I met Simon Gouverneur in the late 1980s, when I gave a lecture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Something that I talked about that afternoon prompted him to introduce himself — I am guessing it was Wifredo Lam. We sat in a drab conference room. For the rest of the afternoon, before I caught a train back to New York, he and I wandered through dangerous territory, which was the problematic relationship between art and race. He was happy to speak to someone who was sympathetic to his quarrel with multiculturalism, and its ideas of essentialism and who shared his interest in visionary art and painters such as Piet Mondrian and Alfred Jensen.
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The other day, at a small cocktail party, a literary agent told me that he liked writers who knew and wrote for their audience. Our conversation soon sputtered out because I didn’t see any value in disagreeing with him. A few minutes later, a writer confided that he would keep working on a manuscript only if he could morally, ethically and esthetically justify what he was doing. For each of them the work itself could never be justification enough. It had to appeal to a larger power.
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I set out with the intention of seeing these shows, so I wouldn’t call it synchronicity, but the simultaneous exhibitions of David Goerk and Martha Clippinger in the same building, just one floor apart, did get me thinking about art making that is concerned with the realm between painting and sculpture — from della Robbia’s bas reliefs to early modernism (Hans Arp) to contemporary art (Stuart Arends, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Lee, and Richard Tuttle).
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BOONE, NORTH CAROLINA — The Rembrandt in America show at the North Carolina Museum of Art is the largest Rembrandt show ever staged in America, containing 47 works.
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In October I had the opportunity to go to the opening of Tour and Trance, Matt Blackwell’s exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery. It’s a strange animated narrative that contains a whole cast of characters experiencing events and simultaneously forming and disintegrating in one moment. That evening we had some conversations on his life and thoughts and the stories that came out felt like some of the missing puzzle pieces. So, we began a conversation. I realized, I didn’t want to ask him the details behind specific pieces or anything detailed in general. I wanted to ask him vague open questions with a lot of room for rambling so we could meander around in his thought process the way his paintings meander around this weird world.
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When I finally started reading about the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the mainstream media I was stunned by how late, and how dismissive it was. After several visits, I found myself wondering how to participate; as a painter, I am always at once feeling a part of and outside of things, and this was no different. And yet my sympathies were strong and my anger at the media coverage was growing.
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The vibe of Anthony Goicolea’s first traveling museum solo show is a slow melancholy. Looking at the photos, videos, paintings and installation in Alter-Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia made me sink slowly into thoughts of living with apocalypse. Goicolea’s work envisions apocalypse not as an abrupt event followed by an aftermath, but as a slow and definitive ruin that continues throughout life.
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I’ve been following the work of Loren Munk for years and had the pleasure of seeing the work currently on display at Lesley Heller in his studio years ago before most people even knew they existed. Today, Munk has been exhibiting regularly and developing a following for his map works that document art world scenes in New York and elsewhere. There is a frenzy of color in his paintings and the choices are obviously subjective (and rife with personal politics) but they are intense explosions of information carefully organized and constructed like a spider web in paint. I spoke to Munk about his latest show, Location, Location, Location, Mapping the New York Art World, on the Lower East Side that continues until this Sunday, October 16.
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GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN — As an artist participating in ArtPrize myself, I had the amazing experience of not only visiting Grand Rapids for the first time, but also experiencing this mega-event for the first time. While walking around the city snapping pics, I was instantly reminded about my solo trip to the Venice Biennale in 2003 when I was just a college kid: feeling like an outsider to the local people, crossing bridge after bridge and trying to consume the overwhelming amount of artwork around me. As a cultural producer, I can’t help but analyze and tally the formal and conceptual trends that are present in such a saturated art environment.
So from the perspective of a dude like me, here are the Top 6 things I saw at ArtPrize 2011 …
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There is something anomalous about running an art gallery in Jersey City. This is a land of discount liquor stores, nail salons, Chinese take-out restaurants and check-cashing joints.
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