Western Swing

Herzog & de Meuron
architects
de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA


San Francisco is a city with charm; it's a cultural oasis.  Our last time here,  we wanted to visit the de Young Museum but it was under construction.  Upon my return a few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised by the new building with its pointilist copper facade designed by the team of Herzog and de Meuron. About the only thing that remains of the previous incarnation of the de Young Museum are the old palm trees.  Now there is a large outdoor cafe with a giant bobby pin (pop sculpture) and indoors there was an opulent traveling exhibition of Venetian painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna as well as a historical overview of Anatolian Kilims.

On top of the educational tower is a ninth floor observatory with panoramic views of the city.  A wonderful place to stop and take in the scene.  People reach for their cameras and snap away, and I did too. You can see up the coast to the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond, when it is sunny and clear - not always possible on a point of land frequently fog-bound.

The lower level is entered by a long gently sloping staircase.
At the entrance to the  show of Venetian painting the gallery visitor finds mural size images of San Marco as well as photos from the Kunsthistorisches Museum.  Among the first paintings we encountered was a portrait of St. Sebastian by Mantegna.  This iconic painting was amazing in detail, and moving by way of the passion and pain it portrays.  Mantegna and Giotto were pivotal figures bringing perspective to spatial arrangement in two dimensional art, and the St. Sebastian portrays this new found structure.

 Andrea Mantegna, 1470
 St. Sebastian


Around the corner in the next gallery we come upon a trove of paintings by Titian, which are so sumptuous and mysterious at the same time.  I try to fathom the personalities portrayed, as Titian paints  in such a way as to reveal his subject's very nature.  A great colorist, Titian follows in the footsteps of Giorgione who also has paintings on view in this exhibition.  Old favorites are here including Titian's
"Danae" and the shower of gold, and another one of Titian's last paintings which is much rougher in texture and darker in temperament.

Titian, circa 1575


We enjoyed Tintoretto, and Veronese also in this show.  Tintoretto's Susanna ( and the elders) presages Manet, and the arrangement of bodies in space still seems so odd and staged to me.  The impression left from visiting this show is one of grand opera and drama, an archaic  and poetic realm full of human foibles and longings.

In The Loop

painting by Jim Mott


Jim Mott is the itinerant painter traveling around the countryside bartering his talents and creating his life's work.  Years ago, when I first met the artist, he had just come back from painting outdoors and I looked over his small plein air panel paintings ( which I just couldn't resist).  Jim's project is to travel and paint what he sees.  He has been around the United States, and even ended up as a subject for a "Today Show" broadcast featuring him scouting out locations and doing what he does best: landscape painting.

The Center at High Falls is hosting a selection of his panel paintings made on Jim's most recent excursions around the Inner Loop here in Rochester, and out in the suburbs.  He and I share many interests including looking for birds, painting from nature, and making observations along the highways and byways if one has the time and the inclination.

Jim is not afraid to paint outside on the snowy days as well as the balmy afternoons, and his postcard sized paintings create mini-environments and containers of light that are very convincing, but not labored.  When the paintings are at their best, they have a guileless approach to matter-of-fact realism that reminds me of the late Fairfield Porter, and the panoramas of Rackstraw Downes.

In order to fulfill his vision, Jim reaches out to people who will let him spend a few days and nights at their home; he finds the challenge of painting in a new neighborhood that is fresh to his eye.  In return for room and board, Jim leaves his hosts a signed original painting, - and then it is back to the road for his next engagement with the land.  Is this a kind of Johnny Appleseed complex?

In a way,  this is a grassroots activist at work - returning to the landscape that has nourished us, and by calling our attention to the surrounding beauty ( and which we oftentimes fail to acknowledge ) we are nudged towards responsible stewardship of our country and countryside.

But Jim is not all birds and flowers;  in fact some of my favorite images in the present show are of Rochester's landmark factories, signs and symbols, including the Little Theatre marquee, and the Rochester Art Supply store.

Thanksgiving Rush

Cy Twombly
at MOMA

Thanksgiving car traffic going into New York City is world class, and so it seems that all those people on the road were going to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) - just when we wanted to.  So we waited in line outside on a brisk day in Manhattan for the privilege of getting into the building to be able to wait in line to buy a ticket.  Then we waited in line to hang up our coats and before you knew it two hours had passed and the only art we glimpsed was a titanic sized Cy Twombly in the entry.  I felt a heavy dose of dread in the bus station that was the MOMA that day.  How did they ever spend so much money to get so little by way of public amenities for the museum-goer?  We look in vain for a place to sit after waiting in line so long.

I only glance at the Diego Rivera mural on the way up to the sixth floor to see the retrospective of Willem DeKooning.  The Rivera dovetails nicely with the social consciousness of the early DeKooning "portraits" of everyman, often dressed in ill-fitting clothes staring with distant looking eyes.  I like the cool declaration of Elaine DeKooning drawn to icy perfection in a near-Ingres like graphite drawing near the entrance of the show.  I went to see early DeKooning - before he commenced with his signature works.  I was curious to see what revelations could be found in the earliest paintings.  Could you really tell what he would become from the start?

The answer is yes, but you really must pay attention.  Even though DeKooning would try a variety of strategies to derail his natural dexterity ( he draws sometimes with his eyes closed, or while watching television ) his artwork is all about the hand and the marks it makes.  DeKooning's art has little in the way of narrative, unless you think of the story being told is an analysis of the artist's nervous system with all its characteristic ticks, jumps and jots.

In 1939 abstraction followed on the heels of the portraits, and the jump may have been precipitated by DeKooning's interaction with painters Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis, both of whom were working on organic or biomorphic forms in their influential art.

DeKooning spends part of the late 1940's teaching at the progressive Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina.  Tucked into the hill country of western North Carolina, Black Mountain would prove to be the spawning ground for a truly modern art movement that had far reaching effect in American cultural history.  Although DeKooning was there for only a short while, something happened to his paintings that brought all of his energy together with a deep gravitas that still looks terrific today.

Paintings on canvas in black and white enamel may have been my favorite things among the early work in the show.  For two or three years, DeKooning made the most of limited color, attached to severe shapes that knit together "Painting", and "Dark Pond", "Attic" from 1949, and "Excavation" from 1950. An instructive collage nearby was put together with cut out shapes and thumbtacks, and one can guess that this process helped hone the consummate draftsmanship that enables the artist to be so convincing.

Fall Opens

The Johnson Museum
on the Cornell University campus
early November, 2011


I drive down along Lake Cayuga during the day in early November thinking that I have never seen the water look so blue!  So, like a tourist, I pull over to take a picture - this kind of marvel has been going on since I moved upstate from New York City.  Back in Manhattan there didn't seem to be any distinct seasons, you would just notice that it gets warmer in the summer.  For a few years in Brooklyn, I had a painting studio with no natural light, and I began to yearn for daylight.  I wanted to have those large picture windows that my neighbor Alex Grey had for his studio space.

So what a joy it is to be on my way down to an opening at The Ink Shop, a cooperative printmaking space on State Street in downtown Ithaca, NY.  The show, opening on the first Friday in November is titled " In Tents" - and represents seven printmakers who show their art at outdoor art fairs around the country - they travel a circuit setting up a booth to sell their prints.

The artists, Ann Eldridge, Johanna Mueller, Christopher Plumber, Jenny Pope, Daryl Storrs, Marina Terauds and Heinrich Toh make a pleasant company and their work has a broad appeal.  Many of these names were new to me, and I found the monoprints of Heinrich Toh to be very intriguing - incorporating hand drawing, photo, and decorative digital elements along with lots of color and space.

Later, I went up the hill to the Johnson Museum on the Cornell University campus to view the new addition and I really enjoyed the visit.  The Johnson Museum collections have been moved around making a new open storage study gallery where you can view anything from a suit of armor, to pre-columbian pottery.  The opening of a new addition a few weeks ago adds levels underground, as well as a mini Japanese garden replete with moss and stones and gardeners at work.

Palampore, block printed and hand colored
early Chintz fabric from India


Inside the Johnson Museum I found a cross section of Indian Textile art in an exhibition called "Essence of Indian Textiles" from the Parpia Collection.  Here you find the origins of  Chintz fabrics in the marvelous Palampore which usually portrays a magical flowering plant that the Indian artisans made for export.  Indian textiles defined deluxe in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Today, we look at the rich colors of their carpets, wall hangings, and even the common Banjara folk arts and we are moved by their sense of detail, high level of design and terrific craft.

How's That?

Extreme Materials 2
courtesy of The Memorial Art Gallery


Two new exhibitions will help start a discussion not likely to be resolved any time soon.  Let me address fans of traditional painting, drawing, and sculpture - Things Have Changed - so why not try something new?  Some may resist change because of the values that new media seem to encourage.  If you found deep resonance with traditional art forms, can you find that in the video and installation art so often encountered in contemporary museums and gallery space?  Are the artists featured at Rochester Contemporary Art Center and the Memorial Art Gallery just reflecting our own culture back to us?

I don't think you can easily dismiss a whole category of fine art - say video - if it doesn't fall into your comfort zone.  Video artists are working within a tradition that goes back over half a century. The fact that fine art video has to compete with other time based media like movies or television is part of the underdog equation, and part of the gallery and art investment complex.

The equation will change when the average person can dial up your experimental video ( or other art ) and have it in front of them on their iPad or wall screen to contemplate, savor and either accept or trash.  The internet is a great equalizer.  The internet can present a common - if very crowded - forum for a population of would-be fans.

However, problems abound with a proposed business model that now seems to turn away from the purchase and ownership of an art object.  On the side of the collector or fan - they have the experience or own a reproduction - this is the truth behind the notion of the simulacrum for the non-practitioner.  For a working artist - how will you support yourself?  Are you only there for the entertainment?

Into the breach of this curious transition are two exhibitions which focus our attention on what  artists want us to see:  Rochester Contemporary Art Center presents "Scapes" and the Memorial Art Gallery has 'Extreme Materials 2".  At the Art Center we have video presentations from Debora Bernagozzi, Jason Bernagozzi, and Sterz - all of whom live and work in Rochester, and Jamie Hahn from Spokane, WA - all in a provocative show about human-landscape interactions.

Sterz' projections are centered on textured aluminum panels which influences our perception of what looks like rain falling on a window pane - all in subtle shades of grey in his work titled "Redress".
Beyond that four talking heads on monitors in a work called "Dataspeak" chatter away at each other, decompose digitally and then start all over again after a long pause.  In "Form,Data,Form " of 2011 Jason Bernagozzi translates waves of information into patterns that look like a 3D oscilloscope.  In the back we have nine monitors showing aspects of a quiet stream with a soundtrack of filtered natural sounds that becomes an odd kind of surveillance film loop.

Contrast this with the new show "Extreme Materials 2" at the Memorial Art Gallery and that will give you something to think about.. So the artwork is not made with paints and brushes or clay - does it really matter?  Going through this show I couldn't help but think of the tradition of Hobo, or Tramp Art ( which was actually made by skilled crafts-people ) examples of which can be seen in the Memorial Art Gallery collection.  This is especially true for Jennifer Maestre's piece titled "Kraken", 2008 made up of pointy color pencils cut into a spiky cactus-like form, and also for the carefully painted screw head portrait by Andrew Meyers.

A sense of humor pervades the "Extreme Materials 2" exhibit - maybe it is the mocking tone of Sally Curcio's "Garden of Earthly Delights" or the fashionable dress made out of latex condoms by Adriana Bertini in 2006.  A wavy wall of translucent Neutrogena soaps creates a corridor that reminds me of Richard Serra, and did I really have to spend so much time looking at breakfast cereal on display as a copy of a Ravenna wall mosaic?

"Extreme Materials 2"  turns the art gallery into an amusement park, and what will be next?  Maybe a wax-museum, or pin-ball machines.. a real Coney Island of the mind and sensibility.  The artworld is fractured and fragmented, and the most we can hope for are threads of sensitivity that we can follow through the woods.

Heating Up The Cool Down

design by
Bruno Monguzzi
for the Musee d'Orsay
Paris, France
1986

Fall is the season and the leaves begin to turn colors and mount up on my lawn, but I put away my rake to join a social swirl at art gallery openings...and there was so much to see!

You had to be there!   Must see exhibitions around Rochester this month include a sterling poster collection by the Swiss-Italian graphic designer Bruno Monguzzi.  I had the pleasure of talking with Mr. Monguzzi whose work I have known for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed an illustrated talk he gave to an audience at R.I.T.

Years ago, I taught graphic design and Bruno Monguzzi's signage - particularly for art museums- has stood out at the pinnacle in a world of fast paced visual communications.  Those of you who are lucky enough to be in Paris, France would know his graphics for the Musee d'Orsay.  (see above )  The unlikely inclusion of J. Henri Lartigue's photo of a manned glider plane getting off the ground is an integral part of the poster for the grand opening, and creates a wonderful parallel in the renewed life of the museum.  You will find this all over Bruno Monguzzi's design work - a deep level of communication and pleasure reaching to achieve a harmony with a viewer.  These big posters are at the Bevier Gallery, and in the Vignelli Design Center and they can be seen this month at R.I.T.

Brand new gallery space in Rochester is hard to come by but this season there are several major openings, and I found marvelous new art by the New York City mixed media artist Mark Fox at the redesigned Culver Armory.  The building is being completely overhauled for offices and retail space and for this month alone go see this exhibition presented by Deborah Ronnen Fine Art.  The physical gallery space reminds me of Chelsea where open bays harbor shimmering cut paper works that on first appearance look like scrims of pale vegetation, and on closer inspection become a mesh of written words cut out of paper and suspended over armatures, or hung from metal pins.

Hiding in an entry hallway are grids of silver color in an "Elegy for Jane Jacobs", from 2010, which I saw first, quickly followed by a ingeniously hallucinogenic "Wraith", which is made of large sheets of cut paper suspended in front of mylar sheets that wavered in a slight breeze that made the whole room quiver.  The "Elegy", was especially apt as the grids call to mind Jane Jacobs writing about cities and neighborhoods, and the silver grids certainly attain a symbolic reckoning.

Mark Fox was the star of his own movie being projected on one wall, and we can learn a lot more from this interview with the artist.  Many of his pieces call to mind the tough wire works of Alan Saret, and also the artist Richard Tuttle.  Mark Fox settles somewhere in between - the art is literate, conceptual and not particularly colorful.  Mostly, the colors are turned away from the viewer, and they begin to represent (for me) a psychological state of introversion or introspection.

Frances Paley, this month
at the Spectrum Gallery


On a block past the Memorial Art Gallery, around the corner from the Arts & Cultural Council on College Avenue is a nondescript building housing new gallery spaces for R.I.T. 's Gallery r set to pop open in a few weeks, and Lumiere's Spectrum Gallery now open in its new location.  On the walls are large pigment on paper prints by Frances Paley, with a emphasis on fashions and reflections.  The albino peacock is a key image here, as are the numerous costumes and storefront images which remind me of window shopping on Madison Avenue in NYC, and they are a little disorienting.  Here is an art that is quite baroque, with feverish color that blurs the boundary between layers of reflections, so it is hard to pin down just where you are when you look them over.

In another gallery that was new to me, at the Skalny Welcome Center- on the campus of St. John Fisher College  I found a quiet reminder of the private vision of smaller scale artwork that has an intimate pull on the eye and mind.

Most of the art in "Interpretation of Site" revolves around landscape traditions that go back a few hundred years to the moors and sky of Constable and Turner.  The three featured artists: Constance Mauro, G.A. Sheller, and Elizabeth King Durand have enjoyed travels in Europe, and come home with sketches and reflections on those voyages.  Inventive use of printmaking and painting techniques abound in this art as does a light touch with color and atmosphere which encourages gentle contemplation.

A final note to commemorate the passing of yet another artist, friend and teacher - Julie Furlong Williams.  Recently, she has had shows of her work both at Rochester Contemporary Art Center, and The Memorial Art Gallery, and her wit and wisdom will be missed.

G.A.Sheller in the Ross Gallery, Skalny Welcome Center, St. John Fisher College

Graffiti With Punctuation

Some wag said blogs were "graffiti with punctuation".  While this might initially get a laugh - blogs do what print journalism seemed to miss, especially when it comes to the visual arts in our community, and that is to get around to see more of what is going on and to address a response that was more than regurgitating a press release.

When traditional newspapers fail to cover openings of shows, or give spotty coverage at best - they cut the links to everyone except the most dedicated gallery goers.  If you were an artist who worked on materials for a show for a couple of years, you would want to be recognized.  Today, it is all-out competition for your attention, and at the moment the sports-entertainment industry seems to be winning, so why take pot shots at bloggers?

Years ago, I was paid to write about the visual arts, but now I do it on my own - for free- with the help of the First Fridays site as a sounding board.  Content providers in the arts are often working on their own- nobody commissions this work, and I hasten to add artists of all stripes say they do it for love, and because they cannot not do it.  When questions are raised about how long one can keep this up, I say as long as I am able..