September 13, 2017 Look Karl Wirsum’s Casting Call By Nicole Rudick Karl Wirsum, Mr. Dry Iced “T”, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 38 1/2″ x 56 1/2″. In the margin of the drawing Study for Looking at a Curve Ball in Cuernavaca are notes written by the artist, Karl Wirsum: Batter up 9 at Bats Last Bats Lost Summer Robert Catcher Umbrella Umpiro Manic Sword Fight Thrust Position He seems to be trying out titles, and given Wirsum’s other titling efforts (for instance, the superlative Study for Drop a Lozenge Ferret Attitude on the Way to the Letter Drop), I wonder if he wasn’t considering something along the lines of “Umbrella Umpiro Manic Sword Fight Thrust Position.” Wirsum’s titles don’t give many hints, if any, about what’s going on in the paintings, but in their agglomerations of words and punning (Shower Girl Taking a Curtain Call), they, like the works they represent, suggest the potential for ample and adventurous meaning. Read More
August 30, 2017 Look “Henry James and American Painting” at the Morgan Library By Julia Berick James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach, 1872–78, oil on canvas. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The Morgan Library is the perfect place to muse on Henry James: John Pierpont Morgan’s scholarly sanctum, with those lapis columns and rare woods, is as much a tribute to costly good taste as to literature. James himself mused there on January 18, 1911; record of his attendance is on display in a logbook at the door to the summer-long exhibition “Henry James and American Painting,” curated by Colm Tóibín and Declan Kiely and on view for another week and a half. It’s possible that the Morgan’s show on James’s relationship with expatriate painters won’t convert the uninitiated, but it will undoubtedly serve as a pilgrimage stop for the faithful. There are some titillating letters from James to a probable lover, and who doesn’t love a Whistler? I heard my favorite lines from The Ambassadors, about the clink of unseen bracelets, when I paused in front of Frank Duveneck’s portrait of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck: “Her smile was natural and dim; her hat not extravagant; he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever seen a lady wear.” It was the wrong novel: Boott Duveneck was apparently the inspiration for the uncanny Pansy Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, not for the sophisticated Madame de Vionnet of The Ambassadors. But the Jamesian perfume is so pervasive you’re bound to hear all manner of rustles and breaths—that is, until you exit onto Madison Avenue. Read More
August 23, 2017 Look Jack Pierson’s Dreamy, Erotic Hungry Years By Eileen Myles Jack Pierson, Grease Monkey, 1990. Courtesy the artist and Cheim & Read, New York. This October, Damiani will release The Hungry Years, a collection of photographs from the eighties by the artist Jack Pierson. The images, taken during the height of the AIDS epidemic and featuring many of his friends, are striking for their dreamy introspection, their melancholy, and their celebratory homoeroticism. Pierson has worked in many forms, including sculpture, word sculpture, bookmaking, drawing, painting, and photography. (The Paris Review published a portfolio of his word pieces in our Summer 1992 issue.) Eileen Myles, a friend of Jack’s, wrote the introduction to The Hungry Years, which we’ve published below, along with a selection of Jack’s photographs. —C.L. Last year we were in my apartment and Jack was talking about going on a trip to Florida in the eighties and I’m of course thinking that Florida means something particular to someone (like Jack) who is from New England because New England sadly has about as much past as America has got—it’s branded by that New and of course New England is anything but new. Really it just wants to be old and it isn’t so you see those of us from New England just traveling around the world, shaking off those chains of the sharp quickening weather and that sad desire to be classy or old usually betrayed by our quaint speech—wicked or our loafers, or deliberately well-worn clothes in New England’s endless imitation of “real,” which is a copy of those who we think know about something older—we think they own stuff, Harvard and the Swan Boats and that Swan Boat accident and all that cold-weather food. So when this person goes south and not because he’s training for the Red Sox and not old but maybe he’s running away from something, hitching a ride on somebody else’s vacation, their buddy’s family owns something down there, maybe a deal of some kind is going on, or their parent’s place on the beach is empty for a while anyhow they go. According to Jack he took some pictures in response to I’m guessing the lightness, the eeriness of the bright buildings and the palms and the Florida tendency to be another America, professing to be new not old and failing at it. And explaining himself about that first burst he took he said, “and I kept using the camera there.” Read More
July 31, 2017 Look Paleoart: Visions of a Prehistoric Past By Walton Ford Adolphe François Pannemaker, The Primitive World, 1857. Courtesy of Taschen. Next month, Taschen will publish Paleoart: Visions of a Prehistoric Past, an in-depth look at an art form that, by its very nature, imagines—in paintings and engravings, murals and sculptures—the lives of beasts from a bygone age, fusing together fact and fiction, science and whimsy. Culled from private collections, obscure archives, and the collections of natural-history museums, the book’s artwork spans from 1830 to 1990 and was selected by the writer Zoë Lescaze and the artist Walton Ford. In the essay below, which serves as the book’s preface, Ford writes of his own fascination with paleoart and how the idea for the book came about. Like many suburban boys in the sixties, I had a childhood infused with images of prehistory. I was obsessed with the stop-motion dinosaurs in the rarely broadcast 1933 movie King Kong, savoring glimpses of their obscure forms through the bluish haze of our rabbit-eared black-and-white television. I pored over popular-science books such as Time-Life’s Nature Library series and The World We Live In, searching for images of long-extinct animals and early hominids. I collected plastic dinosaurs, carefully razoring away their unsightly seams and painting them with what I thought were more realistic reptilian stripes and spots. I hid from the oppressions of my school, neighborhood, and father behind fragrant boxwoods, and arranged these beloved miniature monsters in jungle tableaux of prehistoric conflict. Desperate to see into the deep past, I was drunk with paleoart. What I didn’t know in 1968 was that such primeval imagery was barely over a hundred years old. Read More
July 10, 2017 Look So I Traveled a Great Deal… By Dan Piepenbring “So I traveled a great deal. I met George, Ebbe, Joy, Philip, Jack, Robert, Dora, Harold, Jerome, Ed, Mike, Tom, Bill, Harvey, Sheila, Irene, John, Michael, Mertis, Gai-fu, Jay, Jim, Anne, Kirby, Allen, Peter, Charles, Drummond, Cassandra, Pamela, Marilyn, Lewis, Ted, Clayton, Cid, Barbara, Ron, Richard, Tony, Paul, Anne, Russell, Larry, Link, Anthea, Martin, Jane, Don, Fatso, Clark, Anja, Les, Sue, and Brian,” a group exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, is up through August 18. Organized by Vincent Fecteau and Jordan Stein, the show includes six Northern California artists, and it aims to capture “the lesser-known, the ahead-of-its-time, the hard-to-classify, the ecstatic, the hermetic, and the strange.” Works by two of the artists, Isabella Kirkland and Jack Mendenhall, are below. Isabella Kirkland, Egg Cases, 2014, oil and alkyd on wood panel, 7 3/4″ x 7 3/4″. ©Isabella Kirkland, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Read More
July 5, 2017 Look Kindly Bent to Ease Us By Dan Piepenbring “Kindly Bent to Ease Us,” an exhibition of paintings by Leidy Churchman, is at Mary Boone Gallery through July 28. Churchman envisioned these works as a comment on “what’s lost and found in the process of translation”; they borrow from images in print and online, altering and reframing them. “If I choose an image and use it to make a painting, people already know that image or something like it and have a relationship with it,” he wrote in Spike in 2015. “We can then study the image together. You’ve seen it but you might not have really been able to get closer, because the devices we use separate our bodies from all these pictures … For me, to paint a thing is really to consume it, to eat it.” Leidy Churchman, Giraffe Birth, 2017, oil on linen, 51 ½” x 75 ½”. Read More