art - others

Diana Kingsley, Blue Ribbon, 2005, 42" x 40", lambda print

The artwork above, by Diana Kingsley, was recently removed from a curated show in a building at 55 5th Avenue in NYC (at 13th Street). The property is owned by arts patron Francis Greenburger, founder of Art Omi, an artist's colony in upstate New York. Greenburger employs a full time curator, Elisabeth Akkerman, to install art in buildings he owns around the city and country. And not just install--the above work appeared in a two person exhibition called "Blue Ribbon," which is the name of Kingsley's piece--clearly her work was an important element in the show. The other artist, Kate Gilmore, shows with Smith-Stewart gallery; Kingsley is a Bellwether alum who has been showing at Leo Castelli.

Why was the work removed? Besides housing the headquarters of Greenburger's company, Time Equities, Inc., the building on 5th has a medical office where women come to get mammograms. According to Kingsley, the curator told her that a complaint had been made because someone felt it was inappropriate to see full breasts on display--in a sweater!--in a place where women were possibly getting bad news about cancer.

That's it. That's all it takes, and the artwork is gone. This wryly humorous and rather gorgeous image, with an awkwardly placed brooch mirroring a cheesy floral award in a play of irrational, cantilevered symmetry, will not be seen. And an arts patron does nothing to stop the suppression.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if it was actually men who were disturbed by the image and the traumatized cancer screeners just a politically correct excuse to get rid of it. Corporate lobbies are dull unsexed places and this decorum is ironclad.

Splashy spontaneity vies with nerdy control (e.g., outlining splashes) in these large-ish paintings--the untitled one above is 76 x 84 inches. The graffiti influence isn't on the surface of the work but in its guts. At times the paintings appear to be the product of group activity--this decentered, authorless quality isn't a flaw but what gives the art its poMo frisson. The air of total random street accident is hard to achieve, and the work vacillates between sense and meaninglessness in a good way. Every inch of every canvas receives some surface consideration--it might be good to see some spaces where absolutely nothing is happening. Exhibition details at ArtCal. Through October 20.

Albert Oehlen, Song X, 2004, courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Albert Oehlen, from Google Images--title, dimensions, date unknown

from artnet report on 2005 Miami art fairs (a 2003 Oehlen painting)

Among the German neo-Dada, neo-Expressionist style artists still looming large over the art world, Oehlen showed the greatest commitment to incorporating the computer into his art, with cheesy spray-on fill patterns mingling with AbEx brushwork (middle image above) and egregious photoshop collages (top image, with Lawnmower Man-like virtual noodling in place of fill patterns). Egregious in a good way--his irony and skepticism about this brave new medium always came through. In his last few New York shows he seems to have backed off the "cyber" influence in favor of mushy expressionism (bottom image). I hope this isn't because of collector conservatism keeping "pure painting" on life support. Possibly Oehlen continues to show work in Europe that reflects the warped world we actually live in.

Georg Herold, "compu.comp.virtual visualities.equivacs.bitmapdyes"
September 10, 1998 - October 31, 1998
Brooke Alexander Editions
59 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012

I reviewed this show for Artforum and always thought it defined an excellent midpoint between slightly insouciant gallery art and slightly insouciant computer art. Wooden pixels twisting and turning in space. Color picker dialogues as paintings. Mirrors as screens. Handsome and clunky--what's not to love? This was during Herold's "down" period between Luhring and Petzel but a few people were paying attention. It was much-reviewed and is some of his best work, I think. (Brooke Alexander has the exhibition title wrong on its web page, making the cyber doggerel even worse: "virtual visualities *bitmat dye *equivac")

Here's what my review said in part:

...Stripes of concentrated watercolor on large sheets of photographic paper recalled the palettes of digital tool bars (or their low-tech cousins, paint samples from Home Depot), and strings of suspended wood blocks floating a foot in front of the wall made erratic, looping arcs, like a novice's pixelated MacPaint scribbles gone three-dimensional.

These trappings of digital display remind us that the Internet, touted as a hypermodern realm of infinite freedom, is ultimately linked to the individual user through a set of graphic conventions as regimented as a Skinner box and as dated as a game of Space Invaders. [...]

This was just as the dot com (or dot comp) era was getting good and revved up. The exhibition photos look very "today" to me.