Karma Comes To See You

Alex Grey
1985
"Journey of the Wounded Healer"
Psychedelic
Optical and Visionary Art


"Psychedelic Optical and Visionary Art, Since the 1960's" is a slowly opening time capsule with a provocative premise: can an art exhibition hold together polar opposites?  My experience as an artist, looking at this show, is one of amusement and wonder- this is an effort at revisionist art history in the making.  When a minimalist Frank Stella can hang on a wall in close proximity to Albert Alvarez "Karma and Death" - they do seem to pervade my consciousness....  What kind of story is this show trying to tell? Is it extolling the virtues of recreational drugs? It certainly takes me back to the old mantra of "sex,drugs, and rock n roll".

Outlined here for the viewer:  there once was a time when all the rules were challenged and a few were broken (but this might also be read as over-the-top indulgent and narcissistic).  Is that the point?  Is this show a cautionary tale?  I would have loved to be in the room when the ideas for this show were developed..

Then again, what need does this show answer?  It is a cabinet for the curious, and maybe it will also pull in some of the baby boomers who actually lived through the experience of the 1960's.  Looking back, if the 1960's brought a period of self-indulgence, it was also a period of the civil rights movement and the birth of feminism, plus an anti-war movement that swept the country.  Social activism, and heightened consciousness for every living thing seemed to co-exist, thank you very much.  That is the background providing a foundation for the art on view at The Memorial Art Gallery.

If you believe the philosophy professor and art critic Arthur Danto, then the historical narrative of progress in art came to an end with Andy Warhol's "Brillo Box" - and what we see here in this show is an implosion - where the practice of art fragments and consumes itself.  Zap Comix - popular underground reading material from R. Crumb (not represented in this show - but tonic for the 1960's) is sorely missed as is the anarchic painter Peter Saul, and the optical art of Bridget Riley ( just to name a few missing links).

Enter the exhibit under the theatrical lights that create a swirl on the walls and floor ( and in your mind) and you find the sophisticated in a dialog with the self-taught.  Years ago, many of the paintings on view would have been considered Folk Art, but maybe these distinctions are disappearing.  This is part of my impression that this show is a tug-of-war between various art world factions.

I have my arguments with Fred Tomaselli (about copyright issues) but I like his constellations of pills in "Ripple Trees" that is one of the keystones of this show.  Within his work there is an interest in nature and geometry,abstraction, silhouette and reality all rolled into one.  I think a hallmark of late 20th century art is a layering of representation and meaning, in several paintings in this show such layering creates a busy surface which takes time to read properly.

Sometimes the reading of the painting is not as logical as one might expect.  An example might be the Cartesian spaces described in the painting by Al Held ("South of West 1") that lead to visual paradox.  The wall label mentions string theory, but my guess is that Al Held is trying to subvert the strict logic of geometry which he obsessively constructs.

I had the good fortune to be present at the creation of one of the major paintings on view, so I can remember it first as a drawing on canvas, and then remember the process that Alex Grey employed (great clarity and sense of purpose).  His "Journey of the Wounded Healer" has attracted many who come to marvel at this triptych that describes three stages of life (and death).  Alex was my neighbor for a while, and he learned his craft while working as a medical illustrator and a preparator of cadavers for dissection. A follower of Tibetan Buddhism, Alex and his wife Allyson are building a museum in Wappinger's Falls New York for their artwork.

I mentioned obsession before, and that seems to be another characteristic of this exhibition -  excessive detail( gone is the modernist slogan "less is more").  Exceptions are made for artists Phillip Taafe, Stella, and Victor Vasarely - who are more attentive to a stricter premise and give little attention to embroidery.

George Cisneros provides "Cascades of Jubilation" - a video presentation complete with dark room and round mirrors that is the equivalent of Pac-Man( a prototypical video game) built with a primitive computer from the early 1980's.  In those days even the photo on this page would have required more memory capacity than what was on board that old Apple ll.  Boy, have we come a long way in such a short time! ( or is that an illusion too?).

Moving Image

Life is fluid
photo by Alan Singer




A great photograph can bring tears to my eyes;  I am subject to the force of images - as I suspect many others are too.  Today the pace of image making must break all speed records, pictures come at us from every angle, demanding attention - and I am caught in their spell.

The first exhibition I attended - where photography was given respect as art - was "The Family of Man".
It was arranged by Edward Steichen, and it was the culmination of his life's work as a photographer and spokesperson for a movement.  I was with my parents, I was not more than five years old, but  I clearly recall the images from that show, now more than half a century ago.  Most if not all of the photos were in black and white, though some of the prints were very large.  I imagined myself, even at that young age, as a photographer having my show at The Museum of Modern Art.

Even though I am known as a painter and printmaker, my first exhibition in New York City was a photographic performance piece.  At that time I was a college student who shared a dark room with Joel Peter Witkin at The Cooper Union.  We took classes with Roy DeCarava ( who passed away recently ) who was known for his portrayals of jazz greats in smoky clubs.  Before I got to college I had my own pantheon of photography heroes, and within a few years I would get to meet most of them.

Walter and Naomi Rosenblum's daughter, NIna, was in my class at The Cooper Union.  Nina as I remember painted my portrait one year.  Her father, Walter, was a teacher and skilled photographer responsible for lifting up the reputation of Lewis Hine, who was himself a great photographer of American grit and determination.  Dr. Naomi Rosenblum has written a classic history of photography; her research and clear thinking are essential.

Before I left college I was awarded a scholarship to Yale/Summer at Norfolk, and by coincidence Walter Rosenblum was teaching the photography classes there, so I had a chance to learn from the best.  My dark room technique improved, and I was beginning to feel self-confident - enough to get into an argument with the visiting artist Walker Evans ( who happened to be someone I had great respect and admiration for ).  At first, I didn't recognize him ( he had a white beard ) but he did speak with a voice of authority.  I knew his work with James Agee in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", and I had collected Walker Evans photos which I cut out of old Fortune Magazines.

The following summer I had the good fortune to be on scholarship to Boston University at Tanglewood, and once again, Walter Rosenblum was there to introduce us to Paul Strand who was there for a screening of his movie "The Wave".  Paul Strand was quite old at that point and loosing his eyesight, but for me he was the Corot of early 20th century photography.

I had to make up my mind about what I was going to do with my art, and I felt my photos would never match up to these great masters, so I took another path towards painting and printmaking.  I made large paintings that had a hard time fitting into small gallery spaces in New York City.  One such place on east 69th street was The Carlton Gallery.  Carlton Willers' contacts in the photography world ran deep and wide.  I met Helen Gee of Limelight, Helen Levitt, and Josef Koudelka, but the absolute high point was when I was introduced to Henri Cartier Bresson who was having a show at Carlton Gallery, not of his photos, but of his drawings!  It was at that show when Carlton offered me a signed Bresson photo of  Matisse drawing a white dove... but I couldn't scrounge the $500. to buy the print. My great regret!

The Carlton Gallery closed after a few years, but I had a chance to meet many interesting photographers and artists there.  Now it is my turn to be the teacher, and as I work at R.I.T. I can reflect on how paths cross, and I can speculate on who the future artists will be and the stories they will tell.

Stepping Out For Art

Andy Gilmore in  "Geometries"

The sponsor for this blog deserves a lot of credit - First Fridays is a new incarnation of what was once called "Gallery Night", but now it should be called a hit - and credit can be given to all those who come out to the venues to see what is new, and support the visual arts.  Enthusiastic crowds of people who jam the parking lots, and maneuver their way to the gallery venues - make all this effort worthwhile.  For the artists who are on view - their work would not be seen in such large numbers were it not for the collective effort of gallery owners who stay open a few more hours on a Friday evening once a month.

The Design Gallery at RRCDC is a few steps up from the parking lot at The Hungerford Building on Main Street. The lot is full and First Friday ( Oct 1, 2010 ) is getting underway.  "Slow and Steady" is a photography show that celebrates the slow food movement and is a testament to the produce and the people found at public markets in and around our area.  Our public markets, where farmers and their customers meet, are uncut gems just for the finding.  Christin Boggs presents a suite of photos as her MFA Thesis exhibition and they have a tinge of nostalgia around the edges; maybe it is the belatedness of the color or the casual cropping of the images....

A recent closing of their Park Avenue location has meant that R.I.T.'s student run Gallery r has to look for temporary space to stay with its schedule of exhibitions, and it has gotten off to a rousing start with a friendly amalgam of art and music in a rambling show capitalizing on the same spirit of enterprise that brought Black Mountain College to national prominence over fifty years ago.  At The Hungerford Building the show is called PORCH, and there is interactive art being produced - the notion of collaboration is alive and well.  Installations, and separate works of art indicate a lively, inquisitive student body, which holds much promise for the future.

Recent graduates take over the Joy Gallery on Rochester's west side for a two person essay on the state of abstract art in a show titled "Hard Work".  Here lyrical layers of color in deeper tones by Bradley Butler rub shoulders with hard edge grids of color by Rick Minard.  Butler has a knack for improvisation and the experiments can be dark, poetic and oceanic.  Minard on the other hand is more analytical, precise and buoyant in his color choices.

The whole notion of analysis is paramount in the show titled " Geometries" at Rochester Contemporary Art Center.  This show also catches the wave of journalism that informs many contemporary art projects, in the sense that artists keep track of the days they work, and are conscious of the passage of time.  You could say that the art of Christopher McNulty is cumulative, and embodies meaning,  even makes meaning manifest in the content of his art (marking time).  A circular work on paper is created by making 20,193 little burn marks to commemorate each of the days that an actuarial table predicts that the artist has left to live. Some artists have that ability to make the notion of time palpable, and I think of the delicate drawings of Vija Celmins, and the many photos of Muybridge - who literally demonstrates the duration of actions and reactions on bodies.

Perhaps most telling are the prints left by an auto exhaust pipe in common use by the artist. Set up like pages from a diary, I began to wonder if the marks made were more than Mr. McNulty had hoped for - this is literally your carbon footprint.  For gallery goers looking for beauty- this kind of exhibit can get you to think but also reward you for your efforts.  "Geometries" contains experiments in color by Andy Gilmore  who is a designer/illustrator passionate about form and making eloquent use of the inkjet print.
Max Bill had his way with primary colors in the old analogue days, and Mr. Gilmore updates this pursuit with digital blends and layers that are simple, clean and elegant.

Mitch Messina, and Karen Sardisco had their opening reception in Nazareth College's Arts Center Gallery, and they look like two artists who grew up together.  This juxtaposition of cast metal sculpture alongside mixed media paintings in frames makes the space of the gallery vibrate with figuration.  Karen Sardisco's art contains fragments and diagrams of plants and cell structures, grids and other accumulations usually in dark marks on a light ground, in some ways reminding me of art by Terry Winters.  Messina, a popular teacher who now heads the department at Nazareth College is an active sculptor with a social message:  the figure found in groups or singled out - is vulnerable, and maybe won't fit into the machines that are built for them.

Remarkably, I saw all these shows in one evening with a return to the Hungerford Building to see an installation by my neighbor, Sterz.  He is a sculptor of light and action - in this iteration we have two florescent pink sheets of acetate hanging from the high ceiling, they dance in a breeze from an electric fan - through which a theatre spot light casts its ethereal glow on a white wall.  The thin sheets hanging from a thread move about within a small circumference, the effect of the dance of light and color is mesmerizing. I am reminded of a line from William Carlos Williams:  "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow"..  and I am thankful for an art that merges into poetry, into psychology, into simplicity,  into life.

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"