Showing posts with label Agnes Martin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agnes Martin. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Myke Venable's Big Squares

by Robert Boyd

Myke Venable's art almost dares you to say something about it. It mainly just is. Describing any particular painting in this show is a trivial, unenlightening task.

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Myke Venable, MV 32 Sage/DD Orange (Dare Devil Orange), latex on canvas, 2011

Two square canvases, each hung at a 45 degree angle. the larger one is a pale yellow-green and the smaller one a bright orange. The larger is to the left of the smaller from the viewer's point of view, and the two touch each other ever-so-slightly. Once you've said all this, then what? And Venable doesn't give you anything in the titles. He's not like Barnett Newman, who would give his paintings titles like Achilles or Vir Heroicus Sublimus. Nope, Venable goes for just the facts, ma'am. Each painting is named after the color of paint used.

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Myke Venable, MV 32 Sage/DD Orange (Dare Devil Orange), latex on canvas, 2011

These paintings are so minimal that it's reasonable to ask if they are paintings at all. They aren't framed and the colors extend over the edge of the canvas. They have a certain sculptural presence. And if one is an arch-formalist, then flatness and integrity of the picture plane are important indicators that you are in the presence of pure painting. These aren't really flat.

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Myke Venable, MV 24 Orange, acrylic on canvas, 2011

If you go into the Gallery Sonja Roesch, it seems designed for "pure painting"--the interior is a big white neutral box. In many ways, it seems like the ideal setting to allow big modernist paintings to just be themselves--no distractions, no visual clutter.

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Myke Venable, MV 30 CadRed/Sky Blue, latex on canvas, 2011

It's a totally neutral space except for one thing--it has narrow clarestories on the east and west walls. So early in the morning and late in the afternoon (when the opening for this exhibit occurred), the sunlight will shoot like a laser through the windows into the space. The floor is so highly polished that it reflects the sunbeam back up. The effect of this dramatic light was to highlight the angles on Venable's wall-sized painting MV 30 CadRed/Sky Blue, which was hanging on the north wall of the gallery. So you have a painting that in a dramatic way is in dialogue with the light in the room.

This is a fundamental quality of minimalist paintings, whether Ellsworth Kelly or Agnes Martin or Venable. There is a kind of humility in these paintings, even when they are very large. The humility comes from knowing that they aren't really finished in the studio, but instead only becomes complete in situ--and this last step is not something the artist can fully control.

For example, Venable often uses fluorescent colors in his painting. If a fluorescent color is somewhere where sunlight (which contains ultraviolet light as part of its spectrum) hits it, it will have a kind of glow. But if it is an interior space that only receives artificial light, that glow will be absent. Venable doesn't control the final disposition of the painting--he doesn't know what shadows will be cast on it, what kind of light will be hitting it, etc. This is ironic. These works seem austere and hermetic, but really they depend on engagement with the world to achieve completion.

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Myke Venable, MV 25 Silver/Scarlet Red/Black, acrylic on canvas, 2011

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Myke Venable, MV 26 Purple/Fluorescent Pink, acrylic on canvas, 2011

(Author's note: I own two small Myke Venable paintings.)


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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Edward Lane McCartney at Goldesberry Gallery

I had seen Edward Lane McCartney's work before at Goldesberry and in a group show at Gallery 1724. The thing to remember about McCartney is that he is something of a crossover artist. He is a jeweler, which is to say he works in a form of art often associated with "craft." But he also creates objects that can only be thought of as sculpture. Despite the wall between "craft" and "art" that has existed since at least since Vasari, there are craftspeople who work very hard at making the distinction meaningless. We saw that at Hand+Made. There are other seeming contradictions in McCartney's work. He is a jeweler, skilled in shaping fine pieces of metal into rings, bracelets, necklaces and broaches. But he is just as likely to make jewelry out of plastic cable ties as gold. Some of his materials are extremely humble, and some would count as found objects. As a sculptor, he is in many of his pieces primarily and assemblagist.


Edward Lane McCarthy, Don't Ask...Don't Tell, steel, plastic army men, cable ties, paint


He has used tiny plastic army men in his sculptures before. You know the type--you could order them from comic books back in my childhood. This piece is quite large, and from a distance appears to be a rough but textured triangle of some undetermined material. You can only tell they're army men when you get in close.


Edward Lane McCarthy, Don't Ask...Don't Tell detail, steel, plastic army men, cable ties, paint


As a piece of political art, it's not subtle (but it is very timely!).  McCartney's weakness is his obviousness. Particularly when addressing issues where there is clearly a right and wrong side. For example, Wolves in Sheep's Clothing.


Edward Lane McCarthy, Wolves in Sheep's Clothing, acrylic, brass, copper, sterling steel, paint and photographs


Here's a detail.


Edward Lane McCarthy, Wolves in Sheep's Clothing detail, acrylic, brass, copper, sterling steel, paint and photographs


Get it? Here is a beautifully crafted piece with the message that priests abusing children is BAD! I am sure this is something that McCartney feels strongly about, and I certainly don't doubt for one second his sincerity. But art is most powerful, it seems to me, when it draws you into its metaphors, its subtleties, its mystery. When it leaves at least part of the  "work" ("work" that is, for me, pleasure) to the viewer. This doesn't. It has the subtlety of an antiabortion billboard on I-45.

A piece that works much better is this one.


Edward Lane McCartney, Is the Cure Worse then the Disease?, sterling silver, fine silver, transfer print on linen


This is another beautifully crafted piece, and every aspect of it refers in some way to the medical regimen that people with HIV must undergo. The title seems to indicate that McCartney has a specific beef, but the work itself is much more ambiguous.


Edward Lane McCartney, Is the Cure Worse then the Disease? detail, sterling silver, fine silver, transfer print on linen


The preciousness of the material must in some ways reflect the preciousness of the drugs--both in actual cost and in terms of what they give someone taking them--more hours and days and years. The presentation reminds me simultaneously of a rich medieval place-setting and of a sacrament. Of course the chain and cuff connected to the goblet are a reminder that you can never leave the regimen. So it is a blessing to be alive and a burden to be chained to these drugs forever.


Edward Lane McCartney, Wounded, wood, acrylic, paint, band-aids


I'll close with this witty piece, made out of the very humblest materials imaginable. When I see someone produce a piece with a strict grid, I inevitably think of Agnes Martin. But her work is calming, partly because grids are calming, and partly because of the materials and colors she used and finally I think because her grids featured horizontal rectangles instead of squares. McCartney makes his grid the opposite of calm. Aside from the obvious association of band-aids with cuts and scrapes, the rigid squares within squares don't give the viewer the feeling that the squares are resting on something. Unlike Agnes Martin, this piece doesn't suggest a landscape. Nor does it suggest a figure or a portrait. It's a true abstraction made of many small pains, a gameboard of tiny wounds.

This show is packed--there are many more pieces besides the one I have described here. McCartney is an interesting and highly skilled artist, and his work is well worth seeing.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist

 Robert Boyd



Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist was one of the early pop artists. He has an almost perfect pop biography--midwestern boy, learns the fine art of painting billboards, moves to New York and wows the swells with his paintings of jet fighters and spaghetti. His new autobiography doesn't challenge this capsule biography, but it enriches it a lot.

I think for people my age and younger, the weird thing about Rosenquist's story was that he was a billboard painter. This is a profession that doesn't exist anymore, and one could be forgiven for being surprised that it ever existed. The idea that it was cost-effective to hire an artist to paint your billboard seems amazing today. But apparently it was common at one time. Rosenquist got his start painting billboards on the road in the midwest, including many in Minneapolis. These required a combination of sign-painting skills (he had to paint large display fonts) and more-or-less realistic painting. But beyond that was the skill of painting big--not being able to see the whole while you are painting, yet coming out of it with an intelligible image. Obviously this is a skill that mural painters have always had to master. On top of all this, he had to learn to paint it quick.

He had artistic ambitions beyond billboard painting, so he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. He continued to paint in New York, joining a billboard painter's union, painting bottles of booze on the sides of buildings all over Brooklyn. He made a good living doing this, and in Painting Below Zero, he never hints that he might have thought of this as a job without a future (as it most certainly was). His desire to leave billboard painting behind had everything to do with his artistic ambitions and nothing to do with the fact that billboard painting was about to go the way of the dodo.

His fine art painting in this period (the 50s) was abstract. He worshiped de Kooning and Franz Kline, and for serious contemporary artists of the time, that was what was in the air. But he also new that he wanted to make his own mark in his own style. But he started meeting a younger group of painters who in time would revolt against abstract expressionism. It started with Ray Johnson (who really seems like he was a "connector" in that world), and got to be friends with people like Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. When he was looking for loft space to paint, he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. It was their work that showed Rosenquist a way out of Abstract Expressionism.

The interesting thing about Rosenquist was that he used his billboard experience extensively in his art. I'm not just talking about the large scale of his paintings and the "creamy" painting surface--although those are important. He wanted viewers to overwhelmed by the images, and to see them in fragmentary ways, like he did when he painted a billboard. Hence the overlapping, truncated images in his work. This is one reason why reproductions of his work are so inadequate--they make all the fragments instantly visable and comprehensible. A full-size Rosenquist painting is virtually impossible to see all at once, unless it's in a huge room. And that's intentional.

Ironically, he didn't even meet the two biggest pop artists, Warhol and Lichtenstein, until 1964. This reuse of banal imagery was just in the air. Rosenquist doesn't even quite see it that way--he always had an emotional connection with what he was painting. Obviously there was irony in his art, but that wasn't the main point. He loved the objects he painted (or hated them when he got around to painting F-111).

What I like about this kind of book is the description of the social scene in which the artist operated. How did people meet; how does a kid from Minneapolis find other artists? How do they entertain themselves (lots of drinking, apparently). Rosenquist is quite amusing in talking about the bars they hung in. It was OK to hang at the Cedar Tavern or Max's Kansas City, but if a bunch of painters showed up at Elaine's, they might end up getting booted. The centrality of drinking is kind of intense. I think it damaged a lot of creative people at that time--de Kooning certainly. And for an artist to "network" with his peers, he had to drink.

After Rosenquist moves away from New York, his life is a lot less interesting and more stable. He still has his friends (he was very close to Rauschenberg his whole life), but now he had a family and property and success. He still was doing big bold work. Now he is one of the survivors of his generation, and his memories are welcome. Painting Below Zero was a thoroughly entertaining book.