Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

We’ve reached the round-of-eight in The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tourney-ish. Voting is open until noon tomorrow, when we will begin voting in our final four! Voting on the final will take place next week, on Monday and Tuesday.

In the top-half of the draw:

• No. 1 Ellsworth Kelly vs. No. 9 Mary Heilmann; and
• No. 12 Brice Marden vs. No. 13 Terry Winters.

In the bottom-half of the draw:

• No. 2 Cy Twombly vs. No. 23 Helen Frankenthaler; and
• No. 3 Robert Ryman vs. No. 6 Thomas Nozkowski.

Quarterfinals, No. 1 vs. No. 9answers

Quarterfinals, No. 12 vs. No. 13surveys

Quarterfinals, No. 2 vs. No. 23survey software

Quarterfinals No. 3 vs. No. 6survey software

I recently concluded MAN’s three-part look at the Wexner Center for the Arts’ “Hard Targets” exhibition with a
thought or two on how artists have used boxing in the last 30 years. This week I’ll look at four American artworks that use boxing as metaphor. Yesterday: Ed Ruscha. Today, David Hammons, re-published from a January, 2007 post about an installation at MCASD.

David Hammons’ 1989 Champ (right) is impeccable and clever, beautiful and sad. The materials are simple: inner tube, (silver) duct tape, and boxing gloves (with laces hanging down). Hammons smartly mixes a deflated sport with deflated materials to examine the role of the prize fighter in American culture, especially black culture. Before the NBA was a dreamed-of escape-valve for urban youth, boxing offered the bruising, difficult way up. Fighters such as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were heroes to black America, fighters who crossed-over and had success in mainstream society. But with success came tragedy: Louis died broke, his funeral paid for by German rival Max Schmeling. The tragedy went beyond individual figures: Countless young black men hoped boxing would provide a way up but instead were merely pummeled, used as entertainment or in match-fixing schemes, as disposable cogs in brutal entertainment.

I also think about Champ through the prism of what was happening in the sporting world in 1989. Hammons was likely influenced by what was happening in boxing: Mike Tyson was on top of the boxing game, destroying every in-ring opponent in sight, the most prominent athlete in America. But signs of Tyson’s soon-to-be-messy-end were everywhere: In late 1988 Tyson’s wife, Robin Givens, accused him of beating her. Tyson broke his hand in a much-publicized street fight with boxer Mitch “Blood” Green and wrapped his BMW around a tree, an accident that the New York Daily News reported was a suicide attempt. “Real freedom is having nothing,” Tyson said at the time. “I was freer when I didn’t have a cent. Do you know what I do sometimes? Put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out on the streets and beg for quarters.”

(Early in 1990 Tyson would lose his heavyweight title to unknown Buster Douglas in one of the greatest upsets in boxing history. In 1991 he was arrested on a rape charge. Tyson’s sport has never recovered from the damage he did to it — and to himself.)

So Hammons’ Champ feels right. There are wounds on the ‘fighter,’ a melted patch on the left side, and ’stitches’ on the right, near the top, where the head might be. The duct tape holding the gloves to the inner tube looks old, almost inert. Like boxing, Hammons’ tired Champ won’t be coming back to life anytime soon.

Yesterday I concluded MAN’s three-part look at the Wexner Center for the Arts’ “Hard Targets” exhibition with a thought or two on how artists have used boxing in the last 30 years. Today I’ll start a look at four artworks that use boxing as metaphor.

In many ways 1979 was the worst year of the worst decade America had seen since the Civil War. The 1970s featured low point after low point: Humiliations in Vietnam, a lethal government attack on the citizenry at Kent State, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, the worst recession since the Great Depression, Love Canal, Jonestown. Somehow 1979 found new lows: A partial meltdown in a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, Dan White got away with murder and just nine months after Muslim militants kidnapped the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, three thousand Iranian college students stormed the American embassy in Iran and took 90 hostages. America was repeatedly weak.

In 1979 Ed Ruscha made this painting, Boxer. (It’s in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a gift from Robert Rauschenberg.) The painting cleverly merges 100 years of American art about boxing — think Thomas Eakins and George Bellows — with commonplace, even cliched, familiarity with one of America’s then-most popular sports. In Ruscha’s painting, the boxer is the United States: The country is down but not out. The country can come back. It has a fighter’s chance. The painting is Ruscha at his best: Smart, clever, inquisitive, open-ended and intensely American.

Boxer is one of a series of paintings that Ruscha made mostly in 1979 and in 1980 that featured sunsets — or are they sunrises? The first painting in the series — or maybe just the unplanned forerunner of the others — is 1977’s The Back of Hollywood [left], a painting of the famous ‘Hollywood’ sign viewed from behind with a sunrise/sunset in the distance. Asked about the painting on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2000, Ruscha replied, “Sort of apocalyptic in here, isn’t it?”

It took another year or two for Ruscha to jump off from that painting and to focus on the what’s-next-for-America theme. When he did, he explored it in depth. The pivotal images of the series — or at least the most socio-politically explicit — are 1979’s America’s Future and Anybody’s
Destiny [below]. The paintings are the same size, 22-inches tall and 159-inches wide, and feature nearly identical landscapes. I read one as a sunrise and one as a sunset. The question of which is which — as well as the titles themselves — are two parts (or four parts) of big question: Is America’s dominance
at an end, or is the nation about to rise again? Furthermore, by titling one work ‘Anybody’s Destiny,’ Ruscha seems to challenge American exceptionalism.

In the same series Ruscha tried to reassure himself and us with It’s OK — Everything’s OK and he looks at the root of America’s oil-centric troubles with Two Pumpers, a painting that conjures both Ruscha’s native Oklahoma or Texas and the Middle East. Ruscha would move on from these ’sunset paintings’ to works that examine America’s place in the world, works such as this, this and this.

Ruscha has never really stopped making his own kind of present-history paintings. America’s place in the world was the subject of Ruscha’s Venice Biennale presentation, “Course of Empire,” in 2005. There’s a show here for some smart curator: ‘Ed Ruscha Examines America’…

Related: In 2004 the Walker Art Center presented The Squared Circle: Boxing in Contemporary Art. (I didn’t see the show.)

• I did not know that TASS, the infamous Soviet propaganda agency/central news bureau, created war posters. The Art Institute of Chicago did and is planning a 2011 show. Already-fun sneak peeks start here.
• Trevor Paglen is working on a project for Aperture. (I’m way into Paglen projects, but for Aperture? Surprise.)
• New Museum curator Richard Flood throws down, calls Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the department of European paintings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a prairie dog.
• Perfect timing: Asparagus in art. (The Manets: Wow.)
• Pat Steir’s drawings are on view at the RISD Museum. (Steir was Ellsworth Kelly’s first-round victim in MAN’s Tourney-ish. The round of eight starts tomorrow!) Greg Cook has a good read on the show.
• ROFL: Greg Allen is not into the Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik.

Concluding MAN’s three-part look at the Wexner Center for the Arts’ “Hard Targets” show. Part one: Introducing the show. Part two: Masculinity and sport.

Jeff Koons is the ‘it’ artist of corporatist excess. His work is perfectly made and mass-marketable. When I look at a bad Koons — and there are plenty of bad Koonses — I think of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier: The artwork is controlled to the point of slickness. It often seems to be made to justify its expense. It’s at the end of something. The followers it motivates have UBS accounts instead of studios.

It’s easy to forget that Koons once played for bigger stakes. His best body of work is one of his earliest: The mid-1980s bronzes that examine avenues to success. One of them, Soccerball (Bumblebee) from 1985 is included in “Hard Targets.” [Above.]

Soccerball is the flagship work of the second big theme that runs through “Hard Targets:” the often false promise of social mobility that sport offers. For thousands of kids on nearly every continent, sport offers a pathway to success: Work hard and maybe you too can go professional and make millions of dollars. Of course it’s the thinnest of all pathways. The percentage of South American footballers or New York playground hoopsters that will go on to eight-figure riches is infinitesimally small. The kids who make it get most of the attention, even their whole section in the newspaper. Koons’ Soccerball is for the other 99.99 percent.

There’s plenty of art in “Hard Targets” that uses sport as a metaphor for the false promise of social mobility in a time of nepotistic, oft-entitled, crony capitalism. (Luke Russert or George W. Bush, anyone?) Kori Newkirk’s conjoined basketball hoops offer no way out. Hank Willis Thomas’ Nike-swoosh-scarred male torso points to how some athletes play in service to corporations. The artist who best approaches Koons’ wince-and-nod poetry is David Hammons, whose Untitled (Basketball Drawing), 2006-07 [at right] provides both the head-in-the-clouds basketball dream and the broken asphalt of most realities.

As I pointed out last week, artists have seized on sport as metaphor because they know that sport is one of our society’s shared languages. Sport helps art get over. All of the ’social mobility’ work in “Hard Targets” post-dates Martin Scorcese’s great “Raging Bull,” a film about many of these same issues. Just as it’s easy to think — and hard to demonstrate — that “Lawrence of Arabia” was important to the development of minimalism, I think “Raging Bull” is likely a tough-to-document influence on nearly every artist in this exhibition: It highlighted sport’s ‘utility’ — but also may have ‘used up’ boxing as artistic metaphor. “Raging Bull” is such a dominant work of cinema and came near the end of so much American art about boxing that it may not have left much room for other art about the sport. (The movie was released in 1980 but didn’t receive much critical adulation until the mid-1980s.)

Of course: Another reason may be boxing’s decline, which can be roughly dated to 1989, the year in which Mike Tyson — boxing’s last American superstar — began his evolution into sideshow. American artists who come after 1989, after Michael Jordan — Newkirk, Thomas, Mark Bradford, Brian Jungen, Paul Pfeiffer and others — have tended to make basketball their primary point-making sport of choice. While the sport in which artists are most interested may have changed, the ways in which artists are interested in athletics haven’t: There aren’t many knockouts in American art and there aren’t many slam dunks, either.

Related: “Hard Targets” started me thinking about boxing in American art and the different ways in which artists have used boxing in their work. From tomorrow through Friday, I’ll feature a key work of American art that addresses/uses boxing.

• This Charles McNulty essay in the LAT is about non-profit theaters, but museum directors inclined toward ho-hum, add-little impressionism shows, King Tut and other unimportant yawners should pay close attention. 
• David Pagel’s LAT account of a Jonathan Lasker show at LA Louver leaves me thinking that y’all must really dig Tom Nozkowski to return this margin on Lasker v. Nozkowski in MAN’s Tourney-ish.
• In the Village Voice, Christian Viveros-Faune is the latest to slam the New Museum.
• Given that Washington is a major arts city full of major arts institutions, it’s amazing how little reporting on art surfaces in the Washington Post. It’s more amazing how bad that reporting can be when it does. Take Jacqueline Trescott’s meh story on Washington arts groups ‘recovering from the recession.’ Included, at the very end, is this nugget: “The Corcoran is trying something new: Making living artists fundraise for their own shows.” Oof. Yeah, I’ll say that’s new. It’s so new that no reputable peer institution of the Corcoran’s would even think about it. Incidentally: Still waiting for that Post blowout on the Corcoran’s fishy real-estate-plus-an-exhibition deal. 
• Better version of the same rubric: Mark Stryker on Detroit arts
  groups in the Free Press. Stryker also pulls out details on the DIA here, including much sad news.
• While we’re on my hometown paper, I was surprised by the Washington Post and Philip Kennicott’s story on a recent documentary on the sad story of the Barnes Foundation, “Art of the Steal.” On one hand, the Post is a paper that will always, always favor the biggest institution in a story, in this case the Pew Charitable Trusts. On the other hand, under the apparent premise of Kennicott’s story — the objective of a non-fiction project should be to tell two sides of a story instead of to reveal the truth — there would be no Paul Krugman, no truth-telling-to-power in journalism. It’s a very Washington-insidery premise: Prioritize telling both sides of a story over revealing the truth. (In this case the documentary film in question tried to include both sides — but one of the sides refused to talk to the documentarian… who then gets slammed for not telling ‘both sides’ of the story. Then, at the end of the story, Kennicott suggests that Pew fact-check a story
  in which Pew is a major player and about which Pew refused to comment
  on camera.) Just as amazing: Author John Anderson and Julian Bond — the civil rights leader as well as the son of the man whose relationship with Albert Barnes created Lincoln University’s relationship with the Barnes Foundation — wrote a letter to the Post about Kennicott’s essay. The paper refused to run it. You can — and should — read it in the jump of this post.
• Jerry Saltz’s next book could be a compilation of his whiplash-inducing takes on one show at the New Museum. Here’s Saltz’s latest on that show. Included is this: “The sheer amount of transgressiveness, at least, brings a bracing real-life quality of grit and truthfulness to the show. It’s also in keeping with the museum’s stated aim, ‘to support new art… not yet familiar to mainstream audiences.’” Uh, no: ‘Skin Fruit’ is a demonstration of the NuMu’s support of a collector-trustee, not art or artists.

(more…)

Yesterday’s voting in The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tourney-ish was fast-and-furious. The NCAA had a double-overtime Close races, big upsets and whodathunk it: You adore Helen Frankenthaler. [At right: Interior Landscape, 1964, SFMOMA.] Here are your quarterfinalists:

• No. 1 Ellsworth Kelly d. No. 17 Ross Bleckner, 74%-26%;
• No. 2 Cy Twombly d. No. 15 Julie Mehretu, 74%-26%;
• No. 3 Robert Ryman d. No. 14 Cecily Brown, 65%-35%;
• No. 13 Terry Winters d. No. 4 Mark Bradford, 54%-46%;
• No.
  12 Brice Marden d. No. 5 Frank Stella, 50.4%-49.6%;
• No. 6 Thomas Nozkowski d. No. 11 Amy Sillman, 58%-42%;
• No. 23 Helen Frankenthaler d. No. 7 Philip Taaffe, 73%-27%;
• No. 9 Mary Heilmann d. No. 8 Christopher Wool, 62%-38%.

Nota bene: If you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, please come say hi at the Amon Carter Museum tonight! I’ll be participating in this program.

Continuing The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tourney-ish
with round two, the round-of-16. Today we’ll cycle through the bottom half
of the bracket. Voting here is open until 9:30am EDT Friday. The top half of the bracket is below; voting there is open until 2pm EDT today. Next up:

No. 2 Cy Twombly vs. No. 15 Julie Mehretu: Twombly brought the world back into American painting in part by leaving the United States for Italy. Mehretu is part of a far-reaching Ethiopian diaspora, was raised in Michigan and now reigns over a small army of studio assistants in Berlin, a globalist child of Twombly.

No. 3 Robert Ryman vs. No. 14 Cecily Brown: Ryman often meticulously emphasizes each and every brushstroke, making sure you notice how singularly each one was laid on. Brown does too, but she’s more interested in suggesting order in chaos than she is in precision.

No. 6 Thomas Nozkowski vs. No. 11 Amy Sillman: Nozkowski is one of those painters that you forget about until you wake up one morning, realize that he’s been cranking out small, wonderful, smart paintings for decades and wonder how you haven’t seen him in museums much. Sillman has become a curatorial darling — and a commercial success — over the last few years because her work smartly mines post-war American abstraction for cues and strategies.

No. 7 Philip Taaffe vs. No. 23 Helen Frankenthaler: Neither
artist is a curatorial darling-of-the-moment. Neither has sniffed a
significant American group paintings show in years. Taaffe revels in natural
history, arcana and pattern, all while somehow resisting
decoration. Meanwhile, Frankenthaler’s chemically-enabled acrylics
were on the vanguard
of color-field
abstraction.
Frankenthaler also turned in the first round’s biggest upset, a 71%-29%
thrashing of No. 10 Mark Grotjahn.
 

Round Two, No. 2 vs. No. 15online surveys

Round Two, No. 3 vs. No. 14answers

Round Two, No. 6 vs. No. 11poll

Round Two, No. 7 vs. No. 23trends

Continuing The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tourney-ish with round two, the round-of-16. Today we’ll cycle through the top half of the bracket. Voting is open until 2pm EDT on Thursday. First up:

No. 1 Ellsworth Kelly  vs. No. 17 Ross Bleckner: Kelly’s paintings are cool, analytical, thoughtful and reductive. Bleckner’s best work tries to reach into us, to make us emote. Sometimes they seem mystical or elegiac, sometimes they aim for a chuckle.

No. 4 Mark Bradford vs. No. 13 Terry Winters: A
systems-painters
showdown. Winters is a painter all-the-way, a late-century meld of Picasso and
Pollock. Bradford may end up being remembered as the
artist of the Bush years, but is he a strong enough painter to
prevail here?

No. 5 Frank Stella vs. No. 12 Brice Marden: The turtle and the
hare. Stella started great
and then his work degenerated into a miasma of mess.
Marden has been steady, reliable, safe, conservative and ultimately unexciting.

No. 8 Christopher Wool vs. No. 9 Mary Heilmann: Wool is an intellectual painter, confident, never shy about thinking his way through a canvas or panel. Heilmann is more of a traditional colorist, a painter who finds ways to make the accumulation of line and color come alive. Her paintings have a little bit of pop song to them.

Round Two, No. 1 vs. No. 17poll

Round Two, No. 4 vs. No. 13online surveys

Round Two, No. 5 vs. No. 12surveys

Round Two, No. 8 vs. No. 9poll

I imagine that the most pointed, targeted epithet with which one athlete can taunt another has remained unchanged for decades. The epithet has its power because it is intended as a challenge to the manhood of the opposing player. (True: Part of its power comes from being accepted as such.) The epithet suggests that in the hyper-masculine sporting sphere, there is nothing, nothing less manly than finding other men attractive.

Of course the supposition of a line of demarcation between masculine and gay is a false construct based on a bigoted stereotype: that gay men, gay sex and a man simply being attractive to another man are not masculine.

It’s the illusion of that allusion that makes “Hard Targets” at the Wexner Center for the Arts a particularly strong group show. About a third of the work in the exhibition is by artists who are actively examining the false dichotomy between masculine and homoerotic. In so doing the artists create not a third sex or sphere, but a fuller, more honest presentation of masculinity than you’ll ever see in men’s magazines or on ESPN. The show is on view through April 11.

The most powerful thread in “Hard Targets” is work engaged in showing boys, men and even artists trying to figure out exactly what ‘masculine’ is. Take Catherine Opie’s intense 2007 picture, Josh (above). It shows a high school football player self-consciously trying to
present himself as manly. Well, maybe that’s not quite right. He’s
really trying to present himself as prototypically manly, not in the Teddy
Roosevelt-boxes-with-Gifford Pinchot way, but in an early-21st-century way, which means… well, what does it mean? Josh brought to mind a passage from “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe’s classic account of the early American space program. NASA wanted its budding astronauts to present themselves as man’s men, so it quietly mandated that the astronauts comport themselves in certain ways. For example, the men willing to risk their lives to see if man could fly in space were allowed to stand with their hands on their hips, but their thumbs should be to the rear and their fingers should face forward. Apparently that was officially manlier than standing with their hands on their hips with their hands balled up into fists, or whatever.

Just as NASA didn’t quite know what was manly and what wasn’t and made up an Official Government Version, Josh wasn’t sure either. Opie’s picture shows Josh apparently unsure if it’s more manly to flex his torso or not, so he’s kind of in the middle of flexing. Or not. He’s looking into Opie’s lens as intensely as possible. Manly men look right at you. That’s either confrontational or, well, a sexual challenge from a young man with an amazing body and a bare midriff. Josh’s jaw-line is carved out of his face. His nose is just busted-up enough to be impossible to resist. Thanks in no small part to a provocatively placed football and the hands that surround it, Josh is one of the sexiest works of art of a man in recent years. If that’s not masculine, what is? (Maybe Rusty (2008, at right), with his long, flowing hair, bracelet and rich eyebrows?)

Artists ask that question again and again in “Hard Targets.” The only artist whose examination approaches Opie’s intensity is Sam Taylor-Wood, represented here by 3 Minute Round (2008), a two-channel, three-minute video featuring boxers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, and David Robert Joseph Beckham (“David”) (2004), a digital video displayed on a plasma screen that shows soccer and pop culture icon ostensibly asleep. Boxers are masculine, right? Even when they sit for an artist wearing the name of a clothing designer around their waist? And a soccer player has to be right, even if he is wearing a gold chain and a diamond earring? All three men are presented as unavoidably sexual. The Klitschko brothers, scarred, sweaty, almost confrontational in their posture and pose, seem like men on the hunt… even though we’re the ones looking at them. Beckham is in that traditional place where Western artists have implied intimacy: Bed. Something about Beckham’s frosted hair is even more sexually confrontational because of the intimacy of Taylor-Wood’s examine-him-all-you-like presentation.

While this is an exhibition about athletes and sport, the artists on view are mostly disinterested in man-on-man physical engagement. (Opie presents football teams lined up before a play, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno follow soccer star Zinedine Zidane through a game in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and Harum Farocki follows a soccer match in a befuddling 2007 12-channel video installation titled Deep Play.) If the artists are trying to reveal something about men, desire,
athletics and athleticism — and many of these artists are — that’s a
smart strategy. The game itself is not erotic or sexual, it’s work,
sometimes a job, always a focused exercise. While boys and men challenge each other’s manhood as a taunt on the field, there’s little doubt that a professional athlete is manly. (That’s why you’ll see men
pat each other on the ass between the white lines — and not in the
locker room, where the definition of masculinity is more open.)

If “Hard Targets” posits an answer, a definition of masculinity, it’s split between one of the show’s first galleries and the show’s final gallery. Early on curator Christopher Bedford presents objects and video from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4. Barney is a baroque performance-obsessive. He’s making objects for
re-sale, like a slick marketer leading scores of MFA students down the
road to narrative confusion. Barney’s Cremaster persona and series, full of preening, over-design and carefully considered over-production, is installed in a dead-end gallery, an argument for a negative definition of masculinity.

The most effective argument against
Barney’s narcissism — and the closest the show comes to positively defining masculinity — is in the exhibition’s final gallery where six of Collier Schorr’s 2002-03 photographs of high school wrestlers are presented. (Above: 152 lbs. (H.T.), 2003). Five of the pictures feature teenage boys either training or posing. The wrestlers are doing what wrestlers do: stretching, working out, standing there in an exhausted haze. There’s no posing, no posturing, no self-conscious presentation as artifice — or anything else. Maybe “masculine” is just comfort.

Previously: Introducing “Hard Targets.” I had planned on posting part three of my take on the show — a look at how artists have looked at sport as a site of social mobility — tomorrow. But I want to extend my look at that through some broader posts, so I’ll save those for next week.