Carrie Moyer

Carrie Moyer, Pirate Jenny, at the Tang Museum.

Pirate Jenny, 2012

Mlle. X, 2012

Video Studio Visit - i didn't know she makes little b/w collage studies first as sort of armatures which enlarged the color gets painted poured and layered into... the same design sometimes gets used in more than one painting.

Rapa Nui Smashup, 2009

Motor Belly, 2012

Skullspout, 2007

The Jewel Thief

Stephen Dean Prayer Mill, 2007 on Richard Woods Logo no. 82, 2010.

The Jewel Thief, curated by Ian Berry and Jessica Stockholder, at the Tang.


Jessica Stockholder... it's a platform, seating area, stage... like her piece that was in Madison Square Park.

So yeah - same complaint about the Tang as always - no photography allowed. Ridiculous that the one day this Stockholder piece will ever really be used and you couldn't freely take photographs. I can see three watcher-guards in this photo.


surfer


Chery Donegan, Shake the Page, 2010 and Antibacterial Memory, 2010

i loved that Kitchen painting, and these too.


Cheryl Donegan


Cheryl Donegan, Not In Love, 2009

The gallery is filled with art and includes a series of lined-up cubes each larger than the previous... all used for display... the first smaller ones are used as pedestals and the larger ones become walls... all together they are like very big blocks forming giant steps to where the show continues on the second floor.

LIKES - the Joan Mitchell painting near a same(?) dimension Joanne Greenbaum... wow nice pairing! reflection of the stepping blocks... really brings out all the color in the Joan Mitchell... green and purple and lots, it has a nude descending the staircase rythm, and made me need to go back and look at the Calder mobile in the atrium.... the two paintings are both hung very high and looking up at the Joanne Greenbaum you can see all the painting underneath the black.... Chris Martin... Rico Gatson... textiles... Andrew Massullo... nice Alex Brown... Jessica Jackson Hutchins with a broken white globe, so nice like a nice accident... oh yeah the James Hyde seating area with giant 'painting' very very cool so bummed i accidently deleted the photos i had of it... Patrick Chamberlain, some weird things happening in a couple... Richard Rezac yes, and he has a very good show up now at Feature.

Cary Smith has great installation shots on his Facebook if you want to see.


Tamara Gonzales PAPARAZZI!

anaba paparazzi

Nicole Eisenman, with proud parents.

***Nicole Eisenman and Arlene Shechet at the Tang!***


Tang Museum, at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Sol Lewitt wall piece at left. Nicole and Arlene each have a solo show on the second floor.


Arlene Shechet with her work. Took some nice photos at her Elizabeth Harris show two years ago.


Museum 52's Matthew Dipple.

Anya Kielar at Museum 52, on anaba 8/1/09.
Joe Bradley and Sarah Braman at Museum 52, 5/28/09.
Sarah Braman at the Armory Show, 3/6/09.
Without Walls, at Museum 52, 12/22/08.


Joanne Greenbaum and friend. Joanne's show at D'Amelio Terras is up through October 31st. Francesca Fanelli at far right.


Artists Stephanie Gonzalez-Turner and Kadar Brock.


Admiring one of Nicole's fantastic paintings... love the cloud turds. I'll go back soon to spend more time with these paintings. She has a show at Leo Koenig opening at the end of October.

anaba paparazzi

Lauren Luloff and friend. Click here to see Lauren's work. I'll add her friend's name later cuz I can't remember it now.

***Art-Stars attend Amy Sillman's opening at the Tang***


Thomas Nozkowski and Polly Apfelbaum.

Polly Apfelbaum's work I love... the more I see the more I'm into it. Saw Cartoon Garden at D'Amelio Terras, and recently saw these pieces on pillowcases in Present Tense, at Spanierman Modern.

First saw Nozkowski more than fifteen years ago at Jessica Berwind Gallery, in Philadelphia... can clearly remember appreciating that small painting.

RELATED: Casimir Nozkowski's youtube interview with Tom Nozkowski.... Thomas Nozkowski talks about art while on a hike... check out Casimir's other videos, he's funny.


Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey. Jennifer has a show opening in September at Kinz, Tillou and Feigen.


Halsey Rodman and Dana Schutz. Was Ryan Johnson there? His show looked good.

RED ALERT - Halsey Rodman's show is up at Guild & Greyshkul through the 25th. Read Paddy Johnson's review.


Dean Snyder, on left.

Dean Snyder has the upstairs show, Amy has the downstairs show. Both shows are excellent... with a nice small group show on the mezzanine (including Richard Artschwager) and a small grouping of work from the collection in the first-floor hall (including Nancy Shaver).

The Tang is BACK! The Tang is recommended again! Yay, Molecules that Matter is GONE!

I'll be going back a couple times to see these shows, although I probably won't post anything because the Tang doesn't allow photography and the guards have eagle eyes. It's a lot of mostly thankless effort on my part and I admit to being less inclined to make that effort when a place throws up bullshit restrictions. It would have been nice to show and tell how good the Martin Kersels and Joseph Grigely shows were.

Mass MoCA now allows photography.

Molecules That Matter

Molecules That Matter, at the Tang, REALLY helps one appreciate the presence and role of a good curator. This is not a knock at the curator of Molecules That Matter, because no curators were involved. The show was co-assembled by a chemistry professor, the Director of the museum, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It's an art and science show, organized around an introduction to ten molecules, each of them represented by big models, so you can learn at a rudimentary level about things like "what is aspirin" and "how it works"... with superficially related art and a lot of visual aid set props and labels sprinkled throughout.

Maybe if you are studying or teaching 8th grade art or science, you might like this show, otherwise... don't go out of your way.

Isooctane - Gas! This molecule is explored through the display of an oil barrel, a gas pump, an Ed Ruscha gas station print, and an edited montage/collection of non-stop movie car chase scenes from various movies. Michael Oatman and Eddo Stern have done similar movie time-tunnel sequence videos, but I don't think this piece is intended as art, rather it's provided as a visual aid for what gas does.

Frank Moore - I generally like Frank Moore, but this is not the most interesting Frank Moore. Doesn't have all of the little things going on, scale shifts, no busy-ness or funky frame. It completely has not registered what molecule this piece was serving.

Jean Shin - This piece is worse than the worst undergrad Tara Donovan fan art. Towers of empty prescription pill bottles stacked on round mirrors, some from the floor and some from the ceiling. I think there is supposed to be some endless column thing happening within the mirrors, but it's not working because when you look up you can see all of the white caps reflected back at you. Internal logic functioning or not, this piece is horrible. I can't believe it's been shown at Sculpture Center, University Museum at Albany, now the Tang, and will travel elsewhere with this show.

Copies of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and some old t-shirts and buttons, on pedestals under plexiglass cubes. I'm forgetting what molecule this was about, sorry. Oh, it was probably the DDT.

Alexis Rockman, Romantic Attachments (2007) - a big painting, like a bodice-ripper romance cover, of an ape-man standing over a freakily constructed naked woman, and he has a torch raised in the air. This is a sublimely ugly painting. It seems like it might be really bad, but there are interesting combinations of paint things happening, like the underside of the girls hair, which is kind of a dark stain of drips, and how the slathered and smeared tree is put together. The sky is poured and stained, and the grass is like palette-knife applied amateur painting class grass. So many weird and backward things happening in this total form and concept PROTO-PAINTING, with the apeman bringing fire to the naked human girl, and the amateur moves.

Here is some good advice from Alexis Rockman on how to get ahead, from an article on Ross Bleckner - "Ross taught me a lot about how to be an artist, both socially and professionally - how to make myself available, how not to alienate anybody."

Fred Tomaselli - an old one, with columns of aspirin embedded under resin. Representing the molecule known as aspirin.

Michael Oatman - Michael Oatman has a big collage in an antique test-tube frame, a piece which might actually be something the Tang still had leftover in storage from his big show there a couple years ago. Yes?

Polyethelyne (plastic) had some tupperware, pink lawn flamingos, and good art by Roxy Paine and Tony Cragg.

Thomas Asmuth - this guy got screwed. His piece is included with the Prozac display... it's a soft sculpture of the Prozac molecule, like a big cuddly caterpillar... but instead of being flopped down and presented as something that is accessible and friendly, with which you can snuggle and seek comfort, it's standing upright, suspended by a cable, on a white pedestal, with a DO NOT TOUCH sign.

This piece is ruined by the presentation, and feels like a case of a relatively unknown artist who is being (felt) forced to make concessions to be included in a museum show. The Tang is SUPER anal about anything possibly being touched or photographed.

Bryan Crockett - three larger-than-life pink marble sculptures of genetically engineered rats, based on real experiments, representing three of the seven deadly sins. An obsese rat, a freakazoid steroid attack pit-rat, and I forget the other one. The marble is cast marble, with details carved or added later.

At least three of the artists in this show (Crockett, Moore, Rockman) were also included in Exit Art's Paradise Now, which I saw in NYC but had also came to the Tang. It's almost like they flipped through the catalogue of that previous art and science show, searching for artists that could be applied to selected molecules. I definitely get the sense that the molecules came first and the applied artists were an afterthought.

David Diao

David Diao has some work in Stripes, a small show at the Tang. Six of his Little Suprematist Prisons, from a series of thirty made in 1986.

They're inspired partly by Robert Motherwell's Little Spanish Prison, of 1941... plus of course Malevich. I think next time I go to MoMA I'll look for that Motherwell.


i like stripes.

David Diao is another artist from High Times, Hard Times. They're everywhere! I should make a new label... "artists who were in High Times, Hard Times". Speaking of which, it would be really nice to take a trip out to the Parrish Art Museum to see the Alan Shields show when it opens. If someone plans to make that trip please take me.

RELATED:
- Joe Fyfe's artcritical feature on stripes, with some thoughts on David Diao at the end.
- Chris Ashley's post on stripes and Motherwell's Little Spanish Prison.

James Siena and Window

James Siena and window, at Reynolds Gallery.

This reminds me of the Rudolf Stingel that was in Curator of Last Year's About Painting show. That was a a silvery painting hung in a hall between a door and a window, the silver-grey windowshade almost the exact texture of the painting.

The old Tang site had the entire show on-line, but it seems to be gone now. The only thing I can find is this little blurb (scroll down) by David Brickman for the Albany-based Metroland -

"With 67 artists in one exhibition, there are so many permutations as to defy drawing any real conclusions. Perhaps that’s the point of Tang curator Ian Berry’s overwhelming cornucopia of styles and personalities presented under the vaguely bombastic title About Painting (a smaller selection also on view in the museum titled About Sculpture is far more comprehensible, even if by design less comprehensive).

Two things, however, are abundantly clear: Berry loves paintings; and there is no shortage of artists out there who love to make them. What struck me as particularly odd is that, apparently, more than half of those painters worthy of consideration just happen to live in Brooklyn. An absurd instance of an all-too-prevailing attitude in the art world.

In fact, great paintings are probably made every day in just about every country and state. Here, there are 71 pieces, of which only a few could accurately be called great. I’ll leave it up to you (as does Berry) to contemplate the show and then decide which ones those might be. It’s a good bet you’ll enjoy the process."

That last part is true because as we saw this show we made marks next to each artist's name signifying our responses to the work; a circle by the favorites, an X by the unliked ones, and a wavy line by the okays and undecideds. We did enjoy the process, and happened to run into Ian, whom I think enjoyed looking at our marks. I forget who now, but there was one artist we had X'd of whom Ian said "you're wrong about that one" - so we went back and re-evaluated. It was interesting that he didn't say we were wrong about the other X'd ones.

BONUS: my David Brickman review!!

Curator of Last Year

Edward hasn't made any Curator of the Month posts in a while... so I will post on the Curator of Last Year.


This is Ian Berry.

Ian was the co-curator (along with Michael Duncan) of the Richard Pettibone show I saw last November at the Tang Museum. The Tang usually has three different shows up at a time, one in each of the two main galleries and a third in the small mezzanine gallery (sometimes they have a forth or fifth something happening in the lobby). Ian, as the "main" curator at the Tang, was also responsible for the two exhibitions running concurrent with Pettibone's - the co-curated (with Bill Arning) Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler show in the other big gallery and Kathy Butterly's exhibition in the mezzanine space. Each show was excellent, but it was on my second or third visit that I started to get how brilliantly they all fit together.

My notes are long gone... but I am remembering the miniaturizing and care of Pettibone with the very small and detailed Butterly sculptures with the tiny Rushmore "copy" and dollhouses of Ericson/Ziegler... the repetition of Pettibone with Butterly's pieces all lined up in one long row with Ericson/Ziegler's bars of soap, rows of jars, and small trains (which bring me back again to Pettibone's trains)... Pettibone's Shaker stuff with Ericson/Ziegler's cupboards and chests with Butterly's "teapots". Much much more.. I can't remember it all

So, Ian Berry is Curator of Last Year.

"no photography"... of Richard Pettibone???

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Revisiting the Richard Pettibone show at the Tang I was watched like a hawk by the security guards. My mission was to get a photo of one of the double-sided glass cases holding a bunch of his little paintings, to show how perfect the backs are. Pettibone makes tiny stretchers using tiny nails, with tiny braces. The backs are as captivating as the fronts.

But I couldn't get a photo because the security guards at the Tang are the most attentive you will ever see. Walking up to the mezzanine level where the Kathy Butterly sculptures are on exhibit a lady leapt up from her chair and smiled at me. I felt so bad continuing on to the Pettibone show - she seemed like she really wanted to watch someone.

The Tang's "no photography" rule is exasperating on this visit especially because so much of Richard Pettibone's own photo-realist work of the seventies was produced from polaroids taken in museums. He took photos of work by his contemporaries as well as that of artists like Eakins, Gerome, and Ingres. Those polaroids, often taken at odd angles, were then reproduced exactly - including the white borders of the polaroid.

From a wall text at the Tang beside the photo paintings -

"In 1974, Richard Pettibone moved away from mere emulation of Photorealist style by incorporating historical works of art into the pictures. Using photographs he had taken in New York museums, Pettibone depicts white-bordered snapshots of ..

Taken at lateral angles, the picture emphasizes the works in situ status. These tiny, exquisite paintings reiterate art history's reliance on photography to propagate our knowledge about painting."

It's ironic and sad that the Tang, which promotes itself as a teaching museum, forbids that further propagation.

UPDATE 12/05/07: Nobody ever commented on this post, but I did soon hear from both a Pettibone and co-curator Michael Duncan. The Pettibones sent me a CD of images, and Michael Duncan asked for my address and said he would send a copy of the catalogue... but HE NEVER DID!

Richard Pettibone

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The Richard Pettibone show that debuted at the Philadelphia ICA and which Roberta Smith wrote so positively on for the NYTimes opened at the Tang Saturday night, and before the opening Pettibone and co-curator Ian Berry sat down for a public discussion.

Pettibone, best known for making perfectly crafted miniatures of other artist's work - Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp - says he has always been into model-making, especially trains, and Ian Berry noted that even today a model train encircles his studio; you need to lift up a section of track to enter.

Pettibone was born in California in 1938 and received an MFA from Otis in 1962(!), which he says "was a horrible school". His BIG artistic influences were seeing Duchamp's first U.S. retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum (1963) and Warhol's thirty-two cans of soup at Ferus (1962). The Warhol show left a huge impression: "people were furious", "other artists were red in the face", it "made a big impression on me", "I'm still doing that thirty-two cans of soup".

Pettibone noted that with the Warhol's "it wasn't ever one painting, it was many paintings" - Ferus was a small gallery with walls that created three "rooms", every wall of which was soup cans - but today you usually see a selection of them "compacted for practicle reasons", like at MoMA. Pettibone considers Warhol's soup cans "the best piece of pop art that ever was made", adding "he never did anything better" and "It's a curious phenomenon. I've seen it many times. An artist's greatest work is the first work and the whole rest of the career is, what's the point?".

On the Duchamp show, curated by Walter Hopps (who also co-owned Ferus and gave Andy the soup can show), Pettibone recalled that the book came out before the show, and it (the book) was "all about the non-retinal and non-retinal art, etc" but we went to the show and "it was the most beautiful show". Pettibone said "I don't believe (in) that non-retinal. Art should be beautiful".

Pettibone said Walter Hopps was "the first artworld bigshot that ever bought a painting of mine", and he had his first solo at Ferus, but soon moved to NYC. When Ian asked "what brought you to NY?", Pettibone replied "fame and fortune". Ian also asked about other artist's responses to Pettibone's copying of their work - Andy Warhol said "oh, those are funny", Roy Lichtenstein loved them, "all the pop art people got it". Frank Stella "never liked 'em, he never got it", "Stella was offended". Pettibone shared a funny story of finding out that Frank Stella had bought ten of his paintings, all miniature Stellas, and soon after running into Stella at a party. When Pettibone introduced himself Stella turned and walked away. Pettibone has no idea what Stella did with the paintings, "maybe he took'em to burn'em".

There are some really beautiful little Stella black paintings in the Tang show, plus lots of his colored arc stuff. Pettibone said "I'm not opposed to repeating myself", then he said it again.

I have more I'll share later.

Michael Oatman

I saw a big Michael Oatman show at the Tang Museum when I was in Saratoga a couple weeks ago. Do you know Michael Oatman? He's very well-regarded in upstate NY, lives and works in Troy. This show at the Tang is a presentation of work from mostly the past five years, plus some new stuff.

Oatman does a lot of collage work and is concurrently included in Mass Moca's Becoming Animal show with a bunch of his collages. He has some collages at the Tang of very cute birds wearing helmets and armor and a few of warplanes arranged like snowflakes. I also like the one of a train lifting off it's trestle and spinning up into the air. I think I saw that one at an Arts Center of the Capital Region show once.

Oatman was involved in the original Factory Direct show, organized by the Arts Center of the Capital Region's Gina Occhiogrosso, as well as a New Haven follow-up. I'm not sure if he was included in the first as an artist or if he was a co-curator or what, but I know that for the New Haven show he was a participating artist. The Factory Direct shows placed artists in residence with local manufacturing industries.... similar to the Kohler program. Oatman was placed with Tower Optical - a company that makes those coin-operated viewing binoculars you find at sightseeing spots.

A Romance in Optics is the title of that Factory Direct installation/video presented here. Tower Optical made a portable one of those viewing machines for Oatman which he took to Easter Island and set up for tourists to look through. He also asked each person the question "if you could see anything, anytime, anywhere what would you most like to see?". The video is very quiet, just a kind of spooky music and muted voices and ocean, and the answers spin into view on red discs -the time when Jesus Christ lived on Earth, Peter the Great in Moscow, the eruption of Krakatoa, I'd like to see here about 2,000 years ago, I'm happy with the present, the big bang, I'd like to meet Abe Lincoln and see my grandparents. One young woman looks away quickly and says "my friend died when we were seventeen, I'd like to see what her life would have been". The best is a smiling man who points off into the distance and says "I'm going to find the red-tailed tropic bird very soon" and later in the video shows up to say "I've done it! I've seen the red-tailed tropic bird! I'm happy". I liked this video a lot. Finding a good video might be like finding a red-tailed tropic bird.

The photo above is from his 2001 piece Taken, a mugshot video of him confessing to all of the bad, unethical, illegal, immoral things he's ever done. Lots of sighs. A good one is the story of how he left a museum with a paint chip from a Picasso painting. Hey Michael, look at this.

Interview with Michael Oatman. Here are two photos of pieces in his show (photos from previous installations).