I’ve recently been reading Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates and one of the first essays (about whether food can be art — do not read late at night on an empty stomach!) mentions how philosophers can discuss the ontological status of a work of art (what kind of thing it is), and in particular used Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as an example.  The art is not the sheet music it was originally written on, nor is it a particular performance (there are many of those, they also include interpretation).  One can spend a lot of time figuring out the philosophical distinctions of what is and isn’t art (though that can be fun, too; for instance, see here).  I thought that the subject called for a painting and while the title is a mouthful, making it was mindful.

Ontological Status of a Moonlight Sonata, 24 x 18

After leaving the Whitney Biennial, I was looking for some more inspiring fare and so headed down to Chelsea for a quick trip to some galleries whose shows seemed promising.  On 26th Street, Galerie Lelong provided a nice jolt of energy with the work of Emilio Perez: large abstractions full of swirls and whooshes, meticulously and intuitively created by cutting out layers of acrylic paint with an exacto knife.  (I would have guessed that the hard edges came from careful masking, but the gallery’s press release corrected my impressions.)  The paintings read a bit like a Julie Mehretu abstraction done in the style of a Lichtenstein brush stroke painting: from a distance you get the sense of a swirling atmosphere but as you look up close you see hard, graphic edges delineating the various “strokes” of paint.

Emilio Perez @ Lelong

The next block over there’s a wonderful show of paintings by Jean Lowe at McKenzie Fine Art.  The paintings are intriguing to look at while also quite funny.  Entitled, “Yes, Yes, Yes!”, the show is about excessive consumerism and each of the loosely brushed but still globally detailed paintings takes a slightly fish-eyed view of a large room, part grocery store, part Baroque palace!  In the foregrounds, you see rows of products that could easily have come from a Target store, while the backgrounds and ceilings of the rooms look like European palaces or museums decorated with classical paintings.  The show includes a handmade bookshelf containing a number of hilarious paper mâché faux books with titles like, “Kindle: The Missing Manual” (a huge tome of a book!), or, “The Joy of Pickling: 200 Scenarios”.

Jean Lowe @ McKenzie

Down on 20th Street, Kathryn Markel is exhbiting some colorful abstractions on paper by Diane Ayott that are full of pattern and repitition, addressing some formal issues similar to my own work.  Ayott uses objects such as bottle caps and lids as “stamps” to make repetitive marks in ways that create pleasing patterns and fields of color.

Diane Ayott @ Markel

Finally, in the same building on 20th Street, Kim Foster Gallery hosts a fine three person exhibition where meticulous drawing catches the eye and invites close inspection.  First up are William Brovelli’s “Timeline project” canvases, each of which contains a grid upon which the artist has drawn a small characters in ink on the borders of each grid cell.  As time passes, Brovelli whitewashes each of the characters and re-works the grid cells with new ones.  The process continues for many months until the work is sold or the artist shuts down the canvas, leaving the viewer with a snapshot of time and a historical record of artistic decisions and moods.

Next up is Diane Samuels, whose obsessive pen drawings on handmade paper are full of thousands of small circles when added up render a kind of microscopic mapping of the street in Pittsburgh where the artist has lived for thirty years.  Varying amounts of pressure applied to the paper during the drawings’ creations cause the paper to bulge here and there providing a third dimension of interest to these works.

Finally, the gallery displays some of Paul Glabicki’s “ACCOUNTING for…” drawings.  These finely rendered drawings begin with an “under-drawing”, where Glabicki hand draws in minute detail pages from a found 1930s Japanese ledger, providing texture and a structure upon which to continue.  Then, the artist records various bits of information over time on top of the existing drawing: snippets of equations, graphs, curves, notes, and other markings.  These reminded me both of John Zinsser’s recent “Auction Lot” drawings (replicated from pages of old art auction catalogs) and of particle accelerator images with swirls and collisions of data flying around the page.

Brovelli, Samuels, & Glabicki @ Kim Foster (details)

That ended my day in New York City, but there was still some more art to see back in Jersey.  After about a fifteen minute rest at home, I headed out to the Mercer County Artists 2010 show for a fine opening reception at The Gallery.  The exhibition is full of creative, very high quality work in all media and styles and it was a great show to be a part of.  The show remains up through April 1, 2010.

I made it into this year’s Whitney Biennial…   OK, you didn’t fall for that for a second, did you?  Let me start again.  I attended the Biennial today during member previews, which allows you to spend some time with the work without feeling pressed onwards by a huge crowd.  On the other hand, you don’t get a feel for the “buzz” that might surround the event and for something like the Biennial, buzz is an important part of the experience.

And, just as this year there is no official theme other than the time stamp of “2010″, the takeaways from my visit are elusive.  Thankfully, there are fewer of the large architectural installation pieces that filled much of the 2008 show.  However, quite a few rooms are devoted to video pieces, which I find to be awkward art objects at a museum:  you have to walk into a dark room, let your eyes adjust, try not to bump into anyone; the video is invariably in the middle somewhere; there’s not enough room to sit and you’re not sure you want to devote the time to the piece.  I’d rather that the museum set up a movie theater with fixed screening times so that you could take a seat and settle in for an hour or two.

One video that looked clever, though I didn’t give it more than a couple of minutes, was a Josephine Meckseper piece depicting scenes from in and around the Mall of America coupled with ominous music, clips from a flight simulator showing planes in attack formation, and colored filters that implied war footage.

Another film that I would have liked to spend more time with was Kerry Tribe’s about “H.M.”, one of the most famous subjects in psychology literature.  H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery in 1953 to treat epilepsy but ended up with severe retrograde amnesia: the inability to form new memories or to remember anything for more than about 20 seconds.  The film is projected onto the wall in two places (from a single strip of film) such that there is a 20 second delay between the two videos, cleverly reinforcing (almost Memento-style) the fragility of memory.  The interviews depicted in this film use an actor; I would have loved to see footage of the real H.M.

I had watched a video with Aki Sasamoto on the Whitney’s website ahead of the exhibition and wasn’t expecting to like the actual artwork, but in fact it turned out to be one of the most attention-worthy pieces in the show.  Filling up one small gallery with wires, nets, video cameras, and dangling glasses of “liquid” (hopefully plastic!), it’s the kind of installation that makes you want to figure it out:  where’s the camera that’s projecting that image?  how do those shadows mingle with the charcoal on the wall?  what’s in the glasses?  why those pretty nets?  The art is entitled “Strange Attractors”, with references specifically to the Lorenz attractor, an infinitely looping butterfly-like mathematical structure (not the same as Strange Loops, but you can see why I was “attracted” to this piece).  The artist has a number of scheduled performances of some sort that go along with the installation, though I didn’t see one and so don’t know what I was missing.

There was not a whole lot in the way of painting-that-makes-you-want-to-paint.  Tauba Auerbach’s  trompe l’oeil paintings had a number of gallery-goers looking intently from up close and from far away, debating with each other exactly what they were looking at.  At first, it looks like a wrinkled bed sheet hanging against the wall.  When you look up close, you see that in fact it’s a painting and only by reading the wall text would you determine the mechanism of its creation (spraying paint onto carefully folded and rolled canvases).

I also liked the tempera and oil paintings of Jim Lutes, whose “Piece of Barbara” summons de Kooning’s women with its mixture of figurative and abstract elements.  Swirls of ribbon-like color engulf  the representational, in this case the likeness of a 1950s B-movie actress.  Lesley Vance exhibited a series of small abstractions derived from still life photographs that had a nice color tone and palette knife paint handling.

At the entrance to the third floor, a huge tapestry by Pae White depicts a photographic reproduction of plumes of smoke.  From afar you could almost mistake it for a Mark Sheinkman painting.  The Whitney web site (and the wall text) seems to go a bit overboard in describing this work as “cotton’s ‘dream of becoming something other than itself’ by contrasting an image of something immaterial with the physicality of fabric.”  Okay…  Whatever.  I will say that the thick and varied texture of the tapestry did make you want to reach out and feel it (as if you were shopping for a rug).

One overall problem is the need to rely on the wall texts to figure out what you’re looking at.  Some of the paintings, for instance, don’t stand on their own and require an explanation that tries to turn something mundane visually into something meaningful intellectually.  In some cases, I think the wall texts stretch too far:  does depicting a few photographs of Baudelaire next to Michael Jackson in “The First and the Last of the Modernists” really “raise questions about the roles of art and popular culture as well as how modern figures are presented, flattened, and distributed through the news media”?  Well, it raised that question, I suppose.  There were quite a few grunts (with accompanied head-shaking) from fellow gallery-goers after reading some of the wall texts, though I couldn’t tell if they referred to the art or the text.

Speaking of grunts, Mariane Vitale’s video screams directly at the viewer.  Once again, I missed the beginning of one of these video clips and couldn’t subject myself to the screaming for very long, but I did almost enjoy her diatribe about the products that specific states bring to us, exclaiming (if I heard her correctly), “New Jersey brings us GLUE…”  I didn’t know that.

After the Biennial, I headed down to Chelsea for a quick visit to a handful of galleries for some very fine painting exhibitions (whew, I needed some attention-focusing paintings after being yelled at by that last video).  But I’ll have to report on that in a subsequent post.

I’m happy to announce that one of my paintings, Arising, has been accepted into the Mercer County Artists 2010 show.  The show runs from February 23 through April 1, 2010, with an opening reception on Wednesday, February 24, from 5-7:30pm (at The Gallery @ Mercer County Community College).  This year’s juror was C.J. Mugavero from The Artful Deposit gallery in Bordentown, NJ.

Arising, acrylic on panel, 30x30

I recently finished the following painting, which will be appearing in my 2-person show at Artists’ Gallery in April.

Conceptual Framework, acrylic on panel, 24x24, 2010

In a nice article in tomorrow’s (Feb 14) New York Times, Roberta Smith comments on the sameness of New York’s museum exhibitions with this suggestion:

What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand.

Agreed! 

Charles Katzenbach and I will be hosting an opening reception for our upcoming show, Reflections, at Artists’ Gallery, on Saturday, April 10, 2010, from 6-9 pm.  The show will run from April 9 through May 2 (gallery hours are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, from 11am-6pm, and by appointment).  Please note that as of March 2010, Artists’ Gallery is located at 18 Bridge Street in the heart of Lambertville, NJ.

Foundations, acrylic on panel, 12x12

Most of my abstract paintings are in some way related to my interests in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.  One of the themes that underlies this work is the notion of embodiment, that how we make sense of the world is very much tied to the physical nature of our bodies.  I became interested in this particular theory around 2004 after taking two classes while I was living in New York City:  (1) Brain Gym, which tried to link certain exercises with a kind of mental fitness (see also the book Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All in Your Head); and, much more significantly, (2) a course at The New School based on the book Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

While the number of books on embodiment in its various forms has grown in recent years, I haven’t seen much about it in the mainstream press.  Today, however, The New York Times’ Natalie Angier has written a nice primer on the subject: “Abstract Thoughts?  The Body Takes Them Literally.”  The article highlights some of the fascinating research that shows, for instance, how metaphors we use when thinking about time are so embodied within us that we actually tend to lean forward when talking about the future and lean backward when talking about the past.