George Condo: Mental States

George Condo: Mental States at the New Museum

I won't beat around the bush: George Condo's survey at the New Museum doesn't live up to the hype (see also 1, 2).

The portraits hung salon-style on the fourth floor (seen at left) are akin to an ambitious BFA exhibition--the overall effect was impressive until I started examining individual canvases.

A few jewel-like, multi-layered moments of promise stand out, such as the Goya-esque Three-Armed Man (unfortunately, given its placement on the wall and the highly reflective coat of varnish, it was hard to get a good angle to see it),  but overall these paintings are derivative and underworked.  Picasso, Francis Bacon, and yes, the "Old Masters" that Condo so wants to emulate have all done it before, and better.  Backgrounds are unconsidered, often scribbled in with a single color and left that way, pigments are muddy, and brushstrokes careless, even lazy.  (I won't bother to discuss his ill-conceived and forgettable sculpture busts.)  Note to the curators: "prolific" painters should not get a pass when they sacrifice quality.

I felt the same way about many of the canvases on the third floor as well, with the room off of the elevator being the notable exception.  The large multi-figure compositions in this area occasionally share the problems of haphazard strokes and muddy pigments, but given the difference in visual language, they are more aesthetically pleasing.  Some, like Female Figure Composition and Washington Square Park, are as simultaneously delicate and gritty as well-crafted graffiti, and Dancing to Miles, a richly woven tapestry of glowing colors, is a pure delight.  Condo's talents shine brightest in this work--it's a shame that the rest of the exhibition doesn't measure up.

Guerrilla Marketing in the Snow

When my 9 a.m. interview was canceled because of the monumental heaps of fluffy white crystals blanketing the city, I found myself on the Upper East Side with nothing to do.

My friend Kate, who teaches in the neighborhood, was similarly free thanks to Cathie Black's fortuitous announcement, so we decided on the only logical course of action: a snowman-sculpting contest in the Park.

Kate shaped a paired sculpture of a rotund gentleman with walrus mustache and bow tie, holding the leash of an adoring puppy seated at his feet.  I chose to create a Daumier-style caricature bust of an elderly man with a large hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, and sunken cheeks.  Our efforts attracted a crowd of onlookers, eager to snap pictures and admire our handiwork.    

After about 45 minutes, I added my tag to the sculpture, and we went on our merry way.  If by chance this inspired you to google my website, please let me know in the comments section below!  I will mail you a cookie.

Rethinking the Museum Tour

Isamu Noguchi, Core (Cored Sculpture)

This month, I've been participating in a tour training program at the Noguchi Museum under the auspices of Rebecca Herz, head of education for the museum and formerly the senior education manager of Learning Through Art at the Guggenheim.

So far, the focus has been on conducting meaningful tours for adults, a challenging and thought-provoking endeavor. 

During our conversations the majority of the participants, including me, copped to the fact that we generally avoid museum tours when we visit our peer institutions.  Most of us, as artists and art historians familiar with the process of critical analysis, prefer not to be spoon-fed the information that stereotypically constitutes such an encounter.  Our collective goal in the training, therefore, was to explore what a tour informed by current best practices would look like.  In a nutshell, the aim is an open-ended discussion in which the tour guide serves more as a fellow learner and conduit for visitor experiences than as a teacher.

To this end, we've observed tours by expert educators Georgia Krantz at the Guggenheim and Rika Burnham at the Frick Collection, as well as reading articles on the subject by leading voices in the field, including Burnham, George Hein, and Cheryl Mezaros.  Today we had the opportunity to field-test some of our new techniques, albeit for an audience of fellow museum educators.

Personally, I found it tough to break out of "instruction mode," especially after working with children for so long, but I'm confident that practicing these techniques will be worthwhile.

Project: Website

One of my recent projects, besides volunteering for LTA, art tutoring, and other miscellaneous creative gigs undertaken for fun and profit, has been getting my personal website up and running.  The site has a great design, imagined and executed for me by the multi-talented Nikita Golitsyn more than two years ago, but I'm ashamed to say that it hasn't seen the light of day since summer 2008, mostly because of the rigors of grad school. 

With academia behind me, I thought it was high time that I made my art a priority again.  But this undertaking has challenges of its own.

For one thing, which types of art should appear on the  website?  While I'm happy with all of the pieces I originally chose to use, much of the work does not represent the directions that I'm currently taking.  Once I've photographed and uploaded more recent pieces, will earlier ones need to go?  Another concern is the design itself.  I'm still interested in creating fractal-based abstractions, but do the twisted, tree-like shapes of my earlier work mesh with different kinds of forms?  (See for example Hungry Dragon and Clever Mouse, pictured above, an early precursor to my current work.)

Besides conceptual concerns, there are of course the mundane details of website maintenance: do all of the links work?  Are the pages titled properly?  I'm still ironing these issues out with help from Nikita, but hope to have the bulk of it complete by early 2011.

Visit the page at http://www.phylandart.com for updates.

AbEx New York

Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive

In many ways, the MoMA's Abstract Expressionist New York is exactly what you'd expect.  "The Big Picture" (on view through April 25) features dozens of monumental Pollocks, Rothkos, and de Koonings, with a handful of sculptures and works by women (one apiece by Louise Nevelson, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler, and two by Lee Krasner, more famous 'cause she was Jackson Pollock's wife) thrown in to remind you that the movement wasn't just a macho painterly pissing contest.  And a spectacular show it is, despite the blatant idolatry of certain artists' work at the expense of others, a fault that probably lies less with current curators and more with past museum directors.   

But that's just the fourth floor.

The two related exhibits on the second and third floors ("Rock Paper Scissors" and "Ideas Not Theories", respectively, on view through February 28) are intimate, thoughtfully curated explorations, showcasing works by artists who do not receive the big-ticket treatment as frequently, if ever.  "Rock Paper Scissors" in particular is a delight.  Located in the Prints and Illustrated Books gallery, the show is cohesive and well-suited to the space, which is ideal for close observation of the pieces.

The pairing of small and mid-size sculpture with drawings and prints ties the exhibit together beautifully, allowing viewers the pleasure of observing how artists like Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Dorothy Dehner and Seymour Lipton thought in both two and three dimensions.  Some of the scupltures, especially David Hare's Figure Waiting in Cold, are reminiscent of etchings, their delicate metal ribbing inscribing the space around them with short, linear strokes, while many of the works on paper, such as David Smith's drawing Untitled 5/28/55, or Stanley William Hayter's remarkable print Amazon, possess a distinctly sculptural quality.  This show deserves points for moving beyond the often-aggressive facade of the abstract expressionist movement and producing an experience that is nothing short of a revelation.         

The Magic of Art

Paul Signac, Portrait of Felix Feneon

It's easy to forget, after years as a practicing artist, how exciting it was to try out new materials and techniques for the first time.  Luckily, I have my residency as an artist assistant for Learning Through Art to remind me.

We're two weeks into the classroom sessions now, and the experience has been incredibly rewarding.  Both times we've entered the room, our three third-grade classes have given us a reception that this age bracket usually reserves for Santa Claus: gasps, cheering, and applause.

The energy level in the room gets even higher when the lesson starts.  Our students are avid aficionados of Picasso and Matisse, and never tire of telling us that they want to be artists when they grow up (we tell them, "you're artists now!").  During the demonstration yesterday, after first seeing the broad strokes they could make with the side of a vine charcoal stick and then seeing how easily the strokes could be wiped away, our classes reacted as if we'd produced the drawings from thin air. 

Witnessing moments like that, who could doubt that the arts are a fundamental part of our schools?

Recommended Reading

I'm finally catching up on the recreational reading I postponed during grad school, including Sarah Thornton's excellent ethnographic study, Seven Days in the Art World (released just after the financial meltdown of 2008, in my first semester as a masters student).

The book is a quick read, lively and engrossing, and one that I would thoroughly recommend to anyone with an interest in the contemporary art scene.  It's much less about art-making than the plethora of peripheral activities the field comprises, and as such, ought to be required reading for those pursuing a BFA or MFA in visual arts.  As a funny, often hubristic, but ultimately humane portrait of the leading personalities and subcultures built around this tiny word, it is like nothing I've read before. 

On a related note, Thornton has also written a number of compelling articles for The Economist, among other publications.  I was particularly amused by her September article on Damien Hirst, which critiques the British art star's market sense in the same way Randall Lane's July Vanity Fair article skewered washed-up pop artist Peter Max.  Both writers observe that creating more of something doesn't make it more valuable, a lesson of which economists and artists alike should take note. 

All three pieces offer intelligent commentary on the heady days before the collapse, seemingly inevitable in hindsight, in which many key players were oblivious to imminent disaster.  For this reason, there's actually a shred of pathos in these accounts, although there's hubris a-plenty as well.