February 2009

Have been rewriting an older post about the artist Dennis Hollingsworth:

Dennis Hollingsworth's paintings have been mentioned here a few times. What follows is an attempt to describe the work and answer some criticisms of it.

Let's start by saying what it definitely isn't:

"just about paint"

That's like saying that The Rite of Spring is just about musical notes. If you think the canvases are some dull, said-a-million-times statement about materiality, as some commenters have suggested, please look again and remember that the whorls, blobs, and explosions are not mere accidents but also a record of events shaped by a human consciousness. Not a vision of an animate cosmos as literal as, say, Blake's, but still a teeming universe of suggestive contours and textures, thwarting powers of speech--a morphed mashup of animals, ghosts, genetic mutations, war wounds, and impossibly tangled plant life, at least in this viewer's art-prompted reckoning.

One could say in '80s jargon that his thick paint is a hyperrealized version of past expressionist art--a Baudrillard term meaning roughly "on steroids." But to call it pornographic, as one commenter did, rather ignores the joyful, non-synthetic element. The artist says the work is an "affirmation of paint" after the negation of the post-Modern years. But does that make it Modernist? If so, it's closer to surreal, abject side of Modernism that Clement Greenberg and other 20th Century critics tried to edit out of history. The colors may be joyful, but the sea urchin-like blobs that cling to everything seem vaguely alien and parasitic. The intricate cutting and slicing of organic forms suggests an anatomist's inner burrowing.

And lastly you have the linguistic side of Hollingsworth's work--a hermetic system of recurring elements (which have names--see Scott Speh's review) that serve as a private lexicon in a state of perpetual breakdown and reshuffling. This recombinant practice hews closer to postmodernism than the Modernism that forever proclaimed its abstract vocabularies as new and scientifically derived. Hollingsworth's work is aware of nonrepresentational conventions and builds on the limited vocabularies of Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, et al, who in turn built on the Abstract Expressionists. Yet ultimately his fearlessness to engage in actual, dense, convoluted, expressionistic (or expression-like) paint handling gives him a richer and more varied range of iconography than those predecessor "deconstructors."

This blog was listed as a "best NY art blog" by Mapcidy with the following statement:

The transition from print to virtual is one that is happening across the world, propelled mostly by the younger generations. Fewer people are reading newspapers and magazines, turning instead to blogs. The news is more of-the-minute; often real time. There is less accountability or standards of accuracy, but people are more eager for news than for truth anyway. Certainly the New York Times is keeping a watchful eye on the Huffington Post, and US Weekly has to be less than thrilled with Dlisted and Perez. The art world, however, lags slightly behind this trend. Most people still turn to that bible of all things arty - Artforum - for thought-provoking discussion. Art tends to be less about real-time reporting since it develops at a slower pace than one of Sienna Miller's relationships, and stays relevant for longer than one news cycle. Yet, young artists are all about the immediate, and the virtual, and they aren't going hungry. At least not mentally - I can't speak for their stomachs. For those of you who don't touch paper anymore, there are some good art blogs out there. Here is a list I have culled from some of the best art schools in NYC. These kids know what is hot and who to listen to, so I am passing their wisdom on to you. And so I give you the MFA student's virtual guide to NY's art scene.

This blog is honored and will try to keep things entertaining and straight shooting. It's gratifying to still be read after turning off comments a year and a half ago, a move which annoyed some people. It's still nice to wake up in the morning and not have to read someone accusing me of bad motives on my own page.

1. A Wolf Calls a Wolf
2. The All-Together Playing-Card Operation
3. Hunt Down the Counterfeiter!
4. When the Seventh Bridge Falls
5. Beware the Time Machine!
6. The Emerald's Secret
7. Let's Catch Lupin and Go to Europe
8. Operation Jewel Snatch
9. Lupin Caught in a Trap
10. Keep an Eye on the Beauty Contest
11. Which of the Third Generation Will Win!
12. Catch the Phony Lupin!
13. Rescue the Tomboy!
14. The First Move Wins Computer Operation!
15. The Great Gold Showdown!

(IMDb)