NINE opening

(photo by Alex Ebstein)


Last night's opening of "NINE," showcasing work by AU's first year MFA students was well-attended.

If you missed it, you missed out on some awesome krab dip, sweet ASICS, and of course, ART JUMPING!!!!

(photo by Alex Ebstein)

(photo by Alex Ebstein)



Luckily, you can still see the terrific art. "NINE" will be up until Tuesday, so be sure to check it out.

"Proximity," our MFA Thesis Exhibition will open Friday, April 18th, from 6-9 pm. Mark your calendars!

To read more about "NINE" and for more awesome images of the opening, check out ArtCade Forum and There Were Ten Tigers.

Friday Night!!!

"NINE"
First year MFA candidates present new work.

Opening reception Friday, April 11th, 7-9 pm

Josh Baptista
Kate Gartrell
Nikki Painter
Igor Pasternak
Allison Reimus
Katherine Sable
Bonner Sale
Lana Stephens
Zac Willis

Work will be exhibited April 10th- 16th in the Katzen Arts Center.

For museum hours and information, please click here.

We hope to see you there!

Elena Sisto at Katzen Art Center

Elena Sisto, "Red Tear," water media on paper


By Kate Gartrell


Elena Sisto’s current show at the Katzen incorporates two curiously related bodies of work.

The first is a series of mid-size oil paintings of adolescent girls with large, wide-set eyes who look like they might have stepped out of a Balthus painting, minus pedophilic undertones and geometric spaces. But in contrast to Balthus’, Sisto’s girls wear their geometry overtly, in clothing made up of grids, diamonds, stripes and triangles. The paintings assimilate and respond to historical uses of both geometry and the body in painting, particularly 20th century uses. If minimalism was the 20th century home par excellence of geometry, one could argue in a post-structuralist vein that united with geometry in Sisto’s paintings are precisely those things implicitly excluded from minimalism: the female and the body. And whereas Balthus’ provocatively posed nymphettes participate in a painting geometry whose resulting narrative does not often concern them as individual people, Sisto’s figures – while of a certain type – feel more like individuals. The first painting in the series, Harlequin, is an example. We know the harlequin figure well from Picasso, Cezanne and others, but Sisto’s harlequin is something different: not a boy but a girl, frontally posed, engaging the viwer’s gaze. She enlarges our sense of the harlequin archetype, and it in turn enlarges our sense of her as a subject.

But more than the social issues they raise, what is impressive about the paintings is their enduring presence. They have a solidity and realness that makes us believe the fiction that Sisto weaves. You feel that they – both the paintings and the girls they depict – won’t be going anywhere any time soon. A tension between self possession and vulnerability is at work in them, having to do with the juxtaposition of logical and stable geometric systems with the inherently transitory adolescent body. Sisto’s paint speaks to these dynamics as well: the paintings are built up with areas of significant impasto, but Sisto will brush in the contours of a hand in thinner paint bringing a just-so spontaneity to the work. These are paintings that bear close, contemplative looking.

The second body of work, a series of smaller works on paper, is a somewhat-confusing complement to the oil paintings. Here, Sisto’s ancestors are (at least for this reviewer) harder to identify, though echoes of Phillip Guston’s late figurative work appear in the imagery, which features cartoonish vegetable-headed figures engaged in scenes often of some pathos. One senses that after the oil paintings these works may be something of a release for Sisto, with their decorative flourishes and whimsical, if melancholic, aspect. Their formal and conceptual relationship to the oil paintings is less clear, though a concern with pattern and certain themes – such as twins or doubles – are common to both. In the end, the small works are hard to appreciate on their own terms after the oil paintings. But if they are part of a practice that allows Sisto to make the oil paintings, then we don’t really care.

Paula Rego: The Pleasure and Power of a Quick Read – or – Should Everything Be Measured Against Rembrandt?

Paula Rego, "Dancing Ostriches"


By Kate Gartrell


I went to the Paula Rego show at NMWA intending to review it, and liked it so much that I found myself groping for possible criticisms, of either the show or the work. Most of the work is formally tight, and Rego’s trademark subjects are out in full mythological ghoulishness and fairytale whimsy. More Grimms than Disney, Rego’s is the territory of the playful deviant: we can’t but delight in a “Black Swan” ballerina pastel series populated by chunky dancers in black tutus with sometimes-distorted limbs, decisively rendered with dark contours. Solid technical skill in service of a vital and psychologically insightful feminist imagination is strongly evident throughout the show.

For me, the show raised broader questions about how we can fairly evaluate work that aims to be read quickly. The issue formed itself (albeit primitively) in my mind as: “this is good…but it’s not Rembrandt.”

An internal dialogue followed:
“Huh? Why do you evaluate everything in terms of Rembrandt?”
“Because. He’s so darn good.”
“But what if Paula Rego doesn’t want to paint like Rembrandt? What if she’s up to something else?”
“She is doing very well by the criteria she has set up for her work, but we have to ask about the value of a quick versus a slow read.”
“Yeah…but it’s so much fun.”
“Yeah…but.”

Rego’s work reads quickly in the following sense: it is possible to linger over the images from mid-distance, engrossed in the gestalt of the narrative, but little upon approach encourages marveling over this or that moment of painting or drawing. Up close, it is merely technically solid, losing its emotional charge. This is true even in a series dealing with illegal abortion in Portugal, titled Triptych.

Certainly, Rego is not Rembrandt. Her content is generally not the tender but something darker, wilder, and more overtly political. Still, the question remains: should a work of art hold up at all distances? Should we be troubled that Rego’s work delivers itself quickly and only from a certain distance?

The issue of touch provides one way to enter the question. The touch of an artist’s hand, experienced by the viewer, evokes a virtual touching by the viewer of the subject. In this sense, Rego may not want us to touch her (largely female) subjects. The virtual touch that is so seductive and moving in a Rembrandt- often a corrolary of “slow read” painting- may be exactly what Rego wants to avoid. Her work resists the viwer’s “touch,” compelling us to keep a distance to find them convincing. This is one way of inferring intentionality to the quick read they provoke.

In a post-feminist age, perhaps this is a worthwhile goal. Or maybe we are entitled to expect more from an artwork than to be kept at a distance by it. As enjoyable as Rego’s work is, as alluring are her robust, fanciful figures and the world they occupy, they don’t ask very much of our time. Call me a romantic, but shouldn’t we ask to be held captive by a painting, especially with the rest of the world bending over backwards to accommodate our rapidly reducing attention spans?

Rembrandt, "Self Portrait"

Tony Shore at C. Grimaldis Gallery

Tony Shore, "Beat Down," acrylic on velvet

By Kate Gartrell

Walking into Tony Shore’s show at Grimaldis Gallery, the first thought in my mind was: “Goya.” Shore’s paintings are dark – both literally and figuratively – but not for the reasons you might first expect. A still life with a sheep’s head was the first image to enter my line of vision, recalling immediately Goya’s painting of two sheep heads shown in the Guggenheim’s Spanish painting show last spring (one of the best paintings in that show). In their strongest moments, Shore’s imagery, palette and compositional strategies echo those of the Spanish master, but his choice of materials brings something entirely different to the work, speaking to insidious violences particular to our time.

Shore paints in acrylic on black velvet. You don’t realize this until you walk up to the paintings. What appears from afar as an overall softening of edges is explained upon approach by the velvet surface. But there is nothing soft in Shore’s subject matter, and this juxtaposition of subject and material appears to be the crux of his slightly depressing yet realistic content. I got bothered in front of a still life with a pig’s head, glass and candle stick because the glass and the metal candlestick appeared made of the same stuff as the pig’s head – nothing of the solidity or coldness of glass or metal was present. In scenes of young men beating each other up in nighttime alleys or playgrounds, the velvet acts similarly, softening the edges of forms in a way that seemed at odds with the subject. Shore paints thinly to create this effect, and it is clear he is a good enough painter that this application is not an accident of the material but a choice to let the velvet have its voice.

We are left to wonder, as I did for most of an afternoon: why velvet? What does it mean to treat these subjects in a kitsch medium? Why does he want me to think of a velvet Elvis while contemplating sheep’s heads or street violence or an old man alone in a dark room with an i.v. and a catheter? I think Shore wants us to be aware that the real violence of our times is the disguising of violence, either by our desensitization through overexposure or Hollywood glamorization, or by its hiddenness in forms not obvious at first. Insidious violence may be the most violent of all, because it can act on us longer before we are aware of it (if ever we become aware of it). In Shore’s paintings, velvet acts like a kind of soundproofing, muffling the sharp visual cries that might otherwise issue from the works. Just as kitsch, represented by velvet, is pervasive, so, Shore suggests, are the forces in popular culture and media that dull us to violence and then lull us to complacency over our desensitization.

“Violence and Tranquility” is a comment on painting in the age of technology and mass media. Goya’s contemporaries may have been truly disturbed by his paintings and etchings – as some of us today still are by violent photographs, video and film. On the one hand, Shore seems to question the ability of painting to move contemporary audiences, making paintings that are nostalgic elegies for days when painting on canvas was a strong enough battle cry for the masses. At the same time, his skill and sensitivity as a painter lurks so close to the velvet surface that we sense the images are there in full force, imbued with a truly felt, painterly touch, if only we could take the velvet out of them.

WACK!: A conversation

From: N To: Kate Subject: WACK! Conversation Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007

So we both went to see WACK! this weekend, and we want to try out this "conversation" via e-mail about the show.

Here is what I know about feminism: it’s about equality between the sexes. Women should be able to have the same jobs, benefits, options, as men, and they should also be able to choose to have a family, if that is what they want. I am aware that there were some different periods within the feminist movement, and I know feminism gained a lot of attention due to the actions of bra-burners and the beliefs of “femi-nazi’s,” but I was never under the impression that these more extreme philosophies were the main crux of feminism.

I have heard that the older generations of feminist activists feel frustrated with our (your and my) generation of women, because we are (supposedly) ignoring the struggles that feminists before us endured to give us rights we take for granted. There really IS a stigma attached to feminism within our generation, as far as if you label yourself a "feminist," you are automatically thought of as a man-hater. I guess this is my disclaimer in regards to what may be my ignorance about the specifics of feminism, its mandates and its history.

However, I have felt for a long time that I have a very organic awareness of patriarchal mechanisms within our society, and I usually feel angry when I sense these things at work. I want women to be treated as men's equals (no, I don't think this is happening 100% of the time, everywhere in the world), and because of this, I would label myself a "feminist." With that said, I felt overwhelmed by the show- in a really good way. There were a few works (one, especially) that I felt affected by in a multitude of ways that don't often happen for me in institutional spaces. I also found myself wondering about a few of the works whether, if the same work were created by a man, it would still be considered "feminist art." I don't know, but I think the answer may be lurking in that too-expensive-for-my-starving-art-student-budget catalog.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Do feminist themes have a place in your work? How much do you know about feminism, and is our conversation hurt by my ignorance? (you don't have to answer all these, just some questions to mull over...)


From: Kate To: N Subject: RE: WACK! Conversation Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007
Dear N,
Ok. Here I am, quite in the same boat as you in terms of (il)literacy with "feminist" discourse and history of feminism.
But. At the WACK! show, I had a strong sense of being confronted with a history of which I feel part as a woman.

In response to your question, I do consider myself a feminist. As long as women are paid less than men for doing the same job, I will consider myself a feminist. I feel a debt of gratitude to feminists of my mother's generation for opening the doors that they did. WACK! brought that historical sense to a personal level as I imagined my mother coming of age with all these crazy things going on around her (which still even to me today), having those pin straight 70's hairdos and marching on Washington. (Just as an aside, that personalizing of history - or empathizing with peoples of the past - seems crucial for social change as well as for art; at the film screening this morning on anti-war protest post-9-11, the director talked about the draft as the most powerful agent, in terms of making the political personal, feeding the radicalism of the Vietnam era (in contrast to today).)

So I'll talk a bit about your question, "is there room in my art for feminist ideas?"
In terms of painting: My ideas about painting tend to be fairly universalist and gender neutral, but I recognize that "painting" as such is historically weighted as a "male" tradition. Certainly conventional wisdom about modernist painting and painters has not changed that. It seems partly the legacy of feminism that we are more able today to see where gender has been assigned to a thing - as when masculinity has been assigned to painting. But even this assignation hints at a more involved gender dynamic. Former professors of mine, modernists to the core, have referred to painting as "of the body, by the body, for the body." As much as the physical has been assigned to a feminine sphere, conventional wisdom would assign painting to the feminine sphere as a sensual, physical medium, the tactile qualities of oil paint in particular recalling flesh of the bodily kind (even when not depicting it). In this view, male domination of painting could be yet another instance of the suppression or co-opting of the feminine. Given the history of figure painting, it is important to me to be a woman painting women, but my ultimate commitment is not to "female" subject matter as such. I am still figuring out what my ultimate commitment is to. It probably comes down to making good paintings. Call me naive or a-historical, but I think those, whatever form they take, may be among the most politically radical things we have available to us to look at.

Like much of the show, I think the paintings in WACK! are at their best when they bring the personal and the political together with a universal quality. Alice Neel's paintings were strong to me in this regard. Her portraits of Linda Nochlin and Andy Warhol are sensitively painted and subvert expectations about the sitters - Nochlin the art-historian powerhouse and feminist icon is shown in a personal, intimate and vulnerable moment with a young girl (presumably her daugher); Warhol the superstar is shown with his scars exposed - slouched, vulnerable.

I won't dwell on the paintings for now because I already feel like I'm lecturing and I want to ask you the same question: do you see your work as "feminist" in any way? in either form or content? and if so, was it a self conscious choice to take up feminist themes?

I also want to know if you'd like to talk about what work affected you most in the show. .

For me it was the gallery where Magdalena Abakanowicz giant red tapestry disc hangs from the ceiling and Nancy Spero's frieze piece on torture wraps around the walls. I was suprised that the concept, which sounds so heavy handed conceptually, (a huge drop of blood suspended next to a torture piece) was in actuality really moving. The monumentality of the weaving, the way its weight was suspended - neither rising nor falling - with a wing-like form rising off the back, and the associations invoked by the color red, drew me to read the room like a poem. The notion of a drop of blood being monumental - potentially a sign of either nourishment or destruction - is palpable in that room.



Last question - just as food for thought - was there anything you HATED in the show?

From: N To: Kate Subject: RE: WACK! Conversation Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007

I'm not sure I could really say that I HATED it, but I felt uncomfortable in the room with the Spero pieces and the Abakanowicz tapestry. I tried to read the text in the Spero work, and I was already feeling really drained from everything else I had seen- it was too much. The presence of that huge red object was overwhelming, and I had to leave the room.

I am starting to see my own work as more feminist. In the WACK! show, the work I felt most moved by was one of Judy Chicago's "Rejection Drawings." The particular one that got to me was "Female Rejection Drawing." It consisted of a colored pencil and graphite drawing of what looked like flower petals peeling away from a vagina-like form. Below the drawing, Chicago had written about some of her personal experiences with rejection of the "feminine" within her work by her colleagues and the art world. I wrote down some quotes that particularly appealed to me from that writing:

*"My struggle has been and is to find a way to let the female experience be represented in such a way that it can stand for those areas of human experience that male society denies, thus challenging the prevailing values..."

*"Whatever gap exists (between Chicago's rhetoric and her work, as expressed by critics) grows out of the fact that I have been trying to bridge a gap that exists in the world- the gap between feminist consciousness and sophisticated art language..."



Wow! I'm usually really turned off by written narrative within art, but by the time I reached Chicago's drawings, I was feeling put off by some of the show's artworks that felt inaccessible. I was ready for someone to lay it all out for me, and I thought that Chicago's writings did that. These quotes expressed some things that I have been thinking about- I think of the first quote as relating to our society's denigration of the validity of intuition. Because we live in such a scientifically and technologically advanced time, non-concrete ways of knowing are discounted. Intuition is largely relegated to the realm of the feminine. In the second quote, I guess I was thinking a lot about my own work, the ways in which I work intuitively, and how difficult it can be to explain meaning and content when I am pressed to do so. Because, I think, I am working through a "way of knowing" which is nonverbal. Yet the art world insists (or does it?) that I give it (whatever "it" is) a name.

Sooo... to answer your question more directly: Yes, I see my work as "feminist" in some way. I think aspects of my form and my content may apply to this, but if pressed to go into specifics, I don't think I could, because I'm currently right in the middle of all of that, trying to work my way out. No, I don't think it was originally a conscious decision to take up feminist themes, but I am consciously now working to identify these themes in order to better (consciously) express them. (Ugh- what an answer.)

Okay, here's my question: Do you think there is a gap (as Chicago writes) between "feminist consciousness" and "sophisticated art language"? Why is there a gap OR why do you think there is no gap, AND (here's the tough part) how can we, as emerging artists work to bridge this gap (if it exists)?

That could be really hard- I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I don't think I've formulated mine yet...

‏ From: Kate To: N RE: WACK! conversation Date: Nov 15, 2007
Great question. Do I think there is a gap, as Chicago claims, between "feminist consciousness" and "sophisticated art language?"

1) First, a few disclaimers. Saying "yes" there is a gap, we risk implying that feminist consciousness (and does Chicago mean "feminist" or "feminine" consciousness?) is unsophisticated and even nonlinguistic by nature. But this is only "risky" if these qualities are devalued -- look how entrenched I am in the system! If we take Chicago's argument to its logical extension, we could say that all intellectualism - and the academy as such - is inherently a masculine enterprise. Whew. I am loathe to follow her there, but at the same time, I agree with her statement to a certain extent simply based on my experience in academia and (more recently) in the art academy.

2) The Mind-Body Split or "Clapping for Credit" in upstate NY (a cautionary tale...)
Basically it seems we are talking about the old Cartesian mind-body split. We are all still living under that dualistic way of being, of seeing, of experiencing and knowing, and our institutions reflect the split as well in their structures. (ie/ the specialization of academic disciplines)

Here's an example that relates. At my undergrad school (lefty upstate NY liberal arts college), there was an initiative to encourage what were called "alternative" modes of learning among the student body. A wealthy arts therapist-Jungian had given money to fund the project. Specifically, it was meant to encourage body-based modes of learning and knowing. "Laughter therapy" workshops, meditation and mindfulness, Alexander technique, plus various other improv-theatre-game type sessions sprouted up across campus. An English class I was taking on myth and fairytale incorporated guided visualizations in class as well as a drawing session based on the Odyssey, and a "ritual" by our professor where she brought pine cones and pomegranates to class to accompany our reading of Psyche and Eros. If it sounds a little contrived - well, I wish I could say it wasn't. In the back of my head I knew we were going to eat the pomegranate seeds and then leave and have to write a paper. The academy still loomed large. We were playing at creating a new culture of body-based learning and knowledge, but it seemed tentative and provisional.
So that experiment in cultural revision had mixed results (sorry Carolyn Grant Faye committee...). But the problem - the mind/body split - is enormous. I value intellectualism hugely, enjoy and participate in it, but at the same time, I have never felt like it was the modality that came most naturally to me. My very last written assignment in college was perhaps my favorite, for a 17thC Flemish and Netherlandish art history class. On the final exam, our (female) professor asked: "If there has been a work we have studied that moved you in some way, please talk about why and how this work moved you." My heart leaped and I wrote for an hour plus about Vermeer's Milk Maid. It's no accident that we talk about being "moved" --- real transformation (real education) works on the body as well as the mind.

3) Words as a tool for seeing- Poetry as a possible bridge
The gap. Most language is extremely abstract. We as visual artists are working utterly concretely, with material things.

The old addage: a picture is worth a thousand words. I wouldn't be painting if I felt like I could do in words what I want to do in painting! Yet, there are times when words are a helpful in making me see more, see clearer and better what I am doing and what I have done, and what others have done. Maybe timing is the issue. Have you ever NOT dissected an artwork you loved because you wanted it to keep its non-verbal, bodily hold on you? The only kind of dissection that seems to allow works to keep that for me is a very formal "look at this relationship" kind of analysis - how does the thing work formally to express its content. Not a heady situating of the work in terms of art history or cultural history. Sometimes I feel like I'm being willfully naive when I do that - defer analysis. Other times I feel like it's the best way I can be responsible (in the sense of a call and a response) to the work.

How can we bridge the gap between body and mind? ? ? between feminist consciousness and sophisticated art language? ? I feel like poetry is an attempt to use language in a different way - ie/ to say things non literally but very specifically. Highly concretely (ie/ often highly visually) as opposed to abstractly.
Maybe it's a matter of using everything we have at our disposal - intuition, literal "sophisticated" language, poetic language (which is highly sophisticated), etc etc etc. as we need them, or when it seems appropriate.

What do you think? ? ?
(sorry this response is all over the place)

To be continued…