curranmurphy-blog

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday Nov 14th

Sarah Lucas’ retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum is an unusual treat and welcomed surprise. I have for some time been interested in the various manifestations of Surrealism, especially those that incorporate ethics. I have had for some time, I must admit, a sort of prejudice against works of art, in any medium or genre that aim to make the world a better place with an explicit message. This prejudice is not as expansive as one may imagine. That is to say, I did not find the overt politicization in David Wajnarowicz works unattractive. In fact I found it quite moving.

But for the sake of clarification I must risk exposing what is if not chauvinistic, a somewhat snobbish attitude of mine, perhaps for the sake of redeeming myself. For instance, the obvious message of John Lennon’s “make love not war” from his song “Mind Games” appeals to me far less than an earlier verse from his disguised protest song “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”. It goes, “the children asked him if to kill was not a sin / ‘that way he looked so fierce’ his mummy butted in / ‘if looks could kill it would have been us instead of him.” Both songs have a message, one is given as instruction and is quite obvious, the latter is suggested through a rather subtle statement about human psychology. It is a protest against tiger hunting I will add.  But I always found the latter song superior for its subtlety, for its lack of moral instruction. I have always thought that such works possessed sophistication and a purity that overt protest songs lacked.  

           And so I return to Sarah Lucas, for I think an exploration of her work may help me to better understand this inclination of mine. In fact, I can do better than that. I think an investigation into Lucas’ work could better inform me as to how to incorporate moral content into my work without it taking over my work, something I intend to do albeit with a great deal of ambivalence.  

           One thing that struck me about Lucas’ works is that they are beautifully formal. It is the part of me that is drawn to pretty pictures that leads my eyes around the cast bodies whose legs and torsos flow effortlessly and interestingly into the forms of toilets and table tops. And then there is the beautiful juxtaposition of the white plaster of these bodies against the egg yolk yellow of the walls. And soon enough there is the realization of more than mere subject matter, but of content. And what is it that happens when this takes place? Is the symbolism of the dream found out? Is it castration anxiety that is experienced?

           No doubt, Lucas’ aesthetic sensibility is a powerful force and a powerful weapon when utilized for a particular aim. This of course is true generally and I can think of no reason why aesthetics shouldn’t be utilized. But Lucas has something else that allows her to make a statement that does not mute her own individual voice. There is a certain personality, a distinctive quality that allows the viewer to relate, not on a political level but on a personal level. Her humor as seen in “Au Naturel” is both British and her own.

           And so the egg in the face when I find out what her work is saying is not so humiliating; it is more like being playfully insulted by a friend of superior wit. I am reminded of a particular story from Tales From a Thousand and One Nights in which men of various statuses are tricked into being locked into a hierarchical cupboard inside of which these powerful men are reduced to urinating on each other. There response is not anger toward the woman who deceived them but of laughter, the sort of laughter that results from humility. And so my thoughts return to Julian Simmons, Lucas’ partner, as she reverses the normalized gender roles, rubbing egg yolk over his body.

           I have barely scratched the surface. Nevertheless it is artists like Lucas who perhaps have the most to teach me. I think of what Julia Jacquette has said about being an artist first, being an artist before anything else. My fear perhaps is drowning my own individualism in content, as I fear Lennon did to some extent. And perhaps too I am afraid of the responsibility and the seriousness of moral content. But I can say with confidence that Sarah Lucas is able to mix Surrealism and ethics without one overpowering the other, and above all, without ceasing to be an individual.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday Nov 28th

Perhaps I am beginning to take too many liberties in my journal entries, but I am going to take advantage of this blog to continue on a theme introduced in my blog responding to our visit to the Sarah Lucas exhibition. For me Lucas provides a clear and honorable path towards an artistic practice that allows for moral content while maintaining a sense of individualism. However, I feel that every time I think I might learn to allow such content into my work, there is some other force that beckons me away. In the case of this blog’s subject matter, I am taken far away with Alexander Calder. In fact, I am taken out of this world and all its concerns.

           Perhaps, in the age of Trump I have had my fill of all the troubles that face us. Or perhaps I do not feel the burden of Trump America enough. Either way I feel the need to escape, to escape to place where all our concerns are placed into perspective such that they are insignificant and dwarfed by laws of a “higher” order. I am now talking about the overwhelming beauty of Calder’s mobiles. Actually I am talking about the sublime.

           As this semester comes to a close I find myself thinking about what I have learned, after all, this course was for me, more than anything else, an opportunity to learn something about the world I inhabit, and to respond accordingly as an artist. On the one hand I have met with artists and viewed works by artists whose consciences informed my own, who have helped me better understand my place in the world, and to better understand my own sense of responsibility. And so I am a bit troubled by my desire to escape into the outer skirts of the solar system through Calder’s works.

           So, I would like to return to the term I have introduced here, to the sublime. For Bach it meant leaving the troubles of earth through the transcendence of his contrapuntal forces. His melodies would interlock harmoniously while maintaining their independence, both asserting the individuality of the composer while reflecting the larger order of the cosmos. In short, a force greater than himself, a force to which he could surrender would lull him to sleep at night, would make the pain of living more tolerable.

           But this is also the effect that Bach’s music has on me, and I find that Calder’s mobiles are guided by similar principles. Remove a note from one of Bach’s fugues and the fugue is lost. Remove one of metal discs on one of Calder’s mobiles and all balance and harmony is lost. Just as Bach’s melodies sustain themselves with counter motion so do Calder’s carefully constructed stems and metal discs. In them one can find the principles that guide the cosmos as well as the principles that guide us. Why do I go on like this? And what use is this to anyone?

           I am trying to understand better what has bothered me for some time and what I have mentioned in the Sarah Lucas post. There is a certain kind of purity in works by J.S. Bach, Mary Corse and Alexander Calder. And then there are artists like Sarah Lucas and Judy Chicago who do much to feed our consciences. I suppose to some extent I have said very little. But I am coming closer to asking myself the right questions as far as my artistic path is concerned. If nothing else this semester has shown me is that I have a conscience. How now, do I go about using it? If I pursue Calder’s path am I irrelevant or guilty of some sort of escapism? Can I pursue the sublime while not ignoring the injustices that plague our world? I’ll stop here for now.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday Nov 9th

I have building up in me a fear of artworks, or rather, an artistic practice that challenges previously established aesthetics, namely practices that prioritize not only the space in which a work is exhibited or of which it is constituted, but one that gives precedence to the cognitive experience of the viewer rather than to an aesthetic sensibility as it pertains to color and or form. But this is a fear of mine, and like most fears they are polarizing and give rise to false dichotomies. I expected our visit to Moma PS 1 to be interesting and challenging at best, philosophically engaging and above all a threat to my artistic practice, or at least, its validity. I imagined that Bruce Nauman would be one to instill me with Bertrand Russell’s notion of liberating doubt, a liberation that is often unwelcome as Plato has pointed out. And so it was, only never in my life had I felt so welcome and at home in such a strange place.

           I remember that one criticism of Nauman’s work was that he was inconsistent, that there was no true unification between all the constituents that make up his body of work, and that he was ultimately all over the place. I used to be fond of wearing cowboy hats and if I were wearing one right now, I would certainly tip my hat to the curators and all involved with the Nauman’s Disappearing Acts. Not only did the placement of the works demonstrate the seamlessness with which Nauman’s voice transfers from one medium to another, but they played a crucial role in warming my heart to his vision.

           Upon entering I was greeted not by “word art” but by the warmth of neon lights in the first room, and the distant fire of a steel pedal guitar playing a lonesome yet consoling song from an adjacent space. Another room was empty except for a light bulb, some spectators and a menacing voice telling all inside to “get out.” Following this was a space in which there was a cage-like structure one could walkthrough, a physical manifestation of the voice in the room before. I know now, but then only felt, that I was entering not as much into an exhibition of works of art as into a space in which I could relate to and experience both my own body and my mind, in short my “soul.”

           If the first rooms exhibiting Nauman’s works infatuated me, it was his “Carousel” and “Leaping Foxes” that won my heart. All of Nauman’s works seem to make one aware of his or her own body in by some means or another, or if it is not one’s body, it is one’s mind that one becomes aware of. Sometimes when reading the text of his neon signs, or when reading between the lines in his textual slabs of juxtaposed and superimposed opposites, I would find a particular state of certainty vanishing. But “Leaping Foxes” was one work that was true to the show’s name. One upon viewing this work should become aware of one’s own body through the awareness of bodies themselves more generally. “Leaping Foxes” is sort of an inverted food chain in which the predator, the animal with the least mass, balances upon its snout the much larger caribou it shall consume. One is forced to imagine all of this flesh and bone disappearing into such small and yet vacuous gullet. I couldn’t help but think of Francis Bacon with this piece.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday Nov 30th

Our venture to the Guggenheim’s exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s works hit close to home as it called into question those I regarded as the great pioneers of abstract art, or more specifically art that aims not at representation, but rather at representing pictorially the essence of things, of organisms and their environments, in short, of reality. While I admire Kandinsky and Mondrian I have always had a special relationship with the works of Paul Klee. I believe it was Picasso who likened him to Napoleon, so expansive was the terrain he had traversed, and so bright a trail he had blazed. In short the compliment implied that he was without equals. Only… it seems that Klee was not the first to venture to these strange corners of the imagination. The realization that one could pictorially represent creation itself did not come from Klee nor did it come from any of the other highly acclaimed abstract artists of early twentieth century.

           That such a revolutionary idea should come from any one mere mortal is somewhat of an absurdity. Nevertheless, if we were to pinpoint a singular artist, we should find at the mountain’s peak Hilma Af Klint. While Klee was still experimenting with abstracted, but not abstract, figures, Klint was well on her way, creating works that resemble to some extent, the much later blue paintings of Miro. Needless to say, there has been a prejudice for many centuries against the existence of women genius. If only Clara Schumann had not taken a back seat to her husband Robert Schumann. I favor the latter less to be completely honest. But as time unfolds, so does the truth. I am not very fond of the expression “one was ahead of her time.” I think Hilma af Klint was, like all great innovators, on time, and so in consequence we must ask if Klee and his contemporaries were maybe a little less on time than we had previously thought.

           I will be to some extent, drawing comparisons between the works of Klint and Klee. I do not wish to undermine Klint but rather, demonstrate just how advanced her thinking was for the time period in which she lived. Furthermore, I am by far the most familiar with Klee’s contribution to the world of abstract art, and Klint’s contribution serves to deconstruct what I had previously accepted to be true.

           I do not at this time understand all of Klint’s rules, that is the personal guidelines out of which she has constructed he pictures. One can rest assured that the day will come when I do, at the very least understand many of them. I could however, begin with a meaningful comparison between motifs used by Klee and Klint alike. Paul Klee was interested in getting the spectator or viewer to witness in his work the process of generation or creation through the creative process. More specifically Klee sought not to represent nature as it appears optically, but to illuminate its very functioning through the process of painting and drawing. By doing so the viewer would not just see the image of nature but its fundamental principles, and consequently, its very essence.

           Klee no doubt lived in color, but he also led an ongoing investigation into line. The line was a motif for which Klee had many variations. An active line, versus the more passive plane, was authored by thought. And of course, Klee was a man of scientific curiosity. His lines were often used to transfer energy and to depict growth and states of becoming. But the point at hand is this: for those who are not familiar with Paul Klee but have been acquainted with the works of Hilma Af Klint, this should sound familiar.

Works by Klint such as Group VI, Evolution, No. 15 are imbued with the same principles. In this work in particular, we see line working to form a spiral, such that it resembles that of a snail’s shell. Klint was very interested in Darwin’s ideas on evolution. And like many artists to come, she was not so interested in evolution as an accidental phenomenon, one driven by genetic mutations and success stories guided by chance, but rather she saw evolution as purposeful. And so Klint’s spiral aspires to a higher order, one that transcends this world. Klee too chose this path, calling on the cosmos, ever tracing his lines back to their origins.

What are remarkable are the dates that accompany the titles of Klint’s works. By the time Klee was writing about his lines they were in the process of becoming academic. The aforementioned work by Klint dates back to 1908, three years before Kandinsky’s Composition V, a work that is to this day regarded by many to be the first abstract painting.

But the similarities between Klint’s abstract paintings and those of say the Bauhaus painters are not merely superficial or limited to a few motifs. There is more to compare than just the chromaticism of Klint’s No. 1 Alterpiece and say The Encounter by Johannes Itten. Klint was methodical in her writing about her work, establishing rules by which certain combinations of letters would denote particular spiritual notions and concepts. Roberta Smith points out in her article, “’Hilma Who? No More” that there is too a methodical approach to her use of color. She says that “[i]n the 26 small paintings of ‘Primordial Chaos’ of 1906-7, she uses blue and yellow (colors she anointed as female and male) and green, to wrest abstraction from  a world of squirming spermatozoa, notational charts, decorative writing and a horseshoe crab that evokes a flying saucer, with three exhausts.” (Smith). Such methodology places Klint in a tradition that was and still is largely thought to have begun without her.

In fact, according to the content of Klint’s notebooks it appears that she has beaten Frank Lloyd Wright to his own design for the Guggenheim museum. In any case the building’s spiral structure is the perfect place for the assent of this new and yet age old vision.

Smith, Roberta. “Hilma Who? No More.” The New York Times. Published October 11th 2018.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday Oct 26th

Friday Oct 26th

“In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand At the mongrel dogs who teach Fearing not I'd become my enemy In the instant that I preach My existence led by confusion boats Mutiny from stern to bow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.”

-Bob Dylan

Whenever I think of Julia Jacquette and her body of work, her paintings in particular, I can’t help but hear Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” softly playing itself as my thoughts restlessly turn upon themselves. Jacquette is ambivalent, that is to say that she is ambivalent to an extent. She is ambivalent about particular decisions she makes in the studio, choices as to whether or not to portray a body in a particular way. I respect this ambivalence, largely because I know that it stems from the noteworthy size of her responsibility, from her knowing that she has taken a stance, knowing that she has a conscience, and knowing perhaps, for now I am projecting, that one does not meet one’s own conscience without facing temptation.

Ever since our visit to the Kara Walker exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum I have found myself in search of a line, of a line that simply does not exist, but if it did, it would find itself somewhere in the midst of right and wrong, between sensationalism and critique. In Walker’s case we can see conscience reflected in the viewer as well as the consumer. She uses our baser instincts against us, our curiosity into a world of stereotypes and caricatures. And some of us have a transcendent experience because of these instincts while others succumb to them, these peculiar white men who seek Walker’s art not as art but a window into questionable sensation.

In any case, Julia Jacquette finds herself in a similar position. I think that for all of us there is a certain struggle to see ourselves clearly as the mirror is held too closely to our faces. These “evil geniuses” as she has referred to those who turn the gears that drive the media, use our biology and psychology against us. It is a special brand of mythology that they create. One could call this mythology a lie, but it is a lie of the most dangerous kind, one that holds a grain of truth. I believe that in part, this is what Jacquette is fighting for. She is trying to retrieve that grain of truth.

           Jaquette’s works manage to critique the media’s manipulation and exploitation of beauty, its monopolization and normalization of certain aesthetics, not by dismissing its seductive qualities but by utilizing them. I’m particularly fond of David Brody’s take on this in his article “’Playground of my Mind’: Julia Jacquette Educates the Eye,” in which he says, “Disciplined, cool, yet in love with excess, Jacquette’s paintings manage to critique her cake and eat it.” Paintings such as Swimming Pool Water and Scotch Rocks depict fluids as exalted by the advertising industry. Blonde colors are utilized in her works often as she has noted that these are colors used by advertisers frequently. Many of her paintings are directly inspired by magazine covers and advertisements, Actress Gold Dress being one such work. Another work takes the image of a woman from a watch advertisement, the work of art featuring a blonde woman in a reclining position. These microcosmic presentations seem almost fetishistic, and I can’t help but think of Alfred Hitchcock’s attention to detail, particularly in films such as Vertigo and Rear Window. But Like Hitchcock, Jacquette has a message, or even a warning. The work 36 Sofas has a more overt message. While the work invites the eye into a world that promises comfort and consolation, captions of insecurity and inadequacy inform us that the promise of consolation is false.

Jacquette, as clear as her message may be, is a difficult artist to pin down. Between her depictions of Utopian playgrounds and her fascination with the seductive qualities of glitter, she is both a realist and an idealist. Or perhaps more accurately, she is a realist who embraces the materiality of this world while envisioning a world better than the one we currently inhabit.

Work Cited

            Brody, David. ‘”Playground of my Mind’: Julia Jacquette Educates the Eye.” Art Critical.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday Oct 19th

My cold was particularly bad this Friday and I’m certain that the greatest motivational force for my getting out of bed was Randy Wray’s artwork. While it may not have the gravitational pull, at least in respect to social and political concerns, that An-My Le’s work possesses, it struck a chord within my soul. Utilizing organic forms and found objects, Wray is a man after my own heart.

           There are several factors to take into consideration, at least for me, when reflecting upon Wray’s artworks. First, and perhaps the least significant in the grand scheme of things is his studio’s placement in the Sharpe-Walentes Studio Program. Such practicalities concern me given that I am just beginning my adventures as an artist. The odds of being accepted into such a program are all too slim, a kind reminder of how indifferent the world is to my, or anyone else’s existence. But Wray indeed was a very kind man and a pleasure to meet. I felt somewhat relieved to see that an artist could do well for himself with nothing higher than a Bachelors Degree. It’s a shame that I want to make my living as an artist, because talk of such practicalities bores me.

           His resourcefulness on the other hand is of far more interest to me. Often I am taking into consideration just how taxing the acquisition of materials can be, especially as far as oil paint is concerned. It was validating indeed to see a man utilize, quite literally, trash, to make objects of aesthetic appreciation. Many of his biomorphic sculptures are constructed from found objects and waste materials, such that they seem almost to be organisms thriving off the waste we produce. Accumulating in his studio, he has created his own ecosystem, one that compensates for the perils of our own species’ lavishness.

           His paintings at first glance may appear to be illustrations of his sculptures, two dimensional representations of his sculptural works. However there are similar principles in his paintings as those that drive his three dimensional practice. His works have a certain physicality about them. They seem to me to originate on the threshold, as far as categorization is concerned, of pictorial space and physical object. His work is produced largely by an intuitive spirit, a fact that makes his work all the more genuine in my opinion.

               This fact also leads us to the practice of An-My Le. I recall Hrag Vartanian’s words as he said that all artists bring their politics to their artwork. I have always had some ambivalence about the inclusion of any political or ethical message in my artwork. Not so much because doing so is some anathema to me; a world without ethics is indeed a world in which I do not want to live. Nevertheless, I’ve always thought that one’s individual voice should be well established before taking on such a sizable responsibility. In any case, I recall Vartanian’s words because of something An-My Le said. She expressed her desire, or rather her inclination to consider herself an artist first, perhaps knowing that she as an individual already has in her possession her own politics, or to quote Le herself, “baggage.”

           Also of interest is Le’s inclination to intervene into a certain process of documentation. While she does indeed document events that take place in the world, she graces images of student protests with a poetic sensibility. For instance, a photograph of students protesting gun violence transcends the political when the picture also reveals to us that it is springtime. Of course, I also found it rather interesting that she would choose to photograph a reconstruction of the oval office, a reconstruction made on the set of Saturday Night Live to be exact. Yes, this was done out of practicality, but I find that a lot of tension arises when documenting such “fabrications”, given that we live in a time in which the oval office is a locus of uncertainty and confusion.

(I don’t believe the works described above have been released yet)

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday Oct 12th

I’m going to attempt to tie three of the exhibitions together such, that I might run the risk convolution. And with a sentence like that I might as well add pretension into the mix, and self-deprecation, of course. Still, there is a small unifying theme in the works viewed at White Columns, one that could extend to the John Ashbery exhibition at Pratt as well. This theme is, to generalize to some extent, one of personal identity, one of self.

First I would like to discuss the exhibition of Katya Tepper at White Columns for it is here that we see layers of meaning, the kind of layers that would constitute a self, be it you or me. Now, the name of the show is “Hysteric Signs” and the artist plays with boundaries between the body and its surroundings and the relationship between the two. Furthermore, the artist concerns herself with illness and communicates this through an unusual visual as well as textural language. The principles of this language seem to parallel the principle that may constitute a self, if am to be so bold as to pretend I know what a self is.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that my favorite piece in the exhibition is a wall sculpture shaped like the letter “I.” Aesthetically this was not my favorite though it suits my purposes beautifully. This letter is a symbol with all sorts of connotations as well as denotations. “I” is that sacred pronoun to which we refer to that mystery we call our “selves.” This work as well as the others in this exhibition has in its possession a hierarchy of meanings. At one level there is a symbol, a readable thing, and on another level, there are numerous constituents that are inseparable though they need not relate to the letter “I” at all.

These constituents vary from piece to piece with considerable overlap. Rolls of toilet paper, peeled wax, plungers and bricks all come together to form a textured and symbolic whole. One can easily get lost in the details of these works, forgetting that one is viewing an object that has a form of its own, forgetting that these works have “souls.” Only when one takes a step back does one see that the sign and the textural constituents are one and the same.

This relationship is interesting and carries over into the next room in which Dr. Lakra’s works are exhibited. These works function in a similar manner. This time, it is the subjects of Lakra’s collages that relate to their environments such that their identities are threatened. The scientist’s that these collages feature, notable figures like Renee Descartes and Isaac Newton, become no less the subject of inquiry than they are the inquirer. Lakra accomplishes this feat by composing and deforming his figures by combining them with images pertaining to each scientist’s field of study. The result is a compacted figure, the likes of which one would find in a Francis Bacon painting.

But both bodies of work have in common a relationship between body and environment, and between self and other. And perhaps it is John Ashbery’s works that I understand the least, and it is likely that for this reason I am most intrigued by what he has accomplished. Nevertheless, what is clear in Ashbery’s work, without seeing as much as a letter, let alone the use of text, that it is the work of a poet. In fact, similar principles find themselves in his exhibition as those found in Tepper and Lakra’s. What distinguishes Ashbery from these other two artists is a certain feeling of universality. When trying to peer into the Collages of Ashbery I got the feeling that I could maybe trace my way to the essence of all things, or that maybe there is no road to such a place, or that there is no essence. What do I mean?

Collage seems to make explicit the fact that all we see and experience, that is, that the underpinnings of reality are either the key to some ultimate reality, or perhaps more likely, illusory. I’ll reiterate as far as the latter proposal is concerned. The contextual construction arise through collage creates an otherwise impossible world, a world that cannot in all likelihood be understood once dissected. In this sense Ashbery’s works relate very well to Lakra and Tepper’s. But I believe Ashbery drives this home. His work, in a sense, is about the very principles that drive the other two aforementioned artists. Although truly I can only speak for the exhibitions I saw, not their entire careers.

Nevertheless, Ashbery seems to create something out of nothing, an idea popular among physicists today. A Madonna placed in a wintery scene, a girl with a parrot, indifferent to the storm in which she has been placed, are just a couple of examples of works that create tangible and compelling impossibilities. Perhaps the work I found most jarring and certainly the most mysterious was Bingo Beethoven. Its use of numbers gave me the impression that there was something to be deciphered. I’m embarrassed to say it remains a mystery to me. Yet it is the mystery that I love I suspect a consequent truth supervenes.

I’ll move on and say that I enjoyed our visit with Hrag Vartanian, the founder of the blog Hyperallergic. I’ve always enjoyed their articles and especially their interviews (not to mention Hyperallergic has contributed much to my learning about my art teachers). I do not take notes, and consequently I cannot quote Vartanian. However I remember some noteworthy utterances of importance. One pertained to the inevitability of our politics seeping into our creative endeavors, the other to the significance of subjectivity and its introduction into the political and philosophical world through feminism. I could say more, but my blog post might never end. In short I think these observations of Vartanian have fueled further my interest in Kara Walker’s works, or more accurately, the principles that drive them.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday Oct 24th

           This question as to what role the critic plays has been gnawing at me ever since our Moodle discussion. I find my head spinning as I am still uncertain. The impression I got from Joseph Wolin was that he was an individual of exceptional intelligence, an astute observer and relentless problem solver. But this is a characterization of a particular man, not necessarily a critic. The world is peppered with men and women of superior intelligence who see just a bit further on the horizon. For them, the light of the sun seems to reach their eyes sooner than most. But such people are also artists, composers, novelists or physicists, and so on and so forth. There are artists with formidable cognitive powers who do not quite know what they are doing as they work. And there are those who think from there armchairs without the slightest desire to take a paintbrush into their own hands. But to complicate matters further, there are artists who are also critics. So then, what is a critic?

           Categorization is notoriously difficult, and Aristotle has done a far better job than I could ever dream of doing myself. Nevertheless I shall try, though I don’t intend to be as methodical.

           I’ll begin by revisiting some of my concerns about art criticism. In my Moodle discussion I expressed my concerns about the intermediary role the critic seems to play between the viewer and the work of art, or rather, the artist’s vision. There are many factors to take into consideration, such as whether or not the artist’s intention is relevant or not, whether a work’s identity is fixed or whether it changes throughout time or alters as its context shifts. But critics and philosophers alike disagree on these matters.

           What all critics seem to have in common is they, when acting as critics, examine an artist’s work or works and discuss or publish their findings. Such a phenomenon I witnessed at the David Zwirner Gallery as Wolin shared his thoughts about artist and photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans and his exhibition. I found the show somewhat disorienting, some pictures representational, some abstract, some figurative others depicting landscapes. Some photographs were sharply focused on a subject while others functioned solely to bring attention to the materiality of film itself. Another interacted with its environment, depicting light while real light simultaneously struck the image. Another static image projected on a screen interacted with sound, and this image was only accessible by traversing through a narrow passage that mimicked the shape of a pinhole camera.

           Some of this I could sense on my own, but much of it I wouldn’t have been able to articulate for myself had it not been for Wolin’s observations. In short, this show that involved a considerable degree of self referencing was about the picture and its various functions. Rather it served to ask: What is a picture?

           But to return to the problem at hand, one of my concerns was that the critic was interfering with the sacred and personal relationship between viewer and artwork or viewer and artist. Yet, would anyone in the twenty-first century claim that the scientist was ruining his relationship with nature? And am I treating the work of art as too delicate and fragile a thing by thinking a critic could “ruin” it for me?

           Perhaps, and just perhaps, the role of the critic as far as purpose is concerned is irrelevant. That anyone of us has a purpose may be claiming too much. The critic simply takes more time to see and consequently helps us, who do not necessarily take the time, to see. Wolin took the time to ask us questions and to get us to engage critically with the pictures in the gallery. He wanted us to be critics, just as a scientist may want us to be skeptics. And I have to ask if maybe the only thing that separates the rest of the population from the critics is the willingness to pay attention.

           I think now that maybe any of us could be a critic, and that the critic does not interfere, that a critic cannot truly interfere, but rather, merely bring to light the mystery that the artist has deepened.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday Oct 17th

Heather Bhandari’s book Artwork offers a sliver of hope for artists who anxiously await their entry into the art world.  But as David Bowie has said, “hope is a cheap thing.” Nevertheless, if one is navigating in the dark, any source of light is a blessing. If nothing else, Bhandari dissects a cold and inhuman machine and reveals, if not its heart, its inner workings which are indeed as human as they are diverse.

           What was particularly nice about our meeting at her Brooklyn apartment was that we got to see one of the art world’s faces and not an unfriendly one either. Perhaps meeting with her served a process of demystification in my own mind, as she is one of many individuals representing the art world, many of whom are not conspiring with each other to keep us out but are in fact just as confused, or nearly so, as many of the young aspiring artists coming forth today.

           Furthermore, the ability for us to voice our concerns did much, I think, to calm our nerves. The world Bhandari described was one that was interconnected not by brown-nosers and schmoozers, but by technological advancements. If Wordsworth maintains that “the world is too much with us,” one could argue that this is not always such a bad thing. Sites like Instagram, she explained, offer one the opportunity to find like minded individuals who can open doors as one’s network expands. After all is said and done, I suspect that there can be no success in the art world without an ample supply of gumption and perseverance. Still, there is some comfort in knowing that the world is a diverse place in which standards for success are rather relative and subjective.

           It may come as a surprise to some that the visit I enjoyed the least on this day was our venture to Urban Glass. I can find no fault with the place. It was very welcoming and accessible, and a promising abode for those who wish to express themselves with glass, a respectable way to spend one’s time in my opinion. There was no shortage of variety as far as the ways in which glass was utilized. And no doubt, a burning furnace through which glass is blown is an exciting spectacle. But having visited Bhandari’s studio I had my future in mind and this wasn’t it.

           I found myself more at home at Bric House where I discovered Mary Mattingly’s installation, What Happens After. I found this exhibition particularly beautiful. A combatant of global violence and environmental disaster, Mattingly uses quite literally, a vehicle of war, a light medium tactile vehicle, as a vehicle for justice and social awareness. But as impressive as this pun is, I was drawn more to the wonderful aesthetic of the display as a whole. It was like an orchestrated junkyard of inter-connectivity, strings tying together beautifully objects of military and environmental significance. At the center of this space was a stage intended for dance performances, juxtaposing humanity at its finest with humanity at its worst.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday Oct 10

Perhaps, having just discussed the ignorance and prejudices that lurk behind our syllogisms, it is not a bad idea to examine my own misconceptions and projections as they pertain to Julia Bland’s works.

First I would like to say that our visit to her studio has been one of the highlights of our semester so far. I found each piece very exciting and, between the vibrancy of color and the intricate hand-woven textures, very beautiful. Although this is not so uncommon among artists today, I admire her disregard for conventional skill and admire her preference and aptitude for a practice that is more craft-like in nature. But also I appreciate the tradition that manifests itself in her work.

I suppose that it is here that I ought to begin discussing my own ignorance while hopefully illuminating all I find beautiful about Bland’s work. It was for Bland that I was required to ask a few discussion raising questions. I think I both tried too hard and projected too much my own Christian background.

This said, I don’t believe my Platonic associations are completely off the mark. I can’t help but think of the Christian Cathedrals of the Gothic Era when viewing her works as both play a similar role. Both create an intermediary space for the “soul” to climb upwards from the earthly realm to the divine. And of course, both utilize formal beauty to do so.

Nevertheless, how cans such a statement not give away my own ignorance, and perhaps some of my intransigence? Her works are influenced not by Platonic Christianity but by Islamic traditions, the like of which I am only faintly acquainted. Furthermore, and this is a biggie as they say, her work partakes in a very old and diverse quilting practice. The physicality of her work, the earthliness or worldliness is very important as is the intimacy with which her hands have with each woven strand. Many perspectives surround this tradition, some including depictions of women as great fabricators, others view womankind as the very fabric of civilization, a view the Odyssey upholds. It seems that I can’t help but mention the Greeks. In any case, I find her work captivating in its own right.

Yashua Klos’ works too are interesting. I have to admit that I liked his one sculpture in all its physicality more than the two dimensional works that constituted most of his work. That said, I enjoyed very much the interruptions and interferences of his abstract patterns as they dissected his subjects’ gazes. The illusionistic quality of his two dimensional works are not only impressive but rather intriguing. Just as his method of printmaking is rather difficult to identify, so is the reality of the pictures he assembles. They appear as though they want to deny reality, as though they were not truly two dimensional illusions but actual three dimensional objects. Indeed, I would love to see this phenomenon explored further in a three dimensional medium. But whether or not that happens is up to him.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday Oct 3rd

There is a lot to discuss as far as these few galleries are concerned, and this is without the inclusion of Judith Bernstein, since I did not have the privilege of meeting her, nor was I fortunate enough to view her works in person. That said, what experiences I did have on my own were rich enough, and though I am anxious to discuss syllogisms (a reference to Pope. L of course). I think it is best to begin with richness since it characterizes Petah Coyne’s work quite literally.

           I enjoyed her show at the Galerie Lelong & Co. very much; the work was visceral and brought before me a lucid dream state. That said, whether or not this was a good dream or a nightmare was not so easy to determine. Coyne, in many of these works presents to us a velvet landscape with anthropomorphic tendencies, the likes of which one might find in a surrealist painting by Dali or Ernst. The luminescence of the fabric seems to embody, or perhaps conceal, a deep mystery as one’s gaze oscillates between a surface that is at once shimmering and yet, dark and deep.

           But my interpretations of this show are varied, and some carry more weight than others. My first impression was that of a decadent life of indulgence gone sour. Coyne’s flower ornamented chandeliers have an eerie aura about them as the flowers are embalmed in wax. That the birds perched upon them are dead brings little joy to my heart as it seems that paradise is not all that it promises to be.

           However, this reading is as simplistic as it is initial. And however appropriate my guttural responses to these works may have been, the narratives that grace these pieces are richer even than the velvet in which they are draped. I am afraid that I haven’t read any of the literary works that inspired these works, but the themes are familiar enough. Many of the works involve or relate to narratives of marginalized women protagonists. Each of these works seems to relate to a different literary work though her motifs remain the same throughout, as do her materials. In short my interest is piqued and I would very much enjoy reading some of the literature that has inspired Coyne if it will help me to better understand her work.

           A sort of after-thought of mine is that I appreciate the bird’s eye view the steps provide in this installation space. I think the multiple perspectives this space provides, and this includes the view one can access through the flowery trellis, is especially appropriate for a show largely inspired by literary works.

               I enjoyed too Kathy Butterly’s exhibition at the James Cohen Gallery. Butterly’s small clay sculptures serve, it seems to me, as monuments to a myriad of feminine commodities. She has, I believe, taken objects that are to be consumed and ultimately thrown out, and instilled in them fiery clay souls. I am not sure if they as artworks transcend the items that make up their forms or if they bring to attention the actual status of such commodities, revealing to us just how intimate a relationship we have with our possessions.

                  I’d like to now turn my attention to Pope. L’s show at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery. Perhaps the work that intrigued me the most was the film Syllogism as any critique of deductive reasoning is bound to catch my attention. This criticism is, however, found in the entire body of works constituting this exhibition. Whole figures are illogically, it seems, held together by unlikely constituents, or rather, by the juxtaposition of different body parts belonging to members of different ethnicities. Iconic and political figures are thrown into the mix, be it Bill Cosby or George W. Bush. The result of these collages is a disoriented whole, be it figure or a picture; sometimes it is humorous, at others, disconcerting.

           I have the peculiar sense that there is something mythological about these collage works as they, when dissected, seem to demystify the subjects, revealing a myriad of elements such as prejudice and ignorance. And yet as a whole the works seem almost irreducible and mysterious, or perhaps, unexamined.

           The work Syllogism itself seems to reference the entire exhibition, which is by the way, titled, One Thing After Another, a play, I believe, on the relationship between the premise and conclusion of the syllogism. I’m not sure that Pope. L is calling into question deductive reasoning itself as the show itself functions as a syllogism, its premises implicit. Furthermore, syllogisms are quite reliable when it comes to simple mathematics or to simple and typically harmless categorizations. Although the act of categorization itself is an ambitious undertaking when carried through, and paradoxes do arise. And such paradoxes reveal just how fallible we are. And so Syllogism and the show at large do call our attention to the prejudices that often glue our premises to our conclusions. In some cases, as the works suggest, the premises are fictions.

           Benjamin Franklin comes to mind as I remember an excerpt from his autobiography. It reads, “So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” And to this I say “indeed.”

           I’d like to add that I enjoyed seeing Mark di Suvero’s work in its “natural” environment.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday 9/21 2018

           Although the first works that I encountered at the Whitney were those of David Wojnarowicz, I’d prefer to begin with the works of Mary Corse. Since I was absent the day of the class’s venture, I went to see these works the following day, accompanied by a friend. If I was gypped out of having as a guide an instructor’s deliberation when approaching these works, I was perhaps also fortunate to be left to my limited resources and too, to be accompanied by a friend whose vision seems to fail him when an illusionistic window, in the traditional sense, is no longer present in a work. Of course, this is not an accurate characterization of my friend’s vision, since it was I’m sure, perfectly intact when he viewed the works of Corse at the Whitney, and what he perceived was most likely what stood before him.

           Perhaps it would be better for me to speak of my own ignorance since it is something to which I have direct access. I struggled to find words that could properly defend these works as my friend expressed his disinterest in them. That I mention my friend and his perception at all is to bring to light a significant attribute of Corse’s work. In one respect, there is something fixed in these works. They do not change color in actuality nor do they change shape in any literal sense. Nevertheless, it is equally true that these works, as they interact with the light provided, have transient qualities and have in their possession personalities that are both ephemeral and subtle.

           Using the word “subtle” to characterize Corse’s works does not come without danger for if there is subtly, I believe it is due to the perceiver’s inclination to let the world pass by unnoticed and appreciated. The work, Untitled (Black Light Painting) from 1975, provides the viewer with a more immediate sense of visual gratification. The slightest movement on the part of the spectator seems to inspire a dance between the black of work’s surface and the light that shimmers on its surface, almost as if from within. Such a spectacle is not subtle at all, though it is indeed ephemeral since any shift of movement spells death for the “stars” that meet the viewer’s gaze, allowing new ones to be born.

           I would like to turn my attention to the exhibition featuring David Wojnarowicz, since it is this entry that will be the most difficult to write, although it is the one I have been looking forward to writing the most.

           A particular caption on one of the museum’s walls expresses to no small degree, much of what I was feeling, or rather, much of the conflict within me when viewing Wojnarowicz’s works. It is too long to quote, but it in short, it refers to Zoe Leonard’s guilt while producing abstract and politically neutral works at the time of the AIDS crisis. To return to the ephemeral once again, at the heart of the passage was the subject of beauty, and Wojnarowicz’s struggle not to disengage with what is beautiful. The caption refers to the flower paintings, I Feel A Vague Nausea, Americans Can’t Deal with Death, and We Are Born into a Preinvented Existence.

           Beauty is almost inaccessible when one is suffering, and yet suffering yields beauty of the most poignant kind if one allows it to be experienced. I think this tension is felt throughout Wojnarowicz body of work.

           To turn to a specific element of his work, I’d like to discuss his use of text. Generally text in visual works of art is something I dislike; I typically prefer the imagery to speak for itself. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of this in his works. His post mortem photographs of Peter Hujar speak for themselves with their loving attention to his exhausted face and the intimate presentation of his hands and feet. Together these three photographs document the subject’s humanity. His Sex Series too, accomplishes much without words, juxtaposing images that evoke a sense of alienation with pornographic images of intimacy. Indeed some of the works in this series do involve text.

           In any case, I am not repulsed or turned off by the works that do incorporate text. In Wojnarowicz case, his inclusion of text seems appropriate and necessary. I vaguely remember linguist Noam Chomsky discussing his political activism, saying, and I paraphrase, that he’d much rather focus his attention on theoretical issues, problems pertaining to consciousness and language. However, the urgency of the practical issues or political issues was just too great for his conscience to discard. And I think this relates to Wojnarowicz work in some way. Much of the artist’s imagery is very playful and colorful. It is full of life and embodies some of the sunshine of the eighties’ culture. Naturally, I am reminded of the struggle to find beauty where beauty is not apparent and when beauty is not felt. Nevertheless, his text is necessarily combative. Making explicit reference to the political climate, Wojnarowicz is providing a voice for those who are wrongfully spoken for, and to some extent, he is renaming the named.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday 9/14 2018

           On this particular Friday we visited Storm King and Dia:Beacon, two places that utilize the surrounding environment to place the works within a certain context. In my mind, although this is likely an oversimplification, there were two types of sculptures at Storm King, those that juxtaposed there environments and those that blended in, some to the extent that they were inseparable from the surrounding earth.

           Of the artists whose sculptures stood out from their environments, Alexander Calder and Mark di Suvero made the greatest impression on me. The works of both artists have that “drawing in space” quality. There is no mistaking them with the landscape nor is there any doubt that these objects are placed as to be exhibited as works of art. From afar, these sculptures appear as mere silhouettes, two dimensional drawings that assert their existence against the scenic valley to which they currently belong. When one ventures close to one of these works, the juxtaposition is magnified by the man-made steel that constitutes these objects.

           Nevertheless, these sculptures do find a way to relate to the earth beneath them as well as to the land that surrounds them. Calder’s works, asserting forms far more organic than those of di Suvero, play interestingly with the natural setting. The artist’s biomorphic constructions seem as though they might have grown from the earth as if some invasive species. Furthermore, despite their being made out of steel, they seem to defy their own materials in that they appear weightless, as if the ground beneath them was unburdened by their tremendous weight.

           Until this visit I was completely ignorant of Mark di Suvero’s works. His sculptures, in addition to being constructed with industrial materials, also appear to be made of such. They resemble more than Calder’s works something indigenous to an urban setting. What both works possess however, is a porous quality, the negative space in di Suvero’s work being far more geometric than in Calder’s. Yet both works allow for the natural setting to peek through. And both artists’ works beckon the observer to traverse from one point of view to another, so that one’s gaze wander’s whether consciously or not, to different locations in the distance.

           Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall by contrast, was in such harmony with its environment, and so inconspicuous, that one could have easily misidentified it as one of the many stone walls that dissect the region. Only when one takes notice of the wall’s unnecessary meandering does one notice that stone construction transcends its typical utilitarian function. More courteous than most walls, Goldsworthy’s work of art makes way for the surrounding trees, expressing a respect for the land it divides. Its status as a work of art is most obvious when it completely submerges itself into a nearby pond, only to resurface on the opposite bank. If most walls exist to place in one’s mind the concept of division, this wall serves to bring one’s thoughts to harmonization.

           I never did get to traverse across Fred Sandback’s installation at the Dia:Beacon, despite my the excitement with which I described my anticipation of it in my forum discussion. Nevertheless, the experience was what I expected, one that could not truly be anticipated without possessing prior experiential knowledge of such works. By far the richest experience was that provided by Richard Serra. Consequence was the first work of his that I encountered. Immediately I found myself moving to and fro, finding myself connected to the horizontal space the work provided. The work consisted of two walls each with a horizontal band of paint, each side a flipped over version of the other. If this playful visual display brought my body into motion, it was the aroma of paint that seemed to unify the piece.

           Before I found out that Serra’s works were inspired by motion and sought to embody motion through abstraction, bodily motion in particular, I was a bit puzzled by these large constructions. The works I am referring to now are The Union of the Torus and the Sphere, and Torqued Ellipses. There are still quite a few mysteries remaining as to what each of these works is about. The titles and their specificity are especially intriguing. But what I noticed about all of these works by Serra is that the body seems to understand them before the mind does. Whether one is brushing past the sides of The Union of the Torus and the Sphere or venturing towards the center of one of his giant ellipses, one’s center of gravity finds itself shifting, or rather reacting to the forms as if dancing.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Friday 9/7 2018

           I’m afraid the best moment of my trip to MOMA was rather small short-lived as there is only one painting by this artist on display. It is because of artists like Francis Bacon that I find myself working at all, that I feel that there is something worth striving for in my artwork. While Calder’s aesthetic has influenced me considerably in the last semester, and while I see myself as a sculptor more than a painter, it is Bacon and the principles that drive his work that pulsate through me as I create. Perhaps there is some irony here, as I do not share the artist’s life view. That is to say that Bacon has in many interviews expressed his amoral attitude towards life and towards the species to which he belongs. There is no ethical purpose to his reducing his subjects to mere pieces of meat that await or have already met the hand of the butcher. To Bacon this is just reality as he sees it. One’s inner light is corporeal, and once one has experienced life in all its materiality, it’s lights out.

           This is, of course, evident in his work, perhaps especially in his Painting at MOMA. There is a sense of immediacy in the brush strokes, most of them having a vitality of their own, an intensity with which the German Expressionists and Van Gogh were quite familiar. And quite naturally, his attention to the materiality of the paint and the artificiality of his paintings heightens the sense of immediacy that living beings possess, and contribute the idea that life is brief. These attributes of his work too, and forgive me for the pun is not intended though inevitable, provide his work with a quality of edibility. They are so tangible and intense that the eye cannot help but devour them so that the mind can begin the first stages of digestion.

Of course the content of Bacon’s work goes a long way too. In the aforementioned work, there are two rib cages placed at the center of the composition, hanging as they would in a butcher shop. Two smaller carcasses appear lower in the composition, only this time they do not hang vertically but appear to jut out at the viewer. These pieces of meat seem to rest on a circular rail, at the center of which is darkness, or more literally, blackness. The representation of meat too is partially engulfed by black paint. The painting’s central figure sports a black suit and black umbrella, the likes of which one might see worn at a funeral. The figure’s face is ghostly white and the eyes, those windows to the soul, are concealed by the umbrella’s shadow. What is visible, and is often featured in Bacon’s paintings including his homage to Velasquez featuring Pope Innocent X, is the mouth. One cannot help but notice the reference to this man’s place in the food chain, nor can one not foresee his inevitable downfall as he too shall be consumed.

It is tempting to look for a narrative in Bacon’s work, though no true narrative can be found, with the exception of a triptych he dedicated to a deceased friend. Life and all of its sensations are compacted into one frightful moment.  

A brief aside: being a fan of that branch of Philosophy known as Ethics, I am rather grateful that artist and film maker David Lynch has taken something from both Bacon’s aesthetic and from the principles guiding it, and applied it to narratives that parallel a human psyche in search of what is good and what is just.

That I am so drawn to Bacon’s work and that they have their psychological components likely explains my new found enthusiasm for Philip Guston’s paintings, another artist viewed at MOMA. I did not mention the compact quality of the actual space in Bacon’s painting, but there is a similar function in Guston’s compositions, such that the placement of objects suggests a particular psychological state. Guston’s works are more narrative, paintings such as Edge of Town and City Limits depicting Klansmen who appear to be in action.

The Agnes Martin exhibit served as a reminder that she is an artist whose works I’d like know better. I do not understand her fully at this time, but I was drawn to her minimalistic and poetic internalizations of the world. The titles of her works seem integral to each piece as they juxtapose a word or a phrase that has its own associated imagery and places it in the context of an image that itself expresses a sentiment or, perhaps more accurately, documents a moment in the artist’s mental history.

I have to admit, privilege that it was to access, that the conservation lab was of the least interest to me, although its necessity is obvious and I am far from indifferent to the fates of the works housed at MOMA. Had I thought to ask, I would have inquired into the fate of Francis Bacon’s paintings as they are painted on unprimed canvases. Of course, I’m sure I care more about the fate of his paintings than he would have were he still living.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday 9/19 2018

I can remember reading somewhere, either in a textbook or a notebook of his, the words of Paul Klee, “The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.” I know in fact that Klee had little qualms with the reverse, many of his paintings representing through some playful motifs, kinetic energy or motion of some kind. But what is wrong with science concerning itself with art? Indeed, if Klee was not a scientist, his approach was scientific.

Roughly a century later, Ellen Levy is creating works of art that seem to embody what Klee detested. She is subjecting the artistic vision to scientific inquiry, primarily by investigating attention, a feature of consciousness. Not every aspect of her scientific approach is so radical or “threatening.” Many of her works utilize imagery that alludes to or represents pictorially the phenomenon of attention. For instance, a mixed media work of hers, Migrations, accomplishes this by juxtaposing an anatomical representation of an eye with photographic images of dried earth. There too is a traffic filled highway in the picture. All of these images together function to generate, so I think, a sense of confusion and distraction, not to say that composition itself is confused.

What is more radical in her work is probably closer to what Klee feared. For example, one might have some difficulty deciding whether Levy’s Stealing Attention is a work of art, or a transforming image created for a controlled experiment. Quite frankly, I find this confusion rather exciting. The work features hands that rapidly appear, disappear and reappear, dealing cards as if a game of 3-card monte were being played. The viewer is told to focus on this feature of the work, and often the viewer is unaware that the sculptures behind the hands are disappearing. Needless to say, this is the scientific method, or at least part of it at play.

Of course, scientific inquiry requires the greatest degree of imagination and innovation. However, science checks itself for errors and is self correcting through a set procedure. Art by contrast, looks into a mirror and sees its own reflection. Stealing Attention doesn’t stop at measuring attention, nor is the viewer necessarily kept ignorant of the video’s purpose. The work engages the viewer’s attention and guides it towards the world and back onto itself.

Some have argued that scientific inquiry is free of moral concern, and that it is the role of philosophy to determine what is right or wrong. Whether this is the case or not, Levy’s scientific inquiries are graced with poetic gestures along with serious ethical concerns. Perhaps at the core of her practice is the infiltration of appearances and illusions. She seems to me to be a seeker of truth, or a  bedrock of some kind, an objective reality. That Plato’s Cave references the philosopher’s famous allegory in its title suggests that Levy has a strong belief in an obtainable or recognizable truth, beyond illusion and distraction, a light in which there is form.

Our visit with Ellen Levy was perhaps the highlight of this particular venture, and I only wish I had overcome my shyness to converse with this astute observer of human nature.

I was intrigued by a number of the works viewed in the gallery at Pratt University, however, and the context provided likely helped, I was most taken by Rachel Gisela Cohen’s work T and me. A sort of venomous beauty, the work, utilizing dazzling patterns and saturated colors, takes a lesson from nature and uses attraction as a weapon against a world of danger and harm. The idea itself is beautiful.

The Kunstraum Gallery, a humble space, seemed to me a world in which a sliver of hope is provided to artists of various backgrounds. Between the “Found Formalism” of Nikolaus Dolman, a term of his own coining, and the transient light of Chi Sheri, it was clear that the artists working in this humble space were serious and dignified. I cannot help but think of Robert Gober’s Slides of a Changing Painting when looking back at the metamorphoses taking place in Joseph Liatela’s work.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday 9/12 2018

           I did enjoy my visit to the Judd Foundation, though I have to say that Walter De Maria’s works left a much stronger impression on me. In any case, I rather liked the early paintings of Judd’s, those flat textured works whose surfaces were governed by broken lines and large portions of reds, blacks and yellows. Perhaps the paintings were a bit out of place given Judd’s attitude towards objects in space, but the paintings did indeed function as objects more than they did as windows into any narrative landscape.

           Perhaps I look back more fondly on the experience Walter De Maria’s works provided because of an ignorance I possessed at the time of my visitation at the Judd Foundation. While Gober’s installations certainly demonstrated to me how a work could interact and be a part of its environment, and are in fact part of an ongoing convergence between artwork and environment, the gravity of this did not hit me until after my leaving the Judd house.

           In retrospect I can see the house functioning as a sort of art utopia, this space that in some way strives for perfection and unity with its alignment of murals, windows and furniture, a carefully delineated space of formal correspondence. Utility and formal properties seem to be married to one another in this house. I particularly enjoyed the playfulness of the third floor, its ceiling “mirroring” the floor with its identical floor boards, complimented by the symmetry of Frank Stella’s, which was equidistantly placed between ceiling and floor.

           However, it is between Walter De Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer that most of my attention is divided. Of the works seen thus far, it is these that arouse my interest the most as far as the usage of space in art is concerned. Just the idea that a room can be presented through italics as if it were a painting or a novel is exciting to me. Perhaps what interests me most though is how different these two works are from each other while each achieves to some extent, the same effect.

           What the two works have in common, I believe, is that they bring an element, and I use the word element loosely, from the exterior world and bring it into an interior space. Broken Kilometer takes an abstract standard of measurement large enough to be associated with the “outdoors” and brings it into a space that is small enough to be investigated by the senses from a single position of observation. The Earth Room takes, quite literally something from the outside world, in this case soil, and presents it out of context into an interior space.

           Both works rely on their immediate environments, or they are their environments. Yet, each is experienced differently, and this difference is not too subtle. The Earth Room is a room you can feel; you can breathe this room into their lungs as if it were their first breath of fresh air on a morning on the farm. One feels the lower temperature, (in the summer at least) that results from this sort of biosphere. Questions begin to form. Is there life here? Are there insects? Do things sprout from this soil? Whether intended or not, that this work inspires a kind of myopia contributes to our ability to experience space in a new way. In my opinion, it is what makes this room so beautiful. We often relate to exterior and interior spaces of equal size differently since our reactions to these spaces are informed by context. By placing the soil into an interior space the context changes and our perception of the space is called into question. The addition of microscopic life and insects, that there is ecosystem in this space, enriches the way this space is experienced.

           By contrast, Broken Kilometer provides a “clean” representation of a concept. It takes a given interior space and makes it home to a visualization of this concept. It was such a pleasure to behold those horizontal bars and their five vertical columns, making material the immaterial, or at least appearing to do so. Needless to say this is yet another way of reconsidering an interior space, of relating to an interior space.

I can’t help but think of Zeno’s Paradox, and the supposed illusion of motion. It is most likely the incremental addition of space between the bars that brings this to mind, but it is also the beauty of such a paradox that reminds me of this piece. There is something poignantly defiant in De Maria’s attempt to harness, in this case, the abstract,  with Earth Room and Lightning Field the wild, but in both cases, to bring it back to Zeno’s Paradox, if not the impossible, at least the improbable.

[curranmurphy-blog]

Wednesday 9/5 2018

Before discussing Robert Gober’s work, I’ll begin with a brief gesture, a tipping of one’s hat to Surrealism. I believe Surrealism’s legacy, if it were a wooden ship, is not in its encasement in a glass bottle (Surrealism proper), but in its voyage out into the real ocean of consciousness from which it came. In other words, it is the employment of a psychological state or the action of a psyche rather than the overt acknowledgement of Freudian discoveries that constitutes the true legacy of Surrealism. Just as Shakespeare and Bosch of the pre-Freudian world were no strangers to the human psyche, in a world that has moved past Freudian psychology to some extent, there existed and exist artists who are not by title or category, but by virtue, Surrealists. Pollock was one such artist, and I believe that this extends to Robert Gober as well.

Of course, the previous paragraph could be characterized as a question disguised as an unsubstantiated statement or thesis. I begin my entry with a subject that is very important to me, one that I bring with me wherever I happen to go, including the Pollack and Twombly exhibit at the MET and also the Gober installation, especially that special place behind the scenes of the Gober installation, that cellar of disillusion.

What is significant to me is that both Pollock and Twombly, to reference our visit to the MET, have produced works that exhibit the artist’s psyche, employed through an automated process. The canvases themselves could be characterized as stages for performances of such states in action, freed from any concern for overt Freudian reference. More so than Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm” as it has been called, or painting number 30 if you prefer, which embodies the gestures of the artists physical and mental states through its irretraceable markings, at once tangible and mysterious, I enjoyed  Cy Twombly’s untitled painting more. In Twombly’s painting, similar gestural markings are used. In style the work falls somewhere between De Kooning’s work and Pollock’s. Abstracted figures are dying to come into existence it seems, if such a paradoxical phrase can be permitted. Yet, as far as I can see, no such figures have emerged. Throughout the painting one can find features that find themselves on the threshold of representation, just falling short and remaining abstract. Nevertheless, it is a familiar world of gestural motion, of human motion. It’s a beautiful world that one can relate to, or a state of mind anyone of us could have been possessed by.

But I am now seeking a passage way to Gober’s work. Also of interest to me is what could be characterized as Pollock’s assassination of painting. To quote from Foster’s text, “[I]f Pollock ‘created some magnificent paintings… he also destroyed painting.’ The immediacy of the act, the loss of self and identity in the potentially infinite, allover space of painting, the new scale that undermines the autonomy of the canvas as an art object and transforms it into an environment: all of that and more points to Pollock’s art as one ‘that tends to lose itself of bound, tends to fill our world with itself,’” (520). A new relationship between art and the world it embodies, or rather a dissolution of the barrier between art and the world it embodies seems to be a decent enough starting point for discussing Robert Gober’s installations, as they are indeed works that play with their environments belong to them. However, I must admit my head begins to spin a bit as I think of his work.

There are so many factors to take into consideration when examining Gober’s works. They are not without political and ethical motivation, but indeed for all their detailed representational qualities, they are rather mysterious. A consistent epiphenomenon of his work seems to be disillusionment, a sort of playfulness in his dealing with appearances and reality. Yet, to show how much he has my head spinning, I am not entirely sure this feature is an epiphenomenon for it could be entirely intentional. Certainly that is the case for the process that leads to the viewer’s being disillusioned, the act of creating from the bottom up objects that appear to be readymades, to be the objects they appear to be.

Certainly when one views his Treasure Chest and Waterfall as I did, in an empty room in New York City opposed to a cell in Reading Prison, one is drawn to these objects quite naturally, as they sit and hang in isolation. Inside this treasure chest, innocuous in appearance, there is a rich world of flowing water, of a manikin’s torso, of a fabric dress ornamented with painted cherries, and of leaves and stones, in short a rich inner world. The same applies to Waterfall, a tailored suit on the shoulders of a male manikin (torso only), a work that contains water falling over a small rocky precipice. Of course, most of what is visible of these works as far as their interiors and exteriors are concerned, is made of some material other than what it appears to be. These are not found objects or readymades. The most notable exception is the water that runs through them.

Gober is not an artist lacking in deliberation or intention. The two aforementioned works when housed by a cell in Reading Prison clearly, through their specific placement in a historically significant site, take on through this context a social and moral significance. Having knowledge of the criminalization of homosexuality in Britain and the imprisonment of such individuals provides one with a particular lense through which one can view the lush worlds imprisoned inside of Gober’s installations.

Having read Sussman’s account of Gober’s career I am not without context in reflecting upon the artists work. His moral considerations are clear as far as homosexuality and oppression are concerned, clear in as much as they are present. Yet, much of what the artist has to say about his work is as bewildering as it is illuminating. He expresses that the functionality that running water provided for his works, particularly those that replicated in appearance bathroom and kitchen appliances, a function that brought to his works a form of utility. In short, he liberated his works from a fate he feared, that his works, moral statements about homosexuality, were inferior and useless imitations of real things. But this reflection of his reveals how the work has a life of its own, that it is not completely under his control, hence the artist’s concern for the work’s autonomy.

Speaking of such fears, I’m afraid I may have written more than I’ve intended while saying less than I have intended. To return to my thoughts on Surrealism I’ll say that what excites me the most about Gober’s work is this idea of an economical unconscious, this mysterious drain of his. I don’t yet understand the full significance of this. Nevertheless, the strange playfulness with which these objects are constructed, the dreaminess of the worlds fabricated within these objects, his use of the human body and the peculiarity of these circulatory waterfalls is suggestive of an inner mental life fixated on itself and on the body, and seems to at least whisper to the viewer, this viewer, Surrealism. Works such as Slides of a Changing Painting demonstrate how process oriented this artist is. Just as there is some whimsicality in Pollock’s paintings, so there is the unpredictable metamorphosis that takes place in the aforementioned work by Gober, as well as in his work at large. He is a poet who transforms the ordinary, as poets do, into the extraordinary. And it seems that he encourages the viewer to witness his process. Having had the privilege of viewing behind the scenes the torso that lay deep within his work, Treasure Chest, I feel as though I have witnessed a disembodied dream, subjected to the harsh scrutiny of the rational and conscious thought.

                                                        Works Cited

Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. Vol. 2.

          New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011. Print.

Sussman, Elizabeth. Robert Gober: Installation and Sculpture. PDF.