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A mechanized waterfall running, partially, against gravity -  a large spinning disc attached to a gallery ceiling that reflects the floor below - a thin veil of mist, lit by Fresnel theater lamps, that seemingly dances in front of the viewer.  These are some noteworthy works on view at PS1 Contemporary Art Center by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.  With names like Reverse waterfall (1998), Take your time (2008), and Beauty (1993) its apparent that Eliasson’s work is cerebral yet obvious.  But this, I feel, is the point.  ¶For a few generations now, at least since High Modernism took hold after the Second World War, art and culture has been split into two camps, that of avant-garde and the other, kitsch.   Most famously defined by Clement Greenberg in his 1939 article “Avant-Garde and Kistch,” the terms have come to represent a loftier brand of culture and its more common associate, respectively.  When kitsch had Norman Rockwell the avant-garde heralded Jackson Pollock.  Since then these two camps have held each other off by entrenching themselves in their arbitrary differences. However, sublty there have been some changing tides.  With Pop-Art kitsch found an inroad to progressive art circles, and with appropriation and citation the avant-garde found a way to occupy both realms.  ¶This all may seem unrelated, but this polarity, or rather its blending, is what has been so compelling about the works on view at PS1 as well as the concurrent exhibition of Eliasson’s work at the Museum of Modern Art.  These displays get closer to combining the two camps then much other recent art.  The thesis of Mr. Eliasson’s work is seemingly easy to grasp because he is merely asking his viewers to look, to notice and ultimately to see.  Topically, it may seem as though these questions are irrelevant as the works are, in fact visual.  Unfortunately, it is a comment that is all too necessary in institutions like MoMA, PS1 or San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition originated.  It is a commonality within these or similar places to see people preoccupied with wall labels, famous names and quickness.  Museum-goers speed through galleries, stopping only for moments in front of ‘notable’ works, while overlooking the majority of the room.  It seems that they are merely looking for celebrity artworks or the one’s they were told to view.    ¶Eliasson seems to be gunning for a change by making people, connoisseurs or not,  spend their moments within the gallery looking around.  What is more compelling, however, is the work’s ability to stunt the viewer’s thoughts.  These finely tuned instruments of perception are predominately about being, rather than thinking.  That is where the kitsch elements stake their strongest hold.  Like other examples - low-brow television or pulp fiction - these art-objects force mental relaxation by honing in on the simplicity of experience.  While standing under the exhibition’s title work, Take your time (2008), its hard to think of anything but one’s orientation in relation to the large spinning mirror above.  Similarly, Room for one colour (1997) on view at MoMA, which eliminates all color by washing the area in a mono-frequency light, shocks the audience into noticing only its respective color.  People paused and took photos in the midst of each work, but not so much as a ‘portrait with a famous painting.’  Instead, they were recording their immediate environment, as one would do on a mountaintop or riverbed.  The whole exhibition is partially about this simple, half-numb realization¶It is not, however, all about taking note of the obvious things.  That is merely the first step.  Eliasson, like other successful artist, creates works with fluid meanings.  Its hard to say if he’s speaking on the state of our environment or merely how we view the world.  More likely it is a little of both.  Like most other people from the developed world, Eliasson is informed on a plethora of topics and well read in a fraction of those.  As such, his works take on the responsibility of parlaying that to his audience.  It may sound daunting or even presumptuous, but the works very seriously appear to be addressing the world at large much more than they outwardly claim to be.  The simpleness helps foster this versatility by making only quiet references and also hiding any outright agenda.  Shining elipsoidal reflector spotlights - the particular form of theater lamps Eliasson employs throughout the show -  through fog to create a perfect 3-dimensional grid is as much about the form it creates as it is about seeing the lights in the fog.  Similarly, the glowing ceiling in The natural light setup (2008), which cycles through a variety of white lights, is about experiencing the color shifts while also referencing other light-based artists like James Tyrell or James Whitney.  ¶Perhaps the most important aspect of this body of work is its ability to cue both reactions, that of stunted admiration for one’s surrounding and also the tidal-wave of references and considerations they elicit.  By allowing for such simultaneity, Eliasson is the blending of avant-garde and kitsch.  Where once art was dilineated between the two categories, this stuff may, in fact, inhabit both.  

Day 3: The Museum of Contemporary Art ¶Oh Karen Kilimnik, how many ways can I sing your praises.  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is currently hosting a large and well represented exhibition of the Philadelphia painter’s career that sums up the sentiments of this site’s previous review of her work.  Kilimnik represents an artist who makes solid decisions; conceptually and aesthetically.  Her work routinely plays with the simplicity of ideas and cluttering of forms.  She also manages to make grand statements about the historical position in which we find ourselves today.  Between referencing art history, femininity, youth culture and glamour, Kilimnik seems to be making lemonade out of a whole mess of lemons.  ¶Noone is really impressed with our American culture these days, for good reason.  We have developed celebrity into a new animal, fostered a culture aflood with prescriptions, and managed to piss off the rest of the world.  Artistically speaking, the most troubling of all of these might well be our creation of an uninspired popular culture.  It is less about being outright ‘bad’ or ‘good.’  We have become closer to just being, generally speaking, boring.  ¶Kilimnik, like many other cultural producers, has acknowledged this broken wing of ours.  Also like many others, she is not aiming to repair, but rather benignly comment.   One must first understand that there are few simple things left in our modern lives.  Each subject comes with footnotes, insider information and countless perspectives.  As such, it an inundating task to stay abreast of things.  Perhaps the most important realization on the artist’s behalf is that the best thing to do, and the most entertaining, is to take things lightly and enjoy the times.  Not necessarily avoid the severity of situations or their ramifications.  Rather, absorb as much as possible while continuing to move ahead.  ¶This wisdom is expounded by the oeuvre of Kilimnik.  As a successful artist, she has known biennials, solo exhibition and the feeling of having been the subject of multiple books and articles.  She has also addressed many issues and operated in a variety of media.  Throughout all of these changes her work remains focused on the benefits of being loosely focused.  This boundless perspective affords the ability to freely change and alter trajectory.  If anything, it allows for continual surprises.  Kilimnik knows that once her audience guesses what’s next, it is time to changes.  In such an oversaturated market this is proving to be a successful method of staying on top of the curve.  ¶Chicago: the summation and the Cultural Center¶While enjoying some delicious coffee in the Loop, I was privy to a discussion on New York’s dominance, culturally speaking, over Chicago.  Like many American cities, the mid-Western capitol it posits itself against the eastern giant, often walking away let-down.  What Chicago has, unlike New York, is a lot of incongruous things to do.  The two people I was listening to seemed to share my opinion, if only out of spite for the Big Apple.  Where New York offers codified ’scenes’ to immerse oneself in, Chicago offers only tastes and samples.  With a smaller population, it should be no surprise that a few people tend to support any given event or exhibition.  There are rarely droves or crowds of the New York sort and almost never a line.  Instead, Chicago affords the ability to calmly collect oneself in front of a work of folk art in Pilsen or high art downtown.  It’s wealth of niche museums, only a few of which were discussed here, present just one means of rationalizing the Chicago’s sprawl.  ¶One institution not previously mentioned was the Chicago Cultural Center.  Like the city itself, this bastion of artistic endeavors is one of constant discovery, revelry and entertainment.  Thankfully, for this New Yorker, it is also a place where one can escape a crowd, enjoy some culture and be relatively alone for a time.  Located right on Michigan Avenue in the heart of the city’s tourist district, the museum presents a variety of media, concepts, and artforms - performative and otherwise.  This is why I chose to end here, and also why I chose not to mention the things I encountered there.  Rather, as with the city itself, I will merely recommend a stop next time anyone is in the area.  Like its namesake city, the Cultural center offers a lot, but they won’t tell you that.  You’ll have to figure it out on your own.   

 This year’s Whitney Biennial has been dwelling.  For whatever reason, the works and their relationships to each other have stunned my critical thought.  It was not until a recent conversation with a friend and art viewer that it became clear just exactly why this was the case.  I felt that the show was one of the best in recent history.  I felt that the collection of artists was appropriate and well chosen for the time.  I even felt that the exhibition was, for the first time in my memory, relatively vacant, allowing for a more labored consideration of the works.  There was still something, however, that irked me.  ¶Much of the art work in the exhibition, and the art world in general, has become dizzyingly introspective and wrapped up in its own game of appropriation.  Many artists today are taking imagery and ideas from those who came before.  However, this is something that they were taught to do.  ¶During the final years of the Modern era, a cache of artists developed the ‘trick’ of reclaiming past ideas, images, concepts and methods as a means of developing new art.  This new impulse was in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp who routinely reorganized the world around him to make art - employing objects such as urinals and bottle racks to the like.  It also came out of the era of Pop Art, which allowed artists to freely assume both the authorial language and the aesthetics of popular, consumerist culture.  So in these conjoined paths came artists like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Robert Longo, to name a few well known characters known for re-presenting and reflecting our world and our art back onto our culture.  ¶In the wake of this development, a great many artists came to the understanding that every idea had been thought before and the only option for young artists was clever reproduction, re-conceptualization leaving, ultimately, to savvy rehashing.  As these ideas become dogma, the art world understandably drew its influences from inside.  Like a hermetic bubble of production, the art and the art-schooling were preoccupied with the language and activities therein.  The artists of that time, the 1980s, have since become teachers and professors, in addition to scholars and famous names.  And these artists are among the many who taught the young painters, sculptors and printers whose works are on view at the Whitney.  ¶With this in mind, it is pleasant to view the art there because appropriation is not the focus, even though it may be frequent.  Instead of intellectually gleaning from art theory, these works draw on history in a cut and paste manor, almost without thought.  Many of them are still keeping their references within an art-world bubble.  There are art works about the relationships of seeing and touching, a heady concept but almost culturally moot.  There were works about art display and fetish, another art-world-reference.  Also, there were works that broke down the consumerist ideas of art, the production of art within a consumer society, art about the shallowness of painting in a post-Modern mindscape and a few Modernist sculptures about the artness and materiality of things.  The intention, with developing this discussion, is less about making individual judgments on artists -  as the previous Biennial review notes, I enjoyed the show.  The goal, however, is to call attention to the possible end of this era.  ¶Many critics, myself included, noted a recognizable sobriety to the works on view.  Unlike previous exhibitions, where the works utilized the same appropriation methods with an air of self-creation and pseudo-responsibility, these works display an awareness of their own historical moment.  Basically, the young artists of two, or even six years ago, displayed such a sense of pride in their citations which amounts to historical dominance.   Their works showed a certain cockiness, as if they had won all of the mechanisms that they used in the hard and fast battle of artistic whit.  What we have at the Whitney right now is markedly different.  These artists are acknowledging their lineage and their seemingly minute stature against history.  That same history is pronounced in almost every work of art.  As if awakening to the turbid nature of the post-9/11 American culture, these people are making the first steps toward moving forward; to recognizing one’s present.  ¶Future histories of our passing decade will be voluminous.  It has seen an empire quake and battle.  Culturally, is has witnessed celebrity take hold in new and troubling ways, and discussions of money and belongings develop simultaneously.   Artistically, it has been wild.  From mainstream exhibitions of American colored-pencil artists depicting two-headed dinosaurs, to the ‘opening’ of the Asian marketplace, this first decade of a millennium many of us feared, has been something.  This is what the Whitney exhibition realizes, and what occurred to me while discussing the show with my aforementioned friend.  With the loudness, speed and anger of our contemporary lives, artists have begun to search, instead, for order.  Like many French artists at the close of the Second World War - Picasso and Matisse leading the pack - young Americans are seeking to return order.  They are collectively examining the recent past quietly, soberly and sadly as a means of effecting change.  Our world has quickly become something of a morose backdrop to art-making and as such, the works should themselves be melancholic but ultimately alert.  

Skarstedt Gallery is currently displaying some mighty paintings by New York lifer, Carroll Dunham.  These works from the mid-1980s capture a period in the artist’s development where he is most actively working through a variety of painterly dilemmas and influences.  Each of these paintings is large and abstractly colorful.  As each operates autonomously from the rest, the exhibition is a more similar to an anthology than an exploration of series.  Although many of the panels make use of similar stylistic elements, such as color, line quality, dimensionality and imagery, they are all constructed to different ends.  Where one may be about the shifting tonalities of woodgrain as explored through nuanced brown hues, others display twists and turns in a search of perfect voluptuous balance.  ¶As with any ‘good’ paintings, these offer up a smorgasbord of possible readings.   The most striking to me was each works’ strong preoccupation with space.  Dunham’s use of 3-dimensionality is perhaps some of the most entrancing from the era.  Schooled by Mel Bochner and Dorthea Rockburne, pillars of Post-Minimal painting, Dunham was certainly privy to discussions of painting’s place within the more sculpturally attuned art world of the late 1970s.  His response, the paintings in discussion here, was a variety of explorations into the limits of painting and what they can afford.  ¶Big Pine (1982-3) is perhaps the most vivacious of all the works on view.  Dominating one of the gallery’s larger upstairs walls, the work showcases a wealth of Dunham’s preoccupation.  Heavy with pink and red hues, the panel reads more as collage than high painting.  Here Dunham appears to be toying with the recessional capabilities of 2-dimensional art.  Collage offers this by mixes vantage points and blending perspectives.  It is rare that two photographs will exhibit the same authorial angle, forcing any collager to meld the two in the best possible way.  What is left for the viewer, then, is a combination of perspectives mashed together to create some loosely cohesive idea.  Big Pine represents this mode of thinking for Dunham.  The work overlaps and intertwines drawn forms in such a way as to suggests collaboration. However, it is solely Dunham’s mind that put this variety of tubular and undulating forms to work together. ¶Three years late, Migration (1985-6) was completed with only traces of Big Pine’s legacy.  Rather than limit the recession to joining 2-dimensional forms, here Dunham employs painterly tactics to push the space back.  By adding stronger orthogonal lines amidst an array of brownish backdrops, Dunham increases the representation of space tremendously.  Overlapping flat objects such as dots or expressionistic brush-strokes, he reinforces not only the flatness of the object, but also the depth of field.  We, as viewers, are acutely aware of our relationship to this piece of board, but are given another world to visually inhabit. ¶During this time, Dunham began to entrench himself more in the newly revived discussion of painting.  By the middle 1980s there was a veritable resurgence of contemporary painting, of which he was an active part.  This led him to develop more a personal style - with pronounced blocks of solid color and a slowly encroaching figurative mode - but also to respond to the forefathers of American painting - namely the Abstract Expressionists and their their prodigy.  With Brain Secretes Thought (1985-6) Dunham takes on the male-dominated model of art making as well as its obsession with genius.  The initial catch of the work is its indebtedness to Mark Rothko, because of its bands of color running horizontally across the panel.  These stripes are laid atop seemingly countless pictures that Dunham was overpainting.  The end result is a sense of a young artist bearing the burden of painting’s history.  As a young painter trying to pronounce himself during a ‘revival’ of painting, it is hard for viewers not to acknowledge the legacy into which you are rooted.  Rather then wait for the public to make this claim, Dunham acts.  He references his subjugated place amongst these painters.  In reference to the cult of the artistic genius, Dunham places the most male of icons in the top-right of the panel. A large purple phallus, unmistakable, looks over the work, as if passing judgement.  It seems humorous at first, but sinister upon thought.  Streaks of messy white paint conjure up adolescent joking but also a kind of disturbing prowess.  As if acknowledging his own humility, Dunham pays respect in jest.  Offering one of his paintings up for sacrifice to the male-artist hegemony in order to allow the other to speak volumes for themselves.  ¶These paintings offer such insight into the world of young artists awakening to a point in history that needs them.  Dunham, like his contemporaries, continued the lineage of American painting at a time when it was only lightly endorsed by the market.  They capture a great deal of art history, much more than is outlined here.  So before April 19th, go and see for yourself, some of the strongest paintings of the last 30 years.  

In 2004 I moved to Chicago, Illinois.  At that point a few galleries were promoting independent artists while even fewer participated in the mainstream international art scene.  Before then, however, Chicago had been a semi-hub with the like of Art Chicago, an annual art fair, that helped boost its market.  However, for two years, 2004 & 2005, the fair was cancelled and, in a lot of ways, so was the Chicago art scene.  ¶Something has changed for the better.  On a recent vacation to my old stomping grounds I was pleased to find that those who had been producing art for the two-year hiatus had come out.  The Chicago press more actively sought out new talent.  Small galleries seemed better supported.  All tolled, Chicago seemed to have woken itself up.  And it is doing marvelously.  From the north and south sides alike, artworks by renowned or unknown artists are on display.  The following is a short collection of reviews that best capture my four days downtown.  ¶ The First Day: My friend and I wandered into Chicago’s bustling barrio, Pilsen.  The small Mexican enclave has grown to dominate local politics and as such has become less a clandestine neighborhood and more a certified congregation.  Planted in the neighborhood’s Harrison Park is the National Museum of Mexican Art.  Like most niche museums, the expectation was for an expensive entrance fee with little to look at.  In reality, the free museum offered a variety of art objects that displayed a plethora of styles, concepts and media.  Particularly enthralling was the exhibition “Horns, Hooves, Wings, Fins and Tails: Animal Imagery in the Permanent Collection.”  The shows title seemingly removes any element of surprise.  The works were, as is suggested, based around common animal-like creatures, whether mythological or natural.  Most fascinated for myself was the wide variety of ‘cartoneria,’ or festival creatures.  These creations, often hybrids of real animals, are fashioned into small, highly decorative figurines.  My personal favorite was an untitled figurine by Inocencio Vasquez.  It was shaped like a horse, painted like a giraffe with the face of a woman laid on top of the animal’s skull.  With four long ponytails radiating off the creature’s face, the whole object was absurd and playful.  Also on show were several examples by the Lineras Family, perhaps the most recognizable artisans of such objects.  The most ferocious of their brood was entitled ‘The Encounter of Two Worlds (Eagle Knight, Equestrian Spaniard and Horse Companion).” These three skeletal figurines, two anthropomorphic and one equine, are paused in battle.  Seemingly an allegory of the Spanish conquest of tribal Mexico, the scene is reduced to a playful aesthetic.  These toy-like figures are roughly 12 -16 inches high with the posture of marionettes.  Together they dance in an eternal struggle, seeking balance, perhaps, between Mexican culture’s native roots and Spanish influence.  Ultimately, these totemic figurines illustrate the lighter tone of Mexican folklore.  Unlike the more Euro-centric weight attached to religious ceremony and festivals, these brightly colored, often patterned objects are celebratory in almost every way, for any occasion.  Although they capture demons and other such creatures, there is little remorse or penance attached to them.  Collectively, these small fantasy creations correspond to the nature of the museum which presents a not only different aesthetic, but a wholly different mode of art making.  ¶The Second Day: Henry Darger, now a hero within the discussion of outsider art, lived in a small apartment in Chicago for his entire adult life.  He worked as a janitor by day and created the most concrete fantasy-reality outside of mainstream science fiction in his room at night.  His tome, some 10,000 pages long, entitled In The Realms of the Unreal, chronicals a war of almost unimaginable proportions.  Seven little girls, known collectively as the daughters of Robert Vivian, or the Vivian Sisters, represent the Good army of child soldiers, while the evil Glandilinians represent the opposing side.  Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, has become the repository for this reclusive creator.  His apartment was relocated, plank by plank, into the gallery’s back room.  A library of outsider art is adjacent.  On display are a variety of signature Darger works; all large, colored pencil drawings with imagery based on carbon-copies of advertising materials.   It was not my first encounter with the works themselves, as Darger is somewhat of a posthumous art star.   Individually, these pictures show an acute sense of artistic direction.  Darger understood precisely what he wanted and executed it.  However, en mass his clear vision is only reinforced.  Although little of the lengthy narrative can be deciphered by looking at this pictures, it is remarkable to see such a thorough conceptualization from any artist, whether inside or outside the traditional model.  Darger represents a pinnacle of craftsmanship and drive.  He began work on the novel in response to the 1911 murder of five-year-old Elise Paroubek and was not finished until the middle 1930s.  Throughout, however, his concept and style rarely altered.  Some might saw that he had a limited skill-set which hindered artistic development.  But I will argue the contrary.  Darger, although he had almost no artistic training, was not seeking to develop a style.  He found a means of storytelling and held true, without changing course.  His works are both sophisticated and playful; a balance many young artists seek to establish.  If anything his works demand the kind of study that places like Intuit and New York’s American Folk Art Museum can access.  Intuit should be a stop for anyone in the Chicago area.  Not only do they offer an exhibition hall for other shows, but they retain a home for an idiosyncratic genius and many of his creations.