This week, in light of the news about Cooper Union, Weekend Words considers value.
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Spearheaded by John Yau, Thomas Micchelli, Claudia La Rocco and Albert Mobilio
Stylistically innovative painters outnumber those who have reassessed the accepted conventions of painting. For the most part, artists engaged with issues of style accept certain conventions, particularly regarding spatiality, while those who reevaluate painting find ways to undo assumptions and received tropes. Catherine Murphy belongs in the latter group. Her painting, “Snowflakes (for Joyce Robins)” (2011) is square, a format we associate with high modernist abstraction and artists such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin.
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In part two of this month, reviews of Lil Wayne, the Strokes, King DJ, and Michael Bublé.
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On almost every painting by William Hawkins you will find his birthdate and place of birth (“William L. H. Hawkins Born K.Y. July 27, 1895” or some variant thereof) prominently marked in bold strokes across the bottom or along the side of the image. In some pieces, the signature’s display is ample and vigorous enough to vie with the subject matter for the viewer’s attention. The self-taught African American artist who lived most of his life in Columbus, Ohio, and whose work came to the attention of gallerists and collections in the mid-80s, felt no need to be shy about his authorship or his Kentucky origins. Vibrantly declamatory, the lettering is of a piece with Hawkins’ depiction of his subjects — animals (real and fantastical) and buildings: beasts and bricks alike appear as if shot through with electric current propelling them outside the frame.
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WASHINGTON, DC — If you need one good reason to see the must-see Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, that reason would be the shockingly holographic “Head of an Apostle Looking Up” from 1508.
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This week, anger at MoMA’s plan to destroy the American Folk Art Museum building, art market tidbits, the Digital Library of America, academia’s servants, foundational principles, and more.
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In a case of metaphor becoming reality, on Tuesday Hyperallergic passed along the news that Helly Nahmad Gallery on the Upper East Side had been busted by the Feds for running “high-stakes poker games involving Wall Street financiers, Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes.”
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Joe Zucker is the most inventive artist of his generation, which includes Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, Joan Snyder and his longtime friend, Chuck Close, and perhaps the most misunderstood. One reason for the confusion is that reviewers have often focused on Zucker’s inventiveness with materials and processes without recognizing that they are inseparable from the work’s content. He is far more than an idiosyncratic formalist.
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I’ve talked about Michael Tatum before, but that Kitty song compels me to cite this marvelous Tatum sentence, about Skrillex: “…any hairstyle that resembles a palomino’s hindquarters when viewed from an elevated height commits cosmetological crimes so outrageously grotesque they could send Korn’s Jonathan Davis into a raging fit of trichotillomania.” I mean, that is why I love the English language.
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It’s not uncommon for artists to fall short of their own expectations, only for the public to find delight in the charged gap between the aspiration and the goal.
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