Observe + Collect

October2011 2011 October

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art world

2011 GUTTER CREDIT

art market

KARA WALKER MEQUITTA AHUJA ALISON SAAR JOHN + SHARI BEHNKE OCTOBER 2011

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CONTENTS OCTOBER 2011

WATCH THE MARKET Cindy Sherman Andy Warhol Jeff Koons + more at Sotheby’s

PREVIEWS TO BE OBSERVED

8 Dana Schutz Gerhard Richter pg. 4

REVIEWS OBSERVE NOW Jasper Johns Tracey Emin 6

IN CONVERSATION WITH KARA WALKER Walker discusses her most recent work.

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EXHIBITION IN PRINT ALISON SAAR A look at her recent installation in Madison Square Park.

20 SOLO SHOW ARTIST TO WATCH We interview painter Mequitta Ahuja.

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THE LOCAL ELEMENT JOHN & SHARI BEHNKE These art enthusiasts show their home and their art collection.

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OCTOBER 2011

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PREVIEWS TO BE OBSERVED Dana Schutz and Gerhard Richter are rarities: mavericks leading the way in the mainstream.

GERHARD RICHTER: PANORAMA Tate Modern | October 6, 2011 – January 8, 2012 Curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey

DANA SCHUTZ: IF THE FACE HAD WHEELS Neuberger Museum of Art | September 25 – December 10 | Curated by Helaine Posner

A decade after MOMA’s much – contested but hugely popular Gerhard Richter retrospective, Tate Modern, in a departure from the 2001 exhibition’s painting – only approach, will survey the German artist’s career by looking chronologically and comprehensively across a half century

Dana Schutz paints with directness and expediancy, and her work has an exhilaration the comes from giving form to internal feelings. She is an American symbolist who is sometimes mistaken for a realist. Her paintings often depict scenes that are absurd, goofy, or grotesque: things seen in

of the artist’s practice. Including, in addition to paintings, a selection of drawings and photographs, as well as the largest assortment of Richter’s glass works ever assembled, the show will also be the first outside Germany to present the monumental Stroke, his sixty – five – foot – long painting.

Organized with an eye to the distinct historical contexts and diversity of aesthetic modes in which Richter worked, “Panorama” promises a new look at the artist just in time for his eightieth birthday in February. — Graham Bader

the mind’s eye. A woman eating her own arm, a nude man lying prone in the desert, someone caught midsneeze — the pictures revel in the power of pictorial visualization. Schutz has a winning curiosity about strange forms that the self, and self – destruction, can take; you can imagine her saying, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” This survey, with more than forty paintings and drawings made over the past decade, will prove Schutz to be that rare thing: a maverick leading the way in the mainstream. — David Salle

BELOW: Dana Schutz, Presentation, 2005, oil on canvas, 120 x 168 in.

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REVIEWS OBSERVE NOW Tracey Emin and Jasper Johns both continue to pursue the themes that made them famous.

JASPER JOHNS at Matthew Marks Gallery New Sculpture and Works on Paper Despite my effervescing anticipation, Jasper John’s “New Sculpture and Works on Paper” inspired but a cool response. This owed, no doubt, to the academicism that has crept into John’s work over several decades bow — that is, if we think of academicism as the preservation of the model, the paradigm case, rather than its overthrow.

But let me quickly add that even the most conservative of John’s works still overshadows the larger field of players.

My quasi detachment from these reliefs — they are much more reliefs than sculpture — is heightened by the memory of the blinding enthusiasm that greeted the original encaustic flags, targets, gridded numbers, and alphabets that, at midcentury, established the territory this new work still mines. — Robert Pincus ‑Witten Numbers (detail), 2007, aluminum, 107 x 83 in.

TRACEY EMIN at Hayward Gallery Love Is What You Want One thing about Tracey Emin: she lives her art and, to some degree, she actually is her art. Everything that appears over her signature or on her say – so carries the imprints and scars left behind by her lifestyle. Her notoriety — particularly in Britain — doesn’t just guarantee her prominence in gossip columns, it colors the way her works exert their impact.

“Love is What You Want,” the title of this retrospective, is quintessential Emin: a plain statement that can be read as either pleading or defiant, self – possessed or self – centered.

It suited the show. Emin’s great achievement over the past 20 years of her professional practice has been to engage on several levels, and in many ways, with audiences who respond to the tirelessness with which she asserts herself as a true original. — William Feaver Just Like Nothing, 2009, embroidered blanket, 82 x 72 in.

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WATCH THE MARKET Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol underwhelm while Cindy Sherman breaks records at Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s sale began convincingly enough in the scheme of these things but never fully picked up, with audible bids for the most hyped works (Lot 10: Koons’s porcelain Pink Panther, 1988, put up by Benedikt Taschen, and Lot 21: Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies, 1964) staying below the low estimates. “This is a tough night for Tobias,” someone in the press pack observed sympathetically, referring to chief auctioneer Tobias Meyer. In the end, the sale brought $128.1 million with premiums, just over the house’s low estimate of $120 million. “We took slightly larger steps, anticipating a market that isn’t there quite yet,” Anthony Grant, one of the house’s senior contemporary art specialists, explained during the press conference.

The press pack is a kind of collective hermeneutics — a parasociety forming around a common impossible task and a similarly restricted view of events. Members try to divine meaning from the smallest gestures: a glance at the phone banks, a stutter in the bids — any wrinkle in the proceedings is weighed and interpreted.

Thus, seeing is everything: “Those ladies better get out of our way,” a writer said loudly before the proceedings. “Press don’t get many perks, but one is a fucking sight line.”

The plot of Christie’s sixty – five – lot sale that night was strategically calibrated, with the right mix of pathos, climax,

denouement. The first “moment” was Lot 6, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96, 1981, one of the artist’s iconic centerfolds, first commissioned for Artforum. Consigned by Jane Kaplowitz, wife of the late Robert Rosenblum, the print went to adviser Philippe Ségalot for $3.89 million (with premium): a world record not just for Sherman but for any photograph at auction. “It’s great to see an artist from our community, a real collector, reap some rewards,” an exuberant Amy Cappellazzo said later.

A pair of Warhol self – portraits — a red “fright wig” from 1986 (Lot 16) and a blue quartet from 1963 – 64 (Lot 22) constituted the pinnacle of the sale. The first went to Jose Mugrabi for $24.5 million hammer, under its low estimate of $30 million. My neighbor in the press pack was rooting for the second, which was “so covetable. I really want it to go for more than ’Fright Wig.’” And it did. Auctioneer Christopher Burge kept the bidding war going for an unheard-of fifteen minutes, eventually landing it, to much applause, at $38.4 million (with premium).

“That’s what you want — a little show, some drama!” a colleague yelled.

Fischer’s Untitled was at Lot 32. It quickly went for its high estimate — $6 million, an easy record for the thirty-seven-year-old artist. In the end, Christie’s raked in $301.7 million, selling 95 percent of its lots. “We broke the $300 million barrier. You have to go back to 2007 to see that,” a nearly giddy Brett Gorvy said during the conference. — David Velasco

TOP: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #96, 1981, chromogenic color print, 24 x 48 in. | LEFT: Jeff Koons, Pink Panther, 1988, porcelain, 40 x 20.5 x 19 in. | RIGHT: Andy Warhol, Sixteen Jackies, 1964, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 80 x 64 in.

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In Conversation with KARA WALKER

INTERVIEW BY STEEL STILLMAN

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Kara Walker’s rise to the top of the art world came fast and loaded with controversy. At the age of 24, three months after the artist received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), her work was included in a 1994 survey exhibition at New York’s The Drawing Center, wowing critics and viewers alike. Over the next three years, she had eight one-person shows and became the youngest artist ever to win a MacArthur “genius” award. She also came under attack by a group of 200 older black artists, led by Betye Saar, who mounted a vigorous letter-writing campaign seeking to prevent the exhibition of her work, on the grounds, as artist Howardena Pindell later put it, that its representations of black people constituted “visual terrorism.” • So singular and strong was Walker’s first publicly exhibited work — mural‑sized, wall-mounted tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes depicting caricatures of antebellum slaves and slaveholders in scenes of sex, violence and dissolution — that it might well have eclipsed all that followed. But Walker had other tricks up her sleeve.

Since the late ’90s, while continuing the cut-paper series, she has developed significant bodies of work in other mediums, notably drawing, writing and filmmaking, that have deepened her multiform recasting of tales of African-American life. Walker has been drawing since childhood — her father, Larry, is an artist and retired professor of art who moved the family from Stockton, Calif., where Walker was born in 1969, to the suburbs of Atlanta, in 1983, to direct the art department at Georgia State University. And she’s been writing since her early 20s, typing streams of words onto 3-by-5-inch file cards and scrawling the texts into drawings. Then, less than a decade ago, Walker began making films. Generally short — the first four were between 9 and 26 minutes long — they turn her silhouette figures into small, hand-operated puppets, and transform the implied narratives of her wall pieces into more explicit, if still open-ended, parables. There’s a distinctly handmade quality to everything Walker does: her hand is her voice — her testimony — and its evidence is as much the story as is any depicted event or incident. • Walker has exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world in dozens of LEFT: Kara Walker photographed solo and hundreds of group shows. Her retrospective by artist Chuck Close, 2007.

“Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” originated in 2007 at the CURRENTLY ON VIEW: “Dust Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to, Jackets for the Niggerati and among other places, the Hammer Museum in Supporting Dissertations, L.A., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New Drawings submitted ruefully by York and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris.

Dr. Kara E. Walker” at Sikkema In late April, a two-gallery exhibition of new work Jenkins & Co., and “Fall Frum opened in New York, with drawings and text pieces Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale,” at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea and a new video Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New installation at Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location.

York, Apr. 23 – Jun. 4, 2011. “Kara Both will be on view until June 4. In addition, the Fondazione Walker: A Project on Memory, Merz in Italy will be hosting a survey exhibition of Walker's Identity, Myth and Stereotype,” work until July 3. • Walker lives and works in New York and Fondazione Merz, Torino, Mar. teaches at Columbia University. We met at her studio on a sunny 25 – Jul. 3, 2011. afternoon in February.

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STILLMAN: I read that you made a cartoon strip when you were a kid.

WALKER: I began drawing newspaperlike strips when I was five and from then on I wanted to be a cartoonist, inspired in part

by Charles Schulz, I developed characters that commented, sometimes indirectly, on my family’s life. By the time I got to middle school I’d made plans for a multimedia enterprise that, in addition to the strip, included a Saturday morning TV show, books accompanied by audio cassettes and figurines that I’d made out of clay.

And then when you were 13, your family moved to the South.

My dad was born in Georgia — his family left when he was a child — so moving back to a region that had supposedly changed was, for him, something of a homecoming.

Yet, while he was interviewing for his job at Georgia State, the Atlanta Child Murders were at their peak. I had 12

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actual nightmares about moving to a place that was hostile to 13 – year – old black children.

The Klan was alive and well in Atlanta in the early ’80s, holding rallies and putting fliers and American flags in everyone’s mailbox. We spent the first year in Decatur, but soon moved to nearby Stone Mountain, where the public park’s featured attraction is an enormous stone monument commemorating the Confederacy. We lived in a neighborhood that changed from all white to all black around the time we got there; James R. Venable, an imperial Wizard of the KKK, lived at the other end of the road.

Georgia never felt quite normal to me; overt racism from whites was not uncommon. And expectations for a black girl were more limited than they had been in California. I didn’t have the language to understand it at first, but I could sense the difference in the way people treated me.

Writing is often the first step to making drawings.

Early on, I remember entering a poster contest at school and being made to feel that I’d stepped over a line: “None of our girls ever enters the poster contest!”

It took me years to acknowledge how insidious and effective the stereotyping was within the black community. In the meantime, I just sort of bumbled along, trying to figure out what exactly I was in relation to all that baggage.

You began cutting out silhouettes at RISD — what led to your discovery of their potential?

First at the Atlanta College of Art and then at RISD, I spent much of my time

trying to find something that would have the impact of painting without robbing me of my identity. In Atlanta I’d run afoul of teachers who believed, correctly enough, that I was sidling up too close to traditional, patriarchal modernism, and that I hadn’t come to terms with black liberation ideas. So when I got to Providence, in the libraries of RISD and Brown, I began researching what having a black body meant in art historical terms. From there, I followed a branching network of clues that linked early American art, various folk or “second – class” art traditions and work made by black artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

As I went along, I investigated minstrelsy, looking especially tor evidence of what blacks working in blackface had experienced. And I read Thomas F. Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (which

became the basis for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation), where I found Lydia Brown — described as a tawny vixen, the unruly mistress of the carpetbagger lead character, I adopted her persona as my own — I called her Negress — and realized that through her I could bring historical subject matter into my work.

At RISD I was still painting, but I was also typing things out, appropriating imagery and making prints. One day while drawing, I was thinking about physiognomy, the notion that identity can be divined from external appearances — when it occurred to me that identity was more likely to be revealed by editing away external assumptions, I cut out a shape I’d been drawing and then cut out a few more before abandoning them. After one of my professors said they looked interesting, I tried again. The first successful ones weren’t very big — 3 by 4 feet at most —

but they had too much detail and it was hard to get the paper to lie flat.

Is there still a lot of drawing hidden on the back of the silhouettes?

Yes. The drawings start out furtively; they’re not drawn from life. They develop in a flurry of ideas and mark-making. It’s always satisfying to find — from among the fifty smudges that count for an arm, say — the one that’s going to make it. The cut is a form of editing.

Since your early large – scale piece at The Drawing Center, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs

ABOVE: An installation view of “Dust Jackets...”, a new series of large – scale drawings and text pieces, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. OCTOBER 2011 13

I spent much of my time trying to find something that would have the impact of painting without robbing me of my identity.

of One Young Negress and Her Heart, you have deployed cut figures and motifs across large expanses of white wall. How do you choreograph their arrangement?

For Gone: An Historical Romance, I had two or three anchoring characters and then, as with a comic strip, I found actions and situations that connected them. The silhouette installations can be like three – ring circuses: there’s this going on here, something else in the middle, and, over there, a clown. In 1997, I did an installation in the round, inspired by 19th-century cycloramas, like the 360 – degree Battle of Atlanta. But in a more metaphorical sense, all the cut-paper works occupy a kind of endless panorama, their ongoing narrative suspended between what can and cannot be seen by the viewer.

Gone with the Wind was your starting point for that piece?

When I first read Gone with the Wind in my early 20s, I never got much beyond standard feminist or black studies interpretations; but then, at RISD, I picked it up again and loved it, swept along by its relentless storytelling, fully aware of all the complicated reasons that I shouldn’t like it. The experience helped me realize that my own conflicting reactions — 14

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esthetic, or even physiological, on the one hand, and political on the other could be useful in making work.

There are facts and experiences at the root of most race issues — hard to get to, but there — around which layers of hyperbole and fiction grow. It’s often impossible to know what actually happened, historically speaking, but it can feel necessary to knock those descriptions around. I’m not a historian or a social scientist; to be an artist is to fictionalize. Making work that connects to Gone with the Wind or The Clansman is a matter of weaving fictions around other fictions — trying, by subversive means, to approach another truth.

Your work also appropriates the language of slave testimonials.

Genuine slave narratives have a rough, manhandled quality, full of sex and violent material, which was often cleaned up for readers — black and white — in polite society. I like drawing from sources where the demand for authenticity is satisfied before the censors show up. I’ve adopted the testimonial format but have abandoned nearly all its reform – minded aspirations. Being a black girl means that I operate as the narrator, rendering testimonials in the language of art.

After seeing several silhouette installations, I remember being very surprised to see your watercolor drawings in the late ’90s. The content is familiar from the cutouts, but their figure – drawing style seemed to come from a different place altogether.

I’d taken figure drawing classes at Georgia State since I was 14, and I’d made lots of drawings leading up to the cut pieces, so it felt important to bring all that into the open. I had a teacher at ACA who made

us do 100 drawings in an afternoon, and while I’m not always as disciplined as that, I do love to draw. Though my line is cartoony, my gods are Goya, Daumier and Hogarth; I’m still trying to make figures emerge from darkness as wonderfully as theirs do!

Your drawings often have words in them — but I was also surprised to discover your typewritten text works.

I started typing on my mother’s IBM

Selectric the year I graduated from ACA [1991]; it was kind of a lifesaver because I didn’t talk much in those days.

Writing — which half the time is just letting the sound of the typewriter accompany the voice in my head — is often the first step to making drawings. I don’t think of myself as a writer, but I like struggling with words; and I like the way they move on the page. I’m always astounded by what comes out. Occasionally, when the phrases haven’t sounded like mine,

ABOVE: Untitled (detail), 2010, graphite and pastel on paper.

I’ve Googled them; but I’ve yet to find anything that wasn’t original.

You often make drawings and text pieces in series. For example, “Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk?”, a suite of drawings, many of them bursting with words, was made as a response to OCTOBER 2011 15

RIGHT: Still from “Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale,“ 2011, DVD, approx. 18 minutes.

RIGHT, BOTTOM: One of Walker's world –famous silhouette pieces installed at the Fondazione Merz in Torino, Italy.

the attack Betye Saar and others had mounted after you won the MacArthur “genius” grant.

Three major things happened that year — in addition to the MacArthur and the letter writing campaign, my daughter was born, so I was mostly at home struggling with postpartum depression. I didn’t know at first how to respond to the furor. But then I embraced the 100-drawings process and opened a notebook. Drawing (and writing) helped me sort out what the controversy was about and what I wanted my work to do. Eventually, I understood that my attackers had turned me into a fiction; they were vilifying me for making caricatures of blackness by doing the same thing to me. They were, in effect, rewriting the narrative of my Negress character and turning her into a whore. That irony got lost in all the noise.

When I started making my real work I knew I was stepping into an arena that I didn’t want to get stuck in. I didn’t want to take on all the baggage that goes with being a Black Artist: I didn’t want to have to uphold the race. Recently, I’ve been reexamining 16

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the New Negro movement of the ’20s, in which Alain Locke and others admonished black artists to make responsible, respectable work and to proclaim our past and struggles. The art associated with black liberation movements tends to be propagandistic in tone and is often redundant — the subject matter can’t expand and complicate.

In 2000, you began putting overhead projectors on the floor to cast colored shapes and motifs onto your cut – paper wall works. Viewers moving through these installations cast their own shadows onto silhouettes that were already there. What led to that development?

I bought a Super 8 film camera in 1999,

When I started making my real work, I knew I was stepping into an arena that I didn't want to get stuck in.

never having held a movie camera before. but then found I couldn’t trust myself with it. The projections became a way of sketching out an approach to film and video. I wanted to see what it would mean to make works that traveled through space from point A to the wall.

My projection pieces were on the verge of becoming animate, but there was something halting about them; compared to the viewers’ moving shadows, the cutouts seemed particularly static. I loved the overhead projectors, those funny, sculptural bits of antiquated technology, sitting on the floor, staring, like me.

And then, it seems that you got braver with Super 8. For your first

film, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004), you worked with puppets, mounting small backlit silhouette shapes on sticks, cobbling together a narrative that turned the plot of The Clansman inside out completely.

In Testimony the Negress has the power.

Considering the simplicity of their means and execution, my films have all been difficult to make. I’m always piecing things together on the fly, and trying not to be too precious or romantic with the medium. I learned how to construct the puppets by trying to translate a German book about shadow puppet theater and the work of the pioneering animator Lotte Reiniger, whose 1926 feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed preceded Disney’s Snow White by 11 years.

Do you think of yourself as a storyteller, in a way?

No, not really. Whenever I try to tell or write a story all the way through I stumble around and hesitate. It may be that I’m only really interested in beginnings: my second film 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African – America, A Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005)

is a catalogue of creation stories. I sometimes think the only tale I can tell goes something like this: Once upon a time there was a beginning followed by another beginning, and another, and so on. The primary situation in my work is that of the African – American telling her story. My job is just to tack onto that existing, historicized narrative bits that I’ve picked up along the way.

For your upcoming shows in New York, you’ve made two large – scale series of drawings on paper. One of the drawing series consists entirely of texts.

I’m still trying to find a way to make large text pieces that have the immediacy of typewriting and the visual presence of the silhouette work. For these new works I cut out letters, and block printed them on large sheets of paper. I was thinking about the weight of words, about all the things I had read: histories of colonialism in America; dissertations on the black subject in relation to X, Y or Z; and a few things that have been written about me.

Among the text works are a number of portraits — biographies of creative black women, historical figures like Louise Beavers and Nina Simone. The words I OCTOBER 2011 17

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My attackers turned me into a fiction; they were vilifying me for making caricatures of blackness by doing the same to me.

RIGHT: Untitled, 2010, graphite and pastel on paper, 72 x 72 in.

used came from Wikipedia entries, which are peculiarly fixated on their subjects’ personal problems, profiling legendary black women by way of their endless bad marriages and drug addictions. I’ve since heard that Wikipedia is looking for more female contributors.

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The other drawings are more figurative; like the text works they cover themes and incidents from Reconstruction to the present day.

The figurative drawings are loosely situated in the period between Reconstruction and the Jazz Age. I’m interested in the moments when black identity multiplied in ways that it couldn’t when most blacks were slaves. The process of making these large – scale drawings sort of parallels that multiplicity, and allowed me to work across a range of subjects and times. Going back and forth between the drawings and the text pieces, alternating between intuitive and analytical modes, seemed also to reflect how my imagination works.

One of the most explicitly up – to – date of these drawings (He Will Be, 2011) prophesies the lynching of President Barack Obama.

I’m certainly not the only person who worries about the assassination of our first black president. Around the time of the election, the collective anxiety about this was palpable, and I felt I needed to confront my own fear directly. The text is mostly lifted from an 1899 newspaper article, with some additions. There will be at least three pieces in the show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. that warn of this maddening danger. My hope is that they will function as protective talismans.

Recently, you’ve been making your films on video. What is the new one, now showing at Lehmann Maupin, about? [Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale (2011)] I’m just preparing to do the last shoot, so I’m still working on the narrative — who knows what will happen once editing begins! But essentially it’s a lament, like the Blues, about forbidden love and inevitable, devastating loss. I have material from a number of places, including some things I shot in Mississippi, which I may or may not use. I’m not yet sure how it will come together.

A year after Hurricane Katrina, you curated a remarkable show at the Metropolitan, “After the Deluge.” Using water as a theme you wove a number of your own works into an extended conversation with pieces that had mostly come from the museum’s collection. I wonder if that show might offer an image of your practice as a whole — in which materially diverse bodies of work call out to one another, each in their own way reflecting the same undeniable subject.

My sense of the whole flickers, at best, I often feel my work is having conversations with work by artists from other periods. But here in the studio, the conversations among my own pieces can go off on deviating paths. Years ago it struck me that I arrive at what I need through a kind of negative process, not unlike what I went through when I found my way to the silhouettes. Working from the inside out, thinking about what isn’t visible, I can’t always see the connections — but right now, with things in a flow, I think I can.

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EXHIBITION IN PRINT

Alison Saar Feallen & Fallow Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art announces Feallen and Fallow, a six-piece installation featuring four newly commissioned works by Los Angeles – based artist Alison Saar. Drawing inspiration 2011 GUTTER CREDIT

from the cyclical qualities of life and nature, Saar’s Feallen and Fallow will take park – goers and visitors on a journey through the four seasons as inspired by the ancient myth of Persephone in the urban oasis that is Madison Square Park.

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The series will premiere alongside two of the artist’s known Treesouls (1994), standing fourteen feet amidst the Park’s surrounding foliage. Feallen and Fallow is a commission of the award – winning Mad. Sq. Art program, and will remain on view daily from September 22 through December 31, 2011.

For the occasion of the Madison Square Park installation, Alison Saar presents four larger than – life works cast in bronze featuring the seasons as embodied by the female form at different stages of maturation.

Spring is depicted as an adolescent girl perched high upon an existing tree trunk.

Her wild head of roots cascade downward to conceal her face as chrysalises in various stages of hatching are shown woven within her hair and covering her body as if lively, fluttering moths emerging from cocoons. Summer is depicted as a pregnant woman whose womb holds a swarm of fireflies, illuminated at the center of the bronze sculpture. Fall is represented by a woman of the harvest with a head of branches extending upwards, barring no leaves but a smattering of pomegranates. The woman holds her skirt in both hands catching the fallen fruit while others descend to 22

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the ground. Winter is shown by a curled stone-like figure, cast in bronze in which the seasons come to rest, only to start anew once more.

Together the series tells of the Greek myth of Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus, who embodied the earth’s fertility and whose tale gave rise to the establishment of seasons.

Abducted by Hades and forced to live in the underworld, Demeter’s mourning of her lost daughter lead the earth to become barren. In turn, Zeus negotiated Persephone’s release on the condition no food would pass her lips though Persephone was eventually tricked by Hades into sharing pomegranate seeds.

In consequence, Persephone was confined to living in the underworld for six months, and the earth for six, giving rise to the four seasons.

In addition to the new series, the artist presents two Treesouls (1994) — which is on loan to the Park from the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum — to stand 14 feet high among the Park’s existing foliage. Comprised of found and sculpted wood with copper cladding, the pair depicts a coupled young man and woman whose legs dissolve into the earth as a web of searching roots.

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Spring is depicted as an adolescent girl perched high upon a tree trunk.

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Summer is depicted as a pregnant woman whose womb holds a swarm of fireflies.

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Fall is depicted as a woman with a head of branches extending upwards.

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Q&A with Alison Saar OBSERVE + COLLECT: How were you approached by Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad Sq. Art? Was there a prompt for “Feallan and Fallow”? How did you come up with the concept?

ALISON SAAR: The invitation to submit a proposal to the Madison Square Park Conservancy was initially in response to my earlier work, Treesouls. I took these works as a cue for scale and then proposed four new works, which also investigated natural elements as metaphor. The Mad Sq Art installation “Feallen and Fallow” is a continuation of ideas I am exploring in my current body of work, addressing the genesis myth of the seasonal cycles and life cycles. Each figure represents a season as well as a phase in the development of a woman’s life. The figures also represent the ebb and flow of creativity.

Although the sculptures tell the myth of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, did you draw inspiration from any other

Greek myths? For example, the figures metamorphose into trees themselves, which recalls the myth of Daphne, who escapes love-struck Apollo by changing into a tree. How is Demeter, Persephone’s mother and goddess of agriculture and fertility incorporated into the narrative?

Could the sculptures be understood as composite figures?

The Myth of Persephone served as a springboard for these works which address the seasons, which came to being a result of the legendary mourning of Demeter and her refusal to aid in the growing of crops until her daughter was returned. The “Treesouls,” which were made in 1994, do not draw from the myth of Daphne. They represent some of the older trees that remain in some of New York City’s urban parks and all that these trees have witnessed over the course of New York City history.

How did your own experience as a daughter and mother influence

the conception and creation of the installation?

As my daughter prepares to graduate from high school and leave for college, I believe our relationship was very much an influence for this body of work. It is also a time in my career where I feel the work has come full circle since the Treesouls were created some 18 years ago. I feel that as I approach the end of my years as a nurturer, my work will now take on new issues and ideas.

Is there significance as to why the installation is occurring during the fall and early winter?

Not really, but I like the possibility that the works can potentially be seen in three different seasonal settings, late summer, fall, and winter.

How does the one male tree soul influence the theme of the female change of seasons and “every woman’s journey?”

Did the other commemorative statues in OCTOBER 2011 27

Each figure represents a season as well as a phase in the development of a woman’s life. The figures also represent the ebb and flow of an artist’s creativity.

the park in any way effect the pieces?

I feel the female figures of “Feallan and Fallow” create a balance against the male centric history of the monuments within the park.

Does the general blending of the figures into their environment and the subtlety of their coloring and placement, facing into the park and obscured by its foliage, suggest something about female nature as a whole?

The works are about making the invisible visible, and their subtle placement in the plantings contribute to the quiet power of the figures.

What inspired the installations’s title?

I suppose on one hand the title represents my personal placement in the cycle as a post-fertile female, but the title has 28

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also come to signify, for me, the barren economy over the past years.

Did the future audience of the installation alter your vision for the works in any way?

Not really other than I saw this as an opportunity to reach an audience that may or may not find themselves going to art museums.

Did the fact that the sculptures would be in the public realm affect your approach?

What I find most compelling about New York’s Madison Square Park as a venue for art is the overwhelming diversity of the viewers. I also enjoy the fact that although these works are in a very public setting, people are still able to have an intimate relationship with the work, which is not always possible in a gallery setting or an art museum.

OCTOBER 2011 29

the expansions weren’t enough to accommodate their growing collection.

“Living with art kind of took over.” Another drawback: The place was dark.

“There wasn’t sun until late afternoon, and living in Seattle you really do crave the sun.”

Once they had decided to build a new house, the selection of the Seattle – based architect Tom Kundig was easy. He has made a name for himself with conceptually oriented structures in glass, steel, and concrete that reveal a fascination with both the mechanical and the natural. John explains that they had seen other houses Kundig had done and liked the combination of industrial and airy. In January 2010, after a more – than – two – year design and building process, they moved into their 5,500 – square – foot new home, just a block from the old one. The rusting unfinished – steel façade — a Kundig 30

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trademark — distinguishes it dramatically from the Craftsman and Tudor dwellings that dominate Laurelhurst, where, the Behnkes suggest, not everyone appreciates the latest architectural innovations. “It’s a risk to build a house like this within a neighborhood where people have very traditional houses,” says Shari. “Nobody likes change.”

The main entrance is on the side of the house, reached by a wooden dock that

In the foyer the visitor is also struck by the art. The Behnkes call this space their portrait gallery and have installed it salon – style.

Many of the works depict women, and nearly

traverses a shallow pool — a clever allusion

all are photographs. “We were surprised

to the boat landing on Lake Washington

by how much photography we have,”

down a hill at the back of the house. Once

says Shari. There is a 2001 Cindy Sherman

past the metal entry door, a visitor is struck

self – portrait; “Meredith” and “Claire,” two

by the light. Even when it’s cloudy out, Shari

of Tanyth Berkeley’s pictures of women in

says, it’s light inside. That is because, in

nature; a Sophie Calle self – portrait at the top

contrast to the somewhat opaque front, the

of the Eiffel Tower; and one of Valérie Belin’s

back wall overlooking the lake is a virtually

large – scale images from her “Black Women”

uninterrupted expanse of glass on all three

series. There’s also a portrait of Shari by

levels. The views help integrate the structure

Jason Salavon.

with the environment, something else Kundig is known for.

In the middle of the foyer is Tara Donovan’s pin cube, a massive block of

THE LOCAL ELEMENT Inside the Seattle home of art collectors John and Shari Behnke. by Meghan Dailey OCTOBER 2011 31

Valérie Belin’s photographs elude simple representation or Sophie Calle is a French writer,

description, even though she

photographer, installation artist,

often chooses to photograph

and conceptual artist. Calle’s

simple objects. Instead she is

work is distinguished by its use

attempting to unveil the very

of arbitrary sets of constraints,

essence of her subjects and to

and evokes the French literary

delve into the deepest secrets

movement of the 1960s known

of things, of matter and of light,

as Oulipo. Her work frequently

almost independent of the

depicts human vulnerability, and

objects themselves.

examines identity and intimacy.

She is recognized for her detective – like ability to follow strangers and investigate their

David Levinthal primarily

private lives. Her photographic

uses large – format Polaroid

work often includes panels of

photography. His works touch

text of her own writing.

upon many aspects of American culture, from Barbie to baseball to X – rated dolls. Levinthal uses small toys with dramatic lighting to construct mini environments of subject matters varying from war scenes to voyeurism to racial and political references to American pop culture.

32

OBSERVE + COLLECT

M

oving into a new house has a way of changing things — what kind of art you collect, how you view a familiar neighborhood — in subtle and shocking ways. For 26 years, Shari and John Behnke lived in a 1929 Tudor – style home in Laurelhurst, a quiet residential area of Seattle that may be best known as the place where Bill Gates grew up.

“We remodeled constantly,” says Shari, but the expansions weren’t enough to accommodate their growing collection.

“Living with art kind of took over.” Another drawback: The place was dark. “There wasn’t sun until late afternoon, and living in Seattle you really do crave the sun.”

Once they had decided to build a new house, choosing the Seattle – based architect Tom Kundig was easy. He has made a name for himself with conceptually oriented structures in glass, steel, and concrete that reveal a fascination with both the mechanical and the natural. John explains that they had seen other houses Kundig had done and liked the combination of industrial and airy. In January 2010, after a more – than – two – year design and building process, they moved into their 5,500 – square – foot new home, just a block from the old one. The rusting unfinished – steel façade — a Kundig trademark — distinguishes it dramatically from the Craftsman and Tudor dwellings that dominate Laurelhurst, where, the Behnkes suggest, not everyone appreciates the latest architectural innovations. “It’s a risk to build a house like this within a neighborhood where people have very traditional houses,” says Shari. “Nobody likes change.”

The main entrance is on the side of the house, reached by a wooden dock that traverses a shallow pool — a clever allusion to the boat landing on Lake Washington down a hill at the back of the house. Once past the metal entry door, a visitor is struck by the light. Even when it’s cloudy out, Shari says, it’s light inside. That is because, in contrast to the somewhat opaque front, the back wall overlooking the lake is a virtually uninterrupted expanse of glass on all three levels.

There is a different response to our collection because of the structure of this house.

The views help integrate the structure with the environment, something else Kundig is known for.

In the foyer the visitor is also struck by the art. The Behnkes call this space their portrait gallery and have installed it salon – style. Many of the works depict women, and nearly all are photographs.

“We were surprised by how much photography we have,” says Shari. There is a 2001 Cindy Sherman self – portrait; “Meredith” and “Claire,” two of Tanyth Berkeley’s pictures of women in nature; a Sophie Calle self – portrait at the top of the Eiffel Tower; and one of Valérie Belin’s large – scale images from her “Black Women” series. There’s also a portrait of Shari by Jason Salavon.

In the middle of the foyer is Tara Donovan’s pin cube, a massive block of ordinary stainless – steel straight pins held together by the force of gravity. The piece was acquired with the house in mind: it weighs 800 pounds and requires adequate floor support. “We want to take it apart and reinstall it,” says Shari. “It needs to be redone — everybody touches it.” John adds: “It’s going to shed no matter what.”

They’re sanguine, however, about its devolution. As Shari says, the piece “only exists because of gravity and friction. It makes sense that it falls apart.”

INSIDE THE COLLECTION At the other end of the foyer a wide hallway is lined with artworks by Mel Bochner, Jim Hodges, Jenny Holzer, and Gregory Kucera; Olafur Eliasson’s “Turbosphere” hangs high overhead. This central axis runs from the front of the house nearly to the back, linking different levels and helping to give a sense of openness despite the numerous dividing structures Kundig incorporated to make sure the Behnkes had a maximum amount of wall space for their collection.

The Behnke family has long been a fixture in Seattle’s business and philanthropic communities. John’s late father, Robert, was a major contributor to the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery, where John was chairman. The Behnke Foundation has given grants to numerous nonprofit social, educational, and cultural agencies around town, and the family’s investment company, REB Enterprises, owns the Seattle – based Sur la Table chain of high – end kitchen stores.

John, who grew up in Medina, just across Lake Washington, and Shari, originally from Scarsdale, New York, met in Seattle through a friend and married in 1980.

The couple’s experience in the art world is likewise intertwined with the city of Seattle. Although the Behnkes most directly support local artists through their extensive acquisitions, they are also responsible for two important grants.

Recently, Shari and John launched the Brink, a biannual award given to a regional artist striving to push his or her career to the next phase. The first recipient, in 2009, was the Vancouver – based video artist Isabelle Pauwels, whose work was featured in a show at the Henry.

Fifteen years ago, through the family foundation, Shari established the Neddy, named for John’s brother Ned, an artist who died of aids in 1989. Two winners each year, one of whom is always a painter, receive $15,000 apiece and have shows at the Tacoma Art Museum, where Shari has served as a trustee. “The Neddy really changed things, really began my involvement in the field,” she says. “We wanted to extend Ned’s legacy through art. And through running the grant, we really started to get to know local artists, to go their studios, see their work.”

Soon they were venturing further afield.

They got hooked on fairs — “It’s so easy to talk to 20 galleries in two days,” says John — about the time the international OCTOBER 2011 33

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LEFT: Visitors navigate a wooden dock that spans a shallow reflecting pool to reach the main entrance, a metal door located on the side of the house. ABOVE: Shari and John Behnke’s house in Seattle designed by Tom Kundig. The glass walls flood the interior with light and integrate the structure with the environment, while also offering a spectacular view of Lake Washington.

We really built this house to showcase our art collection. circuit was heating up in the late 1990s and attended their first Art Basel in 2000.

But they never abandoned younger local artists, who are well represented in the house. There are some arresting video pieces, including a stop – motion animation work by Cat Clifford and another, by Tivon Rice, of a dog baring its teeth (it’s actually asleep), both installed in a bathroom with black steel walls. There is a painting

by Joseph Park (a Neddy recipient) of

bunnies and elephants in a harem and a Steve Davis photograph depicting inmates at a juvenile detention center.

There is also humor, as in Jenny C. Jones’s “Breathless” — unraveled audiotape of a Kenny G album — and Isaac Layman’s photograph of frozen Otter Pop treats.

By the boom years, the couple had grown weary of the feeding frenzy at the fairs. “John and I decided some time ago that we’re not going to play that game,”

says Shari. But they also used their move as an excuse to adjust their collecting habits. “While we were building the house, we decided we would only buy art for around $3,000 to $4,000,” says Shari.

“It was our austerity program.” They found the two years of buying less – expensive art freeing, and the budget suited their commitment to locals.

Since completing the house and installing their collection, they have been OCTOBER 2011 35

reconsidering the works’ placement.

Most pieces will stay put for now, but a few changes have already been made.

They recently sold a James Rosenquist painting, Shari says, “because we owned two of them, and because we wanted to buy different art.” In its former spot in the living room is a mixed – media piece

by MadeIn, the Chinese collective formed by the artist Xu Zhen in reaction to his own fast – growing fame. “It’s actually the first Chinese contemporary work we’ve 36

OBSERVE + COLLECT

bought,” says Shari. “We got it at Frieze in London last October.”

They’re smitten with a work by local painter Andrew Dadson — who happens to be this year’s Brink winner and was a sensation at the 2010 Art Basel Miami Beach (they bought their Dadson before then, from the Seattle dealer Scott Lawrimore). The canvas actually isn’t hung but leans against the wall, all the better to convey a sense of the weight of the thick black globs of pigment, which are

still wet. “It’ll take like 10 years before it dries completely,” says John.

Although John acknowledges that the house is “built to really showcase art,” he stresses that it “is not a museum.”

But, says Shari, “since we’ve lived here, people have responded that way when they come in, even though we’ve had a lot of this art for many years.” She ABOVE: Tara Donovan, Untitled (detail), 2001, nickel – plated steel pins, 35 x 35 x 35 in.

ANDREW DADSON: ON THE BRINK Last summer, there was a giant black square on the lawn of the Olympic Sculpture Park — it looked like something had attacked, or something had formerly lived there and been removed, or like Seattle had a posthumous visit from Kasimir Malevich.

That art was by Andrew Dadson, who has just now been announced as the winner of this biennium’s Brink Award.

The Henry Art Gallery is delighted to announce that artist Andrew Dadson is the recipient of The Brink award for 2011.

The Brink is a biennial award granted to an early – career artist working in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia whose work shows artistic promise and who appears to be on “the brink” of a promising career. Dadson will receive a prize of $12,500 and a solo exhibition at the Henry. A work of his art will be acquired for the permanent collection.

Andrew Dadson, of Vancouver B.C., creates paintings of intensely worked layers of oil paint, pushed unidirectionally across the painting’s support, allowing a thick blur to settle on the picture plane while excesses of color build up at the edges. Combining multiple canvases in small groups that often sit on the floor and and lean on each other, he emphasizes the physicality of his process and the object – like nature of the results. Through these paintings and his OCTOBER 2011 37

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equally characteristic series of landscape photographs altered by monochromatic applications of paint, Dadson explores his assertion that “everything has boundaries; the delimitations between such can be static and opaque or permeable and imagined. In my practice, I search for the spaces where society manifests these invisible distinctions, and how they can be indiscernibly breached and stretched.”

Dadson received a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He is represented by Galleria Franco Noero.

Andrew Dadson and many of the other short – listed nominees for the award and jurors will take part in a public program at the Henry. The artists will share images of their work, and members of The Brink selection committee will respond to their presentations. The event is designed to be an open – ended, free – wheeling discussion about contemporary art, and will be an opportunity for dialogue between artists, arts professionals, collectors, and the general public.

The Brink Award, now in its second biennial cycle, is given to an early – career artist in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia whose work shows artistic promise and who appears to be on “the brink” of a promising career. The selection committee considers artists whose work explores a range of ideas beyond the surface of mainstream culture and demonstrates innovation and

high artistic quality. Evidence of some professional achievement is required as a demonstration of the artist’s commitment, but the artist does not need to possess an extensive record of accomplishments (exhibitions, critical reviews, commissions, grants, residencies, etc.). Appropriate benchmarks include a first significant exhibition, the receipt of an MFA or equivalent degree, or other evidence within the last five years indicative of the beginning of a professional artistic career.

The Brink Award, now in its second biennial cycle, was established by long – time Henry Art Gallery benefactors and Seattle art supporters John and Shari Behnke. In developing the idea of The Brink, John and Shari Behnke sought a name that would evoke a critical point in an artist’s career, described by the Behnkes as “a crucial moment, the point at which something is likely to begin.” The award reflects the Behnkes’ adventuresome art collecting interests as well as their desire to support artists in the region and purchase their works.

The Brink complements the Henry Art Gallery’s role as a catalyst for the creation of new work, while still demonstrating the museum’s commitment to artists working in our region. Said Henry Director Sylvia Wolf, “Since its founding in 1927, the Henry has advanced the art, artists and ideas of its time. Today, John and Shari Behnke are building upon that mission

with the Brink Award. All of us at the Henry are deeply grateful for the Behnkes’ extraordinary generosity and support of artists in the Cascadia region.”

The selection committee completed the review of artists’ submissions in March.

For this year’s award, 62 nominations were received from arts professionals across the Pacific Northwest. Of those nominated, 43 artists submitted materials for consideration. The 2011 selection committee comprised Henry director Sylvia Wolf and curators Elizabeth Brown and Sara Krajewski; Seattle artist Victoria Haven; Vancouver artist Ken Lum; Reed College’s Cooley Art Gallery (Portland, OR) curator and director, Stephanie Snyder; and John and Shari Behnke.

In addition to Andrew Dadson, six other artists were chosen as finalists: Grant Barnhart (Seattle, WA); Debra Baxter (Seattle, WA); Dawn Cerny (Seattle, WA); Tannaz Farsi (Eugene, OR); Allison Hrabluik (Vancouver, BC); and artist team Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen (Portland, OR). The committee conducted studio visits with all of the finalists before selecting the award winner. Henry Art Gallery Curator Sara Krajewski remarked, “Evaluating this year’s Brink artists was a compelling and delightful process. The work of emerging artists in our region is thriving, strong, and provocative. The jury appreciated all the entrants’ efforts in submitting work for our review.”

This painting will take about 10 years to dry completely.

LEFT: Andrew Dadson, August, 2001, oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in.

OCTOBER 2011 39

SOLO SHOW ARTIST TO WATCH Mequitta Ahuja’s portraits are large –scale abstractions and symbols of a multiethnic mix.

I’ve started seeing a failed painting as an opportunity.

Ahuja’s layered musings on race and identity have made their way into museums around the country. She had a solo show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005, and her work was included in the Brooklyn Museum’s groundbreaking “Global Feminisms” show in 2007. Recently the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts acquired some of her pieces, which range in price from $5,000 to $20,000. She moved from Houston to New York last fall to start her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she is considering staying in the city for a few years once her residency is finished.

With this in mind, Ahuja has long focused on depictions of her hair. In paintings and waxy chalk – on – paper drawings, strands come to life as tangled masses, folding in colors and shapes suggestive of the artist’s African American and Indian heritage.

It’s a powerful symbol and, for Ahuja, a way to work through her personal issues of race. “At some point, I kind of confronted 40

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my parents about the fact that they never really addressed our having this multiethnic background, and our living in a mostly white town,” Ahuja says, referring to Weston, Connecticut.

Her father was born in New Delhi, and her mother came from Cincinnati. “It was pretty confusing because each group — white, Indian, black — had certain expectations of me that I never really fit. Through my work, I get to be involved with these different communities on my own terms.”

Her latest works — mainly self – portraits, as well as some large paintings that hover between landscape and abstraction — will be exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem this July. In one, a nude with just the slightest hint of facial features wields a sword, hacking her way through crosshatched brushstrokes resembling branches on a dark forest floor. A figure dressed in a bright orange ensemble that evokes the artist’s Indian roots strikes a strong stance atop a tree. Some densely textured patches create a ripple across a few canvases — a pleasant byproduct of the artist’s tendency to paint over her work. “It allows for the sort of things you wouldn’t plan for,” she explains. “I have started seeing a failed painting as an opportunity.” — Rachel Wolff

LEFT: The artist in her studio at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2010.

RIGHT: Forge (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 84 x 72 in.