Gallery Chronicle (October 2015)

THE NEW CRITERION
October 2015

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Seeing Sound: New Works by Jane Harris, Alex Paik, Gelah Penn” at Odetta Gallery; “Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair” at MOMA PS1; "The Still Life Show” at Eleventh Street Arts; Jack Tworkov: Mark and Grid, 1931–1982” at Alexander Gray Associates; “Stephen Maine: New Paintings” at Hionas Gallery & “Gabriele Evertz: The Gray Question” at Minus Space.

Alex Paik, Study #2 for Modular wall Installation: Equilateral Triangle (Thirds) (2015), gouache, colored pencil, paper, 8 x 6 x 1 inches, at Odetta Gallery

Modern art has long been interested in “seeing sound.” Kandinsky drew directly on the idea of “Thought Forms,” the title of the Theosophist tract by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, published in 1901, that visualized the music of Gounod, Mendelssohn, and Wagner as colorful clouds rising above a cathedral. Work such as Foghorns, the 1929 painting of radiating shapes by Arthur Dove, likewise helped open American ears to the sounds of color and form.

Seeing a depiction of sound is different from hearing sound itself. Like seeing a flash of lightning, sights anticipate sound and signal sonic potential, eliciting a feeling of sound against an aural silence. Such crossing-over of the senses can go to the heart of the modernist experiment in synesthesia, but the conditions must be right to appreciate it. Real-world distractions can quickly drown out the poetry of crossed sensations.

With “Seeing Sound,” Odetta Gallery offers up an opportunity to see sound for ourselves through the work of three artists whose quiet art shares a musical affinity.1 A Bushwick-based venue created and run by the artist Ellen Hackl Fagan, Odetta feels like a next-generation outer-borough gallery—clean, spacious, removed from the patterns of the street. This antiseptic and light-filled space lends itself to work that requires concentration—not only close viewing, but also close hearing.

Spread across the gallery wall, Alex Paik’s paper sculptures feel like visual chamber music. The director of the nearby artist-run space Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Paik came to art through classical music and the violin. He says he continues to be motivated by the contrapuntal music of Bach. At Odetta, his Modular Wall Installation: Right Triangle (Magenta) (2015) is made up of hand-colored strips of paper folded into triangles and balanced on nails. These units combine to form larger shapes that spin out across the wall like triangular dominos.

Paik’s paper gets more nuanced every time I see it. Lately he has been experimenting with the negative shapes created on the white gallery wall and the subtle pools of color that appear through the reflections of his paper. These illuminated spaces are ethereal—like music, filled with invisible matter. And Paik has found a way to modulate these forms even further. By pulling some of his paper strips away from the wall towards the nailheads, the triangular forms dissolve, turning down the volume on his volumes.

Jane Harris, Orbiters 6 (2015), Graphite on Arches paper, 22 x 30 inches, at Odetta Gallery.

Jane Harris completed her drawings in this exhibition during a summer residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut. In his teaching, Josef Albers sought to “cultivate vision” to seek out what he considered to be unseen visual reality. Much as Albers’s paintings relied on pattern and modulation, Harris has created meticulous works that she calls “Orbiters” of graphite on paper featuring two radiating shapes side by side. The forms interact, with one growing and the other contracting, or parts turning on and off in black and white, or rotating, or seeming to push from one side to the other. Their binary nature calls to mind our own eyes and ears. They also feel like bursts—not so much Bach counterpoint, but Strauss percussion.

Gelah Penn’s work may be the least appealing but ultimately most intriguing of the three in the show. Her Serial Polyglot Y (2014–15) is a series of six “drawings in space” where she “folds, smudges, and punctures planes.” In this process she uses a polyglot’s materials; to be precise: lenticular plastic, digital print, graphite monofilament, acrylic paint, and metal staples on Yupo paper. The results are as advertised: strips of paper are folded, smudged, and punctured. One by one, they could be mistaken for crumpled trash, but together we see how the smudges relate. Penn has a keen sense for the acoustics of her medium, in particular the cringe-worthy feeling that one can get from certain materials rubbing against paper. Here that goosebump-inducing smudge has taken on a life of its own, jumping from one paper to the next.

Opening Night of Printed Matter's NY Art Book Fair. Photo BJ Enright Photography.

To borrow a line from Mark Twain, the reports of the death of print have been greatly exaggerated. This might be the takeaway of anyone who attended the tenth annual “Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair” at PS1 in Long Island City, Queens over a weekend in September.2 “Attended” doesn’t quite do justice to what it meant to be present here. “Braved” would be more like it. The NY Art Book Fair is the Comic Con of hipsterdom, where Igloo coolers dispense negronis and packed exhibit halls smell of beard oil. Some 40,000 people paw their way among 370 booksellers and publishers on view to find just the ironic hand-Xeroxed zine that speaks to them. If you always wanted a picture book of unknown people taking selfies in parks, National Parks Service from Bad Looks Press at the 8 Ball Zines concession was for you. Rounding out a collection of vintage erotica? Vasta Images/Books had a display of “Sexpapers: Newsstand Smut 1970s–1980s” featuring copies of such publications as Love, Finger, Orgy, and Screw all preserved in archival glassine.

If this felt like the aboveground consumption of something that was formerly underground, you could also add to the mix a neo-fetish for the analogue technology of printed paper. The sponsor of the fair, the worthy nonprofit Printed Matter, has been preserving art books since before books were “books.”

Yet the circus-like atmosphere at PS1, which has become MOMA’s off-campus frat house, forced us to judge these books by their covers, with only silliness evidently contained therein. Maybe I missed the point—the event was so hot and overcrowded, I couldn’t even make it upstairs, and I had neglected to bring a cleverly printed fan to keep cool. Still, as MOMA’s own exhibition “Inventing Abstraction” recently made clear, art books have been a largely overlooked medium of modernism that has the potential to join artists, poets, and writers in unique collaboration. Too bad so much at the NY Art Book Fair wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

Tony Curanaj, The Gumball Incident (2015), oil on canvas, 28x15.5 in

Just a block away from PS1 in Long Island City, the Grand Central Atelier continues to stake its claim as the anti-MOMA. In a former warehouse, the classical revivalist teacher Jacob Collins runs his ever-expanding off-the-grid school for painters who want to study traditional technique. Like last year, the school has organized a fall “Still Life Show” of teachers and students in a space they call Eleventh Street Arts, carved out of the front rooms of the school.3

This year the standouts were examples of trompe l’oeil, where hyper-realistic objects appear to float above the surface of the canvas in the once-popular style of painters such as Victor Dubreuil, John Haberle, and William Harnett. The technique required to pull off such tricks of the eye is astonishing. Dubreuil used to paint images of paper money so realistically that the Secret Service confiscated and destroyed much of his work. Like those earlier examples, the results at Eleventh Street Arts are fun to see. Samuel Hung offers two examples of toys, cards, and candy apparently tacked to a cracking plaster wall in high relief. Tony Curanaj, meanwhile, is showing a breathtaking tour-de-force of table cloth and beadboard with a gumball machine so irresistible, it tempts the eyes of the viewer just as it does the birds and bees seeming to fly around it.

An “inconvenient artist” is what the gallery owner Alexander Gray calls the painter Jack Tworkov (1900–1982), whose estate Gray’s gallery now represents. “Jack Tworkov: Mark and Grid, 1931–1982,” curated by Jason Andrew, the archivist for the Tworkov estate, digs deep into the inconveniences of this Abstract Expressionist, a founding member of the Eighth Street Club, who turned away from Ab Ex’s “extreme portrayals” (in Tworkov’s words) and increasingly “let reason examine disorder” through systems and patterns.4

I have written in this space before about the interest of Tworkov, who abandoned a popular style to pursue a unique vision. Much like the knight in a game of chess—the movement of which he diagrams in a standout painting in the current exhibition—Tworkov made unexpected leaps in his career through gambits that continue to fascinate, and there are many examples here of his cool calculus. Like the agitated line of Cézanne, Tworkov never let his brush stop in one place. His career embodied the spirit of all-over abstraction with a style that truly went all over.

Stephen Maine, P15-0720 (2015); acrylic on canvas, 100 x 80 in. at Hionas Gallery

At Hionis on the Lower East Side, Stephen Maine continues his painting of “residue.”5 That’s the term he calls his process that I first assumed to be silkscreen. But in fact his ghost images are the result of a purely abstract method that stamps paint-covered carpeting and other materials onto canvas as monoprints. The “technique yields a flatfooted trace, a deposit of paint, the residue of a clumsy, imprecise operation,” Maine writes in his exhibition catalogue. I would argue he is far too modest in describing the skill he has developed in pulling off this effect. His bold use of acrylic colors plays off figure and ground. The texture he elicits is remarkable. At Hionis, his canvas format has expanded from previous work to become over eight feet tall. His compositions have likewise evolved, departing from his silkscreen-like grid—the product, I gather, of tufted carpeting—to more varied and irregular patterns that bubble and pop. Here the “technical means of making is incidental,” he writes. What matters is the energy of the paintings themselves—made, in a way, through the energy of their own forms.

Gabriele Evertz, RYBG (Agent) (2015), Acrylic on canvas over panel, 60 x 60 inches, #GE78, at Minus Space

Uniquely dedicated to “contemporary reductive abstract art,” Minus Space has inaugurated its fall program in its new waterfront home in DUMBO, Brooklyn with “Gabriele Evertz: The Gray Question.”6 The question of gray is the unpredictable way it reacts to hue. “Blue recedes and red advances—but the way grays will react is less foreseeable,” writes Evertz in her catalogue introduction.

A professor of color theory at Hunter College, Evertz has long experimented with square-format paintings of sharp-edged vertical stripes of acrylic. Departing from a pure scientific method, she has become increasingly confident in deploying artistic intuition to break from her own color systems to test and push chromatic potential. Her paintings are not just dazzling. They have also become increasingly evocative, with subtitles like “Three Kings” and “Tikkun Olam.” Here she masters the manipulation of the eye, which can be drawn in or pushed down along her slippery edges of color, preventing an easy summation of her compositions. “By alternating between focusing and scanning, we are attempting to see the painting, but a complete mental image is rarely achieved,” she writes. Looking for a “felt, rapturous experience of the real,” her paintings open our eyes to the feeling of color and line—and the mysteries of gray.

1 “Seeing Sound: New Works by Jane Harris, Alex Paik, Gelah Penn” opened at Odetta Gallery, Brooklyn, on September 11 and remains on view through November 1, 2015.

2 “Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair” was on view at MOMA PS1, Queens, from September 18 through September 20, 2015.

3 “The Still Life Show” opened at Eleventh Street Arts, Queens, on September 18 and remains on view through October 16, 2015.

4 Jack Tworkov: Mark and Grid, 1931–1982” opened at Alexander Gray Associates, New York, on September 3 and remains on view through October 17, 2015.

5 “Stephen Maine: New Paintings” opened at Hionas Gallery, New York, on September 9 and remains on view through October 4, 2015.

6 “Gabriele Evertz: The Gray Question” opened at Minus Space, Brooklyn, on September 12 and remains on view through October 31, 2015.

The West 90s in The New York Times

James writes: 

I was delighted to talk up my favorite neighborhood of the West 90s to The New York Times. The fun video is out today.

 

The New York Times is in my apartment.

A photo posted by James Panero (@jamespanero) on Jul 16, 2015 at 7:12am PDT

 

ready for my closeup.

A photo posted by James Panero (@jamespanero) on Jul 16, 2015 at 7:16am PDT

Gallery Chronicle (September 2015)

Stanley Whitney, james brown sacrifice to apollo (2008), Oil on linen, 72 × 72 in. Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2015

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange” at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Stanley Whitney is a painter of color, a double identity that has long complicated his role in the story of art. As an abstract colorist, Whitney has drawn from an array of influences to arrive at a signature style of stacked square fields interwoven with rhythm, a synesthetic syncopation of visible music. As a black painter born in Philadelphia in 1946, one who places aesthetic above sociological concerns, Whitney has never fit within the assumptions of what an artist of his identity is supposed to do or be. “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange,” a must-see exhibition of his recent work now at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Lauren Haynes, helps to right this wrong.1 It also reminds us of the joys and sorrows, the feeling for art that has been missed, and the many artists who, for too long, have been marginalized, sidelined, and left out of view because of the politics of identity.

Whitney’s enigmatic paintings do not answer questions. Instead they question answers. As Whitney explains in his catalogue interview with Lowery Stokes Sims: “The thing about reading abstract art is that you have to be open, you have to bring a lot to it. You have to be willing to admit you don’t know.” In the loft-like main gallery of the Studio Museum, his work absorbs easy assumptions and returns a complexity of emotions.

Whitney explores these feelings through a similar but not serial framework. His structure can call to mind Josef Albers, who had been a teacher of deep influence at Yale University, where Whitney earned his MFA in 1972. Like Albers, Whitney also composes his color in blocks, mostly large and square, but next to rather than on top of one another, with softer edges and with fields of various transparencies that can at times reveal their brushwork and the colors beneath, while others float fully on the surface.

Whitney’s blocks rest on strips of color that divide his canvases vertically into shelves of varying height, often compressing in size the lower he goes, as though pushed down by the weight of the blocks above. Whitney explains how these divisions in part emerged from a stay in Rome, when he visited the Etruscan museum in Volterra: “I saw how they just had everything stacked up—all these funeral urns just stacked up, and I said, ‘You know, Stanley, you’re going to stack the color and let the magic be in the color.’ ” A series of small untitled black gouaches on paper, included in the Studio Museum exhibition, isolate these divisions.

Just as his compositions are pressed top to bottom, Whitney’s colors also squeeze side to side, distilled through another set of untitled gouache studies on paper that get cut down to square when translated to canvas. “Right now I’m looking at a lot of Paolo Veronese’s painting and it’s funny because when I look at his paintings, I think about weight,” he explains. “I think about transitions. I think about the color. I think about how well he draws. I think about how something sits, how something touches.”

Like the best studio painters who came of age in the post-minimalist scene of the 1970s, Whitney has a keen sense for what edges of color can do: whether colors lay on top of one another, or push and pull, or rub together with an energized friction. He also considers how colors balance together, weaving edges to help counteract a single sense of front and back, figure and ground, dominance and recession. “I worry more that my work has good transitions and that there’s a lot to look at and that you can get in and out of the spaces,” he says. “In other words, if you fall in love with that blue, your eye can get out of that blue and move to the red or the pink. I think more about transitions that way.”

Whitney explains how his sense for composition emerged from another Italian. Through Giorgio Morandi, he says, “I got more into an architectural kind of space. . . . I liked how quiet they were.” For this abstract painter, the buttercream softness of Morandi’s paint handling comes off as a more direct relation than the overt gestures of Abstract Expressionism: “The gesture is in the paint itself, like laying the paint down—whether it’s thick or thin.” Further influences include Velázquez (“the way he touches the canvas”), Hans Hofmann (“he opened a lot of doors for people”), even Egyptian art: “I realized I could put forms, colors and marks together and still have a lot of air. The space was still there. This was important because I thought previously that if I put colors or forms next to each other that I would lose the space. Then I realized that the space is in the color, not around the color.” Whitney’s color fields weave together like the warp and weft of textiles. Quilting traditions, such as the folk quilts of Gee’s Bend, the site of a former cotton plantation in Alabama, find another resonance in his work: “To me color is all about being tactile, so definitely it’s about textiles. . . . I feel like I’m from there.”

Beyond these examples, Whitney’s greatest influence, as with most abstractionists, has been Cézanne, whom he calls a “revelation.” Like Cézanne, Whitney weaves his colorful compositions into synthetic wholes that shake apart as much as they come together. They vibrate and sing with a synesthetic soul that goes to the heart of modernist abstraction and that has always been rooted in music. Cézanne, explains Whitney, “used color in terms of music. I felt his color had great rhythm. I was thinking of Charlie Parker. It was then that I could see that what you bring to the paintings is your culture. There is something about my work in terms of the rhythm it has—a kind of polyrhythm.”

Several of the titles of the large paintings on display, one up to eight-feet square, allude to music and stimulate these aural-visual associations. The painting james brown sacrifice to apollo (2008), with its yellows, oranges, and reds, feels like the lights of a hot stage bursting with music and motion.My Tina Turner (2013), with its blocks full of pink, conveys a more feminine lead. Dance the Orange (2013), the title of another painting as well as the exhibition itself, comes from Rilke’s Sonnets of Orpheus, which include the synesthetic exhortation to “Dance the flavor of this fruit as we experience it!/ Make of the orange a dance.”

Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2014), Black gouache on Fabriano paper, 11 × 15 in., Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York 

The attraction of Whitney’s work is undeniable, exhibiting a seriousness of purpose and a mastery of form that have come out of a lifetime of studying, feeling, and experimenting with paint on canvas. “I became interested in abstraction by the openness of it all. I saw endless possibilities,” he says. Yet despite its endless possibilities, his work has been far less known and shown than it deserves, living mainly through the work of his students at the Tyler School of Art. Part of this reflects the general resistance that all abstract painters now face from a museum establishment that largely insists on tapping the superficial veins of art rather than mining the deeper riches that the market chooses to ignore. “To be a signature abstract painter in the twenty-first century is a really odd thing,” Whitney admits.

Still, it must be said that abstract artists who are black now find themselves in a particularly odd isolation: in a world that claims to embrace the voice of black artists, their art is at odds with what an overwhelmingly white art establishment believes the voice of black artists should be. “I don’t think there’s anything more complicated than the subject of black artists and abstract art,” says Lowery Stokes Sims at the start of her interview with Whitney. “There is always this idea that it’s not connected to the black experience.”

Singular black artists have long been out of step with what is supposed to be “black art” and the culture and institutions that promote it. During the Harlem Renaissance, Romare Bearden wrote vociferously against the identity of a black arts movement and the bad results of good intentions behind those promoting it. “There are quite a few foundations that sponsor exhibitions of Negro artists,” he wrote in “The Negro Artist and Modern Art.” “However praiseworthy may have been the spirit of the founder the effect upon the Negro artist has been disastrous,” he continued, singling out the poor quality of exhibitions of black artists produced by the Harmon Foundation. “Its attitude from the beginning has been of a coddling and patronizing nature.” In “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Bearden expanded this critique and wrote against painting what others might expect of him: “It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda, [but] to paint the life of my people as I know it.”

Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2014) Gouache on paper, 21 7/8 × 30 3/8 in., Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York

For many black painters, a turn to abstraction, away from overt statements of race, paralleled the rejection that white painters expressed against the realist demands of the Left. “Proletariat art is poor art for poor people,” declared Arshile Gorky to Willem de Kooning at the height of the WPA and amidst the prerequisites of the American Scene. Likewise Norman Lewis, perhaps our most overlooked abstractionist, defiantly rejected what he considered to be hopeless racial themes for the transcendence of paint on canvas. Considering he died in 1979, it is astonishing to realize that Lewis is only now receiving a major museum treatment with “Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis,” opening this November at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, an institution that more often than not proves the exception to the rule in the art world.

Last year, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston similarly broke ranks from the party line with a two-part exhibition called “Black in the Abstract” organized by the senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who set out to show the “abstract practices of black artists as a continuous trajectory as opposed to an anomaly or a phenomenon that ebbs and flows over time.” This exhibition, along with the tireless advocacy of galleries such as June Kelly and Michael Rosenfeld, among others, has attempted to turn the tide by exhibiting the earlier generation of black abstract artists, such as Charles Alston, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Hale Woodruff, alongside the more recent work of McArthur Binion, Frank Bowling, Edward Clark, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, James Little, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, William T. Williams, and Jack Whitten, on through their many descendants.

Yet the marginalization of these artists has by and large only intensified as Black Power and white mandates have come together to promote a narrowing sensibility for racial identity. Stanley Whitney recalls a time back in Kansas when the Black Panthers questioned him for painting abstract. “Those were hard times because I really wanted to paint,” he remembers. Similarly we now see institutions such as the Whitney Museum, purportedly dedicated to American art, promoting artists with cartoonish appeals to identity politics while excluding modern masters like Lewis. This not only does a disservice to art history. It is also grounded in an assumption that black artists have nothing to say beyond addressing their superficial racial identity. It implies that transcendence from one’s immediate circumstances is the prerogative of white artists alone. It says that the work of black artists cannot be imbued with multiple levels of meaning (as in the case of Whitney, who it should be noted is not in the Whitney).

The brilliance of Stanley Whitney is his ability to capture life not in black and white but in full color: “I realized that color was the subject in and of itself.”

1 “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange” opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, on July 16 and remains on view through October 25, 2015.