Diverse Practices, Common Threads

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Textility, which I co-curated with Mary Birmingham at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit, opens on Friday, January 13, and runs through April 1. This essay is included in the exhibition catalog. .

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Textility was conceived in Miami last December. That’s where Mary Birmingham and I, standing by chance in front of an Arlene Shechet clay sculpture with a surface that can only be described as velvet, noted the significant number of textile-esque works we had been seeing in booths and hotel rooms throughout the fairs: knitted paintings, painted quilts, metal tapestries and more. Our previously expressed desire to work together focused, then and there, on creating an exhibition for her institution, the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, of contemporary painting, sculpture and work on paper that had a connection to thread and cloth.

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 Arlene Shechet sculpture, seen in Miami 2011 at the Jack Shainman Gallery booth, a year after we saw the related skein-like work that inspired our show

“Textility,” a word we coined for this exhibition, describes a contemporary esthetic which draws from a textile tradition, or which exhibits a material presence or conceptual quality related to textiles. The exhibition brings together the work of 28 artists who approach their métier by material means: paintings and sculptures made with stuff other than paint, or conversely, paintings and drawings that reference fiber and cloth, some convincingly so. We’re not talking “fiber art” but about the way fiber has insinuated itself more broadly into the fabric of contemporary art.

The work we selected falls largely into one of two flexible categories: Paintings Without Paint and Textiles Without Thread. A third category, Materiality and Process, allows us to consider idiosyncratic work in more specific ways. .
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Paintings Without Paint

"The interesting thing is that I started working on these paintings when I took a studio in the garment district.”—Sharon Butler

“After a time, I dropped the stretchers and just pinned the constituent elements to the wall. This move brought planar abstraction into the realm of assemblage, and I found myself coaxing pictorial space into existence through sculptural means.”—Stephen Maine

“I’m not a painter. My artwork is built with materials such as wax, paper, string, eggshells. Finding unique ways to manipulate these materials interests me.” –Debra Ramsay  

Sharon Butler, UniQlo, 2011, spray paint, pigment, urethane, pencil and sewing on unstretched gessoed canvas and unprimed linen, 66 x 50 inches; courtesy of the artist

        

Sharon Butler provides a bridge to Textility from conventional painting. With her patchwork UniQlo, Butler reminds us that canvas off the stretcher reasserts itself as fabric rather than disappearing into the substrate. She has stitched together both painting parts and rectangles of unprimed linen, allowing the painting and the non-painting, with their respective lozenge shapes and angular wrinkles, to collide and then resolve into conceptual and compositional détente.

Stephen Maine’s geometric constructions of fabrics pinned to the wall are paintings made completely without paint. Mesh painting #11-011 is simultaneously toothy and diaphanous. You’d think the assertive grid would do the heavy lifting, but in fact it is the shadow that aligns the layers of materiality and sheerness into a hovering dimensional presence.  

Stephen Maine, Mesh painting #11-011, 2011, acrylic, paper, plastic mesh, thermal insulation, T-pins, 36 x 36 x 6 inches; courtesy of the artist

Working more materially with felt, Peter Weber employs mathematical processes to fold one piece of fabric into a tactile painting—or is it a planar sculpture?—which suggests a woven grid.

Then there is Mary Carlson’s translucent Ghost Flag. I think of this work as the anti-Jasper Johns, an object image as transcendent as Johns’ is resolutely material. If Johns’ encaustic flag is subversive as the idea of the object, Carlson’s is equally so, for hers is a painting that is a flag, even made according to U.S. guidelines for proper proportion.
Mary Carlson, Ghost Flag, 2007, sewn sheer fabric, 123 x 70 ins; courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York City

Let us also consider Drawing Without Pencil in this category. Debra Ramsay uses the linearity of tautly pulled threads to create immersive installations with mathematically determined proportions, such as the ones in this exhibition. The exquisitely rendered works embody drawing, painting and sculpture.

Debra Ramsay, detail of Two, Twice With Green and Yellow, 2011, thread, fabric and other materials, dimensions variable 

While Ramsay’s work is based on rule and measure, Gelah Penn’s drawings appear spontaneous and expressionistic. Seeing them, I think of the type of lace known in Italian as punto in aria, literally, a stitch in air.  Penn’s drawings have nothing to do with lace, but everything to do with stitches in air, or as she  would describe them, “the linear language of drawing in sculptural space.”  In works such as Big Blackfil #1, Penn creates gestural abstractions in low relief whose stitched and knotted monofilaments—punti in aria— tangle with their own shadows.

Gelah Penn, detail of Big Blackfil #1, 2010, monofilament, mosquito netting, plastic mesh, acrylic and graphite on Yupo, 60 x 38 x 6 inches; courtesy of the artist .

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Textiles without Thread

“My painting expresses the passion I have for the tactile nature of fabrics and their topographies.”—Lalani Nan

“In these veneer pieces I am interested in exploring the nature of wood as a material. It is the lace image that transforms the wood by revealing both fragility and strength . . . contradictory, and quietly subversive, the doily has gone wild and the wood has been fully domesticated.”—Susanna Starr

“I love the idea of weaving as a metaphor. The warp is the vertical direction, joining all degrees of existence. The weft is the horizontal; nature in time and space.” –Grace DeGennaro

Lalani Nan, Gray, 2006, oil on linen, 52 x 46 inches; courtesy of Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, New York

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Lalani Nan paints outsize portraits of fabric—satins and taffetas, whose folds reflect or hold light dramatically. It is impossible not to think of the European court painters, or the Americans such as John Singer Sargent, who conveyed the wealth of the sitters wearing fabrics such as these and, in a sly wink, their sensuality. There is no sly wink here. Nan’s paintings, like Gray, are out and out luscious.

A similar kind of sensuality imbues Leslie Wayne’s work. Her paintings are objects, undeniably sculptural, and her intent is to evoke “the forces of nature” with tectonic movement, or the rush of water and wind. But the subtext, for me, is their textility. Wayne works like a dressmaker, gathering, ruching and draping her paint film, the sway of a skirt or the fall of a sleeve held forever in the moment.

Leslie Wayne, One Big Love #46, 2010, oil on wood, 14 x 11 inches; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City

Barbara Ellmann paints patterns from textiles around the world. Wherewithall is her way of seeing culture not as a mass of disparate parts separated by geography, language and politics, but as a patchwork of shared and related elements. Formally, her textile patterns relate to geometric abstraction.

Barbara Ellmann, detail of Wherewithall, 2011, encaustic on wooden panel; 12 panels, 24 x 24 inches each, 102 x 76 inches overall; courtesy of the artist

Below: Grace DeGennaro, Weaving, 2007, oil on linen, 26 x 16 inches; courtesy of Aucocisco Gallery, Portland, Maine

The geometry in Grace DeGennaro’s Weaving was inspired more specifically by the patterns of Navajo blankets. DeGennaro approaches pattern with a unique system of paint application that she describes as “beads.” These are dots of alternating color, often black and white, that seem to shimmer. “The image is conceived as symmetrical, but through the handmade process (in both the weaving and the painting) it becomes gently asymmetrical. I am interested in this humanizing of geometry,” she says.

With her monumental wood veneer doilies Susanna Starr allows us to regard a quaint object in a new way, since she has altered its medium, enlarged its size, and reoriented its placement from tabletop to wall. One thing has not changed: the precise handwork. Rather than crocheting this doily, however, Starr cut into thin veneer freehand with a penknife. Notes Birmingham: “She injects a bit of ironic humor into her creation of Dresser Doily, since the doily in this case is actually made from the same material as a dresser.”

Susanna Starr, Dresser Doily, 2005, hand-cut mahogany wood veneer, 70 x 47 inches; courtesy of Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta

Below: Sam Moyer, Close Screen, 2011, ink on paper, 22 x 30 inches; courtesy of Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York City

From wax-painted rugs to bleached paintings to ink drawings of plain weave, there is a strong textile sensibility in Sam Moyer’s oeuvre. For this exhibition we have included an ink drawing in which the artist so convincingly captures the distinctive variations of a weave that it could well be considered a portrait. Also working on paper, but with a different perspective, Sam Messenger creates large-scale drawings, in white ink on a black ink-washed ground, which evoke billowing nets and fluttering veils, their size at thrilling odds with their apparent lightness.

Sam Messenger, Veil from Alpheus, 2011, pen and ink, ink wash, starch paste, ans river water onpaper, 64 x 59 inches; courtesy of Davidson Contemporary, New York City

Arlene Shechet, whose undulating skeins of clay proved an unwitting catalyst to Textility, is here represented by a spiral of rope in cast and pigmented crystal. Coil is as luminous and fragile a form as its matrix was dun and pliant.

Arlene Shechet, Coil, 2004-07, cast and pigmented crystal, 25 x 8.5 x 7 inches; courtesy of the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City  

         

       

Materiality and Process

Despite the various means by which artists have approached painting, sculpture and drawing in Textility, we may tease out of their variety some common threads.

Pip Culbert, Patchwork, Blue and Pale Blue, 2010, cotton and pins, 41 x 27 inches; courtesy of Fouladi Projects, San Francisco

Grid and Web

The connection between modernism’s basic structure, the grid, and the rectilinear web made by the interlacement of warp and weft threads is rarely noted but eminently apparent. Both are foundations onto which more complex elements can be built, or which may stand alone as minimalist structures.

Consider the cutaway quilt by Pip Culbert, Patchwork, Blue and Pale Blue. Stripped of its function as a covering, indeed as a cloth, it is as materially reductive a grid as you will see; consisting of seams, essentially, it must be pinned to the wall for support. Conversely, in 176 by Ken Weathersby there is a meticulously painted checkerboard skin—a fabric, if you will—stretched atop a multilayered grid. While Weathersby’s work is not textile in intent, it is built in ways that evoke fabric construction, from an inference of weave in the painted skin to the dimensional lattice evocative not only of textile structure but of the loom itself. If Culbert is the anti-quilter, Weathersby is the conceptual weaver.

Ken Weathersby, detail of 179 (twn), 2010, acrylic paint film with removed area over wood scaffold over linen, two panels, each 24 x 19 inches; courtesy of the artist

Engaging the grid and implying a weave, Marietta Hoferer works with packing tape on paper. Snippets of tape, precisely cut and placed, create a pattern with an under/over rhythm. Nuance, reflection and inflection color her work, which like Culbert’s and Weathersby’s, is largely achromatic.

Marietta Hoferer, B, 2011, pencil and transparent tape with black line on paper,

21 x 21 inches; courtesy of the artist

Joell Baxter engages weaving fully. Working chromatically with papers she has screenprinted on both sides, she creates woven forms that are set onto the floor: “I am attracted to the idea of building a structure from the simplest parts possible, using the simplest process possible,” she says. Viewing these works, which Baxter sees as hovering between object and image, it is not difficult to make the conceptual leap from basketry to architecture, one grid to another.

Joell Baxter, detail of Endless Day (For G.M.B.), 2011, screenprint paper, glue, 46 x 46 x 5 inches; courtesy of the artist

Unapologetically Domestic

What might have once been disregarded as “women’s work” –or more recently elevated as such—is now simply a means by artists of either sex to make art unfreighted with polemical issues. Weaving, stitching, folding, pressing and other laborious household processes have become choices within the making of contemporary abstraction, rather than alternatives to it.

At first glance, Derick Melander’s sculpture recalls the painted columns of Anne Truitt, but as you get closer you see they are created with a different means and intent. Melander’s columns are  chromatic stacks of second-hand clothing.

Derick Melander, The Painful Spectable of Finding Oneself, 2010, second-hand clothing, wood and steel, 12 x 12 x 72 inches each; courtesy of the artist

“As clothing wears, fades, stains and stretches, it becomes an intimate record of our physical presence . . . For me the process of folding and stacking the individual garments adds a layer of meaning to the finished piece,” says the artist.

Carly Glovinski’s dimensional drawing, Untitled (dishrag), and Caroline Burton’s tape-and-thread wall sculpture, Untitled (tape 1), seem cut from the same cloth. Glovinski lavishes time and attention on an otherwise unremarkable object, the lowly kitchen dishcloth, here rendering it almost perfectly in ink and correction fluid on paper; Burton’s pillow, constructed from tape over wire, has form but no function. Yet both works invite the viewer into a more intimate consideration of domesticity.

 

Caroline Burton, Untitled (tape 1), 2006, tape, thread, wire, metal, 12.5 x 10 x 2.5 inches; courtesy of the artist and Accola Griefen Gallery, New York City         ...                                             

Carly Glovinski, Untitled (dishrag), 2010, ink and correction fluid on paper, 16 x 9 x 6.5 inches; courtesy of June Fitzpactick Gallery, Portland, Maine

Jennifer Cecere celebrates the domestic doily even as she creates her patterns on a computer and sends them out to be laser cut. “What interests me is that I’m taking something as personal and intimate as a handmade doily and making it large and public,” says Cecere, who has amassed a “huge collection” of doilies over the past 30 years.

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Process

With handwork there is the related issue of process. By its very nature, work done by hand was—and remains—time consuming and labor intensive. Once a necessary chore, it is now an option (at least in an industrial nation such as ours), the wonder being that so many artists continue to opt for it.

Elisa D’Arrigo, whose pieced-and-stitched Byzantine Homage I is included in this exhibition, describes the path of her practice this way: “It is the physical process of making the work that takes over and has a life of its own. A work in progress could evolve for months, (even years); expanding, contracting, even recombining with castoff parts of itself. My objective is to stay in the moment, mindful of accident and chance, responding to what unfolds. The actual working with materials, and how that results in particulars of form and configuration, is what ultimately determines each piece.”

Elisa D'Arrigo, Byzantine Homage (1), 2005, cloth acrylic paint, thread, 35 x 35 x 3 inches; courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York City

Nava Lubelski, Chance of Flurries, 2011, thread on stained canvas, 46 x 36 inches, courtest of LMAKprojects, New York City

With her embroidered paintings, Nava Lubelski alternates between what she describes as “the impulse to destroy and the compulsion to mend.” Hers is a productive dichotomy. Working with stained linens she has found, or with canvas she has stained and cut herself, such as Chance of Flurries, Lubelsky then embellishes the blemishes with stitching and weaves lacelike webs into the voids. Sitting at a Thanksgiving table recently, I was struck by just how much her process owes to the handmade tablecloth, stains and all.

Aric Obrosey’s meticulously rendered drawings depict complex nets and laces. Can these be imagined constructions?

Aric Obrosey, Untitled, 2006, charcoal on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches; courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art, New York City

Anyone even casually acquainted with textiles would point out the variety of interlacements within a drawing such as his Untitled in charcoal. There is knotting and weaving, twining as used in basketry, and a type of knotless netting, sprang, that dates to the Bronze Age. Even the various strings are rendered in a variety of patterns, some as contemporary as bungee cords. Obrosey seems to have created a visual metaphor for the web of history.

Reworked and Repurposed

The categories defined in this essay are mutable and intertwined. Butler’s patched fabric paintings,  Melander’s columns of folded clothing, Lubelsky’s reworked stains, and D’Arrigo’s recombinant sculptures could as easily be discussed here, but let me note instead the work of three other artists in this exhibition.  

Lael Marshall intrigued us initially with her Dishtowel Paintings, repurposed kitchen cloths she had combined and painted, but it was her Drama Queen that ultimately found a place here. Patched from various materials whose seams, textures and bulges are barely contained under a skin of green paint, it is a formidable presence softened by a languid ruffle that runs along one side.

Lael Marshall, Drama Queen, 2010, oil and acrylic on various materials, 92 x 75 inches; courtesy of the artist

Susan Still Scott, Slider, 2010, acrylic, flashe and enamel paint on canvas, cotton duck, wood with staples, wire, polyfil fiber, 57 x 16 X 31 inches; courtesy of Kingston Gallery, Boston

“Process is basically my driving force,” says Susan Still Scott, underscoring the fluidity of our category construct. Yet it is her inclusion of used and reused materials that seems to navigate a path to and through her sculptures, such as Slider. “Unsuccessful canvases will be taken apart and bring something of value to a new piece.  . . The activity of using information supplied by the materials . . . is ultimately more important than knowing what it will ultimately turn out to be.” 

Over the past decade, Elana Herzog has made much of her work with found textiles—“often bedspreads and carpets,” she says—which she has stapled to a wall. Herzog describes her materials and process this way: “Parts of the fabric and the staples are then removed and sometimes reapplied, leaving a residue of shredded fabric and perforated wall surface in some areas, and densely stapled and built-up areas elsewhere.” In her framed and wall-mounted works in this exhibition, the scale is smaller but the approach is the same. Her Untitled has an almost festive air, agreeably at odds with the destructive nature of its construction.

Elana Herzog, Untitled, 2011, wood, metal staples, textile, 33 x 34 x 3 inches; courtesy of LMAKprojects, New York City

The Thread of Culture

Until a generation ago, almost everyone had a hand in handwork. Women, especially, knitted, crocheted and embroidered, and girls learned by example. In a society rent by gender roles, boys were surrounded by handwork, even if they typically did not follow—except in maritime communities or in Boy Scouts, where they plied nets, made knots and strung lines. Perhaps there was a tailor in the family, or someone who made clothes out of necessity or pleasure. We, all of us, had a connection to the collective tissue of our lives.

Of course we still wear clothing and sleep between sheets, but not everyone interacts consciously with cloth because we are now so removed from the warp and weft of it. Laundry? Maybe. Mending? Not so much. Who spins yarn anymore? Who weaves?  

Artists engage differently. We do. We make. Certainly the artists in this exhibition are makers. To paraphrase Scott’s description of her own process, they construct, disassemble, cut, glue, staple, repaint, stuff, squash and recycle. I’d add that the artists here also stitch, knot, weave, fold, rip, cast, stain, shred, drape, stretch, gather, layer and ply. Or they draw, paint and define space in ways that suggest those same actions and results. I suspect the attraction to materiality, to textility, satisfies our deeply ingrained need to extend ourselves physically beyond our fingertips. The artists in this exhibition, like many other artists working right now, continue to ply a thread—sometimes tangible, sometimes metaphorical—which has been spun continuously, consciously or not, from the very beginning of human culture.

Above: Peter Weber, Vernetzung BL6 (9), 2009, felt, 20.5 x 20.5 inches; courtesy of Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, and Galerie Renate Bender, Munich

Below: Jennifer Cecere, a work in ripstop nylon similar to Mother, the one in the exhibition; courtesy of the artist

Notes

Quotes are from the artists’ statements with these exceptions: Joell Baxter, Sharon Butler, Grace DeGennaro and Barbara Ellmann in conversation or email exchange with the author; Susan Still Scott in conversation with Lynette Haggard. 

Additional

A Walk and Talk with the curators and artists will take place on Sunday, March 25, from 4:00-6:00 pm. Click here for directions and hours; click here for a blog post with screen grabs showing directions from Penn Station in Manhattan (scroll to the bottom of the post)

I expect to share more with you about this exhibition, including installation views, and (I hope) a few quick Q&As with some of the artists and a conversation with Birmingham in which we talk about the process of curating this show. Textility is up through April 1, so there should be enough time to get to it all. 

Marketing Mondays: Rejected? You're Not Alone

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I had the opportunity to chat with a number of.dealers and curators in Miami.  Several were surprisingly open about  . the difficulties at their end of the business.  Of course I memorized what they said and wrote it down  as soon as we’d parted. I’m not going to tell you who they were, but I am going to tell you what they said:

.  A U.S. dealer who decided not to participate in any fairs sighed, “The only fair that accepted me was the one I didn’t want to be in.”
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.  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” said another U.S. dealer. He then proceeded to admit he was looking for a part-time job to support himself because gallery sales continue to be slow. "Artists always seem to stay afloat," he said with some admiration. Then he asked me if I had any suggestions of what he might do.  (I did; we talked.)

. The curator of a small U.S. academic gallery was talking about a show he was putting together. “I know it’s ridiculous,” he confided, “but I feel really intimidated about contacting a big gallery to ask to borrow work.” .
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. A Canadian curator (I'm not sure what the status of her institution is) said, "When an artist turns me down, whatever the reason, I feel professionally diminished.".
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.  A European art dealer showing at one of the good mid-level art fairs was lamenting her rejection from Art Basel Miami—for the fourth time. “Every year I think, ‘This is the year I get in,’ and every year I don’t. It’s demoralizing. I don’t know how you artists do it.”

So the next time another professional disappointment comes your way, know that some of the very dealers who might have turned you down know exactly how you feel. This is not "payback" as one artist friend has suggested. It's life.

If you have found this or other Marketing Mondays posts useful, please consider supporting this blog with a donation. A PayPal Donate button is located on the Sidebar at right. Thank you. (Or click here and scroll down the sidebar.)

Fair Play: Art? Or Not Art? And the Winner Is . . .

We don’t have a winner but we do have a Top Five and four respondents who got #1 right. Scroll down for their names and then click for the answers on the amended blog post.

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Here's the answer to #1:

1. Art

Here's our Top Five who came closest with the fewest number iincorrect. In order they are:

1. Zackofalltrades with 5X (bonus for getting #1, but he was at the fairs)

2. Hydeordie with 5X (she wasn’t at the fairs, so I’m seeing the top two as neck and neck)

3. Larry Schulte with 6X (bonus for getting #1 right)

4. Stefano Pasquini with 6X (bonus for getting #1 right)

5. Dora Ficher with 7X

I can’t do a feature on all of you, but email me (address on sidebar) an image of your best work. Identify it completely with title, date, medium(s), dimension. Include a link to your website or blog (pick one). I’ll post the five of you in A Good Eye feature, so that JMAB readers can get a good eyeful of your work.

Special recognition for all those who correctly identified #1, which was the trickiest one of the bunch (I think), because in any other context than the art fair, it would just be a newspaper. I did have to ask the gallerina: “Is this art?” She pointed to the wall label and said, “Yes.” See below.

. Bernard Klevickas

. Bonny Leibowitz

. Nancy Natale

. Pollywog

Email me an image of your best work on or with paper, identified as noted above, along with a link to your website or blog (pick one) and I'll include it in A Good Eye.

I checked and rechecked all 52 responses (which is why I’m late with this info), but please check your own answers against the posted results. Everyone got #14 and #37 right, because with an official I don’t know and maybe, respectively, any of these answers would have been correct: yes, no, I don’t know, maybe. If it makes you feel any better, I wouldn’t have gotten them all either.

Fair Play: The Miami Roundup

Report complete. The entire list of posts:
Some Paintings

Stuff

NADA

Best. Gallery. Name. Ever
Pulse
Art? Or Not Art? (Answers posted 1.6.12)
Lean Times
Black is the New Black. Again
Art Miami
A Bloggers' Guide to Art Miami
Seven

A Long, Tall Drink of Aqua

Art Basel Miami Beach

Amuse Oeil

The World Wide Web

Occupy Miami?

Prologue: Head to Toe

Peekin' In

This year's roundup is not so much a best and worst of--though I do have a few superlatives to bestow--but a chance to connect the dots, note unusual installations, make a few observations, and (finally) wrap the whole thing up for another year.

Got a Match?

You know the saying, There's a lid for every pot? It's used mostly by dating services and matchmakers, but what's to keep us from doing a little art yenta-ing of our own?

Above and below:

Balzer Art Projects, Basel, at Pulse: Nici Jost site-specific work on the Pulse grounds and in the gallery booth

Above: Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, ABMB: artist unidentified

Below: Standard, Oslo, ABMB: artist unidentified

Above: Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York: Art Miami: Viola Frey

Photo by Andrea Kirsch, The Artblog

Below: Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, NADA: artist unknown

Above: Budweiser Couture, on a fairgoer at Pulse

Below: Budweiser Decor, Cady Noland installation at the Rubell Collection. Image from the Rubell Family Collection website 

Adele and Eva (more commonly known as "Eva and Adele") at ABMB

Photo from Beached Miami by Jordan Melnick

Newt and Calista (more commonly known as the "Tiffany Twosome"). OK, I'm cheating here. They weren't in Miami and Newt doesn't normally wear this much makeup

Photo via Facebook 

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 Wigging Out

Sometimes it's the fairgoer who just happens to walk by an installation of hairpieces, thus becoming part of that installation if only for a moment. And sometimes it's a Nick Cave Soundsuit that appears to channel Cousin Itt. But sometimes, well, you just thank the Universe for compelling you to surf through People of Walmart when you're supposed to be working on a Miami Roundup post. 

Above: Standard, Oslo, ABMB: Nina Beier

Below: Mary Boone Gallery, New York, ABMB: Nick Cave

Below: A person of interest at People of Walmart. Though this is not what's normally meant by hair extensions, PoW's caption writer called this look "weavetastic," which merits a shoutout of its own

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One Size Fits All

Speaking of extensions, the award in the Stretchable or Expandable category goes to an artist who fills out a sweater better than a porn star with implants.Well, if the implants were made of lumber and protruded from all over her torso.

Lehman Maupin Gallery, New York, ABMB: Erwin Wurm

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Manorexia

Here we see the unnatural thinness of the women's models combined with the off-to-the-foxhunt jauntiness of the menwear line. You think this picture has something to do with Ralph Lauren, too, don't you?

Sorry We're Closed, Brussels, NADA; artist unknown

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I Can Get These for Less on Canal Street

Well the logo bags, for sure. I don't know about the paintings. But if these aren't available, there are some sunsets on velvet that you can pick up for a song.

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At Rudolf Budja Gallery, Miami Beach, Art Miami: Zevs
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Toward the End, It was Just Mini Coopers and Smart Cars

At least that's how it seems.



At Karsten Greve Ag, St. Moritz, ABMB: John Chamberlain

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 If Your Erection Lasts Longer Than 35 Years . . . . . get to a museum immediately.

Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, ABMB: Lynda Benglis iconic dildo photo

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Toys For Tots

With a shitload of money.

Tony Shafrazi, New York, ABMB; Mike Kelley sculptures

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Dopey

Honestly, do I really need to say anything about this?

At Hauser & Wirth, London, ABMB: Paul McCarthy, Bashful

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Which of These Images Doesn't Belong?

Hint: Your answer depends on whether you're grouping them them in the category of Things That Clean or Art.

Above left:  P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, Seven: Jennifer Rohrer, Resolve, gouache on paper; above right: the cleaning cart at the Deauville Hotel, site of NADA

Above: Pierogi, Brooklyn, Seven: John Stoney, Corner Piece #2

Below: Canada, New York, NADA: Joanne Malinkowska, In Search of Primordial Matter, washing machine on perpetual spin cycle

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 You've Got Male
Without John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage to serve up their creepy images of big-bosomed naked women, the objects of our attention this year were just about all male.

At Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, ABMB: Jennifer Rubell sculpture of Prince William, left, and a gallery representative. Note the naturalistic pose and coloring of the figure at right, which features a seemingly spontaneous turn of the head and facial expression

Van de Weghe Fine Art, ABMB: Duane Hanson, High School Student, 1990/92, bronze polychromed in oil, approximately life size

Froelick Gallery, Portland, Aqua Art: Stephen O'Donnell, Le Fumeur, acrylic on panel

At Rubell Family Collection, Miami: Charles Ray, painted cast fiberglass mannequins

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You Had Male

Normally you'd just see a specimen like this in a medical lab, but because the artist photodocumented his transition from male to female, well . . .

. . . let's just allow the wall label to speak for itself:

. . .

You've Got Spam

A good ton of it, each cozied in its own knitted jacket with just a soupçon of silver lamé. Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.

Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, ABMB: Haegue Yang sculpture

Detail below

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Best. Makeover. Ever.

Here art history came to photographic life and got made over into a far more fetching couple than Piero's Tuscan duo.



At Robert Mann Gallery, New York: Maria Alche y Ramon Teves, Ushuaia (diptych), 2006

Now if they would only do something about Sr. Arnolfini and his hat:

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Mel, Shut Up Already

He's been going on like this for the past several years.
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At William Shearburn Gallery, St. Louis, Art Miami: Mel Bochner

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Barbie Dream Art Fair

Barbie has had dozens careers, including Canadian Mountie, Paleontologist, Presidential Candidate, and Artist. But this may be the first time that she's had her own booth at an international art fair.

At Regina Gallery, London and Moscow, ABMB: Jonathan Meese. The title of this installation is Schaukel Die Versachlichte Fuhrung Kunst Ins Erzland (Kunst Jenseits)--minus the umlauts, which I don't have on my keyboard. According to my German-speaking friends on Facebook, it translates into something like Rocking the Art of Objectivity into a Law-Free Country.

(No word on how to say "spam cozy" in German, though.)

If I had to guess, these would be Pole Dancer Barbie, above, and Boner Barbie, below. I must say that these are some of the best uses to which the anatomically unstable doll has ever been put

. . .

Most Seductive Images of a Carcinogenic Substance
I'm one of those annoying former smokers who thinks no one should light up within 100 feet of another human being (especially me), but I find these images sexy beyond all logic.

Pae White castle-size tapestries

Above: Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, ABMB

Below: Neugerreimschneider, Berlin, ABMB

. . .

I Don't Care if They're Not Art, I Love Them

I think Lucio Fontana would have agreed with me about the top one. And the bottom one is surely the graffiti grandchild of Joan Mitchell and Frank Stella.

Fence tarps in Wynwood

. . .

Does This Installation Make My Butt Look Too Big?

If there's one thing worse than spending time in an installation looking at yourself in the mirror, it's taking pictures of yourself and then asking people to tell you, "Oh, no, you look fabulous."

Sies + Hoke Galerie, Dusseldorf, ABMB: The Art Kabinett installation by Claudie Wieser. (You can figure out who the blogger in the mirror is)

. . ..

The End

Over and out. Sayonara. Adios. Ciao. Until next year. Maybe.

At the Rubell Family Collection, Miami: Joel Kyack, installation

Last year for the Art or Trash post I got an indignant comment (anonymous, of course) that said in part, "You and your following of Art Moms probably enjoy this sort of conservative "debate" ...but really only a complete idiot would suggest Cady Noland's work might be confused with artless trash. Congratulations on involving the Internet in your personal insecurity and lack of intellectual curiosity."

Well, Anon, I hope you have enjoyed this year's installment of my "personal insecurity" just as much. Noland's beer-can installation is in it again this year, because it's still up at Rubell and it just went so well with pop-top cardigan. That bud's for you. And for the record, I have no children.

That I know of.

Big thanks to everyone who sent me to Miami. I am most appreciative of your help. To all my other friends reading this: If you enjoyed my coverage of the Miami art fairs, or the blog at any other time of year, please consider making a one-time annual donation of $20 (though any amount is welcome) to help support my effort. See the Donate button on the sidebar. Thank you.

Soie

An Online Solo at Structural Madness

.. Soie 17, 2010, gouache on Arches 140, 22 x 30 inches

Soie, a recent series of gouache-on-paper paintings, was on view the month of January at Structural Madness, a virtual New York City gallery with a geometric point of view. It was my first cyber solo. While the show is over as a featured exhibition on the gallery's homepage, it remain on line. You can see it by clicking onto the gallery name, above.

While the grid has been the underpinning of my own structural madness for some time, Soie was the very first in a series of works in which I turned the square on its axis. The geometry of the shape is at odds with the freehand nature of its execution, equipoise and fluidity afloat on a cream-colored field.

The solo comes at a wonderful time for me. I am a co-curator, with Mary Birmingham, of a 28-artist exhibition, Textility, at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey in Summit. Textility looks at contemporary art that has a conceptual or material connection to cloth. As a curator, I have not included my work, which otherwise might have been appropriate.

Soie, is up through January 31; you can visit it any time during the month. Textility is up through April 1, and I'll be writing about it occasionally over the next couple of months.

Structural Madness is curated by painter Gloria Klein.

Marketing Mondays: Got Plans?

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Fair Play, my report series on the Miami art fairs, will resume on Wednesday with a Roundup. Scroll down for the previous posts.
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No, I'm not going to ask you about your resolutions for the new year.

Resolutions get broken and then you feel like crap.

But plans are another story. Plans are a look forward. Sometimes realistic, sometimes a bit pie in the sky, they allow us to take steps to achieve what we would most like to achieve and be where would like to be. What I like about plans is that they're not freighted with the same baggage as resolutions. Plans can change without being broken.

So today's post is a short one with what I hope will be some well-thought-out responses from you.

What are your art plans for 2012?

I can tell you that I plan to cut back on the curating to spend more time in the studio. (I love curating--in my next life I plan to come back as a curator, and in fact I have a curated show that opens on the 13th, more of which next week--but in this life it takes a lot of time away from my painting practice.) I can also tell you that I plan to spend some time archiving images, not a pleasant task but one that I've been preparing for. 

I also plan to get back to Europe this year. It's been a while since I was there. I plan to spend about a week in Italy, the Adriatic side this time, and then fly over to Berlin for the annual Gallery Weekend, April 29-31. Dining with some new German art friends in Miami, I learned how excited they were about the event. My American friends (a dealer and a collector) and I planned then and there to rendezvous with them the last weekend of April in Berlin. Sounds like the start of a joke: an artist, an art dealer and a collector walk into a gallery in Berlin . . .If I come up with a punchline, I'll let you know.
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Of course I'll continue to work in the studio. That's neither a plan nor a resolution but simply a fact of life.

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OK, over to you.

Tell us what's on the drawing board, whether for artmaking, career pursuits or art-related travel. Spare no detail.

Boarding up the Tolerable Work

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Fair Play, my report series on the Miami art fairs, will resume on Wednesday with a Roundup. Scroll down for the previous posts.

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I can't tell if this recent blog comment is spam or simply a message of thanks from someone who translated it from another language using an online translation site. Or maybe it's one of those two Wild and Crazy Guys?
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"This is my earliest opportunity i afflict here. I base so many absorbing baggage in your blog especially its discussion. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not the one in unison having all the exercise here! board up the tolerable work."

In any case, I intend to keep offering you absorbing baggage in 2012. And may your year be filled with tolerable work. 

Joanne