The Cooper Union Review

Performances, screenings, & closing receptions this Saturday!

2009-05-08T19:26:00.000-04:00

SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2009

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FUN FLU : Performance Art class event

10am – 10pm:
Abigail Nedelka, 7th floor lobby
Cassandra Xin Guan, 2nd floor hallway
Dmitri Hertz, 8th floor Peter Cooper Suite

1pm – 10pm:
Laura Miller, 8th floor Peter Cooper Suite

2pm – 2:10pm:
Devin Kenny, room 715

4pm – 4:30pm:
Christhian Diaz, 1st floor lobby

7pm – 10pm:
RECEPTION in Peter Cooper Suite with performances by Christhian Diaz, Amy Reid, Eliza Winston, Feliz Solomon, Katya Tepper, Alex DeCarli, Kelly Zutrau, and Sam Ashford.

(times are approximate.)

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Noelle Raffaele : ANIMARE - CLOSING RECEPTION & SCREENING
Great Hall Gallery
6pm

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Emani Heers & Sam Vernon : How Ghosts Sleep - CLOSING RECEPTION

6th Floor Lobby

6pm

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Cooper Union Foundation Building

7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

Sonia Finley, “No Place, Here” 2nd Floor Lobby

2009-05-06T17:35:00.001-04:00

Notes:

The audience in Sonia’s video projection, “Room 715F,” can enter and leave as they want. This is the open invitation of this exhibition, too, as Sonia says in her wall text, “stay for a long time or a short time, or leave and then return later.”

In her video, Sonia and Christian interact in a room with or without an audience. It looks as though they are seeking an entrance into one another. The quality of the video obscures specifics so that at times the two bodies make a single form. But the impossibility of what they are trying to do asserts itself, and they have to separate.

We are invited to sit and read her book “No Place, Here,” which includes photographs and text. The large spandex lumps that we’re encouraged to sit on are made from the same materials and correspond to the forms recorded in her photographs. These forms are bodily and speak to skin, folds, torsos, and backbones. Although made of cheap, flashy material, the forms are transformed by the seductive quality of the photographs.

The show discusses “here,” the experience of being in this place (the gallery) at this moment. The photographs demonstrate bodily forms occupying space, and her book addresses this question directly, asking a viewer (of something) “What was it like to enter this space?”

A miniature silicone version of the lump form rests on the arm of a small white topless box that is installed on the wall of the lobby. How does it interact with its space? Why does it stay outside of it? The tone of this piece feels slightly different, but related.

Three of Sonia’s photographs are placed on the main gallery wall, but pushed to the far left side. The show is careful to leave enough space for the viewer and this wall, usually the main gallery space for artists using the 2nd floor lobby, is left open.

Henry

Postcards 5-5

2009-05-05T23:40:00.003-04:00

Sonia Finley : No Place, Here
2nd Floor Lobby

Noelle Raffaele : ANIMARE
Great Hall Gallery

Emani Heers & Sam Vernon : How Ghosts Sleep
6th Floor Lobby

Abigail Nedelka : Extrospection
7th Floor Lobby

GO DEEP closing screening

2009-04-30T18:43:00.001-04:00

Just letting everybody know that we are having a closing screening on Friday at 7, after which we can all watch a feature film together. I think the second floor is having a closing reception, as well.

Keep deep,

Feliz

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“Each Other,” Andrew Francis and Rina Goldfield on the 7th Floor

2009-04-29T21:15:00.002-04:00

Notes:

1. This show suggests rupture with punctures, cracks, volcanic eruptions, and the dislocation of body parts. But because the pieces are built around rupture, or because rupture is incorporated into a piece from the beginning, it is used as a strategy of construction.

2. Rina uses staples, thread, or in the case of the volcano paintings, beautiful varnish to “repair” rupture. These decisions, except for the varnish, allow or force the images to be objects. These function as solutions to a problem posed in paint.

3. Andrew’s bather sets up a moment of realization when the viewer first sees that the body parts don’t, in a sense, belong to one another. Each body chunk—two hands, two knees, and a head/torso piece—float separately in the confined space of the tub.

4. The bather piece is made up of poetic moments, some planned and others unplanned by design. The slight shifting in water of the body parts-as-islands. The porcelain tub. The chin touching the chest.

5. The texture of the paper becomes incredibly important in Rina’s crumpled drawings. Could the drawings have worked with less other information? And I also wonder that about the piece made by two identically sized panels separated slightly. The folds embedded in the lightly treated canvas have much to say. Did the piece need more information?

Henry

Postcards 4-28

2009-04-28T15:31:00.003-04:00

6th Floor Lobby

7th Floor Lobby

Houghton Gallery

2nd Floor Lobby

Exhibitions in the School of Art, April 28 - May 2, 2009

2009-04-28T10:28:00.000-04:00

Opening Tuesday, April 28, 6 - 8pm:

On view April 28 - May 2, 2009

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Dan Catucci, Ryan Andrews & Kalen Mendenhall : Uranus
Houghton Gallery

Dana Miller : And Everything In-Between
2nd Floor Lobby

Michael Bostock & Feliz Solomon : Go Deep

6th Floor Lobby

Andrew Francis & Rina Goldfield : Each Other

7th Floor Lobby

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Exhibition hours:

Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 6pm.

Cooper Union Foundation Building

7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

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Re: Bodies and Pleasures, Lucy Kirkman on the 7th Floo r Lobby

2009-04-22T20:19:00.000-04:00

Lucy Kirkman's small paintings of nudes—warm, delicate, and sensual—
capture a sense of simple comfort. Henry finds this simplicity lacking,
and looks for the pain that inevitably attends pleasure. I think,
however, this simplicity represents an act of bravery. These pieces
epitomize a lot that is uncool at art school: they are figurative
paintings; they are small, precious objects; they celebrate comfort over
criticality. Given their context, these paintings become fierce, speaking
up for joy and loveliness in a place where few others will.

Rather than directly critique our misogynist culture, Lucy offers an
alternative. She rejects the self-laceration so common in "feminist"
self-portraiture. She instead revels in the beauty of the female body and
reveals her own self-confidence. This confidence is rare among women. The
fact that Lucy's paintings lack the pain we associate with self-image thus
becomes the source of their poignancy. An image woman at peace with her
own body is a rare gem, worthy as a message of hope.

Rina

“Bodies and Pleasures,” Lucy Kirkman on the 7th Floor Lobby

2009-04-22T15:02:00.004-04:00

The 7^th floor exhibition, consisting mostly of paintings, but also housing several small sculptures and a painting/projection, is in praise of, or in pursuit of, pleasure. The title says this plainly, but without it the work would still hover around an interest in the delightful. I’m wondering what kind of pleasure this is. Lucy’s dozen golden eggs sculpture gives the hint that this is a pleasure in the everyday. And for me, the most effective pieces in the show—five small paintings showing the artist’s nude or mostly nude body from the perspective of the artist either in the bathtub or in bed, with housecat or not—dwell in this space of commonplace luxury.

These small paintings are worth taking a look at: Lucy has composed images where the viewer’s perspective is that of the artist’s, seeing her own body lying down. This is an effective strategy, if not an overt connection to a tradition of comments on viewing the female nude. If Manet's Olympia acknowledges your gaze, and returns it, in these paintings we are asked to hold the same gaze—in effect, to empathize with it. This is a subtle but powerful move.

In Lucy’s painting/projection, a painted imitation of the figure from the Andrew Wyeth painting, “Christina’s World”, is overlaid by a projection of slides showing different works from art history. So, Christina’s worlds change. This is perhaps a related gesture as the paintings, but more overt at the expense of something (the empathy?) that makes the paintings intriguing. Christina flies through a world of different paintings, but this is a trip I didn’t want to take with her.

I am not so sure if the work depends entirely on a revised feminist agenda. Probably it doesn’t, although it’s certainly there. The major problem for me is not in the strategy, or how effective it is or isn’t, but in Lucy’s take on pleasure. Except for the painting/projection, which may speak to this, the work seems to consciously leave out the provocations of pain and longing, instead portraying pleasure as something still and unchallenged. In reality, pleasure is alive, moved and affected by loss. The exclusion of that loss does a disservice to an understanding of pleasure, and to the work.

Henry

Urgent Meeting in the Great Hall Tonight 10 PM

2009-04-22T14:13:00.001-04:00

Public Service Announcement:

Student Council is hosting a meeting tonight at 10 PM in the Great
Hall on STUDIOS and other important issues.

Postcards 4-21

2009-04-21T13:28:00.002-04:00

Houghton Gallery and 2nd Floor Lobby

7th Floor Lobby

6th Floor Lobby

Exhibitions in the School of Art, April 21 - 25, 2009

2009-04-20T19:39:00.001-04:00

Opening Tuesday, April 21, from 6 - 8pm:

On view April 21 - 25, 2009

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Tommy Coleman, Alana Fitzgerald, Devin Kenny, Eric Mack & Edmundo Majchrzyk : THE ANTEPENULTIMATE JUBILEE: a survey of ancient futures
Houghton Gallery + 2nd Floor Lobby

Rushern Baker : Armchair Revolutionary

6th Floor Lobby

Lucy Kirkman : Bodies and Pleasures

7th Floor Lobby

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Exhibition hours:

Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 6pm.

Cooper Union Foundation Building

7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

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David William

Coordinator of Exhibitions + Special Projects

School of Art

dwilliam@cooper.edu

212.353.4204

“/Līt/”, Julie Kim and Laura Lee-Georgescu on the 6th Floor Lobby

2009-04-15T17:29:00.003-04:00

The 6th Floor exhibition this week starts with “light”, the observation or implication of light, but puts its emphasis elsewhere. Julie Kim’s photographs, drawings and installation feel much more preoccupied with architectural space, not only interacting with John Hejduk’s columns, but also adopting them as the subject of her work. Each of her seven photographs is named after the space shown in the picture, and each shows a strong light source on the building’s staircases, lobbies, and elevators. There is something impressive particularly with her large-scale drawings, and appropriate, as she pushes her drawing into the scale of the room’s architecture. This works well, but the drawings themselves don’t fit quite right. My first impression was that the manner of lighting felt very familiar, pulling these away from specificity and into what feels like more generic scenes. This may not be undesirable, but doesn’t make as much sense paired with Julie’s sensitivity of touch and the commitment to observation that these drawings imply.

Julie’s drawings also speak, in some instances, in oddly graphic or architectural terms, forcing planes and hard edges that complicate the organic nature of light and shadows. This occurs in Laura’s work as well, where hard forms hesitantly structure the organic forms of her paintings. A dark, graphic corner obstructs “Aqua” and a similar strategy is used in the corners of “High Altitude.”

But this issue in Laura’s work, the hard edge imposed over the organic, has more to do with the problem of resolving an image than about a graphic or architectural concern. Laura’s paintings seem driven by a process of staining that is both incredibly spontaneous and also strangely confining. How to work over the delicate and graceful spill? These paintings, which have powerful moments, feel at pains not to disrupt those moments at the expense of the whole work. Her painting, “ Yellow Room” escapes this problem in a way that is not entirely easy to pinpoint why. Perhaps at its somewhat smaller scale, the amount of paint, and the scale of the forms, feel more complete. It also has a strong structure, bisected horizontally by a line underneath the cotton.

Some of the more successful moments come when the paintings reference something naturalistic, sky or clouds. Laura may have had this in mind with her title, “High Altitude.” The work also has an occasional reference to photography which feels intentional. These paintings feel like they are moving in a direction and are at an interesting but incomplete stage.

Henry

Great Evenings in The Great Hall

2009-04-15T09:56:00.000-04:00

Great Evenings in the Great Hall

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Celebrates its
150th Anniversary

Abolition & Civil Rights: An evening commemorating the role of Cooper
Union's Great Hall in Advancing Social Justice in America.

Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church and
President of SUNY College at Old Westbury
Thulani Davis, Author and interdisciplinary artist
Prof. Eric Foner, Columbia University
Barbara Feldon, Actor
Prof. Manning Marable, Columbia University
Marina Squerciati, Actor
David Strathairn, Actor
Music by the New York City Labor Chorus

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 6:30 pm Free and open to all
The Great Hall, Seventh Street at Third Avenue
(#6 train to Astor Place, R&W Trains to 8th Street)

David Greenstein
Director of Continuing Education and Public Programs
The Cooper Union
30 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003
Tel: 212-353-4198 Fax: 212-353-4183

Postcards 4-14

2009-04-14T13:16:00.002-04:00

"Contenpt," Houghton Gallery and 2nd Floor Lobby

"Endpapers," 7th Floor Lobby

Exhibitions in the School of Art, April 14 - 18, 2009

2009-04-14T10:34:00.000-04:00

Opening Tuesday, April 14, from 6 - 8pm:

On view April 14 - 18, 2009

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Stephen Madden, Piotr Shtyk & Ye Qin Zhu : Contenpt
Houghton Gallery + 2nd Floor Lobby

Julie Kim & Laura Lee-Georgescu : /Līt/

6th Floor Lobby

Florian Brozek : Endpapers

7th Floor Lobby

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Exhibition hours:

Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 6pm.

Cooper Union Foundation Building

7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

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"Rich Mixtures of Similarity"

2009-04-09T09:05:00.003-04:00

Battered pieces of drywall, frosted glass, metal and wood fill the space of Laura Miller's show. Heaps of materials seem to belong to an unfinished building project: nails and wood scraps still scatter the floor, and c-clamps hold makeshift walls together.

This seeming unfinished mess offers a thoughtful rumination on the process of generation. Laura's appropriation of discarded construction materials for art offers an unexpectedly hopeful message of growth. She builds new edifices out of the remnants of broken buildings, but not literal ones. Laura's constructions seem like houses of possibility: the funny, lovely moments that emerge from her rubble (light reflecting off of copper, a piece of peeling blue tape) speak to what could emerge. Laura reminds us of the beauty that grows out of common detritus. Decay invariably leads to growth, but humans can guide this process.

This hope for regeneration culminates in a semi-complete tower hiding behind the curved corner of the gallery. The tower, constructed of white wood fragments, teeters from floor to ceiling. It immediately reminded me of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. Tatlin intended his tower of industrial materials to be the centerpiece of Communist Russia. He sacrificed building practicality to his perfect vision, however; his tower, like the Communist Utopia, could never be realized.

Laura's makeshift version offers an alternative to Tatlin's utopian perfectionism. A white tower must symbolize a beacon of hope, yet Laura's is fragmented and unstable. Laura refreshes Constructivism by fracturing it, suggesting that new spaces are fragile restructurings of old ones. I ran into Laura after seeing her show. She told me that she planned to continue playing with the materials over the course of the week that her show would be up. This seemed fitting: for Laura, creation is an incomplete process of change. The final dismantling of Laura's show will not be its end, just another step in her constructive process.

-Rina

*Edited on 4-10 at author's request

Yo Te Negaré Ante Mi Padre y Mi Escuela

2009-04-08T18:15:00.001-04:00

Just when you though that no one would be offended by art, the Baeza show happened. Whatever the rumors, criticisms, or disapprovals that went on, one thing was left clear. And that was the strong commitment, not only from students but also from faculty, that work should be respected and cared for when its liberties are at risk. Someone did point out that at the beginning of Cooper guards stood strong as they let women come into the school to draw from naked plasters cast. It is within the nature of the school to care for its student's ambitions.

Interestingly enough the reaction of some people to the show brought up the same questions that the work tried to criticize. It is not the first time that popular religious imagery is used as a base for a different composition. But is this imagery juxtaposed with a whole different agenda that offended some people. The strict catholic dogmas the show was trying to portray as unrealistic and at times unfair, were the same dogmas that prevented some from looking at the show. Although subtlety was not part of Baeza's vocabulary the small hints of humor and cultural reference reminds you of a contemporary issue that surprisingly, as we saw before the show, still exists.

But prints will be prints. And after all, they showed again their power to stir things up. The show had a very ambitious collection of techniques, varying from woodcuts, silkscreen to the painful photogravure- all executed with a great sense of confidence. I was happy to see the installation next to the elevator doors because it brought the printed matter out of its nicely crafted frame and used its reproductive qualities for a different purpose. It was refreshing after all to see a senior show with such a dedication to the print.
S.A.

"Inner Yonder," Amelia Hall on the 7th Floor Lobby

2009-04-08T18:04:00.001-04:00

One recurring question for me during this week’s 7th Floor show was, is being childlike the same as being naïve, and what can work that is deliberately naïve have to say today? I don’t mean this as a roundabout attack. The work seemed to be about imagination, and the mark making, the color choices, and the subject matter speak to a child-like imagination. Maybe whether that becomes naïve, or is intentionally naïve, is a difficult question to answer. Being “naïve,” the dictionary tells me, is “having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature” and “unsophisticated.” It also means having an “unaffectedly direct style reflecting little or no formal training or technique.” Perhaps the work seeks this out earnestly, or uses it as a strategy to say something, and in either case it’s a choice. Does this choice assert a particular kind of temperament or sense of humor?

In her drawing under the two 7th floor windows, Amelia has synthesized the object quality of some of her prints with the environments she creates in her drawings, so that the drawing, in a variety of textures, makes this invented environment an object itself suspended in the space of the page. Only a very small rabbit on the left hand side seems to imply that there is a ground outside of the sidewalk in front of the building. For me, this is emblematic of the sense of humor in the work. The rabbit—insignificant, cute—grounds the work.

In the framed drawing of a Victorian-type house, Amelia has made a picture of a fairly familiar kind of house in a very direct way, seemingly from imagination. This is the first piece that convinced me of the pursuit of a child-like imagination (the title, “Inner Yonder,” itself a kind of quirky title, speaks to the fantasy lands of the mind). The immediacy, sloppiness, quality of mark making also bring me into that space. In the drawing under the window, the play of competing textures and shapes makes the piece more compelling, and this drawing could use more of an exploration of that imagined space, if at the expense of immediacy.

Environments are interspersed with images of equally fantastical (but still attached to a kind of Victorian aesthetic) objects. These objects are luxury items, invented jewelry as in the case of the five small watercolors with collaged magazine cutouts and drawing. They operate, like everything here, on a very particular internal logic. The two black and white etched gems are the only pieces in the show that don’t seem made from an internal place, but are physical and weighted.

Some of the work might benefit from more physical presence. The playfulness might feel fuller in more concrete form. Some of the work is so faint that one can barely see it, like the green colored-pencil drawing of gems, which almost disappear into the paper. What could be a sort of gentle, prodding humor runs the risk of coming across as non-committal or too nonconfrontational. Perhaps it’s difficult for me to decipher what this kind of imagination, deliberately naïve or naïve at all, says, and maybe that comes down to the question of aggressiveness or lack of aggressiveness in form. If the work wants to baroque, maybe it needs to be more baroque?

Still, the gold painted window felt like a nice demonstration of the thinking happening in this show. The luxury of a gold, ornamental frame around the window contrasted with how it’s painted, I think in gold paint (opposed to gold leaf) and painted with immediacy.

Henry

Plywood Extravaganzas: A Rant

2009-04-07T21:58:00.001-04:00

So far this semester I have been disheartened by the shows of graduating students with whom I entered Cooper Union; I took time off last semester and, for the most part, I will not be graduating with the students in my freshman year foundation classes.

I may be exaggerating the effect of on-going construction work by Sciame on this graduating class because I was a part of that class, but I feel strongly that my year bore the brunt of Cooper Union's New Academic Building growing pains: we remember the Hewitt Building and will leave this institution both without knowing any of the New Academic Building's amenities and with the pressure to produce work in severely condensed senior show/studio space as a result of the Hewitt building's demolition. By these environmental factors I believe that the class of 2009 have been strongly encouraged to make increasingly unambitious work.

I see this in the timid, manageable nature of most shows so far this semester; while I do not want to suggest that bigger work is necessarily better, I have seen very little work in the semester that dynamically engages with the space it is shown in. Like it or not, size is certainly a factor in that concern and this is where my review begins in pleasant surprise:

With their expansive installation strategies, Rich Mixtures of Similarity in the 2nd Floor Lobby and Hyacinth Room in the 6th Floor Lobby give lie to my critique of the way our institution has handled the New Academic Building's construction. Ambitious displays in my year, it turns out, were not killed (even if they were submerged in great adversity).

Laura Miller's work on the second floor coats the floor's architecture: it is impossible to casually walk through the space without walking through or noticing at least one interesting architectural intervention. The work on view is immersive and imposing in all the ways work installed in the same space has been subtle and restrained during the last few months. It's a great show that I know I will think more about the particulars of during the week. The sunlight streaming through tarpaulin Laura hung from windows was remarkable this morning and I recommend setting aside some time before class to see it this week if you can.

That said, the work is problematic as far as style is concerned: I read the show (its materials and their freely organized displacement throughout the space) in part as a sort of de-politicized love letter to Arte Povera. That this should bother me more than it does doesn't stop it from being an important détournement to consider: aestheticization of the past is dangerous ground (though occasionally fertile as this show demonstrates).

Taylor Shields and Justin Smith take a more democratic approach to filling space with Hyacinth Room. By curating friends' work into their senior show, the two have strengthened their presentation without having to fall back on the scale of already impressive large sculptures that each have contributed to the show. It makes for a rich and full environment even if individual works are sometimes unsatisfying by themselves: if you don't like what you see, I suspect that you will when you turn around... and if you feel like remaining stationary as you consider the work in this show, Justin and Taylor's Media Center lets you do just that.

As a final word of critique, I return to style and materials: Cooper Union's storied "house style" is something to be wary of. The way each of these shows (like many in this building that I can remember) employ vast arrays of un-painted plywood is something to be conscious of, though it is the second instance in this review of an objection that doesn't dim the enjoyment of my viewing. There was much good to see this week and—for the first time in a while—there was nothing in the way of my appreciating it.

joshua

this was our show card

2009-04-07T20:22:00.000-04:00

Postcards 4-7-09

2009-04-07T17:39:00.002-04:00

Felipe Baeza (Great Hall Gallery)

Eliza Winston and Valerie Skakun (Houghton Gallery)

Amelia Hall (7th floor lobby)

Other shows tonight:

Taylor Shields and Justin Smith (6th floor lobby)

and Laura Miller (2nd floor lobby)

“Communications Programming,” Alex DeCarli and Dmitri Hertz on the 6th Floor

2009-04-01T14:17:00.001-04:00

In one corner of the sixth floor lobby a very tall, spindly broom, which brought to mind Martin Puryear’s “Ladder for Booker T Washington,” and Dr. Seuss, extends from the ceiling to the floor as though it might clean up the mess at the other end of the lobby. That mess is, we know of course, art. And if art doesn’t get swept up, it does get stored, contained, packed. This highly allegorical exhibition (maybe allegory is my own entry to the work, and imposed) kept bringing me back to the idea of packing, and by extension traveling. In two instances, or three possibly, packing material provides a kind of base or pedestal for the “piece”—packing boxes with the warning, “very fragile” in one instance, a sealed container of packing peanuts in another. One piece is already loaded up onto a dolly cart, or never unloaded.

Following this train of thought, the work seemed to be involved with the problem of its own display, a problem that sculpture more than any other medium seems to take most seriously. And, I guess, it’s a serious problem when you exist in the messy world of three dimensions. The attention to how something is contained allows for some of the nicer parts of the show, like the painted table holding a small video or video game screen, or the container that props up the TV on which a video of a man trying, and failing, to stab himself plays. This container changes the potential moment of viewing radically, so that we are forced to completely “look down” on the video.

This video also captures a recurring tone to the other work in the show and its display. Ironic angst, if that’s the right way to phrase it, present in this piece also plays into the brick (or what I thought might have meant to be a sculpture of a video game representation of brick) that is crushing the middle of a phallus. I honestly don’t know why sculpture shows insist on repeating phalluses. But it’s also possible, in the spirit of irony and fake angst, that this attempts to be a post-phallus phallus piece. Or does every phallus sculpture intend to be that? Certainly that is an easy metaphor to take from it, though I’m not sure how much I can believe that reading.

I failed to watch the performance at 7 and so someone else's reflections on that would be useful here.

Henry

Postcards 3-31-09

2009-03-31T12:08:00.004-04:00

Awol Erizku, "Famous Faces / Diff'rent Places" in the Great Hall Gallery

Constance Armellino and Anna Hutchings in the Houghton Gallery

Alyssa Kosmer, "Schadenfreude" on the 2nd Floor Lobby

Alex DeCarli & Dmitri Hertz, "Communications Programming" on the 6th Floor Lobby

Caitlin Norgard, "Nerken" on the 7th Floor Lobby

Edited. Thanks to D William for the remaining postcard images!

“Whatsoever Things are True,” Houghton Gallery and 2nd Floor Lobby

2009-03-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

Reed Burgoyne, David Maron, Rachel Matts and Erik Winkowski offer a massive, four years of work-filled collaboration this week. The collaboration, they write at the opening of the show, started with the reinterpretation of the words, “Whatsoever Things are True,” the Cooper Union motto of 1859. It’s not clear how much this group effort is a reflection on truth, or on the institution it’s housed in, though that may be possible. Spending some time with the exhibition, I kept feeling like the message was elsewhere. It’s not about truth, but the packaging. Thoughts need form to exist in the world, and the show affirms, to be communicable, so do products, signs, and information of all kinds. How that information is handled, edited and manipulated is incredibly important and can be incredibly powerful.

David Maron’s twelve small silkscreens and one larger print in the left corner give a good example of the show at its best. These prints offer more subtle information than many of the text-based pieces in the show, and manage also to be more compelling. The forms in these prints are being conjoined, spliced and bisected. They hold you and, in rich, colorful gradients, seem to move in front of you. The “23 Dead” poster, which feels so final and frightening, doesn’t let you pass it easily. Sometimes the work, or more accurately the push for cleverness in the work, becomes cheap. The posters made in famous modern art-historical styles feels tired, and the attitude in the “shut the fuck up” cake isn’t convincing.

But there are many virtues to the show, and too many to recount all of them. Part of the appeal of the show is just how much hard work there is in it, and the work is so much and so varied that it spills out into the second floor lobby with some of the more beautiful pieces in the show. One of the best highlights of the show may be its careful and committed design, down to the way in which the artist information is conveyed. Each artist has a symbol so that even when the different artist’s work is put together, little symbols indicate the individual maker. Everything has information and all of that information here gets a package.

Henry

"Brand New Geography for Old-Timers"

2009-03-25T03:53:00.002-04:00

Susan Little's sculpture in the Great Hall Gallery, under the hole in
the ceiling, compellingly allies with the title of the exhibition,
"Historical Geology for Beginners." This interesting turn of phrase
offers an opportunity for lots of play, and lightly touches hard
questions; for example, there is a pun between the words "geology" and
"geography." It is an understatement to say that geological time
exceeds historical time. To think in geological time is to recognize
the incredible brevity of the human span, a thought that renders
"geography" and its political maps ironic, if not silly (while, at the
same time, we have lately noticed that we are not as harmless as
flies). The word "beginners" is also absurd. It seems like a great
deal to teach a beginner the history of Earth. An understatement
again. It's impossible. Earth can't write, yet this title and this
work lend it a memory of a record and a history.

The piece is notoriously missing parts, which renders it still more
site-specific: the below-ground exhibition space, currently territory
of the Sciame company not the Cooper Union, infamously clashes with
the work of students to whom the space is promised, with about the
carefulness of icebergs. There are intended to be 50 ceramic
plate-sized pieces, in the shapes of all of the United States.
Leaning on handmade steel display stands, like new books, they all
face front. They are distributed on a large, about 8-inch high and
solid square base, which is unpainted and looks like the splintery
scrap wood used in construction work. It is utilitarian and doesn't
elevate the work like a pedestal. I am not sure what it means for the
piece to be so close to the floor rather than at eye level, where the
viewer could take in the subtle variations of the clay. There is,
though, a certain sense of grounded-ness when confronted with an
object that sits by your feet on the same horizontal plane.

The ceramic states are all glazed imperfectly, the same white. I
interpret this choice in part as an elimination of the color
differences between states, while still referencing the way a map
usually differentiates them. The edges, the state lines drawn by
rivers and human minds, are articulated in detail. But edge is no
longer a line; it's a thickness of clay, making the transition through
objecthood from "geography" to geology. Walking behind them, which
Susan has allowed room to do, their naked red backs are exposed, which
are grooved as a part of the process of making them. We can look from
below the surface (the back), and see the map backwards, which is a
bit like seeing a flag upside down. Since only one side is glazed,
they are more tiles than plates. The clay can remind you of the dirt
below the surface of everything. This is further emphasized where
gashes like wounds interrupt the glazed surfaces. Here again, it is
impossible to name these states without also thinking of their history
of breaking and floating apart, all made of the same matter and now
outlined and alone. They become icebergs or tectonic plates, so the
space between them would be the ocean, but they remain upright on
display and dispersed not only on a sphere but both in the foreground
and the background. Again working against the conventions of maps,
they are not flat. Not only is the earth not flat, the country is not
flat. They warp convex and concave, a reminder of their softness and
the baking process.

So, it is like the earth, like a kitchen or a bathroom, was tiled, and
surface layer has been lifted off. The unanswered question of where
the earth is now fills the space around the sculpture. It is gone, in
a way, it is absent, while the sense of the human hand and the
earth-likeness of the clay doesn't leave you alone. It is good as a
viewer, not to see colors, lines, or flatness, and see so much
instead, to be a beginner and look.

The 7th floor Lithographs

2009-03-25T00:53:00.001-04:00

The biography of the artist has always been associated with a history- the history of art. Contemporary thoughts on the importance of the author and its personal history have been challenged and at times considered irrelevant or antiquated. How much can an artist introduce his or her own history to the viewer without clichés or failure?
Fortunately Mark's show on the seventh floor has brought the idea of the biography into a series of lithographs that not only narrate his "story", but with a visual language, helps us remember (or introduce us) to a conflict larger than the "self".
I believe the prints told a story more complex than the mere retailing of a Dominican conflict, the "poster" language used served adequately, it did not overly sentimentalize the story nor did it over simplify it.
Political imagery, specially associated with Latin American politics can often result in the same simplified posters alluding to socialist aesthetics or indigenous imagery just to make a point. But Mark's way appears more sophisticated than the usual portrayal of, not only a country, but also a continent's struggle for democracy. I believe he achieved success by not forgetting the importance of artistic individuality rather than using motifs or clichés.
Lastly I would like to mention, for those who though silkscreen would be a more appropriate medium for the prints, that the usage of lithography was important for the style and execution of the image specially considering the level of successes achieved.

S.A.

Postcards 3-24

2009-03-24T17:26:00.002-04:00

“New Work” by Maren Mill, Saki Sato, and Avery Singer on the 7th Floor Lobby

2009-03-11T15:43:00.001-04:00

The 7th Floor show, "New Work" by Maren Miller, Saki Sato, and Avery
Singer, does not, as the title suggests, have a theme, so much as the
work visually and conceptually speaks to one another. Roughly ten
pieces are on display in this group show, with sculpture, collage,
photograph-posters (plotter-print vogue never dies here) one painting
and one wall drawing as well as a video. The connection between the
work is in some cases explicit, for instance the painting of a
throne-like chair (with a clashing, graphic red and blue background)
and the actual, physical throne set on a base. In other cases the
connection is made very simply and visually, like the radar-like
sculpture which faces the photo of a globular fish-eyed window. This
poster of the window hangs above the video of a chair in an empty room
facing a window which displays a distant seascape, making a subtle and
comical link. In one, the empty living room lets out into another
space, and in the photograph, the fish-eyed window reflects back onto
a scene of an elaborately decorated living. This video of a chair
facing the window is, ironically, the most quiet and most
still-seeming piece in the show.

If "New Work" isn't exactly themed, themes abound: windows, mirrors,
shadows, chairs seem, the more I think about it, to be everywhere in
the exhibition. What makes the video of the chair facing a window
subtle and appealing is lacking in the other work, which is often
crudely made to no apparent end.

Henry

Edit: as commenter points out, "Welcome" is the title of the show, which makes my suggestion that there isn't a specific theme slightly more questionable. But I think the general thought remains, that while there are definitely themes to the show it doesn't have one specific theme.

A note on Abigail Collins' video in "In Response to Choking." In the Houghton Gallery with Kirby Mages

2009-03-05T17:30:00.000-05:00

An azimuth check, Abigail Collins tells us, is like living well- it's
better to do before you have to. In her understated video in the
Houghton
Gallery, in a show that she shares with Kirby Mages, Abigail considers
direction-- the english translation for azimuth-- and what having an
"objective" might mean. The camera moves clockwise for 360-degrees
before switching locations (a theater, a snowy field, a church) as
Abigail narrates what sounds like an army-manual on the importance of
taking azimuth checks.

This relatively short video has a lot to say, I think, and deserves
the time it would take to really listen to what Abigail is saying. I
can't say that I fully grasp what I think Abigail is doing here, but
several themes seem relevant. There seems to be something at stake,
though, and maybe that's a defense for a certain way of living, or of
a certain way of seeing living. Perhaps it is a very basic thought,
like, despite the pressure to be single-focused and goal-driven, it's
important to give the time and patience to consider where you are--
not always where you're going.

Josephine Heilpern, “We missed the whole thing.” in the Great Hall Gallery

2009-03-03T21:58:00.002-05:00

“Space” and primarily “outer space” occupies almost every print, drawing and object in Josephine Heilpern’s show in the Great Hall Gallery. For the most part, though, Josephine’s glance is not upward or outward, but backward, back toward Earth with the aesthetic distance of 200,000 miles. This is most explicit in the triptych depicting a beautiful, shiny earth from different outer-space vantage points, but present in much of the work. In two drawings placed together, tourists reach out for a very distant and small—and as with everything in the show, gorgeous—earth.

It seems like Josephine is trying to say something about tourism, and a particularly American brand of tourism, as popular images of the moon landing, takes offs and landings, and earth from outer space are all crucial to modern American self-mythology. What have we missed? The trip to the moon? The trips that made the vantage points to see earth in this way possible?

“Space” in a more general sense gets a brief mention, in a small, seemingly out of place drawing of a staircase that pushes into the space of the picture. This was a good joke, I thought. And it was nice also to see a crack in the otherwise over-devotion to theme. Would it be okay to show something not at all related to space launches or to NASA memorabilia? It would have been nice, I think, to see more of these cracks, even if it compromised a scrupulousness to message.

Henry

Postcards 3-3-09

2009-03-03T13:46:00.004-05:00

A few of the shows tonight:

Josephine Heilpern, "We Missed the Whole Thing" in the Great Hall Gallery

Chloe Jensen, "Prospects" on the 2nd Floor Lobby

Haeahn Kwon, "Drawings: Put Your Foot Down and Take Your Shoes Off" on the 6th Floor

Brief Thoughts on "Trichinae, Trachiniae," Caitlin Everett, 2nd fl. lobby

2009-02-26T23:23:00.001-05:00

It has been a long time since I last wrote anything meaningful about art so I want to keep this short.

(...I did write lots of meaningless stuff in the interim though)

I took a great amount of interest in the food at Caitlin's show and I don't mean that as a back-handed insult. I don't even mean the food itself (though her cookies were remarkable!): the work she has on display this week hangs parallel to bowls hand-made to hold her opening night refreshments and it seems a very conscious decision on her part to leave these dishes in place long after the food in them has been eaten. Both the bowls and the objects (tablets hung from or leaning against the opposite wall) are made entirely from newspaper.

I could imagine thinking about what a newspaper is in these recent days when circulation cannot always sustain one while an economic downturn looms large. That isn't, however, what caught my interest (true, though, that reading into the materials would probably enhance the aspect that interests me in the show—pun intended).

Because these two things are linked by their materials, I assume that their meaning is similarly linked. For this reason I think of Caitlin's bowls and art (proper) as homey supports for an art opening: she gave us something to eat from, something to eat (we ate it), something to stand in front of and (one would hope) something to think about. We were given all an opening needs and the show remains as a reminder.

A Note on "Quality Service," Staff Show on the 6th and 7th Floors

2009-02-24T23:30:00.002-05:00

What struck me about "Quality Service," tonight on the sixth and seventh floors—a show that someone told me felt like it was staging a place for a "sense of community"—was how necessary the institutional problems at Cooper have been to any sense of community. That is, the last few years have been strange for Cooper, and maybe strangest for the art school, which felt the impact of the decision to demolish Hewitt tangibly and reacted with the most anger. Several staff members chose not to be part of this show because, I think, that the tight Spring exhibition schedule has made it hard for some seniors (and non-seniors) to schedule shows, and that the staff show makes it tighter. And shows organized by the administration, really anything done by the administration, seem always to bring on (an unfortunately quiet) resigned protest.

Considering the crunch on exhibition space, a sprawling two-floor staff show may strike some as ostentatious. It may be ostentatious. And shows with the face of the administration behind it (with, like, a title and subtitle) and here I'm thinking of the Middle States show last Spring, tend to feel clumsy and pretentious, especially at a time when the administration and the art-student body have such a tepid relationship.

Still, it was hard not to feel some sense of community—a strange one, fractured by the studios in LIC, and in apprehension of this big, new endeavor where Hewitt used to be—but a community.

A Couple of Quick Thoughts on Oliver Loaiza's 7th-Floor Show

2009-02-18T16:00:00.001-05:00

Oliver Loaiza's show on the 7th floor felt like a beautiful counterpart to "One Liners by Two People" and it wasn't until later that I could see that the way in which the show deals with comedy is in such a different, but in some ways more effective, tone. By necessity (of the material, and of seeming persona of the artists) "One Liners" was large and noisy and crowded and a certain kind of elaborate showmanship fit with the structure of the show. Oliver, who I only saw at another show opening, was, like his show and like the work, quieter and less ostentatious.

Not that the show or the work doesn't stand on its own, and not that it has to be seen in terms of the sixth-floor show. The work in the show was in some ways correlated, but it didn't strive to stick to a theme, or to exist solely within the universe of the show. The golf club-pipes, the (cow?) tongue, the fittingly hard-to-hear drone of a woman speaking on tape—these pieces operated more quietly than the work on the sixth floor or the show and performance on the second floor (which also deserves time and thought) but thinking about them the next day, they seem harder to shake.

Henry

Lisa Larson-Walker and Harold Batista on the 6th Floor, “One Liners by Two People”

2009-02-17T22:48:00.003-05:00

This question came up for me tonight at Lisa Larson-Walker and Harold Batista's well-made and carefully staged sixth-floor show: can irony still be a means to have something to say? "Irony" in art today, or what passes as irony—I'm thinking about Carroll Dunham's cartoon "Dickhead" paintings, Richard Prince's "Spiritual America" show at the Guggenheim, or very differently, Damien Hirst, whose persona-as-production empire might be called ironic in only the most cynical terms—seems to me to be about dressing up or giving attitude to, and so in a sense legitimizing, otherwise shallow and easy work. Irony now (or rather, it's been this way) doesn't function critically so much as it preemptively scolds the viewer for taking the work seriously—who always risks taking it "too seriously"—and it looks smart by keeping the viewer from any meaning, because after all, there is no meaning anyway.

This question of irony animates the show, and in some senses, the show reanimates for me a strategy of irony. "One Liners by Two People" keeps painstakingly true to its title. The work, including but not limited to a slinky on an escalator (that needs a little nudge), a live drummer who beats out the famous one-liner anthem ("buh-dum-cha") every time you look at a poster that reads "that's what she said," a "face painting" where you can pose to have your picture taken, a Hirst-shark-in-a-tank-piñata, is in each instance a one-liner but one-liners that work—I'm entertaining the idea at least, and if we're allowed to call it work and to take it seriously—critically, and with good humor.

My first smile came peering into a pedestal that had the scrolling text, ~~"I can't,"~~ over and over again, which stood in front of the video of the falling slinky. I think what I'm trying to say here is that on one level the show makes a light-hearted joke of "ironic" work that both wants to be taken seriously but not to be seriously considered, while at the same time manages to present an alternative, and more productive, mode of irony. At least, that's what I'm entertaining.

Another joke—Lisa Larson-Walker, who I only met briefly at the show, told me that if I had any questions that she would be here all week. I laughed and she caught the joke in what she had said before being pulled away by Harold, who she was handcuffed to.

Henry

*edit: The scrolling text in the show, which I originally misquoted as "I can't" is supposed to be ~~"I can't."~~Fixed!

One Night Only

2008-12-11T21:45:00.001-05:00

I'm interested in hearing what people thought about this show. I'm only
familiar with two of the artists.

A new year, a new season.

2008-10-03T23:07:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure why this Summer brought that infinitely wise man to our blog, but he was not relevant and has been removed. If "he" decides to actually write about Cooper, we'll welcome him back with open arms.

It's the show season again and there is always something to say about what's hanging on the walls. Any thoughts about "Mystic Touch", the work from Prague? Sophomores making revelations about studio practice, Juniors getting used to LIC?

This blog is not just show reviews, it's for Cooper students to speak about anything happening in the art school, anonymously or otherwise, and promote discussion about these things. We may even glimpse the unity and debate seen nearly two years ago when the student body had to stand up to the administration. Apathy is not attractive or productive; whatever you have to say is welcomed.

Re: Relational Aesthetics

2008-06-15T18:40:00.003-04:00

The social 'linking' function of art? (I clearly don't share any hesitancy to write on a blog about art, whether written in Microsoft Word first or not. And don't see why one would.)

I don't believe that a critical response to art must derive pleasure in correcting the opinions of others. People have ideas that differ and clash, and that's both good and inevitable. (Contributing to this blog is one manifestation of my interest in that clash of ideas.) That isn't necessarily a pleasure in correcting other people—I don't think it is—but if it were, that isn't entirely relevant. The point as I see it is not to say that there can't be a pleasure found in correcting someone (the conceit being, one could actually set "right" another person) it's to argue that hopefully a pleasure can be found elsewhere.

You hit on what's nice (for me) about Woolf's conception of a common reader, which is the necessarily non-social pleasure of reading. I'm skeptical of the contention that art has a social mission—it can, and the conversation around it certainly can have a "social linking function"—but like reading, making art and often looking at it (my favorite museum trips tend to be alone) fulfills a very solitary and personal need. The idea that there can be a pleasure in art that is found in solitude runs alongside the idea of art for arts sake, or reading for the sake of reading, both of which I agree with.

Henry

Relational Aesthetics: a response to The Common Viewer

2008-06-15T17:52:00.001-04:00

With every post on cooperreviewed.blogspot.com I sit down with Microsoft word and write a page or two, but then discard them having decided that my thinking is pretentious and/or grandiose. I often write a clipped, shortened version that misses whatever it was that got me excited in the first place, but at least I look like slightly less of a douchebag, right? One way or the other, I always feel ill-at-ease copy and pasting 2-3 Microsoft word pages worth of thoughts into a roughly 2.5x3 inch comment text field. It becomes painfully obvious (and very embarrassing to me) how far I tend to let my thoughts run away with me, 'but damn the torpedoes!' I say (this time):

The distinction between the common reader/viewer and the un-common(?) one seems vague to me. I understand that quite a few people read (and write) in order to correct the opinions of others, but it's important not to forget, too, that this activity is its own sort of pleasure and is its own way of creating for one's self 'a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age' or 'a theory of the art of writing.' In the same way I would say that even the most critically engaged (non-common[?]) viewer has pleasure at the root of his or her desire to look at art. I would even go as far as to say that a vast majority of those who view art do so for the same kind of pleasure, though the pleasure is exercised and manifested in different ways.

You're right that museums are spaces removed from the everyday (olafur eliasson's 'take your time' at ps1 and moma comments on this by transplanting naturally-occurring phenomena like waterfalls and rainbows into the 'un-natural' modernist setting that the white cube of museum/gallery spaces is); it is this schism that is imposed between the viewer and the space one must enter in order to view art that encourages the pleasure in imparting and correcting, I think.

In my second year of high school I had a humanities professor (whose teaching style was not unlike litia perta's, actually, now that I think of it) who said she was only teaching the class and me the things she did so that we would be 'interesting at dinner parties,' and, though I generally dismiss the sentiment of her statement, the social attributes of learning/art shouldn't be underestimated either. I tend to side with Nicolas Bourriaud when he posits 'the work of art as social interstice' in his book 'relational aesthetics;' this social 'linking' function (as he calls it) of art combined with its spatial inaccessibility (when it's in a museum or gallery) lends support to the indisputably most common art experience in tourism: the viewing of things in order to add such experiences to a resume-like personal history cache, often with photographic documentation (which also often features the tourist in question, verifying for others a proximity they had to the work of art pictured). I think that the inaccessibility of museums—that a special trip or tourist journey/pilgrimage is necessary to enter them—in this way makes the vast majority of art experiences an exercise in preparing one's self to converse with others, 'impart information,' 'correct their opinions' and glean the pleasure of each from these activities.

In looking back over what I've written now, I see that I've mentioned a museum show I've been to ('take your time') and a book I've read ('relational aesthetics') and, though I did receive some enjoyment solely from the localized elements of both experiences, I think that it would be critically irresponsible to exclude the prospective pleasure of talking to others about them later from my decision to read the book and see the show. The theory of tourism that I'm laying out here and implicating myself in comes as a failure on the part of the viewer (and me), but I think that it is a failure facilitated by what it is to go somewhere to look at art. It might even be an inescapable failure, but I should be careful of applying my personal failures to the rest of humanity (as I'm certainly doing here).

I guess I would conclude that an art experience can't or shouldn't be forced into the binary of enjoying experience or experiencing academically and, even if I don't excitedly chat up someone at a museum, I've never been alone in one.

joshua

(p.s. I highly recommend 'take your time' if it's still up and you're in the city)

Common Viewer

2008-06-14T23:23:00.005-04:00

Saturday night and I'm watching the formidable John Updike (wondering, how many things are younger than John Updike?) on C-Span talk about the colonial New England painter, John Singleton Copley. Updike describes Copley shortly before the Revolution in romantic longing for what he imagines to be the bold and free painting of England, and cites a letter in which Copley complains that his new world compatriots consider painting to be as useful a craft as say, carpentry or shoe-making, but not to be, as Copley believed, one of the noblest pursuits. My first thought was, is painting even as useful a craft as carpentry or shoe-making? Or as useful a field as say, biochemistry or mechanical engineering? (Not craftsman, but autoCADsman). Maybe that's a slightly ridiculous question. And "useful" is a tricky word here. But as someone who cares about painting, and also as someone who asks myself fairly regularly, "why care about painting?" it's interesting to consider Copley's complaint. What is so noble about making art?

What kind of audience for painting existed in the pre-Revolutionary colonies? I'm not sure. (I'm also not sure what kind of audience Copley had in militant Boston as a pro- English Tory sympathizer.) It does make a certain amount of sense, though, to believe that art in general held a similar position that it does now—as something somewhat esoteric and something very, very important within an extremely small niche of people.

In a small book I read recently, Anne Fadiman talks about The Common Reader, and quotes Virginia Woolf, who writes, "The common reader… reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing." Art certainly commands a following, and certainly has an audience that is not scholarly, an audience that looks at art because it's pleasurable. But I'm not sure to what extent there can be a common viewer under the definition Woolf lays out for the common reader. This is in part because art is simply not engaged as readily and as easily as a book. To see art usually means going to the museum, or to a gallery, or looking at reproductions in print or online. Books are everywhere, and collecting them is not necessarily for a select few.

Still, I very much like the idea of a common viewer in the terms Woolf lays out for reading. And this idea of the reader gleaning different pieces to create some kind of whole makes a lot of sense in my formulation of approaching text, but also art, and in my formulation of learning in general.

Henry

Why Care About Art?

2008-05-31T12:24:00.001-04:00

Two nights ago on my friend's roof the question came up: why care
about making art? And last night, sitting at a table in another
friend's backyard, the conversation picked up again.

My friend said that the best reason he's heard yet for making art, or
music, is that it's a messy, crowded world, and the only way to live
in it, to coexist, is to practice an understanding for what is foreign
and uncomfortable to you. Art asks for that understanding. I think
what he was saying is that to practice making art or to practice
looking at it is a kind of learning that asks you to exist in what is
uncomfortable, to be able to stand on ground that is unfamiliar, or to
be able to exist without any ground to stand on at all. This kind of
learning practices floating.

Or, learning at all practices floating. This makes sense to me as a
reason to learn, and as a reason to care about art in that it's one
way of learning. At some point in addressing the question of why I
should care about making art there has to be, it seems to me, a moment
where I ascribe a value to making art. That's a tricky moment, though,
and underlies the difficulty of the question. Each justification slips
away when I go to claim it, leaving me with the tautology, it's
important because it's important. My friend's reason to care about art
is nice in one way because it ascribes value not necessarily to art
but to learning, which by its definition is something that is moving,
growing, changing.

It's important because it's important betrays what I really want to
say, though, and what I feel, however much it seems to dodge the
question. It seems to me that I call art important and it has to be
important or else it is nothing. I've heard people say, "I think
making art is important," or "I think painting matters," as though
these were the reasons why it's important or why it matters. This
feels like a moral to me, and I've accepted it that way recently. It
matters and so it matters to do it well, to do it a lot, to practice
at it.

Henry

Drivel

2008-05-18T20:10:00.000-04:00

This morning everybody's paintings were taken out of the racks for the End
of the Year Show. Luke Jansen submitted his entire senior show. Carlos's
big black and gold painting was surprisingly tacky on the sides; I had to
scrub really hard to get it off my left index finger and thumb. Some
little crappo abandoned paintings were stepped on and no-one cares. Is
Tom's long painting even finished? It is the longest painting. Some oil
paint bled through to the back; this once pleased me, to see a doomed
painting, but it seems a little sad now. Three typical crude paintings on
metal sheets with chicken wire were sharp and heavy. There were a few good
paintings that I liked, but they were by girls.

Mason

A Narrative Review of Sentimental Photographs of Canada

2008-05-13T03:23:00.000-04:00

Thomas Gardiner's photographs of rural Canada were pleasant. As I
followed them around the room the theme of New replacing Old was gently
shown with dirty construction covering lush landscapes, fresh buildings
near worn ones. There was a subtle but perceptible preference for the
old, though the new wasn't too evil, and both were always well composed.
People appeared as I strolled, mostly inconsequential and fairly
typical. I settled in near the end of the line with an old man by his
ham radio. Obviously clinging to the past, with pictures of old jets and
Air Command memorabilia covering his walls – this was a melancholy
portrait of a generation nearly gone. There were two or three photos
after the old man, but I only remember the first, immediately following
him. A boy lying on some sort of couch outside, a girl sitting on him in
a bathing suit, another boy (young man?) standing, shirtless. Each
fellow grasped each of the girl's breasts with one hand, one per boy.
All were smiling ecstatic, drunken, exhibiting smiles. I hated these
kids. The old man and I hated these kids. We sat in his living room,
turned the radio dial, lamented the state of the world, and hated these
kids.

These photographs were sentimental, unexciting, and none too
spectacular. The portraits of the old man and the fondlers were, on
their own, compelling, but too standard in their method. Gardiner's
journalistic skill was revealed in the curation, the lead-up with
humdrum treetops and forlorn gazes; the sudden and singular shot of
those terrible children, the rapid denouement. In a very traditional way
the photographs were emotionally stirring, and I cannot denounce them
for that.

Will Schneider-White

A handful of thoughts from the studio: maxims, mess-ups

2008-05-11T22:03:00.002-04:00

Something I didn't realize about Milo Carney until recently, even though it was right in front of my face, is that he collects and invents maxims all the time. I was eating a green curry lunch on the sixth floor near his studio a few weeks ago when he came up with, "It's still foam core to me." He wrote that line in sharpie on a nearby wall, underlined "me," then decided it was better without the underline and tried smudging it out. For Milo, anything is a potential proverb, even, or especially, seemingly inane sentences.

My interest in maxims began to develop just before realizing what Milo's project is. One saying that can be read as a maxim is the sentence Herman Melville had pinned next to his desk, "Keep true to thy dreams of youth." Or what Will has written in his studio, "If not a thought does your mind elicit/ make not your speech too explicit." Which, as he pointed out to me, is a variation of Lincoln's, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Or the simple mantra I have nailed above my studio, "Be stronger! Be stronger! Be stronger!"

Maxims have to do with rules for how one should live. This is in part why I find Milo's sense of humor so sharp. It's funny to me to be constantly picking up little sentences and claiming them as rules for how one should live and it's funny exactly because it's simply a more exaggerated version of what I actually do in life, and what most people probably do too.

This idea of moral art making has been rolling around my head this year as I become more and more of a "moral" artist. This can go off now in a different direction, and maybe I'll take it there sometime soon, as this blog begins to transition into summer time. But I do want to talk about one other statement with a moral, which is the clichéd or platitudinous version of what Alexis was telling me the other day, which I collected, and which I'll pin up here. Failure is a good teacher. Alexis was telling me that it doesn't matter if my work is no good because I'm only a sophomore. And while I don't agree with the sentiment that it doesn't matter—it matters to me, of course— I think the meat of what she was saying is that if you aren't willing to make a lot of ultimately weak art, you're not getting a very good education. That's right, I think, but it doesn't stop at being a sophomore or a student in school. It seems to me that you always have to be willing to make bad work and that's just one of the potential obstacles when you make art for a living.

Henry

Paint Drips Pictures

2008-05-10T01:50:00.001-04:00

Tuesday night on the seventh floor I flipped through a big binder of
funny pictures, many of them vintage advertisements. I don't really know
why they were all funny, but they sure were old! On one wall there was a
big collage of kitschy images like the binder but with paint drips all
over. It looked really cool! There were other paintings too, hung on top
of the collage, full of art-historical and pop-culture jokes. Stonehenge
stenciled teal on a maroon background, for instance. I thought it would
make a nice t-shirt. Featured as well were some appropriated snapshots
of art made into kitsch. A papier-mâché Campbell's soup can with
matching Jif jar (Warhol's lost masterpiece?), Matisse's La Danse
re-done with aliens. An admirable effort all around. There was also a
cute photo of kittens, but there were those paint drips in the way and I
couldn't see the fuzzy wuzzy kitten-coos. I like kittens and there were
many in this show. Near the binder was a computer playing a Youtube
video of a painting in the show. I mean it was just a movie of the
painting, like, just filming the painting. Get it? I've always had that
idea too, but I thought someone had done it already. I guess not! It was
about a minute long and nothing happened. After that I went and stared
at the real painting for about a minute. It wasn't the same. While
waiting for the elevator going to the second floor for those sweet
sandwiches I looked at the big collage. Everyone agreed it was awesome.
I saw some guy looking at it and frowning. I don't know what his problem
was.

In conclusion, I thought the show was super sarcastic and really funny.
It was just like I'm gonna drip paint all over famous art! Yeah! And
like, it really showed how funny anachronisms can be. Did you see that
picture of the old guy with the beard? It was so good. Some of the more
serious seeming paintings made me look harder, which I liked. They were
more like I'm gonna paint in these certain styles and mock them with
context! Like the shape ones. Altogether really good and I look forward
to seeing what this young artist produces in the future.

Oh yeah, and there was pizza!

"Paint Drips Pictures"- 7th floor lobby

2008-05-08T19:57:00.001-04:00

The first thought I had when I saw Erin Ikeler's "Paint Drips Pictures" on the 7^th floor lobby was that she's turned paintings into discreet objects that can so easily be dispersed in an infinite number of directions. I'm beginning with this first thought because Erin's show invites the viewer's attention span to flit from place to place and I thought it might be appropriate to begin with the first place mine alighted.

The paintings in the show are mainly spread across the larger wall of the 7^th floor lobby against a ground of magazine cuttings and pictures splattered with paint. I don't see a strong path my eyes are meant to take between the paintings and that's perfectly fine; I like the extraordinary number of narratives and relationships I can build between the paintings and the elements present in the ground they're sitting on. This reading lends itself to the understanding, also, that Erin's paintings are completely autonomous objects to be shuffled and re-shuffled, split up and spread throughout the world in whatever order and direction they (or Erin) please.

In fact, if I had to pick a theme of the show it would, indeed, be the flexible and (sometimes) subversive means Erin can use to turn a viewer's attention to a painting.

Take, for example, the two potted plants and the single splattered canvas sitting in one of the windows of the 7^th floor lobby: in some ways the drips running down the face of the canvas are non-specific, leading one to simply register its materials as paint and canvas and then take the piece itself as a painting of painting; a stand-in for an artistic tradition sitting innocuously next to two innocuous houseplants. How easy it is for this piece to slip into one's periphery along with these common objects, but how subversive a place for it to be as well!

Many of the paintings in the show, like this one, want to be broadly recognized as paintings about painting (most obviously the pieces which feature diagrammatic palettes which each also include references to brushstrokes as well as meditations on color theory and on figuration) but there are also some broad gestures in the direction of life outside of painting. I sometimes think of this as a question of the artist's engagement with art history set opposed to engagement with the world, but I recognize that this is a somewhat lazy reading of the dichotomy present (for which I apologize). The one thing I'm certain of is that a shift in subject-matter away from painting is a welcome one in that it stops the show's themes from being completely homogenous. My favorite thing about the show was not the themes and subjects of each individual canvas, but the demonstrations and illustrations of how many ways paintings can seep into one's perception.

The most interesting example of these was only on view in the lobby on the show's opening night, but you can see it for yourself from the comfort of your own home: Erin created a one-minute video of one of her paintings (present at the show hanging above her show cards and visitor book) and uploaded it to youtube. Though there are some unidentifiable slapping sounds in the background and the image shakes indicating that it is video from a handheld camera, this is, otherwise, not a narrative video. You look at the painting, see it and keep watching to 'see what happens,' but nothing does. Perhaps you are disappointed or annoyed that nothing happened or perhaps you are disappointed and annoyed because you weren't done looking yet and your gaze has been interrupted. You're just going to have to play it again. Either way, Erin's piece finds a way to make you look longer than six seconds and she finds a place for her painting that you wouldn't ordinarily expect to look at paintings in.

The Original New Addition, 6th floor lobby

2008-05-02T15:18:00.003-04:00

Here are a few thoughts I wrote down about The Original New Addition while sitting on that comfortable purple lawn chair in front of the Super Mario Bros piece.

-The larger than life cut out of a soccer player celebrating a goal
captures the tone of the show. Or the balloons do.

-I think this is what Andrew Francis meant when he told me that people
didn't want senior shows to be engaged critically, they wanted senior
shows to be a celebration, a sort of last hurrah. That's not to take the
work in the show lightly, or to see the exhibition negatively, but it just
seems like the celebratory and collective mood of the show sort of escapes
intense scrutiny. (Or maybe someone will counter with a more in depth
critique.)

-Is this the authentic "integrated curriculum"? The 6th floor lobby is
juggling video game art, painting, books, drawings, sculptures, made
paper, prints, a Nietzsche quote.

-(SPOILER ALERT!) The plaster blocks in black cloth spells out "My hands
evoke sight and sound out of feeling." This kind of work really connects to video games,
which are full of little secrets like this.

-Which makes me think, this is a very, very interactive show.

-This is the only show I can think of that credits the writing center.
Which is a good contribution—Max's artist statement fits in nicely. And
he's right, infinity is a really weird idea.

Henry

"Transcendentalisme"

2008-05-02T12:44:00.000-04:00

I want to begin my critique of "Transcendentalisme" with a word on art that wasn't hung by any of the individuals who contributed to the show:

Though not a fan of Louise Nevelson's work, I have often seen other, very similar examples of it sitting more comfortably in spaces than that piece of hers normally does in its home on the seventh floor. It's not difficult to help make Nevelson's work feel more at home in its surroundings; the key is just giving it some company. Either put it with other big ugly pieces of hers or make something else in the room look remotely similar to the piece in question. Here is where "Transcendentalisme" comes into play.

Welcome to seventh floor as it is now: a pitch-black claustrophobic dungeon where Louise Nevelson's work holds court over a small cast of misfit-toy art pieces that know current art world trends backwards and forwards and who, in general, don't particularly like the viewer or, at least, don't readily want to be seen by the viewer. These pieces are pouty graduate-student gutter punks playing hard-to-get.

As I understand it, the in-joke title loosely tying the show's work together refers to two tiers of transcendentalism(e): the work of ascendancy and the thrill of emergence/revelation within the sublime experience of viewing art. With this in mind, the show's organizer Allie Miller has arranged for heavy objects in the space (a derelict photocopier, paint cans, cinder blocks, etc.) to be outfitted with an array of small flashlights attached to them by bungee cords: if viewers want to see the pieces on display in this darkened room with any clarity, they may do this with the provided flashlights, dragging the heavy objects they're attached to behind them as they peruse the show. When one attempts a transcendent state by struggling to rise above one's self one also, in so doing one would hope, eventually appears elsewhere and, by using these weights and flashlights, the viewer performs a struggle to ascend (by dragging the weights) and a supposed emergence into the sublime following that (revealing pieces of art with the beam of a flashlight).

The conceit is funny in its mechanics though one strongly suspects that the system of transcendentalism described is being described with tongue held firmly in cheek. Even so, one also suspects that on some level the artists in the show really do want to give viewers a kind of sublime experience. Do they do it? Sometimes. Much of the work is very good, though some of it benefits greatly from explanation in the same way that Warhol's piss-paintings ("oxidations") don't need to have their methods explained to be beautiful but suddenly receive new dimensions of interest when explanations are given. The back-story to Taylor Shields' twin prints is fascinating (parental portraiture/tribute based, in part, on the very personal sensory experience of smelling found-lotion from a hotel) but, without that, the prints are merely inexplicable aesthetic objects.

Somehow Joe Kay's work manages to tip the scale of oddness and satisfy viewers with its insolubly cryptic and enjoyably goofy nature. This may be because his materials are not art materials (common objects like books, a traffic cone, a triple-decker shopping cart, a yard sale); viewers have experience with practical uses of his materials as a point of entry.

The least compelling pieces of the show are Ben Seltzer's postcard and air-freshener constructions which seem to lead nowhere, but even these offer enough scattered clues for a viewer to engage with them. I couldn't tell whether his works' hanging method was intended to call to mind the packaging for action figures that obsessive collectors couldn't help but break open to play with the toy within before duct taping everything back together again, but that is the effect they had on me one way or the other.

Allie Miller's work is three-fold: she is first a curator (having corralled the participating artists), second a liaison and third a draftswoman. As far as I'm concerned, this is almost too bad because her drawings are quite good. I would go as far as to say that the one drawing she has framed in metal next to her two highlighter-yellow screen prints actually does, by itself, begin to hint at a struggle toward transcendence with the obscurity of its subject's form. But even if this is disappointing, it isn't too much so because her work orchestrating the opening night lecture series this show was built to hold was a great treat. I missed out on two of the speakers, but those I was present for were spectacular and I strongly suggest that anyone who can attend the closing party with a performance from Screaming Dinosaur Fire today (Friday) at 6 pm. It's sure to be a grand spectacle.

Re: An observation on a line for me

2008-05-01T12:59:00.002-04:00

To the now unnamed observer: I'll think about that edge.

As a side note, if anyone cares to talk to me about my work or about other things I can be reached more directly at chapma@cooper.edu.

Thanks!

Henry

2008-04-30T23:09:00.001-04:00

An observation on a line for
Henry Chapman

The now untitled piece, as it stands in front of the
studio, looks as if a moment of self-awareness took a
toll on the organic nature of the mark. The space
within the painting has been modify countless of times
since its beginning stage; as it stands now the
texture of the piece, its viscosity and its color make
a harmonious play with the various planes in the
composition. What I notice to be a visual problem is
the top side of the purple-gray plane on the left. The
edge, in this painting being one of the most important
qualities, has been modified in a way unprecedented to
any other mark. The patterns of the wavy brushstrokes,
that are neither sharp nor translucent, have an
attitude in the painting that appears foreign. The
lack of conviction in the sharpness of the line fails
to make the space move or recede, while the more
organic and natural lines of the right contradict its
form.
Whether it is a matter of opinion, I suggest a close
consideration of the purple-gray form. There is a
constant through out the piece and the playfully
fabricated edge is not outrageous enough to make an
impact or modest enough to harmonize.

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The Retrospective

2008-04-27T16:44:00.001-04:00

What should a senior show be? This is a common question that has many correct answers, all with legitimate arguments. What causes this question to be brought up so often, then, comes down to the execution, the curation and presentation of the work.

SOFIAPORIA, Sofia Berenstein's show (2nd floor lobby, April 21-26), is an example of the less common Retrospective. She has hung all of her work, from film and digital photography to paintings and etchings, in a novel format involving constructed walls that turn the uncomfortable 2nd floor lobby into a more traditional white-walled corridor. Though some of the construction details are sloppy, for temporary structures the walls work very well, and Berenstein's taking control of the space is admirable and well done. Entering the space by walking up the stairs, one sees that she has even used the walls around the staircase. Guided by the new walls, one then passes through a pleasant hallway gallery of her cleanly presented analog photography. Once the hallway ends the curation becomes immediately suspect. The Retrospective is suddenly thrust upon the unsuspecting observer; an odd etching here, a painting there, a dash of photogravure and a nice large digital photo for garnish. There is a door in the wall – do we open it? I did, and discovered another painting unrelated to the first. Is the door part of the painting? Was that just a convenient place to hang it? Are these recycled walls with a door left in them? Oh, Sofia, what have you done?

Berenstein's exhibit is stuck between two intents, unable to happily compromise. Had she gone with a more focused photography show, the paintings and etchings could go, the photos given a little more room, and it would have been a strong, functional whole. Had she been able to accept her retrospective, the photos could have been edited down and the other work organized a little more carefully, and it would be a successful survey. Even more separation may have worked, to make the analog photos completely and obviously severed from the rest, to save the viewer the confusion of trying to understand their connection. As it is, the confusion remains.

The Moral

Whether you decide to have a show of recent work, thematic work, single-medium work, violet work, collaborative work, or all your work, remember to consider the exhibit as a whole and resist the urgings of pride.

Will

Note – I'm not sure if the photogravures were in fact photogravures, but they were definitely a different type of work. Please excuse any ignorant mislabeling.

about one of next week's show

2008-04-26T14:58:00.000-04:00

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey,

I'm Ben(jamin Santiago) I'm part (1/3) of the show on the 6th Floor
opening on Tuesday (The ORIGINAL NEW ADDITION). I have been following
the show reviews on this site, and I'm interested in what you guys(Will
and Henry) would have to say about our show, especially since I don't
know you guys.

peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeace,
ben

Luke Janson - So Good?

2008-04-26T05:14:00.001-04:00

Cooper's house style is made up of things that are "great" for their
absurdity, their outrageous colors, or their vintage pop culture. Giant
Doritos, odes to Michael Jordan, fluorescent 3D paintings, and other
seemingly random things have been exhibited for their "Oh man!" factor -
a combination of "Isn't this silly?" and "That's so funny!" Beyond a
nostalgic giggle, these works have little to give.

Luke Janson superficially seems to fall into this trap as well;
rainbows, cartoons, and joints populate the gallery, various oversized
phalluses humorously interrupt the viewer's space. The first clue to his
ascension over the "Oh man!" mold is that each piece is excellently
crafted: the arm sculptures are very clean; the barber-pole-man could be
from Toys-R-Us, if they stocked that sort of thing; each painting is
fully worked with apparent intention.

The paintings, in fact, are the simplest way to find the complexity in
Janson. He has developed a vocabulary of styles, each alluding to
specific parts of art history, and collages them in each large canvas to
meet different ends.

There is the "Picture in Picture" canvas, the image shown layered on top
of scale-up versions of itself. Among its historical references are
Holbein's famous skull transformed into a soccer ball, a dripping
Dali-esque appendage, and a pointillist field and figure. These are
mixed with video game details such as the gun-toting hand of a
first-person shooter and floating power-up icons. The other three
paintings might be "Graffiti Interfering With Color-Field/Hard-Edge
Abstractions", "Picasso Gets Metaphysical With Monty Python and Nintendo Basketball", and "Bonnard's Dog Abused By Dali".

The most interesting detail, in three of these four works, is the
sparing placement of colorful globs of paint along the edges of the
canvas. This tiny addition changes the paintings enormously; they are
suddenly active, living, pooling up at the edges and nearly escaping
into the world, to scuttle away or even to capture something new to
bring back. Janson's ability to activate his work (apparent in
everything but "Bonnard's Dog") is the key to this show's success.

Unlike the paintings, which have their allusions to fall back on, the
sculptures in the show rely completely on being somehow infused with
life, so that they are not only observed, but watched. The Great
Galloping Tongue is immediately noticed for its fan and rapid inflation,
but the real interest is at the very tip. Following the gently curved
body we find this curious, wagging end, so eagerly wagging that we fear
it escaping its leash. Opposite is the Nose, the big, rough, drunkard's
nose, gently blurred by its own vibration. Again, this piece feels
restrained, as if it were captured rather than created. Standing near
these works for too long creates a growing sense of foreboding in the
viewer, though it is unimaginable what might happen.

Is Janson's show funny? Yes, but this is only the beginning of its
appeal. He proves that the absurd is not necessarily ridiculous, that
there are greater rewards than a chuckle. Underclassmen, please take
note, everything may not be "so good!"

Will

Leslie Martinez, "Give Us This Day, Our Daily Bread," 7th Floor

2008-04-25T12:27:00.003-04:00

I can't offer a credible interpretation of these words from the book of Matthew, "give us this day, our daily bread," from which Leslie Martinez extracts the title of her exhibition. But I did spend a lot of time looking at the painting on the wall opposite from the other work, at the top of which sits a watermelon—a watermelon which is not one, because it is also teeth, or a hole, or a shiny unnamable prize. And it seems like a plausible reading of the work to see this shiny prize metaphorically, to see it as both the daily bread and the daily work in which Ms. Martinez is engaged. In this way, her work speaks of a kind of commitment, attention and care that is hard to ignore.

You get what I mean?

I doubt very many artists at Cooper would find the source of their exhibition title in the bible, and I know I would find enough reasons not to go there. (First of all, my only copy of the bible is called the "Student Edition.") But she goes there. And the work goes there, too. Fearlessly. To throw a few adjectives at it, the work is narrative, elaborate, painstaking. It's illustrative. Compositionally, much of the work reminds me of Mark Alan Stamaty's "Who Needs Donuts?" in its cluttered masses of figures and shapes. I don't mean that negatively, as to lower it to the level of a children's book—as if the "level of a children's book" or of "Donut's" were lower— but some might see it as such, and see the work as such.

I don't think it can be ignored that the 7^th floor lobby poses a few problems as an exhibition space, in part because the artist has to battle with John Hejduk's columns and Louise Nevelson's anniversary present, but also because of windows, outlets, strange lighting, size, and other irritating distractions. I think those distractions really take away from the work here but I also can't think of where else the work might go in this building. Certainly the show would feel sparse in the Houghton Gallery, and I've heard the argument about this work that it needs to be very tightly packed. I may just like sparse shows (see: La Mama Gallery) but I'm also skeptical of that argument. How tightly packed do they need to be? Space, and less distractions, might allow the work to breathe in a way that the 7th floor lobby doesn't afford.

Henry

Portrait of the Artist as a Rejection of Existing Values and Types: Thomas Witschonke and Cassandra Guan "In the Lubalin Center"

2008-04-16T17:07:00.001-04:00

To make something already is a problem.

For, Tom and Cassandra contend, we should be past the myth of "the creative genius," past the myth of the artist as visionary, past the myth of the individual. An identity is the sum of a thousand biased and meaningless parts, from birth certificates to high school diplomas, from awards and prizes to testimonials and flattering photographs. You are your context.

Either that's the simplistic message of the show, or that's my simplistic reading of it.

I enjoyed Tom and Cassandra's show, and the first few times I walked through it I thought it was hilarious. But I don't think I agree with its central premise, if I'm reading it right. How useful and how true is it that you are your context? That idea has been around, and it comes around again now, asserting that the role of the artist is as curator, as collector, as archivist.

To make a mark on a canvas suddenly seems to betray your naïve subservience to the myth of your individuality.

Henry

Regarding Titles, Again

2008-04-15T22:26:00.004-04:00

Artwork must somehow "arriving" in order to earn a title is incorrect. That galleries and the market deem value and thus titles on work is far too subjective and limiting a notion. A title (or any textual counterpart, though I am only discussing image-based work) is a functional part of any work and exists as a part, or doesn't, as a result of the artist's choice and not the viewer's. One can look at a piece like Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" and see the title as equal to the visual, guiding the viewer to where Hirst wants them to go. Something like de Kooning's "Woman I" (or II or III or IV) is a nearly non-existent (though one could argue that the painting may not be of a woman, but this is negligible) title, purely functional, and the viewer is completely concentrated on the visual. A title being a necessary aspect of the work is therefore also incorrect, as far as thinking of a good one goes, because a "good one" will either be trivial and point only to itself or will unnecessarily complicate the visual piece.

Titles do serve purely functional, non-artistic purposes as discussed with de Kooning. Generic and numeral titles often are used simply for cataloguing and identification; they do not affect the artwork's purpose or meaning. Functionality is also where I go against the case for anonymity. Names should be attached to work and should be accessible to the viewer unless there is explicit artistic reason to exclude it. Unlike having a textual counterpart, having a creator is inherent and does not need intention to exist.

When reviewers ask for labels in the student shows, we are asking only for names and a means to refer to specific pieces, not necessarily for something extra to chew on while evaluating the work. I do maintain that we have every right to add that chew if we want. We are artists, not just students.

Will

Re: The Case for Anonymity

2008-04-13T19:45:00.001-04:00

Can an artist holding an exhibition claim that they haven't titled the work in the exhibition because the work isn't worthy of being titled? The premise in choosing to make one's work public seems to be that the work is worth making public.

I don't think that titles always make work better, but they make work more communicable to the viewer and unless it is integral to the piece to not communicate that element, leaving it out seems like a sloppy omission. Think of a good title! This goes for the names of the artists in group shows, too. Why not let the viewer know what's going on?

Henry

The Case for Anonymity

2008-04-13T00:49:00.001-04:00

As much as it's not supposed to be beneficial to the work when one relinquishes all power of presenting it to the institution it's being presented in, I think that this (the presentation of a piece in a gallery for immediate sale or in a museum for view) is the only occasion when employing labels and binders can consistently work.

When I think about labels, my first thought is of 'Entropy,' the sixth floor show a month or two ago of work by Esteban Cabeza De Baca and some SVA alums. It is true that the amateurish way they executed the production of those labels contributed to how genuinely awful the whole experience was, but it's also true that the labels' basic functionality worked against the paintings on view: though they (in some ways) acted to protect Esteban in that they separated his work from the others' predominately inferior work, they also revealed the immaturity of a bunch of young art students not yet in possession of the responsibility necessary to title a piece of art. The titles given to the pieces and listed on labels next to them made the worst of the work very literally even worse than it had to be and I think that something very similar would happen in any other student show, even if the labels are made more professionally (I should mention Sonia Finley's excellent museum-quality labels in the basement of the Integrated Curriculum show as a contrary exemplary instance of label-making). I just don't think that we, as developing artists, are yet applying titles to things that deserve or can withstand the scrutiny a labeling system brings.

When a piece is put into a gallery it is put there because it is expected to sell and it is expected to sell (one would hope) because there is something about it that it is worth being bought for beyond it's allegiance to a market trend; that there is a reason one would want the work. When a piece is put into a museum it is put there because (one would hope) it is worthy of being preserved in antiquity for future generations to see; that there is a strong reason one would want the piece to be available for viewing past its current age. In both institutional instances there is a sense of unimpeachability that attends the work on display: it is work from artists who have arrived and are now making work strong enough to withstand or benefit from a title, even if that title is simply 'Untitled 1'.

The Integrated Curriculum, 6th Floor Lobby and Great Hall

2008-04-10T17:00:00.001-04:00

What happens when the School of Art cherry picks artists for an exhibition meant to represent the loftiest ambitions of the institution? A couple of things, it turns out. The first thing that happens is that art suddenly has artists, titles and intentions—with a neat, organized exhibition binder to prove it. Maybe this seems childish (or as I hear around from time to time, maybe it seems "high school") but it's also incredibly useful. All ye artists with weekly shows and no labels, maybe you could compromise and make some kind of index of the work available—binder or not.

Another thing that happens when the institution organizes the show is that no one goes to it. That's not entirely true, I suppose. As I write this, Pam Lins' 3D class is in the corner talking about Jenna Dublin's Untitled piece. Or, they're standing next to it, which is kind of like talking about it. The unsurprising lesson is that shows organized by the institution (excluding, as Sam reminds me, the great collaborative End of Year Show) don't have the same sort of enthusiasm from the students in it, or from the friends/family of those students.

I find it hard to muster enthusiasm myself when the work is tethered to the tired, self-congratulatory philosophies and clichés of the School of Art. Are these works truly meant to "initiate critical responses and alternative models in relation to the prevailing forms of institutions?" Maybe: someone give me an argument. But for me, that inflated sense of purpose does not resonate with the work in this show. The work does not represent an education "in the broadest sense," it's a microcosm of a very particular kind of education. All that's fine. Let the show be what it is, a (fairly arbitrary) sampler with some occasional really good samples.

Andrew Francis' Studio Cart—more democratically authored by "Community"—stands as an island in the lobby, reminding the viewer of the mostly unrealized potential of student involvement and voice in the direction this school takes. This isn't a finished piece, it's a piece in progress, and one that communicates directly with the institution it was born in and those who work in it.

Luke Janson drags a little bit of the fourth floor energy (and pomp) up to the otherwise quiet sixth floor. His paintings are deceptively well made and engaging, while his video, Y2K5 (the video game-video) is surprisingly boring. Still the atmosphere doesn't suffer from a little extra noise and life.

Henry Chapman

Dancing with Myself- Caitlin Macqueen in the Houghton Gallery

2008-04-03T03:18:00.001-04:00

I've already used dancing as a metaphor for art in this blog, so I feel all the more incredibly uncreative using a dancing metaphor to describe a painting show of dancers and singers, but here goes anyway:

On the night of Caitlin MacQueen's opening (the excellently titled 'Scratch Back Daub-Shebang!') I wandered the school for a few hours after the crowds had disappeared, opening beverages and snacks gone with them, eventually coming to a stop and lingering in the Houghton Gallery pacing languidly in circles.

Maybe dancing is more like what I was doing than pacing; I would take several long, swinging, enervated (perhaps inebriated) steps in one direction, find myself face to face with a smiling pair of women dancing, spin on my heels and move toward other painted dance partners, passing the faces of their painted musical accompanists on the way, before turning to see more. Flitting from one painting to another felt like slowly spinning around a small dimly lit club or bar on an off-night. It was Tuesday, though, so an uncomfortably large crowd couldn't really be expected, could it? As the night grew long, the faces of these other people at the club with me would become familiar and I would zero in on which of them I wanted to take home (given the opportunity).

The pair I most often returned to was a large grey painting at the center of the wall facing the Houghton Gallery's windows. A sketch for it happens to adorn the show cards for 'Scratch Back Daub-Shebang!' and I would be strongly tempted to assume the painting is named that, if it does have a name: as far as I'm concerned, this painting is the show's key and its best (if not my favorite) painting.

The painting's two figures are in mid-step of dance moves that are almost comically awkward, one striking a mock Egyptian pose with a knee raised in the air and the other with arms half vogue-ing, half flailing. No matter how uncomfortable the dance, both wear pleasant expressions and it's hard not to be glad they're having fun together tonight.

One strange thing about the dance hall they're dancing in is how amorphous it is; they seem to be dancing in a curved grey non-place and, for this reason, I take the piece to be less a narrative than a meditation on the idea of dancing. It's not about where they are or who they are (there are other dance-partners on view who could just as easily be them... the dances on view in this show aren't specific to a dancer or dancers), it's just important that they're dancing.

The other strange thing about the dance hall (and about the dancers themselves) is how grim the colors are that they're painted with. As much as the painting comes across as a general celebration of the idea of dancing, this is a celebration set to the tune of a funerary dirge. I begin to wonder if this is all the talk I've heard recently about "mourning the death of painting" gradually turning on its head, sadly shaking its hips in protest of sadness and step by step casting its veil aside while cautiously adopting a guarded, perhaps cynical, grin. You've come a long way, baby.

I highlight this painting instead of the other dancers on display primarily because I did return to it the most during my private dance party, but also because it's the one painting most like the rest of them. There are elements of each of the other paintings' mannerisms in this one and, I think, it's the one painting in which each of those mannerisms 'click.' The use of line is there, the muddy colors are there and the figures are there. They look good dancing there together.

Lander Burton- 6th floor lobby and 'Hope, Pray and Don't Worry'- 7th floor lobby

2008-03-30T13:54:00.001-04:00

I first saw Lander Burton's work in Cooper Union's annual end-of-year show and I am an avowed fan. I like all of the artists her paintings bring to mind and there is composure in her pursuit of the abstract vein her work sit in that I like and don't often see. It's almost a kind of formality that I miss, but not formality in the sense of 'formalism;' formality that one would apply to formal wear when one plans to go out dancing in the evening. Even if an artist's job is sometimes to let it all hang out, a certain respect for the audience watching your spectacle (in the form of appropriate attire) is admirable. This formality is apparent in the mannered borders of Lander's colors and shapes and the carefully even surfaces of her canvases.

This brings me to the work on the floor above. Mark Nerys and Ye Qin Zhu, as far as I'm concerned, sit on either side of Lander and are, additionally, good complements to each other: surface is a key point of discussion in the work of each of these three individuals.

Lander's mannered surfaces give way to Ye's violent, blooming, sensuous paint masses as well as to Mark's sheer, toothless planes. I'd go as far as to say that Mark's work sits in or near some kind of 'ground zero' of painting; in many ways he's pared the elements of his paintings down to something less, even, than essence. That sounds bad, scary even, but even if it is scary it's far from being bad territory to cover. It's nihilistic at times, sure, but it's also pretty damn funny too (albeit in a consciously low-brow way).

Compare and contrast Mark's minimal marks on his shining clean surfaces with Ye's maximal paintwork; it might be an unfairly simple cop to say that Ye's work can be similarly scary to look at (the rotting dog carcass?), but I think that it holds; Ye's work is, at the least, uncomfortable in a menacing sort of way from time to time. Both Ye and Mark manage to achieve similar results with entirely opposite strategies as far as the surfaces they work with are concerned. This is part of what makes pieces from both of them sit together so surprisingly well.

So where does this leave Lander? Though I like Lander's approach to a canvas, her style and her show in general, I think that comparison to the show above her sets her work in an uncomfortable middle ground. Its formality, the paint neither piled on nor sparingly applied, can leave her work with a loose neutrality, but neutrality is as difficult to maintain as are uncompromising stringency and uncompromising excess. It will be interesting to watch each of these painters waver between this middle ground and these extremes.

Grayson Revoir - 2nd Floor Lobby

2008-03-29T19:51:00.000-04:00

Grayson Revoir does not like Americans. At least, he plays off America's
insecurities and the stereotypes of Americans in Leisure Time, a tiny
exhibit in the 2nd floor lobby space. Six pieces make up the show, four
photos, a beaded curtain, and an immense ball of sloths. Entering from
the round elevator doors, the viewer passes through the beaded curtain
(think Native Americans, not hippies) to find that the tangled mass of
fake fur and wooden claws is the centerpiece, a fairly direct jab at the
orgiastic, masturbatory slothfulness that seems to pervade perception of
our country. What is it to be American if not fat and lazy? The flailing
faux-fauna has matted fur, dirty grey and green, and initially seems to
be a giant, disgusting hairball rather than the interlocked and
well-made animals it is actually composed of. Now, the curtain becomes
mocking. We pass through anticipating exoticism to entertain us and find
only criticism.

Moving to the walls, there are two pairs of photos. The first includes a
picture of a eighteen-wheeler parked on a snowy road and a picture of a
large young man in a small doorway. These take another stereotype of
Americans, their belligerent ignorance, and embodies it in typically
American images. The semi with its huge, white trailer, takes up most of
the frame. It blocks out the landscape and the gas station, and whatever
else it may be in front of, blocks it all out with absolutely nothing
except the vast blank space of the trailer. It is an obnoxious
nothingness. The man in the doorway has the same insistence on being
seen. He fills the door, shoulder to shoulder and head to toe, allowing
nothing to distract from his big, selfish body.

The second pair of photos is the weakest element in the show, and works
least well with the other pieces. Two close-ups of wrapping paper, one
interesting for its reflection and the other a repeating optical
pattern, are more concerned with their formal properties and aesthetics
than any underlying message. Not necessarily bad photos, they simply do
not fit the theme.

Will Schneider-White

Nickola Pottinger and Gabriel Smith in the Houghton Gallery, March 25-29

2008-03-28T20:19:00.002-04:00

A few days after Nickola Pottinger and Gabriel Smith's untitled exhibition opened I came back to sit in the Houghton Gallery, that one genuinely nice gallery space in the building. Some other students had come, too, six or seven elementary school students being chaperoned by a woman who asked in front of one drawing the simple and important question, "do you know what's happening in this drawing?" I realized that I hadn't even asked myself that question, and that maybe this was because for me the drawing had been lost in a jumble of other hectic drawings. I had looked over the drawing on an earlier visit but it wasn't until the children had moved that I asked myself for the first time, does that drawing really need glitter on it?

The two artists each democratically occupy fifty percent of the wall space—ceding all floor space to the viewer— and with so many drawings placed so closely to one another the show can sometimes feel like more like a show and tell than an exhibition. But a coherent and interesting conversation emerges from the two sides of the room, that face each other from different ends of the aesthetic and emotional universe. Pottinger's drawings dwell in the delicate and the perishable (do those drawing really need to be on newsprint?) and in a quirky sort of sexuality. Most of her forms come in doubles and many resemble testicles. Gabriel's drawings stare back with two terrifying eyeballs at the center of a colorful and energetic storm.

Some questions came up for me in this show. First, and I ask this all the time now, and other people should, too, why aren't these drawings labeled? Not indicating names, titles, or a show title outside the gallery space isn't just sloppy, it makes the viewing more difficult. I also kept wondering what the importance of a coherent message in a show is, and maybe specifically in a "student" show. There are formal and conceptual threads through each set of work, and I think the conversation between those two bodies is interesting, but I keep coming back to that "show and tell" feeling. It sounds like: Okay, here are my drawings, take a look. And I keep reaching the question, "so what?" What are these drawings saying? Smith's drawings are frail, sexual, maybe, sometimes beautiful. Does that mean they are speaking about frailty, about sexuality? They feel too ambiguous. For me, Nikola's drawings feel like they are working through some interesting problems and questions—pulling back from an order into something more emotional, and then wiping away some of that emotion to reveal another kind of order.

Henry Chapman

Craft and Afterlife - BFF on the 2nd floor

2008-03-19T01:11:00.003-04:00

A trio of friends put on a surprisingly comprehensive show with BFF –Best Friends For now. Katrina Myers, Karen Sawicki, and Alexandra Shaver hardly use more than a single wall to construct a linear and thematically unified exhibit, their varied styles meshing well.

Reading left to right, we find an ascending journey: from the underworld to our world, then above. First is Myers' drawing of a ringed mountain mimicking Dante's circles of hell, from which we move to a vertical triptych of photos paralleling a painting by Sawicki, both depicting the
falling of the damned. Then we move to our own world, Myers contributing earthy drawings and beadings seemingly imported from islands unheard of, representing the uncivilized and savage, Shaver showing a psychedelic utopia, saturated and swirling paintings, inhabited by a few deer, a lot of minute detail, and much fluorescence. A Catholic in this crowd of heathens and hippies, Sawicki completes our living plane with her strange and melodramatic paintings in subdued near monochrome. An altarpiece and a few shrine-like displays contrast luxurious furs and fabrics with scrimshawed portraits, the scratched bone functioning more to make these vanitas than as sailors' mementos. Finally, Sawicki has a wall of scratchboard idols, shining gold and silver, a yearbook of the risen (and of her classmates).

The narrative that can be read through the work is fun, and the BFFs choice to avoid montage and present an edited and clean show is admirable, but the strongest point is the sincere investment visible in nearly everything hung. None of these artists are self-consciously trying to create something new or original, and therefore avoid contrived novelty. And though they wear their influence proudly, the work does not look derivative. The beadings and scrimshaw are carefully done, learned and practiced craft rather than token unusual materials. The work is created first for the love of creation, then for whatever else it carries.

Will Schneider-White/
/

"News From the World" in the Houghton Gallery, March 11-15

2008-03-12T17:26:00.004-04:00

The young King in Lola Schnabel's video, "Le Bal des Ardents" looks bored with the entertainment. His eyes flutter around the room, unable to focus on one thing, only perking up when he greedily bites into a big chocolate chip cookie. Maybe the King appears as a reflection of the opening night audience, which comes for the beer and brownies (or, in some cases, cabernet and quiche) but has little to say or think about the work itself. Maybe. I felt that the show asked of me a little bit of time, (at least) a second visit.

"News From the World," a show by Alexander Haring, Patrick Roberts, and Lola Schnabel, looks like it could have been made by any number of people, offering an eclectic jumble of different kinds of work in varying mediums. In keeping with the long, irritating tradition of weekly show openings, this exhibition leaves the work without labels and without titles, keeping the work—unless you know the artist, or the pieces beforehand—anonymous. Maybe that anonymity serves the theme suggested by the title, and maybe the work is supposed to be shown anonymously, as artifacts from the world. But if that is the intention, it isn't executed with enough conviction, and without titles or names, I felt farther away from the work, that the work was not communicating to me, or that the jumble of work in the show was not anchored.

What is the news from the world? The most consistent fascination in the exhibition is bodies, their beauty and their strangeness. Almost every piece engages directly with the figure. Two exceptions include photographs that tell a story of human ruins—architectural decay in one, an atomic mushroom cloud in another. This violence is present in the other work, as in the busts of a female human torso and a cushion, which have flashing, sexual imagery projected onto them. Or the looping projection set at floor level, which shows a man trying without success to get closer to the viewer, and being pushed back by some invisible force. Both of these projections have a fast, frantic quality that succeeds in conveying a sense of aggression on the bodies they depict.

The questions concern the body or maybe the body in pain, maybe most explicitly imagined in the three photographs with lush colors that frame snapshots of police detainment, or maybe, as with the severed fingernail, the effects of torture techniques.

The work here is thoughtful, and the curation for the most part lives up to that. The use of the gallery space is creative and while the show does not feel too sparse, it also feels like the work has room to breath. If you only went for the opening night snacks, it's worth a second trip.

Henry Chapman

Prep

2008-03-10T20:11:00.007-04:00

An unusually sinister looking second floor hallway amid preparations for tomorrow night's show openings. Two new shows tomorrow night: Katrina Myers, Karen Sawicki & Ali Shaver on the second floor lobby, and Alexander Haring, Patrick Roberts & Lola Shnabel in the Houghton Gallery.

Aurora Pellizzi on the 7th Floor

2008-03-07T18:32:00.001-05:00

I did not know Aurora Pellizzi or her work before the show from March 3-8 in the 7th floor lobby. I did not go to the opening, did not talk to anyone about the show before seeing it. Hanging are a few large print-outs with multiple digital photo collages featuring Ms. Pellizzi (I assume) crudely inserted into touristy photographs of real and absurd locations, often in multiple. Looking at the show's postcard, I see the title is "Alter Ego, ό Mirame y No Me Toques".

The immediate impression these collages give is equivalent to the tourist photos they parody: I'm sure they are funny to whoever took them. They look like jokes, they are jokes, what else could they be? Are they commenting on the tourist trade or just pointing at it with an obnoxious grin and not saying anything? Aurora in Damien Hirst's diamond-studded skull makes me think of art as tourism, but my thought stops there. The images are rotated and fit on the pages to save room, not to be presented, which brings up the possibility that they're not about tourism or cultural disregard, maybe the subject is the medium. False naïveté has never been charming and when it is so obviously false, when the pixelated cut and paste with her curtains still there between her arm and body is printed large-format and high quality on a big glossy piece of paper, it just looks lazy. Anyway, not knowing how to use Photoshop is not yet social commentary.

So, they're jokes. Sometimes she wears a funny dress, or makes a funny face, or has a cake on her head like a funny hat. I can appreciate humor in art, but these have no punch-line, they are ironic without an end to meet. Do I create that end? These are purposeless images, escaped e-mail attachments, kidding between friends. As an artist, am I allowed to disregard these images as unsuccessful and uninteresting, or must I create a comfortable excuse to leave them on before I can admit appreciative dislike?

Will Schneider-White

Tommy Coleman on the 6th Floor, "Portraits of My Domesticity"

2008-03-07T01:51:00.003-05:00

When I circled the sixth floor on Tuesday night I carried a memory of Dennis Adams' voice—who was voicing Mies van der Rohe, or whoever—saying, "God is in the details." In a room full of well-made things, the joke in Tommy Coleman's exhibit, "Portraits of My Domesticity," comes in the details, in the little cracks and in the slight inconsistencies. Yes, I laughed, looking at the Laugh Now/ Stop Laughing signs, which gave the green light for stop and the red light for go. A drawing dented or ripped. A word mispelled. And what about that bed of growing grass with a corresponding picture of a different bed of growing grass? Maybe this isn't an entirely new joke, but Tommy's show does a good job of telling it.

But the title, "Portraits of My Domesticity," feels false. What does that narrative intend to say? Or add to the work? What joke is it trying to tell? It may not be hard to plug the imagery of lawns, marital beds and household notes into a strange story of domesticity, but that action feels just like that—a plugging in. Perhaps each individual piece would have benefited from having its own title. I always wonder why the standard for show openings on Tuesdays is to show work without titles, and I think here especially the work may have deserved names of their own, designations of their own, if only to survive being eaten by that nagging Domestic narrative.

Still, context matters, and coming after a week of unbearable visual noise, Tommy's thoughtful show, complete with its own mysterious and insistent sound, made refreshing use of the 6^th floor.

Henry Chapman

The Cooper Union Review

Performances, screenings, & closing receptions this Saturday!

Sonia Finley, “No Place, Here” 2nd Floor Lobby

Postcards 5-5

GO DEEP closing screening

“Each Other,” Andrew Francis and Rina Goldfield on the 7th Floor

Postcards 4-28

Exhibitions in the School of Art, April 28 - May 2, 2009

Re: Bodies and Pleasures, Lucy Kirkman on the 7th Floo r Lobby

“Bodies and Pleasures,” Lucy Kirkman on the 7th Floor Lobby

Urgent Meeting in the Great Hall Tonight 10 PM

Postcards 4-21

Exhibitions in the School of Art, April 21 - 25, 2009

“/Līt/”, Julie Kim and Laura Lee-Georgescu on the 6th Floor Lobby

Great Evenings in The Great Hall

Postcards 4-14

Exhibitions in the School of Art, April 14 - 18, 2009

"Rich Mixtures of Similarity"

Yo Te Negaré Ante Mi Padre y Mi Escuela

"Inner Yonder," Amelia Hall on the 7th Floor Lobby

Plywood Extravaganzas: A Rant

this was our show card

Postcards 4-7-09

“Communications Programming,” Alex DeCarli and Dmitri Hertz on the 6th Floor

Postcards 3-31-09

“Whatsoever Things are True,” Houghton Gallery and 2nd Floor Lobby

"Brand New Geography for Old-Timers"

The 7th floor Lithographs

Postcards 3-24

“New Work” by Maren Mill, Saki Sato, and Avery Singer on the 7th Floor Lobby

A note on Abigail Collins' video in "In Response to Choking." In the Houghton Gallery with Kirby Mages

Josephine Heilpern, “We missed the whole thing.” in the Great Hall Gallery

Postcards 3-3-09

Brief Thoughts on "Trichinae, Trachiniae," Caitlin Everett, 2nd fl. lobby

A Note on "Quality Service," Staff Show on the 6th and 7th Floors

A Couple of Quick Thoughts on Oliver Loaiza's 7th-Floor Show

Lisa Larson-Walker and Harold Batista on the 6th Floor, “One Liners by Two People”

One Night Only

A new year, a new season.

Re: Relational Aesthetics

Relational Aesthetics: a response to The Common Viewer

Common Viewer

Why Care About Art?

Drivel

A Narrative Review of Sentimental Photographs of Canada

A handful of thoughts from the studio: maxims, mess-ups

Paint Drips Pictures

"Paint Drips Pictures"- 7th floor lobby

The Original New Addition, 6th floor lobby

"Transcendentalisme"

Re: An observation on a line for me

The Retrospective

about one of next week's show

Luke Janson - So Good?

Leslie Martinez, "Give Us This Day, Our Daily Bread," 7th Floor

Portrait of the Artist as a Rejection of Existing Values and Types: Thomas Witschonke and Cassandra Guan "In the Lubalin Center"

Regarding Titles, Again

Re: The Case for Anonymity

The Case for Anonymity

The Integrated Curriculum, 6th Floor Lobby and Great Hall

Dancing with Myself- Caitlin Macqueen in the Houghton Gallery

Lander Burton- 6th floor lobby and 'Hope, Pray and Don't Worry'- 7th floor lobby

Grayson Revoir - 2nd Floor Lobby

Nickola Pottinger and Gabriel Smith in the Houghton Gallery, March 25-29

Craft and Afterlife - BFF on the 2nd floor

"News From the World" in the Houghton Gallery, March 11-15

Prep

Aurora Pellizzi on the 7th Floor

Tommy Coleman on the 6th Floor, "Portraits of My Domesticity"

Re: Bodies and Pleasures, Lucy Kirkman on the 7th Floo r Lobby