FEEDBACKLOOP - Sandro Kopp at Five Eleven in Chelsea, USA

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In the photorealist tradition painters deliberately began with a photograph as an acknowledgment that the technology of the camera had given us a new layer of reality as legitimate as the traditional layer of reality found through direct individual visual perception. To embrace the photograph as a starting point for a painting was to embrace a mediation of vision meant to enhance a simultaneous awareness of the permanent and transient in the perceivable world; no medium did this as well as photography. The painter renounced a need for a direct encounter with the world because advances in technology did the job better.

Sandro Kopp adds a wrinkle to all of this by painting portraits based on the digital images of people in his Skype conversations. Indeed, one of the series of portraits in the show is of Chuck Close, one of America’s most renowned photorealist painters (probably no coincidence). So we get a realistic painting of a digital image which is meant to be entirely private in nature, therefore departing from the photorealist tradition of using a medium in which the image is, by nature, meant to be shared. 

Yet, we still get a mediation, but it is a mediation of the process of direct interpersonal communication itself. Instead of a direct encounter with Chuck Close, the artist gets a direct encounter with digital images and audio transmissions from Chuck Close. Is this better than Chuck Close himself? How does Skype change interpersonal communication? Does it limit it, enhance it or reveal exactly what interpersonal communication is or can be by trying to replicate it?

The show is called ‘FEEDBACKLOOP’ and a feedback loop is, basically, when you do something, see the result and then your next response is more exaggerated (positively or negatively) as a consequence. So Kopp paints a realistic image of another person during a Skype conversation, then he takes that painting and runs it through a cam again to himself (with a deliberately bad wifi source) and paints another image incorporating the digital distortions. He does this until ultimately the subject becomes completely obscured through large blocks of color due to repetitive distortion – thus the feedback loop is negative in nature, causing a less and less clear image of the subject.

The final abstract image of blots of color for each (famous) person in the series can represent a sort of primordial electronic soup out of which the individual personality/identity arises or can sink back into oblivion. It is a reminder that the digital transmission of these pixels is somehow also transmitting engagement - recognizable humanity with its warmth, passion, sarcasm, envy, empathy, companionship…so then what, if anything, is missing?  Should we be concerned about this form of communication? Inherent in Kopp’s endeavor is a caveat, perhaps, that Skype-like communications may begin to take the place of the real thing and one, consequently, recalls Joyce’s Bloom, who had begun to neglect his own wife Molly in favor of an anonymous erotic correspondence through a personals section in his local newspaper.

Bloom had begun to derive more gratification from the non-physical fantasy life of an anonymous correspondence than from actual physical contact with his own wife. On one level Kopp, who lives in a secluded area of the Scottish highlands and needs Skype to keep in touch with his far flung companions, may be sounding an alarm that Skype seems to be bringing this type of fantasy world or fantasy comfort to its greatest fruition. In Bill Arning’s essay for the show’s booklet, Arning points out, after all, that the porn industry is driving a lot of this Skype-like technology. It could be that Skype is using the real, visceral human to provide, at its best, a cheap form of psychological comfort that nowhere near approximates the range and depth or the effort involved in real, meaningful interpersonal engagement. Perhaps Kopp is saying, “If you are separated from your family, feel the separation, do not avoid that experience through an illusory sense of propinquity through Skype.” Or in general, if you have taken action in the world that involves your separation from meaningful others, embrace the isolation and opportunities of that, which may change you far more than hour-long Skype conversations with those you left.

An overreliance of this type of communication could be just another way to keep us inside, keep us too emotionally safe, too shielded from a sense of loss and longing, unengaged and cyber-bound instead of actively exploring and changing the world through direct experience and the risks of life. More than anything, perhaps Kopp warns us that Skype-like communication exists to save us from the isolation which we may very much need to develop any complexity, humanity or depth in our lives.

Along with Kopp’s paintings one hears a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner of Kopp engaged in painting. Hearing Kopp’s brushstrokes or other sounds of the painting process is comparable to seeing the pixels on the canvases - these are the individual audio-atomic elements that go into the deception of art as readily as the pixels go into the deception of Skype. Architect Alberto E. Alfonso has also configured the show with each lamella painting pivoting toward the viewer who moves through the loop of the space.

Sandro Kopp

FEEDBACKLOOP

12 December 2015 – 06 February 2016

FIVE ELEVEN

511 W. 27^th Street

New York, NY 10010

Artists of the WPA at Bill Hodges Gallery

{{{Norman Lewis - click on images to enlarge}}}

At the height of the economic depression following the 1929 stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover gave a radio broadcast to uplift the spirits of America. He said that 25% of Americans were unemployed. People were hungry, some starving. Farmers were losing their farms to banks, people were living in dire poverty and as President of the USA, he could help…but he wasn’t going to. If he put food in the mouth of a starving person that person would become dependent on government handouts and Hoover would not allow the beautiful system of rugged American individuals taking care of themselves to go down the drain just because a few million people might die in the streets.

His message wasn’t very convincing nor uplifting and FDR became the next president. It’s debatable as to whether the New Deal pulled Americans out of the Depression, but it certainly stopped Americans from dying in the streets.  One of the more inspired initiatives of the Roosevelt administration during this period of time was the Works Progress Administration. One of the wonderful aspects of the WPA was that despite the undercurrent of racism and discrimination and lack of opportunities for African Americans in the USA at the time, many African American artists were given opportunities to create and make a living from their art through the WPA.

{{{Jacob Lawrence}}}

Bill Hodges brings together a group show of mostly African American artists who created for the WTA. Indeed, it’s an all-star cast and reinforces my steady claim that this gallery is a jewel in the crown of the Chelsea art scene, in what I consider to be the best building to see art in Chelsea – 529 W. 20^th street.The show not only highlights the diversity of artists who benefitted from the WPA program, but it also helps to highlight the changes that each artist went through before, during and after the WPA  opportunity and how social change in America over the years either affected or didn’t affect the themes of individual artists and why. 

Will Barnet, for example, arrived in New York City during the Depression and was ‘radicalized’ by the experience. He began with a style and content based on social realism and later dabbled with various other approaches including “Indian Space” painting, a type of abstraction based on Native American art, using organic shapes and lacking any semblance of perspective. The painting here is titled Martha and Two Cats and displays a style far from his social realism days. The two cats could be, I am guessing, of the “Russian Blue” breed – a hyper intelligent type of cat which is very shy around strangers, or maybe of the “Chartreux” breed - an ancient breed from France perhaps brought to Europe from the Crusades. The cats become symbols of status and comfort through their exoticism and plumpness. If Barnet had painted something like this in the 30s, however, it might have been perceived as social satire or criticism of the leisured, privileged class. But in the mid-80s enough social safety and welfare programs had been created to the point that even the poor seemed to have nice stuff in America and an ideology of upward mobility had trickled down throughout all classes. An artist did not need to worry about portraying the wealthy in his work in a negative light. “Wealth,” in itself, was not necessarily to be condemned in that decade of Reaganomics as it might have been during the FDR years.

You may not know that Romare Bearden had a degree in education and worked for the City of New York as a social worker. In fact, many African American artists in the first chunk of the 20^th Century had jobs in helping professions out of necessity, since it was so difficult for their work to be sold. Bearden was committed to his community on many different levels and his daily engagement with the social life around him added immense depth to his work. Under the Waterfall is another of Bearden’s famous collage (montage) works. Many of Bearden’s collages present ‘archetypal’ human forms in his attempt to equate the African American experience to larger themes in world culture and mythology. In this piece we see a figure bent backwards through the force of the water pounding onto him/her. The body is not in flight, but in a position to absorb the experience in what one might interpret as a deliberate attempt to engage the adverse aspects of the world directly in hopes of a greater insight into how one may live in and change these aspects of the world. The fragmented background adds to the feeling of a piercing, excruciating experience with the body at the limit of endurance in an almost shamanic ritual of enduring pain to gain visions.

Elizabeth Catlett overtly used her art as a way to express her social awareness and to protest what she could clearly see to be wrong in her society. She not only protested through art but was arrested periodically for her participation in literal protests. Indeed, in 1946 the US government accorded her a type of honor, perhaps, by declaring her an ‘undesirable alien’ while she was in Mexico and she was prevented from entering her homeland for a decade.  Before that she had experienced various forms of discrimination such as an acceptance to a university followed by a revocation upon the discovery of her race and the inability to live in a campus dorm at another university for the same reason.  Despite the irrational hatred directed against her, however, her art always seems to be a positive statement. The piece Rebozo refers to a traditional Mexican garment worn by women of the working class or women from rural villages. The rebozo served various functions – for instance one could use it to carry objects or to carry a baby. Frida Kahlo painted herself in a rebozo to represent her solidarity with the working women of Mexico.  In this piece we see a woman in a rebozo who could be engaged in prayer or her folded tense hands can be a sign of concern – the implication to me is that she is offering a prayer for better conditions in general brought about through her own experience of pain.

In the work by Charles Sebree that we see here, we can see how African Americans were open to influences from Europe and how these influences were appropriated to reflect American themes. When I saw this Christ with Thorns, Rouault immediately came to mind, but this seems to be a softer rendering than Rouault was used to doing. Furthermore, this is a Jesus who does not betray the sometimes mawkish expressions of some of Rouault’s work as this Jesus does not suffer physical pain and is almost like an icon of a darker skinned Jesus. The implication could be that the African American experience in America has been, to a great extent, “messianic” and long-suffering. There is a hope implied that the suffering will be redemptive and that the African American community may be more capable of initiating positive change due to its horrific experiences and that greater humanity may someday envelope this country through a greater acceptance of the African American people and their insights. This a patient and serene Jesus who has faith that humanity will ultimately prevail.

Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Frederick D. Jones, Milton Avery, and Charles Alston are also included in this amazing show.     

Artists of the WPA

April 16 – June 6, 2015

Bill Hodges Gallery

529 W. 20^th Street, 2E

New York, NY 10011

www.billhodgesgallery.com

On Kawara Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum

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On Kawara, DEC. 29, 1977
“Thursday.”
Private collection
Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

The significance of On Kawara’s “Today” series could be in the fact that just by representing dates we have to focus on what the mere sequence of dates cannot convey about our lives. His work becomes a type of 'via negativa’ of our own experience throughout a course of time (‘via negativa’ is a theological term - we do not know what God is, but we know what God is not and therefore can intuit aspects of God’s existence by what God is not). These individually painted dates, of course, do not measure or record for us our own inner change, growth or development.  If one really wants to be exact, they do not necessarily have anything to do with our own lives, they just really record the continued existence of On Kawara from January 4, 1966 until his death last year.

Is this, therefore, a type of self-absorption or narcissism on On Kawara’s part? At the very worst it could be. Or it could even be a form of pessimism. Like Schopenhauer, On Kawara could be asking, “What is the common denominator of all of our days?” If we see a date from the past, we have to assume we ate, worked, did whatever we had to do to survive one more day. A painted date tends to obfuscate the coarse, natural processes we engaged in on that day just to get to another day, while perhaps falsely validating the process of existence as something autonomous from our physical beings - a date occurs whether or not we lived it or recorded it, after all.  What is the common denominator of each date?  The common factors are that we ate, drank, slept etc. each day. We forget all the natural, survival stuff we do on each day, and the date becomes a record of something apparently ‘higher’ than and divorced from the animalistic. Each date could, in reality, merely pay deep homage to our viscera and the will to live.

On Kawara
JAN. 4, 1966, “New York’s traffic strike.”
Private collection
Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

I think the key to understanding On Kawara, however, is that he synthesizes time and being. Time, as we measure and display it, is intricately tied to human being and action. Indeed, the recording of days is a phenomenon tied up with the process of urbanization, civilization and the creation of religious thought. There is no April 12, 52,000 BCE. A date now occurs whether we individually record it or not, and dates occur whether we are alive or not, but these particular dates in this show only exist in a represented form because On Kawara himself existed. He asserts that time is not autonomous from our individual being nor can we forget the intersection of being and the historical, economic and social processes we are born into. His dates are more than dates – there is history, culture, society, technology, individual experience, religion and philosophy embedded deeply into each painted date. To what extent are we a part of or divorced from this historical flow of time?  To what extent have we all been molded by the circumstances inherent in each of the dates presented?

I would also say there is no pessimism in the show either and point back to the ‘via negativa’ argument I referred to earlier. I think On Kawara points to the highest and best that we can attain to through his Today pieces. Let's say I am much more insightful and more humane than I was in 2006.  That didn't happen on a particular date.  My inner change was due to a process, probably not an event.  These individual dates, therefore, perhaps, point in a negative sense toward this type of process. On Kawara makes us think about what is possible through a sequence of days – which processes are possible? What do we hope to gain through enduring time in its petty pace? He implies, perhaps, that no one day is good enough – we need a long sequence. He opens up a whole range of humane possibilities through his paintings of a sequence of dates.

On Kawara
MAY 20, 1981, “Wednesday.”
Private collection
Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

It is, however, such an unusual experience to look at a date I lived through and just stare at the date not having any idea what I did or what happened to me on that day.  For each date that I stare at, I just have a vague idea of what I was doing those days or a vague idea of the sort of guy I was back then. What do we do or can we do every day to make each day meaningful? Can I look back on October 20, 2008 and be assured I didn’t waste this day? What about my life now makes me think I used October 20, 2008 well?

For me Kawara's work makes us focus on how interesting but glacial our own individual change has been and the possibilities for even greater, meaningful and humane development for ourselves and the world in the future. The common denominator of all of our days can be a higher process of development and individual engagement with each other, beyond the mere necessities of life.

Please be aware, by the way, that the Today series is just one part of this show on Kawara. The show runs through May 3, 2015.

Gregory Hayes at Nancy Margolis Gallery - Abstraction as a peaceful transition

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My friend Ekaterina Lishmanova brought the work of Gregory Hayes to my attention and I wanted to pass this work on through Arte Fuse so that it can have a similar effect on you that it had on her (and me).  Indeed, I would encourage you to drop by the gallery in person to see and experience these paintings.

Ekaterina mentioned that this work had an immediate effect on her mood and she felt it was some of the more joyous and uplifting work she had seen in a long time.  She also pointed out that the continually decreasing squares connoted or depicted, for her, a type of transition. Yet, when we think of some type of transition, we often think of some terror-fraught experience – crossing a desert or ocean or whatever allegorical hero’s journey you can think of. 

Hayes’ work implied for her a joyful, gentle and peaceful transition from one place to another.  If you do things the right way, maybe such a transition will be possible.  Or maybe this is the only type of valid transition possible – a painful transition is no transition...it is the suffering before the real journey. Hayes’ work represents, to me as well, the possibility for a safe and peaceful journey forward.

Viewing these pieces as if they depict a transition is like passing through a light-filled tunnel or cave, the walls of which are covered by candy buttons (you know, those types of candy dots that seem glued to long strips of paper).  This candy button effect is obtained by the artist literally squeezing out little drops of acrylic paint from some type of ketchup-like dispenser. 

Viewed from far away the colors tend to look bright but faded, which makes them more inviting and accessible.  We are not confronted with gaudy or overly bright and shiny colors…the faded quality is understated and is more alluring.  It gives these bright colors a greater pacifying quality and humanity. It is as if the sharp brightness has been extinguished and a residual calm now endures for eternity.