http://neotericart.com An online art magazine ~ Established 2008 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1928 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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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 --- 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. --- 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) --- 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.↩ ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/feed/ 9 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:25:58 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1924 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: They [the artists in Vienna] had an interesting praxis of artists and intellects back then. Were there other artists who Kallir dealt with? Hildegard Bachert: There was Oskar Kokoschka. DT: This was after he had been wounded during WWI? HB: Right. This was in the 1920’s. Kokoschka left Austria after the war and went to Dresden in Germany where he spent a lot of time. He was very shell-shocked and needed psychiatric help. DT: Yes. We would call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD - today. HB: Right. When he had sufficiently recovered he started traveling. He went back to Vienna for a time, then to Paris and London where he painted his famous London landscapes. He would often visit his family in Vienna. Kallir staged Kokoschka exhibitions and purchased some of his art. But Kokoschka was complicated. He had many connections and he did not like Kallir’s engagement with Schiele’s art. During his lifetime Kokoschka did his best to discredit Schiele. DT: Peculiar. HB: No, not peculiar. Kokoschka insisted that he was the innovator of everything. Kallir also knew the artist Max Oppenhiemer. Are you familiar with Max Oppenheimer’s work? He was an Expressionist and a colleague and friend of Schiele. DT: I recollect the name. HB: He was generally called Mopp. He often signed his name like that. I came to know him personally much later. After his emigration to this country as a much older man Mopp was very innovative but Kokoschka kept saying “They all copied me!” He believed that Mopp and Schiele copied him, and the truth be told it was probably Mopp who was first. He was a friend of Schiele’s and he also became friendly with Kokoschka. Eventually they had a big fight with him. Kokoschka was very contentious and tried to influence some of the art historians to sweep Schiele under the rug. DT: So that he would be perceived as the most important. HB: Now, Kokoschka was a very good artist. However his best art was the early work. He did in fact do some good work later on but when he got happy - when he met Olda who later became his wife in Prague –- the tension of the older period left him. DT: That’s an interesting point. I feel the same thing happened to Beckmann’s work when he came to the United States - a lessening of tension in the work. In his previous art the devastations of WWI and its catastrophic aftermath explode with angular tension. HB: This not only happened to Beckmann, who was the least affected. The quality of his oils, particularly the ones from Holland, were good. DT: That’s true. I was referring to the time he came to the U.S. That was when the change in his work became most apparent. HB: Very true, but the works Kokoschka did in America were really not good at all. DT: George Grosz had this problem too. HB: George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein all had problems with their late work. Basically their spirit was killed by the Nazis. DT: And Otto Dix. HB: Dix - he disintegrated. DT: I was told he was very troubled. In a previous interview I had with Donald Kuspit he related to me how he met Dix when he was a student of Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt during the late1950’s. According to him Dix was emotionally destroyed by the Nazis. Today it’s very hard to imagine what it was like, but your generation’s history is very important because you experienced the whole thing. HB: Getting back to Vienna I need to mention one artist of fantastic talent and genius. His name was Richard Gerstl. One day in 1930 a man named Alois Gerstl visited Kallir’s gallery and said “My brother painted and his pictures are in a warehouse here in Vienna. I brought a few samples and I would like your advice: should we keep them or destroy them?” Kallir saw what Alois brought and said “These are fantastic! Take me to the warehouse- I want to see the rest.” DT: To think that his brother had thought of destroying them. HB: Gerstl was completely buried in oblivion. Kallir went to the warehouse where most of his pictures were rolled up. Some were not in great condition. Kallir had the pictures restored, stretched and put on exhibition in his gallery. He discovered him. It was a sensation beyond belief. We have press clippings from that time. In 1931 Kallir compiled a catalog of all the works, numbered each one, put a stamp on each one so they would be authenticated, and signed each stamp. Each Gerstl has a stamp on the back with Otto Kallir’s signature. DT: He took tremendous pains to resurrect his art. HB: He rescued it from oblivion. That’s what Kallir did. He was a trailblazer. DT: He was in the tradition of those dealers who could see ahead, like Vollard and Kahnweiler. Of course the French art world circumstances were a different. I have a particular fascination with dealers andintellects who spearheaded Expressionist art in German and Viennese culture. The Decadent Art Show of 1937 - Entartete Kunst - was Hitler’s attempt to destroy everything it stood for. HB: Not only that. When Kallir came to this country he found that German and Austrian art was unknown or else it wasn’t liked because French art was in and everything else was out. DT: Interesting point. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged the collectors on his board to buy mostly French art for donation to the museum. There were some German Expressionist pieces collected but nothing like the amount of French avant-garde art. What was the art world in America like when Otto Kallir arrived in here? HB: He came in 1939, but I want to relate some events that date from before this time. He sent a traveling exhibition of Gerstl’s work to Germany and other places in Austria. The pictures returned to the Neue Galerie where they were kept over the period of the Second World War. Kallir had purchased many of them from Alois Gerstl before he left Vienna. He brought a few Gerstls to this country. First he emigrated with his family to Switzerland where they had friends. He was able to establish his home in Lucerene but didn’t get permission to work there. With his family safe in Switzerland Kallir went to Paris to open a gallery that he called Galerie St. Etienne in memory of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. He didn’t keep the gallery open for even one year because he wanted to be reunited with his family. Then he managed to get sponsorship to emigrate to America. Kallir was always interested in America because of the country’s engineering achievements. He also loved Jazz. In August 1939 the four Kallirs – he, his wife and two children - arrived in this country. By October he had opened the Galerie St. Etienne in New York at 46 West 57th Street, just up the street from our current location. He thought that he was establishing a branch of the Galerie St. Etienne in Paris at that time, but then the war broke out. He corresponded with his secretary there and told her to put everything in storage and close the gallery. That was the end of Paris. Then Kallir struggled like crazy to establish his artists in this country. DT: A heroic feat considering there was a complete lack of knowledge about his Viennese artists here. HB: He also brought to America some amazing works of art that a Czech collector had placed in his hands on consignment. Of course Kallir knew that his artists weren’t known in this country so he had to come with something that could financially sustain him. But it was the time of the Great Depression and he was able to sell only one of those major paintings, a Cézanne. However he was able to exhibit them, paintings like L’Arlesienne by Van Gogh. Top works of art. He had a fantastic Cezanne portrait Man with the Crossed Arms which now hangs in a famous private collection in New York. He was always in the service of the artists. From the beginning he tried to support the art that he really knew and that he believed needed to be exposed. One of his very first exhibitions was a show that he called Saved From Europe with works by artists like Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka – all totally unknown here. DT: By then the Germans had already staged the Degenerate Art show. They ridiculed Expressionist art. I understand the Nazis destroyed a lot of this art, didn’t they? HB: They certainly did. DT: They must have felt very threatened by the work to take such pains to destroy it. HB: They felt that it was “Jewish” art. They caricatured people like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Of course as you know this Degenerate Art exhibition had one of the largest number of visitors of any art exhibition in the world. DT: That is true. Of all the Expressionists who were Jewish that I can recall, only Ludwig Miedner comes to mind. HB: Well, they hated that art you see. They wanted this “true blue” German housewife-type art that was exhibited in a parallel exhibition. That exhibition hall was empty of an audience. DT: It was kitsch. The Greek god as a German Übermensch. Donald Kuspit has written about the Degenerate Art Show explaining how Expressionism told the harsh truth about the German culture of that time- the darkness and rottenness that lay at its core. HB: Exactly. DT: The Expressionists were showing the whole world upside down. I imagine Kallir must have had a critical sense of what was right and decent. HB: He was a pioneer and he was certainly aware of what was decent and good. He was very upset with graft and cheating and the like. DT: And of course anti-Semitism. It must have been terrible for him to experience that. HB: Prejudice, yes. And he was also very interested in works by women. The very first Paula Modersohn-Becker and Grandma Moses exhibitions took place in this very gallery. Grandma Moses was not classified among the artists of the Women’s Rights movement. Why? I don’t know. She was such an amazing self–made person. She wasn’t a militant Feminist, not at all, but she knew very well what she wanted to do. She was the matriarch of her family - the person in control in her very quiet laid-back way. Of course one of Kallir’s amazing discoveries was finding Grandma Moses with the help of a man who was an engineer employed by the city of New York who loved folk art and traveled around New England. He brought a collection of Moses’ paintings to the New York galleries. One after another the galleries rejected the work, saying “who wants to deal with this old woman?” In 1940 she was 80 years old. Who cared? DT: Didn’t she have a mature group of works at that time? HB: No, not at all. It was the beginning. She painted only small pictures. She had wanted to paint all her life but being a busy farmer’s wife couldn’t find the time. Only in her 70’s did she start to paint because it was the time of the Depression. Where she lived it was terribly depressed. DT: Where did she live? HB: Eagle Bridge New York near Hoosick Falls, the place where John Deere equipment and trucks were made. The area fell apart. All these mill towns were shut down. DT: Devastated I am sure. My father lived through the dark times of the Great Depression in Chicago and had many stories to tell. The deprivation is hard to imagine today and the hardship can leave a black spot on your soul. HB: It did. Economically we are getting a little bit of that right now. There is a difference today but it hits the poor people the same way. Grandma Moses’ pictures were just 8 “x 10” or 14” and some of them were embroidered. Kallir saw a few of the best and said “This is fantastic, I’m going to give this woman a show” DT: He had the insight to see the value in her work early on. HB: Just like what happened with Richard Gerstl. By October 1940 the Galerie St. Etienne had been open in New York for one year. Kallir was something of a greenhorn. He didn’t know English very well though his French was perfect and he spoke it beautifully. However he had a good ear and learned English very quickly. He launched Moses and the exhibition was a success. He represented her from that day on until her death. We had a contract with her. She would send us all her pictures and we would buy them. After she died we continued to represent her estate up to this day. I knew her intimately for 20 years. Getting back to the 1940’s, it was a struggle beyond belief because the most expensive Moses picture cost 0. DT: There are many stories about important art that is inexpensive in the beginning when the artists are unknown. Part 2 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:46:41 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1912 Neoteric Art: Give us a little history on yourself. Gabriel Villa: I was born in 1965 in El Paso, Texas. My parents met and married in the 1950’s in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and had seven children, six boys and one sister. My sister is the youngest of my siblings and I am the youngest of the boys. My childhood was rich with love and laughter. I was three years old when my family moved into what became my childhood home. Many things have influenced my life and my work including: Family, U.S Texas/Mexico Border Culture, American Sports, 1960’s Counter Culture, 1980’s Reaganomics, Indigenous and Western Art. I decided to become an artist when I was in my early twenties. However, the idea of someone making a living and identifying as an artist was something initially foreign to me. It was not until I started taking college courses that I met professors that identified as artists. Since, creativity and art production have been a priority and a constant in my life. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. GV: Generally a work begins by something I see while walking, driving etc. It may be an individual in my neighborhood or it may be an object or scene somewhere in Chicago or while traveling. I’ve trained myself to take a mental snapshot of the location and eventually if this image keeps tugging at me I return to the site and snap a photograph. Although I work with mostly painting and drawing I think of my work as archiving and constructing. I lift images from what I see in my surroundings. I am a scavenger of images. I am drawn to people and imagery that are emotionally charged. Seeking subject mater is a crucial part of my creative process. I am interested in chance, randomness and surprise that “every day life” offers. NA: Recently you've been focusing on drawing. Discuss your drawing and how it compares to your other mediums: painting, mixed media and public work. GV: In 2008, after a long hiatus from drawing I returned to drawing and started working exclusively on paper. There was a lot going on and I suddenly decided to change directions. Something clicked in my head and I started to place an emphasis on creativity and idea rather than focusing on one particular art medium. Prior to this period I was bit of a die hard painter, now I have a different point of view on art making. I believe an artist should select materials and applications that best support his or her concepts. Because drawing is very immediate it is better suited for certain goals. Painting, for me takes longer to resolve. Drawing is like a short story. Painting is like a novel. NA: From 2005-2011 you served as director for Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Please elaborate on your role as director. GV: Yollocalli Arts Reach is an arts education and career-training program for teens and young adults. The Yollocalli model is based on creating a space for youth to partner with practicing artists, access the tools necessary to realize their own vision and build skills as emerging artists. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, Yollocalli is an open forum for experimentation in art making based on issues in art, history, and youth culture. I started at Yollocalli Arts Reach in 2005 as the Youth Programs Coordinator and later was promoted and served as Director. It was a great job and I learned a great deal of valuable skills, including staff management, grant and curriculum writing, youth development, building community partnerships and of course working with many talented Chicago based artist. NA: You recently exhibited at MDW Fair. How was your experience? GV: Over all it was a positive experience. MDW introduced my work to a new audience. It was a pleasure to exhibit my work with artist Nicole Marroquin and work with Curator, Trevor Martin from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MDW introduced me to the work of many Chicago Based artists including Trevor Martin’s Performance work. I met a handful of collectors, gallery directors and a handful of inquisitive art students. I will continue to participate in these types of venues. It is one way for one’s work to be evaluated and every once in a while you connect with people that really get your work. My work calls to people who respond to personal, emotive –expressionist work. My work is definitely not entertaining or conceptual. I want people to feel as if they are walking into my brain when they are experiencing my work. Art venues like MD are a good way to start fostering an audience to one’s work. NA: Discuss your recent book project, "The Art of Gabriel Villa". GV: A few years back I was teaching as an artist in residence at Cristo Rey High School, located in Chicago. There I met an instructor by the name of Francisco Pina, at the time also the editor of ContraTiempo. ContraTiempo is a Spanish art and culture newspaper that feature artists and writers. I introduced to my paintings to him. He became a supporter of my work. Francisco approached me with the idea of collaborating on a self - published catalog. The catalog featured works from 1990- 2005. At the time no one knew who I was (many still don’t). I didn’t have any money and I had many paintings and drawings unfamiliar to many people. I accepted the idea and the partnership. My role was to raise money and write grants for the collaborative project, which I had zero experience. Long story short, we landed a few grants and convinced a few collectors to support the project and I started working at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Yollocalli Arts Reach) to raise the funds. I worked at NMMA longer than I intended to because I enjoyed it so much. Professionally, this was a good move to self-publish. This got the ball rolling and people started to become aware of my work. This publication led to accepting many other opportunities. NA: Regarding your art career, where would you like to be five years down the road? GV: Above ground. www.gabrielvilla.net]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:31:43 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1906 Chicago January Openings - January 6, 2012 On the scene: It was surprisingly warm in the city. River North was jumping with Martina Nehrling's always colorful works at Zg Gallery, Viktoria Sorochinski's intriguing photographs at Catherine Edeleman Gallery, Carl Hammer Gallery's interesting group show "Reflections From a Looking Glass", John Fraser's beautiful mixed media work at Roy Boyd Gallery, Barbara Cooper's and Bob Nugent's wonderful work at Perimeter Gallery, and Ann Nathan Gallery's solid group show. Spotted: David Loew at Catherine Edelman Gallery, William Conger and Judith Geichman at Roy Boyd Gallery, and MCA curator Lynne Warren getting on her bicycle in front of Carl Hammer Gallery. January 13, 2012 On the scene: Wayne White's provocative Ruscha-esque style text paintings at Packer Schopf Gallery...one painting sold for ,000 opening night! Hipsters, Miller beer and a group show curated by Abraham Ritchie at 65Grand...good stuff. Spotted: Tim Vermeulen and Nicholas Sistler at Packer Schopf Gallery. January 14, 2012 On the scene: Saturday night opening at Hinge Gallery featuring a 6-person group show with standouts: Brent Houston and MaryKate Maher. Spotted: Stephanie Burke and Jeriah Hildwine at Hinge Gallery.]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:03:31 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1896 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the next three. [caption id="attachment_1897" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 7 with Bricks | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1898" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 8 with Snow | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1899" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 9 with Oil Drum Garbage Cans | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:16:46 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1887 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: To begin with can you give me some background on Otto Kallir, the establishment of Galerie St. Etienne and how you became his partner in the gallery? Hildegard Bachert: Otto Kallier founded the Neue Galerie in Vienna in 1923 and his first show was an Egon Schiele exhibition. He has specialized in Schiele ever since. He wrote the catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s oil paintings in 1930. He became a Ph.D on the side in something unrelated because he wanted to prove that he was not only good in his field but also had a very good general knowledge of art. At that time he championed the avant-garde artists Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Alfred Kubin – the latter became a good friend of his. He staged some other major shows too. He brought a Van Gogh exhibition to Vienna from Holland and a Lovis Corinth show from Germany, among others. DT: What other artists did he know? HB: Max Beckmann. He knew Beckmann quite well. He was also a publisher of books. He published books by Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. In 1938 the Nazis came to power and Kallir had to leave quickly because he had tried to do some political anti-Nazi work before. There was a warrant out for him. The Nazis took over in March 1938. When they entered Austria they were received with open arms by the Austrians. He left with his family I believe in May or June of that year. DT: How soon was it after the Nazi’s entered Austria that they left? HB: The Nazis entered Austria on March 11, 1938, so it was about two months later. DT: So he had to flee right away. But backing up a little I’m very curious to know any recollections you have regarding his relationships with the artists he knew. He had published prints with Max Beckmann and had intimately known several of the artists that he exhibited. Do you have any stories that describe what their personalities were like? HB: He had a very close relationship with Alfred Kubin and had invited him to come to the gallery’s exhibitions. Kubin was a loner. He always had to be convinced to come to Vienna. He lived in a small town in a little house close to the German border near Passau. It was a little castle-type place that Kubin called Zwicklet. He was a very imaginative and decent kind of person, but also very difficult although Kallir got along very well with him. In fact at the beginning their relationship when they didn’t know each other well Kallir wanted to convince the artist that he could produce perfect reproductions of his art. Kubin claimed it was not possible so Kallir allowed himself to prove it. He published two facsimile reproductions of watercolors which he had printed by the renown firm of Arthur Jaffe. They used a Heliochrome process that involved making reproductions without using a screen. The watercolors he reproduced looked almost the same as the originals. That’s how he convinced Kubin that he was a serious dealer and cared about quality. Kallir was not a printer himself but he only worked with master printers. DT: What was it in Otto Kallir’s background that made him seek out such extraordinary artists who had such profound expressionist and imaginative abilities? This was quite prescient on his part as an art dealer, similar to the way the French dealer Ambroise Vollard foresaw the significance of Picasso’s work. What were the aspects of Kallir’s character that drove him towards Expressionist art? HB: That’s kind of a long story. Even as a boy he was a passionate collector. To sum it up Kallir became a dealer to feed his habit as a collector. DT: A collector of Expressionism? HB: A collector of everything that was of historical importance. He was a “Renaissance” man. When he was young he was terribly interested in technical things like aeronautics. He wrote to the Wright brothers in 1903 when he was only 9 years old. It was at the time they had their first flight at Kitty Hawk. He knew all about human flight and wrote a book about it that was published when he was about 19 years old, so his background was not in art. His father was a lawyer. He grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois family. DT: In Vienna? HB: Yes. He was originally oriented towards becoming an engineer. After serving four years as an officer during WWI he went to engineering school in Vienna where, being Jewish, he encountered so much anti-Semitism that he gave up the profession. DT: This prejudice existed in the medical professions and the sciences, and so on. HB: Everywhere. This was not only in Austria but in Germany as well. DT: So his career became diverted because of anti-Semitism? HB: Exactly. From having previously published a book he developed into a bibliophile and apprenticed at the bookstore of Thomas Heller who was also a young man. It was there that he started to meet artists. He said art is also of historical importance and the first works that he bought and collected were a batch of Gustav Klimt drawings. DT: It ‘s amazing that he had already had an instinct for the top art in Vienna. HB: He saw art, he saw culture, and he saw history. He knew what was important and over time he developed a fantastic eye for art, but he didn’t stop collecting aeronautical material as well. He collected manuscripts of great historical importance in literature, music, science, and history. Not mere autographs, that didn’t interest him. It had to be a document of importance. DT: A manuscript of some kind or a letter - something from the hand of the person. HB: Right. He was very interested in Austrian history so he had many important manuscripts such as those by Kaiser Franz Josef and Archduke Rudolf, the son of Franz Josef who committed suicide. He also had musical manuscripts of importance by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many people he knew personally. DT: Which musicians did he know personally? HB: He knew Arnold Schoenburg, Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal. The latter was the librettist for Strauss. He knew him very well in fact - they were very close friends. So what became his passion? As a young man he published several books on art and literature and then apprenticed at the Galerie Würthle in Vienna where he soon became a kind of partner to the woman who was running the gallery. DT: How old was he at that time? HB: I think he started there around 1920. He was born in 1894 so by then he was 26. DT: It’s remarkable that he was already very developed by that age. He had already become a partner in a gallery that was at the center of the avant-garde art scene in Austria. HB: At the same time he became the director of the art department at the Ricola Verlag Publishing House in Vienna and published more books, mostly on art. The art books are what really survived and are very important today. The most important publication he produced with the help of the Ricola Verlag (he didn’t have enough money to do it on his own) was a portfolio called Das Graphische Werk on Egon Schiele that contained etchings and lithographs which were posthumously published. Egon Schiele died in 1918 and the portfolio was published in 1921. At that time it was popular and had been beautifully bound, presented and numbered. That’s when, with cooperation of course, Kallir started to become acquainted with the whole art establishment. The forward of the portfolio was written byArthur Roessler, one of the major supporters of Schiele whom Kallir knew very well. DT: So Kallir never got to know Schiele personally but came to know about his work through contact with the galleries and art scene? HB: Exactly. So that launched his career. In 1923 he left the Galerie Würthle and founded his own gallery, the Neue Galerie, which is now the name of the museum here in New York. DT: So the museum was named after Kallir’s first gallery? HB: Indeed. DT: As an homage. HB: It’s an homage and it’s an amazing continuation of the spade work Kallir did all his life. He knew many Austrian artists personally - some who are not well known in this country like Otto Rudolf Scatz anGerhart Frankl. Oskar Laske has a certain reputation in the United States. The Busch-Reisinger Museum has two beautiful works by him but they are not famous. To put an artist on the “map” takes a lot of time and you can only do that with top artists. DT: It seems that the art world had only so much space at the top. HB: It seems that way unfortunately. DT: Or else it’s possible that you’re not recognized within your time. HB: Exactly. DT: For some art careers recognition comes much later. For example the Feminist Movement of the 1970’s brought more attention to the work of Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and Camille Claudel creating a new historical appraisal of their work and careers. There can be a delay of recognition based on what the culture is, what the society is, and what critical consciousness is recognized at the time. You mentioned Kallir knew Max Beckmann personally and had worked with him to produce prints. How did they come into contact? HB: He came to Vienna and was friends with relatives of Otto Kallir. Through them Beckmann met Quappi, his second wife, so there are many connections. Our previous exhibition was of Marie-Louise Motesiczky who was a student of Beckmann. Quappi was a friend of Motesiczky so you can see how certain relationships came together around Kallir. www.gseart.com Part 1 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:29:36 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1834 Neoteric Art: Give us some background information on yourself. Sam Still: I was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter moved with my parents and older sister to a small town near my father’s birthplace in South Carolina. Our family would continue to grow with the addition of 2 more sisters and a brother. My mother was from a suburb of Philadelphia. My childhood was filled with alcoholism and violence. Beginning at age 6, we made yearly visits back to Philadelphia to see may mother’s family. On that first visit my father took us to New York City. We rode the subway and visited the Empire State Building. My father stated emphatically that cites were disgusting and dirty and could not understand why one would actually want to live in one. I was mesmerized. My mother’s father was a practicing artist in Philadelphia where he owned a frame shop and offered copies of famous paintings to his clients. He never received recognition for his own work. His 2 sisters, that I never met, taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There were original oil paintings by my grandfather throughout the house growing up. My mother did draw small faces quite often but they were never discussed or saved. My father was a tool & die maker and owned a small firm where in later years I worked on and off until I was 18. I did torch cutting of metal, welding, milling machine and lathe turning of both metal and fiberglass. Making art has always been with me as a means of closing out the rest of the world. In the first grade I was sent to the principle’s office with a collage I had made. I handed it to Ms. Pauline, she took it, studied it for what seemed like forever, handed it back to me, told me I would be a famous artist one day and to please get back to class quickly. It meant nothing to me. As I got older, I drew cars, houses and maps of imagined cities. Purchased my first rapidograph pen at 15 to facilitate a black for tires that I could not get with a pencil. Was given my first car at 15 with a gas credit card, asked my father if I could keep the car, drive less, but buy art supplies, he said no. Started to cut classes, would drive many times more than 100 miles out of town, stop for a burger and return. I did this for two years without anyone noticing it though my father did inquire several times why my gas charges seemed excessive. Forged a fair number of sick passes, as I look back I realize schools at that time looked the other way when confronted with an uncomfortable situation. Did not graduate, acquired my GED at 18. Did apply to The Art Institute of Atlanta at 18 and Ringling School of Art at 19, was accepted in both, went, dropped out of both within weeks. Married three times. First marriage and frame shop at 19 in South Carolina. To supplement income I would make small drawings using a rapidograph pen with overlays of watercolor and sepia ink. These would be sold at small weekend mall shows throughout South Carolina. I had quite a handsome pegboard display if I may say so myself. The drawings were of barns and other ramshackle structures. The structures always had a “brick” foundation and in each brick I would right profanities, only visible if one knew they were there. Generally, I would take twelve drawings, six with profanities and six without. Without fail, the ones with profanities would sell first and many times those six would be the only ones that would sell. My relationship with my father was strained at this time so I did not sign any work with my first and last name as I our names were the same, instead I used Aaron, my middle name. First marriage failed. Entered my first juried exhibition (in S.C.) with work more abstract in nature, got rejected. Depressed and lonely, overdosed on a variety of medications left by my first wife whom had worked at a hospital pharmacy. Unsuccessful suicide. Fearing another attempt, committed myself to a mental institution in South Carolina, realized that was not the answer for me. Produced two drawings while there, got out one month later. I then naively evaluated where I might find an audience for my work. Looked at LA, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Couldn’t afford my car, so LA was out, New York was almost bankrupt, Chicago was too cold, so I settled on San Francisco, it is 1975 now. Greyhound had a special cross-country ticket that I could purchase for 75.00. That meant I could travel from S.C. to California and still have 150.00 left over. I had sold all my worldly possessions for 225.00 to facilitate an escape. My mother told me I was running away and I agreed and stated “not fast enough”. After an 80 hour plus cross country bus ride I arrived in San Francisco. Having only spent 15.00 on nabs (type of snack crackers) and soft drinks, I did have 135.00 left. San Francisco was big, scary and exciting. I found a room on California Street for 130.00 (monthly) and the deposit was kindly waived. Now with 5.00 left, I plotted my next move. Purchased more nabs, a soft drink, (and made a pig of myself) some paper and a pen. That first evening I copied ten resumes to hand out the next day. Being very intimidated by the world in general, I didn’t ask anyone how to use public transportation so I walked all over S.F. and hand delivered my hand written resumes to ten frame shops on Friday. No responses. Saturday I pawned my last possession of value, my Seiko wrist watch for 6.00 and purchased an extremely delicious mushroom pizza and a two liter bottle of a root beer. I was depressed again, but at least in a new world. Having no phone, an extremely kind frame shop owner from Noe Valley actually came by the rooming house on Tuesday and offered me a job. I worked that Wednesday and at the end of the day asked if I could get paid. She said yes and I ate that evening. Things were looking up. Unknown to me, the owner was opening a second shop in Berkeley. Three months later I was the manager of that shop and given a company vehicle to take home every evening, all beyond my wildest expectations. Six months later I was married to the manager that had suggested that I be contacted for the job. She was from the south and was not put off my heavy southern accent. As an artist, she enlightened me to the practice of entering juried exhibitions and creating an exhibition history. Within 18 months, her mother passed and we relocated to New Orleans to care for her father. Second marriage failed. By this time I was established in New Orleans with successful frame shop. 1990 and life is bumping along, third marriage to a wonderfully understanding woman, a great family with 2 young sons, great neighborhood and a convertible! Life was good! By 1998 bored with framing and making art in a much more serious manner in terms of contemplating the process. Sold my business in 2000, packed up the family and moved to New York City. I try to make most of my decisions on a deathbed scenario; what would I think on my deathbed about not trying to become a successful artist in New York and staying in New Orleans with my somewhat easy existence. I could not bare the thought, so here I am in Chelsea cobbling together freelance jobs to stay afloat and selling drawings. The draw of New York was a financial one, in a very basic way I felt I could derive more income (even with a higher cost of living) than in New Orleans. This has proved to be true for my work. On the other hand I was extremely naive regarding the art world in countless ways, and it has been the most difficult endeavor I have ever been involved with. Now in my 11th year living here, I finally know my drawings have evolved to a point that I feel very positive about my practice and the future on all levels except age. Closing in on 60, I know that is the biggest hurdle to overcome on so many levels, alas it is too late in the game to turn back so I continue to move forward. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. SS: I have never felt as if I’m creating new work. The most recent drawing connects to the previous drawing and so on and on. Each work is simply a variation on the previous, no matter what the medium. NA: Elaborate on the overall idea behind your "online" exhibitions. SS: That the work is obviously for sale. I am asking for the sale. At this point, I’m not really sold on the idea of the online exhibitions, but always need to explore. The death bed scenario at work. NA: Discuss your most current online exhibition, "Forty New Drawings". SS: Nothing really to discuss. I make the work and whether it speaks to people is not my concern. NA: Earlier this year you were part of the "An Exchange with Sol LeWitt" exhibition at MASS MoCA. Please elaborate. SS: I enter juried exhibitions that have no entry fee and this was one. Nothing unique re being chosen. I did not know the juror. NA: Who/What has been an influence on your work? SS: Working in my father’s machine shop as a young man. Welding, acetylene torch cutting of metal plates, turning metal on lathes etc. The hard edges and flat surfaces are in my drawings. The very first job I did for my father was sweeping his shop on Saturdays. This was a 4000 square foot building and I did a very sloppy job the first time. He took me around on an inspection and pointed out all of my inadequacies has a sweeper. His lesson to me was to do every endeavor with the utmost respect, no matter how seemingly unimportant, and to do it with the very best of my ability. After arriving in New York I started to read as many art related books, magazines and articles in an attempt to place myself in and art historical context. This did not happen. To place my work in any context is not my job. My job is to make work relevant to my needs. NA: Name a few art magazines and/or online art sites that you pay attention to. SS: None really. I am basically only looking for no cost juried exhibitions to enter. www.samstill.com Images: Top. 5:37 PM April 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38" 2. Runner, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 9" x 14" -- Drawing rejected from SC exhibition that proceeded suicide attempt. 3. Sanity/Insanity, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 10" x 10" -- Drawing produced in Mental Institution. Which opening led to what? 4. Psychic Waterfall, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 11" x 9" -- Life is an up-stream endeavor. 5. Second Chance, 1978, pen and ink on paper, 4" x 36" -- Second chance in S.F. Box is up-righting itself. 6. 1:45 PM June 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38"]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/feed/ 3 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:03:17 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1843 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the second three. [caption id="attachment_1846" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 4 | digital markers | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1849" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 5 Near the President's House | digital marker | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1853" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 6 | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:32:33 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1773 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]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/feed/ 4 http://neotericart.com An online art magazine ~ Established 2008 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://neotericart.com An online art magazine ~ Established 2008 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1928 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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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 --- 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. --- 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) --- 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.↩ ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/feed/ 9 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:25:58 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1924 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: They [the artists in Vienna] had an interesting praxis of artists and intellects back then. Were there other artists who Kallir dealt with? Hildegard Bachert: There was Oskar Kokoschka. DT: This was after he had been wounded during WWI? HB: Right. This was in the 1920’s. Kokoschka left Austria after the war and went to Dresden in Germany where he spent a lot of time. He was very shell-shocked and needed psychiatric help. DT: Yes. We would call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD - today. HB: Right. When he had sufficiently recovered he started traveling. He went back to Vienna for a time, then to Paris and London where he painted his famous London landscapes. He would often visit his family in Vienna. Kallir staged Kokoschka exhibitions and purchased some of his art. But Kokoschka was complicated. He had many connections and he did not like Kallir’s engagement with Schiele’s art. During his lifetime Kokoschka did his best to discredit Schiele. DT: Peculiar. HB: No, not peculiar. Kokoschka insisted that he was the innovator of everything. Kallir also knew the artist Max Oppenhiemer. Are you familiar with Max Oppenheimer’s work? He was an Expressionist and a colleague and friend of Schiele. DT: I recollect the name. HB: He was generally called Mopp. He often signed his name like that. I came to know him personally much later. After his emigration to this country as a much older man Mopp was very innovative but Kokoschka kept saying “They all copied me!” He believed that Mopp and Schiele copied him, and the truth be told it was probably Mopp who was first. He was a friend of Schiele’s and he also became friendly with Kokoschka. Eventually they had a big fight with him. Kokoschka was very contentious and tried to influence some of the art historians to sweep Schiele under the rug. DT: So that he would be perceived as the most important. HB: Now, Kokoschka was a very good artist. However his best art was the early work. He did in fact do some good work later on but when he got happy - when he met Olda who later became his wife in Prague –- the tension of the older period left him. DT: That’s an interesting point. I feel the same thing happened to Beckmann’s work when he came to the United States - a lessening of tension in the work. In his previous art the devastations of WWI and its catastrophic aftermath explode with angular tension. HB: This not only happened to Beckmann, who was the least affected. The quality of his oils, particularly the ones from Holland, were good. DT: That’s true. I was referring to the time he came to the U.S. That was when the change in his work became most apparent. HB: Very true, but the works Kokoschka did in America were really not good at all. DT: George Grosz had this problem too. HB: George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein all had problems with their late work. Basically their spirit was killed by the Nazis. DT: And Otto Dix. HB: Dix - he disintegrated. DT: I was told he was very troubled. In a previous interview I had with Donald Kuspit he related to me how he met Dix when he was a student of Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt during the late1950’s. According to him Dix was emotionally destroyed by the Nazis. Today it’s very hard to imagine what it was like, but your generation’s history is very important because you experienced the whole thing. HB: Getting back to Vienna I need to mention one artist of fantastic talent and genius. His name was Richard Gerstl. One day in 1930 a man named Alois Gerstl visited Kallir’s gallery and said “My brother painted and his pictures are in a warehouse here in Vienna. I brought a few samples and I would like your advice: should we keep them or destroy them?” Kallir saw what Alois brought and said “These are fantastic! Take me to the warehouse- I want to see the rest.” DT: To think that his brother had thought of destroying them. HB: Gerstl was completely buried in oblivion. Kallir went to the warehouse where most of his pictures were rolled up. Some were not in great condition. Kallir had the pictures restored, stretched and put on exhibition in his gallery. He discovered him. It was a sensation beyond belief. We have press clippings from that time. In 1931 Kallir compiled a catalog of all the works, numbered each one, put a stamp on each one so they would be authenticated, and signed each stamp. Each Gerstl has a stamp on the back with Otto Kallir’s signature. DT: He took tremendous pains to resurrect his art. HB: He rescued it from oblivion. That’s what Kallir did. He was a trailblazer. DT: He was in the tradition of those dealers who could see ahead, like Vollard and Kahnweiler. Of course the French art world circumstances were a different. I have a particular fascination with dealers andintellects who spearheaded Expressionist art in German and Viennese culture. The Decadent Art Show of 1937 - Entartete Kunst - was Hitler’s attempt to destroy everything it stood for. HB: Not only that. When Kallir came to this country he found that German and Austrian art was unknown or else it wasn’t liked because French art was in and everything else was out. DT: Interesting point. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged the collectors on his board to buy mostly French art for donation to the museum. There were some German Expressionist pieces collected but nothing like the amount of French avant-garde art. What was the art world in America like when Otto Kallir arrived in here? HB: He came in 1939, but I want to relate some events that date from before this time. He sent a traveling exhibition of Gerstl’s work to Germany and other places in Austria. The pictures returned to the Neue Galerie where they were kept over the period of the Second World War. Kallir had purchased many of them from Alois Gerstl before he left Vienna. He brought a few Gerstls to this country. First he emigrated with his family to Switzerland where they had friends. He was able to establish his home in Lucerene but didn’t get permission to work there. With his family safe in Switzerland Kallir went to Paris to open a gallery that he called Galerie St. Etienne in memory of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. He didn’t keep the gallery open for even one year because he wanted to be reunited with his family. Then he managed to get sponsorship to emigrate to America. Kallir was always interested in America because of the country’s engineering achievements. He also loved Jazz. In August 1939 the four Kallirs – he, his wife and two children - arrived in this country. By October he had opened the Galerie St. Etienne in New York at 46 West 57th Street, just up the street from our current location. He thought that he was establishing a branch of the Galerie St. Etienne in Paris at that time, but then the war broke out. He corresponded with his secretary there and told her to put everything in storage and close the gallery. That was the end of Paris. Then Kallir struggled like crazy to establish his artists in this country. DT: A heroic feat considering there was a complete lack of knowledge about his Viennese artists here. HB: He also brought to America some amazing works of art that a Czech collector had placed in his hands on consignment. Of course Kallir knew that his artists weren’t known in this country so he had to come with something that could financially sustain him. But it was the time of the Great Depression and he was able to sell only one of those major paintings, a Cézanne. However he was able to exhibit them, paintings like L’Arlesienne by Van Gogh. Top works of art. He had a fantastic Cezanne portrait Man with the Crossed Arms which now hangs in a famous private collection in New York. He was always in the service of the artists. From the beginning he tried to support the art that he really knew and that he believed needed to be exposed. One of his very first exhibitions was a show that he called Saved From Europe with works by artists like Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka – all totally unknown here. DT: By then the Germans had already staged the Degenerate Art show. They ridiculed Expressionist art. I understand the Nazis destroyed a lot of this art, didn’t they? HB: They certainly did. DT: They must have felt very threatened by the work to take such pains to destroy it. HB: They felt that it was “Jewish” art. They caricatured people like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Of course as you know this Degenerate Art exhibition had one of the largest number of visitors of any art exhibition in the world. DT: That is true. Of all the Expressionists who were Jewish that I can recall, only Ludwig Miedner comes to mind. HB: Well, they hated that art you see. They wanted this “true blue” German housewife-type art that was exhibited in a parallel exhibition. That exhibition hall was empty of an audience. DT: It was kitsch. The Greek god as a German Übermensch. Donald Kuspit has written about the Degenerate Art Show explaining how Expressionism told the harsh truth about the German culture of that time- the darkness and rottenness that lay at its core. HB: Exactly. DT: The Expressionists were showing the whole world upside down. I imagine Kallir must have had a critical sense of what was right and decent. HB: He was a pioneer and he was certainly aware of what was decent and good. He was very upset with graft and cheating and the like. DT: And of course anti-Semitism. It must have been terrible for him to experience that. HB: Prejudice, yes. And he was also very interested in works by women. The very first Paula Modersohn-Becker and Grandma Moses exhibitions took place in this very gallery. Grandma Moses was not classified among the artists of the Women’s Rights movement. Why? I don’t know. She was such an amazing self–made person. She wasn’t a militant Feminist, not at all, but she knew very well what she wanted to do. She was the matriarch of her family - the person in control in her very quiet laid-back way. Of course one of Kallir’s amazing discoveries was finding Grandma Moses with the help of a man who was an engineer employed by the city of New York who loved folk art and traveled around New England. He brought a collection of Moses’ paintings to the New York galleries. One after another the galleries rejected the work, saying “who wants to deal with this old woman?” In 1940 she was 80 years old. Who cared? DT: Didn’t she have a mature group of works at that time? HB: No, not at all. It was the beginning. She painted only small pictures. She had wanted to paint all her life but being a busy farmer’s wife couldn’t find the time. Only in her 70’s did she start to paint because it was the time of the Depression. Where she lived it was terribly depressed. DT: Where did she live? HB: Eagle Bridge New York near Hoosick Falls, the place where John Deere equipment and trucks were made. The area fell apart. All these mill towns were shut down. DT: Devastated I am sure. My father lived through the dark times of the Great Depression in Chicago and had many stories to tell. The deprivation is hard to imagine today and the hardship can leave a black spot on your soul. HB: It did. Economically we are getting a little bit of that right now. There is a difference today but it hits the poor people the same way. Grandma Moses’ pictures were just 8 “x 10” or 14” and some of them were embroidered. Kallir saw a few of the best and said “This is fantastic, I’m going to give this woman a show” DT: He had the insight to see the value in her work early on. HB: Just like what happened with Richard Gerstl. By October 1940 the Galerie St. Etienne had been open in New York for one year. Kallir was something of a greenhorn. He didn’t know English very well though his French was perfect and he spoke it beautifully. However he had a good ear and learned English very quickly. He launched Moses and the exhibition was a success. He represented her from that day on until her death. We had a contract with her. She would send us all her pictures and we would buy them. After she died we continued to represent her estate up to this day. I knew her intimately for 20 years. Getting back to the 1940’s, it was a struggle beyond belief because the most expensive Moses picture cost 0. DT: There are many stories about important art that is inexpensive in the beginning when the artists are unknown. Part 2 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:46:41 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1912 Neoteric Art: Give us a little history on yourself. Gabriel Villa: I was born in 1965 in El Paso, Texas. My parents met and married in the 1950’s in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and had seven children, six boys and one sister. My sister is the youngest of my siblings and I am the youngest of the boys. My childhood was rich with love and laughter. I was three years old when my family moved into what became my childhood home. Many things have influenced my life and my work including: Family, U.S Texas/Mexico Border Culture, American Sports, 1960’s Counter Culture, 1980’s Reaganomics, Indigenous and Western Art. I decided to become an artist when I was in my early twenties. However, the idea of someone making a living and identifying as an artist was something initially foreign to me. It was not until I started taking college courses that I met professors that identified as artists. Since, creativity and art production have been a priority and a constant in my life. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. GV: Generally a work begins by something I see while walking, driving etc. It may be an individual in my neighborhood or it may be an object or scene somewhere in Chicago or while traveling. I’ve trained myself to take a mental snapshot of the location and eventually if this image keeps tugging at me I return to the site and snap a photograph. Although I work with mostly painting and drawing I think of my work as archiving and constructing. I lift images from what I see in my surroundings. I am a scavenger of images. I am drawn to people and imagery that are emotionally charged. Seeking subject mater is a crucial part of my creative process. I am interested in chance, randomness and surprise that “every day life” offers. NA: Recently you've been focusing on drawing. Discuss your drawing and how it compares to your other mediums: painting, mixed media and public work. GV: In 2008, after a long hiatus from drawing I returned to drawing and started working exclusively on paper. There was a lot going on and I suddenly decided to change directions. Something clicked in my head and I started to place an emphasis on creativity and idea rather than focusing on one particular art medium. Prior to this period I was bit of a die hard painter, now I have a different point of view on art making. I believe an artist should select materials and applications that best support his or her concepts. Because drawing is very immediate it is better suited for certain goals. Painting, for me takes longer to resolve. Drawing is like a short story. Painting is like a novel. NA: From 2005-2011 you served as director for Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Please elaborate on your role as director. GV: Yollocalli Arts Reach is an arts education and career-training program for teens and young adults. The Yollocalli model is based on creating a space for youth to partner with practicing artists, access the tools necessary to realize their own vision and build skills as emerging artists. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, Yollocalli is an open forum for experimentation in art making based on issues in art, history, and youth culture. I started at Yollocalli Arts Reach in 2005 as the Youth Programs Coordinator and later was promoted and served as Director. It was a great job and I learned a great deal of valuable skills, including staff management, grant and curriculum writing, youth development, building community partnerships and of course working with many talented Chicago based artist. NA: You recently exhibited at MDW Fair. How was your experience? GV: Over all it was a positive experience. MDW introduced my work to a new audience. It was a pleasure to exhibit my work with artist Nicole Marroquin and work with Curator, Trevor Martin from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MDW introduced me to the work of many Chicago Based artists including Trevor Martin’s Performance work. I met a handful of collectors, gallery directors and a handful of inquisitive art students. I will continue to participate in these types of venues. It is one way for one’s work to be evaluated and every once in a while you connect with people that really get your work. My work calls to people who respond to personal, emotive –expressionist work. My work is definitely not entertaining or conceptual. I want people to feel as if they are walking into my brain when they are experiencing my work. Art venues like MD are a good way to start fostering an audience to one’s work. NA: Discuss your recent book project, "The Art of Gabriel Villa". GV: A few years back I was teaching as an artist in residence at Cristo Rey High School, located in Chicago. There I met an instructor by the name of Francisco Pina, at the time also the editor of ContraTiempo. ContraTiempo is a Spanish art and culture newspaper that feature artists and writers. I introduced to my paintings to him. He became a supporter of my work. Francisco approached me with the idea of collaborating on a self - published catalog. The catalog featured works from 1990- 2005. At the time no one knew who I was (many still don’t). I didn’t have any money and I had many paintings and drawings unfamiliar to many people. I accepted the idea and the partnership. My role was to raise money and write grants for the collaborative project, which I had zero experience. Long story short, we landed a few grants and convinced a few collectors to support the project and I started working at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Yollocalli Arts Reach) to raise the funds. I worked at NMMA longer than I intended to because I enjoyed it so much. Professionally, this was a good move to self-publish. This got the ball rolling and people started to become aware of my work. This publication led to accepting many other opportunities. NA: Regarding your art career, where would you like to be five years down the road? GV: Above ground. www.gabrielvilla.net]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:31:43 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1906 Chicago January Openings - January 6, 2012 On the scene: It was surprisingly warm in the city. River North was jumping with Martina Nehrling's always colorful works at Zg Gallery, Viktoria Sorochinski's intriguing photographs at Catherine Edeleman Gallery, Carl Hammer Gallery's interesting group show "Reflections From a Looking Glass", John Fraser's beautiful mixed media work at Roy Boyd Gallery, Barbara Cooper's and Bob Nugent's wonderful work at Perimeter Gallery, and Ann Nathan Gallery's solid group show. Spotted: David Loew at Catherine Edelman Gallery, William Conger and Judith Geichman at Roy Boyd Gallery, and MCA curator Lynne Warren getting on her bicycle in front of Carl Hammer Gallery. January 13, 2012 On the scene: Wayne White's provocative Ruscha-esque style text paintings at Packer Schopf Gallery...one painting sold for ,000 opening night! Hipsters, Miller beer and a group show curated by Abraham Ritchie at 65Grand...good stuff. Spotted: Tim Vermeulen and Nicholas Sistler at Packer Schopf Gallery. January 14, 2012 On the scene: Saturday night opening at Hinge Gallery featuring a 6-person group show with standouts: Brent Houston and MaryKate Maher. Spotted: Stephanie Burke and Jeriah Hildwine at Hinge Gallery.]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:03:31 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1896 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the next three. [caption id="attachment_1897" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 7 with Bricks | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1898" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 8 with Snow | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1899" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 9 with Oil Drum Garbage Cans | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:16:46 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1887 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: To begin with can you give me some background on Otto Kallir, the establishment of Galerie St. Etienne and how you became his partner in the gallery? Hildegard Bachert: Otto Kallier founded the Neue Galerie in Vienna in 1923 and his first show was an Egon Schiele exhibition. He has specialized in Schiele ever since. He wrote the catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s oil paintings in 1930. He became a Ph.D on the side in something unrelated because he wanted to prove that he was not only good in his field but also had a very good general knowledge of art. At that time he championed the avant-garde artists Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Alfred Kubin – the latter became a good friend of his. He staged some other major shows too. He brought a Van Gogh exhibition to Vienna from Holland and a Lovis Corinth show from Germany, among others. DT: What other artists did he know? HB: Max Beckmann. He knew Beckmann quite well. He was also a publisher of books. He published books by Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. In 1938 the Nazis came to power and Kallir had to leave quickly because he had tried to do some political anti-Nazi work before. There was a warrant out for him. The Nazis took over in March 1938. When they entered Austria they were received with open arms by the Austrians. He left with his family I believe in May or June of that year. DT: How soon was it after the Nazi’s entered Austria that they left? HB: The Nazis entered Austria on March 11, 1938, so it was about two months later. DT: So he had to flee right away. But backing up a little I’m very curious to know any recollections you have regarding his relationships with the artists he knew. He had published prints with Max Beckmann and had intimately known several of the artists that he exhibited. Do you have any stories that describe what their personalities were like? HB: He had a very close relationship with Alfred Kubin and had invited him to come to the gallery’s exhibitions. Kubin was a loner. He always had to be convinced to come to Vienna. He lived in a small town in a little house close to the German border near Passau. It was a little castle-type place that Kubin called Zwicklet. He was a very imaginative and decent kind of person, but also very difficult although Kallir got along very well with him. In fact at the beginning their relationship when they didn’t know each other well Kallir wanted to convince the artist that he could produce perfect reproductions of his art. Kubin claimed it was not possible so Kallir allowed himself to prove it. He published two facsimile reproductions of watercolors which he had printed by the renown firm of Arthur Jaffe. They used a Heliochrome process that involved making reproductions without using a screen. The watercolors he reproduced looked almost the same as the originals. That’s how he convinced Kubin that he was a serious dealer and cared about quality. Kallir was not a printer himself but he only worked with master printers. DT: What was it in Otto Kallir’s background that made him seek out such extraordinary artists who had such profound expressionist and imaginative abilities? This was quite prescient on his part as an art dealer, similar to the way the French dealer Ambroise Vollard foresaw the significance of Picasso’s work. What were the aspects of Kallir’s character that drove him towards Expressionist art? HB: That’s kind of a long story. Even as a boy he was a passionate collector. To sum it up Kallir became a dealer to feed his habit as a collector. DT: A collector of Expressionism? HB: A collector of everything that was of historical importance. He was a “Renaissance” man. When he was young he was terribly interested in technical things like aeronautics. He wrote to the Wright brothers in 1903 when he was only 9 years old. It was at the time they had their first flight at Kitty Hawk. He knew all about human flight and wrote a book about it that was published when he was about 19 years old, so his background was not in art. His father was a lawyer. He grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois family. DT: In Vienna? HB: Yes. He was originally oriented towards becoming an engineer. After serving four years as an officer during WWI he went to engineering school in Vienna where, being Jewish, he encountered so much anti-Semitism that he gave up the profession. DT: This prejudice existed in the medical professions and the sciences, and so on. HB: Everywhere. This was not only in Austria but in Germany as well. DT: So his career became diverted because of anti-Semitism? HB: Exactly. From having previously published a book he developed into a bibliophile and apprenticed at the bookstore of Thomas Heller who was also a young man. It was there that he started to meet artists. He said art is also of historical importance and the first works that he bought and collected were a batch of Gustav Klimt drawings. DT: It ‘s amazing that he had already had an instinct for the top art in Vienna. HB: He saw art, he saw culture, and he saw history. He knew what was important and over time he developed a fantastic eye for art, but he didn’t stop collecting aeronautical material as well. He collected manuscripts of great historical importance in literature, music, science, and history. Not mere autographs, that didn’t interest him. It had to be a document of importance. DT: A manuscript of some kind or a letter - something from the hand of the person. HB: Right. He was very interested in Austrian history so he had many important manuscripts such as those by Kaiser Franz Josef and Archduke Rudolf, the son of Franz Josef who committed suicide. He also had musical manuscripts of importance by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many people he knew personally. DT: Which musicians did he know personally? HB: He knew Arnold Schoenburg, Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal. The latter was the librettist for Strauss. He knew him very well in fact - they were very close friends. So what became his passion? As a young man he published several books on art and literature and then apprenticed at the Galerie Würthle in Vienna where he soon became a kind of partner to the woman who was running the gallery. DT: How old was he at that time? HB: I think he started there around 1920. He was born in 1894 so by then he was 26. DT: It’s remarkable that he was already very developed by that age. He had already become a partner in a gallery that was at the center of the avant-garde art scene in Austria. HB: At the same time he became the director of the art department at the Ricola Verlag Publishing House in Vienna and published more books, mostly on art. The art books are what really survived and are very important today. The most important publication he produced with the help of the Ricola Verlag (he didn’t have enough money to do it on his own) was a portfolio called Das Graphische Werk on Egon Schiele that contained etchings and lithographs which were posthumously published. Egon Schiele died in 1918 and the portfolio was published in 1921. At that time it was popular and had been beautifully bound, presented and numbered. That’s when, with cooperation of course, Kallir started to become acquainted with the whole art establishment. The forward of the portfolio was written byArthur Roessler, one of the major supporters of Schiele whom Kallir knew very well. DT: So Kallir never got to know Schiele personally but came to know about his work through contact with the galleries and art scene? HB: Exactly. So that launched his career. In 1923 he left the Galerie Würthle and founded his own gallery, the Neue Galerie, which is now the name of the museum here in New York. DT: So the museum was named after Kallir’s first gallery? HB: Indeed. DT: As an homage. HB: It’s an homage and it’s an amazing continuation of the spade work Kallir did all his life. He knew many Austrian artists personally - some who are not well known in this country like Otto Rudolf Scatz anGerhart Frankl. Oskar Laske has a certain reputation in the United States. The Busch-Reisinger Museum has two beautiful works by him but they are not famous. To put an artist on the “map” takes a lot of time and you can only do that with top artists. DT: It seems that the art world had only so much space at the top. HB: It seems that way unfortunately. DT: Or else it’s possible that you’re not recognized within your time. HB: Exactly. DT: For some art careers recognition comes much later. For example the Feminist Movement of the 1970’s brought more attention to the work of Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and Camille Claudel creating a new historical appraisal of their work and careers. There can be a delay of recognition based on what the culture is, what the society is, and what critical consciousness is recognized at the time. You mentioned Kallir knew Max Beckmann personally and had worked with him to produce prints. How did they come into contact? HB: He came to Vienna and was friends with relatives of Otto Kallir. Through them Beckmann met Quappi, his second wife, so there are many connections. Our previous exhibition was of Marie-Louise Motesiczky who was a student of Beckmann. Quappi was a friend of Motesiczky so you can see how certain relationships came together around Kallir. www.gseart.com Part 1 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:29:36 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1834 Neoteric Art: Give us some background information on yourself. Sam Still: I was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter moved with my parents and older sister to a small town near my father’s birthplace in South Carolina. Our family would continue to grow with the addition of 2 more sisters and a brother. My mother was from a suburb of Philadelphia. My childhood was filled with alcoholism and violence. Beginning at age 6, we made yearly visits back to Philadelphia to see may mother’s family. On that first visit my father took us to New York City. We rode the subway and visited the Empire State Building. My father stated emphatically that cites were disgusting and dirty and could not understand why one would actually want to live in one. I was mesmerized. My mother’s father was a practicing artist in Philadelphia where he owned a frame shop and offered copies of famous paintings to his clients. He never received recognition for his own work. His 2 sisters, that I never met, taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There were original oil paintings by my grandfather throughout the house growing up. My mother did draw small faces quite often but they were never discussed or saved. My father was a tool & die maker and owned a small firm where in later years I worked on and off until I was 18. I did torch cutting of metal, welding, milling machine and lathe turning of both metal and fiberglass. Making art has always been with me as a means of closing out the rest of the world. In the first grade I was sent to the principle’s office with a collage I had made. I handed it to Ms. Pauline, she took it, studied it for what seemed like forever, handed it back to me, told me I would be a famous artist one day and to please get back to class quickly. It meant nothing to me. As I got older, I drew cars, houses and maps of imagined cities. Purchased my first rapidograph pen at 15 to facilitate a black for tires that I could not get with a pencil. Was given my first car at 15 with a gas credit card, asked my father if I could keep the car, drive less, but buy art supplies, he said no. Started to cut classes, would drive many times more than 100 miles out of town, stop for a burger and return. I did this for two years without anyone noticing it though my father did inquire several times why my gas charges seemed excessive. Forged a fair number of sick passes, as I look back I realize schools at that time looked the other way when confronted with an uncomfortable situation. Did not graduate, acquired my GED at 18. Did apply to The Art Institute of Atlanta at 18 and Ringling School of Art at 19, was accepted in both, went, dropped out of both within weeks. Married three times. First marriage and frame shop at 19 in South Carolina. To supplement income I would make small drawings using a rapidograph pen with overlays of watercolor and sepia ink. These would be sold at small weekend mall shows throughout South Carolina. I had quite a handsome pegboard display if I may say so myself. The drawings were of barns and other ramshackle structures. The structures always had a “brick” foundation and in each brick I would right profanities, only visible if one knew they were there. Generally, I would take twelve drawings, six with profanities and six without. Without fail, the ones with profanities would sell first and many times those six would be the only ones that would sell. My relationship with my father was strained at this time so I did not sign any work with my first and last name as I our names were the same, instead I used Aaron, my middle name. First marriage failed. Entered my first juried exhibition (in S.C.) with work more abstract in nature, got rejected. Depressed and lonely, overdosed on a variety of medications left by my first wife whom had worked at a hospital pharmacy. Unsuccessful suicide. Fearing another attempt, committed myself to a mental institution in South Carolina, realized that was not the answer for me. Produced two drawings while there, got out one month later. I then naively evaluated where I might find an audience for my work. Looked at LA, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Couldn’t afford my car, so LA was out, New York was almost bankrupt, Chicago was too cold, so I settled on San Francisco, it is 1975 now. Greyhound had a special cross-country ticket that I could purchase for 75.00. That meant I could travel from S.C. to California and still have 150.00 left over. I had sold all my worldly possessions for 225.00 to facilitate an escape. My mother told me I was running away and I agreed and stated “not fast enough”. After an 80 hour plus cross country bus ride I arrived in San Francisco. Having only spent 15.00 on nabs (type of snack crackers) and soft drinks, I did have 135.00 left. San Francisco was big, scary and exciting. I found a room on California Street for 130.00 (monthly) and the deposit was kindly waived. Now with 5.00 left, I plotted my next move. Purchased more nabs, a soft drink, (and made a pig of myself) some paper and a pen. That first evening I copied ten resumes to hand out the next day. Being very intimidated by the world in general, I didn’t ask anyone how to use public transportation so I walked all over S.F. and hand delivered my hand written resumes to ten frame shops on Friday. No responses. Saturday I pawned my last possession of value, my Seiko wrist watch for 6.00 and purchased an extremely delicious mushroom pizza and a two liter bottle of a root beer. I was depressed again, but at least in a new world. Having no phone, an extremely kind frame shop owner from Noe Valley actually came by the rooming house on Tuesday and offered me a job. I worked that Wednesday and at the end of the day asked if I could get paid. She said yes and I ate that evening. Things were looking up. Unknown to me, the owner was opening a second shop in Berkeley. Three months later I was the manager of that shop and given a company vehicle to take home every evening, all beyond my wildest expectations. Six months later I was married to the manager that had suggested that I be contacted for the job. She was from the south and was not put off my heavy southern accent. As an artist, she enlightened me to the practice of entering juried exhibitions and creating an exhibition history. Within 18 months, her mother passed and we relocated to New Orleans to care for her father. Second marriage failed. By this time I was established in New Orleans with successful frame shop. 1990 and life is bumping along, third marriage to a wonderfully understanding woman, a great family with 2 young sons, great neighborhood and a convertible! Life was good! By 1998 bored with framing and making art in a much more serious manner in terms of contemplating the process. Sold my business in 2000, packed up the family and moved to New York City. I try to make most of my decisions on a deathbed scenario; what would I think on my deathbed about not trying to become a successful artist in New York and staying in New Orleans with my somewhat easy existence. I could not bare the thought, so here I am in Chelsea cobbling together freelance jobs to stay afloat and selling drawings. The draw of New York was a financial one, in a very basic way I felt I could derive more income (even with a higher cost of living) than in New Orleans. This has proved to be true for my work. On the other hand I was extremely naive regarding the art world in countless ways, and it has been the most difficult endeavor I have ever been involved with. Now in my 11th year living here, I finally know my drawings have evolved to a point that I feel very positive about my practice and the future on all levels except age. Closing in on 60, I know that is the biggest hurdle to overcome on so many levels, alas it is too late in the game to turn back so I continue to move forward. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. SS: I have never felt as if I’m creating new work. The most recent drawing connects to the previous drawing and so on and on. Each work is simply a variation on the previous, no matter what the medium. NA: Elaborate on the overall idea behind your "online" exhibitions. SS: That the work is obviously for sale. I am asking for the sale. At this point, I’m not really sold on the idea of the online exhibitions, but always need to explore. The death bed scenario at work. NA: Discuss your most current online exhibition, "Forty New Drawings". SS: Nothing really to discuss. I make the work and whether it speaks to people is not my concern. NA: Earlier this year you were part of the "An Exchange with Sol LeWitt" exhibition at MASS MoCA. Please elaborate. SS: I enter juried exhibitions that have no entry fee and this was one. Nothing unique re being chosen. I did not know the juror. NA: Who/What has been an influence on your work? SS: Working in my father’s machine shop as a young man. Welding, acetylene torch cutting of metal plates, turning metal on lathes etc. The hard edges and flat surfaces are in my drawings. The very first job I did for my father was sweeping his shop on Saturdays. This was a 4000 square foot building and I did a very sloppy job the first time. He took me around on an inspection and pointed out all of my inadequacies has a sweeper. His lesson to me was to do every endeavor with the utmost respect, no matter how seemingly unimportant, and to do it with the very best of my ability. After arriving in New York I started to read as many art related books, magazines and articles in an attempt to place myself in and art historical context. This did not happen. To place my work in any context is not my job. My job is to make work relevant to my needs. NA: Name a few art magazines and/or online art sites that you pay attention to. SS: None really. I am basically only looking for no cost juried exhibitions to enter. www.samstill.com Images: Top. 5:37 PM April 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38" 2. Runner, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 9" x 14" -- Drawing rejected from SC exhibition that proceeded suicide attempt. 3. Sanity/Insanity, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 10" x 10" -- Drawing produced in Mental Institution. Which opening led to what? 4. Psychic Waterfall, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 11" x 9" -- Life is an up-stream endeavor. 5. Second Chance, 1978, pen and ink on paper, 4" x 36" -- Second chance in S.F. Box is up-righting itself. 6. 1:45 PM June 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38"]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/feed/ 3 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:03:17 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1843 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the second three. [caption id="attachment_1846" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 4 | digital markers | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1849" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 5 Near the President's House | digital marker | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1853" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 6 | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:32:33 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1773 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]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/feed/ 4 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1928 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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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 --- 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. --- 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) --- 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.↩ ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/feed/ 9 http://neotericart.com An online art magazine ~ Established 2008 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1928 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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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 --- 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. --- 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) --- 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.↩ ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/feed/ 9 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:25:58 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1924 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: They [the artists in Vienna] had an interesting praxis of artists and intellects back then. Were there other artists who Kallir dealt with? Hildegard Bachert: There was Oskar Kokoschka. DT: This was after he had been wounded during WWI? HB: Right. This was in the 1920’s. Kokoschka left Austria after the war and went to Dresden in Germany where he spent a lot of time. He was very shell-shocked and needed psychiatric help. DT: Yes. We would call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD - today. HB: Right. When he had sufficiently recovered he started traveling. He went back to Vienna for a time, then to Paris and London where he painted his famous London landscapes. He would often visit his family in Vienna. Kallir staged Kokoschka exhibitions and purchased some of his art. But Kokoschka was complicated. He had many connections and he did not like Kallir’s engagement with Schiele’s art. During his lifetime Kokoschka did his best to discredit Schiele. DT: Peculiar. HB: No, not peculiar. Kokoschka insisted that he was the innovator of everything. Kallir also knew the artist Max Oppenhiemer. Are you familiar with Max Oppenheimer’s work? He was an Expressionist and a colleague and friend of Schiele. DT: I recollect the name. HB: He was generally called Mopp. He often signed his name like that. I came to know him personally much later. After his emigration to this country as a much older man Mopp was very innovative but Kokoschka kept saying “They all copied me!” He believed that Mopp and Schiele copied him, and the truth be told it was probably Mopp who was first. He was a friend of Schiele’s and he also became friendly with Kokoschka. Eventually they had a big fight with him. Kokoschka was very contentious and tried to influence some of the art historians to sweep Schiele under the rug. DT: So that he would be perceived as the most important. HB: Now, Kokoschka was a very good artist. However his best art was the early work. He did in fact do some good work later on but when he got happy - when he met Olda who later became his wife in Prague –- the tension of the older period left him. DT: That’s an interesting point. I feel the same thing happened to Beckmann’s work when he came to the United States - a lessening of tension in the work. In his previous art the devastations of WWI and its catastrophic aftermath explode with angular tension. HB: This not only happened to Beckmann, who was the least affected. The quality of his oils, particularly the ones from Holland, were good. DT: That’s true. I was referring to the time he came to the U.S. That was when the change in his work became most apparent. HB: Very true, but the works Kokoschka did in America were really not good at all. DT: George Grosz had this problem too. HB: George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein all had problems with their late work. Basically their spirit was killed by the Nazis. DT: And Otto Dix. HB: Dix - he disintegrated. DT: I was told he was very troubled. In a previous interview I had with Donald Kuspit he related to me how he met Dix when he was a student of Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt during the late1950’s. According to him Dix was emotionally destroyed by the Nazis. Today it’s very hard to imagine what it was like, but your generation’s history is very important because you experienced the whole thing. HB: Getting back to Vienna I need to mention one artist of fantastic talent and genius. His name was Richard Gerstl. One day in 1930 a man named Alois Gerstl visited Kallir’s gallery and said “My brother painted and his pictures are in a warehouse here in Vienna. I brought a few samples and I would like your advice: should we keep them or destroy them?” Kallir saw what Alois brought and said “These are fantastic! Take me to the warehouse- I want to see the rest.” DT: To think that his brother had thought of destroying them. HB: Gerstl was completely buried in oblivion. Kallir went to the warehouse where most of his pictures were rolled up. Some were not in great condition. Kallir had the pictures restored, stretched and put on exhibition in his gallery. He discovered him. It was a sensation beyond belief. We have press clippings from that time. In 1931 Kallir compiled a catalog of all the works, numbered each one, put a stamp on each one so they would be authenticated, and signed each stamp. Each Gerstl has a stamp on the back with Otto Kallir’s signature. DT: He took tremendous pains to resurrect his art. HB: He rescued it from oblivion. That’s what Kallir did. He was a trailblazer. DT: He was in the tradition of those dealers who could see ahead, like Vollard and Kahnweiler. Of course the French art world circumstances were a different. I have a particular fascination with dealers andintellects who spearheaded Expressionist art in German and Viennese culture. The Decadent Art Show of 1937 - Entartete Kunst - was Hitler’s attempt to destroy everything it stood for. HB: Not only that. When Kallir came to this country he found that German and Austrian art was unknown or else it wasn’t liked because French art was in and everything else was out. DT: Interesting point. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged the collectors on his board to buy mostly French art for donation to the museum. There were some German Expressionist pieces collected but nothing like the amount of French avant-garde art. What was the art world in America like when Otto Kallir arrived in here? HB: He came in 1939, but I want to relate some events that date from before this time. He sent a traveling exhibition of Gerstl’s work to Germany and other places in Austria. The pictures returned to the Neue Galerie where they were kept over the period of the Second World War. Kallir had purchased many of them from Alois Gerstl before he left Vienna. He brought a few Gerstls to this country. First he emigrated with his family to Switzerland where they had friends. He was able to establish his home in Lucerene but didn’t get permission to work there. With his family safe in Switzerland Kallir went to Paris to open a gallery that he called Galerie St. Etienne in memory of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. He didn’t keep the gallery open for even one year because he wanted to be reunited with his family. Then he managed to get sponsorship to emigrate to America. Kallir was always interested in America because of the country’s engineering achievements. He also loved Jazz. In August 1939 the four Kallirs – he, his wife and two children - arrived in this country. By October he had opened the Galerie St. Etienne in New York at 46 West 57th Street, just up the street from our current location. He thought that he was establishing a branch of the Galerie St. Etienne in Paris at that time, but then the war broke out. He corresponded with his secretary there and told her to put everything in storage and close the gallery. That was the end of Paris. Then Kallir struggled like crazy to establish his artists in this country. DT: A heroic feat considering there was a complete lack of knowledge about his Viennese artists here. HB: He also brought to America some amazing works of art that a Czech collector had placed in his hands on consignment. Of course Kallir knew that his artists weren’t known in this country so he had to come with something that could financially sustain him. But it was the time of the Great Depression and he was able to sell only one of those major paintings, a Cézanne. However he was able to exhibit them, paintings like L’Arlesienne by Van Gogh. Top works of art. He had a fantastic Cezanne portrait Man with the Crossed Arms which now hangs in a famous private collection in New York. He was always in the service of the artists. From the beginning he tried to support the art that he really knew and that he believed needed to be exposed. One of his very first exhibitions was a show that he called Saved From Europe with works by artists like Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka – all totally unknown here. DT: By then the Germans had already staged the Degenerate Art show. They ridiculed Expressionist art. I understand the Nazis destroyed a lot of this art, didn’t they? HB: They certainly did. DT: They must have felt very threatened by the work to take such pains to destroy it. HB: They felt that it was “Jewish” art. They caricatured people like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Of course as you know this Degenerate Art exhibition had one of the largest number of visitors of any art exhibition in the world. DT: That is true. Of all the Expressionists who were Jewish that I can recall, only Ludwig Miedner comes to mind. HB: Well, they hated that art you see. They wanted this “true blue” German housewife-type art that was exhibited in a parallel exhibition. That exhibition hall was empty of an audience. DT: It was kitsch. The Greek god as a German Übermensch. Donald Kuspit has written about the Degenerate Art Show explaining how Expressionism told the harsh truth about the German culture of that time- the darkness and rottenness that lay at its core. HB: Exactly. DT: The Expressionists were showing the whole world upside down. I imagine Kallir must have had a critical sense of what was right and decent. HB: He was a pioneer and he was certainly aware of what was decent and good. He was very upset with graft and cheating and the like. DT: And of course anti-Semitism. It must have been terrible for him to experience that. HB: Prejudice, yes. And he was also very interested in works by women. The very first Paula Modersohn-Becker and Grandma Moses exhibitions took place in this very gallery. Grandma Moses was not classified among the artists of the Women’s Rights movement. Why? I don’t know. She was such an amazing self–made person. She wasn’t a militant Feminist, not at all, but she knew very well what she wanted to do. She was the matriarch of her family - the person in control in her very quiet laid-back way. Of course one of Kallir’s amazing discoveries was finding Grandma Moses with the help of a man who was an engineer employed by the city of New York who loved folk art and traveled around New England. He brought a collection of Moses’ paintings to the New York galleries. One after another the galleries rejected the work, saying “who wants to deal with this old woman?” In 1940 she was 80 years old. Who cared? DT: Didn’t she have a mature group of works at that time? HB: No, not at all. It was the beginning. She painted only small pictures. She had wanted to paint all her life but being a busy farmer’s wife couldn’t find the time. Only in her 70’s did she start to paint because it was the time of the Depression. Where she lived it was terribly depressed. DT: Where did she live? HB: Eagle Bridge New York near Hoosick Falls, the place where John Deere equipment and trucks were made. The area fell apart. All these mill towns were shut down. DT: Devastated I am sure. My father lived through the dark times of the Great Depression in Chicago and had many stories to tell. The deprivation is hard to imagine today and the hardship can leave a black spot on your soul. HB: It did. Economically we are getting a little bit of that right now. There is a difference today but it hits the poor people the same way. Grandma Moses’ pictures were just 8 “x 10” or 14” and some of them were embroidered. Kallir saw a few of the best and said “This is fantastic, I’m going to give this woman a show” DT: He had the insight to see the value in her work early on. HB: Just like what happened with Richard Gerstl. By October 1940 the Galerie St. Etienne had been open in New York for one year. Kallir was something of a greenhorn. He didn’t know English very well though his French was perfect and he spoke it beautifully. However he had a good ear and learned English very quickly. He launched Moses and the exhibition was a success. He represented her from that day on until her death. We had a contract with her. She would send us all her pictures and we would buy them. After she died we continued to represent her estate up to this day. I knew her intimately for 20 years. Getting back to the 1940’s, it was a struggle beyond belief because the most expensive Moses picture cost 0. DT: There are many stories about important art that is inexpensive in the beginning when the artists are unknown. Part 2 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:46:41 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1912 Neoteric Art: Give us a little history on yourself. Gabriel Villa: I was born in 1965 in El Paso, Texas. My parents met and married in the 1950’s in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and had seven children, six boys and one sister. My sister is the youngest of my siblings and I am the youngest of the boys. My childhood was rich with love and laughter. I was three years old when my family moved into what became my childhood home. Many things have influenced my life and my work including: Family, U.S Texas/Mexico Border Culture, American Sports, 1960’s Counter Culture, 1980’s Reaganomics, Indigenous and Western Art. I decided to become an artist when I was in my early twenties. However, the idea of someone making a living and identifying as an artist was something initially foreign to me. It was not until I started taking college courses that I met professors that identified as artists. Since, creativity and art production have been a priority and a constant in my life. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. GV: Generally a work begins by something I see while walking, driving etc. It may be an individual in my neighborhood or it may be an object or scene somewhere in Chicago or while traveling. I’ve trained myself to take a mental snapshot of the location and eventually if this image keeps tugging at me I return to the site and snap a photograph. Although I work with mostly painting and drawing I think of my work as archiving and constructing. I lift images from what I see in my surroundings. I am a scavenger of images. I am drawn to people and imagery that are emotionally charged. Seeking subject mater is a crucial part of my creative process. I am interested in chance, randomness and surprise that “every day life” offers. NA: Recently you've been focusing on drawing. Discuss your drawing and how it compares to your other mediums: painting, mixed media and public work. GV: In 2008, after a long hiatus from drawing I returned to drawing and started working exclusively on paper. There was a lot going on and I suddenly decided to change directions. Something clicked in my head and I started to place an emphasis on creativity and idea rather than focusing on one particular art medium. Prior to this period I was bit of a die hard painter, now I have a different point of view on art making. I believe an artist should select materials and applications that best support his or her concepts. Because drawing is very immediate it is better suited for certain goals. Painting, for me takes longer to resolve. Drawing is like a short story. Painting is like a novel. NA: From 2005-2011 you served as director for Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Please elaborate on your role as director. GV: Yollocalli Arts Reach is an arts education and career-training program for teens and young adults. The Yollocalli model is based on creating a space for youth to partner with practicing artists, access the tools necessary to realize their own vision and build skills as emerging artists. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, Yollocalli is an open forum for experimentation in art making based on issues in art, history, and youth culture. I started at Yollocalli Arts Reach in 2005 as the Youth Programs Coordinator and later was promoted and served as Director. It was a great job and I learned a great deal of valuable skills, including staff management, grant and curriculum writing, youth development, building community partnerships and of course working with many talented Chicago based artist. NA: You recently exhibited at MDW Fair. How was your experience? GV: Over all it was a positive experience. MDW introduced my work to a new audience. It was a pleasure to exhibit my work with artist Nicole Marroquin and work with Curator, Trevor Martin from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MDW introduced me to the work of many Chicago Based artists including Trevor Martin’s Performance work. I met a handful of collectors, gallery directors and a handful of inquisitive art students. I will continue to participate in these types of venues. It is one way for one’s work to be evaluated and every once in a while you connect with people that really get your work. My work calls to people who respond to personal, emotive –expressionist work. My work is definitely not entertaining or conceptual. I want people to feel as if they are walking into my brain when they are experiencing my work. Art venues like MD are a good way to start fostering an audience to one’s work. NA: Discuss your recent book project, "The Art of Gabriel Villa". GV: A few years back I was teaching as an artist in residence at Cristo Rey High School, located in Chicago. There I met an instructor by the name of Francisco Pina, at the time also the editor of ContraTiempo. ContraTiempo is a Spanish art and culture newspaper that feature artists and writers. I introduced to my paintings to him. He became a supporter of my work. Francisco approached me with the idea of collaborating on a self - published catalog. The catalog featured works from 1990- 2005. At the time no one knew who I was (many still don’t). I didn’t have any money and I had many paintings and drawings unfamiliar to many people. I accepted the idea and the partnership. My role was to raise money and write grants for the collaborative project, which I had zero experience. Long story short, we landed a few grants and convinced a few collectors to support the project and I started working at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Yollocalli Arts Reach) to raise the funds. I worked at NMMA longer than I intended to because I enjoyed it so much. Professionally, this was a good move to self-publish. This got the ball rolling and people started to become aware of my work. This publication led to accepting many other opportunities. NA: Regarding your art career, where would you like to be five years down the road? GV: Above ground. www.gabrielvilla.net]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:31:43 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1906 Chicago January Openings - January 6, 2012 On the scene: It was surprisingly warm in the city. River North was jumping with Martina Nehrling's always colorful works at Zg Gallery, Viktoria Sorochinski's intriguing photographs at Catherine Edeleman Gallery, Carl Hammer Gallery's interesting group show "Reflections From a Looking Glass", John Fraser's beautiful mixed media work at Roy Boyd Gallery, Barbara Cooper's and Bob Nugent's wonderful work at Perimeter Gallery, and Ann Nathan Gallery's solid group show. Spotted: David Loew at Catherine Edelman Gallery, William Conger and Judith Geichman at Roy Boyd Gallery, and MCA curator Lynne Warren getting on her bicycle in front of Carl Hammer Gallery. January 13, 2012 On the scene: Wayne White's provocative Ruscha-esque style text paintings at Packer Schopf Gallery...one painting sold for ,000 opening night! Hipsters, Miller beer and a group show curated by Abraham Ritchie at 65Grand...good stuff. Spotted: Tim Vermeulen and Nicholas Sistler at Packer Schopf Gallery. January 14, 2012 On the scene: Saturday night opening at Hinge Gallery featuring a 6-person group show with standouts: Brent Houston and MaryKate Maher. Spotted: Stephanie Burke and Jeriah Hildwine at Hinge Gallery.]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:03:31 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1896 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the next three. [caption id="attachment_1897" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 7 with Bricks | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1898" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 8 with Snow | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1899" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 9 with Oil Drum Garbage Cans | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:16:46 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1887 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: To begin with can you give me some background on Otto Kallir, the establishment of Galerie St. Etienne and how you became his partner in the gallery? Hildegard Bachert: Otto Kallier founded the Neue Galerie in Vienna in 1923 and his first show was an Egon Schiele exhibition. He has specialized in Schiele ever since. He wrote the catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s oil paintings in 1930. He became a Ph.D on the side in something unrelated because he wanted to prove that he was not only good in his field but also had a very good general knowledge of art. At that time he championed the avant-garde artists Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Alfred Kubin – the latter became a good friend of his. He staged some other major shows too. He brought a Van Gogh exhibition to Vienna from Holland and a Lovis Corinth show from Germany, among others. DT: What other artists did he know? HB: Max Beckmann. He knew Beckmann quite well. He was also a publisher of books. He published books by Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. In 1938 the Nazis came to power and Kallir had to leave quickly because he had tried to do some political anti-Nazi work before. There was a warrant out for him. The Nazis took over in March 1938. When they entered Austria they were received with open arms by the Austrians. He left with his family I believe in May or June of that year. DT: How soon was it after the Nazi’s entered Austria that they left? HB: The Nazis entered Austria on March 11, 1938, so it was about two months later. DT: So he had to flee right away. But backing up a little I’m very curious to know any recollections you have regarding his relationships with the artists he knew. He had published prints with Max Beckmann and had intimately known several of the artists that he exhibited. Do you have any stories that describe what their personalities were like? HB: He had a very close relationship with Alfred Kubin and had invited him to come to the gallery’s exhibitions. Kubin was a loner. He always had to be convinced to come to Vienna. He lived in a small town in a little house close to the German border near Passau. It was a little castle-type place that Kubin called Zwicklet. He was a very imaginative and decent kind of person, but also very difficult although Kallir got along very well with him. In fact at the beginning their relationship when they didn’t know each other well Kallir wanted to convince the artist that he could produce perfect reproductions of his art. Kubin claimed it was not possible so Kallir allowed himself to prove it. He published two facsimile reproductions of watercolors which he had printed by the renown firm of Arthur Jaffe. They used a Heliochrome process that involved making reproductions without using a screen. The watercolors he reproduced looked almost the same as the originals. That’s how he convinced Kubin that he was a serious dealer and cared about quality. Kallir was not a printer himself but he only worked with master printers. DT: What was it in Otto Kallir’s background that made him seek out such extraordinary artists who had such profound expressionist and imaginative abilities? This was quite prescient on his part as an art dealer, similar to the way the French dealer Ambroise Vollard foresaw the significance of Picasso’s work. What were the aspects of Kallir’s character that drove him towards Expressionist art? HB: That’s kind of a long story. Even as a boy he was a passionate collector. To sum it up Kallir became a dealer to feed his habit as a collector. DT: A collector of Expressionism? HB: A collector of everything that was of historical importance. He was a “Renaissance” man. When he was young he was terribly interested in technical things like aeronautics. He wrote to the Wright brothers in 1903 when he was only 9 years old. It was at the time they had their first flight at Kitty Hawk. He knew all about human flight and wrote a book about it that was published when he was about 19 years old, so his background was not in art. His father was a lawyer. He grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois family. DT: In Vienna? HB: Yes. He was originally oriented towards becoming an engineer. After serving four years as an officer during WWI he went to engineering school in Vienna where, being Jewish, he encountered so much anti-Semitism that he gave up the profession. DT: This prejudice existed in the medical professions and the sciences, and so on. HB: Everywhere. This was not only in Austria but in Germany as well. DT: So his career became diverted because of anti-Semitism? HB: Exactly. From having previously published a book he developed into a bibliophile and apprenticed at the bookstore of Thomas Heller who was also a young man. It was there that he started to meet artists. He said art is also of historical importance and the first works that he bought and collected were a batch of Gustav Klimt drawings. DT: It ‘s amazing that he had already had an instinct for the top art in Vienna. HB: He saw art, he saw culture, and he saw history. He knew what was important and over time he developed a fantastic eye for art, but he didn’t stop collecting aeronautical material as well. He collected manuscripts of great historical importance in literature, music, science, and history. Not mere autographs, that didn’t interest him. It had to be a document of importance. DT: A manuscript of some kind or a letter - something from the hand of the person. HB: Right. He was very interested in Austrian history so he had many important manuscripts such as those by Kaiser Franz Josef and Archduke Rudolf, the son of Franz Josef who committed suicide. He also had musical manuscripts of importance by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many people he knew personally. DT: Which musicians did he know personally? HB: He knew Arnold Schoenburg, Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal. The latter was the librettist for Strauss. He knew him very well in fact - they were very close friends. So what became his passion? As a young man he published several books on art and literature and then apprenticed at the Galerie Würthle in Vienna where he soon became a kind of partner to the woman who was running the gallery. DT: How old was he at that time? HB: I think he started there around 1920. He was born in 1894 so by then he was 26. DT: It’s remarkable that he was already very developed by that age. He had already become a partner in a gallery that was at the center of the avant-garde art scene in Austria. HB: At the same time he became the director of the art department at the Ricola Verlag Publishing House in Vienna and published more books, mostly on art. The art books are what really survived and are very important today. The most important publication he produced with the help of the Ricola Verlag (he didn’t have enough money to do it on his own) was a portfolio called Das Graphische Werk on Egon Schiele that contained etchings and lithographs which were posthumously published. Egon Schiele died in 1918 and the portfolio was published in 1921. At that time it was popular and had been beautifully bound, presented and numbered. That’s when, with cooperation of course, Kallir started to become acquainted with the whole art establishment. The forward of the portfolio was written byArthur Roessler, one of the major supporters of Schiele whom Kallir knew very well. DT: So Kallir never got to know Schiele personally but came to know about his work through contact with the galleries and art scene? HB: Exactly. So that launched his career. In 1923 he left the Galerie Würthle and founded his own gallery, the Neue Galerie, which is now the name of the museum here in New York. DT: So the museum was named after Kallir’s first gallery? HB: Indeed. DT: As an homage. HB: It’s an homage and it’s an amazing continuation of the spade work Kallir did all his life. He knew many Austrian artists personally - some who are not well known in this country like Otto Rudolf Scatz anGerhart Frankl. Oskar Laske has a certain reputation in the United States. The Busch-Reisinger Museum has two beautiful works by him but they are not famous. To put an artist on the “map” takes a lot of time and you can only do that with top artists. DT: It seems that the art world had only so much space at the top. HB: It seems that way unfortunately. DT: Or else it’s possible that you’re not recognized within your time. HB: Exactly. DT: For some art careers recognition comes much later. For example the Feminist Movement of the 1970’s brought more attention to the work of Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and Camille Claudel creating a new historical appraisal of their work and careers. There can be a delay of recognition based on what the culture is, what the society is, and what critical consciousness is recognized at the time. You mentioned Kallir knew Max Beckmann personally and had worked with him to produce prints. How did they come into contact? HB: He came to Vienna and was friends with relatives of Otto Kallir. Through them Beckmann met Quappi, his second wife, so there are many connections. Our previous exhibition was of Marie-Louise Motesiczky who was a student of Beckmann. Quappi was a friend of Motesiczky so you can see how certain relationships came together around Kallir. www.gseart.com Part 1 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:29:36 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1834 Neoteric Art: Give us some background information on yourself. Sam Still: I was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter moved with my parents and older sister to a small town near my father’s birthplace in South Carolina. Our family would continue to grow with the addition of 2 more sisters and a brother. My mother was from a suburb of Philadelphia. My childhood was filled with alcoholism and violence. Beginning at age 6, we made yearly visits back to Philadelphia to see may mother’s family. On that first visit my father took us to New York City. We rode the subway and visited the Empire State Building. My father stated emphatically that cites were disgusting and dirty and could not understand why one would actually want to live in one. I was mesmerized. My mother’s father was a practicing artist in Philadelphia where he owned a frame shop and offered copies of famous paintings to his clients. He never received recognition for his own work. His 2 sisters, that I never met, taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There were original oil paintings by my grandfather throughout the house growing up. My mother did draw small faces quite often but they were never discussed or saved. My father was a tool & die maker and owned a small firm where in later years I worked on and off until I was 18. I did torch cutting of metal, welding, milling machine and lathe turning of both metal and fiberglass. Making art has always been with me as a means of closing out the rest of the world. In the first grade I was sent to the principle’s office with a collage I had made. I handed it to Ms. Pauline, she took it, studied it for what seemed like forever, handed it back to me, told me I would be a famous artist one day and to please get back to class quickly. It meant nothing to me. As I got older, I drew cars, houses and maps of imagined cities. Purchased my first rapidograph pen at 15 to facilitate a black for tires that I could not get with a pencil. Was given my first car at 15 with a gas credit card, asked my father if I could keep the car, drive less, but buy art supplies, he said no. Started to cut classes, would drive many times more than 100 miles out of town, stop for a burger and return. I did this for two years without anyone noticing it though my father did inquire several times why my gas charges seemed excessive. Forged a fair number of sick passes, as I look back I realize schools at that time looked the other way when confronted with an uncomfortable situation. Did not graduate, acquired my GED at 18. Did apply to The Art Institute of Atlanta at 18 and Ringling School of Art at 19, was accepted in both, went, dropped out of both within weeks. Married three times. First marriage and frame shop at 19 in South Carolina. To supplement income I would make small drawings using a rapidograph pen with overlays of watercolor and sepia ink. These would be sold at small weekend mall shows throughout South Carolina. I had quite a handsome pegboard display if I may say so myself. The drawings were of barns and other ramshackle structures. The structures always had a “brick” foundation and in each brick I would right profanities, only visible if one knew they were there. Generally, I would take twelve drawings, six with profanities and six without. Without fail, the ones with profanities would sell first and many times those six would be the only ones that would sell. My relationship with my father was strained at this time so I did not sign any work with my first and last name as I our names were the same, instead I used Aaron, my middle name. First marriage failed. Entered my first juried exhibition (in S.C.) with work more abstract in nature, got rejected. Depressed and lonely, overdosed on a variety of medications left by my first wife whom had worked at a hospital pharmacy. Unsuccessful suicide. Fearing another attempt, committed myself to a mental institution in South Carolina, realized that was not the answer for me. Produced two drawings while there, got out one month later. I then naively evaluated where I might find an audience for my work. Looked at LA, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Couldn’t afford my car, so LA was out, New York was almost bankrupt, Chicago was too cold, so I settled on San Francisco, it is 1975 now. Greyhound had a special cross-country ticket that I could purchase for 75.00. That meant I could travel from S.C. to California and still have 150.00 left over. I had sold all my worldly possessions for 225.00 to facilitate an escape. My mother told me I was running away and I agreed and stated “not fast enough”. After an 80 hour plus cross country bus ride I arrived in San Francisco. Having only spent 15.00 on nabs (type of snack crackers) and soft drinks, I did have 135.00 left. San Francisco was big, scary and exciting. I found a room on California Street for 130.00 (monthly) and the deposit was kindly waived. Now with 5.00 left, I plotted my next move. Purchased more nabs, a soft drink, (and made a pig of myself) some paper and a pen. That first evening I copied ten resumes to hand out the next day. Being very intimidated by the world in general, I didn’t ask anyone how to use public transportation so I walked all over S.F. and hand delivered my hand written resumes to ten frame shops on Friday. No responses. Saturday I pawned my last possession of value, my Seiko wrist watch for 6.00 and purchased an extremely delicious mushroom pizza and a two liter bottle of a root beer. I was depressed again, but at least in a new world. Having no phone, an extremely kind frame shop owner from Noe Valley actually came by the rooming house on Tuesday and offered me a job. I worked that Wednesday and at the end of the day asked if I could get paid. She said yes and I ate that evening. Things were looking up. Unknown to me, the owner was opening a second shop in Berkeley. Three months later I was the manager of that shop and given a company vehicle to take home every evening, all beyond my wildest expectations. Six months later I was married to the manager that had suggested that I be contacted for the job. She was from the south and was not put off my heavy southern accent. As an artist, she enlightened me to the practice of entering juried exhibitions and creating an exhibition history. Within 18 months, her mother passed and we relocated to New Orleans to care for her father. Second marriage failed. By this time I was established in New Orleans with successful frame shop. 1990 and life is bumping along, third marriage to a wonderfully understanding woman, a great family with 2 young sons, great neighborhood and a convertible! Life was good! By 1998 bored with framing and making art in a much more serious manner in terms of contemplating the process. Sold my business in 2000, packed up the family and moved to New York City. I try to make most of my decisions on a deathbed scenario; what would I think on my deathbed about not trying to become a successful artist in New York and staying in New Orleans with my somewhat easy existence. I could not bare the thought, so here I am in Chelsea cobbling together freelance jobs to stay afloat and selling drawings. The draw of New York was a financial one, in a very basic way I felt I could derive more income (even with a higher cost of living) than in New Orleans. This has proved to be true for my work. On the other hand I was extremely naive regarding the art world in countless ways, and it has been the most difficult endeavor I have ever been involved with. Now in my 11th year living here, I finally know my drawings have evolved to a point that I feel very positive about my practice and the future on all levels except age. Closing in on 60, I know that is the biggest hurdle to overcome on so many levels, alas it is too late in the game to turn back so I continue to move forward. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. SS: I have never felt as if I’m creating new work. The most recent drawing connects to the previous drawing and so on and on. Each work is simply a variation on the previous, no matter what the medium. NA: Elaborate on the overall idea behind your "online" exhibitions. SS: That the work is obviously for sale. I am asking for the sale. At this point, I’m not really sold on the idea of the online exhibitions, but always need to explore. The death bed scenario at work. NA: Discuss your most current online exhibition, "Forty New Drawings". SS: Nothing really to discuss. I make the work and whether it speaks to people is not my concern. NA: Earlier this year you were part of the "An Exchange with Sol LeWitt" exhibition at MASS MoCA. Please elaborate. SS: I enter juried exhibitions that have no entry fee and this was one. Nothing unique re being chosen. I did not know the juror. NA: Who/What has been an influence on your work? SS: Working in my father’s machine shop as a young man. Welding, acetylene torch cutting of metal plates, turning metal on lathes etc. The hard edges and flat surfaces are in my drawings. The very first job I did for my father was sweeping his shop on Saturdays. This was a 4000 square foot building and I did a very sloppy job the first time. He took me around on an inspection and pointed out all of my inadequacies has a sweeper. His lesson to me was to do every endeavor with the utmost respect, no matter how seemingly unimportant, and to do it with the very best of my ability. After arriving in New York I started to read as many art related books, magazines and articles in an attempt to place myself in and art historical context. This did not happen. To place my work in any context is not my job. My job is to make work relevant to my needs. NA: Name a few art magazines and/or online art sites that you pay attention to. SS: None really. I am basically only looking for no cost juried exhibitions to enter. www.samstill.com Images: Top. 5:37 PM April 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38" 2. Runner, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 9" x 14" -- Drawing rejected from SC exhibition that proceeded suicide attempt. 3. Sanity/Insanity, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 10" x 10" -- Drawing produced in Mental Institution. Which opening led to what? 4. Psychic Waterfall, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 11" x 9" -- Life is an up-stream endeavor. 5. Second Chance, 1978, pen and ink on paper, 4" x 36" -- Second chance in S.F. Box is up-righting itself. 6. 1:45 PM June 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38"]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/feed/ 3 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:03:17 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1843 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the second three. [caption id="attachment_1846" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 4 | digital markers | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1849" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 5 Near the President's House | digital marker | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1853" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 6 | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:32:33 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1773 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]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/feed/ 4 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:25:58 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1924 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: They [the artists in Vienna] had an interesting praxis of artists and intellects back then. Were there other artists who Kallir dealt with? Hildegard Bachert: There was Oskar Kokoschka. DT: This was after he had been wounded during WWI? HB: Right. This was in the 1920’s. Kokoschka left Austria after the war and went to Dresden in Germany where he spent a lot of time. He was very shell-shocked and needed psychiatric help. DT: Yes. We would call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD - today. HB: Right. When he had sufficiently recovered he started traveling. He went back to Vienna for a time, then to Paris and London where he painted his famous London landscapes. He would often visit his family in Vienna. Kallir staged Kokoschka exhibitions and purchased some of his art. But Kokoschka was complicated. He had many connections and he did not like Kallir’s engagement with Schiele’s art. During his lifetime Kokoschka did his best to discredit Schiele. DT: Peculiar. HB: No, not peculiar. Kokoschka insisted that he was the innovator of everything. Kallir also knew the artist Max Oppenhiemer. Are you familiar with Max Oppenheimer’s work? He was an Expressionist and a colleague and friend of Schiele. DT: I recollect the name. HB: He was generally called Mopp. He often signed his name like that. I came to know him personally much later. After his emigration to this country as a much older man Mopp was very innovative but Kokoschka kept saying “They all copied me!” He believed that Mopp and Schiele copied him, and the truth be told it was probably Mopp who was first. He was a friend of Schiele’s and he also became friendly with Kokoschka. Eventually they had a big fight with him. Kokoschka was very contentious and tried to influence some of the art historians to sweep Schiele under the rug. DT: So that he would be perceived as the most important. HB: Now, Kokoschka was a very good artist. However his best art was the early work. He did in fact do some good work later on but when he got happy - when he met Olda who later became his wife in Prague –- the tension of the older period left him. DT: That’s an interesting point. I feel the same thing happened to Beckmann’s work when he came to the United States - a lessening of tension in the work. In his previous art the devastations of WWI and its catastrophic aftermath explode with angular tension. HB: This not only happened to Beckmann, who was the least affected. The quality of his oils, particularly the ones from Holland, were good. DT: That’s true. I was referring to the time he came to the U.S. That was when the change in his work became most apparent. HB: Very true, but the works Kokoschka did in America were really not good at all. DT: George Grosz had this problem too. HB: George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein all had problems with their late work. Basically their spirit was killed by the Nazis. DT: And Otto Dix. HB: Dix - he disintegrated. DT: I was told he was very troubled. In a previous interview I had with Donald Kuspit he related to me how he met Dix when he was a student of Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt during the late1950’s. According to him Dix was emotionally destroyed by the Nazis. Today it’s very hard to imagine what it was like, but your generation’s history is very important because you experienced the whole thing. HB: Getting back to Vienna I need to mention one artist of fantastic talent and genius. His name was Richard Gerstl. One day in 1930 a man named Alois Gerstl visited Kallir’s gallery and said “My brother painted and his pictures are in a warehouse here in Vienna. I brought a few samples and I would like your advice: should we keep them or destroy them?” Kallir saw what Alois brought and said “These are fantastic! Take me to the warehouse- I want to see the rest.” DT: To think that his brother had thought of destroying them. HB: Gerstl was completely buried in oblivion. Kallir went to the warehouse where most of his pictures were rolled up. Some were not in great condition. Kallir had the pictures restored, stretched and put on exhibition in his gallery. He discovered him. It was a sensation beyond belief. We have press clippings from that time. In 1931 Kallir compiled a catalog of all the works, numbered each one, put a stamp on each one so they would be authenticated, and signed each stamp. Each Gerstl has a stamp on the back with Otto Kallir’s signature. DT: He took tremendous pains to resurrect his art. HB: He rescued it from oblivion. That’s what Kallir did. He was a trailblazer. DT: He was in the tradition of those dealers who could see ahead, like Vollard and Kahnweiler. Of course the French art world circumstances were a different. I have a particular fascination with dealers andintellects who spearheaded Expressionist art in German and Viennese culture. The Decadent Art Show of 1937 - Entartete Kunst - was Hitler’s attempt to destroy everything it stood for. HB: Not only that. When Kallir came to this country he found that German and Austrian art was unknown or else it wasn’t liked because French art was in and everything else was out. DT: Interesting point. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged the collectors on his board to buy mostly French art for donation to the museum. There were some German Expressionist pieces collected but nothing like the amount of French avant-garde art. What was the art world in America like when Otto Kallir arrived in here? HB: He came in 1939, but I want to relate some events that date from before this time. He sent a traveling exhibition of Gerstl’s work to Germany and other places in Austria. The pictures returned to the Neue Galerie where they were kept over the period of the Second World War. Kallir had purchased many of them from Alois Gerstl before he left Vienna. He brought a few Gerstls to this country. First he emigrated with his family to Switzerland where they had friends. He was able to establish his home in Lucerene but didn’t get permission to work there. With his family safe in Switzerland Kallir went to Paris to open a gallery that he called Galerie St. Etienne in memory of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. He didn’t keep the gallery open for even one year because he wanted to be reunited with his family. Then he managed to get sponsorship to emigrate to America. Kallir was always interested in America because of the country’s engineering achievements. He also loved Jazz. In August 1939 the four Kallirs – he, his wife and two children - arrived in this country. By October he had opened the Galerie St. Etienne in New York at 46 West 57th Street, just up the street from our current location. He thought that he was establishing a branch of the Galerie St. Etienne in Paris at that time, but then the war broke out. He corresponded with his secretary there and told her to put everything in storage and close the gallery. That was the end of Paris. Then Kallir struggled like crazy to establish his artists in this country. DT: A heroic feat considering there was a complete lack of knowledge about his Viennese artists here. HB: He also brought to America some amazing works of art that a Czech collector had placed in his hands on consignment. Of course Kallir knew that his artists weren’t known in this country so he had to come with something that could financially sustain him. But it was the time of the Great Depression and he was able to sell only one of those major paintings, a Cézanne. However he was able to exhibit them, paintings like L’Arlesienne by Van Gogh. Top works of art. He had a fantastic Cezanne portrait Man with the Crossed Arms which now hangs in a famous private collection in New York. He was always in the service of the artists. From the beginning he tried to support the art that he really knew and that he believed needed to be exposed. One of his very first exhibitions was a show that he called Saved From Europe with works by artists like Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka – all totally unknown here. DT: By then the Germans had already staged the Degenerate Art show. They ridiculed Expressionist art. I understand the Nazis destroyed a lot of this art, didn’t they? HB: They certainly did. DT: They must have felt very threatened by the work to take such pains to destroy it. HB: They felt that it was “Jewish” art. They caricatured people like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Of course as you know this Degenerate Art exhibition had one of the largest number of visitors of any art exhibition in the world. DT: That is true. Of all the Expressionists who were Jewish that I can recall, only Ludwig Miedner comes to mind. HB: Well, they hated that art you see. They wanted this “true blue” German housewife-type art that was exhibited in a parallel exhibition. That exhibition hall was empty of an audience. DT: It was kitsch. The Greek god as a German Übermensch. Donald Kuspit has written about the Degenerate Art Show explaining how Expressionism told the harsh truth about the German culture of that time- the darkness and rottenness that lay at its core. HB: Exactly. DT: The Expressionists were showing the whole world upside down. I imagine Kallir must have had a critical sense of what was right and decent. HB: He was a pioneer and he was certainly aware of what was decent and good. He was very upset with graft and cheating and the like. DT: And of course anti-Semitism. It must have been terrible for him to experience that. HB: Prejudice, yes. And he was also very interested in works by women. The very first Paula Modersohn-Becker and Grandma Moses exhibitions took place in this very gallery. Grandma Moses was not classified among the artists of the Women’s Rights movement. Why? I don’t know. She was such an amazing self–made person. She wasn’t a militant Feminist, not at all, but she knew very well what she wanted to do. She was the matriarch of her family - the person in control in her very quiet laid-back way. Of course one of Kallir’s amazing discoveries was finding Grandma Moses with the help of a man who was an engineer employed by the city of New York who loved folk art and traveled around New England. He brought a collection of Moses’ paintings to the New York galleries. One after another the galleries rejected the work, saying “who wants to deal with this old woman?” In 1940 she was 80 years old. Who cared? DT: Didn’t she have a mature group of works at that time? HB: No, not at all. It was the beginning. She painted only small pictures. She had wanted to paint all her life but being a busy farmer’s wife couldn’t find the time. Only in her 70’s did she start to paint because it was the time of the Depression. Where she lived it was terribly depressed. DT: Where did she live? HB: Eagle Bridge New York near Hoosick Falls, the place where John Deere equipment and trucks were made. The area fell apart. All these mill towns were shut down. DT: Devastated I am sure. My father lived through the dark times of the Great Depression in Chicago and had many stories to tell. The deprivation is hard to imagine today and the hardship can leave a black spot on your soul. HB: It did. Economically we are getting a little bit of that right now. There is a difference today but it hits the poor people the same way. Grandma Moses’ pictures were just 8 “x 10” or 14” and some of them were embroidered. Kallir saw a few of the best and said “This is fantastic, I’m going to give this woman a show” DT: He had the insight to see the value in her work early on. HB: Just like what happened with Richard Gerstl. By October 1940 the Galerie St. Etienne had been open in New York for one year. Kallir was something of a greenhorn. He didn’t know English very well though his French was perfect and he spoke it beautifully. However he had a good ear and learned English very quickly. He launched Moses and the exhibition was a success. He represented her from that day on until her death. We had a contract with her. She would send us all her pictures and we would buy them. After she died we continued to represent her estate up to this day. I knew her intimately for 20 years. Getting back to the 1940’s, it was a struggle beyond belief because the most expensive Moses picture cost $250. DT: There are many stories about important art that is inexpensive in the beginning when the artists are unknown. Part 2 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com An online art magazine ~ Established 2008 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1928 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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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 --- 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. --- 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) --- 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.↩ ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/feed/ 9 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:25:58 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1924 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: They [the artists in Vienna] had an interesting praxis of artists and intellects back then. Were there other artists who Kallir dealt with? Hildegard Bachert: There was Oskar Kokoschka. DT: This was after he had been wounded during WWI? HB: Right. This was in the 1920’s. Kokoschka left Austria after the war and went to Dresden in Germany where he spent a lot of time. He was very shell-shocked and needed psychiatric help. DT: Yes. We would call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD - today. HB: Right. When he had sufficiently recovered he started traveling. He went back to Vienna for a time, then to Paris and London where he painted his famous London landscapes. He would often visit his family in Vienna. Kallir staged Kokoschka exhibitions and purchased some of his art. But Kokoschka was complicated. He had many connections and he did not like Kallir’s engagement with Schiele’s art. During his lifetime Kokoschka did his best to discredit Schiele. DT: Peculiar. HB: No, not peculiar. Kokoschka insisted that he was the innovator of everything. Kallir also knew the artist Max Oppenhiemer. Are you familiar with Max Oppenheimer’s work? He was an Expressionist and a colleague and friend of Schiele. DT: I recollect the name. HB: He was generally called Mopp. He often signed his name like that. I came to know him personally much later. After his emigration to this country as a much older man Mopp was very innovative but Kokoschka kept saying “They all copied me!” He believed that Mopp and Schiele copied him, and the truth be told it was probably Mopp who was first. He was a friend of Schiele’s and he also became friendly with Kokoschka. Eventually they had a big fight with him. Kokoschka was very contentious and tried to influence some of the art historians to sweep Schiele under the rug. DT: So that he would be perceived as the most important. HB: Now, Kokoschka was a very good artist. However his best art was the early work. He did in fact do some good work later on but when he got happy - when he met Olda who later became his wife in Prague –- the tension of the older period left him. DT: That’s an interesting point. I feel the same thing happened to Beckmann’s work when he came to the United States - a lessening of tension in the work. In his previous art the devastations of WWI and its catastrophic aftermath explode with angular tension. HB: This not only happened to Beckmann, who was the least affected. The quality of his oils, particularly the ones from Holland, were good. DT: That’s true. I was referring to the time he came to the U.S. That was when the change in his work became most apparent. HB: Very true, but the works Kokoschka did in America were really not good at all. DT: George Grosz had this problem too. HB: George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein all had problems with their late work. Basically their spirit was killed by the Nazis. DT: And Otto Dix. HB: Dix - he disintegrated. DT: I was told he was very troubled. In a previous interview I had with Donald Kuspit he related to me how he met Dix when he was a student of Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt during the late1950’s. According to him Dix was emotionally destroyed by the Nazis. Today it’s very hard to imagine what it was like, but your generation’s history is very important because you experienced the whole thing. HB: Getting back to Vienna I need to mention one artist of fantastic talent and genius. His name was Richard Gerstl. One day in 1930 a man named Alois Gerstl visited Kallir’s gallery and said “My brother painted and his pictures are in a warehouse here in Vienna. I brought a few samples and I would like your advice: should we keep them or destroy them?” Kallir saw what Alois brought and said “These are fantastic! Take me to the warehouse- I want to see the rest.” DT: To think that his brother had thought of destroying them. HB: Gerstl was completely buried in oblivion. Kallir went to the warehouse where most of his pictures were rolled up. Some were not in great condition. Kallir had the pictures restored, stretched and put on exhibition in his gallery. He discovered him. It was a sensation beyond belief. We have press clippings from that time. In 1931 Kallir compiled a catalog of all the works, numbered each one, put a stamp on each one so they would be authenticated, and signed each stamp. Each Gerstl has a stamp on the back with Otto Kallir’s signature. DT: He took tremendous pains to resurrect his art. HB: He rescued it from oblivion. That’s what Kallir did. He was a trailblazer. DT: He was in the tradition of those dealers who could see ahead, like Vollard and Kahnweiler. Of course the French art world circumstances were a different. I have a particular fascination with dealers andintellects who spearheaded Expressionist art in German and Viennese culture. The Decadent Art Show of 1937 - Entartete Kunst - was Hitler’s attempt to destroy everything it stood for. HB: Not only that. When Kallir came to this country he found that German and Austrian art was unknown or else it wasn’t liked because French art was in and everything else was out. DT: Interesting point. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged the collectors on his board to buy mostly French art for donation to the museum. There were some German Expressionist pieces collected but nothing like the amount of French avant-garde art. What was the art world in America like when Otto Kallir arrived in here? HB: He came in 1939, but I want to relate some events that date from before this time. He sent a traveling exhibition of Gerstl’s work to Germany and other places in Austria. The pictures returned to the Neue Galerie where they were kept over the period of the Second World War. Kallir had purchased many of them from Alois Gerstl before he left Vienna. He brought a few Gerstls to this country. First he emigrated with his family to Switzerland where they had friends. He was able to establish his home in Lucerene but didn’t get permission to work there. With his family safe in Switzerland Kallir went to Paris to open a gallery that he called Galerie St. Etienne in memory of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. He didn’t keep the gallery open for even one year because he wanted to be reunited with his family. Then he managed to get sponsorship to emigrate to America. Kallir was always interested in America because of the country’s engineering achievements. He also loved Jazz. In August 1939 the four Kallirs – he, his wife and two children - arrived in this country. By October he had opened the Galerie St. Etienne in New York at 46 West 57th Street, just up the street from our current location. He thought that he was establishing a branch of the Galerie St. Etienne in Paris at that time, but then the war broke out. He corresponded with his secretary there and told her to put everything in storage and close the gallery. That was the end of Paris. Then Kallir struggled like crazy to establish his artists in this country. DT: A heroic feat considering there was a complete lack of knowledge about his Viennese artists here. HB: He also brought to America some amazing works of art that a Czech collector had placed in his hands on consignment. Of course Kallir knew that his artists weren’t known in this country so he had to come with something that could financially sustain him. But it was the time of the Great Depression and he was able to sell only one of those major paintings, a Cézanne. However he was able to exhibit them, paintings like L’Arlesienne by Van Gogh. Top works of art. He had a fantastic Cezanne portrait Man with the Crossed Arms which now hangs in a famous private collection in New York. He was always in the service of the artists. From the beginning he tried to support the art that he really knew and that he believed needed to be exposed. One of his very first exhibitions was a show that he called Saved From Europe with works by artists like Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka – all totally unknown here. DT: By then the Germans had already staged the Degenerate Art show. They ridiculed Expressionist art. I understand the Nazis destroyed a lot of this art, didn’t they? HB: They certainly did. DT: They must have felt very threatened by the work to take such pains to destroy it. HB: They felt that it was “Jewish” art. They caricatured people like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Of course as you know this Degenerate Art exhibition had one of the largest number of visitors of any art exhibition in the world. DT: That is true. Of all the Expressionists who were Jewish that I can recall, only Ludwig Miedner comes to mind. HB: Well, they hated that art you see. They wanted this “true blue” German housewife-type art that was exhibited in a parallel exhibition. That exhibition hall was empty of an audience. DT: It was kitsch. The Greek god as a German Übermensch. Donald Kuspit has written about the Degenerate Art Show explaining how Expressionism told the harsh truth about the German culture of that time- the darkness and rottenness that lay at its core. HB: Exactly. DT: The Expressionists were showing the whole world upside down. I imagine Kallir must have had a critical sense of what was right and decent. HB: He was a pioneer and he was certainly aware of what was decent and good. He was very upset with graft and cheating and the like. DT: And of course anti-Semitism. It must have been terrible for him to experience that. HB: Prejudice, yes. And he was also very interested in works by women. The very first Paula Modersohn-Becker and Grandma Moses exhibitions took place in this very gallery. Grandma Moses was not classified among the artists of the Women’s Rights movement. Why? I don’t know. She was such an amazing self–made person. She wasn’t a militant Feminist, not at all, but she knew very well what she wanted to do. She was the matriarch of her family - the person in control in her very quiet laid-back way. Of course one of Kallir’s amazing discoveries was finding Grandma Moses with the help of a man who was an engineer employed by the city of New York who loved folk art and traveled around New England. He brought a collection of Moses’ paintings to the New York galleries. One after another the galleries rejected the work, saying “who wants to deal with this old woman?” In 1940 she was 80 years old. Who cared? DT: Didn’t she have a mature group of works at that time? HB: No, not at all. It was the beginning. She painted only small pictures. She had wanted to paint all her life but being a busy farmer’s wife couldn’t find the time. Only in her 70’s did she start to paint because it was the time of the Depression. Where she lived it was terribly depressed. DT: Where did she live? HB: Eagle Bridge New York near Hoosick Falls, the place where John Deere equipment and trucks were made. The area fell apart. All these mill towns were shut down. DT: Devastated I am sure. My father lived through the dark times of the Great Depression in Chicago and had many stories to tell. The deprivation is hard to imagine today and the hardship can leave a black spot on your soul. HB: It did. Economically we are getting a little bit of that right now. There is a difference today but it hits the poor people the same way. Grandma Moses’ pictures were just 8 “x 10” or 14” and some of them were embroidered. Kallir saw a few of the best and said “This is fantastic, I’m going to give this woman a show” DT: He had the insight to see the value in her work early on. HB: Just like what happened with Richard Gerstl. By October 1940 the Galerie St. Etienne had been open in New York for one year. Kallir was something of a greenhorn. He didn’t know English very well though his French was perfect and he spoke it beautifully. However he had a good ear and learned English very quickly. He launched Moses and the exhibition was a success. He represented her from that day on until her death. We had a contract with her. She would send us all her pictures and we would buy them. After she died we continued to represent her estate up to this day. I knew her intimately for 20 years. Getting back to the 1940’s, it was a struggle beyond belief because the most expensive Moses picture cost 0. DT: There are many stories about important art that is inexpensive in the beginning when the artists are unknown. Part 2 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/06/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-nyc-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-2-of-3/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:46:41 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1912 Neoteric Art: Give us a little history on yourself. Gabriel Villa: I was born in 1965 in El Paso, Texas. My parents met and married in the 1950’s in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and had seven children, six boys and one sister. My sister is the youngest of my siblings and I am the youngest of the boys. My childhood was rich with love and laughter. I was three years old when my family moved into what became my childhood home. Many things have influenced my life and my work including: Family, U.S Texas/Mexico Border Culture, American Sports, 1960’s Counter Culture, 1980’s Reaganomics, Indigenous and Western Art. I decided to become an artist when I was in my early twenties. However, the idea of someone making a living and identifying as an artist was something initially foreign to me. It was not until I started taking college courses that I met professors that identified as artists. Since, creativity and art production have been a priority and a constant in my life. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. GV: Generally a work begins by something I see while walking, driving etc. It may be an individual in my neighborhood or it may be an object or scene somewhere in Chicago or while traveling. I’ve trained myself to take a mental snapshot of the location and eventually if this image keeps tugging at me I return to the site and snap a photograph. Although I work with mostly painting and drawing I think of my work as archiving and constructing. I lift images from what I see in my surroundings. I am a scavenger of images. I am drawn to people and imagery that are emotionally charged. Seeking subject mater is a crucial part of my creative process. I am interested in chance, randomness and surprise that “every day life” offers. NA: Recently you've been focusing on drawing. Discuss your drawing and how it compares to your other mediums: painting, mixed media and public work. GV: In 2008, after a long hiatus from drawing I returned to drawing and started working exclusively on paper. There was a lot going on and I suddenly decided to change directions. Something clicked in my head and I started to place an emphasis on creativity and idea rather than focusing on one particular art medium. Prior to this period I was bit of a die hard painter, now I have a different point of view on art making. I believe an artist should select materials and applications that best support his or her concepts. Because drawing is very immediate it is better suited for certain goals. Painting, for me takes longer to resolve. Drawing is like a short story. Painting is like a novel. NA: From 2005-2011 you served as director for Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Please elaborate on your role as director. GV: Yollocalli Arts Reach is an arts education and career-training program for teens and young adults. The Yollocalli model is based on creating a space for youth to partner with practicing artists, access the tools necessary to realize their own vision and build skills as emerging artists. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, Yollocalli is an open forum for experimentation in art making based on issues in art, history, and youth culture. I started at Yollocalli Arts Reach in 2005 as the Youth Programs Coordinator and later was promoted and served as Director. It was a great job and I learned a great deal of valuable skills, including staff management, grant and curriculum writing, youth development, building community partnerships and of course working with many talented Chicago based artist. NA: You recently exhibited at MDW Fair. How was your experience? GV: Over all it was a positive experience. MDW introduced my work to a new audience. It was a pleasure to exhibit my work with artist Nicole Marroquin and work with Curator, Trevor Martin from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MDW introduced me to the work of many Chicago Based artists including Trevor Martin’s Performance work. I met a handful of collectors, gallery directors and a handful of inquisitive art students. I will continue to participate in these types of venues. It is one way for one’s work to be evaluated and every once in a while you connect with people that really get your work. My work calls to people who respond to personal, emotive –expressionist work. My work is definitely not entertaining or conceptual. I want people to feel as if they are walking into my brain when they are experiencing my work. Art venues like MD are a good way to start fostering an audience to one’s work. NA: Discuss your recent book project, "The Art of Gabriel Villa". GV: A few years back I was teaching as an artist in residence at Cristo Rey High School, located in Chicago. There I met an instructor by the name of Francisco Pina, at the time also the editor of ContraTiempo. ContraTiempo is a Spanish art and culture newspaper that feature artists and writers. I introduced to my paintings to him. He became a supporter of my work. Francisco approached me with the idea of collaborating on a self - published catalog. The catalog featured works from 1990- 2005. At the time no one knew who I was (many still don’t). I didn’t have any money and I had many paintings and drawings unfamiliar to many people. I accepted the idea and the partnership. My role was to raise money and write grants for the collaborative project, which I had zero experience. Long story short, we landed a few grants and convinced a few collectors to support the project and I started working at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Yollocalli Arts Reach) to raise the funds. I worked at NMMA longer than I intended to because I enjoyed it so much. Professionally, this was a good move to self-publish. This got the ball rolling and people started to become aware of my work. This publication led to accepting many other opportunities. NA: Regarding your art career, where would you like to be five years down the road? GV: Above ground. www.gabrielvilla.net]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:31:43 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1906 Chicago January Openings - January 6, 2012 On the scene: It was surprisingly warm in the city. River North was jumping with Martina Nehrling's always colorful works at Zg Gallery, Viktoria Sorochinski's intriguing photographs at Catherine Edeleman Gallery, Carl Hammer Gallery's interesting group show "Reflections From a Looking Glass", John Fraser's beautiful mixed media work at Roy Boyd Gallery, Barbara Cooper's and Bob Nugent's wonderful work at Perimeter Gallery, and Ann Nathan Gallery's solid group show. Spotted: David Loew at Catherine Edelman Gallery, William Conger and Judith Geichman at Roy Boyd Gallery, and MCA curator Lynne Warren getting on her bicycle in front of Carl Hammer Gallery. January 13, 2012 On the scene: Wayne White's provocative Ruscha-esque style text paintings at Packer Schopf Gallery...one painting sold for ,000 opening night! Hipsters, Miller beer and a group show curated by Abraham Ritchie at 65Grand...good stuff. Spotted: Tim Vermeulen and Nicholas Sistler at Packer Schopf Gallery. January 14, 2012 On the scene: Saturday night opening at Hinge Gallery featuring a 6-person group show with standouts: Brent Houston and MaryKate Maher. Spotted: Stephanie Burke and Jeriah Hildwine at Hinge Gallery.]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/24/the-art-gossiper-no-5/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:03:31 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1896 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the next three. [caption id="attachment_1897" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 7 with Bricks | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1898" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 8 with Snow | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1899" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 9 with Oil Drum Garbage Cans | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/12/alley-studies-iii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/ http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:16:46 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1887 Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history. Diane Thodos: To begin with can you give me some background on Otto Kallir, the establishment of Galerie St. Etienne and how you became his partner in the gallery? Hildegard Bachert: Otto Kallier founded the Neue Galerie in Vienna in 1923 and his first show was an Egon Schiele exhibition. He has specialized in Schiele ever since. He wrote the catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s oil paintings in 1930. He became a Ph.D on the side in something unrelated because he wanted to prove that he was not only good in his field but also had a very good general knowledge of art. At that time he championed the avant-garde artists Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Alfred Kubin – the latter became a good friend of his. He staged some other major shows too. He brought a Van Gogh exhibition to Vienna from Holland and a Lovis Corinth show from Germany, among others. DT: What other artists did he know? HB: Max Beckmann. He knew Beckmann quite well. He was also a publisher of books. He published books by Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. In 1938 the Nazis came to power and Kallir had to leave quickly because he had tried to do some political anti-Nazi work before. There was a warrant out for him. The Nazis took over in March 1938. When they entered Austria they were received with open arms by the Austrians. He left with his family I believe in May or June of that year. DT: How soon was it after the Nazi’s entered Austria that they left? HB: The Nazis entered Austria on March 11, 1938, so it was about two months later. DT: So he had to flee right away. But backing up a little I’m very curious to know any recollections you have regarding his relationships with the artists he knew. He had published prints with Max Beckmann and had intimately known several of the artists that he exhibited. Do you have any stories that describe what their personalities were like? HB: He had a very close relationship with Alfred Kubin and had invited him to come to the gallery’s exhibitions. Kubin was a loner. He always had to be convinced to come to Vienna. He lived in a small town in a little house close to the German border near Passau. It was a little castle-type place that Kubin called Zwicklet. He was a very imaginative and decent kind of person, but also very difficult although Kallir got along very well with him. In fact at the beginning their relationship when they didn’t know each other well Kallir wanted to convince the artist that he could produce perfect reproductions of his art. Kubin claimed it was not possible so Kallir allowed himself to prove it. He published two facsimile reproductions of watercolors which he had printed by the renown firm of Arthur Jaffe. They used a Heliochrome process that involved making reproductions without using a screen. The watercolors he reproduced looked almost the same as the originals. That’s how he convinced Kubin that he was a serious dealer and cared about quality. Kallir was not a printer himself but he only worked with master printers. DT: What was it in Otto Kallir’s background that made him seek out such extraordinary artists who had such profound expressionist and imaginative abilities? This was quite prescient on his part as an art dealer, similar to the way the French dealer Ambroise Vollard foresaw the significance of Picasso’s work. What were the aspects of Kallir’s character that drove him towards Expressionist art? HB: That’s kind of a long story. Even as a boy he was a passionate collector. To sum it up Kallir became a dealer to feed his habit as a collector. DT: A collector of Expressionism? HB: A collector of everything that was of historical importance. He was a “Renaissance” man. When he was young he was terribly interested in technical things like aeronautics. He wrote to the Wright brothers in 1903 when he was only 9 years old. It was at the time they had their first flight at Kitty Hawk. He knew all about human flight and wrote a book about it that was published when he was about 19 years old, so his background was not in art. His father was a lawyer. He grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois family. DT: In Vienna? HB: Yes. He was originally oriented towards becoming an engineer. After serving four years as an officer during WWI he went to engineering school in Vienna where, being Jewish, he encountered so much anti-Semitism that he gave up the profession. DT: This prejudice existed in the medical professions and the sciences, and so on. HB: Everywhere. This was not only in Austria but in Germany as well. DT: So his career became diverted because of anti-Semitism? HB: Exactly. From having previously published a book he developed into a bibliophile and apprenticed at the bookstore of Thomas Heller who was also a young man. It was there that he started to meet artists. He said art is also of historical importance and the first works that he bought and collected were a batch of Gustav Klimt drawings. DT: It ‘s amazing that he had already had an instinct for the top art in Vienna. HB: He saw art, he saw culture, and he saw history. He knew what was important and over time he developed a fantastic eye for art, but he didn’t stop collecting aeronautical material as well. He collected manuscripts of great historical importance in literature, music, science, and history. Not mere autographs, that didn’t interest him. It had to be a document of importance. DT: A manuscript of some kind or a letter - something from the hand of the person. HB: Right. He was very interested in Austrian history so he had many important manuscripts such as those by Kaiser Franz Josef and Archduke Rudolf, the son of Franz Josef who committed suicide. He also had musical manuscripts of importance by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many people he knew personally. DT: Which musicians did he know personally? HB: He knew Arnold Schoenburg, Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal. The latter was the librettist for Strauss. He knew him very well in fact - they were very close friends. So what became his passion? As a young man he published several books on art and literature and then apprenticed at the Galerie Würthle in Vienna where he soon became a kind of partner to the woman who was running the gallery. DT: How old was he at that time? HB: I think he started there around 1920. He was born in 1894 so by then he was 26. DT: It’s remarkable that he was already very developed by that age. He had already become a partner in a gallery that was at the center of the avant-garde art scene in Austria. HB: At the same time he became the director of the art department at the Ricola Verlag Publishing House in Vienna and published more books, mostly on art. The art books are what really survived and are very important today. The most important publication he produced with the help of the Ricola Verlag (he didn’t have enough money to do it on his own) was a portfolio called Das Graphische Werk on Egon Schiele that contained etchings and lithographs which were posthumously published. Egon Schiele died in 1918 and the portfolio was published in 1921. At that time it was popular and had been beautifully bound, presented and numbered. That’s when, with cooperation of course, Kallir started to become acquainted with the whole art establishment. The forward of the portfolio was written byArthur Roessler, one of the major supporters of Schiele whom Kallir knew very well. DT: So Kallir never got to know Schiele personally but came to know about his work through contact with the galleries and art scene? HB: Exactly. So that launched his career. In 1923 he left the Galerie Würthle and founded his own gallery, the Neue Galerie, which is now the name of the museum here in New York. DT: So the museum was named after Kallir’s first gallery? HB: Indeed. DT: As an homage. HB: It’s an homage and it’s an amazing continuation of the spade work Kallir did all his life. He knew many Austrian artists personally - some who are not well known in this country like Otto Rudolf Scatz anGerhart Frankl. Oskar Laske has a certain reputation in the United States. The Busch-Reisinger Museum has two beautiful works by him but they are not famous. To put an artist on the “map” takes a lot of time and you can only do that with top artists. DT: It seems that the art world had only so much space at the top. HB: It seems that way unfortunately. DT: Or else it’s possible that you’re not recognized within your time. HB: Exactly. DT: For some art careers recognition comes much later. For example the Feminist Movement of the 1970’s brought more attention to the work of Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and Camille Claudel creating a new historical appraisal of their work and careers. There can be a delay of recognition based on what the culture is, what the society is, and what critical consciousness is recognized at the time. You mentioned Kallir knew Max Beckmann personally and had worked with him to produce prints. How did they come into contact? HB: He came to Vienna and was friends with relatives of Otto Kallir. Through them Beckmann met Quappi, his second wife, so there are many connections. Our previous exhibition was of Marie-Louise Motesiczky who was a student of Beckmann. Quappi was a friend of Motesiczky so you can see how certain relationships came together around Kallir. www.gseart.com Part 1 of 3]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/01/02/an-interview-with-hildegard-bachert-co-director-of-galerie-st-etienne-24-w-57th-street-new-york-ny-10019-on-february-2-2011-by-diane-thodos-part-1-of-3/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:29:36 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1834 Neoteric Art: Give us some background information on yourself. Sam Still: I was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter moved with my parents and older sister to a small town near my father’s birthplace in South Carolina. Our family would continue to grow with the addition of 2 more sisters and a brother. My mother was from a suburb of Philadelphia. My childhood was filled with alcoholism and violence. Beginning at age 6, we made yearly visits back to Philadelphia to see may mother’s family. On that first visit my father took us to New York City. We rode the subway and visited the Empire State Building. My father stated emphatically that cites were disgusting and dirty and could not understand why one would actually want to live in one. I was mesmerized. My mother’s father was a practicing artist in Philadelphia where he owned a frame shop and offered copies of famous paintings to his clients. He never received recognition for his own work. His 2 sisters, that I never met, taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There were original oil paintings by my grandfather throughout the house growing up. My mother did draw small faces quite often but they were never discussed or saved. My father was a tool & die maker and owned a small firm where in later years I worked on and off until I was 18. I did torch cutting of metal, welding, milling machine and lathe turning of both metal and fiberglass. Making art has always been with me as a means of closing out the rest of the world. In the first grade I was sent to the principle’s office with a collage I had made. I handed it to Ms. Pauline, she took it, studied it for what seemed like forever, handed it back to me, told me I would be a famous artist one day and to please get back to class quickly. It meant nothing to me. As I got older, I drew cars, houses and maps of imagined cities. Purchased my first rapidograph pen at 15 to facilitate a black for tires that I could not get with a pencil. Was given my first car at 15 with a gas credit card, asked my father if I could keep the car, drive less, but buy art supplies, he said no. Started to cut classes, would drive many times more than 100 miles out of town, stop for a burger and return. I did this for two years without anyone noticing it though my father did inquire several times why my gas charges seemed excessive. Forged a fair number of sick passes, as I look back I realize schools at that time looked the other way when confronted with an uncomfortable situation. Did not graduate, acquired my GED at 18. Did apply to The Art Institute of Atlanta at 18 and Ringling School of Art at 19, was accepted in both, went, dropped out of both within weeks. Married three times. First marriage and frame shop at 19 in South Carolina. To supplement income I would make small drawings using a rapidograph pen with overlays of watercolor and sepia ink. These would be sold at small weekend mall shows throughout South Carolina. I had quite a handsome pegboard display if I may say so myself. The drawings were of barns and other ramshackle structures. The structures always had a “brick” foundation and in each brick I would right profanities, only visible if one knew they were there. Generally, I would take twelve drawings, six with profanities and six without. Without fail, the ones with profanities would sell first and many times those six would be the only ones that would sell. My relationship with my father was strained at this time so I did not sign any work with my first and last name as I our names were the same, instead I used Aaron, my middle name. First marriage failed. Entered my first juried exhibition (in S.C.) with work more abstract in nature, got rejected. Depressed and lonely, overdosed on a variety of medications left by my first wife whom had worked at a hospital pharmacy. Unsuccessful suicide. Fearing another attempt, committed myself to a mental institution in South Carolina, realized that was not the answer for me. Produced two drawings while there, got out one month later. I then naively evaluated where I might find an audience for my work. Looked at LA, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Couldn’t afford my car, so LA was out, New York was almost bankrupt, Chicago was too cold, so I settled on San Francisco, it is 1975 now. Greyhound had a special cross-country ticket that I could purchase for 75.00. That meant I could travel from S.C. to California and still have 150.00 left over. I had sold all my worldly possessions for 225.00 to facilitate an escape. My mother told me I was running away and I agreed and stated “not fast enough”. After an 80 hour plus cross country bus ride I arrived in San Francisco. Having only spent 15.00 on nabs (type of snack crackers) and soft drinks, I did have 135.00 left. San Francisco was big, scary and exciting. I found a room on California Street for 130.00 (monthly) and the deposit was kindly waived. Now with 5.00 left, I plotted my next move. Purchased more nabs, a soft drink, (and made a pig of myself) some paper and a pen. That first evening I copied ten resumes to hand out the next day. Being very intimidated by the world in general, I didn’t ask anyone how to use public transportation so I walked all over S.F. and hand delivered my hand written resumes to ten frame shops on Friday. No responses. Saturday I pawned my last possession of value, my Seiko wrist watch for 6.00 and purchased an extremely delicious mushroom pizza and a two liter bottle of a root beer. I was depressed again, but at least in a new world. Having no phone, an extremely kind frame shop owner from Noe Valley actually came by the rooming house on Tuesday and offered me a job. I worked that Wednesday and at the end of the day asked if I could get paid. She said yes and I ate that evening. Things were looking up. Unknown to me, the owner was opening a second shop in Berkeley. Three months later I was the manager of that shop and given a company vehicle to take home every evening, all beyond my wildest expectations. Six months later I was married to the manager that had suggested that I be contacted for the job. She was from the south and was not put off my heavy southern accent. As an artist, she enlightened me to the practice of entering juried exhibitions and creating an exhibition history. Within 18 months, her mother passed and we relocated to New Orleans to care for her father. Second marriage failed. By this time I was established in New Orleans with successful frame shop. 1990 and life is bumping along, third marriage to a wonderfully understanding woman, a great family with 2 young sons, great neighborhood and a convertible! Life was good! By 1998 bored with framing and making art in a much more serious manner in terms of contemplating the process. Sold my business in 2000, packed up the family and moved to New York City. I try to make most of my decisions on a deathbed scenario; what would I think on my deathbed about not trying to become a successful artist in New York and staying in New Orleans with my somewhat easy existence. I could not bare the thought, so here I am in Chelsea cobbling together freelance jobs to stay afloat and selling drawings. The draw of New York was a financial one, in a very basic way I felt I could derive more income (even with a higher cost of living) than in New Orleans. This has proved to be true for my work. On the other hand I was extremely naive regarding the art world in countless ways, and it has been the most difficult endeavor I have ever been involved with. Now in my 11th year living here, I finally know my drawings have evolved to a point that I feel very positive about my practice and the future on all levels except age. Closing in on 60, I know that is the biggest hurdle to overcome on so many levels, alas it is too late in the game to turn back so I continue to move forward. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. SS: I have never felt as if I’m creating new work. The most recent drawing connects to the previous drawing and so on and on. Each work is simply a variation on the previous, no matter what the medium. NA: Elaborate on the overall idea behind your "online" exhibitions. SS: That the work is obviously for sale. I am asking for the sale. At this point, I’m not really sold on the idea of the online exhibitions, but always need to explore. The death bed scenario at work. NA: Discuss your most current online exhibition, "Forty New Drawings". SS: Nothing really to discuss. I make the work and whether it speaks to people is not my concern. NA: Earlier this year you were part of the "An Exchange with Sol LeWitt" exhibition at MASS MoCA. Please elaborate. SS: I enter juried exhibitions that have no entry fee and this was one. Nothing unique re being chosen. I did not know the juror. NA: Who/What has been an influence on your work? SS: Working in my father’s machine shop as a young man. Welding, acetylene torch cutting of metal plates, turning metal on lathes etc. The hard edges and flat surfaces are in my drawings. The very first job I did for my father was sweeping his shop on Saturdays. This was a 4000 square foot building and I did a very sloppy job the first time. He took me around on an inspection and pointed out all of my inadequacies has a sweeper. His lesson to me was to do every endeavor with the utmost respect, no matter how seemingly unimportant, and to do it with the very best of my ability. After arriving in New York I started to read as many art related books, magazines and articles in an attempt to place myself in and art historical context. This did not happen. To place my work in any context is not my job. My job is to make work relevant to my needs. NA: Name a few art magazines and/or online art sites that you pay attention to. SS: None really. I am basically only looking for no cost juried exhibitions to enter. www.samstill.com Images: Top. 5:37 PM April 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38" 2. Runner, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 9" x 14" -- Drawing rejected from SC exhibition that proceeded suicide attempt. 3. Sanity/Insanity, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 10" x 10" -- Drawing produced in Mental Institution. Which opening led to what? 4. Psychic Waterfall, 1977, pen and ink on paper, 11" x 9" -- Life is an up-stream endeavor. 5. Second Chance, 1978, pen and ink on paper, 4" x 36" -- Second chance in S.F. Box is up-righting itself. 6. 1:45 PM June 27, 2011, 2011, ink on paper, 30" x 38"]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/26/interview-with-sam-still/feed/ 3 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:03:17 +0000 William Dolan http://neotericart.com/?p=1843 Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city's rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It's a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It's also a place where many acts that aren't meant for public view are carried out. As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago's rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the second three. [caption id="attachment_1846" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 4 | digital markers | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1849" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 5 Near the President's House | digital marker | 18½"x14½""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1853" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Alley Study 6 | digital marker | 10½"x7""][/caption] ]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/19/alley-studies-ii/feed/ 1 http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/ http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:32:33 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1773 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]]> http://neotericart.com/2011/12/13/regarding-mark-rothko-by-norbert-marszalek/feed/ 4 http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:46:41 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1912 Neoteric Art: Give us a little history on yourself. Gabriel Villa: I was born in 1965 in El Paso, Texas. My parents met and married in the 1950’s in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and had seven children, six boys and one sister. My sister is the youngest of my siblings and I am the youngest of the boys. My childhood was rich with love and laughter. I was three years old when my family moved into what became my childhood home. Many things have influenced my life and my work including: Family, U.S Texas/Mexico Border Culture, American Sports, 1960’s Counter Culture, 1980’s Reaganomics, Indigenous and Western Art. I decided to become an artist when I was in my early twenties. However, the idea of someone making a living and identifying as an artist was something initially foreign to me. It was not until I started taking college courses that I met professors that identified as artists. Since, creativity and art production have been a priority and a constant in my life. NA: Discuss your work/thought process when starting a new piece. GV: Generally a work begins by something I see while walking, driving etc. It may be an individual in my neighborhood or it may be an object or scene somewhere in Chicago or while traveling. I’ve trained myself to take a mental snapshot of the location and eventually if this image keeps tugging at me I return to the site and snap a photograph. Although I work with mostly painting and drawing I think of my work as archiving and constructing. I lift images from what I see in my surroundings. I am a scavenger of images. I am drawn to people and imagery that are emotionally charged. Seeking subject mater is a crucial part of my creative process. I am interested in chance, randomness and surprise that “every day life” offers. NA: Recently you've been focusing on drawing. Discuss your drawing and how it compares to your other mediums: painting, mixed media and public work. GV: In 2008, after a long hiatus from drawing I returned to drawing and started working exclusively on paper. There was a lot going on and I suddenly decided to change directions. Something clicked in my head and I started to place an emphasis on creativity and idea rather than focusing on one particular art medium. Prior to this period I was bit of a die hard painter, now I have a different point of view on art making. I believe an artist should select materials and applications that best support his or her concepts. Because drawing is very immediate it is better suited for certain goals. Painting, for me takes longer to resolve. Drawing is like a short story. Painting is like a novel. NA: From 2005-2011 you served as director for Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Please elaborate on your role as director. GV: Yollocalli Arts Reach is an arts education and career-training program for teens and young adults. The Yollocalli model is based on creating a space for youth to partner with practicing artists, access the tools necessary to realize their own vision and build skills as emerging artists. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, Yollocalli is an open forum for experimentation in art making based on issues in art, history, and youth culture. I started at Yollocalli Arts Reach in 2005 as the Youth Programs Coordinator and later was promoted and served as Director. It was a great job and I learned a great deal of valuable skills, including staff management, grant and curriculum writing, youth development, building community partnerships and of course working with many talented Chicago based artist. NA: You recently exhibited at MDW Fair. How was your experience? GV: Over all it was a positive experience. MDW introduced my work to a new audience. It was a pleasure to exhibit my work with artist Nicole Marroquin and work with Curator, Trevor Martin from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MDW introduced me to the work of many Chicago Based artists including Trevor Martin’s Performance work. I met a handful of collectors, gallery directors and a handful of inquisitive art students. I will continue to participate in these types of venues. It is one way for one’s work to be evaluated and every once in a while you connect with people that really get your work. My work calls to people who respond to personal, emotive –expressionist work. My work is definitely not entertaining or conceptual. I want people to feel as if they are walking into my brain when they are experiencing my work. Art venues like MD are a good way to start fostering an audience to one’s work. NA: Discuss your recent book project, "The Art of Gabriel Villa". GV: A few years back I was teaching as an artist in residence at Cristo Rey High School, located in Chicago. There I met an instructor by the name of Francisco Pina, at the time also the editor of ContraTiempo. ContraTiempo is a Spanish art and culture newspaper that feature artists and writers. I introduced to my paintings to him. He became a supporter of my work. Francisco approached me with the idea of collaborating on a self - published catalog. The catalog featured works from 1990- 2005. At the time no one knew who I was (many still don’t). I didn’t have any money and I had many paintings and drawings unfamiliar to many people. I accepted the idea and the partnership. My role was to raise money and write grants for the collaborative project, which I had zero experience. Long story short, we landed a few grants and convinced a few collectors to support the project and I started working at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Yollocalli Arts Reach) to raise the funds. I worked at NMMA longer than I intended to because I enjoyed it so much. Professionally, this was a good move to self-publish. This got the ball rolling and people started to become aware of my work. This publication led to accepting many other opportunities. NA: Regarding your art career, where would you like to be five years down the road? GV: Above ground. www.gabrielvilla.net]]> http://neotericart.com/2012/02/01/interview-with-gabriel-villa/feed/ 0 http://neotericart.com An online art magazine ~ Established 2008 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/ http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:38:37 +0000 Norbert Marszalek http://neotericart.com/?p=1928 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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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 --- 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. --- 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) --- 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.↩