Photo: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art
propose that Lawrence Weiner’s retrospective entitled ‘AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE’, currently at the Whitney Museum and traveling to MOCA Los Angeles, will undoubtedly mean different things to different people. Co-curated by Donna De Salvo and Ann Goldstein, it has been applauded for being overdue, which it is, and cautioned for its over-crowding on one floor of the Whitney, which it is. That being said, the show feels unexpectedly heroic in these giddy, bloated times. Who knew?
Weiner is a materialist, who pushes around displays of language as a preface to (maybe) pushing around the materials themselves. He is not a Fluxus-mystic, visual poet, or idea artist. The appearance of his art – words, color, and some symbols, is comprehensible and carries an immediate recognition factor. Acceptance of his practice (and Weiner was the first artist I ever was aware of who referred to himself as a ‘practitioner’ in an interview with Willoughby Sharp, Avalanche, Spring ’72) remains controversial to those audience members who require the comforting presence of the physical, or handmade art object . And those are many.
Born in 1942 and on the road until the early 60’s, Weiner, a public school educated New Yorker, appeared less interested in Pop Art, and more in the party-crashing systemic reasoning that led out of Frank Stella’s ‘black’ paintings. I suspect that Weiner, whose first documented work was of a planned explosion (1960), had a penchant for ‘removing’ (Stella’s canvases notched corners and absent centers) than for ‘adding’ (beatnik/pop assemblage). Increasingly dubious with filling in shapes on canvas, the artist formed a militant indifference to the presentation of his art. In a group of paintings from 1965, shown at the Whitney for the first time together (at least for me), Weiner shifted responsibility for the paintings scale, shape, and color to whoever commissioned/purchased a work. The pieces themselves are not startling and look of their time, like ‘do-it-yourself’ versions of Robert Mangold’s later paintings. By 1968, Weiner dispenses altogether with the making of things, intersecting with Andy Warhol’s own ambivalence, feigned or otherwise, in his decision-making process. Weiner appreciated Warhol; both artists were socially ubiquitous and both cast attractive members of their milieu in their films.
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t first look, onestar’s French-sized LARGE IMAGES (exactly the standard format of French billboards) invert the intimate, private space of the books: these digital images created by onestar’s artists have been scaled up for the “grand public.” We’ll bet you can’t fit one in your apartment or loft, no matter how much space you have! Another obvious way that onestar’s LARGE IMAGES differ from the books is that they are in color (the colors are sublime). But aside from the dramatic shifts in scale and chromaticity, these works adhere to onestar’s core principles: strictly unedited by the publisher, identical format for everyone, and each individual work becomes part of a collection. No work exists except in relation to others of its kind. Artists generally like the vertiginous feeling of an “Alice in Wonderland” change in perspective – onestar offers us this experience without perverting its principles. The distortion is all yours. (Follow the links under each Large Image to acquire the works from Multiples By Artists).
Just when you thought painting was dead again (yawn), here’s JOSH SMITH to change your mind and make you sit up straight. Remember he lives and works in NYC, a place where “bad” often means “good,” i.e., “Damn, dude, that is a BAAAADDD painting.” Cunning linguists will note that “ass” is often appended to “bad” (when it means “good”) as an enhancer: “Your girlfriend is bad-ass, man!” At any rate, Josh is one badass painter, and we look forward to seeing what he has up his smock sleeves in the years ahead.
The her & him American-Cuban art team Allora & Calzadilla (that’s Jennifer & Guillermo) live and work in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island that Roosevelt made a protectorate of the U.S. in exchange for voting Democratic. Puerto Rico got welfare, Roosevelt got re-elected president. Puerto Rican independence was a political hot topic in NYC in the 80s, but then it disappeared. Allora & Calzadilla are bringing this complicated, beautiful island and it’s politics back onto our radar screens. Our duo asked the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas to select this LARGE IMAGE from their archives; “Bieké” is the Vieques language, and not speaking it is a kind of death. The image also subtly reminds us that the U.S. Navy for many years used the smaller offshore island of Vieques (snorkeling is excellent) as their private testing ground for some very dicey bombs (radioactive depleted uranium shells), and the cancer rates today reflect that.
CHLOE PIENE loves flirting with dark forces, and her LARGE IMAGE is a photograph of a tattoo worn by a prisoner in Ohio with whom she conversed by phone (her onestar book is a partial transcript of this conversation). Someone should write about the fascination that prisoners hold for the free – Truman Capote felt it deeply, as did Norman Mailer (with famously disastrous results). How far Chloe will go remains a mystery; in her notorious self-portrait of her body surfing at a heavy metal concert she arranged in Brooklyn, N.Y., she is a kind of saintly presence floating over this Goth underworld.
John Armleder’s the most elegant art guru around, and good luck keeping up with him. Don’t be fooled by his birth date. Got an idea? He had it yesterday. Remember Fluxus? John was there from the start. Heard of Ecart, the exhibition/performance space in Geneva? He founded it. Neo-Geo art/furniture morphs? You guessed it. Where would artists like Tobias Rehberger be without John? His onestar pieces (books and multiples) always reuse the onestar collection in some way, reflecting us all in the mirror of his sensibility. Here he takes art stars we are (or would be) literally, offering us all a vision of celestial power we can groove to. State of grace, ommmmmmmmmmm, Dude.
Everyone knows CHRISTOPHE BOUTIN is an artist/filmmaker/editor, but how many of you know he began life as a bluegrass musician and then as a punk rocker who made three albums with CBS in the late 1970s? This image is a still from his recent movie project with cinematographer Garret Linn with the help of Chris Hoover and Mélanie Scarciglia in West Virginia, where he revisited his musical roots by filming the bluegrass group Ernie Thacker Route 23. This is deep Amerika, far from coastal frivolities east& west. Christophe has caught an intimate moment between bluegrass musician Matthew Thacker and his girlfriend Jen, C. Boutin enlarged it for public viewing.
Pierre Bismuth is the first French artist to win an Oscar (in 2005 for “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), and he’s still in the movies! His LARGE IMAGE is part of a series of abstract drawings where he places a screen in front of a video and traces with a felt pen the movements of a hand of an actress or actor. He’s done Gene Tierney in “Laura,” for example, and here we have Marilyn Monroe righthand in “The Misfits.” Fasten your conceptual seat belt when Pierre’s around; the action doesn’t get any better than this.
Lawrence Weiner is an old friend at onestar press (there are still a few, but not many, of his amazing multiples from 2004 left). Here he fills the LARGE IMAGE format with a practiced master’s hand: Lawrence has been working in outsized formats since before some of you were born. He’s one of the guys who put a little retinal juice back in conceptual art in the early days, presiding over a very public ménage à trois consisting of concrete poetry, minimalism & color field painting. Or something like that. At any rate, who can count all the artists who owe part of their vision (not to mention their living) to this legend in his own time? thanks.
Diego Perrone is an earthy guy with deep roots in Italy. He’s great at juxtaposing people/places/animals/objects in ways that bring out inherent aesthetic/conceptual qualities. His projects sometimes have a sly, humorous twist to them, like his Pensatori di buchi (The Thinkers of Holes, 2002), where just the name gets our attention. For this project Diego and his father spent a couple of month digging holes on their property and then the artist photographed local guys, both naked and clothed, around them. His LARGE IMAGE is a self-portrait of him as a teenager with a pig. And aren’t all teenage boys pigs? But what makes this our kind of art is that the focus is on the pig and not Diego.
