“Openness” is a quality that has been much touted in recent years, particularly in circles where art is a center of interest.

As is usually the case when ideas become fashionable, a half truth, or a principle that is true perhaps half of the time, is made into a way of life. In fact, “openness,” like many another attributes of our ambiguous existences, has about as much to discommend as to recommend it.

It scarcely seems necessary to argue the virtues of confronting as much of experience as one can without the straitjacket of rigid stereotype and prejudice (not to be confused with judiciousness, or making judgments after the fact). Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” is probably the definitive testament to the tragic futility of holding… Continue reading...

It seems to be among the perversities of human nature that people can so often agree on abstract sentiments, and then part company altogether on their application.

In discussing art, one can converse at great length, and with impassioned enthusiasm, about the necessity for inspiration, vision, originality, energy. But eventually it will almost always turn out that one person is talking about Jackson Pollock and the other about Josef Albers, that one’s paragon is Mark Rothko and the other’s Max Ernst—twains that just will not meet.

Compounding the perversity, where there is agreement on specifics it is more apt to be “negative” than “positive.” One is more likely to find those who concur in the judgment that Willem de Kooning’s recent paintings are not as good as his… Continue reading...

“I know you don’t like group shows, but if you did, what kind of group shows would you put together?”

“Come again?” I replied. It was like being asked what I would do in a restaurant that served only different kinds of yogurt, or sauerkraut.

The caller came again, explaining she was involved with a new organization devoted to displaying work by young, “emerging” artists. Questions like this make you wonder if haranguing for years on a given subject ever does much good.

Well, after a period of time, things that go without saying need to be said all over again.

It is hard to figure which kinds of group shows are most objectionable: patent space-fillers or shows that obviously consumed some time, effort and expense… Continue reading...

In thinking about my last post—about putting into artists’ mouths a simple statement of what they do–I went back to my favorite art text of all time, “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” a book by Lawrence Weschler about Robert Irwin. The following fragment (which is transcribed from a photocopy of two pages of the open book) outlines what seems to be Irwin’s breakthrough as an artist and—this is what makes it so amazing—a person. Here we can see how and where the artist, the individual human, and the human species merge.

“…purples. It’s a little more difficult to see the incidental transitions, the low-grade shadows caused by the varying textures, because of the starkness of the contrast between the white wall and… Continue reading...

Performance art has undergone an interesting metamorphosis in recent years.

It originated in the 1960s as a branch of Conceptual art and, in most cases, an extension of sculpture. Artists in the 1960s were seized with the urge to make a greater impact in the “real,” physical world. Painting grew bigger or turned into sculpture; sculpture became earthworks, environments, happenings. With performance, the artist became inseparable from his work.

Yet it remained ritualistic and hermetic, basically indifferent to the presence of an audience and to dramatic or entertainment value. Like sculpture itself, it was simply there. The viewer was permitted to “overhear,” but the event would have proceeded even without him. Continue reading...

Curator’s Introduction.

The first in a trilogy of shows at Sweetart Drawing Gallery, The Modern Chimera is a group show that represents a bestiary of hybrid creatures from an imagined world. Exhibited drawings include themes which revolve around a sense of nature violated and a world ecology disrupted. Whether these creatures are meant as menacing forces, heralding characters or even guides of accord with a psychological world becomes clear through the mode of the drawing media itself, the origin of all visual art forms.

Show #1: “the Modern Chimera” Aug.7-Sep 9.09

Artists: Teppei Ando, Christine Benjamin, Jon Carling, Matt Decker, Martha Sue Harris, Dave Higgins, Kevin Earl Taylor

I am in the process of starting a gallery. That’s right: a real, physical space on a street in the city that I have come to adore: Oakland, California. (Point of fact: I will be curating the side gallery at The Compound Gallery on San Pablo Ave.) This has been a long time coming and that last bit of the vision is proving to be the most arduous. My little exhibition space will be focused on a particular kind of art…drawing…or is it illustration? I have to get this right in my head before going further. As usual, when faced with an aesthetic quandry of such ancient and dynamic proportions, I to turn to the community. Fortunately, my community is made up of some of the most talented and inspiring Continue reading...

A Classified Ad seen in the New York Times:
SEEKING AN NEW ART-I/OFFICIAL LANDSCAPE WITHOUT CULTURAL PRECEDENT

It used to be possible to talk about the New Art, in a similar manner to the discussion of the new math, the new sciences or the new religion, i.e. something proposed, discussed and critiqued for merit and usefulness. I’m talking about the worthiness of artwork in our daily lives, as an instructive tool, a memory concretized, or a warning of what’s to come. The “New” artwork is delivered as a statement, a contribution, with an idea of progress, often logical, but sometimes arriving via the unconscious or even by spiritual means.

“Hey, its new! I think I’ll try it! I want that!” Have you overheard this said recently at a gallery opening? Continue reading...

Art is troublesome because it is so much like man.

Man embraces the fundamental contradiction that he is an animal, but not just an animal. A similar contradiction lies at the foundation of art. It is an object, a material fact, self-contained and self-sufficient, a created organism.

At the same time, it is an experience. It functions as an act of communication conveying a “message” that is something other than the mere physical components of its construction, and thus takes its life in the proverbial eye of the beholder.

The artist relates, first and foremost, to art in its former capacity; it is the relationship of maker to object. He begins with a vision or idea, perhaps at the merest threshold of definition, and with the materials necessary to give it form. His Continue reading...