Kirk Hayes at Sean Horton Gallery, New York

 

Trompe-l'œil (sounds like: trump loy) is when an artist creates a super-realistic illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, so that when you look at the painting your eyes are fooled into thinking there are literal objects there. In his current show, Droll’s Lament, Kirk Hayes’ ironic use of trompe-l'œil is a brilliant innovation that has drawn the most attention from critics to his work, even if they have failed to fully explain why Hayes might be doing this. He will first make a collage or assemblage of colored paper and other items, weather it to get a worn out or damaged look for the emotional effect he desires, and he then perfectly depicts the collage as a painting, revealing, instead of hiding, traces of the original collage.

So he perfectly represents the collage he made, showing the seams, textures and three dimensional elements as trompe-l'œil. He does not use the collage as a basic model for a painting, he creates the collage so he can literally paint the collage in minute detail. Folks are often fooled into thinking they are actually looking at a collage or assemblage of colored paper and other doodads and are stunned to find that the wood or plastic or string or any other material depicted is mere paint.

Of course, we want to say, “Wait a minute. You’re not supposed to do that! You are supposed to hide the collage elements, not make them more noticeable by painting them. Why not just display the collage?” Hayes, by the way, destroys the original collage once he paints it. Art critic Ken Johnson guessed in a New York Times review that Hayes was making a sly comment “…on modern arts love of the raw and naïve.” It may be a little more complex than this, however.

There are times when an artist wants you to keenly realize that you are looking at art, something he/she made and how it was made. Sometimes the artist wants traces of his/her work to be seen. So Hayes paradoxically uses a realistic painting technique to fully reveal something he fabricated. Trompe-l'œil is supposed to give the illusion of reality, and Hayes uses it to give the illusion of reality to a collage. In the theater Brecht, for example, created the concept of “epic” theater because he believed that traditional, realistic “bourgeois” theater lulled an audience to sleep and apathy and he wanted jarring and obviously contrived elements of his productions to wake people up to interpret and feel more deeply. He wished to reveal the ploys of theater to his audience to show both the possibilities and limits of art and to keep them mentally active through a production. 

Perhaps Hayes wants you to see how he cut, handled, weathered and positioned the paper in his assemblages because you may be able to better discern or at least be tempted to guess the inner state he was in when he did this. This is the principle of “action painting” which Pollock used so successfully. The focus shifts from the image to the psychology of the artist creating the image. Hayes is going to great pains to paint the way he created and/or presented the imagery in his work. How the artist creates his art often reveals more about what is being conveyed than looking at the figures and constructing our little narratives about the piece.

I would argue that Hayes is trying to get closer to revealing his inner state by amplifying the collage making technique through his trompe-l'œil painting. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that every material has its own language and every technique, perhaps, has its own language. To me Hayes is painting the language of collage, what collage can better reveal about the conflicts and struggles that an artist might be going through so that we viewers who are also struggling can derive some meaning and solace from this. There are reasons why an artist wants to resort to the language of collage, and Hayes is amplifying our focus on this.

Deriving meaning from Hayes work might depend heavily on examining how he created and structured his work, since many of the paintings seem very idiosyncratic and might defy any narratives we might try to create to “understand” them in a traditional manner. Some are more understandable than others. In Ephemeral we see a brief moment when a butterfly is extracting nectar from a daisy. Both have endured extremely adverse conditions as the flower is slightly burnt here and there while the butterfly is covered with band aids. A common theme in many of the paintings seems to be the capacity that exists to continue living and striving even while we are severely battered and harmed. Much of our work that has to be done in the world cannot wait for us to be fully healed; we have to go out there and engage others while suffering and even while feeling emotions due to our past suffering. Deep down inside, perhaps, we hope the healing will be quicker if we keep working instead of licking our wounds.

In some of the paintings we see an unexpected soft or gentle tenacity. In the painting Accepting Fragility we see the arms of a severely bruised person offering a butterfly tied to a folded pillow to someone. The arms recalled for me the arms of an elderly man I had once talked to at a hospital who had had so many blood tests taken on his aged, wrinkled and weakened arms that both of his arms were covered with bruises as if he had endured several beatings. The gentleness of the gesture of offering belies the pain, or perhaps derives from the pain of the person presenting the gift. The gift seems to represent the capacity to suffer without bitterness or malice, to offer joy in spite of pain.

Some paintings defy, at least for me, easy narrative explanations: the Fall of the Dildo King, for example. In this painting we see a crown with four dildos protruding from it, slender plants protruding from the dildos above a brick wall. Symbolically, the penis can represent desire, especially spiritual desire for a type of spiritual fulfilment. To me, this enigmatic painting shows a mystical process of spiritual life emerging from imitative, artificial circumstances. (Hey, give me credit for trying!)

Then there is Response to a Resharpened Fasces. The term fascist, of course, comes from the word fasces. Fasces refers to the bundle of sticks that are more difficult to break united than separated and which were traditionally placed around a pike axe in ancient Rome. A pile of feces is on the fasces. Knives have been stuck into the feces, so maybe we have a type of pun where the feces and the fasces have both been resharpened. Fascism seems alive and well in parts of the world and even, perhaps, threatens our country. But the response to fascism, represented by a pile of feces placed on the fasces, has also become more prominent and we have to wonder whether this will be enough to stop a retrograde political trend. I am guessing that the knives stuck into the feces could also just represent extra aggression against the re-emerging fasces.    

The cuts and bruises in these paintings can represent the lingering effects of guilt, shame, a sense of failure, disappointment or regret for actions which cannot be undone and for which one may always feel remorse. They could represent the continuous stabs of pain that we endure due the callousness and heartlessness of others, which might engender heartlessness in us to compound our own suffering, unless we fight against this process. Hayes paintings for me evoke the New Testament story of the crippled man at the pool of Bethesda who, for 39 years, endured intense pain persisting in his belief that healing was somehow possible, until it finally occurred.

The Future Is Elsewhere (If It Breaks Your Heart): Heidi Hahn at Jack Hanley Gallery, Lower East Side (November 2017, WSI)

The women in Heidi Hahn’s latest series of paintings at Jack Hanley Gallery are presented in profile, almost like subjects in Muybridge motion studies. Muybridge, of course, did his motion study photos in order to be able to see details that normally escaped the eye. So, basically, what do we see in these paintings of women schlepping around in inclement weather, with leaves falling from trees, among big plastic garbage bags? Is there something about being in motion, carrying their groceries among the backdrop just described, that might better reveal the identities of these women or a deeper truth about their lives to us? Can we really get who these folks are by capturing them in a freeze frame on their way home from the supermarket or do we merely exercise our capacities to falsely characterize others based on our own biases? Actually, we are not exactly getting a freeze frame here; in the past other reviewers have mentioned that Hahn uses a Munch-like expressionistic style to convey her women, but the subjects are frozen, in transition, for our inspection.

So, first of all, perhaps, we are compelled to wonder why, wandering the streets with our own plastic bags of veggies and humanely killed chickens, we might play amateur sleuth and try to discern as much about the others on the street as possible. What are we looking for when we check people out on the street? Why are we doing this? And yet, one might ask whether anyone would really pay extra attention to this type of person  – she is somewhat common in New York City. If we take a closer look, however, we might see that she warrants being seen more closely because she very well could be suffering. This type of expressionistic, Muybridge motion study seems to reveal that this person we encounter everyday and dismiss, perhaps, as a benign presence, a well-heeled member of the liberal, intellectual class in New York City, may actually demand our sympathy and fellow-feeling as well. And, of course, many of us who wander through the Lower East Side galleries may recognize ourselves in her/them.

These women are not moving forward very decisively or enthusiastically. We are encouraged, through our educational system, to pursue our own excellence often to the neglect of others; has this type of person finally left school and arrived at her long-struggled-for, beyond-reproach niche in the Big Apple only to find it is not all that it was cracked up to be? Perhaps all the competition and anxiety was not really worth it? Are these folks schlepping in callous self-absorption? In liberal guilt? In longing for something or someone lost? In self-pity? In the awareness that their lives may have been altered or constrained due to their gender? Are they just schlepping while thinking of nothing? Is this just neutral wandering back home with groceries? In these periods of transition do these women reflect on the nature of their lives or do they unconsciously betray some unspoken form of distress while wandering home with their plastic bags of foodstuff?

These folks seem inaccessible and not inviting even though they are not moving forward with an aggressive purpose. They seem to have accepted things, yet they are not comfortable in this acceptance. They are clearly showing external pressures, stresses or concerns that are not currently present. They are preoccupied. They seem alienated from us through their hardship.

Other art writers have pointed out that these figures are a bit gangly and awkward. These women do not conform to the golden ratio in their body proportions and might be missing most if not all of the traits that typically confer ‘beauty’ to a woman from the traditional male perspective. Hahn’s work in the past has referenced the way women have been depicted throughout the history of art – is the perceived distress of these women due to the lack of attention these women have paid to meeting the expectations of men? Are these women who have read ‘The Beauty Myth’ and stopped trying to conform to some male expectations that if they are to be successful they must also sexualize themselves as a type of compensation? Are these women who have struck out on their own, are not trying to meet physical or beauty standards, and who are suffering the consequences, and perhaps even surprised at themselves for suffering these consequences?  We still live in a society where body shape and gender can determine success. It could well be that this is the source of the discomfort in these women.

So another important aspect of Hahn’s work might be that the history of art has been so badly tainted by negative and sexist depictions of women, that when we see women depicted in visual art, we almost always, despite ourselves, are forced to view them within the reference of the skewed perspective of art history. We have a frame of reference toward the depiction of women in art which is a distorted and sexist frame of reference and it might affect the way we see any depiction of women in art. By this, I mean that even a ‘neutral’ attempt at a depiction of a woman might be interpreted as either following a harmful tradition or diverging from a harmful tradition, and not viewed on its own terms, necessarily. Given the flawed history of the visual arts, and the oppression of women historically, maybe Hahn is asking: Can a woman just be a woman in a painting, with no historical baggage (ah, that’s what might be in the plastic bags!)? Isn’t that an interesting interpretation!? Maybe these women are figuratively carrying such baggage home with them in these pieces.

We still live in a society where body shape, gender and conforming to the beauty myth can determine success. It could well be that this is the source of the discomfort in these women who walk down the street with their expressions of apparently forlorn apathy in lieu of the excitement you might expect for a young, independent woman in the city. But, then again, the beauty of this show is that one is encouraged to ruminate on various interpretations as to what is ailing these women on their way home.  The show ends on the 12^th.

Interview with Jocelyn Hobbie

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Jocelyn Hobbie is a visual artist based in New York City known for her brilliantly painted canvases of attractive young women in introspective states. She creates a situation of inadvertent voyeurism with the viewer drawn into circumstances where personal judgment becomes subsumed by an overall mood.

Gauss: How did you hit upon this approach of having these accessory-laden young women looking inward?

Hobbie: The subject of my paintings has been the female figure for a while now, but I see an evolution in what I’m interested in painting and how I go about it. In earlier works I was interested in depicting emotional/psychological states. It was not meant to be explicit or an obvious narrative, but rather very open to whatever story or understanding the viewer might bring to it. They were highly voyeuristic, for example what a woman might be doing in private, caught unaware. The paintings were also very personal. I think I wanted to express something about myself, something about difficult emotions. Even the spaces had a psychological content, often confined or claustrophobic.

As time has passed my focus has shifted a bit from the narrative/psychological content to more formal concerns. Currently the figure acts as a sort of architectural foundation for the painting. It’s my jumping off point for the process of composing the painting, but formal concerns are driving it. I’m not actively looking to depict psychological states, per se, although I am interested in the mood of the picture. Maybe the figure itself is handled more like a straight portrait (which is not to imply I’m ever painting from life). I also don’t want the subject to address the viewer directly, for example by looking back at the viewer, because that adds a different psychological level or component to the painting— not the kind of engagement or confrontation one sees in Manet’s Olympia, for example.

So nowadays the figure is like a building block or a muse that I follow from one step to the next. Everything is emerging out of what the painting presents and demands. More a process of discovery, which I’m finding to be very engaging and enlivening. The space is ambiguous, more like an atmosphere than a specifically depicted space. I’m almost eliminating the space. Of course the figures exist in the paintings and I like the warmth of the human element, it draws me in, gives me something to grasp and build off of. It is also driven by what I feel like painting, and I like to paint a face, hair, hands etc. I used to paint more nudes, but right now I’m into the clothes and other articulated elements because they are opportunities for color & shape & invented patterns. They draw me into the picture in different ways and I hope the same happens for the viewer.

Gauss: In much of your previous work you explore mother and daughter relationships. Are you finished with this? Why/why not? What drew you to this exploration in the first place?

Hobbie: I wouldn’t say I’m finished with it. Seeing oneself and one’s own mother getting older is rich with a myriad of feelings and I just intuitively wanted to explore that. The combination of intimacy and distance, the complicated stuff. I was also interested in the juxtaposition of the old and young woman both personally and socially, and as it has historically been depicted. Maybe more extreme than that; the juxtaposition of a really decrepit old lady alongside a young, nubile woman. I love Otto Dix’s paintings on that subject. It also springs from our culture, the obsession with youth/aging and the inevitability of aging (if you’re lucky). At one point I went through a period of painting a lot of babies. My friends started having kids so there were lots of babies around all of sudden. I was naturally feeling some pressure regarding it and I guess painting could be a vehicle for exploring all those feelings….

Gauss: So, one of your influences, as you mentioned, was Otto Dix, who is an artist from the past who seems to resonate with many contemporary New York art lovers. How much of Dix did you absorb? Can you use his style without also taking his philosophical or political stance? Do you feel a philosophical affinity to him?

Hobbie: Dix has been a big influence. It’s about his way of painting. That unsayable art ingredient that I love in his work. There’s both detail, and a muscular force. Of course his paintings are inseparable from the time and political climate they came out of. The 'humanity' he captured is so powerful.

Gauss: You once mentioned in a talk that you liked the movie Rosemary’s Baby and were inspired as an artist by the acting of Mia Farrow in the film. Why is this film a bit more significant to your work and can you think of other films that are like this for you or your work? Have you referenced female characters in films very often in your art and why?

Hobbie: I think what I respond to about Rosemary’s Baby is that aesthetically it’s quite sunny to look at, but then there’s the underlying darkness of the story. I’m not into horror movies at all, but I’m fascinated by the disconnect between the way something appears and what’s really going on. Everyone does it to a certain extent. I’ve explored that a lot in my paintings. I do find inspiration in movies.

Gauss: Why are there no men in your pieces?

Hobbie: I would like to paint men, I don’t have a reason for not painting men. In general there are way more paintings of women than men. For me it’s just juicier, more colorful. Maybe I inhabit the painting more. In many cases artists aren’t always aware of why they do what they do, or why it comes out a certain way. Every moment that I’m working is a process of constant decision making, but I can’t say exactly where the decisions come from. 

Gauss: I have a goofy little theory that a work of visual art can either be about social ills/circumstances or personal insight about one’s motives, emotions, cognitive processes etc., but an artist can’t do both at the same time. Do you think your work is political or socially oriented? Is it oriented exclusively toward an exploration of inner states?

Hobbie: I’m not overtly taking on political/social concerns, but the fact that I paint what I paint at this time in history makes it inherently political. How can it be otherwise? Nothing exists in a vacuum. I can paint whatever I want, it’s my choice, that’s political.

Gauss: Do you still feel that as a female painter you are kind of like a nun?

Hobbie: I just meant that there’s a solitude and discipline that goes along with being the kind of painter I am, it seems nun-like. But it was meant to be taken in a half-joking manner. Obviously I’m not in a nunnery!

Gauss: In a talk you gave, you mentioned that you went through a bleak period of time that lasted for at least seven years. How bad were your bad days? How did you pull out of them?

Hobbie: I took it day by day, flailing around, searching. It was a lot of experimentation, frustration and throwing things out. I saved almost nothing from that time. Finally one thing led to another. That’s always the best way to work, but in the moment it’s hard to see one’s way out of it.

Gauss: You went to one of America’s premier art schools (RISD). How effective was your education there? You stated you do a lot intuitively which was never taught to you – what did you get from RISD? 

Hobbie: I have mixed feelings about art school. Some people thrive in the school environment, but it wasn’t really for me. That’s probably a personality thing. I mean, my subjects and interests came from myself, not from teachers or interacting with other students. I actually wish I had learned more concrete, practical studio information there, like how to mix mediums and properly stretch a canvas, making grounds and why one method or application of materials is preferable to another, for example, really basic stuff. But I didn’t learn things like that there. It was all trial and error. Being a fine art major was bit of a free for all. I think it was just a place for me to be and begin the idea of being an artist. But I don’t want to sound ungrateful about having the opportunity to be at a reputable school. That’s incredible, but some practical instruction would have been useful— I’m still figuring stuff out to this day technically. Who knows, I probably would have found it boring and reacted against it at the time. It’s always up to oneself to figure it out anyway.

Gauss: Why the intricate patterns and the flowers? Is this just to arrest our attention?

Hobbie: That kind of intricacy of form and color is how I compose the picture. Those elements started out as details but have kind of exploded out. I would love to make something beautiful. Maybe it’s the poignancy I’m after, that’s my hope.

Gauss: Your dog has made cameos in your work. I’m guessing your dog functions as a kind of symbolic surrogate for an aspect of the people depicted, but it’s your real dog among fictitious subjects. In one of your paintings your dog has the letter “P” on his dog tag and I – somewhat tongue in cheek – wrote it possibly represented the ancient Greek letter rho, the second letter in the chi-rho combination representing the name of Jesus. I like making over-the-top interpretations - how close was I?

Hobbie: I appreciate your idea, and I welcome it. However, there’s a “P” on his dog tag because his name is Pablo. 

Gauss: When and where is your next show?

Hobbie: May 2016, Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York City

Kim Cogan - The Other Side - Arcadia Contemporary

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The difference between photo-realism and the realism of someone like Courbet, for instance, involves the existence of the camera.  Instead of responding to the camera with contemptuous attempts to do what the camera could not, photo-realistic painters have acknowledged that the camera and photography do, indeed, exist, that technological reproductions of reality have practically gained ascendancy over direct encounters with reality and that photography can be a starting point in the process of realistic painting. In photo-realism the painter deliberately removes him/herself from a putatively direct experience with ‘reality',  starts with the validation and permanence of reality a photograph implies and then works to make this representation become hyper-real on canvas. 

(Sunbathers)

Kim Cogan contributes a meaningful and thought-provoking twist to the photo-realist tradition at Arcadia Contemporary in Lower Manhattan, as he uses photography in this show to help “reconstruct how the mind remembers”. In the notes for the show Cogan writes, “By combining old photographs with new ones, I wanted to make a complete image, very similar to how you might construct a memory in your head.” So, if we look carefully at his painting ‘Dollhouse’, we see that the dollhouse is, in fact, the house where Cogan himself was raised and not the toy dollhouse you might expect.

A dollhouse is, of course, a child’s idealized home in which fictional stories and fantasies can be played out, so the implication might be that consequent life experience and analysis of our past, along with feelings as diverse as nostalgia or resentment, can completely recast and replace a true or accurate memory with what we now believe happened or believe should have happened. Much personal memory, especially in regard to childhood, is probably vitiated in this way. Whereas photo-realism is often great at capturing or revealing a sense of transience or ephemerality, by super-realistically depicting one particular place at one particular time in the past, Cogan seems to want to go a little further and deal with emotions brought about reflecting on the past and why these emotions occur and even how these emotions can change our memories. The emotional nature of the work is reflected in the slightly more expressionistic style than one has seen from Cogan in the past.

In many of Cogan’s cityscapes, throughout his career, we see buildings in the dead of night which convey a sense of deep tranquility and restfulness along with the awareness that this peace will not last and those inside will be compelled to frantically engage again in the stresses and pressures of their daily lives.  This temporary cessation of coerced activity seems the best we can ever hope for, yet it becomes the basis for the narratives, metaphors and hope we tend to create for permanent or long-lasting peace in our lives. The feeling of tranquility engendered by Cogan’s night cityscapes is mirrored somewhat in the family photo paintings. By using family photography of the distant past Cogan presents images which evoke feelings of a security, warmth and stability all of us were forced at one point to leave but which we now wish to replicate.

This narrative of once experienced perfect security, perfect family life and perfect stability, and the feelings engendered by it, seems, however, only experienced in its fullness upon reflection and was probably never felt to that intensity at the given time. The photo presents a tranquility existing now which we did not recognize and which perhaps did not even exist in the past. This emotional state is what infuses our memories of home-life from the past with such value and creates such a longing for the past. The paintings derived from these photos further, therefore, contain the horror of not being able to reclaim that (possibly fictitious) past.

The show closes soon, October 4^th, so if you can get a chance to see Cogan’s arresting and provocative paintings in person, please drop by Arcadia Contemporary at 51 Greene Street. 

John Kelly's Irish Landscapes at O'Sullivan Antiques

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While over one million people starved to death in Ireland from 1845 – 1850, boatloads of grain regularly arrived from Ireland, through the port of Liverpool, to feed the citizens of England. The Irish people had been colonized by the English and most Irish worked for various wealthy (mostly English) landlords who never even considered stopping the transport of food from Ireland to England so that the Irish themselves might be saved while the potato crop was decimated by a fungus. The tenant farmers who were dependent on the potato starved while the wealthy landowners reaped tremendous profits from the Irish grain they exported. This was free market capitalism at its most transparently inhumane, but it has come down to us through history whitewashed as the potato ‘famine’. Yet, a famine is when there is no food – there was an overabundance of food…the Irish just weren’t allowed to eat it.   

  

John Kelly was born in England to Irish and English parents who raised him in Australia. He now lives in Cork where the Great Hunger was especially horrific. Discovery of a letter written to the Times of London by a witness of the Great Hunger in his region lead Kelly to realize that no visual record of this tragedy existed in the art of the time. Actually, this shouldn’t have been all that surprising, since, until the French Revolution, the only suffering in Western visual art was the suffering of Jesus, some martyrs, souls in hell and maybe some mythological figures being punished for arrogance.  Suffering depicted in art due to social or economic or military oppression is non-existent until after the French Revolution and, even after the French Revolution, when artists could choose their topics for the marketplace, independent of patrons, they often chose what would sell. Real, gut-wrenching suffering that motivates social action doesn’t sell to art buyers.

Furthermore, the suffering depicted pre-French Revolution was meant to awe and inspire and fill the viewer with admiration and veneration, not a sense of outrage. This type of suffering is even, at times, very sensual - to the point where Renaissance and Baroque suffering does not only not encourage us to connect and empathize with victims, but, in fact, it encourages us to become sexually aroused by them (the Japanese writer Mishima had his first orgasm while looking at Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian). You need to stylize and sexualize suffering in the visual arts to make a buck from it.

{{{Kelly enjoys referencing the papier-mache cows made by William Dobell in WWII, which were placed near Australian airfields to confuse Japanese pilots into thinking the airfields were really farms. This piece represents a cow stuck up a tree after a flood.}}}

Kelly’s response to all of this seems to be non-linear but relevant and meaningful. He turns to landscape painting and the true horror to be derived from his paintings is that no trace of the horror can be readily found. The High and Low Islands which bore witness to the suffering on shore look tranquil and inviting. This peace, beauty and sublimity demands, however, a strong response. The Marquis de Sade once said, “Every death, even the cruelest death, drowns in nature’s indifference.” 

In response to this indifference (which parallels the indifference of the English upper classes who nearly committed genocide against the Irish), we are required to speak out and remember the atrocities that both nature and our system of social classes tend to swallow up or wipe away. So through these landscapes Kelly is not looking to validate a historical record or collect and present evidence. Yet, there is a palpable reverence and sadness and evidence of a personal act of compassion and deep sympathy for the loss of life that has never been fully acknowledged by the English government or our history texts. In the painting ‘Sticks (Moonlight)’ (pictured above) Kelly references this sense of reverence by painting what is left of artist Susan O’Toole’s site-specific sculpture ‘Tree Sentinel’ – originally 18 long tree trunks or ‘sticks’ fixed into the ground in Cork to commemorate the Great Hunger in the early 2000s.

Indeed, if we look at the paintings themselves, this seems to be landscape painting divested of any sense of romanticism or transcendence. It could be argued that landscape painting is, in itself, very ‘pagan’, hearkening back to a desire for union with Arcadia, very pre-Christian in its orientation, shooting for something non-Christian, non-allegorical and something that winds up on the canvas which has not been mediated through the intellect.   I would call Kelly’s work a type of ‘secular’ landscape – the painting technique seems affected by the knowledge of what happened on the land. You don’t have the soft blurriness characterizing the English Romantic painters – each aspect of the landscape is clearly delineated from other aspects…sea, sky, land…we see the landscape but might struggle to be affected by it in the way that we have been affected by landscape in the past.

This is landscape that swallows up human suffering instead of landscape of a harmonious, balanced and timeless mood. Yet, we can also feel that this is sacred landscape and the silence does not have to be the forced silence imposed through the censoring of history text books and the oppression of thought by dominant economic classes…it can be a silence of deep and moving reverence and horror for those who were abandoned by the world to inhumane and tortuous deaths so that some could live in economic comfort at the expense of others.

The show was curated by Seol Park of Spark Associates Art Management and it is currently being held at O’Sullivan Antiques at 51 E. 10^th Street, New York, NY until October 15^th, 2015.  

Ray Bull impugns abstraction at Ana Cristea Gallery in Manhattan

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When looking at a representational work of art – a piece that represents stuff and/or illusionistic relationships between stuff in the world - there’s a tendency to engage in a specific cognitive process that might not allow for a meaningful experience or full engagement with the piece (Susan Sontag, of course, wrote about this in her essay “Against Interpretation”). 

There is also the tendency to resort to an easy allegorical interpretation based on what we believe certain traditional ‘symbols’ in a piece might mean. So if we look at Rembrandt’s “Polish Rider” at the Frick we might verbalize something to ourselves like: “The horse in this painting is clearly a symbol of the means of transition from one state of being to another.” In this case one’s engagement with the piece seems sorely limited through that process of analysis, realization and verbalization. The purpose of abstraction was, in part, to subvert this interpretive proclivity and allow the viewer to be more deeply engaged through forms and colors and the relationships between them. That was the theory anyway. 

The work of Ray Bull at Ana Cristea Gallery openly impugns the autonomy of abstraction. In the notes accompanying the show it is stated that, “Ray Bull’s paintings speak to the impossibility of abstraction in painting. His compositions consistently straddle the line between representation and abstraction.” So basically Bull seems to be implying that when you look at a work of abstraction, in order to get anything from it, you engage in, basically, the same thought-processes that you use for a representational piece. 

Abstraction is allegory by another name in which you bring the same preconceptions and pre-existing beliefs to the work as you do with representational pieces and subject it to analysis. There is no way to move beyond this analytical process and to believe there is a way to be affected by abstraction without cognitive analysis becomes tantamount to believing, a la Carl David Friedrich, that staring at mountains long enough will integrate you into nature and help you feel the true Christian God. Being directly engaged, without analysis, by a piece of abstraction, is a myth.

Ray Bull also, in his pieces, seems to take this argument one step further. He seems to want to get at the source of our capacity to verbalize meaning and how a type of destructive interpretive feedback loop can be created through this process. If I look at a work of abstraction and can analyze it, it is due to the relationship and effect of the various elements in the painting. It seems that the awareness of the relationships between colors and forms and their effects then inevitably leads to a need to articulate or verbalize which then destroys any further capacity for direct engagement.  

Once one becomes ‘aware’ of what the piece is doing, or how a piece affects one, the real meaning of the piece is destroyed. Indeed, the tension between abstraction and representation in Bull’s pieces points to the fact that in the very process of creation of abstraction, if analysis occurs by the artist, true abstraction is destroyed. In attempting to create an abstract piece analysis of the relationships between colors and forms will, however, occur and, of necessity, the piece will lose its vitality and potential for engagement and merely invite a limited cognitive interpretation from the viewer.

So Bull’s pieces show abstraction in its flawed reality. Yet, Bull could also be pointing to the fact that a ‘real’ type of abstraction might be possible. By extension we can guess that if an artist chooses pure, unadulterated improvisation, true abstraction might be possible and true engagement of the viewer might occur. Yet, Bull could also be saying that in the deliberate choice of improvising there is also analysis and planning, which would then militate against the ultimate goal.

Ray Bull

Get Up With It

June 18 – July 17,2015

Ana Cristea Gallery

521 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001

www.anacristeagallery.com

Daniel Gauss

De Colores – a Group Show at the Buggy Factory (for Bushwick Open Studios), Curated by Enrico Gomez

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If you were to think of songs associated with the labor union movement or various union strikes, the songs of the prolific union activist and songwriter Joe Hill might come to mind. Once, when a company hired a Salvation Army band to play loud enough to drown out the chants of strikers, Hill simply wrote pro-union lyrics to the music the band customarily played, and the strikers were able to sing along to the music, loudly expressing their anti-management sentiments. Other than the work of Joe Hill, union classics might include: Whose Side Are You On?, Bread and Roses, Solidarity Forever…but, did you ever hear of De Colores?

If you started your Bushwick Open Studios walk from the south, you might have come across the Buggy Factory, which was one of the information hubs. At the Buggy Factory Enrico Gomez curated a group show of seven amazing and accomplished artists around the theme of De Colores, which was a song commonly sung during the darkest days of the United Farm Workers Union’s attempt to secure justice for migrant farm workers.  It’s really not exactly the type of song you’d expect at a labor union rally as it is a song which praises the colors of nature and the joy these colors bring. It’s a Spanish-language folk song with religious undertones, with early versions that can be traced back to the 1600s.

So the song De Colores was sung in response to the callousness and greed of the farm owners and the hatred directed at Cesar Chavez, Delores Huerta and the workers and families of workers they represented. Singing the song was a way to refrain from being engaged on the possible level of malice created by the situation and to direct one’s thoughts elsewhere while the UFW endured and until everything could be resolved. Instead of being worn down and torn down, the farm workers refused to return hatred for hatred and replaced that with the serene emotions engendered by the beautiful De Colores. Like the song De Colores, upon stepping into the Buggy Factory's amazing exhibition space, one was engaged and uplifted by thought-provoking work incorporating a variety of colors and forms by the following seven artists:

If you’ve seen any colorfully painted cement mixer trucks around Bushwick or environs, that was probably Andrea Bergart’s idea. After spending time in West Africa, where artists paint on almost anything, apparently, she floated an idea by a cement mixer truck company and they allowed her to create various designs on some of their trucks. For the De Colores show, we see the same type of clash of strong and bright colors that Bergart seemed to be influenced by in Africa, where the colors and designs of clothing often add a contrast and uplifting element to bleak environments.

http://andreabergart.com/

From Ben Godward’s website it seems that his art of accretion is a response to our ‘slick, saturated media’ and references things from sex to food to toxic sludge.  His work derives from a culture of ‘material excess and imperial gluttony’ where ‘Pure carnival joy harmonizes unselfconsciously with commodity culture.’  

http://bengodward.com/home.html

Anne Russinof seems to use a wet-on-wet painting technique in which she – from what I have gleaned from her web page – uses gestural, abstract expressionist techniques accompanied with a more minimalist concern for structure. 

http://www.annerussinof.com/

The thick strips of aqua and white in the work of Jennifer Ditacchio seem to be derived from the natural environment and the artist herself once pointed out that she has deeply influenced by the light and colors of the Cape Cod landscape where she grew up.

http://www.jditacchio.com/

Denise Treizman is a native of Chile who did her MFA work at SVA. At one point started a program where the athletic shoes of Chilean national soccer team players were used to create art by various artists as a fund raiser for Chilean earthquake victims. According to her artist statement, her work often involves, ‘…informality, improvisation and new forms of abstract assemblage…’ from a process that embraces chance and uses whatever might be available.

http://www.denisetreizman.com/

In Doreen McCarthy’s artist statement she states that ‘My production often appears to present aesthetic oxymorons that occupy both sides of formal and conceptual oppositions such as material versus effect.’ In the centerpiece of the show we see one of her site-specific pieces - a curling and tube-like structure that I dubbed ‘the eternal sausage’ because it’s like viscera defying the laws of entropy with no beginning, no end and no production of waste. 

http://www.doreenmccarthy.com/

Inna Babaeva, originally from Ukraine, tends to use industrial foam to stimulate thought about ‘mass production, recycling, function, materiality, gravity and time.’ Often the foam serves as a means to undermine the function of another object and sometimes the foam is allowed through chance operations to assume its own unpredictable and often absurdly ridiculous shape mimicking some type of organic form.

http://innababaeva.com/home.html

De Colores

The Buggy Factory

June 5 – 7

14 Kossuth Place

Brooklyn, NY 11221

www.thedoradoproject.com

Daniel Gauss - the guy who writes some of the best art gallery reviews in the city.

Hwang Young-Sung - Solo Show at Gallery Shchukin, Chelsea

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Hwang Young-Sung was born in the early 1940s in Korea and, consequently, suffered through part of the Japanese occupation and the entire Korean War - during which he became an orphan. He was born in Gwangju, in the province that engendered South Korea’s Nobel Peace Prize winning president Kim Dae-Jung, who seemed to embody that region’s spirit of strength, democracy and independence. Indeed, Gwangju was where the military dictator Chun Doo-Hwon massacred student protesters on May 18, 1980 – a protest Hwang participated in. He suffered through the dark days of occupation, war and extreme poverty (after the Korean War South Korea was one of the poorest nations on the planet) and survived through the days of brutal dictators to see a more democratic government in his homeland. He is currently the Director of the Gwangju Museum of Art and Emeritus Professor of Art at Chosun Unversity. Although admirably committed to his people and country, his work transcends any type of regional classification and embodies international influences from various eras.

At Shchukin the show focuses on his work from the 90s onward and this work might be best classified as being ‘semiotic’ in nature.  As you can see from the images presented, Hwang seems to create what might be called pictograms in large grid patterns. Some pictograms are recognizable objects, numbers or animals but we don’t know whether each pictogram represents a sound, the object presented or a concept related to or potentially unrelated to the image. Different pictograms could even serve different functions hypothetically. We don’t even know in which direction the text should be read from. So the first question would seem to be: what does it mean to be confronted by an indecipherable language?

First, obviously, when we see text we want to know what it means. Someone is presenting something for us to learn something from and we feel a sense of frustration from inaccessible information locked in foreign characters. Frustration normally leads to aggression. Yesterday when entering my neighborhood Chinese take-out place, I stepped on a mat that had four Chinese characters on it. It bugged me that I had no idea what the characters meant – they could have meant, “Welcome!” “Please die! We hate working here.” “Your amygdala in the limbic system of your brain is the seat of the aggression you feel now.” “The meaning of life is blah blah blah…” “Our food sucks ha ha you sucker.” – anything. So looking at Hwang’s indecipherable grids we can feel a sense of inner pain and aggression due to the frustration and ambiguity that comes from an inability to read text we believe might be meaningful. We feel a sense of desire to know what is, basically, unreachable and are left helpless.

Hwang’s pieces also force us to think of what, basically, language can and cannot convey – just how important might the content be of any indecipherable language that we can’t get? What’s the most meaningful content that can possibly be stored in symbols and to what extent can it change those of us who read it? A Meso-American researcher worked months to decipher a text and was shocked to find that the beginning said: “This text contains everything you need to know to live well and to fully understand the universe.” Upon taking another month to decipher the rest of the text, he realized it was nothing but a child’s math-lesson text from 1,000 years ago. Maybe we expect too much from textual material – maybe text is not sufficient to provide us with all the insights we need to develop into the most humane beings possible so that we can live meaningfully in relation to each other, our society and the planet. Maybe we need to reject text and the word at some point and dive deep inside ourselves and surrender to learning and change through experience to supplement what can be spelled out for us.

Also, when language was created, when symbols were created (first sounds and then images) they must have been created to represent actual physical stuff in the world. If you think about it, any language we might use for processes in our inner world is always metaphorical. Even the term ‘emotion’ comes from the Old French term ‘emouvoir’ which means ‘to stir up something’. So when we think about stuff that goes on inside of us (motives, emotions, desire, thought-processes) we use objects taken from the outer world as markers to understand and express what is happening. If we feel frustrated we imagine an actual physical obstacle, a sense of emotional liberation can be described using a metaphor like a soaring bird or some obstacle being removed. We have no language for our inner reality – our language symbols double for the outer and inner worlds. We use objects and relationships between objects to also describe inner states or situations.

Many of the pictographs in Hwang’s pieces seem to be shapes with mirror images, one half a darker color and the other half a lighter color. Could he be pointing at this dual aspect of language – that language can represent outer and inner states using the same signs? Many of the signs also contain darker and lighter elements – again, does this point to the dual nature of language? Darker and lighter can imply ‘active’ and ‘passive’ or ‘desire’ and ‘fulfillment’. In the more abstract pictograms each symbol possibly derives its meaning by the proportion of active and passive or light and dark in the piece. The objects which can be recognized, furthermore, show how symbols can serve as markers for inner reality. So we see a snake – what is it about the snake that gives it possible meaning for our inner reality? The snake in the Garden of Eden story seemed to symbolize a desire for something more than God had made available to us. Why was the snake used this way in various types of sacred literature? The snake has no arms/legs and so in the ancient world this meant the snake had no creative capacity and had to steal everything it needed. So the image of the snake becomes one of spiritual thief, an inner desire to take what really isn’t ours.

Another key to understanding Hwang’s work also seems to be that he seems to lament the loss of traditional rural culture in modern Korean history. Some writers have seen references to ancient Korean images that represent guardian figures of villages as well as references to other aspects of Korean traditional life. The predominance of animal shapes also hearkens back to a pre-industrial Korea which was unified and peaceful. I even caught images of the number 38 in some of his paintings, which would obviously refer to the 38^th parallel – the dividing line of contemporary Korea.

Gallery Shchukin has been around for about a year now in NY City and Arte Fuse was the first arts source to review one of the shows at this new and remarkable cultural resource. Shchukin has contributed greatly to the NY Arts scene in the past year and is even currently partly sponsoring a show on Russian “shamanism” at The National Arts Club (which I fully intend to cover as well). And, let me tell you something, they have delicious finger-food at their openings! Yummy yummy!

Hwang Young-Sung

Beyond the Grid

May 28 – June 24 2015

Gallery Shchukin

524 W. 19th Street

New York, NY 10011