John Willenbecher tells me that his recent paintings are about “connecting the dots.” One of his lifelong interests has been the night sky – abstraction in nature – which he traces to his childhood interest in astronomy while growing up in eastern Pennsylvania.
John Yau
John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His latest poetry publications include a book of poems, Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and the chapbook, Egyptian Sonnets (Rain Taxi, 2012). His most recent monographs are Catherine Murphy (Rizzoli, 2016), the first book on the artist, and Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert (Black Dog Publishing, 2015). He has also written monographs on A. R. Penck, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011) before he began writing regularly for Hyperallergic. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).
Posted inArt
Ed Paschke’s Portraits of Brooding and Tortured Souls
Ed Paschke (1939-2004), who is considered a Chicago Imagist, is one of the important painters to emerge from America’s heartland in the late 1960s that New York has never fully embraced. One reason for this resistance is his lifelong interest in misfits and the creepy flipside of celebrity, which implicitly critiqued Andy Warhol’s love affair with pop idols and glamour.
Posted inFilm
China’s Buried Past and Submerged Future: Patty Chang and David Kelley’s ‘Flotsam Jetsam’
In the opening moments of the film, Flotsam Jetsam (2007) by Patty Chang and David Kelley, currently playing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a bridge-like structure is seen in the distance, partially traversing what seems to be a wide river.
Posted inArt
Postscript to the Whitney Biennial: An Asian-American Perspective
Now that the Whitney Biennial is finally over, did anyone notice that Patty Chang, Nikki S. Lee, and Laurel Nakadate weren’t included, just to mention three mid-career, Asian-American women artists who were conspicuously absent?
Posted inArt
Sigmar Polke’s Sad, Sinister Little Movie of a Monkey and a Bear
A little more than a week after sitting on a short, narrow bench and watching a video projection of Sigmar Polke’s 34:38-minute 16mm film, “Quetta’s Hazy Blue Sky (Quetta’s blauer dunstiger Himmel)/ Afghanistan-Pakistan” (c. 1974-76), I returned to the exhibition, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, currently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, determined to watch the same film again.
Posted inArt
Joyce Robins’s Subtly Colored, Imageless Objects
In an interview that appeared last month in The Brooklyn Rail, Joyce Robins, while addressing the relationship between abstraction and representation, pointed out: “’Vly’ is a Dutch word for swamp.”
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: An Arcadian Moment in the Heart of New York’s Lower East Side
For anyone interested in poetry (not the same as verse); underknown art and artists; the artists and poets of the New York School after the death of Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara; collaboration; collage; a do-it-yourself spirit; the Lower East Side (particularly from the late 1960s until the late ‘80s, decades before it was gentrified); and the persistence of bohemian life, despite all the efforts to stamp it out, the exhibition A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman, thoughtfully curated by Bill Berkson and Ron Padgett at Poets House, is a must-see.
Posted inArt
With Mouths Wide Open: Guy Goodwin’s America
In her glowing review of Guy Goodwin’s previous exhibition at Brennan & Griffin, which appeared in the New York Times on March 8, 2012, Roberta Smith suggested that Goodwin belonged to the “tradition of raucous American abstraction,” which began with “Stuart Davis and George Sugarman.”
Posted inArt
Lethal Consumption and Silenced Clarinets
FERNDALE, MI – Often placing his work along the periphery of an exhibition space, Michael E. Smith turns the boundaries between his work and its architectural setting into a porous membrane.
Posted inArt
Greg Smith’s Amazing Eleven-Minute Road Trip
From Ulysses and Arjuna to Sir Galahad, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers, Jack Kerouac and, more recently, Greg Smith, the quest (or road trip) for redemption, transformation, utopia, or just some very good peach-and-banana ice cream is a theme that spans world culture, from great literature to bad movies, with lots of stops in-between.
Posted inArt
The Beauty of Howardena Pindell’s Rage
As much as Howardena Pindell’s unstretched paintings and drawings share something with the Pattern and Decoration movement, or with monochromatic abstraction, color field painting, all-over painting, fiber art, the counting work of Roman Opalka, and the spot paintings of Larry Poons, what elevates them above all of these aesthetic and stylistic connections is her subtle infusion of a deep and palpable rage.
Posted inArt
Julian Schnabel’s Formula for Greatness
Since Julian Schnabel first gained attention with his broken plate paintings in the 1980s, he has been predisposed to working on found surfaces – animal skins, velvet, corduroy, sail cloth, tarpaulins, canvas flooring from boxing rings, wallpaper, navigation maps, flags, Kabuki theater backdrops, and photosensitive canvases – which help disguise the fact that he can’t draw in paint and doesn’t really have much feel for paint’s potentiality.