Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

Vietnamese Artist, Danh Vo, Wins Boss Prize

The Guggenheim Museum, despite suffering a power outage to its downtown administrative offices, which are closed (its email and phone systems are also down), managed to get out some news today (the museum itself was closed, as usual for Thursdays, but it plans to reopen tomorrow — it has been closed since Sunday, but opened yesterday only for Picasso: Black and White). So I thought it was worth a post: the museum named Danh Vo as winner of the Hugo Boss Prize. It’s the 9th time for the biennial prize, which involves a $100,000 award. The jury’s citation:

We have chosen to award the Hugo Boss Prize 2012 to Danh Vo in recognition of the vivid and influential impact he has made on the currents of contemporary art making. Vo’s assured and subtle work expresses a number of urgent concerns related to cultural identity, politics, and history, evoking these themes through shifting, poetic forms that traverse time and geography. 

I can’t agree or disagree — the work leaves me befuddled — so I’ll post a few pictures and comments. Here’s one (Tombstone for Phùng Vo — at left) from the competition. The Walker Arts Center, which owns several works by Vo including that piece, has an interesting rationale for its choice by curator Bartholomew Ryan that begins:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” So reads the inscription on a black stone with gold-leaf engraving that will be installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in the spring of 2012. Titled Tombstone for Phùng Vo (2010), it’s one of several works by artist Danh Vo recently acquired by the Walker. …it’s my hope that this piece becomes a part of the life of the Twin Cities—that people will discover it and notice as the installation changes over time. In fact, the tombstone itself won’t always be here. On the death of the artist’s father, Phùng Vo, the stone will be shipped to Denmark and placed over his grave in Vestre KirkegÃ¥rd, a large cemetery in Copenhagen….

Just as immigration documents have controlled his family’s movements in life, the Walker’s acquisition of Vo’s work has led to contractual obligations that will impact various activities after his father’s death:…Phùng Vo has created a will for the Walker that …bequests to the institution four artifacts of personal significance, including a gold crucifix with a chain and three objects based on versions he purchased soon after he arrived in Denmark. These items—a Dupont lighter, an American military class ring, and a Rolex watch—have since been “upgraded” to newer models. Phùng Vo bought them originally because as a recent immigrant from Communist Vietnam, they symbolized a particularly Western brand of success and masculinity.

Whereas the tombstone will rest within the protective enclave of the Walker until it is sent to the cemetery in Copenhagen, these four objects will be part of Phùng Vo’s daily life until he dies. After the tombstone arrives in Copenhagen, the artifacts will be delivered to Minneapolis where they can be installed in a vitrine designed by the artist.

And here’s what Frieze magazine said about him in 2007, reviewing a show in Berlin:

Danh Vo investigates the invisible boundaries between the public and the private, and the possibility of their porousness. He undermines the institutional (he curated an exhibition of works by well-known artists in his parents’ house in Copenhagen) as well as the personal (he has married and then divorced several people, augmenting his name with theirs but not sharing a private romantic life). He has collaborated on a project with Tobias Rehberger without declaring his co-authorship, and stolen an idea from his artist boyfriend for his own funding application. Vo adopts appropriation more rigorously than is often the case, to discover how much a person can actually appropriate. Another person’s idea? An art work? An identity? There is a constant back and forth that questions authorial status, ownership and the role of personal relationships that prevents the ‘appropriator’ from keeping the upper hand….

See what I mean? Vo’s work is undoubtedly thought-provoking, but I haven’t seen it in person (at least I didn’t take note of it, if I have). Until then, I have to reserve judgment.  

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Guggenheim (top); of Frieze (middle)

Hurricane Sandy’s Toll In Chelsea

This is an example where pictures are worth a thousand words. For the past two days, the website Hyperallergic has been tracking down the storm’s impact on Chelsea art galleries and artists. Have a look at one picture below; there’s more information and pictures here and here, and Bloomberg has a short story here.

Meantime, Christie’s is offering space and computer access to dealers and artists who need that.

Critcial Orthodoxy And Roy Lichtenstein

In addition to going to the Per Kirkeby exhibit at the Phillips Collection on my trip to Washington a week ago Saturday, I also stopped in to see several shows at the National Gallery. The Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, officially opened last Sunday, was available to families and members that day — in preview – and I was kindly allowed in, too. I wasn’t going to write about it, though, because — frankly — while I am no expert on him, I have only slight appreciation for the artist, and this show didn’t raise the level. I find his work, in total, to be shallow and at times even hollow — even though I think some of the paintings are pleasing to look at (especially his late works, Landscapes in the Chinese Style).

Then I read Holland Cotter’s review in Friday’s New York Times, and it made me think about Nicholas Penny’s comments on contemporary art posted here last week, particularly the line about a “lamentable lack of critical debate about contemporary art.”

Cotter didn’t pan Lichtenstein, but readers should notice that he employed several words and phrases that betray at least a mildly negative view: “virtually foolproof art style,” “narrow in range,” “ergonomically comfortable to the eye,” “clever, if slight,” “diverse but unrevealing,” etc. The headline went a step further: “Cool. Commercial. Unmistakable.”

Cotter’s ending:

Lichtenstein changed art to some extent, but nothing else. …his work looks like no one else’s, and some of it still feels fresh and audacious. He encapsulates, at least in his early work, the spirit of an era. He is embedded in the culture now, and unlikely to be dislodged.

Let’s call him an American classic, and leave it at that.

Damning with faint praise? It made me wonder whether anyone else even began to challenge the ordothoxy (a Lichtenstein painted fetched more than $43 million at auction recently, so vested interests are operating here). I looked up other reviews of the exhibit.

In the Washington Post, Anne Midgette, sounded a positive note:

…what animates [his work] is not solely its inherent social criticism, but the tension between the individuality of the painter’s hand and eye and the impersonality of what he uses them to illustrate. This tension runs through the whole show, and is what made it such a delight, even a revelation. …After [his]1993 retrospective, I came away feeling Lichtenstein had had a burst of fecundity in the 1960s and ended up repeating himself or looking in vain for a way to get back to that initial energy. The current show, by contrast, shows him dumping a huge bag of tricks out on the table in the ’60s and continuing to play with them, examine them, and follow them ever further to new solutions, for the rest of his life.

And in the Chicago Tribune, which published a review last May when the exhibit was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lori Waxman gushed:

[His appropriation of comic images and use of Ben-Day dots in Look, Mickey] was a great gambit, one of the finest of the 20th century, a period of art-making full of one gambit after another….By the mid-’60s he’d turned to landscape as a subject matter, depicting sunrises, seascapes and cloudy skies as amalgamations of colored dots, solid lines and blank spaces. The results, on view in a somewhat overhung gallery, are breathtaking. They’re also stunning in their efficiency and abstraction: Lichtenstein borrowed these images from comic books, keeping the background and leaving out all the extraneous details. The ensuing gorgeousness can be hard to believe.

I am sure that all three critics quoted here were sincere in their appraisals, and after all, their views are supposed to be subjective. But I think it’s time to have more debate about Lichtenstein. Of course, Peter Schjeldahl hasn’t yet weighed in, nor has Jed Perl. Maybe they will stir the pot.

This show travels next to the Tate Modern. It’s, no question, a crowd-pleaser: in Chicago, it was the Art Institute’s best-attended exhibition in ten years, drawing about 350,000 people.

And here’s the appropriate kicker: “The retail business was ’31/2 times what we projected,’ ” a spokeswoman told the Tribune.

 

 

 

New Round Of Awards For Women Artists

It’s Friday afternoon, so I will keep this short: In keeping with my longstanding interest in the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, which annually gives $25,000 grants to women artists “over 45 years of age and at a critical juncture in their lives or careers, to continue to grow and pursue their work,” I am listing the new awardees — announced today”

  • Ann Agee
  • Uta Barth (her photo, top right)
  • Andrea Fraser
  • Jane Hammond (her work, below right)
  • Mary Kelly
  • Jae Ko
  • Judy Pfaff
  • Betye Saar
  • Lorna Simpson
  • Jessica Stockholder

As you may not remember from last year, in 1997, when these awards were founded, I wrote a Page One story for the New York Times about them. The hope was that they would at some point no longer be needed to counter the bias toward male artists. But that still exists, so…

171 women have now received money from this foundation.  

On a related note, today the Dallas Museum of Art opened Difference? — an exhibition of works by female artists in its collection:

The exhibition draws attention to the fact that there is only one thing these artists have in common. In doing so, we pose the question, “What’s the difference, and does it matter?”

Probably not. I’m kind of against single-sex exhibitions, but I suppose they serve a purpose.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Artists

 

Enigmatic Per Kirkeby Gets A Show At the Phillips Collection

On Saturday, I took the train to Washington for a look at a couple of exhibitions — one being the retrospective for Danish artist Per Kirkeby at the Phillips Collection. I was not very familiar with his work, but I knew he is considered to be the best (“most highly acclaimed,” the Phillips says in its press release) Scandinavian artist working today. 

As I walked around the show, I couldn’t figure him out at all. Some paintings were colorful, almost decorative (like New Shadows V, right); others, muddy, indistinct (like Untitled, 1993, left). His bronzes seemed unrelated (not necessarily bad). The selection was very eclectic, and I wasn’t sure how representative these pieces are of his work. They are all said to be about nature, natural history, and sometimes a merger of “the beauty of landscape painting and the grandeur of history painting.” 

But almost everywhere I saw aspects of other artists better-known in the United States — Guston, Mitchell, Rauschenberg, Richter, Twombly, Salle even — and I tried to figure out from the dates who influenced whom. (One painting, Untitled 2009, which shows horses — a red one, a yellow one — seemed very related to art I’d seen in Iceland in 2011.) When I got home, still thinking about Kirkeby, I thought of the chart that MoMA’s curators and the Columbia University Business School have devised laying out social networks among artists for MoMA’s coming Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which will open in late December. (This was called to my attention by a recent article in ARTNews headlined “MoMA Makes A Facebook for Abstractionists.”) Here’s the link to the social network chart (be sure to magnify it, or you’ll strain your eyes), and you can see that Picasso, Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay and others had the widest networks. 

Kirkeby, born in 1938, obviously wasn’t on it, but it made me wonder what his network would look like.  

I don’t think I’m the only one a bit mystified by Kirkeby. Notice that this review (which has a very good slide show), in Washingtonian, starts out quoting a British review: 

In a review of one show at Tate Modern, the London Guardian described his works as “rich, earthy, spearing, dynamic, fiercely inquiring, solemn droll, skeptical, and yet abundantly romantic; perhaps a portrait of the artist as much as his art.” 

I got hints as well from an interview with Kirkeby by Dorothy Kosinski, the director of the Phillips, in the catalogue. Such as:

  • “There’s this whole idea of being first with some kind of invention or someone being rare and so on. What does it all mean? Artists are there in their own time and they have different reactions, and essentially they are all good. Even the artists we do not like have done their very best, and you have to respect that.” 
  • On a trip to New York, he met George Maciunas, who asked him if he were part of Fluxus. “I don’t want to be a member, because basically I am a painter. I am attached to material and flamboyant things.” 
  • “In the painter community [in Europe], it was not so good to be an intellectual. But I couldn’t change the way I was and still am.” 
  • “It’s far too easy a conclusion, that I paint layer upon layer, therefore I’m a geologist. I wouldn’t emphasize geology too much.” 
  • “In painting, you have to invent, each time, a set of rules. …At a certain point, I know it’s finished and the painting kicks me out.” 
  • “[My wife sometimes] looks in [my studio] and says, ‘that’s beautiful,’ and then this painting is doomed.” 
  • “It’s very easy to be pessimistic about contemporary [art], because it’s all against my idea of art. There is something very didactic about it…”

 That’s enough to give you a feel for Kirkeby’s sentiments – you’ll have to read the catalogue (too bad that an excerpt of the interview isn’t online). Some of you may find him to be pretentious, but I didn’t. I not entirely convinced by his art, but having read parts of the catalogue I think he’s thought-provoking. Which is what an artist is supposed to be, right?

Good for the Phillips for introducing many of us to this artist.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Phillips Collection