Eponanonymous: Reviews, Mostly

Nicholas Knight EPONANONYMOUS Reviews, mostly

September 2007 - July 2012 originally published at nicholasknight.net/wordpress

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Contents 1

2007 1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

2

7 September . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

8

Logic, Intention, and Containment (2007-09-04 11:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Matt Keegan: Any Day Now at D’Amelio Terras (2007-09-07 11:32) . . . . . . . . . . .

11

The Lath Picture Show at Friedrich Petzel (2007-09-19 15:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

14

Francis Cape at Murray Guy (plus Higgs) (and McMakin, though absent) (2007-09-26 10:14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

16

October . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21

Latitude / Longitude at Eugene Binder (2007-10-05 12:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

22

Shallow at I-20 Gallery (2007-10-09 16:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

Enantiomorphs (2007-10-19 14:58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

26

Eileen Quinlan at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2007-10-30 15:38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

November . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

30

John Baldessari and Alejandro Cesarco, ”Retrospective,” at Murray Guy (2007-11-13 17:46) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

December . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

34

”From a Distance” at Wallspace (2007-12-02 12:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35

Joianne Bittle Knight, ”A Royal Family”, at Wave Hill (2007-12-10 11:30) . . . . . . . .

39

2008 2.1

2.2

41 January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42

We Interrupt This Narrowcast (2008-01-07 16:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

43

February . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44

Segue (2008-02-24 15:05) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45 3

2.3

2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9

3

46

”Enantiomorphic Chamber” at NurtureArt (2008-03-01 12:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

”Accidental / Coincidental” at Snug Harbor Cultural Center (2008-03-10 13:10) . . . .

49

Nicholas Knight, ”Depictured”, at 65GRAND, Chicago (2008-03-14 21:52) . . . . . . .

51

April . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

”Gut of the Quantifier” at Lisa Cooley (2008-04-21 08:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

54

June . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

Posting (2008-06-04 21:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

58

On Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel Last Winter (2008-06-20 12:40) . . . . . . . . . . .

59

August . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63

“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns” at Tony Shafrazi Gallery (2008-08-20 20:21) . . . . . . .

64

September . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67

Roe Ethridge, ”Rockaway Redux” at Andrew Kreps Gallery (2008-09-28 12:05) . . . .

68

October . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70

Group Show in Marfa, Texas, opening 10 October 2008 (2008-10-08 19:18) . . . . . . . .

71

November . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera at the Whitney (2008-11-09 11:04) . . . . . . .

73

2009 3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4 4

March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78

Nicholas Knight and Hans Gindlesberger at Gallery 44, Toronto (2009-01-06 23:29) . .

79

Two Reviews of ”Right Frame, Wrong Film” at Gallery 44 (2009-01-18 12:32) . . . . . .

80

”A Twilight Art” at Harris Lieberman (2009-01-18 12:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

82

March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

Walead Beshty, ”Popular Mechanics” at Wallspace (2009-03-04 22:38) . . . . . . . . . .

86

Matt Keegan, ”New Windows” at D’Amelio Terras (2009-03-13 15:05) . . . . . . . . . .

90

April . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

92

Jenny Holzer’s ”Protect Protect”: A Conversation with Catherine Spaeth (2009-04-20 18:46) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

93

Matt Sheridan Smith, ”Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos,” at Lisa Cooley (2009-04-27 10:40) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

94

May . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

96

3.5

3.6

3.7

Liz Deschenes, ”Tilt/Swing” at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2009-05-25 12:50) . . . . . . . .

97

July . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

101

”Rubber Sheets” at C.R.E.A.M. Projects, Greenpoint, Brooklyn (2009-07-22 11:16) . . .

102

September . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105

Nicholas Knight, ”Taking Pictures” at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco (2009-09-07 11:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

106

Six Gallery Reviews, September 2009 (2009-09-27 12:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

108

November . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

112

Shannon Ebner,

”Invisible Language Workshop” and ”The Sun as Error” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

113

(2009-11-18 08:41)

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2010 4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

5

January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

118

Anne Collier at Anton Kern Gallery (2010-01-24 11:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

119

March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

122

Leslie Hewitt, ”On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance”, at the Kitchen (2010-03-28 11:26)

123

September . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

126

Nicholas Knight: Between Nothing and ”Nothing” (2010-09-28 13:22) . . . . . . . . . .

127

December . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138

Luis Jacob, ”Albums”, and Ryan Gander’s Artforum project (2010-12-04 10:46) . . . .

139

2011 5.1

5.2

5.3

6

117

143 January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

144

Nicholas Knight, ”Declaimed”, at 65GRAND, Chicago (2011-01-10 20:16) . . . . . . . .

145

October . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

147

Tableaux Parisiens at The Do Right Hall, Marfa, TX (2011-10-18 12:13) . . . . . . . . .

148

December . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149

Robert Morris and Merce Cunningham, 1972 (2011-12-28 11:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . .

150

2012 6.1

151 July . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

152

On Eponanonymous (2012-07-09 09:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

153

5

6

1.

2007

7

1.1

8

September

Logic, Intention, and Containment (2007-09-04 11:36) When we were in Paris last month, my wife and I climbed the towers of Notre Dame to get a good look at the gargoyles. It was really satisfying:

On the signage, they make a point to tell the intrepid climber that there are 382 stairs to reach the top. It apparently doesn’t dissuade many people, as we waited in line for 90 minutes just to get into the tower. On the way down, spiraling without pause, I had a thought that I scribbled in my notebook once back at the hotel: The following of a rule is the declaration of an intention: the intention to express the meaning embedded in the rule.

But how and what is ”the meaning embedded in the rule”? Perhaps this: rules, be they the rules of a game or the fabric of a logic, circumscribe a set of meaningful actions. It is because the interpretation of objects and actions is ultimately ”uncircumscribable” that one seeks recourse in the legibility of a logical description of the situation.

I’ve been thinking about parentheses. I like that their form tells us something important about their function: the parenthetical statement is set off from the text it accompanies, as an addendum or supplement; but the separation of the supplement is always partial, and the supplement bleeds back into the text. The parentheses themselves are the edges of a circle which does not close. The parentheses 9

cannot contain their content, it’s always spilling out.

And so I think of an empiricist philosophical project, and of an approach to making artwork, that takes as its primary impetus an identification of ”the logic of the situation” such as I mentioned earlier. The project identifies and gives form to those rules that enable meaningful expression. The action of this process is the nesting of various forms inside one another, creating shells around each that turn them into detachable objects. But I posit that these shells are really always parentheses, broken circles that fail to contain. There is no solid shell from which to view the logic, no place for us to stand where it won’t spill on us.

My left parenthesis was climbing the stairs of Notre Dame; my right parenthesis is this notebook comment from 12 July 2007: as Cavell says, there is no such thing as meta-philosophy: that, in fact, is just philosophy; so there is no meta-art: it is, in fact, just art: no parenthesis prevents exchange

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Matt Keegan: Any Day Now at D’Amelio Terras (2007-09-07 11:32)

For a few years now, Matt Keegan has exemplified a particular approach to being a contemporary artist: collaborative, curatorial, writerly, media-breaching. Two main ends are served by this. First is the creation of a rich discursive space that offers many points of entry. Second is the massaginginto-being of an elaborate content that gains clarity through its gestalt shape rather than its oblique particulars.

In his exhibition that opened last night at D’Amelio Terras, a carefully cultivated method is on display, as much as any single work. Many hats are absent: it’s not collaborative, or publisher-ly, or the rest. Nonetheless, a certain slipperiness and displacement keeps the conversation tip-toeing around amongst the work, letting itself be glimpsed through the repeated cut-outs that simultaneously obscure and reveal.

The best work hovers between its idea and its execution. In every case here, this involves cutting.

The left side of the gallery begins with the giant self-portrait cut-out, ”Humberto, Humberto, Humberto”. The artist is positioned on a toe, chair pulled out from under, leaning into the corner. The title directs us down two avenues of reference: as master of self-conscious, carnal ceremonies, he’s Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert; and with three iterations of the image, recursively residing in the next larger head, it points to Homunculus, Homunculus, Homunculus. Of course, the largest figure is too big to fit inside any head, unless we think of the gallery space itself as a giant psychic chamber.

The wall on the left is lined by a set of cut and layered photographs that, while the most modest in scale, also offer the greatest emotional charge. In each, a figure (the artist?) sits in a chair in a living room. Keegan has cut away the person and left the room, and collaged together several versions of the same theme. Fragments are visible through the successive openings, but while new details can be seen, they refuse to reveal. Together the photographs feel like frustrated attempts at memory, and they show that the materiality of any image necessarily precedes its ability to capture, and remind.

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Matt Keegan Untitled, 2007, approx. image size: 7 x 5 inches, collaged c-prints (image taken from gallery website) Absence, or more correctly, negative space, serves the opposite function in the large sheet-rock and metal-stud screen that divides the gallery. On the clean white side, Keegan has cut away a letter-form on each facet of the screen so that it reads ”Good to see you”. The empty spaces allow this action to literally take place, as those on the other side of the screen fill and energize our field of vision. Here language is being held up directly against the world, and put to the test. (I suppose it’s a sign of optimism that it’s good to see whomever may wander by.) While in the photographs, the cut was an act of withholding, here it’s an act of giving.

The last major occurrence of cutting is in a work that has four versions. Parallelograms formed by the repetition of the word ”M E N” are carved into the gallery wall. The letters are sometimes removed, exposing layers beneath the paint surface; or they are partially removed, and refilled with what appears to be joint compound (but I’m not sure); the grid of text is superimposed, inverted, 12

shifted out of phase - in philosophy of science, what would be called a set of ”translations and transformations”. The trembling edge between exactitude and hand-made activates these pieces on close inspection; and to return to the metaphor of the gallery as a large psychic space, it appears that the artist has something on his mind, but that he can only scratch the surface of it.

To this viewer, the left half of the space is much more convincing than the right half. The eponymous piece ”Any Day Now” has a lovely material presence - a grid of photos pinned to leaning sheetrock - but there is little to be done with the message of the text. It exists at face-value, and to my reading, doesn’t expand down multiple avenues. The two different photo sets are even more oblique, and while their visual and textural quality is consistent with the other work, I don’t know where they’re trying to take me. Because the prints lack any subsequent physical intervention by the artist, they feel too mute.

With this show, Keegan presents himself as a patient and thoughtful artist who is ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the sensitivity of his viewers. This is a highly welcome posture. Through all of his various activities, he demonstrates that there are many ways in, through, and out of working as an artist, and that each offers its own rewards. Attention to the inherently discursive quality of materials is his strong suit, and yet his work still reminds us that intellectual exchange need not preclude an emotional poignancy.

nick (2007-09-19 15:29:48) I’d like to, but I have plans already. Dang.

Christopher Howard (2007-09-18 20:31:09) Just a note: Matt Keegan will be in conversation with Joao Ribas at the Drawing Center tomorrow night (Wednesday). I was thinking of going–you? valerie atkisson (2007-09-07 13:14:34) Very insightful review. I especially like the last paragraph and the posture that it frames the artist in.

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The Lath Picture Show at Friedrich Petzel (2007-09-19 15:53) I wanted to write something a little more thorough about this show, but looking now at the clock, I realize I have a game in my basketball league to go to now. Maybe more later. But probably not likely.

Anyway, here’s an image of my favorite work in an uneven show:

Cheyney Thompson Untitled, 2007 Paper, 61.75 x 38 inches [image taken from gallery website] 14

In general, the works at Petzel obstinately refuse to transform into something else. I respect that as a posture. But the engagement with the resulting objects is terribly short-lived. Thompson’s work, made of paper according to the website, is self-evident in its referent (an impression of wood grain, as from the surface of a picnic table), and still mysterious in its actual material embodiment. The transformation is balanced just past the periphery of simplicity. Yummy.

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Francis Cape at Murray Guy (plus Higgs) (and McMakin, though absent) (2007-09-26 10:14)

There’s a nice group show at Murray Guy. Matthew Higgs includes some framed pages. They’re fun, and my favorite thing about them is the way they always demand an acceptance of all the little incidental material facts of their presentation: the raggedy glue along the torn edge of the page, a flattened crease, or the type from the verso showing through. It seems wildly immodest to say, but I think of these moments as a type of metaphysics. -Kind of like ”wherever you go, there you are”?

-Almost, but this doesn’t get past tautology. –OK, so the difference is that the presence of all these incidents is not necessary, but without them the meaning of the piece is irreparably diminished.

Which takes me to my criticism of the works, which is that the full presentation doesn’t withstand the close inspection that the book pages initiate. The frames are crummy, the tone of white feels illconsidered (if considered at all), the paint amateur-ish, the mats mismatched. I don’t point this out to be a connoisseur. I’ve been invited to look closely, and left hanging.

Anyway, I meant to make a couple comments about Francis Cape, especially in relation to Roy McMakin. Both use a highly-skilled language of furniture-making to create discursive objects. To get right to it, Cape’s work is more emotional and McMakin’s more philosophical. I find it really fascinating that both artists can put this traditional craft to such particular and inventive use, while remaining respectful of their inherited language.

Cape’s sculpture unfolds slowly, as you move through space. The full experience that emerges after making it all the way around a free-standing piece, or from one end to the other of a wall work, demands that the viewer think back to what he can no longer see. The changes must be held in the mind in order to be compared. In the sense that his architectural vocabulary has an ”old world” feel (at least to this mid-westerner), this reliance on immediate memory catapults the act of remembering into a much deeper and more mysterious zone. A world brought to mind by the specifics of a physical setting, which is gone, or essentially historical, summons a set of emotions about the passing of cultural relics. The furniture of a lifestyle passes from invisibly functioning to assertively signifying.

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Francis Cape On Main Street, 2005 wood, paint, framed b &w gelatin silver print, 72 x 55 x 29 inches [image taken from Murray Guy website] 17

Roy McMakin’s objects (formerly shown at Feature, Inc., but now represented by Matthew Marks) assert with a different mode. The discontinuities are aggressively present in a single field of view.

At every turn, they contradict the viewer’s attempt to be absorbed by a historically legible referent.

Because they insist on ”what was and what never shall be”, their physical existence is soon consumed by speculation of a philosophical sort. Call it, ”If not, then why not?” And of course there’s never a philosophically satisfying answer to this ”why not”: there’s only, ”because this is how it was, and therefore how it is”. A traditional craft, carefully practiced, is particularly capable of communicating this.

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Roy McMakin Untitled Installation, 2003 dimensions and materials variable [image taken from Matthew Marks website] The close corollary question to ”why not” is ”what if”. In a historical tradition with clear conventions (such as the round table above), ”what if” is askable, but ”why not” is not really answerable.

As a result, McMakin’s objects have a speculative clarity that is visual, destabilizing, and offers no 19

conclusions.

I spent several years working in a woodshop. My skills are nothing like Cape’s or McMakin’s, but I understand the attraction to the craft and the urge to mess with it. Their dysfunctional products - disqualified from existing within their own happy heritage - instead take up residence in the parlour of artistic transformation: where the precision of material declaration dissolves into speculation, memory, and conjecture.

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1.2

October

21

Latitude / Longitude at Eugene Binder (2007-10-05 12:51)

This group show in Marfa, Texas, opens tonight. It also happens to be Open House Weekend in Marfa. I wish I could be there this year, but alas. I’m not. Still, two of my Sentence Diagrams are included, one from 2005 and one from 2007.

22

Shallow at I-20 Gallery (2007-10-09 16:18)

This is a group exhibition curated by Stefan Brüggemann, an artist represented by I-20. Participating artists are Pierre Bismuth, Stefan Brüggemann, Martin Creed, Miltos Manetas and Malcolm McLaren. ”Curating” is a concept without stable meaning. The motives, techniques, and results are as widely, and wildly, variable as most genres of artistic production. Does this mean that it can elevate to an artform itself? I’m ambivalent about this possibility: on the one hand, artists do the things they do, make the things they make, and then this other caste of artworlders (curators, directors, historians, critics, etc) do the things they do with the artists’ products; on the other hand, great swaths of contemporary artmaking involve slicing away parts of the found world and teasing new meanings out by recontextualizing those slices. Once an artwork enters the world, why shouldn’t it be fodder for re-recontextualizing at the hands of the ”curatorial” artist? Wouldn’t that in fact prove that the artwork had succeeded in entering the world, and that it had gained autonomy from its maker (or more importantly, from the strait-jacket of its maker’s intentions)?

I bring this up to give voice to the ”scrabbling for purchase” that surrounds Brüggemann’s effort at I-20. As a gallery full of artworks by a handful of artists, there’s no problem. But Brüggemann’s own studio practice casts an interesting and destabilizing pall. Most of his pieces in general operate through a recursive flattening out of the methods of artistic production. They take the widely accepted containers of artistic content and present those containers as unfolded templates...no space, no volume, and, in the words of one of his neon wall signs, ”NO CONTENT”.

23

Stefan Br端ggemann Untitled, 2007 Glass and mirror 86 x 80 in (218.4 x 203.2). Edition: 1/1 24

I take it that this position is the starting point for the logic of his curatorial choices. I have to say, I don’t get very far. When an individual artist produces an array of dissimilar objects, the viewer can still take it on faith that a thread connects them, however knotted or kinked that thread may be.

Brüggemann ups the ante in this regard by assembling a group of works that are aesthetically close enough that it would not be far-fetched to think they had been made by a single artist. And yet, we know they were not. So what becomes of the thread?

Since the works were all chosen by Brüggemann, are we to read them primarily in the context of his ideas? That is, have they been re-contextualized into one large, new work? I’m tempted down this path since the individual pieces share a common ”emptiness”: colorless; formed by acts of subtraction rather than addition; starkly declarative but irresolvably ambiguous. The title of the show, ”Shallow”, points towards the denial of depth so frequently evoked by Brüggemann.

The elusive sense of this curatorial ethos is pushed further by including two artists - co-equals on the list of participants - who are just barely there in any real sense. Martin Creed’s off-hand drawing is slight even by his own remarkably lax standards. And Manetas’ website, well, I never went and looked at it.

The gauntlet thrown down here is provocative. There is no shortage of art today that trades in the flimsy and abject, the ”pathetic aesthetic”. Very often one suspects that the boldness of declaring a shabby stack of scrap lumber to be a ”finished artwork” has worn off, and the comfort and acceptability of the gesture has put down roots. In this show, emptying-out is pushed back towards its proud, destabilizing history, with no conclusions offered, or even possible.

25

Enantiomorphs (2007-10-19 14:58) A visually engaging blog associated with an upcoming exhibition: http://enantiomorphic.blogspot.com/

26

Eileen Quinlan at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2007-10-30 15:38)

Miguel Abreu Gallery presents a group of Eileen Quinlan photographs, open until December 9, down on Orchard Street. Most of the works are from an ongoing series titled Smoke & Mirrors. Those that do not bear this title are nonetheless very similar visually. As a group, the work inhabits a narrow field, where its vulnerabilities are alternately convincing and disappointing.

The press release for the exhibition quickly points out that the prints are made from large-format negatives without digital intervention, ”allow[ing] for slight details.” (Why this is possible with film but not digital escapes me.) Certainly, the most engaging moments for this viewer are found in the black and white pictures, with their big ugly scratches and dust spots, enlarged to radioactivity-induced proportions. In their play between dustiness and surfaceless-ness one finds the clearest statement of the absurdity of this non-referential photographic imagery. Clichés come to the foreground: scratches turn into Modernist drips, jagged planes of light and dark turn to Constructivist fantasies. Are they suggesting a moral imperative? It’s amusing to even be made to think of the question.

27

The Black & White Version of Smoke & Mirrors #233, 2007 Silver gelatin matte fiber print mounted on aluminum 40 x 30 inches

28

The photographs spar with the language in which they are couched (even though there is more floating like a butterfly than stinging like a bee). ”Smoke & Mirrors” gets right to the point, and I applaud the clarity of it: in common usage, this phrase is used to mean a trick is taking place that obscures the reality of the situation, and likely that ”there is no ’there’ there”. As this idea is forced to co-exist with the actual referents of the pictures - literally mirrors, their edges, and their reflections of themselves a pleasant abyss swallows up the directness of the derelict materiality present in these images.

But a sense of insufficiency lingers. The press release offers an over-heated and incomprehensible torrent of language that wants to send this work to the next level. It doesn’t, and the jargony mess just bounces off these mirrors, set at skew angles to legibility, apparently. What’s left unfulfilled for this viewer is a sense of the stubborn kernel at the center of the echo chamber. Something has to generate the cry of ”echo”, after all. To stick a can of Goya beans into a couple pictures is rather a let down: I wanted to see either a dogged insistence on the ultimate emptiness at stake (”there is no stubborn kernel”), or some surprising turn towards an actual materiality on the far side of depicted immateriality (”here’s your damn kernel”). That what we get is a can of beans is just not that...thrilling.

Still, a lush color suffuses the gallery, creating a kind of Uta Barth emotional space which is seductive.

Abreu is doing an admirable job of cultivating a specific type of intellectual rigor in his programming, and this show provides enough rainfall for the month to keep things growing. (Mixed metaphors are fun.) This viewer looks forward to what comes after the smoke and the mirrors, both for Quinlan and Abreu.

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November

John Baldessari and Alejandro Cesarco, ”Retrospective,” at Murray Guy (2007-11-13 17:46)

John Baldessari and Alejandro Cesarco have collaborated on a suite of 12 silkscreens on aluminum presently on view at Murray Guy on 17th Street. The simple visual presence of the panels disguises the rich conceptual alchemy charging the gallery. The setup is the same for each: floating inside the borders of the panel is a xeroxed image of an open book, framed so that one page of the spread is centered; the contents of that page have been removed, and in their place is a large rectangle of flat color; inside the rectangle, a white circle or two, each with a black number inside; below the rectangle, ”on the page” of the xeroxed book as it were, similarly numbered lines of text; and below this set of nested elements, either one or two further lines of text, set in a complementary color to the rectangular block. (There is an exception: a single panel is all black and white, with the ground black, too.)

Seen in the gallery, the works function individually and as a group, even though the nature of their constituent elements makes the idea of an ”individual work” very slippery: a series of representational shells creates several ”insides” and ”outsides”. Each single panel is already a conglomeration of content and commentary. Added to the formal setup is the fact of two artists’ voices, which, though 31

always remaining in concert, glide unannounced from harmony to polyphony, from octave to microtone.

How does one calculate the volume of a container without depth? The book is not a book, but a degraded image of one, flattened brusquely by the xerox machine; whatever had been on the page is gone, and a ”picture” occupies the place of the text; a line or two of text, in black, sits beneath the color like a caption or citation, preceded by the same numerals which float in the rectangle. Cesarco provided these lines, and they are layed-out as if they were originally on the xeroxed page. Cesarco’s keen sense of textual abstraction is in full effect here: he makes giddy use of the conventionalized compressions text can withstand within the confines of a perfectly schematized method of reading.

But of course the schemas are not perfect, in either the literary sense or in the sense of comprehensibility. That this must always be so is the subtext of Baldessari’s colored (and colorful) ”margin notes” that are the captions to the captions. Rather than provide the next larger context of explanation, they wink at the viewer by being slyly complicit with willful misunderstanding. This tone pushes his texts into the space of the viewer, and further away from the pictorialized space of the xeroxed book. That the Baldessari comments are printed in complementary color to the blocks that occupy the pages reinforces the idea that the two sets of comments exist on either side of a divide.

The most important question posed by this work, then, is, ”Can the divide be bridged?” To this viewer, the truly exciting aspect of the show is the good-faith effort to posit an affirmative model for doing so.

This puts it at odds with so much work today that glibly resigns itself to the supposed impossibility of the task, and as a result seeks refuge in irony, pessimism, and false celebration.

What Baldessari and Cesarco offer instead is finely honed dialogue, humor, and intellectual generosity. The work employs a number of elusive techniques: for example, the numbers on the panels are not only out of order, but some numbers repeat, and there is no number ”1”. Of the twelve panels, five are joined as pairs that share and reverse the colors of the blocks and bottom texts; but the black and white panel doesn’t leave a conceptual space for any such reversal - its ”partner” is a recapitulation of the orange/blue pair, confusing the attempt to decide which two orange/blues go together.

Of course, once the viewer joins two panels together by color, nothing specific in their textual jousting insists that they stay paired. Lastly, as a presentation of physical objects in real space, the colors of the blocks circle the gallery in a fashion that destroys any sense of the linear narrative bound up with turning the pages of a book. In media res indeed.

All the eluding and eliding does not, however, serve as a smoke screen to obscure something that’s not actually there. It functions instead as the recognition of a set of irreducible conceptual and philosophical conditions. This work balances the declaration of this set of difficulties against an intellectual enthusiasm and a lively step. The presence of more thirst such as this would, paradoxically, slake a great deal of the parched artwork today.

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Catherine Spaeth (2007-11-22 10:17:03) Dear Nicholas, I found writing those little reviews in the back pages of magazines, for such little pay and sometimes 6 months of lag time, so unsatisfatory that I started a blog, and because of that, my entry into blog world, I discovered your writing, which is the best I have seen lately. I value criticism generated out of description, and few works merit the descriptive consideration you have given Baldessari here - usually the descriptive context, for me, depends upon a broader history of visual culture, resulting in a diagnosis of sorts. This is simply in order to write, it is often the approach of lazy thinking (visual culture) and when I can write something like what I see in your review of Baldessari, I’m very grateful for the art work that generated that writing. The tone that you describe is so clear an experience. You might read my review of Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins, I’m curious to see how you would consider this quite different tone of address. http://catherinesarttours.blogspot.com Thanks for the intellectual generosity, I love it, and you are so right Catherine Spaeth Nicholas Knight (2007-11-26 18:30:12) Catherine, Thank you for your comment. Writing is tough, and I appreciate learning that some of mine is causing a few tuning forks to mildly vibrate, out there in the world. Nick

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December

”From a Distance” at Wallspace (2007-12-02 12:52)

Curator Vincent Honoré has brought together the work of ten artists in a group show titled ”From a Distance” at Wallspace on 27th Street. The show title finds its most concrete meaning in the fact that all of the artists were born or presently live overseas. In a globalized artworld that finds New York at (or near) its center, this fact is of minor interest. Of greater interest is the show’s suggestion of the aesthetic connective tissue that joins these artists: each is engaged in his or her own attempt to give form to the ”distance” that separates the physical embodiment of an artwork from both the intentionality of its origins and from its ability to successfully contain its own meanings once it is set loose in the world as a finished work.

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Abigail Reynolds Universal Now: St. Paul’s 1912 / 1965, 2006, 280 x 310 mm

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This investigation is not a new one in art, yet its persistence suggests two things: even after being articulated by artists of earlier generations, it has not ceased being true; and that the specific dis-ease of this ”distance” is equally pressing to the generation of artists in this exhibition (who were all born between 1966 and 1980). That is, it is not the job of artists to continuously produce new forms simply for the sake of forms, but instead to enunciate the specific forces fundamentally shaping contemporary experience. The persistence of distance as a central preoccupation, then, speaks perhaps to the ineffectuality of earlier art to displace the gnawing anxiety of disconnectedness from the collective consciousness of the artworld, and from culture at large.

Absurd stakes, perhaps, and stakes not to be accomplished in a modest group exhibition along this cobbled section of 27th Street. But there are many engaging works, and their various strategies form a catalog of ways to deal with the problem, from the philosophical to the political to the personal.

The work of Walead Beshty is foremost here, and is the umbrella beneath which the rest of the exhibition finds cover. The three pieces included - two Fed Ex sculptures and a large photograph - assert an impressive visual and conceptual clarity that gives way, more impressively, to nuance and complexity. For Fedex Large Boxes, Priority Overnight, Los Angeles - New York, Beshty made thick glass boxes the exact dimensions of the inside of a large Fed Ex shipping box, packed them directly inside the eponymous boxes, and shipped them to the gallery. The glass, cracked and nearly smashed in transit, is displayed in this condition, with the Fed Ex box acting as pedestal. Aside from being beautiful little post-minimal rectangular solids, the works reverberate in several directions.

The glass (and the shipping boxes) bear the imprint of the distance traveled, translating space as both a geographical condition and as a commercial condition into a direct index ”written” on the object.

(In fact, it is only partially necessary to surround ”written” with quotation marks, as the shipping labels on the boxes give it a purely literal sense, too.) This viewer does have an aesthetic quibble, however: since the work is so formed by the incidents of its transit, the rather fussy way that the glass and the shipping boxes were arranged one atop the other neutralizes some of the force of the conceptual detachment that is otherwise so persuasive.

Beshty’s other work is a large photograph. It is made by repeatedly folding a piece of photographic paper, exposing it to a directional light, developing the sheet so that the geometry of its folds creates a pattern of light and dark, and festooning it with a descriptive title that directs the image towards a strictly analytical identity. The affectation of the title (Fold (Directional light sources, 15 degrees and 165 degrees), December 23rd, 2006, Valencia, CA, Ilford Multigrade Fiber IV) acts as an interesting irritant. Aware that the image cannot inherently contain any forensic vestige of the pseudo-scientific conditions of its creation, Beshty must overload its title with that record instead.

The steps in its creation taken together cohere into a meditation on the absurdity of expecting photographs to be unblemished carriers of the reality that informed their coming-into-being.

Moving from the philosophical to the personal, the artist duo Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund show a work titled All the Lovesongs. Two speaker wires emerge from beneath a closed door and plug into two speakers which have been joined together, face-to-face; a song, muted by the ”closed loop” of the speaker cabinets, plays continuously. It creates an elegant form, with its imitation wood grain box, translucent wires, and muffled audio. As metaphor, it slides from the elegant to the poignant. No matter how closely and repetitively two entities clutch, an irreducible 37

”talking over each other” transforms communion into confrontation.

Lastly, from the personal to the political: Abigail Reynolds [image above] shows works on paper from her ongoing series Universal Now. Two different images of the same public space, taken at different times, are cut and pasted together into a single image. The cutting pattern, reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s domes (and thus his idealized futurism), results in collages that suggest a type of social discontinuity. Since most of the visible pages that form the ground of the collages are taken from old published sources, the works begin with reference to a historical moment of shared political consciousness; interrupting each scene with an image of itself in the geometrically-erupting present subverts the nostalgia vested in the browning paper of the older pages. Sentimentality gives way to the rather brutal realization that the monumental architecture of the public square can continue to symbolize anew long after the political ambitions of any given generation have been extinguished, or worse, co-opted. It is worth mentioning, too, that these collages are beautifully made, and are quite ravishing as objects.

Not all the artists present work that functions as effectively as the above. Graham Hudson connects two tape measures and hangs them from the ceiling so that the beginning of their tapes meet at standard hanging height. After its pithy form, the piece lapses into a dull type of institutional critique. After all, things have to hang at some height. Michal Budny presents small architectural models made from modest cardboard. Their personal reference is too oblique and their method too familiar for the pieces to gain any traction.

Still, ”From a Distance” presents a well-compressed look at strategies for coping with separation. After years of waiting out the celebration of frivolity that has gripped Chelsea for so long (not that it has passed), a renewed seriousness and engagement is staking out territory in contemporary art. Without the glamour or facile appeal of the attention-grabbing artwork out there, the audience for such work will always be smaller; but shows like this prove the validity of the concerns, and of the artists pursuing them.

Nicholas Knight (2007-12-04 19:08:39) It was pointed out to me that I made a factual error in an earlier draft of this post, regarding the large photograph by Walead Beshty. I have corrected that paragraph.

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Joianne Bittle Knight, ”A Royal Family”, at Wave Hill (2007-12-10 11:30) Here’s an installation shot from Joi Bittle Knight’s recent solo show at Wave Hill, in the Sunroom Project Space:

The show was a presentation of two works: a large work painted across three canvases, hanging on the wall, depicting the brightly patterned backside of a jewel beetle; and a large drawing across three sheets of paper, laying flat in the center of the space, depicting the underside of the same beetle. By keeping to just these two pieces, the installation highlighted a number of formal dichotomies: painted/drawn; hanging/flat; front/back; color/monochrome.

Quickly these formal qualities gave way to another layer of signification. Bearing in mind that both works depict a single individual, these dualities became indicators of grand themes. On the wall was the colorful and potent dimension, boldly announcing its virility and strength, all armored and posturing. Laying flat, belly up, the specimen could not be more vulnerable, a probing pencil line tracing the contours of every unspeakable detail. It may be dead, or if it’s a pose of sexual receptivity, then it’s a sexuality of resignation.

Another aspect to the installation was the secular/religious. The format of the painting made explicit 39

reference to early Renaissance alterpieces. With the flat gold background and side panels flanking the main center canvas, the beetle was taken from its sacred role in non-Western cultures and given pride of place within an idiom usually reserved for Madonna and Child, the great martyrs, and of course, the great donors. The drawing took this theme and inverted it: in its horizontality, linearity, and depiction of the anatomical underside, this work made cunning use of the tropes of scientific depiction.

Further, its presentation in a white frame, on white pedestals centered in the room, made reference to modernist style, and all the celebration of secular knowledge and enlightenment that entails.

The focus and specificity of this exhibition shows Bittle Knight to be an artist fiercely committed to her interests. As a result, the most rewarding aspects of the work are revealed slowly, despite the obvious wow-factor generated by her considerable pictorial skill. Her subjects, in their natural and cultural dimensions, are deeply formed by the cauldron of time; the works ask us to pause, look closely, and glimpse something ancient at large in the present.

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2008

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January

We Interrupt This Narrowcast (2008-01-07 16:25) Ugh. I’m in the middle of trying to move and get a job, so posting will continue to be slow for a couple weeks. Soldier on!

Catherine Spaeth (2008-01-28 14:03:30) I, too, have been off the radar, and have checking in regularly to see if you have done what I have not yet been able to do. Too much teaching prep at the moment. Soon, though!

Maya Reynolds (2008-02-02 16:25:43) Nicholas: I just came across your photo of the gargoyles on the roof of Notre Dame. I have posted the photo on my blog with a link to you. Please advise if you would prefer that I take it down. I will, of course, comply.

The photo is simply amazing.

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February

Segue (2008-02-24 15:05) The searches for new digs and another job have ended (didn’t move, did get job). The hiatus from writing here continues, however, as I get ready for two big shows opening in March. More info about them to come soon. And there are a couple shows I want to comment on, so I hope I can get that done soon...

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March

”Enantiomorphic Chamber” at NurtureArt (2008-03-01 12:51) In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published an essay titled ”Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery”, in which he argued how the factors in the general milieu of a field of scientific research make it possible, and even likely, that multiple researchers will make the same ”groundbreaking” discoveries at nearly the same time. That is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon is everywhere, waiting for diagnosis, and thus integration into the knowledge pool.

And so one comes to ”Enantiomorphic Chamber”, the exhibition at NurtureArt in Brooklyn cocurated by Kevin Regan and Christopher Howard. Drawing both its title and its organizing principle from the eponymous work by Robert Smithson, himself an example of simultaneous (re)discovery, the exhibition presents a selection of artists working with asymmetrical, reflected figures. In their Smithsonian essay for the exhibition, Regan and Howard make some delightfully far-flung interpretive claims about what joins these works other than a common formal device. Most broadly, they identify two themes: sex/fighting/dance, and the ”transcendental...grotto of miracles”. They marshal the support of Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and Mobius (he of the famous ”Strip”) in constructing their analytical edifice. It’s great fun, and persuasive in its own idiosyncratic way.

Marc Travanti, East Siders X, 2007 Analytical edifices aside, what struck this viewer was the sudden awareness gained of the ubiquity of these types of images. Regan and Howard have kept a blog as a complement to the exhibition, in which they have posted nearly 250 artworks that fit their criteria. Furthermore, one can’t make 47

it through a single commercial break in prime-time without seeing an ad (usually for cars, but then most ads seem to be for cars) that has divided the screen along an axis and flipped the image over it.

Many of these are quite creative, and I wonder whether there is a place for them here. (The ”grotto of mileage”, perhaps?)

There are three types of simultaneity at work in the show. And to accede to the ideas of Regan and Howard, I’ll willingly equate simultaneity (time) with ubiquity (space): after all, the point is the fourth dimension: 1. Smithson. His time has come (again). In fact, this show may arrive at the back end of the rediscovery of RS. Nonetheless, the dispersed practice he championed seems particularly well-suited to contemporary, mediated living. Recently, many artists and institutions have noticed this.

2. Reflected Figures. As noted above, this formal technique must carry a great deal of symbolic power for it to appeal to so many, across so great a range of visual arenas.

3. Everywhereness. The conceptual heart of the issue is that the enantiomorph wraps itself into a fully enclosed world. The visual implication is that there is nothing outside the picture’s edges. This suggests that its popularity is a defense against the decentralized, networked condition presently dislocating the identity of each individual: as if to say, ”here’s an axis, in front of me, and the world spins around it.”

Back to Kuhn. Kuhn is flirting with the uncomfortable idea that personal discovery is still primarily socially determined. Such a notion seems particularly incongruous with the ideal of scientific truth (that is, the counter-intuitive claim that scientific truth is dependent on social conditions), but that was the particular genius of Kuhn’s thought. ”Enantiomorphic Chamber” plays on this discomfort by suggesting that the impulse of the artist to place oneself at the center of an enclosed and self-confirming reality is the group-simultaneous reaction to being disconnected from the group itself.

Nicholas Knight (2008-03-01 13:03:18) I elected not to discuss the work of individual artists, and focus on the implications of the curatorial theme. If I had discussed the artists, I would have mentioned Marc Travanti’s reflected paparazzi photos, Mark Stockton’s Michael Jackson and Madonna pictures, and Sebastian Lemm’s forest photographs as particular stand-outs.

Catherine Spaeth (2008-03-01 20:03:50) Welcome back! I particularly love the flat comment that ”many artists and institutions have noticed this.” How Smithsonian!

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�Accidental / Coincidental� at Snug Harbor Cultural Center (2008-03-10 13:10)

I have several works in an exhibition at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, opening next Saturday, March 15. A catalog will be available during the show, but it has not been published yet. I hope those of you who are local can pay a visit. Pertinent info follows!

ACCIDENTAL / COINCIDENTAL Chance, Occurrence, and Intention in Contemporary Art curated by Frank Verpoorten March 15 - April 27, 2008 opening reception: March 15, 3 - 5 pm

Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art Snug Harbor Cultural Center 1000 Richmond Terrace Staten Island, NY 10301 click here for directions 49

(image: Nicholas Knight, Method of Coincidences, 1999 - 2002, oil on 13 canvas panels, 8x10 inches each)

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Nicholas Knight, ”Depictured”, at 65GRAND, Chicago (2008-03-14 21:52) March 21-April 19, 2008 Opening Reception: Friday, March 21 (7-10)

Nicholas Knight, Register: Domino Light Brown Sugar, 2008, collage and pigment print on canvas, 11 x 8.5 inches

65GRAND is pleased to present Nicholas Knight in his first solo show in Chicago. His discursive blend of image and language, color and grayscale, and 2-D and 3-D work takes the form of smart, tragicomic photo-sculptures, existential abstractions and in-situ sentence diagrams.

Knight’s series of Registers focuses on the color test patterns found on the bottom of commercial packaging, like Domino’s Sugar box flaps. He scans the flaps, creating color prints, which unravel 51

the work of the registers by producing faulty color replicas of them. Knight then collages the actual box flap onto the prints, concretely exposing the futility of this process. Reveling in the disconnect between representation of a thing and the thing itself, Knight’s heady, mimetic work is tempered by witty playfulness, like the transformation of utilitarian sugar packaging into aesthetic eye candy.

From there, the show caroms to antique picture frames, electrical outlets, grammatical wall drawing and Marcel Proust.

Knight Holds a BFA in Fine Arts and a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1998. In 2007 he was Artist in Residence at the Domaine de Kerguehennec in Bignan, France. He has had solo exhibitions at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, California and Eugene Binder, Marfa, Texas. Knight will be present at the opening.

The inaugural pair of 65GRAND issued archival pigment prints, in an edition of twenty, will be available at the opening.

65GRAND 1378 W Grand Ave at Noble St. (entrance on Noble) Chicago, Illinois 312-719-4325 65grand.com EL: Blue line to Grand. Bus 65 Grand. gallery hours Fri-Sat. Noon-5:30pm

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”Gut of the Quantifier” at Lisa Cooley (2008-04-21 08:24)

This group exhibition at Lisa Cooley on Orchard Street was impressive for its delicate curatorial step, treading sensitively into areas where others often stumble. Much of the work here functions by suggesting what it is not, by implying the meaningfulness of what is missing; the leftover materiality is inert, sensuous, and longing. The exhibition title, taken from a song by The Fall, sets the dynamic up: ”gut of the quantifier” points towards the visceral power within abstract ordering systems, and yet the phrase remains ambiguous since its literal meaning can only be a nonsensical dead end.

The best work here splinters in two directions at once: simultaneously dumb in its literal simplicity and sophisticated in its shifting layers of consequences. Matt Sheridan Smith contributes a fivepart work titled ”According to speculative logic (five portraits)”, in which engraved portraits from international currency have been enlarged to approximately life-size, and the prints covered with the same silver ink that one finds on lottery tickets. The works are completed when the artist scratches off enough ink to reveal the portraits beneath. The scratching hand creates a drawing, but in a cunning reversal of the Johnsian-Twomblish impulse, the free scribbling removes the silvery layer, and is meaningful for what it reveals, rather than what it obscures. These works cohere very tightly, drawing together the paradoxes that inform the institutional enshrinement of great national figures on currency, and what that ultimately means to a citizenry reduced to games of chance in pursuit of said currency.

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Matt Sheridan Smith According to speculative logic (five portraits), 2008 inkjet prints and scratch-off ink 5 parts framed individually, 12 x 9 inches Lisa Oppenheim’s slide projection work ”The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else” takes a humorous gesture and twists it into an elegaic tribute. The viewer sees a collection of slides of a lone arm holding snapshots of sunsets up against a real landscape, aligning the images so the photograph replaces the actual setting sun. The absurdity is winning, demonstrating both the desire to capture a beautiful natural phenomenon on film, and the utter inadequacy of the resulting image to function as a stand-in for the real experience. But the twist comes with the knowledge that these particular sunset photos were all taken by soldiers in Iraq, and Oppenheim is re-enacting the setting suns in a New York landscape. The humanity that embeds in these images is effective, while steering clear of any clumsy political declarations.

Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez shows four collages, made by cutting out auction catalog photographs of furniture and layering the resulting negative spaces. They dissolve into abstraction, pictures of ”the context of no context”; however, for this viewer, they hew too closely to similar collages by Matt Keegan, whose technique is more complex and rewarding for its inclusion of the human figure, and 55

all the accompanying psychological trauma that brings.

Barb Choit includes five photographs on plexi, which document the gradual illumination of a space that results from turning on lamps. In each image, another lamp goes from off to on, and the picture passes from darkness to �blown out�. Together they amount to a poetry of the literal. It takes a specific intelligence to recognize how nearby the logical conclusions of some thought processes are; the idea that a photograph is about capturing light (or more keenly, capturing just the right amount of it) is played out with the dumbness of scientific discipline, to compelling effect.

As a whole, the exhibition maintained a humility in its scale, materiality, and themes that was very inviting, allowing one to dwell on the missing modifiers that ultimately gave this show its charge.

After all, we all know that quantifiers are all brains and no guts, and yet something in our experience tells us the infinitesimal gaps between numbers hold a universe of truth.

Catherine Spaeth (2008-04-23 11:53:05) It’s a lovely thing to click on your name on my blog and be brought to this writing. Humility and touch, not so missing.

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June

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Posting (2008-06-04 21:11) has obviously been slow. And is likely to continue to be slow as I devote energy to a couple projects.

But I’ll try to get some new reviews up...

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On Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel Last Winter (2008-06-20 12:40) The cover article in the Summer 2008 issue of Artforum is about Wade Guyton, in particular the exhibition he mounted at Friedrich Petzel Gallery during November - December 2007. The article is written by Johanna Burton, the young and prolific art historian. I visited this show last year with the intention of writing about it, but opted not to; the publication of this article prompts me to briefly revisit some of the thoughts I left unresolved six months ago.

First, a short summary: this show consisted of a group of large, mostly black inkjet prints on canvas that were stretched and presented as paintings would be. The floor was covered with plywood and painted a glossy black. Both rooms of the gallery were occupied by these works.

The premise of the work, as I understand it, is contemporary and unobjectionable. The works are ”paintings” because they occupy the space and function of painting; the material that constitutes the work (in this case ink, and not paint) is secondary to its status as painting. They are made at a remove: folded canvas fed through an inkjet printer, often multiple times, resulting in a number of ”unpredictable” flaws in the printing process. These flaws (mis-registration, clogged printer heads, scuffs and the like) mark the surfaces as a place demanding of inspection rather than a purely symbolic reference to well-trodden theories.

I put quotes around ”unpredictable” above to mark the difference between unexpected and not pre59

cisely controlled. After all, an essential character of the work is the effect of the flaws; steps are taken to ensure their presence. They’re neither unexpected nor unwelcome. Decisions about how to use the tools (the printer, the ink, the canvas) establish a measure of control, inside of which the affect of imperfection operates. Furthermore, these decisions indicate a set of values that declare the position of the these works relative to The Discourse, such as it is. And that position is neither unexamined nor accidental.

So I want to take up a couple points from Burton’s analysis now. First is her dwelling, at length, on the phrase ”ostensibly black monochromes” in the press release for the exhibition. Ostensible, for Burton, is about something not quite being what it purports to be, in Guyton’s case both ”ostensibly paintings but not paintings” and ”ostensibly black monochromes but not black monochromes”. Both directions are, in my reading, red herrings. The expansion of the field of painting to include objects not made of paint, or by actual hands, is definitive and not contentious. It’s just a fact, and Guyton’s ”inkjet prints on stretched canvas” have no trouble finding purchase on the cliffs of painting. Secondly, I see nothing about these that’s qualitatively different from every other monochrome that is, in perceptual reality, ”not monochrome”. Her list of predecessors to whom these paintings gesture includes Rothko, Reinhardt, Stella, and Marden. I’m unaware of any paintings by the first three that could even qualify as ostensible monochromes, and I take it as uncontroversial that what makes Marden’s monochromes thrilling is their shortcomings within what appears to be a good faith effort to make The Monochrome.

The other major point threading through Burton’s text is the idea of the Neutral, especially as articulated by Roland Barthes in a series of lectures in 1978. I’m not equipped to comment on her reading of Barthes, but this amounts to the idea that the Neutral is the assertion of desire (in this case, for artistic production) crippled by the reluctance to be constrained by anything easily categorized within existing models of understanding. Whatever already has a clear meaning is a trap. The desire for an active neutrality is the imagined way out of this dilemma.

I think this is an absolutely critical phenomenon in contemporary artmaking, and it is not merely theoretical. It strikes at the heart of an artist each day in the studio: the incredible contradiction between a powerful, idealistic urge to make a report on one’s experience of the world by means of an artistic practice, and the paralyzing fear of co-optation, repetition, banality, and so much else that threatens to render one’s fruits unpalatable to society’s maw. (As Edith Wharton would have it, this is the ”modern symptom of immaturity”.)

But this viewer’s experience of Guyton’s show was less about the Neutral and more about the Dull.

For an artist, the positive attributes of flatness, affectless, and uninflectedness are only arrived at with great effort. That is, bringing the elements that constitute one’s picture into proper alignment, such that a viewer’s experience proves the embodiment of those qualities, demands immaculate calibration.

The calibration can be the removal of one’s self to a degree previously unimagined, or the injection of the self to the opposite degree; but on this occasion, this viewer felt merely indifferent. The flaws are there in the prints, but were neither so subtle as to amount to a pea beneath a stack of mattresses, nor so assertive as to conjure any sort of envelope-pushing experimentation. In the end, the canvases were very prescribed, in keeping with their undeniable presence as a desirable commodities. And the black painted floor just did nothing, other than make one think of that annoying artist - what’s his name? - who does the salt and rock stages and gets so much love from the Whitney.

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I find Guyton to be an interesting artist. The torn magazine pages with the overprinted X’s carry that static charge of relevance. The principle of operating at a technological remove is a good one; giving voice to the wariness of investing in images is a good path. This most recent show did not quite get it right, and to this viewer, no amount of rhetorical bolstering can stand in for seeing the artwork and understanding that the gaps in one’s experience can be filled with the ”trembling desire” so profoundly named by Barthes. It’s not just that it’s possible to have this experience; it’s completely necessary to be endlessly reminded that the articulations and rhetorical excess must always flow downhill, as any plumber will tell you.

Catherine Spaeth (2008-06-30 15:45:17) First, I didn’t see this gallery exhibition, and I have not read that Barthes. But I have seen Guytons’ work, and I know very well what silence is. Given that, all I can do here is put a little pressure on things as they are available to me. When Johanna Burton uses the word ”ostensible,” writing that Guyton’s paintings ”[flash] doubt like a striptease, asking that we believe and interrogate simultaneously,” I take it that it is the doubt that you object to, that we have reached a point - past Buren’s invisibility - in which Guyton’s practice unproblematically qualifies as a monochrome. My own inclination is to say that this would be to argue against Crimp as well, who views Daniel Buren as striking a pose. My understanding of (and strong attachment to)the history and politics of silence - also purportedly the support of Guyton’s work - is that it surrounds writing and criticism of the nouveau roman, that is, it is explicitly against style. Burton sums up her review that Guyton’s ”camp is the purview of ”style,” of, therefore, the ”ostensible.” (This is not quite accurate, the address of a pose is not necessarily bound to style. But no mind.) And so, in comparing those aspects of Guyton’s exhibit that you didn’t care for, the reference to Banks Violette is quite apt, as though you and Burton were picking up on the same things, but with a different relation to them. Is Daniel Buren part institutional critique/part nouveau roman? I see this at the heart of Burton’s essay, the wobbly and off kilter tension - incompatability, even - that it makes visible to me, as though her writing about Guyton were the symptom of a question not yet asked.

Nicholas Knight (2008-07-03 14:54:58) I’d like to have ”put a little pressure on things as they are available to me” tattoed on my somewhere. To have the ambition not to exceed that which is given. You are correct to observe that it is the doubt that I object to –in this particular work of Guyton’s– because I can’t replicate the experience of it myself. Too many negating factors impinge on it, it is too circumscribed by disqualifying characteristics. And as with Burton’s reading of Barthes, I must defer to your reading of Crimp... After further reflection, the ”off kilter tension” in Burton’s essay is, for me, the result of too often wanting to have it both ways: first to situate Guyton’s work with a tradition whose hallmark is its seriousness (Rothko, Reinhardt, Stella, Marden, Buren) and then simultaneously to claim that all the while the project was nothing but a campy misdirection. It conflates and confuses detachment of an ironic and emotional sort (camp) with detachment of a political and subversive sort (Barthes’ Neutrality). If this whole formulation can be boiled down to equating ”ostensible” with ”camp” and thus ”intentionally empty gesture towards bankrupt style”, and if that were truly the case, then perhaps I would concede that my thinking about this was off on the wrong track. And if Burton’s claims of silence (even stronger: the rites of silence, invoking a type of ceremonial devotion) are really claims of a new fusion

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of the preceding formulation of ”ostensible” with a genuine yearning for ”active neutrality”, and that that fusion could provoke no name other than an empty silence where its name would be, well, that would be interesting too. But I just can’t get there. The argument seems to break down at too many critical turns. If ”ostensible” in Guyton 2008 is no different from Reinhardt in 1948, then what instead will generate the necessary detachment? And in discussing the lessons of Buren and others, Burton writes, ”If the language of ’abolishing the code’ has itself become code, what can one say in retort or even response?” [emphasis Burton’s]. By what thinking could that language ever have not been code? It became code at the moment of conception, as has always been the case, and yet retorts and responses are still possible, and necessary. The retreat into ’whatever I might mean, it’s not to be found in what I said’ is lazy and defeated. I mean, we’ve got the code. Use it to retort!

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2.6

August

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“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns” at Tony Shafrazi Gallery (2008-08-20 20:21) This show garnered much props earlier this summer, with reviews in all the major media outlets. I suspect that a second wave will arrive with end-of-the-year roundups in a couple months, so I humbly inject my two cents during this liminal pause in the dialog.

The elements that combined to create this exhibition – the personalities, the artworks, the histories, the references – amounted to a kind of artworld perfect storm. The stories behind each of those elements, as well as detailed descriptions of the show, can be found elsewhere, so I just want to focus on a couple interwoven themes: the photographic dilemma and the perfection of superficiality.

For the better part of a quarter-century, artists have mined Continental theory in search of guidance.

There is something irresistible about the content of that theory – perhaps the ultimate absolution of responsibility it offers? – and like everything irresistible, there is much to be suspicious of. Baudrillard, for example, has always seemed too facile, too untested by actual experience, and at the same time, too widely applicable to really be false.

Furthermore, in the intellectual discourse surrounding any field – I’m thinking here of both art and politics – there is a tendency amongst the learned to feel that once an idea has made the rounds of their rarefied counsels, and once a consensus has been arrived at, then the issue can be shelved in pursuit of the next “problematic”. But the penetration of their conclusions into “mass consciousness” is a different story, later in coming, or never. Political talking heads seem to have a tighter grasp on this, and as a result we consumers of political news get bludgeoned by repetitious talking points in the hope that their psychic blunt trauma can elide their way into, as they say nowadays, “truthiness.”

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Because tastemakers in art are so much less beholden to anything analogous to the electorate, there is little need to tighten and streamline declarations of theory, quality, and historical importance. Intense debates about the nature and role of photography, for example, have gone on now for decades, but really, neither the arguments nor their conclusions have had any discernable effect on mass culture or the worldview of your average Joe Sixpack with a point-and-shoot.

All of which is intended as a lead-in to thinking about the excellent, destabilizing photographic situation presented at Shafrazi Gallery. It is quite one thing to summarize and dismiss, while operating in the domain of verbal description, the “simulacrum” created by Urs Fischer; to be in the space and experience the installation, to try to “get your footing” and decode the visual field, amounted to quite something else.

The displacement was total. The actual artworks hanging over the wallpaper were visible almost exclusively in their relationship to the images they were obscuring. The depicted artworks had resonance primarily through the effectiveness of the illusion, negating any focus on the role of those actual works to function in either aesthetic or historical narratives. Technical questions of production and architectural support asserted themselves as the subject of theme-park entertainment. Each viewer in the gallery became a detective, taking pleasure in unraveling the little puzzles that inevitably marked a gesture at once so simple and so intricate. Photography was expanded to envelope itself, as nearly as possible, and its condition of always being primarily about its own surface has rarely been so clear.

With that realization in place, the next logical step is to suggest that the content of the exhibition, conventionally understood as the artworks depicted and exhibited, didn’t really matter. I think this is true, with a caveat: the mix-and-match, the 80’s graffiti scenesters, the whole edifice of artists skimming the surface of pop-culture waste-products in the hope of being the next Rauschenbergian savant, is the perfect content with which to fill this deeply contradicted container of an exhibition. It was superficiality raised to the level of the profound. There was a cost, of course, with everything subsumed, drained of what it only barely had to begin with. It seems sweetly unnatural, in a historical sense and an economic sense, to claim that both Keith Haring and Francis Bacon are fully realized once they can be celebrated for the utter emptiness of their presence. And yet, something raw, something terribly “truthy,” was to be found by giving form to this nothingness.

That something, to this viewer, was not located in the theoretical underpinnings one can easily identify. It was not located in any updated notion of the “inconsequential” in the guise of existentialism. It was, rather, that the pervasive itch that you can never reach was given a soothing scratch, and it was done with a blend of conceptual wit and theatricality that meant its appeal was broad, understandable in a multitude of inter-related ways…a mirrored signpost in the fork of the road, its directions written in a riddle, for all passers-by.

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cap (2008-12-26 23:40:16) I just found the choices and strategy thoroughly predictable and dull. Tony Shafrazi (’member him!) and Jasper Johns (oh yeah, the old flag guy!) SNORE! Nicholas Knight (2009-01-03 11:14:29) An oddly hostile and un-reflective comment, based on your writing at CAP. I could care less about Shafrazi the dealer or person, but his role in the narrative of early ’80s American art is an interesting catalyst to the ”strategy” of showing history as a fragile edifice. With all your expertise at looking at online JPEGs, I have to assume that you understand the exhibition title is a reference to Barnett Newman more than Jasper Johns; it means to inject (and mock) the conservative exasperation that such predictable and dull choices as Johns’ could be mistaken for important work. Furthermore, as I stated in my review, on the face of it, Urs Fischer’s photographic intervention seems well-contained within the confines of fully-assimilated art theory.

And yet, ”being there” resulted in another story altogether, as it always does in the case of, you know, actual art.

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2.7

September

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Roe Ethridge, ”Rockaway Redux” at Andrew Kreps Gallery (2008-09-28 12:05) There has always been an elusive quality to Roe Ethridge’s exhibitions, a quality made all the more disorienting by the definitive clarity of his photographs. In his current show at Kreps, Ethridge tightens the thematic reins but does not choke off the sense that the narrative may go careening away at any moment.

Photography (be it fine art, journalism, hobbyist, commercial, or so on) always seems to exist in modes: there are broad categories, such as were just listed, but much more important are the modes existing on the ”molecular level”, so to speak. The modes tie one individual picture to another. The modes are what really allow viewers to make sense from a group of images. So even when one enters a gallery and sees photographic content that is jarring or unexpected, in general the idea that the images hang together as a group is not at stake: ”a bunch of pictures of subject x” or ”photos printed with technique y” or ”images drawn from a cross-section of circumstances z.” Each of those modes begins operating almost immediately, out of sight, out of mind.

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Ethridge’s photos in ”Rockaway Redux” ostensibly are governed by the pictures-thematicallyevoking-a-place mode. There are nautical knick-knacks, waves crashing on the boardwalk, sunsets, a crusty clown sailor. And yet, making one’s way around the gallery, the sense of clarity so present in each image (both in a technical sense and in terms of confidence in the rightness of the image) gives way to uncertainty, first, then confusion, then disorientation. One begins to think that ”Rockaway” isn’t really the issue here; after all, there must be more direct ways to get at that than contrived still life shots, or sunsets from the Caribbean, or views of the Williamsburg Bridge. The thematic mode threatens to give way to the horror vacui of the arbitrary.

The press release for this show is a very winning example of the genre, insofar as it presents Ethridge’s own rationales for choosing each image in straight, simple language. It is devoid of obfuscatory intent, or ironic detachment. In the end it aligns with the general timbre of the show, which is a good faith effort to construct a narrative, in images, that can capture the cascading emotion initiated by the personal symbolic experience of a specific place. The privacy of that experience can be difficult to penetrate, and that is reflected in this show; but that difficulty is not criticism of the show: in fact, one feels that the difficulty is an accurate view of the artist’s own experiences of the place and of putting together the narrative, and the inevitable influence those two things will have on each other.

So what of modes? The most fascinating aspect of Ethridge’s work, broadly speaking, is his effort to stretch the molecules until they threaten to fly apart. In so doing, the ”connective tissue” of photography becomes the subject, and the tensile strength of our visual intelligence is put to the test. This only works because of the gut-level instinct a viewer has that he is not being toyed with, that the effort is not one-sided. The net result is not necessarily the unbridled visual pleasure that his individual images seem to offer, but something more displaced and complex, something taut in the psychic space between the frames.

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2.8

70

October

Group Show in Marfa, Texas, opening 10 October 2008 (2008-10-08 19:18)

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2.9

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November

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera at the Whitney (2008-11-09 11:04) Or, The Curious Condition of Democracy in the Age of Obama This retrospective of William Eggleston’s photographs opened at the Whitney on November 6, 2008.

It is remarkable for the high-caliber of the image-making, no doubt; it is relevant to artists now for its fountainhead-like power of influence; and it is unsettling for the calendrical uncanniness with which it presents its myths of democracy, coming as it does in the same week that Barack Obama turned American political consciousness on its head.

William Eggleston / Memphis / 1968 Eggleston is roundly acknowledged, along with Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz, as standing at the beginning of American color fine art photography. This trio wed the new chemistry with a particular brand of ”beat” image-making (”beat” in the Kerouac sense rather than the ”beat journalism” sense, although there’s a dash of that too). This show justifies the acclaim. Nonetheless, there is a sense of being a victim of his own success. As the decades pile up, and his photographs come only occasionally to the fronts of our minds, the ubiquity of his aesthetic invention threatens to swallow the particular degree of accomplishment that he brings to the photographic image.

That is, the oblique, saturated, odd-cropping detail of daily life is now mundane. It’s not challenging, on its own, to be confronted with this type of image. Its penetration into the vernacular of our imageculture is complete. That is not to say that his own photography is indistinguishable from the general method. Quite the contrary, in fact: seeing again the specifics of Eggleston’s subjects and techniques 73

is a reminder of his uniquely attuned vision.

Which brings us to the curious myth of the Democratic Camera. ”Democratic” cuts in two diverging directions here: there is the sense of all those details out there in front of Eggleston, and all of them equally potent for the task of generating meaning; and then there’s sense that, per the democratic imperative, anyone armed with a camera can do it, too.

I posit that both these directions are wrong. In the first place, a group of images of this sort draws its power from the context of all the other images surrounding it. Once the viewer is inside a clearlydrawn world, individual images unfurl the beauty of their blossom, or their decay. But that world of images owes as much to an exacting editing process as to creating the exposures themselves. Editing - selecting, building, excluding, juxtaposing - could hardly be less democratic in that it depends entirely on the refinement of a heightened sensibility for its success...heightened, that is, relative to the base urges of the hoi polloi.

And if this is true of the set of images within which any single frame is articulated, it is doubly true within each single frame. It’s not the case that the camera can be pointed literally anywhere, and just because Eggleston pushes the shutter it comes out meaningful. Instead of the even field of ”one detail, one vote”, the democracy of details is revealed as merely a comforting fiction.

From there the possibility that you, too, could be William Eggleston, and hey, aren’t we all William Eggleston, collapses. A quick browse of Flickr proves this. (Flickr is an utterly fascinating repository: in fact, a follow-up to this post could be written to argue about an alternate nature of the democratic camera, with Flickr as Exhibit A. But so far as I know, the Whitney has yet to mine that particular website in search of future subjects for comprehensive retrospectives.)

And so we come to the uncanniness of this myth playing itself out in public two days after the election of Barack Obama. We the American people ratified our core beliefs to a degree that left us stunned and amazed. It DOES matter if the people are engaged with the process, and if they understand that they have a stake in the outcome. And furthermore, enacting the truth of these core principles inflects our history with a type of meaning we couldn’t really assign to it before Tuesday night. It wasn’t possible to walk through this exhibition and understand images from the American South in the 1970’s without the knowledge that these particular threads are woven into the blanket of American life that warmed us Tuesday night. Such a thesis is disastrously pre-Post-Modern, I know. But if the ”Democratic Camera” has any meaning, it must be found in the ability of the lens to create documents whose full story is not told at the moment of their creation: the democratic quality is that their stories are connected in a living way to our own, and that we all have a role to play in shaping the arc of their narrative, in determining whether it bends towards justice.

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charley (2008-11-10 19:14:53) thanx for posting this. david kramer (2008-11-12 12:55:19) I will definately see the show. Great review and commentary.DK Phil Taylor (2009-01-13 16:27:43) Hi Nick, Coming to this a bit late but it reminds me of one of the most interesting essays I’ve read on Eggleston, published a couple of years in Canadian mag Fillip: http://fillip.ca/content/where-world-vie w-and-worldlines-converge Unfortunately not the complete article, which is too bad, because I recall it ending with a zing!

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2009

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3.1

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January

Nicholas Knight and Hans Gindlesberger at Gallery 44, Toronto (2009-01-06 23:29)

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Two Reviews of ”Right Frame, Wrong Film” at Gallery 44 (2009-01-18 12:32)

From Leah Sandals, writing in Toronto’s National Post:

At Gallery 44, you will find works that question the idea of photographic accuracy.

Rising New York artist Nicholas Knight offers some standout work in this vein, taking a mathematical yet strangely fun approach. Knight treats photo prints of golden frames like origami paper, folding them until the power of photography seemingly succumbs to physical realities. His tearing of a long photo into two separate frames is also playfully effective. Buffalo artist Hans Gindlesberger’s series ”I’m in the Wrong Film” takes a more poetic tack, positing the artist in pitiable, lonely situations – from dealing with spilled groceries to sticking out like a sore thumb at a children’s playground. In all cases, Gindlesberger gestures toward the ways that film is constructed, and perfect fantasies can unexpectedly turn the everyday grey.

From Marissa Neave, writing on her blog The Last Place on Earth You Probably Want to Be:

I think my new favourite artist is Nicholas Knight, whose work is on exhibition at Gallery 44 until February 14th. Despite his work being relegated to the smaller gallery in the space (as well as the vitrines,) it packs a pretty wicked punch. Knight, in his seemingly site-specific installations, takes the mechanics of photographic display (including printing and hanging,) and remixes the materials to produce the content. Paper, pencil marks, registration bars, repeated patterns reminiscent of Pantone swatches — the installation is full of familiar tropes of photography and design, but mashed up and repurposed in a completely fresh and innovative way. It’s clever and masterfully executed.

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”A Twilight Art” at Harris Lieberman (2009-01-18 12:47) Rarely does one encounter a survey exhibition that is less sprawling than this one. Co-curated by gallery director Jessie Washburne-Harris and artist Lisa Oppenheim, “A Twilight Art” reaches across recent generations of photographers to describe the transitional condition that contemporary photography finds itself in. The thematic thread is that the old chemistry (and its limitations) is giving way to new digitized methods (and their limitations); the show’s thesis, then, is to present how this shift is expressed by twenty photographers whose subjects are particularly dependent on the point where an image emerges from its material substrate. There is plenty of excellent work here, all of it presented elegantly. This viewer’s main quibble is that the overall effect is rather like a sci-fi movie set in the future, where all the people are wearing the same streamlined uniforms…the elegance comes to feel like an expression of cautiousness rather than conviction.

Anne Collier / Developing Tray #1 (Grey) / 2008 / 38 x 47 inches / c-print [This work is not in the exhibition, but is very similar to one that is.]

Whether it is because of cross-pollination, or simply that some dilemmas have solutions evident to more than one artist, there is also a sense here that names could change but the works remain the 82

same. Josh Brand and Walead Beshty (and Lisa Oppenheim, had she chosen to include different works of hers) show photogram prints made by arranging color gels on photo paper and exposing them directly. Simon Dybbroe Møller shows black and white prints that appear to have been folded, directly exposed, and flattened, basically the precise technique Beshty has used to great effect in the past. Josh Brand also includes a black print with a single line incised into the emulsion: while this is one of the most satisfying pieces here, it also immediately evokes the more labored and personal work of Marco Breuer. Barbara Kasten’s large photograph is all too easy to mistake for an Eileen Quinlan.

This viewer read the checklist incorrectly and assumed for too long that Markus Amm’s three photos were done by Matt Saunders (that is, washy and gray). And finally there is Tauba Auerbach’s photo of static, the commonness of which shows that she is over-extended and over-exposed, an artist-indemand that needs to replenish her well.

Still, the visual principle that pervades the show is a valid one, and a welcome relief from a decade’s worth of set-up narrative photography of the Wall / Crewdson school. Liz Deschenes shines as usual with her Left / Right (2008), a creamy print mounted on aluminum and floated in a white frame. The shallow depth-of-field creates an immediate emotional aura, which is nicely balanced by a cold, optical rigor.

Erika Vogt’s two Number Portraits (2004) cleverly blend the abstract ”enantiomorphic chamber” effect with actual dice tumbling and reflecting. The modes have something to discuss, even as they cancel each other out. Sarah Charlesworth’s two prints operate in a similar fashion: they depict ”abstraction” (a color chart or a schematic cube) as the result of a special arrangement of otherwise normal things.

Anne Collier brings wit, drama, and touch to her Developing Tray #1 (White) (2008). The photograph of an eye seemingly ”developing” in its tray captures the detachment affecting photographic images as they pass through multiple material embodiments. It is brought home in a singular way by the realization that the light source reflecting brightly on the eyeball is not in the space with the camera making this shot. That moment is already lost, a poignant reminder that materials dissipate, and exclude, with ruthless efficiency.

David Batchelor is the only artist that manages to avoid showing ”a picture in a nice frame” (aside from Wolfgang Tillmans, who doesn’t count, strangely, for reasons of his own long-established personal convention). The material presence of Batchelor’s grid of photos stuck directly to the wall, aligned by visible pencil marks, is the only place in this show where the photographic content has successfully negotiated its way out of rote, commercially-friendly confines. His Found Monochromes (1997 - 2001) document the eroded substrata of message-carrier systems, an idea re-inforced by the images’ proximity to the wall, itself the substrata for all the other pictures.

Which brings this viewer back to the lingering sense of cautiousness cited above. The ”current economic climate” must inevitably affect the strategies and products of artists and galleries alike. But one can’t help but feel that the smooth sheen glossing these works is the result of commercial compromise. It’s too bad, because this same selection of artists could result in a show with more raw edges, and more to say about how photography is going to emerge from its digital chrysalis. And as for whether this contemporary moment is the twilight of anything...I suppose the sentimentality of lamenting a passing leaves one less vulnerable than the gooey hopefulness of celebrating a new 83

dawn. But frankly, what’s happening to photography is clearly for the best, lest it suffer the same fate as –gasp– printmaking.

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3.2

March

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Walead Beshty, ”Popular Mechanics” at Wallspace (2009-03-04 22:38) UPDATE: This post will continue to be edited and amended during the run of the exhibition which is its subject.

“Popular Mechanics” is, at its core, a single large abstraction. It is composed of two main parts: a group of six large, highly saturated, geometric works on color photo paper, made by directly exposing the paper through color gels [*6]; and twenty-one black-and-white prints [* see comment 1] of the people, places, and machinery that played a role in the production of the exhibition. The large color prints are scattered individually through the gallery, alternating with groups of the b/w prints. Each of the two groups is presented in a uniform fashion, with the large prints in white metal frames and the b/w’s all matted, the same size, in black frames.

Much of Beshty’s work to date has been critically engaged with the material condition of photography. Mulched photo blocks, or folded-and-flattened direct prints, or negatives damaged by X-rays put forth a proposition about the material trappings enclosing a fundamentally abstract exchange (the visual consumption of photographic content); yet the works inhabit that proposition with a bit of wry irony that seems to wink, “or maybe not.”

And so it is that this critical posture expands its reach to the economic space that actually enables the discursive space. In the most direct way, this is meant literally: the b/w images show people who make a living providing services for the art industry, or ones who trickle the funds down. There is a 86

strong leveling effect taking place by showing an art fabricator, and Nicolas Bourriaud, and a largeformat Epson printer as equivalent entries in a catalog of production. This effort expands the field of photographic content to encompass as broad a cross-section of its own narrative as possible. [*2] The very idea of “material” undergoes a drastic re-definition here. That is, what used to be “immaterial” to the content of a photographic object (that content traditionally thought of as the drama that was contained by the special discursive space of the gallery) is here made utterly material to that drama, to the exclusion of any of the quaint means by which photographs might be aesthetically judged. One could say, then, that the content of the show has been “crowded out.” [*7] Indeed, the large color photographs are little more than placeholders. They satisfy an admirably superficial conception of an ambitious photo image. [*3] There is nothing to recommend one print over another. Small physical incidents (a tear in the paper, or a creased corner) never rise to the level of inflecting a piece with any charged presence. The color works merely fill in the spaces between the people who made them.

And in this function they complete the circuit of articulating their bizarre economic existence. That the image of art should look so like a vanitas at this particular historical moment is tasty [*8]; without engaging in either class warfare or schadenfreude, this viewer is excited by the prospect of unfettered transparency.

Which brings me to a quibble with the checklist and press release. They don’t name names, settling instead for initials, and an outsider such as this viewer is left trying to eavesdrop on the conversations of more informed gallery goers. This decision feels like a hedge. And to extend the metaphor a bit, the hedge fund types have been held up for particular scorn lately. I’m just saying.

The Modernist project has long insisted that the artist and the audience both confront the ontology of the art object. In Post-War art, this became medium-specific purity, and then formalism. Process and performance shifted the focus to the acts preceding the object. Institutional critique emphasized the settings where ”things” became ”art”. But in each case, these modes still held their claims as their subject. Something destabilizing takes place with the Beshtian economic transparency –or infiltration– model in this exhibition. Instead of taking new content as the replacement for old, conventional modes, this images in this show exclude subject matter. Like those toxic assets, when the music stopped, they just evaporated... [*4]

Nicholas Knight (2009-03-05 13:57:58) 1. I’m pretty sure that the b/w images are digital shots manipulated to look like classic grainy film prints. The grain really looks like digital noise to me. And I’m in favor of this treatment...it’s funny.

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Nicholas Knight (2009-03-09 20:41:08) 2. It has been quite fashionable during the financial run-up of the last decade to describe every system of exchange (even systems of dialectic exchange) with the language of economics. Economics offered the promise that, given sufficiently articulated data, its models could anticipate the dynamics of human behavior and produce, in the end, an accurate estimate of “value.” Less resolved is the question of where the model sits relative to the thing it describes. Do its descriptions of the system impact the function of the system? Is there a space outside the system from which to describe it? [*5] Nicholas Knight (2009-03-09 20:41:55) 3. I’ve written before that it requires a specific intelligence to recognize how nearby the logical conclusions of some thought processes are…and then to exploit those conclusions.

Nicholas Knight (2009-03-09 20:56:12) 4. [original ending] Beshty’s FedEx glass boxes wear the code of their commercial transmission with real elegance. To this viewer, those works are Beshty’s own precedent for this exhibition. He has pushed open wide the gulf between what a picture depicts and the meanings generated by the acts of looking and thinking.

It is a timely and topical exhibition.

Nicholas Knight (2009-03-11 16:20:01) 5. I’ve been circling the drain a little bit here. The key to the conceptual action I’m attempting to describe is the economic hope of producing an accurate estimate of ”value.” As I understand our current economic mess, lots of problems have arisen from the substitution of one type of ”financial instrument” for another. A home was substituted for by a mortgage; a mortgage was substituted for by a bundle of mortgages; the bundles were substituted for as if they were fungible assets... Soon, the ”thing” in which the value is allegedly vested is terribly far removed from the abstract placeholder of the value. Functions are performed on the abstraction, without consideration of the ”thing.” But the thing is real! To be openly dramatic about it, society itself works because abstractions and substitutions are possible. They work. But there is a danger...the complete disassociation of the object from its abstraction will always cause trouble. So finally maybe I’m getting there: Beshty has presented a show of substitutions and placeholders. The exhibition as a whole is an experiment in treating artworks as fungible assets replaceable by the material, social, and economic facts of their production. But what really sets the whole thing in motion is that the substitutions themselves amount to a model abstraction of that which they’re replacing. The system must produce artwork, but instead it’s producing itself. This is a recursive logic that threatens the economic space with collapse. I mean, on the material level, there’s no problem at all, right? The gallery viewer sees framed pictures. They all look more or less like art. Everything’s copacetic. But what would it mean for any individual image (I’m thinking here particularly of the b/w images) to leave the gallery and go out into the world? What is it a picture of? How can it have ”value” in the way that artworks have typically been assigned value? Is this making any sense? The economic model (the curators give ideas, the collectors contribute funds, the technicians help with the prints, the framers frame, the drivers drive, the art handlers install it all, the press analyzes it) in the end produces an aura that demands a baseline value. But there is an assumption buried here: that the point of the work is not merely the activation of the economic process. I don’t know why I carry that assumption, but it seems true. So when Beshty makes this hall of mirrors, it really seems to destabilize things.

Nicholas Knight (2009-04-05 09:29:33) 6. I assume.

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Nicholas Knight (2009-04-05 09:40:18) 7. Which gives me the opportunity to unpack the title ”Popular Mechanics” a little bit. Mechanics is being used in the same way as ”mechanism” (”established process by which something takes place or is brought about”). Popular takes its first meaning from ”referring to people”, used here in a more flat way than the commonly used ”popularity contest” sense. [*8] Joining these together creates something like ”process by which something is brought about by people”: essentially the expanded notion of economics.

Nicholas Knight (2009-04-05 09:48:23) 8. The nice and devious switchback that takes place here is that the ”leveling effect” in the ”catalog of production” isn’t really so level; Beshty certainly appears to be on an upward career trajectory, and he is able to leverage that into making a group of photos of people whose public exposure is more of the ”bold-faced names” variety than as the literal subject of an artwork. Indeed, the opportunity (and flattery) that is presented to the curators, collectors, and gallery directors depicted here must have been understood by them as the opportunity to be a symbolic placeholder for their class in the economic system. Once the incidentals of each person’s self-presentation become stand-ins for the entire group, the meaning of ”popular” shifts away from ”of the people” and back towards ”popularity contest”. Thus the reference to the portrait of the artworld as a vanitas. As Orwell said, ”All abuse of power begins with the abuse of language!” [exclamation point mine!]

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Matt Keegan, ”New Windows” at D’Amelio Terras (2009-03-13 15:05) Matt Keegan’s second solo exhibition at D’Amelio Terras is in the gallery’s Project Room, and though it is a smaller space, this show is simultaneously less dense and more compressed than his previous exhibition in the fall of 2007. Both these adjectives indicate a growing assuredness in the artist’s ability to focus his method of constructing a dislocated and slightly fugitive aesthetic experience.

If Keegan’s first show, ”Any Day Now,” was impressive for finely articulating an emotional presence in all of the excised spaces in the works, it was also a bit over-extended. ”New Windows” finds many of the same techniques, both within and between the works, but with a touch that easily prevents absence from becoming a vacuum. The title of the show is taken from an eponymous series of six photo-collages, all taken during the installation of new windows in his apartment. They show an anonymous Mr. Fix-It hunched down on the floor, all plaid shirt and work boots in so many misshapen lumps. But more importantly, each collage is made of several different shots of the scene, cut and layered together to create surprising and delightful impossibilities. Their title, ”New Windows,” is direct and literal, and yet it is subsumed into pure metaphor by the spatial inventiveness and material sensitivity that courses through these six pieces.

It is this action that activates Keegan’s work: the direct and literal subsumed by metaphor. It is this transformation that allows actions to become gestures, and that allows those gestures to carry a broad 90

range of psychological and emotional associations. In this respect the work is very generous, granting the viewer both the benefit of the doubt and the freedom to operate within the conceptual space of the exhibition.

And this show is about the constructing of that conceptual space. The freestanding metal-stud and sheetrock piece, with its inscriptions on one side and photographic enlargement on the other, captures the play of contradictions at work here. As a wall section, the piece ”cuts” into the Project Room, obscuring the space from outside the door (in a gesture quite unlike a window); as a text work excised from the surface, the work obscures as it narrates a concise emotional passage from slightly-paranoid to erotically-heightened to flatly-acquisitive; as a photographic image on the verso, it reads as a culmination of Mr. Fix-It’s labors, presenting the living room all re-assembled with its new windows.

And yet the de-saturated emotional timbre feels something like, ”new windows, same as the old windows.”

While this sentiment is rewarding within Keegan’s work, it also applies to a less-rewarding degree to the lone work of Richard Aldrich’s which Keegan has placed in the gallery. A classic stretcherstripped-nearly-bare-of-its-canvas, the attractive physicality of this work is never supplemented by the emotional register that Keegan otherwise injects into his own objects. To prove the point, one need only look to the right, where ”Untitled (Light Leak)”, a photographic print ”revealed” but cutting concentric ovals through three sheets of drywall, pierces the gallery with a lone note of lush green and sunlight. When one considers that this highly constructed photo-work *merely depicts* a leak through a wall that was built for the occasion, and which obscures the gallery windows, the irony and absurdity join forces. They suggest that the idea of a single ray of glistening light is more important than a whole glass wall full of the real thing.

My notion about a more compressed exhibition, then, is a remark about the feeling of these works tightly cohering into a meditation on how the coordinates of a room are transformed into a ”space,” as it is imbued with memories and preferences by those dwelling within it. (I suppose this is the role of the cat picture, which otherwise leaves me unmoved. But then again I’m allergic to cats. The personal is political!) Keegan manages this cohesion even as he leaves the space less dense with objects.

One senses the artist beginning with a mundane event from his immediate, personal experience and, with focus and delicacy, reflecting its consequences in multiple directions. The result is a charged, and charming, exhibition.

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3.3

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April

Jenny Holzer’s ”Protect Protect”:

A Conversation with Catherine Spaeth

(2009-04-20 18:46)

Catherine and I walk through the Holzer show at the Whitney...

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Matt Sheridan Smith, ”Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos,” at Lisa Cooley (2009-04-27 10:40)

In Matt Sheridan Smith’s current solo show at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, “Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos,” the artist presents a group of works generated, in one way or another, from the logic of standard sizes and automated processes. The exhibition exploits the promise of some mythical, undifferentiated potential that is built into every artist’s encounter with raw materials while they remain unsoiled by one’s ultimately futile attempts to improve upon their unblemished condition.

Smith’s show suggests, Why overdo it? Indeed, why overdo anything, when undoing it or redoing it will suffice? Each work here is marked by subtly clever twists to the logic of the standards that are the starting point of the piece. The piece Paper Sculpture (A1, A2, A3, A4) translates these four standard paper sizes into sheets of 3/4 inch MDF, which are then arranged, post-minimalist style, into a sculptural stack. A viewer circulating around the stack senses an internal logic to the arrangement that never quite yields to much more than the idea of “being in a stack”. And yet, materially, through the evocative rhythm of seams and empty spaces, the conceptual heritage of Serial art is ironically manifested within the domain of ubiquitous office products, a legacy which seems mundane, save the totalizing effects of international business efficiencies. It begins to feel less mundane when one considers that those efficiencies are intended to facilitate commerce by taking certain fundamental components of exchange (“the paper it’s printed on”) out of the equation, and eliminate that piece of paper as the site of any possible incommensurate confusions.

Matt Sheridan Smith, Paper Sculpture (A1, A2, A3, A4), 2009, MDF, 18 x 23.5 x 33 inches 94

The strongest works in the exhibition are the eight pieces under the title Neither is there anyone who loves pain itself. They follow up on a process Smith used to produce a group of five pieces shown at the gallery in 2008, using scratch-off ink over the top of a screenprinted image. Smith prints the “background” image, covers it with the scratch-off ink, and then scribbles into the surface to reveal the ground. Whereas the pieces from 2008 were explicitly about the logic of “throwing good money after bad”, Neither is there… takes a more abstract approach to the idea of filling up, covering up, uncovering, and emptying. By creating colored backgrounds composed of Lorem Ipsum, an endless flow of Latin text used as a placeholder (but whose translation yields the works title), the artist puts a void beneath the heavily opaque layer of scratch-off ink. The act of “revealing” through erasure is utterly contradicted; in fact, the catalog of erasure techniques pursued across the eight surfaces amounts to a portrait of creative anxiety in the face of a crippling, and liberating, realization: nothing to communicate, and no way to communicate it.

But of course, that’s not really the case, which brings me to the logic that underwrites the logic of the standards. Smith makes cunning use of the expressive possibility of unspoken language. The last moment when silence holds, just before it yields to the differentiating finality of the language imperative, this pregnant pause is the tension that puts energy into Smith’s show. Untitled (the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete) takes this tension as its generating logic. By repeatedly typing ellipses into Microsoft Word (and letting the program “autocorrect” them by replacing the three periods with a properly formatted ellipsis), Smith produces a painted “text” that cannot ever be “read”: Is it on the tip of your tongue? Too obvious to even say? Something you can’t quite find the words for? A lacuna in language that is understood even without being spoken? That an ellipsis could stand for any of these things shows its inability to function on its own as a provider of meaning. If it marks the surface as the site for meaningful exchange, it’s really telling us that the exchange must always be displaced into the much more fraught and nebulous domain of one’s own inconstant prejudices.

That’s a lot to tackle for a white painting with a few dots on it, and in this viewer’s opinion, the work does not get there as a piece that can function visually on its own to make the point. But it’s an ambitious theme, and it ultimately makes its way into the foundational premise beneath all the works in this exhibition. Smith’s work is impressive for saying a lot by insisting on the containers that hold the last moment of silence, and by untwisting and retwisting the little loops of logic that compel the economies of our daily exchange, both commercial and psychological.

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3.4

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May

Liz Deschenes, ”Tilt/Swing” at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2009-05-25 12:50)

Liz Deschenes’ austere new exhibition blends photographic convention and experiment, sculptural form, and architecture. The exhibition title, “Tilt / Swing,” takes its name from the movements of the camera lenses used in architectural photography. Deschenes turns the language back on itself with a large six-panel work, itself titled Tilt/Swing, creating a piece that imposes optical distortions onto the space rather than discreetly eliminating them.

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Liz Deschenes. Tilt / Swing (360° field of vision, version 1), 2009. 6 unique silver toned black and white photograms - various dimensions. Overall dimensions: H: 136 L: 192 W: 58 inches Tilt/swing lenses work by allowing a photographer to place the lens on a plane that is not parallel to the plane of the film. The most common purpose is for making the straight lines of architecture perfectly parallel and orthogonal in the image, rather than allowing them to converge perspectivally.

This technique allows the photographer to create an image which, in Picasso’s formulation, is “a lie which tells the truth.” But the irony is not that this “perspective-corrected” lie is displacing a truth: 98

in fact, it just displaces a different lie.

Deschenes’ piece exploits this ballet of half-truths through the delicate equilibrium of a reduced number of artistic elements. The six panels of Tilt/Swing are arranged like facets on a large cylinder encircling the rear gallery. The prints are mounted on thin dibond panels, which are placed variously on the floor, flat on the wall, leaning into the wall, leaning away from the wall, and hanging from the ceiling. The prints themselves are photograms made by exposing the paper directly to the night sky and then silver-toning them. In effect, they depict nothing, their reflective surfaces streaked by chemicals, small sepia blips, and the onset of oxidation.

The consequences echo back through the language and concepts that define their forms. Silver-toning a picture of empty sky creates a surface that reflects more than it depicts; the print (in general, the result of light passing through a lens) becomes the lens “through” which the viewer sees. The flatness achieved by tilting in conventional architectural photography is asserted by the planar severity of each panel, but their arrangement into a cylinder whose cross-section is orthogonal to the plane of conventional gallery viewing (one could say the panels are arranged on the y-axis, rather than the customary x-axis) reinstates the spatial geometry of “architecture in general.” Flattened space is reinflated, and again un-picturable.

Which brings me to the other primary function of the tilt/swing lens, the precise control over depth of field. The great emotive distortion of wide-aperture photography, throwing all but a sliver of the pictured field into a blurry bokeh, can itself be tilted onto any plane of the photographer’s choosing.

Just as the architectural inversions of the panels produce a paradox of “architecture in general,” so too do the multiply reflecting, fuzzy panels exploit “depth of field in general.” That is, the whole art of using shallow focus is that the photographer makes a point about what’s in focus and what’s out of focus. The photographic moment is decisive, and what’s lost is lost.

But in Tilt/Swing, the form of the object is the only thing “in focus.” Staring into the blurry emptiness of the panels begins a visual journey down the rabbit hole. First, a viewer looks for clues to what the panels are depicting; the little sepia blips might be a hidden image, as if they were a solarized daguerreotype. Finding no purchase, one’s eyes shift the tiniest possible distance closer, to inspect the chemical stains and oxidation. Though interesting as phenomena, one can’t linger there, especially since the next shift in focus is to one’s own blurry reflection on the surface. Suddenly the silver panels plunge into space, and the fact of searching for content within the image seems myopic. As one looks more deeply into the reflection, beyond his own image, he finds the gallery space and the other panels.

Then, most radically, looking into their askew reflections, fragments of the space jostle at seemingly incalculable angles. The abandonment of an aestheticized focal field for a constantly permeating and collapsing one supercedes even the architectural displacements as the experiential center of the work.

For some time now, Liz Deschenes has been getting a lot of action out of seemingly simple investigations into photographic seeing. By engaging real space, and so elegantly combining process-intensive ideas with visual ones, this show proves that her position in the top tier of “conceptual” photographers is a deserved one.

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3.5

July

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”Rubber Sheets” at C.R.E.A.M. Projects, Greenpoint, Brooklyn (2009-07-22 11:16)

RUBBER SHEETS with Joianne Bittle, Alejandro Cesarco, Orly Cogan, Paul Jacobsen, Nina Katchadourian, Luisa Kazanas, Matt Keegan, Dan Mikesell, and Ian Pedigo curated by Nicholas Knight [for images and a curatorial essay, click here.]

August 1 - 21, 2009 Opening reception August 1, 7 - 11 pm

C.R.E.A.M. Projects 99 Franklin Street Greenpoint, Brooklyn 102

—————————————-————{ C.R.E.A.M. Projects } 99 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222 • c.r.e.a.m.projects@gmail.com • creamprojects.blogspot.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE exhibition: Rubber Sheets dates: August 1 - 21, 2009 reception: August 1, 7 - 11 pm C.R.E.A.M. Projects is pleased to announce “Rubber Sheets”, a group exhibition guest-curated by artist Nicholas Knight. The show features work by Joianne Bittle, Alejandro Cesarco, Orly Cogan, Paul Jacobsen, Luisa Kazanas, Nina Katchadourian, Matt Keegan, Dan Mikesell, and Ian Pedigo.

It will run from August 1 – August 21, 2009, in our store-front gallery at 99 Franklin Street, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. An opening reception will be held Saturday, August 1, from 7 – 11 pm.

The title “Rubber Sheets” refers to Albert Einstein’s metaphor that described his General Theory of Relativity: a very massive object actually distorts the space around it, as if it were a bowling ball sinking into a stretched rubber sheet. His new thought model was an attempt to grapple with the unresolved contradictions plaguing classical physics. Similarly, the artists in “Rubber Sheets” pinpoint the gaps in our collective concepts of nature and language, positioning their works right on the event horizon of our willful misunderstanding.

Furthermore, the rubber sheet itself is a metaphor we can apply to the work of these artists.

Nature and language are complementary concepts, but they are fundamentally separated from each other, too. The membrane between them is not permeable like a sponge, but elastic like a rubber sheet. Ideas from one side can push into the space of the other, but they can never fully reside there.

Paul Jacobsen’s painting exploits our hopeful relationship with nature. The utopian illusion is made mechanical: mankind could achieve a more perfect union with nature by simply tweaking the gears of the machine a little. Add in more time with verdant landscapes and sunsets, the promise of perpetually ripe sexuality, and the byproducts of our sublimated desires will somehow take care of themselves.

Photographs by Orly Cogan also place the sexualized female directly into the natural world.

But rather than give herself over to an inherited mythology, she is caught in a web of cultural constraints. She wears substitute facial features, clipped from fashion magazines and placed precariously, and preposterously, on her own, real, body. The images add up to a grotesque clash of two idealized and unattainable realms.

Luisa Kazanas dramatizes the psychological realities that penetrate into the very way we perceive nature. Forms are re-shaped by the encompassing effect that our minds place on all that is recognizable; in her monoprints and sculpture we see ourselves molding the image of nature to 103

conform to our own changeable mental states.

Joianne Bittle exhibits a painting from her series No Man’s Land. Here we see a gnarly jackrabbit, set against a barren and reduced landscape, but boxed in by the edges of the canvas. Such a pose seems richly metaphorical. And yet, though we feel invited, we stare into its eyes and find not even a glint of recognition that our human condition could be mapped effectively onto this foreign body.

The flesh is made real, in a way, by Dan Mikesell’s robotic sculpture. Putting a sewn-prosciutto carapace on a scampering remote control robot may not be the reanimation that the Apostles, or Dr. Frankenstein, had in mind, but the visceral hilarity of this little fellow simultaneously fascinates and repels. What is it about ourselves that we recognize in the Meatbot? Everything?

Nina Katchadourian attempts a different type of transfiguration in her video, being shown in New York for the first time. Inserting gift-shop shark teeth into her own mouth, she channels the spirit of a vanished specimen, who, once given a voice, turns out to be somewhat less vicious than expected.

Ian Pedigo’s sculpture surfs across the surface detritus of cultural turnover. As if plowing the nutrient-rich compost back into fertile artistic soil, his sculptures present us with a form that seems so natural and inevitable that we are seduced into believing these re-purposed materials were always meant for only this one delicate blossom. A different register of language then emerges from his titles, which evoke the applied consensus of the social sciences.

Matt Keegan’s photographs circulate around the cut and the object excised. Text is present as a bridge between things unsaid. What belongs on either side of the conjunction? His collaged photograph transforms a simple home repair into a portrait of conflated memories, suggesting an urge to fill in the social void with something more primal and raw.

Alejandro Cesarco confronts head-on the absence at the core of language with his Footnotes.

By removing the text that gives rise to a footnote, he throws into stark relief the fugitive nature of stimuli, and the frequent incomprehensibility of the ensuing response. Language may be a repository for memory, but it is also a sieve. And if language is this difficult to hold, how can we cling tight to the objects hidden on its dark side?

Nicholas Knight is an artist living in New York.

C.R.E.A.M. Projects is a gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, run by Jeff Rausch and Kim Lane. It was founded in 2009. For more information or visuals, please contact the gallery.

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3.6

September

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Nicholas Knight, ”Taking Pictures” at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco (2009-09-07 11:52)

The press release for my show in San Francisco at SWFA:

Taking Pictures Nicholas Knight September 11 - Oct 10, 2009 Opening Reception Friday, September 11, 6-8 pm In Taking Pictures, Nicholas Knight haunts the galleries of art museums, photographing people in the act of taking pictures. Like an anthropologist in the bush, Knight captures the peculiar comportment of the museum-goer, and finds that directly looking at an artwork is often replaced by the need to see the thing through the camera’s screen.

His own pictures of pictures of pictures create a breathless daisy chain of picture-taking that finds its endgame in a crepuscular video Gotterdammerung, in which the artist is seen hand-cranking a slide projector show of his own picture-taking. It’s picture-in-picture as a repeating decimal.

Like the painter of yore establishing his frame with outstretched thumb, Knight uses people’s handsholding-cameras to organize the compositions in this series. Sometimes the back of the photographer’s head is seen. But it is the hands that grab your attention, as though they were trying to mes106

sage something beyond the functionality of their gesture. They recall John Baldessari’s finger-pointing photos of the early 1970s and Wallace Berman’s mystical verifaxes of the 1960s, in which hands hold radios with mysterious images inside of them.

Michael Kimmelman’s recent lamentation in the New York Times that tourists speed through museums, stopping only to take pictures, is rooted in the conventional wisdom that the original is preferable to the reproduction, and belies a pastoral distinction that a thing experienced through the five senses is more real than one mediated by technology. Knight’s moral compass doesn’t point in that direction. His photos luxuriate in the details of the new world of appropriation: the twinkling lights of the camera’s viewfinder, the simultaneity of the image and its reproduction, and the digitization and miniaturization of the masterpiece.

For art historical purposes, Knight’s photos are the punctum in the story written by the Pictures Generation, in which artists like Sherrie Levine came to prominence by rephotographing original works by other people. Taking Pictures documents how the public has bought into the new authority those artists conveyed on the reproduction, personalizing the democratizing process. What photographer Louise Lawler did for art in the back rooms of auction houses, the public is now doing for art in the public realm, and we can all watch it on Flickr.

The most compelling art in these photos, however, is not the one on the camera’s screen but the tableau created by Knight. In staging this duel over representation of the object, Knight has created photos whose bipolar dynamic entertains to the extent that it destabilizes. And while these photos, just like the reproductions within them, are almost clones of each other, the compositions that emerge and the particularities of the subjects are distinctly original and, ironically, reward a close reading. One set of female hands with a Goth manicure snaps a jpeg of a monstrous de Kooning female. In another, a bald male head with biker jacket and silver skull ring hones in on Jean Baptise Carpeaux’s marble grouping Ugolino and His Sons. And in a miracle of metaphorical self-reference, the light from a Dan Flavin fluorescent tube sculpture illuminates Knight’s camera, as the Flavin itself alights on the subject’s screen, with a glow part Heaven, part Westinghouse.

Steven Wolf Fine Arts

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Six Gallery Reviews, September 2009 (2009-09-27 12:07) ”Slow Photography” at SUNDAY L.E.S. Tauba Auerbach, ”Here and Now / And Nowhere” at Deitch Lisa Oppenheim at Harris Lieberman Sara Greenberger Rafferty, ”Tears” at Rachel Uffner Donelle Woolford, ”Return” at Wallspace Alejandro Cesarco, ”Two Films” at Murray Guy

Sara Greenberger Rafferty, ”Madeline”, 2009, C-print mounted to plexiglas, 24 x 20 x 1/8 in, edition of 5 Although I have preferred, for the past two years, to write free-standing reviews of single gallery exhibitions, the mixture of offerings in New York at present suggests a more synthetic approach. So, I’ve elected to discuss a cross-section of exhibitions, and a few thoughts on the axis about which they 108

spin.

The first observation is that each of the six shows listed above is founded on a displacement: its apparent subject and its material embodiment have a ”fictional” relationship (things are not quite what they purport to be), and the proposal of each specific fiction emerges as the true subject. This is pursued with different strategies, and those strategies position the rupture at different points in the experience of the work.

The most familiar among these is found at SUNDAY, in ”Slow Photography”. The paintings presented by the three artists here use photographic source material in the construction of the image. All the works are, at heart, unproblematic photo-realism. The ”fiction” injected into the image by depending on a photo of the subject (an oceanside view, a hotel in Islamabad, a geyser) is so completely internalized by now that it’s hardly remarkable, except to note the irony that painting has turned to photography for legitimacy. The saving grace here is Lauren Warner, whose paintings achieve a plasticity that exploits our visual recognition of the tropes of photo-realism: by juxtaposing traditional depiction with the expertly airbrushed mist of the geysers, a punchy and exhilarating visual moment seizes these paintings.

Familiarity of a different sort is found at Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition at Deitch. The theme joining the disparate bodies of work here is supposedly ”liminality”, claiming that the works capture the state between forms. An image of folded paper is writ large on canvas, but buried beneath a pattern of Ben-Day dots; analog TV static is photographed and printed at large-scale as an image in its own right: things that ”aren’t” are presented as if they ”are”. However, the exhibition is crippled by the obvious fact that these works have all been made better, recently, by other artists: Cheyney Thompson’s flattened paper paintings from Kreps in 2006, or Heather Cook at Foxy Productions right now; the big organ pales in comparison to David Byrne’s from last year; the ”action at a distance” sculpture is overwrought compared to Beth Campbell’s mobile at Kate Werble; the language of co-opted scientific concepts is warmed over and generic; and so forth. Auerbach’s work with typography is fun and inventive, but her work within traditional fine art idioms is significantly less so.

Lisa Oppenheim’s show at Harris Lieberman includes a group of black-and-white photographs produced by re-photographing plates out of an old art catalog. It so happens that the artworks depicted on these plates have been lost. By layering positive and negative versions of the same image, Oppenheim plays with a visual cancellation that mimics the historical loss of the object. It is only by misregistering these layers that a contrasty, shallow shadow of the image appears. A double-projection film in the back gallery is composed of progressively-degrading xeroxes of images from the original trip to the moon: literal distance is buried beneath the flawed replications of imprecise technology.

The ”displacement” at play here is the illustration that the object behind photographic depiction is permanently fugitive, and that the melancholic loss suggested by this is, ultimately, exquisite and liberating. Oppenheim is an artist engaged with very current ideas about the expanded field of photography; however, that some of her projects don’t quite transcend the literal descriptions of her tactics, or seem imbalanced by their dependence on a backstory, demonstrates the difficulty of being sufficiently thoughtful and visual at the same time.

This delicate dance is achieved with greater aplomb by Sara Greenberger Rafferty at Rachel Uffner.

Images of comedians have been printed on an inkjet printer; those prints physically manipulated by 109

moisture; the resulting images re-photographed; and finally made as c-prints and framed. The finished works bear a grotesque violence that forks down two paths, parallel and unlikely: sophisticated thinking about the reception in the present of found, historical images, inflected by the physical urge to make them understandable within the contours of the present, but ultimately returned to the safety of a pristine printed surface; followed then by a sociological reading into the depictions of comics and their props, bearing in mind the violence to social order that good comedy always trades in. These layers cohere in the works with striking efficiency. And yet the directness that is so palpable in comedy is held at a distance in these photos: how do we account for the emotional punch and the clinical gaze simultaneously, either in comedy or art?

The greatest displacement, and most fictional fiction, is Donelle Woolford at Wallspace. One gets the feeling, while looking at the quasi-Cubist wood-scrap assemblages, that despite their appealing material and visual presence, these works in themselves are not operating on the same conceptual precipice that Wallspace usually offers. They’re nice enough, but something’s afoot. That ”something” is eventually teased out into the open with a little research, and a query: if biography and identity inevitably alter one’s reception of an art object, why not just invent the biography in order to generate a desired effect? Woolford, African-American female, seems ”allowed” to engage with Cubism from a certain post-colonial angle. The story of her growth as an artist and her intellectual history seemingly confers validity on such a project. But when we realize that Woolford doesn’t exist–at least in the conventional sense!–the shortcuts we took in granting her permission for certain investigations blow up in our face. The trail of deceptions (and Cubist references) points back to Picasso’s famous dictum about art being a lie that reveals the truth. But, like a chain of chemical reactions, what truth will halt the collapse of each subsequent, underlying premise that art, in some way, ”contains” meaning?

If the Woolford show goes to the greatest lengths to locate its animating fiction outside the work itself, Alejandro Cesarco’s two films at Murray Guy go just as far to articulate these themes within the work, as its own explicit subject. Each film is a somber meditation on the difficulty of accurately constructing, and faithfully communicating, the details of subjective experience into legible history.

In the film made with his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, a text describing the challenge of balancing testimony against the historical record is voiced by the elderly man; that the text was written by Cesarco for the occasion sends the claims spiraling into a nebulous place that seems both tragic and necessary. The other film in the show, elegaic in its delivery of five sequences connected to youthful passions, has as its centerpiece a monologue about the nature of literary tragedy. It is the only text in either film which is actually spoken by the actor on-screen, rather than voiced-over. When the actor delivers the claim that tragedy is the enactment of a fatally flawed interpretation (due to the indecipherable quality of a message passing between characters on incommensurable epistemic grounds), then perhaps we’ve arrived at a moment that states as directly as possible what all this displacement has been about all along.

The ”tragedy” then (considering tragedy as a literary construct) is that all the claims coursing through contemporary art at this moment end up as cloistered hermeneutics. The proliferation of intentional displacements– as a consequence of strategic distancing – reflects that these slippages have been deeply internalized by artists and audiences alike. The fact of this displacement is already integrated into the fabric of our engagement with art, a situation made clear by the observation that the act of deploying these strategies is no longer enough to signify an adequately acute awareness as an artist.

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It can be done well, and less well. The stakes, for artist and audience alike, are whether art’s fictions can be re-assembled, its distances elided, first for the individual and then into consensus, and whether the violent passage from first-person to third-person will reward the risk and leave us in touch with the continually displacing present.

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3.7

112

November

Shannon Ebner, ”Invisible Language Workshop” and ”The Sun as Error” (2009-11-18 08:41)

While Shannon Ebner’s impressive current exhibition at Wallspace, Invisible Language Workshop, stands as a fascinating document in its own right, it is more richly appreciated against the backdrop of her recent book, The Sun as Error, published this year by the LA County Museum of Art. The two projects are complementary, in that they share many of the same images; and yet each devotes special energy to engaging the discursive possibilities unique to its own mode of presentation, the gallery exhibition and the photo book.

Chief among these unique possibilities are scale, placement, and material. The gallery allows Ebner to enlarge and reduce the size of the prints; to hang them at conventional heights or scattered about the wall; and to mix objects and projections in among the framed prints. The prints, sculptures, and projected images in the gallery are all black-and-white; the same is true of the contents of the book.

The sole exception across both projects is the book cover, with its bright yellow “sun” against a white ground.

Some Clouds, 2009, Chromogenic print, 31.68 x 44 inches Ebner’s work is dense with historical, social, and political reference. It simultaneously ruminates on the philosophical conditions that allow images to contain such meanings. The leitmotif unify113

ing the work is the moment of differentiation between world and thought: the moment when language cleaves the world into irreconcilable fragments. Furthermore, she actively pursues her subject through the terrain, making claims as she goes. So, a photograph of a her pegboard with the black diagonal “strike”, usually presented as space between words, is shown as an finished image. But that proves to be not foundational enough, and we’re given an image of the empty pegboard: the field that makes a blank space possible, the set that contains the null set.

My thinking about these images keeps coming back to two concepts that I normally don’t associate closely: granularity and inter-textuality. The pursuit of a foundational set of images that represent the division of the world into its constituent parts is the granularity. But as each image is put forth as a proposition that its content is a single grain, that it is fine enough to reverse field and start putting the world back together again, that image is despoiled by an intrusion: and insofar as the intrusion can be “made out,” that it can be identified and described as the presence of two things, it is because the intrusion can be “read”, that it already has a name, and that the cleavage the image had hoped to stave off has already take place. This is the intertextuality of the image, an “always already” penetration of language’s analytical function into the pure empirical space of the mechanical photographic device.

That is some fairly dense stuff, but I hope to make one other important point about these images and works, by way of an example. The illustrated image above, Some Clouds, shows a daytime sky, although it seems underexposed to give us more detail in the clouds. But right in the center of the image is a tightly scribbled circle; moving up and to the left is a jagged scribbled form, and then another in the upper left corner, cropped. Suddenly these marks turn into letter forms, and are recognizable as graffiti, even if their message is hidden from us. But while the literary content may be “invisible language”, we are still forced to realize that this picture of the sky is either photographed through some heavy glass or is a reflection on another surface (my hunch). In either case, what had seemed like a picture of nature turns into a picture of the intermingling of nature and our own unintelligible urge to inscribe language onto the world. And if this conjunction of ideas is the real subject, and this conjunction is an object of thought rather than physical mass, then the photograph might properly be said to be “abstract.” [1] Now a couple comments about the relationship between these ideas, the book, and the exhibition.

The book is beautifully designed and printed (with the participation of Dexter Sinister). With its bounty of images and its textual notes in the back (mostly), my reading of Ebner’s broader goals leans more heavily on the book than the gallery. But it is worth noting that Ebner’s foundational approach to her work rightly accounts for the means of presentation of it, and so the book is a delivery system for images and also a depiction of a book. Each spread shows us eight numbered locations, moving across the top of both pages and then across the bottom of both pages; each pair of numbers corresponds to a double-page spread in yet another, hypothetical book. The footnotes in the back then collate a broad cross-section of referential material into a polyglot’s guide to conceptual photography.

It’s intertextuality as a form of publishing poetry: the play of back-and-forth, both as an act of turning the pages and as a conceptual subterfuge, is wonderful.

The show at Wallspace depends less on actual text for its subterfuge, and more on the haptic experience of moving through the gallery. Whereas the book flattens each image into an indexical entry in a numbered sequence, the exhibition makes full use of the work being all around you, jostling for 114

your attention. Large prints in a row, medium prints scattered on a wall intermingled with objects, small serial prints in linear arrangement, a dark room with a projection and a print of a shadowed wall (!)…the strategies amount to a “catalog” of approaches to getting the images off the page and into space. The granularity of any single image is ultimately held up against the “neutral” container, and found to be always already impacted by a group of decisions that prevent any true singular condition to hold sway. It’s a brilliantly integrated meditation on photography and images in our present moment.

Nicholas Knight (2009-11-18 08:48:57) As the past couple years have seen the waning of the Wall – Crewdson school of narrative photography, there has been renewed interest in abstract photography. But to this viewer’s eyes (and ears), there has been insufficient clarity about just what constitutes an abstract photograph. The natural assumption seems to be that if it doesn’t show a recognizable subject, it’s abstract; or if it uses some highly materialized technique, or some vestigial historical technique, it’s abstract; or if it’s formalized to a degree that overrides its subject, it’s abstract; etc. These readings miss the mark for me. An abstraction is a model of (a portion of) the world, reconstituted in a containable way so that we can speculate about it. It ultimately has nothing to do with recognizability or technique; it has to do with our own understanding of what the image-work “is”, ontologically and conceptually. And when it’s good, it follows up our reading of what it is with another, more fulfilling reading of what _else _ it is.

John Staples (2009-11-18 16:37:01) Ditto.

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January

Anne Collier at Anton Kern Gallery (2010-01-24 11:02) Anne Collier’s solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery consists of 13 large c-prints in the main gallery and a slide show work in the rear space. It is clean and focused, and it brings together examples of the different kinds of images she has produced in recent years, including album covers, open books, developing trays, and multiple magazine covers. The depicted content of the photographs and the pictorial strategies involved in producing them perform a delicate dance around the issue of investing meaning in, and extracting it from, the photographic object.

Stylistically, Collier crafts these images with very clean, in focus, centralized spaces. The color is clear and realistic, the light flat, the depth shallow. All of these qualities point towards an ”objective” approach to the content. (Or, to be rather more ”wink knowingly” about it, they ”signify” objectivity.)

The consistent range of print size (around 40 x 60 inches, with some variation) and the same white frames further enforces the effect of neutralizing and cataloging the subjects in the photographs.

Anne Collier / Open Book #1 (Crepuscules), 2009 / c-print / 44 x 59 inches And what of that content, and its alchemy with ”pictorial strategies”? There are two main actions at work, and they are closely related: one is to hold the subjects at arm’s length, to force a conceptual, psychological, and emotional distance into the shallow visual space of the photo; and the other is to stake a claim to the found source material as being one’s own, to make it okay to invest personal 119

attachment into visual elements already pressed ultra-thin by the twin forces of mass reproduction and cultural cliche.

[Non-trivially, maybe I have the order of those two actions reversed. That strikes me as a question for each viewer to answer individually.]

The distancing strategies are more immediate (ironically) and need a closer look. The ”arm’s length” principle is a metaphor made flesh in the ”Open Book” images like the one above. Here we see two arms holding open a book to a spread that features a sunset photo on the right side.[*1] The plunging space of the landscape, and its saturated color set against the overall pale tone of the photograph, gives the sunset some emotional force. But the formal set up of the image is already working against it. Right away we register the fact that Collier’s photograph is a picture of hands holding a book with a sunset image, and not exactly a sunset image itself. This ”not-exactly” is a barrier that protects Collier, and the viewer, from having to own up to the consequences of the re-pictured subject and its myriad cultural associations. It’s an inoculation against the emptiness of kitsch and cliche.

These strategies and ambitions are well-deployed in this exhibition, but they are also widespread in photography today. The switchback towards emotional desire in Collier’s work is what makes it stand out.

One can sense an unpleasant anxiety among younger photographers today, in which they see themselves as being forced to choose between honoring their urge to get out there and make meaningful pictures of their world, on the one hand, and respecting the realizations and principles of the posteverything media world that clearly circumscribes the professionalized domain of fine art. Ugh, I hate to make it sound like that, but it seems true: in the knowing, visually informed world of professional image viewers, who has the inclination to be seduced by a sunset photograph? Well okay, one says, the sunset is SO cliche, it’s an obvious no-no; but once the thought process sets in, what subject can arrest its advance? The image-qua-image gets swallowed up by professional impossibility.

But generally, people don’t become artists because they feel the passionate need to tell a story of professional detachment. The original thirst for meaning is still present, and navigating their practice back in touch with it is a challenge. I can’t speak at all to Anne Collier’s personal motivation or intentions; I don’t know her personally nor have I read anything about her on this point. But the clarity within her images belies a tenuous network of hopeful possibilities that connect her subjects: the open (and unblinking) eye, developing in the tray (or cut in half, a la Dali and Buñuel); the media depictions of women and their cameras, and the feminist reversal embodied there; Judy Garland, and her tragic superficiality; the highly constructed tableau of an album cover, and the way the music within can bear so much personal meaning.

The fact that this particular exhibition draws its images from a range of Collier’s types of images struck me at first as a shortcoming. There is something dispersed about this selection. But on further reflection this dispersal seems like a strength, because it hews more closely to the lived sense we have that meaning is assembled from constellations of incompletely accessed experiences. Trace amounts, able to penetrate the layers of separation. But with open eyes, they’re there, to be collated, bookmarked, and developed.

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Nicholas Knight (2010-01-24 11:11:08) The parenthetical element of the title, Crepuscules, names the scene as a twilight shot. Twilight of what?, one wonders.

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March

Leslie Hewitt, ”On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance”, at the Kitchen (2010-03-28 11:26) Leslie Hewitt’s solo exhibition at the Kitchen consists of photographs from three different bodies of work, and a two-channel video piece. All the works have been made since 2008. The exhibition is curated by Rashida Bumbray.

Looking at Hewitt’s photographs is a fascinating encounter with the problem of reading. They are, first of all, beautifully made. Their beauty and tranquility is an invitation to linger. This makes them very generous, without being cloying. The compositions are generally centered and symmetrical, the images in sharp focus, the light clean. They generate pleasure in the act of seeing. This quality in the depicted subjects easily transfers to the photographic objects themselves.

Untitled (Geographic Delay), 2009. Digital c-print, 30.875 x 36.875 inches From their slowness emerges a ”problem of reading”: a gulf opens between the visual clarity of the image and the complex referentiality of the objects within it. Even a superficial engagement with the work makes it obvious that the books, photographs, and common objects that Hewitt arranges in her photographs are all voices in a serious discourse. They all seem to be talking to each other, in a tone that is focused and deliberate. The ”problem”, then, is how to integrate the visual ”reading” and the content of the discussion taking place within the image: how much can a viewer rely on inference and implication, and still claim a full understanding of the work? How necessary is it to extract the specific literary and cultural references, re-assemble them, and gain fluency in their language? And failing our ability to achieve this, to what extent are we to be indicted for seeing these citations as oblique? [*1] This makes me want to walk my terminology back a bit. The ”problem” of reading feels more like a dilemma, and a productive one at that. Hewitt’s work is multivalent, and positions its legibility like a prism: each angle of entry breaks the view into a different spectrum. Hewitt is African-American, 123

and much of the material that her work references is drawn from the literary and cultural record of the black experience in America. Or, at least, that’s what I gather from much of the critical reception of her work, like Huey Copeland’s text in the February 2010 Artforum. Copeland reconstructs a narrative from Hewitt’s images that, to this white male, is detailed to a degree that is far beyond my present visual ability to grasp. But looking over the checklist and press release provided by the Kitchen, one finds just a brief description of the film installation in terms of a text about 1950’s Harlem, and a single reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness. So how available is the narrative intended to be?

And it is precisely in this space between the clarity of her imagery and the restraint of her intention that I locate the dilemma. The highly structured compositions, the delicate balance of their constituent parts, the very specific way the work is presented in the gallery: these things all ”say” a lot about the pictorial content of the photographs. But in the absence of reading that content on its own terms, those formal qualities become the content. Or perhaps one should say that the formal qualities perform their operations on a depicted content whose meanings are withheld.

But withheld by whom? Hewitt? That doesn’t seem right. After all, there’s nothing actually private about these sources; they’re part of a public heritage; and they’re currency within a cultural community that stretches all across America. It is no secret that the contemporary fine art world is no more racially integrated than society at large, and may be even less so. The majority of Hewitt’s viewers are probably white. And yet her engagement with race as a subject takes a form drastically different than, say, Kara Walker, or Ellen Gallagher. I’ll risk oversimplification here, and suggest that both Walker and Gallagher take mass culture (read ”white”) representations of black folks and give them back to the viewer as exaggerations, meant to expose the latent pathologies present in our collective racial attitudes. I think the reference to Du Bois and double consciousness is pertinent here, seen within the idea of ”positioning” the images. One understanding of double consciousness, according to Du Bois, is that black folks’ self-awareness is always both as an individual and as how they’re perceived by others. Hewitt’s work enacts a reversal of this split awareness. Her source representations are African-American self-representations, given back to the viewer in a visual idiom that does not obviously elicit ”blackness”. That is, one might venture the claim that Walker and Gallagher exploit the shame the adheres to overt racist depictions, where Hewitt elides it. And what is gained by this elision? A new double consciousness: one is not being shown that what he knows is wrong, but that there’s something he doesn’t know that is right.

The thinking and writing I’ve been doing on this site, especially as it regards photography, has generally been done as an analysis of the fundamental ways that artworks contain their meanings. Artists who make an issue of this balance their pictorial content within an image that calls attention to its own techniques of depiction. Hewitt is no exception to this, and were it not for the powerfully philosophical way she structures her images, I doubt I would try to write about her work. [*2] But the specific nature of her content compels me to venture into a discursive space where my footing is much less sure; I admit to real anxiety treading onto racial grounds about which I am obviously so ignorant. But the work also tells me that to be polite and gloss over the subject would be doing the most egregious sort of disservice: ”hidden in plain sight” would be no accomplishment here.

I want to make one brief, somewhat analogous mention in this context. Zoe Crosher’s recent show at DCKT on the Bowery, ”The Unraveling of Michelle duBois,” (that’s a funny connection!) had some of 124

this dynamic in it. The work was self-consciously and explicitly about the material and visual nature of photography ”as such”, with ideas applicable to the evolving discourse about the medium. And yet one could not, in good faith, separate the sophistication of that inquiry from the charged subject of a conflicted and imagined female identity. I think this approach is necessary to understanding and appreciating Leslie Hewitt’s work. In the end, the advanced pictorial strategies (which are fascinating to contemplate and are, on their own, generally the subject of this viewer’s interest) must be seen as a tool in pursuit of a broader and more fraught agenda. May she continue to pursue with such aplomb.

Nicholas Knight (2010-03-28 11:26:57) I’m referring in particular here to two bodies of work in the show, the ”Midday” series (illustrated above) and the ”Riffs on Real Time” series. These comments apply to the film installation, too, but the opacity of the imagery in the film blunts the effectiveness of its referentiality.

Nicholas Knight (2010-03-28 11:32:29) But if I were to focus more on the strategies themselves, I would discuss the shallow space of the photographs, and how it joins literary and pictorial distance; how that shallow lean is dramatized in the chunky leaning frames; how the prints themselves are sitting in the frames and not floating, at a depth unequal to the overall depth of the frame itself; how the floors in ”Riffs on Real Time” are a wonderfully allusive and indexical element, bearing the scars of their heavy wear; how the prints in ”A Series of Projections” present a cinematic experience that confuses time and space in a wonderful way; et cetera.

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September

Nicholas Knight: Between Nothing and ”Nothing” (2010-09-28 13:22) “If I am to possess my own experience I cannot afford to cede it to my culture as that culture stands. I must find ways to insist upon it, if I find it unheard…

In claiming, however anxiously, agreement from you on the matter, I am not asking for permission to enter this claim. Who is in a position to grant or to deny me permission? The logic of the claim is that the claim is open to rebuke, perhaps from myself.”

Stanley Cavell, Philosophy The Day After Tomorrow (2005), p.82 Critical engagement with art and culture begins with an insistence on the possibility of one’s own experience. Yet the shape and content of that experience is constantly being washed over by “culture as it stands.” As defense against this washing-over (against being fully - and only - inside the culture), we must embrace our intuition that “something there, despite being fully open to the senses, has been missed” (Cavell, p.11). What is this missing something? Is it that which, though present in our perception, we deny, when we submit to the definitions and categories of our existing culture?

Maybe, then, we bring back our experiences to ourselves, after all the obstacles that push them further away are—somehow—dissolved. And maybe giving them an external shape (of the sort that can be rebuked) is precisely what the act of bringing-back seeks to accomplish: a reach out of the voiceless isolation of not possessing one’s own experiences.

A specific experience at issue here is the intuition that formed for me, and which I was only able to name in fragments, during conversations with Sébastien Pluot, one of three curators of Double Bind at the Villa Arson, in Nice, France, in early 2010, on the subject of how certain works in that exhibition dealt with the central concept of translation. It was the halting and partial expression of this intuition that prompted Pluot to suggest that I make a text about it, so he could understand my claims. And after some effort, I realize that its purpose is the same for me.

Let’s begin with a work of mine in the exhibition, titled Text / Texte (2007 / 2010). This wall drawing combined a quotation from Henry James (“It is easier to read between the lines than to follow the text”) with one from Jacques Derrida (“There is nothing outside the text”) into a single large sentence diagram, intertwining the two claims, repeating each quote in both French and English along the way.

This apparent argument was offered as a comment on the difficulty of positioning oneself at the right “distance” from an artwork, so as to grasp the full force of its claims. Just how “inside” any work does one have to be in order to “get it”? Or conversely, is the experience “more true” if we can get “outside” the work enough to get an accurate contextual picture of it? By setting this debate in motion, as if the debate itself were outside the game it describes, I aimed to allow the contradictions to flow back into my own work. And if the contradictions that the work activates infect the work itself, do they cancel the thing out? Then what becomes of the claims?

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In order to address these questions, let’s shift gears for a moment with a brief foray into the history of mathematics. Around 1900, some mathematicians, in particular Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, believed that number theory needed to be reconstituted on purely logical grounds, so that all of its claims would be analytically provable. With great effort and genius, they very nearly accomplished this. But the difficulties in doing it completely were profound, and in 1931, Kurt Gödel published a paper that proved the task was impossible, by using its very logic against it. The logical system could never be both complete and consistent: it could not contain the means for proving all the true statements available to the system.

It was in the course of working through these issues that mathematical logic gave us the idea of metalanguages: for any contained logical system, there are the statements that can be proven inside it, and there are the statements that are true, but are outside the system and cannot be proven. If you add those outside-statements to the inside-statements, you can produce a new language in which they are all true and provable, and you can make new claims about this expanded territory. Thus you’re using a meta-language to talk about the original language. What Gödel demonstrated was that once you’ve done that, there will still be new statements outside the meta-language that are true. To talk about that, you need a meta-meta-language. After adding those all together, you’ll need a meta-meta-metalanguage…and so on, ad infinitum. There is no way to close the gates on language’s claims.

But what of art? My intuition to apply this narrative to a specific impulse in contemporary art (an impulse prevalent in Double Bind) emerges in the artistic method where the artwork contains refer128

ence to its own materiality, or pictorial technique, or historical precedents, or logic, or so on. This self-reference is a means by which the artwork reaches out to the viewer, and asks the viewer to offer in return a specific kind of critical engagement. I imagine this offering to be a form of empathy, a claim that says to the viewer, we have the capacity to expand the boundaries of this experience in a similar way, though the boundaries are not established in advance of our agreement on them. Using art to expand the possibilities of art depends on the analogy of the meta-language.

By way of examples from Double Bind, I initially offer three, in brief. First, Mel Bochner’s Language Is Not Transparent (1970). This declaration is written in white chalk on an opaque black background, directly on the wall. The content of the claim instructs us to be skeptical about the ability of language to deliver unmediated meaning. And if we construe “language” here to mean not just text but also the language of an artistic medium (such as the drippy black painting that forms the ground of the work, and the inherited meanings associated with such a mode of painting), then the claim of the work itself must, by its own logic, become something which is subject to doubt. By calling itself into question, it sets off a collapse of reliability, a vicious chain of circular references.

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Second is Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971), in which the artist appears in a film, sobbing, and unable to form any words through his tears. As viewers, we are faced with a (finally humorous) confusion. This unnamed sad thing is hidden from us, yes, but not, after all, the titular claim that he 130

won’t be able to tell us about it. So the opacity of the cause of his emotional state is, with a dark wit, overcome by his demonstrable ability to not do what he said he wouldn’t! This layering of understanding is the creation of a meta-language, in which we are forced to engage with the work as being about its own opacity. The crying and muteness are legible inside the space that is opened up by the fusion of the image and the textual claim of the work’s title.

Finally, Aurélien Mole’s An Abstract (ZFF Soundtrack) (2006). A blank vinyl record placed on a turntable collects dust onto its surface. As the dust accumulates in the grooves of the spinning record, it eventually becomes audible as static, creating a unique audio imprint of the exhibition. This work expands the space of the exhibition by taking the show (and the record player’s own presence in it) as the subject that is being encoded: rather than imagining the gallery as a passive container for artworks, the record, in principle, is determined by the physical conditions of the space. The exhibition becomes a depicted term inside the exhibition, and still the vessel outside it that contains those terms.

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I offer the term “picturing-itself” as a shorthand for this artistic approach, and immediately I want to offer two further (axiomatic) ideas: (a) the viewer of an artwork is not a passive agent, blithely receiving meaning; (b) an artwork is a special type of communication. That is, it has content, even if that content is, for example, “nothing.” The fact of the artwork, then, is the presence of the quotation marks: the condition of art is the difference between nothing and “nothing”.

The critical engagement that I am arguing for, with the objective of “bringing-back,” begins with the process of joining together the nature of those quotation marks with the content contained inside them. The method of “picturing-itself” is a message from the artist that she has made the same effort already: she senses that her experience is not contained by the language of her medium, and so she depicts that medium within the work, to show her claim as being outside the existing language, as contesting that language. (Even as the results of her effort are themselves placed in another set of quotations marks! How do we as viewers then join those quotation marks to the content they contain?)

This ability to detect the presence of the quotation marks is essential to making sense of our culture.

We can read a given content, but within what next larger context is it positioned? We can see what the message says, but what else does it say? And finally, is there any position from which we can arrest this questioning?

[This is what is at stake for us as agents in a democratic society, however flawed that democracy and however imperfect the agents. The task of engagement becomes, if you’ll forgive me this indulgence, 132

an ethical task. Art is fundamentally dependent on assertions of freedom, but freedom is quite distinct from abdication.]

So what have we gained from this foray into “reading” the artworks of Bochner, Ader, and Mole, rather than simply reading them? I return to Cavell, from the Foreword to his book of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969): “If I deny a distinction, it is the still fashionable distinction between philosophy and meta-philosophy, the philosophy of philosophy. The remarks I make about philosophy…are, where accurate and useful, nothing more or less than philosophical remarks, on a par with remarks I make about acknowledgement or about mistakes or about metaphor. I would regard this fact - that philosophy is one of its own normal topics - as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do.”

I wish to claim that we can apply this principle to art as well as philosophy, which leaves us with the notion that a meta-artwork is, after all, really just an artwork. But the key in the Cavell passage is this phrase “where accurate and useful”. Don’t both of those qualifiers require some sort of judgment to determine their effectiveness? Accurate to what? Useful to whom? On what basis can we answer?

It seems to me that if philosophical remarks fail these judgments, then they become trapped as metaphilosophy, and do not do the job of philosophy. By failing, we could say that they narrow the space of philosophy, rather than expand it.

It is my sense, then, that the self-referentiality that pervades contemporary art, either lurking in the shadows or as an explicit end in itself, is directly an address of this issue: to what extent can a work invite consensus about its meaning against this backdrop of the relentless iteration of its own languageframe? Especially if we accept the idea that each iteration must, by its altered context, assume a different meaning? Mustn’t we conclude that Mole’s record player, for example, is insistently demanding an awareness of its specific context for us to grasp its “meaning”? And isn’t the difficulty of fixing that context against a stable ground the reason I feel compelled to place the word meaning inside of quotation marks just now?

But the point to be made here, which will bring us closer to stating what has been at stake this whole time, is that the free accumulation of meta-languages generally occurs within the parameters of what its practitioners recognize as contemporary art. A certain degree of this accumulation is essential, so that the community of practitioners has the opportunity to articulate the consequences of new developments in their (our) practice. Bochner’s Language Is Not Transparent was directed, in part, as an explicit response to specific ideas about language in art around 1970. It addressed itself to a small community of practitioners. Its relevance today, however, depends on its ability to push outside the perimeters of that context, and relate itself to the present experiences of its new viewers.

Thus the greater the degree of “meta” that has attached itself to a work, and the more completely that “meta” is held inside the established borders of art’s language, the less likely that work will be to push into a space outside culture as it is already understood. To not “cede its claims to culture,” the artwork must invite a contested consensus about its significance. That is, for an artwork to reap the 133

ontological rewards of becoming-a-thing-in-the-world (for it to be something that we can bring-back), it must dissolve as much “meta” as possible.

One final example from “Double Bind” to try to clarify this point. The artist collective A Constructed World presented their work Explaining Contemporary Art to Live Eels (2010). The work is basically what the title announces it to be. Live eels are placed in a basin, along with examples of contemporary art. In performances and public events both formal and informal, viewers of all stripes are given the opportunity to talk to the eels about their experience of art. In order to think about this as “picturingitself”, consider the previous three examples: Bochner’s work operates within its own borders, as a logic that subverts itself; Ader’s work expands to a language outside it that alters it, namely the title of the work; Mole’s record player brings in the exhibition space as a term that completes the work; and finally ACW makes the role of the viewing public into the subject: the work demands an awareness that the viewer is part of the language of contemporary art, and insists on making this social exchange into something contested.

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The question of dissolving-the-meta and the challenge of bringing-back one’s experience are dramatized here. It is my claim that the meaning of an artwork is located in the viewer’s experience of meaning, rather than as some metaphysical quality in the object; but unless that experience can be 135

contested, debated, and ultimately shared, it is in constant danger of being missed (as if it never existed); and so the viewer has demands made on her, to give the experience shape and offer it back to the culture. The challenge - first to give experience shape, then to have that shape open to rebuke - is the task of pursuing a consensus about meaning. Explaining Contemporary Art to Live Eels brings this dynamic to the foreground, as the subject itself. The viewers are critical participants in the challenge of consensus, and at the same time, there is a profound sense of “bringing-back,” because the immediacy of the general confrontation with art is so palpable in the experience.

That is both the task and the method of engagement. Artists offer their work with the method of “picturing-itself” as a means to signal to the viewer that this reading-across-levels is necessary. They signal awareness that simply positioning their work inside its medium, unproblematically as it were, would prevent them from claiming the new territory that is necessary for possessing their experiences (at least in part, at least in a new iteration), and by extension, opportunities for us as viewers for new experiences (at least in part, and at least in yet another new iteration).

At long last, what is at stake? Is it all a game, shifting deck chairs on a sinking ship, the idle manipulation of empty symbols? The pursuit of signs, pointing to signs, to more signs, to occupy our minds while entrenched powers preserve their oppressions, and the bounties thus provided?

Maybe! [How would I, or you, or anyone, be able to claim for sure? What are the consequences to forcefully arguing for the pursuit of consensus about meaning, despite its subjectivity and theoretical instability? Do we accidentally propose an ethical position by suggesting that such meanings should be pursued? Is the gain of argumentative clarity worth the loss of empirical experience, since that experience is being codified and interpreted to such a highly articulated degree (by risking the estrangement from immediate experience that comes with its articulation, and the accumulation of meta-layers)? But if one’s subjectivity is not expanded as a result of this engagement, if the spaces and positions of the subjects are not brought some distance closer, then what in the world is the point of the entire exercise? And if there is an ethical basis to making the effort (in full awareness of its necessary incompleteness, but not its complete impossibility), then doesn’t that basis depend on some degree of transcending the subjectivity of both artist and viewer? If not in “reality”, whatever that could possibly mean in this context, than at least in the sensation of transcending? Isn’t art an attempt to reach across the empty space between subjects? And doesn’t art impose all these obstacles in its own path as an acknowledgement (here tacitly, there explicitly) of the difficulty of making the reach?

And finally, isn’t our recognition of those obstacles ultimately a way to facilitate the reach; and furthermore, if our recognition insists that the obstacles were depicted there as a means to facilitate the recognition (provoking, in a sense, the faith that a sufficiently readable code cannot be an accident), then hasn’t the empty space, on some empathic level, been breached? The purpose, at least temporarily and for a self-selecting audience, been attained?]

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Nicholas Knight (2010-10-18 18:02:10) This text will be published in the catalog for Double Bind / Stop Trying To Understand Me!, produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, which took place at the Centre Nationale d’Art Contemporain at Villa Arson, in Nice, France, from February - May 2010. The exhibition was curated by Sebastien Pluot, Dean Inkster, and Eric Mangion. My thanks go to all three of them. Thanks also to Claire Bernstein for her editorial acumen in preparing the final version.

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December

Luis Jacob, ”Albums”, and Ryan Gander’s Artforum project (2010-12-04 10:46) I want to deviate from the customary gallery review mode now for a brief comparative commentary [*1] about two recent projects: Luis Jacob’s ”Albums” (in particular, as seen in his recent exhibition at Art In General, ”Without Persons”) and Ryan Gander’s project for the November 2010 issue of Artforum, ”A Torrent of Ideas on a Beautiful Day”. Both of these artists have developed a practice that is deep, variegated, and complex; these qualities are attractive and occasionally intimidating, because they instill in the viewer the sense that there’s always an important idea about the work that he’s not informed about. And that anxiety discourages him to offer opinions. But this viewer forges ahead, hoping that by limiting the scope of his comments, he can escape that particular doubt.

Luis Jacob, ”Album II”, 2004. Image montage in plastic laminate First, some immediate differences between the projects of Jacob and Gander. The Albums are artworks presented in galleries: they have a material presence with their laminated plastic, various photographic supports, and wall pins; and they are arranged in the space of the gallery such that a viewer engages the panels while ”on the wing”. He must walk one to the next, rhythmically pausing, enacting that conventional gait that characterizes the gallery-goer. Gander’s work, on the other hand, is specifically for the magazine: it has no other material embodiment; it is encountered sitting down (usually at a table, due to the unwieldy dimensions of Artforum). These material and modeof-engagement comparisons lay the groundwork for the more important issue, which is the presence and function of language in relation to the image.

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Simply put, Jacob eliminates printed text from his work and Gander adds text to his. Jacob’s images are found-objects. They are circulating in the global-cultural matrix of various published sources. Inevitably, images that pass through this system are accompanied by some sort of caption that tethers the visual component to an indexical reference. (I do not use ”indexical” here in the usual way it is applied to photography, in the sense of a direct imprint. Instead, I mean it in relation, for example, to a search engine that indexes the textual content within a database.) By excising the captions, Jacob creates a new matrix whose relationships must be completed by the viewer. He insists that we must already have the wherewithal to assemble these ”grammatical” elements into a functioning syntax.

But because photographic images are so inherently muliplicitous, so multivalent, one viewer’s act of re-assembly will never produce an understanding that maps unproblematically onto someone else’s, the artist’s included.

Ryan Gander, ”A Torrent of Ideas on a Beautiful Day”, November 2010 issue of Artforum Into the space of this multivalence comes Gander’s project. It takes the form of a 10-page spread in the magazine, with 67 images, each coupled with a caption penned by the artist. Each is numbered and arranged on the page so that the narrative sequence is unmistakable. The viewer is not invited to construct his own path through the thumbnail-like reproductions, nor is he expected to uncover the special syntax that governs the inclusion of any single image. Gander’s source material is dizzyingly diverse, and it generates considerable pleasure following his leaps of insight that connect the images: a documentary photo of an existing work of his; a photo of a randomly observed moment; a piece of text, presented as an image; someone else’s photo, co-opted for his purposes; his daughter doing something; and so on. For Gander, the border of the image constrains a space that is not otherwise 140

delimited. Anything picturable becomes a picture, and it does so primarily through the imposition of a language frame that gives it sense, that connects it to its surroundings. At a certain point, one senses an inversion: the pictures have become support material for the captions. The language-frame is the laboratory where the calculations are being performed.

I do not wish for the previous two paragraphs to suggest that Gander is beholden to written language and Jacob is not. Quite the contrary. It is my contention that the relationship of any image to the language that envelopes it is one of the most interesting and pressing issues for visual culture today. Our fluency within a cultural space that is constantly iterating new and mutated forms depends on our ability to shift from the textual mode to the image mode, almost as if there is no distinction between them. And perhaps, fundamentally, there is no hard-and-fast distinction. These projects by Gander and Jacob point to two paths through the thicket of looking, reading, and the ownership of meaning.

Nicholas Knight (2010-12-04 11:01:10) This is difficult to keep brief. A lot more wants to be said about the rough sketch of ideas in this post. But for the moment, I leave it unsaid.

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2011

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January

Nicholas Knight, ”Declaimed”, at 65GRAND, Chicago (2011-01-10 20:16)

NICHOLAS KNIGHT: Declaimed

January 14 – February 12, 2011 Opening Reception: January 14 (7-10PM)

65GRAND is pleased to present Nicholas Knight in his second exhibition with the gallery. The show 145

is comprised of three bodies of photographic work that present the picture as a screen, surface, or chimera, and examine framing and being framed.

Knight’s focus ranges from the digitizing and re-scaling of a museumgoer’s experience with a work of art (Taking Pictures), to the beguiling language and unstable imagery appropriated from commercial advertising (Disclaimers), to self-referential works made by staging, photographing, and then painting over the elegant lines of a piece of wire (White Outs). The show is tied together by his piercing scrutiny of originality and reproduction, which leads Knight to the very core of photography’s function, and helps him to underscore, and, in equal measure, undermine it.

By exposing both the concrete and speculative foundations of his work, Knight offers viewers a feast of materiality and meaning, inviting them to indulge in the technological mediations and aesthetic pleasures of this photographic smorgasbord…main course, desert course, discourse!

Nicholas Knight lives and works in New York City and earned his BFA in Fine Arts and BA in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. He has had solo exhibitions at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, and Eugene Binder, Marfa, Texas. In summer of 2009 he curated the group show “Rubber Sheets” at C.R.E.A.M. Projects in Brooklyn, New York.

65GRAND 1369 W. Grand Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60642 http://www.65grand.com/

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October

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Tableaux Parisiens at The Do Right Hall, Marfa, TX (2011-10-18 12:13) http://tableaux-parisiens.tumblr.com/

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December

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Robert Morris and Merce Cunningham, 1972 (2011-12-28 11:00)

Searching for a specific Robert Morris drawing on Google Images, I just came across this. It’s from the Walker Art Center in 1972. A Merce Cunningham performance with background designed by Robert Morris. Funny.

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July

On Eponanonymous (2012-07-09 09:24) It should be obvious from the date stamps, but this blog is essentially retired.

It began in 2006 but its most interesting period of activity was from September 2007 until December 2010.

During that time I used it as a platform for writing reviews of other artists’ exhibitions.

At that time, and even until recently, I imagined this activity as being separate from the other kinds of activities that together formed my studio life. But now I have reconsidered this idea and I have decided to fold ”Eponanonymous” into the broader sweep of ”things that I do (did) as an artist.”

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BlogBook v0.5, LATEX 2Îľ & GNU/Linux. http://www.blogbooker.com Edited: May 3, 2015