Gone are the days of “Must-See A.R.T.” Today the art scene is Premium Cable On-Demand. In New York alone, there is a gallery for every man, woman, and child in the art world. Nobody can keep up with it; no one can see everything, nor, frankly, would anyone want to. So the judgment of art now occurs, first, in what we see, not in how we see it—just as with television, one’s taste is a matter of choosing what to watch, not how to watch it.
Your confusion—which I sense—is good, because the art world depends on confusion to maintain the fear that you’re about to miss the Second Coming of Jackson Pollock. Connoisseurship has given way to eschatology. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the end of times. And chances are you’ve tuned in to the wrong station.
In this thousand-channel environment, contemporary galleries thrive not on blockbuster shows but on small sellouts tailored to individual tastes. It’s not urgent that everyone sees a show, only that the right people do—not that art speaks to the ages, only that it speaks to the moment. In this world, criticism has been downgraded to the status of a TV Guide cover story. What people really want is advice on what to see. They want listings and listable art, which the galleries, editors, and artists are happy to provide, creating work that packs up conveniently into single statements. Here are some examples of such concision from a recent issue of New York magazine:
•“New text-based paintings reproducing phrases from the diaries of Samuel Pepys” (Monique Prieto at Cheim & Read);
•“Plexiglas sculptures of valises and suitcases” (Jaye Moon at Newman Popiashvili);
•“Perspective drawings that parody familiar map overviews” (Adam Dant at Adam Baumgold).
As a matter of comparison, here are some actual TV Guide listings for Thursday, October 20, 2005, 9:00 p.m. (Eastern):
•“A trek through the stunning natural beauty of the Canadian Rockies aboard the Rocky Mountaineer. Included: a visit to the train’s observation car.” (“World Class Trains” on PBS);
•“A cupcake-making competition is spotlighted” (“Challenge” on the Food Network);
•“A move from an Andover, Mass. apartment is complicated when one of the movers develops a bad back” (“Make Your Move” on Discovery Home).
In the multi-channel lineup, the art world and the television world both traffic in the same mild prurience matched with overwhelming tedium. As the New York editor Karen Rosenberg and the unnamed TV Guide writer clearly show, there is some humor to be had in these dry descriptions. The New Yorker’s art editors, by contrast, still write as if their jewel-encrusted prose had meaning beyond length. Here is one shimmering description from that storied publication (of Yuken Teruya at Bienvenu):
Arguably the most charming objects in P.S. 1’s “Greater New York” were Teruya’s delicate trees hovering inside the paper shopping bags from which they were cut. The Japanese-born artist continues that project with “Forest Inc.,” a collection of trees carved out of mundane paper products such as McDonald’s bags and toilet-paper rolls. The sly “Three Seasons (Phillips, Sotheby’s, Christie’s)” goes upmarket, using stiff sacks from the auction-house triumvirate, while “Gap Inc.” and “LVMH” explore a sliding scale of luxury …
… et cetera for another column inch. Something for everybody—but not much of anything for anybody. All the channel flipping can make you long for the golden days of network television, if only because we once had something in common to talk about (and art was a running conversation).
When I go about finding art for this chronicle, what interests me most are those shows that still talk in more than speeches —art that consciously engages in what some might call a narrative and others might call “the story of art.” The art world today doesn’t need more thematic rehangings; it needs Alfred Barr. Fortunately, there are certain curators who still reach for this goal of masterful narrative—and often achieve it. Barbara Haskell at the Whitney ranks at the top of the list. Since her arrival at the museum in 1975, through exhibitions and monographs, Haskell has worked through the early twentieth-century history of American art to arrive at a canon of the artists who centered around Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, including Marsden Hartley and Elie Nadelman, and artists like Milton Avery who were influenced by them. She has exposed one of the richest veins in American art.
With a major show at the Whitney Museum, drawing on material that only became available after the dissolution of the artist’s estate in 1999, Haskell has now nominated the colorist Oscar Bluemner (1867–1938) for renewed consideration among his contemporaries.[1] Raised in the textile town of Elberfeld in Wilhelmine Germany (with parallels to the upbringing of another colorist—Henri Matisse), Bluemner excelled in his architectural education before running afoul of the Kaiser himself (he claimed). In 1892, he emigrated to the United States, where he found quick work at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and among government building contracts in New York City. A paranoid and an egomaniac, however, he soon began to follow a course of professional and personal disintegration that would undermine his modest successes in life. Haskell describes Bluemner as “an artist of the first rank who destroyed his career through a combination of arrogance and insecurity that left him incapable of sustaining relationships with those in authority.” This included an ill-timed falling out with Stieglitz, an early champion with whom he shared a German aesthetic education.
While Bluemner maintained a sensitivity to color similar to that of Henri Matisse, whose work he saw at Stieglitz’s gallery even before the Armory Show of 1913, Bluemner employed color for its emotional rather than harmonic properties. As he became disenchanted with his architectural practice, he pressed further into painting, arriving at a signature style of boxy landscapes in red and blue by 1910. Over the next three decades, the architectural scaffolding of his canvases began to buckle under its own emotional weight. Moonlight burns through a series of watercolors on paper from 1927—theatrically illuminated (unnecessarily, I think) in the Whitney hanging. Trees sway and buildings cave in around the center of his compositions (Moonlight on a Creek [1928-1929]). A homemade mixture of casein and formaldehyde brings the colors to the surface in the later works. Placing the color red above all others, by 1929 he had styled himself “the Vermillionaire.” Bluemner allowed an intensity to enter his work that eventually destroyed his life: in 1938 he took a knife to his throat and slit his neck from ear to ear. His art became distinctly American, but his destruction remains unmistakably German, alienating him from the very canon he died to join—a haunting specter cast over the entire New York scene this season.
The history of American art is indeed one of “theme and variation”—the title of a rewarding show of mainly hard-edged prints now at Hirschl & Adler Galleries.[2] The themes: colors, shapes, influences. The variations: within single works, such as Josef Albers’s “Variants,” or within a series, such as Albers’s “Day and Night,” or between teachers and pupils, such as Albers and Kenneth Noland (Quartet 1–4 [2001]). The best pieces on display are the ones where color and form interact in fundamental ways; the least rewarding: those that engage in mere serialism, such as Fred Sandback’s silkscreens of installation plans, or the sentimental Focus I–V (1979) by Brice Marden, based on studies from Pompeii. Nevertheless, the show remains intense—a conversation in many voices—an art education in two rooms.
If only I could say the same for many of the Midtown galleries participating last month in the 130th anniversary of the Art Students League of New York. Instead, this became an occasion to pull out from the vaults what seemed like any and all represented artists with a semester’s credit or more from this famous institution. With thousands of students passing through the League, the connections between teacher and pupil are far from self-evident. Albers and Noland at Black Mountain College this was not. The one experience Art League students appeared to share—to gather from these exhibitions—was that they had few experiences in common. Without supporting research or intelligent hanging, how could we think otherwise?
One of the few highlights of these shows, beyond Burgoyne Diller at Rosenfeld and Will Barnet at Babcock, was an array of early work by mid-century masters at Washburn.[3] Here one could see Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith from the 1930s, not so much squaring up against each other but contending with what we know as their future selves. Considering Rothko’s Mother and Child, Smith’s seashells, and Pollock’s self-portrait, things could only look up after the amateurishness of this early work. What role the League played in this? That’s anyone’s guess.
Allow me to change the channel for a moment to a very different show. Tim Bavington, born in 1966, is an abstract painter raised in the Trinitron generation. Now at Jack Shainman, in Chelsea, his work speaks to nothing if not the moment: dazzling, blinding op-art, loaded to the hilt, expansive, recorded in Surround Sound, overproduced, poised for greatness in the multiplexes of the mind. Noland may paint “quartets”; Bavington gives us Makin’ Out (With Blue) (2005), Physical S.E.X. (2005), and Processed Beats (Fool’s Gold) (2005).
Bavington doesn’t waste a second in delivering his mind-bending charge. Is that because, any second, the history of art may come crashing back down to Earth? Sometimes I wonder if today’s art world is engineering its own Bluemner-like demise —this time in the form of an explosion of over-amped successes. The question is, who is going to blow up with it?
Notes
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- “Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on October 7, 2005 and remains on view through February 12, 2006. A catalogue of the exhibition, with an essay by Barbara Haskell, has been published by the museum (240 pages; $70). Go back to the text.
- “Theme & Variation: Twentieth-Century Master Prints” opened at Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, on October 14 and remains on view through November 19, 2005. Go back to the text.
- “Salute to the 130th Anniversary of the Art Students League” was on view at Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York, from September 8 to October 29, 2005. Go back to the text.
- “Tim Bavington: Recent Paintings” opened at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on October 14 and remains on view through November 12, 2005. Go back to the text.
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