Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

• Good line from Kenneth Baker on Rufus Corp.’s/Eve Sussman’s latest: “[I]t seems drawn out and more enjoyable to recall than to watch.”
• Christopher Knight on Anselm Kiefer: Is he a pre-modernist? Is he the resurrection of a prior artistic model?
• Roberta Smith on small big abstraction. Roberta Smith on artists going from small to big (galleries). Ed Winkleman replies.
• Dan Flavin comes full circle in St. Louis, and David Bonetti is so awed that he suggests you stop reading him and go see the show at the Pulitzer. Or see the online exhibit (borrowed pic at right), which is awesome.
  
• There’s a whole genre of non-fiction books that focuses on what-if: What if Hitler had been assassinated?, etc. (Websites too.) And art: Ben Davis (whose day-job left him editing Charlie Finch’s paean to their boss) reviews Josh Azzarella at DCKT in the Village Voice.

This is both unfortunate and hilarious. Given the Official MAN Nickname for the museo-ethics-deriding director of the MFA, this is merely the latter. (Regardless, the related exhibition could be a highlight of the summer.)

I closed out yesterday’s Amy Sillman-at-the-Hirshhorn post by objecting to the increasing museo-trend of dropping commercial gallery shows into their galleries. Picking up from that post…

While the Hirshhorn’s Amy Sillman is a perfect example of this trend, I don’t mean to pick on the Hirshhorn. SFMOMA, MAMFW, MOCA, St. Louis, and other museums all do these small one-artist shows, brand them as ‘Focus’ shows, ‘Projects’ shows, ‘Directions,’ or what have you. I think it’s time for art museums to consider whether they’re presenting something up to the standards of the rest of their exhibitions program, or if they’re not. And with occasional exceptions, they’re not.

These small, immediate exhibitions have special merit when an artist and a museum can work together to present something in an institutional setting that would not have been possible in a commercial setting. I don’t particularly respond to Jim Lambie’s work and I thought his Hirshhorn ‘Directions’ show was numbingly decorative, but that was a good example of the proper use of the rubric: The Hirshhorn and Lambie (right) worked with an unusual, architecturally specific space (the gateway-to-utopia Bunshaftian fantasy that is the Hirshhorn lobby) to present a unique project, something that was not possible elsewhere. (The Lambie show also indirectly made the argument that the Hirshhorn should restore their entrance lobby to the condition Bunshaft intended, without a store in the middle of it.)

I admire the way the Art Institute of Chicago uses their ‘Focus’ program. Last year, while the AIC was in the midst of a series of exhibitions and other programs focusing on the Silk Road, the museum presented the work of Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, two artists whose work fits perfectly into the museum’s focus on the Silk Road. (The artists show with Ed Winkleman. Ed is a blogger and a friend.)

I also liked what the AIC did with its Jana Gunstheimer ‘Focus’ show: It provided American audiences with the artist’s first American exhibition. (That’s another way in which these shows can transcend the typical: In best-case scenarios, institutions give their curators the freedom to discover.) Gunstheimer’s show also specifically addressed Chicago. Both exhibitions were curated by the AIC’s Lisa Dorin.

But too often museums simply present mini-commercial shows by commercially popular, even familiar artists, and then present the work in a way that fails to add context or depth. MAMFW’s recent Joshua Mosley ‘Focus’ presentation didn’t attempt to contextualize Mosley in any particular way, nor was there any notable scholarship affiliated with the show. (Again: How could there be?)

Understandably, when I raise this point with curators they typically respond, ‘But Culver City galleries aren’t in My Town. I’m bringing this artist to my audience.’ And that’s true. But if the artist is good enough or important enough to bring to their audience, they should do it in a more thorough, more museum-like way. If the museum can’t bring
some of the museum and its role to the exhibit, it shouldn’t do the
show. [Lambie photo. Gunstheimer photo.]

Related: Dorin talks with Gunstheimer on a Bad at Sports podcast. Art or Idiocy and James Wagner on Gunstheimer.

• The Stranger’s Jen Graves is trying to figure out the Vogels’ gift to the Seattle Art Museum. Sounds like SAM is hoping to have it figured out too. The Boston Globe’s Geoff Edgers wasn’t thrilled with the way the MFAB HUAM gift went down. [Ed: Sorry about that.]
• Also from Graves: Exhibition migrates directly from art fair to art museum.
• Also from Graves (geez!): The Gugg/SAM is taking this ‘exhibition copy’ thing about six steps too far.
• Like the rest of us, Kriston Capps is trying to figure out the weirdness surrounding Goya’s El Coloso. He sees politics.
• When we are dead, cyan will represent us.

Last week the NYT published this web-only Ahmad Fadam dispatch about art in Iraq. Don’t miss it. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Also: Earlier this week Michael Kimmelman contributed a strong feature story about culture and the presidency in France.

Amy Sillman is one of the most interesting painters in America, but there are problems with the Hirshhorn show.

First: the Hirshhorn’s one-room installation. Within the gallery are 13 oil paintings and 12 works on paper. The works on paper are installed on a temporary wall that blocks the viewer from entering the gallery until s/he has looked seen the drawings. The 13 oil paintings crowd each other on the walls and in space, making it difficult to focus on any one painting without seeing bleed from the painting on either side. Many commercial galleries install art better than this.

Which brings me to the bigger problem with the Hirshhorn show: At a time when art museums should be emphasizing the differences between institutions and commercial galleries, Sillman at the Hirshhorn is Sikkema Jenkins 2.0. All of the work is from 2007 and 2008. The museum does not place the
artist in any kind of context, not within her own 25-year body of work, not within the work of her contemporaries, and not with her historical antecedents.

The Hirshhorn exhibition is a commercial-gallery sales opportunity dropped into a museum. This is especially a problem for contemporary museums that show the most recent art; try as curators might, there is no amount of jargon that can historicize work made a month or two ago. (The Hirshhorn and the Tang, where this show goes next, certainly tried. The Tang published a catalogue that is impenetrable even by the falling standards of its type.)

Next: A common museo-rubric and its problems. Previously: Amy Sillman part one, two, critical response.

• Uh, ya think Renzo Piano has seen some Martin Puryear? (The closest image is an untitled 1997 work that Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro have promised to MoMA. Couldn’t find an image to link to though.)
• Greg Allen has more on NuMu-featured painter Tomma Abts. (Me: Monday.)
• Mark Dion is traveling in the footsteps of Philadelphians John & William Bartram.
• Got podcasts for MAN’s blogroll?
• British artist Steve McQueen remembers war with postage stamps… that could actually be postage stamps.
• Jerry Saltz offers up the NYC art canon of the last 40 years. OK… but the first piece was made in Los Angeles, and the last piece is by an artist whose aesthetic was substantially borrowed from an Angeleno. Unrelated (because I realize that Saltz writes for New York magazine, thus it’s natural for his piece to focus on NY): I love NYC, but NYCers should be over their self-perceived import, their belief that their centrality is so all-consuming that ‘their’ city can or should exclude all else.
• Edward Winkleman spotlights a story that discusses usually undiscussed issues related to museum acquisitions of contemporary art. [Abts photo.]

Amy Sillman is a New York painter, an artist who is as much a New Yorker as, say, Lari Pittman is an Angeleno. Sillman’s first six American solo shows were in New York, and she didn’t have her first non-NYC show until 2002, when she was 47. (Pittman’s first nine shows were in southern California, and he didn’t have his first exhibition away from home until he was 42.)

How ‘New York’ is Sillman? Her commercial gallery shows have been reviewed by the following New York Times critics: Roberta Smith (1994, 2000), Michael Kimmelman (1996), Grace Glueck (2003) and Ken Johnson (2006). Jerry Saltz wrote a super piece about Sillman’s last Sikkema Jenkins show for the Voice.  (That review was included in the package that made Saltz a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the second time.) Eight years earlier Peter Schjeldahl declared himself a fan too. Also worth reading: Carolyn Zick on a Sillman artist’s book at PS1.

Meanwhile, the critical reception to Sillman here in Washington has been, well, shocked: Michael O’Sullivan’s bizarre review in the Washington Post’s weekend pull-out has been derided. I wasn’t a fan either. (The Post’s primary critic, Blake Gopnik, hasn’t reviewed the show, and our alt-weekly hasn’t given it a full write-up either. Quite oft DC seems to be unsure of what to do with post-color-field painting.) I like Matthew Mann’s observation about Sillman’s next-door neighbor. Artcade heard politics in Sillman’s Hirsh Q&A with two curators.

Related: Sillman week on MAN: Part one, two, three. The Sillman above is P (2007).

Picking up from yesterday (part three here)…

Amy Sillman layers paint over layers of paint the way Richard Diebenkorn did. Sometimes she loads up her brush like Park, Bischoff or other Bay Area School types. She shmears wet paint across a canvas like Gerhard Richter. Sometimes she dabs it on almost tentatively, as Guston did in his great Turneresque abstractions.

Then there are the compositions themselves. Her diagonals reject a painter’s tendency to grid, the same way Diebenkorn’s did circa Ocean Park. This one recalls Lee Bontecou’s delicate, small hanging sculptures from 1967. A green, red and gray section on the right-hand side of I (2008, below) seems informed by those atmospheric Gustons. The vaguely cartoony shapes in several of the paintings here (including this one) abstract Carroll Dunham’s body parts. And Sillman’s stitching together of seemingly disparate swatches of sometimes garish color and pattern recall 1980s David Hockney. Sillman’s rejection of a traditional, harmonious, palette reminds me of of abstraction from about that period, including Howard Hodgkin, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Nozkowski.

There are no shortage of sources in Sillman’s paintings. While many abstract artists love to hide the quarries they mined — such as how Clyfford Still spent decades denying and hiding the influence of landscape on his art — Sillman flaunts hers. Like many painters who came of artistic age in the 1980s (Sillman first showed her paintings in NYC in 1982), Sillman has grappled with the history of American post-war abstraction. Instead of running away from it, she’s cleverly chosen bits and pieces to embrace and incorporate. (The painters she’s rejected stand out just as loudly: Her paintings include none of David Reed’s finish, Joan Mitchell’s free-fall, or Still’s disdain for brushiness.)

What you think of Sillman’s paintings probably depends on whether you think that riffing on abstraction,
incorporating different strains of it, challenging it, and mixing it up is a worthwhile pursuit,
or if abstract painting was good enough the first time or two (or
three). I think Sillman’s paintings make a strong case that abstract art is still fertile ground for painters today. They’re exciting, hopeful.

The Hirshhorn show, curated by the Hirsh’s Anne Ellegood and the Tang’s Ian Berry, shows 11 Sillman oil paintings from 2007 and 2008, along with 12 ink-on-paper drawings (all from 2007). The show’s set-up is straightforward: Sillman started with a dozen drawings of friends and abstracted them into paintings. The Hirshhorn almost bludgeons visitors with this point: The museum built a temporary wall just inside the entrance to the gallery that holds Sillman’s paintings; A viewer can’t avoid seeing the works on paper before advancing ‘inside’ to see the oil paintings.

The point of the exercise is to reinforce the archeology of Sillman’s paintings: Look! They’re rooted in figures! That’s fine. But I’m much more interested in the other roots.

Yesterday MAN published an email from Smithsonian acting secretary Cristian Samper foretelling this Washington Post story about the resignation of the head of the Smithsonian Latino Center. If you thought Lawrence Munitz was a handful, wait until you read that Post story. The whole story.