LIC bike parade

Everyone loves a parade! Or at least on a day when spring seems irrevocable and the nibs on the tips of trees are enchanting us into the thinking life might be for the enjoying. OK, that wasn't a sentence but really all I want to say is this:

First Annual LIC Bike Parade
Queens, New York
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Registration 11:30 AM
Workshops 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Parade 3:00 PM - 4:00PM Free / Rain or shine!

Socrates Sculpture Park has more info.

Macro challenge

I'm taking the challenge. Or at least half of it.

Orange Flower has started a 30-day macro photography challenge over at Flickr -- not a contest, just a share, compare and don't despair kind of thing (thanks for sharing, Kim). Meant to keep you engaged and taking pics every day.

Here's the Flickr pool; here's the announcement with a list of participants.

What's a signature mean?

I ask because I don't know. It could mean nothing. It could add to the meaning of a work. In Jasper Johns' case, it certainly means at least one thing: big $$. But I want it to mean more.

I started thinking about Johns' signature because I went to his show of drawings from 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery (NYC, through April 12). I noticed in the end of his show that he marked some of his drawings with very precise signatures. It's not just his signature on this handful of pieces. It's "J.Johns / March '06 / St. Martin, F.W.I."

I recently wrote about Johns' "Gray" show at the Met. The show has been trashed online, but I thought it was a tidy retrospective of someone who is still a major force. To sum up: I love his early work, and his later work (after the cross-hatching hayday) leaves me cold and confused. I've been thinking about it since I first wrote about Johns, but now I've got a few thoughts I'll try to add.

It's easy to focus on the ways Johns broke from the previous generation. Johns' debt to the abstract expressionists used to escape me. He's frequently pegged as a pop precursor, which isn't entirely inaccurate.

But seeing the gray paintings, it really struck me how much he owes to their approach to creating a canvas. He's an all-over painter. He sticks to the surface and deals with relationships there. I think it's why the paintings of his I like the most take subjects that are already flat, like targets and flags and maps.

I love Jasper Johns' brushwork. I love the way he can mix paints and let colors (even gray ones) rain onto a canvas in an all-over way that's visually interesting without seeming contrived or over-designed. There's a nervous energy to his brush strokes, a kind of brutal, abrupt elegance to the way he stops and starts.

When you're painting something from life, color adjustments between light and dark and big and small blobs of paint usually describe physical space. You can highlight the tops of cheeks with light mark, model the shadow in dark. But when you deal with Johns, that approach is completely shot. You have a target. Sometimes he'll make a circle in the target lighter or darker (though he frequently erases the color differences) but it's not to describe something in reality. He's not referring to anything but the design. It's pointless to look at a painting of Johns and ask "How big is that flag in real life?"

But when you have his more figurative work, it can refer to things we know the size of. The human body, for instance. Our minds can compare the size and proportion and suddenly, sbconsciously, we're comparing a painting to things otuside of it.

In these paintings, Johns has to do a tricky balancing act of working a surface, but also creating recognizable physical forms. He could make a decision to erase any idea of modeling the figure. But I don't feel like he has. He'll try to shadow a figure, but still keep the rest of the work on the surface, or in a confused place in between.

Look at the image below. Why are there shaded parts? They aren't random, since some of the dark spots seem to be where shadows usually fall.

Photo: MoMA

So why do I go on this long ramble about the subject of Johns' paintings and his signature? It was a theory I had looking around these recent drawings of his. Does Johns feel like he's approaching the end? Does he feel anxiety about whether these works are sufficiently "Jasper Johns"y? I don't know.

There's a drawing of Johns' from the '60s where he signed in the lower right and then made a big X to cross out his name. My theory is that somehow the specificity of the signatures on some of the newer works is related to the specific marks he once froze in time.

He may have once called authorship into question, hiding his enigmatic persona behind his canvas, using generic subjects like targets and maps, but now his work has lost its signature. His new work is not as distinctive as the "signature" work from the '60s.

When I look at the older paintings of Johns', I can't help but feel the beat of his brush hitting the canvas hundreds of times, each stroke marking a particular moment in time. A particular place. Does Johns now have to sign what he used to paint?

The rough sheen of Faris McReynolds

Faris McReynolds makes paintings like good baseball pitcher throws spitballs. It's nasty stuff, roughed up and delivered with a predictable inpredictability. There's an amazing moment where you lean in and ask "How did he do that?" And as soon as the question is asked, he's got you.

Check out the photos above, of a painting in his current show at Goff + Rosenthal (NYC, until April 26). One is a detail from the other.

It's a big painting of a bunch of cowboys looking at strippers on a stage. The close-up makes one the of the dancers look like Christ, as drawn by a 5-year-old with a pocket knife. It's angular and direct. Colors are bold and contrasting. Like so many good paintings, you lean in and it looks abstract; you step back and it coheres as an image. McReynolds observes with a touch of rock 'n' roll and a lot of sass.

Check out his blog here, and his music here.

Taking the train with Robert Morris

Artist Robert Morris spoke last night at the New School as part of the Sculpture Center's "Subjective Histories of Scultpure" series.

I have a soft spot for Morris' sculptures.

In 1991, I saw a small collection of his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It was like a miniature retrospective of his work. I was just in high school, and growing up in a Richmond suburb, I hadn't been exposed to minimalism or any of the more radical artistic developments from the last 50 years.

Entering the gallery, I saw one of Morris' felt sculptures. I looked at the tag on the wall. It said the artist's name was "Robert Morris."

It was a big, thick piece of felt, slashed horizontally and attached to the walls at the corners, so the middle formed a slow arc. Interesting. I didn't know if I liked it or not. Was it really art? Did it mean anything?

CONTINUED

Katy Moran, downright Constable-esque

In the same way we can be moved by the rustic paintings of Lascaux, seeing something innately human in their creation and stroke, we can look at Katy Moran's paintings and be moved at something that will last as long as our DNA does. They are like cave paintings of the future, descended from those damp, rough walls via Delacroix and Joan Mitchell.

There's just something about Katy Moran's paintings that is very, very old. Or really, I mean "old masterful." Old master-y. Whatever the kids call it. (Spray Glue calls them "Victorian.")

Moran, a 33-year-old from Great Britain, has her first show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery currently on view in New York until April 19. Strolling around the gallery, Moran's small oils seemed very reminiscent of Constable's cloud studies. It might be in color selection, especially those seductive greenish-blues and earthen browns, or in her delicately descriptive stroke, or maybe she uses old-fashioned mediums.

Even though there's an aged patina about them, they seem very current. The press release for the show says Moran uses images she finds from the internet or magazines and works until they become abstracted. They are post-abstraction, but clearly refer to something. Her line isn't an invented meander, like De Kooning's elegant late paintings. It's descriptive, but vague, like distant lights in fog.

Julian Hatton's folded lanscapes

Julian Hatton isn't exactly a cubist, but his approach to landscape is that of an artist trying to compress multiple perspectives into one flat canvas. His colorful landscapes, currently on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (in NYC, until April 12, so act fast), are suggestive, evocative, and ultimately satisfying in themselves. His work can be a bait-and-switch where, in the end, you're happy to be fooled.

The color is extrapolated, which is to say it's not realistic but nor is it unrealistic, exactly. He'll use perspective lines that evoke a fence by a country road, or a round-ish shape that evokes a pond, but stack them so it's impossible that these things were observed with his feet planted in one place.

You're left going through a space that doesn't make sense, like one of those screwed-up perspective rooms in a science museum. Bathe it in a Mediterranean, Matisse-esque color scheme (by way of Michigan, where Hatton was born) and you have challenging painting that feels like silk.

Thomas Nozkowski at Fisher Landau

Painter Thomas Nozkowski spoke to a crowd gathered at the Fisher Landau Center in Long Island City, Queens. The occasion was a small survey of his paintings there (until April 14). Pace Wildenstein also has a show up, of Nozkowski's most recent work (until May 3).

The show at Fisher Landau spans all of Nozkowski's mature period since the early 1970's, and includes 20 of his small-ish canvases.

Mr. Nozkowski, who arrived in his Suburu just as I got to Fisher Landau, is a pleasant and modest man with big ideas and an unassuming manner.

He talked about going to art school at Cooper Union in the early 60's, when the main concern was systemic painting -- creating canvases based on a set of rules. Like, what can I come up with if I confine myself to vertical dotted lines or just these colors, etc.?

Nozkowski recalled going to a gallery in Soho as a young painter and seeing a show with just one 40-foot long abstract canvas. He realized that something was off in the context of abstraction. "Our rhetoric was totally someplace else."

He said he thought these huge works were paintings designed for people downtown painters despised. He decided to reevaluate his assumptions -- and instead of creating gargantuan canvases, he started working on a small scale. He wanted to make paintings that would work in his friends' tenement apartments. He said almost half of the paintings at the Fisher Landau Center were done on canvas board out of a deliberate decision to work with a humble, everyday material.

He joked about how "sophisticated" his thinking was as a young painter in the '60s.

But today, in 2008, it's clear he's still engaged. "For any good work of art," he said, "it allows people to get out of the prison of their own consciousness."

Many of the paintings in his show at Fisher Landau are 16 x 20 inches. Nozkowski quoted Jean-Luc Godard in saying that ethical decisions wind up becomes aesthetic ones (and vice versa). He found the smaller scale was more manageable and it liberated him to try new things. Instead of working three days to prep a large canvas, he could make quicker decisions.

"I was taught by abstract expressionists," he said, "so I don't believe in tinkering."

In the '60s, when he was still working at these systemic paintings, his grandfather dies. He shared the experience of going to his studio and looking at his canvas and realizing he had no way to respond to this very personal event. The "system" just didn't allow for it.

So after that, his paintings all have a particular source. "Every painting I do comes from a source in the real world," he said.

"Now the whole paintings are memos" of real-life events.

When asked exactly how these abstract shapes relate to real life things, Nozkowski listed his inspirations as songs, newspaper stories, and family events. He even said perhaps this talk would inspire a painting. It's not about physical correlations -- he said the glint in someone's eye would not appear in one of this paintings -- but something else.

Asked why so many of his forms repeat, such as what he called a "squashed oval," Nozkoski said "There are limits to how many things you can do."

He used to take a subject for a painting and work it out on canvas until he ran out of ideas, then put the canvas aside and return to it later. Looking around the third floor gallery at the Fisher Landau Center, Nozkowski said "Some of these paintings are 10 years in gestation."

Now, he says, he just works straight through. At any given time, he can be working on multiple paintings. Right now he has six sticky paintings in his studio.

Untitled, 1984, 16 x 20 inches.

Most of his paintings feature a centralized abstract figure on a differently abstracted ground. He says he starts canvases with a kernel in the middle and sees where it wants to go. "I tried to make everything simple so I could see what I was doing," he said. "Composition is determined by the thing itself."

But he says he's "deeply skeptical about our power to read any paintings." He continued, saying "I don't really believe in a visual language." For Nozkowski, it's the relationships that have meaning.

He talked about old Chinese landscape artists who would go out into nature not with a pen and ink but just with their own perceptions. They would return to the studio and use their memories as their "filter."

In response to his advice for young painters, he said "You have to keep working. You have to keep going... We have the freedom to do anything we want to do. And if you're doing boring, crappy work: rethink it."

He summed up his lesson by saying the key to art is the same as the key to life: "Stay interested in things."

In response to a different question, he said "I like the idea of painting being in a complex, multidisciplinary world where it can be tested."

To people are talk about the death of painting, Mr. Nozkowski said "Painting will die when no one cares about it any more."

The Brooklyn Rail has a good interview with Thomas Nozkowski.

Best milkshake in New York?

I stumbled upon Brgr yesterday, having somehow avoided any buzz or or word-of-mouth. And the days of me seeking out good hamburger restaurants are a distant memory.

But as I was walking back from the art galleries in Chelsea, I happened to see they claimed to have the best milkshake in New York. Could it be true? Could a place without vowels actually have a frosty cold river of frothy, bold taste? I decided to find out.

I ordered a black and white shake. They only have one size and it costs $5.50. After five minutes or so, a small, clear, plastic cup arrived about the height of a soda can. The color of the milkshake was deep sienna. The size smaller than I expected. But the flavor. Oh the flavor.

It was just the right consistency, melted enough not to roadblock the straw but frozen enough to have a slow creep of wintery goodness. The vanilla taste was up-front and all around and the chocolate was subtle and lasting. It's easily as good as Shake Shack's milkshake, which is the most comparable shake I have to compare it to. And there wasn't a line.

Unlike Stand, which I'm boycotting because of bad service issues involving bored cooks brazenly bouncing ketchup bottles off their biceps while I waited for 20 minutes, I'll definitely put Brgr in my list of fvrt NY shks.

Brgr is located at 287 7th Ave (between 26th and 27th Streets), Manhattan.

Carrot cake cupcake recipe

Since the cupcakes I made for Jennifer's birthday were such a huge success, I thought I'd share the recipe (and the modifications I made from the Barefoot Contessa's).

The biggest change I made to this recipe were adding a lot more carrots, baking at 400 degrees for the whole time, and... the coup de sucre... injecting frosting into the carrot cake cupcakes.

I've put up a food porn photo set from the making of.

Here was the finished product (sorry for the fuzzy but the photo was taken *after* the party):

Here's the recipe, with my modifications. Pretty shamefully ripped off of the Food Network's site, but I hate how URLs can disappear.

2 cups sugar
1 1/3 cups vegetable oil
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 extra-large eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 cups grated carrots (less than 1 pound) Use a whole pound
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts

For the frosting:
3/4 pound cream cheese, at room temperature
1/2 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 pound confectioners' sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat the sugar, oil, and vanilla together in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the eggs, 1 at a time. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. With the mixer on low speed, add 1/2 of the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Add the grated carrots, raisins, and walnuts to the remaining flour, mix well, and add to the batter. Mix until just combined.

Line muffin pans with paper liners. Scoop the batter into 22 muffin cups until each is 3/4 full. Bake at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes then reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F and cook for 35 45 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

For the frosting, cream the cream cheese, butter, and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the sugar and beat until smooth.

When the cupcakes are cool, poke a hole in them. Put cream cheese frosting into a baker's bag and inject the frosting in until it begins to ooze out. Frost and serve.

The recipe makes A LOT of frosting. I only decided to try injecting it when I realized I'd have way too much frosting just for the tops of the cupcakes. Even after injecting, you'll still have enough, in fact, that after your cupcake party you'll come home a little tipsy and find a little frosting in the fridge waiting for drunken consumption. PERFECT.

I made the frosting to taste, adding little bits of confectioner's sugar until it met my exacting sweet tooth. I went ahead and added all the carrots because #1: have you ever had carrot cake that's too carroty? I haven't. And #2: Who wants a stray carrot or two rotting in their fridge, turning gray and limp and lonely?

One note on the bakers bag: you can make it yourself. I rolled up a piece of cardboard into a cone and taped it to the corner of a heavy-duty freezer bag. I taped it to make sure it was secure and that precious frosting didn't ooze out all over the place.

The best things about this recipe: The tops of the cupcakes get slightly crunchy. The raisins and walnuts are delicate and not overpowering, which raisins and walnuts can certainly be. And there's frosting inside!

Art bloggers around a table

If bloggers have a roundtable and no one blogs about it, is it still a media event? I'm not sure, but I'll do my duty and blog about it any way.

Hung over and in not a great mood to look at art, I was pleased to listen to the Red Dot Art Fair's blogger's roundtable at the Park Hotel. It featured Carol Diehl (ArtVent, Edward Winkleman, C-Monster, Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), Sharon Butler (Two Coats of Paint) and Joanne Mattera was moderator.

My favorite part was bloggers recounting their favorite big-traffic headlines. Who can top "How to preserve a chocolate Santa butt plug"?

I didn't get a chance to ask a question, but I would've asked: is there something innate in the medium that makes a successful blog unable to have thought-out critical writing? After all, it takes time to look and to think and to write this kind of material. Can meaningful ciriticsm be Twittered?

Christie's contemporary

I took some time today to stop by the Christie's in Rockefeller Plaza for the First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art preview. The auction happens April 1.

There were a lot of shocking sticker prices that made me wonder how long the art market can maintain this. The place was packed, however, and there was a lot of good work there. This is one of those cases where I didn't photograph all my favorite work -- just what struck my fancy for one reason or another.

See photos below, with Christie's estimated prices attached -- and my totally unqualified commentary on those prices.

Ida Applebroog, Untitled (Knife), 1995.

Estimate: $5,000-7,000.

DG estimate: Completely worth it. Applebroog seems underappreciated.

Andy Warhol, Untitled (Furniture), circa 1960.

Estimate: $20,000-30,000.

DG estimate: Worth it... if you must buy a Warhol. Seeing this charming tempera work reminds me of how much I like Warhol's illustrations. They're much better than the horrific star-fucking icon paintings. As a painter friend of mine is fond of saying, Warhol was a genius because he painted icons. Who doesn't want Marilyn in their living room? If I were a museum (and I understand that I'm a relic, at least) I would buy one of these pieces instead of pissing money away on another soup can. Who needs another Mao?

Dana Schutz, Untitled, 2001.

Estimate: $120,000-180,000.

DG estimate: Yowsers. I have to admite my heart leaped when I saw this price tag. She's very young -- she got her MFA in 2002, I think? -- and very talented. Clearly this price tag is for collectors banking on Schutz's continued ascendancy so they can have an "early" work. It's a good painting, though: check out the second photo, which is detail of the little bird in the tree on the far right. To paint like that takes Schutz-pah!

Elizabeth Peyton, "Stephen Malkmus," 1998.

Estimate: $25,000-35,000.

DG estimate: Let me go into a brief backstory. I'm feeling bad about a sort-of bad review I gave Peyton for the 2006 Whitney Biennial. A friend of mine read that recently and I tried to explain myself and when it comes down to it, it's not the work I have problems with; it's the money. I'm sorry for reacting against the hype and not just the work. I actually do like some of her work a lot. Some of it I don't care for, but I could say that about Gainsborough.

I like that her life is intertwined with her art and her friends are indistinguishable subjects from her musical interests (yeah, Malkmus, yeah!). The price for this work is actually low compared to some of her other stuff. Is it worth it? I don't actually have the money to evaluate. But if I were forced to spend that cash, I would rather buy 3,500 copies of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and distribute them to the needy.

Robert Motherwell, Untitled, 1975.

Estimate: $20,000-30,000.

DG estimate: Yes. Buy it now. Not only was a Robert Motherwell book responsible for getting me into the idea of abstract art as a teenager, but here you have a funny work where it's clear he's written the numeral "4." It's funny to think of a leading abstract expressionist getting his feet wet in Jasper Johns figures-as-abstraction territory, and for that this seems like an even more important document. The guy knew balance and gesture.

Ray Parker, Untitled, 1967.

Estimate: $3,000-5,000.

DG estimate: Worth much more -- maybe. It seems like a low price tag, but I have to admit that I didn't know his work before seeing the couple pieces at Christie's. Apparently he was a member of that first generation of post-war American abstractionists working in New York. This photo doesn't do it justice, but his work seems very balanced yet dynamic, managing to keep my eyes in a controlled movement (like Cirque du Soleil?). The NY Times has a review for those interested in Ray Parker's "Piece of the Abstract Puzzle."

Reading John Ruskin

Reading John Ruskin is like sitting in a living room with that good old grandmother of yours who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and everything after. Not the annoying one who talks about being part of "the Greatest Generation" (though that seems to be more of an anxiety-born boomer label for them). I'm talking about the one known for her patience, thoughtfulness, inner strength and forgiveness. Perhaps she's named Mildred or Barbara and she's tougher than you and twice as kind. Reading John Ruskin's thoughts on art reminded me of her.

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life," says John Ruskin, in his long essay "The Nature of Gothic," originally published in 1853. He continues:

It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, --a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, -- is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

Here you have a man explicitly tying the arts of humanity to nature's creations. He's realizing that our lot isn't so separate from trees and flowers and challenges artists, sculptors and architects -- and all human beings, for that matter -- not to challenge the laws of nature but to harness them and work with the flow of life and death.

What seems quaint about Ruskin is the way he creates rules and laws for things like "human life" and "human judgment." I imagine the key phrase is "divinely appointed." Who now advocates for something within human beings that's connected to the infinite?

He was writing in the 19th Century, before Hitler and Stalin and the various tyrannies and wars that proved just how cheap life could be. We are so tied now to individual fates and specific judgments. We are confronted with landfills of evidence of how difficult it is to control human desires, what our lives are filled with and what we leave behind. For Ruskin to argue for craftsmanship and the ability for all workers to exercise creativity and connect our daily lives with nature sounds downright out of touch.

If the pleasure or change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which we have spoken.

This might be my favorite paragraph from the "Gothic" essay. Although he was fighting it, I can't believe Ruskin could foresee the scale to which our culture would embrace "the diseased love of change." I don't think it's just novelty that would make Ruskin wince -- it's the ways in which we've dehumanized our culture in order to create and consume an ever-changing series of new delights.

What's interesting to me is the friction between individuals and collective experience. Change itself has become monotonous from the outside -- just think of how your best-traveled friend's stories can become so boring -- but living in constant change feels exciting and fresh. This is a big topic. Let's return to Ruskin:

Again: the talent of the composer is not in the monotony, but in the changes: he may show feeling and taste by his use of monotony in certain places or degrees; that is to say, by his various employment of it; but it is always in the new arrangement or invention that his intellect is shown, and not in the monotony which relieves it.

So it comes back to the individual's talent for balancing invention and monotony. I take this to mean there is no guidebook -- just individuals making their way, who can reflect and criticize and scheme and praise together. There are no real rules, or no specific rules. It's a constant navigation back and forth. We aren't nature, we are a part of it.

In true mystical fashion, Ruskin sets forth a distant light, tells stories of its brilliance, and tells us to go to it.

It's worth noting that unlike our quiet dignified elders in the living room, Ruskin wrote volumes and volumes and said quite a bit. Despite feeling so passionately about Gothic styles, he was disappointed in even his own architectural constructions. The physical reality of making a building wasn't commensurate with his vision.

It's a beautiful dream, and we can see things leaving tracks to and from his ideas like deer crossing a stream in the snow, but where that river stops and starts we can't hardly say.

Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met

There is an orgy of art happening at the Met these days and I encourage everyone to check out the Poussin show (which converted me to playing in the fields with nymphs), the Courbet show (wowsers) and last but not least, Jasper Johns.

There were several surprises for me in the Johns "Gray" show: first, the show is big. I was thinking a small gallery of a handful of paintings. No. It's pretty much a Johns retrospective in black and white, as if you've bought a cheap used copy of a '60s book on Johns -- only they're the real fucking paintings.

The second surprise for me was that I like Johns again.

I used to count him as a living giant, but after the exhaustion of his MoMA retrospective in 1997 and a few sightings of his current work, I'd forgotten how great his early work is. During this "Gray" show, I even came to like pieces that I never cared for, and it may be because I'm reading a book on David Hockney right now and I realize the two share a lot.

Hockney came to art school in the '50s at the height of abstraction's dominance in the art world. He liked to draw, and was attracted to modernism without being an acolyte.

Reading his story, it's easy to see where a young painter could be frustrated with this idea that you have to express yourself purely in abstraction in order to be current and deep.

But if you're young enough, or outside of the art world enough, how could you buy into thinking of abstraction as the only sincere way a painter could work? It's easy to see from the outside that these colors and lines on canvas are a style among many, but still they hold an expressive power. So how does one hold onto that expressive power but do the unthinkable--actually have a recognizable subject? Both Hockney and Johns figured out their own ambitious solutions.

The work that made me a reborn Johns fan in the current "Gray" show is the work called "Drawer." Johns basically takes a canvas and puts the front of a drawer on it, creating the illusion of having a drawer inside the painting. There are the remnants of abstract-expressionism in gray brushwork all over the painting, but you realize immediately that this isn't an abstract work at all. The color and texture are decorative. The subject of the painting is what happens in your mind when you think you can pull a drawer out of a painting--as if behind the canvas, there's a world the art observer doesn't have access to.

All of a sudden, it clicked. Jasper Johns is about surfaces. I don't know why I never thought about his approach, but I think his response to the dominance of abstraction-expressionism is to see it as a physical surface (albeit propped by lots of critical theory and beer).

If modernism did away with illusion and the idea of art mirroring reality, then what gives a work depth? I think Johns' solution was to see the power in suggestivity and the connections between surfaces. Take his work "Tennyson," which is really similar to "Drawer" except for instead of sticking the front of a drawer onto the surface of a gray expressionistic canvas, he writes the word "TENNYSON."

There is no clear reason for him to write that word there. It's about association. It's an evocation, and either it evokes or it doesn't. Could it be a juvenile joke about his gray canvas and Tennyson's "Edward Gray"? Could it be a connection with the poet's mood? The clever, elusive thing about Johns is he gets it both ways: making work that is detached but also expressive by sheer association. (It can also be boring or annoying, but let's leave that aside).

Included in "Gray" is one of my favorite Johns works. "Painting Bitten By a Man" is exactly what the title says: a book-sized canvas, coated with wax, that has had a big chunk bitten out of it. Again, it's Johns playing with the associations of a style. You might think by looking at the canvas that yo uhave direct access to the artist's feeling and emotions. You might think "Clearly, he was frustrated -- he took a bite out of his canvas!" But it could also be a joke -- or just another surface. To me it's hilarious and funny and mysterious, because even if it's a goof I imagine Johns spending time stretching the canvas, laying down the wax, contemplating where to bite, etc. Like the best humorists, Johns comes well prepared.

"Disappearance II" is another typical Johns piece in that it leads to questions about surface and what a painting "really" is. It features a large square-ish canvas, but place on top is another canvas with the four corners folded in, so you get a diamond shape. Looking at the canvas folded in, it's hard not to wonder what's on the surface of the canvas that has been turned and hidden from your view. It's like he's hiding something. But what do you call someone who announces he has a secret?

After the ab-ex house of cards collapsed, Johns' approach became extremely useful as a way of creating meaningful work that doesn't rely on advanced critical theory but uses natural associations and relationships built into people's perceptions. It's neither reactionary or amnesiac. It stokes questions that have no answer, because in the end you realize they're not questions at all. It's like a blind person feeling his way around a room. Feeling surfaces can yield amazing depth.

Joanne Mattera wrote about the show, and includes interview excerpts of Johns, and Two Coats rounds up the reviews.

'Unmonumental' at the New Museum

After hearing so many negative things about the inaugural show at the new New Museum, I really draged my feet before heading down to check it out. Since the waves of negativity primed me for a bad show, I was in the best possible place to go see it: Things could only look up from what I was expecting. Right?

Right.

It's not as bad as you've heard, but let's face it: it's still not good.

The show features lots of work using disposable materials, magazines and cardboard boxes and couches found on the curb. This doesn't make it a bad show. What makes it a bad show is the lack of originality or ambition.

Since it was my first trip to the new space, I kept thinking about the shows I saw at the old New Museum. One of my favorites was Tom Friedman, whose work was done with fingernail clippings, bubble gum, and construction paper. I loved his show because he seemed to think long and hard about his mediums and what strctural power they had embedded inside their physicality. When he made a bird skeleton out of fingernail clippings, it made sense. The shapes and endurance of fingernails speak to the toughness and texture of bone.

However, when someone paints an old iron plow neon orange, it's just there. It's novel without being connected. The response doesn't resonate, and maybe that's the point.

The thing I kept thinking was that art has to be more than what creative people do when they're bored. It's hard for me to fault artists. I fault curators, who might be out of touch with the larger world or experiencing anxiety about art's importance.

The work that greeted me when I came onto the fourth floor out of the stairwell was Oliver Laric's YouTube montage of people singing 50 Cent. It's a great video. I've rated it as a favorite on YouTube and given it 5 stars. But let's face it: In a museum, it's boring.

I love the Web. I love that people respond to a song, do their own versions, and mix it up. But doing a straight montage of 50 different videos and showing it in a loop where users have no control and can't really interact is completely antithetical to the way the Web works and the way people have begun to demand more of a say in popular culture.

I just kept thinking about an abstract curator, knowing the internet is somehow changing art, but not quite knowing how things are changing. So you go with something you know -- a video loop -- that has the internet as its subject, only without any of the power or magic of realy interactivity.

How about a station where museum-goers can do their own mix of these 50 videos? How about a booth where they can sing and record their own versions? One-way art about interactivity doesn't seem to work so well.

And that experience captured my experience of the show generally. There were ideas there, but they weren't given form or pushed far enough. I don't demand masterpieces, but I do want more from art than to experience it through headphones.

(Click here for my review of the new space)

The new New Museum

I finally made it out to the new New Museum on Bowery. I have fond memories of the old building in Soho, although I would always leave that space remembering the awkwardness and particularities of a museum shoe-horning itself into a very old building not designed for museum display.

The first thing I noticed approaching the new building on Bowery is that it looks like a prison, except designed for Dr. Caligari. I understand the steel fence is supposed to operate like a scrim, filtering out light to a shimmering effect. Instead, it just looks like constrictive chain link. WIthout many windows, the steel looks like it's designed to keep people in.

The charming, weird character of the old space -- the space I was sometimes frustrated with, but always remembered -- is gone. No more mini-mezzanine or exposed brick or little spaces for curators to figure out. That's been replaced with a lot of new space for exhibits. There are three floors for New Museum shows.

The space is generic. Large white box warehouse space that could be in Chelsea or Cleveland or anywhere. It's monumental space with high ceilings that can actually house monumental sculpture and painting (ironic, given the first show is called Unmonumental).

This big generic space is theoretically flexible -- they could build temporary walls for each exhibit. That didn't happen for "Unmonumental," but I hope it happens in the future. Otherwise, it's just a big space with a bunch of things thrown in, formless.

There are some good things about the new building. I love the roofdeck (see above). It actually looks like an advertisement for a new condo building, and in real life it looks that way too. Like living in the future, when the future is pretty much the same as the present except for lots and lots of white minimalist design. That effect is mixed in my mind, but any time you can be outside and mix public space with the open is OK with me.

And I feel like I should say the best thing about the new New Museum is the bathroom. There's a fantastic mosaic mural in there of grayscale flowers on bright orange. The flowers are comforting and the gray and orange accents the pixilation effect. So I guess that's new. In any case, it's a hell of a way to take a piss.

Could the new space be better? Yes. Is it better than the old space? Probably. For me, the most important thing is that they've made room to show more work. At a certain point the architecture isn't the point. Creating good shows is.

(Click here for my review of the first New Museum show, "Unmonumental.")

Whitney Biennial, off the top of my notes

I went to the Whitney Biennial today. I plan on writing a longer review, but I thought I would draw up a list of words and phrases out of my notebook to maybe give the tenor of what's up. Like most Biennials, it was a mixed bag of work. Very few stand-outs for me, but the mood was very strong -- like a lo-fi Indie rock album. If it's supposed to be a portrait of the artworld moment, then the curators did a good job. Here's my list :

found objects
involuntary medium
slap-dash
rickety
DIY
boring games
shifting perspective
transferrence
one thing becomes another
antiquated realism
nostalgia
consumer expression
mixed media, mixed message
optimism
rebuilding
creating a 3-D experience
unfinished space
seduce, reuse, recycle
disappeared past
fragility
juxtaposition
permeable
escaping the museum
jerry saltz is excited
publicly private
multiplying perspectives
personal response to mass media
at an intersection
life-sized collage
faux decadence
nature is gone
if artists are questioning art, curators aren't

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner

It's test time. Which of the following words best describes the above painting?

1) Soft
2) Luminous
3) Monochrome
4) Gruesome

CONTINUED

Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham

For anyone who believes painting's connection to an artist's observation of nature, Rackstraw Downes is a hero.

Downes can spend months on a canvas, going out to a site every day for a half hour or so -- so the light remains the same each day -- observing a scene and making sketches from nature. And when I say nature, I don't mean the glorious American escape of the Hudson River painters, or even Downes' classmate Neil Welliver. I mean the complicated and well-trodden landscape of populated America. Much of Downes work, in fact, is of busy urban street corners.

The first thing you notice about Downes is how realistic is paintings look. And then the second thing you notice is how unrealistic they are.

The straight lines can curve, the colors can get flat. I wondered at first whether he was using some kind of wide-angle lens. But upon third and fourth looks, his canvases become complicated and personal. His dedication to repeated, specific observation has not taken out his choices.

Downes is only cold in reproduction. In person, his canvases are alive. From the rough texture of his canvas to the controlled elegance of his brush strokes and blobs of color, Rackstraw's vision is his own. His colors are push vibrance and saturation to the point of being unrealistic.

I had several experiences of leaning in to look and having realistic details disappear into abstractions (see detail above). He can radically simplify a field of color, how to describe a mountain, for instance, that retains fidelity to the overall vision and becomes very formal and broad on the micro level.

Below is a series of six paintings he did of a barn in Texas. It's the same barn, painted from six different angles. There's an accompanying chart for when and where these canvases came from. Like most other things, in Rackstraw Downes' art it's specificity that matters.

At Betty Cuningham Gallery until March 1.

Juan Usle's organic geometry

I apologize for the photos above--it's impossible to convey the charms of Juan Usle's warm, charming paintings.

He paints in thin, translucent layers, grids mostly, to which the press release for the show credits his living in New York City part time. I'm not sure about that, but the discrete blocks in much of this work makes me think of the many discrete days Usle had to sit down to get his canvases to glow like they do.

At Cheim & Reid until March 15.

Chris Martin

Chris Martin is at the end of his rope. The top of the ladder. There's nowhere to go. So why not play?

If Pollock was melted Picasso, Chris Martin can be melted de Kooning with shellacked Wonder Bread (really!) sorted by a hairbrush. Most of his work in the current show is abstract and contains added collage elements to make the paintings three dimensional.

I was reminded of Joan Mitchell's roll-up-your sleeves ethic to get every last drop out of a surface. Her canvases always look like she's worked hard to make her surfaces shimmer. But those were the days of abstract-expressionism religiousness.

These days, when abstract paintings are just abstract paintings, Martin's look like he's worked hard to create something novel, with loud clashing colors, bulbous islands of cushion affixed, lines of gesture dragged through a dump of paint. His real spiritual forbearer is Stuart Davis' jazz-inspired abstractions of commercial art and American signage.

Chris Martin has said that he's "turning up the volume" of painting. It's hard not to listen.

At Mitchell-Innes & Nash until March 1.

Weschler's Robert Irwin

It says a lot about artist Robert Irwin that my favorite work of his has never actually been created. Irwin is a conceptual artist, horse race afficionado and dreamer whose artistic career is sketched in Lawrence Weschler's superb book "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees." This book gives Irwin's conceptual art a humanity that experiencing it in person does not.

Weschler's book traces how Irwin went from being a precocious teenager winning national figurative drawing contests to joining the second generation of abstract painters in Los Angeles, to becoming a mature artist stretching a rope in the desert for no one to see.

Until the 1980s, he refused to allow his work to be photographed or reproduced because he believed the context for art as important as the piece. In the late '70s, Irwin pushed the Marcel Duchamp art-as-context idea into boredom, like when he transformed an empty room at MoMA by replacing the lights and running a string along the room. The point was to get people to notice the environment in which art is situated. Most artists working today know where this line of thinking ends, and lucky for us Irwin did it so we don't have to.

At one point, Irwin created these clear glass columns that were designed to be almost invisible. The idea was that a viewer would look across the room and, not seeing an "artwork" per se, notice a slight refraction, a visual hiccup through the glass, and question their visual experience of a particular place. Or at least notice how the eye is working with physical expectations layed out by the brain. When you consider this piece you see the basic Irwin contradiction: he was creating art that's not meant to be looked at.

Irwin came to make art like this after his experience of creating beautiful abstract-expressionist canvases that were about the surface of the painting, creating space by with and color. It talks about his long days in the studio, making one mark on the canvas and then retreating to ponder its relationship to all the other marks, figuring out whether the picture plane had been compressed or expanded, how this figure related to the ground. Weschler would think and think on the surface and how a viewer would enter the painting.

Once you see the artwork as a surface, you notice all the other surfaces around it. For instance, for Irwin the sides of the canvas became as important as the front. The viewer's experience wasn't just frontal, after all. And then he worried about the back, and the light that hit the painting, and the wall it was on, and then the building. He became not just a perfectionist (although he was accused of being that) but someone who saw the canvas as unending.

He was questioning the foundations of art. At one point in the book, Irwin is invited to join an exchange program where artists were invited to work with scientists. Most artists continued to do what they were already working on, only at a bigger and more complicated scale. (Think Warhol meeting up with Polaroid folks in order to produce larger, more fabulous Polaroids.) Irwin joined with a Buddhist NASA engineer and fundamentally changed the artwork he was doing. Talking to Weschler, Irwin says that there are people in every discipline who just continue working at the traditional elements of the trade, and there are those who work on a more philosophical level. These people, according to Irwin, have more in common with conceptual thinkers in other fields than with traditional practioners in their own field. Irwin has more in common with a physicist who thinks about quantum theory, in other words, than with Norman Rockwell.

Weschler's book, which was originally published in the early '80s, keeps artspeak and technical philosophy at a blissful minimum. Instead, we hear the voice of Irwin, funny, anecdotal, searching. He recalls his days betting at the racetrack in order to make a living, and his youthful days cruising southern California as a teenager. If, like me, you can feel scammed to pay $20 admission to an empty warehouse just to read wall text to a fluorescent light in the corner, this book is indispensible.

Watch an interview with Robert Irwin here.

Coming soon: 44 presidents

I'm working on a funny little project that should launch within the next month or so. (Click on Grover Cleveland for more detail on the drawing). 44presidentscoming.com is coming!

Bubblegum Pop

My new ethos for 2008 is to open up and share my thoughts more, so let me talk a bit about a piece I just delivered for a Long Island City gallery called Local Project.

LP is upstart and old school -- a gallery run by passionate volunteers who want to promote experimentation and, well, art (as opposed to the complaints I've heard from Chelsea artists that their gallerists are more interested in the financial aspect of owning a gallery).

LP has a yearly fundraiser where artists donate work done on old LP records and the money is used for the gallery's expenses. I decided it's a good cause and that it would be a fun project. As opposed to most galleries in the art market boom, LP is just trying to pay the bills. (Silent bidding starts at $50.)

My first idea was to melt the vinyl. There's something appealing about the texture -- both fluid and solid, like Dali's clocks melting. And continuing with the texture theme, I imagined hard vinyl melted over the soft latex of a hard substitute penis. That's right -- a monster dildo. My sketch looked like this:

Then I looked at the instructions again and realized I should keep the vinyl fairly intact and the protruberances to a minimum. So my dreams of patronizing my local fleshpeddlers in Queens Plaza to buy a king kong dong were thwarted. There's always tomorrow.

I wanted to keep with texture and form and started thinking about unity. It's what I'm always after. To me, it's what the best art is about. I've gone to a lot of experimental music and film shows where the piece begins with order/beauty and descends into disorder/confusion. I always leave wondering why it can't be the other way around. Rarely will a band start out setting their guitars on fire and banging the Peavey amps and end up playing in synchronous harmony. Things fall apart, I guess, but the beauty of the human mind is being able to put them back together again -- even if for a moment.

So I made a painting with a balloon.

Don't ask me how it makes sense, but once I realized I had to use plastic-based acrylic paint, and it would be on a vinyl record, the texture of a rubber balloon made a whole in my mind. Materials were related and tight; they seem to come from the same family. So I thought of the record, how tones can be colors to musicians, and how the circle of a record was echoed in the circles of brass instruments.

I started off sketching a trumpet player. It seemed too cool and smooth jazz for me. My impulse, as always, is to go with the dorky and awkward. So I made with the sousaphone.

I tried to use loud, garish, thick and harmonic colors that reminded me of sousaphone tones. I wanted to use different colors on the different tracks of the records, and wasn't scared about vibrating the line since brass instruments always seem wavy to me.

I wondered what color to make the balloon. As I looked at the colors available to me, I saw the pink and the phrase came to me: Bubblegum Pop. Texture. Music. Circle form. I remembered the sound of a balloon popping, and the piece was done.

Neil Young overcomes loneliness at the United Palace

In his song "A Man Needs a Maid," Neil Young sings from the perspective of a man who has been hurt and confused by human relationships and would rather have something that he can "understand."

I was thinking that maybe I'd get a maid
Find a place nearby for her to stay.
Just somene to keep my house clean
Fix my meals and go away.

During his lively performance at New York City's United Palace Theater in Washington Heights last night, it was clear most of the audience knew the feeling.

The crowd was so engaged and shouted between songs, getting into philosophical arguments about their duties and Neil's. The typical exchange went something like this:

"Play 'Cinnamon Girl'!"

"Let him play what he wants!"

"Shut up!"

"Leave him alone!"

"We love you, Neil."

"'Old Man'!"

To which Neil Young smiled and replied, "Watch it, now."

If the crowd was engaged, it was becase Neil Young never seems to be going through the motions. A crowd does not need a rock star. They wanted Mr. Young, who did an acoustic set alone, surrounded by seven guitars, a banjo, a grand piano, his grandmother's upright piano, and a synthesizer, before doing a loud and white-hot plugged in set.

Sitting in a chair in the middle of the stage, surrounded by a circle of his guitars, he moved like a scarecrow with his limbs loose and syncopated, but not totally in control. Something moves him.

He performed my favorite song ("Ambulance Blues") and did an amazing rendition of "Mellow My Mind" on the banjo. His acoustic performance of "Cowgirl in the Sand" wowed the entire audience, leaving the woman behind me to ask how he could fill the United Palace with sound like that. "I can't believe it was just one guitar," she said.

Since so much of Neil Young's catalogue deals with loneliness (he played, for instance, songs called "Sad Movies," "Bad Fog of Lonelieness" and "Oh, Lonesome Me") it was overwhelming to feel a packed house singing along together to songs abut feeling alone.

By the time he plugged in, the crowd was willing to follow, and he did raucous renditions of some old songs and new. His last song before the encore was a 20-minute crunchy jam to "No Hidden Path."

For his encore, he blazed through "Cortez the Killer," which is a song whose lyrics have always mystified me. But to see Young intimate, with his guitar solos before an audience of thousands, was to understand.

Mos Def has said that hip-hop is medicine for loneliness, and it's clear that for Mr. Young -- and the audience last night -- a guitar can do just as well.

Click here for setlist.

Georg Baselitz remixes German history

Georg Baselitz, at Gagosian Gallery, NYC. Through Dec. 22.

The German painter Georg Baselitz rose to fame in the '70s and '80s for his fearless and direct confrontation with his nation's disgraceful 20th Century. At a time when his teachers and the German art world embraced American pop art, Baselitz went art brut.

He was kicked out of his East German art school and came west to make big, sloppy canvases that snaked with wide swaths of bright color, black outlines, sloppy drips. He painted an infamous canvas of the child Adolf Hitler with an erection the size of a salami. It was all very scandalous to a nation trying to forget the past.

For years, Baselitz painted all of his canvases upside down. It's hard to say why. There's the formalist's explanation: that modern paintings are always about the surface of the canvas, and nothing could reinforce that like a decade or two spent seeing form first, subject second. The painting painted upside down (and not just hung upside down) is seen as abstract form instead of as a picture of known objects.

I've never been satisfied with the formalist explanation, since I think most successful drawing and painting is done by seeing the world abstractly anyway. And since Baselitz isn't what you'd call a finicky draftsman, it's hard to say he was using the technique to see anew.

A political explanation -- that Baselitz saw the world as upside down -- is just too corny.

To me, Baselitz's methods have always been about scrapping to get out of the dilemma of being a German artist after Hitler. But like a dog on a tether, he pulls as far as he can and finds himself leashed.

In his show of paintings now at Gagosian, the East German emigre is at it again.

His "Remix" paintings, two of which are photographed above, are Hitler redux. They feature so many dirty Charlie Chaplin mustaches and wagging cocks that you'll think you're at a Fatty Arbuckle party.

The imagery is strong, explicit, unavoidable. He's taking on big subjects. He's standing atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall with paintbrushes in his hand and painting his nation.

However, this dilemma of a German artist unable to avoid the Nazi era can almost be seen as Stockholm Syndrome. "Being preoccupied with your past gives you something to hold onto," he says in an interview (about work that does not show Hitler, but more "folk" elements of German art).

The tragic horrors of National Socialism were unavoidable to Baselitz's generation. Now Baselitz, who is 69 years old, has returned to suite of images he made when he was young. Now they're writ larger and with more clarity. In the painting above, Hitler emerges from the soil fused with a nasty rootball that stretches its tentacles firmly below ground.

"What I could never escape was Germany, and being German,” said Baselitz. He says he uses the term "remix" because it comes from youth culture, and it's not just the rehashing of old material. It's a return to an approach, to a freshness of dealing with what's inescapable.

Baselitz uses Hitler the way an American might use McDonalds or JFK. It's part of his national mental landscape, to the point of being interestingly banal.

Read an interview with Baselitz here.

Sophie von Hellermann: Sleepwaking

I almost walked through Sophie von Hellerman's show at Greene Naftali without thinking, which is to say without really looking. My eye went to a canvas that features a group of figures gathered around a table with a huge drawing or map unfolded on top. I couldn't figure it out visually, what it was. Then I marvelled at how little von Hellerman used to suggest a figure -- a dash of line here and a blotch of color there -- and became enchanted.

Her work looks soft and sloppy, but don't be deceived. It's strategic and suggestive. She is often described as dreamy or Romantic, and it's easy to agree. Her imagery is magical and her method is to work around the concrete facts. Instead of drawing the meat of a subject, she'll dash a minimal outline or wash a color field that's very non-specific. She applies pigment directly to unprimed canvas -- like Morris Louis -- so the colors have a subtle glow.

Take the photo above: two faces looking at a group of bees. One face washes out, as if a shadow. The bees could be a threat or a discovery. It's Sophie von Hellerman's art to suggest a different world that looks like our own, viewed through honeycomb.

Sophie von Hellerman was at Green Naftali Gallery in NYC, November 2007.