NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Found Art (Lafayette): Unmonumental 22

Found Art (Lafayette): Unmonumental 22, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Dona Nelson, in situ

Dona Nelson. No Title, 1973. Enamel on masonite, 14 x 11.75 in.

via NYTimes Art in Review, Friday, May 23, 2008 :

DONA NELSON: IN SITU

Paintings, 1973-Present

Thomas Erben
526 West 26th Street, Chelsea

Through May 31

There are many ways a New York museum could avoid merely validating the art market; one would be to surprise us all and give the New York painter Dona Nelson a survey. She has painted prolifically and innovatively for nearly 40 years, following her own path through the gap between abstraction and representation. She has been sustained by an adventuresome emphasis on materials, an appreciation of outsider art and an athletic (or, more fashionably, "performative") approach to process that builds on the art of Jackson Pollock and the Minimalist notion of specificity. For Ms. Nelson, however, specificity evolved into a charged compression of feeling, surface fact and optical experience.

Her restless career has dodged the burden (and thus the rewards) of a superficially consistent style. But this show, which sums up 35 years with only 10 works, reveals some of its underlying unities.

For example, a small untitled black-and-white work from 1973 and the quietly hallucinatory "Fleshy Reflection" from 1997 reflect her pursuit of more complex and organic variations on the Minimalist grid. "My Home III" and "My Home IV" from 2000 and 2001, which have an image of a village church in common, use cheesecloth dipped in paint to conflate the white-on-white of modernism with snowy calendar art. The first painting has the added jolt of crazed, spidery flings of intense blue, and the second has a predella of the Nativity.

"April," a blue abstraction from 2008 that has been worked on from both sides and is attached perpendicular to the wall, seems willfully eccentric. But "Line Street," a bright, scabby abstraction from 2007, is excellent, as is "The Palmist Reveals the Future of Painting" from 1992, a bright mandalalike image made entirely of short strips of dyed canvas; it shows an immense indigo hand embedded in designs of orange, yellow and purple.

Ms. Nelson is a bit like Marsden Hartley -- that is to say, a great risk-taker and consequently a sometimes uneven artist. But in curatorial terms, her lengthening, adventurous career has produced more than enough to work with. -- ROBERTA SMITH

The Mantra of Our Age...

Zhang Huan, courtesy of Pace Wildenstein. Zhang Huan's "Giant No. 3," at PaceWildenstein, is made of stapled-together cowhides (complete with hooves and tails).

via NYTimes Art in Review, Friday, May 23, 2008 :

[...] Mr. Huan's role models would seem to be artist-impresarios like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, except that his intellectual rationales -- explained in detail in the exhibition catalog -- are more complex than the works themselves. This reduces his efforts to grandiosely physical Conceptual Art, entertaining and accessible but devoid of new form. The main subject here is scale itself; height, volume and quantity as well as hours of human labor. It's the mantra of our age: I'm doing this because I can get someone else to do it.
-- Roberta Smith

Gore Vidal: Crooks, Lies, and Red Tape

Senator Barack Obama arrived on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters). Via.

via Times Online (From The Sunday Times):

May 18, 2008

I knew JFK, says Gore Vidal, and believe me Obama's the better leader

Gore Vidal, the writer and long-time Clinton supporter, tells why Hillary is insane to keep on fighting

by Melvyn Bragg

At 82, Gore Vidal has reached an enviable position: he is an influential man of letters, a political activist, a scion of the New World aristocracy and a friend of the powerful and famous, including the Clintons.

So what does he think of Hillary Clinton's stated intention to fight on to the bitter end for the Democratic presidential nomination? The reply is instant and searing: "I think her strategy is more or less insane."

He continues: "I'd always rather liked her. She's a perfectly able lawyer... But this long campaign, this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy."

In his view Barack Obama has won; and if the nomination is taken away from him, "I fear what our black population might do. There has never been a revolution of blacks - yet".

During the Clinton administration, Vidal admired Bill's understanding of the poor and of black people. His devotion to the Clintons has now been laid aside, however. By clinging on to her campaign, waiting for the small chance that Obama will make a terminal mistake, Hillary has crossed a line, he believes.

As for Obama, Vidal has taken time to warm to him. "I liked the idea of him, but he never managed to get my interest. I was brought around by his overall intelligence - specifically when he did his speech on race and religion."

In Vidal's opinion, "he's our best demagogue since Huey Long or Martin Luther King".

I ask if he thinks Obama has a similar charisma to that of John F Kennedy, whom Vidal got to know because he was related to his wife, Jackie.

"I never believed in Jack's charisma," Vidal says shortly. JFK, he believes, was "one of our worst presidents"; Bobby, his brother, was "a phoney, a little Torquemada”; and their father, Joseph, was "a crook - should have been in jail".

So much for Camelot. "But Jack had great charm," he adds. "So has Obama. He's better educated than Jack. And he's been a working senator. Jack never went to the office - he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him."

There's no guarantee, of course, that the Democrats will triumph later this year, even if Obama does win the nomination. Does he think Obama can beat John McCain?

His views on the man the Democratic candidate will have to beat are even more brutal than his views on Hillary: "You could beat McCain! I've never met anyone in America who has the slightest respect for him. He went to a private school and came bottom of his class. He smashed up his aeroplane and became a prisoner of war, which he is trying to parlay into 'war hero'."

In his view, McCain is "a goddamned fool. He was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he does not know what a mortgage is. His head rattles as he walks".

However, in Vidal's eyes, McCain is just a symptom of the real malaise affecting America today: the cynical subversion of the US constitution. "The Bush people", he says, "have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back."

By now he has worked himself up to a crisp fury: "Those neocons, lawyers, the big corporations - worse than that, extremists - want to get rid of the great power of oversight of the executive. See what they'll try to do to Obama. They're crooks. They're just gangsters. They are the enemy of the United States. There's no such thing as a war on terrorism. It's idiotic. There are slogans. It's advertising, which is the only art form we've invented and developed. It's lies." [...] emphasis ng's

NEWSgrist: 'take no prisoners'

Pic: Cannes Film Festival. Via. Revolutionary fervor: Benicio Del Toro in Steven Soderbergh's "Che."

In her send-up of Erin Langner's new Seattle-based art blog, Peripheral Vision, Regina Hackett mentions NEWSgrist on her A-list of art blogs. She says NEWSgrist has a 'take no prisoners' 'tude.

:-)

(Not to mention: thanks, Regina, for your other nice review "Paint That Burns Through Narrative"; I take paint rather personally).

...Okay, I really wanted an excuse to post that pic of Benicio Del Toro as Che in Soderbergh's new film...