Art & Engineering & Biennial

photo courtesy of Memorial Art Gallery and A.E. Ted Aub

A parade of people are coming to Rochester this month to praise the Erie Canal as the engineering marvel that changed our land and spurred growth throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The World Canals Conference will be meeting to discuss the future of canals and what their role will be in the 21st century and beyond.  "Re-Inspired"  an exhibition of art will accompany the World Canals Conference and travel to New York City and Troy after the conference has concluded.   The Oxford Gallery will extend that vision with a show titled "Waterway West", and both invitational shows will begin in mid September.

As a frequent visitor to the Erie Canal, I am pleased that there is a trail for biking, running and walking, and along the extent of the canal you can find vestiges of American history and feel a heightened sense of space.  The canal may be New York's most prominent landmark ( next to the Empire State Building) and yet its public purpose can be renewed and should become a vibrant feature once again.

Claude Fayette Bragdon ( 1866-1946) was someone who had a lifelong experience with art and engineering and a small collection of his work is on view in the Lockhart Gallery at the Memorial Art Gallery.  A collaborative and friendly relationship between Fritz Trautmann and Claude Bragdon is celebrated in this little show that highlights their accomplishments as artist and architect respectively.

Years ago I would have thought that mathematics had nothing to do with art, but seeing the work of Charles Bragdon could change all that.  His mathematical abstractions from the late 1930's anticipate much of computer/digital modelling  and his sense of color ( aided by his friend, the painter Fritz Trautmann) softens his Modernist tendencies.   In the end, these two American artists are nowhere near as extreme as their European counterparts coming out of the Bauhaus, nor as visionary as a Frank Lloyd Wright or Buckminster Fuller, even though the vocabulary is so similar.

Stepping across the threshold of the Main Gallery at MAG, the visitor is greeted by A.E. Ted Aub's sculpture as part of this year's Biennial honoring six mid-career artists.  Ted Aub is a teacher at Hobart William & Smith College in Geneva, New York and his five works in bronze and one in Hydrocal (pictured above) have a kind of cartoonish streamlining that reminds me of Art Deco and Elie Nadelman.
Like toys that are knocked off balance, Ted Aub's figurative sculpture brings an element of discomfort
along with the playfulness of his topsy-turvy world.

The spirit of play and light fills the next room with Anne Haven's contributions to this exhibition which include my favorite artwork in the show which is titled "Grace".  Such simple pleasures, but also eloquent and ethereal in the sound and movement of dangling silverware!

Should you be having too much fun looking around Anne Haven's mixed media pieces, you can always temper that with Alberto Rey's mural size paintings of dead fish  from his series "Aesthetics of Death",
or watch his documentary video "Biological Regionalism".  I think that the temper of this Biennial is  summed up in a little statement from Anne Haven's: between the priest and the jester.

There are appeals to our collective conscience in the mixed media art of Julianna Furlong Williams.  The human condition's of illness and mortality is never far away in the rugged statements made in a series of modestly sized works which can include handwriting, photos and gritty paint-handling.
Photos by Rick Hock, also communicate through iconic statements augmented in typographic
headlines: "NOIDEASBUTIN" (2010), and "WHAT I SAY GOES"( 2009).  There are some paralells here to the work of Barbara Kruger but without the sting of her confrontations.

Lawrence M. "Judd" Williams taught at Rochester Institute of Technology and has been a contributor to many shows in Rochester.  He was one of the artists featured last spring at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in "Makers and Mentors".  Here "Judd" Williams  relief constructions of wood and mixed media comment on rhythm and number,  titled "Increment" ( One, Two, or  Three), and these works have a craftsman's sense of specific detail, while not being too fussy, trying to overwhelm us with technique.  The paintings of Sean Scully, and maybe cross hatch paintings of Jasper Johns come to my mind as I look at this work, but then I look away at the free standing complex called "Stacked Land"
and I am in a realm that neither of the aforementioned artists could have created.

 

Arcadia

Kurt Moyer
"Frost Pond", oil on linen


With so much rain during this summer, my garden is lush but gets out of hand if I don't give it constant attention.  I like to be outdoors and think about how artists' portrayals of nature have helped form my personal aesthetic.  Childhood memories include my father packing art supplies on family vacations so we could paint on location.

Great art will stand the test of time.  Some subjects (like landscape) may never go entirely out of fashion, it just seems as though some artists' styles get dated.  Style is more about what you leave out of a painting; and style also has to do with how an artist structures space in a painting.

If you go outside to paint (en plein aire) - how do you begin to comprehend nature in all its variety?  If you can understand what you are seeing, how does that translate into color, shape, and atmosphere?  How will you determine what is essential to your art?  With that in mind we could begin to look at some paintings in recent exhibitions and have a view into the artists' modus operandi.


At the Arts & Cultural Council gallery on North Goodman Street in Rochester, we have bright new paintings from Kurt Moyer. Roughly divided into three sections, Kurt Moyer's paintings are figurative realism within a classical compass.  Nude bathers, calm bosky ponds, and spring flowering are all handled with a painterly, not overly fussy, approach.  It seems as if it is a perpetually sunny day in Kurt Moyer's world where people swing in a hammock, go sailing or cavort in the woods.  Associations could be made with Manet and Cezanne - but seen through a more contemporary lens - so that these paintings are neither the transgressive fleeting nudity of Manet, nor the heroic near-abstractions of Cezanne.  Kurt Moyer's matter-of-fact observations translate with joy and care for his subject.

Scale, the relative size of things, becomes a critical factor in landscape painting - it helps or hinders our "reading" of the artwork and can render a painting more or less chaotic if the artist is not sensitive to it.  What is painted with clarity and what is not becomes an issue to be addressed.  In photography it is the focal point and the sharpness of edges relative to lighting that can determine how we respond to a scene. Something similar happens in painting.

Windsor Whip Works Art Gallery

Just outside the city boundaries of Binghamton is the village of Windsor, and on Main Street a beautifully renovated store has now become the two story Windsor Whip Works Art Gallery. Bill and Johanne Pesce migrated up from Long Island to create this art center which is becoming a magnet for visitors and artists alike.  On a recent weekend, I met George Rhoads at the opening of a show of more than one hundred of his imaginative landscape paintings.

In the 1960's George Rhoads had shows in New York City of his expressionist paintings, but he is known more for his kinetic sculptural installations found in many museums and in collections around the world.  Rhoads was educated in Chicago and has been an artworld presence for over fifty years.  Curiously,  only one or two of his sculptural works were on hand at the Whip Works Art Gallery, and the rest of the space was given over to his and his son Paul's paintings.

The mostly smallish size of the paintings does not mean that George Rhoads is a miniaturist, but it does mean that for the viewer to make the most of the experience- you have to get very close to fully enjoy the work.  A typical George Rhoads landscape has a quality that folk art seems to share - unusual brightness of color and unusual clarity in places that make the reading of the work more structured and more uniform than would happen in nature.  George Rhoads does not paint on the scene, these are more memories or evocations of places, and at their best they are knit together like a fascinating quilt of color and texture.

George Rhoads
at Windsor Whip Works Art Gallery

Landscape with People

Landscape with People

Catching up with my summer reading, I am ensconced in the letters of Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) and an autobiography of Marcia Tucker ("A Short Life of Trouble", University of California Press) who died in 2006.  I met both of these people when they were forces in the artworld, but that artworld was much more circumscribed than what we have today, which is perhaps more democratic but spread rather thinly.  Fairfield railed against the technology that ironically would help make the arts more accessible, but he would also bring his firm intellect down on media and critics who were too authoritarian.

I regularly follow a few writers on art including Peter Schjeldahl ( Let's See) in the New Yorker, Barry Schwabsky in The Nation, Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times, and Sanford Schwartz in The New York Review of Books, among others.  When I read their words, it is like I have an extra set of eyes and ears and I am enlightened and entertained.  In Fairfield Porter's letters ( "Material Witness", University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor)  he details struggles in his life and art that jump off the page.  Early on, other artists like Willem DeKooning overshadow him, and he frets but defends his position as a painter of intimate family life ( with some substantial tools that set him apart in the early 1950's).  Porter's book of art criticism ( "Art In Its Own Terms") will renew your interest in painting if it has lagged, and any artist who paints the landscape owes him a debt.

Marcia Tucker's book is much more present, and as a curator and museum director she has left a richer legacy that is still being tested.  The first few chapters of her memoir could be called the trials and tribulations, as she deals with death and near-death experiences - not the kind of thing you would expect from an art history student, and soon-to-be curator.

I felt her impact when I lived in New York City where she curated shows for the artists Bruce Nauman and Richard Tuttle while she worked at The Whitney.  I could have guessed that she was an early feminist, that she was an engaged political activist and she bucked the system which turned her out and away from The Whitney Museum and onto a path towards directing her own museum.

Her show "Bad Painting" sent out ripples in every direction and it was just one of the noteworthy projects she instigated while working at her start-up "The New Museum" before it found a space in Soho.  I think I saw every show she produced for a number of years while she was first at an annex to The New School on 14th Street, and later when "The New Museum" moved down to Broadway.
The late 1970's and 1980's brought "pluralism" and efforts to shake the gallery system and the old boys network that so dominated the visual arts in prior decades.

Marcia Tucker provided a role model for women in the arts, she blazed trails that few had taken before she arrived.  She had courage and smarts, and stayed on course even when the going was very rocky and she was almost broke.  Even if you never knew of Marcia Tucker, you can still feel the repercussions of what she accomplished in the world of visual arts.

Art Cities

Big Bambu
takes the terrace garden to new heights
at the Met.

We went against the traffic and drove down to the Big Apple, and The City of Brotherly Love.

In NYC, the august Metropolitan Museum of Art is an unlikely place to find an unruly thicket of bamboo, but there it is - taking over the terrace above Central Park.  In case you thought that the gardener went berserk, take the time to catch up to this latest artwork from Mike and Doug Starn and buy your ticket in advance for a guided tour of "Big Bambu".  Thousands of bamboo poles have been erected to create a kind of floating scaffolding which you can enter on gently sloping paths that work their way upwards and around.

The Starns have been making art in the New York area for over twenty years.  I was at their first show in NYC when the art critic for the Village Voice wrote: Run! Don't walk to see their exhibition.  Last year
subway riders who stop at South Ferry found that the Starns had revamped the space with wall murals of
fused glass that represent silhouettes of the trees in Battery Park.

Back at the Met, several floors down, a neat little Picasso exhibition of paintings and prints is underway. There are several standout paintings like the portrait of Gertrude Stein, but the balance of the show tilts towards Picasso's graphic art with a room of linoleum reduction prints and a suite of later etchings featuring the artist as an old Musketeer recounting his various conquests surrounded by consorts.

My wife, Anna, and I were art tourists, visiting sites in two cities, and soaking up the sun and fair weather like a magic elixir.  By design, we stopped in at the Barnes Foundation down the main line from Philadelphia.  Dr. Barnes was a collector without peer in the early 1930's and his specialty was finding great European art and crating it up to send back home in Merion, Pennsylvania.

Ultimately, he wanted his collection to be a teaching tool, and to all this he added a school of horticulture.  Surrounding the museum is an arboretum, which on a summer day was verdant and beckoned the gallery goer, so we took advantage of the fresh air to think about what we had just seen.
Acres of Cezannes, Renoir,Seurat, Modigliani, and Matisse.  Exquisite metal work, folk art and American Indian art, some of it hiding away in the basement ( what a shame - if you don't use the facilities, you might miss the terrific collection of Acoma and Laguna pottery! ).  A new museum is being built to harvest the Barnes Foundation's art, so it will all move to a new location nestled next to The Philadelphia Museum of Art within the next few years.  If you want to experience the collection in its original setting - they only sell one hundred tickets per day to visit, so don't put it off.

Monumental sculpture often demands resources that only a team of creative people can deliver.  Steve Sears, of Sears Iron Works gave us an insiders look at how he has helped fabricate many of the large scale public art pieces that Philadelphia is so proud of.  We were standing in Center City learning the details of how Robert Engman's sculpture "Triune" came to be, and how William Penn was cleaned from his perch atop City Hall.

Around the corner, we inquired at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts ( the school that brought us Thomas Eakins and many others ).  Finding our way to the Fabric Workshop we sat down and contributed a drawing on one of Mel Chin's blank bills that he is using for "Fundred" his national interactive art project.  Mel is using the leverage of visual art to focus attention on the contamination of our soils from lead and other toxic metals.  The idea is a kind of visual testament or petition which will be delivered to Congress from all corners of the country.  Read about it online and participate, this form of social activism is both timely and necessary.

Robert Engman's "Triune"

Cut and Paste, Fabricate and Weld

Ellen Stoll Walsh signs a book at Ock Hee's Gallery, Honeoye Falls, NY


Two very distinctive solo exhibitions opened last week by artists who have had great success with their work.  I can't help but draw some comparisons between the art of Ellen Stoll Walsh and Albert Paley even though their personalities are so different and their audiences wouldn't recognize each other.

Along with her garden and her antiques Ock Hee presents an exhibition of childrens book art by a best selling author and artist.  Ellen Stoll Walsh makes her home in the Rochester area, but her books will be enjoyed around the world, and those lucky enough to see this rare showing of her select original art from her books are in for a treat.

Ellen Stoll Walsh shares some formal similarities with other author/artists like Eric Carle ( his book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" might be an influence) and their art is designed to be engaging, enlivened by balancing silhouettes of primary color with activated open space of white pages.  What you can't see from the printed pages of "Mouse Count" or "Dot and Jabber and the Big Bug Mystery" is that her art is a very sophisticated form of collage.  Her art is totally integrated with the story she tells (though it is possible to understand "Mouse Paint" with no text at all).

This is where I begin to think of "Albert Paley in the 21st Century" on view this season at The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester.  There are many facets to Paley's artwork and recently he has added a form of illustrative sculpture that is not too far removed from Ellen Stoll Walsh's silhouettes.

Albert Paley bucks trends often found in contemporary monumental art.  As if the whole enterprise of minimalism hadn't occured, Paley's art is feathered, fragmented, and maintains alliances with cubism and Art Nouveau.  Austerity is not in Paley's DNA - it is more like full orchestra with chorus.

Even though Paley's  art is three dimensional, there is a reliance on planes of cut metal that at a much smaller scale could easily be Ellen Walsh's cut paper dandelion leaves.  What we see in Paley's work right now is a translation of rhythms in nature displayed with pictorial concern.  In fact, Paley's art is rejuvenating a regard for composition -something we haven't seen in Cor-Ten steel in the wake of Richard Serra and Mark DiSuvero.

Albert Paley has accepted commissions from civic boosters, private collectors, zoos and corporations.  His reputation has grown steadily which keeps his studio collaborators buzzing with activity.  Surprisingly, this is the first large scale exhibition of Paley's sculpture presented in Rochester, his hometown.

"Albert Paley in the 21st Century" contains many drawings ( in distinctive red pencil ) and many models or maquettes for much larger artwork.  Visitors to the gallery are greeted with a dashing photograph of Paley handling searing hot metal, forging a new element to be added to a work in progress.  Above the photo is a quote " The main function of ornament is to articulate emotion" which seems to preempt questions that are raised by the complexity of Paley's artistic expression.

Portals, gates, and semaphores seem to be the basis or premise from which he builds.  The elements of utility and adornment are never far behind.  Particularly impressive are the skills needed to forge and fabricate this sculpture.  The physics and engineering alone, to balance weights and keep the art stable, must be a daunting task.

I was particularly struck by his most recent art for St. Louis, MO; Trenton, NJ and Monterrey, Mexico.
Albert Paley's show is long overdue, and we can only begin to assess how his art addresses the landscape or cityscape in which it finds a home.  It is well worth the effort to keep an eye on Paley's symphony of form.

Museum Building

I witnessed the Herbert F. Johnson Museum being built on the Cornell University campus in the early 1970's and now I was back to see a new wing being added to this famous edifice designed by I.M.Pei. Upstairs, I found the outdoor sculpture court so agreeable on a stunning spring day, but ultimately it is underutilized.  In the near term the collection will be shifted as renovations occur and the fifth floor, which houses Asian art, will be the first to see major changes.  Panoramic windows offer a view up Lake Cayuga (still spectacular), and now the art will be given more room to breathe.

On the lower floors new acquisitions are given prominent placement, chief among them are works like Leger''s "Composition With Two Figures" which is marvelously wacky: two flying nudes up in the clouds encounter a Russian Constructivist painting or is that a manual for building your own radio?

Going back to see the Herbert F. Johnson Museum is like visiting an old friend, but one with a few surprises in store.  In a basement gallery, artwork from James Siena (Cornell grad from 1979) was on display.  His paintings were described as the ones he couldn't part with, but there were also some real oddities like the flattened gilded mouse, and a collection of unusual typewriters.  His show "From The Studio" also has some art that Siena collected, including drawings by the irascible Alan Saret ( also a Cornell grad), a wonderful Alfred Jensen painting, and some obscure aerial surveillance photos from World War l.

James Siena has a mathematical mind: precise, calculated, methodical and a bit obsessive.  The surfaces of this art are rarely out of control, so the paintings can engage you on several levels and are reassuring in their completeness.

But maybe your taste is for something not so compulsive?  Well, in the next room see Michael Ashkin's photographs - set up like old stereoscopic prints with one image next to another.  His remarkably mundane textures of construction sites bring to mind the truly historic exhibitions of Robert Smithson's ( creator of "Spiral Jetty") art held at Cornell in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  Smithson's "Non Sites" are the progenitors of Michael Ashkin's photos.  The power of entropy, a favored function in Robert Smithson's universe, details a measure of disorder or randomness in a system and the gradual apparent loss of energy that ensues.  Ashkin documents the fall out from a developer''s voracious appetite in historic Long Branch, New Jersey.  Will greed overpower entropy? It is not a pretty picture.

Driving to Buffalo and Back

I am driving a car in a recurring dream when I realize my need to stop or turn the wheel, but I can't because I find I'm in the back seat (no one else is in the car) and my feet can't reach the brake pedal. Some anxiety is associated with this, but the overwhelming feeling that I take away from this experience is not one of being out of control, but a feeling of being infantilized. When was I last in a car when my feet did not touch the floor? When I was a child.. This dream is a complex and not so subtle metaphor for some event from my life. In visual art a metaphor could be used to have one image signify another. There is an implicit comparison, just as there is in poetry. This comparative aspect is an organizing principle at work in artistic pursuits (among other things) and seems to run on autopilot in regions of the heart and mind. In the news, researchers are beginning to map out with greater certainty where in the brain our thoughts occur. Which brings me to Guillermo Kuitca, whose exhibition: "Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper" runs through May 30th at The Albright Knox Gallery, in Buffalo. Kuitca conducts his own form of research and diagrams his findings on the walls of the museum. Right away, his art talks about locations where things happen, judging from the seating charts which make up a portion of this show. You know somethings happening, you just don't know what it was, to paraphrase Bob Dylan. Mapping is a hot topic (in some ways more obscure than the amazing Google Maps), with Kuitca you are given locations but you have to supply the substance of what's there. He does this over and over again, and you realize that this is a form of ritual - a human performance with some habitual movements that takes you someplace and later returns you to start all over again. The performative element of this visual art is unlike theatre - the audience does not get to see the painter in the act of creation. So why are all these works of art about available seating? Isn't there a paradox here? The artist takes you to a place, but can't show you what is going on. This sometimes frustrating feeling is compounded by paintings of nearly empty rooms shown in a childlike style that reminds me of the dream I wrote about at the top of this article. Down a long hallway at The Albright Knox, does anyone notice a most powerful tiny drawing from The Dorothy and Herb Vogel collection by Don Hazlitt? Only a couple of square inches, this drawing from 1977 forecasts a plane crash in Clarence Center, New York that I thought about as I drove up the Thruway to Buffalo, in full control of my vehicle.