Thomas Nozkowski wasn’t thinking about Philip Guston’s “Untitled” (1980) while he was working on “Untitled (9-21)” (2012), but the number of formal attributes they share — from size to composition and imagery — has proven hard for me to ignore. It was while I was looking at Nozkowski’s “Untitled (9-21)” at his exhibition at Russell Bowman Art Advisory (April 12 – June 15, 2013) in Chicago that a specific Guston work came to mind. Shortly after I got back to New York, I checked to see whether or not my memory had been playing tricks on me. It hadn’t.
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
George Sugarman’s Unrecognized Greatness
I am tired of critics characterizing George Sugarman (1912–1999) — whose work was either overlooked or marginalized during his lifetime — as an idiosyncratic sculptor. By labeling him in this way, they are able to suggest that the neglect was partially his own doing, and to imply that he wasn’t interested in formal issues thought to be integral to sculpture, and which had been explored by his innovative forebears: Constantin Brancusi, Julio Gonzalez, Alberto Giacometti and David Smith. If those are the measures of idiosyncrasy, then he clearly wasn’t that at all. In fact, the opposite seems more true to me — he was at the center of things, but hardly anyone dared to notice.
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Why Jeff Koons Made Michael Jackson White
I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was part of the series, Banality, which became a definitive step toward garnering the kind of attention Koons has always craved.
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Painting as an Occult Practice: Philip Taaffe’s Recent Work
There is something subversive about Philip Taaffe’s interest in how information can be preserved and transferred from one medium to another. Since the early 1980s, when he first began gaining attention, he has mastered a wide range of processes — including collage, linocut, woodblock, rubber stamp, silkscreen, marbling and decalomania — to capture images, symbols and signs from various sources and convey them to paper and canvas. Although many discrete steps go into making one of his layered paintings, the collection, preservation and transmission of bits of information are central from start to finish. Through his imaginative repurposing of minor art forms — collage, printmaking, and marbling — Taaffe has dissolved the barriers separating artisanship from painting, effectively redefining the latter.
Posted inBooks
Thrivers in the Muck: Matias Viegener (Part One)
Sometimes, it is hard to remember that Social Media came along years after the rise of the personal computer and the Internet, which Al Gore called the “Information Superhighway.” But like the highway in Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic comedy, Weekend (1967), the Internet is littered with refuse and ugliness of all kinds: overturned vehicles and violence.
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Geometry Under Pressure: Don Voisine’s Paintings
Don Voisine’s oil paintings on wood brim with all kinds of tensions: between flatness and spatiality; stasis and torque; containment and expansion; light and dark; tonal gradations and sharp contrasts; matte and glossy surfaces; transparency and solidity. Once you begin noticing the variety of stresses animating these paintings, more start to emerge — that’s how finely and tightly tuned they are.
Posted inBooks
“There can be no immigrants in utopia”: On “Haute Surveillance” by Johannes Göransson
Before we settle into our plush, faux-velvet seats, share bags of popcorn and watch the latest film about zombies who managed to escape from Pittsburgh and its parking lots, does anyone out there dream of making a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer starring Brad Pitt or James Franco?
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Who’s Afraid of Hot Pink, Canary Yellow, and Midnight Blue?
Color is frightening. From the color of one’s skin to the color of a painting, it can stir up unlikely obsessions: all kinds of irrational responses tend to explode without provocation. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko have two things in common: wide expanses of color and the proclivity for people to deface their paintings more than any other Abstract Expressionist work.
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Single Point Perspective: Catherine Murphy’s Perfect Storm
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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Tilting at Windmills: Joe Zucker as Don Quixote
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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Color Visions: The Sanford Wurmfeld Experience
For many, Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013 at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery (February 15–April 30, 2013) will be an introduction to an artist, who, according to the art historian William C. Agee, “may well be the best little-known painter in New York today.” There are many reasons for this oversight, but I want to single out three.
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Before We Are Completely Swept Away: Joshua Marsh’s Recent Paintings
The changes that Joshua Marsh has made since his debut show at Jeff Bailey in 2010 — which I reviewed for the Brooklyn Rail (October 2010) — should be mentioned. In As If, his second exhibition at the same gallery, he shows drawings for the first time — thirty works on clay-coated paper measuring 5 ½ x 7 inches. Marsh relies on scribbling and shading to locate forms. Some drawings are airy and open, while others are dark and dense, where he has gone over an area countless times.
