Yes, I'm still away on Thanksgiving holiday, however that does not mean I've forgotten about you. These shows (all over the place...) point to exciting signs of life all over the country (and one is in England, which, let's face it, is practically in the US. - I joke.. I am a kidder).

Phillip Guston - Small Oils on Panel 1969 - 1973. Through 12/31 at McKee Gallery NYC.
I'm so impressed with the spirit and courage that Guston had when he made the change from his abstract paintings to these that I would probably have followed him anywhere...

3 X 3 - Painting by Imi Knoebel, Robert Mangold and Jason Martin, Sculpture by Richard Deacon, Joel Shapiro and Peter Shelton. 1/14 through 2/13 at L.A. Louver, Venice, California

Susan Rothenberg - Moving in Place. Through January 3 at MAM Fort Worth, Then Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe (1/22 - 5/16) then Miami Art Museum (10/15 - 1/9 2011)

Mark Tansey through January 23 at Gagosian London.
I think Tansey is way under-rated as a painter. I think that might start to change with his new gallery...

Labels: Galleries, Painting, Sculpture

I did a quick video of the Leo Villareal installation, Multiverse (below). I love this Rachel Whiteread sculpture (above). You can probably tell why - but you'd be wrong. It's not because of the gridded nature of the work (although there is something to be said for that...) - it's about the artworks ability to describe space in something that we talk about but never physically define.

Labels: Museums, Sculpture, Washington DC

Many thanks to Andrew McCrarry and Adam Lister for all of his help in getting me into the show and being such a positive force.

Labels: Galleries, Painting, Sculpture, Washington DC

Interviewed Ted Larsen (photo above) for the blog later next week - What I didn't know about his work is the life change that took for him to move into his current direction. This should be really interesting. More about Ted's work is here.



Had a drink with Sharon Butler (photo above) of Two Coats of Paint, and talked about a bunch of stuff, Sharon is going to be joining us at 246 Editions - so that was exciting. I had a great time talking about the Guston's she had just seen at the NGA.

I believe it is time to clean my studio (or at least get the hockey sticks out), as this short video will no doubt show...

Labels: 246 Editions, Painting, Sculpture, Washington DC

Jeffry Cudlin has put together a thought provoking show built on a premise of Arts relationship with life as we live it. All of the artists have developed works that are built with objects and items that are in our day-to-day life experience.

My highlights of the show:
Anissa Mack, My Sister's Diary. Every week, new copies of redacted pages from the artist's sister's journal are posted onto this public bulletin board outside of the arts center. What I really like about this is the handwriting of the journal pages are different and the same all at the same time - it has an authenticity that is really engaging.

Mandy Burrow, creates tableau that are made and meant to be seen in her subjects' living spaces. The installations could be just about anything, but the artist claims a collaboration with the intended subject. I believe this, but miss what might be a certain unspoken eccentricity to the installations. They seem almost too in order. However they are rich in detail and pathos.

Christian Moeller, Mojo. A curious video of a theater spotlight follows random passer-bys' as the move through the beam. This is both amusing and weirdly big brother-ish. I feel it asks more questions than it answers and at the same time, the questions are barely whispered by the art - while only coming to the forefront upon further thought about the work.

All in all the show puts forth an idea of art not always thought about or seen. If fact I'm sure you could point at some of the "major art critics" of our time (and years gone by) and see their disdain for this sort of thinking. It's a curious place to visualize a group of art works from, and to be most successful, I think it requires viewers to think about the show afterwords and question a notion or two about what they expect from the art in our time.

Labels: Galleries, Painting, Paperworks, Photography, Sculpture, Washington DC

In my recent travels on the web, I stumbled over this post from Design Assembly in which the blogger is talking about how much he likes the design done for the Haunch of Venison show of Dan Flavin's artworks.

I do too, and thought you should see it.

Labels: 60's, Europe, Galleries, Sculpture

Hiroshi Sugimoto - 7 days 7 nights at Gagosian
In what was probably the biggest surprise to me, this is probably the most intense and rewarding show currently up right now. In the past, I have never been the biggest fan of Sugimoto - he seemed a little easy, and the images seemed a bit boring - I really thought it was the case of the emperor's new clothes. I don't think I've ever been so wrong in my life.

Here's the easy part, it's a show of 14 photos. Upon entering the gallery you see seven photos in a line in a pristine white room. Everything is equally spaced it is literally like looking at one line of a calendar. The images are close to identical and frankly at this point I went in and studied the images, they reveal themselves slowly and force the viewer to spend some time with the image to get anything out of it. Then a guard led me into a totally black room, I took a corner and saw another line of seven. The night photos are shown in the black room are displayed almost the same way that Avedon showed the miners in the American West show here at the Corcoran in the early eighties, while the two shows have almost nothing in common they have almost everything in common. Eventually your eyes adjust and the images are popping off the wall. Its almost violent how much info your getting from the images. I started to notice that the images were revealing themselves in subtle ways I wasn't expecting, the blacks and grays are so close that when they finally show the differences between each other it is just amazing.

A question I had leaving the gallery was who is able to print these? I mean your talking about some serious tonal differences that I don't think anyone can calibrate these in a standard darkroom environment, the printing of these alone is masterwork, while the installation is genius. Combined it makes for a very special gallery experience.

I know very little of the official approach of the work, however, ideas of time, motion and stillness become the guideposts of the work in its entirety.

Hiroshi Sugimoto
Ligurian Sea, Saviore, 1993
Gelatin silver print
47 x 58 3/4 inches unframed (119.4 x 149.2 cm)
Ed. of 5



Imi Knoebel at Mary Boone
Have I ever said that the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea is like a church? It's just an amazing structure, that certain shows kind of get swallowed up in that great space. This is not one of them.

As a friend of Blinky Palermo, Knoebel currently has an exhibition up at Dia:Beacon of works of his from the late sixties that are dedicated to Palermo, however the new work being show at Boone is really interesting These continue to explore his interest in picture space, support and color. The presentation is just amazing and the images themselves quiet but demanding of your attention.

Imi Knoebel, installation view

Worth Noting: Andrew Moore currently has a pair of amazing photographs up at Yancey Richardson. Although not an exhibit the two images by themselves are very close. Currently hung is new work showing the decay of the american rust belt, the images are sublime and tinged with a warmth that is hard to dislike. These were up in the back area, I hope they are still there if you get a chance to go.

Andrew Moore is also the Producer/Director of Photography of one of my favorite art biographies How To Paint A Bunny, a feature about the life of Ray Johnson.



Jim Dine - Hot Dream (52 Books) at Pace
I know that Jim Dine has ben focusing on his poetry quite a little bit, and upon looking at the current show, I think it's the best thing he could ever have done. This show is like someone took his mind opened it up, dumped it on the floor and threw it all over the place. You have everything in this show it's all there, all over the place and it's all right. Those magnificent drawing of tools he did in the seventies are here, as are photos and sculptures of the recent "Pinocchio" works, as well as Santa Claus and every little bit of detritus floating around his brain. It is a brilliant and magnificent show. It's also messy and fucked up and even stronger because of it.

It's almost unbelievable as well, especially when you consider that it is showing at Pace, not a smaller, but larger risk taking type space.

The work on display means less to me than watching dine take over this space and change it to match the psychographic mood of what he does and possibly how he works. The show is fascinating and inspiring. I wonder if we might be moving into an era where only successful artists will be able to take these kind of risks in a commercial space - I want to see even bigger risks being taken with even bigger approaches getting even better results. This is not the show of an artist who is slowing down, but of an artist that is still looking with his eyes, heart, and mind - and then thinking about it to new and unexpected results.

Jim Dine, installation view



Peter Dayton - Black Boards, White Chicks, part II at Salon 94 Freemans
One complaint - what a pain in the ass to find this gallery. I had mapped it and still needed directions.

Other than that the show is a knockout. Peter Dayton has been on my hit list for the last few months and when I received word that this show would consist mostly of his amazing Black Stella paintings, well, I wanted to go. For those late to the party, here is what Dayton does; (in a nut shell) He plays the high culture/low culture game better than anyone I've ever seen. It's that simple.

The Black Stella paintings play with shared images of Frank Stella's "Black" paintings of the fifties through a filter of the california finish fetish movement of the sixties. Although these have one more layer attached - they look almost exactly like a Stacey Peralta Warp Tail Skateboard deck that was manufactured by Gordon & Smith in the late seventies/early eighties. I should know because every little hessian rocker type kid I knew had one - even me. In fact I had two because my first one got ran over by a car and was snapped in half.

Back to the work, earlier Dayton's that I've seen play with color field painting - usually early Kenneth Noland (his stripes before the targets and chevrons), but these, with the Frank Stella "logo" on the top of the board mimic every important signifier that the real boards had, while using the geometric approach that Stella used. The idea is just so well executed it is hard not to be thrilled with the work. It is a show that asks a little bit from the viewer but returns more than asked with a smart approach and pristine execution along with smart aleck humor thrown in for good measure.

Bonus Play: A great little story told to me in a gallery that day.
I was talking to a friend at a gallery about how bad the Diebenkorn show recently at the Phillips was - and we were bummed because we both really like his work but this was just student stuff that probably was best to be shown as a piece of two for guidance in a larger show as opposed to an entire show of immature works he did while pursuing his masters.

Here's the story I was told. It is similar, but kind of worse.

She was at a show and the curator pulls out this painting from a flat file, that even in the best of times is laced with every bad Aryan stereotype you can think of. it's a blond haired, blue eyed mother in traditional german garb (think sound of music here) with a daughter in front, same kind of features, etc. while in the background it's the alps on the cleanest day that there ever was. Both of the figures are staring up and out to the bright future only illustrated in images like that. She turns to the curator and says "what is this?" The curator without missing a beat says. "It's a Franz Kline".

Labels: Galleries, New York, Painting, Paperworks, Photography, Sculpture

Douglas Witmer interview at "visual discrepancies"
Brent Hallard, in Tokyo, has just published a short interview with Douglas. Read it here.

JT Kirkland interview at PDX Art
Richard Schemmerer has a few words with JT here.

Richard Serra Reinstalled
After almost twenty years in storage, Slat by Richard Serra was reanchored on Monday in La Défense, a Parisian business district. The sculpture spent five years in a nearby Paris suburb, Puteaux, but vandalism and graffiti prompted that town’s mayor to remove it.

Labels: general notice, Painting, Philadelphia, Richard Serra, Sculpture, Washington DC

People don't seem to be talking much about the Martin Puryear show at the National Gallery - and it's a shame because the work is so good and Puryear is one of the few local artists to reach the international arena.

However the exhibition is disjointed as parts of the show are located all over the gallery. Four or five pieces are in the west building, Ladder for Booker T. Washington is installed in the main rotunda in the east building and the rest of the show is shoehorned into the smaller galleries of the west wing of the main building, forcing the viewer to go through a maze of rooms. Even with only two or three artworks in each gallery, they feel tight and really with one exception the works are unable to resonate with each other.

To me one of the great beauties of Puryears work is the absolute craftmanship that is evident in his work in every form and material he uses. These are well thought out and beautifully made objects that hint at mystery and the eccentricity of the creative process. This ecentricity has always intrigued me - its almost cagean in the way that these artworks refer to something but they never give the whole picture. Instead they give a distillation of visual approaches without giving away the whole idea behind the piece. I find them to be some of the strongest sculpture made in the last 20 years.

Highly recomended, despite the awkard staging of the exhibition.

Martin Puryear, Old Mole, 1985

Labels: 80's, Museums, Sculpture, Washington DC

Robert Rauschenberg died.

I have a number of things to say, but I cant until tomorrow.

Robert Rauschenberg in 1953. Photo by Allan Grant, Life Magazine © Time Warner Inc/Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York/DACS, London

Labels: Death, Painting, Photography, Sculpture

Thanks for sticking with me today while I continue talking about William Christenberry's current show at the Katzen Art Center at American University. I have been thinking about a discussion that arises with the idea of the grid and how it relates to WC's art in an era that could be defined as reductive - by this I mean the early seventies and into the very early eighties, the early stages of his mature artistic output.

I have always thought of the work as documentary in style and presentation - while I still find this to be true, I'm starting to think about the serial nature of the places that are photographed in Christenberry's work. Why for instance have I seen more that 10 different versions of The Palmist Building, The Green Warehouse, Sprott Church, and The Bar-B-Q Inn. Certainly these images could create a grid of changes to the location or even a timeline of the same, however could we now start to see that structure as a formal 3 dimensional grid that could represent; image of the location, deterioration of the location, year of the location, anthropological uses of the location. An x,y, and z axis if you will. This grid (or cube) could now start to also work in other disciplines - his drawings, paintings, and sculptures of the locations (or details thereof) of said subject combined.

There is a secondary question to this that needs to be asked as well - Is this an intention of the artist or is this something that has sprung from reading the output of his practice. Or is it a combination of both, in my mind, probably both. While this says nothing definitive of WC's work, it does raise a curious thought about art we (especially in the DC area) have grown very accustomed to.

Clearly this post is as much me thinking aloud as it is definitive theory - I have been kind of rolling the idea around for the last couple of days just to see where it might stick.

Labels: DC Galleries, Galleries, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Washington DC

Daniel Buren has threatened to destroy his signature black-and-white striped columns in the Palais Royal courtyard in Paris, saying the government has let them go to ruin, the London Times reports. The 260 columns, which form Les Deux Plateaux (1986), one of Paris's most controversial sculptures, are crumbling, the lights for illuminating them are broken, and the fountain has run dry.

In response, culture minister Christine Albanel said Palais Royal would undergo a $20.6 million restoration starting in 2009, with up to $4.7 million allocated to the courtyard and the sculpture. Buren said he had been pressing the Culture Ministry to repair his site-specific sculpture; his supporters said the renovation may come too late.

This is from Artinfo

Labels: 70's, Europe, Sculpture