Category Archives: Culture

Exhibit Review: Dan Flavin and Donald Judd

The nine grand Dan Flavin works and one big five-unit Donald Judd aluminum cube installation, now collectively up at the David Zwirner gallery on 20th Street will serve as a slap in the back of the head for anyone who thinks they’ve had enough of minimalist art.

And, as much as I want “to get” the elevating art historical language that dust-devils around these works, and American minimalism in general, the best response I have come across to date and the one most appropriate to describe this show, is Kirk Varnedoe’s clear-eyed description from his 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures delivered at the National Gallery. In the process of debunking the theory that the CIA actively promoted American abstract expressionism to highlight “the freedom of the individual” against Communism, Varnedoe described minimalism as follows –

Luc Tuymans : The Summer is Over

To stand in front of a painting by Luc Tuymans means accepting that while you can “get” what it’s about you can never really say you fully understand it. This later point stings in that his paintings calmly stand as a rebuke that so much of what we think we have independently earned in terms of knowledge or sophisticated understanding is really just second hand.

What makes it uncomfortable at times to look at Tuymans’s paintings for an extended period is the sickening feeling that comes out of the inability to engage the paintings using our own eyes and wits.  The paintings lay bare, in the here and now, our intellectual impotence to create meaning from them without inside knowledge.

And then it kind of dawns on you, maybe that impotence shadows you in some form or other wherever you go. Maybe, to a large extent, you are only as good as your information.

Fall Books, Part 1 | In Case You Missed the Show…

To think of Christopher Wool only as a painter is to deprive oneself enjoyment of his accomplishments as a bookmaker and photographer. For three decades now Wool has brought to bear his trademark attention to detail, professionalism, intelligence and disquieting use of copy and re-presentation to over 30 books. While some were published in miniscule edition that would be rough to come by now, the admirable thing about Wool is that each of his book projects – regardless of price — is produced with the care normally reserved for more valuable and marketable works of art. In this regard, a book by Wool is part and parcel of his artistic practice.

Rather than merely document and reproduce his works — as art books traditionally do –the design of each publication pushes further the questions his paintings raise about authorship, the original, the copy, gesture, mechanical reproduction (silkscreen,, photography, Xerox), seriality, reading (of books, of paintings), and the glitch versus the mark.

Deborah Turbeville | Unseen Versailles

As I was packing for Europe last Monday I got an email about the opening of Deborah Turbeville’s new show “Unseen Versailles.” It was to be on the one full day I was in Paris, and Turbeville would be attending. There is something especially joyful about meeting someone half way across the world from whom you are normally separated by a subway ride. Needless to say, I went.

The exhibit is quintessential Turbeville in its feeling of intimacy. It is held in the Galerie Serge Aboukrat, which must be the smallest gallery in the world (two people holding hands would be able to span its perimeter). Tucked away in a postcard-picturesque and postage stamp-sized Parisian square complete with a roundabout that can barely fit a car and an ornamented lamppost straight out of a fairy tale, the gallery is not easy to find, but the exhibit is well worth the trouble, as was evidenced by the intimate gathering that included the singer Charlotte Gainsbourg and the designer Haider Ackermann.

RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHY 1908-1938

It takes a show like the current exhibit of early Russian photography at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York to remind us of several things. One, that the visual age we live in is neither as sophisticated nor as original as we think. Another, that the size of a photograph is part of its intended meaning or, at least, an important part of its impact, and that this critical information is frequently obliterated in physical reproduction or on the Internet. Or that we need to get into galleries where we can experience physical prints, particularly vintage prints, because their featheriness, deep blackness, greasiness, technical (im)perfection and chemical tactility ground them as physical objects as much as imagery itself.