JOHN ZEAMAN

Contemporary

Whitney Biennial 2014

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The avant-garde is dead. There is no more “cutting edge.”  The Whitney Biennial, which used to bill itself as an exhibit of risky art that outraged the establishment, has dropped even that pretense.  A typical artist in this year’s Biennial is a middle-aged associate professor of art who does the sort of things that used to be considered radical, but are now, well, academic.

Consider Chris Larson.

He’s in his late 40s. He teaches sculpture at the University of Minnesota. Last year he built a superficial replica of a house by the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. Then, with the press in attendance, he set it on fire and burned it to the ground. Breuer, it should be noted, also designed the Whitney Museum, so Larson has a certain timeliness, especially because this will be the last Biennial held in the landmark building before the Whitney moves to a new building downtown.

Then there’s Joe Scanlan.  He’s in his early 50s. He teaches sculpture at Yale.  He makes wood sculptures in a cubist style and attributes them to an alter-ego – a fictional young black woman artist named Donelle Woolford. He likes the irony inherent in an artist of African descent making cubist art out of wood, because cubism was partly inspired by African wood sculpture. When journalists come to interview him, he hires a young black actress to answer the questions.

Or, consider Lisa Anne Auerbach. She’s in her late 40s and is an assistant professor of art at Pomona College in California.  Auerbach produces machine-knit sweaters with radical slogans on them – creating a tension between hard-edged politics and a traditional feminine craft.  For the Biennial she made a banner covered with quotes from storefront psychics.  Then she printed a five-foot-tall magazine, which she calls a Megazine, featuring photographs and conversations from the oddball psychics she interviewed.  Two assistants, wearing her sweaters, turn the huge pages for visitors.

These are only three out of 103 participants in this year’s Biennial, but they illustrate what has happened to contemporary art over the past several decades.  Art used to originate outside the academy. There were teachers, yes, and artists went to art schools, but the schools taught mostly basic skills and left the mysteries to those who had the talent to tackle them. Artist-professors who are in their 40s and 50s today went to college in the ‘80s, by which time once-radical styles were institutionalized.  You could – and can — go to CalArts and study to be a conceptual artist, an idea that would have seemed hilarious in 1965.

Visually, this Biennial is an absolute mess, a three-level Tower of Babel, in which galleries are crowded with things that, if they could talk, would be incomprehensible to each other – a pup tent, stuffed animals, paint-smeared flat-screen TVs, antique furniture, X-rated mannequins, and a photo display about a transgender filmmaker couple who are transitioning in opposite directions.   There are headphones to put on, dark rooms to enter, and cases of arcane memorabilia to peer into.

Maximum chaos has been achieved by handing the reins over to three curators – MoMA’s Stuart Comer, ICA Philadelphia curator Anthony Elms, and Chicago-based artist and professor Michelle Grabner – each given a floor to play with.

It shouldn’t be surprising that in an art world now dominated by academic theory, the common-sense distinction between artist, curator and scholar would be blurred.  Grabner, for example, wears all three hats. She is the first practicing artist to curate the event in its 80-year history.  Her art, not on view here, is a dry production of black-and-white patterns that look like interwoven strips of fabric. Back home, she curates exhibits in a backyard garden shed called The Suburban.

She speaks fluent art babble: “I developed a fourth-floor curriculum that presents identifiable themes, generalities even, that are currently established in the textures of contemporary aesthetic, political, and economic realities.”

This Biennial will probably be best remembered for shows within the show. On the second floor, for example, Joseph Grigley’s artwork is a display of memorabilia about the art critic Gregory Battcock.  Battcock, once the flamboyant editor of Arts Magazine, appeared in several Andy Warhol films and wrote numerous books in the ‘60s and ‘70s about “the new art.” He was murdered in Puerto Rico in 1980.

The institutionalization of conceptual art, which often substitutes words for crafted objects, has even made it possible for the late novelist David Foster Wallace to be a Biennial artist. On view are notes he left in a set of Cuddly Kittens journals while working on “The Pale King.” The novel was left unfinished when he committed suicide in 2008.

Why, even a publishing house can be an artist, here.  Semiotext(e), credited with bringing – what else? – French deconstructionist theory to North America, displays a new series of single-essay pamphlets in “an installation” by L.A. artist Jason Yates.

Where would our culture be without brave artists like these?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Claes Oldenberg

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In the winter of 1961, Claes Oldenburg rented a storefront at 107 E. Second St. and packed it, wall to wall, with cartoonish sculptures of coffee-shop food and bargain-basement clothing. He called it “The Store.” It had things like a blue fedora, a wristwatch, an ice cream sandwich, a pair of sneakers and an entire pastry case. Everything was lumpy, misshapen and sloppily painted, as if made by a child.

As silly and as worthless as these things looked, they had art gallery price tags. A relief of a rumpled girdle, for example, was tagged $249.95 (about $2,000 in today’s dollars). The whole thing seemed like a big joke.

But this was the beginning of pop art, which was, in fact, the art world’s equivalent of a joke on itself. Oldenburg, 83, is one of the surviving members of the original pop art movement that included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. All started out by poking fun at the high seriousness of abstract expressionism, then the reigning style, by celebrating the banal imagery of American commercial culture.

Of course, that particular irony is lost on most people today. The public, it turned out, just found pop art entertaining. And Oldenburg, though never the media darling that Warhol was, has today become something of an international brand with a global string of monumental public sculptures of lipstick tubes, erasers, clothespins and the like.

In two small exhibitions, however, the Museum of Modern Art turns the clock back to the ’60s and Oldenburg’s goofy beginnings on the Lower East Side. Artists are sometimes described as people who never lost essential childlike qualities, and that fits Oldenburg to a T. In his first show, “The Street,” he reveled in the dirt and debris of his funky neighborhood. Graffiti-like scrawls on newspaper and scorched cardboard depict junky cars, barking dogs, street fires and signs with missing letters.

With “The Store,” Oldenburg turned from primitive drawing to primitive sculpture. Most of these pieces are made of plaster-covered muslin smeared and splattered with enamel house paint. Some, like “Blue and Pink Panties” and the crushed cigarettes sticking out of the pack, are reliefs, while others, like the pork chops grilling in the frying pan, are fully three-dimensional. Everything looks about as permanent as a papier-mâché volcano at a junior high science fair. Their common denominator is funkiness, and some – a lumpy, greasy-looking cup of coffee, for example – aspire to the repulsive.

In this group, you see Oldenburg’s first forays into enlargement, the trope that would define his later career. His “Floor Burger” is 7 feet across, and his dropped ice-cream cone measures more than 11 feet in length. Both are stuffed canvas.

The second part of this exhibition, seen on a separate floor, consists of two walk-in structures that are like miniature galleries within a gallery. They are from the ’70s, and, if you were to chart Oldenburg’s career as a progression through developmental stages, he has arrived at the latency stage where kids start collections of things. “Ray Gun Wing” contains 258 “ray guns,” ranging from actual plastic toys to scraps of L-shaped wood or metal that require a child’s imagination to become a space weapon.

The other structure, “Mouse Museum,” has a variety of collections that illustrate Oldenburg’s method of keeping found objects and the sculptural experiments and prototypes they inspired.

Being a childlike artist is a balancing act. Push too hard on the juvenile pedal and you end up being precious, as Oldenburg did in these two miniature museums. Push too hard on the adult pedal, and you end up becoming a corporate brand, as Oldenburg (in collaboration with his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen) did in blowups of clothespins, erasers and the like – in which fabricators actually made the art. But he got it right in “The Store,” which was in the spirit of that favorite childhood enterprise, the lemonade stand.

 

See It Loud

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Paul Georges

The post-war generation of American artists came of age at a time when abstract painting seemed an irresistible force. Most were swept up by its vortex, but a tiny minority felt confined by a new orthodoxy and rebelled.  For them, paint itself was not enough.  They wanted to make pictures.

Now, with most of these artists dead or in their twilight years, the National Academy Museum has mounted “See it Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters.”

What makes these painters different from representational painters of the past, and what gives this show its special flavor, was their attempt to reconcile these two different modes of painting – the abstract and the representational.

Take Paul Georges, one of the outspoken leaders of the group. For him, picture-making didn’t mean a return to careful academic methods. His execution retained all the swagger and dash of action painters like Pollock and de Kooning.  No subject seemed too daunting for Georges. He painted allegories and gods cavorting in the heavens. In a monumental canvas that greets visitors to this show, a Zeus-like figure (with the artist’s face) yanks a maiden off a flying horse.  Despite its size, the painting looks like it was executed with the rapidity of a sketch.

Like Georges and others, Paul Resika studied abstraction with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown.  Later, he spent several years in France and Italy, painting landscapes and canal scenes.  In the ‘90s, he rented a Thoreau-like cabin in the woods of nearby Oakland where he painted nudes in what looks like a mythical Arcadia.  Resika also heard the siren-call of reduction. His paintings of Provincetown harbor, have over the years grown increasingly minimalist . Moon, pier, sailboat and water have been stripped down to their essential geometric forms. Ironically, he has now almost come full circle, back to abstraction.

Peter Heinemann,

Peter Heinemann, who studied with the influential Josef Albers  at Black Mountain College, was a longtime teacher at the School of Visual Arts.  He has an oval shaped gallery to himself, here, in which the visitor is surrounded by Heinemann’s  glaring, blue-eyed self-portraits. These  “heads, as he preferred to call them, are painted in an architectonic  style, features blocked in with dark lines,  and set into Albers-like nested squares of color.  They are alternately angry, tragic, grandiose, foolishly romantic, self-critical. In one of the few to include his hands, the artist holds his brush like a wand, fingers at his temple – the artist as magician or swami.

Inspired by the art of Giacometti, Leland Bell enclosed all his figures with black lines in forms almost as simple as cut outs. He animated these schematic characters with high emotion acted out on a domestic stage. In one series a couple’s lovemaking is interrupted by the family cat dropping a bird by the bed.  In another, a butterfly in the house causes an uproar.  The latter painting is reminiscent of one by Balthus, the French figurative artist who was an inspiration to many of these artists. Coincidentally, that painting, “The Moth,” can be seen in the current Balthus show at the Metropolitan Museum.

Albert Kresch

The other three painters in the show are essentially landscape artists.  The best is Albert Kresch, whose small panoramas of hills, fields, water and clouds are reduced to elegant horizontals, bands of dark and light, executed in swift, confident strokes and evoking a twilight poignancy.

Neil Welliver’s bleak canvases of stony fields and log-clogged streams are as anti-romantic as Kresch’s are romantic and are done in a bland paint-by-number style that seems pop-culture ironic.  Stan Lewis’s eccentric works are middle- American streetscapes and backyards, painted in drippy oils on paper that is cut up and reassembled. The resulting pictures are as lumpy as real landscapes, while the image that sits on top is as correct as a photograph.

“Mugging of the Muse” by Paul Georges

Painters tend to squirm in bunches.  Like the abstract-expressionists who met on Tenth Street, some of these artists gathered for discussions and show-and-tell in a group they called the Alliance of Figurative Artists.  Georges captured the ambiance of this bohemian camaraderie in his 1973-74 “Cedar Tavern,” in which prominent members of his milieu huddle closely around a table.  Unlike the abstract expressionists, who got famously drunk at the same bar on University Place, these artists are mostly drinking coffee.

That didn’t prevent acrimony.  Another Georges painting from the same period, the allegorical  “Mugging of the Muse,” portrayed several fellow artists as killers of beauty and resulted in a lawsuit that made national headlines when the plaintiffs were awarded $60,000 in damages. The decision was later overturned.

This show was curated by Bruce Weber, drawing on works owned by the Center for Figurative Painting in Manhattan.

 

 

Whitney Biennial 2010

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Everything’s relative, so it can said that this year’s Whitney Biennial is easier on the senses than many in the past.  It’s smaller (only 55 artists), quieter, and less frenetic than many of its predecessors.  You can get through it without feeling assaulted or insulted (well, almost).  There are even a few artists who seem to be groping toward (but not quite reaching) the sort of pleasurable or meaningful visual experience traditionally associated with art.

The bar, in other words, is set pretty low.

The most radical development – for this cutting-edge crowd, at least – is a turn toward the decorative. Pae White’s billboard-size canvas fills your field of vision with lazy wisps and curlicues of smoke. Or take Charles Ray. Best known for his life-size doll-like people, he is represented here by pinwheel-petaled flowers in colored ink.

The Whitney typically has a big surprise waiting when you get off the elevator on the fourth floor — something intended to knock your socks off. This year’s entry, by Polish artist Piotr Uklański, is a 40-foot-wide beige curtain pieced together from ragged burlap and other cloth – but it’s a gentle giant. It looks like a Julie Taymor backdrop for “The Lion King.”  Perhaps that’s why Uklański put an angry disk-shaped sculpture out in front of it. Painted with red enamel paint, it looks like an upright plate of road kill. The two stand in juxtaposition, having some sort of dialogue or argument.

The next room features a white 1960s Cadillac hearse.  This, believe it or not, is the second hearse to appear in a biennial. The first, in 1995, was older and decorated with a thick coat of grease.  This one talks and shows video on its windshield.  It’s a production of the collective called Bruce High Quality Foundation.  The funeral appears to be for America. You see images of Elvis, war protesters, a burning monk, President Obama and someone leaping in front of a subway train, while a female voice blandly eulogizes the country as a daughter might a mother she never got along with.

It’s jejune, and depressing, but at least it has an identifiable emotional content.

In fact, there’s a pattern in this.  The pieces here that tug at your heartstrings are journalistic, such as Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of Afghanistan burn victims, women who set themselves on fire to protest domestic abuse.  Or photographer Nina Berman’s series on former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel, who had his face blown off by a car bomb but returned home to marry his high school sweetheart.

Meanwhile, the pieces that might be called high art are devoid of any emotional content.

Some are in the category of the Eiffel tower made of toothpicks: it looks like it took a lot of work, but why would you do it?   These include Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ couch upholstered with newspaper pictures of Barack Obama. Or the photographs of James Casebere, who meticulously constructed a cardboard model of a housing development in upstate New York then took pictures of it in different light.

James Casebere’s cardboard model of a housing development.

Boxes seem a motif this year. A rough-looking wooden one in the building’s sunken moat seems to be chanting “Ohmmmm, Ohmmmm” as you cross the bridge into the museum.  Inside, there’s one you can slip inside of to see in image of John F. Kennedy’s head spinning on a TV screen. Best of this group is the video of a woman trying to punch and kick her way out of a drywall box.   It looks like a Bizarro-world version of a Home Depot how-to video.

Among videos, the most obnoxious is Marianne Vitale’s close-up of a woman’s face barking orders at the viewer. My favorite, by Ari Marcopoulos, features two boys playing with their homemade electronic synthesizer in a tiny kid’s bedroom. They scramble around on the floor operating the myriad controllers that pump their techno music through a wall of speakers.

The fifth floor has an exhibit by biennial artists who made it into the permanent collection – from Edward Hopper to Julian Schnabel. Meanwhile, the back of the show’s catalog has photos from past biennials, and, even more interesting, newspaper clippings of critics’ reactions. Up until about 1965, the reviews were respectful. Since then, it’s been all downhill – with minor blips of course. Consider this one a tiny uptick. Nothing to get excited about,

 

 

Tim Burton

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Walking through the gaping monster mouth at the entrance to the third floor exhibit, you might be forgiven for thinking the clock at the Museum of Modern Art has been turned back to Halloween.

MoMA, the scholarly temple of classical modernism, home to Matisse, Picasso and Monet’s “Waterlilies,” has gone gaga for Burton. He’s all over the place: installations in the lobby, movies and posters downstairs, drawings and paintings upstairs.  Why there’s even a film festival devoted to the horror movies that influenced Burton as a boy.

For almost two generations, artists have been drawing on the energy – negative or otherwise – of commercial culture: television, advertising, Hollywood movies, the media, etc.  Given this incestuous relationship, it was only a matter of time, perhaps, before commercial culture – unmediated by a Cindy Sherman or a Jeff Koons —  was welcomed into the museum.

I like Burton.  When his “Beetlejuice” came out in 1988, I thought it was one of the cleverest movies I had ever seen, unusually imaginative and deftly satirical. It skewered yuppie greed, Goth morbidity, new age silliness, and artistic pretension. It was playfully macabre and – this is a key to Burton’s charm – sweet. It became a great family favorite.

I’ve seen others, including “Edward Scissorhands,” a portrait of the artist as an alienated adolescent, and good stop-action films like “The Corpse Bride,” which reminded me of “Beetlejuice” in its rendering of a zany afterlife, but none has ever done it for me like that one did.

A Burton film festival is perfectly consistent with MoMA’s movie standards and its interest in “auteurs” – directors who have a unique vision. But the rest, the serious-art-exhibit-with-curatorial-analysis-and-catalog treatment goes a bit overboard.

The fun of the exhibit is mostly biographical. I especially enjoyed the scratchy Super-8mm films Burton shot as a 13-year-old, enchanted with the magic of stop-action. With it, toy animals could chase and bloody each other, a beanbag chair could move like The Blob, and a fallen soldier could be vaporized into an outline of burning lighter fluid.

His depiction of suburban sterility in “Edward Scissorhands” might be grounded in his middleclass upbringing in Burbank, Ca., but without it, Burton would never have developed his particular sensibilities. Instead of being taken to museums like MoMA as a child, the young Burton was left to comic books, horror films (especially those starring his idol, Vincent Price) and Japanese monster movies.

His cartoons, with their doodling line and gross caricatures, were shaped by psychedelic art, the hot-rod cartoons of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Mad Magazine’s Don Martin, Dr. Seuss, Gahan Wilson, Zap Comix’s R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman (the ink-splattering illustrator of Hunter Thomson’s pieces for Rolling Stone). Museum curators now call this culture pop surrealism or “lowbrow art.”

The exhibit is an opportunity to see drawings for projects that never made it, such as “Trick or Treat,” “Little Dead Riding Hood,” and “Romeo and Juliet” (in which the protagonists are personifications of land mass and ocean mass).

You can also see animatronic puppets from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” costumes from “Edward Scissorhands,” and “Batman Returns,” and props such as the severed heads from “Mars Attacks” and Sandworm jaws from “Beetlejuice.”

Burton spent two years at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), then four years as an animator at The Walt Disney Studios. The drawings he did in his spare time show a penchant for sight gags: to illustrate a man undressing a woman with his eyes, he shows eyeballs literally jumping out of their sockets on stalks and unzipping the clothes.

But what set Burton apart from others with a similar humor, was his ability to engage his own vulnerability.  You can see that in “Vincent,” the short film he did about a boy who idolizes Vincent Price.

What you learn from this exhibit is that when Burton has been most successful, it’s because he’s kept a taut tension between three tendencies. His macabre side is kept from becoming too gruesome by his sweetness, the sweetness is kept from becoming too sentimental by the humor, the humor is kept from degenerating into silliness by the macabre and so on. When he hasn’t succeeded, it’s usually because one of these has gotten the upper hand.

 

 

 

 

Matthew Barney

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Matthew Barney

 

It’s not easy being a famous artist today. To command the necessary attention, to poke your head above the rest of the scrabbling crowd, you must be utterly, even flamboyantly, outrageous. No halfway measures will do. You must be willing, for example, to strip naked, don a mountain-climbing harness, and clamber around on an art gallery ceiling with titanium ice screws dangling from your anus.

A still from Matthew Barney’s “The Cremaster Cycle.”

But here’s the hard part, that which separates the men from the boys. You must maintain an attitude of utter seriousness. You can’t refer to what you’ve done as a “happening,” as earlier artists

innocently called such stunts. You must give it a title that is at once enigmatic and scientific, such as “Blind Perineum.” And it must fit into a theoretical framework that transforms the act into something profoundly symbolic, having to do with “pulsating cycles of desire and discipline,” or “the permeable membrane between the human and the inhuman.”

So began the exemplary career of Matthew Barney, who, a mere 12 years after this auspicious debut, is hailed by critics as a genius and “the most important artist of his generation.” His Wagnerian-like masterpiece is  “The Cremaster Cycle,” a series of five feature-length art films, wordless but visually extravagant, a new millennium mix of biology, mythology, and autobiographical symbols in which Barney plays a satyr, a ram, a magician, Harry Houdini, and the murderer Gary Gilmore.

All five films are showing continuously at the Guggenheim Museum, both in its auditorium and on monitors in the main spiral exhibition space, where also can be found related sculptures and props from the films, including a concrete-filled piano and a trough filled with molten Vaseline.

Now for the impressive bio. Bright, athletic, and handsome, Barney went from Boise, Idaho, to Yale University on a football scholarship and supported himself with modeling jobs. He graduated in 1989, and that very same year, performed his first major video, “Field Dressing,” in which he slid up and down a metal pole, scooped up petroleum jelly, and repeatedly pushed it into all the orifices of his body. After clambering naked on the walls and ceiling of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Barney did a piece called “Radical Drill,” in which he performed football blocking exercises dressed in high heels and a black evening gown. By 1993, he was in the Whitney Biennial with a video, “Drawing Restraint 7,” in which Barney plays a goat-boy limo driver of indeterminate sex who chauffeurs two older satyrs around Manhattan’s tunnels and bridges, while the two old goats wrestle in the back.

The title of “The Cremaster Cycle” comes from the name for the muscle in the male reproductive system that raises and lowers the testicles in response to temperature changes, external stimulation, or fear. Another theme that fascinates Barney is that moment in fetal development when the male and female sexual organs differentiate. In one film, chorus girls do a Busby Berkeley routine on a football field, forming shifting outlines of reproductive organs.

The other films play out these themes, blending them with ancient myths and modern film genres and a host of bizarre and kitschy characters who cavort about in strange, architectonic environments that are themselves symbols of anatomical structures and psychological constructs. “Cremaster 2” is a gothic western based loosely on “The Executioner’s Song” by Norman Mailer, who plays Harry Houdini in the movie. It tells the story of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, said to be Houdini’s grandson, who was put to death by a Utah firing squad in 1977.

The third “Cremaster” film is a gangster thriller about Masonic initiation rites, zombies, and the construction of the Chrysler Building — which functions as a character in the story. One sequence has dead horses (wearing body costumes to simulate rotting flesh) racing at Saratoga. In the fourth, set on the Isle of Man, Barney plays a dandified, tap-dancing satyr, who writhes his way through a treacherous underwater canal. “Cremaster 5,” performed in a Hungarian opera house, stars Ursula Andress as the lovelorn queen and Barney as the diva, the magician, and the giant, and features hermaphroditic water sprites in a bubble bath.

What kind of artist is Barney? Despite all the postmodern theory and esoteric biology, Barney he has a lot in common with the good old surrealists. His films work more like dreams than any dramatic or narrative form, and, like the surrealists, who paid homage to Freud and the Marquis de Sade, Barney is preoccupied with sexual development and orifices.

His surrealist progenitor might be Salvador Dali, the most outrageous, sex-obsessed, and narcissistic of them all. Dali had a hyperactive imagination, and the ability to realistically render any paranoid or infantile fantasy that flitted across his mind, so that, no matter how weird the subject—the giant grasshoppers and limp clocks—he won people over with his polished technique.

Dali was, of course, a flamboyant and eccentric personality, which the deadly earnest Barney is not, despite the nude cavorting. Dali, for all his pompous claims of genius, was too madcap to consistently take his own nonsense seriously. When asked by visitors to his exhibits about the meaning of works with such titles as “Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone,” Dali would respond with even more ridiculous commentary, such as “the telephone represents the blackened bones of my father passing between the male and female figures in Millet’s ‘Angelus.'”

It makes you long for the good old days.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

2003