August 2008

The Guggenheim has an exhibit up now devoted to conservationist efforts to keep Ad Reinhardt paintings smooth and black for all eternity. It is more than a little nuts. A wall placard explains that in life Reinhardt was a teacher and therefore above the crude economics of buying and selling paintings. His abstractions aspired to spiritual and physical purity and the placard actually uses the pre-postmodern word "timeless." The rest of the exhibit shows how state of the art science is used to analyze the paint and varnish layers so they can be repaired to a state of perpetual newness (e.g., using laser-induced spectroscopy "to burn off submicron layers").

All this technology and research costs oodles of money and not surprisingly, that's what the paintings are now worth. There is something more than a bit decadent about the process of creating art that is almost impossible to keep free of scuffs and scratches and then doing whatever is necessary to keep it on life support. The exhibit, full of diagrams, photo blowups, and actual cut up "test paintings" fascinates in the degree to which it reveals an industry of extreme neurosis.

Finally caught up with "Action/Abstraction" at the Jewish Museum. A mostly well known group of abstract artists' work organized within a Harold Rosenberg vs Clement Greenberg frame. Unfortunately there's really no comparing the two critics. As I noted at Paddy's:

Rosenberg doesn’t have much of a reputation outside the art world, and his writing and theory is not as cogent as Greenberg’s. Rosenberg's "American Action Painters" essay is pretty much of a crock–-the artist as existential hero, but who must also be "serious" [i.e., not a mystic], gimme a break. Whereas Harvard modernism scholar Daniel Albright (a cross-disciplinary thinker) recently said of Greenberg’s "Towards a Newer Laocoon," which argues for separating media into areas of competence (or honesty, as Greenberg phrased it at that time): "in this essay Greenberg presents the finest statement I know of Modernist aesthetic purism."

Paired video loops of the two critics at the Jewish Museum tell the story. Greenberg talks about art after Cezanne being in some way responsive to or influenced by the rectangle that surrounds it, whereas Pollock worked on the floor to avoid this ingrained rhetorical limit. Rosenberg says nonsense along the lines of "Someone in England asked if you could have a slow action painting. I said that action painting can take an artist's entire life."

The intelligent theorizing of the former and the empty bloviating of the latter can be seen in quote after paired quote throughout the exhibit. A large chunk of the art world defined itself in opposition to Greenberg but that's because he offered something to oppose.

We're discussing the mural Jackson Pollock did for Peggy Guggenheim's home at Paddy Johnson's. An anonymous commenter from Iowa (where the painting now resides) is trash-talking certain aspects of its legend based on opinions of nameless experts. All very interesting but we're waiting for some actual evidence.

Twitter notes on recent trip to Whitney Museum:

buckminster fuller show: tensegrity heaven, wall of buckyballs

the new, rigorous paul mccarthy: no fluids, no orgies, "critique of architecture"--weird museum-enabled self-revisionism

fritz glarner, burgoyne diller, leon polk smith, ellsworth kelly, mary heilman - whitney humor except it's not supposed to be funny