Bruce High Quality Foundation University
The Old Schoolhouse Museum. Courtesy 29 Palms Historical Society and Museum.
The popularity of fine art university training over the past few decades (thanks to various factors such as the G.I. Bill and the promise of success through an inflated art market) has been blamed for the cool impersonal wave of conceptual ideas that has taken over practical technique. Workshop or atelier training is now something of the past and contemporary art has become as specialized and esoteric as the sciences. The current financial downturn will likely have an impact on the number of graduate fine art students and it is at this point that it seems appropriate to question the function of the art school and its effectiveness for artists.
In its defense, experimentation can still take place within the art school, with more focus placed on multidisciplinary learning and process than the final object (although this learning and experimentation is often based on that of the prior generation so there are certainly limitations). The school can also be a place where academics come together in lectures, symposia, etc., providing further cultural mediation so it is not just dedicated to advancing the education of younger generations. However, the school is, for the most part, inaccessible to the general public and these events simply perpetuate an exclusive, rigid academic system.
Believing that the social structure of art should reach the needs of everyone, Joseph Beuys was one of the first artists to advocate a radical reshaping of the art school system. With an anthropological understanding of art, it is necessary for everyone to participate creatively and equally, according to Beuys, in order for a change to take place in our economic behavior and our political systems.
However, art audiences (those who attend galleries and museums) have very little political agency for the most part. The artwork is passively observed but rarely engaged with, particularly on an actively participatory level, so spectators become consumers much like in the film theater or in front of the television. Attempts to provide a transformative function have occurred recently with artists and art projects such as Tino Sehgal, e-flux’s unitednationsplaza, Mark Leckey, and Terence Koh. Beuys’s utopian theory has influenced a number of these artists, but most recently and possibly most demonstrably his influence is evident in the work of the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF).
“You Don’t Know” — Matt Connors at Canada Gallery
Matt Connors, installation view of "You Don't Know." Courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery.
Striped bathroom wallpaper, Cy Twombly, Imi Knoebel, and scribbles resembling Pop-like lineaments or cave markings are all evoked by Matt Connors work in his current exhibition at Canada Gallery. Red and green pillars of solid color, made from digital C-prints, stand like abstract Photoshop totems to Color Field painting. Neon splashes cover one canvas while another contains three beige, geometric rectangles. Colors, although never clashing on a single canvas, vary dramatically from brash to soft pastels throughout, as do the abstract influences that Connors depicts. One canvas resembles the frame of a painting, and the next echoes a chaotic, colorful Matisse collage. Tropical contains juxtapositions within the work itself: a brightly colored image has been overpainted by a layer of white that almost covers the surface but the edges have been left exposed so the vibrancy peeks out from behind. Another work, Tunnel, conjures a three-dimensional image through the title but consists of two colorful rectangles (one within the other) framing a brown Kenneth Noland-like bullseye that instead appears flat against the canvas. Connors refuses to stick with just one abstract model and repeatedly plays with overlooked gestures such as the doodle-like markings. It is as though he has selected sections of various Modernist works, examined them closely and then made them his own.
Matt Connors, installation view of "You Don't Know." Courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery.
As with Connors’ earlier work, frames are a crucial element — not only do pieces resemble the frame of a painting but some of the canvases actually have a frame or give the effect of having one with a white or unpainted border. The word ‘frame’ is included in the titles of three of the paintings and framing the display of the works is also something he continues to question: paintings are not necessarily hung on the walls, some lean against the wall on the floor.
Gedi Sibony at Greene Naftali
Gedi Sibony, "The Cutters, From The Center, Her Trumpeted Spoke Lastly," 2007 /2010. Canvas, paint, wall, hollow-core door, matted drawing reversed in frame, 137 x 164 x 13 inches / 348 x 416.6 x 33 cm. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo Credit: John Berens
The invitation for Gedi Sibony’s solo show at Greene Naftali consists of a large grid of uneven lines with the exhibition details run along the edges. The work in the show itself proves to be equally asymmetrical and minimal with unpolished materials creating incomplete scenes around the gallery space. A large unfinished wall partition, The Cutters, greets visitors in the main space. Parts of the wall are missing and the inner framework is exposed on the sides. The white paint job is also only half done and two pieces of canvas hang around a doorway that leads to an industrial-looking door firmly attached to the back wall. An open, jerry-built wall leading to a firmly closed one.
Gedi Sibony, "The Brighter Grows the Lantern," 2010. Vinyl, nails, and light, dimensions variable. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo Credit: John Berens.
In the following room, The Brighter Grows the Lantern consists of a large sheet of vinyl that blocks a direct view of the illuminated wall as you enter (echoing Olafur Eliasson’s recent installation at Tanya Bonakdar). The vinyl also reflects the warm shower of light back into the space and the atmospheric radiance is almost perfect until you turn to leave and find the wall by the door has been stripped away, overshadowing the corner with a darker tenor. Next door, Who Attracts All That Is Named seems like the makings of a shambolic living room stage set formed of objects plucked from the street, while the raised platform sculpture, Sets Into Motion, in the back space is equally ramshackle and resembles a flimsy, Richard-Tuttle-like loft bed, with the title also adding a domino-fall precariousness to it.
NY Print Fair 2010
IFPDA Print Fair. Photography by Andrew Sciaulino.
An air of refinement hung fairly heavily throughout the old Armory building this weekend with a weighty reminder of the long history of printmaking at the IFPDA Print Fair. Many of the booths such as David Tunick’s, where Rembrandt etchings, Matisse lithographs, Picasso etchings, Edvard Munch drypoints, as well as nine Whistler prints of Venice hung salon-style, could have been plucked from the Drawings and Prints Room of somewhere like the Metropolitan Museum.
Barbara Krakow Gallery featured polygon etchings by Robert Mangold, with deliberate imperfections in his architectural lines and ruptures of bright green and orange bursting out of some of the shapes. Around the corner, Sol LeWitt etchings with aquatint Stars — Light Center in various gradations of gray were similar in tone to James Turrell’s spatial Series E, from 1st Light pieces on the next wall. Krakow also had a print of Philip Guston’s The Street, which seemed to provide an underfoot perspective of the chaotic street scenes depicted in a number of the Max Beckmann prints on the wall opposite at Alice Adam.
IFPDA Print Fair. Photography by Andrew Sciaulino
In fact, a whole wall was dedicated to Max Beckmann prints at Alice Adam as well as at another booth, Jörg Maass. The former gallery was offering pieces from his earlier period of 1916-22, while Maass had more from between the wars, which are a lot less salacious and no longer depicting a heady glamor. Albrecht Dürer was also as prolific as ever: C.G. Boerner had Dürer’s Melencolia I, Adam & Eve, as well as St. Jerome in his Cell, while R.E. Lewis & Daughter were selling his Joachim and the Angel woodcut from 1554 for $24,000. Five rare Goya etchings were available at Kunsthandlung Helmut H. Rumbler, featuring violent bullfights, the aftermath of warfare as well as his 1797 print Until Death of a decrepit-looking woman adjusting her headdress at her cosmetic table while surrounded by her servants.
NY Art Book Fair 2010
AA Bronson. Photo by Rebecca Sahn, courtesy of Printed Matter, Inc.
This year’s NY Art Book Fair marks the departure of AA Bronson, one of the fair’s original organizers. Bronson resigned from Printed Matter only a few weeks ago, intending to focus on a retrospective of General Idea, of which he is one of the three founding members, along with studying for his Master’s of Divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary. Despite this seismic shift in the art book world, this year’s fair at MoMA PS1 still succeeded in bringing together not only New York publishers but also a wide variety of both young and established book publishers, distributors, antiquarians, booksellers, and artists from all over the world.
Photo by Rebecca Sahn, courtesy of Printed Matter, Inc
The first eye-catcher on the ground floor was the Purple Portfolio, featuring prints by Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, and Juergen Teller, selling for a whopping $25,000 at John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Other high-price, rare books were scattered around at stalls like Anartist, who had Keith Haring ephemera as well as small books and exhibitions catalogues from Christian Boltanski, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Richard Serra, Sol Le Witt and Marcel Broodthaers, to name just a few. The latter, as with previous years, continues to prove popular with a number of booksellers, including Banana Books, who also featured his publications. There was a white-glove, ask-before-you-touch affair at the Belgian publisher mfc-michéle didier’s table, with exclusive books by Philippe Parreno and AA Bronson; while Francesco Clemente’s mammoth 50-leave portfolio The Departure of the Argonaut was on sale at Sims Reed for $5,500. Bookseller Marcus Campbell was offering slightly more affordable options by the artist Max Ernst, however. Unbound sheets from the original print run of Une Semaine de Bonte from 1934 were just $20.00 a sheet.
Sales seemed to be going quite well in general — the German publisher Sternberg Press had been finding John Kelsey’s Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art was particularly popular with visitors and sales had also been going well for other German publishers, including the seasonal interview magazine mono.kultur.
