Last week, I dropped by Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see the Ho Sook Kang exhibition. Her paintings are built up with teeny tiny gestures, marks or dabs of colour really, that when viewed as a whole capture and communicate a sense of movement and elemental power.

I wasn’t familiar with the artist before seeing the show, so when I got back to the computer I check out what the gallery had to say. Here’s an excerpt,

If abstract art is the consummate means of communicating what Kandinsky famously called “internal necessity,” then it is a matter of the quality of inward depth in abstraction. In American action painting it means enacting raw feeling, implying that the instincts in which it originates are uncontrollable, while in Kang’s Orientalist action painting it means refining feeling, so that it is brought under ego control and stabilized, and can be aesthetically contemplated, that is, incorporated into the conscious self and used to fertilize its growth and understanding. The goal of Kang’s Orientalist action painting is self-consciousness not self-expression–more particularly, the transformation of self-expression into self-consciousness. If American action painting is informed by avant-garde primitivism–the climactic statement of the “noble savagery” that Gauguin pursued–then Kang’s action painting is informed by the Oriental ideal of meditative calm, holding its own whatever emotional and social storms threaten it. {Read more…}

While the academic in me would argue with certain turns of phrase in this piece and the implications/assumptions of both action painting and the “Oriental ideal of meditative calm,” it did get me thinking about a couple of points of comparison. First, in American gestural painting we often find that the expressive gesture functions as metaphor for an individualistic or atomistic conception of the self. Kang’s paintings seem to point to a different conception of the self, one that is more holistic. In her work, the individual gestures function together as a whole to create a unified abstract image. Second, it got me thinking about the Confucian/Classical Chinese idea of the “Doctrine of the Mean” (chung-yung) and so I pulled out one of my books and Wing-Tsit Chang had this to say which I found interesting.

In the Analects chung-yung, often translated the “Mean,” den;otes moderation but here chung means what is central and yung means what is universal and harmonious. The former refers to human nature, the latter to its relation with the universe. Taken together, it means that there is harmony in human nature and that this harmony underlies our moral being and prevails throughout the univers. In short, man and Nature form a unity. {Read more…}

Yesterday morning, because the figs and the air biscuits awoke your editor before the dawn, and because he had to stop stealing from THAT BOOK on colour, your editor was scanning the bookshelves looking for something good on colour. Anyway I came across a that Arthur Danto guy, who wants to kill art and go to its funeral because he writes books like The Wake of Art. So, I picked up his book, Philosophizing Art, which I figured must be some kind of fancy instruction manual for euthanizing art, and I was totally shocked. ARTHUR DANTO IS TOTALLY GAY FOR ROBERT MOTHERWELL also, which must make Andy’s whig flip around in the grave. I  mean just look at the title for the opening essay of the book, “The Original Creative Principle,” come on why not just call it YHWH’s penis and be done with it. Also, we find out that  Motherwell is such a cock tease, just listen to Danto wax about how he wished Motherwell would just whip out his philosophy and play a little, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, but that Motherwell would hold out and string poor Arthur along.

The circumstance of having had advanced training in philosophy before going on to become a painter, and indeed a great painter, is almost certainly unique to Robert Motherwell. But he carried his philosophical knowledge so casually that other than in the autobiographical mode that came easily to him in later years….In our numerous conversations, from 1985, when we met [he was totally cheating on Andy for 2 years], until the year of his death, philosophy rarely came up in a way that made me feel that he brought with him from his graduate years any special grasp o the world that an exposure to philosophical disipline might explain.

Now that’s just gross. Here I am looking for some colour and all I find is gay porn erotica, I could have accomplished that just as easily on this internet. And I would have gotten pictures, video, and live webcam too!

But I digress, you are not here [that's right you idiot no one is here reading this garbage] to listen to me name drop and tell you about how big my philosophy is because I’m like super insecure about being one of those reactionary painter types who clings to a dead art form that uses oil instead of just walking into the Whitney Museum, taking a dump in the corner and wanking on the walls and ceiling to electronica in front of a digital video cam every couple of years, like all the real artists from Yale and Columbia. You are here because I talk with dead people, which is what psychic automatism, i.e. automatic drawing, seance, ouiga, masturbation, whatever you want to call it, is all about, as told to us by Mr. Danto tells us in this essay.

I bring all this up because on Sunday, I was talking with a couple of painter friends of mine, one of whom is really stuggling because life sucks and her partner just up and died like that and shit this past year and she is really struggling draw and to paint, as we were walking through the Miro at MoMA.  Anyway, I am a big proponent of scribble drawing, especially when stuck, and do it all the time, for example, when I wake up, or before I go to sleep, or when I am bored and nothing is on the teevee. I find it to be a really good practice and tool. I would tell you why but this post is already way to long and I haven’t even given you any pictures, which means you haven’t even read this far, and besides I have to go see my therapist and then go to work for the man. Anyway, if you don’t believe me, and especially if you do, you should read this Danto essay because there is some really good stuff in it, and I’m not talking about the gay porn erotica, though that is good too!

Katy Moran / Carla’s Garden  / 2007

Coming back to a contemporary abstract painter I have written about before, and whose work I was struck by back in the spring at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, I was google-stalking the London based painter Katy Moran. Hoping to find some new work or upcoming shows or something, I came across a video interview on the Tate website for an exhibition back in Feb-April 2008 called Strange Solution. Anyway, I thought Katy had some interesting comments on abstract painting, issues that Paul Ching-Bor and I, along some other painters, have been discussing recently at the Art Students League, particularly working from photos and images and pushing toward abstraction. Around the 1:05 mark she comments that for her it is about finding an image that is interesting enough to get started and then leaving that image at the right point. Check out the video here since I can’t post it to the blog. Below is a snippet of what she had to say.

‘They’re finished when I can see a figurative element in them … through the paint I’m searching for the thing it reminded me of, or suggested to me, and trying to get close to that thing.’ The exuberant spontaneity of the gesture is genuine rather than contrived, Moran comments, ‘When I’m making a painting, I get quite excited by how close to awful I can push it, while getting something quite lovely from it as well’.  {Read More…}

Emily Warner talks about the monumentality of small abstract paintings in her Brooklyn Rail review of Suitcase Paintings: Small Scale Abstract Expressionism

These works are particular in their details and insistent on the profusion they convey. Concurrent with the drive toward monumentality is a striving for the contracted and claustrophobic, a sort of qualitative smallness. In these pages, John Yau recently alluded to the “density” and “compactness” of Charles Seliger’s work, noting that “our eyes cannot take them in with one glance.” It is an observation one makes again and again with many of the works in Suitcase Paintings. You do not look at them but rather peer into their interiors, picking your way across their fictive and textural forms.

These denser, tighter works invite a focused and expansive gaze, penetrating and loose. If the monumental works assert their presence in our space (making an impact from across the room, or disturbing one’s sense of bodily orientation), these smaller ones pull us eyes first into their space. Of course, the dichotomy is not absolute. Like the Cubist grid that insidiously asserts itself in all-over gesture painting, density has an alarming way of precipitating the monumental, and vice versa. {Read More…}

From the ArtCollectors

Layered Days, Jose Parla’s latest exhibition and first solo show in New York, is on view now at Christina Grajales.  The show presents a new body of  paintings, adorned in layers upon layers of Parla’s signature abstract lettering and textures. Here, the artist’s graffiti roots combine with modern abstract expressionism, conjuring up recollections of both Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. In addition, a wall installation builds upon Parla’s themes of history and story telling, through an array of artifacts and photographs combined with original canvas, wood, and ceramic pieces. A hard cover catalog has been published to commemorate the exhibit, and Parla graciously decorated fan’s copies on opening night. Layered Days is on view till Dec. 20.

Jose Parla – Layered Days
Nov. 8 – Dec. 20
Christina Grajales Gallery
10 Green Street, 4th Floor
NY, NY 10013

Yang Chihung / Dreaming Blue / 2007 / acrylic on canvas / 198.1 x 254 cm / 78 x 100 in. / ChinaSquare Gallery

I have been on a Chinese painting kick recently and will be posting more over the next little while I am sure, but…I got to this exhibit at ChinaSquare Gallery last month. Yang Chihung’s paintings are dynamic and exciting, I spent a long time in front of each piece just looking and it still wasn’t enough. Each painting is rich in complexity and reveals itself over time. I admire the energy and movement in the gestures and the spacial dynamics established in the compositions. Unfortunately the paintings were executed in acrylic and finished with an overall gloss varnish. The result was that the paintings had a very uniform plastic surface that was not very inviting. It’s almost as if they were hanging on the walls wrapped in plastic for display, I could look but I couldn’t touch. They lacked that sensuous quality of an oil painting or the complexity of ink or watercolor on a rag paper or silk. However, the color stains and the quality of his gestures are unique to water media, specifically acrylic on raw canvas. They work with the strengths of the medium and display superb understanding and masterful handling of the brush. It is the structure of the brushwork, the building up of the composition with multitude of various strokes and touches, that gives the paints such a wonderful life and energy.

Chihung Yang’s deeply complex abstractions and sweeping brushwork transports the viewer into universe ruled by the Chinese tradition of the ephemeral “floating clouds and flowing waters.” In tanding before Yang’s work, it seems as if the universe has come to a standstill, that his clouds and rivulets of paint have been frozen in time. Yet, his balanced compositions hint at the grandeur of nature, or perhaps chaos unleashed and then reigned in. Mixing subtle monochromatic hues with right bursts of paint, the fleeting appearance of color results in a feeling of life breaking through oil, or rays peeking through clouds. Organic structures emerge from the otherwise abstract nature of Yang’s painting in the form of buds, roots and veins. As abstract painting, Yang’s oeuvre stands its own in comparison with the great names of the tradition, whether Western or Chinese.

Rebecca Horn / Tree of Winter Dew Drops / 2007 / pencil, colored pen, acrylic, and India ink on paper / paper: 71 5/8 x 59 1/8 inches (182 x 150 cm) framed: 81 1/2 x 68 3/4 inches / Sean Kelly Gallery

The drawings and paintings are light and airy. The sculptures and installation pieces brought a smile to my face. Like a child encountering and fascinated by the surrounding world populated with birds, butterflies, and a myriad of other flying creatures.

Rebecca Horn’s exhibition will be comprised of both new large-scale paintings on paper and a group of signature sculptures. These important new paintings, the scale of which are determined by the extent of the artist’s physical reach, evoke personal, metaphorical, and metaphysical influences orchestrated through dynamic gesture. The new paintings on paper clearly relate to Horn’s seminal early performance pieces in which she sculpturally extended the body into space. In an accompanying catalog essay Doris von Drathen explains: “Against this backdrop, the paintings on paper assembled here under the title Cosmic Maps are more that just ‘recent works.’ As a group, these paintings from the last few years plot oscillations, for the first time opening out a pictorial space that hazards to sever all connection to topographical space ….”

Rebecca Horn, (born in Germany, 1944), is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Historically, her work has ranged over an extensive variety of media, including film, performance, installation, photography and sculpture, whilst addressing themes of corporeality, perception and philosophy. The employment of such wide ranging interests as science and alchemy, the rational and the intuitive, the mechanical and the sensual, has occurred repeatedly in her work over the last three decades and has resulted in one of the most distinguished and individual oeuvres in recent memory. Horn has participated in the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions, she has had a retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and she is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta on four separate occasions.

Rebecca Horn, Cosmic Maps, at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29th Street through June 14th

Doug Trump / Choice / 2008 / oil, pencil, collage, ink, on canvas / 65 x 72 inches / Reeves Contemporary

I spent time at Reeves Contemporary Gallery yesterday and was impressed with the abstract paintings of Doug Trump. His work actually touches on a few of the issues I brought up in my piece about craft, I could see areas where the oil paint, laid on over ink or acrylic was cracking, but that does not take away from his work in the least. I plan on going back a few more times before the show closes. His transparent colors, hiding and revealing shapes forms and gestures, create quiet compelling spacial shifts and rhythms that are a visual treat. I’ll come back to this later….In the meantime, here’s what the gallery has to say:

Doug Trump’s newest oil paintings employ rich, industrial color and collaged surfaces, punctuated by gestural marks in pencil, ink, and charcoal. The artist continues over-painting, sanding back painted layers and then obscuring the surface again with new color fields, a process giving Trump’s works their complexity and depth. While the artist’s process remains consistent, the work no longer focuses upon a unified, balanced composition, but rather prizes expressionism as manifested through color and brushstroke. He is allowing his own energy – and thus the energy in the paintings – to jump from one area to another, without qualifying it, without constraining it within a preconceived or determined canvas. Through this spontaneous yet measured approach, Trump allows the paintings to breath in their own vitality. Ultimately, Trump is creating paintings with agitation and friction. For the viewer, there is ample room to move into the work, and receive its kinetic energy.

Doug Trump is on view at Reeves Contemporary, 534 w. 24th Street, through May 24th.

Andre Butzer / Viele Tote im Heimatland: Fanta, Sprite, H-Milch, Micky und Donald! / oil on canvas / 2007 / Metro Pictures Gallery

In art criticism of another era, John Dewey made an attempt to distinguish between expression and emotional discharge. To paraphrase, expression is a distillation of emotion whereby the artist creates a unity between medium, idea, and emotion to create a communication of a higher order, whereas emotional discharge is the actual experience of an emotion at a moment in time. Expression is the mark of the artist and art, while emotional discharge is simply an ordinary universal human experience, its not art. While criticism of this sort has fallen out of fashion, I think it is relevant to a discussion of Andre Butzer’s work and the category of abstraction represented by his paintings, because his work reminded me of Dewey’s distinction between expression and discharge. It wasn’t and isn’t clear to me exactly what was going on in his paintings. In formal terms, the figure ground relationships weren’t well developed, the gestural markings didn’t seem to relate to images, and the colors were all the same intensity, which is not to say that this is not intentional. The overall effect in all of the paintings is a of a flat, busy, and loud pictorial surface that is visually disturbing.

As I am not in the business of psychoanalyzing artists, and as I have no knowledge of the artist’s history, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he is most likely not engaged in emotional discharge. But, it is a fine line, and the artist’s loose methods of drawing and paint application make it difficult for one to know for sure. In addition, the mask-like and vegetable-headed figures that populate the paintings provide few clues to the communication, making it difficult for the viewer to know what to make of what is happening on the walls. Only if you take time to read the exhibition listing and press release on the counter at the front of the gallery do you learn the titles of the paintings or the identities of the figures, but even that is only of limited help.

When I enter a gallery or museum and engage with a piece of work, I try to avoid reading any of these statements and try to engage first with work. I want to try, as much as is possible, to engage directly with the work and not have that initial first experience mediated by the artist or critic telling me what I am supposed to experience or take away from the artwork. It’s more interesting for me to watch my own response and sort through what I bring to the experience and what the artist is attempting to communicate or get me to experience. In this case my first response was very hesitant, looking through the widows of Metro Pictures and seeing Andre Butzer’s paintings on the walls, I almost didn’t enter the gallery. Once I was inside I could feel my body collapsing in on itself, overwhelmed, as if I had entered a space with loud punk rock distorted guitars blaring. The paintings are intense, loud if you will, very large format, saturated bright colours, disturbing imagery, applied with bold gestures and strokes, as well as other abrasive or jarring sprays and splashes. They are heavy and charged, loaded with emotion (or irony, if I am to be fooled). It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the stimulation. I noticed many others step in through the doors only to turn around and quickly scurry away without exploring the exhibition and spending time with the paintings.

The fact that people walked out of the gallery before engaging with the paintings on the walls was actually something very interesting to me. It was easier for them to turn and walk away than to move forward and face the issues on the walls. Like not talking about the alcoholic or abusive family member, or about the fascist president or dictator and their crimes or society’s crimes (remember the artist is German), it easier to remain silent. To try to ignore the abuse. If I don’t pay attention to it, its not there, and its not a problem. Yes, Andre Butzer’s paintings are difficult and problematic, but they should not be ignored or avoided.

Andre Butzer’s work is on view at Metro Pictures Gallery through May 3

Katy Moran / Pecking Order / 2008 / Acrylic on canvas / 18 x 15 inches (46 x 38 cm) / © Katy Moran. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery

Today I got over to Andrea Rosen Gallery to see the abstract paintings of UK artist Katy Moran. An artist of my own generation, it was great to see how she is struggling to find her own way in abstraction. Walking into the space I was pleasantly surprised to see tiny canvases hanging at eye level on the two-story bare walls. A quick loop around the gallery, at the relatively safe 5 ft to 6 ft distance from the canvases, left me feeling a bit disappointed – a disappointment that seemed to be magnified by a longer more considered glance across the room. My first response was that they paintings had no life. They appeared to lack spacial development, to be centralized compositions of oval or kidney shapes in a rectangle, the colors had no juice or luminosity.

However, first impressions are often deceiving and this is definitely the case with Katy Moran’s paintings. As I stood on the precipice, considering whether to wander on to another gallery, or stay and give her work a more considered visit, I asked myself, “What’s really going on here? What is she up to?” Having these thoughts, I stepped up to a painting titled Pecking Order and got in real tight – maybe I was a foot or 10 inches away. Suddenly the whole painting came alive. The space opened up, they gestures and strokes had energy and movement, the colors that a moment ago seemed washed out, tired, and just the plastic of acrylic, found some pizzaz. I could see the foam bubbles of acrylic paint too vigorously stirred, that had burst and been captured in the surface. I could see the lint and the studio dust and I felt compelled to brush off the surface, like brushing the lint on the back of a friend who has just taken off her sweater. I chuckled realizing that she had drawn me in. Brought me in physically and that in close proximity, Katy Moran and her paintings began to speak. Or maybe they always already had been speaking, just in a quiet and soft voice. I made another loop around the gallery, sliding right up close with my nose in the pictures.

After, I read the press release and the write-up on the web, my opinion is forget what they have to say because the person writing has no idea how to look at an abstract painting. The dichotomy between abstraction and realism is not relevant to the viewer’s experience of the painting. Sources and references to recognizable imagery seem to be only a curious piece of trivia. If trying to find the image is your game, then it is better to pick up a Where’s Waldo? book, you’ll have more success. Otherwise if you fall into that only too human trap of finding the image on the cave walls or in the clouds then you miss the whole experience of the paintings. You miss the intimacy of standing with Ms. Moran as she brushes her canvas.

Katy Moran is on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery thru April 23