April 18, 2019 Look Gone in Sixty Sentences By Rachel Kushner Matthew Porter, Valley View, 2013. From Matthew Porter: The Heights (Aperture, 2019). © Matthew Porter. Every time I’ve attempted to start this side-winding meditation on Matthew Porter’s airborne muscle cars, cars that are things and also backlit silhouettes of things, I end up scrolling the new version of the old Autotrader, online, and looking at models of cars I’ve always wanted and haven’t yet owned, and also their silhouettes. If I had a hundred grand to drop right now, this morning, which I don’t, I could buy a 1969 GTO Judge, mint. But really it’s not my style. A ’67 GTO and its classy cigar-box lines is what I always wanted. The ’69 is a novelty item, like roller skates or a leather shirt, and anyhow I get bored of the color orange. I’d love a GTO but I don’t need a Judge, even if there are certain days—Tuesdays?—when I feel like I need a Judge. For a Sunday drive I want a Stutz Blackhawk; doesn’t even have to be the one Elvis owned. I’ll humbly accept some other Stutz, but the more I research who owned Stutzes—Dean Martin, Wilson Pickett, George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Willie Nelson, and Barry White, just to cherry-pick from the longer list of celebrity owners—I get mad that I haven’t yet myself acquired the pink slip for a Stutz. Even if I could afford one, there aren’t very many, and today none are listed for sale. There’s a 1965 Mercury Marauder, I always liked those. Even if the lines are a little square, the fastback makes up for it, although it’s a car that has to have sport rims or forget it. Why is 1965 the chicane through which all American car design went from curved to boxy? Nineteen sixty-eight was another chicane, which led to puffy quarter panels, and even outright blimpage. Read More
April 11, 2019 Look Chantal Joffe’s Many Faces By Olivia Laing Chantal Joffe, Self-Portrait, 1st January, 2018, oil on board, 24 1/8″ x 18″. © Chantal Joffe. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of small boards.” The first was painted on January 1, 2018, “the worst day of the year,” not that the rest of the year was that much brighter. Joffe’s marriage was breaking up. She painted herself nearly every day, sometimes at night, always in fairly pitiless light. Speaking broadly for a minute, she looks in this extraordinary series of self-portraits like someone almost warping under a heavy weight. Bowed down, weighted by feeling, she peers back at herself, artist prowling after sitter, avid to catch pouches, moles, sags, bags, and quirks of flesh. Maybe at first it looks like someone giving herself a hard time, the visual equivalent of how (women) rail against their face, their thighs. Something funny happens when a woman looks at herself, as if she can’t ever not be narcissistic, flaunting the way she either measures up or doesn’t to the flawless face we all carry around inside the handbag of our heads. That’s inevitable, you can’t unthink political realities, but it isn’t exactly what’s happening here. The clue, I think, is what it’s like to look at these faces communally, as a chorus. They are so wildly specific, peering at you sideways, each one differently unhappy, each one concrete, present, original as in not a copy of the last. Read More
March 14, 2019 Look Nudes By The Paris Review Innumerable nudes are scattered across millennia of art history, but none look like Alice Neel’s. With radical frankness, she painted bodies outside the scope of most visual art: those of pregnant women, of children, of a blissfully domestic couple peeing in a bathroom. There’s a touch of the surreal to her demonic reds and sickly greens—and, as often accompanies the surreal, there’s also a touch of the uncomfortably alive. The subjects stare out from the canvas and feel uncannily real. But Neel rejected traditional realism. Of her style, she once said: “I hate equating a person and a room and a chair. Compositionally, a room, a chair, a table, and a person are all the same for me, but a person is human and psychological.” Instead of the omnipresent male gaze, here the gaze is Neel’s, in which nakedness is not explicitly sexual and body parts can assume proportions untethered from the purely representational. A mother’s breasts sling out like red-tipped yams. A penis, thin and long, slithers like an enoki mushroom. A child’s hands clutch and creep like opera gloves filled with hay. Through April 13, David Zwirner will host “Alice Neel: Freedom,” a new exhibition of significant paintings and works on paper from Neel’s six-decade career. Below, we present a selection of the glorious nudes for which she’s known. Alice Neel, Bronx Bacchus, 1929. The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Read More
March 7, 2019 Look R. Crumb’s Portraits of Aline and Others By The Paris Review Whatever one thinks of his subject matter, it’s difficult to deny R. Crumb’s prodigiousness with the pencil. He’s a master of crosshatching, and his illustrations and comics boil over with ideas, all sketched in his distinctive style: controlled yet frenzied, obsessed with proportion, often lewd and also oddly sweet. In his Art of Comics interview, Crumb hints at the birth of this style when he discusses how dropping acid for the first time fundamentally altered his work—and his view of the world. “I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality,” he says. “It didn’t seem real to me anymore. Seemed completely fake, only a paper-moon kind of world.” In lieu of the real world, Crumb created his own realm, some twisted amalgam of past, present, and subconscious. A new show at David Zwirner, “Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb,” gives us a glimpse into Crumb’s mind through comics tear sheets and rarely shown pages from his private sketchbooks. Perhaps most striking among the sketchbook selections are his portraits of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his longtime creative partner and wife. Lost in thought, she stares out from the page. She relaxes on the couch with her eyes half closed. She reads in the sunshine, her “ass getting sunburned while posing.” In a body of work notable for its horniness, these pictures of Aline stand out for their care and tenderness. No matter how lost Crumb gets in his own world (the introduction to his Art of Comics interview notes that as he worked on The Book of Genesis, “he pursued his vision in a desolate shelter in the mountains outside town, working for weeks without human contact”), he can always return to Aline to get his bearings, to find his way through this cardboard reality. Images from the David Zwirner exhibition—including a few of the Aline pages—appear below. Page from R. Crumb, Sketchbook, 1979–1981. © Robert Crumb, 1979–1981. Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner. Read More
March 1, 2019 Look Tolkien’s Watercolors By The Paris Review Those in need of J. R. R. Tolkien–inspired imagery have a wealth of options at their fingertips. There are Tove Jansson’s illustrations for the Swedish translation of The Hobbit, adorably round, perfectly storybook, and vaguely Moomin-esque; Peter Jackson’s award-winning film trilogies, unapologetically epic and meticulously shot; and lo, in the darkest depths of the Mordor-like internet, enough Lord of the Rings–My Little Pony fan art to fill at least one wing of the Louvre. In the face of this hoard, indecision threatens. Perhaps it’s best to pare down and turn back to the source: Tolkien himself, who depicted a few key Middle-earth locales in lush watercolor. These illustrations are currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum for “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” (on view through May 12), the most complete exhibition of Tolkien artifacts in decades; Bodleian Library Publishing has produced a book, Tolkien: Treasures, to accompany the show, which is sure to help us reengage with the fantasy master’s vision for a fully realized world: pure, unmediated, and enchanting as ever. J. R. R. Tolkien, Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-Elves, 1937. Shelfmark: Bodleian Library, MS. Tolkien Drawings 29. Credit: © The Tolkien Estate Limited 1937. Read More
February 15, 2019 Look James Baldwin, Restored By Hilton Als Jane Evelyn Atwood, James Baldwin with bust of himself sculpted by Larry Wolhander, Paris, France, 1975, gelatin silver print. After the Alice Neel show I curated closed in 2017, David Zwirner asked me what I’d like to do next. I immediately said James Baldwin, for some reasons that were clear to me and some that revealed themselves only when I began to meet with artists and see their work. I wanted to give Baldwin his body back, to reclaim him for myself and many others as the maverick queer artist that drew us to him in the first place. It’s difficult to visualize those feelings—complex, almost nonverbal feelings—and, as it turns out, difficult to get the right mix that further articulates those expressions of thought and feeling. But I think what we have here in this show, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin” (on view through February 16), is exactly as I wanted, which is to say a myriad portrait of a significant figure. And as everyone knows, when an artist is making a portrait, they are also making a portrait of themselves. So to a very great extent, this is not a group show but, I hope, a new and valuable way of showing artists who are interested in exhibiting aspects of themselves, their thinking in relation to their times and the history that made them. Baldwin certainly helped make me, and in recent years I have been disturbed by the conversations around his work—largely, shall we say, heteronormative conversations that elevate the imitator and plunge the so-called liberal into a very comforting cold bath laced with guilt and remorse. These are reflexes, not thoughts, really, and so in order to help give Baldwin himself, I thought we had to start from the beginning. The first part of the exhibition is rooted in biography, and the second part is about metaphor: artists making the art Baldwin could not make himself. Read More