The Women, Part 2: The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim & Read

The Women: Part 1: "Daughters . . ." at Pavel Zoubok

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If I exhaled at Daughters of the Revolution, I was positively breathless at The Female Gaze, so welcome was it to see so much work by women in just two shows in Chelsea at the same time.
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The curatorial conceit at Cheim & Read is to counter the notion of the male gaze by providing a group of works in which "the artist and subject do not relate as 'voyeur' and 'object' but as woman and woman.' " In this beautifully curated show, which spans over a century, 40 female artists--many from their own roster--turn the conventional male gaze inside out. Here there's pleasure in equality versus the longstanding idea of power over passivity.

What you see when you enter, above: a small cut-paper work by Kara Walker, Untitled, 1995 (foreground, under the exhibition title); and Deborah Kass, Double Red Barbara (The Jewish Jackie Series), 1993. The two photographic portraits below are also in this room

Starting chronologically with the sad and shadowed visage of May Prinsep and the confrontational stare of a very butch Mme. Theodore Van Rysselberghe, the exhibition delivers a range of expression and emotion. The bodies are strong and beautiful, or fleshy and imperfect. The sex comes in several different flavors and positions. There's mystery, eroticism, humor, pain. In short, life. The installation delivers these from every angle.

Left: Berenice Abbott, Mme. Theodore Van Rysselberghe, 1926-30, vintage gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches; right: Julia Margaret Cameron, May Prinsep (Head of Saint John), 1866, albumen print, 13 x 10 1/2 inches. Both images from the gallery website

Back in the foyer: another view of Kara Walker's silhouette and, over the desk, Mickalene Thomas, A-E-I-O-U and Sometimes Y, 2009, rhinestone, acrylic and enamel on panel, 24 x 20 inches (each); full view below. Both images from the gallery website

The three images below are what you see when you enter the main gallery. The vitrine with a Louise Bourgeois sculpture will orient you as we turn counterclockwise around the room. You can see these and all the works on the gallery's checklist. (These three images are mine; the gallery has many more.)

Sex, sex and sex: Louise Bourgeois, Couple, 2004, fabric and stainless steel, 11 x 28 x 14 1/2 inche, in the vitrine; behind that, Joan Semmel, Flip-Flop, 1971, oil on canvas, 68 x 138 inches .To the right: Lisa Yuskavage (hate it)

Below: Bourgeois's Couple

Above: Bourgeois, Shirin Neshat, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Holzer, Maria Lassnig

Below: Kathe Burkhart, Bourgeois, Marilyn Minter, Katy Grannan, Lucas

In the smaller back gallery, from left: Hannah van Bart, Vanessa Beecroft, Lynda Benglis, Tracey Emin. Image from the gallery website

Below: Capture from Lynda Benglis, Female Sensibility, 1973, video tape loop

With the video to your back, here's another view of the same back gallery: Victoria Civera, Judith Eisler, Beecroft, Ghada Amer. Image from the gallery website

Below: Vanessa Beecroft, Blonde Figure Lying, 2008, water resin coated with beeswax, human hair, 77 x 36 x 10 inches [when I saw this work in Miami it was not as yellow as it appears here; maybe it's an edition and this is a different work?]

Ghada Amer, The Woman Who Failed To Be Shehrazade, 2008, acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 62 x 68 inches

With Beecroft and Amer in the distance, we have now entered a third gallery looking at work by Ellen Gallagher, Hellen van Meene, and a large nude by—surprise—a young Joan Mitchell. Who knew this master of the lyrical mass painted such forthright figures early in her career? Image from the gallery website

Above: Gallagher, van Meene, Mitchell. Image from the gallery website

Below: Ellen Gallagher, Bouffant Pride, 2003, handmade collage, cutout, painting and photogravure on rag paper, 13.5 x 10.5 inches

Moving around the gallery we see a painting by Alice Neel similar in size to the Mitchell. Between them are photographs by Zoe Leonard (also below) and Catherine Opie.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Untitled, circa 1945, oil on canvas, 54 x 35.75 inches; Alice Neel, (1990-1894), Olivia, 1975, oil on canvas, 54 x 34 inches. Image from the gallery website

From the third gallery looking back into the main space, with the Bourgeois vitrine to orient you. On the wall: Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1988-90, gelatin silver prints, 6 x 9 inches each

The Female Gaze , is up through September 19 at Cheim & Read, 547 W. 25th. Go gaze.

If you can't make it to New York between now and then, the gallery website contains great installation shots, some of which I pulled and posted here (with attribution) and an image of every work in the show. My blog buddy Steven Alexander has written about the show, too.

Update 8.19. 09: James Kalm's video report on You Tube

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Marketing Mondays: What's In A Name?

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Janet Filomeno, The Sea Has Veins: The Delaware Series, No. 22, 2009, graphite, aluminum paint, mica powder, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 inches

I don't subscribe to the idea that the art must speak entirely for itself. While I don't expect the artist to spoonfeed me her meaning and intent, I do like it when she provides me with a path to her work. Then I'll depend on my own eyes and perceptions to find a way in.

As you might guess, then, I'm not a fan of Untitled as a title (though I have "untitled" plenty of work in the past). Since I work in series, I typically have one title that is repeated numerically. I think a lot about what to call a series, because once the first work is named, there's no turning back. It's going to continue for the duration.

Sometimes the title is clearly suggestive of the work, as with my series, Silk Road. I was painting small color fields, engaging grainy bits of pigment to energize the surface. Then I switched from

Joanne Mattera, Silk Road 117, 2009, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches

a soft brush to one with a harder bristle to create a subtle vertical and horizontal grid. By the time I'd completed four of five paintings, each with a slight sheen and an almost textile-like grain, I had my title: Silk Road. I added "Road" because I wanted to convey that the series should take you on a visual journey from one small color field to the next.

Other times, as with Vicolo, I want you to ask, "What does the title mean?" That gives me a way to engage you. I also provide a statement, so that if I'm not available, you still have a path to the work. But enough about me.

By far the most poetic and mysterious title I have come across lately is The Sea Has Veins, a series by the Pennsylvania-based painter Janet Filomeno, who works in an abstract expressionist idiom (images top and below). Janet's process is physical; she wrests every rivulet and drip out of the paint in service to an almost biological composition. She happens to be my friend, so I asked her to talk to me a bit about where this particular title came from and, in general, how she names her work.

"The titles evolve from metaphorical thinking. Water, fluidity, the organic essence of life, its physicality, all of its many associations are so rich," says Janet. "The Sea Has Veins: The Delaware Series came quite naturally to me as I was influenced by the river that I see daily. I jotted it down about a year before the series came into full fruition, knowing that it would become the title for the series."

I love that the work flowing inside her studio and the river flowing outside it ran together in a single current of image and reality. Typically, though, the title is less physically present. "Usually it pops into my mind as I work on the pieces, or when I am in deep thought about the work. It is my response to the work," she says.

"If one [work] gets edited out for whatever reason (usually edification on my part), I do not re-configure the numerical order. It had its purpose and brought me to the next one."
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Janet Filomeno, The Sea Has Veins: The Delaware Series, No. 5, 2007-08, graphite, aluminum paint, mica powder, acrylic on canvas; 80 x 68 inches.

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How do you deal with titles? Are you a fan of the "untitled" or is naming important? Do you feel it's your responsiblity to provide the viewer with a path to your work, or do you feel your work can speak for itself? And, because this post is part of the Marketing Mondays series, do you think the title is an important aspect to presenting your work to the world?

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Never Land

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OK, I know I said this blog would be a Michael Jackson-free zone, but two items have changed my mind. So just this once I'm breaking my own rule:

1. What MJ might have looked like if he hadn't had surgery, left (image via the Internet)

2. Hitler finds out Michael Jackson has died. Author is "stubod2001." Link comes via Zack Peabody's post on FB. (Hitler is played by Bruno Ganz, one of my favorite actors.)

Tomorrow it's back to business as usual: Marketing Mondays.

The Women, Part 1: Daughters of the Revolution: Women and Collage at Pavel Zoubok

It's no secret that women artists are represented at the galleries and museums in far smaller numbers than the other sex, but here I’d like to focus on two current shows in which women are very much in evidence: Daughters of the Revolution: Women and Collage at Pavel Zoubok Gallery and, in a post to follow this one, The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim & Read. Feminism lives! Both galleries have assembled impressive group shows with artists whose work spans two waves of Feminism and then some.

In Daughters of the Revolution (the "Pasted Paper Revolution, " Clement Greenberg's essay description of Cubist collage), the always egalitatian Pavel Zoubok shows 34 artists, many from his gallery's own roster, working with collage. The range is impressive, from such early practitoners of the art as Hannah Hoch and Anne Ryan, to Seventies icons Miriam Schapiro, Hannah Wilke and May Wilson, to contemporary artists like Judy Pfaff, Donna Sharratt and Nora Aslan. Sometimes the work is political and sometimes not; mostly it's on an intimate scale, though there are some impressively large works as well.

Above: To the right as you enter, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Chess 1, 2001, photograph and black sandpaper, app. 16 x 16 inches

Ann Ryan (1889-1954), Collage #640, 1953, mixed-media collage [I can see handmade paper], app. 7 x 5 inches. Image from the gallery website

Miriam Schapiro, My Nosegays Are For Captives, 1976, collage and acrylic on canvas, app. 43 x 34 inches, image from the gallery website; my detail below

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), Kobenhavn, 1975, kneaded erasers and postcard on painted wood panel, 16 x 18 inches, image from the gallery website; my detail below

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"This generally intimate art form has historically been more accessible to women, who for many years were excluded from a conventional studio practice; collage was the medium that could be done 'on the kitchen table,'” writes Zoubok in the catalog introduction to a conversation between himself and the painter Melissa Meyer. Meyer, who collaborated with Miriam Schapiro on the 1978 essay Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry Into What Women Saved and Assembled—Femmage, underscores the truth of that statement, even among women artists in the 20th Century: "I remember thinking . . . of Lee Krasner getting the kitchen table to work on while Jackson Pollock got the studio."

Daughters of the Revolution: Women and Collage is a big show in a small space. And the installation is a collage in itself. Take a look:

Installation view, from the front of the gallery looking toward the back. The images that follow are on the right-hand wall

India Evans, Into the Selves, 2008, mixed-media collage on paper, 22 x 30 inches; image from the gallery website

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Untitled, 1983, mixed-media collage, app. 30 x 20 inches; image from the gallery website

The domestic environment, above and below; both images from the gallery website. Above: Addie Herder, Bruges, 1972-74, collage construction, app. 17 x 20 inches

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Below: Louise Erhard, So It's All Come to This, 2008, mixed-media collage on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Another view of the installation wall with three by Judy Pfaff, just to the right of the large works in red (the top work there is Strawberries by Ann Shostrom)

Below: Judy Pfaff, Untitled #33, 2007, ink, found images, acrylic paint, perforated and layered paper, app 14 x 18 inches framed; image from the gallery website

Stepping back and looking over Pavel Zoubok's shoulder to the left back wall, you can just make out a work by Donna Sharrett. It's shown below, along with the rest of the work from that corner

Donna Sharrett, Always, 2006-09, mixed media including rose petals, violin bow string, garnets, dirt and encaustic, 16.5 x 16.5 inches; image from the gallery website. Just to the right of this work are the pieces you see below

Top left: Dodi Wexler, It's Nice to Share Your Home, 2005, mixed media, app. 16 x 28 x 1 inches; Bottom left: Gail Skudera, Veiled Intruder, 1997, mixed-media collage, app. 22 x 20 inches

Center: Nora Aslan, Good Old Games Last Forever, 2008, mixed media collage, 68 x 60 inches; top right, another by Donna Sharrett; bottom right, Miriam Schapiro's My Nosegays are for Captives

Below: Sharrett and Schapiro with Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1893), #154, 1965, mixed-media collage on canvas

In the catalog essay, Zoubok asks Meyer: What do you think has changed with regard to the general attitude toward collage and so-called 'women's work'?

Meyer: My take on the art world in 1978 is that it was not interested in supporting "women's art" and giving women credit for predating anything aesthetically in the canon—but this is now 31 years later, and a lot has changed.

Still, if MoMA put on a collage show whom would it feature? Braque, Cornell, Gris, Picasso, Shwitters, Samaras, Rauschenberg and Rotella, I'd wager. Sons of the Establishment. So Daughters of the Revolution is not only a great exhibition, it's a historically important exhibition. A catalog is available at the gallery ($10) or by mail ($12). Contact the gallery for mail-order specifics.

Daughters of the Revolution: Women and Collage at Pavel Zoubok, at 533 W. 23rd Street, is up through August 14. Summer hours (Mon-Fri) are in effect.

(Next Wednesday, August 6, I'll post Part 2: The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim & Read.)

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Marketing Mondays: Enough With the Reference Letters

Fine, but leave me out of it

(Image from the Indianhead Federated Library System, Eay Claire, Wisconsin)

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I just received my third request this month to write a letter of reference. One was for a very talented young artist, another was for a colleague who has a full-time teaching position (and thus more salaried time off via sabbaticals and vacations than I will ever have), and the third was from someone who likes my blog and thinks I'd write "a kick-ass reference letter," never mind that I don’t know this person from Eve.
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With the exception of the young artist, my response was a polite No.
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Am I being a curmudgeon? A bitter artist? A horrible human being? I don’t think so. As a working artist I have very little free time in my day. Those of you who know me understand just how true this is. When I do sit down to write, it’s to work on my blog, which is my gift to the art community. Individual letters of reference or recommendation require time that I simply do not have. I feel so strongly about this subject that I no longer apply for grants requiring these letters (if I apply for a grant at all) because I don't want to add to someone else's time-and-labor load.

Let me be clear: My issue is not with the artists who ask for letters to be written on their behalf; they are simply jumping through the requisite hoops. I want to see the hoops eliminated. This can only happen at the institutional level, because as generous as funding institutions may be to a small number of lucky individuals, they are placing a huge burden on a large part of the art community. So . . .

Dear Grant-funding Institution,

Enough with the reference letters already. Aren't an application, j-pegs, slides, resume, statement, personal narrative, project proposal, budget, and financial records sufficient to help you select a handful of artists from the hundreds, possibly thousands, who will apply to your institution for a grant/scholarship/fellowship/residency each year?

Yes, the artists are expected to put in many hours to create a submission package, I get that, but why require them to drag others into their (typically fruitless) quest? Each application for your largesse requires three to four letters of reference. Let's calculate the time spent on those letters, shall we?
. Each applicant: 4 letters
. Estimated number of applicants: 500 (less for smaller institutions, more for larger)
. That's 2000 letters
. Each letter takes at least an hour to write
. That's 2000 hours
. In other words, that's 50 weeks of unpaid work—a year's job—for each round of applications to your institution alone

Now let's multiply those figures by the hundreds of institutions that are being applied to annually, each with those requisite letters. Let's say for the sake of argument that there are 500 grants to which artists apply each year. If 500 artists apply to each of those grants, we're talking 100,000 letters and thus 100,000 hours of labor to write them. Of course no one person doing is all that writing, but the combined hours add up to 50 years' of unpaid work--a lifetime of work. Each year.

Who's writing these letters? Teaching faculty, arts administrators, artists, dealers and curators, mostly.
. Many professors are now adjunct, so they’re writing these letters on their own time, not during office hours. These people are typically juggling multiple part-time jobs to pay studio rent and health insurance; they need to be doing work that will pay those bills
. Arts administrators are already up to their eyeballs writing grant proposals for the funds that keep their institutions afloat
. Most artists are themselves working outside the studio 20-40 hours a week; any time they take to write a letter of reference cuts into their studio time
. The average dealer works 10 hours a day five days a week, and then spends her "time off" delivering work to clients and making studio visits
. Maybe institution-affiliated curators can take the time to write letters, but independent curators--i.e.people without a regular income--are very likely seeking grant funds for their own projects

I think the appropriate path for you is clear: Abolish the requirement of reference letters. Judge each applicant on her or his own merits, as some grant-funding institutions already do (bless them!). Grants provide essential support to needy and/or talented artists, but not at the expense of others whose needs and talents are being endlessly tapped to help you make your selections.

Respectfully,
Joanne Mattera

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Readers, have you been asked to write reference letters? How have you responded? Have you asked for reference letters? Has it bothered you to do so? Does anyone feel as strongly as I do? Have I gone too far? Feel free to respond anonymously if you're still in grant-application mode, or if you're uncomfortable with the topic but have something to say..
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Talking Chairs

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I have a long rectangular table in my loft that seats 10. It's got a frosted glass surface set within a maple frame. The current chairs--Karim Rashid's Oh chair, ten of which which I bought in 2002-- are translucent white plastic, which create a nice dialog with the frosted glass. I need to replace them, however, because the white plastic is turning a particularly rancid shade of yellow.

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I don't expect plastic to last forever, especially on chairs for which I paid something like $50 apiece, but I was shocked at the dialog I had with the clerk at the Karim Rashid store on West 19th Street when I went in to look at a more upscale Rashid model, the Skool, made of molded plywood with a birch veneer. ( I like Rashid's design sense, so despite the metamorphosing chairs--which are still very comfortable--I wanted to test drive a new model.)

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Oh no. My translucent white chairs have turned translucent yellow
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Me: I have to replace my Oh chairs. They're turning yellow.

Clerk: How long have you had them?
Me: About seven years.
Clerk: Well, I guess it's time.
Me: But I hadn't expected them to turn yellow!
Clerk: Why? Things don't last forever. Besides, you only paid about $50 each.
Me: Price is not the point. They used to be white and how they're yellow.
Clerk: Well, it's not as if they fell apart.
Me: But they turned a different color.
Clerk: Plastic changes color.
Me: Not all plastic changes color in such a short time. If I'd known the plastic would turn so fast, I wouldn't have bought them.
Clerk: Well, if we'd told you that, you wouldn't have bought them, would you?
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It took a moment for me to process that.
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Me: So the company doesn't stand behind its product?
Clerk: For $50 chairs? Don't be ridiculous.
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There was no point in being ridiculous enough to consider the $200-apiece Skool chairs, then, because I need 10 of them. I left. The store lost a sale.
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Next stop: Ikea, where I can get three-quarters of the design for less than one quarter of the price.

Lesson learned: Elegant as it is, I won't be purchasing this molded birch ply Karim Rashid Skool chair, above, but I will consider these from Ikea (I'm leaning toward the one on the right; price: $49).

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese in Boston

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BOSTON: Some years ago in Venice, I found myself in the early evening in Piazza San Marco looking at a banner proclaiming an exhibition of paintings by Tiziano at the Palazzo Ducale, the Doge's Palace. I happened to be facing the Palazzo, and the ticket booth happened to be not more than 50 feet away. By some small miracle it had no line. The ticket seller explained that entry was by timed ticket and that if I wanted to enter then, I woud have the place pretty much to myself.

"Allora. Un biglietto, per favore." Well, then, one ticket, please," I said, my heart pounding.

Tiziano, Flora, 1516-18, oil on canvas

I have seen Tizianos in Venice at the Accademia, in Florence at the Uffizzi, in Napoli at the Capodimonte, in Madrid at the Prado, in New York City at the Met, and recently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston at a wonderful show that's the subject of this post, but nothing came close to the experience of seeing his paintings the way the doge himself did.

Still Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, the current exhibition in Boston, is quite fine and you get two more Venetian painters in the mix.

The premise of this exhibition is that the three powerhouses of Venetian painting, whose lives overlapped for four decades during the 16th Century, were spurred by rivalry to do their best work, often taking on the same sacred and secular subjects in the pursuit of acclaim in Venice, throughout Italy, and in the courts of Europe. Their rich palette and sensuous paint handling defined a Venetian sensibility. All three artists adopted the then-new technique of painting with oil on canvas, which resulted in brilliant color on larger paintings than panel allowed.

Portraits range from popes to the painters themselves, from Last Suppers to martial themes, and from sumptuously dressed figures to nudes. Of course it is the women—Danae and the Venuses—who are naked. (Yeah, they're mythological figures; I get it.) I find the red room where these nudes are installed a bit too "bordello" for my taste. But if I can put my politics aside for a moment, these are pictures about flesh and sex, and the hue suggests fertility and engorgement. Why beat around the bush?

Whatever your feeling about these zaftig objects of the male gaze, we're reminded how standards of beauty have changed.

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The naked and the dressed

Tiziano: Portrait of a Man (Tommaso Mosti?), about 1520, oil on canvas; Venus with a Mirror, 1555, oil on canvas (dimensions not available online)

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Tintoretto: Portrait of a Man Aged Twenty-Six, 1547, oil on canvas; Susannah and the Elders, 1555-56, oil on canvas

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Veronese: Portrait of a Man, 1551-53, oil on canvas; Venus with a Mirror (Venus at her Toilette), mid-1580s, oil on canvas

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I think what touched me most, however, were two Tintoretto self portraits, one made in 1546 when he was 28, a young man challenging your gaze (so unlike the self-absorbed fleshy beauties he and his compatriots painted) and another 42 years later, well dressed but pale and tired. For artists who spend so much time in the studio, time passes while we are alone in solitary pursuit. Who has not one day looked in the mirror and wondered where that young painter went?

Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, 1518-94), son of a tintore, a fabric dyer: Self Portrait, about 1546, above, and Self Portrait, 1588, below; both oil on canvas

The Museum of Fine Arts website provides plenty of information. The exhibition is up through August 16. At $25 for adult entry, it's a pricy ticket—but not as pricy as getting to the next venue on the schedule: It will be at the Louvre in the fall.

By the way, you notice now all the portraits (as opposed to the narrative paintings) have one eye centered along the vertical axis of the canvas? Read more about it here in The Centered Eye, a post I wrote when this blog was in its infancy.

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