Top, An artist's rendering of the "light box" of the Barnes Museum, and left to right on bottom row, Giorgio de Chirico's "Dr. Albert C. Barnes" (1926), Henri Matisse's "Red Madras Headdress " (1907) and Picasso's "Head of a Woman" (1907) (images via barnesfoundation.org)

This week, critics weigh in on the new Barnes Foundation museum in central Philadelphia … and in other non-Barnes-related links … discotecture, the impact of progressive architectural ideas on urbanism and the voice of Rene Magritte.

 This week, the art world is chattering about the Barnes Foundation and its controversial move to Logan Square in central Philadelphia.

Here’s the low down …

 First the AP story via The Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York:

It may look like a museum but officials are quick to point out that the Barnes will remain true to — and expand upon — the educational mission that its creator intended. Opponents say removing the collection from its original context has created a “McBarnes,” despite the efforts to replicate the dizzying floor-to-ceiling arrangements of paintings, furniture and metalwork that underscored Barnes’ eccentric philosophy of art appreciation.

 Travel and Leisure magazine give us the mind-numbing statistics:

Numbers may mean little but there is an astounding embarrassment of riches: 181 works by Renoir (the largest group of the artist’s paintings anywhere), 69 by Cézanne, 59 by Matisse, 46 by Picasso…, 7 by van Gogh; early twentieth-century American paintings (William Glackens and Maurice Prendergast); Old Masters, including El Greco, Paolo Veronese, Frans Hal; 125 African sculptures and masks, Native American ceramics, and more, a lot more …

 New York Times critic Roberta Smith, who appears to be a fan of everything nowadays, likes it:

Others, myself included, did not object to the move per se, but felt that faithfully reproducing the old Barnes in the new space, as promised by the trustees, was a terrible idea. To us it seemed time to at least loosen up Barnes’s straitjacketed displays, wonderful as they often were. And why go to the trouble of moving the collection to a more accessible location when the galleries were not going to be any bigger?

And yet the new Barnes proves all of us wrong. Against all odds, the museum that opens to the public on Saturday is still very much the old Barnes, only better.

 Christopher Knight, of the LA Times, predictably doesn’t like the new museum, which he writes:

The result is one part Colonial Williamsburg, where authentic and ersatz mingle; one part Lehman Wing, where an excellent New York collector’s expensive period taste is enshrined in a Metropolitan Museum of Art replica of his apartment; and one partDisneyland’s Main Street U.S.A., where a spiffed-up version of what time has torn asunder offers commercial entertainment.

 Writing for Vanity Fair, Paul Goldberger thinks the building is great:

This building won’t please the absolutists, the people we should probably call Barnes fundamentalists, because nothing would please them short of a return to the way things were. But it really ought to please everybody else, because — to cut to the chase — the new Barnes is absolutely wonderful.

 Joel Rose of NPR thinks other than the location there is little else different about the new Barnes:

Barnes Foundation officials promised a Pennsylvania judge they would preserve the dimensions of the original galleries; in return, he gave them permission to move the collection to a new $200 million building in Philadelphia. They also pledged to re-create the idiosyncratic “ensembles” of paintings, furniture and metalwork conceived and arranged by founder Albert Barnes in the first half of the 20th century. Even the burlap color of the walls looks the same. But that didn’t stop the architects from making a few … tweaks.

 Blake Gopnik of The Daily Beast opines:

So the collection fell into the hands of the Philadelphia establishment Barnes hated … and mostly that’s been a good thing. More people can see the art, in better conditions than ever before. Numbers will be limited to avoid overcrowding, but that still leaves one major caveat: although the move from the suburbs has put the collection much nearer to the disempowered masses and minorities that Barnes had cared about, an $18 ticket charge will help keep them away. Some part of the hundreds of millions raised for the move should have been set aside to keep admission free.

 Inga Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s architecture critic, thinks the building is great but it’s not an example of exemplary urbanism:

But while there are many moments of breathtaking refinement, and the galleries themselves are a revelation, the result is sadly – no, tragically – a long way from being a successful addition to the city.

 The music critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer also wades into the discussion and thinks the new Barnes Museum removes some of the institution’s quirkiness:

Gone forever, of course, is any claim to authenticity. Whatever the Barnes of 2012 and beyond becomes, visitors will never again have the same fully prescribed experience, the powerful feeling of being led around the museum by the hand of its founder.

 And he goes further to tie these changes to the city’s changing face:

Paradoxically, though, the repackaging of the Barnes may also be seen as the latest in a string of changes to Philadelphia that dilute its special character — advancements that bring Philadelphia into conformity with what visitors from other places may expect, but that also render the city more generic.

 The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that anti-poverty protesters aren’t happy with the city of Philadelphia’s value system, which they say favors tourism over the needs of its citizens:

Inside the Barnes, guests were served lamb chops and smoked salmon cannolis with a lemon aioli sauce along with champagne and red and white wine at the $1,500-a-plate opening-reception dinner.

Outside, at 20th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the menu was drastically different.

A coalition of homeless-advocacy groups and others protesting the Barnes’ move from Merion dined on doughnut holes, salmon dip, bread, apples, bagels, rice, and string beans served on paper plates with plastic utensils.

They said they hoped to send Mayor Nutter a message.

“A city that prioritizes tourism over feeding starving, homeless people is a city without a soul,” said Laura Evangelisto, 31, a member of Food Not Bombs, which organized the protest.

 And for those interested in who was at the opening night gala, there’s this.

 And Forces has compiled a series of video tours of the new museum.

Now in non-Barnes related links:

 Vice Magazine has been taking a look at “the future of nightlife” and this episode focuses on discotecture, particularly the New York clubs of Limelight, Studio 54, Mudd Club, Area and Palladium.

 Speaking of architecture, writing for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman takes a look at the progression architectural vision of Medellin, Columbia, which (some seem to suggest) helped reduce crime:

I arrived in Medellín to see the ambitious and photogenic buildings that have gone up, but also to find what remains undone. The murder rate, while hardly low, is now under 60 per 100,000. Architecture alone obviously doesn’t account for the drop in homicides, but the two aren’t unrelated, either. Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself.

 And the voice of René Magritte, recorded in 1926, discussing “Le surréalisme et les questions” [MP3 link] has been uploaded to UbuWeb.

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.

As a reviewer, I’ve wondered about these questions as I consider novels and short story collections, often in translation, that include impressive artwork created in response to the text, or vice versa, texts born from visual art.

Last year, there was Animalinside, a comic-book-length collaborative exchange with existential-themed text by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and paintings by Max Neumann, focused on an enigmatic dog-being with two legs. I ended up liking the pictures more than the words, but Kraznahorakai’s prose proved to be funny in an over-the-top barbaric yawp sort of way.

I also read Paul Scheerbart’s mesmerizing “failure journal” called The Perpetual Motion Machine, published by Wakefield Press (reviewed at Hyperallergic here). Wakefield included 26 schematic drawings by Scheerbart, which added to the humor (he’s a comically bad engineer, though a skilled technical artist), and their meticulousness showed how dangerously lost he was in his utopian fantasy.

Seagull Books recently published some striking examples of art/text: The Loss Library, a collection of prose about failed stories by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic; and a children’s tale by Thomas Bernhard (yes, that Thomas Bernhard) called Victor Halfwit, in which a couple pages of text were transformed into a thick folio-fable of collage artwork, perfectly capturing the tone of Bernhard’s slightly gruesome and hilarious fairy tale.

Both books benefit from complex and hypnotic artwork by Sunandini Banerjee. After several years working on book covers for Seagull, Victor Halfwit became her first full-length, illustrated book project.

“Not having illustrated a book before — but knowing that I disliked children’s books which had pages full of text and a picture cowering in a box in the corner somewhere,” she says, “I began to read it word by word, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, and began to ‘draw’ on wherever the associations and images came to me naturally.”

Bernhard’s work is known for its intense seriousness, and Banerjee said when she first read Victor Halfwit she thought it was “simple and perhaps even a wee bit dull.” “But I found that when you take your time over it… when you pause to breathe between those words, whole worlds of pictures come cascading through the cracks and between the lines. So even though he uses the word ‘forest’ about 20 times, each forest is different. And that perhaps was the challenge.”

She said her goal was “to be true to Bernhard’s style and yet to bring in enough of myself to prompt the reader to read a little more, to bring in some of themselves and go, ‘Ah, that looks familiar,’ or ‘Hah! That’s really funny.’ Each page becomes a story in a much bigger story.”

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "Victor Halfwit" (all images courtesy Seagull Books)

She created over 200 pages of artwork based on a few pages of text. “It was an immense undertaking,” she says, “and I feel that I have to generate a new lifetime of images and memories and associations, for I have vomited everything I possessed into those pages.”

As a collagist, Banerjee is staunchly independent and when I suggested Hannah Höch as one possible influence, she politely resisted the idea. “One of the things I simply do not do is to identify any form or person as ‘an influence’ or as ‘an inspiration.’ I don’t want to be ‘like’ anyone. I want to be me.”

“It is not just a question of assembling images. One is reading, remembering, recalling, reinventing, rediscovering, associating — all at once. One is picking up on certain words or motifs and then chasing them down the alleyways of representation to see what they finally look like when you stand face to face. … After it is over, I can never remember how it was that it came to be done.”

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "The Loss Library" (click to enlarge)

Picture-filled texts make the story feel like it’s drawing two reactions out of me: first comes the calm memory of children’s books I’ve loved; second, the feeling, decidedly more abstract, of knowing that these words triggered images in someone else’s mind, and these “other” conceptions are now alive in the book. The result is a palimpsest — an overlay of visual responses each competing for dominance.

When I asked Banerjee about this in relation to her intentions with the artwork she created for Vladislavic’s The Loss Library, she said, “I don’t think there can be a specific intended effect with any form of art. One can hope or wish for something to have a certain effect, but so much of it lies in the eye of the beholder. Our idea was to have a frontispiece for every story, a pictorial representation that could be its seed or its fruit. And we wanted to treat them like old-fashioned picture plates, which is why they were printed separately and then stuck in. Not to illustrate each story, in the strict sense of the word, but to perhaps walk alongside, to accompany, sometimes even to comment, to point out.”

One thing I hadn’t even considered was what the author might think about any of this tinkering. After all, a book cover is usually something authors just have to live with and hope the publisher can do their best. With The Loss Library, Banerjee said Seagull worked with Vladislavic:

[He] was remarkable in his generosity to allow me to ‘intervene’ if you will, or illuminate if you will, his words. And for that I am grateful. Every reader, every viewer, is welcome to make of it what they will. Once it is in their hands, it is their responses that will make them read or turn away.

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "Victor Halfwit"

Though I greatly admire the artwork in these so-called picture books, I find them a challenge to read and enjoy. Their subject matter lives a complex life, the writer, the artist, and my responses all contending. And I find myself struggling to preserve my ideas and images, to preserve relationship with the author. To preserve its intimacy. Maybe because I write fiction as well as criticism, I don’t want that third partner in my reading experience — no matter how fine or complex their contribution. Mere words on the page may not be very exciting things to look at; what’s exciting is what I make of them. I want to keep that work to myself.

Installation view of "Thomas Nozkowski: New Editions and Related Drawings" at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (all images courtesy Senior & Shopmaker)

If there is one constant about Thomas Nozkowski that I would single out, it is his lifelong insistence on subverting conventions. In 1974 he began painting on canvas board measuring 16 by 20 inches. (Let’s be clear here — Bill Jensen never painted on this small a surface because it had no historical precedence).

He used an inexpensive, mass-produced product, the same kind that comes in “paint by number” kits and carries associations with “Sunday painters.” No wonder his defiance went largely unnoticed, particularly when the 1980s rolled around.

In that hothouse decade of overstatement, his paintings weren’t big enough to fill three galleries at once; didn’t incorporate piles of broken dishes; had no nudes in soft-porn poses overlaid with nasty, stream-of-consciousness imagery; had no one masturbating. Unlike many of his peers, he made no claims on behalf of his work.

For more than half a century — at least since Hans Namuth’s photographs and film of Jackson Pollock painting — the art world has equated subversion with theatricality, which increasingly plays into mainstream society’s desire for spectacle and distraction. (No wonder there are reasonably intelligent people who think Jeff Koons is radical and even avant-garde.)

Going to The Pace Gallery didn’t change Nozkowski, which you can’t say for every artist who gets picked up by a blue chip venue. In his second exhibition at Pace (October 22 to December 4, 2010), he paired twenty paintings, all of which measured 22 by 28 inches, with the same number of drawings, all of them around 8 by 10 inches.  (Only eighteen pairings were actually shown, with the other two pairs in the office. All twenty pairs were reproduced in the catalog.) The reason for the pairing was simple enough; Nozkowski had done a small drawing in colored pencil after every painting.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled (P-90)" (2010), oil on paper (click to enlarge)

By hanging the painting and drawing next to each other, Nozkowski challenged the viewer to see the works as separate, but related — a further working out of a motif. However, instead of the drawing being a preliminary work for the painting, which is the usual sequence of things, it came after the painting. The point wasn’t to see similarities, but to make more and more distinctions, and to trace the decisions the artist made after leaving one and going to the other.

Even among his most ardent supporters, the consternation was immediate. David Cohen titled his review: “Ground Control to Major Tom: Please re-hang your show.” And yet, what Nozkowski did wasn’t theatrical or, worse, gimmicky. Given that he wanted to show the paintings and their related drawings, he had two choices: to hang the paintings and drawings far apart from each other, or close together. The conventional wisdom is to sequester them in separate quarters. Nozkowski defied that wisdom.

*   *   *

While the show was up, Nozkowski used the catalogue as the basis for a second series of twenty drawings after the paintings, this time done in black-and-white. (Another constant is his tenacity — he’s got a memory like a steel trap and he never lets go of anything). The twenty black-and-white drawings are now mounted in a grid on one wall of his current show, New Editions and Related Drawings, at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery.  It makes me wish for a show including the twenty paintings and both sets of drawings. A show like that would be a revelation.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled (M-28)" (2011), gouache and colored pencil on print

Drawing is one of the things that holds Nozkowski’s work together. He has done drawings in ballpoint pen — among other materials — in response to books he’s read; recalling movies he’s watched; while remembering art works he’s made or studied; or jotting down, on a moment’s inspiration, things he’s seen — almost none of which we can figure out from looking at the work. At the same time, if he likes a motif in a painting that he’s working on, but knows it has to go, he will move it onto a work on paper. One work leads to another, eventually forming a maze of motifs. One could say this maze is a fairly accurate reflection of Nozkowski’s view of life.

*   *   *

At the heart of Nozkowski’s practice is improvisation, a willingness to take something (anything) and do something else to it. He seems to have been one of the few of his generation to understand Jasper Johns’s declaration: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it, etc.”

*   *   *

The other binder in Nozkowski’s work is reflected in a remark he made to me in an interview, where he said that he always “go[es] to the opposite of what the logical move would be.” In other words, he begins by undermining his own immediate assumptions and responses to a particular experience.

This is what subversive artists working in our postmodern epoch share. They don’t have a style, which is, in the end, both a brand and a judgment. How can you produce a brand and be subversive? (It’s like selling torn jeans made by Armani!) Subversive artists always try to undermine conventions, including those that might influence their practice.

*   *   *

How far does a subversive artist go? Why all the way, of course. In Nozkowski’s case, this means that he does something in his prints that seems counterintuitive. Rather than deriving them from his paintings, as most artists do, he generated a number of his recent ones from drawings. “Untitled #1″ (2012) is a 7-plate/8 color aquatint, with a 2-block woodcut comprising thirteen colors. It improvises off of his “Untitled (P-90),” an oil on paper done in 2010. While the print has more than twenty colors, it seems to operate on the principle of bright (light) and muted (dark).

Thomas Kozlowski, "Untitled #1" (2012), 7-plate aquatint with 8 colors, 2-block woodcut with 13 colors

Nozkowski joined two shapes — one long and narrow and the other bulky and squarish — along a horizontal border near the top. A thin band, pressing against the  top edge, spans almost its entire width, like an I-beam with angled edges at each end; this has been divided into nearly three dozen different triangles, trapezoids, rectangles, and parallelograms.

Nozkowski further divided the geometric shapes into two groups: the black, gray, and white irregular ones that extend from the top edge; and a band of slightly different-sized rectangles, each done in a different color. The band of rectangles — which lie end to end like a row of children’s blocks — forms a brightly colored zone between the black, gray, and white shapes above and the bulky conglomeration of mutely-colored rectangles below.

A large squarish-form, which is made up of many small, mostly vertical rectangles, hangs down from the I-beam like a beehive surrounded by a cream-colored atmosphere.  It is a mishmash of vertical and horizontal rectangles that are all extremely muted in color. The highly varied but barely visible color seems to have been the result of overlaying the creamy, atmospheric color over the shape’s already muted colors. It looks like the sun reflecting off a wall of colors, making it impossible to see. They have literally been whited-out.

The cumulative effect of these three contrasting elements — the black, gray, and white band, the row of brightly colored rectangles, and the conglomeration of rectangles in which the creamy white has diluted all the colors — is the vertiginous feeling that one is looking at something as well as through something.  Our eyes keep refocusing.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled #5" (2012), 4-plate aquatint with 22 colors (click to enlarge)

He achieves similar jarring shifts in a very different way in his etching, “Untitled #5″ (2012), a 22-color aquatint, in which variously-sized cream colored hexagons perforate a black field, and the only color is found in the hexagons lined up along the edges.

It’s as if Nozkowski wants to discover how far he can go before something falls apart and becomes chaotic and arbitrary. What an unlikely thing he has done. In “Untitled #1,” he has made most of the print appear as if it is behind a muted white scrim. It is nearly impossible to tell whether the ground is separate from the form or covers it. I cannot think of any other prints that remotely resemble the two I have discussed.

*   *   *

In the generative oil on paper, “Untitled (P-90)” (2010), which Nozkowski used for “Untitled #1,” the I-beam spanning the top goes from mostly from maroons, reds, and pinks on the left to blues and greens on the right. However, the colors between them don’t seem to follow any logic. Nozkowski undermines viewers’ expectations in different ways throughout a work, encouraging them to take the composition apart and, more importantly, put it back together.

*   *   *

Nozkowski has been celebrated for being “mercurial” and “provocative”  and making “sumptuous” works (Cohen’s terms). I am reminded of Wallace Stevens who wrote in his poem, “It Must Give Pleasure”:

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

We have yet to consider Nozkowski’s work, and all its formal compressions, in a broader context, preferring instead to isolate him. The reasons for this withholding seem obvious—a deeper analysis of his work would go a long way toward subverting the art world’s elevation of all those other artists who possess an abundance of style and opinions, but, in the end, have very little else to offer us.

Thomas Nozkowski: New Editions and Related Drawings is on view at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 804, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 16.

Dana Schutz, "Flasher" (2012), oil on canvas (all images courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice.

Instead of accommodating herself, like a good student, to the pressures of the historical moment, Schutz turned the tables. If painting was no longer possible, then what would it mean to depict the impossible in bold colors and clear forms? At once macabre and funny, her early painting “Face Eater” (2004) joyfully defied the doxa, the repressive discourses demanding conformity.

*   *   *

Piano in the Rain is the title of her current and her first exhibition at Friedrich Petzel. In a painting with the same title as the show, Schutz depicts a young woman wearing a robin’s egg blue shirt and violet bellbottoms and playing a piano in the rain. She is seated in a nearly flattened profile, but the piano is tilted up slightly toward the picture plane. This spatial contradiction isn’t the only one you’re likely to notice. The young woman seems to be both sitting outside, with a raincloud floating just above her head, as well as inside a room (or on a stage?), a suggestion conveyed by the two dark green horizontal lines spanning the width of the painting. These formal paradoxes reverberate with the contradictions implied by the subject. (Who in her right mind would play a piano in the pouring rain?)

The image of a young woman with long brown hair playing a piano in the rain might initially seem like a metaphor for the absurdity of painter’s situation, but it’s not.

Dana Schutz, "Piano in the Rain" (2012), oil on canvas

For one thing, the image evokes Walter Pater’s statement: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” Music shapes time without needing to resort to narrative or reference. This state of self-sufficiency is what Wassily Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka wanted to attain in their art. It would seem Schutz also wants to achieve this state but recognizes that it is impossible; the rain intervenes, messing up the otherwise ideal situation.

Here is another line of inquiry: Is the young woman playing something “original” or is she “interpreting” someone else’s music? What does it mean to be original if you are a pianist?  Are you appropriating someone’s music if you play it? Are there clear distinctions between originality and appropriation?

Or one might consider these questions: What is the meaning of rehearsal and repetition? Is there a correlation between a pianist’s daily engagement with her art (practice and play) and that of a painter?  What is the meaning of skill and its opposite, de-skilling, in this context?

If there is absurdity in the metaphor, it emerges when we draw equivalences between the two disciplines through the lens of academic theory. Should we listen only to de-skilled pianists to prove our bona fides in a post-studio world? Is there something obsolete about the physical contact the pianist has with the piano? Should we only listen to pianists who never touch the piano? (The pianist, we might remember, does touch the piano and the sheet music when playing John Cage’s notorious 4’33”.)

*   *   *

Correspondingly, the absurdist situations that Shutz depicts as embodiments of the painter’s predicament inform us of the extent to which her inquiry is motivated by a philosophical disposition.

In the largest, most crowded painting in the exhibition, “Building the Boat While Sailing” (2012), Schutz’s deft manipulations of space could serve as an instructional manual for art students. In the lower third of the painting, from left to right, she depicts four figures, each of which activates the surrounding space differently.

Dana Schutz, "Building the Boat While Sailing" (2012), oil on canvas

On the far left, a woman sits on the edge of the raft (an irregularly shaped geometric board tilted away from the picture plane), facing out. She holds two pieces of wood, each pierced by two nails, as if they are cymbals. Although her shoulders, head, and hair are largely flat shapes, they come across as solid and weighty.

Beside her, but lower, is a woman in the water, presumably pushing the boat forward. Her head, shoulders, and white hand (abstract shapes) and the bottoms of her feet rise above the water. Unless the woman is shaped like a horseshoe, with her head at one end and feet at the other, the configuration is impossible.

The third figure is an upside-down man — a position most likely inspired by a painting of Christ being lowered down from the Cross.  Sprouting from the painting’s nether regions, the figure flattens everything out, even as the figures around him activate the space in individual ways. On the right, slightly angled in from the painting’s right edge, a woman seated cross-legged faces away from us, engrossed in what’s going on in front of her.

If the boat (the painting) is a vehicle that is capable of transporting us (the viewers) elsewhere, then what does it mean to both build it and sail away at the same time?  Perhaps the boat (painting) isn’t supposed to take us anywhere, that it has been doomed at least since the death of God.

Does that make it as worthless to build as to deconstruct, which the figure boring into the wood (the bore is near the exact middle of the painting!) might seem to be doing?  If you do both at once, does that mean you are a dumb painter rather than a smart conceptualist? There is a sharp bite to these paintings, but, as we all know, some bites can be enjoyable.

*   *   *

Dana Schutz, installation view of "Yawn" paintings at Friedrich Petzel Gallery

This is what Schutz does so well — she asks questions that challenge the answers given by others. More importantly, she asks her questions by folding them into the painting. There is nothing extraneous, no overt or didactic message. We get everything in the work by unraveling it. There is no secret hermeneutical code we must possess to unlock the door.

One question that Schutz addresses is the porous border between abstraction and representation. In “Flasher” (2012), a man opens his flesh-colored coat, which is indistinguishable from his skin, revealing a wristwatch, scissors, schematic eyeglasses, and an array of crosshatches — which allude to the ones Jasper Johns deployed in his “Corpse and Mirror” paintings — across his torso. The “Flasher” has exposed his marked, naked body, and it has turned out to be largely abstract.

*   *   *

There is a disturbing pathos in Schutz’s work. A young woman holds a flame to her ear, while holding her index finger to her lips, as if lost in thought. She is so disconnected from her body that she doesn’t feel any heat from the flame. The colors are jaunty, while the face is impassive, a distant relative of Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse Walter.

In the back room of the gallery, Schutz mounted five small paintings of a plump, almost featureless, young woman caught in the act of yawning. Given how many times each of us has yawned in public, the paintings seem to be having their revenge. They are bored by our constant know-it-all self-regard, and you can’t really blame them.

Piano in the Rain continues at Friedrich Petzel Gallery (537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 16.

(image of bees via thevintagemoth.blogspot.com)

I waited a week to see what reaction there might be to Holland Cotter’s summary dismissal of 21st-century art, but so far, few takers.

Cotter’s pronouncement — laid out in the third and fourth paragraphs of his review of the Frieze Art Fair — was relatively matter-of-fact:

The gentrification of contemporary art itself is an old story in two parts. Part one is about a 20th­century model of an avant-­garde, with artists as feisty cultural delinquents and idiot savants who set themselves outside the mainstream to make baffling things and think deep thoughts.

In part two, set in the 21st century, the model has changed. Now artists, whether they know it or not, are worker bees in an art-industrial hive. Directed by dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants, they turn out predictable product for high-­profile, high-­volume fairs like Frieze.

One blogger, Paul Corio of No Hassle at the Castle, responded this way:

The fact that Cotter was able to run this down with such brevity shows not only his knack for concision, but also how familiar the story is by now. Just about anyone interested in reading a review of Frieze already knows this stuff; very little historical framing is required.

While Corio acknowledges that there are many who “find the whole thing extremely distasteful,” including “participants and beneficiaries,” he reminds us that art “has always been a career path” and that those who create “the best examples of the art” most prized by a particular culture also “become highly paid professionals.”

I have no argument with that, or with much else in Corio’s post, which includes a critique of the institutionalization of institutional critique.

As he suggests, it should be a given that if a society wants art, it must support its artists in a material way.

But in the U.S. (as opposed to the government assistance distributed in pre-financial-crisis Europe), the cultural support system for visual artists is rife with ethical issues related to the high cost and commodification of the art object — the very object that happens to be the prime focus of fairs like Frieze.

Cotter’s assertion, as Corio notes, is a familiar story — that is to say, a recapitulation of received ideas.

But what is most bothersome is its glib disregard for historical nuance, romanticizing the past’s makers of “baffling things” and thinkers of “deep thoughts,”  while categorizing current artists as either the willing pawns or the unwitting dupes of high rolling “dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants.”

Perhaps it’s because I have yet to attend an art fair (its novelty has never had enough appeal to carve out the time to go, which I suppose would be a journalistic failing if I considered myself a journalist), and so my nerve endings remain unsinged by the reputed toxicity of an art mall.

Consequently, it would seem, I haven’t developed the requisite degree of cynicism to properly navigate the shoals of 21st-century art.

Cotter isn’t the first to refer to art-world worker bees. That distinction might rest (as far as my Googling can tell) with Jerry Saltz, who used the term in a review of the 2009 Venice Biennale (though he is referring not to artists but presumably to those without whom the show could not go on — fabricators, art handlers, installers, registrars et alia):

… by my having skipped last week’s press preview and the opening hoopla  … I missed the international bigwigs, artists, dealers, curators, and thousands of art-world worker bees.

This quote is apropos of nothing other than to segue (vis-à-vis the Biennale and the art-world class structure Saltz inventories) to the question that I believe cuts to the heart of the matter: “Who chooses?”

Like it or not, we have an official visual culture, and that culture is determined by an entrenched hierarchy. This is no different from any other historical era, though the hierarchy has evolved from emperors, popes, cardinals and kings to museum directors, biennial curators, collectors, gallery owners and select members of the media.

And this official culture is no less fallible than the one that once considered Guido Reni (1575–1642, aka “The Divine Guido”) to be the greatest of all Italian artists.

But it can also bring to the fore the most noteworthy artists of our time. I first saw the work of Regina José Galindo in the Venice Biennale of 2005, El Anatsui in the Biennale of 2007, and Adrián Villar Rojas in this year’s Triennial at the New Museum.

These artists cannot remotely be considered “worker bees in an art-industrial hive.” Rather, their art reflects Robert Henri’s sentiment from The Art Spirit (1923):

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

And so does, oddly enough, the work of the artists I know and care about.

These artists are by and large laboring in the shadow of official culture. Of course they would like to make a living from their art — who wouldn’t?  But they see the act of making as the primary goal. And their choice to live an artist’s life is not subject to the whim of the hierarchy or the market.

The danger that Cotter senses, I assume, is that the art fair will usurp (if it hasn’t already) the museum and the biennial in the official culture game — that the determination of quality will shift from connoisseurship to the price tag. But that dichotomy is such a cliché I could barely bring myself to type it.

If fairs like Frieze draw art and money into uncomfortably close proximity, all that does is state the obvious. To separate them — to pretend that the former can float free of the latter — might appear to be a clean, ethical stance, but that’s a misperception.

To be ethical means to make uncomfortable decisions. Not to avoid the mud, but to understand that everything worth doing entails both gain and loss.

This is the real texture of art and history. Was the Borgias’ money any cleaner than the Rockefellers’?  And did the artists supported by their patronage “turn out predictable product” for their collections?

Perhaps some did, but the ones we still esteem, even as they took the same money, made their own choices and followed their own lights.

If that’s the way it was then, why should it be any different now?

The new DPRK web site features Kim Il Sung, the (late) Eternal President of the Republic and his admirers.

LOS ANGELES — North Korea has a new website. And as far as I can tell, it’s not a parody. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has officially launched their new English-language site, and what a sight it is.

Here’s what Charlie Custer at Tech in Asia had to say:

“It’s not clear where the site was designed, and a WHOIS lookup returns the true owner of the domain has been concealed, though it appears the site is currently hosted in Denmark. Although it is apparently the official English-language website of the North Korean government, it is connected with and seemingly operated by the Korean Friendship Association, a sort of international fan club for North Korea that anyone can join.”

Nothing says North Korean power like a flower show that showcases missiles and handguns in the floral arrangements. (via korea-dpr.com)

The site is a treasure trove of traditional Communist propaganda in the 21st century. Behold the music section, with enough mp3′s to create an iTunes playlist with hits like “I Love My Motherland” and “Raise Your Weapons to Wave the Supreme Commander” (I’m waiting for the remix). The visually inclined will enjoy the architecture and photo galleries, offering a glimpse at the Arch of Triumph and Juche Tower.  Learn more about the national flower, the magnolia (and its offshoot, the Kimjongilia) and order traditional propaganda from the online store. The site is detailed and descriptive, with enough photos, text and music to paint a rosy picture of the infamously secretive nation.

Nothing says grand like sculptures at the Korean People's Study House (via korea-dpr.com)

Convinced you’ve found your next summer break destination? The tourism section offers packaged tours in anticipation of the Arirang mass games. But before you go, just be sure to brush up on an alternative perspective of life inside.

Both fellowships will run for six weeks at the center, where all visiting artists receive a bedroom, studio and three meals a day. In addition, the social media fellows will each get a $2,000 stipend. Artists are not limited to specific platforms; the only requirements are that the finished work be presented and fully accessible on the web.

Asked how the center plans to present the fellows’ final work, VCCA Program Director Craig Pleasants told Hyperallergic that plans are still in the works:

“My vision or supposition at this stage is that there will be a microsite on the VVCA website, which becomes an online outlet. It’s not going to be for showing stuff so much as for experiencing it. I’m imagining that this is going be an interactive experience. That’s the kind of artists we’re looking for.”

Pleasants added that the center hopes to make this an ongoing project, but it will depend on further funding.

And if they’re looking for suggestions for social media artists, we humbly suggest they check out our exhibition from two years ago, #TheSocialGraph.

Lolcats stopped by the office today and asked the staff if they could write a review of a show. Wanting to get the non-hypoallergenic felines out of the office, we decided to take the Lolcats to the closest exhibition, seven @ SEVEN at the Boiler.

Here is what they came up with:

René Magritte, "(Shell in the form of an ear)" (1956) (via wahooart.com)

Every Friday, we post things in “Overheard in the Art World.” #OHAW Honestly, art world, don’t take yourself so seriously.

This week, summer officially began for the art world with the opening of Tomas Sarceno’s “Cloud City” on the roof of the Met. And you know what happens when summer begins for the art world? People start talking of weekends in the Hamptons, whats “hot” and “what’s not,” and NO ONE wants to be seen eating a “pig in a blanket.”

“Pigs in a blanket? Really, Performa?”
— overheard at Performa Benefit

“Pigs in a blanket? Really?”
— overheard at Tom Sachs’s Space Programs: Mars opening at Park Avenue Armory

“Uh … [with sigh of city disgust] I can’t wait to get to the Hamptons this weekend.”
— overheard on the sun-filled roof of the Metropolitan Museum during the Tomas Sarceno Cloud City opening

“Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is bidding on EVERYTHING.”
— overheard at Performa Benefit

“Um, is there a VIP line?”
— overheard at entrance of Storefront’s Secret Sounds of the City party at The McKittrick Hotel

Man: “I need to take some clients to some openings tonight, any suggestions?”
Woman: “Are they hot?”
Man: “If you were in finance you would realize there was no one hot at this bank. One of them is married, fat, has a horrid greased haircut and lives with his ugly wife and four kids in North Carolina, which just voted to ban people like me.”
— overheard in a ZingMag-forwarded email chain sent to #OHAW

Guy #1: “Who is that guy Tom Sachs is talking to?”
Guy #2: “He looks like Kanye West but fatter.”
— overheard at Tom Sachs’s Space Programs: Mars opening at Park Avenue Armory in front of the artist talking to Kanye West

“Hey, people in the back of the room! Are you bidding or just drinking?”
— auctioneer overheard at Performa Benefit

Girl #1: “How’s MoMA boy?”
Girl #2: “He called me the ‘worst person ever’”
Girl #1: “Ha! Dramatic, much?”
Girl #2: “I know! I was like, worse than the father you never met? Worse than the mom who had 8 husbands before you turned 15? Man, I’m sorry!”
— overheard at Anton Kern Gallery Opening

Heard something too? Send your quotes with where you heard it to overheardintheartworld [at] hyperallergic [dot] com

Marianne Slevin, Doolin, Ireland (site)

There is nearly always music in my studio. Two unstretched canvases of dresses and roses hang from driftwood and another one out of view, though these are pieces from a different body of work. The stone floor is covered in driftwood that I collected from the beach. I have been going to our local beach a lot lately, I find it really inspiring, and always come back with more things I find as well as ideas.

On the driftwood I have written in cyan ink my version of Haiku poems, which are usually even more minimal than the three lined ancient Japanese poems. I am quite a chaotic person, as you can see by my studio, but the work I am making at the moment is economic and sparse. I get excited about using a limited amount of materials at a time, working with things that are fragile and almost not there at all!

A series of very delicate rice paper scrolls, with burns from the cinders from a driftwood fire lie on top of my “very organized” giant tupperware boxes of materials and things I will probably need one day. On top of them more rice paper scrolls with ink drawings of shells imitating waves on them. The old shower curtain on the floor was laid out with some shells on it, and I used it as if it were a real wave to disperse them . In view there are drawings on Japanese paper with two colours of ink these are kind of splatter maps.

All of my artwork floats somewhere between accident and intention. If I am not conjuring up interventions I am imitating nature in my studio, using materials and techniques that allow accidents and unexpected surprises to happen. I try to get out of my own way and learn things I could never have imagined.

Ryan Hoyda, Burns Harbor, Indiana (site)

The space is a basement. It’s dry with fluorescent lighting, and covered with tools that adorn pegboards. It’s kind of like a hardware store. On the shelves, I primarily reserve the bottom shelf for acrylics, the middle for oils. I have a variety of premixed colors left over from various pieces. They have sat for a while, but I can’t bring myself to discard them. Brushes tend to be strewn between both, not too haphazardly. I tend to prefer soft brushes. The top shelf typically contains whatever I happened to use most recent, beside the energy drink (Monster Rehab, a friend recommended it after a nasty hangover.)

I use multiple pallets, in constant rotation as they become too saturated with paint. I also like the colors that form, and the way they harden like the skin on top of pudding. I use multiple pieces of wood, or rulers, as straight edges. Yes I cheat. Some of these are made from brick molding, which I use to build my frames. Brick molding has a lip, and its less expensive than stretcher bars, though you need to have the tools.

Rollin Leonard, Portland, Maine (site)

My studio is a squash court on the third floor of a creaky old house. The walls are layered with ovoid marks from thousands of rubber balls and several decades of hasty repainting. I live in a small apartment just off the studio with my girlfriend, a textile designer, who also shares this work space.

The way I work varies but most often involves photography. Seen in this picture are large aluminum frames for screen printing, boxes of tiny wooden blocks I’m sanding for a sculpture, a paper folder that I use to make notebooks, six tables and a dress form that often helps me focus the camera for self portraits.

I rearrange my work space often to make room for sets or large paintings. I find reshuffling my working environment also helps reset my thinking. The great stack on the left (mostly out of view) contains an assortment of tools and materials. Boxes are labeled with masking tape: rope and string, canvas and green screens, lighting, glue, tools, blades, hardware and so on. Usually there are more plants, but they had to be removed for their own safety while I tore the place apart. As a kid my brother and I had a small room designated as the “play room” and with this space I maintain that tradition.

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Hamilton, Ontario (site)

This is my new studio. It’s downtown, on the corner of Canon and James Street North, in the city formerly known as Steel Town. It has the best light, the nicest floors and friendliest spirits.

My work starts on the floor then moves up the walls, and gradually makes its way to the ceiling. The sun moves through the space in much the same way.

Judith Rushin, Tallahassee, Florida (site)

My studio is a converted garage at my house where I live with my husband and two teenage kids. Family life and studio practice are integrated. I like it this way because I no longer see a big difference between the two.

Right now the studio is very messy, meaning I’m in it a lot. My practice is sporadic — slower during teaching months and intense in the summer. On the other side of the windows is a lovely, shady garden. I go there to think, take a break, visit or write.

The column you see on the right side of the image is a stack of canvases. I wanted to literally building with paint, so the canvases became bricks and house paint became the mortar. This piece, like a lot of my work, is modular, so it might be exhibited as a wall in one place and a column in another. Behind the column is a partial view of another work — two salvaged sections of old aluminum siding. I stripped one section bare and had the other powder coated in metallic gold. There was something about the idea of classy garbage in that piece, as well as being naked and clothed.

On the table I’m making paint skins for that flat screen TV mount you see just to the left of the column. And then under the table and beside it are salvaged materials I’ll use at some point. What is not visible in the photo is a wall of storage, some power tools, and, most importantly, a sofa where I spend a lot of my time.