A couple of nights ago I happened on a site that gave me such pleasure I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Succinctly and accurately titled Great Art in Ugly Rooms, the site is is a tumbler image role of just that. Meticulously photoshoped pictures of banal rooms with artworks from the canon of art history. A Matisse hung over urinals in a public bathroom. Elsworth Kelly Prints on wood paneling of a cottage. Two Brâncuși displayed gingerly in a small bathroom. And Jeff Koons’ porcelain MJ and Bubbles on a booth table of a single wide trailer. “You had me at Hello.”

Robert Motherwell
from Great Art in Ugly Rooms

Technically they’re pitch perfect. Drop shadows, perspective, tone matching and exposure make the placement completely believable. Suspension of disbelief is thoroughly accomplished. They are completely dead pan and with their desert-like dry wit they work and resonate because ultimately they are sincere. There is no snark. There is no academic irony. There’s as much affection for these ugly rooms as there is for the art. The visual equivalent of a Stephen Wright stand up routine.

Marcel Duchamp
from Great Art in Ugly Rooms

Lastly, I found myself thinking that Great Art makes Ugly Rooms livable. Great Art does transform. So while I might not prefer rattan chairs with a floral print couch, if the sofa-sized art over said couch is a Robert Motherwell, well then, I would consider living there.

Jeff Koons
from Great Art in Ugly Rooms

Shooting from the hip, here are several other reasons that this visual flight of fancy transcends the disposable trappings of a one liner.

• The blog, as it stands right now, is anonymous. The prodigious talent behind this effort is offering these surreal meditations of high culture in base environments generously. The difference is not to be trifled with. It says look at the work rather than look at me. The generosity doesn’t stop there because each of the artist’s names is hotlinked to a google image search.
• The work also contains commentary of the haves and the have nots of our economic climate. The art is the asset class of the one percent while the homes are the residences of the 99 percent.
• Humor can be a powerful tool of parody but only when the knife is sharpened on both sides. The title of the project may be Great Art in Ugly Rooms but to the uninitiated the adjectives could just as easily be inverted. If I love an Agnes Martin, does that make me immediately an aesthetic enemy of a painted brick wall in a basement family room?
• The artist is taking requests of art and rooms from the audience thereby creating a collaborative environment. Crowdsourcing the ideas creates an ownership in the artist’s audience while making the project nearly infinite.
• The artist tackles the medium of digital deception in a fresh way. We know it’s fake but it’s fakeness is merely the conduit for a narrative. I never thought for an instant that Robert Downey Jr actually flew in Iron Man but allowing myself to buy into it delivered a rather entertaining two hours at the multiplex.

What can I say, I’m a fan. The artist is posting more daily.

http://greatartinuglyrooms.tumblr.com/

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, May 24th

Man Ray is still da man!

Man Ray
Meret Oppenheim, Untitled and Erotique Voilee
1930, 1932 and 1933 respectively
12 x 9 cm each
Courtesy 1900-2000 Paris Gallery

Gallerie 1900Δ2000 Paris offered a uncommon opportunity to see a bevy of vintage prints each a jewel from the man who wielded photography with innovation, wit and daring. Double exposures, solarizations, unexpected compositions and artistic collaborations with a peer group of surrealists and founders of Dada were all on display. Man Ray didn’t think as a photographer. He used and experimented with photography as a tool of creation and interpretation. Several pieces are routed in genres of the nude, still life and portrait but while their origin may be tradition, his Midas touch of transformation left tradition choking on the dust of his fertile “anything is possible” imagination.

Abstraction is different than Abstract!

Allison Rossiter
Two examples from
Eastman Kodak Azo, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1940, processed in 2012
Four Gelatin Silver Prints
4.25 x 3.25 inches each element
Unique
Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery

It’s always such a welcome moment when you see more of an artist’s work and like it even more than you did before. Such was the feeling when encountering the lyrical art of Allison Rossiter at Yossi Milo Gallery. Rossiter is an artist of the highest caliber. She combines the intellectual rigor of a Sol Lewitt with the organic charm of an Elsworth Kelly. And in an environment of art fairs where people gravitate to art that shouts and screams for attention, Rossiter’s intimately scaled works are whispers that draw you in for further investigation and dialogue.
Made with expired silver gelatin papers anywhere from ten to 70 years old, Rossiter exposes and paints with developer letting the forms unapologetically appear. For a medium that is almost indivisible from the shackles of depiction and referent, she coaxes form that is wholly abstract. But our eyes read forms as adobe structures, pyramids, skyscrapers and leaves. We can’t help ourselves. But the pleasures of truly abstract art are undeniable. There are so few who have the chutzpah. She gets my vote as inheritor of the mantle of Malevich and Reinhart.

Fissures in the provincial nature of the photo world.

Brian Bress
Cowboy (Brian led by Peter Kirby)
2012
High definition single-channel video (color), high definition monitor and player, wall mount, framed
38.5 x 23 x 4 inches
30 min., 19 sec., loop
(While this is not the piece that was on display at Paris Photo, it resembles this earlier work enough for this photo to stand in as its avatar.)

Photo fairs were notoriously slow to include either digital methods or video in their comfort zones of provinciality. Digital origins or manufacturing limped in and video is still eyed with a suspicion. The fine art world has neither hesitation nor disdain for the new. Thankfully there are a few video artists on the art fair horizon that create work that demands the medium’s kinetic elements. We should all be thankful for Cherry/Martin gallery for vigorously supporting the work of Brian Bress. I was fortunate enough to see Bress’ one-man exhibition at the gallery in Culver City last fall. Bress has a dark wit, which he pairs with high key lighted surrealism. No doubt, the Gee Whizz factor is there, which often can fade into a chorus of Patsy Cline’s “Is that all there is?” but there’s subversive and thoughtful content that shines as resonance long after the vertically placed wide screen has been unplugged. He understands that video art has to work both on an episodic, 20-second encounter and on the long (for him the 20 minute loop) form landscape. Bress also understands that humor can be an on-ramp for both attention and curiosity. But a Henny Youngman joke is good for a giggle but I’d venture to guess that hanging Henny on my wall would get old fast. This last malaise is the death nell for most video based work. Bress avoids any of these trappings while delivering sophisticated technological wizardry with compositional and content acumen that resonates with the impact of any narrative painting master.

The fair that allows and encourages an exhale.

Real galleries inhabit the fake facades of NYC Brownstones.

If seeing art, booth after booth, wall after over hung wall is an experience of visual inhaling then Paris Photo in its new LA incarnation has mastered a built in exhale. I know no one who can continue to inhale endlessly. After a while, it all becomes white noise. With the physical layout of the fair spread over stages and streets, visitors had a chance to exhale; sip a coffee in the sun and chat about their favorites with fellow art enthusiasts; strike up conversations about either art or the relative merits of sliders versus turkey focaccia sandwiches with strangers and wing men alike. Paris Photo has managed a paradigm shift that might be hard to replicate elsewhere but has, in the process, set a new high water mark for the very concept of what an art fair can be.
In this regard, much has been made that Paris Photo chose Los Angeles as their first non-Parisian branded version. The standard line has been what a gift to LA it has been that Paris photo is here but I’d like to venture that it’s LA’s gift to Paris Photo.

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, April 27th, 2013

A great opportunity to witness this interdependence is an exhibition titled Double Rifts at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills through June 1st, 2013.

Of course the cavernous spaces of the gallery are well suited to see large-scale drawings by Serra. Eight Double Rifts fill the gallery’s first floor. At an average of 8 feet tall and 18 feet wide each, these are pieces that one has to confront with a corporeal awe. But the exhibition remains airy and intimate, an uncanny assertion for pieces of this scale and gravitas.

Texture detail of Richard Serra’s Double Rift seen in perspective.

Briefly describing Serra’s drawing strategy is important to begin. Line and volume are all executed with black oil stick on paper. Oil stick is what it sounds like. Oil paint is fabricated in a thick consistency and filled into a soft wax cylinder with a similar hue. So what in essence is a painting medium becomes a draughtsman’s tool. Serra accrues a phenomenal thickness to the paint and whether the result is line or massive field of black, the paint has a raised level that transforms two-dimension into weight and sculpture. The artist’s touch is often absent. Direction of application can be read in the striations of paint but gesture exits stage right.

While the novice may find the large black fields of thickly layered paint cold, non narrative and thereby less than generous, three observations will lead as on ramps to appreciation.

RICHARD SERRA
Double Rift #4, 2011
Paintstick on handmade paper
114 3/8 x 198 7/8 x 3 3/4 inches framed

1.) The Double Rifts are actually compositional triptychs. Three large forms and the angled absences between form one and two and again between form two and three make up the slimmed down compositional paradigm. The triangulated absences either at the top or the bottom of these interior edges set the forms in motion. They tilt and lean with a strange vertigo. That such subtle angles of white can activate the eye into motion and three dimension remains uncanny.

Detail of overlap in Richard Serra’s Double Rift with Frame seam behind.

2.) Not only is the composition of each Double Rift a triptych but the physical structure of each work is three pieces. I discovered this by peering down through the glass window from the second floor where one can clearly see the bolts attaching the three framed units. This epiphany is wonderful for several reasons. Immediately you react to these gentle giants as sculpture as well as pictorial planes of painting/drawing. The edge of one paper unit slips over or under another of its cousins. You can see this layering in some more than others. But once recognized, one can never unsee this detail.

Detail of edge in Richard Serra’s Elevational Weights, Equivalents II with edge of oil stick encrusted paper with oil bleed visible.

3.) Lastly the oil stick which Serra has been wielding for several decades now, bleeds its oil content into the paper support. That means that a halo of yellowing can been seen from up close on all the masked out triangles of tilt and lean. It creates a segue between the heavily impastoed rough textured black surface and the smoother white of the hand made paper on which these are drawn. Furthermore it introduces an element of the organic and uncontrollable into a formal and almost mathematical visual exercise. It humanizes these behemoths and activates the space between the forms with an aura almost invisible from a certain distance.

Richard Serra, Double Rift #8, 2013
Paintstick on handmade Paper, 84.25 x 240.75 inches
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

The best piece of the exhibition is Double Rift #8, hanging in the south gallery. The asymmetrical tilt moves the unmovable in effective ways. Scale and content and methodology merge in perfect harmony. On the second floor rest a pair of Drawings called Elevational Weights, Equivalents I and II. While listed as two separate pieces, the power and grace of these two comes from a diptych viewing. They force us to Compare and Contrast our optical predilections when it comes to measuring volumetric size. Consider the second floor icing on an already substantial cake.

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, April 25^th, 2013

Both Khan and Keyes harness a unique aspect of the photographic medium: the multiple exposure. Whether meticulously controlled or haphazardly accidental, the multiple exposure carries rich metaphoric potential. It’s far from a technical innovation, but in the hands of a gifted artist, this eccentricity of medium can become the template for a career trajectory. Repeatable paradigms are after all a gallerist’s marketing goldmine. The story of these two artists and their overlapping artistic paradigms is repeated year after year. But the lessons are seldom learned and when they are learned, they seem to be immediately forgotten. Quality is not always the most heralded or even the most visible. Cream doesn’t always rise to the top.

The Artists

Doug Keyes, Chuck Close, 1999, Dye-coupler print, 17.25 x 23.5 in

I stumbled upon the work of Doug Keyes about 15 years ago, likely at an AIPAD Photography fair. The series I encountered was titled Collective Memory. Keyes creates a photographic image of a book by making multiple exposures, one for each page of a book, creating a single image visually fusing its contents. Furthermore, Keyes prints the resulting image in the exact size of the book observed. The books/prints, thus manipulated, range in subject from novels, encyclopedia and scientific texts. But the subset that really spoke to me was of artist’s monographs. The books include Damien Hirst, Chuck Close, Ed Ruscha, Hilla and Bernd Becher and Karl Blosfeldt, all deftly deconstructed and reassembled through Keyes’ graceful paradigm.

Doug Keyes, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life…-Damien Hirst, 2002, Dye-coupler print, 20 x 31 in

Keyes creates poetic images that are intellectually rigorous. He obviously is an artist knowledgeable of the craft of photography. The results yield an image that contains an artist’s career trajectory fused into a single hagiographic ghost. The prints hold an art historical nod that is both reverential and remarkably transgressive.

Idris Kahn, Preludes…Sergei Rachmaninoff, 2007, Digital chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 95 x 75 inches (241.5 x 190.5 cm), Edition of 6 with 1 AP

About 7 years later I encountered the art of another young artist named Idris Khan working extremely similar territory. The venue this time was the Armory Fair in NYC. The first work of Khan’s I witnessed was a piece that fused sheet music through multiple exposure into an identical fog of notes. Most of these efforts collect one type of composition by one composer like Preludes by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Unlike Keyes’ Collective Memory, Khan’s prints were bombastically large. The intellectual effect though was, it seemed to me at the time, remarkably consistent. I enjoyed seeing the variation on music, made note of the name and more than anything remembered Keyes fondly and the authenticity of his paradigm.

Idris Kahn, Every… photograph of Nicholas Nixon’s Brown sisters, 2004
digital chromogenic print mounted on aluminium
44 1/2 x 53 1/6 inches (113 x 135 cm)
edition of 5 with 1 AP

Final Cross fade to 2012: A couple of months ago I received a FaceBuch post in my news feed from Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. It was a multiple exposure image, which fused all 30 portraits by Nicholas Nixon of the Brown Sisters*. It was an Idris Khan. In a bit of a knee jerk reaction, I responded with a couple of snarky comments calling the work derivative and extolling the work of Doug Keyes as exemplary and more authentic to the paradigm both artists had chosen. I stand by the content but a mini rant in a facebook post seems a tad infantile and beneath the serious nature of the topic at hand. And thus was born this essay.

Idris Khan

Since Fraenkel’s post I’ve investigated Idris Kahn’s career. Kahn’s reputation over the last 7 years has grown exponentially to where he is now represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in NYC, Victoria Miro in London, Yvonne Lambert in Paris and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. For anyone unfamiliar with the art world, these are top-tier galleries who represent significant artists, many of whom have entered the canon of art history. Khan’s work has diversified greatly in these years as well. It now includes sandblasted concrete and aluminum as well as his continued use of photography’s multiple exposure capabilities. Press releases about his work extol appropriation and deconstruction in art speak so opaque as to be unintelligible.

Assessment

In my mind Keyes is the better artist for several reasons. Keyes’ subject is books and the dissemination of both images and ideas. As any passionate collector or fine art aficionado can tell you, images and ideas do run together and create a texture of multiple exposure memories. The images work as manifestations of accrued knowledge. The books, as seen through Keyes’ paradigm, reveal and veil with equal force and effect.

Doug Keyes,
Becher-Water Towers
1997
dye-coupler print
16.25 x 23.25 in

Khan’s work, while undeniably visually arresting, has to be placed in the hip-hop culture of sampling. The subject is neither the work sampled nor the original intent of the sampled artist. Nor, for that matter, is it the history of art and/or photography. The subject is simply the medium of sampling. Ultimately, the gee-whiz moment of discovery falls flat without the resonant underpinning of choice, theme and intent. Investigations of this paradigm can of course be transformative. When this happens with Kahn, it occurs almost by accident. The best example is Kahn’s cribbing of Karl Blosfeldt’s botanicals. The multiple overlays of Blosfeldt’s centered stems and flowers create a near perfect rendition of a female pudendum. Nature’s reproductive manifestations morph into a corporeal version.

Left and Right- Examples of Karl Blosfelt’s botanical prints from the 20′s and 30′s
Center- Idris Kahn multiple exposure sampling

Keyes has tackled Blosfledt as well but the sexual energy of the resulting image is chaste in comparison. The diptych format of the book pages transforms the tome and less the images contained therein. Keyes’ choice of books is nothing if not eclectic. The range is wide and while it includes several art monographs, it’s hardly limited to that. Restricting that field of vision to art monographs would result in a navel gazing preciousness that Keyes has excellently avoided. Khan’s choices seem forced. They’re also in keeping with an art world that wants nothing more than to be self-congratulatory. “I own a Cy Twombly and an Idris Khan which cribs Twombly’s mark marking.”

Keyes’ scale is in keeping with his subject matter. As I stated, the prints are “Actual Size” and thus index the body that holds and reads them. Khan’s scale doesn’t seem to have a purpose or urgency. While the scale of an Andreas Gursky is essential to not only its impact but also its content, Khan’s choice of scale bears no reference to its appropriated source material. It’s scale for scale’s sake. The benefit of this however is that it clearly defines itself as conceptual contemporary fine art and not photography.

Doug Keyes,
They Called Her Styrene-Ed Ruscha, 2001, Dye-coupler print, 10.5 x 21.5 in

Lastly, Collective Memory, as a series, works as a portrait of the artist. Whether these books are in Keyes’ personal collection or not isn’t even relevant. By choosing them, he has invited us in and, for more than a decade, presented his character through the avatar of his library. He makes us ponder how our favorite books would look if put through the rigors of his technique. Khan, to date, has revealed more calculation than character.

Conclusion

There’s about ten years between Doug Keyes and Idris Khan. Khan is the younger of the two.

Khan lives and works in London. Keyes resides in Seattle, Washington. While Khan is represented by the aforementioned deep-pocketed galleries, Keyes is represented by Gail Gibson in Seattle and Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn, both reputable galleries to be sure, however both more modest in scale, reach and means. Khan has also obviously entered the world of outsourced fabrication (including digital means,) while Keyes maintains an endeavor wholly organic and personal. Any of these and other factors could be responsible for the fact that Khan is garnering more attention on the fine art landscape.

My greatest issue when I think about these two artists and the marketplace that supports them is the unfortunate truth that intelligent whispers are almost always drowned out by bombastic shouts. The intimacy of Keyes’ work is its greatest strength and perhaps also its Achilles heel.  My lament also emanates from the fact that large and influential galleries might be best positioned to nurture talent like Keyes, build sophistication and connoisseurship in a collector base and champion restrained intelligent work.  But the financial models almost exclude this potential from the start. Bigger galleries mean bigger overheads, which require bigger ticket items to meet the monthly nuts.  Fold in the necessity to get noticed in the mall-like atmospheres of fairs and the game is over.  This may be most true in the realm of Photography.

Photography’s role as a fine art medium still lives with the weight of playing catch up. To my dismay, scale (of both art work and gallery space) continues to index importance in some circles. In this same context, scale almost always is in direct corollary to economics. Very quickly people start talking about the art of the deal and not the art of the art. My ultimate cautionary recommendation is twofold: scour high, mid level and emerging galleries constantly and never equate gallery reputation with an immediate sense of quality. Originality is often suspect in a trajectory of creative experimentation so build a hierarchy based on aesthetic resonance not price tags. And lastly, economic success isn’t always the reward for aesthetic accomplishment. Okay that’s three.

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, March 1st, 2013

Nicholas Nixon, Two examples of the Brown Sisters Series, 1975-2009, Silver Gelatin Contact Prints

*Nicholas Nixon‘s work is stunning. The Brown Sisters is a project of 36 years of annual portraits Nixon has taken with a large format camera of four sisters (one, Bebe, is his wife) in New England. The project was started in 1975 when the sisters ranged in age from 15 to 25. I saw the series at its 25-year anniversary when it was shown at MoMA in NYC. The series now numbers 36 annual portraits. The intimacy of the sisters as they age is both emotionally abstract and a highly personal. Seeing the prints in person is transcendent.

Bonni’s unapologetic nature was her calling card. She didn’t suffer fools easily. There was no ingratiating charm hurled at some loafer wearing whale at an art fair. Not to say that she didn’t have charm. Quite the opposite. She had it in spades. But when she smiled, she meant it. If she gave you a hug, you knew you earned it.

In the Nineties, I loved going to her space on the upper east side in a brownstone a block or so away from the Whitney Museum. There, I saw excellent shows, was introduced to artists I had never heard of and always had a chance to kibitz either about the art world in general or art in specific. She was always generous with her time, perhaps because she loved the art of the art and not only the art of the deal. I felt the same way. Her manner was honest, funny and forthright. If she didn’t like something, she’d say so but she’d tell you why as well. The back room was always cacophonous. Portfolios staked high. A salon style sampling on the wall. Her environment, like her taste, omnivorous.

My love for photography may have been planted by my parents who in their infinite wisdom or naïveté would gamely hand me their camera to snap a picture or two. My acumen about the history of photography was nurtured at college and later by endless volumes of magazines and books. But my appreciation for curatorial authorship in the professional world of photo galleries I lay at Bonni’s door. For a taste of her curatorial eye one need only Google Image search her name. There, on the first page, you will only find one image of her and the rest are images of the artists and prints that she championed over the years. Matthew Pillsbury, Abe Morrell, and Massimo Vitali are here. Karine Laval, Linda McCartney and Gillian Laub are also here. Diverse to be sure but the red thread seems to be an empathic intelligence, with not a small trace of humor. And there you have it, that was Bonni Benrubi in a nutshell.

Google Image Search for Bonni Benrubi

Countless denizens of the New York and International art worlds will miss her. My heart goes out to her husband and two kids whom she loved very much and to the artists who were always an extended family as well.

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, December 3rd, 2012

Here’s a link to a lovely and stiring piece in the NYT Blog

If you have memories of Bonni, I’d love to hear them. Please share them with a comment.

The thing about those early memories though that fascinates me most is that my mother never chose a specific screening. We just went, bought our tickets and sat down whenever we arrived. We’d sit through, say, the last third of the movie, remain seated as the lights went up, people exited and entered and then as the house lights dimmed again proceeded to enjoy the first two thirds of the film. When we reached the point where we entered we simply got up and left feeling satisfied at having seen the full film. Later in my young teens, I remember doing this often when going to the Regency Theater on Broadway by myself at matinees. The mysteries of starting viewing a film, 60% after it began, are inurmerable. The film actually presents many more questions initially and only through patience are answers procured. Not understanding everything never phased me, in fact I guess the expectation of “knowing” never got planted in the first place. My mother’s early introduction of discontinuous narrative may have been vital to my pleasure of not knowing.

Art by in large doesn’t spell things out. I might posit that really good art lures you in with a “not knowing.” Two things are then essential to experiencing art: One is patience and the second is pragmatism. Patience is essential since narrative and aesthetic paydays can be attained long after the initial encounter. Pragmatism is the other cog since not everything will payoff. The pleasures of the Patience/Pragmatism polarity paradigm are also rooted in a suspension of disbelief. You have to release the desire for immediate gratification and trust (have faith) that some possible future epiphany lays in wait, like Tigger about to pounce.
Above all else, the equation stands clear: Seeing(Art)=Potential(Pleasure) or Potential(Insight) The converse is more concrete: Seeing(Art)=Barren(Landscape/Emotions) It is with these thoughts that I enter a new cultural season of exhibitions, screenings and aesthetic sniffing. Come sniff with me.

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, October 2nd, 2012

Postscript: These ruminations were ignited by another two hour viewing of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, the 24 hour masterpiece of filmic collage. I’ve now seen just under six hours and I’m simply addicted. To read my thoughts about the film please see my post from earlier this year.

Around the World in 80 Days

There, you’ve gone and done it! Your eyes scanned each word of a concise five-word sentence, assembled meaning from subject, object and verb and simultaneously made it come true. The sentence will be equally true for the next person who reads it. But it wasn’t true before you dialed in this page. So the act of reading that sentence births the veracity of content.

Lest you think I’m going all Donald Barthleme on you, I’m setting you up for the paradigms of linguistic calisthenics with which you might best appreciate the extraordinary work of Ed Ruscha.

Reading Ed Ruscha opened on July 7^th at the KunstHaus Bregenz and will remain on view through the summer and into a part of the fall. In three distinct floors, the exhibition traces Ruscha’s use of language, redaction, typography, the palindrome, and his use of the Book as both medium and subject. The title of the exhibition is apt. Reading paintings, both visually and verbally, is what one does with Ruscha’s work. But reading is only the beginning of the aesthetic experience.

Language

When tasting wine, you’re supposed to swirl the wine in your mouth, inhale to oxygenate the flavors. Tastes come in initial impressions, undertones and finishes. There is also the distinction between aroma and taste, which can work both in contrast and harmony to one another.

Ed Ruscha
Manual, 2002
Acrylic and ink on raw linen
60,9 x 50,8 cm
Photo: Paul Ruscha
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s visual use of language can best be framed in these vintner paradigms. There is direct content that is immediately evident: A painting of a book with the single word “Manual” on the cover. Concrete meaning if you will. Often there are undertones of wit and humor: the word Manual can naturally take the form of an instruction/reference tome but it comes with its equally evocative mirror doppelgänger of “automatic.” In a digital age, there is something distinctly analogue to a Manual. These double entendres and grammatical complexities alter meaning and add to a perhaps more resonant appreciation of Ruscha’s artistic paradigms. For instance, invest some more thought and one may arrive at manual labor, which Ruscha embraces. The painting is made by the artist’s hand and the charm of an almost trompe d’oeile depiction of a book is made even more intoxicating by its organic hand rendered methodology.

And here’s the most fascinating aspect: These intellectual investigations are not immediately necessary to appreciate or understand the work. There’s a matter-of-factness to the painting that doesn’t demand anything other than its objectness. While intellectual investment may yield greater pleasures, it doesn’t negate the simple purity of the image. This allows for an art that is simultaneously democratic and distinctly elite. No mean feat that!

Redaction

Introduced, I believe, with the Cityscapes series of the mid 90’s, Ruscha has used the shape of words and phrases and their placement on a plane as stand-ins for the meaning. The best incarnation of this particular paradigm is when these shapes are made by gently applying bleach to the linen cover of a vintage book. They are, however equally evocative when executed in a dry brush technique on linen. I have always seen this series and technique as an allusion to redaction, the onerous deleting of text by government censors wishing to keep sensitive materials from the public gaze.

Two examples of redacted documents. Left from a document from the CIA and right: a document pertaining to federal loan guarantees for nuclear construction in Georgia.

(This is quite different from the strike through option in digital typography, which allows the reader to understand the meaning of a sentence while simultaneously acknowledging that the publisher means to have it withdrawn. I rather abhor blogs who use this technique for snarky comments while trying to remain aloof.)

The use of bleach furthermore changes the feel significantly as it places it square in an act of erasure and not blacking out. Lost memory and fading inks are also alluded to.

Ed Ruscha
Give Up The Gold Or Give Up Your Life, 1999
Bleach on linen-covered board
50,8 x 40,6 cm
Photo: Paul Ruscha
© Ed Ruscha

Ruscha’s use of this compositional trope highlights the cadence of the phrase in size and placement. The artist always supplies the content in the title of the work thus the act of reading is twofold: 1.) the title has to be read, and 2.) the viewers gaze then places each word in the bleached spaces allotted. The viewer becomes an essential cog in the wheel of aesthetic completion. It also brings to mind scansion, the study of beat and meter in poetry. Scansion is the discipline that defines iambic pentameter as a line with ten syllables of five pairings of unstressed/stressed units (feet.) A fine example would be a line from John Keats’ Ode to Autumn “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells.” Poetry is everywhere for Ruscha but rather than tap the literary lions, Ruscha hears the poetry in lines from Westerns and Film Noir: “Give Up The Gold Or Give Up Your Life.” The quote, or mere evocation places the work in a contemporary context. Poetic paradigms like alliteration can also be handily applied when listening to Ruscha’s chosen phrases like “Lion in Oil” and countless other examples. Alliteration and onomatopoeia in Ruscha’s work could easily be a doctoral thesis in and of itself.

Left: Ed Ruscha
In God We Trust,
Acrylic on Raw Linen
Right: The American Penny circa 2010 

Linguistic content can also be obliquely political like in “In God We Trust” where Ruscha places the phrase in the circumference of a circle, which quickly becomes the text on the face of a penny in one’s memory. Politics, money, history and religion in a swift and economical gesture! The exhibition basically acts like intellectual dominoes. The more you savor, the more allusions cascade around you.

 Books

The first floor of the Bregenz exhibition contains several vitrines containing the entire output of Ruscha’s extensive book publishing. These are not monographs but rather quixotic visual conceptual books that gather images and present them as art works in and unto themselves. Rather than affecting a public library presentational coldness to the proceedings the exhibition has struck upon a wonderful alternative. Each book is represented by an Ipad version and said tablets jut out from the vitrines offering the viewers a chance to swipe your fingers and scan the contents of each precious intimate tomb.  (There’s nothing that I want more than to have Ruscha’s entire art book oeuvre on the digital shelves of my Ibook App. I’ll inquire if this might be forthcoming and keep my TruffleHunters posted.)

Ed Ruscha
Reading Ed Ruscha (Installation View of On The Road)
Installation view 1st floor,
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Photo: Markus Tretter
© Ed Ruscha, Kunsthaus Bregenz

An impressive volume of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, illustrated and designed by Ruscha, is also on display-encased in a vitrine and individually framed pages covering an entire wall. I mentioned this book and series in a previous post when I first saw it at the Hammer Museum last year. The book is wonderful and Ruscha’s “illustrations” are pitch perfect. I find them especially good because they work on an evocative level rather than an illustrational one. There’s also a wonderful inversion of chronology at work. Ruscha’s objects make Kerouac’s writing seem extremely relevant and contemporary while Kerouac’s writing makes Ruscha’s images and selections vintage. Seldom does one see a pairing that is so mutually beneficial and complementary.

In Ruscha’s able hands the book becomes a filmic medium taking each reader on a journey. The visual book is one of the few mediums that collect several images as a unit. Turn a page, the next image is revealed while the previous image is cloaked. Sequence affords a journey. With Ruscha, narrative development is often undermined with a surrealistic flourish of the unexpected. Each book offers such a path and to look at Ruscha’s career in total, the same can be said for his imagistic trajectory. The Bregenz exhibition bears this observation out handsomely. Bodies of work that may appear dissonant or unexpected at first, fit into an umbrella paradigm effortlessly when seen as the artist’s entire oeuvre. It seems to me that Ruscha is as good as he is because he practices a creative “both/and” generosity rather than a dogmatic “either/or” paradigm.

Typography

Most, but certainly not all, of Ruscha’s verbal/visual work is executed in a type style that the artist describes as “boy scout utility modern.” A free font version is available as Tapeworm, the name being a derivation of a sign making technique of using masking tape.  It’s as declarative and non-emotive as a lot of the content Ruscha traffics in.  Perhaps the most stunning deviation is Ruscha’s introduction of a topsy-turvy typography in the execution of a painting/book pairing “Stock Market Technique Number One.”

Ed Ruscha, Stock Market Technique Number One, 2002, Acrylic on Linen with Book, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

The original book is framed at the bottom right of the painting. The title on the original is a rather bland serif rendition but content dictates a different interpretation in Ruscha’s faux book painting. This contrast is sly. The editorializing of content happens solely in the use of what can only be described as a Chubby Checker font. I bring this up as simply another example of the fact that every choice on display is intentional and thus has the potential for content. The onion-like layers insist on pealing.

The Palindrome

Lastly, Ruscha’s fascination with language and visual punditry is on display with his quixotic use of the palindrome. For those unfamiliar with the term, a palindrome is simply a word, sentence or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards.

Racecar and Madam are wonderful individual word examples and my personal favorite phrase has always been “Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?” But least you think Ruscha merely uses this visual word play as an end itself, Ruscha couples this visual/linguistic complexity with another visual cousin to the Palindrome.

Bookmatching veneers for a Stratocaster Guitar!

Bookmatching is a term I first encountered in seeing wood veneer being manufactured in Indiana. The grain of the wood creates a rhythm when flipped and matched. To demonstrate, if a grain reads from left to right ABCD to create a longer pleasing pattern you flip the next slice and abut it to the first. This creates a visual pattern that reads ABCDDCBA and so on. The Rorschach inkblot is another visual example if you will. This fits deftly into the aforementioned allusion to scansion as well.

Ed Ruscha
Tulsa Slut, 2002
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
161,3 x 182,9 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and Committee
© 2012. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Ruscha uses the palindrome as the verbal equivalent of bookmatching. “Tulsa Slut” fuses the two. In “Tulsa Slut” the words are painted on a large canvas that bears the double, book matched image of a snowy mountaintop. The double image then also becomes the two halves of an open book. Lastly, this mirroring is also a referent to the wonders of the human body, which bears the same twoness: eyes, ears, ovaries, lungs, kidneys, testicles and breasts all come in pairs. It’s all there, if one cares to read it.

Having your cake and reading it too.

I spent three hours at the exhibition, dividing my time almost perfectly one hour per floor. If the exhibit were in my hometown, I could see making weekly visits to have the works reveal more magic with each subsequent reading. For every visual and linguistic epiphany I managed to share in this post there are probably a dozen more that lie in wait. I can only hope that the exhibition travels to other institutions. I don’t believe this is the case right now.

Installation View of Reading Ed Ruscha
Photo: MM Muller

Thoughtfully curated and installed with grace and restraint, Reading Ed Ruscha is a delight. The exhibition further proves that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. The parts are pleasurable to be sure, but boy howdy, the assembled oeuvre really impresses.

Reading Ed Ruscha continues at the KunstHaus Bregenz through October 14^th, 2012

-Mario M. Muller, Bregenz, Austria

Final European post forthcoming in a couple of weeks.

Travelling on a train in Germany has always been one of life’s great pleasures for me. Until this trip, I had never even considered any other form of travel within Germany, let alone Europe itself. The steady sound and the passing images induce a dreamlike environment wholly conducive to creative conjecture and imaginative flourishes. Last week, as I was winding my way from Frankfurt to Weiden, I luxuriated in the visual and audible rhythms of my bummelezug connection from Nuremberg to Weiden. A superb feeling of recognition flooded my senses. I was traversing a landscape of Gerhard Richter paintings.

Gerhard Richter, Buche, Beech, 1987, 82 cm x 112 cm
Oil on canvas
Catalogue Raisonné: 637-1

I have seen dozens of Richter’s landscapes over the years in gallery and museum exhibitions. Their beatific calm instills a wonder. And aside from their vast technical gift, they are timeless. Close to, but never indulgent of, nostalgia, these paintings offer straightforward and affectionate views of a Germany unaffected by history or politics. They are immensely hopeful pieces.

Germany seen from a train ride to Weiden, July 2012 Photo: Mario M. Muller

So as the real landscapes unfurled before me, there they were. I was travelling through a Richter world. A world Richter knew, captured and shared. The frames were the windows of my train. I, too, knew these landscapes but through his renditions. So, once again, a Life imitates Art moment filled me with delight.

Next Stop on our European Adventure, Bregenz, Austria. Stay Tuned!

-Mario M. Muller, July 15th, 2012, Weiden, Germany

I’m pleased to be reporting from Germany this week where I will be bringing you a couple of TruffleHunting’s first international reports. Our first stop is Frankfurt, Germany where a couple of weeks ago saw the opening of two ambitious exhibitions by America’s premiere artistic raconteur Jeff Koons. The double show, held at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Liebieghaus Musuem is split between Koons’ polemic between Painting and Sculpture. Both exhibitions reinforce Koons as an ambitious creative force for the new century. They also highlight the intellect that courses under the bombast of execution.

Jeff Koons, The Painter

The exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle is joyous and exuberant. On display are selections of every major body of work from the early advertisement appropriations to the lusty Made in Heaven series to the gargantuan collaged compositions of the Easy Fun, Hulk Elvis and Antiquity series .

Jeff Koons The Painter Ausstellungsansicht (Installation View) © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Foto: Norbert Miguletz

The show’s most successful paintings are definitely those from the last dozen years. Collaged compositions wrought large in meticulous paint are sometimes difficult to read, often captivating and delicately humorous. The cacophony of images tumbles forth in gymnastic flips. Figure ground reversals become the norm. Art historical references tango with pop culture quotations. Advertisements coexist with titillating glimpses of fleshy porn. The tonal quality ranges from the audible din of a soccer stadium to the insistent stage whisper.

Jeff Koons
The Painter Ausstellungsansicht (Installation View) © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Foto: Norbert Miguletz

Thematically the exhibition handsomely traces Koons’ involvement with sex, childhood, mass culture and art history. He cribs the iconography of each and folds them together with deft skill like Julia Child preparing a souffle. In an age of information overload, the pastiches become the turbulent memory cache of an American male. Bytes of information, urges, memory and desire flash on the canvas triggering synaptic leaps of dislocation and insight.

Jeff Koons
Landscape (Cherry Tree), 2009 Öl auf Leinwand 274,3 x 213,4 cm
Collection of Michael & Lise Evans, New York © Jeff Koons

I personally love the works that harness the color half-tone technique. Transparent dots of color approximate the feeling of looking at a reproduction of a photo in a magazine as seen through a strong magnifying lens. At ten by 13 feet these fields of color devolve into abstract patternation. Any referent is all but obliterated by scale.

Jeff Koons
Detail-Landscape (Cherry Tree), 2009 Öl auf Leinwand 274,3 x 213,4 cm
Collection of Michael & Lise Evans, New York © Jeff Koons

Silver brushstrokes are layered on top as are gesticulations of paint that appear improvisational but are also controlled and executed to within a centimeter of intention. As I articulated in a previous post on a Koons’ exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, the silver strokes are nod to Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) and thus are a graphic distillation of female anatomy, desire and obsession.

Jeff Koons
The Painter Ausstellungsansicht © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Foto: Norbert Miguletz

It must be said, really at this point as an afterthought, that it doesn’t bother me a lick that Koons himself doesn’t paint these pieces. Koons the artist, is a brain trust. His entire oeuvre is wholly unique and unquestionably original and authentic. His sculptures are fabricated by master craftsmen who with the inspiration of assignment have pushed the envelope of technique and medium to heights unimaginable.

Jeff Koons
Lips, 2000 Easyfun-Ethereal Öl auf Leinwand 299,7 x 431,8 cm Privatsammlung, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery © Jeff Koons

There maybe be several people who might dream large (aesthetically and/or physically) but it is Koons who transforms the idea into actuality. His team of painters and sculptors and technicians serve Koons’ ideas and imaginative will. Content, theme and leitmotif are Koons’ and we, as viewers, witnesses these ambitious works sometimes with wonder, sometimes with awe but always with respect.

Jeff Koons, the Sculptor

The exhibition at the is Liebieghaus is a revelation. A generous sampling of Koons’ sculptural oeuvre is installed deftly in the midst of a historical museum filled with objects, sculptures and liturgical monuments of the ages. The proximity of contemporary braggadocio aside historical objects is quite marvelous.

A carved polychromed oversized poodle lies at the feet of the Virgin Mary. Buster Keaton riding a Donkey is displayed in a room right after a bust of a church scholar from 1475 wearing the same pork pie hat.

Early Koons in a religious context. Installation view of Jeff Koons The Sculptor, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt, Germany

Koons’ thematic involvement with German kitsch is one of reverence and fascination. Early on, Koons tapped the zeitgeist of German Craftsmanship by commissioning artisans to execute his ideas in hand carved wood and porcelain. The transformation of contemporary subject matter (a portrait of Micheal Jackson and Bubbles the chimp) into an oversized Hummel Figurine of porcelain never ceases to fascinate me. And ultimately transformation through both material and content is the subject of his ambitious career. The jarring and sometimes comical context heightens this transformation.

Jeff Koons, The Sculptor Installation view, Ausstellungsansicht Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Foto: Norbert Miguletz

It is ironic that several of the works are on loan from the Broad collection where I have visited them on a monthly basis at BCAM at LACMA. There, in the sterility of the modern white cube setting, they act as monuments to America’s gossamer crass culture of consumption.

Jeff Koons, The Sculptor, Installation View, Ausstellungsansicht Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Foto: Norbert Miguletz

Here in Germany they act as passionate, intimate and strangely affectionate comments on the lasting nature of idol worship. This chameleon nature of content is just another proof for me in the lasting significance of Jeff Koons, The Artist.

Jeff Koons, The Sculptor at Liebieghaus and Jeff Koons, the Painter at the Schirn Kunsthalle remain on exhibit through September 23rd, 2012.

-Mario M. Muller, Frankfurt Germany, July 4th, 2012

My Morning Cup of Disappointment.

It is a great loss to the art world that ArtNet has ceased publication. Under the watchful stewardship of Walter Robinson, ArtNet’s magazine was a clear and diverse voice of the new and noteworthy. It was fun to read. It had international perspective.

Over the years I became a greater fan of Jerry Saltz. I often bristled at Charlie Finch’s missives but found him an invaluable wasabi-like palette cleanser. Reverend Jen’s off center narratives made me smile and sometimes sulk. And Donald Kuspit’s analytical bent brought me new and sustained appreciation for people like Roberto Matta, Otto Dix and Robert Graham. (I’ve linked each writer to but one of their outstanding pieces. Fortunately, ArtNet archives will remain open.)
These and countless other contributors enlivened the essential dialogue that makes art resonate and fosters sophistication and connoisseurship.
I am a writer about Art in no small part because of the wonderful, intellectual, conversational and current coverage I encountered there on a daily basis.

The Readership of TruffleHunting approaches capacity at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, NY

Last weekend TruffleHunting garnered it’s 20,000th reader. It is with sheer delight that I share this. To think that I’m reaching the visual equivalent of Arthur Ashe Stadium’s capacity boggles my brain. This fact, coupled with ArtNet’s demise, makes me even more adamant that the need for intelligent, non-partisan artistic dialogue has never been greater. Buck-naked Emperors should be called out and the delicate whispers of visual alchemists should be championed. I’m just the one to do it and I’m doubling down.
-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, June 25th, 2012