Richard Misrach, "The Writing on the Wall," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco





Richard Misrach,  "The Writing on the Wall," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
(published in  fttp://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&pcID=17&aID=4211 without the intro paragraph on Bible lore)

RICHARD MISRACH: The Writing On The Wall

Fraenkel Gallery

‘The writing on the wall’ refers to the story in the Book of Daniel of the end of the reign of the Babylonian king Belshazzar (son of Nebuchadnezzar, conqueror and enslaver of the Israelites during the Babylonian Captivity) in 539BC. Belshazzar is interrupted at his impious feast by a terrifying disembodied hand writing fiery letters on the palace wall. Mene mene tekel upharsin is decrypted by the Jewish sage Daniel as a warning that Belshazzar’s reign has been divinely weighed and found wanting, and is thus forfeit, and prophecy is verified that very night when the kingdom is overthrown by the Medes. The story is the subject of religious, moralizing paintings by Rembrandt (1635), Washington Allston (1817) and John Martin (1821).

Richard Misrach, who has been documenting the environmental damage of America’s capitalist culture for decades—“these cultural manifestations in the natural landscape, ... the collision between nature and civilization”—may not be assuming the role of prophetic doomsayer per se, but the signs of incipient collapse are there for anyone to see and decipher: the government environmental-damage report asserting that climate change is real, leaked on Wednesday in order to evade death by redaction; and, of course the ongoing comic tragedy and tragic comedy in Washington. Misrach began working on this series of ruined houses in the American Southwest bedecked with anonymous graffiti during election year, and found in the swastikas and racist comments (as well as some rejoinder a compelling record of “the dystopian side of the American dream” now familiar to everyone: desperation, despair and vicious scapegoating. Misrach: “These are the hieroglyphics of our time.”

Five large photos depict abandoned houses seemingly invaded by malefic spirits. Swastika, Barstow, California presents three layers, or registers: the dry gray-brown dirt; the blue sky dotted with clouds; and, separating them, a beige wall of a building, with a sky-blue door decorated with a swastika. A similar tripartite composition structures “Trump Loves American People,” North of Reno, Nevada, with a crudely lettered. misspelled sign the only evidence of human presence. Shotgun practice, "he will return," Nevada shows a trio of cinder-clock walls crowned by rebar stems, with a crucified Jesus serving as target, all but obliterated by bullet craters, only his limbs still recognizable.

Also included are smaller-format graffiti shots taken with an iPhone, and grouped in clusters, from the Obama years: ‘premonitions’ (to use Misrach’s term) of the current culture war; and Tagged Boulders, Lucerne Valley, California, a thirty-two piece grid of medium-sized photos of rocks upon which messages have been written: $, thug life, We color the world! —DeWitt Cheng

Chris Antemann at Crocker Art Museum (reprinted from Artillery magazine, July 2017, http://artillerymag.com/chris-antemann)





CHRIS ANTEMANN: Forbidden Fruit

Crocker Art Museum

By DeWitt Cheng

The term forbidden fruit nowadays refers to mere guilty pleasures, but it once designated the fatal, tragic fruit of knowledge — knowledge of sex, or course, being a discovery that every generation makes defiantly, with mingled trepidation and delight. Chris Antemann’s Forbidden Fruit sculpture installation depicts that pleasure principle in action, minus moralizing; the tiny porcelain youngsters, dining and dallying, are charming and seductive, like Bosch’s naked figures in the central panel of his great triptych, but without a lost heaven or future hell waiting, so to speak, in the wings. Antemann wrote her master’s thesis on the porcelain figure tradition, and made figurines in the style for fifteen years before being offered, two years ago, the use of Meiseen’s facilities and skilled artisans, resulting in an inspired collaboration.

The Rococo art of the mid-eighteenth century, succeeding the religious dramas of the baroque era (e.g., Caravaggio) and preceding the political moralizing of the later neoclassic era (e.g., David, Ingres), is witty, decorative and aristocratic, and commonly associated today with the artifice and pomp of Louis XV’s court. If one later critic mocked its "jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants," we in the late capitalist era can accept and admire its light-hearted fantasy and fanciful profusion. The Rococo painters Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard depicted fêtes galantes, with costumed figures lounging and flirting in manicured gardens, often endowed with mythological or allegorical themes. Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717), a mythological land of love and youth, epitomizes the style and worldview.

Antemann updates the elaborate, symbolic dinner settings, or surtouts-de-table, created by Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-1775) for Ancien Régime festivities. At the center of the gallery—which is decorated with pink Rococo wallpaper, created digitally— sits, atop a large pedestal, Forbidden Fruit Dinner Party (2013), a multi-part installation. The central Love Temple ((2013), is a circular Roman temple or pavilion housing doll-like banqueters in various states of erotic abandon, the structure festooned with allegorical figures: three Graces and four personified seasons. Two flanking works, Tempted to Taste and Fruit of Knowledge (2014), depict pyramids of fruits associated with the Temptation—pomegranates from Asia; figs from Italy; and apples from western Europe. Surrounding the fruit pillars are four small sculptures, Pursuit of Love, Secluded Kiss, Coronation, and Love Letter (all 2013), based on paintings that Fragonard made for Louis XV’s mistress, tracing romantic passion from vernal urgency to autumnal nostalgia. Around this central feast table are related works: Covet, Trifle and A Taste of Paradise (all 2013); and A Strong Passion, Little Maid, Ambrosia, A Delicate Domain, and Chandelier (all 2014).

Antemann’s meticulous craftsmanship and obvious affection for this tradition make for an interesting commentary on our times, beset byf economic hardship and ruling-class denial: Apres moi, la déluge. In the wake of much postmodernist agitprop flattering today’s aristocrat colletors with ironic winks, Antemann’s elegant, humorous, girl-power updates of this pre-revolutionary tradition manage, improbably, to hit a cultural nerve. They may appear a mere spoonful of sugar, tiny cousins of Kara Walker’s gigantic sugar sphinx, but their subtlety and ambiguity are seductive, and, I would say, like Kändler’s fruits, which were once made from sugar but later metamorphosed into porcelain, more lasting.


 

Charles Howard,abstract surrealist painter, at Berkeley Art Museum (reprinted from East Bay Monthly, August, 2017)



Charles Howard, abstract surrealist painter, at BAM

The Berkeley Art Museum looks back to the 1940s, when modernism was making its way to California, with a re-examination of the painter Charles Houghton Howard (1899-1978), who came from an illustrious family of Berkeley artists and architects. His father, the architect John Galen Howard, supervised the design for UC Berkeley’s campus; brothers Robert and John were renowned in sculpture and painting, respectively; and Robert’s wife, Adaline Kent, became a prominent sculptor. Howard, who was shown in New York in the 1930s with the likes of Man Ray and Joseph Cornell, along with the European Surrealists, deserves to be remembered nearly seven decades after his Legion of Honor exhibition. This large retrospective of some 75 drawings and paintings on canvas celebrates a local talent (Berkeley High School, class of 1917; UC Berkeley, class of 1920; 1940s Bay Area art star and shipyard worker) who contributed significantly to the modernist tradition.

Despite his famously artistic family, Howard was educated in journalism at UC, becoming a convert to art only after graduating, in a 1924 epiphany over a Giorgione painting in Venice. Moving between New York, London, and the Bay Area he absorbed a host of influences, developing his trademark style of complex geometric constructions or environments suggestive of stage sets, carefully designed and immaculately rendered, and brightly lighted or deeply shadowed, with caravaggesque drama and mystery. The ex-journalist described his paintings with deliberate ambiguity and bohemian understatement as “portraits of the same general subject, of the same idea, carried as far as I am able at the time.”  Elsewhere he characterized his work as “a balance between reasoned construction and free intuition.” Howard’s biomechanical forms—reminiscent of Mirò, Picabia, and Duchamp—always appear (despite their tendrils, whiskers and buds) designed for construction, and oddly palpable. A catalogue written by Curator Apsara diQuinzio and others, including artist Robert Gober, is available. A Margin of Chaos runs through October 1; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2120 Oxford Street, Berkeley, 510/642-0808; bampfa.org. DeWitt Cheng








Stuart Davis "In Full Swing"at deYoung Museum, San Francisco, through August 6 (fromVisualArtSource.com)

STUART DAVIS “In Full Swing”





 



"… realism doesn't merely include what one immediately sees with the eye at a given moment. One also relates it to past experience, … to feelings, ideas and … the totality of the awareness of it … By realism I don't mean realism in any photographic sense. Certainly not." — Stuart Davis 

San Francisco is fortunate this summer to host three exemplary museum shows: the young Claude Monet at the Legion of Honor; and, less heralded but no less important or inspiring, or revelatory, Stuart Davis at the de Young. Davis may be less well known than the others, but his dazzling work deserves the red carpet treatment, too. Donald Judd, not someone who might be suspected of maximalist tendencies, after seeing a Davis show, suggested that an appropriate reaction might be applause: "Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper." 

"In Full Swing" features some seventy-five of the artist's works, mostly oils on canvas, but also preparatory drawings and smaller paintings in gouache and casein. The show originated at the Whitney Museum last year, and is accompanied by an excellent short film tracing Davis's evolution from Ashcan-school street realism; through Cubism, which the artist encountered as an exhibiting young watercolorist at the famous 1913 Armory show, and in more concentrated form on a 1928 yearlong stay in Paris; to his mature style, dating from the 1930s, which derived from American-scene observation but transformed it utterly into joyous, electrifying visual music.  Davis's ebullient syncopations of bright colors and interlocking shapes are uniquely his own (despite occasional resemblances to Picasso, Matisse, Léger, and Miró). Peter Schjeldahl characterized Davis as "a polemicist and a happy warrior for modernity as the heart's blood of what he called, invoking the nation's definitive poet, the thing Whitman felt — and I too will express it in pictures — America — the wonderful place we live in.” 

     



Occupying several meandering galleries on the museum's second floor, the works are hung for the most part chronologically (although the careful viewer will need to look at dates, as the direction of pedestrian traffic flow is not always clear). Deviating from this progression are several groupings of paintings and drawings showing Davis brilliantly reworking themes, sometimes from decades past, like a musician riffing on old standards. Jazz was one of Davis' longtime passions, beginning in his youth, when, "hep to the jive," he frequented  the rough bars of Newark, and he continued to do so throughout his life.  

A playful but telling inscription from Duke Ellington in "American Painting" (1932/1942-54) makes this clear: "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing." The painting also features stylized renderings of Davis and Federal Arts Project colleagues Willem deKooning, John Graham and Arshile Gorky. Gorky's cavalier attitude toward politics ended his friendship with Davis, who for a time abandoned painting for organizing, before becoming disgusted with lefty kowtowing to Stalin. Davis: "I took the business as seriously as the serious situation demanded and devoted much time to the organizational work. Gorky was less intense about it and still wanted to play."  Gorky, who killed himself in 1946, when the painting was yet unfinished, may be the figure who has been canceled out. 

     



If Davis' paintings are timeless, they are also historic windows into the art of the early twentieth century, combining aspects of Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and, with their playful deployment of the everyday imagery of commercial America, Pop. To follow Davis' career is to recapitulate the phylogeny of American painting (except for Surrealism, which had no appeal to this son of artists, high-school dropout and student of real life). Davis died in 1964 at the age of seventy-one, of a stroke. His final, unfinished painting is here, still bearing the masking tape that he used to achieve the crisp lines that contrast so well with his pastry-chef paint surfaces. Its title, "Fin," or End, inspired by a French movie's final frame, is the last thing Davis painted.  

Holland Cotter wrote:  "What Davis got right was belief: the belief that he was doing the one sure, positive thing he could do, and that he would keep doing it, no matter what, in failure or success, in sickness or in health. That's the lesson young artists can take away from his show ..." In our faithless, feckless times, governed by academic learned helplessness and commercially induced moral slackness, these are lessons worth learning or relearning.—http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&pcID=22&aID=4096



     

Ricardo Mazal @ Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, San Francisco (from VisualArtSource.com)

 
Ricardo Mazal
Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, San Francisco, California
Recommendation by DeWitt Cheng

Continuing through August 12, 2017

Ricardo Mazal, a Mexican painter now living in New York and Santa Fe, might be said to absorb the contradictory impulses of his environs: monochrome abstraction and a feeling for landscape. He combines photographic studies of sites that he has visited, many of them endowed with spiritual meaning, brought together through his love of the painting process and its materials. The spiritual element, given relatively little attention in the hurly-burly art world, lay at the center of Mazal’s 2013 show, "The Kora Dialogues." That show featured paintings inspired by the artist’s kora, or circumambulation, of Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash, in the summer of 2009 (which included witnessing a rare traditional sky burial, in which the body of the deceased is ritually cut up and fed to scavengers).
Current works include oil on linen or oil on aluminum dibond paintings, which are rectangles of a single color or abutted rectangles of different single colors, reading as landscape and sky, all inflected with seismographic-looking ‘drawing’ made by applying and scraping paint with long foam-rubber blades scored at irregular intervals. If the method suggests Gerhard Richter’s high-key squeegee apocalypses, Mazal’s paintings, which suggest the strata exposed by land cuts are more subdued, suggesting a meditative calm and underlying the geologic formations and deformations.
These paintings are pure abstractions made graphically powerful with their swirling black and white ribbons and banners. The artist metaphorically examines the geology of high mountains. Inspired by high-contrast photographs of the escarpments, and directed to excellent spiritual ends, Mazal deploys painterly sedimentation to suggest the forces of mountain-building in layers of red, violet, blue, gray and white oil paint.