DAISY AMES

I wish I had more time to post my thoughts and observations on these exhibitions… oh the waxified-paint, the strokes, the thickness… oh the rusty yellow residue, the slivers of light at the seams, the figured shadows… maybe later… but I really suggest going to see/experience the Serra’s on 24th Street for yourself :) 

Drawing: A Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - this past summer… more: nytimes
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Junction / Cycle Installation at the Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, NYC - until November 26th 2011… more: gagosian

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I also took a day trip/night to Dia:Beacon in July which has a large collection of Richard Serra sculptures and one large “drawing.” Absolutely worth the trip upstate along the Hudson River - it’s so beautiful! 

photos by Daisy Ames

I finally convinced some friends to take a road trip to Dia: Beacon this weekend, after years of wanting to revisit. The moment I entered the Agnes Martin room, I got weak in the knees. There is such peace and softness in the collection of paintings that I couldn’t help but try to understand the mental state in which she painted. I focussed on the 72” x 72” canvases which had two or three horizontal bands of varying pastel hues. The colors seemed to be a watered down (not watercolor) but more like a gessoed-down version of itself. Then, on top of the uneven seam between the two tones, a very sharp and precise pencil line was drawn over the division. This gave the illusion from afar that they were painted with a much denser layer of paint which accentuated the distinction between the colors. In addition, these lines did not terminate at the end of the canvas, but stopped within the frame, offset roughly two or three inches. I could image these lines requiring more than just the arm or wrist, but the whole body to move the length of the canvas allowing a steady drag of a pencil to be slowly and carefully lifted right before the edge. The perfection that some of the artist like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo, Bruce Neuman, Robert Ryman, along with Martin, achieve is incredibly impressive. Knowing that the precision is part of the charm, it allows a viewer to wonder how it was executed, and the art becomes a product which reflects the process of art-making. Some of the artists’ theories try to deny the existence of object or subject, so the focus suddenly becomes you, the viewer, and what it means to you. The open interpretation makes something that seems so simple become very complex and different in everyone’s eyes. The ambiguity of subject and viewer, the line between product and producing an object, is still a very captivating concept.

Detail of edge of painting.

Just last night, I was sitting and talking with a friend about some of our favorite abstract painters, theory and post-war expressionism. As we sat facing a large wall of books, our eyes darted around the room from book to book, title to title, painter to painter. Then, I reluctantly came across Cy Twombly and expressed my discomfort with his half-hazard paintings, calling them unstructured, uncalculating, uninspiring scribbles. Then my friend gave me a dose of my own medicine: “It’s not that you don’t like his paintings, it’s that you haven’t come to understand them.” “Explain them to me,” I said. And so he did… calling on Cy Twombly: A Monograph by Richard Leeman, he read to me an underlined passage:

“The history of handwriting in the United States, since the colonial past when it was codified according to gender or social position, was always linked to assumptions about gender. At its zenith in 1915, the Palmer Method was part of a general reaction to the ‘crisis of masculinity’ at the beginning of the century, which also saw the birth of the Boy Scouts, Theodore Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders, the promotion of sports and so on. So the question of scribbling, raised despite himself by Twombly, belonged in a more general context of great uncertainty. The development of mechanical devices (telephone, typewriter, dictaphone, telegraph) fed the notion that handwriting was disappearing, on the one hand; on the other, the appearance, during the 1930‘s, of laxer method of teaching handwriting as a means for children to express themselves, combined with the working classes’ growing interest in graphology (the idea that handwriting reveals character) seemed to proclaim the rise of a nation of scrawlers. Illegible scribbling and scrawling, to a certain American mindset, represented the antithesis of the male virtues of order, discipline and strength: an infantilism or effeminacy that the critic Michael Fried in 1964, apropos of Nine Discourses on Commodus, associated by implication with mannerism, preciosity, speciosity - in short with Twombly’s all too European sophistication.”  (p.171)

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Sometimes we block out the very things that speak to us most clearly, because we don’t recognize it at first because it is in a different form. But now that I have been exposed to this book and other intriguing passages, I have recognized something in Twombly that I never knew was there, but always assumed existed - theory, logic, a stream of consciousness, and thoughtfulness that is not apparent at first glance, but requires intense inquiry. It’s unfortunate that I am only now starting to understand his work, since he passed away this morning. 

The Yale British Art Center is featuring a retrospective on British artist Rebecca Salter, called “into the light of things.” She is an artist who combines multiple mediums to create an abstraction of depth and light. Having studied art in Japan, her work speaks to the minimal and highly detailed aesthetic that often comes with exposure and appreciation of Japanese culture. What I particularly like about her paintings is that they have a subtle hint of being natural surfaces. For instance, vertical ivory lines faintly applied over a white canvas interestingly resemble the grain of wood. Another piece I enjoyed was charcoal veneer of paint which appeared homogenous when you get very close, but when you step back, it looked like cold slate, or the wet skin of a whale with with extremely slight areas of reflection. (see example below)

Untitled R72 - 1999

Another component of her work are canvases which have been cut into tiny 1” x 1” squares, meticulously reassembled onto another canvas so that you can hardly see a seam. Each square is unique, and has a perfectly loose composition, which makes them seem haphazardly arranged next to one another. However, when you back up, you can interpret an underlying directionality to the mosaic, which I read as I highly calculated assembly of these squares. (see example below)

Untitled J23 - 1995

Her work can be understood simply as pure, calm and monochrome, but it beckons the viewer to spend time and notice intricacies and differences within each composition. This often reveals a grain or movement within the work, which I enjoyed finding. It made me do what I love doing: ask why… and then discover other things along the way. If you are ever in New Haven, I suggest taking a trip over to the BAC and checking it out… open through May 1, 2011.  

in the second floor atrium space of the moma hangs a whale skeleton. on the second floor, adjacent to the room of monet’s water lilies are hundreds of colorful geometric variations (see below). on the top floor next to the bauhaus exhibition, is a full exposé on his work which defines gabriel orozco’s multifarious work as it defies an artist’s attempt to master one arena. he does not confine himself to one medium, applying his artistic outlets across drawing, painting, sculpture, installations, photography and more.

i particularly enjoyed his samarai tree prints which take a pattern consisting of overlapping circles and squares defined by only four colors: white, gold, red and blue. each shape “grows” from the other with help from a computer generated graph that alters the color of each shape to create only a slight variation from one print to the next. the samurai tree room:

art means so many things to different people, making it impossible to define. but i define it simply as something that makes you think: “how did he/she do that?” it is not a question of whether it is beautiful or not, it is a question of whether thought was put in to its creation. is there a meaning? what is he/she trying to accomplish? what are my feelings as a result?  while viewing and experiencing gabriel orozco’s work, i was constantly asking myself these questions, and i hope you do to.

show ends on march 1st!

more on gabriel orozco:

moma exhibition

wikipedia page

talking about samurai prints

i finally had the opportunity to visit the guggenheim restrospective on russian painter, wassily kandinsky. he was born in 1866, studied law and economics, decided to make a career as a painter at the age of thirty, taught at the bauhaus, lived through three wars and died in 1944. he is credited with producing the first abstract paintings in 1908, ie Autumn Landscape with Boats, below.

though his paintings are not my cup of tea, i enjoyed learning about his journey towards his artistic career having had a strong foundation in academic areas, which would have seemingly provided more lucrative income at the time.

for more on wassily kandinsky:

guggenheim retrospective

wikipedia page - wassily kandinsky

nytimes article - kandinsky helps gugg set record