Bantamweight Flickr Battle!
After the gorgeously gargantuan show at MoMA that held New Yorkers spellbound in its midtown courtyard, the whole country of France is now making a fuss this week over Richard Serra. The New York Times slideshow revealing his latest steel monoliths at the Grand Palais is surprisingly vertical. Plus, who can resist Richard Serra’s craggly mug, above.
Meanwhile, the blogosphere is a-twitter about whether Serra could be gathering steam as the most popular artist captured on Flickr. A recent Flickr search has revealed that at time of posting, there are 6,192 Flickr photos that match the search terms ‘Richard Serra.’ A new bantamweight contender, ‘Olafur Eliasson‘ is up to 4,256 and averaging about 30 adds per day, presumably fed by visitors to his current show at MoMA and PS1. Surprising names in the flyweight division are ‘Matthew Barney‘ at 1,139, ‘Marcel Duchamp‘ at 1,408, and the white canvas master ‘Robert Ryman‘ trailing with just 107 Flickr posts. Please note that photographing museum paintings by Robert Ryman is not encouraged.
In the heavyweight division, readers have suggested that Henry Moore, at 14,563, and Alexander Calder at 17,471 (by last name only), are positioned to defeat the overall reigning champion Andy Warhol, who currently has 18,900 Flickr photos tagged with his name. Further investigation has revealed that not all works tagged with Andy Warhol actually are by Andy Warhol, but include some creative appropriation.
Spotlight on Paradox: Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1930. Ryman studied at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and the George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, before serving in the United States Army (1950-52). Ryman’s work explodes the classical distinctions between art as object and art as surface, sculpture and painting, structure and ornament—emphasizing instead the role that perception and context play in creating an aesthetic experience. Ryman isolates the most basic of components—material, scale, and support—enforcing limitations that allow the viewer to focus on the physical presence of the work in space. Since the 1950s, Ryman has used primarily white paint on a square surface, whether canvas, paper, metal, plastic, or wood, while harnessing the nuanced effects of light and shadow to animate his work. In Ryman’s oeuvre, wall fasteners and tape serve both practical and aesthetic purposes. Neither abstract nor entirely monochromatic, Ryman’s paintings are paradoxically ‘realist’ in the artist’s own lexicon. Robert Ryman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994) and has received many awards, including a Skowhegan Medal (1985) and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1974). He has had major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1993); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1994); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994); Dia Art Foundation (1988); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland (2006); and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2006-07). He has participated in Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982); the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1980); the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995); and the Carnegie International (1985, 1988). Ryman lives and works in New York and Pennsylvania.
About his work, Ryman says,
“I don’t think of my painting as abstract because I don’t abstract from anything. It’s involved with real visual aspects of what you are looking at‚Äîwhether wood, paint, or metal‚Äîhow it’s put together, how it looks on the wall and works with the light…Of course, realism can be confused with representation. And abstract painting‚Äîif not abstracting from representation‚Äîis involved mostly with symbolism. It is about something we know, or about some symbolic situation…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 142).
Read more about his work and watch clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Ryman’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Robert Ryman by leaving a comment below.
Contemporary Conversations: Robert Ryman, 1976
The Menil Collection will open a collection of work from 1976 by Robert Ryman, featured artist in Season Four of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recognized for his remarkable ability to demonstrate innumerable variations within what have become the two defining characteristics of his work: white paint and a square frame, he is among a generation of artists who are continuing the legacy and belief in the purity of painting after abstract expressionism. Since 1958, when he gave up pigment, he has experimented within these limitations to celebrate the nuance and possibility of the expressive potential of paint.
With such a reduced and minimal language, he is able to highlight qualities of a painting that he feels are often overlooked, such as different types of brushstrokes, the methods of applying paint to the surface of a support, variations within the color white, and the way the placement of an artist’s signature affects a painting’s composition.
It will be the first exhibition to focus exclusively on Ryman’s work from 1976; a pivotal and often overlooked year in Ryman‚Äôs career. During this time, he continued his formal explorations by looking carefully at the way a painting exists in space. As one result of this inquiry, Ryman began to accentuate how a work of art is placed on the wall by making it‚Äôs the essential hardware; from steel mounts and Plexiglas fasteners to socket bolts, important compositional devices in his work.
You can see Robert Ryman’s segment in PARADOX, which premieres Sunday, November 18 on PBS at 10:00pm. (check local listings)
The Menil Collection
1515 Sul Ross
Houston, Texas 77006
Exhibition on view November 9, 2007-February 17, 2008
