Jim Dine (American, b.1935), PINOCCHIO (EMOTIONAL), Cincinnati Art Museum, Museum Purchase: Lawrence Archer Wachs Trust, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Leyman Endowment, Phyllis H. Thayer Purchase Fund, A.J. Howe Endowment, Henry Meis Endowment, On to the Second Century Art Purchase Fund, Israel and Caroline Wilson Fund, Trustee Art Purchase Fund, and Tom and Dee Stegman, Accession #: 2012.9, © 2012 Jim Dine/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

With his new bronze sculpture, “Pinocchio (Emotional),” a scary-monster/sweetie-pie welcoming people outside the Cincinnati Art Museum, Jim Dine conjures a lot of pop-culture ghosts and nightmares while also paying homage to the original 1883 children’s novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.  The statue is imposing, and the glazed patina of it harkens back to Rodin.  High art glosses low, but also an eccentric sentimentality gives the whole thing a kinky veneer.  It’s as if Dine wants to transform the Disney puppet/boy into a man-boy-god of steel, a cartoon pulled from suspended animation and recast as personal totem.

When I witnessed “Pinocchio,” it was a beautiful spring day, not a cloud in the sky.  The crystal clarity of the sunlight only made the statue seem a little creepier.  The facelessness and the wide open arms are disquieting and Golem-like, as if it just might come to life and move slowly toward you, like a figure in one of those stop-motion animated movies made by the Quay Brothers, or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.

Dine’s sculpture also brings to mind Michael Jackson.  More specifically, seeing “Pinocchio (Emotional)” reminded me of the tragic and accused pop-music pedophile trying to reclaim his status as “King of Pop” on the cover of HIStory, his 1995 greatest hits LP.  Just as the rest of the world was moving onto other idols, Michael transformed himself on the cover of that album into a Stalinist icon, a lavish, stone-gray skyscraping monument.  In this grand gesture of sculptural hubris, Jackson seemed to be wishing he could bury his past and resurrect himself as innocent, super-talented, somehow beyond human.

Dine’s hulking “Pinocchio” isn’t a skyscraper by any means, but it does stand there in its little swath of grass as if to declare its ontological importance to a world no longer interested in old-school morality tales, or even possibly Pop Art.  And like the statue on the cover of Jackson’s album, Dine’s sculpture’s rigid, antique permanence gives off the vibe of a gigantic piece of Stalinist-era playground equipment.  Pinocchio’s rugged facelessness transforms the puppet-boy into toy-soldier.  Dine wants to provide gravity, it seems, to Pinocchio’s reputation.  (Inside the museum hangs a suite of prints he did to illustrate the original Collodi-written Pinocchio story.  These color lithographs exhibit the same gorgeously blunt treatment of the legend as the sculpture does.  There’s an artist quote on the wall too, in which Dine defines the spiritual/metaphorical aspects of the Pinocchio legend, as well as its importance on his life and work.)

In turns out Jackson not only had an existential resemblance to Pinocchio, he also had a major obsession with him.  In a recent auction of some of the items from Jackson’s estate, Pinocchio statues, paintings, figurines, and puppets abound.  As well, back in 2000, Jackson commissioned an airbrushed painting of the puppet-boy with its creator Geppetto, both of them smiling and cuddling on a mystical tree-swing.  In 1996, when Walt Disney World celebrated its 25th anniversary with a TV special, Jackson co-hosted and insisted on having a life-size Pinocchio escort him through his hosting duties.  The mythology of the story becomes Jackson’s mirror:  he seems to find a version of himself in the talking stick transformed into flesh and blood.  It’s both poignant and so obvious as to be just plain sad.

Dine’s interest in Pinocchio has some of that same nostalgic yearning, without the tragic gloss of super-stardom gone sour.  There’s no Neverland in Dine’s cosmological connection to the Pinocchio story, no undercurrent of transgression.  He just seems to want Pinocchio to mean more than he actually means.  In a news release for the unveiling, Dine states that he feels “the idea of a talking stick becoming a boy [is] like a metaphor for art, and it’s the ultimate alchemical transformation.”  Dine sanctifies his love of Pinocchio in an effort to find “meaning,” to elevate the 19^th story of the stick-into-boy into a metaphor about art and artists and the art they make.

A godfather of Pop Art, Dine was one of the main figures in its birthing, beginning in 1962 with the exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at the Norton Simon Museum, his works featured along those of Claes Oldenberg, Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebeau, and Roy Lichtenstein.  From the start, Dine’s art has always been about simplifying and glorifying simultaneously, which is one of the essences of how “common objects” transformed into a genre called Pop Art.  Dine turned screwdrivers, hammers, housecoats, skulls and hearts into totems of meaning outside of themselves, capturing their throbbing essences without paying attention to what any of that process “means.”  His  Pop Art never seemed to be about metaphors or alchemy; it was almost like a cancellation of metaphor, simile and magic, and more of a reinforcement of both the object’s strangeness and how he had found, through art, a purposelessness that transcends what objects do and are supposed to be.   In other words, he was writing love-letters to banality.

The “Pinocchio (Emotional)” sculpture is almost in opposition to that sense of estranged, candy-colored ordinariness.  This bronze enlargement of Pinocchio seems more like a really loud prayer than a love-letter.  Dine is staking a claim to meaning instead of trying to figure out how to escape it.  This transformation from Pop Art cheekiness to a yearning to turn Pinocchio into a god gives the sculpture, and the appropriation of the whole Pinocchio brand, a soulful yet humorless hush, an oddly official countenance, as if the Church of Pinocchio, Inc. commissioned the piece.

Jeff Koons’ 1988 ceramic sculpture “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” is a golden, glossy, slightly mean-spirited parody of Jackson’s luxurious iconography, as well as a paean to Jackson’s (and to some extent Koons’) penchant for being his own puppet, a self-appointed Pinocchio who spent the majority of his adult life trying to return to innocence by re-inventing (through plastic surgery and other means) what it means to be a man and a boy at the same time.  And then there’s Bubbles, of course – his sidekick/soul-mate – given his chance at glittery posterity.

Unlike Dine’s to Pinocchio, Koons’ elegy to Jackson is ceramic, an indoor overgrown knick-knack with a twisted irony built into both its subject-matter and technique (think of Jackson in Martin Bashir‘s 2003 TV interview as they toured a high-end Las Vegas kitsch superstore, buying every trinket and bauble in the land, saying, “Do I already have that?  Did I already buy that one?”).  This Pop Art tombstone is breakable.  Dine’s is most definitely not, an outdoor giant of a boy, anonymous and heavy, colored by that expressionistic patina.  The thing stands proudly with its arms wide open as if to invite us into another world, possibly at the gates of Heaven, or at the entrance to a theme park.

Dine’s Pinocchio doesn’t seem to be any blither or weirder than any other big bronze statue depicting a religious or historical or pop-culture figure.  What’s missing, possibly, is that hint of meanness, that sense of irony that turns pop into Pop.  Maybe sentimentality, no matter how you try to cut it, needs a chaser just like whiskey does:  something to splash away its overt intention, to make the drunkenness a little less “there.”  Or in an inversion of the Mary Poppins’ tune:  “Just a spoonful of medicine makes the sugar go down.”

Pinocchio exists in this media-saturated world in so many styles and guises, a bronze statue of him decorating an art museum’s lawn feels a tad-bit unremarkable, and not in a good way.   The transformation is kind of static and slightly morose, a memorial that gives Pinocchio a faux gravitas.

Another popular culture genius, Steven Spielberg, used Pinocchio as both muse and avatar.  Writing the screenplay for his 1978 masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he relied on the Disney movie as a source of inspiration.  In fact he played the Jiminy Cricket song “When You Wish upon a Star” over and over while he wrote.  But even Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for all its wide-eyed, romanticized worship of “the third kind,” has at the center of its narrative a kidnapped child.  The scene in which that boy is taken out of his house in a vacuum of sinister orange light is one of those masterful cinematic set-pieces that fuses entertainment with real emotion.  The kid’s mother struggling to keep his legs within her grasp as he is swept from her through the doggy door is the flip-side of “When You Wish upon a Star,” as if to answer Jiminy Cricket’s mystical populism with the populism of mass disappearances.

Jim Dine (American, b.1935), Detail of: PINOCCHIO (EMOTIONAL), Cincinnati Art Museum, Museum Purchase: Lawrence Archer Wachs Trust, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Leyman Endowment, Phyllis H. Thayer Purchase Fund, A.J. Howe Endowment, Henry Meis Endowment, On to the Second Century Art Purchase Fund, Israel and Caroline Wilson Fund, Trustee Art Purchase Fund, and Tom and Dee Stegman, Accession #: 2012.9, © 2012 Jim Dine/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Contemporary art often tries to de-spiritualize – to suck away the popular cultural meaning in an effort to reveal the absurdity of objects meaning more than they really should.  “Pinocchio (Emotional)” is about the opposite of that kind of deconstruction; Dine is applying spirituality to a pop-culture figure, luxuriating in that godliness, celebrating the nostalgic thrill of it.  It’s a beautifully crafted homage, as are the lithographs inside.  But where do you go with all that except to church?

–Keith Banner

Ron Gorchov, Noli Me Tangere, 2011, oil on linen, 44 1/2 x 36 x 10 inches (courtesy Cheim & Read) photo: Brett Baker

This is the third in a series of a quarterly letters, which will cover painting shows in greater New York.

Paintings shouldn’t simply be seen, they should change the viewer, suspend him or her in an altered moment. Although this is the hope each time a visitor enters a gallery, it is a rarity. A recent visit to exhibitions by Adolph Gottlieb, Ron Gorchov, and Douglas Florian proved one’s sense of time and place can, indeed, be altered by a colored surface. ¹

Entering Adolph Gottlieb: Gravity, Suspension, Motion at Pace Gallery, one experiences a lifting sensation, a sense of weightlessness. This is striking because rarely does one’s experience of a painting so closely mirror that of the forms within.  Twelve large paintings are spread throughout two spacious galleries. They tower over the visitor; the tallest painting rises 11 feet high. Forms pulsate optically and physically weightless in their dissociation from the canvas edge.

In Gottlieb’s signature ‘Burst’ paintings, the space is divided in half. In the lower half, the viewer encounters a “burst” or “blast” of paint – an energetic, abstract gesture. The gesture is contained, as if frozen in time. In the upper half, a single round shape pulsates, its indistinct edges expanding and contracting. The burst forms, which imply action, are in fact action stopped, suspended rather than completed. Gottlieb’s forms hover and remain independent. They defy gravity.

Gottlieb varies these forms by shape, color, and size.  In the most dramatic example, Spray (1959), a bright, cadmium yellow burst sits atop a rich umber ground while a compact black orb shines darkly above. The quiet canvas Expanding (1962) holds the opposite wall. In it, a round, diffuse cloud of dusty blue and a rust colored burst co-exist in a pale green ground.  Another painting is shockingly spare. In Aftermath (1959), only the pulsing orb exists, high above the viewer in a silvery aqueous space. The painting is reminiscent of the most spare of Turner’s Folkestone watercolors, yet the scale is galactic. Turner’s radiant sun here becomes a glowing, distant planet.

Weightlessness remained with me as I crossed the street to Cheim & Read gallery where I encountered the paintings of Ron Gorchov. In these paintings (as in Gottlieb’s bursts) the forms hover in an aqueous space – they never touch. Gorchov’s thinly washed forms are an ethereal counterpoint to the sculptural solidity of his saddle-shaped supports.

In painting, the sense of dynamic tension is most often achieved via internal forms pushing and pulling against each other and the external edge. The push/pull in Gorchov’s work is between painting as image and painting as object. As in the works of Robert Ryman, materials, paint, canvas, stretcher, and staples, share centerstage.  Unlike Ryman, Gorchov also preserves the image. Two forms hover in each saddle painting, and while their slow contours echo the saddle-shaped support, their ameoba-like appearance conjures the primordial.

A second series of work by Gorchov is also represented by two multi-panel paintings.  In them Gorchov stacks six canvases vertically. Overlapping, with a curved, slightly flared top edge, the panels form a type of polychrome phalanx. In the company of these works, the saddle-shapes become shields, and their construction suddenly seems archaic – modernist push/pull is displaced by a sense of antiquity.

Douglas Florian’s abstract paintings also conjure the ancient and timeless. They have the feel of rare artifacts, not by virtue of their scale (they are modest but not small) but by their time-worn feel.  The paintings are on plywood, seemingly found rather than crafted. Slightly notched, with abraded edges, the supports feel ancient yet enduring. Florian integrates this worn physicality with vigorous, sensitively painted abstract forms.

Douglas Florian, Bewail and weep, 2010-2011, oil on wood, 24 x 20 inches (courtesy BravinLee Programs) photo: Brett Baker

In paintings like Bewail and Weep (2010-2011), richly layered surfaces and jewel-like color, feel like newly discovered fragments from Pompeii or large leaves from an illuminated text.  Standing in front of Florian’s work there is a sense of stopped time.  While his color, gesture, and surface recall Roman wall painting they also evoke Philip Guston or Milton Resnick, reminding us that painting is universal, a language shared across time and space.

– Brett Baker

Notes

¹ “We should remember that a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story, is essentially a flat surface, covered with colors arranged in a particular pattern.” Maurice Denis, ‘Definition of Neo-Traditionism,’ Art In Theory: 1815-1900, Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. 1998, p. 863

LVG 21c. #31: Dissemination…under the big black sun. Diptych 78"x150" 2012 acrylic, acrylic resin, carpenter chalk, latex, oil, wax on canvas

Joseph Winterhalter’s show “The Revolution Says:” at Clay Street Press, presents a portrait of a contemporary American society lacking political will and stifled by emotional inertia.  He presents two large paintings on canvas, a series of small sculptural paintings, a wall sculpture of hand made tiles, and some lithographic prints. When listed this way, the work sounds formal, and one might expect a certain sensual experience upon entering the gallery. This is not the case, as Winterhalter’s rigor comes from his conceptual depth not his formal transcendence. The diversity of form yet cohesive statement of the works is impressive. Winterhalter employs a visual language found in institutional architecture, military camouflage, and digital imagery to get his points across. Along side these he presents images associated with a series of extremist political movements. Slogans, images and graphics from the groups are reproduced in lithographs. Winterhalter was born just after the upheavals of the sixties in the strange social trough known as generation X. The works presented here hold a mirror up to the listlessness associated with his generation’s feelings towards politics, authority, and society.

This show is uncompromisingly political. The series of Lithographs in the show:  S.I Said, RAF Said, Weatherman Said, Revolutions Said, and The audacity of Hope present a bevy of past political movements that championed anarchy and revolution in various countries. Although Winterhalter is not endorsing their agendas specifically, he is nostalgic for their momentum. The lithographs stand like an anti establishment hall of fame along the far wall of the gallery. The Baader-Meinhoff RAF, Situationists International, and Weather Underground are included, all of which rose to prominence in the sixties just before Winterhalter was born. These prints stand as a reminder of what “taking a stand” looks like. They are bold, clear, and decisive in their visual language, in contrast to the muted colors, overall patterning and pixilated forms in the paintings.

The large paintings in the show hold a heavy uneasiness. This imbalance happens for two reasons. On the one hand it is a result of the obvious political agenda of the show in contrast to the rich surfaces of the paintings up close. This creates a sensation of muted noise like static on a television.  We are given a sense of the human presence, but only if we get past the overall super flat appearance and machine generated forms.  The paintings are formally awkward. Winterhalter’s painterly language has its roots in minimalism and the process based work that dominated sculpture and painting of the 80s and 90s.  Artists such as Agnes Martin and Frank Stella are present, as well as Anselm Kiefer, with his alchemy of materials that Winterhalter shares. The paintings at Clay Street Press utilize latex paint, waxes, resins, and other high and low craft materials resulting in a soft patina. The paintings glow like old leather or worn flooring.  This atmosphere promotes quiet and introspection. Up close the works seem to ask for meditation.  One cannot help but imagine the buffing, sanding, wiping, and coaxing that were required to create the effect. The awkward feeling is also a result of these diverse surfaces meeting the hard geometry, strong text elements, and mechanical shapes in the pieces. Winterhalter’s large-scale paintings are peculiarly close to the ubiquitous look of gymnasium floors, cafeteria walls and hospital bathrooms.

The compositions are unrelenting in their harsh geometry. They are cut into  rectangles, tiles and mechanical patterns, muffling the effect of the hard won surfaces underneath. Again a political parallel seems apt: Contemporary society’s inability to organize around a set of beliefs or feelings is a result of the iron control of our consumer culture and fear of uncertainty.

Dissemination…Under the Big Black Sun. is the largest work in the show.  It is a diptych painting on canvas measuring 78” x 150” The shape language of digital communication and Kmart wall vinyl combine with a surface that feels strangely opulent upon close inspection, like waxed cotton or distressed flooring. The German words  “anarchistische gewalttäter”or:  “perpetrators of anarchist violence” are stamped in red in the upper left hand corner of the painting. The conceptual contrast here is clear: The large worn and austere panels that comprise the ground for this statement are our contemporary political landscape: mottled, repetitive, secretive, ultimately muted and impotent. The clear hard language of the text visually clashes and negates the soft variations of the surface.

The smaller groups of works in the show, the small sculptural paintings and wall sculpture, continue the language of the soft surfaces of the large pieces without as much of the internal geometric organization. The rooms of small paintings that are 4” square each are especially gentle. The intimacy of their size and box like dimensions creates a more humble voice. However, since they are displayed alongside the larger pieces, their surfaces read as hushed and confused instead of purely atmospheric. Lit by a fluorescent bulb, the works feel strangely vulnerable and inconsequential. Both heavy in their chunkiness and light in their color schemes and air, they serve to add to the general feeling of unease the show produces.

Winterhalter has created a complete statement with this show. It is a scathing critique of contemporary society presented through a medium that is traditionally used to ask questions of the viewer, not give answers. Contemporary art can turn the tables on the role of painting.

Lithographs on assorted print making papers 30"x22" each

This leaves a clear question:

Does an artist with a political agenda need to make his or her point so clearly that the various formal mysteries of the work are lost? In Winterhalter’s show, a case can be made for his overall rigor. His show produces a feeling in the viewer that is real and intentional. Our discomfort in front of the harsh foreign language of the lithographs and ponderous muffled paintings certainly implicates us. Many artists claim this sort of political message, but it is not often that works direct the viewer so fully towards a desired feeling.  I am reminded of Jimmy Baker’s recent show at the Contemporary Arts Center where a similar political statement was intended. While Baker claimed a certain political territory, his work used it as a jumping off point for an experience that was at turns lyrical and beautiful in his large paintings. The message was present, but in front of the paintings, the viewer was interested in a new visual experience. Winterhalter’s work creates the landscape of his agenda more singularly and forcefully.  However, the work suffers formally as a result.

–Emil Robinson

Installation View, NL Sunset 1, 2012, aluminum, plastic, photo

“The Bambi [Airstream model of 1960] is a machine for living and traveling, the sort of industrialized, rationalized vessel that had long been the dream object of modernist architects, from Le Corbusier to Buckminster Fuller.” – Christian Larsen, curatorial assistant, MOMA. [1]

The aluminum-clad Airstream travel trailer conjures up a virtual cavalcade of nostalgic American archetypes, like some sort of space age prairie schooner, wheeling leisurely westward in a modernist recreational take on the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”. It had, and still has, a kind of “On the Road” vogue of retro-stylishness and comfort. Nowadays, a geriatric Dean Moriarity, if he were mortal, could be found curled up napping in a corner of an “Eddie Bauer” limited edition, like a kitty fallen into a Viagra stupor, tired after a day spent “appropriating” a favorite model just for you. As I continue to age on the coattails of a similarly profligate life, I often ask myself if we can, or should even try and hold such disparate ideas as say “Comfort” and “Wanderlust” in our minds at once? Are such things mutually exclusive or just frustrating, even frightening, signs of an inevitable domestication? Can we really commune with travel if we’re literally bringing along the kitchen sink in a bubble, eating the menu and not the meal? Living abroad sort of accomplishes this conflation of home and continual travel, but ultimately it seems we are either pulled in one direction or the other, or the two eventually cancel each other out. “Abroad” becomes home. Expatriates patriate. Even for a gypsy Diaspora, they are most likely in a home away from an ancestral home, finding one in motion, not in space.

Peter Haberkorn’s current solo exhibition asks us to hold many such “Heraclitean” concepts in both hemispheres, not only those of our brain, but also those of our world’s geography, even typography. The success of his show at Prairie depends on a sort of willing suspension of disbelief surrounding a kind of shared memory we, the viewer, are asked to grasp at in photos framed by the passenger window of our common existence. The photos seem to ask one to view them as if they were right there, riding along the aerodynamics of this magical mystery trailer, just beyond the reach of our outstretched hands where the wind is passing wistfully through our fingers. It’s a type of archetypal exercise, a communal travelogue telescoped from the very personal, framed through the physically deconstructed windows of an Airstream, the “eyes wide open” of the vehicle. This is somewhat of a streamlined departure not only for Haberkorn’s work, in installation at least, but also for us his audience. For this reason, before we climb on board, a short art and design specific contextualization of the Airstream travel trailer might serve us well.

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crack-Up.

The original streamlined and riveted version of the Airstream, manufactured by the sole travel trailer company to survive the Great Depression [2], still lives on the road not only because a company continues to manufacture an updated version right here in Ohio [3]. The vehicle, especially its vintage model, has also managed to take on something of the gleaming idol status. A seemingly unassailable and stainless symbol, a totem of our well-healed progress, rolling headlong toward its designated campground somewhere out on the wild and windswept netherlands of the collective United States’ unconscious, in some cases known as a museum.

It just so happens that this shiny spectacle was codified as art and artifact through the appropriation of a vintage mid-century model in March of 2007 by MOMA’s Architecture and Design Department [4]. This may be a nod to the fact that, in spite of its look of indestructibility, time has made the early iterations of the vehicle itself, relative to a ubiquitous heyday, something of a semi-precious collector’s item largely absent from 21st Century highways. The ultimate pioneering symbol of the rugged self-reliant 20th Century U.S. auto-mobile trailer has been made an anthropological im-mobile. If pushed on the point, even Rene Magritte himself might have to admit that this is not a trailer. [5]

Like many such popular contemporary icons, (i.e. iPods/ Pads), their almost instantaneous im-mortalization, even canonization, through marketing, design and public sentiment, and in some cases Art, (i.e. Campbell’s’ soup cans, Brillo boxes) clashes with the nagging feeling that their obsolescent by-products continue to pile ever higher and higher up in our communal garbage dump: a kind of “consumer subconscious” made physical. Some artists have made it their life’s work to mine such obsolescence, this “present absence”, to create iconic works with found objects or “readymades”, as Marcel Duchamp coined them and rarely discussed:

“The word ‘art’ etymologically speaking means to make, simply to make. Now what is making? Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it’s always choosing. So in order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, you can use brushes, but you can use a ready-made thing, made either mechanically or by the hand of another man, even, if you want, and appropriate it, since it’s you who choose it. Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.” [6]

Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” [7] also come to mind, especially those with taxidermied animals, a seemingly strong influence on a good number of Haberkorn’s previous works. (I have to admit that I’m sort of partial to those embalmed animals, at least their abject quality, as I currently have two aging housecats). Rauschenberg though, like Warhol, later gravitated more toward image appropriation through screen print. Symbols and icons seem to eventually settle to the portability of flatness and text, especially when reproduced photographically for posterity in art history books, online or exhibition catalogs. Image, whether still or in motion, seems somehow most closely partnered to, even overwhelming visual memory, especially in our simulacra saturated society.

Come to think of it, I’ve actually seen practically none of the above-mentioned icons in person, only in digitized photos or in art history books.  Is there really a “Treachery of Images” in this? I mean when you’re hungry, the occasional can of Campbell’s soup, easily found at the local supermarket, tastes pretty OK. This processed cultural staple, also apotheosized as Art, I can see, even touch often. Now I can also say that I have in fact seen at least the symbolic window bits of the iconic Airstream travel trailer in Peter Haberkorn’s exhibition. The rest of the vehicle was resonantly absent, although much else is conceptually present.

The deconstruction of this “present absence”, whether in a fleeting memory captured in photo, or the objects we try and to sometimes haphazardly memorialize them with, also seem central to what Haberkorn self-describes as his “3D Collages”. In this case, deconstruction is taken to its literal and logical conclusion by the artist having appropriated a physically cut up Airstream [8] and presenting only the rough hewn aluminum and plastic windows from the vehicle to adorn the gallery walls as frames for a series of what at first glance appear to be merely travelogue photographs.

On closer inspection, these assemblages are more than personal travelogues or novel ways of framing an image. They’re strong conundrums that start puzzling one upon first entry to the gallery, even more so, in some cases, because of the Gallery statement posted alongside them in both the front and back rooms of Prairie:

“The Airstream trailer itself represents the pinnacle of family luxury in the post-World War II population boom and subsequent suburban expansion in America. In this context, Haberkorn’s images represent adventure, luxury, possibility and optimism; the American dream.” [9]

This portion is posted in close proximity to the first assemblage: “En Route to LAX” which seems to tell us that we’re probably not going to be in Kansas anymore, LA or maybe even America for that matter. This seems a bit odd, as the statement says we are dealing with the “American Dream”. In some ways though the American Dream is stronger and in clearer focus outside the States, or for freshly minted immigrants, since you’re not entirely mired in trying to live its reality.

“En Route to LAX” will be, for most, the first piece encountered and, in some ways, the most successful of the Airstream assemblages in the show. Its conundrums are self-contained and broad enough to appeal to the archetypal and not yet circumscribed too much by the personal, as the pieces further on in the show seem to become. It captures best the essence of the light speed of time and memory transfixed by the “alchemy” of creation that seems to pervade the show.

The found frame window in this initial piece is closed, possibly because of something as practical as the narrow passage it’s in. Also, as opposed to pieces later on, the edges here are clean cut, framing an image of traffic taillights abstracted by a long exposure blur. This not only evokes a playful readymade take on the “hole in the wall” perspective and framing of much of classical painting, but also encapsulates its inverse in Modernist Art: Abstraction. We peer inside the caravan window only to see that we are peering “outside” at a nearly unrecognizable motion-blurred photo of traffic lights on the open road, mottling our own reflection. These are, as it were, the  “eyes wide open” of the Airstream whose discarded hull seems, especially because of the singularly clean edges of this particular piece, to lurk architecturally encapsulated somewhere just behind the wall. It’s the kind of conceptual, almost engineered alchemy Haberkorn seems to aspire to in much of his work. (http://haberkorn-alchemy.com.)

Haberkorn confirmed these outside/ inside conflations in a recent interview about his work with found windows: “I like positioning the viewer in an out-of-body experience, meaning the viewer is looking at the window from the outside, but what they are viewing is an external picture.” [10]

En route to LAX, aluminum, plastic, photograph

En route to LAX, aluminum, plastic, photograph

As we enter the main space of the gallery, this recontextualization of interiority/ exteriority continues, yet now this trope is given some breathing room, as pieces are sparingly mounted here and the windows of the Airstream frames are open to reveal the photos directly: photos from the Netherlands nonetheless.

“NL Sunset 1, 2012″ had me doing a double take at first, as I was expecting maybe “NV” for Nevada, as this is the “American Dream”. Having spent over a decade in Europe, I did recognize the designation for Holland and the rest of the kingdom. I hitchhiked to Amsterdam, (the “capital of gedogen“) [9], from my place in Prague (the home of Alchemical Enlightenment) [10] a few times. I often waited impatiently for hours in gas stations along the Autobahn in order to see if just such an “NL” on the yellow Dutch license plate would slow down for me.

NL Sunset 1, 2012, aluminum, plastic, photograph

NL Sunset 1, 2012, aluminum, plastic, photograph

This “not-being” in America was also confirmed by moving directly across the room to “NL Sunset 2, 2012″, where I then and there looked up Haberkorn’s biography on my Smartphone, and after a little searching, found out he had lived in the Netherlands from 2001 to 2006. [11] Things seemed to have gotten personal (an ambiguous word in the age of the internet) and expanded in place all at once.

This expansion of place in the front room of Prairie is also helped by the coupling closely together of two sets of the Airstream frames, windows opened, at the same height, exactly opposite one another on their respective walls. This at once  ”airy” and accurate placement, does lend a certain jouissance to the overall experience, similar to when you open the windows in early spring for the first time after a long winter’s claustrophobia. The ambient sound filtering in the from the main street running outside Prairie’s second story only helps this effect of shifting realities and departure from the here and now.

The frames we encounter here are also a departure from the initial “En Route to LAX” piece. They are more rough-cut, which ultimately makes them feel less integrated into the architecture of the gallery space. They do elicit more of an emotional response though, as if they are hard won memories culled from a life’s journey. Seeing the physicality of the photo without the reflections of the closed window also makes them seem more of a memento than an ethereal memory barely glimpsed behind a glare of tinted Plexiglas. These “Sunset” photos, also motion-blurred, open-road shots, are more easily inspected and recognized here with the windows open, and do gradate nicely from orange tinted atmosphere to darkened road to lower pane of tinted Plexiglas in the Airstream frames’ bottom halves of “NL Sunset 2, 2012″. The roominess of the space may have required the windows to be opened, as these two pieces, alone on their respective walls, might have felt dwarfed otherwise. This openness seems to come at a cost though, as they lose the “suspension of disbelief” held by the closed window assemblage of  “En Route to LAX”.

It’s worth repeating that there is nothing else directly alongside the respective walls holding the centered works of  “NL Sunset 1, 2012″ and “NL Sunset 2, 2012″. This leaves plenty of pregnant negative space in the front gallery. It would have been a significant risk to have left these two pieces alone there, but Haberkorn chose to incorporate two other works, one older and one more recent.

“Oars” is an excellent mounted assemblage piece from 2010, and the objects of its namesake resonate with the overarching theme of travel and the nearly inescapable and wistful “campground” feel of this show. Horizontal and vertical lines lend a meditative symmetry to what is an economic use of what appear to be window shutters and the front end of a tractor combine. Although it is an older piece, it doesn’t have the same feel of an afterthought that wants to fill up “too much space” as has its partner piece.

Opposite “Oars”, both physically and formally is “Two Vents, 2012″, an assemblage of two window vents mounted upright with trash bag cinches to a dishwasher rack on a traditional pedestal. This piece seems to want to call attention to the general architectonics of the gallery, albeit heavy-handedly pointing skyward. Unfortunately this disrupts our uninterrupted sightline and visceral associations with the portals of Airstream frames, real gallery windows and even the skylights and doorways therein.

NL Sunset 2, 2012, aluminum, plastic, photo (detail)

NL Sunset 2, 2012, aluminum, plastic, photo (detail)

As we pass through one such doorway to the rear section of Prairie, the luster and relative success of most of the installation in the front room does fade a bit as we encounter further 3D Collages of found window (in this case from a school bus) and photo, and a third assemblage. The harsh rectilinear lines here don’t seem to expand “frameness” [12] as much as the rounded rectangles et al. of the previous Airstream works. Their strict rectangles have too much of a sameness to traditional frames. In the two compositions incorporating photos from 2012 entitled “Dusseldorf Steelworks” 1 & 2, I do feel more importantly that we are being usefully “schooled” in Haberkorn’s interests in industrial architecture and design, as the photos seem to be a direct homage to Bernd and Hilla Becher whose iconic pictures of factory structures drew attention to these “eyesores” not only as cultural markers, but also as semiotic and formal investigations of typology [12]. Haberkorn does curiously depart from the Becher photos’ nearly unflinching use of flattened black and white and centered/ ground framing of subject, trading them in for color and mostly aerial perspective views. An updated and more direct appropriation would have followed better from the overtures of the front room.

Overall, Airstream, despite a few minor missteps, seems to be, much like its namesake, a streamlined departure from Haberkorn’s previous work, one well worth your stepping on board. It’s mostly a safe trip though, one that won’t send you careening off the well marked trailblazing of his predecessors in mixed-media appropriation and assemblage Art. Still, you may feel a certain headiness related to these investigations of Memory at light speed, transfixed in photo, found frame and object.

–Regan Brown

Regan Brown (http://www.reganbrown.com/) has advanced degrees in both Creative Writing/ Journalism (B.A. Miami Oxford, 1991) and Fine Arts (MFA, Electronic Arts, DAAP 2009). That noticeable gap is not a typo, but represents a long stint spent living and working in Post-Soviet Central Europe as a journalist, woodwind multi-instrumentalist, professor and audio/ video producer. He currently teaches New Media Art at NKU and has several in progress projects.

Sir Moses Ezekiel, "Israel"

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, home of the Skirball Museum,  was established in Cincinnati in 1875, due primarily to the efforts of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who was responsible for the organization of the College’s founding body, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.  In the mid-1850s Wise moved to Cincinnati—a city which already hosted a significant German-speaking population—as part of the general movement of Central European immigrants who came to the United States largely in the wake of the revolutions of 1848. Reform Judaism, although it had its beginnings in the German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century, took hold and developed in the less tradition-bound atmosphere provided by the young country.  The center of Reform Judaism’s early growth was Hebrew Union College’s original campus in Cincinnati. The College today offers rabbinic as well as graduate degrees, and has sister campuses in New York, Los Angeles and Jerusalem.

Cincinnati’s Skirball Museum, located on HUC’s historic campus, was founded in 1913 as the Union Museum,  and was the first formally established Jewish museum in the United States. After receiving a generous gift from former HUC rabbinic student and Hollywood producer Jack Skirball, whose studio was responsible for such classics as Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the museum, in 1972, took on its current name. The Skirball’s aim is to provide a compelling core exhibition, as well as important traveling exhibitions, lectures and tours. It is one of the most prestigious Jewish museums in the Midwest, and houses an extraordinary collection of art, artifacts and documents which reflect the unique and varied experience of the Jewish people from antiquity through the present.  The museum’s core exhibit, “An Eternal People, the Jewish Experience,” presents over 300 objects—art, ritual articles, textiles, photographs, documents,  jewelry and memorabilia—which reflect, and allow the visitor to relive, significant periods in Jewish history. A tour of the collection takes the guest through eight thematic galleries which together constitute this overview of Jewish history: Immigration; Cincinnati Jewry; Archaeology; Torah; Jewish Festivals and Life Cycle; Holocaust; Israel and, finally, a striking display of back-lit photographs that depict the diversity of Jewish communities throughout the contemporary world.

“People of Immigration” chronicles the acculturation of Jewish newcomers to the United States through an assemblage of objects and photographs brought from the immigrants’ native lands, as well as items which document Jews’ successful absorption into American life. The stories of eminent new Americans  such as Irving Berlin (a Jew best known for writing “White Christmas” and “The Easter Parade (that’s acculturation!) and Louis Brandeis are displayed here, alongside Civil War medals and records of the appointment of the country’s first Jewish chaplains—all powerful attestations to Jews’ embrace of, and acceptance by, their new land.

“A Home in America,” entered through a portal modeled after the doorway of Cincinnati’s Plum Street Temple, treats Cincinnati as a microcosm of the larger American Jewish experience. The life of Isaac Meyer Wise is chronicled here through objects from his North College Hill farmhouse, and articles depicting the lives of many well-known Cincinnati Jews provide local interest and apprise the visitor of the importance of Cincinnati as an early center of American Jewish life.  The exhibit details the history of the Manischewitz Company, which began here in the spring of 1888 when Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz decided to take into his own hands the community’s need for Passover matzo, as well as the life of Joseph Jonas, the first Jew to settle in Cincinnati, who arrived from England in 1817 and was instrumental in the founding, in 1824, of Rockdale Temple, the first Jewish congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains.  Sir Moses Ezekiel,  the first great American Jewish sculptor, studied painting and sculpture in Cincinnati and Berlin.  His  bust of Isaac Meyer Wise resides at the college, and the Skirball (downstairs in a separate alcove) houses his Israel, a symbolic work based on the legend of the Wandering Jew. Ezekiel was the only well-known American sculptor to see combat in the Civil War, and was commissioned to create the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery.  Ezekiel received the Rome Prize for Israel in 1873, and, in recognition of the beauty of his work, was knighted by Emperor William I of Germany and Kings Humbert I and Victor Emmanuel II of Italy.

“People of the Land,” the area of the museum devoted to archaeology, simulates a home from the biblical period, and includes domestic artifacts, many of which were unearthed at the HUC Tel Dan excavations in Israel. This area also displays Mesopotamian figures (c. 1800 BCE), an ossuary inscribed with the words “Shimon the Temple-builder” (c. 100 CE), an original Qumran Jar which contained part of the Dead Sea Scrolls— the literary remains of a pious Jewish sect who lived at Qumran from about 135 BCE (although there is some scholarly dispute over this attribution)—and a wonderful Mandaic bowl (5^th -6^th century CE) inscribed with an Aramaic incantation. The purpose of these “incantation bowls” has only recently been determined: they are apparently a precursor of the mezuzah, and, overturned in the corners of a dwelling, the  interiors of the bowls were believed to trap evil spirits and render them harmless.

The Skirball’s central section concentrates on the Torah, and the role Torah and the synagogue have played in bonding Jews together through their years of wandering and dispersion. This is the center of the core exhibition—as the Torah is the core of Jewish life—and includes  a family Torah recovered from a Nazi storehouse and returned to HUC-JIR professor the late Werner Weinberg,  as well as an extraordinary Sephardic Torah case (Iraq, 1916) of chased silver on wood, inscribed with the words “The Supervisors of the Sefer Torah may take it to other places…” and rimmed with a crown-like setting of forty-eight scarlet beads. An important Jules Butensky (b. Russia 1871; d. New York 1947)  bronze also resides in this area of the museum, and depicts the debates of the legendary adversaries Hillel and Shammai, who lived during the 1^st century BCE into the 1^st century CE.  Audio phones make it possible for guests to hear a debate while viewing its representation.

The largest display in the core exhibition, “People of the Community,”  features  festivals and traditional life-cycle events.  This collection includes illuminated marriage contracts (ketubot) dating from 1728‒1973, as well as an 1863 bill of divorce (get). The text of the earliest of the ketubot, from Conegliano, Italy, is framed by the signs of the zodiac, beginning with Aries, the sign of the first Hebrew month. The ketubah (s.)  also portrays birds, flowers, vases, and a knotted ribbon of myrrh, a reference to chapter 1, verse 13 of the Song of Songs: “My beloved to me is a bundle of myrrh.”  In this section the visitor will also find memorial (yahrzeit) lamps, a gown, similar to a christening gown, of the type once worn by eight-day old boys at their circumcision ceremonies, phylacteries, an 18^th century silver Seder plate, megillot (scrolls of the book of Esther, read on Purim), embroidered prayer shawls (tallitot), ornate silver spice boxes (the aroma of which is to summon up the sweetness of the Sabbath as one enters the week of work), Sabbath and  havdalah candlesticks, the latter used in the ceremony ushering out the Sabbath, and a brass relief titled “Havdalah” made by Boris Schatz, founder , in 1906, of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design  (then known as the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts). This beautiful and extensive selection of art and artifacts is crowned by a silk marriage canopy (huppah)  painted in 1990 by Corinne Soikin Strauss, who trained at Pratt Institute and has won numerous awards for her work. The brightly-colored, hand-painted design reveals Strauss’s  interpretation of Ezekiel 1:28: “As the appearance in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. That was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

One of the most striking objects in this particularly compelling collection is a huge Hanukkah lamp (early 19^th c.; Central Europe), a multi-tasking ritual object which is not only useful on the eight days of Hanukkah,  but is also outfitted with Sabbath candle holders and a clock—so one can know the correct time to light the candles. The lamp’s  corners are decorated by rampant eagles, each raising a foot to its mouth in order to sound a silver trumpet. This winter, the museum received a phone call from the White House, inquiring if the Hanukkah lamp might be available for use in the Obama administration’s Hanukkah candle-lighting.  Unfortunately, it was too short notice for the lamp to be sent to Washington in time for the holiday.

Entering the area of the Skirball dedicated to the Holocaust, the visitor is met with a wall whereon appear the names of Holocaust victims who were relatives of Cincinnati residents. This area of the museum includes a painting, titled Calendar: Days and Nights,  by Hungarian holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana (b. Hungary 1929)—a raw work in red, black and grey which evokes the struggle to survive in the camps—and a lamp by the prize-winning artist Moshe Zabari (b. Israel 1935) dedicated to the lost six million. “Concentration camp money” from Theresienstadt, a file-folder made by the Nazis from the pages of a Torah, an unkosher Torah scroll (stepped and urinated upon), woodcuts by Ari Koch (b. Germany 1913) reminiscent of the disturbing work of Otto Dix, and paintings by DAAP’s Robert Fabe are other profoundly moving objects which exemplify the power of Holocaust collection.

The penultimate area of the Skirball’s core collection (preceding the photographic gallery) addresses the diversity of Israel through an assemblage of art and artifacts which delineate its history, languages and culture. Works include a  lithograph by Israeli artist Shraga Weil ( 1918-2009; winner of the 1959 Dizengoff Prize for painting), an anonymous Ethiopian sculpture of the Lion of Judah, a beautifully illuminated copy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence by Arthur Szyk ,illustrator of the renowned Szyk Haggadah (b. Poland 1894; d. USA, 1951), and another example of the work of the prolific Boris Schatz, a bit of a chestnut depicting a long-suffering, pensive ghetto Jew, titled When Will Come the Miraculous End?

With the museum’s public presence a priority for the college’s recently appointed Dean, Jonathan Cohen, and with  an ongoing  series of important visiting exhibits, the Skirball Museum is undergoing a revitalization and a reintegration into Cincinnati’s artistic life.

Michael Gore (b. United States 1954), whose  beautiful glasswork occupied the Skirball’s revolving gallery this winter,  trained with the master glass blowers and artisans of Anfora Furnace of Murano,  and concentrates on fused glass techniques while specializing in Judaic art and design. From April 22 until July 1, 2012 the Skirball will host The Jews of Czestochowa, an exhibition which commemorates, through documents and precious objects, the Jewish contributions to the Polish city of Czestochowa, a once-thriving  community of 40,000 Jewish inhabitants before the destruction of their lives by the Nazis. This exhibit, which opened in Poland in 2004, comes to Cincinnati from Houston as part of its North American tour.

Docent-led tours of the Skirball museum, 3101 Clifton Avenue,  are available most days by appointment. (513-221-1875)

Beginning April 22,  the museum will be open Monday through Thursday from 11:00 until 4:00, Fridays 10:00 to 2:00, and Sundays 1:00-4:00.

San Diego Art Museum (photo credit: Cynthia Kukla)

Our Debt to the West Coast:

Pacific Standard Time: 1945-1980

“An unprecedented collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene.”₁

Visiting L.A. is like a review of your whole life. Driving around greater L.A. in traffic much less crazy than my hometown Chicago, mind-surfing images of hotrods and humming Beach Boys tunes, seeing the exit signs for Disneyworld brings iconic childhood movies flooding into my mind: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Lady and the Tramp.” The lure of Hollywood is present with each glimpse of luscious palm trees hugging sleek, contemporary architecture. The music scene at Venice Beach from the 60’s just about rises from the pavement as we pass hippie holdout stores, houses and shacks. I can still hear The Doors playing. In Venice Beach, we pass the street named Ocean Park as we drive to LA Louver to see the Ed Kienholz Retrospective. Immediately, the iconic paintings of Richard Diebenkorn flash through the museum in my mind.  As a young painter, I studied and analyzed Diebenkorn and his Ocean Park paintings are his most celebrated of series.

Starting with the Disney factor: a fact perhaps not widely known, Disney was instrumental in the creation of Cal Arts in Valencia, California.  John Baldessari, certainly one of the fathers of Postmodernism, was put at the helm there. The roster of prominent artists graduating from the Cal Arts radical art program is lengthy, and California, for a host of reasons, is key to the development of contemporary art. This is exactly what the Getty underscores with “Pacific Standard Time,” the culmination of a long-term Getty Research Institute initiative focusing on postwar art in Los Angeles. Though its research purpose is greater than this article can discuss, I will focus on the major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum which presented a survey “Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970,” on the Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) and on Ed Kienholz Before LACMA at LA Louver Gallery.

“Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970” begins with the‘Fifties’ -abstract, hard-edge paintings that set LA painters apart from New York painters and the rough, ambitiously scaled ceramic sculptures that set LA artists working in clay apart from just about everyone. Painters like Karl Benjamin explored optics, color and a special emphasis, fixation even, on surface. The Getty’s chosen curators brilliantly teamed the slick, color-charged hard-edge paintings with visceral West Coast ceramics. Ken Price insouciently used acrylic and lacquer on his sculptures while Peter Voulkos seemed to irreverently throw huge rough slabs of clay together to make sculptural vases denying vase-ness and affirming muscle abstraction.

Next in “Crosscurrents” is ‘Fifties’ assemblage sculpture and collage by prominent L.A. artists like Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy and Melvin Edwards. The art did not strike me as being as different as the West Coast’s ceramics are, but there did seem to be a hermetic spirituality in play that was less present in East Coast assemblage artists like Louise Nevelson or Robert Rauschenberg. Yet, I find it nearly impossible to easily characterize various groups – as the whole realm of assemblage, starting with Braque and Picasso’s delicate cardboard and plaster works, to Joseph Cornell’s tender boxes, Chicago’s John Chamberlain’s vivid crushed auto parts and H. C. Westerman’s quirky carved tableaux, and especially Rauschenberg, surely one of the most generous and prolific of contemporary artists – continues to richly influence us artists no matter what mediums we may use.

L.A. painters increasingly looked to the automotive and aerospace industries for new materials and methods.  Judy Chicago worked in an auto body shop trading oils and brushes for industrial strength spray guns and auto lacquer.  This is the land of candy apple red and psychedelic lustres. Let’s also not forget the influence from legendary surfboard designers Hobie Alter and Gordon “Grubby” Clark, the innovative surf board makers who trafficked heavily in polyester resin, forever leaving a mark on West Coast artists of the 1960s and 70s who took this new technology back to their studios.

Especially in the 1960s, the sleek and sexy aesthetic we associate with L.A. really takes hold.  I saw a lacquered plank by John McCracken at the Venice Biennale several season ago and it looked as fresh as it must have fifty years ago. Taking so much from the nearby auto and aerospace industries, artists used chemical and processes that took painting and sculpture to a new place of shared space: witness a bright orange Billy Al Bengston chevron painting, illuminated from within by its own internal spotlight.

“Advanced modes of painting,” in the large, fourth gallery of the exhibition is the centerpiece of the Getty exhibition and I focus on three iconic paintings: Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park 67 (1973), David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) and Ed Ruscha’s  Standard Oil Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963.)  Looking away from the Pacific Ocean, Diebenkorn turned his attention to the geometry of Ocean Park Street where he had a studio, as it rose sharply away from the water. Any of his Ocean park paintings were worked on for weeks or months and he carefully scraped away areas and added delicate, linear, geometric buttresses and color patches that are poetic and visually alluring. But the unabashed winners are David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash for its relaxed, pastel palette of colors and its economy of brushwork to convey the L.A. lifestyle and Ed Ruscha’s Standard Oil Station where Ruscha developed his signature hard-edge and ironic imagery. Both artists, younger than Diebenkorn, gave up the poetry and fussing with brushstrokes so characteristic of the prior generation of paintings’ giants, and they give us instead straightforward painting. Paint is laid down and there it stays. Ruscha’s Standard Oil Station breaks classical rules of composition, slicing the canvas in half diagonally with a stark black sky bisected by a crisp red and white gas station and golden spotlights.  All stark red, yellow, black and white, not Matisse, simply 100% American.

For the 1970s, the final gallery, the opening up (or abandonment of) painting is set in motion by John Baldessari who commissioned a sign painter to letter Baldessari’s description of a perfect painting. There is a wonderful arc in Baldessari’s work, from the rejection of painting in the 70’s to his recent Noses and Ears etc. Bruce Nauman’s  Four Corner Piece abandons painting for video technology and an installation that controls the viewer’s access to and reading of a complete work, continuing his exploration of behavioral codes, a hallmark of his oeuvre. Fortunately, women artists are represented throughout the decades-specific spaces of Crosscurrents. For the 70’s, the Getty included Mary Course’s White Light Grid Series – V, a large white canvas shimmered with reflective glass microspheres. Like Doug Wheeler whose work is seen in the San Diego show, Mary Course will benefit from this recognition as she sits squarely within a most experimental decade of painting.

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego takes over where the Getty left off, paying homage to the movement whose leaders are Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Craig Caufman, Jophn McCracken, Bruce Nauman, Eric Orr, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, De Wain Valentine and Douglas Wheeler. The museum “presents the pioneering artists who focused on visual perception rather than discrete objects, showcasing paintings, drawings, resin and acrylic sculptures as well as site-responsive installations in which the predominant medium is light.”₂ I would be wasting time trying to describe in words what these works are like, they are so dependent on the viewer’s direct, visceral and conscious perceptual interaction with the art work.  I flew to L.A. primarily to see this exhibit since no extensive survey of this perceptual movement existed until now.

So instead of descriptors, I can say that, especially with Wheeler’s floor to ceiling radiant, icy-blue wall of light DW 68 VEN MCASDII (1968/2011) and Turrell’s luminous magenta room-space, Wedgework V, you simply drink in what your eyes are seeing and you register viscerally what your body is feeling. Turrell’s magenta work is so peaceful to take in, that my colleague said “If all the art work in the world were like this, there would be world peace.” Imagine wishing to remain in a room the whole day with a work of art: Wedgework is that powerful.

Although Robert Irwin is considered the master of Light and Space and I have greatly admired his work over the decades, I do not feel his painting-cum-disappearing installation topped Wheeler or Turrell. Irwin’s piece begins with a subtle red on red hard-edge painting of brick-red horizontal lines on a brick-red background. Next is a curved canvas filled with tiny dots.  Next is a quintessential Irwin work, an acrylic disk that has on it? behind it? in front of it? a clean dark band. Irwin’s command of clear acrylic and carefully lighted spaces keep the viewer from being certain where a form resides, if it is painted, or it is a sly vision hovering in space. Irwin wraps up his magic with a trapezoidal space covered floor to ceiling by a scrim of translucent fabric.

Not to miss, “Ed Kienholz Before LACMA Works from 1957 – 1964″ at LA Louver, in collaboration with Maurice Tuchman, senior curator emeritus of 20th Century Art, LACMA.  The 1966 Kienholz exhibition at LACMA was the first show devoted to a Los Angeles artist and condemned by the County Board of Supervisors for its supposed pornographic and indecent content, There was intense media coverage and public outcry which kept the exhibition open and led to record-breaking crowds, similar to the situation in Cincinnati in 1990 over the Robert Mapplethorp “Perfect Moment” exhibition. Tuchman gives us meaningful early work that beautifully enriches the understanding of Kennholz.  Moving away from oil painting by the late 50s, Kienholz created The Little Eagle Rock Incident, 1958, his first painted construction using a taxidermied deer head. In 1959, Kienholz made his first free-standing work: Mother Sterling. Comprised of a dressmaker’s dummy, the bottom third was converted into a wire cage that held altered fragments of dolls, covered in resinous drips where resin retains for Kienholz the feel of gestural painting elements. “Before LACMA” is L.A. Louver’s contribution to the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time” art initiative. His work is represented in several other PST venues, including “Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture,1950-1970” which after closing at the Getty in February 2012, travels from March 15 to June 10, 2012 to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany.

1Getty Center press release.

2Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego press release.

Cynthia M. Kukla is an artist and professor of art currently living in Illinois.  She also writes about art.

Henry François Farny (American, b.1847, d.1916), THE UNWELCOME GUESTS, Cincinnati Art Museum, Bequest of Harry S. and Eva Belle Leyman, Accession #: 1943.14

Ten years ago when I was teaching Intro to Painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, I was cutting through the galleries on the second floor of the Art Museum when “The Unwelcome Guests” by Henry Farny suddenly caught my eye for the first time. There was a luminosity in that yellow sky that jumped off the canvas and grabbed my attention. That was the hook. I stopped, looked and was drawn into the painting by sweeping diagonals; the cold vast windswept landscape of the frontier in winter punctuated by figures and horses held together in a dynamic tension not only by the composition, but by the narrative as well.

“The Unwelcome Guests” depicts a Native American cautiously approaching a group of white hunters huddled around a campfire in front of a dug-out shelter in the side of a hill. Tension hangs thick in the air as evidenced by a trio of indians on horseback looming ominously in the distance and the body language of the white men, rifles in their laps. Even the horses tethered near the wagon appear ready to bolt at the slightest sudden move. I was reveling in the technical brilliance of this painting; the luminosity of color in low diffused light, virtuosity of the brush work, masterful use of figure / ground relationships, negative space and encapsulating the defining narrative moment. Then I saw “him”. The anomaly.

It took a moment for me to notice because he blended in with the dark tones of the shelter, but standing upright between the two suspicious hunters by the fire is an improbable character dressed in garb not unlike that of a Prussian Field Marshal! Unarmed and wearing a monocle, a full length, double-breasted, slate blue, woolen great coat, and atop his head what appears to be the signature spiked pickelhauber of the Imperial German army with canvas field cover, he looks more like a prisoner than a member of the hunting party. At that moment, my perception shifted and suddenly I was carried off on a narrative tangent of my own. In fact, it wasn’t until I began writing this essay that I bothered to learn what Farny actually titled this painting. For the past decade, I’ve always referred to it as: “Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill capture the Kaiser”.

I was so amused by this digression that I followed the idea trail further, postulating how the course of human history would have been indelibly altered had the Kaiser’s hunting excursion in the United States been ambushed by frontiersmen and the emperor himself sold to a local indian tribe for say, a couple of dozen buffalo hides. No world wars, no arms race, no cold war, no global warming.

I’d always assumed Farny (like his contemporaries, Remington, Sharp and Russell) was chronicling the wild west, packaging its history and selling it to the public while westward expansion was quickly erasing it. To my surprise, in many of his paintings Farny wasn’t recording history at all but inventing a very convincing narrative. His masterful and compelling use of the medium pulls the viewer in and creates a visual dialogue which allows the storyline to unfold in an open ended fashion. It doesn’t matter what the artist’s intent was, he gives you the elements of the story and you’re free to draw whatever conclusions (if any) you like. What’s important isn’t whether or not the character is Kaiser Wilhelm, but the train of thought that occurred by my thinking that it was.

By following my own invented narrative of the painting, I began to examine and question the validity of history itself. We interpret events through the subjective prism of our own personal perception which in turn informs our reality. We generally tend to regard history as an objective and accurate recording of events played out along a timeline. Accurate and objective according to whom exactly? History is written by the victors and whoever is in control. Change the control grid and you change history. Perhaps the most authentic account of any given event is the one recorded closest to when it occurred, but even then, how can you be certain? No matter how objective one tries to be, the accounting will always be colored by subjective perception at best, and political agenda at worst. History is continually being revisited, reevaluated, revised and rewritten. The best we can hope for is a contextual consensus.

Continuing down the conceptual rabbit hole, I then considered the implications of viewing this painting some 125 years out of context. In 1887, it was a vibrant contemporaneous depiction (contrived or not) of a wild frontier still in existence. Today it’s a film still from a John Ford movie, the characters no more real than the dim reflections in the tarnished silver of an old mirror. What’s poignant for me in this image isn’t the depiction of a bygone era or the wistful nostalgia that it conjures up, but the tangential path my mind races down in response to the anomaly. The infinite expanse of possibility that exists between the infinitesimal spaces of our perceived reality is the place where art grows.

P-1002 Kevin T. Kelly "Dear John" Acrylic on Canvas 60 x 81" ©2010 Kevin T. Kelly

No, that’s not Kaiser Wilhelm by the fire. According to the museum’s didactic panel, the figure has been identified as Edward Flynn, a Cincinnati newspaper editor and close friend of the artist who modeled for many of his paintings. He’s not sporting a pickelhauber either. The helmet was a gestalt conclusion I inferred from the rest of his attire and appearance. I saw the Kaiser in this painting because subconsciously I wanted to or more importantly because I needed to. He showed up as a lesson in helping me to better understand my own creative process. He taught me to fearlessly follow those paths of “What If”, because in the end, it’s all grist for the creative mill.

–Kevin T. Kelly

Smith, Brad Austin, Meyer Place, 2010, C-print, 30 x 40 inches

A vivid group of photographs by Brad Austin Smith are on display at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery through June 3, 2012.  At the heart of this exhibition is a raw look at the Queen City, its suburbs and American culture.  Playful and striking photographs coalesce around a common viewpoint of the American visual lexicon, the gaze from the automobile.  All the images have been shot from the interior of a classic car looking out at both urban and suburban Cincinnati.  Each image is appropriately titled with the name of the street where it was captured.  The world caught on film engages us with haunting and playful images of everyday life.  Enright Avenue with a blurred shot of a cemetery picks up the same texture and shapes from the adjacent image of an industrial refinery in/on River Road.  Smith is able to blend these diverse images into a narrative structure that evokes a social study of Cincinnati.

The reality and context of the images is reinforced by the frame of a 1960 Buick Le Sabre from which they were shot.  In essence Smith takes us on a journey to experience the world as he sees it.  We are looking through the front windshield or a side window of his car and see outlines of the car frame in the captured images.  On occasion the image is captured directly behind the wheel, exposing the steering wheel and windshield wipers.  Other images include the side-view mirror, which cleverly frames an additional image for us to reflect on.  Bits of the turquoise blue car body let us know the images were all photographed from the same vehicle as we take our journey with Smith.

Hot dog stands, classic cars, airstream trailers and weathered signage summarize the architectural landscape that Smith has captured.  However about a third of the twenty-eight images in the exhibition do capture people in the act of repairing cars, begging for money or making out.  It seems as if the subjects photographed are all engaged in their daily lives without notice of Smith in his Buick, with one exception.  The expertly composed shots reveal multiple layers for the viewer to peel away.  The images all have a strong sense of nostalgia and are warmly saturated with color.  Although the images were captured in the past two years, they look as if they could have been from 30 or 40 years ago.

One of the most powerful Images, Meyer Place, captures two children in the path of each other’s toy guns.  On the one hand this is a simple depiction of two kids playing cops and robbers, but in keeping with the show’s title, Drive-By and present day violence of our culture it depicts the larger threat of the American psyche.  Combined with ominous landscapes of flooding, shredded trees from recent tornadoes and suburban sprawl the exhibition has a foreboding presence.   The images ask us to look more closely at the world around us.

Overpowering decaying vehicular structures show an ironic backdrop to a lone cyclist who rides beneath the rusting iron framework on English Avenue. This haunting vision is created by a strong juxtaposition of a singular human form against the ominous built environment.  I get the sense that Smith wants us to pay more attention to our surroundings.  His photographs make me want to do just that: to write down the name of the street from which they were captured and to go explore this place for myself.  Despite the ominous presence of the decay the bicyclist is focused and in the process of escaping.  Although many of the works depicted here show the residue and character of a decaying city, they also offer hope through various devices, such as the movement of the bicyclist.  Another persuasive technique is the use of alternate reflections from side-view mirrors.  They let us see multiple viewpoints into the scene.  We are given the ability to look both forwards and backwards.  Some examples of this juxtaposition are the reflected sunset in a larger field of traffic or a humorous vision of Frisch’s Big Boy set against a suburban strip mall or the hand of the photographer holding the camera.

The tensions between the safety of the interior of the vehicle and exterior are powerful.

This uncomfortable dialectic is created through the gaze of the viewer.  Looking at the photographs I feel this uncomfortable obligation to stare at the people, places and things; however it is with the figures that the heavy tension is mounted.  I delight in the voyeuristic opportunity to take in the scenes to try to understand them more thoroughly.  Photographs themselves allow us the same opportunity to scrutinize subjects without the judgment of the gazed, the way that sunglasses hide our eyes from where our gaze may rest.

Looking at Smith’s larger portfolio of work his inclusion of multi-generational, diverse races and economic backgrounds is impressive.  Drive-By contains some great examples of our economically diverse culture with images of a homeless Vietnam Veteran and toddler in the arms of father with a can of Colt 45.  I do find it striking that of the images of people in this exhibition, not one of them was an African American.  Since, Drive-By, is also a catchword for violence in many poor disenfranchised African American communities.  Perhaps out of deference to the title of the exhibition Smith left these images out. I think this was a lost opportunity, especially with such a powerful range of images that coalesce to tell a story of Cincinnati.

This is a compelling show that left me contemplating many people, places and things. After experiencing these viewpoints I want to get behind the wheel and explore my world further.  Smith offers new perspectives on everyday life in our region.  This is fresh look at the world that we often dismiss as monotonous visual information while getting from point A to point B.  Smith engages us with an adventure to explore our surroundings and our city more closely revealing a world of kitsch, love and desire in the process.

–Brad McCombs

These extraordinary dimensional interpretations of landscape are particularly appropriate in expressing the forward thrust of every part of culture in China today. To wax poetic: like a blossom opening after a winter’s sleep. Those who appreciate the art of this ancient land, have always been aware of its pictorial language throughout its history. Art has been its means of expressing hope, praise, faith, appreciation of nature, and even occasional veiled criticism of alien political views. Landscapes, however, maintain a constant in Chinese art, a country which rivals our own in its diverse scenery. Like all landscapes, China’s is changing; raising skyscrapers, factories, and travel links to its far corners, in spite of which, the core of the nation’s traditional symbols remains: its turbulent waterways, seasons, clouds, flora and fauna can be found here energized through new eyes.

“Changing Landscapes” began in the 1950’s with the International Tapestry Biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland, through the support of two Frenchmen inspired by the hopes of a revival of tapestry art. The Biennale continued through 1992 promoting new ideas in fabric art with each show. When news of its demise reached Professor Lin Lecheng of Tsinghua University, he felt so strongly about continuing this artistic forward movement that he reorganized it, this time as the Beijing International Fiber Art Exhibition. From this “Changing Landscapes” was selected from the international artists featured, focusing on the Chinese contingent. This selection has proven to be a powerful statement in a comprehensive display of innovation.

Today’s China is change, well-illustrated by Ni Yuehong’s “Floating House”, a structure of raised fibers, adrift on your choice of hot, colored clouds or sea. Woven in classic wool Gobelen tapestry, its dark skewed beams rest tenuously on a fiery support: its fate beyond control. Another structure “The Old Dwelling” by Song Ye, is solidly anchored, showing a spacious, dreary dimension but little sign of human inhabitation. Between the two a world of time and changing custom are expressed.

Too many of these pieces are true traffic stoppers to mention them all. A dark-walled room lit strategically by spots of light, make the cradled half-moon shape, “The Memory of August” by Zhao Dandan , glow like a sculpture of diamonds. Its stunning appearance, due largely to the setting by Design Chief and Preparer, Martin Pleiss, denies its common elements of construction: those of translucent thread and stainless steel .

In the sculpture category, the two-piece “Washed Landscape” by Ren Guanghui stands like dwarfed trees, blackened at the square roots, delicately fading into gray, then white as it puts branches out at the top. Wood branches, closely wrapped in wool and formed into squares about 26” high, offer the beholder a variety of possibilities. They may be dead and withered, evil and strongly thrusting upward, or some beautiful flotsam left by tragedy. Whatever they are, their strength is undeniable.

Wrapping again pops up in disguise in “Wuxing (The Five Elements)” by Zhang Yizhuang. Paperboard is wrapped in colored fiber and formed into the Chinese characters for Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void, featuring a circle of the same wrapping colored as the element described above it. “Wuxing” is a dimensional wall hanging referring to traditional subject matter in a highly modern method of rendering.

More tradition hangs in several pieces featuring the wild waters of Chinese rivers and falls,notably “The Origin of the River” by Wang Kai. Two sets of floral pieces, embroidered using factory facilities, are dead ringers for contemporary paintings; “Dance of Rainbow Light” by Wen Lihua and “Aria of Autumn” by Tian Weiping. Just one solidly traditional Gobelen tapestry by Xu Wanru, combining the crane and landscape with fragile woven textures of brush strokes in scroll format, invokes our own Western idea of the old dynastic paintings.

Two three-dimensional works stand out so strongly as pure contemporary exhibits, that this writer felt compelled to set them aside in a class of their own. A set of three fabric chairs called “Role”, a collaboration by Xu Wen and Pang Qi, are arranged in a row. Brilliant plastic orange-y reds flame out from square backs and seats. Black plastic tubing coils beneath and supports them. The thought of actually sitting on them is repellent, for unexpected reasons. The fiery color predicts uncomfortable heat, while the square elements indicate waiting rooms, or other stressful places of seating. The whole effect is far from welcoming, yet fascinating.

The other, “Choice”, is an installation. All rounded shapes, (read: non-threatening) of natural vine and linen fiber, they hang vaguely connected and floating. The breath of visitors in their corner moves them. As people move about them, they move in reply.

The only threat implied is the size of the balls, and possibly some of the frizzy linen protuberances, but in general, this seems to be a friendly place, and much the opposite of “Role”. The picture of the artist in the catalog shows a sweet-faced young woman, Qiu Weili, who fits my personal reaction to “Choice” to a “T”.

Occupying the last two rooms of the exhibit is Maya Lin’s “Flow”. Her interest in exploring every facet of landscape as art is exemplified by her famous VietNam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin’s vision necessitates entering the landscape as a personal experience and her extensive research into every project makes each a personal sculpture for each participant. “Flow” occupies the room, undulating as any land does. In the next, the last, room are the boxes in which “Flow” was shipped to DAI. A video accompanies the wall of crates showing the steps required to setting it up, nearly more engrossing than, yet, somehow, more connecting to, the wooden landscape itself,

Leave your pre-conceptions behind. “Changing Landscapes” will do much to change views about Chinese art. It’s a lot more than paper fans and teapots.

–Fran Watson

Photo by Michael Everett

Admittedly, authenticity is a word I know well.  As a specialist at a local auction house, I am often asked to verify a work of art.  Usually, I consult a variety of resources and other experts who help to conclusively argue for or against the veracity of an object.  The most difficult items often get sent away to a consultant or academic for final verification.  Even still, not all rabbit trails end with irrefutable results.

But are authenticity and market value really the only quantifiable values worth giving to a work?  This question, I think, is central to the exhibition Faux Real:  A Forger’s Story at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.  The content and central premise of the show, which raises questions about value and reality, was indeed what first attracted me to it.  This exhibition recounts the story of a master forger, Mark Landis, who duped not just a handful of experts, but nearly fifty institutions into accepting his counterfeit copies.  Because Landis never sold or received monetary gain for any of the items, charges were never pressed.  His work runs the gamut from illustrations of 1920s ladies fashion and portraits by Picasso to cartoon drawings of Dr. Seuss characters and even conté crayon Old Master copies.  Although counterfeit copies, each is meticulously done in a beautiful way that retains an attention to detail and craft.

That attention to detail immediately caught my eye when I entered the space.  After wandering briefly around the gallery, I quickly realized that there seemed to be a very deliberate beginning and end to the exhibition, which allowed the narrative to unfold chronologically and thematically.   A small alcove to the immediate left is devoted to the biographies of Matthew C. Leininger, the registrar who uncovered the story, and the infamous Landis.  The main perimeter of the room features works by Landis, all copies of other artists’ works, which he passed off as his own.  A handful of these works sit next to strategically placed items, such as a Christie’s auction catalogue or a Sotheby’s invoice, which allude to their alleged authenticity.  A center wall displays other notable art counterfeiters, such as Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) and Eric Hebborn (1934-1996).  Towards the back right corner, a grid of snapshots depicts Landis in various poses.  The majority of the right half of the gallery is devoted to displaying and explaining the scientific strategies experts use to authenticate works of art.  A final wall highlights a recent prank done by Landis, commissioned by Maxim magazine.

Once I discovered this defined layout, I began to detect an underlying but pervasive educational or even redemptive tone.  The authentic, that which is real, genuine, and of undisputed origin — and absent from the show — is clearly given creditability over the forgeries presented.  This pointed reading locates forgery within a negative light. Rather than sparking a dialogue about the implications of the gifts, Landis’ actions, or the reality of authenticity, the subsidiary evidence and heavy use of didactic text present the facts to the viewer in a way that allows for limited interpretation.  Ultimately, it seems as if the exhibition is meant to inform and save the public from falling into similar traps.

This blunt message is problematic and restrictive, which asks the viewer to consider other avenues for understanding the intriguing content presented within the exhibition.  For example, one might consider Landis within the artist-trickster paradigm, a situation that places emphasis on the performance over the final product.   In fact, the exhibition touches on this notion of performance by including such artifacts as Father Arthur Scott’s — a recurrently used alias — coat and clerical collar as well as photographs of Landis dressed in disguise.  Unfortunately, as presented, the placement of the items serves as merely visual documentation.  However, I think this performative element is the most successful part of the exhibition, because it begins to delve deeper into motivation, the role of the art object within the narrative, and the boundaries between acting and reality.

Of the work itself, I am most intrigued by how each gift alters and indeed even questions and disrupts the value of a museum’s collection. Think of the — now well-known — Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A., which somewhat openly displays objects of questionable provenance.  By appropriating the language of the institution, the viewer at first glance believes in the legitimacy of the objects on view there.  However, the success is in its subversion of information – think of that second glance or moment of realization between truth and fiction.  But the museum retains this success because it never fully reveals its secrets.  There is never an a-ha moment, but instead that nagging sense of uncertainty.

Photo by Michael Everett

When I first heard about the Faux Real exhibition, I expected to see that type of slippage between real and supposedly real.  Especially given that Landis himself was rumored to appear at the opening.  In some uncanny but visceral way, I almost wanted to be duped or at least confused on some level.  Which brings me back to my original question about the relationship between authenticity and worth, even the notion of legitimacy itself.  Authenticity is a disposable term in a culture that verbally values genuineness and trust but in reality discards truth and sincerity.  We must reexamine the reality of authenticity to discover whether it is a valuable notion worth saving or instead something that must be redefined.

–Amanda Dalla Villa Adams

Amnéus’s office is tucked in a corner with one large window facing the room, a small appendage to the larger show. It is heaped with books, drawings and signs of a busy life. “My job is to be a steward for the collection, do research, and oversee purchases or donations,” says Amnéus. I work with our conservation department, but at the moment we don’t have a textile conservator on staff, and I’m not a professional textile conservator by any means. I do have a background in sewing and construction.”

The permanent collection is a combination of planning and serendipity: “Donations are certainly helter-skelter; purchases are a little more directed. I’m looking to fill gaps in the collections. For instance, we don’t have any early nineteenth century men’s wear, a time when men wore colorful and interesting clothes.” Examples of what is included are eighteenth century pieces, black men’s tailcoats, and some 1890’s ball gowns. “Essentially,” she adds, “We have dress from the late eighteenth century to the present day.” This includes women’s, men’s and children’s wear. “We have ethnic clothing – African costumes, Indian saris, Portugese garments, things from all over the world.” There is outer wear, nightwear, and underwear – whatever is worn on the body, including accessories such as shoes, hats, belts, parasols and handkerchiefs. All of this is kept in a temperature and humidity controlled environment monitored by the conservation staff. “I know what the atmosphere should feel like when I walk in, and if it is different, I immediately look it up.” In fact, the air feels moist in this area, and Amnéus says that textiles need the humidity, or they will dry out.

“When we renovated this space, we got a grant to buy compact storage. When we first got it ten to fifteen years ago, my colleagues were quite jealous. That was a huge undertaking – moving from the previous area.” However, it gave her a chance to see everything in the collection. This translates to a huge intellectual capital that Amnéus carries around in her brain when it comes time to fit pieces into shows. She adds, “I think this collection is somewhat comparable to the decorative arts collection in that it encompasses such a broad range of objects.

“One of the things I’m trying to do now is build our jewelry collection. This often ends up in decorative arts collections in museums. I don’t know a lot about jewelry, but I’m learning, and that’s what makes my job fun. There are a lot of gaps in the collection; our strength is really 1860’s to 1880’s, neoclassical, revival, Etruscan revival pieces, micro-mosaics – some really great things there. We do have objects on either end, but we don’t have a lot of great contemporary jewelry.” Part of the problem is that the collection has not been shown a lot, so people aren’t aware of it. People also tend to pass jewelry along to family or sell it instead of giving it to museums. “The Brooklyn Museum has a wonderful collection of jewelry,” she continues, “made by Art Smith (1917 – 1982), an African American jeweler working in New York. They are large-scale, beautiful sculptural pieces. I’m talking to them about bringing that exhibition here. They have his tools, sketches, the original shop sign, and photographs of models wearing the jewelry – the whole story.” The Brooklyn Museum had a show of Smith’s jewelry in 2008.

Amnéus is not aware of any prominent Cincinnati jewelers except perhaps the Whitehouse brothers. “We don’t have anything from them in the collection and don’t know a lot about them.” Whitehouse Brothers, started in 1898 by Joseph C. and William H. Whitehouse made platinum jewelry, and by the 1920’s was the largest firm of manufacturing jewelers in America. “There were silversmiths like Duhme & Co.” Duhme manufactured huge quantities of silver on the premises. Also, from the 1850’s on, there were the Kinseys, C. Oskamp and C. Hellebush.

What does Amnéus say to a person phoning her with clothing and accessories from, say, the 30’s and 40’s comprising objects that are of little historic interest? “That,” she laughs, “is the hardest part of my job. Saying ‘no’ to people is difficult, because many times these things carry a lot of sentimental value. What I try to do is explain, before I see anything, that we are very selective, and we are. What I’m trying to build is a good 20^th century collection. We have great 19^th century things, but once we hit the 1960’s, our collection is not as strong. We have a lot of ‘good’ dresses; we don’t need any more ‘good’ dresses; we need ‘great’ dresses.” When Amnéus looks at possible additions, she assesses a number of factors: condition; if it fits a gap in the collection; and finally she has to ask herself whether, given what is already in the collection, she would choose this piece to compliment it. If the answer is ‘no’, then there is no reason for her to take it. “It doesn’t serve the donor to have it sit in storage forever, and it doesn’t serve the museum. I will always suggest other places that they might consider donating things. Some people are not happy with my decision, but most people understand.” Deacquisitioning is another hard part of the job and a further reason to be selective up front. “It does happen, as over time the mission will change. For instance, Mary Meyer, curator of the costume wing at Cincinnati Art Museum (in the 1960’s), who had been head of the fashion design department at UC, wanted to encourage students to come to the museum to study objects. She took in a lot of things that were put in what was called a ‘study collection’. They were things of lesser quality that could be handled by students.” Valid at the time, the present goal precludes the collection of study objects, due to limitation of space, time and money. These are things that would be deacquisitioned. In that collection there was a group of 19^th century bodices, some of which had been stripped of trim, for research only. These are no longer appropriate to the collection.

“Too, focus can change with directors and curators, incremental changes. There is always that kind of massaging of the collection. Or we might have acquired 20 years ago a Pauline Trigère dress, and then we are given a better example, so we have to weigh the quality. It is a sensitive subject; we always notify families that this is happening. We might trade or transfer or even sell the piece at auction. In the latter case, we would credit the original donor with the funds to buy something new.”

Amnéus’s mother taught her to sew on an old Singer machine. “The first things my sister and I sewed were Barbie Doll clothes – very difficult in terms of size,” she laughs. “Both my degrees are in fine arts, but I’ve always had an interest in textiles, dress and fashion. My master’s is in fibers and textile, so that’s where my background comes from. There really aren’t a lot of programs out there, and for my generation there were even fewer. People from my generation come to this from all different areas, from studio art to fashion, sometimes through what used to be home economics and material culture. Some come through theatre and costume design. Through all that is the interest in fashion and, for me, an understanding of construction, which is important to what I do.”

Amnéus says that she can often attribute a dress to a specific designer by its cut and fabric, but not always. Balenciaga, Dior, Yves St. Laurent and others had their distinctive attributes. Halston is a favorite of hers. “Vionnet was the pioneer of the bias cut being draped on the body instead of flat patterning and was a definite influence on Halston. Halston was a genius – when I look at some of his things, I think: how would you conceive of constructing a dress like this? If you look at a sheath dress, the natural way to construct it would be to have shoulder seams and side seams, but he would take a single piece of fabric, cut it on the bias, and you have one diagonal seam that wraps the body and makes a sheath dress.”

Aménus has recently been to Dallas on business and got to see the Jean Paul Gaultier collection. “His work is unbelievable,” she says. “Galliano does some amazing things too. I also have a particular interest in some of the contemporary Japanese designers, more avant garde, and fascinating in terms of the work they are doing.”

Amnéus loves working with the objects and doing research. “When I moved from teaching at Xavier University to working at the museum, it was a tough decision, as I love teaching. I actually started here part time in 1991 and was the assistant to the previous curator, Otto Thieme, really the person who got this collection on the map with big exhibitions – Simply Stunning was the first one he did. When I started, we did With Grace and Favour, Victorian & Edwardian fashion in America. He became involved in The Costume Society of America, the professional organization for curators, educators, and theatre people. He bought a great many mannequins and convinced Millard Rogers, then the director, that we should for the first time actually purchase pieces. He filled a lot of important gaps, filled out the textile collection and was a great mentor for me.

Earlier research by Amnéus was focused on the work of dressmakers who worked in Cincinnati in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and resulted in the 2003 exhibition and book A Separate Sphere: Dressmakers in Cincinnati’s Golden Age, 1877–1922 (This publication won the 2004 Victorian Society of America Publication Award and was nominated for the Costume Society of America’s publication award.) She also curated the more recent Wedded Perfection: Two Centuries of Wedding Gowns, and authored the book by that title with Sara Long Butler and Katherine Jellison.

Of dressmaking in Cincinnati, Amnéus says A Separate Sphere “was a great exhibition to organize” as she discovered documents in the handwriting of Mary Meyer, Caroline Shine (curator after Meyer) and Otto Thieme comprising their research on the local dressmakers. In the 19^th and 20^th century, “these dressmakers were really stepping out of the box in terms of what they doing. In the 19^th century it was not proper for a woman to be working, so most of them operated out of their homes and got their business through word of mouth. The bolder ones had salons in buildings downtown. A very few advertised. In the census, however, their occupation would be listed as ‘housekeeper’. They were highly revered. Selena Cadwallader, for instance, worked in the 1880’s. One of the women from the Swift family went to Paris and had a reception gown made by Charles Frederick Worth. She brought home extra fabric and took it to Selena Cadwallader and had her make an evening bodice to get extra use from the skirt. The wealthiest women in town patronized these dressmakers.

“At the height of dressmaking in the 1890’s there were over 1,500 dressmakers in Cincinnati that I was able to chart. There were probably hundreds more – not seamstresses but dressmakers who were designing. Anna Dunlevy, one of my favorites, had a client who, as an unmarried woman came on the train from Huntington, WV (her father was a railroad magnate). She went on to marry a Texas rancher, and Anna Dunlevy made her wedding dress. She continued to take the train to New York or Washington, stopping on the way out to choose designs, and on the return trip for fittings; then the pieces would be shipped when done.”

Exhibitions, curated by Amnéus at The Cincinnati Art Museum are: 2012, Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth; 2011, Art Deco: Fashion and Design in the Jazz Age; 2010, Wedded Perfection: Two Centuries of Wedding Gowns; 2009, Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry; 2008, Co-Curated Long Time No See: Hidden Treasure; 2007, Masterpiece Quilts from the Shelburne Museum; 2007, Designed to Dazzle: Cincinnati Collects Tiffany Jewelry; 2007, Where Would You Wear That? The Mary Baskett Collection; 2006, Co-Curated Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum; 2005, Cat Chow; 2005, Hanten and Happi: Traditional Japanese Work Coats from the Sumi Collection; 2004, It’s About Time: Dressing through the Day; 2003, John Bartlett: Dreaming in Darkness; 2003, A Separate Sphere: Dressmakers in Cincinnati’s Golden Age, 1877-1922; 2000, Sleeping Beauty: Tapestries by Maud Rydin March; 1998, Spirit of the Cloth: African American Quilts; 1997, New Art 8: Beyond Form, Beyond Fashion and at Textile Museum, Washington, DC, Contemporary Japanese Fashion: The Mary Baskett Collection.

Publications include: 2012, “A Method for Mounting Costume Using Fosshape” forthcoming in Journal for the American Institute of Conservation, co-authored with Marla Miles; 2010, Wedded Perfection: Two Centuries of Wedding Gowns, Exhibition catalog (Nominated for 2010 Millia Davenport publication award from the Costume Society of America); 2010, “The Willard Family Portrait” in Adornment: The Journal for the American Society of Jewelry Historians; 2010, “Fashion Designers, Seamstresses, and Tailors” in Volume 3 Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion; 2006, “The Art of Ornamental Hairwork” in Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum; 2003, John Bartlett: Dreaming in Darkness (exhibition catalog); 2003, A Separate Sphere: Dressmakers in Cincinnati’s Golden Age, 1877-1922, Exhibition catalog, (awarded 2004 Ruth Emery publication award from The Victorian Society in America and nominated for 2004 Millia Davenport publication award from the Costume Society of America).

Amnéus is a member of the Costume Society of America, the Textile Society of America, and the American Society of Jewelry Historians.

–Cynthia Osborne Hoskin

Medieval manuscript depicting God as the Geometer.

“You cannot conceive the many without the one.”

-Plato

Since this is my first article pertaining to the design field, it may aide the reader to know how to distinguish art from design.  Design in essence cannot be accomplished without specific degrees of control, and almost always has a definitive point to make. How well the ‘point’ can be made is attributed to how well the design was carried out. This cannot be said about art. Art can be about anything or nothing at all, which makes design a subdivision of art. In this respect design can be seen as separate from other art forms, in that there is a singular goal in the mind of the designer. In order to understand any art form at its core, the viewer must understand visual acoustics on an elementary level. The level I have chosen to start with is numbers and their relationships with each other through geometry and proportion. Design cannot be truly understood without attaining this knowledge. Not only is this the basis for every art form, but it is also the architecture of the natural world. Also to aide the reader, I will be referencing specific visual instances where the number or geometry in question can be better understood.

As stated in my previous article ‘Design Intervention’, the goal of these next few articles will be dedicated specifically to understanding our numerical system through the process of sacred geometry. I will be breaking down each of the single digit numbers from 1-9, and end with zero. Of course, if we are talking about numbers, the best place to start is technically zero, but I think saving the best for last is appropriate for this kind of approach.

As for the number one, what can be said that isn’t already common knowledge? It implies wholeness, singularity, but at the same time, unity. In this manner, one is unique. It is the only number that appears to be all by itself. Mathematically speaking, it is the beginning of the numerical sequence, which seeks its end at 9, and its resurrection at 10 (which is again zero, but we’ll get to that in the article on zero). The problem with one is that it is difficult to grasp with any material sensuality. What is a singular thing? Are there any singular things? Even when we attempt to conceive of something that appears as singular, our minds find a way to divide it into infinity.

Imagine, for example, a small black marble. At first we might think we are imagining a singular object, but the mind is not fooled. We know that inside this object are countless atoms forged together in beautiful synchronicity. We also know that this marble must be within an environment, and cannot exist in a vacuum. The placement of the environment alone would destroy any notion of singularity. How can we visualize what one really is? According to our modern view of dimensionality, one symbolizes the ‘point’, which is arguably dimensionless. What does the point symbolize? Time, and thusly space since they are both relative. The very root of our physical existence is the perception of time.  This has been long argued, and even Stephen Hawking at one point got this wrong (although he eventually attributed the point to time). Time is technically where dimensionality takes its form on the material plane, and this is why time and space are indeed relative. It is the cosmic glue that binds all of creation into singularity. This might be why we have such difficulty gathering a mental picture of what ‘one’ looks like. It’s more of an idea or thought than any one object can possibly be. Let us again suppose that we absolutely had to attach a shape to the number one. What would it be?

This brings us to the circle. As simple as many people think the circle may be, it has always been shrouded in great mystery. Even the ancient philosophers knew that the circle (or sphere in the third dimension) contained within it, all subsequent shapes and forms. They referred to the one by many names such as The Seed, The Foundation, The Truth, and many others. To them it was, and still is, the womb of all creation. Even the word universe means “one turn” in Latin referencing the circle. Before my experience, described in the previous article, I never gave the circle much thought. I was always taught in school that a circle is the way it is, just because. As a graphic designer, I never really took the time to admire its precision, its elegance. Deep down I always knew there was something about the circle that was timeless, since its importance in art and design has always been present (See images embedded in the article). Nature seems to have a way of hiding these things in plain sight until its viewer is ready. Most writers would attribute this to dramatic irony.

To construct a perfect circle, we might attempt to draw it freehand as the great Florentine painter Giotto once did, or we could simply use a compass. I would advise the later. I would also advise anyone who hasn’t handled a compass recently, to pick one up at once and start experimenting with it. This device, coupled with the straight edge, have a way of literally prying open the human mind to certain truths that would otherwise go unnoticed. I cannot express how important participation is in this exercise.

So now that we have our perfect circle in front of us, let us examine its perfection. It expands outward from the central ‘nowhere’ of its dimensionless middle point (expressed by the point of the compass) towards the infinity of its equilateral circumference. There are no sides, and thus no place for the eye to rest. Forever in motion, yet motionless. Its radius and circumference are never measurable at the same time due to the ever elusive transcendental value know simply as “Pi”, or 3.1415926…As you open your compass to create the circle, realize that you are repeating the first principle of creation, the opening of light/space/time and power in all directions. It’s a very powerful experience when you stop and think about it. I always think of the Biblical command “Let there be Light.” Or you may think of the dimensionless Brahma of Hindu mythology speaking the word Aham or “I Am”. In essence, the circle represents that part of ourselves that we know to be infinite, our spirit.

Let us take into consideration how the number one reacts in certain mathematical arenas. Anytime another number is multiplied by unity it remains itself (4 X 1 =4). The same can be said for any number dividing itself by unity (6 / 1 = 6). This means that the one preserves the identity of all that it encounters. It is a silent force, supporting all that is: the common denominator of the universe. When allowed to ‘breath’ in of itself, all subsequent numbers are created (111111111 X 111111111 = 12345678987654321). The one in addition to itself is said to be responsible for duality (1 + 1 = 2). I will talk more about this in my article on the number two.

There is much more on this subject that I cannot explain in such a short segment of writing, but hopefully I captured your interest for at least a brief moment. For those of you in whom I have sparked an interest, I will conclude with a list of suggested reading. However, please note that once you are taken down this path of enlightenment you can never see the world the same again, or so it would seem.

Suggested Reading List:

“The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life: Vol 1 & 2” by Drunvalo Melchizedek

“A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe” by Michael S. Schneider

“The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean” by Doreal

–Dustin Pike

Team Building (Align), 2010, Type A, American, founded 1998, courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Spring is a time to enjoy the outdoors, and for this, one of the heartland’s leading cultural institutions, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), is a destination. Even if you never enter the museum itself, it’s worth the trip.

In 2010, the IMA opened their 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. 100 Acres is characterized by the water that runs through and around it—a human-made canal and lake, and the White River, which is a tributary of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The land itself has undergone significant changes. It was cleared for agricultural use in the 1900s, and was converted to a quarry for gravel excavation decades later. The site served the construction of many of the region’s highways. The company that operated the quarry—Huber, Hunt and Nichols—donated the land to the IMA in 1972. Planning to develop the land into park space started back in the 1980s when the IMA’s Horticultural Society contracted the firm Sasaki Associates to develop a Master Plan. In 2010, the park finally opened and it now also serves as an extension of the museum as a space for contemporary art.

In 2002, Lisa Freiman, Ph.D., joined the IMA as senior curator and chair of the museum’s contemporary art department. Her primary role at that time was to oversee the renovation of the contemporary galleries and breathe new life into the collection and the contemporary art exhibition program. When the galleries reopened in 2005, space had doubled to 25,000 square feet. Freiman has since realized commissions by artists including Robert Irwin, Kay Rosen, Tony Feher, Orly Genger, Julianne Swartz, and Ghada Amer, and curated numerous exhibitions of works by international contemporary artists including Amy Cutler, Ingrid Calame, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ernesto Neto, and Tara Donovan. Then there is Freiman’s curatorial vision for 100 Acres. In addition to raising the IMA’s profile within the contemporary art world through influential commissions and exhibitions within the walls of the museum, Freiman is blazing trails through her work with the park.

As project partners were considering how to design the 100 Acres visitor experience, they decided to explore the relationship between those things that were natural to the environment and those that were introduced. In that process, they removed all the invasive plant species, planted species native to the area, and then developed a series of pedestrian paths that the IMA calls Landscape Journeys. The Landscape Journeys wind around the marsh, lake and meadow and lead visitors to discover 10 different large-scale works of contemporary art.

Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion, courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

100 Acres might be described as a sculpture park, but what that traditionally means is there are works of sculpture placed around the park space. What’s different about 100 Acres is that Freiman handpicked these artists to create something inspired by the site. She calls the work interventions. In a 2010 interview with artinfo.com, Freiman said she was inspired by projects like the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, as well as by the Diane Shamash’s “Watershed” project in the Hudson River Valley. She was drawn to the idea of letting the artists engage with the site, and really giving them the freedom to do what they want to do. Freiman clearly represents a very well established encyclopedic museum, and the response from peers to her concept for the park was that it was somehow meant to be an institutional critique. When in reality she was just finding her answer to a critical question posed by Ned Rifkin, one of her advisory board members at the time, “What is a 21^st-century sculpture park?”

100 Acres includes works by Kendall Buster, the Havana-based art collective Los Carpinteros, Jeppe Hein, Alfredo Jaar, Tea Mäkipää, the artist collective Type A, studio group Atelier Van Lieshout, Andrea Zittel, Mary Miss and the Swedish architecture duo visiondivision. What’s beautiful about the way people interact with the work is that those experiences are completely unique to each person.

Take Jeppe Hein’s Bench Around the Lake (2010), for example. The 15 benches positioned around the park were designed to be one bench that emerges, twists and turns, and then disappears into the ground. I found couples sitting, admiring the view of the lake. There were people taking pictures of the benches without interacting physically with them at all. There were also children who were climbing and playing, treating them like a slide or piece of playground equipment.

Funky Bones, 2010, Atelier Van Lieshout, Dutch, founded 1995, courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

The same thing can be said for the piece by the Rotterdam-based multidisciplinary company and studio group, Atelier Van Lieshout. Funky Bones (2010) is made from 20 fiberglass benches. On the top of each piece, from a distance, you see evidence of black lines and shapes. It’s difficult to see exactly what all the pieces together create. So instinctually, people walk around and through the various pieces. They climb on top and jump from one to the other. Once you get more of an aerial view you see that it’s a large stylized human skeleton. These little discoveries reinforce the idea that exploring the park is a journey—through the surprises that you find along the way, you’re able engage with the site in new ways.

The piece by artist collective Type A called Team Building (Align) (2010) consists of two incredibly large metal rings, 30-feet across, suspended in the air. The rings are meant to represent the complexity of collaboration. The shadows cast by the rings become perfectly aligned during the summer solstice. What’s particularly striking about the rings is that they look at home in the clearing of trees where they hang, but at the same time the scene itself feels like something from another dimension because it’s just so unusual. It’s really fascinating.

Eden II, 2010, Tea Mäkipää, Finnish, b. 1973, courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Other works add to this sense of otherness—works like Tea Mäkipää’s Eden II (2010). Eden II consists of a large ship emerging from the 100 Acres lake. There is a guard house on the shore nearby. The museum says it’s meant to be a modern ark seemingly filled with human passengers who have been displaced by the rising sea levels caused by climate change. Peering into the guard house windows you see surveillance equipment, a coffee maker and other office supplies. There is a loud speaker that calls out to the ship. The ship itself looks somewhat ragtag, and the audio can be heard elsewhere in the park so the piece has an imposing kind of presence. It seems to mystify visitors in an interesting way.

In addition to the art that visitors can discover, the Landscape Journeys also meander back to the gorgeous Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion. Designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects, the museum says the Visitors Pavilion takes inspiration from the structure and geometry of a fallen, folded leaf. It beautifully emerges from the environment and provides visitors with restrooms and the opportunity to sit or take cover from any weather. Being on a floodplain, the architects had to figure out a way to elevate the structure. This required some creative engineering, but the effect is seamless when approaching the pavilion.

One of the most striking features is the large slatted sunshade that extends off the side of the pavilion. Walking underneath it offers the same experience you get walking along the path through the woods—the light naturally filters down like it does through the leaves and branches of the surrounding trees. The light feeds into the interior spaces as well through floor-to-ceiling windows, and there are meeting rooms that make the space perfect for private events or corporate retreats.

The 100 Acres experience is a beautiful one, for communion with nature, for the unique discoveries that can be experienced alone or shared with others, for the incredible artwork that can be enjoyed on so many levels. Freiman and the IMA have done an extraordinary job trying to define what the sculpture park of the 21^st century should be, but it will change as the landscape itself will grow and change. The museum intends to commission a new work each year so that the park will continue to be enriched by these wonderful interventions. It’s a great asset to the Midwest and the perfect destination for that spring road trip.

Indianapolis Museum of Art, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis | 317-923-1331

–Laura Partridge

Mark Daly Tyler Davidson, Fountain Square (Looking East on 5th) Cincinnati Oil on Board 16 x 12 inches Signed Lower Left

Mark Daly’s engaging paintings line every wall at Cincinnati Art Galleries, treating of pleasurable aspects of life at the seaside, in New York City, on Nantucket, and points as far away as Venice. The show’s subtitle, “The Musician’s Paintbrush,” refers to Daly’s playing a mean mandolin, sometimes on Fountain Square, but overlooks his ongoing business career. At one time with Procter & Gamble, he now has his own firm. In our era of specialization, it’s refreshing to come across someone who ignores barriers.

The hanging at Cincinnati Art Galleries wisely mixes up the artist’s various subjects, but the Nantucket paintings can be picked out from a distance as he has caught so exactly the particular light of that island. Daly is good on light; Manhattan is an island, too, but in the deep canons between buildings light is not the same as on green Nantucket. Sanibel Island and the Florida coast, also represented here, are individual as well. Daly’s Venice is a city in the rain, water compounding above and below. “California Coast, Point Lobos,” has heavy grays and a brown foreground in a different light from anything else in the show.

The works are dated on the back, I was told, and all are from the last two to three years but Daly seems to present a time frame of his own making. The Tyler Davidson Fountain in its current location doesn’t lend itself to his interpretation, so he worked from vintage photographs for the several depictions in this show. Another group of works shows Amish life in northern Indiana, again an anomaly in today’s world. The Delta Queen, now permanently docked and made into a hotel in Chattanooga, in Daly’s painting forges up river, gang plank in the lead, as it used to do. His Fifth Avenue, as flag-hung as anything from Childe Hassam, appears to have no building dating later than Hassam’s time.

Before he was a painter Daly was a collector, focused on 19^th and early 20^th century American art, and he seems not to have left that world. References in his works to artists like Hassam, Edward Potthast, John Henry Twachtman are so clear they become homage rather than borrowings.

Some of Daly’s work is distinguished by strong brush strokes in thick paint, but certain circumstances bring out different approaches. He has developed an effective and beguiling means of showing falling snow that I’ve not seen before. Thread-like white lines form a network across the painting, and presto! a gentle snowfall is underway. Mean winds, biting cold, or wet feet play no part at all in this invocation. “Rainy Day, Tremont Square, Boston” is equally appealing in presenting the good side of bad weather, in nice blocks of grays and whites.

Daly’s strong brush strokes and thick paint appear in an added dimension in one of my favorite paintings in the show: “Nellie (Long Island Scallop Boat) Mystic Seaport.”  The paint is thicker, the strokes broader and curve in a manner not seen elsewhere; texture takes over as the painting’s reason for being. It’s a simple painting, a white boat in profile, low horizon line, blue sky and bluer sea, but that sky and sea and boat are all carried out in strokes that incorporate blues and pinks and bits of red, touches of yellow. In a nice juxtaposition, it hangs next to a Venetian sunset (“Sunset Gondola, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice”), familiar buildings silhouetted against a sky of mingled reds and yellows, gondola in the foreground lagoon, all carried out in the thinnest paint for the smoothest surface seen in the show.

Daly’s work speaks to the good life, observed with visual pleasure. His show may be seen through April 28 at Cincinnati Art Galleries, 225 East Sixth Street in downtown Cincinnati, open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

–Jane Drrell

Alibis is a series of essays in which Aciman reflects upon his statelessness.  Although now an American citizen, he is unable to actually live in America, as his longing for Alexandria is so great; when, however he returns to Rome with his new family, and looks for anything in his old neighborhood that might serve as the Proustian madeleine, he finds himself intellectually and visually frozen, and feels as if he never lived there at all.  The same phenomena happened to him in another book of essays when he finally returns to Alexandria.  Although we might cheapen these experiences and lack of affects into a kind of emotional dissociation, the human mind is far cleverer than that, and Aciman presents himself in Alibis as a latter day Marcel Proust.  Proust’s masterpiece, usually translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is much more accurately as In Search of Lost Time (A Le Rechechere de Tempes Perdu).

The sense of living in permanent exile regardless of actual home address and passport, is a new type of literature, which we might call exile literature; one of its most famous practitioners is Salmon Rushdie; others include Karen Disai, Monica Ali, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  But the author who may be said to have invented the genre is Marcel Proust.  Alibis, which shows us how complexly Aciman may invent narratives of his past where none existed, begins to penetrate Proust’s ideas of time and of one’s self in time and space.  Those are the Alibis of the title.  Neither Proust nor Aciman is able to live in the present, nor does either wish to; they both live in the past somewhat of their own invention, and their ability to sift beauty and experience from the past is to make the present and the future all of the same tense as the past.  This immensely complex system could be called neurotic, or it could be called genius.  Aciman explains that the reason for the extraordinary lengths of Proust’s sentences is his way of integrating past, present, and future all at once, and next time you may be in the mood to pick up Proust, you will find that, indeed, Aciman has stumbled on to Proust’s primary troupe about time.

Eventually, Aciman adjusts to his internal need to loop through and around time in the Proustian manner for him to enjoy any current experience, particularly when he travels.  In other words he can only enjoy New York while thinking about Alexandria, and can only enjoy Alexandria by remembering his longing for it in Rome and New York.  It makes for fascinating literature and a total change of the very point and essence of time, indicating ways of redefining it to suit multiple, complex and deeply felt hurts, and to abreact them through the redemptive act of writing.

–Daniel Brown

I am really particular about what I choose to post, and I thoroughly investigate the artists’ work to avoid the ‘flash in the pan.’ New Baroque focuses on artist such as Aurora Childs, whose work I have watched change over many years.  Childs works with sculpture, installation, and performance to create an overwhelming, nostalgic experience for her audiences.  Working with a range of materials including feathers, glass, ceramic, and even her own voice, Childs provokes emotional reactions and makes the viewers consider their relationship to these materials.

I just finished curating a New Baroque exhibition entitled Conditional Reality. The nature of the blog creates a disjointed relationship between the viewer and the work, so I wanted to present the artists who have been featured on New Baroque to provide my audience with an intimate view of the work from the blog.  The exhibition not only created connections between the viewer and the work, but it also highlighted the baroque nature of the art through the location.  Griffin’s Modern Motel is an old mansion in downtown Lexington that boasts details that are perfect to create a Baroque atmosphere.  The Baroque was about drama, detail, and grandeur, and I felt that the nooks and crannies and the elaborate detailing on this late Victorian mansion presented that, while adding to the experience of the exhibition.

Fashion has also found its way onto New Baroque, creating more of a cultural experience rather than simply an art experience.  Fashion has had an increasingly important role in the arts lately, and some designers seem to be making art more than clothing. We see this with Alexander McQueen who draws our attention to form, line, and the silhouette. I am also featuring up and coming designers such as Creatures Of The Wind, whose whimsical creations are almost over stimulating but keep us grounded with their intricate designs and their extravagant textures and colors.  I am very interested in Haans Nicholas Mott at the moment because his hand-made creations are akin to a conceptual art project. Mott is very particular about who buys his clothing and how the articles are documented; I hope to have images for New Baroque soon.

With New Baroque, I am interested in actively engaging the community as opposed to blogs that passively post photographs of artists’ work. For example, I am holding a competition for local writers, both in Academia and out, to write a review of the first exhibition.  The winner of this competition will have their review of the exhibition on New Baroque.

As for the future of New Baroque, I am interested in curating group and solo exhibitions through collaborations with established galleries. I am looking at the Land of Tomorrow as well as a few other spaces to hold future New Baroque exhibitions.  Finding ways of bringing the community into the picture through exhibitions and competitions is also on my agenda.  More than anything however, New Baroque will serve as a platform for discovering artists, such as Aurora Childs, Ming Ying Hong, Clint Colburn, and writer Robert Weickel, who have not had the chance to be seen by a greater audience.

–Aaron Michael Skolnick