Who Do Benefit Auctions Really Benefit?

Original artwork by Jason Andrew for Hyperallergic

America has finally woken up to discover that the free life they thought they were living is really governed by a system. A system designed at first glance to be “for the people, by the people.” But in recent years we’ve all realized that this is furthest from the truth. Facets of the system are under scrutiny. So in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement, perhaps it’s time for artists to rewrite the rules of the game.

Not so long ago, William Powhida, that maverick satirist, finished a drawing/board game titled “The Game.” It’s a brilliant satire imitating the race made by most of today’s artists to not only remain relevant, but also make history.

To accompany “The Game,” which was published in the September 2010 edition of The Brooklyn Rail, Powhida wrote:

“The goal of the game is relatively simple, get your work into the Met and make history. You need to follow a path through the art world from an MFA program towards recognition, representation and museum exhibitions while picking up some supporters along the way who will help propel you into history. Like the real art world, whether you’re in or out is largely out of your control.”

Today’s art world talent remains transfixed by the rules of Powhida’s game (“Roll snake eyes and you’re in the Whitney Biennial!”). Having a work enter the collection of a major Manhattan museum is a golden day for any artist, and the relevance of having one’s work white gloved either into a fancy gallery in Chelsea or a museum on the Upper East Side should not be dismissed — but at what cost?

In today’s economy artist are forced to play the game whether they like it or not. The art world is polarized. There are those who are revered and those who pander for respect. Those who play by the rules and those who resist and remain outsiders. Artists have forgotten that they are the ones that control this game. There are many that make the rules, but why do artists follow them? Artists forget that they control the speed with which the art world moves. How long will they continue to fuel this machine?

One annoying aspect of the system that has gotten out of hand is the fundraising model whereby artist are asked to donate their work for auction. It’s a proven fundraising model, but does it take advantage of the artist? Is there a right way to do this?

Artists donating art to support important causes are nothing new. There was a time when Martha Jackson Gallery (open from 1952-1969) hosted an exhibition and sale to support the nonviolent, interracial program of the Congress of Racial Equality in May of 1963. Over 100 American artists participated in the exhibition. James Baldwin and Jackie Robinson were among the tightly assembled benefit committee.

An Education Over Coffee: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy

Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 featuring, among other works, Kenneth Snelson's Easter Monday, 1977, foreground, and Jack Tworkov's Day Break, 1953, to left

Originally published by ArtCritical
Contributed by Jason Andrew

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.

For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.

Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the Black Mountain College Bulletin, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite tapestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.

Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, Composure and his Homage to the Square (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.

Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting V.V. (1949), and Soft Touch (1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.

Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled Black Mountain Number 6 (1948).

The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting Asheville.

Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her Gradient and Field (1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.

Tworkov’s first comprehensive NYC survey opens this week

Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio. Photo by © Arnold Newman, for an article written by Robert Hatch, “At The Tip Of Cape Cod,” July 1961 issue of Horizon.Via the Provincetown Artist Registry.

The UBS Art Gallery presents New York City’s first comprehensive survey of the work of American painter Jack Tworkov (1900-1982). “Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes – Five Decades of Painting” reflects the artist’s transitions and evolutions over his five-decade career. A founding member of the New York School, Jack Tworkov is regarded as one of its defining figures, along with Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, whose gestural paintings and dramatic strokes defined the Abstract Expressionist movement in America. “Against Extremes” will feature 26 paintings and related drawings, including many rarely seen works from the artist’s estate. Highlights range from the artist’s Social Realist paintings and drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, to major Abstract Expressionist canvases of the 1950s and 1960s, and finally to the geometrically inspired paintings of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Ford + Biala: A Fateful Meeting

Originally published by ProQuest
Contributed by Jason Andrew

There must be young men and women, of genius even, who are unsuited to gain their early living at normal occupations, or whose feelings will not let them do so. For these New York is the best place in America... but it is not a good place because it does not arrange itself to suit their necessities. Until it does so it must be content to see such young men and women drift... into expatriation. For them there is... Paris.

Ford Madox Ford, New York is Not America1

When the young American painter, Janice Biala, met the great English novelist Ford Madox Ford, she was twenty-six and he was fifty-seven. They met in Paris on May Day, 1930, at one of Ford's regular Thursday afternoon salons. She had arrived from New York just five days prior, travelling at the invitation of her best friend Eileen Lake, an aspiring poet.

Lured to the gathering at Ford's with the promise of meeting Ezra Pound, whom she much admired, Biala instead found herself alongside Ford, the incorrigible romancer. Ford, legendary and proud, perched himself on the edge of the long divan, and in the dim light the pair 'seem to be alone...' recalled Ford in his collection of poems dedicated to Biala.2 Their meeting was the kind of spontaneous fiction for which Ford was famous - the principal character being himself.

Biala hoped that France would offer a new life she so desperately desired. She had a massive fascination with France. As a child she collected 'as many books as one could find on the subject'. These well-worn novels and picture books, tucked secretly under her bed, fed her already excessive imagination. She would later tell French art critic René Barotte that it was because of Porthos that she became an artist.3 The Three Musketeers was her favourite.