April 30, 2015 Look Prim and Proper, Crude and Vulgar By Dan Piepenbring Mel Bochner, Enough Said, 2012, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″. © Mel Bochner Our Spring issue, available now, features “Thesaurus Paintings,” a portfolio of text-based paintings and drawings from Mel Bochner. They have a focus on ordinary language, specifically the “emotional trajectory” that emerges when one riffs on words and phrases of a certain theme. The direction, Bochner says, is evident in how one gets from the first word to the last word—from the prim and proper to the crude and vulgar. I concentrate a lot on the sense and sound of the language. The flow of words has to have a certain kind of rhythm—or a certain kind of lack of rhythm. That’s how the narrative of the painting is constructed. You can see what he means by looking at Easy/Difficult, a painting that wends its way from a breezy, “easy” high point, to, well, “some deep shit,” as optimism shades into fatalism: Read More
April 22, 2015 Look Posthuman Utopia By Dan Piepenbring Lori Nix, Mall, 2010. Earth: it’s a neat-looking place. Agèd. Spherical. Cerulean-ish. Problem is, there are more than seven billion people here, gumming up the planetary works with such “advances” as “buildings,” “indoor plumbing,” and “rust-proof tension-mounted shower caddies.” Earth is so crowded with human beings that many of them live and work within mere feet of one another. It is, on Earth Day, something of a buzzkill. Read More
April 17, 2015 Look Tales from the Void By Dan Piepenbring A drawing by Le Gun to commemorate “Tales from the Void.” Click to enlarge; see below for a list of references. The art collective Le Gun (Steph von Reiswitz, Neal Fox, Chris Bianchi, and Robert Greene) has mounted “Tales from the Void,” a stealthy takeover of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, that Parisian mainstay. Their installation comprises hand-drawn “sculptural books”—many with fake but disarmingly plausible titles like Encyclopedia of Beatnikism and The Minotaur of Montmartre—hidden among the shop’s shelves. You’ll find some favorites below. They’ve also completed the large-scale drawing above, a sprawling tribute to the history and culture of the bookshop that depicts various writer personages, including—count them all—George Whitman, Michael Smith, Ezra Pound, Gregory Corso, Olympia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Joyce, Paul Auster, Frank Sinatra, Colette the Dog, Martin Amis, Henry Miller, Aaron Budnik, Richard Wright, Sylvia Whitman, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin, Sylvia Beach, Ray Bradbury, William Burroughs, Dionysus, James Jones, Zadie Smith, the “generic spirit of Beatnikism,” Anaïs Nin, and Kitty, the shop’s resident cat. Read More
April 16, 2015 Look Headshrinker By Dan Piepenbring Steve DiBenedetto, Reverse Epiphany, 2015, oil on linen, 20″ x 18″. If Thomas Pynchon writes systems novels, Steve DiBenedetto makes systems paintings—paranoid, erratic, vaguely interconnected. His latest exhibition, “Mile High Psychiatry,” up through Saturday at Derek Eller Gallery, has an air of zany premonition to it that put me in mind of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop, who in Gravity’s Rainbow predicts rocket attacks with his erections: a carnal dowsing rod. There’s some of that rollicking terror in DiBenedetto’s paintings. You better figure this shit out, they seem to taunt, before your head explodes. (Fittingly, one of the more splattered numbers is called We Blew It.) DiBenedetto’s earlier work was fixed on helicopters, Ferris wheels, and especially octopi. Those figures are still here, but abstracted, sometimes almost runic, surrounded by formidable blasts of texture and noise. Take the Cannolis and Good Mystic vs. Bad Mystic vs. Tom Carvel conjure brains on the brink of meltdown. Sam Chinita and Biodynamic Radiation have lurid pustules of color, thick enough almost to be popped, like zits. Much of the time you can talk about these paintings as you’d talk about something half buried in your backyard: they seem not just encrusted but mulched in paint and grime. Even the gallery’s release speaks of “scraps and globs and stabs and billows,” to say nothing of “prelinguistic slime.” That release, which I suspect DiBenedetto wrote himself with some relish, is weird enough to quote at length. He says of one painting: Read More
April 14, 2015 Look Etel Adnan’s Leporellos By Dan Piepenbring Etel Adnan, Inkpots, 2015, ink and watercolor on paper, 78 3/4″. Click to enlarge. We’ve featured Etel Adnan, who turned ninety this year, on the Daily before. A Lebanese American poet and artist, Adnan was born in Beirut; she lived in California for some fifty years before moving to Paris. She excels in many media—paintings, tapestries, novels, poems—but the most unique, I think, are her leporellos: accordion-folded booklets of the sort once sold in Victorian England as souvenirs, folding out to reveal panoramic illustrations. Adnan uses them to a variety of ends, often using them as vehicles for unpublished poems and fragments. Some of them are more than six and a half feet long when fully extended; on one of them, she wrote a series of poems in Arabic, a language in which she seldom composes. These four will be on display at Galerie Lelong, along with some of her paintings and a tapestry, through May 8. In 2012, she told Nana Asfour, My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape. Inkpots with Signs, 2015, ink and watercolor on paper, 7″ x 4 3/4″ x 3/4″. Click to enlarge Pirkle Jones world, outside, 2001, ink on book, 7″ x 5″. Click to enlarge Point Reyes n°2 California, 1989, india ink on book pages, 6 3/8″ x 3 3/4″. Click to enlarge Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.
April 2, 2015 Look Night Time By Dan Piepenbring Hans Op de Beeck, still from Night Time, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. © Hans Op de Beeck The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s new show, The Drawing Room, opens tonight at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Among its sculptures and watercolors—painted after nightfall, when “all of the machines in his studio were switched off, the phones stopped ringing, and his staff had left”—is a fifteen-minute animated film, Night Time, produced from some six years of paintings. These three stills give a sense of its perturbing, placid, faintly vatic style: they read as a series of nocturnal establishing shots, each a study in tranquil desolation. They put me in mind of Daniel Lopatin’s synthesizer composition “Zones Without People.” “I just like the spectator to be on his or her own,” the artist told Elephant Magazine in 2011. “Having a fictional or fantasy character sitting there would be like an interruption.” The Drawing Room shows through May 2. Read More