Lagomorphs


Lagomorphs

 The incessant insanity from Washington may have gradually raised Americans’ threshold of tolerance for nonsense, like the proverbial lobster luxuriating in the slowly warming pot, but sometimes one has to take a stand against even the banal and pointless (saving the truly criminal and murderous for another day). I refer, of course, to the $90,075,000 sale of the not-latest but apparently greatest (at least as determined by the group-mind wisdom of the art market) of Jeff Koons’s balloon-animal sculptures, “Rabbit (1986).” Made in stainless steel, the 41-inch-tall bunny, modeled after a swimming-pool toy, is one of an edition of three, supplemented with one artist’s proof, according to Andrea K. Scott in The New Yorker. It has a curious provenance as well. The painter Terry Winters bought it from Sonnabend Gallery in 1986 for $40,000, selling it a few years later to S.I. Newhouse, owner of Condé Nast (publisher of The New Yorker), for a cool million, for a $960,000 profit. Newhouse’s heirs have just reaped an enormously larger windfall, earning a return on investment of $89,075,000, give or take (minus commissions). Even more piquant in this tale of financial greatness are the players: the broker was Robert Mnuchin, an art collector himself, and the father of Steven Mnuchin, our current Treasury Secretary; the buyer, it has been revealed, is the hedge-fund billionaire, art collector and philanthropist, Steven A. Cohen, whose modernist and contemporary “trophy” pieces may someday furnish a private museum, probably in his home state of Connecticut.

The staggering amounts of money being invested by the 1% in this story cannot fail to appall and aggrieve those of us who see Koons as a kind of huckster in the Trumpian vein; as well as a descendant of the Pop artist Andy Warhol—now the subject of a large retrospective at San Francisco Museum of Art—and, before him, the New York Dadaist and proto-conceptualist Marcel Duchamp. Their joint legacy that art can be, respectively, whatever sells and whatever the artist decides have had a liberating effect on artists, but not one without the downside of making the market values (and public relations, fashion, and advertising) the drivers of the art world, not aesthetic quality. Que sera sera, we might sing, in honor of the late Doris Day.

My low opinion of Koons falls decidedly into the grumpy-codger Robert Hughes vein. Scott quotes him: “He has the slimy assurance of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida... [Y]ou can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture with out him.” Yet she concludes that he is both expensive and great. Kirk Varnedoe, the art historian and MOMA curator, wrote in Artforum in 2003 (again, cited by Scott): “It seemed to me instantly, by involuntary reflex—and it still does by long reflection—that this bunny is one of those very rare hits at the exact center of the target.” Scott continues: “It became an icon of eighties excess (and thus, of white male privilege): fuck like bunnies, make more money, the one with the most toys wins.” It sounds a bit like Arthur Danto’s for-me dubious epiphany of The Brillo Boxes, frankly. Alexander Rotter, a Christie’s executive, went “even a step further.” Here he is, quoted in a Japan Times Culture/Entertainment article:

 Rotter said the sculpture is the antithesis of “the perfect man,” Michelangelo’s “David,” which was “carved by one of the greatest artists of all time with a chisel, out of one block of the purest white marble.’ “It’s the end of sculpture. It’s the anti-‘David,’ as I call it,” he said, referring to Michelangelo’s masterpiece. “You can’t go any further away from ‘David,’ still being figurative and a traditional sculpture.”

 It’s a telling comment, clever in its false-equivalency logic: Koons = Michelangelo, just with the polarities reversed. It does, however, reveal something about our anitheroic, cynical, even subservient era, when even young idealists have been socialized by postmodernism into bitter knowingness and impotence. Sir Kenneth Clark, in his BBC series Civilisation, remarked that great art like that of the Florentine Renaissance comes from periods of cultural confidence. The postmodernist riposte to this would be a catalogue of the crimes of all civilizations, including the moribund American empire, with its dirty laundry now triumphantly aired by the liberal professoriate. There’s no question but that the western liberal democracies have sinned, and often faltered, but can art and civilization be saved from the alternative to humanism, the brain-dead worship of money and might, wedded to theocratic fantasies, before the world ends with a nuclear bang or an environmental-collapse whimper? Is our late-capitalist decadence still amusing, really? I used to mock the phrase ‘late capitalist,’ in the simpler times of the triumphalist post-USSR 1990s, when we thought it safe to fantasize.—DeWitt Cheng

Stas Orlovksi at Traywick Contemporary

Subjective Objects

Stas Orlovski is a Los Angeles artist who employs subtle palettes to produce effects far beyond the relatively modest size of his works. He assembles wind, wave and water patterns from Japanese woodcuts; flora and fauna from Victorian books; and abstracted geometric figures from Russian Suprematism to create small theaters or filmscreens replete with birds, butterflies, moons, forests, and fragmented statues, (especially balloon-shaped featureless heads). Comparisons with Paul Klee and Joseph Cornell come to mind, but also with Dadaist/Surrealist collagists like Max Ernst, Bruce Conner and Lawrence Jordan. With the current show, обjект, the artist continues to expand beyond drawing, painting, printmaking and collage into animations projected onto his sculptures, continuing the cinematic turn of his earlier work, Troika, in 2016; like William Kentridge and Tony Oursler, he enlists 21st century technology to pursue his vision, transforming an “iconography of nostalgia” into compelling “dream-like objects.”

 обjект is a hybridized English-Cyrillic spelling of ‘object,’ and hybridization is the theme here, with drawings and ‘illuminated’ sculptures, sometimes of the same motif, engaged in dialogue. “Feet With Flags” is a sepia-toned ink drawing of two mannequin feet set atop a shelf or pedestal and outfitted with blank flags, one rectangular, one triangular, both blown forward, as if by a tailwind. A sculpture of the same feet probably predates the drawing; amplifying the absurdity of these obedient marching metonyms is the fluttering cloth projected on the flags. The antique mannequin torso of “Figure with Suprematist Composition” has a hollowed-out abdomen in which we see jostling geometric forms, like the battling Whites and Reds of revolutionary Russia as represented abstractly, briefly, in contemporaneous political posters. Also shown are four of Orlovsky’s Arp-like heads, two painted and two sculpted and enriched with projections; and a half-dozen landscapes of the artist’s inner world projected on the outer. A large Orlovski installation is coming to San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art in November. обjект runs through May 25; Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, Thu-Sat 10--4  and by appointment (510) 527-1214; traywick.com. —DeWitt Cheng

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

The Crisis in Art Criticism (reprinted from VisualArtSource.com)

Is There a Crisis in Art Criticism?

Last December the art critic Irving Sandler posed (www.brooklynrail.org) fourteen broadly philosophical questions to fellow art critics who are trying to understand where art is going. Today, the third question, Q3: Is there a crisis in art criticism?

Well, yes, sort of. But first a trip down Memory Lane. In 1925, the Dadaist/Expressionist George Grosz and the publisher Wieland Herzfelde (brother of the photomontage artist John Heartfield) published a diatribe against the avant-garde art of the time (which they considered out of touch), and a defense of Dadaist sociopolitical iconoclasm, entitled “Art is in Danger,” referring to the alarums of “foes of Dada.” It’s a pithy, funny rant, and extremely partisan, excoriating the “the head-in-the-clouds tendency of so-called holy art, whose disciples brooded over …the ‘really’ revolutionary problems of form, color, and style” “while the generals were painting in blood.” If we, a century after The Great War, now oscillate between holy art and aesthetic iconoclasm, and often confuse the two, well, there’s nothing new under the global capitalist sun, maybe. Grosz and Herzfelde: “Formal revolution lost its shock effect a long time ago. The modern citizen digests everything . . . [I]ce-cold, aloof, he hangs the most radical things in his apartment. . . . Rash and unhesitating acceptance so as not to be “born yesterday” is the password. . . . [C]ool, . . . skeptical, without illusions, . . . he understands only his merchandise [read ‘business’]. . .for all culture, there are specialists who determine the fashion. . . . Even the formal revolutionaries . . . do fairly well, for, underneath, they are related to those gentlemen, and have . . . the same indifferent, arrogant view of life.” (That Grosz later repudiated, or at least depicted his earlier radicalism with irony, does not invalidate the 1925 analysis.)

The worldview of the consumer/flâneur, of course, pervades the art world, and it’s no good pining for “holy” art again, in either its realist or abstract incarnations. But to the extent that art exercises an influence on us, even shapes us, we need to be conscious of the values that it embodies, and what pleasure (or pain) centers in our brains it stimulates. If there is a crisis in art criticism—and I think there is—its cause is the present crisis in art, which is due to its plurality and diffuseness. There is no consensus about art’s purpose or function; indeed, at the top rungs of the art world, it often seems devoid of aesthetic value or human emotion, devolved into mere markers of social status. The reason so much art criticism divides into the extremes of formalist exposition/description (without analysis) or politically correct tendentious tract is that meaning has been leached from art in the name of total creative freedom. Today we are conditioned to invest blind faith in the artist and the art world, at the risk of seeming culturally retrograde. The last domain of free thought that many of us once discerned in art once has gradually become (or is becoming, or is in danger of becoming) an entertainment for the fashionable conformist: the popular game in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Centrifugal Bumble Puppy. The crisis in art, reflected in the crisis in art crit, is a reflection of contemporary society. In my opinion—and take it as misguided or alarmist if you will—is that we cannot afford to remain arrogant and indifferent to—and perpetually distracted from—the critically important larger crises at our doorstep. Art can be part of the solution; it should not exult in being part of the problem, or cover-up. —DeWitt Cheng

 

 

 

2014 review of Jeffrey Beauchamp shao at McLaughlin Gallery. Artist is currently showing (thru mid=April 2019) at Maybaum Gallery, San Francisco.

JEFFREY BEAUCHAMP: Freefall
By DeWitt Cheng

From the Renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century, artists believed in the power of the visual image to comment on the world. Painters were taught to create skillful depictions of observable reality. With the modernist revolution of roughly1860 to 1960, artists asserted their independence from what was characterized as the slavish imitation of reality; this revolt was in part a response to the advent of photography. With the postmodernist revolution—by this term I include Pop art, land art, minimalism, conceptualism, and social-relations art—that began in 1960 and is now five decades old, the notion of the art object as personal expression came into question and under attack. In today’s pluralistic, anything-goes ferment, no central organizing principle predominates; there is indeed no consensus about what art is or does, since the anti-art ideas of Duchamp and others, promulgated through academically oriented art schools, define current practice for many. With the rising popularity of what has been “crowd-sourced curating,” i.e., interactive art situations, described recently by Ellen Gamerman in The Wall Street Journal (“Everybody’s an Art Curator”), it appears that art museums, too, are stepping away from the idea of personal expression toward what might be seen by old-school lovers of aesthetic visual experience as audience-friendly, risk-free group play. 

The title of Jeffrey Beauchamp’s painting exhibition, Freefall, could plausibly be misinterpreted as a commentary on this current atomization of culture, but for this Bay Area painter it represents the condition of art-making, and even, more broadly, living: there are no guarantees (or recipes or formulas); everyone is free-falling from birth toward (spoiler alert!) the ground. (If you don’t believe me, see Dino Buzzati’s story “The Falling Girl” or Max Beckmann’s painting, “The Falling Man.”) Beauchamp’s goal, he says, referring to the Buzz Lightyear character in the Toy Story movies, is “to fall with style.” Contemporary artists who believe that only the new is significant deny themselves both aesthetic pleasure and a broader perspective if they fail to see the great works of the past as imaginative flights that never end—that transport viewers, century after century. Beauchamp is a consummate painter who was cautioned many times in art school, the San Francisco Art Institute, with “the F word,” i.e., facility, a bugaboo of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but who, suitably ‘inoculated’ against art fashion, uses his skill in the service of an eclectic mind, restless imagination, trust in instinct—and playful sense of humor. Beauchamp: “I go with the flow and follow my impulses and assess as I go. I try to bring both sides of my brain into play and get a good balance.” 

In 2012 I wrote in Art Ltd magazine:

A skilled realist, he [Beauchamp] became dissatisfied some years ago … and loosened up his style with what he has described as "busting out" brushwork and a "caveman dance" process, of making gestures guided by intuition and improvisation, in the abstract expressionist style. His turbulent landscapes all but fly apart through sheer bravura, but somehow remain legible and coherent, due, no doubt, to his apprenticeship in realism in the late 1980s, when nothing could have seemed more demodé.
It was a self-guided study, of course. Beauchamp ensconced himself in the school library, studying Turner, Monet and Lorrain, emerging only to explore northern California's "amazing garden," hiking and painting with a friend. His work thus derives from both tradition and nature, and oscillates between realism and abstraction, but in an odd way: the modes are not fused, as in Cézanne or the Bay Area Figurative painters, nor are they confined to separate bodies of work, as in Gerhard Richter (whose soft-focus realism Beauchamp explored for a period). Rather, they are presented simultaneously in parallel, in the same paintings, as double images. As we change focus from depth to flatness and back, the hazy, golden-hued landscapes dissolve into energetic calligraphy, and vice versa, with each aspect canceling and superseding the other, like the complementary but incompatible partners in optical illusions: duck and rabbit or goblet and profile. Despite their humorous, absurd, enigmatic titles (some bearing excruciating puns), Beauchamp's small landscapes … reward serious, sustained looking.

The dozen-plus paintings in Freefall reward slow looking, too, their opulent color and brushwork complemented here and there by the artist’s philosophic humor (exemplified in a series made several years ago of carved, painted books — perfect for bibliophiles and bibliophobes alike). All the Good Little Californias appears to be a traditional landscape in the grand, turbulent, Romantic style of Turner, though loosely set down in quick strokes, as if by Manet, but it’s a conceptual work as well, an imagined landscape synopsizing the state’s geographical features. Bridge Out, Race On and I Hear Voices in My Head and Only Just Realized They’re All Actually Mel Blanc (referring to the voice of many Warner Brothers cartoon characters) are similarly faithful to the Romantic landscape tradition—in its own way, commenting both on the natural subject and the ways in which culture presents it for vicarious consumption. Cocotron the Chocolate Robot depicts a massive oak tree, hyperreal in its high-contrast modeling and implied anthopomorphism, rooted, like the boulder-like group of trees in the background, amid rolling hills that are delineated with expressionist brushstrokes—a crashing surf of vivid color. Familiar Balance of the Hasty Glacier and Landscape When Her Bread Machine Went Awry add figures to the landscapes; in the former, a small girl playing with a hula hoop between art books on Degas and DeKooning, two consummate draftsmen whose styles are represented here by the realistically rendered girl and the fluid, calligraphic landscape’ in the latter, a small girl, her back toward us, approaches a pile of burning leaves taller than she is—a miniature volcano. Longest Truce Ever and Proper & Common —Some of My Best Friends Are Nouns also play with traditional genres: the medieval city as depicted before artists mastered perspective, with its jumbles of masonry, and the bucolic forest scene, here contemplated by two inquisitive but hardly decorative crows. Birth of the Audubon Venus is a nude figure study of stunning realism and sensuality, but also an allegorical figure in the nineteenth-century style: woman as force of nature. Frida Be You and Me riffs on the title of the 1972 feminist book encouraging kids to question restrictive gender role models, and may incidentally refer to Frida Kahlo, who challenged stereotypes in her semi-autobiographical work; in Beauchamp’s painting, a solemn-looking teenaged girl sits on the floor or ground, kneading her hands, enlarged because they are extended toward the viewer, with strings of red and white paint squeezed from between her fingers; it can be interpreted as premonitory or symbolic, like Renaissance depictions of baby Jesus playing with toy crosses and flails, or as a metaphor for artistic creation derived from profound feeling, in the Van Gogh/Munch/Pollock mold. The two Resolution de Fleur paintings depict the same model, wearing a floral-print dress, seated, and dramatically lit in a dark interior, the first loosely rendered, with the face actually ‘out of focus,’ and the second, more ‘finished’—a nice conflation of the styles of, say, John Singer Sargent and Gerhard Richter. Two more related paintings, these depicting traditional bedroom suites, Blue Four-Poster and Red Four-Poster, lack the stylistic playfulness of the other works, offering instead the plaisir promulgated by Matisse a century ago with his ideal of paintings that would be as restful as armchairs for tired businessmen, not the sordid contemporary delights of real beds with real stained sheets. Those who love painting’s traditional pleasures and also enjoy intellectual provocations in the contemporary mode will find much to peruse and consider in Beauchamp’s generous, lively, irreverent painted world.

Richard Shaw and Wanxin Zhang at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art


RICHARD SHAW AND WANXIN ZHANG

Sonoma Valley Museum of Art

January 19 - April 7, 2019

The popularity of new media and conceptual art, as well as American’s obsession with the new, in every sphere, including the arts, tends to obscure the work of artists working in traditional media, as well as the very notion of lifelong commitment to one medium. Ceramics, of course, has been accorded the full status of an art material only in the past half-century, largely as a result of doggedly individualistic Bay Area artists like Robert Arneson, Clayton Bailey, Stephen DeStaebler, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos, who infused wit, subversive humor, pathos and delight into that ancient and earthy (therefore humble) medium, with its tactile, shape-shifting expressiveness, suited to both Abstract Expressionist gesture and polished, geometric perfection—and its traditional Christian connection with the human body.

Two of the Bay Area’s undisputed masters of art ceramics are united in a show at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (until April 7). The show originated at the gallery in Santa Clara University’s Edward Dowd Art and Art History Building Art, initiated by by SCU ceramicist and Gallery Manager Pancho Jimènez, and curated by San Francisco State University Art Professor Mark Dean Johnson and SVMA Executive Director Linda Keaton. The show, untitled but for the artists’ names, is modestly-sized, with only about a dozen works by each artist, but it’s large in spirit and ambition: vigorous, assertive and pointedly funny, when so much contemporary art looks forced and voulu, willed and affectless, and overly reliant on being oh-so subversive, but only that. The works of Shan and Zhang score some sociopolitical points, but with beauty and wit.

Shaw and Zhang, friends and colleagues from different generations (born in 1941 and 1961, respectively), are deeply personal artists who, along with being invested in clay, are interested in cultural critique of a personal sort. Shaw’s trompe-l’oeil assemblages of faux oddments, sometimes conjoined into humanoid figures, play with the conventions of mimesis and traditional realism, but in the playful mode of the Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who contrived portraits made of fishes, book, and fire; and in the melancholy mode of the Metaphysical painter, Giorgio di Chirico, whose mute mannequins reflected the modernist disbelief in classical heroes—though not without nostalgia; they’re junk-pile ruins that are analogous to T.S. Eliot’s verbal collage in “The Waste Land.” Mark Dean Johnson in his informative and readable catalog essay also cites those usual suspects, the trompe-l’oeil American painters, Peto and Harnett, as well as the virtuosic decorative porcelains of the Frenchman Bernard Palissy in the sixteenth century. (To digress slightly, Chris Anteman’s 2017 Forbidden Fruit show at the Crocker Art Museum was inspired by the eighteenth-century German, Johann Joachim Kändler). Zhang, who emigrated to the US from China in 1992, and soon made his mark with life-six=zed ceramic figures akin to the Xi’an warriors guarding the tomb of the First Emperor, but done in a, expressive, loose style that to my eye melds Rodin and Bay Area Figuration; there are also sly notes of satire and humor in the anachronistic modern accessories—boom boxes, shades, skateboards— that these stolid, stoic, heavy, timeworn warriors bear with such fortitude and resolve. Johnson also points out that the two artists share a biculturalism that disproves Kipling’s old adage that East and West never meet: Zhang uses the formidable academic sculpture skills that he honed at LuXun Academy of Fine Arts, but he modifies it with the free, intuitive expressionism that he absorbed in the Bay Area; Shaw’s still-life assemblages draw on the history of Chinese porcelain, which he imitates in his parodies/homages, with seeming effortlessness.

Among the outstanding pieces of this very strong show I have space for only a few. Shaw’s 2014 “Canton Lady” is a composite figure composed of a paint-can head (labeled “100% Pure Paint”), paintbrush fingers, a cigar-box hips, baseball-bat limbs, and a blue-and-white ‘Cantonware” vase for a torso, all made in clay and colored with decals or hand-painting; his 2012  “House of Cards with Pearlware House and Fence Motif,” a seemingly precariously balanced arrangement of objects anchored by a heavy textbook (Psychoanalysis in Modern Art) atop which are stacked an inverted Ming-style teapot, another book, and then a pyramid of playing cards. Zhang’s 2008 “Untitled Warrior,” a life-sized columnar figure of daunting power and weight, protected by jade-plate armor—and a white-snouted respirator mask of the sort that Bay Areans used for protection in last year’s wildfires (or goggled, equine-looking Great War soldiers, against mustard gas); his 2018 “Shifting Mountain” is a similar courtly figure, this one bearing wrapped gifts, but surmounted by a tower-like encrustation of rock akin to the intricately eroded scholar stones collected by Chinese connoisseurs for centuries; his 2013 “Fish Dinner Box” replicates a takeout Chinese-food container, replete with faux grease stains and the injunctions,  “Microwave Safe ... Enjoy... Call Again.”