I can't figure this one out. I've spent close to an hour stading in front of it, searching for something. The resin and paint on the piece is eeiry, as if it were faded, or ancient, but there's something more. Perhaps it is the setting, surrounded by the smokey cube, the door-like panel piece next to it, or Erdnase that hangs next to it. I'm still not sure.
And to me, that makes this a hugely successful piece. To engage the kind of viewer I am, who powers from piece to piece, fluid in his travels, and force me to consider your piece for such a long time, that says a lot... though perhaps not as much as this piece does.
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What do Abstract Expressionists do when they get older? Some go figurative, like Phil Guston. Some go POP, like Rauschenberg. Some simply keep on trucking, like Joan Mitchell. Willem de Kooning did something really interesting. He began turned away from human figuration and towards gestural figuration. Untitled V looks at the gestures that were the markers of Abstract Expressionism, but presents them in a way that still feels as if it is working the surface from edge-to-edge and with a grand sweep, but it is so controlled. I know, I know, they all said that their paintings had been controlled all along, but that's bullshit, and they knew it. It is a bit of a turn towards biomorphism, which is where Abstract Expressionists started their journey from.
Some would see these as being referential, like the Brushstrokes by Lichtenstein, as if de Kooning was simply trying to recreate his old glory, but saw himself as going back over his old tracks, so did something cleaner. I can see that argument, but they're wrong. This feels as if de Kooning was finally coming to grips with something: the fact that his works in the 1950s and 60s were about the gesture and not the image they created, and thus, he removed the obvious gesture, tightened down, and gave that composed form he had used in Woman and released himself from it. The result is something far more powerful, and it feels like an artist not looking back so much as an artist re-visiting something he never put out in the first place. There is a lot of talk about de Kooning these days, what with the AbEx shows that are going on all over the place, and particularly about his woman images and the inherent violence in them. I see that in many of them, and even in Woman Standing - Pink, with that slash of vermilion right across her lower abdomen, but I think what he was going for was the grotesque. I think he was always going for the grotesque, but the methodology, and perhaps his own biases towards a slasher-like style of figuration, impart a violent aspect and by choosing woman as his subjects, that becomes a problematic issue. It makes it hard for me to synthesize his works within my own vision of abstract expressionist modality because I can sense something dark lurking behind each picture.
I am not as big a fan of Woman Standing - Pink as I am of the other de Kooning in The Anderson that I'll write about a little today, but I recognize that this is what Abstract Expressionism needed with Pollock and Rothko riding tall - they needed a figurativist to apply the concepts they were working with to bring another view. It works, but today, I find it painful. I love neon as a part of the art world. I love neon as a part of commerce. I live in a tiny mountain town with a ton of neon. I love it. Bruce Nauman's Live Death / Knows Doesn't Know is a wonderful piece (that I did a bit of manipulation on above) that does a lot of work in art and language. The way it flashes gives you only a moment to capture the piece in your eye before it changes, morphs both the meaning and the presentation. That makes it a smart piece, and one that kinda plays really well with Frank Stella's shaped canvases which alter with the angle you view them from, making some things recede and others pop forward, only here it is not your positioning, but the flow of electrons through tubes of colored glass, glowing, excited, calling.
We all remember the moment we fall in love, right? For me and The Anderson, it was here, staring at this piece, a good five minutes after I arrived and made my first fast circuit around the place. This was the piece that got me, the piece that I fell in love with, the piece and made me think about doing this series, writing these pieces, going back again and again and again.
I have a thing for sculptures that use found objects, and more so for things that bring them together in a way that establishes an emotional sensation, which this does in spades. To me, this is a story. A story of disunity, how we are all constructed of bits and pieces, often cast-offs of what we used to be, might have been, wanted to become. We are a disunity of these ideas, these dreams, and when we take that step forward, when we reach for a whole, a cohesion, we are still that muddled whole, that assemblage of pieces disloyal and ill-fitting. But we try. We take that step, just like the Canton woman, and we reach forward. It is likely that once we pull the weight off the back foot and try to take another, we'll still be this inharmonious entity without a singular form, but we will have gone forward, perhaps placed ourselves in a new scenario where our inability to become a single thing is our calling card, our definition, our desired trait. Like maybe an art museum, where these things are celebrated. This piece, the apparent yardarm of a gallows, perhaps, has a violence associated with it. Thus, it makes sense as to where it is located within the display of the Anderson Collection, and that may speak better of its connotations than anything I might have to say.
There is a lot of attention on the women of Abstract Expressionism, with the two major exhibits featuring them. Joan Mitchell has been getting the attention that she has sometimes been denied. The piece at the Anderson of hers is the first I ever saw, but it was the two pieces at the SFMoMA that really moved me. The massive piece that greets you as you enter the AbEx segment (I'm sorry, Approaching American Abstraction: The Fisher Collection) is a wonderful entry into the Abstract Expressionism vein, with the entry being so striking. It's a gorgeous Mitchell, but it is framed by the doorway and makes it perfect!
The other Mitchell, smaller, slightly denser, and the power of this one is in that density. It's not messy, but the sense of control is the kind of control that is far-flung. I love these works! Mary Abstract Expressionism was not killed by Pop Art. In fact, it continued in a fascinating direction, and has bubbled up from time to time into the popular art discourse. Mary Weatherford is one of those Abstract Expressionists who happened to have been born after the deaths of Pollack, Kline, and Ryan. Her work is in the vein of Joan Mitchell, Morris Louis, and the de Koonings, and though this is hte first piece of hers I've witnessed in the flesh, I was incredibly moved by experiencing it. it is a piece that comes to me with an impact of Joan Mitchel's 1970s and 80s work or early Philip Guston abstract pieces, but then there's the neon, a single stripe of neao buzzing blue through teh center, immediately bringing the power of Barnett Newman to the party. In a sense, this is a synthesis of the great Abstract Expressionist work of the 1950s, but using the neon tube seems to push the idea that this is a piece of technology as well, and since neon signage is the way I see the 1950s, it all ties togehter. The fact that this is a piece of 2017 is so impressive.
The Anderson Collection is so smart with this piece. It is placed across from the Frankenthaler, between a Morris Louis, a Robert Motherwell, nest to the alcove where slumbers Lucifer, the Kline, the David Smith, the Gottleib, and the Rothkos. It is set among the Abstract Expressionist master that is seems to be speaking of, or perhaps speaking to, and that makes it a heavy punch. There is a sensuality to Plum, and an impermanence. It is resin and purified beeswax, shaped into a shortened ski, complete with a central position that seems merely waiting for a boot-lock to be installed.
The pigment applied is the point. The bumps and plateaus are settings, housings. The pigment shifts, transistions, invites a search for the brackish zones between greens and reds. It is hung, a trophy, as if it is a victory of the artist over fluid, that the beeswax, with its specific requirements, had been tamed by an artist who not only gave it a permanent form, and to celelbrate her mastery over it, she placed her mark upon it, coloring it to her whim. HAving experienced the Matisse-Diebenkorn exhibit at SFMoMA, I can say I'm a fan. I'm not big into Diebenkorn, though I appreciate him on several levels, and I really tend towards dislike of Matisse, but the combination played so perfectly off one another, and it exposed Diebenkorn in a way that I absolutely appreciated.
The work currently hanging at the Anderson that I have the most love for is Ocean Park #60 and it is a wonderful work. Not a color field painting, though certainly influenced by Motherwell and Rothko, and not a minimalist painting, and it almost feels like a Mondrian painting executed freehand. It is the colors, the marine sensation, the fact I feel as if I am being washed over, that takes me. The Ocean Park paintings in the SFMoMA exhibition are wonderful, and at least somewhat interchangeable, but this one, this one feels different, as if Diebenkorn was working out something. This was a middle work in the long series of Ocean Park paintings, but it not only feels as if it is a part of a fully-formed definition of the series, but it feels as if it is breaking away, giving us something both more and less meaningful to the entirety of the series. The firm geometric encounter is powerful, but it is left with a hazy feeling, and one that made me look deeper into it, to find where the perfection gave way to the sfumato. There is no point, both exist, quantum-entangled, waiting for a viewer to make the decision whether or not the method to Diebenkorn's madness is alive or dead. To me, it is the Ocean Park series that is alive, and the definitions of how Diebenkorn's work that die with this piece, and it does both of them at the same time. |
Your HostChristopher J Garcia - Curator, Fan Writer, Podcaster, and a guy who just loves art. Archives
February 2019
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