ART'S LAST GASP?

“In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played.”

Seems I've been having this thought myself, ever more frequently since abandoning the DC art scene in a hail of sinking financials. Now, several months into my exile, I have created a phlegmatic video short to explain that defection. Glad I've gotten off that whirligig. Still, weaning oneself off ambition and the need to express oneself is difficult.

Indeed, who are the experts, and who are the fakirs?

Read it all.

AN EVENING OF IMPROVISATIONAL BUTOH

VANESSA SKANTZE | SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2005 - 8PM
AN EVENING OF IMPROVISATIONAL BUTOH

Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life.
-Tatsumi Hijkata

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF AMBIENT industrial clang. An inspired female performer of the Butoh method of dance. A handful of mostly uninformed cheap-fisted gazers. Enough to tranform an ordinary Saturday night at the MOCA into an extraordinary syntax of human expression.

Originating in Post World-War II Japan, many consider the Butoh dance a mysterious ritual to be interpreted many ways. A contemporary form of dance, Butoh borrows elements from traditional Japanese and many western forms of dance. Variations in form range from the violently flamboyant to the tranquil poetry of a gentle breeze, from the painfully intimate to grandiose levels of spectacle, from subtle improvisation to the splendid choreography of highly stylized gesture. On this lovely spring evening not only did artist Vanessa Skantze introduce her rather intimate MOCA audience to this powerful expression of the spirit, she empowered several overheard to expand our own universes of self-exploration, self-commitment and spacial communication.

We first notice Ms. Skantze, her skin pale, submerged in white body makeup, peering from around a doorway as a sounding fog of metallic minimalism cogent of a busy seaport dock perhaps, announces the dance, her dark, matted tresses lending an air of Nipponese authenticity to this impressive performance. Clothed in a beige slip blending with flesh into similar tones of the gallery walls, the dancer's calm sensuality is never in question but is quietly integrated into the whole fabric of the event. Not all Butoh performers incorporate body makeup, a traditional visual clue of the Japanese arts, though gold, silver, red or black makeup are also common. Many artists choose elaborate costumes with extensive props, a simple leotard or loincloth, while others may perform completely nude. Rumor had it that the loincloth is Ms. Skantze's usual garb but the short slip was adopted for the sake of her parents who were in the audience.

At first, to the uninitiated eye, Ms. Shantze's dance in bare feet seemed to describe a familiar path, a path pitched in the metaphors of the human embryo scooting along the development process, pedantically trapped in a predictable world of darkness and physical limitation. While perhaps visually striking, had this dance remained framed as a dance of the embryo, an all-too-familiar cliche in these post-feminist times, the powerful and muscular limbs of Ms. Skantze could not have delivered the same stark yet writhing emotional glances required by the visual grammars of true innocense at work, anxious curiosity in play, mortal terror in vain, vivid self-awareness on parade - all of which are transformed by an industrialized experience evoked by the convincingly appropriate score arranged by local musician and painter, Andrew Corrigan.

However, this transformation does not rely on the past but builds upon it, insisting upon the present conviction that a naked raw energy is best extrapolated step by step, into a stride, then a glide beckoned into a feverish surge of self-satisfaction. Momentum inches toward an explosion of sarcastic exilaration which holds court before fading away into a wandering repose past the audience into a dark corridor before re-emerging none the wiser. Then collapse. Into the sheer indispensible exhaustion of it all.

It is this ALL that our Butoh dancer portrayed so persuasively.

No, if the first impulse of the observer is to dismiss as ho-hum this performance as yet another birthing passion sequel, the second impulse, that of recognizing one's own struggle with and adaptation to contemporary angst in the universal march toward one's own transformative powers is one of awe and resolve. As pathway on the critical search for joy long lost within the pre-fabricated ruins of an ephemeral culture, a cliche in its own right, the entire slowed down cadence of Ms. Skantze's movement of limb and facial expression becomes sculpture on the spot and furthermore, is the key to unlocking oneself as the witness who serves notice to both the spirit and the body - that life is worth living - that the struggle is merely to be challenged not as an imposter compromising life, but to be embraced and proclaimed in all its proclivities as the very nomenclature of life irrepressible.

In dance terms, an unconventional aspect of Butoh is its movement cadence. Just as important, perhaps more so, is the ritual the dancer undergoes to prepare. A dance which regards with equal measure meditation or martial art training as much as it does conventional dance wisdom, directing energy to the audience from the artspace itself serves both the inclusive nature of the dance and the individual artist as performance medium. Variations in training methods abound. Certain masters focus on a strong physical discipline to initiate a catharsis in the dancer. Indeed, those who have had no training in dance at all generally have the easiest time of it because Butoh teachers tend to stress the need to forget all training other forms of dance require. Masters claim there is no physical technique or common terminology for Butoh since each dance is the unique expression of the dancer, unencumbered by language, tradition, or constraint. The usual Zen doublespeak notwithstanding, there may be something real to grasp here.

It has been said that the development of a dancer or athlete or artist can only occur beyond a certain point if certain qualities already dwell in the aspirant. Thus, not all who try Butoh will excel at it, despite optimistic charms of Butoh theorists dizzy in the heat of pontification. However, this writer was extremely pleased with the performance of the youthful and vigorous Vanessa Skantze, and as she climaxed asprawl the cold gray floor of the gallery, eyes closed, music waning finally to silence, sweat beading, heart pounding, I felt I knew her and she knew me, if just for that fleeting moment before she stands and bows, and I am cast again upon myself, knowing once more that it is in the making of art itself that the victory resides.

Coupled with the realization that even the greatest uncompromised artist of them all can share only a beggar's sample of their genius for public inspiration, perhaps winning a fleeting moment of second-hand motivation in return, we too are moved to utter, "Yes, Virginia, the sweat and the blood and the everlasting life vibrates in the work. Only in the work." And I guess that was the point all along.

—Gabriel Thy

Originally published on the MOCA DC website.

ANDREW WYETH DIES AT 91

ANDREW WYETH, the popular American painter of rustic landscapes, farmhouses and plain country folk whose pictures evoked a range of feelings and emotions and a nostalgic vision of times past, died at home early Jan. 16 at age 91. No cause of death was reported, according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Wyeth sketched, painted and drew the people and places of Pennsylvania's Brandywine River Valley and the rugged Maine coastal region near Cushing, where he had lived all his life. He died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, the AP reported.

His artistry was of fields and hillsides, wildlife, sawmills, springhouses, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. It was symbolic and paradoxical, expressing tranquillity and turbulence, tenderness and rigor, cruelty and compassion. Some of it included such discordant details as hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters, meat hooks, peeling paint, cracked ceilings, fallen and sharply sawed or broken logs that conveyed subliminal suggestions of violence and decay, and a sense of loss.

One of the most widely recognized and highly priced American artists of his era, Mr. Wyeth was probably best known for his 1948 painting, "Christina's World," which shows a young crippled woman in a pink dress crawling across a brown field toward a bleak and distant farmhouse. In its degree of familiarity, this picture was once compared with the portrait of George Washington that appears on the $1 bill.

In the 1980s, Mr. Wyeth was the subject of an intense media spotlight for his "Helga" series of 45 paintings and 200 sketches. These pictures, many of them nudes, were the product of hundreds of modeling sessions with a Chadds Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf, over a 15-year period. No one else, not even Mr. Wyeth's wife, had previously known about them, and their disclosure to the public was arguably the art event of the decade.

A household name in the national artistic community since the middle years of the 20th century, Mr. Wyeth rose to prominence in the same period in which the abstract expressionist painters of the New York School were establishing their mark as the mainstream artists of the era.

His work was different. The abstract expressionists did non-representational compositions, characterized by what they said was a spontaneous and self-expressive application of paint. They often worked in bright and flowing colors with flamboyant brush strokes.

Mr. Wyeth painted in pale colors, lighter shades of brown, red, yellow and black, and the shapes and objects in his pictures were concrete and easily recognizable. Houses looked like houses and people looked like people. He favored fall and winter landscapes, which he believed gave the impression of a deeper and unarticulated meaning; his messages were indirectly conveyed. Rarely did he speak or communicate with others in his profession, and in his personal life he tended to be reclusive.

As an artist he was generally considered a realist, but he never accepted that characterization. "In the art world today, I'm so conservative I'm radical. Most painters don't care for me. I'm strange to them," he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life magazine. "A lot of people say I've brought realism back. They try to tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken. I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins' figures actually breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way; there's another core—an excitement that's definitely abstract."

To many critics, Mr. Wyeth was out of touch with the primary artistic trends of his time, and the quality of his work failed to merit his popularity with the general public. Nor did it justify the prices people were willing to pay—a collection of Wyeth works including several of the Helga paintings brought $40 million in a 1989 sale.

"Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw," wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New York's Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth's art "formulaic stuff, not very effective even as institutional realism . . ."

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to display the Helga paintings. "We had an opportunity to show the Helga series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do so," said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

And so turns the vicious world of art criticism. Note the tone of this obituary, also a product of the Washington Post.

Read it all

SHIMMERING GROTESQUE AND GORGEOUS

MARLENE DUMAS AT THE MUSEUM of Modern Art in New York City. Folks, this is an exhibition that meets the eye with the same might as a two by four.

Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photo-dependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original. Her work tends too much toward well-done pastiches of ideas and tactics from the last 25 years, primarily Conceptualism, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism

Ms. Dumas’s stained and brush-worked canvases are lurid in subject or color, and usually both. The subjects include pregnant women; rather monstrous-looking newborns; murdered children and victims of suicide and execution (mostly women); hooded prisoners; forlorn adolescents; bodies in morgues. Each image is served up in a blank, abstract space with handsome trimmings of lush colors and surface action that have their history in Abstract Expressionism and even Color Field painting.

Striking abbreviations and fuzzy blurs make us look twice. Is that woman asleep or dead? Has that naked child been playing with red paint or is that blood on its hands? In many instances such doubts keep you moving between the harsh, suggestive imagery and the brushwork and process, but after a while you may begin to feel a bit manipulated.

Other paintings go for point-blank sensationalism. “Dead Girl” shows just the head and shoulders of a fallen adolescent with blood streaming from her face. Yet in some of Ms. Dumas’s portraits suffering is subtle and implicit, a life sentence and therefore more convincing. In “Moshekwa” the resolute face of a black man fills most of a large canvas with an aura intensified by the shifting tones of his skin, which culminates in a gorgeous patch of dark purple glowing from his forehead like a mark of nobility.

Read the entire NYT review.

GALLERY CLOSES AFTER THREATS

The following entry is adapted from an earlier quick comment I posted on another website earlier this year after it reported the news that a Berlin gallery had temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed.

IT'S ABOUT TIME a few extraordinary Western artists step up to the plate to take a swing or two at this crucial issue. This is a very serious issue in terms of defending our own culture against the egregious assaults made on it by ruthless newcomers with their strange gods and ideas, and since I work in the arts myself, a painter, I know that few artists are tackling the Islamic problem with anything more than fearless silence.

In fact, just the opposite position rules. I'd surmize that 95% of the art being created today in this most political of cities, and I speak from the underground art movement, is frivolous and redundant, lost in fairy tales and harmless charm, and anything remotely "controversial" is dismissed. The so-called controversial art is hardly controversial any more because how many times can Christianity or homophobia or the president be attacked in the generic way that artists depict their hyperventilated disgust with religion, sexual mores, or politics, and it still be new, iconoclastic, or controversial? But with all the world in flames and blood, hovering at the brink of financial crisis, most of the "ruthless honesty" work is anti-American at worst, anti-war (pseudo-lofty) at best, and nothing is ever presented that even hints of global incrimination due the jihadists and their copious allies in shepherd's clothing.

But what can be expected otherwise? The art world, unlike the more recently abducted halls of lower and higher education, has long been the high-browed bastion of the liberal cognoscente, and today's system of wine-tasting galleries and its stiltifying air of mass dementia is now vigorously geared to the boilerplate Left.

Scandal is often the fast track in the whirl to "make" an artist, but history seems to prove that this model holds only when breaking "preferred" molds.

Let's hope Berlin doesn't bend knee to this Islamic nonsense compounded by thuggery. It will only encourage more outrage. Don't we all deserve better than this?

STUDIO GALLERY

I DELIVERED MY MATERIALS to the Studio Gallery this afternoon. Tonight the membership will jury some 65 selections in considering my application for membership. Studio Gallery is Washington's oldest artist owned gallery, located in a beautiful brownstone in historic Dupont Circle. The director, Adah Rose Bitterbaum, has been most helpful and courteous in guiding me through the application process.

I don't know if I am overwrought in the explanation of process of at the expense of highlighting the transliterative matter of the work itself. Below is the statement I offered along with three canvases 1200 square inches or better, and two smaller 24"x18" ones. In addition to these five paintings, I presented a portfolio of over 60 images—photographic glossy 10"x8" digital prints of other work.

My statement:

I work from the gesture, or rather, wherever my quivering stroke takes the brush.

Each painting I complete is nothing but the conflicted wonderment of an angst-driven subconscious on the prowl for a brutal honesty, urged to sniff out those personal heresies residing somewhere between a humble arrogance and an arrogant humility, harnessing hidden energies which instruct the flow of imagination. Rarely do I start with a pre-conceived notion of what "I would like to imagine" but instead, I struggle against the common elements of mind and materials the status quo presents. So, when painting, I follow the paint from first splash to finished canvas, making choices of color, syntax, and narrative.

Believing I privately owe each image to the Muse of Idea, to the God of Permanent Arrival, my attack of the canvas is best described as a tension-loosening charge of inertia transfixed in sequence as a terse mixture of hesitation, followed by an explosive jolt of fierce joy at what is happening, almost always followed in the end by a weak fear, anxious worry and misgivings until I eventually reach a plateau of reflex gratitude, or flat acceptance of what has transpired.

Concerning the veracity of any paint, I presume that my art begins from a "condition of need" and is a matter of ambiguous perception with carry-on luggage both in sociopolitical and metaphysical terms, and while I often struggle against my operative senses when confronted with an uneasy thought or a complexity I can't easily deconstruct, a certain unexpected beauty and intelligence are often the reward for faith and diligence, hence, each canvas is the physical battleground where an immutable struggle works itself out.

"Does this painting resolve itself in an apt equation? Is it a valid expression of real concerns, rooted in its own space and time and asthethic experience?" I ask. If I affirm that it does on all counts, I accept it as a finished painting, or mixed media work.

As a conflicted idealist, I find myself continually drawn to the manifested contradictions of global society in all its metaphysical flux. I use a strained figure, a rough erratic line, oscillative texture and virilent color to speak of that battleground where art and politics beat each other up while few are they who seem the wiser.

Self-taught, I work full-time from my 52 O Street Studios loft located in the northernmost reaches of the NoMa neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Yeah, maybe a bit too overwrought...

DEFACING ART THE ISLAMIC WAY

NYC street piece by Swoon before defacement. See below for links.

PRO-TALIBAN MILITANTS in Pakistan have used electric drills to chisel off the face of a massive 7th century Buddha sculpture, raising concerns that hundreds of other Gandhara-era relics located nearby could also be at risk.

The picturesque Swat Valley has become infested with Taliban militants in recent weeks as the influence of the radical Islamic movement sweeps rapidly across northwest Pakistan.

The militants have launched a bloody vice campaign that has left 47 dead, decimated the valley's tourism industry and terrorized the local community. Locals tell ABC News authorities have made no effort to stop the spread of "Talibanization" in a normally peaceful region, often described as "Pakistan's Switzerland."

One Pakistani archaeologist described the Jehanabad Buddha as the second most important Gandhara monument after the Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, which were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.

"For me at least, the Jehanabad Buddha was the most beautiful," said Fidaullah Sehrai, a retired professor of archaeology and a leading expert in ancient Buddhist art.

Buddhism flourished in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 7th century, and the Swat Valley is considered the birthplace of Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. In his memories, the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang described hundreds of Buddha sculptures, monasteries and stupas in the valley. Only a handful has been excavated so far.

The Jehanabad Buddha watched over a stretch of the ancient Silk Route, said Professor Sehrai, and was believed to offer protection for travelers and traders. It is the second Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in recent months.

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Now in New York City, the same sort of art defacement is being charted by an unknown assailant who has been dubbed simply—the Splasher. Two different NYC street artists have had their works scarred recently. Two female artists, known only as Swoon and Gaia have had their work partially sprayed out or marked over in deliberate fashion. Any connection to the NYC phenomenon and the Pakistani one? Probably not, but have no fear. What the Taliban is doing in Pakistan, the keepers of the Koran have done all over the world whenever the Islamic regimes gain a modicum of power over a previous culture.

But let's be clear here, thee is no solid evidence that the defacement has been carried out by Muslims on the prowl. But those Muslim youths who agitate in the shadows against Western targets (evidenced here and here and here) often roam in packs and attack single defenseless victims, male or female.