Pictures--or the lack thereof
It's a tired, tired strategy, but so many young painters keep throwing their time and effort into it: Take a piece of canvas or paper--unprimed, or stained with some monochrome wash--and scrawl a tangle of graphic signifiers across it, like you're laying out a picnic spread of pictorial conventions.
I see it with Jiha Moon's blooms of watercolor that carry along fauns and dragons and clumps of silly string at their edges, or Maggie Michael's knots of airbrush, pooled enamel and calligraphy. I saw it at Irvine's old location last year, with Nicola Lopez, who makes apocalyptic doodles using blotches of ink, ruled lines, and cartoonish drawings of drain-pipe labyrinths...and I saw it last weekend at their current front room survey of works on paper--clearing out old inventory, natch. There's Christine Kessler's greatest-hits-of-Rauschenberg-and-Twombly collages, or Susan Jamison's graphite and string drawings of birds, hands, and spiders against blank backdrops, or Peregrine Hong's unicorn kiddie-porn drawings, or...well, it just goes on and on.
Nobody's interested in pictorial space or chiaroscuro or even composition, it seems. The page or the canvas becomes an arena in which to have fey little graphics, detached from context, fumbling around one another--an illustrator's warmed-over approximation of good ol' flat-bed construction.
Decorative, unnecessary, played-out. A lot of gallery-goers mistake these pictures for actual displays of skill. Instead, they're avoidance strategies. Why choose the rectangle if you're not interested in it? Why use the tools of illusionistic rendering to dot the unconsidered page with little episodic meanderings?
What about pictures? And I don't mean illusionistic windows onto another space or anything--just the evidence of an artist looking at the substrate/format and responding to it in some constructive, considered, foundational way.
That's my big, obvious rant for the evening, anyway.
Thoughts?
5 comments:
Thank you for beginning the blog this way...it gives it atleast the beginnings of arena of actual, inteligent conversation about art. It is much appreciated.
who knew your blogging voice would be harsher than your print voice...
Hey, I'm trying. Hopefully not too hard.
Harsh? I don't know. People keep telling me I'm mean...but dismantling other people's work is just part of my training--of our training. Right?
Besides, when an artist puts work on the wall, he or she should expect the claims made in (and for) the work to be tested--and, quite often, rejected. That's the way it works.
Having your claims rejected *in print* at least acknowledges your position in the discourse.
Even if it's, you know, a bad one.
Jeffrey,
I just saw this about Jiha Moon and beg strongly to differ. Of course, as her "gallerist", you can accuse me of having a vested interest, but the curator part of me responds far more intensely.
I see a tremendous amount of compositional consideration in her work. She lays the foundation with
gesture derived from Abstract Expressionism and bold calligraphic traditions.
She then carefully considers pictorial space by creating scapes that are indebted to numerous Korean, Japanese, and Chinese landscape traditions. Her dense layering on top of and through these scapes allows her to alter our expectations of space as she interweaves ethereal painterly passages and delicate lines with flat pop shapes. I have not seen many artists in recent memory who can accomplish that complex bending approach to pictorial space and scale. Well, maybe Julie Mehretu, but her approach is quite different. (And Moon and Mehretu are frequently commented on together by critics and curators.)
As you may have noticed she frequently goes back in and delineates the brushstroke, a painstaking approach (and nod to Lichtenstein) that has become a signature motif in some of her work.
I invite you to see work in the show at the Asia Society in New York. The complexity in the work is breath-taking. Not just some random fey squiggles and marks made on paper. Each mark is carefully thought through. Each form has a source that she purposefully leaves open-ended so as not to lapse into any design cliches. That they have a wit or playfulness only adds to the arena of upended expectations.
And she can paint representationally quite well. I've seen her oil painting portraits. But she chooses to use her particular skill at painting representationally in novel ways in her works on paper as in "Wishing Tree" and "Legal Gale". See her website, www.jihamoon.com although JPEGs rarely do her work justice.
BTW, sometimes she also paints HanJi paper mounted on ovals canvases, so it's not just about the rectangle.
Yes she makes it look so easy because she is freakishly talented. Go look at her work again. Moti Hasson show in April in NY if you miss Asia Society presentation. And, of course, she will be showing at Curator's Office this fall.
So that is my two-cents. A riposte, of course, is always welcome.
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