Art From Online Winter 2019

Art From Online Winter 2019

Approach

I put together this list as a sort of exercise to get better at selecting, thinking about, and writing about modern and contemporary artworks. I guess I’m also put to prove something about social media and art. While the unique experience of facing a work of art in person can’t be replicated online, i think the internet provides access to a lot of cool pictures, and I want to prove you can have a meaningful experience with a work of art even if you don’t have access to the hottest galleries. I put this whole thing together on my phone in the pages app.

If something catches my head eye while i’m scrolling instagram, i flag it to save for later when i have time to process it slower. From there i select a handful of saved works that hold my attention the most and record observations about them. Its not intended as a best of list or a summary, just some stuff i wanted to spend more time with. Sometimes i google the title or artist names to find outside context where i think it might be helpful. I intentionally use a casual voice and a stream of consciousness style of writing because Instagram is a casual platform, and I’d like to make my whole process of looking visible. I don’t claim to have discovered any of these images or to be an expert on them, which is why i included the source account names in the photos. In fact, this whole experiment is grounded in first impressions, and good art only gets better with time.

It’s just for fun!

Nairy Baghramian, Truant, 2016

So we have this fleshy sort of column thing and this pale, white-grey stick appendage propped against one another. The fleshy column activates a shallow space in the way that it turns out slightly, light adjustments break horizontal plane.

The piece varies in hard and soft edges, sometimes as the eye follows a hard edge it softens out, rounding to a nub. It’s almost hard to imagine what the actual surface feels like.

It’s relationship to human human height, flesh, bone, and posture suggests an anthroporphic presence.

Creates literal tension at the connecting point of the prop, space held delicately, bottom of bone tips up slightly off of floor.

The relationship of the two parts suggest dependency or mutual responsibility in staying upright. Just human enough to call on internal and external relationships without really behaving like a figure at all.

“At first I worried that the sculptures (and the photographs that often accompany them) might be too insular in their intellectual games, but then I saw the bony crutch placed just so under the bent form of the fleshy peach Truant (2016) from the series Stay Downers, and decided that this sculpture and I could be friends, supporting each other as best we can.”

-Andrew Berardink, mousse mag

Ron Nagle, can’t find title, ceramic (I think) Matthew Marks Gallery

It’s small sculpture- table or hand size. It’s also very frontal, which establishes a relationship to pictorial conventions (you don’t usually walk around to look at the back of a painting).

There’s sort of a pink discoid sitting recessed on a smaller platform in front of it.

Theres a vertical opening or gap that partially bisects discoid, and stops short of the top.

The artist’s hand is much more present in the left half, where the piece is dappled with indents.

The dapples arc over the bisecting line and the discoid smoothes out, where it becomes harder to tell process.

A flap of discoid folds over the gap, itself punctured with nine sort of pin holes.

At the front of the base is a silver cushiony looking thing, totally different in texture and color than the rest of the pink, almost like shiny car upholstery, exactly fits where the base stops.

Holding all of it is this thin sort of chocolate maroon slab, with hard edges, totally finished and opaque.

Like Baghramian, concerned with abstract sculpture that retains bodily sensations

· phallic shape

· slit both phallic and yannic

· pink clay takes on feeling of flesh, both touched and untouched

· folds, flaps, slits, pores, droop, impressions, these are all bodily words, and if we want to extend it even further, most of them apply to sexual organs.

At the same time, the work independently functions as an interesting formal composition, with dazzling contrasts of textures and shapes, always considering space. Difference in finishes so drastic that it also reads as tongue in cheek or humorous -hard base, clay, silver cushiony.

New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl on Nagle : “No two of his works are alike, and they’re rarely more than six inches high. But, at close range, they become monumental, conjoining clay, polyurethane, and epoxy resin to create textures—smooth or nubbly, shiny or matte—in such chromatic chords as yellow, black, and pale blue or gray, pink, and oxblood. One resembles a pink ice-cream sandwich, with two boxy green chunks of something atop it at one end and a glossy black handlebar mustache at the other.”

Their delicacy and technical perfection imbue them with a sense of preciousness—take good care of this thing—while at the same time its bright colors and bodily associations allow it to take on a blurry, sensual, whimsicality.

Derek Jarman, Avebury Series No4, 1973

Here, Jarman plays with depth big time.

There are four sort of main categories of compositional element here.

· black lines of varying widths

· blue lines of varying widths

· red lines of varying widths

· rocks. no shadows or environment cues, just rocks

Square composition

A border frames, contains relationships.

The work functions illusionistically, poles read as converging parallel lines, which cue depth. Blue strips add depth cues with implied shadows.

Rocks occlude suggested space, breaking up, the landscape, despite being the only elements of the painting that are literally from a landscape, in Avebury where Jarman was working from.

It’s almost possible to read everything on same plane save for black poles.

Rocks function as abstract shape elements.

The overall space space of canvas is well divided and balanced.

Avery Singer, Untitled, 2019

portrait? collage?

Like Jarman, Singer plays with depth and media in her compositions, but instead of collapsing a landscape, Singer visits with depth through a digital clipping effect. Like a claustrophically cropped software glitch, we see hands, a face, and fuckin memes desperately vying for cramped real estate. Singer’s work has the distorted grain of an instagram meme ran through forty different filters. Through the jammed haze of the image, a narrow space opens up in the center for a confrontational eye to meet our gaze. eerie and piercing.

“I love painting technique and thinking about what it means to physically paint, those meanings will change over time as we have different politics and different ways of looking at art, and as media continues to expand and explode.”

-Singer to Artnet

Elizabeth Peyton, David, March 2017, Watercolor

This watercolor portrait was painted in 2017, from a 1974 photo of David Bowie. Every color feels weighed out and balanced against the other, and in this way, to me the work is as much about bowie’s psyche (what’s on his mind?) as it is interesting and fantastic combinations of hues and values of watercolor. Patches of the paper left untouched, on Bowie’s neck, forehead, and the background balance the dark, concentrated strokes which bring his eyes, nose, and hair into focus. Light as air, sea greens blend with rusty ochres and plum tones. It feels like any less and the figure would evaporate, yet Bowie is immediately recognizable.

Katelyn Eichwald, Knife, oil on canvas, 8x8 in, 2019

Here Eichwald works in the square, and on a small scale. This is worth noting because a square has different compositional demands than a rectangle and because the small scale lends an intimate, handheld size.

Like many of her other works, Eichwald’s smudgey, almost smoke-stained looking surface sticks to the top of the picture. our only depth cues are the diagonal line and then the knife, which almost intersect at a perpendicular angle. It could read as a knife laying flat on a table top surface, then to a knife stuck into a wall, then snapping back to total flat. The knife, a weapon or a tool floats, charged in purgatory of a specific, real object stained into nowhere

from Eichwalds artist statement:

“You can’t make a painting feel like something just by pushing a feeling onto it - you have to remake it, somehow, with different pieces, different actors, like restaging a play. It has language and cadence and rhythm, a set and actors in their places. They can’t speak all at once or too fast or too slow, the light can’t be too bright or too dark to see. Or if it is too bright or too dark, that is a choice you have to make, in balance with the rest of your choices, to get the right feeling.“

Philip Guston, i can’t find the title, late period.

Guston has an upcoming retrospective at the National Gallery in dc that i’m really hyped about. After years as a successful abstract painter, Guston made an abrupt and jarring (to some) shift from abstract painting to this cartoonish, figural painting style. This is late 60s early 70s where abstraction dominates. Critics are aghast. Guston’s dumb, clumsy surfaces remain visually fascinating while they ground in the mundane and the grotesque. Big clunky shapes, restricted color palette. parallels between spaghetti shape and head shape. tiny gaps in space, a strand of spaghetti grazes the ground. Theres a slight release of oppressive, blocky tension in the gap between the figure’s nose and the spaghetti. The man’s blemishes dialogue with each other, eyelashes dialogue with mustache. Guston paints an ugly world in a deliberately ugly style, using deliberately ugly colors and it comes out beautiful (to me) how????

Vincent Desiderio, Sleeping Child, 2019, oil on canvas

Most of the painting is relatively close in value, except for the child’s shirt and legs, which appear much brighter, whiter, and forward than the comparatively dimmed, surroundings. The lip of the chair just brushes against the picture plane touching our space. Masterful technique. The Central chair splits between a naturalistically rendered child sitting in contrast with a graphically rendered mickey mouse. Red wallpaper background. A still, peaceful atmosphere permeates the room which if not for the compromising mouse, could be a dutch golden age painting. At the same time the mouse acts to balance out the space of the chair. Both child and mouse, emblematic of wholly different eras and styles are framed by the chair, while the decorative background floods out to frame. Technically perfect anachronisms sustain an illusionistic space while contradicting itself or posing a problem—how can someone integrate divergent approaches to art making into a psychologically active space?

from an interview on paintingperceptions.com:

“When painting manages to access the “real” in our existence, when it evokes a perpetual sense of being and does not allow itself to be relegated to the category of artifact, when it pushes its aspirations to the brink of total collapse but remains intact – then it will find its subject. And its subject will be important as equipment for ours and all times.”

Jordan Casteel, Serwaa and Amoakohene, 2019, oil on canvas

The title of her gallery show, “The Practice of Freedom” comes from Bell Hooks’ groundbreaking book “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,” which emphasizes a teaching practice where teachers and students collaborate through a reciprocal relationship based in mutual interest.

Interested in leveling the pedagogical plane, Casteel painted this series of her art students by asking them to choose the location and conditions of the painting.

Here we have an intimate, domestic setting. Each surface is an optical feast, from the swirling floral couch upholstering to the warm toned wood floors.

Casteel’s loose brushwork renders the student, Amoakohene, and his mother Serwaa as solid, present. There’s a sculptural quality to the heft of the clothing’s drape. At the same time, Casteel’s control of light as it shines through the window and reflects off the subjects integrates a complex palette of colors that seem like they wouldn’t work (a dull yellow shines off Amoakohene’s arm from the green curtain) into a whole image that hums in a carefully observed, suitably complex closeness founded in mutual interest.

Shiro Kasamatu, Sunset at Minakami, 1958, Woodcut(?)

I love the artists treatment of armosphere, as snow dots the entire surface, especially impressive for a print. Dense, lovely. I wonder whats going on in those lit up windows.

Happy Holidays everyone!