January 2007 Archives

I feel betrayed by John Currin. I went to his show, I enjoyed it, I gave it a positive review. I was willing to give John that much, which so many people -- aside, I guess, from high-end gallery directors -- haven't been willing to give him. And then he went and ruined it. Some anonymous person -- I'd like to think it was Currin himself -- commented on my review that they'd found John's source material for a number of the paintings in his show. And it was online Danish porn scanned from magazines from the 1970s. (Amusingly, such images, once fairly mainstream hardcore pornography, are now relegated to the "hairy" niche.)

I spent a while trying to figure out why I felt betrayed by this. Clearly it's not because Currin used photos as a painting reference; I've reviewed painters who lean much more heavily on photos -- Denis Peterson and Mary Henderson -- and not only did I like their work, I absolutely adored it. It's not that he didn't take the photos himself or that he found them online; Mary found all of her photos online and doesn't even personally know the photographers. It's not that Currin was a slave to the photos; just like Denis and Mary, John changed details around and modified compositions as he saw fit.

And yet still I feel betrayed. Almost as betrayed as I did when I found out that Roy Lichtenstein was a thief, fraud, and shameless huckster. He not only borrowed the images of his most famous paintings from the work of better, more accomplished craftsmen, but he copied them almost precisely. I never had a whole lot of respect for Lichtenstein, but learning about this pretty much wiped out the rest.

Clearly what John Currin has done is not in this league. So it took me a little bit of thought to determine what bothered me so much about his copying. And then I realized: It's about intent. It's about depth. It's about soul.

Both Denis and Mary do what they do in an attempt to elevate their subject matter. Denis works with the photographs and tries to empathize with their subjects, to use his painting to somehow change the very fabric of the universe so he can transmit his care and love and attention to the people and places he portrays. He is trying, the way only an artist can, to suspend and rewrite mundane physics to change the world. Mary, meanwhile, is finding the glowing center of being human, energizing and enriching simple, banal, meaningless photographic moments until they are imbued with the power of lives as they are being lived.

Meanwhile John Currin is copying pornography. And not particularly well, either. As one commenter wrote after my review, now that we know he worked from photos, Currin has no excuse for how badly he drew the hand. Or any of the other piss-poor passages.

I don't know if I would mind quite as much if Currin were using the photos as references. We've all done that. I can even point you to a painting of mine online where I used online porn as a guide. But there's a difference between referencing a photo and copying it.

The second one is less obviously a copy because Currin made two copies, one shown here and a second painting, not available online, which is more directly a copy, with the hairy open vulva and all. But you can see he copied over the guy's gold chain, the woman's glove and bracelet, their rather frighteningly organic tongues. You can see he shifted the guy's hand over, too, and really, really badly, like maybe he'd never seen a real human hand before, but heard about them somewhere.

There's also a matter of resources: It seems to me that a painter of the stature of John Currin could have found himself some real models to work from, or had his own photos taken at the very least. Maybe part of the point he's trying to make required that he repurpose ancient pornography -- it's almost as old as I am! -- but, if so, I'd say that's even more asinine and worthless. What point is there worth making about old porn?

Maybe I'm taking this too personally. Maybe I feel invested in Currin's work because I stepped up and wrote positively about it. Maybe it's because, back in the fur behind those two society women, I saw in his swirling brushwork echoes of my own drawing and it scares me to think I could end up like an unfamous John Currin myself. Maybe I'm just jealous that he can get all this attention simply for copying online porn and people like me can't get a break.

Or maybe, ultimately, John Currin really is just a bad painter. And he duped me. Thank you, you anonymous browser of online pornography, for opening my eyes.

If I ever get to write a review for an opening of my own work, I might be more proud than I am to write this review, but not by much. Back when I was considering starting this blog I went looking for people who were doing what I was planning on doing, namely reviewing art openings as an artist in the New York City area. My first search was admittedly very shallow and I didn't find much. But I did find this blog called Thinking About Art by this guy named J.T. Kirkland. I found a pleasant little online community of reasonably thoughtful reasonably smart people had grown around this writer and artist, so I started writing to him and commenting on his blog. Eventually he was in New York and we went through Chelsea together.

Since then, of course, I've found that there are about a million blogs doing approximately what I'm doing, all with slight differences, of course. But J.T. is still special to me, because his art is like nothing I've ever seen; and he introduced me to Ed Winkleman, and without that I wouldn't know anyone.

Of course what you say to any artist you know is "Let me know when you're having a show!" Only J.T. is down in Virginia and, really, when am I ever going to get down there? I'd certainly like to think, if he had a major show as far north as Washington, D.C. or Baltimore, that I'd make an effort to get down there. But who am I kidding? I've lived almost my entire life on a line between Philadelphia and New York City. I'm not going anywhere.

So naturally when J.T. told me about his GREAT IDEA -- to hold a mini-art fair of his own work in his hotel room in New York, where he's holed up for his day job -- I knew I had to be there. I really wanted to be there all three nights, actually, but my life keeps intruding, so I could only go Wednesday.

I arrived to find that J.T. had managed to convert his small hotel room into a mini-gallery. His work -- mostly wood, with one framed drawing -- hung on the walls, and the bed was covered with his drawings and prints. The room's table became the gallery's front desk, along with postcards, verbiage, price lists, a laptop and a sign-in book. Altogether this was clearly the work of some kind of insane details freak -- just the kind of guy you might expect to spend his spare time drilling hundreds of tiny holes into planks of wood.

J.T. has noted that most people don't care much about wood. Even other sculptors -- he mentioned Donald Judd -- who use wood don't care about the wood per se. They only care that it's plywood or whatever. And of course any artist who paints on a panel uses wood -- but, J.T. asks, are they really improving on it?

Turning the question around, TJ on J.T.'s blog said that he felt J.T. wasn't improving on the wood -- that in fact the holes distracted viewers from the beauty of the wood itself. Having seen the work in person, I now see that the exact opposite is true. By drilling holes according to his own plan, J.T. calls attention to the wood in a way impossible using just wood alone. His intentional acts -- the holes -- serve to highlight the areas in which his intention has not acted -- the wood grain. In a sense -- although I don't mean this literally, even though it is literal in some of his pieces -- J.T. has put a frame around the wood grain, allowing us to appreciate it as its own sort of random art. Without the frame, it's just wood. It's flooring or furniture or a handrail. With the frame, it's something to look at and appreciate.

One thing that's impossible to appreciate online is the range of sizes in J.T.'s work. Sure, he prints the size next to each JPEG. But it's not the same. Some pieces reminded me of toy blocks while others were quite large. None of them ended up being the size I expected them to be. And of course the depth of the wood grain -- he uses no stain, no varnish, nothing but sanding (he alluded to some secret process he's worked out to enhance the grain) -- the depth of the wood grain can't be reproduced.

His drawings are oddly different and yet similar to his wood work. They all share a common sense of some obsessive compulsive working out his energy at the end of the day. His drawings are mostly circles, each carefully -- not to say laboriously -- inked in the style of a turn of the (last) century draftsman. J.T. has taken to using scrapbook paper, which is archival and comes in a wild array of patterns and colors, as the background for his intense scribing. The clash of arts-n-crafts and art makes beautiful music, even when J.T.'s only addition is a dark line slashing arrow straight across the graded stripes of the paper.

At the show J.T. talked with me and Stephanie Lee Jackson, who had beat me there, and a few other people who dropped by, including Cate Nolan and Jim Leonard, who together form a married pair. (The preceding sentence was brought to you by People for Non-preferential Gender References.) Jim, incidentally, is clearly, if you read his Website, entirely insane.

Because I was one of the lucky few to visit, J.T. gave me a free print. I chose this one here. Not for any good reason beyond I liked it best out of the ones he had available. J.T. told me it was his favorite. I wonder if he says that to everyone who gets a print.

I'd suggest at this point that everyone go and see his show, but it's gone now. So instead I'd suggest you read his blog, and keep an eye out for his next show. And even if it's in Virginia, you make the trip.

I'm a sucker for several things. As I've written, I'm a sucker for painting technique. I'm also a sucker for a pretty girl and an invitation. And if a pretty girl invites me somewhere, well then I'm a double sucker. (Quick definition so you don't think I'm some kind of patriarchal throwback: I define "pretty girl" as "female person about my age or younger who I like and is nice to me." It actually has almost nothing to do with physical attractiveness and is mostly about my inability to admit that, at 36 years old, I am a grown-up.)

In this case, Lisa Schroeder invited me to her gallery's latest opening, which is how I ended up in New York on a Friday instead of Thursday. "You'll like it," she promised, because, as I admitted in print, our tastes in art are usually wildly incompatible. Alas, Schroeder Romero's show of Reuben Lorch-Miller turned out to be, as usual, a head-scratcher for me.

I wrote once about the three categories of art as being Wow!, Yuck!, and Huh?. I realize now there's a fourth category: What Were They Thinking? All three original categories assume that we can all agree the works in question are probably art works, although we might disagree about their merits. The fourth category asks, "What made anyone think this was actually art?"

It's clear that Reuben has made things. These are certainly man-made items. It's clear Reuben has some intention with these items. What's unclear is whether his intention was to create items which are so lacking in any outstanding qualities of any kind -- including badness -- that they just have no effect at all. I'd seen art that was aggressively awful. I'd seen art that was uninteresting. I'd seen art that was incompetent. But I don't think I'd yet seen art which was essentially nonexistent until now. This show is like a perfume which evaporates the instant you open the bottle leaving no scent behind, so you can never tell if it's the most wonderful perfume of all time or simply a broccoli fart.

What's in the show? A few C-prints of very lossy JPEGs enlarged far beyond their limits. A few banners, like collegiate team flags, with cryptic phrases stitched on them ("SURRENDER", "WATCH OUT"). Some wooden plaques with cryptic phrases painted on them ("Bless the night." "Just the other side of nowhere."). A box with leaves painted on the inside. And a video showing a river and its bank, helpfully shown on a thirteen-inch TV at floor level.

At the opening I found myself next to the video and Lisa.

"If I watch this long enough," I asked, "does something happen?"

"Oh, Chris," she said, playfully exasperated.

"I mean, does some naked person run across the screen or something?"

She leaned in close to me. "It's conceptual."

"Uh huh."

Then she tried to explain how, if you watch it long enough, you do start to see things. Like, the river is always moving. And so on.

I had no doubt if I watched it long enough I'd start to see things. I felt this process would be greatly aided by ingestion of alcohol, or perhaps cannabis.

There was one piece I thought was rather neat. Off in the gallery's side room, usually where they keep a few extra pieces from other artists, Reuben had hung untitled (lanterns). Two lanterns, one upside down, joined at their bottom point, hang from the ceiling and slowly rotate. The glass in the lanterns has been replaced with mirrors. In the small white room, at the right angle, the mirrors appear to be reflecting nothing at all, while the joined lanterns give the appearance of one lantern with a mirror underneath it. The piece has an immediate "Hey, cool" effect.

That was the one piece where, as the artist says in his statement, experience superseded understanding. Well, almost.

Next door Ed Winkleman was hosting an opening of his own. I was surprised to see it -- I'd come in just for Schroeder Romero. Ed has up some photos from Victor Skrebneski. A little later -- I'm jumping ahead in time here -- I was returning to the gallery for a second look when, outside, I was stopped by a tall beautiful woman with a Slavic accent.

"Are you here to see Victor Skrebneski?"

"Yes I am."

"Have you seen his work before?"

"No. I mean, I was here earlier, so, yes, but not before tonight."

"You'll like it. He's a legend."

"Really?"

Turns out he is a legend -- a PDN and Kodak Legend.

I've gone on record multiple times as saying I'm uneasy about considering photography as art. I love photography, especially of people, especially of nude people, and I find it engrossing and fascinating, and I enjoy taking photos myself. But I've yet to find a photograph that moved me the way truly great art does -- the way, say, a great symphony or song or painting might. I've never seen a photograph that really got inside me. I won't say that photography cannot be art -- I think anything can be art -- I'm just saying I haven't seen it yet. And I've seen a lot of photography.

I did like Victor's show. He has some lovely photos of athletes. Each photo is actually a pair of photos, printed out very large, of different aspects of the athlete. I was most taken by an image of a swimmer's legs, actually a composite image of three photos of the same swimmer's legs from different angles. His legs are quite beautiful.

On the way into New York, a little bit outside the Lincoln Tunnel, there's a billboard which has, for a while now, anyway, been taken up by Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Each ad features some impossibly sculptured guy in a state of undress -- with his pants undone, his shirt off, being naked in a field, whatever. I always find myself captivated by this billboard. I can't believe the model in the photo is even the same species as me, let alone the same gender. I mean, I've never seen any part of my body remotely resemble the parts of their bodies. I might as well compare myself to a helicopter.

Driving in and looking at the billboard, I thought to myself that I needed to ask Ed a question when I saw him. And then finding that my favorite photo in the show was of some man's legs, I felt I had to ask even more urgently. So I told Ed about my preference in photos, and the billboard, and then I sprung it on him.

"Am I gay?"

Of course I'm not. He did say that he thought I'd appreciate that particular photo, though, because in my art I clearly appreciate the human form. Which is certainly true. Another thing I liked about Victor's photos was how they communicated the strength, both physical and mental, of the subjects. Each athlete looked like someone who had found their limits and sought to extend them as much as possible. They each looked like people of passion and purpose. And like people who really enjoyed their sport.

After my first pass through Victor's show I saw that the corridor behind Ed's gallery was open and lit. I'd never seen it that way, but now it was possible to cross the corridor and go into the gallery on the other side. So I wandered over to Black & White Gallery which was showing Jackie Saccoccio's In Transparency.

I was immediately taken with the first thing I saw, which was an enormous drawing on a huge sheet of paper tacked to the wall. The drawing was entirely in black ink and none of the lines intersected -- it reminded me, in fact, of the drawings I've been doing, only much larger. Further into the gallery, I saw that Jackie had drawn all over the walls of the gallery in the same style. I barely noticed her paintings, honestly.

While getting a postcard I was accosted by the gallery director, Tatyana Okshteyn, who introduced herself to me and began telling me about her upcoming show. It turns out that Eric White is going to be in that show. I have a couple of lithographs from him, and met him at an opening of his a few years back. He's terrible at responding to e-mail so I haven't had much contact with him, but I'm looking forward to seeing him at that opening. In the meantime I asked Tatyana to introduce me to Jackie, which she did, and Jackie and I spoke for a while.

I'm afraid I barely mentioned her paintings, which, in retrospect, might have been a little rude of me. But we got to talking about her drawings, and how her drawings served a similar purpose to mine, which is that we were both trying to break out of established routines to create something without putting too much conscious thought into it. I was thrilled to see that someone had gotten to fulfill my dream of drawing on the gallery walls -- an urge I often have to fight down -- and she said it was, in fact, a liberating amount of fun. It was also interesting that her lines on the wall were reactions to the space; if you stood in the right spot, the drawings on the faces of two columns fit in with the drawings on the opposite wall, merging them into one space. Too many so-called art installations could be set up anywhere under any conditions. Jackie's installation was very site-specific, and was due to be painted over in a few short days.

I bid good bye to the evanescent drawings and went out to the only other opening I found that looked good. Nicole Klagsbrun was showing the work of the late artist known as Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel). According to the online gallery verbiage Cameron was a mystic, a follower of Aleister Crowley, and maybe a member of the OTO. Well, sign me up -- I'm a huge fan of Robert Anton Wilson (who died only recently, alas) and through him something of a fan of Crowley, so I could hardly miss this show.

Not that it was great. Turns out I could have missed it and gone on with my life just as happily. The curators of the show apparently just took apart a bunch of Cameron's sketchbooks and pinned the pages to the walls. There were a few striking images, a large number of apparently idle doodles, and a few ink and/or watercolor paintings which were somewhat muddled. All the images seemed very dated to me, like something out of a 1960s Walter Foster book on How to Paint Psychedelia.

On the way back to my second run through Winkleman and Schroeder Romero -- just a little while before my fated run-in with the Russian lady -- I wobbled in to Derek Eller Gallery. From the street the show didn't look like much -- in fact none of the other openings on 27th Street near Winkleman looked like much -- but I'm glad I went in. I found the show Whirl and Magnet by Lorenzo De Los Angeles, whose wild name, if it isn't a pseudonym, should be.

Lorenzo's work in this show consists of colored pencil drawings of deep subtlety of shading and detail. His content is less subtle but more incomprehensible: Strange molecular figures, seemingly infinite regressions, vaguely sexual sphincters, the occasional toad, these all figure in his compositions. Each drawing is beautiful, meticulous, and weird all at once, but it's a weirdness all Lorenzo's own; far too much weirdness in the art world these days is the cookie-cutter Juxtapoz weirdness, which isn't weird at all but is instead its own sort of counterculture culture. Instead of simply being odd and shallow, or twisted and sick, Lorenzo's art is approachable enough that it demands you explain it in some way. Like, this here's about how toads are leaving our planet because of excess nicotine. I wish there was more of the work from his show online; this wasn't my favorite drawing by half, but it's the only one I could find.

To sum up, then, I'm glad I came in on what was, for me, an off night. I'm sorry that once again I couldn't love what Schroeder Romero had up for me. Maybe one day we'll overlap and then I'll write a glowing, fantastic review. But until then, sigh.

January 4, 2007 was a quiet night. Everyone was still recovering from the holidays and Miami, so there were almost no gallery openings in Chelsea, almost no postings on the blogs, almost nothing happening in the art world at all. But J.T. Kirkland was in New York and he wanted to go out -- in fact was going out almost every lunchtime and going through Chelsea -- and since Lyons Wier • Ortt was having an opening, we decided to get together and see what there was to see. J.T. had never seen a New York opening and he was interested in seeing "the scene" for the first time.

He picked a bad night. A really bad night. But he saw what he wanted to see, which was how many people -- and what kinds -- show up for openings around here. Answer: Lots and all kinds. In fact the wide range of attendees at art openings in Chelsea is boggling. I was so worried a year ago when I first started going to shows that I'd look somehow wrong; ordinarily I don't give a crap how other people perceive me, but when I began in the art world I wanted to make a good -- or anyway accurate -- first impression. Turned out I needn't have worried, because everyone and everything can be found inside a Chelsea gallery opening. People wear black tie; people look homeless. Goths, punks, street artists, street people, classical musicians, oil refinery mechanics, horse traders, professional golfers, dumpster divers, captains of industry, Mole Men from the Underdark. Everyone. It's as if you took one of those Victorian illustrators who made engravings of various ethnic groups and plunked them down in 21st century America, then flipped through the resulting book. Chelsea galleries, often thought, casually, as being elitist, are in fact one of the most egalitarian gathering places in all of New York City outside of Central Park itself. Even on a bad night.

The night wasn't just slow, it was also disappointing. I started at Winkleman where Ed was in a meeting involving a gesticulating Orthodox Jew so I couldn't do more than wave to him. I gave a quick look around at the show, Boyce Cummings, which I'd really thought would be better. I won't say too much about it because I didn't look that closely at any of the paintings; but then none of the paintings really made me want to look too closely. As near as I could work out, each canvas consisted of an argument between representation and abstraction; abstraction appeared to be winning, possibly because it's easier to paint.

I went next door to see Lisa and Sara Jo at Schroeder Romero and arrived just as they'd turned off all the artworks. (J.T. reports the show, by Ted Victoria, was very cool.) The result was a pretty fantastically minimalist installation of smooth glossy black rectangles hung on the wall. Lisa invited me to their next opening and I was off to meet J.T.

J.T. ran late -- through no fault of his own -- and left me at possibly the worst show of all time for waiting for someone. I'd had high hopes for Anthony Lister's show: First, Michael Lyons Wier and Anna Ortt had yet to disappoint me. For an entire year, I liked every show they had, and even loved some of them. Second, the image for the show online looked intriguing. And third, according to the gallery verbiage, Anthony was exploring a subject in which I was very interested. As a father of young children, I've wondered about the effect and influence of advertising, sponsorship, and consumerism on the minds of my kids. And as the gallery says, "As a conscientious 27 year old citizen and parent...Lister has created a body of work that unabashedly combines seemingly passive content with its probable underlying subversive message."

What I found in the gallery, however, was three paintings and an installation consisting of a pile of cardboard boxes. In the corner of the boxes sat some unfortunate performer in too-tight shorts and a homemade papier-mâché Batman mask playing with an old kiddie electronic keyboard and occasionally singing along very badly.

The show's signature image was the only decent painting, and that might have been okay only because it was so big, and I find big paintings tend to look better than small ones, if only because the large size lends more gravity. As usual, Anthony fell into the fine artist trap of being unable to competently reproduce cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob, and ultimately his message was hopelessly shallow: Corporations use the same techniques to sell porn that they use to sell movies for kids! Sex sells! Won't someone think of the children?

I tried to give the show some slack, I really did. Then I noticed that there were three small LCD screens set crudely into some of the stacked boxes, and one of them was showing footage of the World Trade Center on September 11th. That did it for me: This show was not deserving of any goodwill. It simply sucked.

J.T. finally found me outside. Rather than make him shuffle through the tiny show on his own, I went up with him. I refused to say anything about the show until he saw it for himself so as not to poison the jury pool. Luckily, J.T. is a man of few words and quick opinions: It took him less than a minute to realize the work was crap. We left and, since we were in the building, floated next door, where we found a show -- I didn't get the names, but it was a two-artist team -- consisting of large hunks of rusting iron on the floor and some poorly stretched canvases which appeared to have been painted with metallic housepaint then left out in the rain for a year. I'll say this: Very few shows require tetanus shots if you accidentally brush up against the artwork, and that's a damned shame.

After that we were at something of loose ends; I didn't know of any other openings. J.T. only had one more he thought might be worth the walk, so we found our way to the Julie Saul Gallery to see Brian Ulrich's Copia. This consisted of several large photographs of American stores and Americans shopping. A guy pensively examines a fishing pole. A line of checkout counters at Target marches to the vanishing point. A woman on a cellphone muses over the refrigerated section of a supermarket. The gallery attendee grows so bored his autonomic nervous system shuts down and he has to be revived with an Automatic External Defibrillator (not available at Target, although you can get one very reasonably here).

Standing in front of one of the prints, I said to J.T., "Okay, so are these about the relentless dehumanizing effect of our shallow consumer culture on the human spirit?"

"Wow," he replied, "you figured it out that quickly?"

"Well, it could be about how there's beauty even in the mundane."

"It's the former."

In the next room, Roz Chast, the cartoonist, was showing some of her drawings. Cartoons. Comics. Whatever you'd call them. I have great good feelings towards all cartoonists. I think cartooning is a really difficult field of endeavor; I think it communicates with such a large audience that its practioners are very influential; I think all cartoonists are, in some measure, saints; and cartoonists have given me, collectively, so many hours of pleasure that I cannot ever put a cartoonist down, no matter what. That said, I never really understand or find amusing any Roz Chast cartoon. More power to her: I wish her all the success in the world. But if I never see another one of her drawings, I will not go to my grave disappointed.

J.T. and I wandered a bit after that. I'm not sure what else we saw. I know we stopped in at Nancy Margolis where we saw Jack Earl's show. Jack is a ceramic sculptor and this show looked like the Attack of the Hellborn Tchotchkes, like someone made a line of the worst Father's Day Hallmark figurines of all time. There were guys with bags over their heads, and, geez, you know, I don't even remember. They were all grimly humorous, well made, and ultimately not very exciting.

What else was there? We peered in the windows of some closed galleries, and that work was much better than what we'd subjected ourselves to. We walked dispiritedly back and forth across Chelsea hoping something good would fall on us. Eventually, I drove J.T. back to his hotel, got mildy lost in the financial district, and made it home early.

However, while we were walking around, J.T. confided in me his GREAT IDEA, which I highly recommend you go read about.

I don't feel like writing reviews right now. But maybe that's why I should do it. Stephanie says: First thing, you should put on your shoes. Somehow that makes you feel like you're going out, and that way you can actually get things done. I didn't feel like putting pants on today, either, but I did that. To go out and feed the addiction. Nothing serious, just Coca-Cola and Pepsi -- those archaic names from a time when they were expected to heal the sick and comfort the afflicted. A minor addiction for a minor life. But still, they'll probably kill me.