Rauch

You've called your earliest paintings (from 1993) in the Wolfsburg show your first "valid" pictures. How do you judge a painting's "validity?"

Let's go back to that image of the internal compass that I just spoke of: Before 1993 the magnetic needle was swinging all over the place. Discovering my position was complicated, because there were so many artistic points of reference. I was overwhelmed by all of the possibilities coming into my studio from thousands of different directions. My work displayed violent mood swings from abstraction to figuration, and this was just one of the many internal conflicts I faced at the time....

"Validity" comes down to the extent to which the uniqueness of the artist's psyche can establish a permanence of form and meaning in the actual work. Since 1993, I have been able to focus better on sorting out what is most significant for me.

Neo Rauch interview on ArtInfo. Here's a review by Schjeldahl on the show at the MET.

Alexey Titarenko

lens culture has a conversation with Russian photographer -Alexey Titarenko. I'm new to the artist and these are really stunning images. Like a contemporary Etienne Jules Marey mired in the masses of a changing Russia. - more pics at artnet.

great tip by wood s lot

Edward Burtynsky's visions of a hyper-industrialized world.

"A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions … apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" - by Harold Pinter

So I’m taking a moment here from the apocalyptic (well sort of!) to look at this recent interview with Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky. He’s pretty much a household name at this point but if you are by chance unfamiliar you should know that he has been building an incredible body of work over the last 25 years looking at the relationship between humanity and consumer desires as plays out on geologic and maximal scales.

Here is Burtynsky on the quote above:

"Truth is open to a lot of interpretations in the artist's hands. I think, what Pinter is saying is that, as a global citizen you are responsible for asking a question: do I agree with particular politics, do I agree with a direction we are being lead. As a citizen you have to make a decision how you feel about the world, what you think is right. As citizens, it's our responsibility to move out of the domain of creating reflections on humanity into the domain of acting on our beliefs." "As a citizen I do take a pretty strong stand. I do believe that there are serious environmental consequences to what we do and what we don't. There are millions of little things we can do every day. We're making decisions about the kind of cars we drive, how we insulate our houses, how wastefully we use the water and what we do with our old computers. These are real things that make a difference, millions of these decisions done by millions of individuals." - Burtynsky

Christopher Grabowski has some great questions for the artist - here's a few that seem particularly acute for recent postings around the blogosphere.

On why the news media isn't really getting the big story:

"Mainstream news media has a problem with it because they are searching for the breaking story that would sell papers. They're always on the search of headline grabbing material. At the same time, the news media are very top down hierarchal organizations that are not very good at allowing creativity. They are not very good at allowing the people who are on the ground, seeing things first hand, to become a feedback system to back up the organization's pyramid."

On why he decided not to photograph the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

"I've photographed several natural disasters in the past and have decided that it is to close to spot reporting for me. You're in and out very quickly. The thing I was interested in was the slow burn, not the ka-boom, the things and processes that gradually create the world we live in, the processes that we tend to see as normal, as opposed to a tsunami or a hurricane.
"I focus on a world that we're consciously creating. The Three Gorges dam under construction on the Yangtze River looks like a disaster but it was a conscious decision to tear all these cities apart, to relocate 1.5 million people and to build new homes for them beyond the flood area. It was a conscious, industrial transformation of the landscape.
"I don't think it's been adequately covered. As far as I know, I am the only guy who ever went there with a 4x5 camera. In many places up the river, I was the only professional photographer people said they'd seen."

[my post regarding this very topic: Soth, Polidori and Katrina]

On whether photographs reveal or conceal the truth:

"I constantly face questions concerning truth and distortions. As an image-maker I have degrees of control on how I tell my stories. If there is a piece of plywood somewhere in the corner of my frame that catches the sun and burns a hole in my image, I may consider moving the plywood, or if access is difficult, to remove the reflection in the Photoshop. Now, if I take that same image and paste some people into it and introduce some staged narrative without telling anybody about it, that would create a challenge to the traditional trust in the relationship between the image, the creator of the image and the viewer.
"Having said that, photography can be used in various, non-documentary, forms depending on how the author wants to engage the audience. The meaning can be found in making something up completely, a flight of imagination can sometimes have more to do with truth about poverty than, let's say, a straight picture of a street scene."

On simplistic framing of images – and issues:

"I started my work off saying: look these are the complex issues here; there is a definite disconnect between what we consciously do and what the global reality of what we do is.
"To me, if you build your polemics around the point that all corporations are bad, it lacks the necessary complexity, it is just too narrow and almost a caricature of a view. There are some bad corporations and some good corporations. There are some very bad people who work for the corporations but it is also quite easy for some environmentalists to feel self-righteous, to get up on the soapbox without the full grasp of the complexity of the problem.
"My goal is to allow dialogue, not to draw lines and start throwing things at each other again, because this has not gotten us anywhere all these years. It pleases me if my work does something to arouse consciousness, to increase dialog or to influence people to make real personal changes, which is the only thing that makes a difference, as far as I am concerned."

On whether a still image works differently on our consciousness than a documentary film:

"Absolutely, I do believe that a still image fixes in the consciousness in a whole different way than a documentary film does. With a film we are caught up in following the narrative and we don't really pay attention to the images. The still image does fix into the memory, it locks in, it's easier to recall. It has a role in raising consciousness and it does it differently than a documentary film. One might say that film is more compelling because you're more driven to understand the theme but the film doesn't recall the same way in our minds. What I recall from the Vietnam War is not the video footage; it's Eddie Adams' images that stick in my mind."

On whether artists need to be analytical, like anthropologists:

"People who are engaged in art are engaged in a process of thinking beyond the present moment, looking both forward and backward, reflecting on how the human story plays itself out. In a way, art is a research and development department. It shows us new places we can go in terms of thought; it makes us reflect upon our actions, our ethics; it questions our definitions of good and evil.
"I believe that culture is key to a healthy society. So many people are caught so entirely in the process of working and making a living that society needs somebody to put a mirror up, to open up our consciousness to the things that are out of sight, out of mind."

Full interview at the Tyee

image: Edward Burtynsky

via wood s lot

Barney and Danto on Joseph Beuys

I've been sitting on this post awhile and finally willing to delve into it as there has been some excellent discussion on the nature of Christianity recently on various blogs I enjoy (see recent posts).WAY back in September '06 Modern Painters published a pretty damn good (email) discussion between Matthew Barney and Arthur C. Danto on the legacy of Joseph Beuys and by extension its relationship to Barney's recent sculpture. I gotta confess I'm one of those Cremaster viewers that finds himself nodding off within 10 minutes - Tarkovsky they ain't. I know I;'m supposed to gush at over how importantly obtuse they are but I always feel I've been treated to something a bit sophomoric. They do very little for me but this conversation is about Barney's sculpture (which I generally like) which has turned my head and made me appreciate Barney much more as an object maker and thinker. That Beuys should be on people's minds seems very appropriate for 'these times' and I have to wonder if we will see any here in the States. On a recent trip to Berlin it was a great pleasure to see a ton of works by Beuys at the Hamburger Banhoff Museum.


I'll start with this basic observation by Danto:

There is what we might speak of as the world of Beuys. It is like a mythic overlay on our world, and serves as a kind of moral critique...

Barney:

I continue to feel engaged with the problem of making narrative sculpture. Beuys’s oeuvre has one center, whether you consider that center to be Beuys, or if you follow his logic of the sun state. Which sketches his vision of a democratic state of interconnectedness and balance. Somehow that didn’t register for me when I first came across his work. Perhaps its that our current international political and environmental condition that makes one more conscious (and weary) of dominant religious structures. I’m told that the younger generation of German artists is not as interested in Beuys. I’m wondering of models organized with distinct center are less useful to younger people. An artist from Beuys’s generation could align his practice with the more binary philosophies of Hegel or Rudolph Steiner, for example, while an artist from the current generation would naturally gravitate toward something pluralistic, along the lines of Deleuze... my sculpture making system was developed as a tool to navigate through the world, and this tool definitely gives a privileged role to intuition. With this system, I have attempted to create a map of my creative process. This map feels necessary to me. There’s a way in which I fear that I will lose my ability to relocate the fertile point of initiation, the creative impulse that one must always return to, and this fear grows stronger the deeper I delve into any given project. Its narrative is more a proposal, and has an intentionally open-ended structure that invites the audience to complete the story. And as the primary objective of this system is to generate sculpture, the narrative remains abstract – a way to leave space for more specific distillation in the form of sculpture. I believe these ideas are sympathetic with those of Beuys.

Danto:

For one thing, it would have never occurred to me that he was projecting a Christian structure. I always thought this message was religious in a diffuse and rather anti-denominational way. He seemed a kind of Druidic presence: ritualistic, shamanistic, primitivistic. Bueys wanted to undo all the technology that separated us from nature. His central thought was healing. He wanted to repeal Modernity, fraternize with animals, live by means of plants, and converse with birds. If he is Christian, he is like St. Francis. I think you and Bueys have a philosophy of salvation in common – overcoming gender boundaries, the human – animal boundaries. I agree that your sculpture making system gives a privileged role to intuition. I wonder whether Beuys would not have said something like that. He would not have used the word ‘system’, I would guess. But he would also not have feared that he would lose the ability to reconnect with his creative impulse. I think that is because he did not think of himself as making art in the first place. He thought he was doing something more important than art. In that way he was practicing a religion of healing, if you believe him, or just believe in him. I am struck by the difference, as I understand it, between sculpture as you think of it, where it is definitely art; and social sculpture, the organization of human beings into an ideal political community, of the kind Faust aspired to establish in the second part of Goethe’s masterpiece.

Barney:

Beuys remains a cornerstone of my faith that art can provide useful models and tools for understanding the world, and that these models eventually proliferate into the broader culture and become functional in the collective consciousness. I wouldn’t argue that all art does this, or should do this, but only that it is possible. That said, I’m disappointed Bueys is not so present in the minds of the younger German generation, as this seems like a natural time to reconsider him, given our current ecological and political condition...I guess I think of Beuy’s body as being at the center of his practice. For this reason, I feel like I haven’t had a primary experience with his work, only secondary experiences with the sculpture and documentation of his actions. I accepted that Beuy’s body was a transformer, a conductor, and a transmitter. But this brings me back to the question about a Christian model. If this belief system is about healing and redemption, and if everything must pass through this central body, or transformer, it starts to suggest a Christian character, or at least a Christian structure. Perhaps I’m being too simplistic about this. Again, if this is true, I’m not condemning the work for it, but only wondering if it might suggest a reading that makes the younger generation uneasy.

Danto:
I guess I can see what you mean by Beuy’s body. It was typically present in the work, either when Buey’s was a performer, or when the work referred to Beuys as a physical presence – wounded for example, or teaching while surrounded by blackboards. So his body was transformative. Something passes through it, and that, to you, suggests the analogy of Christ, and ultimately to a Christian relationship between his message and his auditors. That has to be underwritten by his suffering, as Christ’s suffering is the means to our redemption....Maybe the young generation of artists disaffected with Beuys has something to do with the way Beuys made the war so central to his personal myth. I believe, like you, that healing the knife belongs to a much wider vision than its use as a weapon – a vision in which the means and the subject of sacrifice belong to a larger whole. I think the first generation of students were put off by his persistence in art making. German art students in my experience are pretty career oriented. Maybe Beuys was too idealistic to be a model!

Images Modern Painters; Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys

Walton Ford

Some of my contemporaries are just interested in talking about fashion or pornography. You have an American Apparel-style theory of making art, and I couldn’t be more bored with that. But that seems to be all that some painters seem to be interested in now.

And I think, “God, you know, look at what’s happening in the world. Is that your preoccupation: Celebrity, glamour and pornography? Is that really what we’re going to go down in flames celebrating?” - Walton Ford

Finally I see something about a show I've been wanting to post about! The Walton Ford interview at Artinfo is a decent intro into one of the most intelligent artists working right now. I was very much impressed and challenged by his current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

For all the blagghing about Ron Mueck, this exhibit seems to have been overlooked - its superior to Mueck's I think. Why? Because it's really about something urgent - not that Mueck's show isn't good because it is - but Ford is on to some major topics (human culture/natural history) without being topical. Stylistically he has embarked on an incredible tightrope -he's pushing a very familiar (cliche) form of drawing into a conceptual and political arena without relying on tiresome irony. How these do not become political cartoons is stunning. The poetic dimension achieved here is far too often missing in works that aim for political coverage or toy with allegory. Quite simply, there is a hell of a lot payoff for the viewer!

Marlene Dumas

Why do you think art magazines do that?

They do it because they don’t care about painting. Most people in the art scene have no sense of what a painting is. That’s why art magazines have such terrible layouts, because they look at a painting as if it is a photograph, and it becomes a photograph in the reproduction. They can’t say they understand anything about painting. - Marlene Dumas

Not sure if anyone caught the Marlene Dumas interview on ArtInfo a couple of weeks back but it ha some tasty bits on being a painter and the frustrations she has with the art media as an artist. Dumas has taken over for Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union and for my money one the greatest living painters. She's one of only a few painters that make me feel actual jealousy when veiwing particular works. Funny how she gets no play here in the States?? ...a travesty really.

Dumas on Teaching:

I see teaching as a very important thing, and not only because I teach them things, but also because we have a dialogue, and you see what you really want. You find things out. I still believe in the Socratic dialogue. Art is really something that you learn from being around people. My own experience in South Africa was that the art school was part of the university, so I learned such a lot in general, not just about painting. I am from a generation that seems to want to copyright their inventions, but I am not one of those artists who think they invented everything. You are part of a tradition. It’s the same as when people write books—they have read other books that they relate to. Painting is part of a visual tradition. The worst kind of artist is one who thinks they’re so wonderful because they don’t understand that there have been all these wonderful things done already, and that you exist in relation to that. Just because an artist from the past is dead doesn’t mean the work is dead. Art is something that relates you to the past, and hopefully to the present as well.

check the interview.


image: The Painter - Marlene Dumas

Wicked Games

"When the 1960’s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man was I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?"
- Phillip Guston, 1974. (something we should all be considering)

Seemingly out of left field comes some figurative art that is addressing the more sinister brutalities of today - Abu Ghraib by Botero. Yes, Botero. I confess, I associate Botero with art collectors who spend as much on their fumador and wine collections as their contemporary art collections. Yet here the Colombian born artist is addressing atrocities and pulling it off (I think) like Leon Golub. They have an intensity reminescient of Bacon and perhaps a little of Masaccio. I'm still digesting these and I'm sure scale (these are huge) plays a major part for these works. A visit to Marlboro may be necessary.

Botero has addressed violence in the past regarding the upheavals of Colombia so in some ways this isn't new territory for the artist but certainly for viewers less familiar with his engagements in Colombia - such as myself. It is worth noting that these works have been traveling throughout Europe but NO U.S. institution has agreed to show the paintings! That silence speaks volumes - you fill in the gaps.

My initial response (beyond historical and journalistic) was to compare this work to Jenny Holzer's last show at Cheim & Reid which focused on Gitmo. I was flinching abit as I was hoping that this was not some effort at relavancy through platform political/human rights subject matter. I detest profiteering like that in the artworld or Hollywood for that matter. I was relieved to read this:

Botero:

They are going to be donated to a museum eventually, I don’t know where. I’m not new to the principle of donating. I donated 200 of my paintings to Colombia, and I donated a whole series of paintings based upon the war in Colombia to the National Museum there. But I will donate these because I don’t feel like doing business based upon somebody else’s pain. That’s not my thing.

I have no proof to the otherwise, but I'm wondering if the Cheim & Reid show was strictly for profit on the shoulders of others agony. I'm not doubting the content but wonder about the back room business ethics surrounding politically senstitive works. It is a very sticky line to walk. Despite no US venue to have a discussion on America's role in torture, these Botero works will at least be part of the public record somewhere long after the journalistic images go into hiding.

Here is the complete ART INFO Interview:

Polidori and Katrina

As Katrina has been on my mind alot for the last year and obviously this week, it was not such a surprise to learn that Robert Polidori has a new series of New Orleans centered on the disaster. The pictures are due for exhibition this fall at the MET. There is a short interview with the photographer at Art:INFO. Several knockout thumbnails are included of homes decomposing in the aftermath of the storm throughout this past year. They are beautiful, horrifying and fascinating works. Poverty and decay seem to have a way of preserving the strangness of the "past". Polidori has some interesting insights into artmaking and photography.

Here's a sample of the interview:

Something that has always struck me about the high level of detail that you’re talking about in your work is that it allows you to make your pictures more telling in psychological terms.

Yes, I think so. When images are soft, they just remain evocative, or in your imagination. You get a mood, and it remains on the emotional level. The viewer has to put more of him or herself into it. When there is more detail, it’s like that old expression: There’s no fiction stranger than reality. Reality will compose the most extreme paradoxes and contradictions and adjacencies, which can’t be understood.

So detail gives you more mental work to do. There are more things to look at, which suggest more and more questions. All that mood is still there anyway, so it’s like the double-punch effect. It’s a question of keeping the mind occupied while the emotions are being silently manipulated on the back burner. I just think it makes for a richer experience. And it has the added value of being a more accurate historical record. So you have something for everybody.

And how does that relate to the pictorial sophistication of your images?

I’m not one of these artists who’s making art about the processes or the rules of art-making. I’m not interested in that. I think that that’s been gone through, and I think that it’s one dimensional. It’s not about art-making. However, there are aesthetic principals there, pictorially speaking. The grammar of my pictorialism comes from pre-Renaissance and Renaissance perspective, because all of that stuff is built into modern lenses. So that is assumed in the technology that I use.

What would you say was your basic reason for taking photographs?

I don’t take photographs because I love doing it (though I don’t hate it). Some photographers are in love with the process of taking a picture. Psychologically, I’m more interested in the situations that taking the picture puts me through, and what it forces me to witness. I really do it because I want that picture. It’s like I’m collecting evidence, like a detective looking to solve a case. I don’t mean that literally, but I use it as a simile. It’s a thing about phenomena and asking questions. And answering some, but not answering all of them.

Yes, I see that. It’s like you were saying earlier about reality’s paradoxes. It seems to me that this is what makes these New Orleans pictures so poignant. Each image presents the evidence of someone’s neat and ordered life that’s just been turned upside down.

Yes, it’s imploded. I’m interested in interiors, and I have been for a long time, simply because they’re indices of individuals’ personal values. They tell you a lot about the individual. Like I’ve said before, to me interiors are both metaphors and catalysts for states of being. You can take a portrait of somebody, and you might have a feeling looking at their face, but you know less things about them by looking at their face than you do when you look at the way that they compose their own interior space. What interests me are their values.

image: Robert Polidori