Monday, September 23, 2013

Porfirio DiDonna: "A Painters Journey" at the Danforth Museum

I wish I could remember his name. He was a talented student at AIB. The last I heard from him he was in Brooklyn making his way as an artist. Since I never had meaningful conversations with other faculty, he became my sounding board for discussions on the contemporary scene. He was at the stage in his life, where he wasn’t worried about finding his academic niche so that art was an open book. For the faculty it was a closed book. They had solidified their styles and now wanted to solidify their academic status. Teaching was pure theatre for them, holding forth in crits and making sure discussions didn’t venture too far from the script.

I recall at one point this student and I became intrigued by the work of Jake Berthot. He showed regularly at Nielsen and had a certain presence in the art magazines. Students who moved on to graduate school often had him as a visiting artist. His work was painterly and slightly mystical in its mood. Unlike much contemporary art it had an affect that was appealing to me. It didn’t have a conceptual issue to belabor. At the time, probably the early Nineties, he was painting colorful lozenge shapes floating in a darker ground. The edges were not sharp and the centrally placed lozenges looming out of the dark ground created a sense of the painting being a search and discovery.

One Winter the student learned of a major show of Berthot's work at Dartmouth. We decided to make the trek up there to get a good sense once and for all what he was about. I can’t remember much about our reactions to the painting in the show except that after viewing it we went to a local tavern, the sort you find on Ivy league campuses that have a pedigree to them, downstairs and dark with lots of wood paneling, names of former students carved in the tables and a good selection of draft beer. It was warm and cozy, a respite from the cold winter air. Enjoying a good draft beer, I found myself humming spontaneously: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”. Was it the mood of the Tavern? Or was this the sum total of the mood of Berthot's paintings? Did they radiate an atmosphere that didn’t go much beyond a popular ballad?

Low-grade spirituality. Reminded me of what I wrote about another Nielsen artist, a protégé of John Walker, who now shows at Alpha. Her expressionist paintings of beaches at slack tide conveyed the low-tide languor we experience when we visit beaches off season. If Berthot makes me hum “The Christmas Song” then her work got me humming “Ebb Tide”. I called her Johnny Walker Lite.

DiDonna

Hartley

Last night I went to a member’s opening at the Danforth Museum of another Nielsen artist, Porfirio DiDonna, which purports to revive interest in an artist, whom they presume should have more recogniton than he is currently accorded. He died in his mid- forties in 1986. Before his death he was able to develop a distinct style that also embodies the sort of yearning that I observed in Berthot’s work. According to the literature accompanying the show, he was a devout Catholic on a path to inner spiritual truth. His early work is put together out of minute dots that follow grids and are reminiscent of Agnes Martin. Each mark could be seen as the gesture of a believer denoting each Hail Mary with a flick of the rosary beads. There is a sense of marking time. The body of work that is ostensibly the most Catholic is put together with patterns and bands of warm colors that resemble at times chalices, or at other times elaborate priestly garb. The marks that add up to these images/symbols remain independent as gestures of color on their own. Often they are S shapes, where the S gives a kind of thrust or purpose to the lines, a dance or flickering of the candle flame if you will. It is as though he deconstructed the images of the church in the way Hartley deconstructed the images from the life of his German soldier lover to create a pattern of love and relationship. In fact, from a grammatical point of view, DiDonna’s work seems deeply informed by Hartley. It is more gestural and the parts have an inner thrust to them that is reminiscent of deKooning or Pollock but in the end, if Agnes Martin

Berthot

informs his early work, Hartley is all over the last work.

It is unfortunate that we will never know where DiDonna would have gone with his quest to know something beyond his physical self. Unfortunate, as well, in that the gestalt of his last works seems earnest, yet, a lot like Berthot’s, rests on the level of inchoate emotions. There is too much feeling and not enough knowing. Or maybe ”not knowing”. I think that if there is a God his transcendence is so far beyond our physical reality or any cognitive act that we can perform, that if we were to get close to it, it would char our souls to a crisp. Spiritual guides often warn adepts of pursuing a search for God, as it is fraught with danger and numerous cul de sacs.http://hyperallergic.com/97175/beer-with-a-painter-jake-berthot/

This show captures a creative climax, where everything holds together.There is the spiritual glow conveyed by the colors and his gestures do take Hartley to a different linguistic space. But as a friend and artist said after reading Baker’s exegesis on DiDonna and recalling his work:

“About the shape of knowing: I never understand why mysticism always takes the shape of monotonous centrality, soft edges, elegant curves, glowing light and color etc. etc. I like to think I'm reaching toward a kind of mysticism but through urgency, agitation, and explosiveness with an underlay of stillness. It’s more how I sense the universe to be.”

Solid work, thoughtfully wrought, full of sincerity but I think in the end it leaves this viewer unconvinced of its greatness. Maybe this was the first basic level to be uncovered in his spiritual journey.Greatness lay ahead of him, possibly.

Review of a recent show of his work at Elizabeth Harris.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

I have been searching for a topic and the WSJ provided it:Martin Mugar as part of the scenery

Study: Saltwater boating brings billions to region

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Winters,Held,Kiefer and Rothenberg at the Met

Summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Retitled "Capturing the Concentrated Moment" by Brett Baker of "Painters Table"

By: Martin Mugar - 07/22/2013

Click to Enlarge

Our being in the world is doubly constructed, first by our own personality and secondly by the public reality that by chance surrounds us. That we can’t jump out of our own shadow is a given when we take stock of ourselves. We are always situated in a place and time and that place and time is understood from out of our personal limitations and the constraints of society. In the art world the place and time is defined by the art media, i.e. whatever is thrown up for us to respond to. We do not choose what is given to us to observe. The fact of the matter is that most people accept both blindly. They are at ease with the destiny given them, and whatever the media presents on a monthly basis. To try to deconstruct these two is not an easy task and who would want to bother. At some point we accept our personality especially if we are by chance hoisted up on the shoulders of the art world or render some sort of service for which we are compensated. Accepting the status quo can be lucrative as well. To be at ease with both must be heaven on earth.

I experienced something strange in the large room of post 60’s modernist work upon my last visit to the Metropolitan museum, that seemed to deflate a moment in time that was once a monumental part of my artistic life. What was on exhibit had the art establishment’s approval of being blue chip. The curators, the galleries, the collectors, and the critics (or some subset of critics) were all in agreement this must be work to consider seriously. There was a a black on white geometric shape painting by Al Held, a Terry Winters of webs and nets, the famous Anselm Kiefer painting of flowers made in part of straw, a Susan Rothenberg totemic abstraction. I can remember acknowledging their strength either in their art magazine reproductions or in museums. I accepted that they had cultural weight and that there was some serious thinking behind them. Held, the positivist, who believed in the reductive language of science. Winters using the same ellipses as Held casts them more existentially likes nets upon the real. Rothenberg saw the underpinnings of the real hovering between shape recognition and amorphous paint. Kiefer meditated on the weight of Nazi past on a German in the modern world.

There was a strange feeling of desuetude in this room. The paintings seemed to have less gravitas. I reflected on what caused the work to fade in stature before my eyes: #1 the canvas as being able to express philosophical ideas seemed in doubt. #2 Maybe the first intersection with an idea and an image seemed to be where the artist stopped and suffered from arrested development. Lets consider #2: Winters with this casting of the net that catches nothing evokes the void, in the same way that Giacometti’s gestures create a space between the artist and the thing he is representing, without catching the thing itself. But does it suffice to say this once or does this meditation on the void merit a life long engagement and moreover can the net capture some essence over time. To do this would be more in keeping with the active nihilism that Nietzsche espoused. The constant orbiting of the self around the void that is suggested in the philosophy of Nishitani, which renders a deeper understanding of the void with each orbital passage. Benefitting from the availability of more recent work online by Winters it is clear that he did not go down that path and in fact seems to have wallowed in a lazy abstraction that is no better than what you see in regional art venues. Held’s positivist belief in Science was absolute and led him to a sort of delirious evocation of the self, expressed as its endless extension into as much space as nature provides it to fill. It seemed to come from a less cynical era and seemed analogous to the American exploration of outer space. It is interesting that Kiefer’s eschews structures except for the death houses and builds his paintings of flowers out of the fragile stuff of organic nature. They are the opposite of the reassuring solidity of Held’s structure by this German who saw positivist technology run amok in Nazi Germany. His work thrives on angst and guilt. However, as in Winters the repetition of the mood in recent work renders no new emotional territory. Rothenberg’s Dance on the edge of recognition and intransigent stuff is hard to repeat over a lifetime and keep fresh. Judging from what I see online, Rothenberg’s latest work like Winter’s suffers from inertia. It is god forbid more representational than abstract. The passion is gone; the delicate yet important balance between the object and unshaped matter is no longer there. It is more image than raw material.

2009 Rothenberg

Maybe the work on display which was all from the 20^th century needed to be redeemed by a sense of an authentic journey, All of the work was mid career work and only Held, in his later years took his painting to a higher level. In the case of Winter’s, Rothenberg and Kiefer the work stagnates. The edgy realm they worked out of that seemed so culturally relevant does not seem worthy of the big name galleries they show in (I am still intimidated when I go into Sperone Westwater or Matthew Marks). I think that the artists bought into the labels that the art critics gave them. It was a perfect cultural storm of the work fitting into a cultural agenda and being successfully thrust on the public, but it was a storm in which their creativity did not survive.

Winters 2014

As long as people have a conscience and a sense of what lies underneath them, whether it is science or the void or the weight of history then painting will remain that concentrated moment, that intersection, where the self is shaped by its knowing of those realms. So I will abandon my first hunch that painting is dead. Maybe what I had to get over was the arrogance of the cartel that hyped the work, Now that the hot media presence has receded into history the paintings are left high and dry to function on their own. They are imbued with fragility. They are not supported by big ideas, just ideas. Maybe that is for the best. The New York art scene was bigger and noisier than it is now and the works were all over sized to match the egos of the artists and the dealers. The din of the battle of the titans has subsided and all that is left are the weapons created in that battle. They still communicate and maybe have more nuances than they did when they were often cudgels used to crush the competition.

I have jumped out of the shadow cast by these artists. And I have jumped out of the shadow cast by my own limitations. I am no longer susceptible to being impressed. I am not surrounded by artists with their fawning need to situate themselves within a context. There are ideas in these paintings that still communicate. I hope there are younger painters who will learn from their exploration of the visual to embody their emotions and ideas.

P.S.
Another big name has jumped the rails: Gerhard Richter. I gave him credit for the squeegee paintings that seemed to function as an event. This new work, as his whole involvement with color was never organic, could not evolve into a new space and is therefore limp and looks like carnival spin painting.
It is post-climactic.In the end his interest in color was in the material of the paint not an inner sense of color and mood.

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Reader Comments

From "Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship"

07-22-2013, 09:33 am

Good writing! D. H. Lawrence wrote a similar comment on art history in his article on Cezanne in Poets on Painters (Paperback).

From "Paul Pollaro"

07-22-2013, 09:31 am

Oh, yeah, I liked the Held. Yes Rothenberg has become a good illustrator and Kiefer has turned to feeling the heat and humidity on a summer day with a breeze. not a bad thing..

From "Mark Gottsegen"

07-22-2013, 09:30 am

We are both older and smarter and no longer taken in with the "next new thing [idea]." This was a good calming little essay.

Half of my entry in "100 Boston Artists" published by Schiffer Publishing

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Addison has an interesting blog on Marsden Hartley that I commented on

"Dogtown", Cape Ann

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-was-speaking-with-collector-of.html

Thursday, June 13, 2013

"Not a Rose"or "Heide is not Heidi".A review of Heide Hatry's book and exhibit at Stux in New York City

Charles has published it on Berkshire Fine Arts

“Not a rose” or Heide is not Heidi,

Some artists are so outside the box that it appears impossible to insert them into any kind of narrative. Heide Hatry’s most recent efforts contained in a book of photos and numerous essays written about the work, at first glance seem to be one of those that defy labeling. To put an artist back in the box, although maybe not an obvious one, is a task I often use in writing my blog. It is probably due to having read too many social theorists, who for example see Impressionism as the outcome of urbanism disrupting our easy relationship to things at hand. I know for sure that this appears to many to be just another procrustean bed, where the poor artist gets his or her limbs lopped off to fit some notion of their life in a time and space. But in fact it works the other way around. Inserting the artist into a context can actually bring them alive. It gives them eyes and ears to the influences around them. Hermeneutically we are always working with preconceived ideas.

Heide Hatry’s latest work, displayed in the book “Not a Rose” could be analyzed aesthetically. She uses animal organs to reconstruct them in the shape of flowers. She does it so well that you do not recognize the photos taken of these short-lived constructions as being made from offal, recently collected from the abattoir. The intelligence and talent of the artist is obvious. There appears to be an understanding of ikebana judging from the adroitness of the “flower’s” arrangement.

To look at the work solely in terms of its aesthetics, is not satisfactory. Moreover, structural analysis may not tell the whole story either. All artists use raw material to shape objects that transcend their origins. El Anatsui for example takes tin cans and bottle caps to weave wall hangings. As artists we are all involved in transformation of one material into another reality. Paint becomes light. Glass becomes a flower. But the outrageousness of using butchered animals as the literal raw material to create flowers makes it impossible to leave her floating outside of the box. Sheep clitoris becomes a daisy. Something needs to be unpacked. What is she up to? Where is she coming from?

One hint is to be found in her work that precedes this recent body of work. Portraits of women with the faces made out of pigskin, that at first glance appear quite real. Not the tanned version on a football but the real flesh, whose shelf-life I have heard from a gallery assistant unfortunately got extended once beyond the expiration date. For me this portraiture points to an obvious influence: Hatry is looking at Cindy Sherman and enters into the realm of identity politics. Identity politics deconstructs the social image (the face) as being infinitely pliable so as to free it from whatever society might impose on it. There is no permanent self because there is no self to begin with, just myriad images we can concoct at will. We see a face that looks like Marilyn Monroe, only to see that momentary recognition questioned by the disturbing suggestion that this is an invention made of animal flesh. These deconstructive notions of self have permeated our world to such a degree that Hillary Clinton can in a calculative way change her image from one public event to the next. One day she is dowdy, the next sexy, or scholarly. Accepting the image that society expects of you is no longer an unshakable burden.

Another obvious influence comes from one of the most famous contemporary artist as provocateur: Damien Hirst, who is famous for displaying in a glass box a whole sheep embalmed in formaldehyde. The use of this noxious fluid recalls the work of another artist, Serrano’s “Piss Christ”. Hirst’s embalmed sheep remains one huge affront to human sensibility. The goal of the artist as provocateur is to mix objects or activities that rarely share the same space in order to shock the bourgeois sensibility that needs to separate out human activities in order to function. The first time I understood this ploy was in Mapplethorpe’s photo of a man dressed in a suit with his substantial penis hanging out of the open zipper. Two different realities, ”suits”, the costume of business, ”cock” the reality of in this case of homosexual sex. If the body had been totally naked we could have entered into the allowable social category of the nude. But the two realities are shown together and create a good deal of cognitive dissonance. Is this what Hatry is doing? quaint flower arrangements done by the museum docents conflated with the reality of the harvested sexual organs of animals. Two categories of experience normally separated. On the one hand we have the decoration or gift of choice for weddings, birthdays and funerals, so integrated into our cultural norms, with its notion of evanesce, delicacy and hope. To make them out of animal parts that have never been used in those contexts before succeeds in destroying the flower as vehicle for reverie. The perfume and delicacy of the flower is the product of the plants sexuality. Hatry seems to be a woman on a mission to abolish all separations of human activity. She brings the abattoir into the flower shop. Her own little shop of horrors. This balancing act is more interesting than HIrst and even Hatry’s earlier work which shows her butchering animals and wallowing in the blood. The subtle weaving of bourgeois notions of beauty and the reality of carrion where the flesh is almost flower and the flower we imagine almost flesh is mesmerizing and straddles exquisitely the fence of tradition and taboo.

Since the 19thc “Epater le bourgeoisie” has been the preferred habit of avant-garde poets and artists. Take the bourgeoisie’s shibboleths and show their hypocrisy. The world of work and production, of science and industry has been built by separating out many of our activities that were once accomplished side by side. Dialectically to criticize these disparities has been a powerful force for social change. Animals are raised in industrialized settings far from view by transient labor and end up in packages in the antiseptic supermarket. Hatry’s earlier work showing her performing the slaughter herself tries to bridge that gap.

Hatry’s goal in “Not a Rose” is to show that the sexual organs of a sheep can be as beautiful as flowering plants. However, a flower is as much about air and perfume as it is about physical construct. She succeeds more in cutting away our need to believe in delicacy and nuance. She can’t have it both ways. She uses the delicacy of flowers to validate the beauty of animal life but takes it away from flowers. Moreover, breaking down the walls between categories of human activity is a dangerous game. Jeffery Dahmer comes to mind as someone who saw people as food or the making of lampshades from human skin in Nazi Germany is another. Animal rights activists seem to think Hatry is working on behalf of animal liberation. Ultimately a rose is a rose is a rose.* It remains an integral part of our culture of gifts, recognition and reciprocity. I suppose to liberate it from the greenhouses where it is mass-produced, would be a nobler cause for Heide to pursue.

Trying to conflate the world of animals and those of plants is more than slightly diabolical and has more in common with genetic engineering, which is currently blending animal and plant genetic material. Maybe the shock of the new will pass as the shock value of so much critique of social norms fades with time. Mapplethorpe’s photos seem dated probably because the separation of public and private (parts) is not longer so extreme. Ads for erectile disfunction are commonplace and condoms are handed out at school.

…Or Serrano’s piss Christ is no longer effective when the object of its derision the Catholic Church is in such disarray. I hate to think what societal norms will have to expire for Hatry’s work to be commonplace.

*Addison Parks contributed an essay to Hatry's book that he reproduces on his Artdeal blog.It talks about flowers and our day to day life

Painting