art - others

From an exhibition currently up at Michael Rosenfeld gallery, New York. Top to bottom: Ruth Asawa (electoplated copper wire), Claire Falkenstein (copper and glass), Ibram Lassaw (bronze over galvanized wire). All works from the 1950s/60s; more details at the link. This art still interests for its contradictions: the Abstract Expressionist mythos stressed immediacy and being in the moment, yet to make these chaotic drawings in space required the time and craft of fabricating a permanent object. It's not just frozen chaos but patiently made chaos. All suggest an emerging crystalline order (or flocculent in the case of Falkenstein) in a field of energy. The Lassaw announces its geometry the most blatantly but the horizontal and vertical "universals" quiver unsteadily as if they are about to melt back into the void. Making it have four legs so it could sit on a tabletop might still need to be rethought--Lassaw belongs in the "dated but interesting" category.

collage made in MSPaint; late Picabia reproduction found on the Internet

Top: Dan Colen; Bottom: Adam McEwen

From an interview with Ella Searls, curator at the Kunstverein Schmulke, Cologne: "Of course it is possible to critique the differences between two artists making 'all-over' paintings with dried-out wads of masticated commercial chewing gum. Colen is a young New Yorker with 'street cred' who uses gum chewed by his friends in a kind of debased ritual of eating and sharing. McEwen is very British, very conceptualist, and pays people to chew the gum in a planned performative methodology. One senses the energy and urgency in Colen's placement of the gum on canvas, it's more risk taking. 'Just get it down,' he seems to be saying. Whereas McEwen is circumspect, slow, cautious, almost another Seurat considering the positioning of each wad by color and texture in the larger matrix. One would be tempted to call them the 'Picasso and Braque of gum,' but of course they are in separate worlds, communicating their intentions almost telepathically rather than through shared studio visits. In any case their gum works are important statements, addressing themes of the abject, the loss of the tactile, and the relationship of art to its immediate environment."