ArtSeen
VIVIEN BITTENCOURT
In the Arms of Time
By Ron Horning
When you walked into the gallery—light, low, and airy—the first thing you saw were large color prints of Doric temples at once warring Sicilian towns, the single photo of the temple at Segesta made at a distance.
JOSEF ALBERS in America: Painting on Paper
By Charles SchultzJosef Albers in America, yes, but also America in Josef Albers. Work the ratio: how much America was in the German when he arrived here in 1933?
CHARLES LONG Pet Sounds
By Desiree GonzalezIt is a sunny day, 82 degrees, just a few clouds in the sky. I enter the park from the southwest corner, brush by the hordes chattering and eating Shake Shack burgers at aluminum tables, walk past the fountain, and pause at the entrance to Charles Long’s installation.
JEAN-BAPTISTE-SIMÉON CHARDIN “Chardin’s Visor”
By John ElderfieldThis two-part note concerns the pastel of 1775 by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), acquired by the Musée du Louvre in 1839, and alternatively known as “Self-Portrait”and “Portrait of Chardin Wearing an Eyeshade.”
Some Shorter Lines for MARTIN PURYEAR
By David Levi StraussA few months ago, Martin Puryear asked me to write an essay for a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of his new work at McKee Gallery (May 3 - June 29, 2012). When I went to Martin’s studio to see the sculptures that would appear in the show, the wheels immediately began to turn, and I knew that I could write the essay.
Paving Paradise Part II
By James KalmIn part I of “Paving Paradise” I started to discuss the results of some of the research I’ve been conducting for a large painting diagramming the history of the East Village art scene. Patterns of circumstances began to leap out at me with regards to the current situation in burgeoning Bushwick.
CHRISTOPHER KURTZ Longhand
By Robert C. MorganChristopher Kurtz is a sculptor who works in wood. His work moves between natural winding branches and pointed stick-like forms. Either way, his approach to sculpture is a classical one. It contains a will to order, one that is less about power than balance.
ALEXIS MYRE Orchid Petal and Small Twig of the Upper Hemisphere: “Ojo de Dios”
By Anne WaldmanAlexis Myre builds a box of light with flowers, other natural objects, fragile and tenacious, and metaphors and correspondences. Alexis Myre begins “using a compass” to master a world within. What plays out in the Orchid theatre? Am I her Situationist? Her poet? We will see.
A Panorama Considered as a Conversation (or the Other Way Around)
By Carter RatcliffFloating in this blue panorama are forms that look like chunks of limestone, though some look more like clouds hit hard by sunlight. Of course, this is just a first impression. The second impression is of forms that are neither clouds nor stones but unique to this setting and, for all their differences, united by a family resemblance.
EUGEN SCHÖNEBECK, “Saxon Landscape” (1964)
Eugen Schönebeck 1957 – 1967
By Robert Storr
“Sausage clouds” were the first words out of my mouth—to the apparent dismay of the artist whose drawing I was looking at. I couldn’t help myself.
Seeing Blindness
NICOLAS POUSSIN, “Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun”
By David Carrier
A blind man might write an interesting treatise on visual aesthetics: he could explain that painters depict still-life objects, historical events, landscapes and whatever else may be seen. He could tell us that some 20th-century artists created paintings with no depicted subject.
NICOLAS POUSSIN, “The Abduction of the Sabine Women,” (1633-34)
By Nathlie ProvostyThe actors have forgotten. One of the women has forgotten her real name and maybe the rest of them have lost their’s too, as has he, and his friends.
JANET CARDIFF and GEORGE BURES MILLER The Murder of Crows
By Kara L. RooneyThe history of the drill hall carries its own weight. The history of the unconscious similarly traces a lineage of effects waged by war: community, a sense of connection forged in darkness, the flicker of nightmare and equal parts light, at times visual and at others purely aural, haunting, familiar, elusive, as if existing just beyond the boundaries of the physical world.
MARSDEN HARTLEY Soliloquy in Dogtown
By Vincent Katzclouds over land / land filled form / flows floods scratches / Boulder and Brake
The Nobody in a Field of Abstraction
OTTO DIX, “Wounded Solider”
By Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
There is meat in this face, an explosion of vivid abstraction. Meat is the nobody; the abstracting of the once lived. In war, soldiers who are sent to the front of the battle to distract are called “meat shields.”
On the Drawing Cases at Musée Gustave-Moreau, Paris
By Jarrett Earnest“I dreamed of breaking into it at night with a lantern,” wrote André Breton of the Musée Gustave-Moreau, which to this day remains as the Symbolist painter designed it in 1896. Moving up the narrow stair, past the apartment areas preserved with their original decor, one enters a two-storey atelier.
“The Poetics of Wattage, after Alighiero e Boetti”
ALIGHIERO BOETTI Game Plan
By Raphael Rubinstein
Once a year this poem / will be temporarily transformed / from a self-descriptive exercise / written in the plainest language / into something altogether different
TAUBA AUERBACH, “How to Spell the Alphabet”
Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language
By Diana Seo Hyung Lee
Tauba Auerbach’s “How to Spell the Alphabet” is an ink and pencil drawing on pale pink paper. It is 30 inches tall and 22 inches wide. Completed in 2005, the drawing is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in the Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language exhibition.
Standing Still and Walking in Kassel
dOCUMENTA (13)
By Terry R. Myers
No way was I anticipating coming to the conclusion that dOCUMENTA (13) is a triumph. I arrived a cynic and left a skeptic, and a joyful one at that.
On MICHAEL BERRYHILL’s “Sensitive Parlour Ghost”
Incidental Western
By Phong Bui
Possessed by certain homeostatic eccentricities, / She prefers to avoid definite lines that / Trace the body, especially in sunlight.
Put Neon, Bright Light
JAMES TURRELL, “Milk Run”
By Jeff Sanford
What we really want is nice places to hang out—pool halls, swimming pools, pools of light in a museum. I liked it so much I puddled; what glows captivates. Who sleeps, eats. It splashes arbitrarily on its surroundings.
RAOUL DE KEYSER To Walk
The tranquil ambiguity of an intriguing line appears punctuated by speculative moments. At least, that is what I hope to encounter. Concise yet inconclusive, these moments do in fact occur, again and again.
ANDRÉ BRETON, PAUL ÉLUARD & SUSANNE MUZARD: 33 Collages
By Valery OisteanuOnce upon an avant-garde time, three poet-artists collaborated on a one-of-a-kind artists’ book of 33 photomontages done in the spirit of the cadavre exquis. Together they discovered a completely new yet universal language of sexual symbols, radical juxtapositions, the sublime, and the grotesque.
