Re-Examining The New Art Examiner Symposium at Northern Illinois University on January 28, 2012 with Panelists Derek Guthrie, Josh Kind, Buzz Spector, Richard Siegesmund, Janet Koplos, Paul Krainak, Alice Thorson, Lynne Warren, Michael Bulka, Jennie Klein, and Susan Snodgrass.

The New Art Examiner was born out of censorship. ~ Derek Guthrie

As long as you don’t have a vetting process it’s hard to have credible critics. ~ Michael Bulka

You get what you pay for. You need an editorial framework so that you have some kind of entity that has a mission. ~ Alice Thorson

This much anticipated seminar at Northern Illinois University went far in amending the absence of provocative and historically informed voices about the New Art Examiner (NAE) that were not present at the School of the Art Institute’s art criticism panel on November 22, 2011. I begin with a rich exchange between Derek Guthrie, co-founder of the NAE, and several panelists on the critical subject of patronage in the arts.

Derek Guthrie: The elephant in the room is very simple. What are the strings attached to patronage? I don’t care whether it’s an industrialist, The National Endowment for the Arts under Democrats or Republicans, collectors, or academia. They are all systems of patronage and they are called reward systems. We have spoken about the NAE and its different evolutions and it is quite clear (and it delights me very much) that was started a long time ago under different editors. Somehow certain aspects of a certain kind of thinking repeated itself from generation to generation- with variations. The Examiner came from community. The Examiner was forced to live in community. This seminar, by serendipity and accident, has been a revival of community. I’m not going to make a definition of what community is or isn’t, but I’m old and I know what cultural fashion is. All generations start inside the fashion of their time….the issue of originality is absorbing the fashion and then getting out from under it, because if not then you die with the fashion of the time….New York stole the idea of the avant-garde from Paris. I happen to know what Paris was like. I’m lucky. The point is that the Americanization of the avant-guard is the cultural context which the avant-garde was shoehorned into. It is quite clear at this moment in time, for whatever reason you like, that it [the avant-garde] has waned and its dynamic is gone. So when I look back at art, I look back to between WWI and WWII- [Europe was] devastated, bombed to hell. Millions of people were on the street and angry. Guess what? It produced all the art and we still value it. So all I want to say is this…I think we have lost language. I think we don’t know how to address issues any more. I think it’s a cultural problem…I think this is our moment in time. I also think it might be a great moment…that the nature of modern art came out of a time when it was like this…we are exactly coping with the same kind of weird space and weird individualism that we happen to be living under. It [the NAE] could happen again. It’s very simple. You need 8 pages, you need an editor, you need a few writers, you need a few articles, and you publish – beginning and end of story. What’s more it would be easy because we got a brand name that everybody likes.

Jennie Klein: The NAE had the ability to recognize the cultural conditions and was somehow able to move above them, and that’s why the magazine was important and continues to be so.

Derek Guthrie: We never fell into the crap of being rewarded because nobody gave us a reward. James Elkins who is the chairman of a very important department of the SAIC published a very important book called “Whatever Happened to Art Criticism”, and this is a very good book and I like it…we all know what he reported on. That’s not the issue. It’s a cultural issue…the NAE, with little or no support and with great hostility [against it] came out of Chicago and James Elkins sits on the throne of Chicago culture. Why could he not recognize the phenomenon that we are all around here to say? – because we made art criticism and he did not acknowledge it.

Richard Siegesmund: What we have [today] is criticism that works within the academy. There is dialogue about establishing community. Those are two different things. Those are both called criticism. We get them switched back and forth all the time. Part of my own vibration in terms of art education …is that we don’t talk about the kind of art theory that James Elkins in talking about. We try to engage dialogue with students in order to create community in a kind of democratic space. The Examiner was clearly about that – the John Deweyan community aspect. That’s why the National Endowment for the Arts excluded [the NAE from funding] – it was ‘reporting’, it wasn’t ‘theorizing.”

Jennie Klein: [Compared with the UK] the academic system here in the US is flawed. It’s also very tied to tenure, which makes Elkins a big deal. He’s published a lot with respectable publishing houses whereas many of the Examiner writers were not big deals in the same sense that Elkins is.

Richard Siegesmund: There is the problem of editorship…with analysis. There is a problem of who is getting written about and why. We are in an age when the motives of institutions are questionable. I am enough of an insider of the art world that I saw some heavy duty sausage being made – with a lot of critical cover put over it so you don’t see the sausage making…its’ happened in the international biennale marketplaces.

Starting from the beginning of the discussion it was clear that the presence of Derek Guthrie and his perceptions on the heady spirit in which the NAE was born was the centerpiece of the seminar. The panelists consisted of former writers and editors brought many meaningful – sometime contentious – experiences and philosophies to the debate, plotting out how the discernable changes in the NAE’s content was based on who was editor at that time. Much discussion centered on how contention between the NAE and institutions of power in the art world – particularly the Chicago art world – developed and why.

Barbara Jaffee, Associate Professor of Art History at NIU, began with a brief summation of the importance the NAE assumed in the history of art criticism – a useful overview that was printed in a catalogue produced for the seminar – The New Art Examiner: Chicago’s “Independent Voice of the Visual Arts” 1973 – 2002. She opened by quoting the magazine’s original statement of purpose “by promising – and delivering – an often sharp-edged critique of…”

“The definition and transmission of culture in our society: the decision making process within museums and schools and agencies which determine the manner in which culture shall be transmitted; the value systems which presently influence the making of art as well as its study in exhibitions and books: and, in particular, the interaction of these factors with the visual art milieu…”

The catalogue outlined the NAE’s most potent years “Without Fear or Favor” 1973 – 79, followed by “Redefining Regionalism 1980 – 1992” and finally “Down and (eventually) Out 1993- 2002”, tracing its trajectory as a muckraking and art critical hub for a restless and energetic arts community to it’s final demise. Jaffe contrasted the NAE’s high quality editorship at its beginning from the editing in its declining years.

The intricate politics do not begin to account for the magazine’s true significance….where once the magazine had set its sights on making visible the hidden operations of institutional power, it was now equal parts poetry and politics…at it’s most principled such critical theorizing may seem like nihilism.

Following Jaffee Kathryn Born, founder of the online Chicago Art Magazine and co-editor of the newly published book The Essential New Art Examiner discussed her meeting with Derek Guthrie several years ago. “It was this fighting spirit that I found Derek and I had in common.” She saw the role of the rebel who rejects popular opinion as important. “Keep an eye out for disloyalty ….the person who seems unpopular has managed to tick off everybody and that just might be an excellent sign.” Co-editor Terri Griffith discussed the publication’s boisterous muckraking verve which died in its later years. “The NAE started out as a newspaper for artists and ended as an art criticism journal.”

On the first panel Derek Guthrie was joined on by Professor Josh Kind, a former contributing editor to the NAE, and artist Buzz Spector who is presently the art department dean at the St. Louis based Washington University. Guthrie described how the NAE came into being when he and his wife, NAE co-founder Jane Addams Allen, were dropped from writing for the Chicago Tribune and how a commissioned article was killed from being published in Art News. Regarding this cause and effect he mentioned “I heard through the grapevine that a letter writing campaign was organized by the MCA….thus the NAE was born out of censorship.” The essence of the magazine was the result of the chemistry between the two. For Jane that included the belief in the philosophy of her famous aunt Jane Addams. “Jane Addams made Hull House available to everyone, even Communists and Anarchists, for the simple reason that she believed what was quintessentially American was the constitution, and that was the right to free speech.” He described how the NAE came out of the 50’s and 60’s generation – a time filled with change, movements, and social dynamism.

We never hired a single person to write a review about an institution that they had an affiliation with. We didn’t care if someone wrote a good [positive] or bad [negative] review. I think the NAE gained a certain strength because it did that….We always assigned a review to what we knew to be the exact opposite of that person’s taste, and guess what? 9 times out of 10 that was the better review.

Spector mentioned that when he started working for the NAE he felt torn between careerist conformity and the desire to speak truth to power. The office at the NAE was

…the most striking culture of discourse and argument that I was ever privileged to participate in… the drug of choice was argument. As acerbic and sharp and incisive as some of the writing published for the magazine was, the arguments in the office were even better…it was an ethical training ground. We were constantly pushing back the notion we should be comfortable with what we wrote. It was about connecting of that personal experience…to a set of social, political and environmental circumstances. In this way the NAE was truly ahead of its time…. [it] was never corrupt, occasionally self-pitying but never corrupt. Corruption in this context means being comfortable with power.

Josh Kind spoke briefly on his regular writing of the column Thick Tongue published in the magazine’s beginning years. It was “an antidote to the engagement of unconscious pretense. Thick Tongue was always about shooting that down.“ He also mentioned his passion as a teacher and how important it was for his students to form a community to talk about their work after graduating. The NAE served a concrete purpose with its art audience. “The public needs the translation of art into another dimension – that language brings people closer to their feeling for art.”

Guthrie continued with his salvo on the decadence of current conditions in the mainstream.

To talk about art and not talk about the context of the larger world and the politics within which artists are creating is cheating the entire community….the publishers today cater to blue chip galleries and selling ads that do not want to alienate anyone. But for good publishing to survive it’s going to need sincere readership – people who enjoy content.

When discussion turned to the relevance of reviving the NAE today Guthrie replied, “Of course it is. Why not? It should happen. There’s no where for critics to go” and mentioned SAIC professor James Elkin’s book Whatever Happened to Art Criticism? which describes much about the source of this crisis.

A question was raised regarding the objection to the Essential New Art Examiner’s co – dedication to Kathryn Hixson, the editor who oversaw the period when specific changes in the quality of the magazine’s critical content occurred and who was active at its demise in 2002. Guthrie responded

I cannot sign off on censorship.…Kathryn was an academic. She wanted a full time position [at SAIC]. She had her passions…She was sincere and I have no problem with sincerity…the NAE got institutionalized inside of academia and academia will impose ways of doing things. The larger issue is what is the effect of academia on art? I would argue that if you take a population of artists there is a whole game that is not being talked about. Look at the history of Circle Campus. Look at the history of the Art Institute. Look at who does get and do not get teaching jobs…[it’s about] patronage, content, in other words a rewards system. Who is giving the rewards and what are the rewards for? Who do they and do they not give them to because they do not conform to the game that certain people are playing?

The moderator for the second panel, Richard Siegesmund, focused on the NAE’s years from 1980 – 92. He is Associate Professor of art education at NIU and was deeply influenced as a writer by Jane Addams Allen when he worked in the NAE’s Washington office. Panelist Janet Koplos, a long time writer for many art magazines including the NAE, described her primary focus on craft, and how this had been sidelined by the mainstream art world. “Craft is an underdog field.” She spoke about how Derek and Jane embraced craft as an important subject of art that deserved deeper focus and contrasted her writing against formalist and deconstructionist writing approaches. Siegesmund replied “at the time [Greenberg] wrote craft was not part of the orthodoxy…the NAE was open to challenging that error.” MCA Curator Lynne Warren mentioned, “It wasn’t as much a craft and fine art dichotomy as much as it was [about] materiality” to which Koplos responded “Skill is still an issue though…perhaps that’s the stigma.” Paul Krainak added that Chicago had been more associated with “the history of object making rather than the production of theory.” As a student of Josh Kind he recalled the necessity to

take responsibility for the contextualization of your generation’s work…the rise of alternative spaces [Artemisia, Name Gallery] and the NAE happened at about the same time. They nurtured each other – made each other vigorous and healthy. Chicago was considered a healthy place to begin a career – you could get your ideas out.

Siegesmund talked about the importance of government programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, before the money dried up under the Reagan Administration

[they] kicked the slits out from under the visual arts program and the NAE. But there was a moment of what I would call almost an experiment with European cultural thinking in this country….[government] was able to put up the bucks to support something like NAME Gallery. There was this moment of possibility created by government support of the arts which we had not seen since 1900 or so.

He also added that because of the fragility of funding to these alternative spaces “to actually give a critical analysis [of the art] was perceived as hurtful to the organization.”

A relevant quote from Barbara Jaffe’s catalogue – by Maureen Sherlock – explained how the culture wars of the 1980’s and subsequent funding loss led to the end of an era

The decision of the Reagan administration to both privatize support for the arts and the insistence that all institutions receiving public support follow standard business practices…[was] the death knell for more spontaneous responses to issues of the day [and] led to a vast system of both internal and external censorship.

Lynn Warren had written an article for the NAE on alternative spaces, but added that she was predominately “on the other side of the fence” working as a curator for the MCA. There was “perceived and maybe outright hostility between these two institutions from time to time.” She read an article from the NAE that described how both the MCA and Art Institute stores refused to carry the NAE because of its negative press. Warren mentioned that “throughout the 70’s the NAE wrote little or nothing about shows happening at the MCA.” Koplos responded that criticism in America is used as a form of PR and “Derek and Jane did not practice that…the expectations were that the dialogue would not be ‘respectful.’” Krainak added how in the past students took the responsibility for the discourse around their work but now you “get a curator to do it for you” and how the National Endowment for the Arts defunded the NAE because it deemed it’s writers were unqualified. They weren’t “theorizing in the way that was expected of the art world.”

An audience member asked if the visual arts in Chicago are being hampered because there is no publication that has replaced the NAE’s function. Warren mentioned there are lots of art blogs with greater access but more fragmentation “no one can get through everything out there.” Siegesmund replied

One thing the Internet does not have are editors. The Internet does not have librarians. The role of those very contentious [NAE] editorial board meetings …as much as they were wide open and their wasn’t censorship…is there were still standards of editorial guidance.

Alice Thorson, a former editor of the NAE and arts columnist for the Washington Times described how she was struck by Guthrie’s editorship. “What Derek did …was to really hold the art world’s feet to the fire in terms of letting everybody in.” This included embracing Feminism, lobbying on their behalf, writing about African American artists, and covering the crafts.

A question was raised about how critical dialogue and dialectic that engages an art audience has died and has been replaced by impenetrable theoretical discourse – was this the reason why the NAE lost its critical focus in its final years? Krainak recalls “how focused criticism was out of grad school in the late 70’s.” Art had much more clearly defined boundaries, whereas “what the art object is [today] has changed dramatically” which creates the problem of focus and generating a dialectic around it. Barbara Jaffe added that The NAE “flew in the face of theorizing” by focusing on the art object itself which theorizing did not do. “There is a tension there.“

The final panel began with writer Susan Snodgrass who described her early aspirations as a political reporter in Washington D.C. and switched to art writing for the NAE in the 80’s. “I was very happy to be working in what I saw as real true journalism.” Michael Bulka, who wrote regular columns for the NAE loved the “Raging arguments” his opinion created and missed “the passion that was generated on those pages – I would live for someone complaining about something I wrote. I would say stuff just so people would come after me.”

Siegesmund added “the Examiner let you address issues of community” rather than objects. Bulka replied “It’s not about objects anymore, its all about the delivery system – economics, sociology, politics – they will never be bringing in the weirdoes.” Jennie Klein, associate professor at Ohio University, wrote for the NAE in the 1993 – 2002 period when Structuralist theory was on the ascendancy. She expressed strong interests in Feminist and performance art and “the de-materialism of the art world” citing influence from writers like Doulas Crimp and Roland Barthes. Bulka raised his objections to this kind of writing. “I really hated the poststructuralist theory.” Siegesmund responded

Since Hegel and Marx we have been theorizing about art and we have an American exception to that – John Dewey and American Pragmatism – looking at art through experience and perceptions without theory. Dewey began in Chicago and was friends with Jane Addams. I see an element of Pragmatism in the way the Examiner started, and I think there is a case to be made that what happened in the 1990’s was the collision of American Pragmatism with European Continental Theory and we have still not sorted our way out of that collision yet.

A question was asked – how do we find an ideal forum for art criticism today? Michael Bulka replied “Part of the problem is editors are really important… [in the blogosphere] any monkey can have access. With the Examiner the writer needs to be vetted by an editor. As long as you don’t have that vetting process it’s hard to have credible critics.”

Jennie Klein mentioned “most of us were too young to have participated [at the NAE] in those halcyon days of the mid to late 70’s. We are going through a very strange period in American art history, very reactionary. I wonder if we will ever get back to such a great period for the arts.” Alice Thorson criticized the support for blogs as a substitute for art criticism “Do you get paid for that? You get what you pay for. You need an editorial framework so that you have some kind of entity that has a mission.”

Many of the audience questions did express that we need a new critical consciousness and the vitality of the NAE in our public sphere. During the last set of panelists it was rather chilling to hear one of the audience members ask what is the alternative to our current art writing options– descriptive journalism for commercial media or unvetted blogs. The panel gave no answer. This silence couldn’t help me from thinking the degree to which the ability to even imagine alternatives or resistance to the present systems has disappeared from the consciousness of the professionals in charge of the art world. Current BFA’s and MFA’s graduated from conceptual and theory oriented art programs like to wear the avant-garde badge – but isn’t this in fact disguising what is actually a rear-garde market servility, cynicism and apathy? As Guthrie mentioned, that avant-garde vitality has waned. The more that art writing media and institutions are incapable of supporting real critical consciousness the more that change will only be possible from the margins outside of power. Sound familiar? I will end with a quote from a recent January 2012 issue of Art in America article by Erin Sickler entitled Art and the 99%.

One error was abandoning our former resistance, our dedication to humane alternatives, and caving in completely to the market-only syndrome…once radical-institutions have seen their missions diluted by the corporate values of their funding institutions. Government cuts, which we have failed to stop, have allowed corporations and wealthy patrons to grow increasingly dominant in the culture sphere.

There will be a continuation of this seminar with a panel discussion aimed at opening up debate about problems in the contemporary art world, the revival of critical discourse and the NAE. It will be happening on April 15th 2012 from 1 – 5 pm at the Evanston Art Center 2603 Sheridan road (847) 475-5300. It is free and open to the public and panelists will include Derek Guthrie, Diane Thodos, Annie Markovich, Keith Brown EAC Director of Education, and SAIC professor Andrew Falkowski among many others to be confirmed in time. Hope to see you there!

Derek Guthrie

Derek Guthrie, Josh Kind and Buzz Spector

Richard Siegesmund

Lynne Warren

Paul Krainak

Buzz Spector

Michael Bulka

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Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in 2009 and is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

The current traveling exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series offers a unique opportunity for viewers to participate in the artist’s grand achievement as negotiators – and re-negotiators – of visual dynamics and material effect.

“The painting is the story that is presently searching itself out.” – Jennifer Meanley¹

“I am amazed that some people can be so lacking in anxiety as to imagine that they have grasped the truth of their art on the first try.” – Matisse²

It is not often one gets to see a significant portion of a major artist’s oeuvre in one place at one time. We are used to knowing the canon of art history via the mediation of reproductions – such as they are – and often spend decades only imagining what the surfaces and colors actually look like. Taking cues from the few works we get to see, we extrapolate and do our best to apply what little direct knowledge we have to the pictures in glossy catalogs or musty old monographs, never really knowing how limited our grasp of the work might be.

So it is that artists and lovers of art value traveling to see great works of art in person. We make the Louvre, the Prado, and the Uffizi points of pilgrimage. We do our best to be with the works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, to test out the feel of Rothko and El Anatsui, to walk along Goldsworthy’s wall or Smithson’s jetty. We solemnly venture into the interior space of Chartres or the resonant words of Elizabeth Bishop. These real-world experiences prove the truth of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura”³ of artworks, and they raise our visual IQs as we experience art in as direct a way as possible.

Having the opportunity to see a great number of Richard Diebenkorn’s iconic Ocean Park Series paintings together in exhibition has been something I have looked forward to for many years. My initial exposure to Diebenkorn’s art was through images of the Ocean Park works during the first few days of my undergraduate art school experience. In many ways these reproductions – and my subsequent reading about the works and artist – calibrated my entire perspective on painting in particular and art in general.

Over the years I have taken every opportunity to see Diebenkorn’s paintings in person. Given my placement in the Midwest, most of my repeated visits have been in that region: in Cincinnati, Chicago, Des Moines, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. But these examples left something to be desired. In Des Moines, Ocean Park #70⁴ was hung devastatingly close to an untitled Anselm Kiefer – the German master’s massive work was a stentorian presence that muffled the light and line of Diebenkorn’s piece. At the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Diebenkorn’s Interior with a Book⁵ is cracked and dimly lit. Other viewings suffered similar fates.

Thus more often than I would like to admit I have been disappointed rather than excited by my encounters with Richard Diebenkorn’s actual work. None of the paintings I had seen seemed as powerful as I had expected or hoped; they had been situated in the midst of other artists’ works, without enough breathing space in art fairs, or otherwise depraved of sufficient context of their own. Was I responding to some quality apparent in the reproductions but absent in the actual works? Was I merely uninformed, my assumptions tailored to expectations that the paintings could never meet? Was my sense that it was the cluttered museum context that failed them rather than some problem with the works themselves just wishful thinking?

Thankfully, this was not the case. The fourteen years I spent reading all I could find and tracking down what was available to see near me did not prepare me for the majesty of a whole space given over to the proper presentation of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings. The first iteration of Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, laid any lingering fear aside and cemented for me the power of Diebenkorn’s mature vision as embodied in the series. Fort Worth gave the works both dignified space and illuminating sequence, offering broad, expansive views and the opportunity to sense the deep connections and synergies that exist within this astounding body of work. In this setting where the paintings could breathe and sing in concert, I was able to more keenly perceive the underlying structure and deep-seated provisionality that operates in the Ocean Park Series.

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That word, provisionality, is perhaps the most particular and necessary one that I will use in my further discourse on the work in this traveling exhibition. There has been much discussion about “provisional painting” of late, stimulated by Raphael Rubinstein’s May 2009 Art in America article identifying practitioners of this mode of painting – artists such as Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, and Mary Heilmann. Rubinstein describes provisional painting as “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-canceling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.”⁶

Sharon Butler, a painter, writer, and professor at Eastern Connecticut University, expanded on “the centrality of the open proposition in contemporary abstraction”⁷ in a 2011 article for The Brooklyn Rail. Butler talks about this approach to painting as “a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness” and “subversion of closure” that exists within “multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right.” Artists working in this vein, Butler suggests, “cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure.”⁸

Butler’s and Rubenstein’s exploration of provisional or “casualist” painting today could be interpreted as an indictment rather than a celebration, yet it seems to me that they are on to something. I submit that there was provisional painting before its current practitioners surfaced, and it found its varying degrees of unfinished tentativeness through a negotiation of “rightness”⁹ rather than an acceptance of “the not quite right.” I believe that we see this in the work of artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Edvard Munch, as well as in the impulses of the Vorticists, the Fauves, and even the Impressionists. It goes without saying that Cubism participated in – even paved new avenues to – this arena. Making artworks through the calibration of a feeling of rightness beyond the expression of perceptual or conceptual truth – indeed, the denial of these things as entirely definable ends – is at the root of a provisional approach. This proclivity is distinctly evidenced in the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

To be sure, Diebenkorn’s methods and aims were far removed from those of the artists currently carrying the mantle of provisional painting. It seems to me that the artist inhabited a middle ground between the heroics of the abstract expressionists and what too often feels like the deadpan ennui of contemporary provisionalists. His mode and facture brought the flittering tenuousness of choice and perception to center stage and offered a vision of seeing and making that continued to move pictorial logic away from an if/then proposition to a both/and one. In the following paragraphs I will explore what I identify as Diebenkorn’s penchant for provisional action and show how it stimulates a provisionality of vision in his audience.

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Diebenkorn encoded provisionality in his work not via a “casual, dashed off” quality – though spontaneity and “commitment to improvisation”¹⁰ were key to his process – but by embracing uncertainty and tentativeness within an overarching compositional format. His working method was comprised of questioning choices and negotiating varied factures within a particular compositional schema: a “definition and re-definition of the relationship of line and tonal field.”¹¹ His work became a ceaseless reappraisal of the rightness of the constellation of visual dynamics in effect at any particular time within the work at hand.

Unlike the provisionalists of today, Diebenkorn was deeply concerned with the aforementioned rightness as well as with a necessary openness of potential action. His notion of rightness seems to have been related to a modernist sense of compositional balance and a feeling of effective effort toward that end through material and its application. In all of this Diebenkorn pursues his rightness while recognizing that it is not a specific, definite end. Therefore the openness he sought could be described as a desire to maintain the potential for each choice – whether of the artist in making or the viewer in looking – to have true over-all effect and discernable affect. These two seemingly opposed ends are set together, providing an arena for possibilities to begin or end, to coalesce or dissipate. Though we recognize that, in a very real sense, the works are forever locked in stasis since they can no longer physically change under the artist’s hands, we see that they can shift and modulate under the eyes of viewers.

This is exactly what they do. Diebenkorn’s paintings invite us to collaborate with – and second-guess – his choices in an active yet elusive viewing of the potential of the works to be what they are, or to become what they might be. The viewer participates in working out the rightness of the image and in so doing critiques its success. The Ocean Park Series is an investigation into the prospective and shifting nature of both painting and vision itself.

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To get a clear view of Diebenkorn’s connection with provisionality one must think about the sense of compositional balance exemplified in the Ocean Park Series. It is a balance that is hard-won yet still teetering on the edge of disarray. Though the works are in some ways locked, they flicker and undulate; these are compositions that don’t always feel as if rightness was absolutely achieved. When I initially encountered the series in books I was not aware that Diebenkorn was seeking that sense of rightness so often considered as his chief aim. I felt that the works exhibited a rather unbalanced, clunky sort of tension among their various parts. Years later, I still hold this view, but only as they read in reproduction, not as they appear in person.

Consider Ocean Park #38.¹² On the printed page or pulled from the web, this work presents an almost unbearably fast, tilted read; our eyes shoot to the top left, swiftly running over the sharpness of the interwoven diagonals there. These dark forms contrast with the rest of the image, their “V” shape and separation from the rest of the work standing out with iconographic strength. The painting is unbalanced and top-heavy.

In person the effect is dramatically reversed. Surface, color, line, and application become supercharged with multivalent weight and effect. The lower mass of light-infused color rises up slowly, monolithically, to countermand the angular insistence of the upper edges of the painting. The combined physical reality of the works – the symbiotic nature of their formal, material, and chromatic characteristics – is absolutely necessary to the true experience they stimulate. They are not balanced in a straight compositional sense at all; they are instead balanced via the interdependent visual effects that they initiate and propagate. We do not read these works directly by receiving all of their parts at once. Instead we wade through the indirect information they provide and must circle back for second, third, and fourth viewings to accumulate a semblance of the full experience.

Diebenkorn worked to orchestrate and manipulate the layered, syncopated reading of his paintings by making his various strategies, attempts and dead-ends the direct means by which we, the viewers, open them up. He enlivened the surface with arenas that take diverse levels of effort to move through, that require different visual solutions to understand. Yet these compositional forces and the quality of balance they achieve are illegible in reproductions of the works. They are, in a sense, unavailable to the eye in reproduction because it is the action of the eye playing over the actual surface that constructs – or rather works to reconstruct – the quality of rightness Diebenkorn sought. Our eyes alternate in stalling or speeding through the scintillating fields of line and hue, pausing in certain locations only to find another form, element, or color effect coalescing into importance before us. John Elderfield saw this effect in how the equally essential figure and ground aspects of Diebenkorn’s paintings so often seem to “fluctuate and interchange in importance… the surface vibrates like a translucent skin as if the space it encloses is the full and living space within the body.”¹³ The works flatten and bloom, are at once deep iridescent seas and impenetrably dense walls. They are simultaneously snapped to the bare grid and densely interwoven in layers. They are both “aperture and field.”¹⁴

Indeed, colors and shapes may flicker into resolution after sustained viewings; structures float up while others – previously more apparent – seem to drop away. This is a major aspect of reading the paintings and of perceiving the movement and weight they possess. The pieces play on the ability of our eyes to capture latent images and sustain them while interpreting subsequent visual sensations. There is a kind of planar phase transition in these works, something that rests on the dual nature of our eyes: ceaselessly motile yet able to retain aspects of what has been seen.

Thus the formalism at work in Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series seems directly connected to vision itself. It is in our activity of perceiving his work that the provisional nature of Diebenkorn’s painting has its power. The lines push us out or lock us in. Analogous angles sync up, seeming to define particular shapes, only to dissipate upon a second glance. An area of color that one once read as flat may instantly project out dimensionally and stimulate a sense of vertiginous parallax. The glacial movements of color fields counteract the speed of linear diagonals; they seem both dense and weightless. Edges where two colors meet may simultaneously indicate low spatial relief and mere tonal variation along a level plane. Open areas take on strength as they hold large swaths of canvas against the complexity and tension of the smaller, more active, geometric, or hue-charged areas. The artist’s famous pentimenti stall the route of one’s eyes and trap them into recursive delays amid muted apparitions of texture and shape.

These pentimenti are more visible and more powerful, and their importance all the more apparent, when one takes in a large swath of the Ocean Park works at once. Their functions in the paintings, how their varying uses may shift from cursory notation to indication of procedural reassessment to stabilizing post-and-lintel, are as central as color or composition to these works. They mediate the sense of scale, compositional tensions, and veils of light in the paintings. They pop in and out, never entirely giving away their reasons for being, yet always pressuring the eye to redefine its route over the visual field. There is so much going on in these paintings that has been perfunctorily obliterated yet remains incontrovertibly present. Diebenkorn said that it was “a great relief to obliterate,”¹⁵ yet these obliterations are less complete erasure and more obfuscation and tinkering. As Robert Buck observed 35 years ago, our experience of Diebenkorn’s “facture is purposefully and prominently retained in the works” allowing us to follow along with “the artist whether the method was finally acceptable to him or not.”¹⁶ The tentativeness of this reappraisal and reconstruction is signaled in the nature of what is left behind on the surface for viewers to excavate.

There are many layers to dig through, as each chromatic sheet, each ruled line, and each dashed-in brush mark has its own nature and particular effect on the overall work. What yellow may do in an interlocking diagonal group or as a swift line is entirely different when it is given over to the service of light-infused planes. A color that neatly subsumes into an area of analogous hue may violently react when, only a few feet away, it intersects with some seemingly innocuous middle tone. Any location in a work seems at the very least binary in nature, taking on a kind of duality: speed and stillness, position and vector, passivity and forcefulness. With Diebenkorn, almost any element can embody seemingly opposing states. In some sense it depends on the facture – how he put the marks down – but it can also be based simply upon the interdependency and indeterminacy of the formal relationships he created. In Ocean Park formal properties play on the provisionality of the audience’s subjective apprehension of the artist’s pursuit of his own rightness. He said as much when he told Gerald Nordland in 1976, “one’s sense of rightness involves absolutely the whole person and hopefully others.”¹⁷

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It is not only that Diebenkorn has constructed a dynamic visual maze for us; it is also that he built temporality into the effort we must expend to perceive the works. This is something we can readily understand – we recognize that the “V” shape in the upper left of #38 is “fast” to our perception. But do we sense the dozen other speeds that he has embedded within the work? What may in a small-scale illustration be read immediately and totally becomes a much harder prospect at full scale, and a much richer one.

The time it takes for us to read certain constellations of elements is a condition of the scale of these works, and it is not accidental. Most of the Ocean Park Series is human scale and their size – many of them are 100 by 81 inches – obviously forces a viewer to calibrate his or her bodily relationship to the work. Because of this the viewer must move to take in the tableau, tracking across a surface that will not allow for smooth, easy travel. Thus the amount of time necessary to physically move around the work – something done not only with the eyes, but also with the head and whole body – varies and is full of starts and stops. Any cohesive structure becomes a pivot point; a firm place from which to read/re-read the work, a place of calibration for the next interpretation. The material information on the surface of the work and the interactions of colors and shapes will, by turns, dictate or suggest different speeds of sighting and different levels of attention, alternating types of focus. All of this maneuvering takes time, both physically and mentally. That temporal aspect in the experience of the works adds weight to the negotiation of the different areas and, as we find more to excavate, more to challenge, we sense that the amount of time we have spent in certain areas adds compositional weight to them; their balance is not based on strictly formal principles.

This temporal quality in the works extends deeply into their making, clouding our ability to grasp clearly the process by which they were made. That is, their surfaces are inscrutable in terms of the order or sequence of their creation. One cannot emphatically state when one layer was placed down in regard to other layers; each layer seems sequentially multivalent. As a matter of course we dissect a work of art as we view it, considering this area part of the under-painting and that element a detail added toward the end. This aids in our processing of the work and enlivens the temporality of the work. Yet when Diebenkorn created each element is a variable unknown to the viewer, so what one may think is on top may suddenly appear distinctly embedded, and vise versa. The order of the layering may be chaotic or simply non-linear, yet we perceive it as an amalgamated whole and only through extended viewing can we try out different potential orderings or viewing strategies. This factor adds to the provisionality of our reading, since any determination we make may pressurize other layers and elements, causing them to move away from our prior assumptions about them and altering the feeling of the whole work.

Therefore, in the Ocean Park Series, formal elements and their interrelationships are as subtractive as they are additive. By this I mean to suggest that they do more than simply accumulate in one manner or toward one particular state. There are multifaceted ends at play in these artworks, more than one solution being simultaneously considered upon their surfaces. It is the overlapping of alternate purposes uniting or interfering with one another that create divergent and potentially unplanned syncopations in the visual field. Ocean Park is indeed more complex than it may appear on the printed page.

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From all of this it seems to me that the mode of painting in the Ocean Park Series is not intellectual or emotional so much as it is kinesthetic. Diebenkorn succeeded in creating zones of reference and incident that allow a viewer to feel out and maneuver through the tensions in much the same ways he may have. He knew that we each inherently read these sorts of dynamic visual forces differently and at vastly different speeds. His provisional manner purposefully encoded, as described above, many varied spatial and temporal effects into the total compositional effect of his paintings. The works become catalysts for the kind of search for rightness that he himself pursued.

His commitment to “tension beneath calm”¹⁸ and “an exciting kind of stillness”¹⁹ in the gestalt experience of his art never removes the astonishment of discovery and sense of reconsideration it stimulates. Though they certainly carry a sense of calmness or stillness, the paintings deny viewers any sense of particular point of view and initiate the plurality of reading that I have suggested above. The Ocean Park works of Richard Diebenkorn “invite the viewer into a moment of intense contemplation without enabling a fixed viewpoint, no Cartesian sense of where artist or viewer is situated in relation to the composition.”²⁰

Thus Diebenkorn’s rightness is not about collapsing possibility or locking in any particular read. Ultimately, that feeling of rightness may only be accessible via a condition of uncertainty rather than of objective facts. Perhaps that is why, at least in Ocean Park, the instinctive stroke of the artist is not a dogmatic assertion but a questioning reformation of what he has already done. There was vulnerability and risk in this methodology; it was a risk of which he was well aware. Yet he stated that he wanted to “hold onto the incidentals” and work with the “kind of tension that would involve a large flex” to create a sense that “potentially, something was about to happen.”²¹ He sought simultaneous “potency and impotency”²² in the work, an approach that kept it constantly open and pressing toward both resolution and beginning. Burying previous strategies and disrupting safe, settled areas in favor of new angles and more tremulous solutions were at least as important to Diebenkorn as was any clear rightness. In some sense, it seems that the only right kind of rightness would be the sort that allowed the incidental and provisional to exist in the formal point and counterpoint of works that could be balanced only by viewing, negotiation, and experience.

It is a remarkable gift to be given the opportunity to see as the artist saw, if not in the specifics, then in the general manner and force of his vision. In the aesthetic economy of Ocean Park, anything may be reworked, each line and edge and color challenged or reasserted. As viewers we participate in the review. We get to be with Diebenkorn in the resolution of the tensions. We follow along in the fussy ease, the relaxed awkwardness, the tentative tautness of the work. We try and retry our own perceptions, testing them, following the artist on “a path of continual new beginnings”²³. In this the work becomes involved with our experience beyond the mere making and display of pictures. It exists as an invitation to negotiate and analyze.

What a reward for deep engagement: that each viewing of an Ocean Park painting may be a fresh aesthetic experience, informed but never eclipsed by those past. Perhaps this explains the popularity and resilience of Richard Diebenkorn’s painting; every time we see them we see them for the first time.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series will travel to the following locations over the coming year:

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
September 25, 2011–January 22, 2012

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
February 26–May 27, 2012

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
June 30–September 23, 2012

Note
I want to thank my student and friend Marcus Miers (http://marcusjmiers.net/) for traveling to Texas with me to see the Diebenkorn show. Our conversations during the trip were an integral contribution to my thinking in this essay; much of the above content is contingent upon his insight and clarity. I’m grateful to him for helping me to honestly reevaluate my understanding of Diebenkorn’s work.

Matthew Ballou is an artist and writer living in Columbia, Missouri with his wife and daughter. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Painting and Drawing at The University of Missouri, where he has taught since 2007. Recently his work has been seen in solo shows in Boston and Seattle, as well as in a two-person show with Tim Lowly in Louisville, KY. Ballou was a Finalist for The Ruminate Visual Art Prize, 2011. His extensive article on the work of Odd Nerdrum was the cover feature in Image Journal’s 2006 Summer Edition. Ballou has been a contributor to Neoteric Art since 2009, and Neoteric released a collection of his essays, titled Nine Texts, in October 2011. (http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Texts-Matthew-Ballou/dp/1105088936)

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Footnotes
¹Meanley, Jennifer. One Day: New Works by Barry Gealt. Indianapolis: Ruschman Gallery, 2008. Print catalog.↩
²Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 22.↩
³Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1st ed. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-252.↩
⁴Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #70. 1974. The Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. Web. http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/images/thumbnail.aspx?img=/webres/Image/photo_gallery/54.jpg↩
⁵Richard Diebenkorn. Interior with a Book. 1959. The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Web. http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/CollectionDatabase.cfm?id=17593&theme=M_C/↩
⁶Rubinstein, Raphael. “Provisional Painting.” Art in America. May 2009: N.p. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/provisional-painting-raphael-rubinstein/.↩
⁷Butler, Sharon. “The New Casualists.” Two Coats of Paint. N.p., 04 06 2011. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/06/new-casualists.html↩
⁸Butler, Sharon. “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists.” The Brooklyn Rail. June 2011. n. page. Web. 18 Jan 2012 http://brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/abstract-painting-the-new-casualists/.↩
⁹Diebenkorn, Richard quoted by Gerald Nordland. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 40.↩
¹⁰Nordland, Gerald. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 34.↩
¹¹Buck, Robert T. “The Ocean Park Paintings.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 46.↩
¹²Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #38. 1971. The Phillips Collection of American Art, Washington, D.C. Web. http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/artwork/Diebenkorn-Ocean_Park_38.htm↩
¹³Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 32.↩
¹⁴Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 22.↩
¹⁵Richard Diebenkorn. Directed by Tom McGuire. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and TVTV, 1977. Videocassette (VHS), 22:40 min.↩
¹⁶Buck, Robert T. “The Ocean Park Paintings.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 46.↩
¹⁷Diebenkorn, Richard quoted by Gerald Nordland. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 41.↩
¹⁸Mills, Paul. Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting. 1st ed. Oakland, California: Oakland Art Museum, 1957. 12.↩
¹⁹Ashton, Dore. “Richard Diebenkorn’s Paintings.” Arts Magazine 46. December 1971-January 1972. 35.↩
²⁰Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 22.↩
²¹Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 54.↩
²²Ibid.↩
²³Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 35.↩

I never gave much thought to Mark Rothko or his large colored soaked canvases but with the play Red in town and a planned tripped to Houston where the Rothko Chapel is located I would get my fair share of the man.

Red is about Rothko and a fictitious studio assistant during a two year period when the painter was commissioned to create several large paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in NYC. The play was fantastic—full of energy. I tend to forget that painting can transcend time and place. Both the act of painting and being a spectator of the work can be a very spiritually moving event. Red reminded me that painting is very human.

It was then off to Houston and the Rothko Chapel. I didn’t know what to expect except some Rothko paintings and some sort of chapel. The magic was in the conflation. The first thing that struck me was the quietness of the chapel. The stillness was beautiful. I don’t know if I ever equated quietness and beauty before but I do now. And of course there were the paintings. The paintings hovered on the walls. As time passed I felt I was becoming one with the paintings…with the stillness. The whole space evoked inspiration.

Both of these experiences are making me give more thought to Mark Rothko.

A review of Red from Time Out Chicago is here.
www.rothkochapel.org

I came to the auditorium at 112 S. Michigan with high hopes for an engaged debate on art criticism in Chicago and expected a lively discussion about the recent book The Essential New Art Examiner – a republication of seminal essays from the Chicago-based magazine which began in 1974 and ended in 2002. I had been a writer for the New Art Examiner in the late 90s until its demise and was rather itching for a conversation. But this was not to be. There were glints of subjects that could have sparked rich topics of conversation – Jim Yood the moderator had started out by saying the NAE had “challenged authority and power” – but for the most part the panel proved that art criticism in Chicago does nothing of the sort today, and worse still would simply have no idea of what this meant. As far as the conversation went the pot never got to simmering let alone boiling.

For me this is a rather sad state of affairs. I had to wonder how the “elephant” in the room – major issues surrounding art world power, control and impenetrable art theory – remained invisible to most of the seven panelists. What seemed more visible were the “emperor’s new clothes” – art writing that responded to the kind of and inbred art world thinking that pours out of art schools like SAIC. This is the situation that has displaced critical consciousness and inquiry. Perhaps I was wrong to be surprised considering the style of the media and blog-based writing reflected by most of panelists– Jason Foumberg of New City, Abraham Ritchie and Steve Ruiz of Artslant.com and Lori Waxman of the Chicago Tribune.

In saying so I do not wish to overlook the considerable efforts of two of the panelists – Kathryn Born and Terri Griffith- who do not profess art world training but whose indispensable efforts brought the recent Essential New Art Examiner into existence. Students in art departments all over the country retained their old copies of the NAE because they got dynamic art discussions and answers which they could not find on the pages of Artforum or Art in America. We live in a time of commercial and institutional – dare I say corporate – influence which makes independent structures with alternative points of view, like the NAE had once offered, rare and valuable particularly today. Creating the new book is an important step in sustaining this value. One of the panelists, the former NAE editor Ann Wiens, was thorough in discussing the particular 1980s art world background she came from. She was interested in bringing in “lots of peoples points of views” to the NAE and mentioned the time she spent working with the New York art critic Donald Kuspit. Her answers to questions were well grounded and brought a sense of Chicago art history that was useful, stressing the magazine’s importance to the city as the only source “chronicling the work being made at the time “and “interested people who mattered in our community.”

Aside from this most of the discussion was lost in space. I could not grasp the basis out of which most of the panelists interpreted art, and perhaps this is because they write for media formats and publications that don’t demand it. There was the sense that the younger writers are looking for answers but do not know where to find them. In an art world lacking critical consciousness and suffering from amnesia about its history it’s easy for writers to cling to self-reference and the centralizing mechanisms of the mass media. This makes the art world boring and complacent. Plenty of descriptive art writing abounds, but there is no stabilizing force which allows coherent meanings or interpretations to emerge. I could not discern how these writers linked art with human experience or life outside of the artist’s self-proclaimed intentions. Most of the writers on the panel had started their careers after the NAE had disappeared, which goes some way in explaining the loss of a “center” for the discussion of art in Chicago. The NAE was a “town square” to use Ann Wiens’ metaphor, where artists could meet and discuss – it was a focal point for debate. Jim Yood as moderator was talkative and humorous, but his questions offered no real challenges or issues of controversy. Conversation was mostly anecdotal and nostalgic, ever cycling around details of the New Art Examiner’s past without hitting any target of deeper interest or sparking debate. Finally things came to life during the question and answer session by a few older members of the audience. One question brought up discussion of the time when Kathryn Hixson, the last editor of the New Art Examiner, had mismanaged the magazine to the point of bankruptcy and how this continues to remain a sore spot for many who knew how important the magazine was to Chicago’s ever-fragile art infrastructure. The NAE was originally created as a bulwark against censorship “without fear or favor.” In its last days it looked more like an imitation of Artforum.

I was alarmed by the incuriousness of the panel as well as the SAIC students in the audience. The narcissistic attitudes of artists have been deeply inbred by countless art programs over the past 30 years. This has lead, for the most part, to a fairly uncritical acceptance of what is being taught. Donald Kuspit once said we have gone beyond self-censorship to self-ignorance, which makes for quite an Orwellian situation. The framework of power over what is considered art – disseminated from art school to gallery to museum – is effective because it is invisible. For all of the contemporary art world’s claim to being “liberal” and “progressive” it is deeply conservative at heart, and the panel discussion was point in case. Yes the doors to the auditorium were open, but in a sense the public was not really invited. We live in an art world – I would call it a “post-art” world – where meaningful human content and experience is ignored and where the purveyors of culture don’t seem to know the difference and couldn’t care less. That is the real crisis.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She has written for The New Art Examiner Art on Paper, and Dialogue magazine among others. She currently writes for Artcritical.com and Neotericart.com and has written numerous artist catalogue essays. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago in 2009. She is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

Ellen Lanyon & Philip Pearlstein: Objects/Objectivity
Valerie Carberry Gallery
Chicago
September 16 – November 5, 2011
www.valeriecarberry.com

Ellen Lanyon and Philip Pearlstein are artist friends who share outings to collect antiques, flea market finds, and vintage toys – the theme on which exhibition title Objects/Objectivity is based. The articles they find inhabit distinctly different worlds in their art. While Lanyon has always expressed an overt emotional attachment to the items that populate her fantasy-based imagery, Pearlstein renders his antiques and toys with a harsh objectivity that can sometimes exude unsettling feelings lurking behind their attempt to mimic life.

Both Lanyon and Pearlstein had technical drawing training early in their careers, which helps to explain a common interest in mechanical objects. Pearlstein’s first job as a machinery draughtsman influenced the stark “objectifying” realism he brought to his nude figures. Mechanical renderings operate somewhat differently in Lanyon’s work, becoming props that mix up and recombined with other objects as though performing on some subconscious theatrical stage.

Lanyon’s work bears some similarity to the art of Seymour Rosofsky and is rooted in the surreal, and fantastic images of the Chicago-based Monster Roster art group of the 1950’s. Lanyon clusters her objects into skewed interiors where one cannot tell exactly where the tiled floor meets the striped wallpaper. All manner of porcelain creatures, gadgets, cards, and items of nostalgia clutter these spaces with a whimsical disregard for logic. They often are energized with a strange, sometimes lugubrious, inner life. The animal presences in her paintings are particularly noticeable and seem to act like the ringmasters at the circuses being performed around them. In one painting a porcelain fish in a red velvet suit glowers at the viewer with its large glassy eye. In another a monkey uses a snake to squirt tea into a cup. Birds peep through windows and spring out of clocks. Animal effigies appear to be the silent guardians of a secret world. Space becomes unstable, topsy-turvy, and surprising. Bright colors burst through the surface in jazzy patterns while other areas are rendered in ghostly outlines. The aura of nostalgia embedded in her objects do not make them “sweet.” They exist in a world that teeters between irrational whimsy and the grotesque. There is a darkness that exists within the sentiment she feels for her objects, which makes them both tragic and imaginative. Like Seymour Rosofsky Lanyon’s scenarios are often haunted by a sense of bittersweet loss that brings both a personal and expressive life to her arrangements.

Ellen Lanyon
Fisch, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

By contrast Philip Pearlstein is well known for his stark objectivity painting the nude. He is famous for posing his naked figures under harsh, glaring lights that emphasize their “objectness.” Their static and somnambulistic expressions prevent the sparking of erotic desire, as does the rendering of flesh with veins, sinew and hair in all its particularity. The introduction of objects present new formal challenges to these figural arrangements. In this exhibit items like duck decoys, puppets, and other toys are rendered in the same harsh and unsentimental light as the nudes. Like Lanyon, the animal effigies in Pearlstein’s paintings act as a kind of psychological lynchpin, looking at us with open eyes where the nude’s gaze does not. Yet humans and objects co-habit a common space with uneasy awkwardness. A “Gulliver” sized foot is lodged on a “Lilliputian” sized model of the White House (a bird house in actuality). Two nudes are surrounded by a jumble of duck decoys that have truly “wooden” expressions. An uncanny deadness emanates from the leering expression of a Mickey Mouse doll on a unicycle, similar to the opaque expression of a wooden rabbit marionette placed between two nudes in a different painting. In another arrangement an old copper butcher’s sign is placed in front of a nude woman, seeming to trap her – compositionally – into a corner. The silhouettes of a knife, cleaver, and saw overlay her body, making her flesh seem all the more delicate and vulnerable. In another painting a model airplane on a vertical flying pole pushes to the front of the picture plane, crowding the foreground and directing attention away from two nudes that are seated below and behind it. The toy plane presents a kind of visual dissonance – a compositional mechanical “noise”- that contrasts with the human presence. Unlike Lanyon’s paintings there is no whimsy, sentiment, or nostalgia embedded in Pearlstein’s items though there are strange juxtapositions that arise between the nudes and objects, sometimes hinting at a surreal otherworldliness. In each case the object’s inner deadness makes the nudes come to life by sheer contrast. His inert animal effigies attempt to mimic life, but their harsh realism renders this mimesis as a strange phenomenon. There is something a bit frightening about the lifelessness in many of these objects that ends up animating Pearlstein’s otherwise pallid figures. The inertness of his articles reinvigorates the sense of human presence in his paintings, and emphasizes the existential fact of their aliveness by contrast.

Though both Lanyon and Pearlstein have interests in nostalgic objects their paintings result in quite different outcomes. For Lanyon, magic can upset the rules of reality and imagination can twist space and memory. In Pearlstein’s work, realist empiricism reveals a disconnection between the human aliveness and unliving matter – rehumanizing the human presence as a result. Both artists have maintained humanizing artistic traditions – whether through Surrealism or Realism – which stands in distinct contrast to the postmodern spectacles and conceptual ideologies of the current art world. This certainly goes along way in explaining the integrity of their artistic survival in these all too dehumanizing times.

Philip Pearlstein
Two Nudes and four Duck Decoys, 1994, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Ellen Lanyon
Hanafuda, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Top image:
Philip Pearlstein
Mickey Mouse, White House as Bird House, Male and Female Models, 2001, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in 2009 and is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

MDW Fair which had its debut earlier this April ran again this past weekend with the intent of being a bi-yearly event. This time around the Fair—once again on three floors of the GeoLofts building on Chicago’s South side—offered the same high energy and most of the quality venues that were present the first time out. There were also some exciting new exhibitors.

The first floor had the Hand in Glove Conference. As their website states: a new semiannual conference for independent visual arts facilitators working at the crossroads of creative administration and studio practice. This conference was open to people engaged in the pragmatic realities and imaginative possibilities of organizing exhibitions, re-granting programs, publications, residencies, public programs, platforms for projects, and a variety of other programming that challenges traditional formats for the production and reception of art at the grass-roots level.

The second and third floors held the small not-for-profits, artist-run spaces, independent galleries, collectives, curators and publishers from around the country. Strong showings included Erik DeBat at 2612 Space, Paul Nudd at Western Exhibitions, Brian Kapernekas at 65Grand, Tom Torluemke at Linda Warren, Kristina Paabus and Raul Mendez at Hinge Gallery and bookmaking at North Branch Projects.

Let’s hope that MDW Fair will continue and become a driving force in the Chicago art scene.

Megan Euker: Reenactments
Linda Warren Gallery
Chicago
April 15 – May 14, 2011
www.lindawarrengallery.com

The Linda Warren gallery is never stingy with its exhibitions and their heady pleasures. They often appear on the verge of being interrupted by applause. The current show, Megan Euker’s, “Reenactments” holds a familiar fit and pours richly into that trend. Anyone can buy a ticket to ride, but the destination should tug early on. These works do so. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, and it features new works and large sculptures, displaying her critical focus on gesture, body language and the figure.

“Sociology, psychology, acute observation of behavior, deep interest in human interaction and cultural rituals are all things that have impacted my work,” shares Euker. “I have also traveled to Italy many times, which has had a huge impact on my work. I depict a lot of stories from Italy in my paintings and sculptures and almost all of the bathing paintings are from natural thermal baths in various parts of Italy.” She continues, “I think when I get away from my normal routines and habits, I become more acutely aware of my surroundings…how people interact, etc.” She invites us to think about that through these pieces.

Ms. Euker’s periods of living in Italy, on a Fulbright, and her time in Brazil are dramatically captured in this show, from her, “La Mola”, oil on linen with its seductive use of color to her sculpture including, “Chamada”, chicken wire armature with plaster gauze, latex paint, and wood base of two figures engaged in capoeira. The artist trained in capoeira, a martial art developed by African slaves brought to Brazil, heavy with spirituality and physicality. “Athletics are a big impact on my work,” Euker says. “I paint and sculpt in a very physical manner, and I think my history doing many athletics informs how I approach art. I think I have an athlete’s mentality to making work in regards to pushing myself.”

The artist brings a determination, an almost obsession to her work in seeking ways to, “document the moment,” and therefore “make a painting, drawing or sculpture based on the situation.” “I am incredibly interested in how humans interact, touch, don’t touch. So I am attracted to images that are sometimes romantic, sometimes ritualistic or revealing of human nature, she says.” Euker tells the story of her sculpture, “The Calling”, chicken wire armature with plaster gauze, latex paint, and wood chair, part of her “Good Intentions” series. “When I was living in Italy during 2008-9, I visited a church in Naples where I saw a priest answer a cell phone call while a woman was giving confession”, she recounts. “There were about 30 confession booths up and down the aisles in this particular church, and the booths were all open. You could see the priest’s face and torso,” she continues. “It was such an ironic, slightly comical, strange thing to see, and I kept imagining scenarios to explain why the priest would casually answer the phone. In any case, I didn’t make the sculpture until two years later, but I kept thinking about the image and the story in that time…the paintings were becoming too much of an illustration. I started imagining them as sculptures, and I think they really work as such. I related the story to my parents, who dressed in costume and reenacted the story I told them. I filmed the reenactment, took stills, and loosely based the sculpture on these images.” Euker aims straight to her own version of the sublime. “The Good Intentions series represents one of the more idiosyncratic aspects to Euker’s practice”, write the exhibitions curators.

Megan Euker’s work develops into an intimate rapport. Nothing lurking in the shadows of surrealism…nothing hiding…nothing seething with irony. The artist received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. She lends elegance ot her work with color. Most is done in the service of “realism”. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. (New York) and Change, Inc. (est. by Robert Rauschenberg). She is an Adjunct Professor of Painting and Drawing at the College of DuPage.

“I studied a lot with Dan Gustin during undergraduate and grad school, and he has impacted me a lot as an artist. Geoff Barnes was my first painting teacher, and helped in forming the way I paint and teach.” Euker also had studio visits with Jerry Saltz who helped her uncover the essence of what she felt she needed to explore as subject matter.

“A lot of artists have stories about being deeply moved by the work of another artist, and Lucien Freud is the artist that brought tears to my eyes”, holds Euker. “I went to L.A. in, I believe, 2002 to see a retrospective of his work, and that exhibition took my breath away.”
Eric Fischl has also impacted her work. “I like the way he talks about painting and the evolution of ideas in painting, the strange narratives in his images and the speed at which he paints. I think his images are intriguing, both formally and on a narrative level, and I am interested in the dynamics of relationships that he creates between the figures in his paintings.”

She gains power with her dramatic sculpture, and undertakes a transformative process. “When I’m making sculptures, I think of George Segal’s work a lot, because of the everyday-ness of the situations that he portrayed”, Euker says. “I am drawn to the relation of his process to abstract expressionism, the fleeting moments he depicts, and the whiteness of the plaster and its timelessness.
It will be intriguing to watch this young artist/academic’s development, and we eagerly await it.

Peter Allen Hoffman: When the Cathedrals Were White
Thomas Robertello Gallery
Chicago
April 1 – May 21, 2011
www.thomasrobertello.com

With little fanfare, Thomas Robertello recently opened his relocated gallery in Chicago’s West Loop, reestablishing his presence in the city’s art world with an exhibition of Peter Allen Hoffman, “When the Cathedrals Were White”. “I chose Peter’s work for the first exhibition mainly because the timing was right for both of us”, said Mr. Robertello. “It had been four years since his last solo exhibition with me and I feel honored to represent his work. While I could have opened the new space successfully with a group show,” he continued, “a solo show by any of the artists I work with, or someone new, I’m really pleased that his work is here right now.”

The show assumes numerous poses, rolling from order to conscious anarchy, from irreverent and funky to establishment still-life with some works bordering on the Hudson River School. Such is the case in, “Pomegranate III”, oil on linen, with his rich use of deep red and orange on a black background, and, “The Source”, oil on linen, capturing the nature and romance of a tumbling stream through earth shades of beige and green forest.

“I suppose I am a pluralist”, is the voice he paints in. “I am interested in many different things. I try not to separate my life into too many parts,” Hoffman shared. “Therefore, the paintings reflect my own experiences of places I have been and images I have collected, as well as work by other artists. Placement of these ideas and thoughts next to each other and seeing what happens is fascinating to me.”

The artist’s works, however, are more than just picture windows. He challenges and shifts gears. “I think the painting “Untitled”(Red Hook) may give some sort of insight into my process. I was interested in making a painting that contained opposing forces, and yet, looked void or empty,” says Hoffman. “It is almost an achrome. It hung on my wall in my former studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn for a year before I realized it was finished. I find it a very difficult painting. There doesn’t seem to be much happening at first, but it gets more complicated the longer you look at it.” In, “Gambit II”, oil on canvas, the artist presents his abstract language in cool off-white and blues with a bold crimson edge on three sides…almost minimalist. Other of Hoffman’s abstracts provide tasteful glimpses of thick, vigorous strokes.

For the most part, the paintings are 12” x 12”, which the artist tags as, “facial” in scale. “They are to be read like faces”, says Hoffman. “Most people are better reading faces than paintings…which is also why I hang them relatively high.”

Given Robertello’s plans for the new space, Hoffman’s show is a fine re-start. “My new vision for the space and its programming isn’t much different from the old one, at least in terms of goals. As usual, I operate by instinct, a keen eye, and never get involved in the vision or production of an artist’s work,” Robertello says. “I trust them implicitly and I have diverse interests. I’m careful to not influence them during any dialog we may have about their work.”

The curator/gallery owner also shared his intention to turn over the tiny project space of the gallery to Jason Robert Bell for an entire year, a fantastic opportunity. “He will have 6 small exhibitions there, coordinated with shows in the main space, and culminating with a solo show
in the main space next year,” said Robertello. “I hope that my commitment to his work will bring recognition to Jason’s massive genius.”

“I plan on continuing to work at this scale,” Hoffman added, “Yet I will be working on larger paintings as well. ‘When Cathedrals Were White’ is aesthetically pleasing in a fresh way, with spirited moments offering suggestions, and the artist completely in control.

Melinda Stickney-Gibson: Laughing, Growling, and Chirping in Paint
Thomas Masters Gallery
Chicago
November 5 – 29, 2010
www.thomasmastersgallery.com

The Modernist inventions of Abstract Expressionism have gradually faded from the contemporary art mainstream, ever since the ascendency of Pop art, Minimalism and conceptual art in the 1960’s. For nearly half a century Postmodernism, with its subversion of subjectivity and its endless thirst for irony, has become like watching clothes tumbling around in a washing machine. Postmodernism has spun, rewashed and endlessly recycled appropriations of past art, especially neo-Dadaist art, while emphasizing a fascination with technological media. Very little outside of these spectacles has made its way onto the pages of Artforum magazine.

Yet occasionally one can find artists who have somehow kept parts of Abstract Expressionist language alive and invented a vocabulary for themselves from it. Melinda Stickney-Gibson’s works appeal and surprise with a kind of sincerity that does not harden into ironic betrayal. Her brush strokes and painterliness are refreshingly frank and unapologetic in a time when expressionism has not made an appearance since artists like Georg Baselitz and Susan Rothenberg were exhibiting in the 1980’s.

This artistic lexicon that enraptures her work comes from many sources. Sometimes she scribbles a large bundle of lines that twang across the surfaces of her canvases in a seeming homage to the works of Joan Mitchell. There is something inspired by Susan Rothenberg and Philip Guston in the painting Growl which presents an awkwardly scumbled cinder-grey rectangle backed by a threatening patch of red on a white field. There are shades of Cy Twombly in the painting Giggle, with its spontaneous graffiti scrawled into a thick custard of white paint. Then there is a shadow of Franz Klein’s sumi-e ink brushwork in the grand and loopy automatist gesture that skirts the bottom of Gibson’s large painting Dreaming, Listening. The many “weathers” of texture in these fields of off white paint (and bare canvas) are more free and spontaneous than those of Robert Ryman’s minimalist painted “zones.” Yet the centerpiece of Gibson’s purpose remains the expression of mood, not Abstract Expressionism as a “style.”. The groundwork of each painting is rich and multi layered in unpredictable ways. A rusty dirt brown is besieged by a field of clotted white gestures in the painting SSSSSHHH while in My Silences a red grid peeps out from behind a yellow-white fog with a kind of mute austerity. Canvases which evoke darker moods overshadow the white fields in deep, muddy tones, while more lighthearted feelings become playful gestures that dance and glow on the sea of white paint. Gibson’s layers of paint add up to a diary of feelings that settle on some engagement or battle within the field of white. Each stakes out its unique emotional instincts with unpredictability in an abstract shorthand of her own invention.

Gibson’s titles also occasionally allude to differences between male and female consciousness – as with the title of her large painting For The Girls. Sexual tension vibrates in the painting Boy Story where the eggshell white surface is almost completely covered in a curtain of four angular red brushstrokes that seem to signal both seductive power and danger. There is a distinct whimsy in many of the painting titles which are as poetic and surprising as the brushwork. There is laughter lurking behind a giant brown cloud of woven brushstrokes humorously titled The Crashing Maybes. Gibson also understands how to create space not only through value and color differences, but also through the subtle play of texture. The painting Falling Down masterfully plays shiny surfaces off of flat, and heavily painted areas against thin. There is a richness to these textures that cannot be photographed and which gives an uncanny physical satisfaction in the presence of the work.

Rothko, Guston, Klein, Rothenberg, Mitchell and Twombly are all artists whose work offers traditions which were meant to be built on – and build from these Gibson certainly does well, fusing influence into unique subjective invention. Barnett Newman had once commented that here was never really such a thing as an Abstract Expressionist “style” and the art writer E.C. Goossen had once said the movement might well have been called “Abstract Individualism”⁽¹⁾- a description which fits Melinda Stickney-Gibson’s work very well. It is a good time to reconsider the tradition of abstraction which Kandinsky had instigated – how improvisation is directed by “inner necessity” – a practice which Gibson keeps alive and well through the many surprising poetic moods of her painted surfaces.

Footnotes:
1. E.C. Goossen, “Rothko: The Omnibus Image,” Art News, January 1961, p. 38

Diane Thodos is and artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Paule Friedman & Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

Growl, 45″ x 49″, Oil on Canvas

Falling Down, 45″ x 49″. Oil on Canvas

Giggle, 26″ x 24″. Oil on Canvas

My Silences, 45″ x 49″, Oil on Canvas

SSSSSHHH, 45″ x 49″, Oil on Canvas

Top image: Dreaming, Listening, 73″ x 91″, Oil on Canvas

It was a bold statement when the Chicago art scene needed one. After a downturn in the economy and The Fire, Chicago’s art scene seemed to have lost the luster it had in the 1980s. It was said during the high point of that decade that the number of galleries in SuHu was only second to that in Manhattan.

However, by the early ’90s the Chicago art scene was a shadow of its former self. Some notable temporary art shows, put on by artists like the Cold House group, proved there was still an artistic spirit in Chicago that was still hungry, even if the art world couldn’t sustain it. World Tattoo was the embodiment of that spirit. Since the nomad galleries were fleeting, the work may not have been shown in the best light. World Tattoo was different. It was a strong, solid permanent exhibition space that took a stand on the corner of 13th and Wabash. Arms folded and with the sneer of a bouncer at a biker bar, it said “Fuck you!” to those that would write off the Chicago art scene. “There is good work being made here and you need to take a look!”

It eventually closed down and the space was taken over briefly by another exhibition space, Izzo’s Artery, before it was inevitably swallowed up by the condo revolution, as the South Loop became a place to eat and sleep. Fitzpatrick moved on to focus on his work, yet continued his leadership in the Chicago art scene. This time, though in a more mentor-like role, with his Firecat Press and by example.

Fast forward 17 years and the Chicago art scene again finds itself in need of a kick in the ass and Fitzpatrick is once again happy to oblige. Last night I saw the opening at Firecat Projects, a new space dedicated to showing new work in a more dignified manner than we’ve seen in recent months. Run by Tony and his business partner, Stan Klein, it occupies his former studio, as the artist now works at home. The inaugural show is the first solo show of his work here in two years. To some this may seem kind of self-serving, but he can do this because it’s his, damn it (and he’s the Fuckin’ Mayor)! And what better way to stir shit up? The show kicks ass.

Firecat Projects steps in at just the right time. The Chicago art scene has been sort of languishing since the heady blogosphere days of the mid-oughts. It is a time when stupid little contests (Loop Open, I’m looking your way) and filling abandoned store fronts with art are supposed to get us excited about the Chicago art scene again—however, these efforts fail to stir the hearts of anyone. Firecat Projects proves that there is still a bold spirit in Chicago that will not rest.