Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio. Photo by © Arnold Newman, for an article written by Robert Hatch, "At The Tip Of Cape Cod," July 1961 issue of Horizon.Via the Provincetown Artist Registry.

Owing to its timeless insights about artmaking and life, art teachers traditionally assign Ashcan School painter Robert Henri’s 1923 collection of writing,  The Art Spirit, to beginning painters. The newly-released collection, The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, seems destined to be another such classic. Edited and annotated by painter Mira Schor, the 500-page book includes letters, lectures, journal entries, and published essays from the 1930s to the 1980s in which Tworkov intersperses unpretentious philosophical inquiry with progress reports from the studio. One of the primary players among the New York School painters in the 1950s, Tworkov recognized that his ideas were often at odds with prevailing theories. Nevertheless, he was committed to teasing out not what he ought to believe, but what he actually believed. The book is rooted in Tworkov’s era, which spanned the rise and decline of American painting, and manages to entertain readers with amusing anecdotes about his famous cohort while also imparting wisdom gained from a lifetime spent in the studio. Here are some excerpts.

“Every art can only say what the medium allows it to say. Every change in medium is a change in content. A painter knows that what was originally suggested by charcoal can never be said in paint. If you paint you say one thing. If you stain you say another. If you paste, you say still another. By the time you use a computer you will say an utterly different thing—that’s why painting will go on…” Feb. 12, 1967

“Among artists much more sure of their seeing, there is a much more instantaneous agreement on the worth of a painting than there is among laymen. It is interesting to note and compare the artist’s positive tone in speaking of a painting and the layman’s hesitativeness and vagueness. The layman is vague because he is guessing, because he does not see as fast, or at all [what], the artist sees….” October 16, 1961

“My main problem at Yale [Tworkov chaired the Art Department 1963-1969] was to establish the degree of my responsibility and authority. To smother the fights of the faculty, which mostly was between Chaet and Peterdi on the one hand and Albers followers on the other…” November 19, 1963

“A Mr. Slesinger from the Guggenheim Foundation called to say that I’ve been awarded a fellowship. Because of the mail strike they could not mail the award. So Wally [his wife] went to the office to pick it up. What is strange is that Motherwell and Geldzahler are on the jury, two people I have no high regard for….” March 20, 1970

“There was a time when painters could ignore what critics said about painting,  since it was agreed that they did not know what they were talking about. Now it is no longer true. Critics have caught up with painting. They are talking sense about it. And that is perhaps what is wrong with painting. Painting needs once more to go beyond ABC.” Feb. 12, 1967

An exhibition of Tworkov’s paintings, organized by Jason Andrew and the Estate of Jack Tworkov, will be at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, NY, August 13-November 13, 2009.

Toronto’s CN Tower is the world’s tallest, at 1,815 feet. I’m drawn to the smaller, unadvertised, local observation towers used to spot fires, watch nature, protect territory, and perhaps provide modest entertainment for visitors. Positioned above the tree line, the towers are distinctive features of the regional landscape, and can be seen from almost everywhere in the community. But from a distance, we’re indistinct as we stare from the platform, nearly invisible to everyone down below. If they can see us at all, they certainly can’t tell who we are. By climbing the tower and distancing ourselves from the throb of life below, paradoxically we feel as though we might be able to get a closer look. To some of us, that’s a keener vantage point than the heart of things. (SB)

At the time, working on a series of paintings loosely based on the structure of observation towers, I collected hundreds of tower images from the Internet. Here are a few.

America's most famous artist, Shepard Fairey, in his studio. Photo courtesy www.lataco.com

No matter how hard I try, avoiding reality TV is a challenge. The shows are like invasive kudzu: Nanny 911, Extreme Makeover, The Housewives of New Jersey, Jon & Kate, The Price of Beauty, COPS, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, and many, many more. This fall I’ll be avoiding American Artist, Sarah Jessica Parker’s collaboration with Magical Elves, the team behind Top Chef and Project Runway. The new show will serve a mash-up of amateur entertainers—that is, real people—engaging in old-fashioned game-show-style competition and unscripted activity. According to press reports, each episode will feature the show’s “contestants” competing in art-themed challenges from a range of disciplines—including sculpture, painting, photography and industrial design—and completing works of art that will be assessed by a panel of “top figures” in the art world, including artists, gallerists, collectors, curators, and critics.

If there are any producers out there (PBS?), here’s my suggestion for a better reality show about artists. Create a show that’s a little more verité, like an old-fashioned documentary. Forget about vetting “contestants.” Cast the net wide and choose 100 art grads from all over the country in June by random lottery. No auditions, video entries, or artist statements. Abandon any attempt to frontload charisma or talent. As the competition proceeds, to minimize the artists’ artificiality and self-consciousness (and their inclination to ham it up) they would be forbidden to reveal that they are participating in a reality TV show. Inevitably, some will be genuinely talented, some avidly self-promotional, some charismatic, some absolutely clueless—just as in real life.

Give them a list of goals to complete over the course of the viewing season. Those who fail to make the benchmarks are gradually eliminated. Here are some purposely vague goals that might be included:

• Find suitable living/working space that they can afford
• Get their work in three group shows
• Contribute in some creative way to the wider art community
• Publish three reviews (either essay or video format) of their colleagues’ art shows
• Curate a themed group show
• Get a grant or a teaching job
• Arrange five studio visits with gallerists or curators
• Get a solo show by the end of the year

Automatic ejection results if an artist:

• Fails to make art for more than four days during the period.
• Works longer than forty hours a week at their day job

In addition, in the early stages the artists are responsible for assembling a three-person crew to creatively document their progress on video, in any way they see fit. Before airing any of the results, a season’s worth of episodes would be prerecorded to avoid special treatment.

For me, a show like this, that creatively and realistically demonstrates the overwhelming challenges would-be artists face, would be must-see TV.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "Wall with Objects," 1966, Indan ink on paper with plaster form, 14” x 11.” Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Armand Versaci.

Mel Bochner’s new book, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007, is a compilation of his writing, both about art and as art. The book opens with thirty-five sharp, pithy reviews he wrote for Arts Magazine in the sixties. The editor paid $2.50 per review whether they were published or not, so Bochner turned in thirty each month, earning enough to pay his rent.

After reading the reviews, I wondered whatever became of the unfamiliar artists he had skewered. Consider a 1965 review of Marcelo Bonevardi’s work:

Competency, craftsmanship, and professionalism lend these large painting-constructions a certain interest. Into shallow spaces constructed behind a heavily surfaced canvas, small wooden abstract shapes are placed in the manner of meticulous Nevelson. The keyed-down color, non-referential shapes, and small esoteric numerals and arrows do not quite achieve an intended aura of mystery. If Bonevardi aspires to enigma, his all-too-familiar international vocabulary is incapable of expressing it.

Marcelo Bonevardi? For many of the artists Bochner reviews, a web search yields few results, but Bonevardi’s son Gustavo created a website for his father. Marcelo died in 1994 of cancer, and therefore won’t have to experience the disappointment of reading this review again. In any case, despite Bochner’s defensible assessment, it turns out Bonevardi fared well. “A native of Argentina, Marcelo Bonevardi spent most of his career in New York City, where he absorbed avant-garde practices and influences such as abstraction and primitivism, using them to invent a pictorial and symbolic language with which to express his deep spirituality and affinity for myth and ritual,” his website reports. “During his lifetime, Bonevardi received many honors, and his work has been collected by the leading North American and Latin American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.”

A book about his life and work, Bonevardi: Chasing Shadows, Constructing Art, which includes essays by Dore Ashton and Ronald Christ, was awarded Best Arts Book by the International 2008 Latino Book Awards. Gustavo Bonevardi, who has an architecture degree from Princeton, and John Bennett were the editors.

Gustavo and Bennett are co-founders of Proun Studio Space, which was part of the team that created “Tribute in Light” after 9/11.  Their videos have been included in the exhibitions The Un-Private House and Mies in Berlin (including the documentary Mies and Exhibition Design 1926-1945).

Marcelo also had a daughter, Cecilia, who lives in Argentina.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "The Supreme Astrolabe," 1973. Acrylic on stitched linen and wood construction with textured substrate, polished wood assemblage and carvings, 70.25” x 87”. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift The Dorothy Beskind Foundation, 1973.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "Trapped Angel III," 1980. Stitched burlap and wood construction with textured substrate, painted wood assemblage, 97.25” x 48”. Museo National des Bellas Artes, B.A. Argentina.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "Study for Head," 1993. Charcoal pastel and acrylic on pigmented stucco over wood construction polished wood carving, 24.75” x 13.5”. Private collection.

Related post: In honor of fathers who like to make things

In January, Chan, second from left, participated in an informal gallery talk with members of New Orleans art collective The Front. (Photo: Hrag Vartanian)

Paul Chan
With funding from Creative Time, Paul Chan went to New Orleans and staged Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. The project evolved into a larger social production involving free art seminars, educational programs, theater workshops, and conversations with the community. As a result of Chan’s seminars and workshops, several artists organized ongoing collective projects. In January, one of the collectives, The Front, was invited to participate in Things Fall Apart, an exhibition at Edward Winkleman Gallery, curated by artist/blogger Joy Garnett. “It is fashionable today (still?) to claim that there is nothing new beyond our horizon of art, that everything worth doing has been done, “ Chan said in his project statement for Godot. “But this seems to me an altogether specious claim, for it ignores the vast undiscovered country of things that ought to be undone. In these great times, the terror of action and inaction shapes the burden of history. Perhaps the task of art today is to remake this burden anew by suspending the seemingly inexorable order of things (which gives the burden its weight) for the potential of a clearing to take place, so that we can see and feel what is in fact worthless, and what is in truth worth renewing.”

“Habitat For Artists Goes Indoors” is on view through Feb. 28. Draper built a replica of one of the sheds so visitors could sit in it and appreciate the small spaces.

Simon Draper: Habitat for Artists
Using reclaimed materials, Simon Draper created a makeshift community of studio sheds in Beacon, NY, and invited artists to use them for the summer. He and co-organizer Amy Lipton, curator for ecoartspace, a New York- and California-based non-profit organization dedicated to raising environmental awareness through the arts, encouraged each artist to adapt their shack, initially outfitted with simple openings, doors, windows, or skylights to suit their own needs. This month, Draper, Lipton, and their band of collaborators brought the project inside to Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, NY, where artists are using the gallery as studio space, offering workshops, organizing panel discussions, and sharing their art making practices with the general public.

Kalm Report on Blip.tv

Loren Munk: James Kalm Report
Loren Munk is the mastermind behind the James Kalm Report, a video chronicle of the contemporary New York art scene. Munk, a painter himself, bikes to art shows, tiny videocam in hand, interviewing both famous artists and friends at openings around the city. Each video, featuring Munk’s stage-whispered narration, is edited and posted on BlipTV free of charge. Munk’s commitment to the local art community also includes “Brooklyn Dispatches,” a monthly column in the artist-run art journal, The Brooklyn Rail. When Munk was honored by WagMag (Williamsburg and Greenpoint Monthly Art Guide) for his contributions to the local art community, he turned the event into a conceptual performance project called “The James Kalm Artist’s Economic Stimulus Grant,” giving everyone in the audience a dollar.

“Prototypes,” a wall installation of Simon’s acetate stencils at Pocket Utopia. The solo show is on view March 7-April 12, 2009.

Adam Simon: Fine Art Adoption Network
Adam Simon keeps a deliberately open focus between his painting and public projects, one of which is the Fine Art Adoption Network. Recognizing that many of the projects artists create end up in storage, Simon started FAAN as a way to place artworks by committed artists into appreciative homes and institutions. Since its inception in 2005, FAAN has enabled both emerging and established artists to connect with new art audiences. In March Pocket Utopia (see below) will feature an exhibition of Simon’s paintings, as a well as hosting discussions about FAAN and his other projects, all of which were conceived as a way to link people with one another.

Austin Thomas, “Open and Shut Case,” 2004. Suitcases, chairs, and BBQ chart, Wood, plexiglas, cloth, chalk board. Currently on view in “Out of The Blue,” curated by Amy Lipton, Joy Episalla, and Joy Garnett. Gallery Bergen, Bergen Community College, Paramus, NJ. On view through April 17.

Austin Thomas: Pocket Utopia
For several years artist Austin Thomas, interested in how we fill space and interact with other people, adapted her artmaking to facilitate a studio-free practice. Paring down her art supplies for portability, Thomas worked in public libraries, vacant office cubicles, and other patches of underused real estate throughout the city. Two years ago, she opened Pocket Utopia in the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn, which she describes as a relational exhibition, salon, and social space. Pocket Utopia is an integral part of her art practice and she has extended invitations to like-minded artists to use the space as a studio when the gallery is closed.

Jennifer Wroblewski’s solo show, “New Monuments to the AntiConcept,” is on view at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, through March 1. Detail: "Slave to Love," charcoal on paper, 72 x 190 inches.

Jen Wroblewski: Mother/ Mother
Jennifer Wroblewski was originally discouraged when older female artists she knew intimated that her pregnancy would adversely affect her career. Rather than accept the projected consequences of professional indifference and potential dismissal, Wroblewski decided to curate an exhibition tentatively titled Mother/Mother that would explore ideas garnered from the process of parenting. With a couple of solo shows in the works and an A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship for support, Wroblewski hopes to turn what used to be seen as the “harbinger of the end of a woman’s career” into a auspicious beginning. The show, which will feature work by Julie Heffernan, Monica Bock, Sharon Thomas, and Dana Lee, is scheduled for Fall 2009.

Sharon Butler maintains an art blog, Two Coats of Paint. Her paintings can be seen in Blogpix, an exhibition curated by art bloggers Joanne Mattera, Libby Rosof, Roberta Fallon, and Hrag Vartanian at Platform Project Space, New York, NY, March 5-March 28. The show’s organizer is Olympia Lampert.