A Playground for the Soul: Lost in Ann Hamilton’s World

The readers at Ann Hamilton’s “the event of a thread” (All photos by Jason Andrew unless otherwise noted)

For those craving a bit of the ephemeral this holiday season, artist Ann Hamilton has hung 42 swings from the wrought-iron trusses at the Park Avenue Armory as part of a new installation the artist titles “the event of a thread.”

Recognized for her visceral, temporal, and intricately crafted works, Hamilton is internationally known for her large-scale, multimedia installations. The title for Hamilton’s work at the Armory is borrowed from that great modern Arachne, Anni Albers, who reflected that all weaving traces back to “the event of a thread.” True to form, Hamilton expands upon a single, simple idea, weaving ropes and pulleys into a grand, kinetic, inspired, multi-layered experience.

At its core, the installation features two fields of suspended swings connected via ropes and pulleys to each other and to a massive white curtain that bisects the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Each swing has its counterpart on the other side and it is the visitor’s momentum on the swing that activates a rolling undulation of the curtain. The resultant movement brought on by one swing is enhanced when another visitor engages the corresponding swing on the opposite side. The movement of the curtain alone is mesmerizing and the beauty is that the curtain remains in a continual state of flux set in motion by the interaction of visitors.

“I can remember the feeling of swinging,” Hamilton states in a release about the installation, “how hard we would work for those split seconds […] when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised off the seat. We were sailing, so inside the motion — time stopped — and then suddenly rushed again toward us. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the sky, alone together.”

Completing the installation is a succession of “attendants.” The first, two at a time, wear wool capes and read aloud at an enormous table near the drill hall’s entrance. Reading from a long scroll of text, their voices are broadcast by way of radio receivers packaged in brown paper bags and tied up with twine. The floor is scattered with these bags and visitors are able to carry the voices around with them.

During opening night, a young boy came running through the space yelling, “Look Mom! It’s my sack lunch.” Not just any sack lunch, though: This one spouts historic texts by philosophers (Aristotle, Johann Gottfried Herder, Giambattista Vico), naturalists (Charles Darwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson), an explorer (Captain William Dampier), as well as contemporary authors Susan Stewart and Lewis Hyde. Continuing the theme of transmission, there are 42 homing pigeons housed in cages surrounding the readers’ table.

Jackson Pollock and John Cage: An American Odd Couple

Jackson Pollock and John Cage

Jackson Pollock and John Cage are legends in American history. In the centennial year of both artists’ births, two exhibitions now on view in New York celebrate their work and underline the fact that even after their deaths, their influence continues to play an important role in how we understand, interpret, and even make art today.

Jackson Pollock: A Centennial Exhibition at the Jason McCoy Gallery presents a selection of significant loans including paintings, works on paper, and objects by Pollock, ranging 1930 to the early 1950s. John Cage: The Sight of Silence at the National Academy Museum showcases sixty pieces, mostly watercolors,, created by Cage in the 1980s and 1990s, and also includes musical scores accompanied by recordings of his music, photographs, and videos of the revolutionary composer.

Pollock and Cage were aesthetic extremes of each other. Pollock sought to make paintings that were entirely an expression of his manic inner ego, whereas Cage fought to remove himself completely from the decision-making process involved in art. And yet, Pollock and Cage did have one thing in common. They shared a common adversary: hundreds of years of European history, theory, and dominance in the arts. So while Pollock fought to break from Braque, Cage battled to break from Beethoven.

Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists attempted to strike an emotional cord through grand gestures that reflected the subconscious mind. According to Caroline A. Jones in an article in Critical Inquiry, the movement became a celebration of the “masculine solitary whose staunchly heterosexual libido drove his brush,” with Pollock as the “quintessential hero of this powerful mythos.” Pollock and the New York painters argued from an existentialist platform, “[declaring] their independence from all institutionalized concepts of the artist’s role in society,” writes Dore Ashton in the book New York School. They placed an importance on the individual over all else.  “Painting is self-discovery,” Pollock once said. “Every good artist paints what he is.”

The Brucennial Defends Nothing, Represents Everything

A general view of the Brucennial (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

Since it’s founding in 2001, The Bruce High Quality Foundation has been using performance and pranks to critique the art world. The collective prides itself on “developing amateur solutions to professional challenges.” I’ve admired their irony, even envied their sense of anarchy.

In 2010 BHQF brought us the Brucennial. Organized by the then 23-year-old Vito Schnabel, the son of the artist Julian Schnabel. The show opened the same night as the reputable Whitney’s uptown Biennial, and I was one in the crowd that packed the space on West Broadway (which was provided to the artists courtesy of art collector Aby Rosen). I was also one of the many who after a few beers, and joining in on the ‘fuck you,’ tore up my ticket to the Whitney and spent the cab money I we saved on pizza at Two Boots.

According to the news release for the 2010 show, “420 artists from 911 countries” were shown and it added that the artist were “working in 666 disciplines to reclaim education as part of the artists’ ongoing practice beyond the principals of any one institution or experience.”

Tonight the Brucennial returned for its second edition. I hustled into the show at 5pm to avoid the lines (which went around the block in 2010). I was met with the expected paintings stacked floor to ceiling, sculpture loading up floor, Tina Turner playing on the speaker (I actually didn’t expect that!) and beer in bins.

As anticipated, it’s an enormous show. The big names like George Condo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman,and Richard Price stand out. They’re squeezed between the hundreds of no-name (there isn’t a label in sight) under-employed, under-recognized artists, gallery interns and Sotheby’s art handlers. It’s a massive show. An incredible undertaking. Absolute in its inclusiveness. It about the passion. The real. Hunting for quality just seems so uncouth among a crowd where everyone was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. The Brucennial defends nothing.

The End of the Legacy: Merce Cunningham’s Final Performances Begin Tonight

“Antic Meet” (1958) with décor and costume by Robert Rauschenberg. (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Written jointly by Jason Andrew and Julia K. Gleich

With a final series of performances beginning tonight and continuing through New Year’s Eve at the Park Avenue Armory, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will close, ending nearly sixty years in operation.

First formed at Black Mountain College in 1953, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has changed the world of dance, not only through the development of a unique dance technique, but also in its embrace of cross-disciplinary collaboration with musicians and artists. Cunningham’s dances certainly stand alone in their use of space, time and the human form, but the experience of his choreography is magnified through his collaborators.

Cunningham’s most famous collaboration was with his life partner the composer/philosopher John Cage. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. One of the most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded can occur in the same time and space but can be created independently of one another.

“This continued to play out over six decades of Merce’s creative lifetime including a variety of other types of artists other than composers including visual artists, digital media artists, filmmakers, dancers, costume designers, and lighting designers,” remarked Trevor Carlson, Executive Director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, at a panel hosted at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on Thursday, December 8. The panel invited four of the Company’s recent collaborators to discuss their work with Merce Cunningham: Daniel Arsham (set design), Gavin Bryars (composer), Paul Kaiser (designer), and Patricia Lent (dancer).

The sculptor Isamu Noguchi was among the earliest artists to team up with Cunningham and Cage, designing sets and costumes for Cunningham’s “The Season’s,” which was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein for his Ballet Society in 1947. And when it was officially founded in the summer of 1953 at Black Mountain College, collaboration had become a vital signature of the company.

Pharma-Cultural Landscapes

A view of the performance in Storefront from Kenmare Street (image courtesy Storefront)

During a brief two-week run, Storefront for Art and Architecture was transformed into a laboratory by the creative team of Harrison Atelier (HAt) in their latest iteration of dance-installation titled Pharmacophore: Architectural Placebo.

Conceived, dramaturged, directed and designed by the husband and wife team of Seth Harrison and Ariane Lourie Harrison the project explores “the cultural and philosophical economy that surrounds medicine, technology, and the human prospect.” Quite a heady agenda.

Architectural Placebo is the third installment in HAt’s Pharmacophore series of design-dance hybrids. HAt developed two prior versions: a ten-minute performance at Storefront in December 2010 with dance team Catherine Miller and James McGinn; and a full length performance at the Orpheus Theater in August 2011. For this iteration HAt collaborated with dancer/choreographer Silas Riener, who currently dances for Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Bringing such lofty scientific terms and advanced terminology into a project certainly carries the risk of alienating an audience unaccustomed to such things. Pharmacophore is certainly unique in concept, but audiences don’t have to know much about the science of pharmacology or macrobiotics to appreciate this. The project is exceptionally designed and presented. And I’m sure that having a couple of dancers from the Cunningham company involved doesn’t hurt.

Architectural Placebo incorporates nearly every inch of the uniquely triangular ground-level space on Kenmare Street. It is perfectly suited for the complexities of HAt’s collaboration. Dancers Rashaun Mitchell, Jamie Scott and Melissa Toogood join Silas Riener and cellist Loren Dempster offers live accompaniment and original score.

Looking at 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach Through the Prism of One Influential Painter

Chaim Soutine, “Le faison au chou” (1926/27), oil on canvas at Galerie Thomas. (photo by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

MIAMI — Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was somewhat of a super star to the Abstract Expressionists. His retrospective in 1950 at the Museum of Modern Art all but gave the artists of the New York School a license to practice. Jack Tworkov, whose Art News article reviewing the show, spoke of “[Soutine’s] completely impulsive use of pigment as a material, generally thick, slow-flowing and viscous, with a sensual attitude toward it, as if it were the primordial material, with deep and vibratory color.” Richard Armstrong called Tworkov’s review “one of the earliest attempts to characterize the emerging expressionism of the New York painter in light of other twentieth-century painting.”

Soutine’s expressionistic quality and gestural swirl of paint on canvas seem to celebrate the sheer physicality of the world and beyond. A viewer of Soutine’s work exclaimed that painter virtually threw dozens of paint brushes loaded with vivid color at the canvas, “flinging them like poisonous butterflies.”

With Soutine in mind, and the world’s best galleries around me, I culled a few great works by mostly American artists from the 1950s that have Soutine in mind. There is still a healthy market of top notch works on the market.

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.

“Generating, analysing, and organizing movement using the mathematical concepts of vectors” in The Dynamic Body in Space

Excerpt:

Dance can be seen as simple combinations of directed energy. This applies to motion as well as apparent stillness. Directed energy could be a pathway or line of direction with a length or magnitude, a vector. A vector is a mathematical concept, usually represented by a line with an arrow at one end. In its simplest geometric sense, a vector has only direction and magnitude (length).

Vectors allow the possibility to strip dance down to its essential properties in similar ways to Laban's development of Space Harmony and more. "One of the things that gives mathematics its power is the shedding of attributes that turn out to be nonessential. .. " (Hoffmann 1966 p. 10) In developing this research integrating mathematics, kinesiology, physics and dance, there are implications for pedagogic practice as well as analysis and choreographic invention.

Preston-Dunlop, Valerie, and Lesley-Anne Sayers, eds. The Dynamic Body in Space: Exploring and Developing Rudolf Laban's Ideas for the 21st Century. Alton, Hampshire: Dance Books, 2010.

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.

Reports from Around the World. Not Just Any Body & Soul, The Hague

“Reports from Around the World.” Not Just Any Body & Soul, The Hague, IADMS Newsletter Vol. 11 No. 2. Spring 2004.

“Exorcising Ghosts of Dance” in Healthier Dancer Magazine

“Exorcising Ghosts of Dance.” DanceUK Healthier Dancer Magazine. Spring 2004.

“Ode to Alexander Bennett” in Ballet Review

“Ode to Alexander Bennett” Ballet Review. Winter 2002.