The spiritual and emotional significance was left in favor of its new industrial production and wide availability.  Artists began to deal with color in new more conceptual ways that widened our understanding of the significance of color in art and life in general.  When someone mentions color to me I often think of colors that I see in mass produced products or on T.V. or the Internet.  Many of the colors I see and use on a daily basis are completely artificial and few if any of them could be found in nature.  It seems clear to me then that we have come a long way in our understanding of color.  Just as our lives involve direct experience of nature less and less so to have our understandings of color come to change.  The colors of nature seem bland and boring when you compare them to the intense hues of a Pantone swatch book.  That being said I don't think I would prefer that everything be neon electric color.  Rather, its interesting to see how everyday color in nature looks in comparison to the new colors created for the screen or industrially produced products.  

Marc Swanson at Bellwether

Probably the first thing that one notices on viewing Marc Swanson's new show at Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea is the overwhelming variety of materials in use. From glitter, to t-shirts, to deer antlers and rhinestones, Swanson has a way of combining seemingly disparate elements into into forms that are seductive and metaphorical. The natural and the man-made rub up against one another and at times trade places. This is the case in a number of his pieces where t-shirts and underwear are treated and displayed such that they appear much closer to animal hides than underwear made in a factory. Swanson's use of glimmering rhinestones and glitter alongside unfinished wood and deer antlers again shows one how his formal talents have allowed him to bring together these different materials in a productive way. There is also a sense of some sort of ritualistic quality in the arrangement and composition of some of the pieces. The way that antlers are stacked or the pentagram forms that are repeated seem to hint at Pagan rituals and nature worship while his use of shiny man-made materials in these very pieces simultaneously pulls the viewer away from those Pagan references. I find these various sorts of dichotomies or elements of tension to be the most interesting and productive aspects of Swanson's work. While at first view one may be tempted to write off his work due to what seems like a fashionable attraction to luxurious materials, there is a lot to be gained from a closer inspection of his use of these sensitive and loaded materials.

Brian Jungen at Casey Kaplan

Brian Jungen's work deals in part with the aesthetic possibilities of globalized culture in ways that remind one of the ubiquity of western consumer goods throughout the world. Jungen's elaborate creations re-purpose typical western consumables like sneakers, sports jerseys and leather goods into works of art that reference the artistic practices of his native British Columbian Indian ancestry. In Dragonfly, 2008 Jungen has drilled thousands of small holes into the can to create an intricate design based on beading work done by Indigenous Canadian tribes. Here Jungen is referencing the landscape of the remote reservations where these tribes live by using a common part of everyday life - the jerry can. With little gas stations in these areas, the local people must rely on the jerry can to provide fuel and therefore mobility. The irony of this necessity is that the area where these tribes live is rich with oil deposits that have failed to enrich them or even contribute to more filling stations. Jungen's choice to adorn the can with holes, thereby rendering it useless, has an element of protest that is masked by the sheer beauty and intricacy of the drill work. Like much of his other work, including the woven sports jerseys also on view, Jungen is able to bring up the complex and problematic relationships between cultures in a global society while simultaneously pronouncing the possibilities for beauty and wonder.