Charles Ray at the Art Institute of Chicago

New, but traditional, classical figure sculpture has intermittently been fashionable over the past two millennia. Formality (Maillol) followed melodrama (Carpeaux) in it’s previous two iterations. An intensely expressive Romanticism (Rodin) spun off between them. In the intervening century, the human figure was first excoriated, and then celebrated, as kitsch. But now, aided by digitized tools of photo-fabrication, a new version of timeless, idealized naturism has emerged through the application of a kind of three-dimensional photography. Thanks to the camera’s instantaneous capture of image, the sculptor can accurately record brief gestures made by anyone, including children and other non-professional models. The artist can then develop a kind of formal style through software manipulation, leading directly to mechanical fabrication.

Ray’s “Huck and Jim” demonstrates both the advantages and limitations of this process. Overall, the piece has the natural elegance of young bodies. It’s surrounding spaces have been as carefully measured as the dynamic Chicago skyline that stands behind it in this Modern Wing exhibition. It invites a calm meditation on the relationship between these iconic figures of American literature , effectively conflating the two prominent moral concerns of the academic humanities: gender identity and racism. But in detail, it has no more aesthetic impact than the anthropological displays at the Field Museum. Ray has focused his attention on the surface. His forms have no inner life.

 
A similar sense of peaceful naturalism, measured space, and cultural dialogue is found in Ray’s other monumental standing figure, “Boy with Frog”. Originally commissioned for Punta Della Dogana in Venice, the figure’s boyish curiosity nicely complemented the dragon-killing St. Theodore high on a column across the Grand Canal. But like jokes, editorials, and academic essays, it’s impact does not extend into multiple viewings. It’s not surprising that the City of Venice removed it from one of the world’s greatest public spaces.


Ray’s crouching or reclining figures are far less stimulating, though, like his monumental double-portrait relief in tribute to Alex Katz, they still proclaim a new Classicism, while engaging the tropes of the contemporary artworld in one way or another. Hardly an improvement or compelling interpretation of the originals, his monumental still lifes are grandiose exercises in futility. They serve as metaphors for our moribund civilization, as they meticulously copy enormous decaying objects. Such pessimism has been  standard fare in museums of contemporary art ever since they first opened.


But the institutional success of Ray’s standing figures may be ushering in a new wave of classical sculpture. If only other artists will have the desire, and then the ability, to make the new tools of fabrication serve a more dynamic sculptural expression.


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Postscript:

This is the cover of the  May/June edition of the Member Magazine of the Art Institute of Chicago.

It is probably the first time that images of anything like contemporary classical sculpture have appeared anywhere in that publication for at least fifty years. .

The museum also created a promotional video for the show.

Why have museum officials  promoted this exhibit so  strongly, and kept it on display for nearly 5 months ?

Perhaps because they believe that it might reconcile the contemporary with the classical.  Calvin Tomkins, the New Yorker's long-time chronicler of iconic contemporary artists, tells us that "Few artists have mined the history of sculpture more deeply than Ray.  He wants to renew traditions, not  just to borrow from them".. while in the video mentioned above,  Ray himself tells us how he wants to makes surfaces that are timeless: "everything I've said is going to be washed away, and what's going to be left is the art part".


But as Tomkins also relates, a pivotal mentor in Ray's art education once told him: "That sculpture you made today was very interesting spatially.  But those wheels - they looked like flowers in a still life. It shows me you want to make something, instead of discovering something.  Don't ever do that in my class again" -- and  Ray took this lesson to heart : "It changed my life -- I've thought about it ever since, the difference between making and discovering"


When all contemporary ideas have been washed away by time, can such an approach to art-making ever leave anything behind worth looking at?

One Hundred Faces of War

No Statement

One Hundred Faces of War, at the National Veterans Art Museum, through May 1

 

As it speaks to both national and personal destinies, this exhibit of 100 portraits at the National Veterans Museum makes most  postmodern art seem frivolous.   Lives change,  nations change, and this exhibit seems to have put its finger on the pulse of both kinds of transformation as America enters the fourth century of its experiment as a non-sectarian, democratic,   nation state. It shares the solemnity of the permanent exhibit at the Elks National Veterans Memorial – but there’s less bluster and  more honesty.  There’s more reason to be sad, because you’re connected to  actual  people who were killed ,  injured, or transformed.   But there’s also  more reason to be hopeful, because you meet people who  stood up for our country, right or wrong, and now are moving on with their lives.

 

It was an ambitious project.  One hundred life –size , waist-up portraits, accompanied by un-edited testimonials “about themselves and their experience of war.”  The flat, brownish,  monochrome backgrounds create the ambience of a military facility, and the straight-ahead, waist-up, poses of the veterans feel like soldiers rising up and  dutifully responding to a summons.  They all feel quite alive and present, except for the dead ones whose posthumous portraits depict them as distant and other-worldly.

 

You can’t really expect any artist, even Rembrandt, to paint 100 portraits in nine years and make them all masterpieces.  This artist, Matt Mitchell,  was apparently attracted to young women, as he usually paints them cute and flirtatious.   But otherwise, the identity of the artist recedes behind the profundity of the subject matter, and how often does that ever happen? Since exhibition material does not identify Mitchell himself as a military veteran, he probably is not, so this exhibit might  fall outside the mission of the N.V.A.M. to " exhibit art inspired by combat and created by veterans." But an outsiders point of view is not necessarily any less valuable.

 

Sometimes the unique,  enormous task that Mitchell gave himself seems too much for him to bear.
Some pieces feel like awkward pastiches of generic faces and torsos, begun separately and never joined well together.  But at least ten of them are real masterpieces of character expression in sharply, economically executed oil painting. 

 

The testimonials may disappoint those who are critical of American military  culture and the  Middle-Eastern wars it is still fighting.  Some of the veterans are still on active duty or serving in a civilian, supportive role.  They can’t really be expected to threaten their careers.  Others are  obviously far more concerned about putting their new lives together than with debating foreign policy.  But if you read between the lines, they all seem to be defensively answering the question:  “why the hell did you enlist?”.  And one of the most compelling portrait/testimory combinations of all is the young, troubled looking security guard who had “No Statement”.

 

Richard Hunt at the Chicago Cultural Center

Richard Hunt has had two careers. Immediately upon graduating the School of the Art Institute in 1957, he embarked on a career as a gallery artist that culminated at the age of 36 in an unprecedented retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Thereafter, he became the most prolific public sculptor in America, with over 160 commissions over the last 45 years. Over that time, the Artworld has grown ever more elite, confrontational, and distant from the world of public art, making Hunt’s upbeat, acrobatic, aspirational  expressions more suitable for a street corner than a gallery of contemporary art. But his non-public work, as revealed in this exhibit, has not lost a beat, even as he enters his eighth decade. In work that has now become more triumphant than defiant, his virtuosity remains stunning. Has anyone else ever drawn space with welded steel as apparently effortlessly and spontaneously as ink might be brushed on paper? He appears to have an endless appetite for balance, tension, and ever-erupting energy. In contrast to the strategies of conceptual art, there appears to be  one obvious explanation for his production: his virtuosic ability to do it. It’s work that is quite independent of his reputation, as it would likely stand out in any un-attributed collection of welded metal objects.

But it’s also work that thrills more than  satisfies. He has dedicated his career to the flame-like intensity that he picked up from one of his teachers at the Art Institute, Egon Weiner. But unlike Weiner, and Weiner’s generation of figure sculptors, mass, weight, character, history, and narrative have not been his concerns. His abstract pieces still feel figurative, like dancers balanced on one toe with both arms in the air.   But they don’t feel like members of an historic, human community. They’re more like daemons or spirits that belong in some other realm. In this, he stands apart from the primary concern of so much African American art that preceded him (Charles White) and followed (Kerry James Marshall).  And though public works sometimes enhances their sites, his pieces may appear to emerge in spite of them. (or - at least that's my response to the piece installed at the northwest corner of the Cultural Center)

As an artist, just like each of his pieces, he stands wonderfully and triumphantly alone.







(Matt Morris's politically more correct panegyric  is published here )

Joe Steiner at ARC

2014

Joe Steiner at ARC Gallery, through June 21

The painter, Joe Steiner,  has been his own  favorite subject for the past 50 years,  though he has addressed his personal image with more curiosity  than satisfaction.   “Who is that man in the mirror?” he always seems to ask.   Answers have ranged from “cute young dude” (age 25) to “wizened old  sage” (age 75).  Humor and bewilderment characterize the  intervening years, and he’s more than a little chagrined by the aging of his sagging body.

1995

His work is less about the expressive possibilities of painting. But though he’s self taught, he has become much more adept than those who are limited by the photographs that  they copy.  He paints spatial relationships as they appear from a single point-of-view,  so his paintings  naturally display a one-point perspective.   This  can be rather dramatic when painting his standing body as reflected from a  mirror  high up on the wall. He also looks at 20^th C. art, so he enjoys a sense of expressive freedom.

1972

His earliest efforts, though a bit  awkward, still could be quite expressive.  A dual portrait, standing in profile behind  his father, reveals what must have been a difficult transition to independent adulthood.  Like humorous cartoons, the expressive human figure is the focus of each and every painting.  The eye is not encouraged to linger and enjoy colors or forms,  nor is  the mind encouraged to linger over puzzling ideas, other than his biography.  Each painting just tells us “I am what I am”, with no hint of where he would like to  go or what's happened to him,  and no sense of transcendence into a larger scheme of things.

And yet – over the past 50 years, his painting has consistently gotten better, with progressively greater control over space,  more energy in the design, and a greater sense of mystery.  His latest self portrait doesn’t even seem to be about him so much any more. He now is making the best paintings of his life.

This is a man who  knows how to age well.

Rebecca Gray Smith at Bert Green Fine Art, through June 21

In 1391,  Gaston Phoebus, the brilliant , warlike Count of Foix,  was hunting in the hills of  his mountainous domain,   when he stopped for lunch and dropped dead as a servant  washed his hands.  That was death in the pre-modern era: universal and often inexplicably, unpredictably  sudden.  In the following centuries, that became the theme of danse macabre – those quaint depictions of grimacing Death rudely interrupting medieval life, from peasant’s hovel to prince’s palace.. Over the past 20 years, printmaker Rebecca Gray Smith, impacted by the Aids epidemic,  has updated that theme to contemporary life.  Death is still a malicious joker, but sometimes it is preventable, and that is the message that Smith presents in her alphabet of morbidity: G is for guns, N is for Narcotics, E is for education (about Aids)  etc.  But while she’s free associating,  there are other kinds of  issues she would like raise: H is for Harlots and Hookers, P is for Petroleum , and B is for Banks, Bailouts, and Baseball.   Baseball ?  --   what’s wrong with Baseball ?  Is she a Cubs fan ?  And what’s wrong with “L” (Law)  or “T”(time) If everything is already in the grasp of Death’s bony hand, why be concerned about anything at all?   So though this project  bears some resemblance to the passionate, skull-filled  social satires of the great Mexican cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada  (1852-1913),  it’s theme  is more universal – and more despairing.  “C” is for Crucifixion, but “R” is definitely not for Resurrection.   The universe is a big cruel joke at our expense – all presented in the grim,  gray light of a netherworld.  It’s as if the artist never recovered from the demise of  her youthful idealism.  But at least, some images are funny – like the violins serenading the exit of the poor dunce who’s just lost her job in “F” (Fired).  And  there’s plenty of life in the variety of Smith’s compositions.  If one thing refuses to die, it’s the Classical traditions of perspective, anatomy, and  design that this artist employs almost well enough to give  a convincing reason to live.

Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool at the Art Institute of Chicago,

 through May 11

Deep-pocket collectors of contemporary art like to be annoyed, puzzled, and intimidated.    And they have an appetite for nihilism – which must play, for them, like a kind of horror movie. Terrible things may be happening up on the screen, but they are safely ensconced in plush, comfy seats at the theater. Christopher Wool has been serving that market well for thirty years.

Art museum professionals must accommodate such collectors, but their tastes are likely to run wider and deeper. They have probably loved historical art their entire lives – which is why they chose that career in the first place. So they want to be pleased as well as puzzled, and prefer understatement, or even minimalism, to more aggressive kinds of contemporary art. The Art Institute of Chicago has run big shows for Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, and its directors have shown a special affection for Ellsworth Kelly. But no such attention has been paid to Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Richard Prince.

Which might also explain the decorative and calligraphic “Gray Paintings” of Christopher Wool. They appeal to lovers of traditional art – which might even include the artist himself, and stand quite apart from the text paintings that deliver messages you don't want to read with typography you don't want to see.

They’re large enough to dominate the walls of Regenstein Hall – just like the Baroque tapestries that hung there two years ago – but  have the dramatic spontaneity of a single hand snaking bold but casual lines against a blurry background. An entire room full is a thrilling and refreshing oasis from the rest of the large retrospective. The Jasper Johns “Gray” show, in 2008, never looked this good.

Unfortunately, it only took about two years, 2007 – 2008, for the artist to purge whatever lyricism afflicted him. Thereafter he returned to the  obliterations, blotches, and frustrated scrawls  that are just as annoying as his text paintings.

It makes you wonder what he might done had the contemporary art market not valued  pleasure so much  less than pain.

(note:  I really like this review that New City printed )

Ed Clark

Silver Screen, 1956

Ed Clark at the Art Institute, through March 9

Ed Clark is an African American artist, but he’s not primarily about African American identity. He’s an Abstract-Expressionist, but he’s not primarily about angst, creativity, mental processing, or other kinds of self exploration. So he doesn’t really fit into the world of contemporary art. He’s more of an early Modernist like Kandinsky – or even earlier – like JMW Turner, in connecting himself to the powerful forces of nature. But unlike Turner, Clark’s forces are more tectonic than atmospheric.

This current show only consists of three paintings, all done in the 1950’s. But it’s enough to demonstrate the artist’s willingness to go wherever the forces take him – in one case erupting beyond the rectangular edges of the panel, establishing him as one of the pioneers of shaped-canvas painting. But in that piece, as in the other two, he seemed far more interested in the forces from within than in the shape from without. In all three, he seems to have consistently asked himself “how can I crank up this energy just a little bit more”

These are paintings that could be altarpieces in some kind of post-religious church that celebrates big-bangs or the other cosmic events that left our universe in its wake. Because not only are Clark’s forces powerful, but strong and clear colors emerge from their dark and violent interaction. The results are beautiful, full of hope and promise.

The current show coincides with his receipt of the Art Institute’s “Legends and Legacy Award” an honor recognizing living African American artists.. Some day, hopefully, a full retrospective of Clark’s 60 year career will acknowledge that his achievements have a much broader scope.

Untitled, 1957

Untitled, 1953

Silver Screen, detail

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postscript: I wasn't the only one to love this show!


Here's what Barry Schwabsky had to say in the Nation:


"For me, though, the great revelation was at the Tilton Gallery, where the artist David Hammons curated “Ed Clark: Big Bang,” an aptly titled dose of explosive energy from a remarkable second-generation Abstract Expressionist born in 1926. Until recently, Clark has been almost criminally overlooked—
including by me, I must admit. When I was first gobsmacked by one of his paintings, at the uneven “Blues for Smoke” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year, this African-American artist was just a vague name to me. Now, suddenly, with the Art Institute of Chicago having recently devoted a little room to three of his works from the 1950s, and the Tilton exhibition of eight of his paintings from 2001 through 2012 alongside one from 1959, Clark can no longer be sidelined. He is, simply, one of the best living painters.


Like his contemporaries Norman Bluhm, Al Held and Alfred Leslie, Clark developed his painterly gesture on a grand scale. No mere brush seems big enough for him—
photographs show him pushing paint around with a broom—but the results are not empty bluster. Clark revels in the subtlest interplay of will and accident, painting wet-into-wet to coax suave modulations of color out of the bluntest, even seemingly most slapdash concatenations of matter. (He appears to take particular pleasure in transforming blue into brown.) It’s almost indecently voluptuous, and yet rigorously structured. Paint as a literal, physical presence and as a trace of the artist’s mental and physical activity becomes inseparable from the evocation of the glory of light."