Jim Long: Curated by Rackstraw Downes

2006–2007

511

west 25 th street, new york, ny www.cueartfoundation.org

10001

j i m lo n g

j i m lo n g

CUE Art Foundation September 7 – October 14, 2006 Curated by Rackstraw Downes

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CUE Art Foundation

Artist’s Statement

Jim Long

We are honored to host this exhibition of the work of Jim Long, generously curated by fellow

Juggernaut is a group of four paintings I made between 2003 and 2006. They are works in a

artist Rackstraw Downes. Long, originally from Springfield, MA, has long been admired by his

series that began in 1988. At the time I was looking for impersonal visual material: spatters, stains,

peers as an artist who has forged a unique artistic voice over the years Mr. Downes’ appreciation

visual “noise”, complex accidents. I combined incompatible materials like water or crushed ice with

of Mr. Long’s paintings demonstrates how the Foundation’s discretionary selection process allows

oil paint and ink. In trying to create an accident, most of my effort showed manipulation when

the unfettered expression of each curator’s views.

what I wanted was facts. A real accident is hard to come by.

In 1991 I noticed that oil paint left floating in water formed small interesting

The works in this exhibition a part of a series Mr. Long began fourteen years ago.

We appreciate that artists often work tirelessly without thought or concern of exhibition opportu-

structures, like cartoons that existed in dimensions between two and three. I caught some of these

nities. CUE is pleased to recognize such commitment by affording just such an opportunity, thus

configurations on paper, and later found out what I was seeing was the fractal irregularity of the

celebrating the efforts of artists such as Mr. Long.

“classic mess” I was looking for years before. It was the same phenomenon the botanist Robert Brown had seen in 1827: the physical trace of invisible molecular activity that kept pollen grains floating in water in perpetual movement.

This is common visual imagery. It’s a material/perceptual layer with elastic

dimensions. Scaling replaces perspective and illusion, figure and ground shift constantly. Delacroix wrote in 1864 about drawing small rocks and seeing that their irregular forms were identical to those of nearby cliffs.

A few years ago I was in an empty room and for a moment imagined four large

discs covered with linear movement. I recognized the images: thirteen inch mylar circles I had put aside ten years earlier. When I thought about the amount of work it would take to translate them into large paintings “juggernaut” came to mind, though I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

While I was working on the first paintings I looked it up and found the word comes from the Sanscrit name for Jagannatha, a title for Krishna and Vishnu meaning “protector of all that moves”, including things invisibly small.

Curator’s Statement

Rackstraw Downes

The four consummate and monumental works that make up Jim Long’s show are collectively titled For Jagannatha, after the Hindu god. In these works, the normally conspicuous stamp of human decision making appears to be absent, and art making resembles a protracted natural process, like the formation of stalagtites on the ceiling of a cave.

In For Jagannatha, Long’s process creates colonies of matter made up of tiny warm dark branchings, lying on a blonde surface of natural cotton duck and dispersing towards a proto-circular periphery. In their slight but bewilderingly endless internal variations these colonies image a society held together not by laws, hierarchies or leaders but by an indivisibly affiliated consistency of substance. Long maps them on the most singular of geometrical areas—only one directional decision determines the periphery of a tondo—and the one to which they most nearly, and almost, correspond. But they behave organically; like garden vegetables in rows, or versals on backgrounds in illuminated manuscripts, they spill over the tondo’s confines and offset its inflexibility. At their boundaries, where the dispersing energy appears to conclude, they mass more densely in an act—so it seems—not of territoriality but of self-defining completion: to the viewer they say with satisfaction: “Now I am whole”.

Florence

1988 Oil, ink and graphite on paper 14" x 11"

untitled

1994 Oil on mylar on aluminum 4 discs, 12" diameter each

The Drunken Boat 1994-95

Oil on canvas

109" x 210"

Saturn Devouring 1996 One of His Oil on canvas Children 28" x 28"

top: Out of Kishkindhya 1996 (Hanuman #1) Oil and wax on canvas

40" x 60"

bottom: Hanuman (Night)

2000 Oil and enamel on canvas 48" x 68"

top: For Jagannatha 1993-2003 Working Drawing 1 Oil on mylar

13" diameter

bottom: For Jagannatha 1993-2004 Working Drawing 2 Oil on mylar

13" diameter

top: For Jagannatha 1993-2003 Working Drawing 3 Oil on mylar

13" diameter

bottom: For Jagannatha 1993-2005 Working Drawing 4 Oil on mylar

13" diameter

For Jagannatha 1

2003 Oil on canvas 126" diameter

For Jagannatha 2 2003-2004

Oil on canvas

126" diameter

For Jagannatha 3 2004

Oil on canvas

126" diameter

For Jagannatha 4 005

Oil on canvas

126" diameter

Biographies

Jim Long

Jim Long was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1949, received a B.A. in Art History from Swarthmore College, and attended San Francisco Art Institute. He moved to New York City in 1976, and began exhibiting work in galleries and museums here and in Europe in 1981. He worked in set design and technical production for dance and theatre, and has taught for many years in the summer program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. He is a contributing writer at the Brooklyn Rail.

Rackstraw Downes Rackstraw Downes was born in England in 1939. He took his B.A. in English Literature at Cambridge University, England in 1961 and his M.F.A. in Painting at Yale in 1964. He has since divided his time between New York, Maine and Texas. He has had solo shows in New York at the Kornblee; Hirschl & Adler Modern; Marlborough; Robert Miller; and Betty Cunningham galleries; and at Texas Gallery, Houston. His work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Ludwig Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1979, Downes edited Art in Its Own Terms, Selected Criticism 19351975 by Fairfield Porter. In 2000, Downes published In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays from Three Decades – 1973, 1981, 1996 (Edgewise Press) and Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal: The Making of Two Paintings (Turning the Head Press). In 2005 Princeton University Press published Rackstraw Downes by Sanford Schwartz, Robert Storr and Racsktraw Downes. Downes received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.

Mission Statement

CUE Art Foundation

CUE Art Foundation, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit arts organization, is dedicated

Board of Directors

to providing a comprehensive creative forum for contemporary art by

Gregory Amenoff

supporting under-recognized artists via a multi-faceted mission spanning

Theodore S. Berger

the realms of gallery exhibitions, professional development programs and

Patricia Caesar

arts-in-education.

Thomas G. Devine

CUE Art Foundation was established in June of 2002 with

the aim of providing educational programs for young artists and aspiring art

Thomas K. Y. Hsu Brian D. Starer

professionals in New York and from around the country. These programs draw on the unique community of artists, critics, and educators brought together

Advisory Council

by the foundation’s season of exhibitions, public lectures, workshops, and its

Gregory Amenoff

studio residency program: all are designed to be of lasting practical benefit to

William Corbett

aspiring and under-recognized artists. The entire CUE identity is characterized

Meg Cranston

by artistic quality, independent judgment and the discovery of genuine talent,

Vernon Fisher

and provides long-term benefits both for creative individuals associated with

Malik Gaines

CUE and the larger art marketplace. Located in New York’s Chelsea gallery

Deborah Kass

district, CUE’s 4,500 square feet of gallery, studio and office space serves as

Irving Sandler

the nexus for educational programs and exhibitions conducted by CUE. executive Director Jeremy Adams Director of development Elaine Bowen

Cover: Studio view of, at left: For Jagannatha 1, 2003, Oil on canvas, 126"

programs coordinator

diameter; at right: For Jagannatha 3, 2004, Oil on canvas, 126" diameter

Beatrice Wolert-Weese

Photo credits: Regina Cherry: pg #11; Jim Long: cover, pg #10; Kevin Noble: pg # 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; Ken Showell: pg # 6-7, 8-9

programs assistant Kara Smith

ISBN: 0-9776417-5-9 All artwork © Jim Long Catalog designed by Elizabeth Ellis